Dr Zubaida Haque

Its genuinely mad that we are, arguably, the most successful multicultural state on earth and instead of celebrating that we...

...keep trying to copy nations who have very evidently done worse at it than us

Oxford Street pedestrianisation plan gets final official approval City Hall hopes to stop traffic from using the street by September.

Delighted to announce that following the consultation, I'm giving the green light to make Oxford Street traffic-free.

Thought his Trumpian temper tantrum was really disgraceful, even by his standards. Just utterly graceless in defeat - Gorton and Denton voters emphatically rejected him, the margin wasn't close - to undermine the legitimacy of a result like that is ugly stuff.

Gorton and Denton by-election result:

GRN: 40.7% (+27.5)
REF: 28.7% (+14.7)
LAB: 25.4% (-25.3)
CON: 1.9% (-6.0)
LDEM: 1.8% (-2.1)

Green GAIN from Labour.

Land and Expand - how Palantir captured the Ministry of Defence What a close reading of public domain documents tells us about two concerning contract awards

Excellent analysis from @davidallengreen.bsky.social on the MoD contract awards to Palantir

And it looks to me as if the Gov (as with MoD - initially Tory and now Labour) have walked into similar contract traps 🎣 with NHS contracts awarded to Palantir
Woeful

emptycity.substack.com/p/land-and-e...

NEW

Land and Expand - how Palantir captured the Ministry of Defence

What a close reading of public domain documents tells us about two concerning contract awards

Detailed post by me, following-up on my FT column

emptycity.substack.com/p/land-and-e...

Goodwin & Kaufmann announced an event "is rising ethnic diversity a threat to the west" & later changed it to "immigration & diversity politics: a challenge to liberal democracy" The critique of their title, which they chose to accept as valid, is presented as an objection to discussing the topic

Wunmi Mosaku accepts the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress for ‘SINNERS’.

#WunmiMosaku #Sinners #BAFTAs

Wunmi Mosaku wins Best Supporting Actress for ‘SINNERS’ at the 2026 BAFTA Film Awards.

#WunmiMosaku #Sinners

Met police using AI tools supplied by Palantir to flag officer misconduct Exclusive: Police Federation condemns deployment of US firm’s tech to analyse behaviour as ‘automated suspicion’

Looks like the state is being slowly outsourced to Palantir. I am not sure this is ideal.

Met police using AI tools supplied by Palantir to flag officer misconduct www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Who's the billionaire behind London’s biggest mass eviction? He's the London philanthropist who says he's committed to solving homelessness. So why is Asif Aziz's Criterion Capital rushing to make hundreds of Londoners homeless in the coming weeks?

London’s “worst mass eviction in recent history” is underway; hundreds of households across London told to get out of their homes this week by the same landlord, ahead of the renters rights act. The landlord? Billionaire Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital. www.londoncentric.media/p/asif-aziz-...

This started as a single tip about one building but on a hunch we got @pollysmythe.bsky.social to chase around London and check all the Aziz family’s properties. Sometimes she got there just before the eviction notices. The scale of the clearout is enormous – and we don't think we found all of it.

If Starmer 2.0 means nothing else, perhaps it can mean this…

Starmer 2.0: could a more authentic PM revive Labour’s appeal? After surviving a coup, and with his critics chastened, No 10 insiders say a more combative PM is up for taking the fight to Reform UK

For this weekend’s long read

The fights Starmer has started to pick with billionaires and and the hard right - and whether a brutally honest, wholesale revaluation of why Labour won in 2024 is the thing that could revive their fortunes.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Discussing this article in two separate group chats with other women in tech, and I think it gets a lot wrong. The sexism isn't worse in the tech industry now, it's just that people outside the industry can see it too. I've worked in tech since the 90s and disdain and misogyny has always been there

I have no particular knowledge nor interest in Palantir, but as a public procurement lawyer looking closely at the public domain documents about the MoD-Palantir contracts, there is something concerning going on.

Two successive high value tenders without advertisements or competition?

Really?

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

NEW

How Palantir captured the Ministry of Defence

How a close read of public domain documents show how MoD was commercially colonised by Palantir

By me, at FT

www.ft.com/content/5207...

"These tariffs have been in effect for almost a year. They have upended whole sectors of the U.S. & global economies. The fact that a president can illegally exercise such powers for so long & w/ such great consequences for almost a year means we’re not living in a functional constitutional system."

BREAKING: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, BBC News reported reut.rs/4s0NSPL

Exclusive: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere The U.S. State Department is developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including alleged hate speech and terrorist propagan...

Exclusive: The US State Department is developing an online portal to enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda, sources told Reuters reut.rs/4cySsA6

Lost my phone in London, with four credit cards and £150 cash in the case. Returned to me within 21 minutes. This hellhole of a city eh.

...my team has to spend a reasonable part of their week trying to make sure none of us get murdered.

This also a greater burden for women, MPs of colour, LGBT MPs, so they effectively get less staff time to focus on what actually should matter...
6/?

It appears that the Government is finally waking up to the harm from misinformation and disinformation, at least for public health and measles vaccination.

‘We almost lost you in the night’ - the life-threatening rise of measles in the UK It is one of the most infectious diseases around, and can cause blindness and hearing loss – and can also be fatal. Why are cases now soaring and what can be done about it?

Pneumonia, blindness, hearing loss and brain inflammation are just some of the impacts measles can do and these are heartbreaking accounts shared here. Measles is extremely infectious but also preventable by the full course of the MMR vaccine #MMR #Measles

ALSO - if you missed out on your childhood measles vaccine and haven't had measles, you can get *free* MMR vaccination from your GP! (whether as an older child, teenager or adult).

I got my MMR about 10 years ago!

www.nhs.uk/vaccinations...

The Guardian view on the BBC World Service: this is London calling | Editorial Editorial: With just seven weeks before its funding runs out, the UK’s greatest cultural asset and most trusted international news organisation must be supported

And another bites the dust?

The BBC World Service will run out of funding in just seven weeks. Its funding arrangement with the Foreign Office finishes at the end of March. There is no plan for what happens next.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Proportion of non-pensioner below-middle income families in different tenure types: GB/UK

We’ve seen a *massive* swing away from homeownership into expensive private renting.

Mortgaged families dropped from 30% to 17% of Unsung Britain, while private renters nearly doubled. Almost as many people live with parents (15%) as own with a mortgage (17%).

'I wouldn't touch a Jewish woman': Meet the Reform team in Gorton and Denton Members of Reform's campaign team shared racist content online and aligned themselves with far-right groups

Manchester Mill find the small group of Reform activists includes several with v overt prejudices. They fairly note that Goodwin can't be expected to vet them all in advance. To date, the site report he is not willing to criticise ant of it once revealed either
manchestermill.co.uk/goodwins-gan...