New post: Should the government compensate consumers for cost of living shocks? mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/04/shou... Any government subsidy today has to be paid for by raising taxes or borrowing. Why should the government do either to shield consumers who can afford to pay higher prices?

NEW | Clean power met ALL the growth in global electricity demand in 2025 Solar generation alone met THREE QUARTERS of the demand rise and grew by 30%. Fossil generation stagnated (-0.2%). 🧵 A thread on changes in the global power system in 2025...

In 2025, renewables overtook coal in global electricity generation for the first time in over 100 years. Renewables: 33.8% Coal: 33.0% Coal fell below a third of global electricity generation for the first time in history.

The latest proposals to fix NHS corridor care are an unfocussed clusterfuck of bad ideas that manage to ignore the biggest cause of the problem: www.hsj.co.uk/daily-insigh...

In my view fair summary of where the last two days leave us. And how even to make judgements in the absence of a clear political approach to government.

More than 2,500 troops remain in the nation’s capital, Washington DC, eight months after President Donald Trump declared a crime emergency, in a deployment that has grown increasingly routine with no clear end in sight. TAT: [Nationalism | Undermining democracy]

A small conservative legal group used direct access to the Federal Communications Commission chairman’s office last September to accelerate a complaint targeting Jimmy Kimmel and his employer, ABC TAT: [Corruption | Suppressing dissent]

Today, we published the @ember_energy Global Electricity Review 2026. That also means 2025 electricity generation data for over 100 countries and regions is now LIVE on our data explorer, data downloads and API. Open electricity data for everyone! ember-energy.org/data/electri...

The idea that being *a member of the House of Lords* in any way means you can be trusted with Top Secret/STRAP material without proper vetting is so beyond absurd that this must surely be a joke?

Good. It’s easy to forget that climate change denial & shilling for fossil fuel companies provided a template for Tufton Street, Brexit & pretty much every egregious example of persuading populations to vote against their own interests. The story of Don Pearlman should be taught in kindergartens…

Ed Miliband has said he'll “double down, not back down” on government’s clean energy mission in the face of critics calling on him to change course The Energy Sec said "solar panels, heat pumps and EVs are not woke, or a left-wing conspiracy, or even a Marxist plot. They're actually common sense"

Crackers.

Post Office GLO Redress Scheme Closing — But "Platitudes" Hide the Struggle, The government has announced end of the Group Litigation Order (GLO) redress scheme #PostOfficeScandal www.computerweekly.com/news/3666417...

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.

Telegraph newspaper editorial on Mandelson's appointment in December 2024 versus editorial today

I haven't commented on Palantir specifically but their actions are clearly in line with the rise of corporate giants as significant actors in the world order which is routinely under-discussed by pieces that only focus on what national governments do. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

In spite of all the talk of Claude Code and Codex meaning the end of humans writing code, software job adverts are actually going up, according to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com's crunching of millions of job ads for this week's The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/7325...

The fact that Jared Kushner derives nearly all his income from the Saudi government while he purports to be negotiating issues of acute interest to the Saudi government allegedly on behalf of the US is simply swept under the rug by US mainstream media.

What is missing from this pretty accurate long assessment of UK-EU ties is the bigger picture vision from either side as to the future of Europe in the age of unreliable superpowers - and that is what will have to change for the relationship to move on fundamentally. www.ft.com/content/2007...

I checked this too. *20 seconds* of Reform logo display. *No other* party logo displayed. In local election purdah. This is not normal. At all.

Trump today seems to be auditioning to lead an Orange parade on 12 July.

For anyone wondering whether the fossil fuel crisis in the Middle East is driving interest in clean energy technologies: China's exports of batteries, EVs and solar products shot up in March to $21.9 billion! This is an all-time record and a 70% increase over March 2025.

An AI triage tool has been integrated into the NHS App, allowing more than a million patients to directly book appointments with clinicians. www.digitalhealth.net/2026/04/ai-t...

when there's an enormous backlog of asylum claims, re-litigating all the previous 5 years seems like a really stupid way of slowing things down further. Quite apart from fact that most 'illegal' arrivals are from most repressive countries and have zero 'legal' routes! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"[More than] 800 loves ones and families have lost a person who probably didn't need to die" Dr Jayne McLaren told BBC Scotcast's NHS special about the dire state of Scotland's Emergency Departments ahead of next month's elections. rcem.ac.uk/press-releas...

A new round of talks between the US and Iran is starting. Last time, Washington sent negotiators with little nuclear expertise and never even addressed Iran’s legal right under the NPT to enrich uranium. That omission alone guaranteed failure. www.npr.org/2026/04/... 1/3

This from trade guru Richard Baldwin on Trump's trade war conduct is great. And helps explain why in fact he is not remaking the world economic order or anything else. He's just going to leave a huge mess behind. www.linkedin.com/pulse/trumps...

Reform are announcing today that they would review and retrospectively strip asylum status from hundreds of thousands of people who are making their lives in the UK. Notable that the Conservative response to the plan seem to effectively endorse it.

Obviously Reform's proposals is simultaneously racist, economically and socially damaging and impractical. But, yet again, instead of saying so, Labour/the government's response is tin-eared me-tooism. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

THREAD: The IEA global energy review 2026 * CO2 record high, but growth nearly ground to halt * Clean energy shaved 3bn tonnes off CO2 * Fossil-fuel power pushed into reverse * Age of Electricity "confirmed" * "Extraordinary" solar growth * Batteries up 40% * EVs up 20% 1/10

The China balance according to the FT Editorial Board. A slowly dawning realisation that its rise cannot be stopped or ignored, and thus the world will never be the same again. Far more significant in the long term than a mad US President. www.ft.com/content/d62f...

Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust (TEWV) has signed a contract with The Access Group to implement its electronic patient record (EPR) system. www.digitalhealth.net/2026/04/tees...

While we're on the workings of the UK government today, a moment to reflect on the US pharmaceuticals deal which even if these numbers feel exaggerated is something that really needs parliamentary scrutiny that successive governments have denied for trade deals www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/...

Second album syndrome for this UK government with regard to EU ties - after last year's summit common understanding based on several years policy work, now there's a bunch of disparate issues that it would like to address but hasn't really conceptualised. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Reform pledges to review the previous 5 years of asylum grants if got into power - deporting those granted refugee status if came without permission. Reform claim 400,000 people granted asylum would be "in scope" - and they would deport most of them www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

Donald Trump again threatens to "knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran" if no deal is reached. Targeting civilian infrastructure is a violation of international law. TAT: [Foreign policy]

Narrator: in fact, he had quite a lot of cards.

Obviously right thing to do for EU & UK (for its similar agreement with Israel). Absolutely no excuse for preferential trade agreements with a country that is deliberately defying international law to pursue systematic mass killings, war crimes & ethnic cleansing www.politico.eu/article/spai...

The Israeli army struck civilians in the Lebanese city of Mayfadoun. And then, the Israelis double-tapped the medics who arrived onto the scene. And then, they triple-tapped the next wave of medics. And then, they did it one more time for good measure.

6 days after Trump made 13 celebratory posts in a hour claiming that Iran surrendered to all his demands and the war is over, he’s back threatening to blow up power plants and bridges.

This from @dsmitheconomics.bsky.social is a commendable exception to the astonishing parochialism of UK economic reporting. Tthe IMF downgrading UK growth by a few tenths of a % is not the story here, it is the damage done to the global economy by Trump's madness www.thetimes.com/article/389a...

📢 We've reached *3000* documented authoritarian-like actions of Trump's second term since Jan 2025... the two most recent are classic suppression of the press & using the justice system to attack political enemies www.trumpactiontracker.info

Here’s the director of the NIH explicitly espousing populism over expertise as the means of determining priorities for federally science funding by leaning into the stupidest possible examples: ivermectin as cancer therapy .

Brexit. British Exit from the EU. But also stands in my mind for British Exceptionalism. That of being as a country so different to say France or Germany or any other that we couldn't really be happy members of a bloc. Which was always nonsense.

It doesn't take a forensic accountant to work out whose interests Nigel Farage really serves

In this weekend's Observer, I ask: why always us? How come whenever there's a global economic shock, the UK always seems to find be particularly exposed? observer.co.uk/news/busines...

Pleading ignorance is a wretched alibi, but the best one that Keir Starmer has got. observer.co.uk/news/columni...

There is no evidence that GP referrals are the cause of the waiting list issues Referrals were not up but hospital treatments are still a problem Advice & Guidance funding has now been ‘capped’ by adding it to core rather than paid separately Cynical ploy to cut £ to GPs for work done

My Sunday Times piece: The big story of the IMF’s latest assessment was not its minor downgrade of UK growth but its fear of what could happen to the global economy if the Iran war persists: A UK growth downgrade is the least of our worries www.thetimes.com/article/389a...

James Bembridge, Reform Party election candidate, truly hates the NHS. If he and Nigel Farage get what they want, and win power, can you afford private healthcare?