Berkshire Heroes podcast host. Editor https://xitter.cf/t.co/7NNS9Dlocl ✍️ Served 10+ years Berks councillor. Work in the City 🏙️ Opportunities. Freedom. Humour. 🚀
Berkshire
Joined February 2009
- Tweets7.6K
- Following4.6K
- Followers3.6K
- Likes9.4K
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
Cliveden House burnt down in 1849. The architect behind Parliament rebuilt it in two years.
Now, Parliament has spent over a decade just planning its own repairs.
What happened to the country that built things? 👇
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
Comprehensive takedown of some seriously shoddy work.
NEW: How the push to ban data centre construction in Britain is based on sloppy research.
One paper widely cited in the media and by the Green Party contains multiple howlers:
- It claims that a single data centre will be responsible for 8% of the East of England's water shortfall. This is wrong by a factor of almost 100.
- It suggests data centres are to blame for England's predicted 5bn litre daily water shortfall. Yet under the most water-hungry assumptions, new data centres would account for less than 3% of it. Under more realistic assumptions, it's just 0.5%.
- It compares global AI water withdrawals with British household water consumption. But these are completely different things. Most withdrawn water is returned to its source. The comparison exaggerates AI's water footprint by around ten times.
- It repeatedly uses worst-case estimates of data centre water consumption, ignoring that many data centres use little or no water for cooling. One of its sources is literally titled Overestimating AI's water footprint.
The real cause of Britain's water shortages isn't data centres. It's our failure to build reservoirs.
samdumitriu.com/p/will-data-…
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
After the Green Party's "Zionism is Racism" vote, the Leader of Haringey Council, which is controlled by the Greens, wrote to various Synagogues in the borough to "reassure" them.
I want to show you Highgate Synagogue's reply. I believe it is worth reading in its entirety.
Synagogue rejects Green council leader’s attempt to ‘reassure’ them after “Zionism is Racism” vote
jewishnews.co.uk/synagogue-r…
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
Today is October. 7th.
Prior to 3 years ago, I didn’t really have a dog in the Israel-Palestine conflict. As a Brit my mental model of it was Northern Ireland; two mutually hostile communities held together by a fragile peace.
But the horrors of that day, and even more so the western leftist celebration of the gruesome violence, pushed me to a Zionist position. Not an extreme one of course, simply a belief that the state of Israel should definitely exist. That, to the British left, is an evil position to take. They sincerely think that state should be destroyed, violently if needed, and mouth absurd platitudes about some kind of single secular democratic state which can’t possible exist in the real world to try and pretend they aren’t advocating for the slaughter of millions of Jews.
Simply holding that Israelis should be able to live in peace without being murdered puts you at odds with the bulk of the left in the UK, and that was a shocking revelation to me. And none of them have done anything to help the cause of the Palestinians, who also deserve to live in peace.
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
On the third anniversary of the 7 October Hamas terrorist massacre, don't fall for the lies. Here is a fully sourced account of why you shouldn't believe the propaganda. And do not denounce it unless you've actually clicked on it and read it.
Gaza is the most lied about war in history. There was no genocide, no famine, no intentional targeting of children. These are modern-day blood libels. We need to expose all the Islamo-left lowlifes who spread these lethal falsehoods, says Brendan O’Neill
buff.ly/v0hJX0j
I visited the Nova exhibition in June which brought the burnt out cars, festival set, Hamas videos of 7th Oct and photos of the victims to London.
The endless pictures of young happy people who were murdered will never leave me. The horror of it all. The unnecessity. Imagining if it had happened at Reading Festival.
The world’s reaction to that day is what truly horrifies me. The celebration and unbelievable lies. The murders of Jews around the world, including in Manchester. The violent obsession to destroy a country and intimidate anyone who shows sympathy for 7th Oct victims. Now formal Green Party policy is to destroy a nation. Evil is clear and Oct 7th showed who people are, including those on the streets of the UK today not allowing people remembering the victims to have a moment’s peace.
I’m grateful to be a member of a political party which has moral clarity on this issue, one which doesn’t fall for reality inversion or victim blames. Please read some of the memories of the loved sons and daughters in the second photo 💜
👀
A pretty eye-popping list from @NeilDotObrien of all the left-wing crap the Arts Council is funding neilobrien.co.uk/p/we-should…
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
Imagine lying about such a thing in an age of rampant Holocaust denial. Or being so careless with the truth and so lost in a performance you no longer even really know.
Polanski said his family 'fled the Nazis'. But all four of his grandparents were born in Britain - long before the war trib.al/cEIekAl
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
Every time I think I've got a handle on how bad we are at building infrastructure, @Ben_A_Hopkinson finds new ways to shock me. Have pulled out some of the most jaw-dropping stats/charts in the thread below (1/?) xitter.cf/Ben_A_Hopkinson/status…
Britain has an infrastructure costs problem. But what's causing this and how can we fix it?
HS2 will cost up to £102.7bn for 140 miles. Spain built the second longest high speed network in the world, 2,500 miles, for less.
It isn't just HS2 though.
Underground extensions cost twice the per-mile average of France or Italy, and six times Spain's.
Heathrow's third runway, excluding new terminals, is expected to cost 10 to 70 times more than other runways.
British trams cost more than double the European average.
Why are these projects so expensive? There are eight key reasons:
1. Planning: it took 14 years, £300m, and 360,000 pages for the Lower Thames Crossing to go from being designated a national priority to receiving permission.
2. Environmental and Habitats Regulations: these gave us the £216m bat tunnel and the fish disco, as well as an 18,000 page environmental statement to re-open just 3.3 miles of railway on an existing alignment.
3. Judicial review: of 36 legal challenges to approved major projects, only four forced a re-decision. All four were approved again, but fighting a legal challenge can add £120m+ to a project's cost and mountains of paperwork.
4. Funding: the Treasury pays, but cannot directly control a project's spend, so it instead requires long business cases. Once given funding, promoters don't have the incentive to build more cheaply.
5. Procurement: currently generalist teams rely on consultants and are more focused on social value than past performance and value for money.
6. Regulation: quangos and departments create regulation that they don't bear the costs of. E.g. new tram projects must pay for 92.5% of the cost of moving utilities, which means utility companies demand a completely new set of pipes and wires.
7. Lack of state capacity: Madrid trebled its metro at a tenth of London's cost led by nine in-house engineers. The DfT has the second highest staff turnover of any department and cannot effectively oversee a project from design through construction.
8. Centralisation: Mayors cannot fund and approve their own infrastructure. If they could, they'd have strong electoral incentives to build quickly and cheaply, as seen in France and Spain.
The good news is that every one of these is a policy choice, which can be reversed. Some fixes need only a letter from the right minister and none require significantly more spending.
My new @CPSThinkTank report lays out these fixes and how to lower infrastructure costs. If we implement them, Britain could once again build the infrastructure it desperately needs. cps.org.uk/wp-content/upload…
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
CPS Director @LiamHalligan responds to the Prime Minister's party conference speech:
'Half a century ago, a Labour Chancellor named Healey had to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout to rescue our economy. We are dangerously close to history repeating itself.
'Andy Burnham had the chance to speak to the country today, to tell the public the measures his government would take to get our economy moving once more. Instead, he spoke solely to the room, preaching to the converted and telling Labour activists what they wanted to hear.
'An openness to reforming the triple lock may be welcome, but it remains to be seen how much his proposed changes would save.
'His attacks on Margaret Thatcher and her legacy are as predictable as they are historically nonsensical. Her reforms and the reforms that followed gave Britain growth, ownership and most importantly, hope.
'Burnham promised hope, but he cannot deliver.'
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
I’ve written about the grim trend of people asking @JewishNewsUK to remove their names from old articles because they no longer want to be publicly identifiable as Jewish.
This morning was the saddest yet. The children of a remarkable man, honoured by the late Queen, asked us to remove his obituary because it mentions them.
Britain has been enriched for generations by stalwarts of our community who were proud to put their names to what they built, created and contributed. Now their children are asking for those names to disappear.
The question is no longer whether British Jewish life is in retreat. It is how much of it will soon be left. This is not a country where my children can build their lives.
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
If this is not sobering, I do not know what is @rafaelmedoff …
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
Zoe Hollowood is incredibly brave to challenge her party in this way. I know what it’s like to state biological sex is real and be attacked for speaking common sense and telling the truth. She is not on my side of the political spectrum, but courage calls to courage everywhere.
Zoe should be supported in trying to get the Lib Dems to stop being silly, follow the law and respect the supreme court judgement.
Yesterday our chair @hollowood_zoe asked @LibDems conference in a trans debate:
"In 2026, are women allowed rights?
Rights to dignity.
Rights to safety.
Rights to say no."
Conference resoundingly voted 'no' thus deciding that women were second class citizens. 🧵
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
Couldn't agree more with Fiona. Rory Stewart's words are those of a man blinkered to the fact male violence against women and children is an endemic, enduring crisis in our society.
Rory Stewart, I beg you to come and see for yourself why the grooming gang scandal is far from irrelevant—not to my life, or to the lives of the thousands of other victims and families affected.
Our lives were torn apart by deeply embedded failures within institutions that enabled the mass sexual abuse of children, while those children were blamed, ignored and left to suffer the consequences.
Children were failed because institutions prioritised political sensitivities over safeguarding. That is not ancient history. It is a pattern of institutional failure that continues to have consequences today.
Please tell the families who lost loved ones as a result of these failures that their deaths were irrelevant.
To suggest the grooming gang scandal isn't important compared to other national issues completely misses the point. The very issues that allowed it to happen, fear of being accused of racism, institutional cowardice, political correctness and the prioritisation of community cohesion over children's safety, have not simply disappeared.
The scandal exposed a poison that had been allowed to spread through our institutions. It exposed how different standards could be applied depending on who the victims and perpetrators were, and how concerns were repeatedly ignored when authorities feared the consequences of acknowledging what was happening.
That failure didn't just destroy individual lives. It damaged public trust, allowed organised criminality to flourish, and left vulnerable children exposed to horrific abuse.
Downplaying this scandal is precisely why victims went unheard for decades.
And for anyone who thinks this is simply history: it isn't.
It is still happening. Children are still being failed. Victims are still being ignored. And the same institutional patterns continue to put people at risk.
The grooming gang scandal is not irrelevant. It is one of the clearest examples of what happens when institutions abandon their duty to protect children in favour of protecting themselves.
So please, Rory Stewart, tell me why that isn't important.
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
This will be my last comment on this whole Macklemore saga (or maybe not, who knows). In his self-aggrandising statement after he got dumped, he talked about weaponising accusations of antisemitism.
I want to talk about that. First, I don’t think that anyone who dressed up like this and claimed he didn’t know it was a Jewish stereotype gets to talk about what is and isn’t antisemitism. As I’ve said before, antisemitism is not necessarily or merely a hatred of Jewish people, or of all Jewish people. It’s a worldview built on libels about destructive Jewish power.
So this gets me to the second and more fundamental point. My presumption whenever I see someone talking about weaponising accusations of antisemitism is that they are, indeed, antisemites (or Jewhaters if you prefer).
Why? It’s axiomatic for those who proclaim themselves as anti-racists or progressives that minorities get to define what is bigotry targeting themselves. And that those minorities’ lived experience must be listened to and not spoken over. Not only are Jews denied these norms, but they are told that their accusations of bigotry are made in bad faith as a way for them to exploit their power and subjugate others. That’s two lots of double standards right there.
As the brilliant Henry Ergas wrote in The Australian earlier this month in response to Richard Flanagan who used the same tired lazy formulation:
“The goal is simple: to avoid addressing the substance of the charge by impugning the accuser's supposed motives. Critics are presumed to be acting in bad faith, fabricating persecution to advance their political ends. Hatred is thus rebaptised as legitimate criticism, while those who object become accomplices in a secret campaign to stifle debate.
Every attempt to expose antisemitism is therefore just further proof of Jewish deceit, allowing the Jews to be accused of inventing the antisemitism that now mars our national life.”
Laura Blumenthal 🇬🇧 retweeted
The death of Jason Arday is tragic, and makes me so angry.
Even the most casual observer could see he was a vulnerable fantasist.
A number of people at a number of academic institutions have serious questions to answer. They put him into positions he was clearly not qualified for so they could have a black wunderkind to show off, they pushed him into the spotlight for their own benefit.
His exposure was inevitable, a case of when, not if.
His whole world fell apart.
This is an infuriating read. How the police can fail to protect women with so much evidence and harm is mind spinning. The least the public ask is for dangerous people to be kept away from them. Wonder how many more Levys are out there. Terrifying. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jn…
