DLR has such impeccable style: hefty mass of elevated concrete above the road but nimbly held up by these little piers hardly occupying any space; no curves too tight, no gradients too steep; as happy weaving along a waterway as a motorway.

It's extraordinary how much green technology investment the UK government has turned down recently – first XLinks, which would have supplied 7% of Britain's electricity with North African solar and wind power at a literal fraction of the price of Sizewell C Then the Ming Yang wind turbine factory

UK age limit for these is 16 vs 14 in France and Italy. That plus the wackiness gets in the way of it being a legit solution to be considered for some of the hardest to solve/most expensive rural home-to-school/college trips.

Reeves and Starmer won’t enjoy new series of Clarkson’s Farm

I was in Amsterdam at the weekend and saw a Google streetview style car driving round automatically enforcing parking. Cool. But thanks to Eric Pickles we can't use them here. If there's no ANPR, it isn't my devolution.

So if Labour shifts to pushing for electoral reform while in Govt with 2 years to go, would the plan be to have a referendum on the same day as next GE?

Thanks to the first YouTube comment under this, TIL Ceefax=see facts. Feeling especially dense.

Great name, great project. Could have a national tunnelling strategy. Get a project pipeline going, build up capacity, expertise and funding model to churn them out.

Incoherent is generous.

Recent reforms designed to stop legal challenges delaying infrastructure are working. So why is the Labour Government going even further? My latest explains the thinking (and why further action is necessary). www.samdumitriu.com/p/the-real-p...

Air conditioners a bit like weight-loss jabs (and e-scooters?). Govt can’t face down wide but weak public revulsion to new & easy, rather than British solutions - old, inadequate, primarily a test of moral character - to help ppl deal with annoying<->fatal problems. British public just goes around.

Great to speak to the inestimable @chrisbaraniuk.com about air conditioning (aka air to air heat pumps). You shouldn’t have to feel guilty about using air con imo, especially when it’s sunny. But the best thing is if you also use it for heating in the winter - a big climate win

This is great. Vanne’s Breton crowd singing ‘Bro Gozh ma Zadoù’ their own Land of My Fathers (to the same tune) with bagpipe players in the background. French second division rugby puts English equivalent to shame far more than the Top14 vs Prem.

Oh boy, if Mamdani is the vibe vessel through which British urban leftism switches to loving planning reform, and start preaching from the gospel of Auckland and Austin, he will be the Muad’Dib of the Anglosphere. ‘Zack backs Zohran Zones’.

Strange article. Arsenal as good as they were 20 years ago when they reached a Champions League final after period of winning league titles. Paris always odd - and is with only one big team. If predictive is the argument Roma/Lazio or Hertha/Union Berlin coming powers? Legia Warsaw?

My latest for Bloomberg: "We are about to see the Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0 – a discontinuity in energy markets as profound as the oil shocks of the 1970s, and one that could bring forward the peak in fossil fuel use and emissions to this side of 2030." about.bnef.com/insights/cle...

London had 70 lidos in the 1950s. God knows how many more splash pools. Build a load more. One change since the 1950s is London’s docks are no longer full of ships. It’s happening in places but fully open them up, add a beach to each: Copacabana at Surrey Quays, City Airport Strand, Poplar Plage.

- Iraola missing out on the Athletic Bilbao job - Palace with potential to be *the* South London team - Sitting in one of the hotbeds of global football talent If there were ever a team and manager in a position to be able to - and to commercially benefit from - trying a ‘Basque-lite’ model…

Public reporting provides eyes 24/7, deterrence, enforcement opportunities and saves lives. We accept public reporting for every other crime type, so why such contention re road crime? Do otherwise law-abiding road offenders fail to recognise the harm they cause? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

UEFA should have a vase for each European cup after league phase/playoffs for non-qualifiers. Opens the chance at glory beyond the Big 5 leagues while giving everyone a chance and games against the big boys at the start.

Yeah yeah I know… but I do think it’s worth reading the Blair ‘intervention’ in full. It’s AI-pilled, ducks fiscal tradeoffs, is sanguine about Trump and could have been written by a Cameron era Tory. But it does also spell out some home truths that Labour and British politics need to reckon with.

I just think it's incredibly short-sighted for people to casually dismiss the architect of what is still the longest period of non-Tory government in this country since the eighteenth century.

UK should get on the phone to Mercosur now and do the thing it is genuinely world beating at vs every other industrialised nation: selling out its farmers in trade talks for cheap food and market access. Copy and paste the EU deal without the ghost of José Bové setting quotas.

Not sure this has even been a great period for London’s economy. But London’s high nominal wages/house prices mean taxman takes a bigger wedge while disposable income is pretty flat vs rest of the country. And 20 years of tax policy has tilted that even further.

A 150k youth* (*18-40) mobility scheme for ~3 years would look like a lot like FoM for workers in UK when it was a member. With no recourse to public funds it would feel as FoM-like as Denmark or Belgium if EU citizens pitch up without a job offer. Or Switzerland for that matter.

Why is this a surprise? The governance arrangements for this project is fundamentally flawed where HS2 ltd has zero skin in the game. www.ft.com/content/b8c9... Moreover, the government continues to ignore the NAO's criticism that Whitehall has a governance issue.

First official data evidence to back up what international students have been telling us. It’s now much harder to get a work visa as an international student than it was a couple of years ago.

Now let's see which age group is overrepresented among violent crime perpetrators, would be a shame if we stopped punishing people from that group for that!

That Manchester Mill piece makes me feel a bit more sure of my Burnhamism (and Khanism) as Starmerism avant la lettre. But rip the Scooby Doo mask off of the attempted -isms and it’s all just different flavours of ‘Labour is nice, Tories bad-ism’ where a theory of governing should be.

Top 3 there are to different extents manifestations of high energy costs. Overheads most directly but energy intensive producers are just passing that on, and higher labour costs are NMW/employers trying to manage the energy-induced inflation elsewhere.

Greater Manchester has already taken over London today with Bolton v Stockport in the League 1 playoff at Wembley.

Amazing stuff from a Tory Chancellor and business groups. What do they actually think they’re there to do?

Grim stuff. Feels like Ed Miliband is fighting the last war on decarbonisation. Stuck in the bunker and treating people saying there’s cheaper, faster, greener approaches to Net Zero as enemies.

"The tragedy of Burnham’s wish to return to Westminster is that it means leaving a job that seems custom designed to take advantage of his skills and to mitigate his weaknesses." Brilliant, must-read piece by @joshih.bsky.social

Hidden away on ITV4 now in lo-definition. Bordeaux looking irresistible.

"Hello, I'm certifiable"

Probably the clearest case for nationalisation (municipalisation) out there.

Pardon the pun but this is a gross misuse of migration statistics. For good or ill we discuss the issue in net terms. Total net migration was 170k in 2025. Asylum applications was 95k with 10k removals, so 85k net. Share of net migration made up by asylum seekers is pretty much 50%. Not 9%.

Pardon the pun but this is a gross misuse of migration statistics. For good or ill we discuss the issue in net terms. Total net migration was 170k in 2025. Asylum applications was 95k with 10k removals, so 85k net. Share of net migration made up by asylum seekers is pretty much 50%. Not 9%.

Two things I think are true: 1. Most of the public are unaware annual net migration is falling 2. Showing everyone in the country the chart that proves it would be a disaster for the case most people saying 1. are trying to make.

It is a "boost for Burnham", but it's much more a boost for the principle that if you stick to a regional growth strategy for 30+ years you can see productivity and living standard improvements at the end of it. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

Good news for JR reforms to speed up infra: 7-day time limit to get the second appeal in has been upheld. Opponents to Luton Airport expansion missed it, asked for an extension and were told no, so helpful precedent set. That still took 5 months, but hopefully much faster from now on.

Common unscientific opinion: Birmingham partly underperforms relative to Manchester - at the very least in brand and swagger terms - due to recent football underperformance. Villa and potentially Birmingham City renaissance are good omens.

Buried the lede here. Swiss format is has been terrible dreadful in Champions League yet somehow spreading. Total switch of UEFA World Cup qualifying to 12 team groups, 6 games each. Nations League divided into 3x 18-team divisions made up of 3 seeding pots each. 6 games a pop too. Why???

🚨Exciting policy news 🚨 The Chancellor has announced that the government will consult on devolving 'Transport and Works Act Order' decisions to mayors. This would give them the power to get on with building transport networks, speeding up delivery like other countries. 1/2

Badenoch asks Starmer why oil from Russia is acceptable while oil from Aberdeen is not? It is a *very* good question and a sign of just how stupid and venal the government's relaxation of sanctions was in this instance.

People kicking off about fuel duty pause are getting Coalition flashbacks. But there are certain (Cameron-Osborne) downward slopes on this chart during low inflation when freezes were indefensible, and other, upward bits/high inflation where it’s not so clear cut.

Nobody is going to listen, but these sorts of hypothetical questions are not reliable guides to how voting intentions would actually shift if there was a leader change.

Torn on this. Love fuel duty and would raise more but price increase since Iran War ~25p on unleaded and ~4p VAT as well as ~45p on diesel and ~8p VAT are generating tax receipts like a 5p fuel duty rise and incentivising switching to EV/less driving like a 25p rise!

This is true and it is bad. It’s the Government certainly, but let’s be clear that it’s primarily Ed Miliband who won’t permit drilling - and a weak Starmer scared to overrule him. Reeves very clear on her position to allow new drilling.