Burnham on Manchesterism

Andy Burnham, the likely next leader of the Labour Party made a speech on Monday 29th June, from the People’s History Museum in Salford. I have linked to the Sky News video of the speech. I have captured the transcript and post it below/overleaf. This may differ from the speech due to inaccuracies in youtube’s…

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World Democracy Indices

I was pulled to return democraciness by some comments on the UK and the Copenhagen Criteria. I replied in this blog article, where I returned to Economist Intelligence Unit’s index and gave a nod to https://www.v-dem.net/ and Polity IV. See also https://davelevy.info/how-democratic-is-the-uk/ 2018. On quora I was pointed at some further indices that I had…

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UK Democracy in 2025

Time to look at the Democracy Indices again. In particular the EIU are suggesting that democracy is making a comeback. They say, “democracy stabilises after eight years of decline”. Here are my notes and links …

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Brexit Reset – Spring 2026

The Government has announced it plans to introduce a Bill to allow the Government to “dynamically align” with the European Union‘s single market. This comes at the end of a series of events over the last four and half months, since I wrote, https://davelevy.info/wiki/brexit-reset-winter-2025-26/ I comment on these at https://davelevy.info/labours-brexit-tanker-is-turning/, since then What’s disappointing is…

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From Here On, We Must Go Alone

I was sent an English [machine] translation of a speech by Jürgen Habermas together with a prequel summary. … I am sharing below the new speech by 96-year-old Jürgen Habermas, titled “From Here On, We Must Go Alone,” which he gave at the Siemens Foundation in Munich. It is about the future of Europe and…

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The Law and Free Speech

A lengthy post on “Free Speech/Free Expresion” by Graham Smith on linkein caused me to pick up my copy of “Prohibiting incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence”, published by article 19 in December 2012 which reviews the conflicts between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on civil and political rights. The…

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Two speed E.U.

One of the reform proposals at the end of the last EU mandate, was a multi-speed Europe. I reported on the most explicit initiative https://davelevy.info/wiki/sailing-the-high-seas-reforming-and-enlarging-the-eu/ . Has the time come again to look at this as an answer to the EU’s sclerosis. The challenges are clear, with the federalists or federalist adjacent players looking at…

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AI & Search

There is some stuff written about how Google struggles between offering a great customer experience and profitability, but AI is changing that. Here are two articles that address Google’s continued anticompetitive behaviour, and AI become an interlocutor for search.

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Where are the chips made?

There’s probably a joke about British and American use of the word chips here, but in this article we are talking about silicon chips. Here is some stats I took 1½ years ago on which countries make them, taken from Wikipedia.

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