Thank you Mr President, that clears things up.

I sometimes feel like I am going mad. Owning a £1.5m home is not normal in London or the South East of England.

Say what you like about Rachel Reeves, she has done wonderful things for tenants' rights awareness

It was Helen Lewis: 'nutpicking'.

IIRC @stephenkb.bsky.social gave a snappy name to the act of mining for the most idiotic takes you can find - what was it? Because it's in overdrive today.

As @duncanstott.bsky.social points out in The Other Place, West Oxfordshire District Council declared a Climate Change and Ecological Emergency in 2019.

Had not expected to have to verify my age to send a message about rail subsidies on Bluesky! The camera took one look at me and decided immediately I was over 18...

Bizarre discussion on the radio likening air condition to passive smoking because it accounts for 3% of CO2 emissions. But: we don’t moralise turning heating on in winter, and heating accounts for 15% of emissions. If aircon is intrinsically immoral, so are radiators.

Lol.

"This is what we believe"

"It noted a surge in withdrawal charges, with almost double the amount of people making an unauthorised withdrawal (99,650) compared to the number of people who used their LISA to buy a home (56,900) in 2023-24" www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Will be interesting to see if certain media outlets just ignore the report from the Spanish government confirming the key role of thermal power plants in the Iberian power outage or still try to erroneously spin it as a failure of renewables. www.businessgreen.com/news/4515109...

I’m convinced this is how a bay leaf would talk

Fab local reporting. Oxford should be getting congestion charging as soon as this autumn! 💪

The question remains .. if they're not guarding town centres what ARE the police actually doing these days?

This country is going mad.

You wouldn't know it from today's newspaper front pages screaming "betrayal", but new YouGov polling finds that 66% of British people now want the Government to deliver a closer relationship with the EU, compared to just 14% who don't

How long before the Tory defections start? Braverman will surely be a Reform MP before too long.

Bad housing is devastating for our mental health. New ONS data finds people with moderate to severe symptoms of depression are about 3x more likely to be worrying about their housing/living conditions than those with no or mild symptoms www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...

Since 2014, the average time to determine an outline application for more than 10 homes has tripled from around 250 days to about 750. Over the same period, the number of applications submitted has declined sharply.

Can't disagree with a word of this

More voters now view Labour unfavourably than ever did under Corbyn - two thirds - with barely a quarter favourable. A quarter of the electorate on your side isn’t enough to win even with fragmentation and a big electoral system assist bsky.app/profile/youg...

In short, Starmer has taken a massive hit among Labour voters, for no gain elsewhere, while boosting Farage's popularity, including doubling his ceiling among Labour voters. I.e., the political scientists were right, Morgan McSweeney was horrendously wrong.

New data out today from the English Housing Survey on Experiences of the 'housing crisis. Shows a particularly sharp rise in costs for low-income private renters, who are now spending 63% of their income on rent. A few other highlights 🧵 www.gov.uk/government/s...

'We're economically stagnant and that's how we like it.'

Here is a cool map about land use in the UK, and the agricultural land abroad used to feed the UK. Note the huge amount of land we use for beef and lamb pastures. Altogether, the amount of land used to rear these animals + grow their food is slightly bigger than the area of the UK itself.

So much of London's green belt is near the public transport network, doing very little for nature, and could be providing much needed homes. It's fantastic news that the Mayor is taking steps to get building on that land - bravo!

Eleven days ago.

British institutions came through too, despite some intense and sustained pressure. Just been reading the bit of Tim Shipman's latest where Johnson and Cummings try to get Cabinet colleagues & Civil Service to break law, and they are all, immediately: "Nope. Not doing that. Do that & you're toast."

We should remember that (a) in the US people like this went from “fringe crazies LOL” to running the country in a decade and (b) this kind of thing is already rife in Reform (c) Reform are already leading in some polls

I'm so tired of Trump's face, his voice, his ridiculous words, his nutty cabinet members, his awful voters, his imploding country. This 24/7 rolling atrocity of a presidency that poisons the entire world.

Not often I agree with David Olusoga, but he is spot on in this paragraph. (The rest of the article is pretty interesting too). www.telegraph.co.uk/radio/podcas...

British Library confirms £1.1 billion expansion will go ahead -- with space for Crossrail 2 www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/bri... A £1.1 billion extension to the British Library, including space for Crossrail 2, is to go ahead now that the library has signed construction contracts.

Everyone: Trump destroying the university sector is a massive opportunity for the UK to drive growth in high value sectors and pull in some amazing researchers! The Treasury:

German Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz: "The circumstances are determined above all by Putin's war of aggression against Europe. It is a war against Europe and not just a war against the territorial integrity of Ukraine⤵️

Ngl, I was never a particularly big fan of the sugar tax, but things like "slushies are now actively dangerous to small children" seem like a pretty big negative unintended consequence www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Much-needed new homes 🤝 upgraded cycle infrastructure

quite: __________________ The single best testing ad by the Kamala Harris campaign was one where she looked directly into the camera and said something like, “I know the cost of living is too high, and I’m going to fix that by building more housing and taking on landlords who are charging too much.”

Is there some grim case study of a housing development that was occupied and caused a sewage disaster? Because this seems to be a particularly common planning problem in the UK. It's been affecting the North East of England and Northern Ireland as well as Oxford and Cambridge.

The people we must turn to for expertise on charity administrative regulations is *checks notes* the melodic pop-rock band Coldplay.

"I was eating Cheerios and then bye bye tooth" - my son, to government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

If you want to stop a planning application, find the nearest "local heritage asset" or conservation area and say that the development will "impact the setting" of the asset. *Any* impact on *any* "heritage asset", including even just its setting, has been ruled illegal by the courts

My favourite film genres 5. Obscure unbelievable true story 4. It's society as we know it, but for this one weird technology 3. Infinitely grittier Batman 2. Ey it's tough oop north but the'll never break us spirit 1. "Abraham Lincoln, bring your space chair right back here!"

Who asked for this?

No greater betrayal of your humanity than this. Handing over the independence of your mind to a leader. Turning yourself into their slave.

Californians will be like "we need to protect this neighborhood's character forever by stopping overdevelopment" and the neighborhood looks like this

"In a world without US security guarantees, all other priorities must give way to defence" is a far-reaching headline. But the paragraph that this feels like the early weeks of Covid, where it was clear but not yet understood an all consuming crisis was coming, resonated particuarly strongly.

Starmer is between a rock and a hard place here. If there is a 5% chance the US will continue to support the North Atlantic Alliance, as it has essentially since Pearl Harbour, that is what he must pursue until it has definitively gone. But the public also need to know it has probably gone.

Republican support for same-sex marriage down 31pts, from 55% to 24%, in four years according to new poll from YouGov. Yikes.

The lack of clarity in the requirements, coupled with nobody willing to confirm in advance what's required has led to 40% of applications being refused. www.housingtoday.co.uk/in-focus/wha...