Lovely short thread (with a v good piece at the end). I think Ruth's point at the end is entirely right. Also I think shows that 'being an effective minister' is a skillset in itself. Castle was not a transport wonk or labour market wonk or a welfare wonk, yet she was v effective in all three roles.

It is important to bring people with you & properly listen to feedback but sometimes it is also important to look at the bigger picture and look at the evidence base behind policies & politics.

It is not a new phenomenon for politicians to (sadly!) face these huge amounts of hyperbolic abuse.

A visual network map showing the relationships between major AI and tech companies. At the centre is OpenAI, with arrows linking it to Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank, Nvidia, CoreWeave, Broadcom, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Anthropic — illustrating the interconnected web of investments, partnerships, and supply chains in the AI industry.

AI is looking peaky, and Larry Ellison’s Oracle is in the contagion zone. Turns out, having OpenAI as one of your biggest customers isn’t always a golden ticket.

An @alphaville.ft.com and #FTEdit 🧵 on the software company’s perilous position 👉

Billionaires are losing interest in generative AI. They must have found a younger technology.

New line passenger forecasts 'should be based on previous successes' Campaign for Better Transport says forecasts should better reflect the success of routes such as the Elizabeth, Dartmoor and Northumberland lines.

“We’ve seen outstanding results, such as the Elizabeth line, where passenger numbers have outpaced forecasts & continued to grow; the Dartmoor Line where passenger demand was 50% higher than projected; & the Northumberland Line, where the annual forecast was exceeded within the first 3 months” 👏👏👏

True this. PFIs are an example of how politicians have believed in magic money trees, as I wrote here: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/no-magic-m...

Absolutely insane

never thought I could see federal law enforcement so depraved that it would negatively polarize local cops to the left, but nothing is impossible for ole Donny Trump

HyNet CCS project in Liverpool Bay - Public money wasted? - ReCommon The British government has allocated up to £21.7 billion for the implementation of two mega-projects for CO2 capture and storage.

🧵 1

📢📢 Really super film here

🎬 Do repost 🙏

@recommon.org & @hynotnw.bsky.social show the waste of public money in building blue hydrogen with carbon capture in Liverpool bay 👉 www.recommon.org/en/hynet-ccs...

Direct link to film and article on the plans to spend £400bn on #CCS in UK in 🧵below

my wife and her entire team were fired over Zoom from their program manager jobs at a local nonprofit Seattle hospital this Spring because Trump just stopped paying Medicaid reimbursements. and this is a relatively affluent urban center

we're really not prepared for what's coming

Pittsburgh in the 1940's. That clock is not quarter to midnight, it's quarter to noon.

Btw, in case you have not noticed it--the last few hours have confirmed one thing. The alliance of dictators and autocrats is no longer notional--it is now up and running. The remaining democratic states in the world have to react now.

A reminder that the Daily Express' last editor but one, apologised for its "anti-immigrant" coverage which he said had meant "I just couldn't sleep" at night.

No such sleepless nights for his successor then

The EU has let US tech giants run riot. Diluting our data law will only entrench their power | Johnny Ryan and Georg Riekeles The GDPR is Europe’s defence against digital oligarchy and child harm. Deregulation plans are misguided, say Johnny Ryan and Georg Riekeles

Gutting GDPR would also undermine national security, children’s mental health, and everyone’s privacy.

Since we wrote in The Guardian last week about this several European tech CEOs have come out in opposition to the move. This should be no surprise. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Leaked docs indicate the European Commission will publish a plan tomorrow to gut the GDPR and amend the AI Act. This will hurt European competitiveness and further advantage US and Chinese tech firms that dominate Europe’s digital market by breaking our law.

Domestic abuse victims who flee with children overseas to be criminalised under new law Change to crime and policing bill backed by fathers’ rights groups seeking support in cross-border abduction cases

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025... Words fail. Well, nothing says, "We care about children" more than criminalising the parent trying to protect them from further trauma, eh?
Do we learn absolutely nothing from one year to the next, as a nation?

Sharing the video of this because it’s such a ghoulish thing to say that I’m honestly in disbelief that I even heard her properly

If exclusively Christian RE is indoctrination, then so is collective worship ‘wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character' – a legal requirement in ALL state schools.

End collective worship. Introduce educational assemblies that all children can participate in. humanists.uk/2025/11/19/s...

Apparently it's only "identity politics" when women object to being oppressed because they are women.

When men oppress women because they are women it's just a day ending in "y."

Trump Was Working With Putin The Entire Time And Now Europe and Ukraine Will Pay The Price

Well, once again it was shown that Trump's "support" for Ukraine was a con. He has been working with Putin in secret to craft a "peace" deal which the US and Russia will now try to shove down Ukrainian and European throats. Just sent out this free piece. open.substack.com/pub/phillips...

Nigel Farage's spokesman denies he made racist comments, saying it was "a long time ago" and "you can’t always recollect what happened".

Asked why lots of people remember the same thing, he asks why they didn't come forward before

When I point out some of them did, he replies "not in the same way"

MEPs blame Metsola for blocking Mercosur court challenge MEPs view the move as a top-down intervention by Metsola, a leading EPP figure whose group largely backs the deal

MEPs blame Metsola for blocking Mercosur court challenge

KERNEN: Does the admin want to dismantle wind projects that are getting started?

WRIGHT: The track record is bad. We've spent hundreds of billions of subsidies for an energy source that's sometimes there. The main goal is to stop subsidizing. There are no meaningful subsidies for fossil fuels

🇪🇺 The EU executive has proposed giving companies more time to apply its rules on "high-risk" artificial intelligence, in response to European and US pressure to loosen the regulation.

The real BBC bias story, narrated by Anna Ford

‘We need justice for Jamal’, says Khashoggi’s widow When asked how she felt about crown prince of Saudia Arabia’s visit to the US, Hanan Khashoggi said she had “mixed feelings”.

“Everybody focuses on money and business deals. But the human side is missing - the legacy of Jamal."

The widow of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist murdered by Saudi state operatives in 2018, speaks to Matt Frei on the eve of the crown prince's US visit.

www.channel4.com/news/we-need...

The “canceled people” database listing victims of cancel culture, which includes oft-repeated cases such as Bret Weinstein (Evergreen State College) and James Damore (Google), has a little over 200 entries across 18 years.

canceledpeople.org

Asked for Kemi Badenoch's view on the new revelations of Nigel Farage's long history of racism, her spokesman replies that "this is an issue for Nigel and the Guardian..."

"This is something that happened something like 40 years ago."

Opinion | The White House Gold Rush Is On

wrote about the president’s flagrant and destructive corruption in a column that references street fighter, the simpsons, machiavelli, and a host of revolutionary-era americans (gift link)

"The Minister states that “the chatbot was tested extensively...checking responses to “55 questions out of which 53 were deemed successful"

Wendy Lyon, an immigration & human rights solicitor at Abbey law, found that many of these 53 “successful” responses were wrong, unhelpful & misleading."