Writer, the Wrong Side of History substack
London
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Ed West retweeted
Cambridge has abandoned its plan to investigate the hiring of Jason Arday. It will only investigate whether it offered him enough support.
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Of course it's him
🚨NEW: Judge Tan Ikram CBE, the judge who denied Danny Tommo bail and said he was "satisfied there is a real possibility of an immediate custodial sentence", has a history of being placed in politically motivated cases.
. Sentenced a man to 20 weeks in jail for posting a racist joke in a WhatsApp chat.
. Let off the OnlyFans girl who threw milkshake at Nigel Farage.
. Let off two women for terrorism charged after glorifying 7 October massacre.
. Was himself given a disciplinary after liking a post on LinkedIn that stated Israel was a terrorist state. Although obviously not a crime, it did bring into question his impartiality.
. He was given a CBE by Boris Johnson in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to judicial diversity. He has spoken out about what he sees as the problems due to the lack of ethnic diversity in the police and the judiciary.
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Ed West retweeted
The decision to remand 'Danny Tommo' - a foregone conclusion the moment District Judge Tan Ikram was listed to preside over the hearing - is a reminder that despite the shortage, space can always be found when it suits them.
The inability of the courts to remand dangerous offenders in custody is further undermining Britain's justice system. My latest for @unherd
unherd.com/newsroom/trust-is…
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Ed West retweeted
Has the victim of the criminal damage, an unknown people smuggler, come forward and given a Victim Personal Statement on how the crime has affected him emotionally?
Danny Tommo pleaded not guilty this morning at Basingstoke Magistrates’ Court.
Charged with criminal damage after footage of him slashing a dinghy in the Channel with a French rescuer still on board, plus failing to give police his phone PIN.
Prosecutor: case too serious for magistrates.
Judge: “I don’t think I’m entirely with you on this.” 😎
He elected Crown Court. Bail application followed.
He had already been remanded overnight after charge.
news.sky.com/story/anti-migr…
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Or we could just tell them 'no' and there's nothing they can do? I still cannot understand what the government's aim is here. Genuinely baffling
Exclusive: The UK is exploring strengthening ties with Mauritius including helping it access more aid money, in a bid to manage relations after Trump vetoed the Chagos deal for the foreseeable
In a meeting at the UN this week, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Mauritius’ Foreign Minister Dhananjau Ramful that Britain could support it in a range of areas, from trade to accessing climate financing and backing economic and development projects, sources say
Ramful says Miliband pledged “total collaboration” in identifying areas where Britain could provide support to Mauritius
Officials confirm they want to strengthen bilateral ties with Mauritius but stress they are not reopening negotiations over the deal nor offering it new British taxpayer money
One official says it’s essential to keep Mauritius onside given the Chagos deal now won’t proceed until Trump leaves the White House
UK officials are very concerned that in the longer-term, Mauritius could sue Britain or move closer to China, increasing the risk of Beijing interfering with the Diego Garcia base. They still think the sovereignty deal is the best option to secure the base post-Trump
In the meantime the UK needs to keep relations with Mauritius going. The island nation faces a budget deficit and needed the £165 million a year it would have got from Britain over the next three years if the deal had gone through
Even if the UK does not directly offer Mauritius more money, there are ways it could help it access financing such as through British International Investment, a development finance institution controlled by the government, and other international climate financing schemes
With @KB2803 @EllenAMilligan: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Ed West retweeted
The entire point of these protests is to get a photo for Instagram because they know there are no real consequences. In Iran you protest for your life and face execution and these people don't even support them.
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Ed West retweeted
It's a shame that the name Ask Jeeves was already wasted on a search engine because it'd make a much better name for a consumer-facing AI agent tool
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It's the same obsession with 'access' you hear about on Radio 4, even though opera is cheaper than football.
A stylish video by the New York mayor though - he is annoyingly slick and charming
Mamdani’s scheme to give away “free” tickets to the opera, obviously in a crude effort to flatten class differences and because opera is viewed as something white-coded, something very much non-black and non-Indian, actually just shines a light on how non-elitist such institutions are.
Among philistines on the left (of which Mamdani is one—the history of silver-spoon Indian rappers is a slim volume), there’s an assumption that “the opera” or “classical music” must be so prohibitively expensive that there are millions of impoverished black and Hispanic New Yorkers longing to walk the hallowed halls of the Met and perhaps hear Wagner’s Ring Cycle, far from the crushing banality of life in the bodega.
But the truth is that a ticket to the Met costs just $25, while the cheapest tickets to see Beyoncé cost three times as much. If they had any genuine interest in opera before this stunt they might have known how affordable it is.
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Ed West retweeted
Or to put it another way, the British state's failure to stop the asylum scam yesterday wiped out the entire lifetime tax contribution of about 1000 people earning an average salary.
If you assume each arrival will have a lifetime net-fiscal cost of £350,000, then the arrivals just yesterday will cost the British state £273.4 million.
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'When the water rises above your head, you put your child under your feet' telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/09…
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Ed West retweeted
🇬🇧 RULE, BRITANNIA! HMS Agamemnon, the world's most advanced attack submarine, has sailed from BAE Systems' Barrow-in-Furness shipyard for the first time and is heading for her new home at HM Naval Base Clyde.
The departure marks the first in a series of sea trials and training evolutions before she can join her five Astute-class sisters in the operational fleet.
Named after the ancient Greek king who launched the Trojan War, the nuclear-powered powered boat - the sixth of seven Astute-class submarines being built - weighs in at 7,400 tonnes and is 97-metres long.
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Ed West retweeted
The Chagos deal, if enacted, would be so beneficial to Mauritius, that they were planning to implement tax cuts that would see 80% of workers exempt from paying income tax.
British taxpayers would quite literally be funding tax cuts for Mauritians.
Mauritian media highlighting just how large a contribution the Chagos deal would make: a perpetual 1.3% of GDP / 4.5% of govt revenue line item. The govt snuck it into its equivalent of the OBR’s forecasts to get their last budget through.
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Aberdeen man jailed for 8 years after attacking and threatening to kill a woman, holding her hostage in her own home for 21 hours & leaving her with more than 50 injuries. He was free despite 37 previous convictions, including *eight* for domestic abuse bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv22…
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33-year-old man convicted of raping teenage girl lbc.co.uk/article/man-raped-… In November 2023 he was sentenced to five years for placing an exploding article outside a pub. He also has convictions for ABH and stalking two different women . Why was he out?
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Three counts of assault by beating of an emergency worker, affray, a racially aggravated public order offence, threatening to destroy property. Despite 21 previous convictions for 44 offences, spared jail as he's 'having a mental health crisis' countypress.co.uk/news/25975…
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Ed West retweeted
I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron.
Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence.
Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons.
Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist.
After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence.
New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today?
worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…
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Ed West retweeted
If you assume each arrival will have a lifetime net-fiscal cost of £350,000, then the arrivals just yesterday will cost the British state £273.4 million.
BREAKING: A total of 781 migrants crossed the English Channel on Wednesday - the highest number for a single day this year
trib.al/MBK58TY
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube
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Ed West retweeted
Extraordinary scene in the Atacama desert of South America.
Historically one of the world's driest locations has been completely transformed by heavy El Nino rain, leading to the proliferation of stunning flowers from long-dormant seeds.
ALT https://www.theatlantic.com/photography/2026/09/photos-wildflowers-bloom-atacama-desert/688728/
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