"Speech" is an action. It is an action like riding a bicycle, selling fish, or baking bread. If someone invoked "freedom of action" as a reason for not regulating a harmful activity, we'd see straight through it. Speech can be just as harmful as any other activity. /1

He's right. This needs urgent collective action by states (other than the US, which will try to impede it). UK/Aus/Can and the EU. The former are most vulnerable because we share the same language as a state with a fundamentalist attitude to "freedom of speech."

That the UK government remains passive in the face of literal pogroms on the streets is amazing. You need to get off fucking X now. You need to start regulating it and other social media platforms in conjunction with the rest of Europe. /1

We need some "two tier" sentencing. You destroy a car or burn down a house deliberately, that is a serious offence, meriting a custodial sentence. Do it during a pogrom? Much more serious, much longer sentence. Incite the latter? We charge you with incitement.

Everyone on X and elsewhere who called for a violent response should be charged with incitement. Everyone involved in the pogrom should be locked up with exemplary sentences. Govt should make it clear that will be the response in future anywhere else. Enough.

Villainous. Do something.

Things are awful now. But, my God, the courage of someone as brilliant as Barnes facing up to these knuckle draggers in the 80s. They deserve the contempt he showed then.

Sadiq Khan on coming to the nuisance

I could take a better corner than that in my slippers.

Being entirely fair to Oxford, it is more set up for cycling than London. Where are the bike stands near tube stations? I understand the paucity at older stations, but why so bad outside West Ealing, Hanwell and Acton Mainline shiny new Liz line stations?

I have less interest in this World Cup than in any I remember. I was more interested in 1978 when I was hardly old enough to understand what was going on, and I was supporting Scotland. I may just watch the games in Canada and Mexico.

An indication of how bad Starmer has been is that even now, when he must rationally know he's going to be replaced and who by, he still fails to make any choices where there might be losers as well as winners. He hates governing.

Or, indeed glance at the weather. The failure to immediately reverse the NI cuts, and the subsequent failure to try to reform the tax system, is damning. They've tried to govern without making any hard choices. That isn't governing.

Unless Scottish contract law is very different from English, an employer can't require you to do more work than you're obliged to do in order to be required to pay your salary. The non-striking staff should tell the University to go fuck themselves (that is as polite as is necessary).

This will get love, but is wrong imo. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Rules requiring solar on house or over car parks cost money to be complied with. We need to build solar on the cheapest most efficient way possible. /1

Good we have a peace deal, or the bombing would be much wore. Well done POTUS.

It was indeed appalling that MI5 had a pro-Irish-Catholic bias in the 1970s...

I’m not an expert on counter-terrorism but I feel like there’s an obvious reason why the intelligence services may be interested in having a diverse workforce.

We all think this was great: A reporter finally pushing back. Trump flailing and quitting. A clear picture of a corrupt and weak leader for all to see. But if you watch to the end, it's clear Welker viewed it as a failure because she angered her subject, may lose access and embarrassed the network.

But also, fundamentally the economics does actually need to reflect the economic value. If the grid has more than it needs then personal solar panels aren’t doing anything from the environment and a pricing system that encourages you to get them anyway is a governance failure.

As someone for whom downsizing cost £60k in tax, I tend to think we should go for less foolish ways of taxing land use.

One of the oddities of bsky is I've pointed this out a couple of times and received instant blocks from some very rum people.

Evergreen renewable energy infrastructure post.

"Inept political and economic strategy has left the UK in a horrendous situation." @alanbeattie.bsky.social on immigration policy dilemmas in advanced economies. www.ft.com/content/c57b...

Sad to hear Marjane Satrapi, author of this extraordinary memoir, has died

Don't make me care about the cricket. Stop it.

I find this infuriating. Bring on the development corporation.

Indeed. So why no DO something about it? Do some governing. Try it. You might like it. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Since we’re doing Bluesky drinks in Paris, I have a terrible terrible urge to do a Bluesky summer party in London. So who has a suitable garden in central London and a penchant for very serious groups of mainly middle aged men earnestly discussing public policy?

This is what has happened. Which is Bad. It shows a government that is all vibes and no thought.

Fundamentally, if you have a situation where many homes are thinking it’s cheaper and better to do home solar and batteries then your governance structures have screwed up enormously. Whether via tax, being slow to approve utility solar, or by having an unstable grid.

A fun thing about this is that this is state failure. Building utility level solar and batteries is 1/2-1/3 of the price of installing home solar panels per unit of capacity, so this should only happen if the state is far far behind the curve in building utility solar. Compare with China:

Crypton and Reform. Another open goal for the government that they will not even try to score into. Crypto is simply evil. No use has been discovered for it. We've had it for 18 years, still none. Its only uses are criminal/anti-social. /1

If you don't follow these things, the most significant scholar saying the 14th amendment doesn't say what it clearly says is Randy Barnett. But, although Barnett is a libertarian nutjobs politically, he is a good lawyer. So why does he trash his reputation? Genuine question.

the people have heard about ridiculous Supermarket Sweep embezzlement and they like what they hear

Reread Lucky Jim on a flight. It is still very funny. But. The sexism is a bit remorseless. (No shit, I hear many say.) Being young and your future controlled by the decision of a capricious fool still resonates for me however.

The UK government and the EU need to do something together about X. Now. It is pushing racist nonsense that is now bleeding into the mainstream media.

That stuff like this is now "mainstream" in the sense of being pushed by a party with 20%+ support is appalling. This is now worse than the 1970s. Open racism. But. I am pretty confident it means they'll get nowhere near power.

"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. " I wish I could write like that. /Ends

This week's column: the policy detail from Tony Blair is almost always not worth your time (even in government he did the big picture stuff). But the big picture criticism is right, even tho in many ways the biggest Starmer mistake was 'not becoming prime minister after John Major'.

The best guide to what it is to be English (and concurrently British) is still Orwell in England Your England. I commend it to everyone. It also has the best opening line of any essay I've read (or at least equal best). /1

The idea that I am a Mancunian, English and British because of my skin pigmentation misunderstands what those terms refer to. Outside of legal definitions, they're ideas. Racists don't understand ideas.

Always an infallible guide to wrongness www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I'm a City fan and KK gave me my most fun time as a fan. For years we'd been terrible. Alan Ball.Pollock's own goal. Relegated to the third tier. And then. /1 www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Want a genuinely exciting use of AI? You can tell it to clear your gmail account of trash. (My trash gmail account has been building up junk for 20 years).

Aaron Barr would have probably laughed along. The others? Not so much.

Hard to believe I’m even writing this. Meteorological summer hasn’t even begun, yet Paris, France has already logged more days above 32°C than its annual average.

I loathe this. Give me the figures. Tell me how long the gap the batteries can fill. Give me the pricing for the large scale batteries to the alternatives. Just handwaving at the issues. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

lol

“The Financial Times has swung to the right” No it hasn’t, what the fuck are you talking about?