“I haven’t been included in the defence investment plan from the start. I only got read into it two weeks ago.” Al Carns shares what “ruffled [his] feathers” enough to prompt him to resign as armed forces minister and says that in the event of a leadership race, “if someone fires a starting gun, I’m not scared of gunfire.”

Today @Lyan82 and I launch SCIENCE WORKS – a new policy and research studio for accelerating progress in British science and tech. The UK is fundamentally a scientific nation. Our place in the world was built on our creativity and imagination.

The AI Safety Institute is the right foundation. The opportunity and the risk management both demand a state that can execute at speed. That’s the reform conversation Britain needs to have now and we have a genuine advantage here, regulatory freedom outside the EU means we can move faster and set our own frameworks

'Let workers use their pensions to buy a house - It's the best way out of Britain's housing crisis' ✍️ @timleunig for LBC Opinion lbc.co.uk/article/workers-pe…

A fully electric autonomous tractor that lifts 4 tons, pulls 8 tons, runs 24 hours, and you can repair it in the middle of a field. This is Voltrac. 🦾 Made in Europe 🇪🇺 How would you design a futuristic autonomous tractor? Voltrac threw out everything and started from scratch. 70% fewer parts. One motor per wheel. Hot-swap batteries. Backwards compatible with any attachment a farmer already owns. Voltrac is more than a tractor, it’s the brain of the farm. One operator supervises multiple tractors across multiple farms. Every drive analyzes the crops, catches disease early, cuts fertilizer costs. And the same hitch that connects to farm tools connects to demining gear and resupply payloads for the front line. Disclaimer: I'm an early investor, because this is exactly what Europe needs. Europe had 70 million farmers in 2020. Projected 7 million by 2030. Our population keeps growing. Everyone still wants to eat. Somebody has to solve this. They build in Valencia, not China. Because the talent, the precision manufacturing, and the know-how are all here. We just forget how good we are. If we don't build this, someone in China will and sell it to European farmers. 🇪🇺🔥 Full Video on YT!

The focus of debate around Henry Nowak's murder is turning to this document by the National Police Chiefs Council - its 'Anti-Racism Strategy', from 2025. It states: "Producing equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences... "It does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind’ (racial equality)." Kemi Badenoch says it is "virtue signalling" and should be scrapped. Reform UK calls it 'two-tier policing'. A source close to the Home Secretary says the wording is "clumsy". Tonight, the NPCC says it is already reviewing the language and willing to amend it. But it stands by the principle of the document. npcc.police.uk/SysSiteAssets…

the Henry Nowak murder sounds like a completely outrageous parody of the british criminal justice system. it's hard to believe it's real. - native Britons can't legally carry a breadknife - for some reason Sikhs get a special carveout and can carry "religious use" knives of any length. even over 50 cm - 18 year old boy Henry Nowak is walking home peacefully, is fatally stabbed by Vickrum Digwa with his "ceremonial" kirpan - Digwa claims to the police that he was racially abused and the responding police immediately believe him and shackle the dying Nowak, ignoring Digwa and his co-conspirators - Nowak informs the officers that he has been stabbed and the officer says "You've been stabbed? Whereabouts? I don't think you have, mate." - the officers do not check on his condition, cuffing him roughly as he bleeds out. as they read him his rights, he dies. - Digwa's mother, Kiran Kaur arrives at the scene and takes the knife with her, attempting to conceal it - Digwa's brother Gurpreet Digwa made the 999 call and attempted to concoct a defense for his brother, claiming he had been the victim of a racial attack - Despite the "life sentence" the court meted out, Digwa will be eligible for parole at age 43 - there have been no consequences whatsoever for the police officers that shackled Nowak and left him to drown in his own blood while his killers watched. none of the officers have even been named each fact is more radicalizing than the last.

Hello, we are Jonathan and Abigail - unashamed pedants who want to bring this affliction to bear on all things public policy and practice. We believe that details matter, especially in public administration. This is why today we are founding quibble: a campaign to fix the small stuff. Think, for example, about the cookie banner that we click on every webpage. Each instance is not a big deal, so we just put up with it. But its cumulative impact adds up - on average we press it 5 times per day. The European Commission estimates that it costs EU citizens 343 million hours per year. And who is there to represent the impacts of seemingly minor issues like this in a systematic way? We want quibble to be the answer. In the case of the cookie banner, lots of advocacy has rightly focused on privacy, but has this meant that user experience has taken a backseat? We believe there are ways to improve user experience without compromising on privacy. We will share more about this soon. Consider another example. Did you know that in some government-run car parks you can be fined for a minor keying error, such as accidentally typing a zero instead of an “o”? Again, we will come to the detail of this quibble in the coming weeks, but for now just consider again the question: who? Who is there currently to systematically represent the interests of the parker who is given an unfair ticket? An inherent feature of consumer interests is that those who have them rarely have enough other things in common to make collective organisation and representation feasible. This is the gap that quibble seeks to fill. Now of course excellent consumer interest groups exist. But understandably quibbles might not be at the top of their lists. Our hope is that quibble will be complementary; picking up the bottom-of-the-list issues faced by various groups - the stuff they are almost too embarrassed to raise because they are too small. We are not embarrassed about detail. If you’ve ever had a splinter, you know small things can have a big impact. This is what quibble is committed to tackling, and our wider hope is that by doing so we will also incentivise policy makers to be even more careful about detail. Check out our website here, including our first four campaigns: quibble.org.uk