New Reform council in Gateshead set to scrap music arena on the basis of an AI projection. Financial calculations for public projects are invariably flawed. Financial calculations based only on GenAI assessments of public data are ireedemably flawed. www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-e...

Swamp-draining latest: giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT

The snooker is absolutely awesome

Great to chair this roundtable at the @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social annual conference in Oxford-and thank you to @acadsocsciences.bsky.social for filing and promoting our discussion on English devolution! 👇

Take a look at a State Dept design for new American passports. Banana republic stuff. Genuinely tragic to see.

What an absolutely crazy end to a match. I need to go and lie down. First automatic promotion for York in over forty years

👇 this looks fascinating. But it's also not surprising, given the enshittification of more established social media platforms and the increasing dominance of influencers, celebs and downright unpleasant people. Social media is just getting less *social*

Big day ahead. Forty years of supporting #YCFC and today might be the first time we get automatic promotion in all of that time

Are you interested in devolution & the future of subnational government? Read our summary of a discussion which took place at #PSA26 where @peckersley.bsky.social, @ariannagiovannini.bsky.social, Prof Janice Morphet, @marksandford.bsky.social & Dr Joanie Wilett discuss just that. Link below.

Brilliant to hear David Ward's commentary from the end of the York-Altrincham match on the Today programme just now (from 08:33) 🙂. I'll be at the game vs Yeovil tomorrow and hoping we can get automatic promotion for the first time ever in the 40 years I've been a fan www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Feel the need to post this pic before the rain and wind arrives to blow it all away

If you’re just waking up, here’s a summary. No, the geopolitical situation is not OK.

Nice to see my latest paper, co-authored with Bernard Kofi Dom, come out in Public Money & Management. We trace how a lack of agreement about what local government should be *for* - its role in the UK state - have characterised central-local relations since the 1970s. doi.org/10.1080/0954...

👇Thread below summarising the sessions that we in @psalocalpol.bsky.social will run at the @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social conference in Oxford next week. Delighted to chair our opening roundtable, another panel, and present my paper on "Understanding the power of place in local climate policymaking"

Spotted in Morningside, Edinburgh, earlier today. Oops.

Still my favourite vending machine in the world - at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin

Really pleased to pick up these babies in the flesh from the office 😊 Book by Wolfgang Haupt, me and Kristine Kern, on "German cities in a changing climate: challenges for politics, public administration and society" now out in hard copy with @nomosverlag.bsky.social share.google/QL3MVTJbdPXi...

Blimey, these articles by Goodwin and Oakeshott in the Spectator appear to be genuine - they both read like Private Eye spoofs

@gabyhinsliff.bsky.social on the nail here. Unlike many other economic migrants, Dubai influencers have the opportunity (perhaps even the duty) to inform their followers of the perils associated with fleeing conflict zones www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

👇 Brilliant take on the societal risks on relying on LLMs and their hallucinations, particularly in under-researched fields. Also great that @leahbroad.bsky.social refrains from using the term 'AI'. These models are, of course, *not intelligent* in any genuine way.

I see that the current holder of the FIFA Peace Prize is - once again - showing the world why that award was so well deserved

The thing about Gorton and Denton: it wasn't even close. Reform a long way behind the Greens, and not much ahead of Labour, in a seat that was supposed to be a three-way tie

Great article on tariff rebates from @alanbeattie.bsky.social in the FT, here with a gift link. He points out that Chinese companies, rather than US consumers, will benefit from the fiasco - in direct contrast to how the policy was framed and sold originally giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

It's been a real pleasure to contribute to this report into climate action in English local government. We even managed to keep it to a very-unacademic, readable length! 🙂 Liam Clegg will be talking about our analysis at this launch event in London next month - tickets are still available 👇

My massive Schadenfreude at the tariffs judgement is tempered equally bigly by this observation

Really insightful analysis of the intelligence and diplomatic build-up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, four years after it started. It's reassuring to be reminded that Putin remains a very long way from achieving his objectives. My favourite bit 👇 www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int...

Turns out (says @jburnmurdoch.ft.com) it's not so much an oversupply of graduates in the UK (the same would be true of other similar countries but it's not) as an undersupply of the kind of jobs that a better-performing, more productive economy would supply.

Terrific from Bedford Council 👇

South Korea, like Brazil before it, shows older democracies how to deal with insurrectionists BBC News - www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cq... Yoon Suk Yeol: South Korea’s ex-president jailed for life for masterminding an insurrection - BBC News

I'm all on favour of puns in news headlines, but I wonder how many times it's possible to get away with something like this when reporting on the curling www.bbc.co.uk/sport/articl...

Last call for our PhD position to work on the project "Analysing Net-Zero Discourses in the Context of Democratic Backsliding"! Details here, deadline is this Friday, 13 Feb 👇 www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...

I'm keen to see this play, but also highly annoyed that the tour goes to nine more southern venues after completing three months in London. The only theatre it will play north of Birmingham is in York! Nothing in Scotland, the north east or north west... www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/f...

The UK's first, but definitely not last, climate evacuees 👇

This is a terrific analysis of how and why we got here - gift link The pessimist who became a prophet - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT

This is quite interesting, even if it does highlight the fact that - AFAIK - no other big tech orgs make it easy for users to opt out from GenAI, despite growing public scepticism. FWIW, the problems that GenAI has caused me since its inception far outweigh any benefits I think it may have delivered

Ich freue mich sehr auf die kommende Publikation unseres neuen Buches 👇 Das Buch wurde von Wolfgang Haupt, mir, und der leider verstorbenen Kristine Kern geschrieben, und befasst sich mit der Entstehung und Entwicklung städtischer Klimapolitik in Deutschland www.nomos-shop.de/de/p/deutsch...

Respect to this guy for wearing shorts whilst out walking dog on the seafront this morning. Weather forecast also posted for context

There's a big, bright, warm, yellow thing in the sky today. What's going on?

Pleasure to contribute to this report on local climate action in the UK for Climate Emergency UK CIC. Thanks to Liam Clegg for doing the number-crunching to underpin the analysis. The full report will be launched at this event in London on 18 March www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/accelerati...

NEW: NEW: Standards commissioner finds Nigel Farage committed seventeen breaches of MPs code of conduct. He failed to declare £333,000 in outside interests (more than 3x MPs annual salary)…

[email protected] is on top form here

I'm very happy to see this #openaccess paper out to start off 2026! It was mostly written almost two years ago, when I was reflecting on 20 years of research and teaching in Museum Studies in the UK, but also increasingly facing questions from academics... www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

👇 - Event this coming Thursday!

Saw this in the supermarket for the first time this morning and very intrigued to try it later. AFAIK no other northern English brewery has yet branded their alcohol-free beers as being 'nowt', I've ways found pretty strange. Nowt Peculier works on multiple levels

This is pretty ironic, given that the US government has tried to justify Maduro's kidnapping on the grounds that it comes under the umbrella of the 'war on drugs'

Trying to forget the global carnage with a walk to take in one of my favourite views - even better than usual with a snowy sunset

Where next? Cuba? Greenland? Iran?

Oops www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Great piece here juxtaposing AI with humanity's previous reliance on religious forms of authority in the pre-Enlightenment era

Not the first person to put this, but I've just woken up and WTF is going on with the cricket?