Leeds is probably the most unlucky city in Western Europe 🎭 European City of Culture funding? Sorry we're leaving the EU. 🚄HS2? Sorry we spent too much in the chilterns. 🛫New Airport terminal? Sorry that's not climate friendly, but London Airport expansions are fine. (1/X)

Marcelo Bielsa refused to look at the camera for his official World Cup photo.

For anyone wondering, it’s only been a positive thing in Aus. No one even talks about it anymore which can only mean the kids don’t care. The ones desperate for it will find workarounds, but the majority have found better things to do with their spare time.

🚨BREAKING: Someone just put $1M on Spain to WIN their match vs Cape Verde today This pays out is $1,085,943.48 on Polymarket

🚨 WATCH: School children react to the UK social media ban for under-16s live on BBC News

‘My wife and I were greatly saddened to learn of the death of David Hockney O.M., a giant of the world of art and painting, a Yorkshireman through and through and a dear friend and inspiration to so many. David was one of life’s true originals; one who wore his genius as lightly as those beloved yellow Crocs of his that helped brighten Palace occasions. I trust they will see him tread safely into the hereafter as we mourn a man whose irrepressible charm, talent and constant innovation will be most sorely missed, but whose dazzling creativity lives on in galleries and museums around the world.’ Charles R

2am - Haiti vs Scotland 5am - Australia vs Turkey 6pm - Germany vs Curacao 9pm - Netherlands vs Japan

Tried out the UK government’s official new AI chatbot for jobseekers. Its advice: work in the US. Quick, which public service can we add AI to next

Home Office is cooking today

RT @MOTweets1919: Embarrassed that we’ve stopped this low. Awful awful slop

What should Labour's political economy be? In my contribution to "hot essay summer", I argue that Labour should define itself as pro-work, and anti-slop. Good work is productive, the best that slop can be is distracting. Slop gives the impression of frenetic activity, but without creation of real value. This turns out to be a pretty good description of Britain's economy. We've created an economy of rent-seekers and extractors rather than risk-takers and builders. I look at: 🍬 tax-avoiding American candy stores that crowd Oxford Street 📖 the 44,000 page planning document for Sizewell C (33 times longer than War and Peace) 🚄 the unbuilt railway that cost £100 billion 🏦 the cheapening of designs in our public spaces 🏗️ "fire safety" rent seeking that is stopping homes being built The common theme is slop. To escape this, Labour needs a plan to take on slop-generating tech companies, but also other rent-seekers throughout the economy that have made it impossible (or very costly) to build anything of value. Labour was founded to represent workers in the tangible economy: those who were physically building things. Today, 37% of British workers do not believe that their job makes a “meaningful contribution to the world”. Whoever leads Labour must have an answer to this, and it begins with tackling slop. Read the full piece here: substack.com/home/post/p-201…

RT @MayorofLondon: Mobile phone crime won’t be solved by policing alone. It also needs coordinated action from industry. Having already se…

Andy Burnham seemingly entertaining the WASPI stuff is depressing. We've gone through much more process than necessary to decide rightly that there isn't a case. It's a huge amount of money at a time where we should be investing in growth.

Example of the sort of thing doing the rounds and being denied by authorities

oh my god inflicting ai tutors on the poorest in society, when their effects are so little understood, is the height of irresponsibility. this government has been entirely captured by the tech industry

to the ends of the earth and then some. 🤝 💛 introducing the @adidasfootball Leeds United Away Jersey 26/27, available now

Blair, Burnham, Streeting and Starmer all wrote essays this week. Here’s a summary of what they said for those who can’t be bothered to spend an hour reading about Labour’s favourite pastime: fighting about what it means to be Labour. Blair's thesis is that Labour lost its nerve after 2007 and needs to rediscover the radical centre. Markets work, the private sector is your friend, competent technocratic government is still the answer, and the biggest transformative force on the horizon is AI, which he sees as a positive revolution that a serious centre-left government should embrace. Miss that wave and you miss everything. TLDR; the model isn't broken. Labour just needs to run it properly and stop indulging the perennial delusion that losing votes to the right means the country secretly wants you to go left. Burnham, Streeting and Starmer think this misses the point. And they broadly agree on the diagnosis but disagree on the cure. All three locate the origin of Britain's political unravelling in 2008, not 2007. The financial crisis broke the implicit bargain of modern capitalism: work hard, things get better. When that bargain collapsed and the banks got bailed out while wages stagnated for a decade, people got poorer – but also angry in a deeper, harder-to-satisfy way. And then austerity poured petrol on everything. The more philosophically interesting disagreement is about what the crisis was actually a crisis of. Blair frames it as a delivery failure: the wrong policies and the wrong positioning. Starmer and Burnham both reach for ‘dignity’. The idea that whole communities (post-industrial, working class, people who didn't go to university) were made to feel invisible. That implies a fundamentally different kind of politics. Burnham argues that New Labour never actually took Britain off the Thatcherite track. He blames deregulation, privatisation, leaving things to the market for the cost of living crisis. The centre failed people. You can't win them back by reasserting it more confidently. On AI, Burnham calls for tougher regulation of big tech and signals that an active, interventionist state would govern how AI develops rather than leaving it to the market. For Burnham, ungoverned AI is just the latest mechanism by which powerful interests extract value from everyone else. Streeting is more moderate but lands in similar territory. Inequality is the organising fact of contemporary politics, and treating it as secondary is what produced the crisis in the first place. When the rules stop rewarding effort fairly, resentment grows. Starmer agrees Britain should be an AI superpower, but where Blair frames AI as an opportunity to be seized, Starmer frames it as a force to be governed. The question isn't just whether AI grows the economy but whether Britain is a rule-maker or a rule-taker, and whether the gains flow to Blyth and Castleford or just to London. The deepest difference, underneath all of this, is a question about whether the post-war and post-Thatcher economic settlement is fixable or finished. Blair thinks it needs better management and AI is the tool that makes better management possible. The others think the settlement itself was the problem, and are open to the possibility that AI (if ungoverned) compounds it by concentrating power further.