It’s all just so pathetic. We need to add 2p to the higher rate and 4p to the basic rate and then unpick a bunch of the tiny demented tax incentives that crap like this has created and instead they are gonna do more of the crap and still get hung for breaking their promises. Incredible scenes.

🎉 Camden's new plans for Holborn are mind-blowingly good: bit.ly/4qOtVMg Major changes for Theobalds Rd, Southampton Row, Kingsway, High Holborn & further afield. New Oxford Street & Great Ormond Street plans look like big changes for better! Kudos Cllr @adamdkharrison.bsky.social 👏

London and Manchester to get NBA Europe teams. Brutal confirmation to Birmingham of second city status. Man City building the Co-Op arena next door to the Etihad looking pretty smart.

This video from CityEd on Manchester’s potential 3-cross city tunnels is fantastic. Not sure TfGM could do better. youtu.be/PADrgyTPpFs?...

Definitely don't hate the 3-unitary Kent proposal

Congestion charge is rising from £15 to £18. EVs to go from 0% to 75% rate. So that’s £13.50 a day from an Uber and £5k a year if that vehicle was being driven every day. A helpful contribution.

The data continues piling up from non-sophisticated anecdotes, to sophisticated anecdotes (this one), right up to fleet telematics data that the battery management systems in EVs have solved battery degradation (at least to a level that keeps the vehicle on the road)...

Fun dynamic of the budget is that the Tories did all the easy bits when it came to hosing the rich, leaving behind an unbelievably progressive income tax system www.economist.com/britain/2025...

If true, delighted Reeves is doing it this way. Surprised by the negative reaction seen on here. Keep it simple, stupid. Just read the odometer at your annual MOT, no risk of 'Big Brother wants to track you' stuff. Leave the management congestion to local transport authorities.

A withering critique of British energy policy by Dieter Helm. "Britain is not going to have cheap energy any time soon – unless there is radical policy action." dieterhelm.co.uk/energy-clima...

Tbf the worst of the beast starving tax cuts - the huge increase in the personal allowance - was a Lib Dem policy. The ironic awfulness of Osborne’s tax and benefit policies is that a sensible Tory party wishing to regain professionals and not just pensioners would look to undo his wheezes too.

Businesses have noticed this is a leftwing government. Farmers have noticed. The globally mobile rich have noticed. Basically the only people who don’t think this is a leftwing government are the people who want one.

You can have robust public support to raise little while warping behaviour negatively to raise even less, or moderate support for a tax with robust income and minimal changes to overall behaviour(and those changes probably will be on the positive side). I’ll take broad but small and beneficial.

My sense is quite a bit is already being done and some great institutions out there but Britain is uniquely well positioned to endow every city with an unmissable museum or gallery. Lots of interesting ways to slice and dice things to provide locally resonant yet world class collections nationwide.

Unpopular opinion: not being ‘a good constituency MP’ does not necessarily make someone a bad MP. Where voters elect a party leader, they are making a clear choice. Reform voters in Clacton, Labour voters in Holborn or LD voters in Kingston complaining they ‘never see their MP’ can largely do one.

Easiest thing to do is to rename the BSR the Building Swiftly Regulator and declare the entire enterprise an unparalleled success in the history of quangos. Swiftness has been almost entirely removed from the construction of tall buildings in England.

The number of international tourist nights spent in London is about 120million a year or avg 320k per night. That foreign tourist poulation is the same as resident population of Nottingham or Newcastle or Cardiff council areas. And in high season tourists are probably closer to half a million.

I am going to tap the sign: ________________________ |A tight labour market is| |better for your policy | |goals than any of your | | policies. | |________________________|

Sounds like time for a bunch of noblemen to come up with some rules for what the king is allowed and not allowed to do and force him to accept it, possibly writing it on some sort of big piece of paper, like a great charter

Preach. Bus fare cap is incredibly popular but genuinely harmful for wider affordability and accessibility of local bus networks. Not to mention rank centralisation of one of the most obviously local govt services. Lost routes can’t be restored/fares rise while a lucky few get a £150m windfall.

The quality of discussion available on demand to accompany a drizzly stroll is a crazy modern privilege. ‘Ever wondered how the CIA tries to get inside Xi’s mind? Well here’s the guy you who was doing that a few months ago’

Has there been a follow up on the Met’s claim that ‘western iPhones fetch £4k in China because they avoid censorship’ in this story? Would love to read about it IF TRUE but it smells extremely fishy. ‘Has the CCP left a huge hole in the Great Firewall … or is the Met chatting breeze to deflect’

Time for 2025 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, you might like the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until end of November 2025. www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...

Bravo Cardiff. “It’s only fair that those driving the biggest, heaviest and most polluting vehicles pay more for the extra space and danger they bring” - Spot on from @olord.bsky.social Important: two-thirds (66%) of respondents to the related consultation agreed larger vehicles should pay more.

The problem with this argument is that if the affordable mandates lead to even a modest reduction in building they quickly become self defeating. If a 25% mandate leads to a 20% reduction in supply then you are constantly exchanging two market rate homes for one affordable home.

Larding welfare benefits and contribution policy onto household bills for energy, water or telecoms is a wildly thankless and ineffective endeavour by govt. Just on the sneaky politics, the public will probably notice a £100 reduction in a £1k energy bill much more than £100 increase via income tax.

Lime’s UK revenue from renting out e-bikes and scooters hit £111m last year. www.londoncentric.media/p/lime-is-ea...

This could have been a ‘bills falling’ story. But sodding social tariffs. If you want richer people to help poorer people pay their utility bills use the flipping tax and benefit system we have to do that fairly and efficiently. It’s like re-inventing council tax but much worse.

Sounds like the parity of esteem Andy Burnham has long been pushing for.

British public does seem to be exceptionally keen to embrace all big sporting events held here in huge numbers. Set huge records for Paralympics, women’s Euros (fair play to Switzerland for beating it this summer) and now women’s Rugby World Cup

The ‘revised’ offer seems to be the original offer on the table of 3.4% (RPI in Feb) this year and RPI for 2 more years. Nothing about 32-hr work week or fatigue. The Lime/Lizzie/login from home effect at work?

'This new online system might lead us to miss serious cases because there will be so many requests' 'When we get too many cases by phone now we just pull the plug out the wall...' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

BBC’s Local Democracy Reporting Service seems to be a bung to Reach et al at the moment. Rather than directly fund journalists for them, flipping to act as a purchaser and cross-poster of any public interest local journalism. Would fund and help promote a wider (more deserving?) ecosystem.

And we should be having a proper debate about what the right level is for the personal allowance. One that recognises the extent of the changes/fiscal vandalism (delete as appropriate) of the 2010s. ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxla...

Took the chance to get catch the Bakerloop on launch day for lunch in Elephant Park. 20 mins from Lewisham through decent traffic. Excellent. Orbital Superloop is fine but London needs more of these arterial express buses.

Great news to hear Aarhus' cap on legal costs is under review - a whopping subsidy to comedy legal cases from Nimbys, funded by you, the taxpayer

The Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world's first public railway to use steam locomotives, opened on this day 1825. Its first line linked collieries near Shildon with Darlington and Stockton. (Painting of opening day by Terence Cuneo, 1949, National Railway Museum.)

Despite reports I really struggle to see govt abolishing this, at least not fully. Set a child poverty target and aim for it in the way that matches whole of govt strategy. That’s boosting growth, helping working people and, more recently, fairness. This is not most people’s view of fairness.

Govt reaction to Grenfell has combined unforeseen rank incompetence at Building Safety Regulator with completely predictable knackering of resi viability in London via cripplingly expensive yet meretricious regulations. Plus the vast financial and mental toll on flat-owners with cladding too.

All good from the minister. But makes the proposed changes to planning cttees stranger: anything >9 units even on an allocated site could be called in by cllrs. Barely empowers ‘plan-led system’ or local democracy vs loud objectors dragging cllrs into site-by-site mini-refs.

Following approval of recovered appeal on Brighton Gasworks by @matthewpennycookmp.bsky.social the council has had full costs awarded against them. The letter from PINs is v robust & makes clear that no. of objections is not a planning consideration-it's the substance of the objection that matters

The Pride in Place Programme - announced today - has published its allocations. At first glance, I think £3.5 billion of the £5 billion is new - mooted in the Spending Review - and £1.5 billion is from the Long-Term Plan for Towns that has been previously announced. www.gov.uk/government/p...

UK Bluesky arguing about digital ID, while here in Belgium I'm buying some train tickets... this is a much better argument for government ID than "you have to have this so government can be tougher on migrants"

Great scoop. Hackney the most cycle-centric part of the city due to the demographics, location and relatively weak/absent rail and tube links. No surprise e-bike hire companies in a bidding war - Hackney is their Premier League TV rights. Great to see the lid lifted ever so slightly on the business

Hopefully refocuses the govt towards rebalancing levies from electricity to gas. Need to ensure EV/heat pump are the value option vs ICE/gas even as Net Zero Dad prosumer tariff strategies become less bountiful.

Interesting energy consumption stats out today - electric cars and domestic heat pumps now account for more than 5% of total electricity use www.gov.uk/government/s...

Good to see that this at least being discussed. But makes the half-baked compromises on geography of devolution deals and reorganisation worse. Too important to leave up to councillors and council boundaries when health/schools/police factors to be considered.

If govt wants lower bills, especially for lower income households, it needs to pay for it through tax rises right now. Fiddling around with standing charges is deck chair rearrangement - and people who end up with higher bills will make more noise than those who get a cut from this.

Key charts from a great thread. Careful analysis by my @theifs.bsky.social colleagues shows that the two-child benefit limit has had no detectable impact on school-readiness at age 5, including among the poorer children most likely to be affected. Key policy takeaway: scrapping the ... [1/3]

For people who want to make World Cup qualifiers less interesting and bring that level of competition to the first round of the big show itself.