Recent posts by UK Constitutional Lawyers on Bluesky

Also about sending a message about where power lies, and where he intends it to lie

The Scotland fans deserve so much better that this.

Scotland forgetting/ignoring the two Basic Rules of Football for Weaker Teams: 1. DECREASE the chance of CONCEDING a goal by HOOFING IT out from the back 2. INCREASE the chance of SCORING a goal by PUTTING IT IN THE MIXER

French Resistance fighter and historian Marc Bloch, murdered by the Gestapo in 1944, is inducted into Panthéon in Paris.

Most football fans are really bored by the modern tiki taka bollocks of playing keepball & would much rather have a return to the old style British blood and thunder football but think it’s uncool to say so so they keep quiet and pretend they really appreciate the quality of eg Spain

Don’t know who posted this but it is always and everywhere true

Peter Thiel. All that money and he can't buy a clue?

Thank you so much for all the recognition tonight. 🙏 so lovely to be among so many dear friends and great colleagues.

Didn’t have ‘thirst trap diss content posted by incoming PM’ on my Westminster bingo card, but I guess you can’t predict what’s going to happen in politics these days… (Check out @andyburnham.bsky.social ‘s insta stories if this intrigues)

Tsunami alert issued for Venezuela, Curacao and surrounding islands after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake west of Caracas.

When the German delegation to Versailles arrived in 1919, its members were brought to Versailles in cars with yellow flags. Yellow flags meant plague on board. Very classy.

Big Ukrainian drone raid on occupied Crimea now underway. #explodey

Scotland get a goal back, kind of

Is Rivaldo's face okay now?

Trying to get Deliveroo to bring me a thunderstorm

‘Researchers uncovered 20 columns of previously hidden text covering more than a metre of charred papyrus without physically unrolling the scroll. The work discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art & human behaviour & dates to the second or late-third century BC’ www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Counting down to kickoff is like clapping when the plane lands

With the the appointment of James Purnell as Burnham's chief of staff, this lovely piece by @GeorgeWParker Parker on their five aside football team Demon Eyes is a must read. as.ft.com/r/4097ab21-b... Power games

G'night.

Almost none of the content of this article is actually about students finding lectures 'intimidating' and what little is, is anecdotal. Almost all of the content concerns financial impediments to student attendance (a serious issue). A red herring of a canard of a headline.

Technomania. The obsession to relentlessly develop technology for its own sake, regardless of costs and risks, and an absurd over-valuation of any benefits it may have.

Oh well. It was nasty while it lasted.

Maybe put some posters on lamp posts

“There does not seem to be in the story of the capture of Rome by the Vandals any justification for the charge of willful and objectless destruction of public buildings which is implied in the word 'vandalism.” Encyclopedia Brittanica What a coincidence.

100% agree. seeing this on kids saturday TV, when i was nine, blew my mind. My love of anume traces back to then.

as.ft.com/r/a6aab412-1...

Court rules banks can cheat customers without challenge or redress as long as it was more than six years ago

This does seem A Bit Silly www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

$88 billion Surrender fee.

Trump on Burnham: "I don't know anything. I see that he was, I guess, the mayor of a town" Adds he believes he's "extremely liberal" so won't "open up the North Sea"

If Iran had a sense of humor they'd name it the "Liberation Day Tariff".

The climate scientists are telling us. We need to listen, and join the fight. Or we may literally be cooked. (Alt text is in the replies)

🚨 WATCH: Donald Trump says Andy Burnham is "extremely liberal"

Premium unleaded petrol and unleaded petrol are the same thing.

So has anyone attributed the heat wave to immigration yet?

‘I wanted the baby phase,’ says man who doesn’t have to give birth

Grim. And to be stoking false fears of the consequence of 'instability'. We have to assume that Reeves was co-architect of the strategy that drove Labour into the ground. A credible change of direction, notwithstanding her capabilities, needs someone else in that job.

“Middle-power alliance” my arse. Treating everything as a zero-sum game as per. #areyouwatchingMarkCarney

New "fuck, marry, kill" just dropped.

Growing up on American football I’m always calling violations in soccer “penalties”, and then my son corrects me, but since he grew up in Holland he calls them not “fouls” (“vuil” in Dutch is “filth”) but “overtredingen”

The Pentagon lied about injuries inflicted on US soldiers in Iran.

Still relevant

Occasionally get the feeling the Swiss are organizing fake referendums just to wind us up

Hello Berlin! Another flying work visit

Maybe those rumours of Tucker Carlson starting a Far Far Right third party might be a thing.

Not mine, but I’ve mentioned before my grandfather didn’t believe anyone wins the premium bonds, it’s how MI5 pays agents in the field was his thesis

The Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani says regional states are negotiating a new security arrangement with Iran, shifting away from US-only protection, the FT reports. Trump really has remade the Middle East, by pushing America to the fringes.

Hydration is necessary and many people don’t drink enough water. However, my experience in hot environments in the army is that fully hydrated people can still overheat. It’s not a panacea

Labour trying to force through the most hostile and draconian anti-asylum, anti-immigration, anti-rights policy agenda in decades knowing it is exactly this level of inhumane and cruel policies which have led them to the current cluster they find themselves in. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

You see! Those philosophers said to have argued against having a single measurement for temperature, on the grounds that it reduced something very complicated to a deceptive over-simplification, were correct!

Just an fyi, if you are using climate refugees as a "threat" against wealthier countries, i.e "if you don't combat climate change you will have more people seeking asylum", you are feeding a hard/far right narrative that people seeking safety are "something to fear". Stop it you utter ghouls. 1/

"Fine. Just derp quietly down there, please. it's too hot to argue with you."

Some interesting thoughts, much of which might be as applicable to the UK and other European countries as the US.

Heard Trump compared to the Roman Emperor Commodus today:

Vaguely similar to the Uber story a few weeks ago. This sort of stuff is surely a challenge to the AI business model. We’ve gone from big corporates encouraging adoption and having staff league tables of usage to corporates shouting at their staff “you’ve spent how much?”

I predict that if you like More Jam Tomorrow, you’ll enjoy Our Friends in the North.

The government is adrift. The next PM needs a plan. For Prospect, Ravi Gurumurthy wrote one

A fun thing that will happen fairly soon is chunky models being explicitly RL’d to say “no, do it yourself” to users trying to get them to waste tokens on trivial tasks

I really enjoyed chatting to Andrew Baird at Mix92.6 radio about nature, chronic illness and Hertfordshire's chalklands this morning. #naturewriting #chronicillness

The bench ruled by a 3-2 under majority that the plaintiff’s case has been sectioned pending a ruling on the Resuscitation Order to be forwarded to the superintendent within six ovals of Labour Day. How every report on a US legal ruling reads to be.

🚨 NEW: The Government is now considering a maximum workplace temperature limit amid the ongoing UK heatwave

Walthamstow a reminder we have our regular monthly open meeting to raise any issue in person with me on Thursday 25 June at 7pm in a central Walthamstow venue - only Walthamstow residents can attend and for security purposes you must register so please rsvp to my office by tomorrow morning.

"... even AI models marketed as having conservative views, including Elon Musk’s Grok, offered by his company SpaceX, cited left-leaning arguments more often, on average." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

Brits, Our Friends In The North, one of the finest drama series of the past 35 years, is starting a run of repeats on BBC Four this evening from 10.20pm. (I feel old; I watched this when it was new.) www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

One of the problems of academic research culture is that it pathologically cultivates FOMO. Whilst in most other walks of life personal or professional fear of missing out is recognised as a mental stressor, in academia it’s regarded as a marker of competence & a predictor of success. It’s bonkers!

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It could be the best case scenario is that AI eventually takes all of our jobs & the primary human purpose changes from work to fun. No need for greed or hunger. Nothing to kill or die for. All the people living life in peace. AI fulfilling Lennon’s vision. OR could it be the heat melting my brain!!

Never listened to WHERE POLITICS MEETS HISTORY? It's one of the few political podcasts where the two hosts always disagree. Politics * History * Banter *Argument Check it out podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/w...

Yh my appetite just goes in the heat* *shovelling ice cream and summer fruits

If you see Pride and the LGBTQIA+ community as a "political act" then it is on you for making our lives political. LGBTQIA+ rights should not be seen as political decisions, anymore than anyone else's are. Living our lives should not have to be a "political act". www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Trump at the Senate Steering Committee lunch: “The war is going very well. As you know, we are winning by a lot. “Iran is making very big concessions. We will see what happens, but it's been very powerful. It's going very, very well.”

The View from Westminster newsletter comes from Athena Stavrou tonight. Free sign-up here independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

🏺🧪 Important new study on late #Neanderthals, helping us refine variation in their populations, & situation on a few millennia before they vanish. Tskehomes from rapid look: - unlike in Eastern range, these aren't living in v isolated communities - still no detectable late Sapiens ➡️ N interbreeding!

Hard not to regard this as a classic example of a pre-emptive campaign by certain sectors, along with their media sympathisers, to discourage a new prime minister from appointing someone who might damage their interests in the long and short term. And it will almost certainly work.

🏺 🧪 Thoughts on new Naledi info: - if results are correct it doesn't mean all individuals there are female, just sampled teeth - if there is strong female bias it's interesting but cultural burial is not the first thing I'd be thinking about - nobody comments on weirdness when 💀 samples are all ♂️

Trump as model for Musk’s bond & stock issues…. “After narrowly escaping financial ruin in the early 1990s by delaying payments on his debts, Mr. Trump avoided a 2nd potential crisis by taking his casinos public & shifting the risk to stockholders.” annpettifor.substack.com/p/nasdaq-and...

22, feels like 27, at midnight feels unreasonable. The heat dome must be destroyed.

Dang, with weather like this we should really do a chilled outdoors social for the next @atproto.london London ATProto summer drinks? Anyone down??

Ruh roh. Maybe asking a chatbot to design your capital stack *wasn’t* a galaxy brain move? www.ft.com/content/7d55...

Alexa play Heatwave by Martha Reeves

Jesus this is fucking terrible

“The British right appears…to have lost its bearings—its grip on reality, its own principles and a proper sense of proportion—in this visual, AI-driven echo chamber,” writes Benjamin Clark

Religious experiences really do produce natural opioids in the body bit.ly/4erTqyP which is also why from the outside they look so bizarre

It’s official - 2nd class mail is to be scrapped and replaced with 3rd class that may arrive when there isn’t a ‘y’ in the day. All at the old 2nd class price of 91p

It will come as a shock to you that some of us don’t live in the USA

Times they are a'changin'.....for the better. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mjD...

Of a long list of hideous anti-asylum policies Labour has implemented, it's one in one out policy is one of the worst, with tough competition. It's dramatically undermined trafficking and modern slavery protections in a way the previous government only dreamed of. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

swear to god the "aircon is bad, actually" Bluesky scolds are the most annoying Bluesky scolds

Private Eye points out that former Ukip leader Paul Nuttall is heading up candidate vetting for Reform ahead of the next general election. Readers might remember when items on his CV were revealed as false during the 2017 Stoke-on-Trent by-election." #IronyIsStillDead

Doesn't GTA VI have to sell like eleventy billion copies to break even and stop Rockstar going bust? Just in case you were wondering why the grift is particularly bad on the ultimate edition

as.ft.com/r/fb1d5291-e...

There’s me thinking I’d seen the back of Andy Burnham 😂 Am v pro this No 10 idea though as you might expect. Could have a lot of consequences if done right, incl for media ecosystem Also not a ££££ thing but it sends a message. (Helpfully could also allow him to be near Makerfield on a Fri)

Good god I just stepped outside this feels like Mexico not London

How the hell is anyone still claiming climate change is a hoax? Can we stop with the "other countries are hotter". Yes, yes they are. I've lived and worked in far hotter countries. They have infrastructure designed to cope with it and people are used to it. UK very much doesn't and people aren't.

great mini interview with SPROCKET co-applicant Prof David Lane

this is very cool! www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

At this point in the heat wave you should not be on speaking terms with anyone you know. If you can still muster any civilized behaviour we are forced to review your citizenship

A fifth of Leave voters have died.

Make yourself popular in Scotland today by talking of toe pokes against Brazil in 1982...

Delighted to be part of this excellent collection, with an essay on "How do we write the history of Brexit?"