🚨Exciting policy news 🚨 The Chancellor has announced that the government will consult on devolving 'Transport and Works Act Order' decisions to mayors. This would give them the power to get on with building transport networks, speeding up delivery like other countries. 1/2

Listen to/read this important podcast by @akshatrathi.bsky.social to understand how ignorance of or ideological opposition to the science of climate change gets dressed up as maverick open-mindedness by the far right

I feel sick. We live in a sick country. I wonder what Labour members would say to “should we put Suella Braverman in charge of immigration again?” Reminder: Mahmood’s policies are *harsher and more restrictive* than Braverman’s under the Tories. (Minus Rwanda and prison ship gimmicks).

The local elections in one chart. Labour has been squeezed between the Greens in young wards and Reform in older working-class wards www.economist.com/britain/2026...

I covered that march. Here's the first paragraph of the story I wrote about it: www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-t...

one theme running through toby's essay that i think deserves more emphasis is this: reactionary centrists like starmer are simultaneously bullying towards their own supporters and grovelling towards their opponents. it is this abject lack of self-respect that makes them seem so weak

The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.

What film that was already old at the time did you love most when you were a kid? Still remember watching and re-watching the original Clash of the Titans at my grandparents house with my cousins when I was a kid. We loved that film!

Hating the voters you have for not being the voters you want seems a theme in UK politics. Labour in its current form will struggle to prevent voters from defecting to the Greens as long as too many in the party seem prone to bourgeois self-loathing projected on to much of its post-2000 base.

Ok, that’s it. Starmer has to go. Changing approach to immigration apparently “the wrong lesson” in an election they bled votes to the Green Party more than anything else and got absolutely crushed. Utterly blind.

I wrote a piece about the need to end climate silence. Don't listen to the "climate hushers" -- people telling us to ignore the crisis & only focus on affordability and "kitchen-table" issues. Instead, connect climate and our fossil fuel addiction to the issues that voters care about most.

UK being middle of the pack and Spain having among the cheapest electricity somewhat goes against the narrative in the press that “UK’s electricity is the most expensive anywhere and it’s all because of net zero”

“It would be unwise to overstate what these results portend for the next general election. Some local votes really are about potholes, not Peter Mandelson.” Yet the reality is that local govt is now so centrally constrained that seems entirely logical that voters would treat as national polls…

A Harvard study just published estimates Elon Musk's destruction of USAID has already caused 600,000 deaths 2/3 of them children. That is his legacy in this world.

Ok there's a lot of incorrect information going around on this, so I want to be clear that the problem with the Big 3 and EV's isn't that the Big 3 didn't want to make EV's. The problem, as with so many things, is Trump. I'm gonna do a little thread on this because people don't seem to be aware. 1/x

If you’re wondering how the national struggle against antisemitism is going, Zack’s repost remains high up on the BBC politics page, but they somehow haven’t found space for Zack being subjected to a Nazi salute in Sussex or for the Times’s Der Sturmer-style cartoon of him

Here are the most recent numbers. They are even better! The main plus from biking is the health benefit, whereas the main costs for cars are congestion and accidents. Source (in Danish): Row 373-382 in tab 'Katalog - enhedspriser' in this spread sheet: www.man.dtu.dk/-/media/inst... #dktrp #dkpol

That's what bugs me about what Talarico is doing. He's playing on that field of archetypes & vibes, invoking fossil fuels as traditional & manly & reliable, because he thinks clean energy loses that vibes contest. But Dems should be trying to move energy *off* that playing field.

I like that they didn’t fall into the trap of going in on hybrids. UK seems to be stuck in the hybrid bridge-to-nowhere at the moment.

There is an "earthquake" going on in the energy system and we are at risk of building the wrong stuff, says Jackson, which would be like "building shopping centres just before Amazon"

What's stopping YOU from hitting these kinds of numbers? It's all about SHOWING UP and HUSTLING and CASHING IN on the deaths of thousands while taking advantage of an over-reliance on fossil fuels that is sending us all headlong into mass extinction.

Shipping companies say the Strait of Hormuz is closed. An elderly convict who regularly shits himself in public says it's open. For busy Americans, it can be hard to know who to trust.

Hold on. We the taxpayers are going to pay companies $900 million, which is more than 6x what we spend on wind power R&D, to NOT build wind power at a time when electricity prices are spiking and we need more clean power?

I don’t think I can take another news cycle of Democrats solemnly tutting about how violence is never the answer while Republicans promise to put their political enemies and whatever immigrants they can find in a wood chipper

I set an alarm clock and go to work everyday, but y’know, I really don’t feel like Farage is on my side in any way whatsoever. This is really a message for conservative retirees wanting to tell working age people how to live their lives and how they should work while claiming 3x lock state pension

An expert opinion that the scam reported by the BBC wouldn’t work, and so was a scam on applicants not the system, seems like important context

If you have a system where some people can be rendered fair game for any and all violence because they fall into some extralegal category of unperson, it is only a matter of time before that category expands to include you.

Although, let’s be real, this will have been McSweeney driving all of this. (Buck still stops with Starmer obvs.)

Listening to today’s Daily on this article, I don’t get the sense the reporters understand the absurdity of Roberts’ claim about a regulation to reduce coal to ~25-30% of power generation by 2030.

Imagining every Green party in Europe feeling equal parts satisfaction & exasperation

You might have seen a post about Nimbys in Chelsea objecting to the expansion of *an NHS cancer hospital*. It's even worse than it sounds. 1. It's not a hoax 2. @jonnelledge.bsky.social got in touch with them. I've got their response. 3. I dug out some objections. One of them…well, just read it:

Disgusting reporting by BBC using a tiny number of cases to suggest widespread abuse of a system which routinely denies LGBTQIA+ individuals asylum and forces them back into environments of persecution. This article massively distorts the reality of the situation. 1/ www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Good explanation from @stellacreasy.bsky.social of my analysis of the government/MAC's own data on the fiscal impacts of recent immigration, as featured in today's Guardian.

Amazing they’ve managed to spin this in a negative way. “In the midst of the latest energy crisis, free or paid electricity for all thanks to abundance of energy from the sun” is bad actually, says newspaper.

Treasury brain strikes again

Not only will Labour's hostile and inhumane immigration policies not provide the savings they claim, but they are also likely to create such massive external costs, including losses to key sectors and drops in income for the treasury as to crash the economy. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

"How can we get rid of you?" The immense significance of the defeat of Orbán's illiberal political machine and methodology By me at the Empty City substack emptycity.substack.com/p/how-can-we...

We need to talk a bit about how utterly absurd the March heatwave was in the USA. This heatwave would have been impossible without a boost from climate change, but even with climate change it remains a deeply unlikely event. A thread looking at some of the numbers. 🧵

Sorry mate the last shred of your credibility was lost when you signed up for this. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli... #tonyblair #oilandgas #cleanenergy

Very good explanation of the profound problems with the government’s proposals on permanent residence and why simply tackling retrospectivity isn’t nearly enough

From today, for thousands of couples and families staying together in the UK just got even more expensive. Visa fees are rising again — quietly wrecking lives. We know that around 60–70% of many visa fees are profit This is not cost recovery, it is excessive charging at the expense of families💔

Fun fact: every five months, the world builds as much solar power generation as all the nuclear power that has ever been built. And still some people dream of a ”nuclear renaissance”. That train has left the station long ago…

Unedifying scenes from Scotland, where desperate Scottish Labour is promising to raid the scant active & sustainable travel funding pot to spend on motorists. Sarwar is the *worst* - but Glasgow Labour are also opposing a congestion charge, mainly because SNP support HT @paul0campbell.bsky.social

Ok, I get he thinks it’s all fake. But can he explain why space exploration is gay? I’m intrigued.

Trump “repeatedly vented to confidants that the Bondi-era DOJ isn’t prosecuting his many foes swiftly or ferociously enough, and that the now-former AG was at risk of letting his political foes, in Trump’s phrasing, “get away with it.”

"When we take seriously professed concerns about the exchequer cost of immigration, we are paying too much of a compliment to opponents of immigration." @chrisdillow.bsky.social on the public finance impacts of immigration. chrisdillow.substack.com/p/on-the-fis...

I feel like “the world passed peak gas-powered car sales in 2017” is not a widely known fact

I've thought of trying to get an online army to just tag all these pieces of bad news #theydidthis and this is a big one. When the catastrophes, the hunger, the breakdowns happen, please trace it all back to #theydidthis.

The LNG shock isn’t driving Asia back to coal, says @davidfickling.bsky.social "a boom in rooftop solar is far more likely than a return to coal" HT @carbonbrief.org $ www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...