rare W for the US legal system

even if it was good policy, this shit is completely ancillary to the goal of actually limiting the power of big tech. Elon Musk has a trillion dollars and is trying to start a global race war, your response to that can’t be “kids should be on their phones less”

'What is perhaps remarkable about the Exeter cuts is that they are targeted at some of the university’s most successful departments, many of which turn over a profit even after they have made enormous and increasing contributions to the central university budget.' Read, rage and weep.

I've been in Montreal for two days and twice had lager served in a Guinness glass. Heathens

Israel deliberately targeting Gaza children to commit genocide, UN inquiry finds

It’s wild that politicians don’t seem to grasp the degree to which universities contribute to the economy- local, regional, national. The failure to intervene is a stain on this govt - a shocking dereliction of duty to every worker, every local business, every student, every area that is suffering

The politics of the National Front do not become more moderate just because you have a lawyer read them out in front of a big flag. Quite the opposite: it’s now you that’s extreme, it’s you who are the extremists.

Officials clad in black, standing in front of billowing union flags vowing relentless, calculatedly cruel crackdowns on migrants is not moderate. Directing McCarthyist hate of your own party’s supporters is not moderate. This is all extreme, it is these people who have been pushing the boundaries.

Concealing your plans to scythe benefits from the public is not “moderate”. Nor is joining culture wars on the side of hateful, cruel reactionaries, or conniving in war crimes and genocide, vastly expanding what counts as “terrorism” or creating spurious pretexts to arrest thousands of protestors.

If you think Keir Starmer is a 'decent' person, you need to speak to the many, many minorities his government has targeted mercilessly. You can't speak to all of them, however, because many of them are dead because of choices Keir Starmer's government made

A summary and brief comment by me on today's judgment in For Women Scotland (No 3) The Court adopts an interpretation of the relevant legislation which prohibits, in all circumstances, trans women from being housed in the women's prison estate. administrativecourtblog.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/f...

There's a fashion for data protection regulators to step back from enforcing the law to "working with" organisations that break it In the UK, the regulator <signed an MoU> with the government, which it's supposed to oversee, to say they were about helping not punishing Thread below is the result:

I've tried to ignore the US reflecting pool thing becaue who honestly cares but this is objectively very funny

I hate to say it, but Labour are actually worse for UKHE than the Tories. It seems they actively want pretty much all but a handful of HEIs to go bust or merge. 30k jobs have already been lost over three years. The Government are actively making this worse. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

My GP doesn't let you book appointments. You fill in an online form (with character limit), attach photos if needed, and they assess and respond by text message from a number that doesn't allow replies. No way to discuss, clarify, ask questions Is this normal? It feels tremendously disempowering

Your periodic reminder that people are *more* abusive online when they're using their "real names" than when they're using a persistent pseudonym and this effect has been replicated in literally every study that has ever been done

What is Al Carns's theory of how prosecuting soldiers who murdered civilians in Northern Ireland helps republicans achieve a united Ireland

The problem here isn't with the CJEU - it made the right decision on the law The problem is that the law is wrong. That's on the legislator Some of us saw this coming years ago (others disagreed). We told the Commission they needed to address this when they were developing the DSA. They didn't

Relying on Google Translate for this as the official translation isn't up yet - so this could be wrong - but the Court's position here (left) seems to be essentially what we argued in *2019* (right): ejlt.org/index.php/ej... If so, nice to see the Court catch up

Relying on Google Translate for this as the official translation isn't up yet - so this could be wrong - but the Court's position here (left) seems to be essentially what we argued in *2019* (right): ejlt.org/index.php/ej... If so, nice to see the Court catch up

Once again begging the EU to go back to its old Curia website. It might have looked rubbish but at least it was usable

Further evidence, if it was needed, of just how rational and efficient the market is

Would love to see the proportionality assessment for forcing all adults into age verification to use an app no kids use to protect the kids

Pleased but not surprised to see this - we argued back in *2021* that AI service providers would not be able to benefit from liability shields in EU law: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Guys, just one of you, tell me the demographics of your voter base.

Pleased to say that my paper exploring how the CJEU has gone in the wrong direction on the definition of personal data from Breyer through to EDPS v SRB - and what to do about it - is now out in Computer Law & Security Review: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Fresh from alienating huge chunks of its base over immigration and trans rights, Labour seems to have decided to have a go at pushing away its remaining reliable source of support - the young

Being an academic in the UK is to be told that your research having a real-world impact is hugely important... only for you to wake up every day with the government announcing a new stupid policy clearly devoid of any fact-based evidence or underpinning research to justify it.

From one of the many PR emails I'm getting about the government social media ban. Obviously this is from someone selling this technology. But stop to think about just how utterly dystopian this is: *constant* video surveillance of all online activity, for everyone.

Starmer in 24: my government will let you just get on with your lives, promise Starmer in 26: IS THAT A PRO PALESTINE BIT OF CARD I SEE??? DO I SENSE A TRANS PERSON HAVING A WEE SOMEWHERE??? WHY IS YOUR 17YO NOT TUCKED UP IN BED WITH LIGHTS OUT AT 8.30, CITIZEN?????

Almost nostalgic for the heady days of last year when the Online Safety Act was going to make the UK the safest place to be a child online

Phone ban, social media ban & curfew, trans bathroom ban, trans youth healthcare ban, repeated protest ban, arrests of peaceful protestors for Palestine. All this government seems able to do is ban, ban, ban. No positive vision of the future, just kneejerk authoritarian crackdowns.

Totally distracted now thinking about how febrile the meeting must have been at which it was decided *the* thing that would save Starmer's reputation was turning off social media for 17 and 18 year olds at 2030 every night and what on earth were the ideas that got rejected?

Presumably this will rely on age verification? Which means it's not just a ban for under 16s, it's a ban for anyone of any age who doesn't want to hand over their data to questionable companies like Yoti A boon for the VPN market at least

Musk is a generationally repulsive monster. But he didn't make the Today Program's Justin Webb say that migrants in NI “have been able to come here and get access to services’ that local people can’t”. He didn't make the BBC head its live coverage of the pogroms with “Belfast Knife Attack Latest”.

Also, laying the blame so fully on Musk - who is absolutely a dangerous and contemptible racist creep - is very convenient for the UK's newspapers, news channels and politicians who've either spread the self-same racist myths, 24/7, for decades, or have entirely abandoned any pushback against them.

Notable that a relatively small number of people conducting a pogrom leads all the news for two days, but thousands turning out a few days later for an anti-racism rally in the same city is below the royal family watching the red arrows and Trump's cage fight on the BBC website

Aerial PARTIAL view of the anti racist, anti fascist crowd in Belfast right now. City Hall to the left for scale. This - this is the real Belfast. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Below is a letter sent by Tom Hayes, Labour MP Bournemouth East to the Mary-Anne Stephenson at the EHRC, with Bridget Phillipson and Liv Bailey cc'd. The reply will be evasive, no doubt. But I hope it results in some pressure to change.

On legitimising yet another pogrom.

The New Statesman asked me to put down a few thoughts about Belfast. On the politics and media that have failed everyone, and how much, and how little, has really changed. www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

We've had nearly sixty years of US dominance of Internet infrastructure, and 20 years of a near-total US monopoly of social media and we did very little about either. So US dominance of AI hardly came out of nowhere, and yet here we are getting blindsided by it.

The British state is handing contracts for increasingly sensitive elements of the Defence/Security apparatus to a man who has repeatedly tried to stoke open insurrection while aggressively backing British politicians who receive shady foreign funding and a guy who is currently in Moscow.

This is obviously very bad - but note also the contrast in this story between the policing minister's AI boosterism and the police chiefs' organisation warning against using it for critical purposes

Net migration could fall to zero and Reform and the Telegraph and all that lot would still bang on about it and the BBC would still cover them banging on about it and the government would still bow to “legitimate concerns” because it’s not numbers, it’s the industry of racism

Northern Ireland is such a beautifully revealing test case because it is both still *incredibly* racially homogenous *and* has extremely, extremely obvious non-immigration-related reasons for high levels of violence and community unrest - yet these people still can't help themselves

Many mistakes have been made in the course of the Northern Ireland peace process Perhaps the biggest is the idea that loyalist paramilitaries can be managed and contained and made respectable - and not a cancer on NI society that must be excised if we're ever going to move forward

Per most recent figures, net migration to NI *over the past 22 years* has been ~62,000 people. Only 3% of Northern Ireland’s population currently belong to an ethnic minority. Pogroms in Belfast (as with Ballymena last year) are just gutter-level "One Is One Too Many" racism, and nothing else.

The Times view on pogroms.

Today I've written for Arguably on one big mystery in our public life: why does no-one care about the existential crisis of our universities? Read all about it... 👇 www.arguably.uk/p/the-quiet-...