James Hewland

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The Daily Mirror, 1978, the first year Britain got a bank holiday to mark ‘May Day’. Marx’s grave was defaced. Shopkeepers vowed to stay open in defiance of an “un-British” or “communist” holiday. Conservative clubs flew flags at half mast… 🤭

A final piece of advice from Holly Butcher - written the day before she passed away from cancer at just 27: “It’s a strange thing knowing you’re going to die young. At 26, I thought I had time… To fall in love. Start a family. Grow old. But cancer doesn’t care about plans. Now, I understand how fragile life really is. Every single day is a gift, not a guarantee. I’m not writing this to scare you. I’m writing to remind you: really live. Stop stressing over little things. Be kind to your body- move it, nourish it, stop criticizing it. One day you’ll wish you had appreciated it. Go outside. Look at the sky. Feel the sun. Just be. Spend less time chasing “stuff” - more time making memories. Don’t skip moments with people you love. Laugh more. Write a note. Tell someone you love them. Complain less. Give more. Helping others brings more joy than anything you can buy. Be present. Put your phone down. Show up - really show up. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You don’t need a perfect body, or a perfect life. Just follow what makes your heart light up. Say no to what drains you. Make changes when you need to. And please - donate blood. I wouldn’t have had that extra year without it. And that year gave me memories I’ll hold close… forever. Thank you for reading this. Live your life well. And maybe… we’ll meet again someday.” Holly 🩷 Repost & share Holly’s important advice. ❤️

In 1995, 45% of British milk was delivered to the doorstep before seven in the morning by a milkman in an electric float. In 2026, it is 3%. The milkman has been effectively abolished inside one human generation. The supermarket walked in, undercut the cost by a few pence per pint, and the daily ritual of British household life, glass bottles clinking on the step at half past six, was gone by the time the children of 1995 had finished secondary school. The cost to the customer was a few pence per pint. The cost to the system was, in rough order: the glass bottle that was washed and reused hundreds of times, replaced with a plastic bottle that is used once and recycled imperfectly. The local dairy that supplied one town, replaced with a national processor that supplies half the country. The milk that arrived four hours after milking, replaced with milk that arrived three days after milking after a journey of 200 miles. The conversation on the doorstep, replaced with a self-checkout beep. The milkman himself, incidentally, had the lowest recorded rate of heart disease of any male occupation in Britain. He walked approximately 12 miles a day, finished work by 10am, and ate a cooked breakfast. He has been replaced, in the same delivery role, by a zero-hours Amazon Flex driver sitting in a Ford Transit. A small piece of British daily infrastructure was quietly demolished. Nobody was consulted. The milk is still being produced. It is just being produced further away, transported further, kept in plastic, and sold at a different margin, by a different business, to a customer who never sees who milked the cow. The milkman knew your name. The self-checkout does not.

Alert 🚨 Please share (the original post) and make others aware. Thank you. Liverpool Street Station, which sits on a historic part of the north-eastern corner of the City of London, is about to get a modern makeover.

@LizWebsterSBF @DavidPorkyEvans

We’ve built cheap energy but we’re still pricing it like it’s expensive. The UK uses a marginal pricing system, where the last (most expensive) generator sets the price. That’s usually gas. So even when most of our electricity comes from cheap wind and solar, households still pay gas prices. That’s why bills haven’t fallen. Getting off gas pricing is about fixing the system by reforming the electricity market so gas no longer sets the price, building storage so we don’t rely on gas for backup, reconnecting with European energy systems to smooth supply, reducing gas demand through insulation and heat pumps, and continuing to expand renewables so gas is needed less and less. Until we do that, cheap energy will keep being priced like expensive gas.

What a difference twelve years can make...

@ThatTimWalker @DaveJGarton Did you see this interview yesterday on Sky? Needless to say they aren’t showing the clip.

@PJTheEconomist I'm old enough to remember when ardent economists and tabloids were saying that the £40bn total budget proposed by Corbyn in 2017 would destroy the economy. Three years later treasury gave more than that to a peer's company operating a "track and trace" system that didn't work

That’s obviously bollocks. People didn’t want Labour. They didn’t want Tories on steroids either. So they voted Green. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just voters saying, “Nah, not you.” And spare me the culture war nonsense. If this country supposedly can’t stand women or minorities, then how exactly did a blonde lass from Bolton win, in a party led by a gay Jewish fella from the South? Doesn’t quite fit the dramatic little story, does it? The truth is you and Farage thought it would be a cakewalk. Wave a few flags, shout about migrants, collect the votes. Instead, you got a metaphorical bloody nose. Turns out people can smell recycled rhetoric from a mile off. You’re on 90k a year, banging on about “the working class” like you clock in at a warehouse before Parliament. There’s something almost impressive about earning that much while pretending you’re one late gas bill away from disaster. The average Joe isn’t stupid. He’s tired, skint, and wide awake. Reform and the Great Yarmouth People’s Front trying to cosplay as working class is genuinely comedy gold. It’s like watching lads who’ve never done a proper graft shift in their lives explain to bricklayers why Abdul down the road is the reason their wages are low. No. People are struggling because you lied about Brexit, you hollowed out industry, and you treat the working class like a photo opportunity with steel-toe boots. And the more you shout, the more obvious it becomes.

“When the foundations are extractive, everything built on top is expensive.” Govt economic policy has to change and change rapidly. Any review on energy has to consider public ownership as an option. Here’s why: This isn’t just about a bad year or a temporary spike. It’s not something we fix with another sticking plaster or short term rebate. This is structural. For 40 yrs we’ve treated the basics of our economy as assets to sweat, not foundations to strengthen. Energy, water, transport, housing, even parts of our food system have been organised around extraction first, production second. When the foundations are extractive, everything built on top is expensive. High energy prices don’t just hit families trying to heat their homes. They hit factories, pubs, farms, small manufacturers. They feed straight into food prices, rents and transport costs. That’s why the cost of living crisis & the cost of doing business crisis are the same crisis. You can’t build a serious manufacturing base on top of an energy system designed to reward volatility. You can’t have food security when water companies are loaded with debt and paying out dividends. You can’t grow regional industry when transport is fragmented and overpriced. You can’t ask small firms to invest when commercial rents are inflated by land speculation. Tinkering won’t cut it. Price caps without structural reform just socialise the risk and privatise the reward. Short term subsidies ease the pain but leave the model untouched. Industrial strategy without control over energy costs is industrial strategy with one hand tied behind its back. If we’re serious about growth and renewal, we’ve got to talk about democratic control of the basics. Not control for its own sake. Control that lowers the cost of capital. Control that aligns investment with long term public need. Control that treats water, energy, transport, housing and food as the infrastructure of prosperity, not chips in a global casino. A Productive State doesn’t micromanage everything. It does something more important. It shapes the rules, owns or co-owns the natural monopolies, and makes sure essential services run at cost plus resilience, not cost plus maximum extraction. Right now we’ve got manufacturers paying some of the highest industrial energy prices in Europe. Households squeezed. Government spending billions managing the fallout instead of fixing the cause. Every time we patch instead of reform, we lock in higher structural costs. For families. For firms. For the state. The business groups are right to worry. But we won’t fix this by begging for another relief scheme. We fix it by rebuilding the foundations. Energy priced for production, not speculation. Water run for resilience and public good, not dividend flows. Transport integrated to support growth. Housing treated as infrastructure, not a tax shelter. Food supply anchored in security, not fragility. Until the basics are under far stronger democratic guidance, the cycle carries on. Higher bills. Higher business costs. Lower investment. Lower growth. That isn’t fate. It’s a policy choice. And we can choose differently.

For all the different owners of @RoyalMail , the financial analysts, (paid off & gone). The marketing companies, (paid off & gone), regional directors, (paid off & gone). Shareholders, (paid off & gone). Watch this video - it's not rocket science.

The entire 'vetting process' for appointments under this government only has one aim: Keep out the left. That's it.

It's quite amusing that twice a season neutral football fans arbitrate whether Crystal Palace v Brighton is a valid rivalry, with many concluding it's not. Yet, their elitist view is irrelevant. The two clubs clearly loathe each other, with the rivalry predicated on 50+ years of conflict — unlike nonsensical feuds based on location. Mullery/Venables/Noades prompted the war, though the original tensions existed thanks to fierce battles for glory in the lower divisions. The hatred has stuck, both clubs are better for it — it's the first game supporters seek when the fixtures are released. Off the pitch, the ill feeling is clear. On it, Lewis Dunk and Dean Henderson have assumed the mantle of the rivalry, grabbing every opportunity to wind up the opposition. Henderson’s cup-lift mime yesterday perfectly encapsulated it. There is one issue with the game, yet it has nothing to do with either club. The desire from Premier League broadcasters to turn the contest into something it's not, the cliched ‘M23 Derby’, impacts the outside credibility of the rivalry. If the history was properly respected and understood beyond the two clubs, much of the criticism would fade away. #CPFC | #BHAFC

Update #SaveOurPiglets

You'll want to be sitting down for this bit. Water companies are currently £82.7 billion in debt, have paid themselves £85 billion in dividends, leak over a trillion of litres of water per year, dump sewage for almost 4 million hours per year, have been convicted of over 1,200 criminal acts since 1989 and an average of 35% of your bill goes on nothing but paying more interest and yet more dividends. And not a single company has ever lost their operating licence. 👇

Rachel Reeves should be very careful arguing only graduates should pay for their degrees Would be a lot of cold pensioners without our generation’s taxes. I don’t make much use of the nuclear deterrent either Education is a public good, not a commodity

Is wind turbine waste a real concern? Yes, by one estimate, in 2050 the world will generate ~3 million tonnes of wind turbine waste per year. But for perspective, the world currently landfills ~500 million tonnes of coal combustion residues (coal ash) every year.

@JamesMelville How sustainable is gas and oil? What subsidies to gas and oil have? Follow the money James.

Wind farms are a sunken cost fallacy that rely on taxpayer funded subsidies to survive. They only last for 25 years or so. This is the diametric opposite of sustainable.

Thanks to Trump, right-wing multibillionaire Larry Ellison will now control the TikTok algorithm, along with: CBS MTV The Free Press BET CMT Simon & Schuster Nickelodeon Paramount+ Pluto TV and more This is what Oligarchy looks like.