Treblig 🇺🇦

It's like the Wario of the 2015 Tory majority coalition

If David Beckham had stayed I probably would have enjoyed it more, but let's say it wasn't difficult to abandon the bit

I think what this shows is not so much that the Home Office should be broken up but that a lot of those responsibilities should be devolved. Immigration and national security should really be the only things it has full responsibility for

Oh I'd never actually stop supporting Chelsea. But I lived abroad I followed the local team for a bit, with the weird coincidence being one of their managers later became Chelsea manager (and one of their players was a coach under Maresca)

Didn't realise we had devolved this responsibility to mayors. It would very appropriate for this country if we gave mayors the power to deploy troops to foreign countries but only limited revenue-raising powers

I was 11 when Abramovich bought Chelsea and god I hated my contemporaries who went from being Man U fans to Chelsea fans. I even had a brief period where I pretended I had become a Man U fan just to annoy them

Big WASPI energy to the reaction

The thing is it's not like they are empty. I don't go that often but when I do it's usually pretty crowded, just entirely with boomers. My theory is the only advertising they do is putting flyers inside the envelope with the winter fuel allowance letter

I saw Iolanthe recently at a venue in east London that was literally surrounded by student accommodation and new build flats. Yet other than me and my partner, the only people in the room who looked under 50 were the performers

The story of Chelsea Pitch Owners is arguably the most successful NIMBY campaign of all time

Compensation is another which, as well as being more generous, needs to be paid out more quickly. I think I'm much more likely to launch a legal challenge against a CPO if they are seizing my home and won't be paying for it for a few years

A lot of the successful legal challenges to infrastructure projects have come from ministers rushing things through for political reasons, meaning that they're done sloppily and cut corners, which end up being grounds for appeal. They could just simply take the time to do it properly

My discomfort comes from the fact it'd be incompatible with the ECHR.

You can probably sort a lot of the problems by speeding up the legal process, more generous and quicker compensation (sometimes it takes years to come through) and government being less sloppy about procedural issues

I remember a lot of Putin apologists pointing to all the roads in Ukraine named after Yanukovych as proof that he was really popular, and it's like yeah of course they named them after their corrupt president, that's the only reason they got built in the first place, be real

Not sure I would go as far as no recourse (I'm too lawyer-brained to ever accept limitations on JR), but definitely think it needs to be made easier to build critical infrastructure without endless litigation

Some googling confirms that it wasn't about Heathrow, it was when they were building Stevenage. The minister in question was Lewis Silkin and local residents started to call the new town Silkingrad (even defacing road signs), which was meant as an insult but imho is unironically a better name

(the story might be apocryphal or was actually about the building of the post-war new towns)

I remember reading one time that this was essentially what a minister did to the residents of the village of Heathrow when they were building the airport

The key is better leadership, in the sense that leaders need to say “we’re building important infrastructure here, get over it”

I think you could go further and say this specific type of Christian just doesn't acknowledge that people of colour can be Christians, especially people from the Middle East

Would this be the same Iran conflict Kemi Badenoch has just spent an entire week calling Keir Starmer a coward for not wanting to join?

Yeah ngl all the cryptographers I sent your reply to were pretty stumped

Iran-Contra 2: electric boogaloo

Maybe he means actual tomahawks, ie axes?

Occasionally I'm like I could totally be an investor, this shit is dumb af and then I remember oh yeah, I'm not dumb enough to do this

By donating heavily to Democrats in all future election cycles

Wile E. Coyote: “Surely it’s a tunnel this time?”

Labour has always been intensely factional and practically every official policy position on major issues has had a substantial minority opposing it. And people on any part of the party pretending otherwise are just showing their ignorance

There’s this weird cognitive dissonance in Labour members where they are completely obsessed with the party as an institution, its history and what it stands for, and yet have this incredibly simplistic view of what its history and traditions are