As set out in this thread, the causes of the court backlog are chronic lack of funding and absurd inefficiency. The government has made no proposals to address either. Their answer is to remove juries. Rather than fix the leaking roof, their solution is to burn the house down.

I have reached the pinnacle of my DS9 rewatch.

Minor point. But this is the OBR saying that the briefing about income tax being dropped because of improved forecasts is bollocks.

If the budget wasn’t so depressing I’d find the OBR leak hilarious

what the fuck

Indeed. Railway nationalisation doesn't have to be like this: not every nationalised railway is 'Germany in 2025' or 'the United Kingdom in 1994', but it's wild seeing the government actively go 'British Rail in 1989, here we come baby!'

Ah, 2025. When you need to do a firmware update on your Christmas lights when you plug them in.

Of course it’s the over 65s who overwhelmingly support this while simultaneously not being affected by it and being the people who should actually be more rigorously (re-)tested.

Inconvenient facts for malign (often foreign) influencers who try to portray my home city as a lethal no go zone. After more than half a century living here, I’ve never felt safer And kudos to Fraser Nelson for his work on this

I literally swore at the radio when this came on the news on my drive home.

The fools! They'd be so much happier now if they had just talked endlessly about battery trains and hydrogen.

Successfully avoided the spoilers and finally watched the final tonight. Gutted for Cat. Well done Alan. Nick - we go way back and I’ll always have so much respect for you.

Every leak and rumour about the budget gets more and more depressing.

Don’t give a fuck about St Paul’s but having to keep 13 sightlines has meant London’s skyline truly is one of the most interesting in the world

FIFA awarding a "peace prize" to Trump would be so absolutely on-brand, a truly genius innovation.

This is why we can’t have nice things

I am in transit nerd heaven

gm

New awareness campaign

Picard: there ARE FOUR GUYS! FOUR

London's Ringways are a whole network of unbuilt urban motorways threaded through the capital. There's never been a complete map of them,not even one made by their designers, until now. Today we're publishing the Ringways Map from @roads.org.uk to let you see in the city that London nearly became.

Horrible news from the ECML tonight. My thoughts are with everybody involved.

Apropos of absolutely nothing... I was looking at Chicago Bears NFL team trying to relocate from their really cool downtown stadium to some suburb. And it's just such a perfect example of the weird size and sprawl of US cities... it's the equivalent of Liverpool building a new stadium in Manchester!

Ngl I preferred it when they were made with 100 per cent potatoes

Print edition @theonion.com ads don’t miss

Reminded that Warner Bros, owner of Friends, is suing Midjourney for copyright infringement and wants up to $150,000 in damages per infringed work.

1980: NHS spending as a % of GDP: 5.1% Defence spending as a % of GDP: 5% 2024: NHS spending as a % of GDP: 10.9% Defence spending as a % of GDP: 2.2% This is such a common applause line, but it’s also total bullshit.

gay men in their 30s:

Finally found a decent plumber in London. Only taken 13 years…

This is a fascinating - and excellent - post by @samfr.bsky.social on his recent experience of being an NHS hospital patient. My heart jumped when I saw bed occupancy mentioned in the article: I have “views” on bed occupancy, so I thought I’d say something about it. substack.com/inbox/post/1... 1/6

A few weeks ago Storm Amy gave me an unexpected opportunity to explore Liverpool. What an amazing city

"Parking is such sweet sorrow"

Tony Blair thinks that tax rates should be lower www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/202...

“I’d rather take a picture than be one”. I hadn’t realised someone had summed up my attitude to photography nearly 100 years ago until @3licks.bsky.social took me to the Lee Miller exhibition. What a remarkable woman. Here’s a photo I took on the way there. www.bbc.co.uk/culture/arti...

Love this: "mediocre" is the only one US and UK agree on; US rates "average" above average

Please don't call it that

We are already seeing some fantastic (but horrible) contributions to the Bad UX World Cup! 😃 This year's challenge: Create a horrible date picker! See all the contributions (so far) here: badux.lol #baduxworldcup

it’s always “make unhealthy food more expensive” and never “make healthy food more accessible” 🧐

If I was a tutoring company and I wanted to convince you that I could teach your kids maths, I would probably not have an advert that said “3=2” on it! That’s just me though.

Why is the uk so shit at realpolitik these days?

It will never not baffle me that I can have better mobile internet reception in the desert in Morocco than I have in most places in the UK.

all my love to the new waiter in this place who, when I ordered a glass of picpoul, went "a glass of......pickle? :("

Editing photos in style this evening

We don’t know what the messages said, so it’s hard to comment on the details here. But more generally: things that once would now be phone or in-person conversations now leave a permanent written record. These chats dated from 2017. Can politics actually survive that level of relentless scrutiny?