On top of @RossjournoClark's points in his piece, when faced with a pressing and ongoing *actual* environmental hazard (Walley's Quarry), the EA were toothless and ineffective for several years.
Abolish and replace them with an agency that focuses on people and communities.
You can almost feel John Selwyn Gummer, Zac Goldsmith and the rest of the Conservatives’ green lobby quaking. Kemi Badenoch has incurred their wrath by proposing that the Environment Agency and Natural England be abolished.
It is part of a package, which also involves the reduction in levies charged to housebuilders, which the Tories claim will reduce the cost of building a new home by £50,000.
✍️ Ross Clark
Article | spectator.com/article/the-to… | @RossjournoClark
Aaron Bell retweeted
Ugh. The organisation that was supposed to be our DARPA and back scientific leaps forward is now hiring a "DEI lead".
Public innovation funding is so captured by slop.
Aaron Bell retweeted
Andy Burnham: “We will always stand with the underdog. ...That is leadership on the world stage.”
This may be the most perfectly left-wing, and utterly useless definition of leadership imaginable.
The morality of a cause is not determined by the relative strength of those involved. The weaker side is not automatically right, and the stronger side is not automatically wrong.
Leadership is not choosing the perceived victim. It is having the courage to determine what is right, and standing for it, even when the wrong side has better public relations.
The stupidity is actually embarrassing.
Aaron Bell retweeted
Blimey. Andy Burnham says "national security cannot come at the expense of social security".
Aka no welfare cuts to pay for defence.
Total gift to the Tories.
Aaron Bell retweeted
I listened to a Labour MP and trade union member saying how he was proud he was that Wales had resisted the education reforms England had seen.
Aaron Bell retweeted
Having repeatedly taunted Rishi Sunak with suggestions he'd move to California after losing the General Election, Starmer himself is the one who cuts and runs. V apposite that his departure involves one final bit of shameless hypocrisy
Aaron Bell retweeted
A big part of leftism is deliberately misunderstanding perfectly innocuous statements, reading an offensive message into them so that you can pretend to be morally outraged, and thereby boost your social status.
Aaron Bell retweeted
This is all quite grim but for the BBC it is really really deathly bad.
Aaron Bell retweeted
Be fascinating to see FIFA's reaction to the serious accusation contained here. All of it piles more pressure on Gianni Infantino... he has to go.
There is no shortage of issues regarding FIFA. Let me start by clarifying what some of these are from an FA perspective, in particular that of Jordan going into a World Cup for the first time.
We are a small country with a minimal budget for our FA and had to deal with enormous hurdles. First, getting our fans into the USA: not all were granted VISAS, even though they had tickets -which we also know were sold at exorbitant prices. Secondly, we are being taxed by the US govt through FIFA for our participation. Money that should go to players and staff. This was not the case for those who played and set up camp in Canada and Mexico. But we happened to be in the USA so now we face these huge costs in taxes for having participated.
Thirdly we have been waiting for reward money for our players since December for the Arab cup in Qatar, which is a FIFA event. The money our team should receive for having reached the final has not been delivered yet, while at the same time FIFA brags about how many billions they have in reserve.
It is clear the problem really is with leadership. For months, FIFA has been refusing to help us on any of these or other matters- until it was verbally communicated to me during the World Cup that if I endorsed Infantino it would go a long way to helping our FA out.
We pride ourselves in Jordan in upholding ethical values. We did not endorse him before and certainly will not now. But the whole situation amounts to blackmail and we refuse to give in to that.
Aaron Bell retweeted
This tweet is an example of what's wrong with academia. In a word: sophistry. You are describing the Arday case as a single data point, when you must know this is deeply disingenuous.
He openly lied and committed plagiarism, and even when this was publicly demonstrated, much of Cambridge's academic leadership not only defended him but denounced his critics in the most vicious and slanderous terms.
Like a nuclear meltdown, so much more than one thing had to go wrong to get ust to this point. It bears repeating: a pathological liar and plagiarist, one whose plagiarised work was in any case of a very low standard, was allowed to pass his PhD, get jobs at Roehampton, Durham and Cambridge. At every stage there were committees, examiners, supervisors and administrators who should have notice something or said something. Not a single one did, until a blacklisted rightwing academic, with no official role in all this, blew the whistle on him.
We are not, by and large, producing rigorous, critical scholars in academia. There is too much politics, too much bureaucracy, too much careerism, and too much subject specialisation. It's not just a problem of wooly minds, but of wooly characters - fearful, timid and overly agreeable people make for bad thinkers.
What Arday did was deplorable; I've made my position on that abundantly clear.
But if you're going to argue that the academe is morally rotten, you should bring good evidence to the table.
Case studies are interesting. We can learn from them. But they go on the bottom of the evidentiary pyramid.
We should never generalize from a singular case study. That's bad practice.
It's ironic that the crowd that regularly calls for more rigor in the academe is, itself, often lacking in rigor.
Aaron Bell retweeted
I for one am shocked that, since retiring from Sky News and being able to tweet freely, Kay Burley has revealed herself to be an off-the-shelf progressive who parrots fashionable leftwing opinions.
Aaron Bell retweeted
When Jason Arday was named Cambridge's youngest black professor, the BBC made at least 5 documentaries about him and gave him his own radio series.
He's now been exposed as a fantasist and plagiarist, and the BBC has ... so far completely ignored this story.
Aaron Bell retweeted
Not for the first time, Stock smashes it over the rope. Just calmly devastating.
This Arday case is insanity. Not just how and why we got here, but how entrenched, and convinced, the defenders of this rot are.
unherd.com/2026/07/jason-ard…
Aaron Bell retweeted
This is an amazing quote from Lindsey Graham about when he realized how politics works. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…
