The anti net zero backlash going on in some parts of Labour at the moment does seem rather poorly timed given most people live in houses with windows and have the ability to detect temperature.

Arguably the best photo I’ve ever taken of an ominous stranger on horseback approaching lazy cattle on a chalk hilltop beneath an irascible sky.

This is absolutely damning.

Same with the North Sea. If Burnham approves Jackdaw and Rosebank as part of a ‘pragmatic’ reset he gets a couple of hours of credit and then the attacks start to scrap the ZEV Mandate or ditch the clean power goal or cut fuel duty or just whatever the next vibes-based attack line happens to be.

Appointing Ed Miliband as Chancellor may or may not be a good call, but it’s worth noting that if Burnham went for someone else it would not buy him a single iota of goodwill with those lobbying against Miliband.

the way it works is that if i say, "i'm a black american," sam alito thinks that is "dividing people up by race." but if someone says, "get that jigaboo out of my country," alito thinks, "looks like nothing to me"

This is fantastic news Angela Rayner👏

imagining a grizzled hardboiled detective saying this while gripping some guy's lapels at a shady bar

I have to say, it's making me feel a little insane hearing commentators say Ed Miliband shouldn't be chancellor because of his "ideological zeal" for Net Zero, in a week where temperatures are so extreme that my kids are being sent home early every day and it's regularly 30 degrees inside my house

Can I add one word: algorithmic Algorithmic platforms are publishers

Treat. Platforms. As. Publishers.

This is one of the dumbest and saddest things I've ever seen. We should not think of universities in this way, and if we do that'll destroy everything that is both useful and good about them. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I admit it, I was wrong. I didn’t think there was time for a new challenger for the title “the stupidest and most ill-conceived political gambit of the Starmer era”, but “Operation Save Rachel” has won it at the death.

Joseph, 17, Gift, 15, and Alumbwe, 12, lost both their parents to AIDS, when their medication was cut off by USAID Joseph dropped out of school to care for his brothers. They sleep on a shared mat and blanket, their roof leaks, and they only eat once a day www.npr.org/2026/06/18/g...

Achol Deng was 8 years old. Her HIV meds and her caseworker were funded by USAID. She died when she couldn’t get more medication www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Three women in Afghanistan died when their USAID maternity clinic closed. One bled to death, the other’s baby got stuck inside her. Their midwives were fired when USAID funding ended www.npr.org/2025/03/25/n...

Eight people, including five children, died walking 8 hours in 40 C heat to get cholera treatment in Sudan, because their local USAID-funded clinic had closed www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/...

Tor Top lost his mother Nyarietna, in South Sudan’s worst cholera outbreak, caused by $20m in USAID cuts She started vomiting, he put her in his canoe and paddled 8 hours to the nearest hospital. She died in his arms less than halfway www.propublica.org/article/usai...

Musk says not a single person has died due to him axing USAID. Sadly, part of my job involves tracking aid spending. So here’s a thread with just some of the people who lost their lives because of USAID cuts

Per the new @privateeyenews.bsky.social, while David Sullivan was banned from contact with the women's and youth team, Karren Brady spoke in the Lords in support of an attempt to dilute the new football regulator's fit and proper test by narrowing the scope of civil cases that could be considered.

swear to god the "aircon is bad, actually" Bluesky scolds are the most annoying Bluesky scolds

HMRC failed to collect £59.2bn in taxes last year (tax gap, difference between taxes collected and what should have been) Small businesses accounted for 62% of the tax gap. £500bn+ not collected since 2010. Offshore tax gap data not released. Silence on tax avoided through profit shifting.

Badenoch saying “he’s not here, is he?” about Miliband when his mother recently died is a bit classless, is it not? #PMQs

📈 3,008 more teachers in secondaries & special schools 📈1,646 more teachers in colleges 📈Trainee teachers up 13% 📈 Teacher pay up 9.5% 📈 Record investment in schools If standing up for state schools makes me a spiteful class warrior, I’ll wear it with pride. #PMQs

Higher education policy under the last few UK governments seems to be shaping up into an experiment in how you sustain a knowledge economy without knowledge

Anti-semitism is absolutely a real thing and as a Jew I am deeply nervous about the worst faith people in public life working relentlessly to rob the concept of all gravity by making it synonymous with "anyone not fully supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu and everything he does."

You might be assuming that this is a hyperbolic framing, but it really isn't. If anything it *understates* the depravity of his answer to the question:

EU native digital payments are a crucial issue for the power and integrity of the EU. This should be a big step forward. Good to see general support.

LIKE if you support the Gracchi, RETWEET if you believe public lands should be divided among the people, FOLLOW if you protect the rights of the plebeians, BLOCK if you are in the Senate!

There is one and only one clear lesson from the fall of Keir Starmer for every political party in the world: Do NOT, under any circumstances, appoint Keir Starmer as your leader.

oh my god

Policies dealing with the tiny number of trans prisoners in Scotland have kept cis and trans prisoners and staff safe for many years. Now trans prisoners will be placed in a situation which we know increases the risk of both assault and suicide, while people calling themselves feminists applaud.

When you see statements like the one below, it's worth pausing and asking whether the fact used to support the assertion is correct or not. In this case, it's probably more questionable than often realised: paulkrugman.substack.com/p/challengin...

Is this the line? This does not seem to me like the best possible line. If this were my line, I would go back into hiding and come up with a better line.

op-ed with author photo

hate all the tweeness around Larry the cat when his record is clearly one of a destabilising presence at the heart of democracy but you aren’t ready for that conversation

That includes Warsaw and Prague as well as Western Balkans, Croatia and Slovenia. 13 countries between us. 6 weeks' notice for me, after a 32-year association. No severance, redundancy, words of appreciation or apology. But there's a lot of anger from my colleagues. www.linkedin.com/posts/guydel...

Is binning expert correspondents in eastern Europe a good idea at a time like this? Disinformation on the rise, Russia interfering in many countries, threatening several and actually at war with one? Well, BBC News management seems to think so. It's disposing of me and 4 of my colleagues.

"I don't call him Ronaldo I call him Cristiano here is only one Ronaldo and he wore 9 not 7" Henry just hit the hardest slide tackle of the entire world cup while standing in the studio

The speech genuinely made me a bit sad because he *still* has not got that the job of the prime minister is not to spend five years talking about the next election. He never realised he was not leader of the opposition and now he never will.

I think the fact we still don't have a DIP is a sign of this.

Quite a lot of Keir Starmer’s leadership has brought to mind this passage from Blair’s memoirs, and it feels like it goes quite some way on explaining why Starmer didn’t really convince or appeal to anybody by the end.

After 18 months of R&D with a team of specialist academics, I'm VERY excited to say that @carbonbrief.org has just launched 'Project Cosmos'... ...the world's largest database of climate research Our hope is this becomes a major new resource interactive.carbonbrief.org/cosmos/index...

I've had 2 journalists today asking if Miliband as Chancellor would be a "Liz Truss moment" and find it difficult not to just respond "are you on crack?".

All the people "puzzled by why Starmer is so disliked" are then doing a follow-up where they go "but people are giving a hundred different reasons rather than one!" Yes. That is why he is so disliked.

i think, if I tried to boil it down to a sentence, it'd be: "All politicians are hated by their opponents - but Starmer went out of his way to be hated by his supporters too."

My unified theory here is that after a decade of Tory government, people expected a Labor leader with a huge majority in Parliament to govern radically differently in action, tone and focus. Starmer did not. People may have differing reasons for feeling that way, but that's what it comes down to.

The sealed train has arrived at the Euston Station.