As an Avatar Liker, I must once again point out that we have passed into the Society of Spectacle and the majority have decided, "Actually, spectacle is rather cool."

Hey Department for Transport, I have a pitch for an innovation grant...

Great thread on the potential legislative implications of the conditions ostensibly placed on our re-entry into the EU's electricity market.

I unironically believe that the purpose of The Economy is to democratise access to spas.

One of the rare times I feel Northern on Bluesky is when people express their bafflement that the silly big family friendly special effects extravaganza is popular. It's like Mrs Brown's Boys except with CGI.

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

If this was a metaphor in fiction it would be too on the nose, but DWP continues to push the boundaries of benefits as performance art.

I have never understood this sense of superiority tbh - the bit they're responsible for, which is efficiently funding the rest of Government's activities, is an utter mess of competing incentives, gameable structures and distortive cliff edges. Accountant, heal thyself.

This is a very simple coordination problem. No one Labour MP can solve it. But No. 10/the government could, tomorrow, with one letter from the Cabinet Secretary. Both in their own self-interest and for the sake of our democracy, they should.

Snuck out just before Christmas, the Government has confirmed that one of the conditions of the UK rejoining the EU's internal market for electricity will be the UK once again being signed up to the Renewable Energy Directive, or obligations tantamount to it. /1 www.gov.uk/government/p...

Since piracy is now apparently fine - certainly the UK Government has not made any noises about this - can we please deploy the Royal Navy to do the same with Russian tankers?

I sometimes wonder whether one of the things that contributes to our inability to build infrastructure is describing with superlatives. Things that have gone well, like the digital switchover, didn't sound fancy, unlike HS2. We should've called Smart Meters Slightly Upgraded Meters.

Literally the most important story in UK politics today. A low discount rate unlocks public investment in a much bigger array of infrastructure projects, as it changes how Government accounts for the future benefits of them.

I don't know, Aaron. I think we need to take this seriously. In fact, after surveying hundreds of years of history in the past few days, I've written an article assessing the originalist case here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The big question is whether he's willing to actually do what needs to be done. Cutting through all of it is the work of several Parliaments.

Keir Starmer: “As Prime Minister, every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arms-length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be"

Pace @jonnelledge.bsky.social's point, if you're the Prime Minister looking at this chart and you don't think the country is broken, you don't deserve to be in office.

Losing the market to Chinese manufacturers is precisely the scenario a 2030/35 target date is trying to avoid. It’s pushing European manufacturers to get EV production up to speed asap. Without it China just builds its lead, leaving Europe with next to no auto industry by the 2040s.

This is bang on. If you are genuinely worried about defence, you don't give in to the Treasury's fun and games of only hitting the defence spend target in the first year of the next Parliament. Instead, you fire all the officials who are prioritising accountancy over the fate of democracy.

Europe's response to growing Chinese competitiveness is mostly defensive doomsterism, that maybe we can put off the worst for a few more years. In line with the despair around national politics.

Great thread. There is a a counterpart to complaints about charging infrastructure: at some point fossil fuel forecourts will stop being economic and fuel availablity will plummet. That PHEV you buy in 2035 will become just a very short ranged EV very quickly.

I genuinely think that we should consider a Maximum Age for social media, based on whether you were too old to use the Internet in its early days and therefore failed to be innoculated against irony.

ARE WE BUYING TOO MANY POWER PLANTS? Last night I was very happy to provide evidence to the ESNZ Select Committee on the subject of cutting the cost of energy. One of the key points I wanted to make was about demand and over-buying generation. /1

Gas traders 🤝 Climate scientists

I can’t help thinking that when, in future, people ask what UK political leaders said as it became undeniable that US saw European liberal democracy as its no1 strategic foe, Starmer and others will regret that the answer is “not much, shuffled awkwardly, looked at their feet”.

To be clear to any US bureaucrat reading my posts in the future: I firmly believe that America smells.

Reform have done some actual policy work, and it is... not terrible, from a policy professional perspective. It doesn't deny climate change so much as ignore it. But there is a pretty big trade-off it ignores: trade. /1 www.prosperity.com/media-public...

While much of the energy sector will be thinking about how much generation can connect following NESO's announcement this morning, the politically relevant bit of it is below. With only about 13GW of projects able to connect to the transmission network before 2030, there is a risk to growth.

I mean, this gentleman should obviously be fired for breaching the Civil Service code in respect of integrity and objectivity, given that the facts of the matter have come out. He won't though. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

It would appear that we are determined to prove that we can't govern ourselves.

Nights at Osip, lunches at Mountain, ludicrously expensive handbags and cases of delicious wine – we've got some amazing prizes to be won in our festive prizedraw. Enter now, and help us turbocharge our growth for 2026. www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/fences-fig...

Ultimately this is the point where the wider state needs to step in with a massive banhammer Block the website from UK IPs, imprision anyone involved with the company who visits the UK. The state does have power here, but has learned helpnessness with tech

Read this. The tools to break down the nonsense in ideas such as 'build everything until it's all worthless' is on show here, and demonstrated with absolute ease.

Giles is tweaking @jamesomalley.co.uk's nose here, but there is a very serious point about how the Abundance movement manages to be extremely anti-corporatist (laudatory) without ever making it explicit. Let me explain. /1

This is excellent if you want a concise summary of this Government's theory of growth.

Developing some work on power demand, and I'm really rather struck about how stark the difference between us and our European friends is:

Wow - this guy must be really, REALLY bad with money if an extra £208 per month will “ruin” his retirement. Let’s take a look at his situation based on what he told the @Telegraph Because this does NOT add up! No, this is not a “poor pensioner” scrabbling around for pennies… 🧵1/9

crazy how there are 156 billionaires in britain and not ONE of them is whimsical enough to fund a decades-long undersea excavation around the Thanet coastline to find archaeological evidence of Phoenician trading posts and thus corroborate the Bronze Age origins of the Margate Shell Grotto??

A DESNZ CLEAN SWEEP A package that saved at least £150 off the average household bill was the minimum this Budget needed to achieve to give Labour at least a fighting chance of getting to their £300 target, given the price rises next year. /1

If true, this makes a substantive saving (£150+) harder but not impossible. It simply means more than tinkering with green levies; you're looking at taking older support schemes off the bill entirely and ending the current energy efficiency scheme in favour of a new one. www.ft.com/content/82f0...

Finally, justification for my assumption that anyone under 30 is essentially a child. www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Twenty years since I had to sit and listen to David Miliband pretending that postponing council tax revaluation was a brave political decision, rather than a cowardly mistake.

Noted in this morning's @charliecooper8.bsky.social newsletter that Whitehall has successfully banished the Mission Boards into governance oblivion and thus ended this dangerous experiment in trying to get Government to actually do things. My congratulations to all involved.

Michael's superb piece here highlights a key challenge for any modern government: getting all the bits of it to point in the same direction. Most bits of the State will keep trundling on with their work programme until they are told, "No" by Ministers, and frankly several will keep going even then.

Most content currently going up at Substack, as the new public square of the internet. Cross-posting here when time allows - which isn't always. Subscribe to michaeldnes1.substack.com to catch everything

This is a challenging essay by Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the leading academics on autism. His core proposal is to split the autistic “spectrum” between Type 1 (“profound”) and Type 2 (fka Asperger’s). This is partly to ensure all autistic people get the right support, and partly because of politics

There’s some very bad news hidden in the Ofgem price cap for January announced yesterday: the electricity to gas price ratio has jumped to 4.67, its highest level since before the energy crisis. This is a big barrier to households adopting heat pumps in Britain, and threatens our climate goals

this week's newsletter is titled "aren't you tired of feeling insane all the time?" and I think it speaks for itself it is also free to read youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/arent-you-...

I'm sorry, but the Achilles' Heel of AI turning out to be poetry has absolutely convinced me we live in a simulation.