If Keir Starmer leads Labour into the next general election*, a seventeen year old will not be able to use YouTube to watch party political broadcasts and their screen would cut out half an hour into the debates, but they can vote in the election afterwards.
*He won't but bear with me
We are, basically, at war. It might be a grey zone, hybrid version, but it's happening as our chief ally has abandoned us and as our own politics are being manipulated and torn apart by hostile forces. And the PM has lost the confidence of the armed forces.
May exploit those same networks that manage to smuggle 30 tons of coke into the UK every year, except it could be drones and explosives
You might smuggle operators too (like Rus spies entering UK via cargo ships for hostile surveillance in 2025) or recruited on Telegram and paid in crypto
Stephen Bush
Arthur Snell
I just can’t understand how muddle-brained and/or obviously un-led Government can be as to reach the point where this 17-year old is mature enough to vote on who represents them, but can’t be trusted to stay up making jokes about the result as it comes in.
Proxies, drones, and collusion with organised crime are now key vectors of asymmetric state threat toward UK and other Western European nations
Intimidation of political and military targets, sabotage of critical civilian infrastructure more likely than conventional attacks in a future crisis
Whilst I still can't find any mention of gunfire in the COLREGS as a valid alternative to five blasts on the horn (though god knows many skippers have felt like it), I do have sympathy with any officer of the watch faced with a yachtie who thinks two degrees is "an obvious change of course"
Interesting to contrast comms and attribution in defence sphere (John Healey: "Putin, I say this: we see you, we see your activity") vs home affairs (silence)
Also a marked contrast to e.g., the Skripal poisoning response
Struggle to believe BBC and FT uncovered info that Met and MI5 unaware of!
NEW: John Healey quits over defence funding. Devastating letter for the government and Keir Starmer: “You have been unable and the Treasury has been unwilling to commit the resources the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.”
Yes to all of this, but also let's not forget Jeremy Hunt, laying a trap (that Labour shouldn't have walked into) that basically salted the earth and has left the country weaker and less able to defend itself as an electoral gimmick
Iain
Dreadnought Holiday
Polish PM Donald Tusk on the arson in Oct '25:
"The problem is that no one in Britain was [taken aback] by this. I was shocked, frankly speaking... The reaction was like it was just an Arsenal-Liverpool football match"
a lot of people out there need to take the threat from Russia a LOT more seriously
It is the official stance of the UK government that you're mature enough at 16 to vote in general elections, but not mature enough to go on YouTube after dark.
Amid concerns of Russian hybrid activity across Europe, reports of a series of mysterious drone flights over NATO’s nuclear bases are raising questions about espionage, potential sabotage operations and the vulnerability of strategic infrastructure.
www.iiss.org
Rachel Cunliffe
The pledge not to raise general taxation is basically this government’s original sin and a synecdoche of everything that’s wrong with it - timid, and forced into a series of unpalatable, harmful and unpleasant manoeuvres that please literally nobody because of its timidity.
