'What do you think of Rishi Sunak?'
'Who? ... he hasn't been prime minister long enough for me to remember his name!'
@AnushkaAsthana
and
@menendez_elisa
hear from voters in Gillingham
Such a great point on Newsnight by
@kenanmalik
: Rushdie’s opponents lost the battle because the Satanic Verses was published but they won the war because their case that ‘it is wrong to give offence to certain groups has become much more mainstream’
In 99% of suburban Britain there should be an automatic right to build a replica of these semis in place of the existing structures, with no room for neighbours to object
This no-nonsense handling of Layla Moran’s moronic, petulant question by Andrew Neil on
#bbcqt
is beautiful. We need more of this when people try stunts like that:
Goodbye Sunday vibe on Devonshire Road, as it re-opens to traffic every day. Congratulations to
@JoannaBiddolph
and
@RealOneChiswick
on their victory. The relentless drive to prioritise cars and parking has paid off.
The founder of Stop Taxing Periods has criticised the government for delivering their agenda due to ministers linking the issue to Brexit. She says it’s not true that Brexit enabled the change because the EU might one day change the relevant EU law anyway:
Britain’s number one economic problem is the planning system but building regulations are also hugely destructive to the wellbeing of the nation and also need a radical overhaul
The sooner
@wandbc
designs out this nonsense on Queenstown Rd cycleway (CS8) by Chelsea Bridge, the better. Every single time I pass it happens. Sooner or later it’s bound to end badly
Northcote Road in Wandsworth has been utterly transformed. It’s been made amazingly pleasant, just by removing motor vehicles. On balance, motor transport makes our lives better, but it really trashes our streets and turns them into shitholes. Let’s turn a few more back:
Having a second home should be a normal, reasonable ambition. Whether it’s a pied a terre for a professional whose family would rather live in the sticks or a holiday cottage or flat on the coast, abroad or in the countryside. This should be something way more should afford
This is great but it doesn’t match a vox pop in a shopping centre with a woman who, in 2017 iirc, asked what Brexit was and then when told said ‘oh, politics’
Med student:
"I'm soo ashamed that he's the prime ministah of my cunt-tra. It's disgusting and I wish him... a horrible death. He's fucking avrythang up for people my age. Our future. I plan to wark in the NHS. I plan to be a doctor! I plan to act chew lay car about people!"
Hiking the tax burden to a 70-year high makes you 7/10 economically right wing. Cancelling some of those hikes make you 9/10 economically right wing!
😂🤣
Very little room to go further right once you’ve done that…
Supply matters, but we won't resolve the housing crisis unless we also tackle demand, including from migration.
48% of households in social housing in London are headed by someone not born in the UK.
Sometimes I think British car crash death rates are horrendous... then I remember how grisly the situation is in the US, where the incentives are all lined up for it to get ever bloodier
This tweet makes people very upset because they know I’m right when they think critically about it.
But I’m going to keep saying it so people wake up:
Vehicle safety ratings are the greatest scam ever.
They only test them against other similar sized vehicles and single car
The leader of the Canadian Tories is so great. Imagine if British Tories took this approach instead of babbling on about the precious green belt and how they'll stop 'over development'?
Britain badly needs a first amendment to protect citizens from this kind of abuse.
This is utterly appalling. The police and the judge should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. But not as much as the politicians who drafted the laws which enabled this
18% of the French have a second home
15% of Germans
14% of Italians
27% of Spaniards
In the UK we’re so impoverished by the housing shortage our number is 3%. And class war baiters try to weaponise even that
I can scarcely believe that the English police have stooped to such a hateful, disgusting low. I thought we were a bit better than this. No risk in driving somewhere a little further for exercise. Heart breaking to see our police reduce themselves to tin-pot Continental gestapo:
Despite posts yesterday highlighting issues of people still visiting the
#PeakDistrict
despite government guidance, the message is still not getting through.
@DerPolDroneUnit
have been out at beauty spots across the county, and this footage was captured at
#CurbarEdge
last night.
Almost one in six of all rail journeys in Britain are, according to data from the Office of Rail and Road, now made on London’s Elizabeth line. Why is it so popular?
Has any country ever tried replacing general elections with staggered elections every week? Once a week three constituencies go to the polls, ~150 seats a year. No grand event, majorities grow and shrink over time as seats are won and lost. Like rolling tv news but for government
So damn pathetic that we have pubs and bars aren’t allowed to open late except on odd events that politicians deem sufficiently worthy.
Broken society:
So weird that politicians like her don’t give a toss about the housing crisis when they’re causing it by nimbying against taller/bulkier buildings in towns, or on the green belts around them, but then they emote when they learn that the crisis they caused also harms Ukrainians
Over 2,000 Ukrainians arrived in Oxfordshire this year. I'm so proud of the way our community has come together to support them.
But many families now face issues finding housing as they look to settle in the UK. This week I spoke in Parliament about what more govt needs to do.
This looks increasingly like the future of British public life.
As well as weekly rallies in support of Hamas and Houthi terror (to varying degrees of openness), ghastly behaviour towards MPs like we've seen with Gove and now Rayner.
Britain has a massive, massive problem
Angela Rayner out campaigning is challenged by protestors.
She has no defence for her party’s betrayal of the communities they claim to serve.
#BoycottLabour
I know Brits are bad for having their brains addled by car culture but we're nothing like Americans. If the replies and QTs are anything to go by, they're absolutely insane over there.
Most seem to be excusing this shitbag's ghastly behaviour. Astonishing:
Tom is right about the weird way people treat the EU as if it’s some apolitical, neutral authority, and our own government as always in the wrong and deserving of punishment for disobedience. God only knows what’s going on with all that and what causes it, psychologically
please can we all stop taking everything the EU says as gospel, and nothing that the UK says as truthful.
The EU is playing politics far harder than any other party in this negotiation.
And what is it all for?
To prop up a failing, wasteful healthcare model, to prop up a failing, wasteful pensions model and, most of all, to prop up a failing, wasteful land use planning model:
Britain's housing crisis is the biggest proof of the failure of neoliberal economics.
Bringing back rent controls is the first step to fixing the problem,
@Victoria_Spratt
says.
Beyond the thieving that’s causing it, this is such a heart-warming scene.
These lads probably have no contractual obligation to intervene like this. Many others in their situation don’t. But they did. Possibly simply because they don’t want thieves to thrive in their community
Delighted to hear that Graham Linehan will now not be appearing before Oxford Union to debate "cancel culture", but I'm profoundly concerned this was ever considered to be an appropriate idea in the first place.
I was curious about the value of land used for on-street residents' parking in London, so I estimated it. It was £48 billion using MHCLG's residential land value estimates for 2017:
The tax burden is approximately at the level proposed by Corbyn in the 2019 campaign, net immigration is at half a million and predicted to rise to 700,000, the last budget announced welfare state expansion. Might Tories become ‘even further to the right’?
No London council should give away free rental of land to drivers to store a car. Every single parking space owned by councils should be charged at least the revenue-maximising rates, with receipts used to lower council tax.
Taxpayers shouldn't be cheated out of these revenues
Arguably the most depressing facet of 2020 is that we have government busybodies equating behaving ‘with wild abandon’ with ‘going off to the bingo halls’. What a fallen people we are!
Southwark council has a new transport strategy:
* Benches every 100m
* Water fountains
* Street furniture in carriageways
* 2.4m pavements, 4m in busy areas
* Crossings on desire lines
* Parking-free junctions
* More cycle hire & motorbike parking
No 10 sources say stamp duty policy polling v strongly (they would, wouldn’t they, but still) , private polling suggests its most popular measure in Budget
The housing crisis is entirely caused by councillors (under pressure from comfortably housed nimby residents) blocking builders from building open-market homes.
The guff about ‘affordable’ (ie subsidised) homes is just the state’s way of ameliorating one consequences of that
There should be a range of designs like this for which, anywhere in outer London, people have the automatic right to permission to build in place of the existing:
Cool street in Clapham.
If most of one or two storey london was built to this density instead, we’d be a long way along the road to solving the housing crisis.
This is appalling. Five storeys is a scandalous waste of prime inner London land. Inner London default should be double that. No wonder we have a massive housing crisis when this is what councils do to us:
A big win for residents this week, after two Labour Cllrs broke ranks and helped us defeat a massive
@Barratt_London
overdevelopment at the
@SWLSTG
Springfield site.
For now, at least, five-storey blocks won’t loom over
#SpringfieldPark
. Here’s why:
Truss 'has no idea what is about to be unleashed on her. Constant, vitriolic assaults on social media… daily pounding on broadcast news… snide comments on BBC “comedy”… put-downs from the panjandrums… assisted by Remain Tory grandees like John Major'
The NHS is one of the things that is embarrassing about being British. The asinine mawkishness about a healthcare sector would be bad enough if it were a good system. But it leaves us with more death and disease for the same amount of money as other systems.
Tragically naff:
The NHS makes us proud to be British.
But after 13 years of the Tories it's on its knees.
Labour will deliver the biggest expansion of the NHS workforce in history.
We'll pay for this by scrapping non-dom tax status - because if you live here, you should pay your taxes here.
One thing I’ve learnt on on twitter is to never underestimate its power to take a seemingly obvious joke literally because you didn’t make it quite obvious enough
"Some people used to sneer at wind power... and say it wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding," says Boris Johnson, who used to sneer at wind power, and say it wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding.
This is odd. Partly it’s great, an example of an entrepreneur spotting opportunities in untapped markets. Makes sense that you’ll spot these gaps if you’re in the demographic. But partly it’s grim race-baiting, encouraging people to shop according to owners’ skin colour. Nasty:
Today marks Black Pound Day which encourages people to buy products from black-owned businesses.
We speak to founder of Blaqbase,
@BenedictaBanga
, about why the day is so important.
Read more of today's stories:
People with an authoritarian disposition, which is to say the overwhelming bulk of people who involve themselves in current affairs, are having a hard time coming to terms with the consequences of the success of the vaccines. Life is becoming much less thrilling for them
Absolute tour de force of a blog by
@edwest
on how cars uglify cities, make us fat, make us unhappy, destroy civic life, prevent childhood play and why we need road pricing (the title explains pretty much explains it):
Sometimes physical infrastructure isn’t enough either, as this soft-top Toyota driver mounting the pavement to drive through a traffic filter on Old Ford Road shows
Middle income families in London should be able to comfortably afford a spare room.
Pied a terres should be a reasonable purchase for professionals living in the shires.
Graduates should be able to afford to rent a reasonably central studio flat or flat share with a living room.
Imagine the Romans or the Victorians being this pathetic? (Or indeed anyone else in pretty much any developed (or rapidly developing) economy today. So contemptible:
EXC: Rishi Sunak has shelved plans for a ‘big bang’ overhaul of the childcare system drafted by Liz Truss
Truss was looking at an extra 20hrs of free childcare + scrapping staff-child ratios. Due to be revealed pre Xmas
But reforms delayed + scaled back
This site is:
* literally a bus station
* 100m from Kingston train station
* In the middle of one of London's biggest shopping districts
So what does
@TfL
propose? During a massive housing shortage?
A new single storey bus station with no flats at all above...
Transport for
#London
press release:
#TfL
to start work to transform Kingston Cromwell Road bus station
Work will begin on 28 August and complete in summer 2024
#Superloop
service SL7 will serve the new bus station when work is complete.
Self checkouts are awesome. One of the things about life now that’s so much better than life 20 years ago. Queuing is so much rarer than it used to be, so much shorter if there is one. We should automate as much as possible
The self checkout in supermarkets is the event horizon where technology, corporate hegemony, decay and general shitness all converge.
Your frustration and fatigue has been calculated and deemed worth it, as has your temporary employment as a checkout girl
This might be how you pronounce it in Spain but not when you’re in England. Here it’s pronounced ‘cho-ri-zo’. Similarly, it’s not ‘Pa-ree’, it’s ‘Pa-ris’. And it’s not ‘Barth-a-loner’, it’s ‘Bar-ce-lona’. Etc.
It’s going to take years, perhaps decades, to treat Britain from the authoritarianism that has been allowed to let rip over the past year, says
@DanielJHannan
to
@MarkJLittlewood
. Depressing but highly plausible:
New Zealand has passed legislation meaning anyone born after 2008 will never be able to buy cigarettes
Most Britons (57%) would support a similar ban in the UK:
Strongly support: 34%
Somewhat support: 23%
Somewhat oppose: 16%
Strongly oppose: 12%