Just paid my eye-watering half-yearly water bill to a company that has been looted since privatisation: £8bn in dividends and £5bn in debt.
It barely needs saying that utilities and natural monopolies don’t belong in the private sector where they become little more than predatory institutions.
This is the sort of genuinely brilliant achievement for which we should be giving out knighthoods
www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...
Doubly ironic, given that his parents are from a country that is not only considering pursuing reparations against Britain, but also has an actual "Office for Reparations" that deals with domestic post-conflict reconciliation and transitional justice.
The “world’s town square”, where the local gangsters have rigged up an enormous speaker system and decide who gets to say stuff on it while forcing everyone to listen
I'm sure when I was a kid, people didn't celebrate Easter like this, as a sort of over-commercialised mini-Christmas
It's weird too, in the sense that the less religious everyone is, the more they seem to go to town on it
Not gonna lie: $4 a gallon sounds alright to me
From neglected land to a vibrant sanctuary. 🌱 The Windrush Legacy Garden in Sheffield is officially open! Created by volunteers at the Sheffield Caribbean Sports Club and @WildSheffield, this space celebrates an incredible legacy through nature. Full story www.wildsheffield.com/windrush-leg...
Agreed. Hard to know who they're representing on this question, particularly since getting on for half of those who voted to Leave the EU are now dead, a similar number who didn't and wouldn't have done have now joined the electorate and many who voted remain are flocking to the Greens.
I'm not sure it's just this government. Nobody in Westminster is prepared to admit that it has completely failed and you either join and accept the trade-offs or stay out and accept ongoing decline. They still hope there's a sweet spot where you get to pick and eat cherries without paying for them.
Why do both sides need to show more ambition? The EU has already ambitiously constructed the single market. If the UK wants the benefits, its up to us to show the ambition to join. It's not up Brussels to create fudges that meet our self-imposed red lines. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
I’d pay off the external debt of every Small Island Developing State in the world
These are the banknotes we need in the UK, like every other proximate country
"The pollster Peter Kellner has calculated that if the referendum were rerun today, instead of a leave win by 1.3m votes, remain would win by 8m. There’s no historic parallel for the injustice of that"
Image of the start of the latest blog post
Real war and culture war. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog analyzing the Brexit imprint of domestic responses to the Iran crisis, the hypocrisy & sectarianism of Reform's response to the by-election and the questions it poses for Labour: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2026/03/real...
I mean it was obvious. All he has to do now is promise a referendum on joining the EU and the Greens will be polling in the 30s.
Anyone wondering just how we got here vis-à-vis Iran could do far worse than read Steven Kinzer's "All the Shah's Men" which was written after 9/11 and explains why 1979 happened (and, by implication, why 2026 could be opening a pandora's box)
The obstruction of goalkeepers at corners in football is becoming ridiculous. A simple rule change would be that attacking players shouldn’t be allowed into the six-yard box until the ball is played.
All Reform need to do now is replace Farage with Boris Johnson and they've pretty much got the band back together
Brilliant restaurant. There are also about a million other places there that you just fall into that are pretty much as good.
The Man United team last night fielded players from Belgium, Portugal, France, Brazil, Argentina, Ivory Coast, Slovenia, Cameroon and the Netherlands. One of the two English players has Ghanaian heritage. They'll all be delighted to hear this. www.theguardian.com/business/202...
As the world heats, places become increasing unliveable. Who pays? #NomadCentury
Wrote this over a decade ago on £9k student fees and much of it still holds. The question is not “why should non-graduates pay for people to go to university?” but why have those who went for free offloaded the cost on to today’s young people: speri-blog.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/blog/2013/pr...
Plenty of French politicians simultaneously serve as mayors, both local and regional, while holding seats in the national legislature. Chirac was Mayor of Paris and a Deputy in the Assemblée Nationale and Prime Minster (and an MEP at one point).
Danny Boyle et al have absolutely nailed the 28 Years Later trilogy so far: it's really hard to see how these movies could have been any better, utterly breathtaking from start to finish
The US hasn’t been truly hegemonic since the 1970s
It's 2026 and we still haven't got to the bottom of the mystery of who, exactly, is telling students not to use subheadings in essays
Strong, if questionable, thesis statement, but lacking a genuine puzzle. Overwrought sensationalist writing. Low 2.2 at best.
The word “essay” doing a lot of heavy lifting here
There's an alternative timeline in football history where Man United never re-signed Ronaldo and Solskjaer is still the manager, delivering regular top-four finishes and decent attacking football with a team featuring lots of academy players
While many argue that dangerous criminals must be treated as such, and that this strategy is essential to suffocating Maduro’s regime, the truth is that this was yet another example of how Venezuelan suffering has been normalized, minimized, and tokenized …
globalvoices.org/2026/01/05/a...
