Now we are in favour of the free movement of people. We’re also aware of Milton’s point that free movement and also a welfare state that incomers gain access to doesn’t really work. Only ever trade offs and all that.

Nick Shaxson gives us his absolute proof that Amazon is a vile, dirty, monopolist that definitely needs to be regulated into something something:

The Guardian tells us that: Women in Britain are paying up to £11,154 for a hysterectomy in a private hospital, amid huge delays for NHS gynaecological care, research reveals.

In line with our introductory post last week, the UK has become more adventurous, at this point more facing westwards.

Thanks to a healthy combination of private sector innovation and pragmatic public health policy, the UK had, for a long time, led the way in reducing smoking rates. Over the past decade, they have plummeted from 20% in 2012 to just 14.7% in 2021. 

Nixon to China is not an iron rule it’s just an observation about politics. It’s those who have their rightward flank protected who can make a move towards communists. Equally, it’s only those who have their leftward - or planning - flank protected who can do this:

Some truth-telling from the Member for Great Yarmouth: ‘By a continuous process of inflation… governments can confiscate secretly and unobserved an important part of the wealth of their citizens.’

From Kate Bingham, the only person to have done something successfully in recent years through governance - largely, by not being like government - a useful description of the basic problem:

This is one of those terrible ideas that needs to be stamped upon, hard. Rachel Reeves’s Treasury is looking to keep millions of pounds levied on polluting water companies in fines that were meant to be earmarked for sewage cleanup, the Guardian has learned.

Terrors: In December the ONS pushed back the publication of the overhauled labour market statistics to 2027, the latest of several postponements from spring 2024.

We thought this was interesting: The Conservative government spent more than £130m on IT and data systems for the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which will never be used, the Observer can reveal.

We are told that: The United States on Friday grounded SpaceX’s Starship and ordered Elon Musk’s company to investigate why the spaceship spectacularly disintegrated in a fiery cascade over the Caribbean during its latest test mission.