Eminently sensible from Rob, who is a good egg.

I've got a long piece about a visit to the construction site to see how they're actually building this stuff on tomorrow's newsletter, and they are going to a frankly *insane* amount of effort to placate people who just don't want stuff built, and we are all going to pay the bill.

There really is no point in doing deals with the US with Trump in charge - because he has the reliability of a toddler.

When I try and house the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why we can’t house the poor they say I’m endangering a beloved bowling alley.

Kind of wild that the US is demanding Ukraine cede land to Russia

Tapping the sign again.

Why is this week’s economist a combination of “the right wing is amazing” and “more benefits for pensioners is good” … hello???

www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/s... @dlknowles.bsky.social @jonnelledge.bsky.social you probably saw this anyway

Reading the replies to this were certainly eye opening insofar as there are way more tankies on BS than I thought

When the winner of the Nobel peace prize smuggled herself over the water and out of Venezuela to attend the ceremony in Oslo this week, her allies called the Pentagon to ask them not to arbitrarily murder her. www.wsj.com/world/americ...

"In his endorsement of Brexit trade freedoms, Starmer resembles Alec Guinness’s half-mad colonel in The Bridge on the River Kwai, defending an edifice he has forgotten was built for the benefit of the other side." www.ft.com/content/2d00...

Keir Starmer appears to intuit that the British people love to be deferential to American bullying, proving at least he doesn’t know the best bar in Wisconsin to find three hot sisters

Christmas CANCELLED in London 💔🎄

The fact that Labour think this might work makes me think they are probably cooked

My lovely Kiwi golf instructor whose partner (also Kiwi) works in the city told me they’re very worried they’re going to be kicked out in 2027 when his visa expires. Like, what the actual fuck are we doing?

“Hardly anyone does this well on cognitive tests” yeah bro they only give them to people with dementia

Some nations fight to protect human rights — Russia fights to erase them. Moscow not only strips its own people of basic freedoms but extends that repression to neighboring countries. 🧵 1/10

Britain cannot rely on the US any more. Which means we need to be strategically independent. The only way this happens is to start from scratch. Trade needs to be oriented to Europe. We need to scoop up all the brilliant scientists being driven out of America.

Mercantilism & anti-immigration policies, but with a human face. Really seems to be working great for center-left parties around the world over the last decade. Let’s do more? 🤷‍♂️😬

The opportunity cost of all the wasted effort that was required to leave the EU, only to find it absolutely didn’t address any of the nation’s ills, when that could’ve been spent fixing real issues, & the cost it will take to one day rejoin. People should be in gaol; instead some are running for PM.

They keep testing my brain because it's working so well. I'm constantly having my brain tested

In some ways this is a useful reminder that a lot of the talk of European security guarantees to Ukraine have the whole thing backwards. For more than three years Ukraine has been guaranteeing European security by fighting and degrading the Russian armed forces. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I need you to listen to and share this story - of how Trump is preparing to abandon Ukraine in exchange for Russian money for his billionaire friends. It could be the greatest corruption of American foreign policy in our history. Russia gets Ukraine. Trump's friends get rich.

Absolutely amazing chart from @peterkellner.bsky.social's piece in @thenewworldmag.bsky.social today: www.thenewworld.co.uk/peter-kellne...

I’ll never forgive them for this

The LAPD killed 13 people in 2025, firing their weapons 40 times, injuring another 30 people. The Metropolitan Police haven’t killed any people in 2025 despite them policing 2.5 times as many residents as the LAPD.

The difference in tone (both in the wider political context and the literal texts of official guidance) between two countries which desperately need more dentists could not be starker or indicative of how we've ended up here immigration.ca/how-to-immig... vs www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-role...

First step: Hey Channel Islands, either you’re in the UK or you’re out of it. Your choice.

Looking forward to Yanis’s inevitable pilgrimage to Moscow to point at subway stations and ruminate on how great it all is

So it just becomes 'look, I know you don't agree with us on social policy, but have you considered that we have made everything more expensive and that your railways work less well than they used to?'

There’s a billionaire funded, autocrat supported, internationally coordinated attempt to destroy western democracy and we need better from our governments and our media than pretending it’s not happening

Watching a show where a guy conspires to become president to enrich himself via a complex terrorist scheme. All seems a bit overly complex when they could have just accepted bribes.

It's a good thing I've paid in all my life otherwise I'd worry about who'd be covering my healthcare and pension.

renews.biz/105719/uk-ap... Ed is the king

If it were steel works we would have a government bailout plan, yet losing thousands of jobs at unis is met with a shrug. & unlike steelworks universities were profitable when they had foreign students. You are killing the golden goose… one of our best exports… HOW IS THIS HELPING GROWTH?!

"Official documents and expert conversations reference the growing belief that the fossil fuel economy has run its course, and that it can and should be replaced by a new, better system centred on manufactured goods that generate and run on renewable electricity." Core truth of the 21st century.

Can we all take a moment to acknowledge that Ed is doing a Good Job

"We will have an economy in which the full-time work of some young people will pay less than the state pensions of retirees, and yet it is the young people who will be taxed." www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

When this criminal was jailed, the judge told David Gentile and America: ‘This is a warning to would-be fraudsters that seeking to get rich by taking advantage of investors gets you only a one-way ticket to jail.’ I guess not

The “fell for it again” award for anyone who (in good faith) said that Trump was the anti-war candidate

Not really the point, but I love that “showing the US president images of POWs starved by the Russians” is apparently now an unimaginable faux pas.

Kinnock voice - "I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions....and you end up in the grotesque chaos of a Labour government, a *Labour* government, rejecting visas for homeless 8 yr olds trying to joing their parents"

an underestimated threat AI poses is not convincing you that fake things are real, it’s convincing you that real things are fake

The "don't have an extra kid if you can't afford it" brigade get awfully upset when you suggest they don't stay in their £2m house if they can't afford it, don't they?

Every version of this story is some version of ‘well you couldn’t expect me to be able to afford to buy the house I currently own’ and yes that is the point welcome to the housing crisis.

I think this is a very important point in yimby discourse: people say they don’t like densification but in London at least the densification is happening anyway. It happens via house shares, kids living in parents houses forever etc. you get the densification with or without more housing!

Maybe Starmer & Reeves hate their Blue Sky fanclub as much as the rest of us and so designed a tax increase lazer focused on screwing them over

My main takeaway from two weeks on a Coroners’ Court jury 18 months ago was that Coroners’ Courts should not have juries.

I was telling @michael-fox.bsky.social that I had pretty high hopes for this Labour government and boy was that a wrong shout on my part