Subsidising energy consumption in the face of both a short-term supply shock and the long-term need to decarbonise. Bad for the economy, bad for the planet, bad for the world's poor. And *if* you favour a wealth tax (I am sceptical but there's a case) spending it on *this" is just idiotic.

I used to think thw German Greens transitioning Germany away from nuclear and renewables and back toward coal was the most anti-green Green Party policy I'd see in Europe, but subsidising fossil fuel usage during the best transition opportunity of our lifetimes gives it a run for its money

Joel’s right and it’s part of how parochial the British political class has become that hardly anyone says this, and that hardly anyone points out that Labour’s ODA cuts have literally killed people.

Once it’s a park it’s a park forever. Initiative-42 requires any developed park space to be 1:1 replaced. This downtown site should be seen as a loss of hundreds of homes

Sandie Peggie *still* getting front page stories and sympathetic interviews while Beth Upton has had to flee to Australia is so unbelievably grim.

In essence:

Man arrested for arson with intent to endanger life over a fire at a packed LGBT club on Saturday night. The club today looks completely destroyed. Thankfully nobody hurt. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Can’t wait for like, 500 articles that are like “as I dived under a table to hide from the shooter I realized I had to be even more sycophantic to the White House”

Kind of a perfect metaphor for the media and the role they've played over the last ten years

I’m at the combination Comedy Central Roast of Adolf Hitler / Reichstag Fire

The amount of misinformation we’re getting about an incident that just occurred in front of 1,500 news reporters is truly the metaphor of our generation.

Going after Parkrun – a non-competitive event which has no changing rooms – perfectly illustrates that it's never been about fairness in sport, women's safety or anything else. It's about bullying and demonising trans people, hounding them out of public life in every space possible. It's disgusting.

V good read on house building. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Solar panels don’t damage the countryside you just don’t like the way they look. Skylarks. Linnets. Yellowhammers. www.ecoportal.net/en/solar-pan...

Fascinating thread this.

I honestly have nothing but withering contempt for people like this. They are consumed by No Bedtime Socialism. It's atomised hyper-individualism masquerading as something collectivist. The people who suffer the most here are staff and consumers due to the impact it has on inflation.

It says a lot about Labour that their "saviour" is a politician who came 4th in a leadership contest vs Ed Miliband, a very distant second to Jeremy Corbyn, and whose maneuvers against Starmer backfired so badly as the last conference even his allies asked him to stop.

Think Britain would be so much better if "second home" was read as "small place for the weekend", rather than either landlordism or ultra-wealth. And that comes from making housing cheaper for all.

I don't think anything sums up the level of hairshirt socialism here than banning second homes (something that is a normal, middle-class, aspiration across continental Europe).

Politics on easy mode. Or perhaps politics for a kid. Imagine Biden announced a magical super-ship "100 times more powerful" than any other, with lasers and go faster stripes, to be finished in 3 years. It'd be treated as a scandal, a joke and proof he's senile. But for Trump, oh it's just Trump.

I genuinely think some people do not want to look this in the eye/think about it because it is so awful. We wrote what I thought was a pretty eye-opening story about all this and I was surprised by the lack of engagement tbh

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

Politicians just seem to have given up trying to explain the world as it is to people. It's a huge problem.

Yeah, I think the willingness to “just say things to make people in difficulty stop complaining for an hour” over “actually doing things that help” is in part a manifestation of not caring enough about people’s real difficulties.

The fuel shortage has left me depressed about British politics in a way I never have been before, in that not a single party has avoided either saying or doing something incredibly stupid and completely removed from how anything actually works.

Haven't read and not gonna read but mental to see British commentators praise Enoch Powell?? The hallmark for unacceptable racism for over 50 years, and was considered racist when he made that speech *in 1968*

when it's going great

"It would be really bad if they don't work out this Hormuz thing, so they'll figure it out some way" is still the prevailing attitude. Can see it in markets, media, politicians, public. Bad can't happen, people in charge know what they're doing, it's all content anyway. I find it... unsettling.

Feels like a big season for Oxley's First Rule of Political Parties: new/expanding parties will initially attract many people who are very political but have worked their way out of all the other parties due to an oddness of their views, personalities, or often both.

I think a lot of the question of why don't Brits invest very much comes down to Brits have learned to see their economic future as tied to their house price which unlike stocks and shares they simply refuse to believe can go down

I think this is true, but also the inevitable result of that being a policy-reinforced one-way bet for a large chunk of people in a select geography, in a select time period. And the consequent politics making "reinforce the one-way bet" a popular option.

Still of the view that the biggest risk in this whole mess is widespread hunger in poorer countries leading to political instability.

This is also why universal demand subsidies in rich countries are immoral.

🚨NEW HISTORIC LOW 🚨 - net economic optimism in Britain has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded since Ipsos began collecting this data in 1978.

I think, of all the idiocy around trans rights, this may be the thing that annoys me the most. It's fucking Parkrun! The whole point is that it is inclusive, non-judgemental and encourages people into sport. The entire attempt to drive trans-women from Parkrun is just so against the spirit of it

My view on the Briefing Room 5 weeks ago was: If the Strait reopens in the next week, we have economic disruption but it’s manageable. Closed for another 4-8 weeks & we have high energy prices throughout the year. Closed for few months & all bets are off and we’re in a really grim economic world.

good, productive feminism explains that gender isn't innate and the patriarchy can be deconstructed; essentially telling young women that all men are creeps and predators and will never change is actually just weirdly reactionary and purposeless

i think it's just my algorithms since i interact w feminist content and this stuff often cloaks itself in that philosophy, but the fatalistic gender essentialism being fed to young women on social media rn is SO bleak

i think a lot of this would be solved if people learned how to have normal friendships with people of the opposite sex but unfortunately i dont think the people buying into this stuff have any friends at all

Mad fact... 42% of Labour Prime Ministers have had to fire Peter Mandelson.

Little known fact: if nobody will pay £850,000 for your house, it's not worth £850,000.

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You can actually see the moment Ed Miliband thinks, what's the point burning through whatever political credibility I've got left energetically defending a man who's going to be gone in a matter of weeks.

I think @hern.bsky.social was exactly right that it has been a truly astonishing bit of brand destruction by Google to bundle a free, bad version of their AI into their once incredibly useful search engine. It makes people think Google's AI is much worse than it actually is per its peers!

These are a really good set of reforms - and carries on the Govts outstanding record on clean power - and will get virtual no coversge because of everything else. Ffs

Resolution has applied my model to data up to 2025. As the chart shows, we can be less confident as time goes on. But firm-level evidence from Bloom et al shows a 6% loss. I think it's time to retire the OBR's 4%, which was a simple average of pre-Brexit forecasts.

Also they have social media in Canada and Carney's doing fine. They have it in Spain and Sanchez has been PM since 2018. And in France where Macron's been President since 2017.

IMO the fetishisation of local communities and placing their views/benefits about the national (or even regional) interest is one of our biggest challenges as a country. You need a balance and broadly ours is swung way out atm