Conventional UK politics is in crisis. By this I don't mean merely that things are bad. I mean that destabilizing forces have strengthened and stabilizing ones have weakened.

To see what I mean, think about financial markets. When these are stable, it's because they are dominated by negative feedback processes. If an asset price falls, "buy on dip"traders and value investors buy it, thus helping to stabilize prices. During crises, however, the opposite occurs: there's positive feedback, whereby falls in prices beget further falls. This can happen because information cascades cause people to sell because others are doing so; during the tech crash of 2000-01 Amazon's price fell by over 90%, as much as that of stocks that subsequently became worthless. Or it can happen because falling prices trigger margin calls which cause investors to avoid illiquid assets, depressing their prices even more, and to sell anything regardless of quality merely to raise money; this was part of the story of the 2008 crisis. Or it can be simply that falling prices lead people to sell to cut exposure to what they see as risky assets. This is what happened with portfolio insurance strategies (pdf) in the 1987 crash and with the liability-driven insurance strategies in the gilt market in the autumn of 2022.

Although the details of these crises differ, they share an essential feature: positive feedback mechanisms become more powerful, thus generating instability. We might define a financial crisis as one in which positive feedback mechanisms are strong, relative to stabilizing negative feedback ones.

There's an analogy here with politics. It used to be thought that the dominant character in electoral politics was the "median voter" who occupied the "centre ground". Any party that strayed too far from this median would thus lose out to the one that could capture that "centre ground". And so there was negative feedback, whereby deviations from the centre ground would eventually be corrected.

We've seen such stabilizing negative feedback only recently. Both Truss and Corbyn were victims of it.

But I suspect that such stabilizing processes have become weaker, and the destabilizing processes have become more powerful.

Take, for example, Brexit. The median voter now opposes this: a recent Yougov poll found that only 31% say UK was right to leave EU. The conventional theory says that the parties should therefore be moving towards this centre ground. But Tories and Reform are not, and Labour's movement is inadequate.

Or take economic growth. One might imagine that 20 years of near-stagnation would provoke intense debate about how to change policy to boost growth. But it hasn't. The Tories stopped thinking about economics years ago, and Labour's ideas stop at anything that might challenge the interests of rentiers or incumbent companies. Instead, what's happened is exactly what Ben Friedman described in 2006: stagnation has bred intolerance and racism. Instead of seeing negative feedback, whereby stagnation leads to policies to improve growth, we have positive feedback: stagnation leads to a retreat from serious thinking into culture war BS.

Which contributes to another area where negative feedback is weak - immigration. Net immigration almost halved last year. You might imagine, therefore, that those who were worried by it in 2022-23 would be less concerned now. They aren't. Quite the opposite. The right is merely demanding even bigger drops in migration. Cutting immigration isn't enough for them.

Which might explain why the "problem" of small boats hasn't been solved. Logically, the answers should be simple: process asylum claims efficiently and permit asylum seekers to work whilst their claims are being processed. But this hasn't happened. Instead the government prefers to make facile gestures to appease the right. Negative feedback would consist of: public concern - policy response - falling migration - public satisfaction. This mechanism is broken.

It's not just stagnation-induced intolerance that explains this breakdown. Another factor is simple ignorance. Most voters wrongly believe that net immigration rose last year. And Yougov have found that almost half of voters think there are more migrants staying in the UK illegally rather than legally - a portion that rises to almost three-quarters amongst those wanting large numbers of migrants to leave. But the truth is that less than 10% of immigrants are here illegally.

Now, in a stable political culture, we'd get negative feedback; mistaken perceptions would be corrected. But this isn't happening.

Of course, one wouldn't expect the right-wing media to inform people correctly. But the BBC doesn't do so either. Since Brexit (and possibly before) it has often preferred to report controversies as merely "he said, she said" without asking who is right. Former assistant political editor Norman Smith said in 2016:

There is an instinctive bias within the BBC towards impartiality to the exclusion sometimes of making judgment calls that we can and should make. We are very very cautious about saying something is factually wrong and I think as an organization we could be more muscular about it.

Since then, the problem has got worse. Patrick Howse says its idea of impartiality (rather than the pursuit of truth is "fundamentally dishonest and logically absurd", adding: "if you give equal weight to lies and the truth, you take the side of the lie."

One reason for this is that the corporation's commitment to public service is undermined by a commercial mentality which leads it to appeal to consumers. Adam Bienkov reports that it has "drawn up plans to win over voters of Reform UK". Hence its abject apology to Jenrick when a Thought for the Day contributor called him a xenophobe. Hence too it allowing the right to set the agenda, reporting much on migration to the detriment of issues such as inequality, economic stagnation and underfunded public services.

The problem is, though, that chasing customers isn't always consistent with telling the truth.

What it is consistent with is dumbing down and coarsening public debate. Let's take another example. Back in 2008, David Cameron claimed that the Labour government "has maxed out our nation’s credit card." This was gibberish at the time and seems even more so now that government debt has tripled since then. If negative feedback mechanisms were working, people would have driven this idiotic trope out of the discourse, pursued by derision and scorn. But they didn't. Instead, Laura Kuenssberg repeated it and Sir Keir Starmer, believing it a good attack line, turned it onto the Tory government. And so we have another positive feedback mechanism; moronic gibberish gets perpetuated and spreads. And this isn't merely a problem of rhetoric. Ignorance of concepts such as opportunity cost, comparative advantage, transactions cost economics and regulatory capture are all contributing to rank bad policy-making.

It's not just the media that has replaced stabilizing negative feedback with positive feedback, though. So too have politicians.

When Enoch Powell delivered his "rivers of blood" speech in 1968 Ted Heath sacked him days later. Compare that with Badenoch permitting Jenrick to remain in office despite associating with neo-nazis.

It's not just the Tories that aren't holding the line against the far-right. Nor is Labour. As Antonia Bance said:

Myth-busting doesn't work, so no, I am not going to waste my time correcting misconceptions and arguing with my constituents.

The government takes a similar view. One of Starmer's spokespeople has said that protestors outside asylum "hotels" are “right to protest” in order to express their “legitimate concerns” about migration - sentiments not extended to protestors against genocide.

The problem with this is not only that it is morally obnoxious. It's that it doesn't work as electoral strategy. Labour's support is falling as it leaches more voters to the LibDems or Greens than to Reform. As Anand Menon says:

You don’t fight Reform UK by making its strongest issue the national priority. Nor, as countless political-science research projects have illustrated, do you effectively combat the radical right by accommodating them.

In our FPTP electoral system, this risks letting in a Reform government. And so the negative feedback we saw under Heath - whereby politics was stabilized against the spread of racism - has been replaced by a positive feedback mechanism, whereby mainstream politicians legitimate fascism.

Of course, you'd expect Ted Heath to be to the left of today's political-media culture. But so too was Thatcher. One of her defining ideas was a reverence for the rule of law. "For justice to prevail the most basic requirement is the rule of law" she said. "The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob." Her epigones do not share these sentiments. Whilst Jenrick has been supporting mobs of racists, the press has been lionizing a woman guilty of inciting racial hatred. Again, Thatcher was a source of negative feedback, wanting to uphold the law against detabilizing forces, whereas today's right is a destabilizing force.

All I'm doing here is spelling out a few mechanisms in support of David Allen Green's recent attack on the complacent idea that "unpleasant situations will resolve themselves" and that balance will be restored. For this to happen, there must be negative, stabilizing, feedback mechanisms. But our political-media class has weakened these, preferring to pander to racism.

I'm not surprised that so many in this class choose barbarism over socialism. What is surprising is that they choose barbarism even over liberal democracy.

Labour’s reluctance to name Brexit as the cause of so many problems hasn’t stopped Reform’s rise. It’s time to try the truth

So begins another chapter in the liberation struggle. Released from bondage to the EU, Britain finds itself subjugated to a more insidious foe. The border that should have been sealed is wide open. The foreign hordes are still coming, but their passage is no longer directed by bureaucrats from Brussels. This time, national emancipation depends on breaking the tyranny of human rights lawyers.

That is the plot to Nigel Farage’s Brexit sequel, previewed on Tuesday in an airport hangar in Oxfordshire. The Reform UK leader laid out plans for “mass deportation” of migrants – all who arrive without permission, plus those who are here already and came by illicit channels.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Poll after poll shows most voters think leaving the EU has been a failure. Closer ties with Europe would bring huge rewards

Brexit isn’t working, and the British people know it. Poll after poll, including that unveiled this weekend by More In Common for the Sunday Times, shows that people are feeling the terrible damage caused by the deal forced upon us by Boris Johnson, Kemi Badenoch and the rest of the Conservative party, and want something different. The latest shows less than a third of Britons would vote to leave the EU if a referendum were repeated. There’s no doubt that fundamental change is needed. There’s no doubt the public will is there to make it happen. The question is: will Keir Starmer seize the moment and deliver it?

There are big prizes on offer if he does. Giving our economy the boost it desperately needs, pulling it out of the cycle of low growth and high debt that the Conservatives plunged us into. Helping to raise more funding to lift our NHS and other public services off their knees. And, crucially, showing people that there is a better, more hopeful way forward than the nasty, nonsensical “solutions” they hear from Nigel Farage and his fellow snake-oil salespeople on the right.

Ed Davey is the leader of the Liberal Democrats and MP for Kingston and Surbiton

Curate your own newspaper with RSS

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Last week, both The Verge and Wired announced major newsletter strategies. Wired writes of a “traffic apocalypse”, where “platforms on which outlets like Wired used to connect with readers, listeners, and viewers are failing in real time”.¹ The Verge describes “Google Zero”: the moment when the dwindling supply of visitors from Google Search completely dries up.²

Traffic to news sites from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter has atrophied as those services limit links to external sites to keep users locked in. Google Search’s excerpts and, more recently, AI overviews have satisfied users’ questions before they click on the article that actually provided the information. Some have abandoned Search altogether for ChatGPT or other chatbot LLMs that summarize journalists’ work with varying degrees of accuracy, often without linking or even mentioning the source.

These intermediary platforms between news organizations and readers are undergoing a type of predictable decay Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”.^a As executives twiddle the knobs to extract ever more profits from their user base, things worsen for people on both ends of the consumer–producer relationship. Readers no longer see news articles from the journalists they chose to follow on Twitter as the site downranks any posts that link offsite. When they search on Google, they’re bombarded with error-ridden AI facsimiles before reaching the higher-quality underlying work. Producers who once relied on social media and search engines to drive visits are losing traffic as platforms embrace a vampiric strategy: rip off others’ work while expecting high-quality journalism to magically continue to appear, even as journalists are starved of audience and revenue.

The newsletter strategy aims to bypass these rapidly enshittifying intermediaries and instead establish more direct relationships with subscribers. “I don’t intend to ever rely on someone else’s distribution ever again,” wrote Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel on Bluesky.³ Although email has undergone some enshittification of its own,^b its fundamental nature as a protocol rather than a platform has provided one essential prophylactic to enshittification: the escape hatch. If your email provider suddenly inserted ads two sentences into every email, you could easily switch providers^c and still receive emails from everyone you previously emailed. As a result, email has become a go-to refuge for news outlets fleeing their abusive relationships with deeply enshittified platforms they grew reliant upon.

But the surge in newsletters has been overwhelming. Whether it’s writers like me who’ve never worked in a traditional newsroom, journalists who’ve left or been laid off from traditional jobs, or established newsrooms entering the newsletter business, there’s a newsletter around every corner. Instead of subscribing to a single newspaper for columns and articles by a dozen journalists, now you have a dozen separate newsletter subscriptions, with articles appearing haphazardly in your email inbox amid bills, business communications, marketing spam, order confirmations, and two-factor authentication codes.

Even as a newsletter writer myself, I sometimes miss the newspaper. Sure, maybe half of the articles I paid for were deeply uninteresting to me, and sure, the executive overlords and editorial teams of the one-time titans of journalism seem to be in a competition to see who can most eagerly defend fascism, but hey: at least I could choose when to read the news, go to the newspaper and get my fill, and then put it away. No pings in the middle of my workday pulling my focus away from my writing. No notifications during my planned relaxation time, alerting me to some new horror. No threats to my inbox zero, requiring me to choose between staring neurotically at the unread emails notification or marking an email as read only to lose it forever. Maybe there was something to be said for the newspaper.

And increasingly, your reading is spying on you in a way a print newspaper never could, with websites tracking when you click a link or scroll down the page, and even email newsletters tracking when you open an issue or visit a link.^d Apps like Substack collect data about your reading to show you an algorithmic feed, ostensibly to grow the “Substack network” and drive new subscribers to writers hoping to build a following. In practice, these mechanics in turn drive writers to please the algorithms, writing what gets the most clicks and ranks them higher in the recommendation system. Independent thinking and creativity often get sidelined to click-chasing.

What if you could take all your favorite newsletters, ditch the data collection, and curate your own newspaper? It could include independent journalists, bloggers, mainstream media, worker-owned media collectives, and just about anyone else who publishes online. Even podcast episodes, videos from your favorite YouTube channels, and online forum posts could slot in, too. Only the stuff you want to see, all in one place, ready to read at your convenience. No email notifications interrupting your peace (unless you want them), no pressure to read articles immediately. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Platforms like Substack recognize this appeal, and invite you to follow numerous writers in a tidy feed on their app. But with Substack, you’re limited to following only the writers who publish on that platform. You’re also at the mercy of their rapidly accelerating enshittification, as they work to lock readers and writers into the product, while making the experience worse for both.

There’s a more enshittification-proof option.

Meet RSS

Perhaps you’ve heard of RSS. It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it allows websites like blogs, newsletters, and news sites to make their content available in “feeds” for outside services called “RSS readers” or “feed readers”. Far from being the new hotness attracting glitzy feature stories in tech media or billions in venture funding, RSS has been around for 25 years.

Google Reader was once the most popular RSS reader, and many (including me) were heartbroken by its shutdown in 2013. A lot of people moved to centralized microblogging services like Twitter and stopped reading blogs. But despite the loss of Reader, RSS continued on, and many contemporary tools do similar — even better — jobs than the decade-old service. In fact, you’ve almost certainly been using RSS without even knowing it, because the entire podcast industry runs on it.

Many, if not most, websites publish an RSS feed.^e Whereas you can only follow a Twitter user on Twitter or a Substack writer in the Substack app, you can follow any website with an RSS feed in a feed reader. When you open it, all your reading is neatly waiting for you in one place, like a morning newspaper. And RSS is more of a one-way street from a privacy perspective,^f pushing writing out to you with less of your data flowing back to the publisher.

I’ve been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it’s a travesty more people aren’t familiar with it. Here’s how to join me in the brave new (old) world of RSS:

Choose an RSS reader

Many good free and paid RSS readers exist, as web-based, desktop, or mobile apps. I personally use and like Inoreader.^g I pay for a subscription, but it has a generous free tier. I’ve also heard good things about NewsBlur and, for Apple users, NetNewsWire. I no longer recommend Feedly. There are also RSS browser add-ons, like Feeder and SlickRSS.

Don’t agonize over this decision too much. RSS is a protocol, and switching feed readers later is straightforward.

Do note that various RSS apps may themselves try to collect data about you, so check their privacy policies. As of writing, Inoreader collects some data on your reading activities, but does not sell or share it with marketers.⁴ Some tech-savvy people opt to self-host RSS feed readers like FreshRSS for maximum privacy and control.

Add your sites

Once you select a feed reader, add the feeds you wish to follow. Most feed readers let you paste a website’s URL to find available RSS feeds. Some websites have multiple RSS feeds, like Wired, which allows you to subscribe to a firehose of all articles or trim things down by subscribing separately to specific topic feeds like science or cybersecurity.

Put anything in there: a URL to your favorite newsletter (like this one!), a traditional news publication you enjoy, a blog, a YouTube channel, or even a Mastodon or BlueSky feed.

If you need ideas, I publish several folders of my feeds to my blogroll. The OPML file can be imported into a feed reader to automatically subscribe to all of the feeds I follow, but beware: these are some of my “firehose” feeds and can be overwhelming. I’d recommend starting small with just a few feeds you enjoy.

Power users can even subscribe to search results from search engines or other websites, making RSS a powerful tool for research. Have you ever wondered how I keep up with cryptocurrency news? Besides the crypto publications in my RSS reader, I have feeds for Google searches like (cryptocurrency OR NFT) (theft OR hack OR scam) and CourtListener searches on crypto-related keywords for newly filed cases. CourtListener provides a feed for every docket, so I have a folder in my RSS reader for ongoing court cases I’m tracking.

What about sites without RSS feeds?

One hiccup you may encounter is a website you love that doesn’t provide an RSS feed. I encounter these rarely, as many content management systems provide RSS feeds out-of-the-box, sometimes without writers realizing they’re there.

Publishers sometimes need to enable RSS functionality, and some will happily do so if you ask nicely. (I’ve successfully asked at least one newsletter writer I subscribe to to turn on their RSS feed on beehiiv, which doesn’t provide feeds by default but can be made to do so with a click.)

Some paywalled email newsletters lack RSS feeds due to subscription-gated feeds not being universal (though they exist — shoutout to 404 Media). This leaves writers with the choice of exposing all their paywalled writing for free on an RSS feed or not offering a feed at all. Fortunately, many RSS readers can ingest email newsletters, typically by generating a custom email address for newsletters to be sent directly.^h When that newsletter sends an email, it appears in your RSS reader alongside your normal feeds.

And if your RSS reader doesn’t offer this service, there are third-party tools like Kill the Newsletter tha can accomplish the same task.

Read!

With your RSS reader configured, you now have your own custom newspaper — or several.

I heavily use the folders functionality in my feed reader to create several “custom newspapers” for different purposes. I have a Subscriptions folder for all the newsletters and media outlets I pay to read, and I usually read almost every entry. A broader Newsletters folder contains a wider array of writers, and I read only the articles that interest me. My News folder usually has thousands of unread articles (often from high-volume publishers like Wired), and I skim through headlines without reading every article. My Food folder holds over 100 food blogs, and I browse it for dinner ideas.

Some publishers provide full-text articles in their RSS feeds, so you can read everything without leaving the reader. Others publish only an excerpt, requiring you to click through to the website to read the page. I often click through regardless, because I like reading articles as their web designers intended.ⁱ But on sites cluttered with ads and cookie banners, a full-text RSS feed offers relief. For more privacy-minded readers, reading articles in your RSS reader can also reduce ad tracking, click surveillance, and other privacy invasions.

Support writers

As always, support writers when possible. The RSS feed can make it easier to miss subscription prompts or donation requests that appear on a website outside the content feed. If you regularly read a writer or publication through RSS, consider subscribing to their newsletter directly, purchasing a paid subscription, or making a one-time donation if accepted. Many newsletters (including this one) allow you to sign up for a paid subscription and turn off email delivery, so you can support the writer financially while reading through your RSS reader and avoiding inbox clutter. This is how I read most of my newsletters.

Escape enshittification

Using RSS is a way to regain control over the information you read online. Instead of letting platforms like Twitter or TikTok control what you see based on engagement metrics meant to prolong your time on the platform and subject you to endless ads, you can subscribe only to the sources and writers you want to read. Unlike enshittified social networks, your RSS feed will give you exactly what you signed up to read — no promoted posts, no algorithmic deboosting for posts that dare to link to articles, no ragebait from people you don’t follow.

RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

Related reading

• “You should be using an RSS reader”, Cory Doctorow
• “What using RSS feeds feels like”, Giles Turnbull
• “It’s Time for an RSS Revival”, Wired

Europe’s silence has allowed the genocide of Palestinians to continue unchecked – undermining all it stands for

• Josep Borrell was the high representative of the EU for foreign affairs and security policy from 2019 to 2024

If they survive Donald Trump’s attacks, the international courts will not deliver their final verdict for several years. But for all those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, there can be little doubt that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza, slaughtering and starving civilians after systematically destroying all the infrastructure in the territory. In the meantime, settlers and the Israeli army are every day guilty of serious, massive and repeated violations of international law and international humanitarian law in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Those who do not act to stop this genocide and these violations of international law, even though they have the power to do so, are complicit in them. This is unfortunately the case with the leaders of the European Union and those of its member states, who refuse to sanction Israel even though the EU has a legal obligation to do so.

Josep Borrell was the high representative of the EU for foreign affairs and security policy from 2019 to 2024. He is president of the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, CIDOB

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Competiton regulator smells abuse of a dominant market position, Zuckercorp claims all is well

Meta's addition of AI services to encrypted messaging platform WhatsApp has Italian officials suspecting the Silicon Valley giant may be abusing its dominant market position to push unwanted features on users.…