John Barrett

Pinched this video from @cjsnowdon.bsky.social on Twitter because Bluesky has to see it.

Nothing can prepare you for the punchline here.

Huge news from the UK today: after UN climate talks in which there was a massive fight over language on fossil fuels, the UK government today announced that it will in fact be keeping many millions of barrels of oil & gas in the ground. Deeds rather than just words for a change! 🧵

Related question for any legal brains: if one candidate says incorrectly that another candidate has previously stood for election "many times" (when it was in fact only once), would that be a breach of Representation of the People Act 1983 s106(1)?

Photograph of the article described in the post.

Has Britain become an economic colony? US tech dominance was meant to bring prosperity - but disempowerment seems to be the result. By Tim Wu, Guardian 22.11.25

Why do people think England flags have been raised on lampposts?

White adults
National pride: 26%
Anti-migrant/minority sentiment: 49%
Both: 19%

Ethnic minority adults
National pride: 15%
Anti-migrant/minority sentiment: 55%
Both: 20%

yougov.co.uk/society/arti...

Bellingcat’s contact email has always been a magnet for people with fairly unusual views; paranoid delusions, sprawling conspiracies, the works. But recently, the pattern has shifted, we’re seeing more and more emails clearly written with ChatGPT.

Discounts for families to keep warm in winter and cool in summer Boiler Upgrade Scheme has been expanded to include air-to-air heat pumps and heat batteries giving families more choice in how they upgrade their home.

Here’s the official government press release:

www.gov.uk/government/n...

Here's the latest variant picture for the United Kingdom, to late October.

The XFG.* "Stratus" variant remained dominant, falling slightly to 82%.

NB.1.8.1 "Nimbus" grew to 13%.

#COVID19 #SARSCoV2 #UK #XFG #Stratus #NB_1_8_1 #Nimbus
🧵

"Seizing Brexit opportunities to deregulate" was mostly unspecified magic fairy pixie bullshit then, and it's not going to get any more realistic in the hands of a bunch of Reform clowns who don't know how anything works, don't care to learn and disdain anyone that might.

Nottingham is quite diverse. In many parts of the city and surrounding areas, plots were sold individually for building. One street can have houses that were built over many decades.

Elon Musk is boosting the British right - and this shows how Elon Musk is boosting the British right - and this shows how

X is designed to radicalise people.

The algorithm promotes Elon Musk's agenda to promote racists and people who want violence bought - specifically - to the streets of Britain.

Members of Parliament, major institutions and the media should not be there.
news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

Immigration, indecency, and incompetence. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog. The ever-more indecent terms of the immigration 'debate' are another failure of Brexit, which links to the ever-more obvious incompetence of Reform in local government: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2025/10/immi...

Log In Welcome to the National Trust 2025 voting website, hosted by independent voting service provider Civica Election Services.

It's that moment again for National Trust members to vote to keep the entryists out.

Quick and easy to vote and please do so by 31st of October

Quick Vote link keeps the AstroTurfers out.

Then share. Thank you.

secure.cesvotes.com/V3-3-0/nt25/...

I’ve used WA Health’s COVID-19 wastewater surveillance page to estimate the number of infections of BA.3.2.

I estimate ~400 BA.3.2.* infections in Perth for the latest week, and ~4,600 over the 9 weeks since BA.3.2.* was first detected.

#COVID19 #SARSCoV2 #BA_3_2 #Australia #WA #Perth
🧵

The most important reason is at the end "... giving people who do have the right to be here the cast-iron guarantee that this is their country and that they are welcome in the UK."

England is now experiencing a significant Covid wave, after 10 months of relative quiet The latest Covid situation in England and a look at where NHS services are as we head into winter

We are now in a significant COVID wave after a period of relative calm- excellent summary from @chrischirp.bsky.social

When Will the Lion Concern Himself Joking memes make light of the uncomfortable reality: everyone's got a little of that post-COVID brain damage these days

Nobody has Long COVID, but everybody has brain fog, cognitive decline and memory loss. I talk about the overwhelming scientific evidence that COVID damages the brain, and the overwhelming social unwillingness to acknowledge it in my latest:

www.thegauntlet.news/p/when-will-...

🔥 Finally an EU leader says it out loud:

“We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies.”

Dear Bridget Phillipson, Please Can We Talk About Health? Dear Bridget Phillipson, Please can we talk about health? It’s autumn 2025. We’re one month into the school year, in England. Two of my children are ill, again.With Covid, again.It&#821…

Brilliant article by a teacher highlighting the current dire situation for teachers and kids every winter when it comes to infection risk and spread. We continue to fight for our kids to have the right to breathe clean air.

stevebheadteacher.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/d...

1/ There’s quite a lot of misunderstanding by good journalists about how right to work checks operate. It’s not illegal to work without having provided proof of your right, as James goes on to say later in the thread. And employers are not under a legal duty to conduct checks: ID is not mandatory.

Isn't the net economic effect of a youth mobility scheme small or zero once you take account of the young UK citizens going the other way?

Try using a paper LPA...

Trial of X in Belgium for refusing to remove unlawful content. In the UK, X appears to be treated as above the law, as it actively defends so much extreme & unlawful content of many kinds, with so little challenge since those responsible for the rule of law seem to be indifferent or asleep

‘The conference was disastrous for Reform. It's easily their biggest misstep’ | The News Agents Reform UK’s 2025 conference was a horror show of misinformation, with a celebration of admitted racist Lucy Connolly and lies about vaccines spread by a conspiracy theorist – both greeted with rounds…

"Having their first big conference about vaccines and Lucy Connolly – it was a stupid mistake... This was actually disastrous for Reform."

Did the Reform UK conference expose the party for what it really stands for?

www.thenewsagents.co.uk/article/the-...

My analysis of Reform’s appeal to a mix of a toxic/radicalised core and more normal mainstream target voters

Robinson Meyer: Why do we have a surplus of oxygen in the air in the first place? It was, for me, also something I did not understand at all before I read the book. Peter Brannen: So there’s this common trope that two out of the next three breaths you have is from phytoplankton the ocean, or a quarter of it is from the Amazon alive today. And there’s a sense in which that’s true because oxygen and CO2 are being exchanged very quickly in the biosphere. But there is something like 800 times more oxygen in the air than can be produced by the entire biosphere. And all of the oxygen that’s produced by the rainforest, say — the rainforest is a living system where everything else is consuming that organic matter and feeding off of it. And it’s kind of a wash — just as much oxygen is created by the trees as is consumed by the bugs and fungi and jaguars and all the things that are living in the rainforest that are feeding off those plants and respiring that plant matter back to things like CO2 and water. So on a net scale it’s a wash. So that gets you a planet with close to zero oxygen, and instead we have this absurd abundance of this thing that wants to react with everything. And the only way you can do that is if, say, you imagine a tree and when it dies, rather than being decomposed by fungi and beetles and on and on, that tree suddenly gets buried in sediment and falls into the crust and becomes part of the rock record, and the oxygen it made in life is not used in its own destruction. And by shielding that tree in the earth, you leave this surplus of oxygen in the air. And over all of Earth history, as a vanishingly small amount of this organic matter, things like plants and algae, do make it into the rock record, they leave an equivalent gift of oxygen in the air as a surplus.

We are more familiar with plant matter in the crust where it’s economically exploitable — we call those fossil fuels. So in a weird way, the fact that me and you can breathe — I don’t think a lot of people attribute that to the fact that there’s fossil fuels in the ground. Luckily most, you know, quote-unquote fossil fuels are very diffuse in mudstones, and they’re not economically exploitable. And we’re never going to run out of oxygen by burning fossil fuels because, you know, we worry about CO2 going up in parts per million and oxygens in whole percent. So, you know, it is true that for every molecule of CO2 we burn we’re bringing down oxygen by an equivalent amount, it’s just not that concerning. But yeah, there is this astounding way of reframing, of looking at the world where the plant surface is breathable only because of what’s happened in the rocks beneath it.

Why can you breathe Earth’s atmosphere?

The answer isn’t that the Amazon rainforest is producing excess oxygen on the surface. (It’s not.) It’s that fossil fuels exist. I didn’t understand this at all before reading @peterbrannen.bsky.social’s new book. heatmap.news/podcast/shif...

PM Starmer agrees with the SNP that "we had an [asylum] returns agreement with the whole of Europe. It was ripped up when we left the EU by people making promises" that were a fantasy

Yes, it was carefully hidden in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... )

1/2

PM: 'Reform UK are talking down our country - I'm giving kids a brighter future' 'We are kick starting our Best Start In Life campaign, to turbocharge children’s learning and give hard pressed families the extra hand they deserve,' the PM writes for The Mirror

...from today, parents can take full advantage our new offer of 30 free hours childcare a week - covering children from nine months until school age.
www.mirror.co.uk/news/politic...