@jezobrien recently appeared on my timeline via @UxbEconomist07 to claim Brexit had *obviously* severly damaged the City. Anyone who has read my blogs know this is total bollocks. Here is a THREAD with the most up-to-date data and, spoiler alert, the export data is a corker

Read all of this. It is more important than you think. Wayne Dixon is a councillor in Leeds. He doesn't get involved in foreign policy issues. No standing with Ukraine or Palestine or Israel or wherever. He doesn't even get involved much in national issues. He just focusses, laser like, on doing small things that make the lives of his local constituents better. Cleaning up footpaths covered in wet leaves. Harassing the local authorities until they fix potholes. Cleaning up graffiti. Trimming hedges so they look neat and tidy. Liaising with the police to deal with antisocial behaviour. Ensuing that the local schools have enough places for every local who wants to send their kids there. Getting bus stops put in the right place when roads are re-laid or new roads are built. Making sure that green spaces where kids play football are not flogged off. Ensuring that important community groups and support networks are helped as much as they can be. It is hyper local politics. It is the work that only somebody with high energy and who knows the local area can do. If we had 20,000 Wayne Dixons, the cumulative transformation in the entire country would be shocking over ten years. Any sports fan knows that marginal gains have huge cumulative effects when achieved consistently over a period of time (see the Chicago Bulls and Team Sky). Same with countries. 150,000 little, easy, cheap things over 10 years and you have almost a new country. This is achievable right now, with no changes in legislation or 'new elite'. More politics should be about exactly this: putting right the 20 streets closest to where you live and making the lives of people who live there better. Remember: there are black and white pictures of a young Lee Kwan Yew sweeping the streets of Singapore. That's where he started his politics. Of course we need to get the big things right -- and Britain is facing at least three existential problems that only central government can address. Yet simultaneously, we also need this.

Cant believe thats not his real name. 😳

Does anyone else think the government is talking up cyber threats so when we get the power cuts Net Zero has been leading us to for years, they can then blame Vladimir rather than Milliband? @AllisonPearson

‘NATO has always operated in a defensive capacity’ Tucker Carlson gobsmacked by Piers Morgan’s ignorance

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Meet Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the man Ilhan Omar married in 2009. All signs point to him now being a PhD student at Bristol University in England. In a paper he published in 2026, he writes: "As a gay man of the East African diaspora, my fieldwork was never neutral." His thesis? "Bravery amidst Brutality: A Queer Resistance to Violence and Criminalisation in Contemporary Kenya." The British government is paying for it with a full scholarship. His big idea is that Western research needs "decolonising." He's arguing that from a Western university, on Western taxpayers' money. From October to December 2025, he helped curate an African LGBTQ+ art show at a gay and lesbian archive in Johannesburg.