Theresa May: “To row back now would be a catastrophic mistake for while that consensus is being tested, the science remains the same.” 🎯 💯 https://www.ft.com/content/fdcba944-8fd0-4cf0-bfbd-6bfbb2256987 via @ft

Is Anthropic's AI really going to be able to recreate the full scale of human creativity if it's not sampling the literary works of Chuck Tingle? Seems like an oversight.

I want to call out this "tackling climate change is bad for the working class" argument: 1. Poorer communities tend to be more vulnerable to climate shocks 2. The shift to net zero is expected to create more jobs than it destroys 3. Turning back on clean energy likely won't lower energy bills

I am genuinely exhausted by the idea we "haven't had a serious conversation about Immigration in the UK". It's all we have been *fucking talking about* since I was, like, eight.

The Warm Homes Plan is coming, and it should provide a lot of answers and new details to how the Government will tackle the issues of energy bills, fuel poverty and emissions from homes. @acjsissons.bsky.social sets out seven tests to judge the merits of the plan www.nesta.org.uk/blog/seven-t...

New thing alert! 📣 Today's we're launching a new initiative: The Centre for the Edge 📣 @kinship.works and @jrf-uk.bsky.social How can leaders in our struggling public institutions support the emergence of alternatives? More here from @mssophiaparker.bsky.social and me: medium.com/@jamestplunk...

The government has floated the idea of takin VAT off energy bills as a quick fix to lower bills. @mashley.bsky.social has run the numbers. He reckons it would cost £2.5 billion a year - and that there may be better ways to spend that kind of money www.nesta.org.uk/blog/is-remo...

🚨 Even more housing data alert Today’s housing supply indicators show a welcome uptick in the number of dwellings started. But data released yesterday showed planning approvals dropping to a record low in Q2 2025, a worrying sign. Read our blog on this here: buff.ly/WLt3Z6e

100% with Marie on this; we need more waterfront pubs in Central London. The relative abundance of spots upstream of Battersea is one of the things that makes the stretch from Isleworth to Putney is particularly nice. h/t @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/so-about-t...

My most centrist dad take is that most governing politicians deserve sympathy because almost every policy that's actually any good for the country is unpopular, and almost every popular policy is probably bad. Johnson's Brexit approach was far worse than Chequers IMHO but 20ppts more popular 1/

Moving gas plants - which set the price of electricity- out of the market and into a nationally controlled reserve, would take £5bn off the UK’s energy bills “Renewable energy is cheaper than gas but we’re not reaping all of the benefits clean power brings” www.theguardian.com/business/202...

I'm a bit conflicted on this story. On the one hand, these changes are overbroad, based on a bad-faith approach to the issue. However, the climate emergency declarations created a slew of entirely unrealistic targets. No council is going to get itself to net zero 20 years before the UK as a whole.

With Melvyn Bragg retiring, @tomwhyman.bsky.social introduced me to the best episode of In Our Time where Bragg just kicks off at the guest historian for --reasons--. (Skip to 14:40 if you don't have the patience to listen to the whole thing.) www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Well worth revisiting Zack Polanski’s comments on net zero from May

"It can be irritating to feel like your national identity is one of the few it’s unacceptable to take pride in: it’s not as though France and Spain and a dozen other countries don’t have their own imperial-atrocity strewn history to contend with." With a heavy heart, I have written about flags.

Celebrate the counternarrative. Progress is happening and it is good.

"This is absolutely the time when we must work out how to do a social tariff and build the infrastructure now" @mikebrewerecon.bsky.social explains why creating social tariffs can't wait until the next energy price spike 👇

No notes From: www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-...

Council tax is terrible. I don’t like this exact proposal but am in general in support of replacing stamp duty and council tax with a property tax. Bizarre to have any proposal for a property tax that doesn’t remove stamp duty, the worst of all taxes. However, this doesn’t really cover how bad CT is

This would be laughable if it wasn't so serious: yet again, the Tories are claiming that we can get "all our oil and gas" from the North Sea and that we should be doing even more to support the industry to extract. There are several reasons why we should treat this with maximum scepticism:

North Sea liabilities may already be larger than future sales revenues implying this may have significant costs. But more fundamentally, the quicker you deplete an already declining basin, the more rapidly you become exposed to more imports. Proper energy strategy needed.

Madness, but the ball is firmly in Labour's court to come out and underline, again, why this will not reduce people's bills. Labour cannot continue to let the conversation be driven by the far right.

I am forever fascinated by allure of fracking to certain people, despite its clear flaws and broad opposition. So here's a list of some things that are more popular than fracking (or generally have more support). www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Not sure about the political risk of various sorts of tax reform but I do think at a certain point governments do need to actually try to make the British economy work better and reshape it to accord with their vision of fairness.

See also, Betteridge's Law of Headlines

When is the parade?

And that's why they got a London Overground line named after them.

DAME CHLOE KELLY

YESSSSS LIONESSES

So much outrage because they want to replace a golf course with some tennis courts?

Great thread on the offshore wind farm by Clacton-on-Sea, including the lack of local opposition to the project and the benefits it generates for the community. This is Farage's Westminster seat, of course!

This is some good news

I've just had to go through the servicing/MOT on the 4 year old EV. Servicing is the wild west. You get 'specialist' places telling you it's a £300-£400 job with loads of technical terms...

Con artists like Tice and Net Zero Watch get their traction by conflating 'old' renewables with 'new'. Old renewables were expensive (duh). They are still being funded by legacy subsidy regimes (duh). But new renewables are not because of the things learnt when they were expensive.

Apparently when the Government merged the NIC and IPA into NISTA, they didn't migrate over any of the NIC's reports or data. It's all on the national archives, but doesn't come up in search. So you'd need to know exactly what you're looking for.

Extreme weather is the UK's new normal, says Met Office www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

We're traveling back from Spain today and our flight home has been (so far) delayed by 2.5 hours. The plane was there the whole time, they just didn't have a crew. We just boarded and the pilot apologised, and blamed 'the weather' around Barcelona for the delay.

Listen, fair play.

"Oh, it's silly spending all that time thinking about the Roman Empire," they said. "It's not actually relevant to the modern world," they said. Why do it? TO AVOID MISTAKES LIKE THIS

The costs of Brexit continue to mount up, making us all poorer than we would otherwise have been.

‘The No10 communications team has banned any official from speaking at events that include question and answer sessions, or where the media are expected to be in attendance’. Ridiculous. www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/gove...

An efficient electricity system is materially important for living standards. Falls in electricity prices are progressive and disproportionately benefit lower-income households. Read more➡️ buff.ly/rpMJphF

If I were Ed Miliband and gas prices open very strongly tomorrow morning (likely they will) then I would get a proper media blitz going. The line of protecting the economy from foreign energy conflicts works really well during foreign energy conflicts.

A key factor for how many heat pumps get installed: It is the ratio between electricity and gas prices (so-called spark gap). My graph below shows that countries with the highest spark gap also see fewest heat pump installs.

New thing klaxon! How do you know if your organisation is mission-driven? Today we’re releasing a mission maturity framework I’ve co-authored with @danhonig.bsky.social and Vinuri Dissanaya at Georgetown Better Government Lab in collaboration with Nesta. Link: www.nesta.org.uk/report/on-mi.... 1/n

Europe relies heavily on imported fossil fuels—a big risk for energy security, competitiveness, and climate action. Geopolitical tensions can disrupt supply and spike prices, making us all vulnerable. Investing in local clean energy is key for resilience, jobs, and a sustainable future.

Here's the part of the Spending Review on the Warm Homes Plan. My first reaction is: the £13.2bn has survived, but £5bn of it is financial transactions, not government capital spending. (£5bn is most of the new funding) This will be used to underwrite government-backed retrofit loans I suspect.

We've just published our work on reforming energy levies. Current levies inflate electricity bills by ~20%, and favor fossil fuels over clean energy. We project impacts of levy reform on a range of households and show that it's possible to make them both fairer and more climate friendly.