NEW REPORT: Under Keir Starmer, England and Wales’s failing criminal justice services made tentative steps towards improvement. But the new government has already put this fragile progress at risk and real improvement requires more difficult political choices. 🧵

Performance Tracker 2026: Criminal justice system | Institute for Government

The Starmer government made fragile progress on criminal justice, but sustaining this requires further action and difficult political choices.

instituteforgovernment.org.uk

"America is important, but it is not everything. Keeping Trump inside the tent is helpful, but his value to Ukraine and Europe has proven time and again to be limited and often absent." My latest for @theipaper.com inews.co.uk/news/world/t...

Trump is always sowing chaos. Europe just needs to hold its nerve

Luke McGee: Europe is only powerless in this conflict if it chooses to be so

inews.co.uk

This careful thread on the extent to which "AI is asbestos for the mind" is well worth reading. (It had me watching and remembering this hard-hitting 1975 BBC Horizon documentary "Asbestos - Killer Dust" to remind myself about the awful decades-long asbestos cover-up: youtu.be/nwvsx0v7hn0?...)

Horizon The Killer Dust (1975)

YouTube video by Grove

youtu.be

Shannon Vallor@shannonvallor.bsky.social · 17h ago

OK, since this thread has blown up a bit, I think it's worth clarifying in a new thread to what extent the 'GenAI is asbestos for the mind' analogy might hold up, and where it breaks down (as even useful analogies always do): 1/n

"Yandex Strikes Caused Russian Bot Activity To Drop By 50 Percent" Is FALSE. buff.ly/Pa7fvr8

Rapid-response fact-check: "Yandex Strikes Caused Russian Bot Activity To Drop By 50 Percent" Is False | Joohn Choe

This is going on viral on Facebook today and it's unfortunately wrong. Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers in Russia did not cut

buff.ly

For all this talk of Russian bots being defeated by the Yandex strikes I'm still getting the usual Matryoshka emails with the same fake news posts and purchased bot engagement. Seems more like wishful thinking based on misinterpreted data than reality.

Well worth reading, by @jillongovt.bsky.social: www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/kemi... [.. Badenoch’s proposal may delight a few aristocrats (& farmers) but looks designed to spend billions solving a problem that does not really exist, & damages a wide range of other policy objectives. ]

Kemi Badenoch’s inheritance tax proposals are myth-based policy making at its worst | Institute for Government

The leader of the opposition’s conference announcement was not well thought through.

instituteforgovernment.org.uk

In our course and book _Calling Bullshit_, we posit that If something seems too good, or too bad, to be true, it probably is. Now as a college professor I'm pretty confident that overreliance can AI can harm our thinking ability, but just ten minutes of use? Let's dig into this this study a bit.

Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News

A UC Berkeley researcher co-authored a study that raises profound questions about how we interact with artificial intelligence in education — and daily life.

news.berkeley.edu

"Sweet but too short to be genuinely formidable". Kent Road in Sheffield has an ave gradient of 16% and a max of over 20%. My first proper hill (walking very slowly) since joining the zipper club. (By improvising hairpin bends, I've Bromptoned it in the past.) sheffieldcyclingclimbs.com/tag/15-20/

Finally, some signs of progress in the River Sheaf at the Castle site. These structures have appeared under Castlegate. They look like the ones shown in graphics of the site plans. They will brace the river banks eventually allowing for removal of the yellow temporary supports

I will not only be relieved but truly *ecstatic* to be wrong, if more and better studies soon start showing that AI actually improves learning and cognitive motivation. But so far they all show the opposite, and that is consistent with the evidence that I and other educators are seeing on the ground

Shannon Vallor@shannonvallor.bsky.social · 3d ago

We are soon going to have to come to grips with the fact that this shit is asbestos for the mind

Well worth reading, by @jillongovt.bsky.social: www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/kemi... [.. Badenoch’s proposal may delight a few aristocrats (& farmers) but looks designed to spend billions solving a problem that does not really exist, & damages a wide range of other policy objectives. ]

Kemi Badenoch’s inheritance tax proposals are myth-based policy making at its worst | Institute for Government

The leader of the opposition’s conference announcement was not well thought through.

instituteforgovernment.org.uk

lol

October 10, 1977 – famous scientist Solly Zuckerman writes to top UK Civil Servant, warning about climate change allouryesterdays.info/2022/10/09/o...

October 10, 1977 - famous scientist Solly Zuckerman writes to top UK Civil Servant, warning about climate change - All Our Yesterdays

On this day, October 10 in 1977, the former Chief Scientific Adviser for the United Kingdom, Solly Zuckerman wrote to the Cabinet Secretary (Sir John Hunt) about global warming, having been sensitised...

allouryesterdays.info

“This recent dump of papers on Tuesday destroyed the careers of early-career mathematicians. We've had whole research programs wiped out on Tuesday by their dump … they have all the mathematicians research programs in their training data” - Tristan Buckmaster on OpenAI solving unsolved math problems

When I was at school, we knew my friend’s dad as a slightly eccentric Polish geezer. Little did we know…. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Codebreaker, 103, kept his WW2 heroics a secret for decades

Fred Vanke was sworn to secrecy but has now been honoured by Bletchley Park.

bbc.co.uk

After the Green Party's "Zionism is Racism" vote, the Leader of Haringey Council, controlled by the Greens, wrote to some Synagogues in the borough to "reassure" them. I want to show you Highgate Synagogue's reply. I believe it is worth reading in its entirety. www.jewishnews.co.uk/synagogue-re...

There are at least two international experts I know - both fierce critics of Israel's destruction campaign of Gaza - who believe the ICJ will not find Israel guilty of genocide, due to the highly conservative approach of the court. This is a real possibility, that should be considered.

The latest "Anywhere But Westminster" from @johnharris1969.bsky.social and colleagues. Always worth the time. (Look out for the "direction of travel indicators".)

John Harris@johnharris1969.bsky.social · 4d ago

New Anywhere But Westminster! Inside Burnham's Labour and the byelection! www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Simply read this summary on what is driving the increased prevalence of mental health distress from the long awaiting final independent report into teenage mental health. Now compare it to the public discussion on mental health which basically comes down to social media and over-diagnosis.

As the US President calls for pogroms against American Somalis in Minnesota, in Holborn and St Pancras a local Somali-born woman is elected an MP. The contrast is stark and entirely in our favour.

This prompted me to go back and check the claim that "On current DWP forecasts, from the 2024 election until 2030, Labour will have increased working-age benefit spending by a further £51.6 bn/year." It appears to be equally fictional/spreadsheet error. Correct figure is maybe £36bn..

Peter Walker@peterwalker99.bsky.social · 4d ago

NEW: Kemi Badenoch’s flagship party conference policy document, The Right Way, overestimated the cost of net zero by nearly £500bn, seemingly after someone accidentally double-counted figures on a spreadsheet. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Freedom may be close, but MS will, I assume, fight like tigers. 'When we said AI could be a powerful tool for the office, we didn't mean this...'

The Register@theregister.com · 5d ago

Rust upstart reveals 'reimplementation' of Microsoft Office – with Claude on coding duty

Ignore the Greens’ misleading claims. It was a catastrophic night for Zack Polanski, and a remarkable victory for Sagal Absi-Wali kellnerp.substack.com/p/the-figure...

The figures that make Sagal Abdi-Wali’s victory remarkable

Ignore the Greens’ misleading claims. It was a catastrophic night for Zack Polanski

kellnerp.substack.com

This is what crowd out looks like.

America right now is the maddest place on earth. Like watching a David Lynch film.

A thorough and thoughtful piece about social care by @cjayanetti.bsky.social: national.thelead.uk/p/death-tax-...

Death tax, dementia tax, no tax at all: Why England hasn’t fixed social care

Fifteen years after Dilnot called adult care "not fit for purpose", reform still hasn't come. As Andy Burnham and Louise Casey try again, Chaminda Jayanetti traces three decades of false starts.

national.thelead.uk

On the unacceptable behaviour of 'pro-Palestine' activists in a mixed, partly Jewish, London neighbourhood yesterday. What is going on inside their heads? davehillonlondon.substack.com/p/the-unacce... #london

The unacceptable behaviour of ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters in London

The tactics, timing and campaign materials of those who targeted the Board of Deputies of British Jews were sinister and wrong

davehillonlondon.substack.com

Of course, the fiscal incontinence problem is on top of the “it’s a stupid policy that would stuff up the housing market” one