Sam Miles

I'm excited to publish entries on 'Space' and 'Nightlife' for the Encyclopaedia of Queer Studies @ElgarPublishing. In a political climate reducing trans people to legislative 'gotchas', it's even more important we support queer communities. Volume eds. @robcover & Christy Newman

HS2. A masterclass in how Britain destroys money. The cost: • 2011: £32.7bn • 2013: £45bn • 2015: £55.7bn • 2019: up to £88bn • 2020: up to £106bn • 2026: up to £102.7bn… for a fraction of the original route What’s been cut along the way: • 2021: Eastern leg to Leeds: SCRAPPED • 2022: Golborne link to Scotland: SCRAPPED • 2023: Birmingham → Manchester leg: SCRAPPED • 2023: Crewe hub: SCRAPPED • Euston terminus: paused, downsized from 10 platforms to 6, now needs private finance Original plan: 11 cities, 340 miles, £32bn, open 2026. What we’re getting: 4 stations, 140 miles, £100bn+, open 2039. A national embarrassment, paid for by taxpayers.

The one on the right is my van. The one on the left sits higher than my van, weighs more than my van, has less storage space than a VW Golf, weighs around 1000kgs more than a Golf and almost 700kgs more than our own EV. With the high risk of these burning down an airport carpark in Luton, their horrific emissions, reliability, fuel economy and weight, it’s a wonder why people buy them.

Why did they do that? What moral or legal right did they have to do that?

Can't stop thinking about Elon Musk, the wealthiest man alive worth $828 billion, spending $290 million to elect Trump, becoming $563 billion richer since Trump was elected and ending humanitarian aid that will lead to the deaths of 4.5 million of the poorest kids on the planet.

A cause for national shame. This is the Rainbow Map for LGBTI+ rights across Europe. Until 2015, the UK was top. We've now collapsed down the rankings - and are the worst in Western Europe. We're now near Albania.

There really is no need for the catastrophic redundancies hitting our university sector. The UK is an educational powerhouse and its resources are being squandered.

UK universities are miraculous. A case in point is the University of Sheffield, which has a total endowment of £59m (about 21x Princeton's per-student endowment) and 6 Nobel prizes. We're losing one of the most cost-effective research juggernauts on Earth.

This is exactly why cuts to arts and humanities subjects should be an alarming red flag. Once the bean counters on six figure salaries get the trimming scissors out, they're unlikely to ever actually stop.

reform voters haven’t even read the manifesto, they’ve blindly voted based on bigoted views thinking reform will remove immigrants to “protect women and girls” NO mention of protecting us in their manifesto: but, 1 in 5 reform MPS has been to prison for violence against women

You let the Tories gain one (1) London council and they immediately make everything worse For those too young to remember, this is just like how they were in Government

The UK public celebrates a genuine national treasure on his centenary, which coincides with a landslide of council votes for a political party that rejects net zero, wants to defund the institutions that Attenborough's life has enriched, and doesn't care about nature. Go figure.

The UK voted the Tories out of office with a vengeance after more than a decade of mismanagement, corruption and scandals, so naturally the UK then opts to vote them all back into power again, under a different name, alongside the architect of the UKs decline via Brexit. FFS.

In time we’ll see the mass closure of humanities departments as among the most clueless & self-defeating things that’s ever been done. As Carl Sagan said, a school that doesn’t teach history, philosophy, music, literature is offering you a half-education at best.

as usual, these courses are actually extremely cheap to run and often end up subsidising other courses for the university, but consultants and management don't respect them and think they need to make the universities look futuristic by opening Raytheon AI Crypto centers instead

Imagine being a scientist investigating vaccines in the U.S. After years of research and millions spent, your study is blocked from publication because your data doesn't support RFK's and the FDA's battle against vaccines. This is why people like me were forced to leave.

A cyclist aged in her 20s has died in a horrific collision with a lorry in a busy main road in south London. trib.al/aHLlsgt

Just a reminder that someone burned down a queer bar packed full of people the other day, and it was a footnote in the news.

not enough people give a shit that a lgbt venue was burnt down in the UK last night and I feel like I’m going insane

Lots of accounts on this site are financially rewarded for spreading lies and convincing you that everything is getting worse and you should be afraid. The good news is it's not: homicides in England and Wales are their lowest level in five decades and killings involving a knife are at their lowest recorded level

The most common reason a child is admitted to hospital in Britain today is to have their rotten teeth extracted under general anaesthetic. Tooth decay, in 2026, in a country that still occasionally describes itself as a G7 economy without noticeably laughing. Roughly 13 million adults cannot register with an NHS dentist. 9 out of 10 dental practices are closed to new patients. Large parts of Devon, Cornwall, Lincolnshire, and the North East now qualify, by any sensible definition, as dentist deserts: places where if your tooth abscesses on a Tuesday, your options are a 90-mile drive or a pair of pliers. We are at serious risk of becoming a mid-century cliche of ourselves. The reason this has happened is not complicated, and anybody who tells you it is should be viewed with a certain suspicion. The government pays NHS dentists less per treatment than it costs the dentist to carry out the treatment. In practice that means every root canal, every extraction, every fitting of a crown is a loss-making piece of work that the state is obliging its clinicians to perform. Dentists have responded rationally: last year the profession handed back nearly £1bn in unused NHS contracts, because they could not afford to deliver the care the government was nominally paying them to deliver. The money was not spent. The teeth were not fixed. The children ended up in hospital. And they ended up in hospital at approximately 10 times the cost to the taxpayer of what a filling would have cost six months earlier - which tells you something about how the British state understands the economics of its own health service: it will spend any amount of money at the back end to avoid spending almost any at the front. Spending on healthcare as a share of GDP is above the OECD average and rising year on year. The problem is what happens to the money after it arrives: it sinks into a procurement system that was designed, in significant part by people who went on to rewarding careers in the consultancy firms it now funnels work toward, to reward bloat and penalise clinical time. The dentists saw this more clearly than most because their contracts were rewritten in 2006 in a way that broke the basic economics of the profession. They have been walking away ever since, quietly and without fuss, to private practice or to Ireland or to Australia or to the simple dignity of doing something else for a living. We need a government who will run a Back to Basics campaign for the NHS with dentistry at the top of the list. Competitive pay. Contract redesign. An end to a procurement regime that treats the clinical workforce as an inconvenient cost line and the consultancy class as the actual customer. That is Progress' vision. You cannot solve this problem by telling dentists to work harder. They have tried that, and having tried it, they have left. Chew on that one while you still can.