Tomas Ruta

The “Texas” in your mind is an abstraction which no longer exists. Probably only 40% of the votes are from anyone you would clock as a “Texan” if you met them in the street. The schools from K to PhD are indistinguishable from Massachusetts. I am begging you to live in reality

Birmingham is fascinating because it’s basically the future of the entire country in about 20 or so years & yet barely anybody seems to really care what the texture of life is like here. It’s a very different city from everywhere else in the country, almost completely unexamined

Exclusive: A Conservative shadow minister has privately called for the pension triple lock to be replaced by an “entirely new” system. Katie Lam, the shadow communities secretary, said there needed to be a “radical” shake-up of the coalition-era policy that Andy Burnham has committed to reforming. A leaked recording obtained by The Times from June (when she held a different front-bench role) reveals her response to a question at a Tory association event about the triple lock policy. “Ultimately I think what we will need in the end is an entirely new pension system,” she said. “I mean, a baby that is born today has a 20 per cent chance of living to be 100 and I don’t think we can fund one in five people half of their lives, you know, for the first 20 and the last 30 years. But obviously if you are 90 you probably can’t go out and get a job right, so I think you have to be realistic about how you would taper that and bring that in across the population.” She added: “I just think the whole system as it stands can’t stand for very much longer.” The comments appear to break from Badenoch’s position, which is that pensions should continue to rise in line with the triple lock, by 2.5 per cent, average earnings or inflation, whichever is highest. Lam said that “ultimately” the pensions system would be more likely to have to rely on private schemes. She said: “Some of the coalition changes around private pension contribution rates are like directionally the right ones. I think ultimately we will just need to have individual pots that people have for themselves, private sector pensions, Sipps [self-invested personal pension], all of that kind of thing. “Maybe some sort of annuity product that’s, like, guaranteed by the government or something like that, I don’t know. But it’s hard to imagine like, the triple lock for me is a bit like in the immigration system, like changing the conditions of a specific visa or, I think we need something more radical and less incremental than that.” Public spending had risen dramatically as a percentage of GDP since 2010, according to Lam, who told attendees: “We have to have honesty and humility about the fact that that happened under a Conservative leadership.” She added: “The state is just going to have to do dramatically less, which I suppose comes onto the pensions point.” Her comments reflect the private view of some senior Tories. Tom Tugendhat, the shadow foreign secretary, said when he was a backbencher last November that the triple lock was “simply not affordable”. After Burnham’s announcement that he would remove an annual earnings link in the next parliament, the Conservatives launched an appeal to “help us fight him”. A petition launched by the party this week said: “Pensioners built this country. They worked hard, paid in and did the right thing. They live on fixed incomes. Most cannot work,. That is why the Conservatives invented the triple lock. Because we recognise contribution.” Approached today about the comments, Lam said: “Our commitment to the triple lock is clear and unwavering. It is farcical that the prime minister wants to take away money from pensioners while billions are being spent on foreign nationals who have never paid into the system, and on people who choose not to work. “Andy Burnham needs to focus on slashing the welfare bill, not on ideological attacks on pensioners. As I said in my full answer to the question, if you’re going to change the pension system for people who did actually pay in all of their lives, you’ve got to start by not giving benefits to people who aren’t Brits, and getting people back to work.”

modern travel is increasingly flying 10 hours to experience a slightly different version of the same globally optimized lifestyle. same third wave coffee. same natural wine bar. same brutalist menu. same sourdough. same beige hotel. same tasteful ceramics. same instagram lighting. what a ridiculous convergence.