They said it couldn’t be done, but this is just the start.

If we do this right the giant sign outside the British Museum listing all the documents you can produce two of in order to gain free entry could become a tourist attraction in its own right, and the constitutional dispute about the omission of the Young Scot card could be the next indyref trigger.

Absolutely no criticism of this policy (it's great!) but I've seen discussion before of putting plug-in solar on balconies and wondered: are balconies just much less common in the UK than in a lot of European countries?

Goodwin’s book has prompted an intellectual move I did not anticipate: “the steelman case for just saying things”.

Been at a conference all day; at one point a senior academic showed me something on his phone while swiftly batting away a push notification about Chuck Norris. Disappointed to learn that this was an actual news story and the erudite prof doesn’t actually have a subscription to Chuck Norris Updates.

I’m not sure this matters much, but it seems a bit implausible that Polanski, not then a public figure, would have ended up on the BBC the day after a 2013 Sun article that I don’t think anyone paid much attention to at the time to apologise for it? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Could be worse. In order to avoid controversy, all Euro notes feature bridges. In order further to avoid controversy, they're all fictional. Or they were until the folk of the Dutch town of Spijkenisse took it upon themselves to build them. Now all Euro notes feature bridges from just one Dutch town

www.gov.scot/publications... - published today

Just walked past Union Street in Glasgow and it looks like firefighters are still firing water into the building even now (I assume as a precaution at this stage).

At least Liz Truss's failure was "not anticipating that a tax-cutting budget might increase long-dated gilt yields and require pension funds employing liability-driven investment strategies to rapidly increase collateral", not "not anticipating that a war in the Middle East might make oil pricier".

People expected to live forever in limbo, forever as outsiders, and they will still be asked: “Why won’t you just integrate?”

EXC: Arts groups based in a landmark Glasgow cultural centre have been told to get out by the end of the March after City Property terminated their leases. Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, Glasgow Print Studio and Project Ability are among those affected. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2589875...

Legal advice re use of UK bases for attacks on Iranian missile bases now published www.gov.uk/government/n...

This reminds me that a single polar bear liver could kill 50 humans, which is one of these facts that lives permanently in my head despite the fact that if it ever *approached* being relevant the actual polar bear would kill me first.

Useful and interesting thread!

Rhodes Professorship of the Laws of the British Commonwealth and the United States www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQR395/r...

“Our defeat just convinces me we are on the right track” would win a prize for absurdity had it not been topped by Kemi Badenoch drawing the same lesson from the Conservatives losing their deposit.

You lot need to go to bed: if any of you can make accurate predictions at this point, I’ll eat my book.

It is very funny how Mandelson’s fury over his arrest has led to the Met apologising profusely, but to someone else entirely.

I keep thinking about how a lot of our discussions of aspirational young people and the various woes they face, struggling to save for a deposit, whether to have kids, saving rates, do then loop back to the fact we've set up our tax system to be more expensive in the years they would do those things

Every day we get an example of Freddie DeBoer’s point that people are supportive of people suffering from mental illness right up to the point that it becomes awkward or unpleasant for them

Ultimately no neighbour wants to live next door to a successful private members’ club with people coming and going all the time, which is why they should support Liz Truss’s venture.

Some really good, impartial, explanatory journalism here from @bbcphilipsim.bsky.social Most of the debate on the dual role has focused on “perceptions” of independence. That’s clearly important But not all of the current distrust of these institutions is healthy www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Sitting in the cinema waiting for a film to start and I assume when I turn my phone back on he’ll either have declared war on John Roberts or announced special new tariffs based on a law that you didn’t know about because it goes to another school.

I can't work out whether Labour members looking at a former Alba candidate who thought Ash Regan wasn't hardline enough on independence and thinking "that's our guy!" is a sign of complete and utter dysfunction or evidence that Ahmad has political skills that Holyrood has never before seen.

Well, at least “Melania” is now solidly in the top 10 of Letterboxd’s lowest-rated films ever and that may not be much as elite accountability goes but you have to take what you can get.

just imagine how much stuff the government could fix if everyone paid the same marginal tax rates as a middle income graduate under 33.

Braverman's portfolio is education, skills and equalities. In this hypothetical, she's not doing herself out of a job, just drawing the same salary for doing less work.

I know it’s unreasonable to expect these arguments to be coherent, but consider that this opens with a story about how her kids were distressed when they got their first vaccines: so, obviously, when MMR fell due she looked into getting them multiple single jabs rather than the combined one.

I am sceptical that fraud by false representation is a clear cut route. The problem is this paragraph, which seems to suggest two lines of defence but only rebut one of them. If Mandelson runs the first (only intention was to avoid embarrassment) how do you prove the intention to make a gain?

The wonderful @scotunipress.bsky.social has some vacancies on the Editorial Board, which I chair - if you care about Open Access scholarship, academic accessibility and not-for-profit academic publishing, come and join us. T&Cs, details and processes 👇 #OpenAccess

NEW: Nobody in Britain is going to see the new Melania movie – I've crunched the data to prove it (FREE TO READ) takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/i-really-d...

My Twitter account had the gold-standard explanation of why WASPI women enrage. Definitionally they cannot produce a sympathetic case study. Follow along with me: > The supposed injustice and grounds for their campaigning are that they were not informed, not the change in age itself. So:

What is going on here? If Vue had a policy of showing 99% of BBFC approved films I would be delighted but I do not believe it does. That’s well over 1000 films a year!

I do not say this lightly when I tell you, as a proud Scot, that this is the funniest thing Keir Starmer has ever done.

I have no problem with the idea that Burnham might be better than Starmer but everything about this was stupid: forcing a mayoral by-election; turning the Gorton by-election into a psychodrama (and possibly losing Labour both); implausible claims about wanting to back the government by doing this.

Ok, this is bad if you know what it’s referring to but what on *earth* would you make of that graphic if you didn’t?

Wondering whether glasses with very thin/minimal wire rims will become de rigueur in future years as people try to reassure those around them that they’re not being filmed. (Possibly not; for all that people are rightly worried about these products on here I suspect the wider public may just shrug.)

During the 2015 Labour leadership contest I did a series of posts where the candidates reacted to the news of the day and given AB is back in the running I'll re-up a couple here. Cecil The Lion

This is a fun thread, and I particularly agree with this: I am very sceptical of gifts which are effectively a request that the recipient use their time in a particular way which may not actually be of interest to them.

The bit about running 1.5 miles reminds me of this fact I stumbled across yesterday: in investigating the JFK assassination the Warren Commission felt the need explicitly to record that 0.9 miles was the sort of distance that a person, or at least one specific person, could manage to walk.

and once again: you can pre order here www.amazon.co.uk/No-Second-Ch...

Just came across proceedings in the Scottish Parliament years ago where an MSP felt the need to tell colleagues that “Even Professor Chalmers would accept that taking an action that ends another person’s life is already illegal”, as if trying to reassure colleagues about my planned reign of terror.

One reason for not allowing world leaders to publish statements directly on their own social media sites is that a civil servant might have discreetly edited out “consummated” here.

He’s clearly just not taking proper advantage of Iceland if he thinks that.

“We obviously want to ask him about Greenland” is the logical journalistic approach but: you’re not going to learn anything and you may just provoke him into a 300% tariff on some random product, so I wonder whether there’s a case for “we’re just going to ask him what his favourite breed of dog is”.

Letter in Times today

Is this the approach they took to winning the 2024 election?