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Miliband's got a local problem to deal with first:

Three MPs have criticised plans for a 3,500-acre solar farm between Doncaster and Rotherham.

The project, named Whitestone Solar Farm, would stretch across a number of separate parcels of land and could power 250,000 homes.

However, local MPs John Healey, Sarah Champion and Jake Richards have all raised concerns about the size and location of the scheme.

...


Healey, Labour MP for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough, told project developer Green Nation in a letter that the scheme did not meet his expectations, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

"In my view, every project must still meet three tests: it must be proportionate, it must be safe, and it must be fair - Whitestone fails all three," he said.

He said it was "the wrong scale of scheme in the wrong place".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr5e246pdgzo

I'm struggling to think of ways in which the solar farm won't be safe... Solar (photovoltaic) panels are -one would think- by far the "safest" form of electricity generation. There's no swinging blades at high height; there's no radioactive byproducts; there's no high pressure, high temperature steam; there's no slag heap.

What is the safety aspect that Mr Healey is concerned about?

I mean, you can take issue regarding their cost or location or the opportunity cost of not using the location for (say) housing. But safety... I mean... what?

"According to cancer biologist David H. Nguyen, PhD, toxic chemicals in solar panels include cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, cadmium gallium (di)selenide, copper indium gallium (di)selenide, hexafluoroethane, lead, and polyvinyl fluoride. Silicon tetrachloride, a byproduct of producing crystalline silicon, is also highly toxic."

https://www.americanexperiment.org/solar-panels-produce-tons-of-toxic-waste-literally/

You aren’t supposed to eat them.

I don't think it can happen. Clarkson isn't dim. He will think about what's involved in being an MP and decline.

The one thinkable route is as a celeb addition to the Reform circus, with a promise that he will be a minister with a Reform manifesto for transport crafted around Clarkson populism. But I think this is a QTWTAIN.

He wouldnt want the transport job, he would want the Defra job. And I suspect he’d do it very well. Whether Farage wants him pissing inside his tent is quite another question. And I’m pretty unsure whether Clarkson would want to be inside that tent rather than just being the axeman for Miliband. But stranger things have happened.

It's not a great time for normal people who have lives to enter politics. Real success is not really in sight, so it's a career for chancers and so on. Commentary, punditry and journalism is one thing; but in current politics if you get anywhere worth getting, there is a very very high chance you and your reputation are going to go down with the ship.

On the contrary. It’s exactly the time for people who have lived real lives and careers to enter politics and potentially make a massive difference on chosen areas of policy.

The major parties are leaving a vacuum and on current polling, Reform looking like getting a strong majority but without a long established party of careerists ready to climb the greasy pole.

Reform are seeking out what they see as top tier talent for background policy advisory roles but more if the person wants it. Clarkson well might be like everyone else that isn’t an #FBPE weirdo and have come to terms with the existential grief of leaving a continental customs union and single market.

The single market and customs union re the economy are not the main reasons Remainers wanted to stay in the EU . It was about so much more than the economy .

It was psychological. Those pushing for EU integration had/have successfully manipulated such people into a state where not supporting EU membership would seriously undermine their sense of self - it would make them part of an uncivilised mongol horde. That's why you cannot deploy logic or facts in an argument with a remainer.

You seem to assume all Remainers wanted more EU integration . As for facts or logic not sure being on the Leave side is a badge of honour in that respect ! As one of those Remainers EU membership isn’t really about economics . That was really a stale argument flogged to cremation by a very poor Remain campaign in 2016.

When support for an institution is central to ones' sense of self, that institution has carte blanche to act as it pleases. That's very dangerous.

If people felt the EU was going too far then they wouldn’t support it . Countries still have veto power in a number of areas . FOM was something to be celebrated IMO and not seen as something members were subjected too . Luckily I still have that by dint of my parents and count myself extremely fortunate . Anyway thanks for at least putting your arguments forward based on your genuine concerns .

They didn’t support it and the establishment knew. That’s why Brown signed Lisbon with as little ceremony as he could get away with.

FOM was portrayed as some hideous thing the UK had to suffer . Instead of a wonderful chance for Brits to live and work freely in 30 other EU and EEA countries . Now most Brits want FOM back . Most EU voters class FOM as one of the best things about being in the EU .

@alex_prompter

This might be the most disturbing AI paper of 2025
Scientists just proved that large language models can literally rot their own brains the same way humans get brain rot from scrolling junk content online. They fed models months of viral Twitter data short, high-engagement posts and watched their cognition collapse: - Reasoning fell by 23% - Long-context memory dropped 30% - Personality tests showed spikes in narcissism & psychopathy And get this even after retraining on clean, high-quality data, the damage didn’t fully heal. The representational “rot” persisted. It’s not just bad data → bad output. It’s bad data → permanent cognitive drift. The AI equivalent of doomscrolling is real. And it’s already happening.
https://x.com/alex_prompter/status/1980224548550369376

It's the "dead Internet theory" come to fruition. Bots trolling other bots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Or Leon arguing with other Leons.

I hate to side with Johnson, but listening to St. Boris. I do believe he is being questioned by some idiot Labour MP with the benefit of hindsight.

School lockdowns were an imperative under the circumstances regardless of whether vulnerable children were at risk. School closures were the least worst national outcome even if some children were put in harms way.

"School lockdowns were an imperative" 🤔 Does anyone believe this ridiculous narrative anymore? 💩

They were imperative, you ignorant fool. In fact, to a great degree they had already happened because the rapid spread of the virus meant so many of pupils and staff were off ill it was impossible to function normally.

The big mistake was not locking down, it was refusing to put in place sensible measures to minimise it. We might have dodged the January full closure if we had had blended learning from October - two weeks on, one off. The government refused to allow it. We could have minimised missed learning by issuing data enabled tablets to every child. The government refused to pay for them. We could have dodged the issue with exams by running coursework units from September. The government refused to allow it because we were not going to lock down, or cancel exams, so it wasn't needed. They didn't even prepare or release extra sample papers for the innumerable additional exams we had to set (the class of 2021 had *more* exams than a normal year group, bizarrely, but we had to write the papers ourselves) as they were not going to be needed.

The fact is that anybody who worked in education knew as far back as October that there was going to be a train crash due to lack of planning and perverse and wilful denial of the seriousness of the situation by a government that was as clueless and dishonest as it was drunken and inept. I was yelling that from the rooftops on here. The unions were hammering it morning noon and night. Even local authorities were sounding the alarm. And not one person in Whitehall listened.

And I have no sympathy for Johnson or Williamson's persistent, self-serving and whiny refusal to note just how badly they messed up. That was not about hindsight, that was about having the courage and humility to admit they were not going to be able to carry out Plan A at a time an acceptable Plan B might have worked. Which because they are cowards as well as liars and scum they still refuse to do.

And there are still people out there pushing false narratives on the back of that. Frankly, I find that pretty disgusting and I suggest you look hard at a photo of RFK Jr before remembering every single thing you have said on the subject of Covid is wrong and not worth listening to.

Morning all! Whilst we are doing revisionist history its worth looking at what the Tories were saying in the run up to the GFC:

Revisionists: Brown was overspending, stupidly assuming the city would generate mega money forever
Tories07: We'll match ever pound of Labour's spending commitments AND inflate the bubble even harder to create cash for tax cuts. And we're sick of the city being tied up in all this red tape. Lets slash it and free the banks up to go even harder.

In hindsight what Brown/Darling did was stupid. But at the time the Tories offered the alternative of even harder stupid. Lets not stick one side on a pedestal and the other in the gutter - both were in the same gutter with the same policies. The only competition was who could let the city get furthest out of control fastest...

The problem with financial regulation pre-2007 wasn't that it was insufficient, it was that it was ineffectively applied. The mechanisms existed to control financial markets, but the ineffective regulators in the FSA and the top management at the banks simply didn't understand the risks they were running.

Not all Tories favoured ever higher public spending and debt - many hated Cameron's and Osborne's Heir to Blair crap and foresaw it would end it tears when the money stopped flowing, and that it wouldn't even be particularly popular electorally, as shown when supposedly slick PR man Cameron failed to get an overall majority against GORDON BROWN for Christ's sake.