Alom Shaha

Honestly the collective national level of disdain for Brits living in Dubai on all my social media platforms today really is bringing the UK together as one in a way that's hard to achieve in the modern era.

Ironing funeral clothes. If you're able to support my @mariecurieuk.bsky.social fundraiser, today would be a good day for it. Thanks again to everyone who's given so far. www.justgiving.com/page/richard...

The very fact that an EV tax is being proposed is because electric cars are so popular that they are eating serious chunks of the income the taxman gets from fuel duty.

Wasn’t that long ago the government were paying people to buy one, now we need a new tax…:)

Christopher who? In May, a party founded eight years ago, with no record in national government and only eight MPs, will fight elections in Wales and Scotland, and for control of councils across England, with every chance of winning many of them. British politics is being reshaped by Reform UK. This is a result of Nigel Farage's personality and of Christopher Harborne's money - £9m, from a fortune amassed largely through cryptocurrency investments. The party would not be able to field candidates, run social media operations or door-to-door campaigns if it weren't for the Harborne war chest. There is a template for crypto-funded campaigning - in the US, where it is viewed as having led to securing crypto-friendly legislation and sweetheart deals to enrich crypto charlatans and undermine transparency and accountability in politics. Reform threatens to destroy the Conservatives as a party of government and divide communities, increasingly along ethnic lines and with overtly racist arguments. It also poses the most serious threat to Keir Starmer's government, Harborne lives in Thailand and owns a 12% stake in the Tether stablecoin. Little else is known about this intensely private man. Yet he can influence the course of politics, seemingly without either much of a business or life in the UK. It's a lot like overseas interference in British democracy. Didn't someone once say: "Take back control"?

From yesterday's Observer.

Britain is just an outpost now

Airstrip One

no independent Great Power

hasn't sunk in yet, so the dissonance is wild

the cracks may bring some overdue light on how to think about the past, why other people wince at your patriotism, and then what truly shared global values might look like one day

An open letter has been sent to Lord Vallance from 57 heads of UK physics departments and institutes, including all of the heads of physics departments of the Russell group.

www.iop.org/about/news/o...

Why Don’t Things Fall Up? Why Don’t Things Fall Up? delivers what every adult and schoolchild deserves, but often doesn’t get: an authoritative and accessible account of the key ideas in science. The book is rooted in Alom’…

Primary Teachers! British Science Week starts next Friday. To help any of you who’d like to refresh and / or deepen your understanding of the science in the National Curriculum, I’m giving away FREE kindle editions of “Why Don‘t Things Fall Up?” Drop me a line if you want one!

Mr. S: You know why they're Scottish Widows?

Me: Go on ...

Mr. S: Their husbands got kilt.

Because we put... incels in charge of the Pentagon???

People are drowning in disinformation on a social media site run by a Fellow of the @royalsociety.org

A slur was shouted at the Baftas – but what followed was ... The BBC Tourette syndrome furore shows that the stigma exposed by the I Swear film is ongoing

“The Bafta episode reveals the limits of many people’s imagining of diversity.” My @theobserveruk.bsky.social column, already online, and today in print: observer.co.uk/news/columni...

This reminds me of that Frankie Boyle joke about how Americans not only come to your country and kill your people, they also come back twenty years later to make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers sad.

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death The capital city is Finnish’ed with car-related fatalities.

“Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year…Citing data that shows the risk of pedestrian fatality is cut in half by reducing a car’s speed from 40 to 30km/hr, city officials imposed the lower limit in most of Helsinki’s residential areas and city center in 2021.”

As journalists working today many of us are taught to recognise disinformation when we see it and fight back against it.

Unfortunately there are some who willingly seek it out and put it on their front pages. A disgrace to the profession.

Very clear that for Starmer, 'sectarian voting' is when British Muslims don't vote Labour, and for many others, it is just when British Muslims vote.

Agree with this. Seems to me people who voted Green voted for hope and community, while likely recognising that the party doesn’t yet have a serious programme for government.

Many different images on multiple formats, prints, phone cases etc…

Absolutely sickening. The attitude of “I’ll have that” by these sellers boils my blood. I feel like dispensing some Judge Dredd form of justice.

A print (stolen from my partner Clare Caulfield) of a stylised New York City scene. Taxis trundle past shopfronts and tall buildings, figures stand at traffic lights. The original was done in watercolour, pencil and printmaking techniques, it is beautiful and I’m well proud of her (A) for making this and then (B) battling the thieves who are stealing it by selling prints, phone cases and other naff items and passing it off as their own.

My partner has had a truly rotten couple of weeks discovering that her beautiful artwork has been stolen & sold by sellers (a print we purchased to do detective work👇🏻) on Amazon, Temu, Redbubble, Etsy & others.

Please visit her own Etsy shop & cheer her up www.etsy.com/uk/shop/Clar... Thanks 🙏🏻

I still find it weird when people say "Impeach him" as if that's likely about the guy who, if laws applied, would have been arrested before he took office.

Sorry if I'm messing things up this is my first time living through a dystopia

Regret to announce that we’ve reached Wrong Coat season. Every coat you wear from now til mid April will be The Wrong Coat for the weather

If anything good comes of this it will mean I can separate people in booths come May without being screamed at.

I'll be honest, when I wrote this paragraph this morning I did not think that Keir Starmer would find someone else to blame.

I especially did not expect that person to be George Galloway.

A consistent recurring theme of Farage byelection losses over a decade - Oldham 2015 with Ukip, Peterborough 2019 with Brexit Party, Gorton & Denton 2026 - is to talk loudly about electoral challenges about minority voters. But never to actually put the case to authorities. Media should spot pattern

Foreground: me, sweaty. Background: lighthouse.

In case anyone feels like making the world just a bit less shit this afternoon: SPONSOR ME PLEASE. Thank you. x www.justgiving.com/page/richard...

Not serious enough of a problem when so many people still voted for an openly racist and hateful party.

Holy shit, Tony Blair fucked Rupert Murdoch's Wife and I never heard about it? (Story here: www.gawkerarchives.com/rupert-murdo...)
Starting to believe I've lapsed into a kind of coma overnight and woken up in some sort of Vanilla Sky shit.

Countdown to the Farage argument that the only way to remove the risk of “family voting” from elections is to impose a ban on women voting.

Lmao