This is genuinely the most mental thing I have read all year. It would mean no person could discuss the election online in any meaningful way within the defined campaign period (last six weeks). The broadcast rules are already long outdated and are in desperate need of reform, not of being imposed on everyone else.

Britain is increasingly becoming an economic dictatorship – but it’s the judiciary, not a military junta, who are in control. Last week, the GMB Union’s branch in Leeds announced that more than 4,000 women have begun a legal case against the City Council for ‘pay justice’. These are not claims brought forward by women who are being paid less than their male counterparts for doing the same job. That has been unlawful since 1970 and rightly so. This claim is the latest in a long series, based on the vague concept of ‘work of equal value’. The argument is that completely different jobs – like teaching assistants and bin men – have ‘equal value’ and should be paid the same. The arbiter is not the employer, nor the taxpayer who picks up the bill, nor the individuals who decide to apply or not apply to be teaching assistants or bin men. It is an unaccountable employment tribunal judge who gets to decide whether fundamentally different jobs are as ‘valuable’ as each other. To state the obvious, bin men waking up at 4am to do manual and smelly work in all weathers is clearly not the same job as being a teaching assistant. This is not to say that teaching assistants are paid enough for the work they do, often working with children with specialist needs. However, there is no reasonable way to compare their jobs to those of bin men. They are fundamentally different, appealing to different people, and providing completely different services. These cases are not always a great victory for the British worker either. The end result of the Birmingham City Council case was not higher wages for teaching assistants, but a proposal from the council to cut the pay of bin men by £8,000 per year. A compensation claim was paid, but this was so unaffordable that it forced wider job losses and pay cuts and resulted in sky-high rubbish piles filling the streets for months on end. The pursuit of equal outcomes did not lift the women up, it simply pulled the men down. The absurdity of trying to compare completely different jobs can be seen in the Next case, where a judge ruled that retail workers on the shop floor should be paid the same as those working in the warehouse. That was despite the company struggling to recruit for the warehouse roles and shop staff refusing to move to warehouse roles on higher wages when offered the chance. One shop worker even told the tribunal that she would only have considered moving to the warehouse if she were paid “a lot more money”. In a sane world that would be clear evidence that workers were not willing to do the two jobs for the same wage. Nevertheless, the court decided the two jobs were of ‘equal value’, leaving consumers to pick up the bill. These vexatious claims undermine fairness and reward grievance. Even Barbara Castle, the architect of British equal pay laws, rejected ‘equal value’ claims as too abstract. Many factors determine the value of a job: how many people are willing to do it, what qualifications they need, how unpleasant the work is, and what alternatives are available. The most effective way of balancing these competing factors is through price signals in the market. If employers advertise jobs and wages, employees are free to either accept or reject them. This is both more objective and fairer than a judge poring over thousands of pages of subjective ‘job evaluation studies’. It is a Soviet method of setting levels of pay where the person choosing wages is absolved of any accountability for the impact. Wages are not the only area where this is happening. Bad political decisions have piled up legislation and handed unelected court officials powers to set prices in huge swathes of the economy, from rents to energy costs to council budgets. This is not only undermining democratic accountability, but it is also picking away at a fundamental truth: growth comes from economic freedom.

England and Norway to face off in the quarterfinals of the World Cup.

Wanting to apply broadcasting purdah rules to all of social media. These people are insane.

The most stunningly successful thing about the American experiment is that in the late 1700s, the thirteen colonies were hardly valuable at all. They had no known great natural resources, they were far from a jewel in the crown of the British Empire. The British were far more desperate to keep the profitable sugar islands than the thirteen colonies. That’s why upon the entry of the French to the war, peace was sought soon - and the priority was to keep the profitable Caribbean and control of the seas. In seeking peace, Britain was thinking with its treasury not its heart. War is expensive. And while losing the thirteen colonies was embarrassing, it was not the kind of hit to the British economy that losing other colonies would have represented. In stark contrast to the relatively barren North America, the Spanish Empire in South America had vast obvious natural resources. Spain extracted gold. But it never built anything to last. The United States of America proved what far too many countries are yet to understand today. The wealth of a nation is not in its natural resources. It is not fixed. The world is not zero sum. America became the wealthiest country on the face of the planet, not thanks to its soil - but thanks to the men who stood on it. The institutions they built - the English liberties they codified - created the basis for a stable, prosperous, market economy. Freedom under law. It’s thanks to the systems of government the founders built that the United States became what it is today. Were any other group of people - with any other ideas about how a society should be structured - to settle that land, America would be like any other country today. But it isn’t. And that’s thanks to the enlightened ideas of its founding. Happy Treason Day, cousins. 🇬🇧🇺🇸

The most stunningly successful thing about the American experiment is that in the late 1700s, the thirteen colonies were hardly valuable at all. They had no known great natural resources, they were far from a jewel in the crown of the British Empire. The British were far more desperate to keep the profitable sugar islands than the thirteen colonies. That’s why upon the entry of the French to the war, peace was sought soon - and the priority was to keep the profitable Caribbean and control of the seas. In seeking peace, Britain was thinking with its treasury not its heart. War is expensive. And while losing the thirteen colonies was embarrassing, it was not the kind of hit to the British economy that losing other colonies would have represented. In stark contrast to the relatively barren North America, the Spanish Empire in South America had vast obvious natural resources. Spain extracted gold. But it never built anything to last. The United States of America proved what far too many countries are yet to understand today. The wealth of a nation is not in its natural resources. It is not fixed. The world is not zero sum. America became the wealthiest country on the face of the planet, not thanks to its soil - but thanks to the men who stood on it. The institutions they built - the English liberties they codified - created the basis for a stable, prosperous, market economy. Freedom under law. It’s thanks to the systems of government the founders built that the United States became what it is today. Were any other group of people - with any other ideas about how a society should be structured - to settle that land, America would be like any other country today. But it isn’t. And that’s thanks to the enlightened ideas of its founding. Happy Treason Day, cousins. 🇬🇧🇺🇸

The most stunningly successful thing about the American experiment is that in the late 1700s, the thirteen colonies were hardly valuable at all. They had no known great natural resources, they were far from a jewel in the crown of the British Empire. The British were far more desperate to keep the profitable sugar islands than the thirteen colonies. That’s why upon the entry of the French to the war, peace was sought soon - and the priority was to keep the profitable Caribbean and control of the seas. In seeking peace, Britain was thinking with its treasury not its heart. War is expensive. And while losing the thirteen colonies was embarrassing, it was not the kind of hit to the British economy that losing other colonies would have represented. In stark contrast to the relatively barren North America, the Spanish Empire in South America had vast obvious natural resources. Spain extracted gold. But it never built anything to last. The United States of America proved what far too many countries are yet to understand today. The wealth of a nation is not in its natural resources. It is not fixed. The world is not zero sum. America became the wealthiest country on the face of the planet, not thanks to its soil - but thanks to the men who stood on it. The institutions they built - the English liberties they codified - created the basis for a stable, prosperous, market economy. Freedom under law. It’s thanks to the systems of government the founders built that the United States became what it is today. Were any other group of people - with any other ideas about how a society should be structured - to settle that land, America would be like any other country today. But it isn’t. And that’s thanks to the enlightened ideas of its founding. Happy Treason Day, cousins. 🇬🇧🇺🇸

Burnham says the problem with HS2 was "a remote bureaucracy which always wanted to cut costs", and not "listening to the people whose areas it will affect".

Burnham says the problem with HS2 was "a remote bureaucracy which always wanted to cut costs", and not "listening to the people whose areas it will affect".

The Second Permanent Secretary of the Treasury, Beth Russell, has effectively confirmed the story that it dropped its Numerical Reasoning Test for diversity reasons.

Burnham says the problem with HS2 was "a remote bureaucracy which always wanted to cut costs", and not "listening to the people whose areas it will affect".