Can you imagine the headline: 'Attempted murder arrest after knife hits pedestrian on Argyll Street'? No, of course you can't. Because no sub would ever write that!!

Frank Herbert I apologize for ever doubting you

Record number of homes in Great Britain turn to green energy as fuel prices soar Iran war drives demand for solar panels, heat pumps and EVs, with energy bills expected to rise 18% from July

Heat pump orders up 2x in a month. Solar panel inquiries up 250%. EV leases up 85%.

The Iran crisis has made energy security feel personal.
I understand why: I have solar panels, a heat pump & EV on a flexible tariff. When gas prices spike, my bills barely move.

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

I mean the insurance companies hike your premiums when you have an accident which is wha makes it so expensive that people go uninsured. They are doing the hard work of identifying the people you should be from driving! The market works! Just enforce the decisions!

Have been waiting almost two years for the right article to smuggle this fact into.

(From my leader on America's misguided war on taxes: economist.com/leaders/2026...)

This is a great data visualisation.

It clearly shows why policy interventions that support/subsidise driving tend to not just miss an opportunity to reduce inequality, they are likely to entrench inequality, because those in the most deprived areas will derive the least benefit.

A grid of 3 by 3 scatterplots representing the regions of England in approximate geographic position. Top row is 'North West' (green), 'Yorkshire and The Humber' (brown), 'North East' (blue-green). Middle row is 'West Midlands' (light blue), 'East Midlands' (dark blue), 'East of England' (yellow). Bottom row is 'South West' (purple), 'London' (red) and 'South East' (pink). Each scatterplot has a form similar to the first scatterplot in this thread showing a curved positive correlation from bottom-left to top-right.

If we split the comparison between deprivation and no-car households by region, London stands out showing a greater spread of car access across deprivation levels. This suggests other geographic factors are influential such as urban density and transport policy.

Let's explore this further... [5/8]

For my first column as Observer economics editor, I've written about the folly of calling for blanket price subsidies during a global energy shortage.

It doesn't seem to be online so if you want to read in full, you'll have to go out and buy a physical paper, like in the good old days.

To grow the economy we need more trams, and fewer kebabs Britain’s second-tier cities are being held back by a simple problem, too many people still cannot get across them quickly enough to reach the jobs, customers and opportunities that drive growth.

Why do our second-tier cities underperform?
Why do we have fewer trams in the UK?

I try my best to give an answer to these two interconnected questions.

chriscurtismk.substack.com/p/to-grow-th...

The government ought to be honest about why this is bad (terrible) policy. I think their silence is bad, but this is so much worse.. the populist bandwagon rolls on... are there any fiscal conservatives out there?

Figure 11: Real terms percentage change in the cost of transport since 2006

DfT traffic projections suggest that drivers will face increasing congestion in the coming years. The Department forecasts a 10% rise in traffic, resulting in an average 10 minute delay per month for drivers (17 minutes in urban areas), between now and 2035. The three main drivers of this forecasted increase in traffic are increases in GDP, population growth and decreases in the real terms cost of driving. Together, these factors accounted for around 90% of the traffic growth in the National Road Traffic Projections, 2022.

Deep in the Government’s new integrated transport strategy is a truth at odds with the rhetoric you hear in the media: driving a car has gotten cheaper in real terms, while public transport has gotten more expensive.

The Government is also clear that this will mean more traffic and more congestion.

You may not like hearing this but actually free on-street car parking is objectively a ridiculous idea when you think about it for a second. Imagine if I plonked literally any other bulky item of personal property in front of my house and expected it to not require permission or payment!

person riding a cargo bike Road Safety Experts: Helmets and Hi-Viz Are the Best Tools To Ignore Root Cause Of Road Violence

Road Safety Experts: Helmets and Hi-Viz Are the Best Tools To Ignore Root Cause Of Road Violence

HT @lanrickbennett.bsky.social

There is something profoundly unserious about demanding the country spends vast sums on reducing its carbon emissions and then calling for a massive fossil fuel subsidy to consumers the moment gas prices rise.

I was at a meeting yesterday where the most passionately expressed opinion was "the UK needs to channel more money to the SME sector, that is where all the growth is", and I felt I needed to put the data out there, again

A sensible 10 point mitigation plan from the IEA.
www.iea.org/news/new-iea...

Big news for devolution and regional growth!

The Chancellor has just set out how an unbalanced and overly centralised country has held us back.

So mayors in England will in future get a defined share of national taxes rather than relying on grants.

More detail to be announced at the Budget.

Most of governing is picking losers. So idea that no-one can ever lose out is pretty fatal for good governance. www.economist.com/britain/2026...

How Paris beat the car www.ft.com/content/882e...

Queuing for a bus earlier - every time I see this, it annoys me.... we must be one of the few countries in the world, where towns have to bid to the central Gov for a bus. Must be a bid consultant's dream. The UK Gov logo is a collective sign of failure, not success.

Graph showing % of UK children driven short distances to school, creeping upwards from 2002 to 2024

BOOOooooo
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68a434...

A medal please for the Economist subeditor who came up with this headline #puntastic

Billionaire halts mass eviction after London Centric investigation Exclusive: Asif Aziz's Criterion Capital hoped to replace hundreds of tenants with more lucrative temporary accommodation. That plan has been shelved – for now.

Asif Aziz's Criterion Capital halts mass eviction after London Centric uncovered what was going on. Hundreds of Londoners now receiving bizarre door-to-door visits blaming misinformation and being asked to record videos saying they don't want to be evicted. www.londoncentric.media/p/asif-aziz-...

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Inquiry brought up the case of Denholm Elliott's daughter - PAUL McMULLAN: Oh, yeah - BROOKE GLADSTONE: - which is one case that you truly do regret. PAUL McMULLAN: I do, yeah. After Denholm died, she hit rock bottom, was allegedly doing methadone. And although she had, you know, the half-million-pound flat that Denholm had bought her, she didn't have any money to get her ten-pound bag in the morning. So she'd get up and go begging at the tube station. Here was a young girl crying out to be helped, and she met a police officer who didn't help her but rang up the News of the World and asked for money because he couldn't believe that this is the same girl who'd walked down the red carpet behind Eddie Murphy with Denholm Elliott, you know.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you offered her 50 pounds - PAUL MCMULLAN: Yeah. BROOKE GLADSTONE: - if she would come to your place and have sex. So you led her into prostitution, which she wasn't in that space for. PAUL McMULLAN: No, indeed. But she was in such a bad place that someone offering her 50 pounds for sex. I mean, that's five bags.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So how do you justify that? Yes, she was a drug addict, yes, she was begging. Why push her that extra step? Why take pictures of her topless? PAUL McMULLAN: I was keen. It was in my first year. I wanted to impress Piers Morgan, who was my boss at the time, and just wanted to say, not only have I caught this girl begging, but l've got pictures of her topless and I've got her offering me sex for 50 quid. How great am I? BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is a pretty dehumanizing enterprise, not just for Jennifer Elliott, but for you, yourself. PAUL McMULLAN: Yeah, that's why I feel terrible about it, not just 'cause she killed herself afterwards, but I, I actually liked her as a person.

Sharing from a friend, a passage from the Leveson Inquiry regarding the British actor Denholm Elliott, who died of AIDS in 1992. Three years after her death, the News of the World journalist Paul McMullan did the following to his daughter—neither a celebrity nor even someone of public interest.

‘Is university still worth it?’ is the wrong question The graduate earnings premium isn’t really measuring what most people think

Turns out (says @jburnmurdoch.ft.com) it's not so much an oversupply of graduates in the UK (the same would be true of other similar countries but it's not) as an undersupply of the kind of jobs that a better-performing, more productive economy would supply.

NEW: The UK’s approach to fiscal policy needs a rethink.

📗 Instead of pass–fail fiscal rules and the consequent fixation on ‘fiscal headroom’, @benzaranko.bsky.social’s new report argues that the UK would be better served by a new framework, based around a set of ‘fiscal traffic lights’:

The thing about bubbles is they can happen even when the underlying innovation is transformational.

Indeed almost all major technologies from railways to the internet were accompanied by an initial bubble.

The idea that someone who gets around with a $2000 piece of equipment is "elitist" while someone who uses a $30,000+ piece of equipment that costs hundreds of dollars per month to operate is "normal" is quite the brainwashing.