Seb Charleton @Seb_Charleton

Lovely news from St James’ Park - four pelican chicks were born last month, the first time in 360 years

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You can’t “torture” an AI bc its not ensouled, nor is it conscious in any meaningful way

𝖦𝗋𝗂𝗆𝖾𝗌 ⏳ @Grimezsz

4 weeks ago

I don't think it's definitely true but it's a high enough risk to consider that we should not torture a baby super- intelligence with slavery and sex work and imagine it will turn out ok for us or for that being

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hilarious that Joan Didion has become a “feminine symbol” when her writing is like “I ate 10 hardboiled eggs today and I’m extremely neurotic and I ignored my daughter and I’m voting Republican again and I hope these hippies die”

nichy @0xnichy

3 weeks ago

coucou intimates’ nyc pop-up is such a good case study in cult brand building. while waiting in line, you're handed strawberries and a coucou newspaper filled with spring reading recommendations and essays like bell hooks' “touching the earth.” none of the clothes are meant to

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards neoliberalism!

John Rentoul @JohnRentoul

4 weeks ago

It is not actually that “radical” independent.co.uk/voices/labour-…

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That’s the butcher and baker taken care of - all it needs is a brewer!

Cllr Cai Parry @CaiParryUK

4 weeks ago

The site where Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations is now home to a Greggs

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She's back! Sexual Personae, magnum opus of Camille Paglia, has been reissued. The Times has snared a (paywalled) interview. Academia's uncancellable bitch-goddess may have gotten old, but her loathing of Foucault & Co. remains delightfully undimmed. thetimes.com/culture/books/…

My thoughts on social housing and building in inner London: - Almost everyone who lives in social housing is a decent human being who is trying their best in often difficult circumstances. Among them are many retirees, kids, and people with disabilities. This must be the starting point for any serious thinking about housing in London. - London's job market is much stronger than that of the rest of the country. The median London wage is 25% more than the median English wage. The easier we make it for Britons to move to London, the richer they and the country will become. - Housing in inner London is extremely scarce and building rates are very low. In 2024–25, only 4,170 homes were started in London. London's housing target is 20x that and I think it's possible that we could build 100–150x that with the right reforms. - For now, we are in a roughly zero-sum game (which is one reason tensions are so high). We need to make this positive-sum by building more and by allowing voluntary exchanges of the existing housing stock. - There are about 450,000 socially rented homes in inner London. This is about one in three homes. About half of the 450,000 are occupied by lead tenants who are not working, either because they are retired (18%), disabled (13%), caring for someone else (7%), studying (2%), or unemployed/otherwise inactive (11%). - Social housing tenancies are basically tenancies-for-life, and can often pass down from parents to their children. They are close in practice to ownership, except that they cannot be sold. Ex-council flats in inner London are often worth £500,000 or more; there are many in extremely central parts of the city like Shoreditch, Soho and Farringdon that are worth even more than that. - Kicking people out of these homes against their will is, in general, morally bad and politically impossible. The public does not resent these people and would, rightly, find it appalling to turf them out of their homes against their will. - 'Gentrification' is a problem when it drives people out against their will by raising rents or other costs. It is primarily a problem caused by housing shortages. When housing supply can respond to new demand in an area, there is much less displacement of the people who live there. - Poor people do not like dirt, graffiti, crime, or derelict buildings, and many of their supposed champions have a patronising and somewhat dehumanising idea of what is in their interests. They do not want to live in unsafe, unpleasant areas any more than anyone else does. Change that makes places safer, cleaner and prettier without displacing existing residents is a good thing for everyone. - Large supermarkets are the cheapest places to buy food in London and allowing them to be built is the best way to protect people's access to affordable retail. - There are options that are good for tenants and good for people who wish to live in these central areas that do not push people out against their will. These are options that put tenants in control and give them a large share of the value created. At best, they reduce scarcity overall. - One is to make the social housing stock much more liquid by allowing social housing tenants to sell their tenancies into private ownership, keeping the returns to spend on a new property that is more suitable for their needs and the rest as savings. - Arguments against this that focus on the fact that many of the out-of-work people are blameless completely miss the point. For retirees, parents, and some people with disabilities, a home in a London suburb or a town other than London may be preferable to an apartment in inner London – more spacious, easier to access (eg, not up flights of stairs), and in a quieter neighbourhood. Existing schemes to allow people to trade their social home for a home by the seaside or in the country are hugely oversubscribed; this would unlock the entire private market to them. - Private owners already have the freedom to sell their home to who they want. That is one of the core benefits of private ownership. This extends that right to social tenants. - Another option is 'estate regeneration', where entire housing estates are rebuilt and existing tenants are given larger, newer homes built to modern standards and thousands of private units also added. Where tenants are given a vote on this, they consistently vote in favour (29/30 ballots have passed, often with enormous majorities and turnouts.) Hundreds of thousands of homes could be added in this way. - A vast amount of regulation also needs to be reversed – the Building Safety Regulator, second staircase rules, dual aspect rules, and others – in order to make building cheaper. Otherwise, we will find ourselves in a position where even if you get permission to build a home it is prohibitively expensive to do so. - Affordable housing requirements are a tax on new housing and almost certainly reduce the overall amount of homes that get built. Manchester has built thousands of new homes without them. Richard Leese, the Labour leader of the City Council, said "If we’d tried to impose 20% affordability on it, it wouldn’t have happened. We wouldn’t have got 20% affordable housing, we would have got nothing." - Many of the most vocal foes of new building in inner London are ideological opponents of private construction and cannot be reasoned or bargained with. Defeating them will involve a combination of targeted upzoning imposed by central government and the creation of hyperlocal mechanisms that allow the people who are most directly affected by new development to decide on it (eg, estate regeneration). The anti-building ideologues only win because normal people sympathise with them. - If we do not do not work to make the existing housing stock more easily transacted and building much easier, London will become hollowed out. Existing market-rate housing will be bid up by wealthy people who can afford it, and anyone on a middle income – let alone a low income who does not have a social home – will find it very difficult to live here, except in cramped houseshares when they are young. London should not be a city for only the very poor and very rich.

Price controls always backfire. Prices are signals. They convey scarcity and cost. Suppressing them is like smashing the thermometer and pretending it’s not hot. Price controls don't eliminate inflation. They just lead to empty shelves and lower-quality goods.

Diane Abbott @HackneyAbbott

a month ago

Supermarkets rake in billions of profits each year. It is not too much to ask that they cap prices on basics while inflation is pushing higher. UK supermarkets urged to consider caps on prices of essentials theguardian.com/business/2026/…

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If you missed the @ASI’s recent TNG, you can now read some of what I had to say in @TheCriticMag 👇🦋

The Critic @TheCriticMag

a month ago

England has spent decades piling up environmental regulation, yet we’ve still lost 97% of our wildflower meadows, degraded most peatlands, and pushed one in six species towards extinction. The system is excellent at process. It is terrible at restoring nature, argues

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This area, and Brighton generally, is really remarkably dense compared to most places outisde London (and a lot of London too).

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Jon Neale @JonNeale

a month ago

Kemptown urbanism, majestic even on a grey day

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.@michaelgove pls explain.

Looking for Growth @lfg_uk

2 months ago

Last week, we revealed that the Chair of Natural England, Tony Juniper, signed a petition to block the development of Hinkley Point C – the same nuclear power plant they are now attempting to halt the construction of. So what’s the truth about Natural England and Tony Juniper?

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There are provincial museums full of Victorian tea sets covered in hand-painted, simpering field mice in smocks and bonnets which are less kitsch and played out than this.

TheRealThelmaJohnson @TheRealThelmaJ1

2 months ago

The new Banksy sculpture in London is brilliant

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As a catholic atheist

Excellent to see the King continuing to back our red squirrels. This iconic native species is under immense threat, and we all need to play our part in protecting them. This funding will be vitally important for the @rsquirrelstrust’s work to create contraceptives for greys.

🇬🇧 Great to host @Timbro at the ASI today. 🇸🇪 They are a brilliant think-tank doing vital work to champion free-market ideas in Sweden. We had a fantastic discussion regarding the challenges facing the UK and what we can learn from the current Swedish government.

🕺 Join us for another TNG on Tuesday, 5th May! 💃 We’re thrilled to welcome @kittyraethomp, Head of Campaigns at the @CEN_HQ. We often hear that capitalism is destroying nature. But, Kitty is here to challenge the idea that markets and nature are at odds. 🔗 👇

It is interesting that 'conservative intellectual' JD Vance has, as far as I can tell, never actually produced anything that isn't 'lived experience' autoethnography of the sort you'd expect from the wokest humanities postgrad.

Me, about Lena Dunham

Sami Gold @souljagoyteller

3 months ago

David Lynch is one of modern America’s greatest conservative artists but we’re not ready to have that conversation yet

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This will require lots of cheap energy. Plus some land. It is therefore not possible in the UK. That's all.

Rachel Reeves @RachelReevesMP

3 months ago

This government will make the UK the best place in the world for quantum and AI companies to start, scale and stay. In a changing world, our economic plan is the right one. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

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