Top recent posts by UK Constitutional Lawyers on Bluesky

I love how this contradicts with the argument for the deportations - that migrants were stealing jobs from everyone else. Now the claim is that the jobs were created by migrants just as they are now gone with them.

Joint statement from the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway and Canada.

More on America’s growing food crisis. The FDA has upgraded a recall of frozen blueberries to the highest risk level, indicating a reasonable chance of "serious adverse health consequences or death" from E. coli contamination. What happens when you gut federal government protections.

Oh dear oh dear. The best bit of this is that the dollar is still falling, now alongside the rising bond yields. For the uninitiatied, the technical term for this is 'shitshow' www.ft.com/content/0c01...

Creating a hugely expensive, onerous, and almost certainly cruel nationwide bureaucracy to somehow task, monitor, and manage millions of wildly differently abled people as they do 20 hours of weekly community service... ... to address a 'feeling' that someone may be getting something for nothing.

A Romanian F-16 destroyed a marine drone packed with explosives that was near an offshore gas facility, the defence minister Radu Miruță announced. This comes after Romanian F-16s shot down three Russian drones that had entered the EU country’s airspace.

The wife of Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News producer Jennifer Hegseth, attended sensitive, high level international meetings without a security clearance. She was also included in the Signal chat where her husband shared plans for US strikes in Yemen.

Basically very, very few people are openly objectionable in person - but you are the totality of what you do and say, not just when you want people to like you and when you're around people you've decided worthy of respect.

The US Navy is considering renaming the future USS Doris Miller, an aircraft carrier honoring the Black sailor who became a hero during Pearl Harbor, and have discussed naming it after Trump instead, CNN reports.

Looking back to surges of elite anti-Semitic or anti-Slavic sentiment in Germany and Austria between 1848 and 1932, a key factor was how upward social mobility of once marginal communities fuelled a vicious response from established groups fearful of losing their monopoly on positions and power

“Young men were being sucked into violent misogyny by the cesspit of social media.”

Am I shocked that the programme seemingly specifically designed to attack neurodivergent individuals and diminish our support needs twisted evidence to attack us and diminish support needs? Uhm...no. Not even remotely. It fits a pattern in coverage seen right now. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is in Seoul, making the most of Trump’s stupid decision to alienate a longtime ally. Wang urged South Korea to stay neutral between Beijing and Washington and called for stronger China-South Korea economic ties.

Trump’s economic D-Day on America.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar is upset with Britain.

I'm sorry but it's clearly newsworthy that the President's decisions are being unduly influenced by a mentally unstable obsessive no one voted for who has attached themselves to him in an effort to live out weird fantasies they've had for decades. Something has to be done about Stephen Miller.

This article is extremely weak. It barely tackles lock-in (Palantir’s business model) and fails to notice the one, overriding response that almost all users have to Palantir - it’s nothing special and lots of other products can do what it does. But Palantir costs more and undermines sovereignty.

St Neots Eynesbury (Huntingdonshire) Council By-Election Result: 🔶 LDM: 47.9% (+29.8) ➡️ RFM: 30.3% (+3.1) 🌳 CON: 6.7% (-3.8) 🌍 GRN: 5.5% (-12.5) 🌹 LAB: 4.9% (New) 🙋 Ind: 4.8% (New) No Ind (-26.2) as previous. Liberal Democrat GAIN from Reform UK. Changes w/ 2026.

Not read it because the answer to this is just obvious. Get a cat. If you have a cat then you never argue about who's hogging the most space in the bed ever again. Because the answer is always "the cat".

Denazification update.

I’m not a politician but is a man who has been struggling to articulate why he has been given millions of pounds really the best person to be the face of a campaign against a “something for nothing culture”?

A 6.7 magnitude earthquake has hit southern Peru with the epicentre in Ayacucho province.

It is always someone else's fault. Always.

Electoral shenanigans in Alaska. “Hafner is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence and has never been to Alaska. He was elevated by a super PAC.”

Oh God are we going to have to spend several days explaining Ghent University is not in the UK..?

It felt to us ghoulish to monetise the episode in any way, but as it is difficult to temporarily vary our underlying commercial arrangement, we decided that all advertising revenue from this edition will be donated to the Society of Black Academics.

The entire world is paying the price for Trump’s incompetence in Iran. This time he’s not just bankrupted a casino - he’s pushed the defence of “the free world” to the brink. 1/

So fun that Meghan is going to be next James Bond

This piece rather misses the fact that large corporates are increasingly becoming direct political players, and arguably in doing so undermining the notion of free markets that The Economist is supposed to support.

Best response to this nonsense is probably no response. Europe shd also accelerate efforts to reduce reliance on the increasingly erratic & unreliable US; & find legal ways to block US funding of far right parties & organisations in Europe, designed to undermine European values & create 'EuroMAGA'.

“I’ve been full time at The Guardian for over a decade now. I’m the first columnist in the country to use a wheelchair. I’m still one of the only visibly disabled journalists in the press. That is objectively batshit.” I wrote about the British media’s diversity problem. shorturl.at/ZHX5W

'The area of the National Trust’s Holnicote estate where rivers have been returned to their natural courses and wetlands have been restored have remained green and lush during the five heatwaves across the summer.'

“When you saw me at the cash register.” Reminds me of that line from ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby?’

Tortie in the morning: chaos warning. Tortie at night: Pouncing on sight.

siiiigh ok fine: ban the pervert pods too (this vid actually explains that they might not be super-enhanced for perverts but still, this tech will need watching like a hawk)

St. Anslem poll | 8/17-8/18 RV 2028 Democratic US presidential primary (New Hampshire) 🟦Pete Buttigieg 25% 🟦AOC 17% 🟦Jon Ossoff 12% 🟦Mark Kelly 12% 🟦Gavin Newsom 7% 🟦Kamala Harris 3% 🟦Cory Booker 2% 🟦JB Priztker 2% 🟦Ro Khanna 2% 🟦Rahm Emanuel 2% 🟦Josh Shapiro 1% 🟦Wes Moore 1% 🟦Andy Beshear 1%

Penistone East (Barnsley) Council By-Election Result: 🌹 LAB: 51.6% (+14.4) ➡️ RFM: 23.8% (-6.7) ◼️ RES: 6.5% (New) 🌳 CON: 11.6% (-7.6) 🔶 LDM: 2.1% (-3.6) 🌍 GRN: 1.7% (-5.6) 🙋 Ind: 2.6% (New) 🙋 Ind: 0.2% (New) Labour GAIN from Reform UK. Changes w/ 2026.

rarrrr! panther dreams!

Crummock Water

I would not normally comment on the return of Harry and Meghan to the UK, except to say that this presents me with an excellent reason to prolong my *as few newspapers as possible*-summer-routine for another fortnight, as it is safe to assume that the British media will lose their … Again.

Karma my son. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving racist. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

If you're moaning about "DEI" in the UK you are tragically underinformed. It's literally not DEI here. It is EDI

Ra Ra Natsputin Trad wife of the Orange King

"Man intends to move house" should not be the top story of the day, and especially not when it is accompanied by a bunch of people just pulling hunches out of the air about what is happening.

I’ve alwaysloved @vermontgmg.bsky.social ‘s writing but this is astounding “AI has arrived in American life & communities across the country as a giant turd mountain. No one wants it; it makes everything worse when it arrives; and it’s been pushed & backed & cheerled by the absolute worst people”

Some WILD points from Acadian’s Owen Lamont on how volatile markets are these days.

2½ years ago. #ADHD

The Trump administration is so unfathomably lucky their reign coincided with the AI Boom/Bubble. - Huge capex spending that's immune to their bad policies - Massively inflated stock market - And now they can just imagine AGI will deliver 300% GDP growth any day now so the debt doesn't matter.

If it’s anything like the election, United Russia should be on 136%.

Daphne is annoyed with me because I woke her up by kissing the top of her head, but it's entirely her fault for having that velvety kissable space between her ears.

Morning Bluesky.

If only there was something, anything, that was happening right now that explained why oil prices might be high.

The Treasury market rally is unraveling following Bessent’s surprise buyback announcement yesterday. Our piece on the new interventionist Treasury and how success will not come easy www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/b... w/ Alan Rappeport @nytimes.com

Extraordinary that Reform members can't criticise the leader

"Hello, I am a psychopath"

What should you do if you break your foot in two places? Don’t go back to those two places. (Told to me by a Dad Radiographer.)

Morning all - this morning’s sky

i have cleaned the pond pump. without somehow using the hose. because apparently i have to conserve a few litres of water while Thames Water are pissing away thousands of litres of the stuff every day.

I am delighted to announce that it is Chucking It Down outside

I don’t think I had quite realised that Cofnas was not employed by Emmanuel College (he had Leverhulme funding) and this was just an affiliation largely for social purposes. It’s hardly firing someone if you neither employ nor pay them. It’s removing an association with a charitable organisation.

I think we need to be talking more seriously about the gap between polls and reality. All part of the social media effect (the intl reputation is the obvious marker here, deranged US culture warriors do not reflect the hordes of visitors)

The idea adding "realism" after words like race of sex make your views any less racist, transphobic or anything else is the "academic" equivalent of social media users saying "end of" after a comment. It's an automatic red flag for someone being a bigoted tool who should be ignored at every juncture

My mother died 30 years ago after a long and difficult illness. I'm running the Oxford Half this October in her memory and to raise money for Occtopus, the Oxford Colon Cancer Trust. They do good work, and any donations would be gratefully received. www.justgiving.com/page/tim-har...

Liz Truss Mark Littlewood Lembit Opik John Cleese All ex-Libdems. Makes ya fink, don't it?

The person who just told me I wasn't calm enough has blocked me. Now I can be calm.

I’ll take Manchester being mentioned in the same breath as Oxbridge and go from there

Dire reporting from BBC which frames people seeking asylum as de facto criminals, along with a pretty patronising and derogatory booklet from the Home Office. This fairly obviously, as Reform's comments show, plays into a narrative people seeking safety are a "threat". www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is half the story of the UK-US medicines deal, focusing on the rather grim sectoral aspects. The other half is the resolute determination of UK politics to learn nothing whatsoever about the modern realities of international negotiations. ukandeu.ac.uk/the-uk-us-me...

“The term 'feeding frenzy' originates in animal behaviour and is defined as 'a total loss of control triggered when an intensely competitive predator group is overwhelmed by an abundance of prey'. Actually, I cannot think of a more complete explanation of what happened.”

More on America’s growing food crisis. The FDA has upgraded a recall of blueberries to the highest risk level, indicating a reasonable chance of "serious adverse health consequences or death" from E. coli contamination. What happens when you gut federal government protections.

'The statement said: “We attach great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial. However, that freedom is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others.'

Further to my own stance of pure indifference, this is a prime ministerial style I can really get behind.

Narrator: LLMs are not and will never be conscious 🙄

Blimey, is this the closest a former senior civil servant has ever got to calling a prime minister effing useless?

Me: Maybe I should be a columnist. Also me: Perhaps not.

FFS you chowderheads, Ghent is not even in the UK

One of my fave facts about the Dardanelles naval campaign is that they kept turning the battleships at the same spot. So the Ottomans waited, then went out that night and laid a line of mines right across the apex point. Next day... BOOOOOOOOOOOM

The best example of dressing up bad news as good I have yet seen! New ICEs from Amsterdam to Hamburg Hbf? Nope. Just massive trackwork disruption to existing Amsterdam-Berlin ICEs which are diverted via Harburg with journey times extended to 7 hours. nieuws.ns.nl/nieuwe-ice-v...

If you understand German, watch this, it is relevant far beyond Germany. How a public discourse & society built on noise and self-aggrandizement makes people more susceptible to authoritarian ideas. Everybody already thinks they know everything, which is why nobody listens to each other anymore.

Westminster Voting Intention: RFM: 23% (-1) LAB: 23% (+1) CON: 18% (-2) GRN: 14% (=) LDM: 11% (=) SNP: 3% (=) Via @findoutnow.bsky.social, 19 Aug. Changes w/ 12 Aug.

"Harp has become increasingly inseparable from the President, leading to some concern from White House staff"

America. Is *anything* ok?

This weird liquid substance came out of the sky. No idea what it was.

Yakisoba for lunch today like some kind of low-level JRPG new character. +15 HP for me oh yeah baby.

I think we all need to limber up for not caring about Harry and Meghan by not caring about smaller stories first so we feel confident not to care about the bigger ones down the line. #Idon'tcare

Ah, a female Rasputin.

'Let me have men about me that are fat, Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights. Yond Montie has a lean and hungry look, He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.' 'Julius Caesar' by William Shakespeare

Totally understand why Masnick stopped quotes but I concur with this. I’m not sure Bluesky is a really that much of an echo chamber except in the case of AI, where yeh it kinda is. So it’s hard to learn much here about what works and what doesn’t with a technology that gotta say, ain’t going away

I honestly don’t see how Burnham can address homelessness when Mahmood’s Home Office inflicts NRPF conditions on millions of people

tfw you are totally cool with the price action

PRESS ACCESS - my free guide to disabled and marginalised journalists looking to break into the industry - is officially launched! Sign up for info, advice, and whatever gossip I thought it was a good idea at the time to share. Read the first article here: shorturl.at/ZHX5W

Generally living alone means the ability to starfish in the middle of the bed, but I live with Daphne, who somehow manages to expand to at least eight times her size and mass in the night, which means I often end up clinging to the edge of the bed, pretzeling around an immovable lump of floof.

I write partly because I like to find a sentence with rhythm and colour and economy of expression. (I realise I’m taking a risk announcing this.) Using AI to help me write would, for me, be a joyless admission of failure.

Treasuries are starting to look like full-fat gilts

My Trade Secrets column today. We're 3/4 of the way through China's year-long ceasefire on manipulating rare earth exports. Trump administration says it's spent the time securing its own supplies of critical minerals. Sadly it's too cronyish and untrustworthy to do so. as.ft.com/r/ec670ec0-2...

Waited an hour in the sun in an uncovered viewing area for today’s Falcon launch. Which was cancelled with about a minute to go. Urgh. On the other hand, Cape Canaveral is still a great day out. If you like rockets. I like rockets.

Absolute scenes at the bird buffet

Let me tell you a funny US Army story. I served with some guys who had gone to jungle warfare training, the old one not the new one... at Jungle Operations Training Center at Fort Sherman, in Panama.