HeyJaredNeil O'Brien's Substack
The Substack of Neil O'Brien, MP for Harborough and Shadow Minister for Policy
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 10
- Latest publication
- Aug 30, 2026
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- Aug 6, 2026
Latest issues
It’s just sausage to me (opens the original)
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Mashed language, borrowed wordsI hugely enjoyed Ed West’s brilliant series of posts (here and here and here) on the English language - and the chaos and beauty that comes from its mash-up of Germanic and Romance influences. The mixing up of two very different language families (one posh, one common) makes it hard for new learners: I am helping my son aged six to learn to read, so I feel the pain first h
There are no miracles here (opens the original)
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“This country desperately needs a strong second city… and we don’t care if it’s London or Birmingham.”-Old joke among Manchester politicians“This city needs more council housing like a hole in the bloody head.”-Senior figure in Manchester local government to the authorOne of the things our new Prime Minister has traded off is a sense that he has presided over a city that is going places. Shiny skyscrapers… shiny new yellow buses… and a shiny new Prime Minister. What’s not to like? His claim is:
The dentist won't see you now (opens the original)
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The Labour government has raised tax a lot. Spending will soon be £152 billion a year higher than planned under the Conservatives - that’s 11% more every year. The top priority for all this extra tax and spend was supposedly to improve the NHS. This post looks at whether the extra money has worked in one particular bit of the NHS: in dentistry.The summary version is this:Less dental treatment is being done on the NHS than before the pandemic.The big geographical variations in access to NHS denti
The returns to expanding higher education could be even worse than we thought (opens the original)
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One of the most cited facts in the higher education debate is the finding from a groundbreaking IFS report that:“total returns [on going to university] will be negative for around 30% of both men and women.”The IFS have recently updated this work, looking at the same cohort of students - people who did their GCSEs in 2002 and graduated in 2007.We now have several more years of
You can’t fix illegal immigration by making it legal (opens the original)
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In June this year, the Home Office announced the creation of three new “safe and legal refugee routes”, supposedly inspired by the Homes for Ukraine scheme.The story got a bit lost because of the chaos around Keir Starmer’s departure, but it’s a really big deal.There are three separate new immigration routes being created this year:“A new community sponsorship scheme will allow communities to sponsor refugees to resettle in their area, taking res
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