Gove is in the House of Lords and his magazine publishes Great Replacement conspiracy theories.

2097: The number of people who leave the UK annually is 100 times the number who enter. The population of the UK is now 683. 73% of them say immigration is too high and needs to come down.

headlines praising the reduction in immigration numbers to the UK will be followed at some point with headlines complaining about the UK's ageing population and there will be zero attempt to make the obvious link between the two

'Remigration' is a Nazi euphemism for 'violent ethnic cleansing of immigrants, ethnic minorities and their descendants' and we must not let them get away with normalising these ideas, although this stuff is becoming more mainstream by the day.

I look at the wonderful transformation of Paris under Anna Hidalgo and I can only dream about what Greater Manchester could achieve if we had a mayor that cared about active travel as much as he cares about getting a seat in Westminster.

fascism cannot be appeased the other side has utterly won this one & they're now moving on to demanding we remove gender reassignment from protected characteristics, demanding sex at birth id cards, demanding anyone who ever expressed a pro trans view be fired, harassing store workers, etc

Yesterday I cycled 80 km (50 miles for my British friends) and today I went to the gym, that exercise is good for you is indeed true, I found out since I started going to the gym.

I'm developing a theory that your propensity to follow the highway code is negatively correlated with: a) How big your car is (the bigger the car, the worse the driver) b) How much you use it for work (taxi/Uber and van drivers being some of the worst in my experience)

In a couple of minutes walking back from the shop I saw a driver (SUV, obviously) run a red light and another driver (Uber, ça va sans dire) turn right where turning right is forbidden.

What a lovely Critical Mass we've had yesterday! Thanks everyone for coming along. See you next month, same place, same time :)

We set immigration policy trying to reflect the views of people who understand the least about what's actually going on www.economist.com/britain/2026... It's the opposite of leadership! And not what representative democracy should be about

«A trade unionist who voted Labour at the last general election, she says she has spent the past three years following Rupert Lowe. “I just like the fact that he brings up other things apart from migrants,” she says.» As @francesryan.bsky.social says, a terrifying insight into the electorate.

This is messaging that should be coming from MPs, but at least Chris Boardman is being allowed to say it.

the uk needs a major reckoning with its ideas about who is most likely to settle, and that those people may well be completely unrelated to making as much money as possible. oh, my wife isn't the most "economically desirable kind of migrant"? too bad, feel free to roll yourself down a hill

It's fine to be pro-EU FOM (I am!) but rather less fine to be pro-EU FOM because you think that otherwise the wrong kind of foreigner will arrive in the country.

In amongst the thistles. Photo taken this morning on Glastonbury Tor.

Your regular reminder that PoliticsUK is a fake account owned by a Reform councillor Bailey Nash-Gardner who also works for Reform MP Andrew Rosindell. ***Stop following and sharing their stuff***

I wish this argument would go away. I am an EU immigrant who came here under FoM, and I wish the UK had never left the UK. But I am not better than my fellow non-EU immigrants (a group that includes my wife btw). And they are not "imported", that's very dehumanising language.

"You should use your real name on the Internet" no I shouldn't, you should learn how to be on the Internet.

Safe, protected bike-lanes are: Better for business Better for emissions Better for air quality Better for space Better for public health Better for noise Better for equity Better for affordability Better for public costs Better for safety for EVERYONE Better for oil independence Better.

Any football lover should read this book.

Penalties are not a great way to decide a football game, but the worst thing I've seen in my life was the golden goal. And its short-lived replacement, the silver goal.

Eze reminded me of Zaza in that horrible penalty shootout for Italy.

I wrote some words about Thursday... after a nice bike ride in Epping forest open.substack.com/pub/lauralak...

Wonderful new mural from @rame13.bsky.social in Bedminster, Bristol. Part of this year's @upfest.bsky.social @everyheron.bsky.social

Some more photos from today's beautiful ride.

Also, a regular reminder:

This has changed a lot since we were there in 2019. How can French cities have this sort of ambition and with some exceptions, we can’t?

I'm currently in Lille, and the transformation of the City Centre is incredible. A network of cycle lanes, LOTS of planting including SUDs. And the effect is amazing, it's quite quiet, and easy to walk around. And still seems really vibrant, very few empty units. Cont.

This bike lane in Wigan is good, it's just a shame that it only lasts a few hundred meters before ending abruptly.

Innsbruck. Beautiful city, surrounded by beautiful mountains, very well connected to Italy and Germany via rail and motorway, you can eat Knödel and it has trams!

Where there is water, I will stop to take some photos.

If a place, let's say a woodland park, has a large car park but no place to park a bike, it makes me not want to go back and spend time there. And if you say your place promotes "healthy living" it's even more ironic that you don't have bike parking.

Many thanks to this heron for posing for the photo.

There must be a German word for the urge to be along a canal when the weather is beautiful. Schönwetterkanalnähetrieb?

Once again: German universities were the envy of the world before the Nazis rose to power and took an ideological wrecking ball to the entire enterprise. If you want to know how long it took for German universities to recover… they haven’t.

I'm an atheist who loves to visit and photograph churches: in a country where fewer and fewer people are Christian, if you care about the buildings you must invest massively in preservation or let them be converted so they'll be taken care of. Banning building conversion is just spiteful and useless

Despite what a worrying number of British drivers think, an amber light does not mean "press as hard as you can on the accelerator to try to cross the line before the light turns red"

This is unbelievably gross.

ME, a Home Office official, complained the Home Office is being “told off” by NGOs standing up for torture victims. Tone of whining, petulant menace captures the bullying, cowardly mentality of this little group of bureaucrats. “Don’t YOU criticise ME! I don’t work for you! I work for MINISTERS!”

Blackley Forest and the River Irk #ForestFriday #Photography #EastCoastKin #ECK

What are they waiting for? There has been a case for taking action against X for nearly two years now - ever since the 2024 riots.

The UK government should do something about malevolent foreign interference in British democracy. Urgently.

Oxford Street, Manchester, painted as if in 1956, by Steven Scholes.

Lady In Red, Green Park I love the colours on the Jubilee Line platform at Green Park station. Dancer Viola was wearing a red dress, so I couldn't resist taking a quick photo of her at one of the most colourful locations on the London Underground. Second version of this photo

Happy Friday from Glastonbury. Have a fabulous day and weekend everyone.

I'd like all the "control and compassion" and "firm but fair" people to explain to me (with words or pictures) how this is compassionate or fair. We were lucky to escape this, because the old MIR was applied to us (and now I earn more anyway), but many families are separated by this requirement.

My theory that when a politician says something like "Britain had always welcomed immigrants" it's always just a few seconds before supporting harsh immigration policies is more accurate with every passing day.