Daniel Moore

Two bits of good news. 1. UK has quietly regained its position as the World’s 5th largest economy. 2. UK unemployment rate in surprise fall to 4.9% in three months to February, figures show. Nobody is complacent about the effect of events in the Gulf.

Neville employs 700+ Mancunians. He pays shit loads in tax. He opened his hotel to front line workers during the lockdowns. His deal with Goldbridge annoyed me, his punditry has been bugging me, but he's clearly a patriot. Actual men don't do this⬇️ x.com/i/status/20462…

A new 28-storey tower in Manchester is almost complete. The £56 m skyscraper will deliver over 500 student bedrooms, a roof terrace, and an outdoor courtyard. Here's what the 'Fusion' skyscraper will look like 📸 Follow us on TikTok: @yimbyalliance" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">tiktok.com/@yimbyalliance

😢 situations like these are truly scary and I can assure you they are not delightful💔

This is Ghost Pitùr. An anonymous counter-cultural street artist in Brescia, Italy he….removes pointless tags and visual crap on otherwise attractive buildings. Otherwise known as cleaning up other people’s mess. Let a thousand Ghost Pitùrs bloom!

Brexit has likely done more economic damage than feared. Recent evidence suggests the economic cost of Brexit may be approaching twice the 4% impact assumed by the OBR. The Chancellor has signalled a shift in approach to EU trade, but the effect will depend on how far the govt goes on alignement.

I was around 3 when I first heard this song and felt the pain in it, telling my mom I miss the good old days! I was 3! Early melancholic nostalgic. ❤️

Fifty years later it's still a classic🎵 The way she reaches those high notes so effortlessly is amazing, what a talent.

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page. It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection. Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do. Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades. The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water. It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left. The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero. When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

This was a gorgeous article. Why the FT weekend is Britain’s best newspaper.

Approx 14% UK firms (circa 16.4k) that previously exported to the EU stopped after Brexit: CEP at LSE. Hundreds of small businesses reported having to "close entirely" as a result of new, costly red tape making trade with Europe impossible. n.b 95% includes the local pub, cafe.

Not perfect, but a good example in Dalston of house to better blend new social houses with existing terraces

If I was PM, I’d go straight to Europe and say: forget the Brexit red lines, let’s get back into the single market immediately. I’d use emergency powers so we’re inside the EU’s resilience and can secure resources. And tell Donald Trump we don’t want his bad trade deals. Then make sure farms have what they need to produce food and speak to farmers urgently! Listen to 🎙 Food Fighters podcast here: share.transistor.fm/s/0f6ef85a

Le Royaume-Uni va rejoindre le programme Erasmus+ ! 🇪🇺 Comme président du Cercle Erasmus 🇫🇷, je me réjouis de cette bonne nouvelle, pour eux et pour nous (assortie d’une contribution financière 🇬🇧) Et un retour sur l’un des mensonges du Brexit, à méditer…

RT @JonathSchofield: Three years and counting since I first exposed ‘fat cat’ millionaire Barry Tucker’s vile treatment of Manchester’s her…

She was the Conservative Home Secretary, in charge of immigration. Twice. What an imbecile.

Rejoining the EU itself is more popular than the single market alone. That's huge! independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

This is still one of the most heart breaking songs... 💔 #SuzanneVega

Abbey Wood station. 20+ trains per hour to central London via Elizabeth line, Southeastern Metro and Thameslink. You may think this would spur housebuilding. No. Various plots still sit vacant after 10, 20, 30 years under public and private ownership. It's frankly pathetic

There's been a lot of discussion this week about comically low salaries in Britain, and much cope and sour grapes as Brits try to save face in front of the yanks. The UK is poorer than all fifty US states on paper, so it’s a valid discussion. Let's have it! Firstly it's true, so let's not pretend it isn't. By averages, medians or the great state of Mississippi, the Americans get paid more. I work in US multinationals in Ireland so I get to see first hand the difference in cost rates and it's real, there's no point stressing about it: Either get a work visa or don't. I'm British, so I've seen both sides of the divide and know that comparing ourselves to America is silly, because it's on a completely different planet. But Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, among many others, also do more with what they have than us, so what gives? Firstly, let's shoot down the obvious nonsense: British people aren't lacking in spirit or vigour, or animal instincts or innovation. It's not a nation of losers or a giant crab bucket of bitter malcontents… no more than anywhere else, anyway. There's probably an extra frisson of class-based snobbishness, but people are people everywhere and Brits are more of the same, so the country's underperformance isn't some kind of divine judgement on our character. Secondly let's stop thinking about Britain as a monolith, because in reality it's two economies, not one. This island has other islands inside it, which outperform much of the world: London, Cambridge, Oxford and half a dozen others casually take in globally-leading research, finance, engineering and practically all of Formula 1. Then there's oil, jet engines, pharmaceuticals, fusion and AI. There's stuff going on in the UK that flies vanguard for the entire world. But then there's the other Britain, which I was born into. This is the vast hinterland that spreads outside the islands of wealth and sees echoes of itself in the dingy flats and drawn faces of Britain's very successful, and deeply depressing, soap operas. Thirdly, it's not all bad and it's not all about the money. Manchester is a lot poorer than similarly-sized Dublin or Minneapolis but it's also a lot more vibrant and fun. There are a hundred reasons a Brit might want to stay put instead of shipping out to Boston: Culture, community, football or just not wanting your kids to get weird accents. All good reasons, but we're still not doing as well as we should be. What gives? We need to face reality, fellow Brits. We're not the richest kids on the block or anywhere close to it: Our woodwork is decaying, our lawn is ragged, our car is old and we're keeping up appearances with fresh coats of paint. Nevermind comparing ourselves to the USA, because Poland will probably overtake us soon. There's no point coping about it online, pretending that 'Our NHS' makes up for it or lambasting immigrants, because that won't help either. What will? Britain's already good at flashy stuff. It grows more unicorns than anywhere else in Europe, it has cutting edge science and technology, a gigantic financial centre and is getting more proficient at linking University R&D into the commercial sphere. It's got the stable rule of law and all the tricky bits sorted, but struggles with the basic stuff… Britain doesn't build. Decades of not building infrastructure or housing doesn't kill you immediately, but over the decades it paralyses a country, and that's what we're seeing. A discretionary over-centralised planning system whose prime commandment is “Thou Shalt Not!” paralyses private building just as much as endless legal challenges hamstring new national infrastructure. So the moral of this story? We've got the hard bits right, but the basics wrong. That's not the worst position to be in, because it means it's fixable. On the one hand, the only thing standing in our way is ourselves. But on the other hand, we've only got ourselves to blame.