There's quite a bit of talk at present about the possibility the UK might face a fiscal crisis & have to "go to the IMF". An under-discussed aspect of this is: Would the IMF have enough funds to bail us out even if it wanted to? 🧵 When a country faces a fiscal crisis it's natural to focus upon the deficit. We might think: If the UK got into distress, what might it be borrowing? 5% or 6% a year? With an IMF spending cuts programme that might drop to 2% or less. So maybe 15% of GDP IMF funding needed? 2/

Have you ever wondered what the ur-thought was, the intellectual leap, that led to political liberalism? Here's the answer. We shall set it up backwards from the end.+ +Last step. Locke develops his concept of a liberal political society by taking Hooker's concept of what we now call a "Broad Church" & applying it to secular society.+

Between his 2016 Election & his inauguration, Trump sent team members to the UK to meet with various people (including me) to find out "what it would take" to get a trade deal.+

https://twitter.com/lionelbarber/status/1854944127080882404

+They said the deal had to be agreed in the 1st six months of Trump's term, when he was defining his Presidency. They wanted it to be a paradigm example of a "fair" trade deal they could then use as a precedent & to demonstrate they weren't anti-trade.+

Assisted dying should not be permitted. MPs should vote to reject it. The key reasons for this are as follows.
1) We will not be able to sustain our system of interventions to prevent suicide if we deem that suicide is something people are entitled to do. 1/ 2) Suicide itself is profoundly wrong. People should not be able to assist others, at their moment of greatest weakness, over the psychological & other hurdles that might prevent them, into doing something so profoundly wrong. 2/