| Nigel Farage's Reform party is due to publish its manifesto this afternoon. It's perfectly designed to "chime with disenchanted Tory voters", says The Times. Farage is calling it the "immigration election". He is also promising massive tax cuts, including a pledge to increase the minimum income tax threshold from £12,571 to £20,000 – lifting six million people out of income tax entirely. Global spending on nuclear weapons increased by 13% last year, with the world's nine nuclear powers forking out a combined $91.4bn. Meanwhile, international defence firms are recruiting at the fastest rate since the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a bid to deliver on the soaring demand for weapons of war. More than a million Britons are off sick with "footy fever" this morning, says the Daily Star. There was a projected 128% increase in sick leave submissions on what's being dubbed "Hangover Monday", after 30 million pints were downed yesterday to celebrate England's 1-0 victory over Serbia. "Sorry boss." | | |  | Teenagers demanding the vote. @votesat16/X |
| Keir Starmer's plan for a one-party state | A couple of years ago, says Daniel Hannan in The Daily Telegraph, Labour MPs voted to outlaw cosmetic fillers and Botox for under 18s, to "safeguard children" from any potential risks. Because under British law, that's what you are until your 18th birthday: a child. You can't buy fireworks, serve on a jury, get a tattoo, shop for wine or cigarettes, open a bank account, use a sunbed or be tried as an adult in court. Labour backs all these prohibitions, and "imposed several of them itself". Yet it has the brass neck to claim that 16-year-olds should get the vote. | What grates is Labour activists posing as Chartists and Suffragettes, "extending rights to the hitherto excluded", when really they want to enfranchise the young for one simple reason: they will overwhelmingly vote Labour. A survey last year showed that, among those aged 18 to 24, Labour led the Conservatives by 69% to 1%. What's increasingly clear is that Keir Starmer intends to "load the institutions of state" in such a way that they "list Left" long after he has left office. He wants a new agency to police MPs, for example, meaning "quangocrats" rather than voters will decide who gets kicked out of parliament. He also wants to replace the House of Lords, turbocharge devolution and maximise the power of judges over ministers. His dream seems to be a corpus of laws and policies that are, in practice, "immune to the ballot box". If polls are right about Starmer's forthcoming record majority, we may end up with "the closest thing to one-party rule we have ever known". | | | | Collectors are going crazy for "celebrity clutter", says The Guardian. With the fine-art market in a slump, interest in cheaper, less risky pop-culture memorabilia is higher than ever. Freddie Mercury's moustache comb fetched more than £150,000 at auction, well over its estimate of £400; Elvis's bible, "complete with scribbled marginalia", sold for £59,000; and one of John Lennon's teeth was snapped up by a Canadian dentist for £19,000. |
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| | | 🗳️ 17 days to go...
Nigel Farage got off lightly when he was struck by a wad of wet cement on his battle bus last week, says Andrew Pierce in the Mail on Sunday. In Victorian times, candidates were routinely "pelted by stones, mud, turnips and even dead cats and dogs". When the Liberal statesman William Gladstone visited Chester in 1892, he was hit in the eye by a lump of gingerbread thrown at him by a "middle-aged and bony woman". Perhaps that's what comes of "hob-nobbing with voters". | | | | | | Advertisement | | On the look out for a daily escape from the pressures of modern life? Find out how our gardens can be sanctuaries for both body and mind in the latest issue of BBC Gardeners' World. Discover simple garden tasks that can improve your physical health, reduce stress, and foster a sense of community – all backed by scientific insights and inspiring stories. Click here to read the full article on Readly, the magazine and newspaper app. |
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| | |  | A happy reader catching up on The Knowledge in bed. Ridofranz/Getty |
| It turns out that staring at a phone screen before bed doesn't harm your sleep, says The Times. For years, the general advice has been to limit evening screen use due to fears that "blue light" suppresses melatonin – the hormone that signals to the body that it's time to rest. Now bedtime boffins have changed their minds. "There's no evidence from 11 studies conducted across the world that screen light in the hour before bed makes it harder to fall asleep," says sleep psychologist Michael Gradisar. He thinks the only way devices might interfere with a good eight hours is by motivating people to stay up scrolling after lights out. | | | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share | | |
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| | |  | A nuclear power plant in China. Zhongguo/Getty |
| Without abundant energy we're just "whistling in the wind" | After weeks of trivia, the general election has finally alighted on the one issue that "towers above all others", says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times: productivity. It is the single biggest factor in living standards and whether we can afford to fund our public services and upgrade our rather shabby military. At the moment, productivity is "painfully, tragically flat", but nobody knows quite what to do about it. Rishi Sunak has plumped for tax cuts; Keir Starmer has no bright ideas at all. The problem is no one seems to understand that the core of all productivity growth is "abundant energy". | For the first 250,000 years of our existence, growth was stagnant because any technological innovation quickly ran out of fuel. Productivity finally took off in the 18th century thanks to near-limitless, energy-dense coal. What's "screwing us today" is that fossil fuels are becoming more inefficient. When people started digging for oil, they were getting 100 barrels back for every barrel expended in the extraction process. Today, as we "dig ever deeper and frack harder", it's as little as five. Productivity will only rise when we move to fuels with a higher energy return on investment. Renewables are part of this, but more urgent is nuclear power. South Korea, India and China are all building nuclear power plants at "breakneck speed". Meanwhile in the UK, it takes 20 years to "reach phase 1B, sub-paragraph C, of the planning process". If we want to raise productivity, we have to break free of our "self-imposed chokehold". Anything less is just "whistling in the wind". | | | | | | Because of the country's nightmarish work culture, 78% of US workers say they don't take all their paid annual holiday, says CNBC. The figure is highest among millennials and Gen Z, but not because they're secret Stakhanovites. They're taking time off, "just not telling their boss". Nearly 40% of these younger workers say they are "quiet vacationing". In other words, claiming to work from home while really putting their feet up by a pool somewhere. Lazy sods. | | | | | | | | It's a real photo of a flamingo that was sneakily entered into an AI photography competition and won third prize, says PetaPixel. The photograph of the bird with its head hidden as it turns to scratch itself took bronze in the AI category of the 1839 Colour Photography Awards, though photographer Miles Astray was later disqualified after revealing that the photo was the work of a human. He said he wanted to show that "nature can still beat the machine and that there is still merit in real work from real creatives". | | | | | "Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."
HG Wells |
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