On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James talks about Technology Secretary Liz Kendall’s speech last week, which essentially sets out Britain’s AI strategy – and he explains why the strategy is determined by some rather limited choices.

• And then we speak to Hannah Keenan, from the Institute for Government, who takes James to task over an incredibly bad take on the pod from a few weeks ago.

James’s newsletter is here, and he’ll have something new up about Palantir by the time you’re reading this.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, YouTube and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

Palantir makes a lot of people mad.

The tech company, co-founded by Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump ally Peter Thiel, is unusual in its approach to public relations.

A few weeks ago, Palantir’s Twitter account posted an excerpt from a book co-written by CEO Alex Karp, setting out the 22 core tenets of a manifesto it calls ‘The Technological Republic’.

And though some of the ideas aren’t obviously objectionable – such as the observation that American power has underscored the long peace since World War II – some of the tenets are pretty spicy. For example:

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Yeah.

What’s more, this isn’t exactly strange behaviour from Palantir. Last year the company paid for digital billboards near a number of American universities claiming that “A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West”, which as an advertising slogan is slightly more provocative than “I’m lovin’ it” or “Just do it”.

So it is perhaps understandable and pretty obvious why Palantir scares people, including many British politicians, who have called for the company to be disentangled from the hundreds of millions of pounds of contracts it has with the British state.

For example, last month LibDem Treasury spokesperson Daisy Cooper called for an investigation into Palantir’s work with the Financial Conduct Authority, and Green MP Sian Berry said the company should have “no place” in UK government systems.

Then a couple of days before the Technological Republic excerpt was posted, a group of MPs urged the government to remove Palantir from a major NHS contract to build the health service’s Federated Data Platform (FDP).

And then most recently, just a few days ago, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan reportedly threatened to block plans for the Metropolitan Police to use Palantir’s software.

If you want a full accounting of Palantir’s reach in Britain, then Carol Cadwalladr’s new outlet, The Nerve, has a somewhat paranoid-looking red-string infographic with the details, but the upshot is that across the board, lots of politicians are unhappy.

So the obvious question to ask is… are they right to be? Do we actually need to worry about Palantir? Is the company really as malevolent as detractors imply? Or is this another Cambridge Analytica-style scandal, where despite the hysterical coverage there isn’t actually much there there?1

As I’m someone who styles himself as a tech-and-data guy, who writes about government tech projects and the like, I feel like I should know the answer to this, and have a considered opinion on Palantir.

But the reality is that I don’t – at least, not yet.

So this week, let’s have a look at the case for and against Palantir, and work out whether we should worry or not.

Read more

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, I’m still mad about solar farms, and Martin talks about his trip to see the Bat Tunnel. Plus we speak to economist Dan Davies about why the planning system is too adversarial, and how to fix it. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

ESSAY! Don’t forget to check out my exhaustive long read from last week, debunking all of the arguments against ‘industrial-scale’ solar.

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen this week, plus some shorter takes.

Before we begin, just because I’m a total show-off, here’s a photo from last Friday, of me speaking on a panel at Kings College London, alongside none other than Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales! Many thanks to Prof Elena Simperl for inviting me along!1

Anyway, I believe the event was recorded, so I’ll post the link as soon as it has been published.

Now, let’s get on with the links – this time I’m featuring:

• An intriguing new progressive project

• Someone built the bin app of my dreams!

• A jaw-dropping gender divide on nuclear energy

• A grim assessment of where the energy crisis is heading

• Someone did the maths on how many solar farms we need

• Why data centres provoke so much bad thinking

• A genius way to avoid future Chagos situations

• Could building data centres actually help us decarbonise?

Read more

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• Why Green Party complaints about “industrial scale” solar farms are fundamentally unserious.

• Martin visits the actual Bat Tunnel – and returns with a crazy plot twist.

• And we speak to Dan Davies about his pitch for a less combative planning system, Build the Rail! Save The Snails!

Dan Davies’s book, The Unaccountability Machine can be found here.

James’s newsletter is here, and his latest post is a deep dive into the arguments against solar farms – and he explains why none of them hold up.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his latest video, visiting the Bat Tunnel, is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, why it’s your patriotic duty to run your air conditioner, why phone signal is so bad in Britain, and the NIMBYs taking on… a cancer hospital. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

It is likely that this summer Britain will achieve a major decarbonisation milestone.

If the sun shines brightly, the wind blows fast, and demand on the grid is low, it is possible that the national grid will briefly be entirely free of fossil fuels.

And it will probably happen. Just yesterday, in fact, we nearly did it. At 11:30am, the share of gas fell to just 2%. So on a hot, windy, weekend afternoon in July, when factories are powered down and shops have closed, it could finally be the moment.

When it happens, it should be a moment we celebrate. Just like how Britain moved from a grid in the 1980s that was mostly powered by coal, to a grid today without a single coal power station, it will be another tangible sign that we really can build a better world.

And the word “build” there is important.

When the grid reaches net zero – at first momentarily, and in time permanently1 – it will be because we have transformed the built environment of the United Kingdom, and transformed our energy system by building new infrastructure.

But there is still a long way to go. Hitting net zero when circumstances are perfect is one thing, but we still need to build much more, so that we don’t need to fire up the gas generators when the sun isn’t shining.

And the only way we are going to do this is if we generate green energy at industrial scale. Think vast wind farms both at sea and on land, solar farms blanketing swathes of the countryside, and nuclear reactors to provide baseload power for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind does not blow. We’ll also need new pylons and other energy transmission infrastructure to move this new, clean energy around the country.

So it will be an enormous challenge, but – perhaps surprisingly – so far, it is not one at which Britain is failing. Around the country, utility-scale renewable projects are planned or are under construction, incrementally adding to Britain’s supply of green energy.

East Pye Solar in Norfolk is one such project. It’s a solar farm that will be chained across ten sites close to the village of Long Stratton, and the 500 megawatt (MW) project could one day generate enough clean energy to power 115,000 homes. It is so important that it has been designated a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project by the government, and it’s exactly what we need to be building, if we are serious about decarbonising the grid.

Sadly though, it seems that not everyone is quite so serious about decarbonising, and there is opposition to the project from politicians of all stripes.

For example, predictably Reform deputy leader Richard Tice, who splits his time between Dubai, London, and hopefully his constituency of Boston and Skegness, has criticised the development, because he’s the absolute worst.

But there is also opposition from one party that might be more surprising. The party that you might assume would be in favour of renewable energy, because until recently it was the party’s entire schtick.

I’m talking, of course, about the Green Party.

The leader of the Green Group on Norfolk County Council, Catherine Rowett, expressed her opposition to the scheme, telling the BBC that:

“The basic thing is that these shocking schemes are [proposed by] foreign investors looking to make a profit out of our ridiculous energy prices,” said Rowett.

“It’s a huge profit margin for those who can get some renewable energy from our sunshine and take the profits offshore.”

In other words, she has searched around and in an impressive feat of mental gymnastics, she has managed to find a rationale to oppose a large solar development in her proverbial backyard.

Subscribe now

It’s all about me

I’m now going to make this all about me.

When I saw the BBC story linked above, because I can’t help myself I posted about it, writing that “I see the Greens are opposing (checks notes) solar power now”.2

Let’s just say the reaction was… mixed. It wasn’t a pile-on – most of the feedback was either polite or at least as equivalently rude as I was, and you know, you shouldn’t dish it out if you can’t take it. So as my mentions filled up, I attempted to exercise good epistemological hygiene, by only blocking the truly abusive people, who invariably had anime avatars.

Anyway, seeing the Green supporters’ pushback was strangely interesting. It was striking just how many people were willing to drive an intellectual Zamboni behind Rowett, and attempt to justify or further explain her opposition to building solar, without conceding that she was, as I saw it, opposing the construction of solar energy.

But as open-minded as I like to think I am to changing my mind, basically all of the arguments against constructing the solar farm are bad. So I thought that rather than go toe-to-toe on Bluesky, I’d write a proper response here and dig into the real arguments that were made against building. And for ease, I’ve sorted them into four core arguments, and included a representative response that makes the case.

So let’s go through them and get mad.

Argument 1: Put solar panels on buildings instead

It’s a seductive argument. Instead of rows of solar panels in a field, why can’t we put them on top of buildings instead?

Now, I’m all for rooftop solar where it’s possible. In fact, a couple of weeks ago I signed a contract to have solar panels installed on my own home because, well, have you seen the news?

But rooftops are not a magic bullet that avoids the need for difficult choices. The reason we’re going to need large solar farms is because we can only generate the energy we need, and we can only do it affordably, if we do it at scale.

Let’s start with cost. Laying panels out in rows in a field is just obviously much cheaper than retrofitting existing buildings, for the same reason that building on a greenfield site is cheaper than brownfield. There’s no need to come up with a bespoke installation, put up scaffolding, or work around the existing built environment. And similarly, there’s no need to fight thousands of individual planning battles,3 or arrange thousands of separate new grid connections.

However, I think the bigger problem is nobody realises just how many buildings we’d need to transform.

Let’s say that like East Pye, we wanted to generate 500MW for 115,000 homes, and let’s imagine the best case scenario for rooftop solar: we’re not putting panels on a historic building, or somewhere architecturally tricky in the centre of a city.

Instead, we’re putting panels on top of a boring, massive metal box, like the 2-million-square-foot Amazon warehouse in Tilbury, Essex. It’s equivalent in size to 28 football pitches, and the roof is relatively flat, so this should be the easiest install in the world.

Except... in 2020, Amazon proudly announced that it had installed 11,500 panels onto the warehouse in its largest single solar deployment in Europe, and yet despite the enormous size, total generation capacity was just 3.4MW, or equivalent to 700 homes.

That means to generate the equivalent energy to East Pye, you’d need over 147 Amazon warehouses.4

And again, this is the best case scenario. In fact, this warehouse is the largest single warehouse in the UK. And this back of the envelope calculation doesn’t take into account the complexities of retrofitting panels on different types of buildings in the real world.

So I think this basically illustrates why achieving utility-scale solar with just rooftop solar is largely a fantasy. And given costs are constrained – because money is not infinite – if you want to deploy solar and get the most bang for your buck, then large solar farms need to be a significant part of the solution.

Argument 2: Large solar farms should be community owned and the problem is private equity

On an emotional level, I can understand the appeal of ‘community ownership’ of solar assets. It implies that the energy generated will pay back to the local area, just as putting solar panels on your house means you can sell energy back to the grid.

The only problem is, well, there’s absolutely nothing practical about building solar in this way.

The term is used pretty loosely, but as far as I can tell, the largest solar farm in Britain that we can reasonably call ‘community-owned’ is currently Derrill Water in Devon. It only has a capacity of 42MW – less than a tenth of what East Pye will manage. And even there, the model is that only 10% of the shares are reserved for local residents and local businesses to buy – with the remaining 90% sold on the open market just like normal commercial developments.

And for context, the second largest community-owned site I could find is Ray Valley in Oxfordshire – which generates only 19.2MW. The list rapidly shrinks from there, with most other community-owned facilities weighing in at around 5MW, a one hundredth the size of East Pye.

So I suspect that in reality, if we did insist on a ‘community’ owned East Pye, it would effectively just mean that no solar gets built. And at risk of sounding like a neoliberal shill in my old age, this sort of illustrates why private equity firms like East Pye’s owner, Macquarie, are often involved in solar deployments – because they can do something ‘communities’ cannot. They can raise the cash to build the solar farm quickly, and because they own other things around the country (or world), they are better hedged against any one project failing.5

By contrast, if local investors, or even a local government like Norfolk County Council, were to put all of their spare cash into a solar farm, and it were to fail for some reason,6 locals would be totally out of pocket.

Finally on this argument, there is the very specific point that with East Pye it isn’t just any private equity company involved. Macquarie is the Australian multinational that until 2017 owned and arguably mismanaged Thames Water.

Surely I’m not going to defend that company getting involved?

I mean, I’m not looking to specifically hold a candle for Macquarie here, but it does seem like there is a significant difference between a company putting up the cash to build a new solar farm, and taking ownership of an existing, decaying asset like Thames Water. Not least because there is less that can go wrong, as less electricity can’t leak like water can and worst case scenario, the new thing doesn’t get built, instead of the existing utility getting worse. So honestly it doesn’t bother me that much.7

Argument 3: Farmland is best kept for food production

One common argument against building new houses on greenfield sites is that whatever is planned is taking away valuable farmland. It is usually only an absolutely massive coincidence that the proposed development is close to the opponent’s own home.

So it is fun to see the argument deployed here, against a solar farm. As much like how people don’t seem to understand the scale required for a renewable grid (see above), I don’t think people quite appreciate the unnatural reality of farming.

Let’s start with biodiversity. As my YIMBY Pod co-host Martin likes to point out, farming isn’t great for biodiversity! In fact, the entire point of a farm is to plant rows of the same crops as a monoculture. And even though fields might appear natural, they are basically just as man-made as our cities. That’s why George Monbiot-types have tried to make ‘rewilding’ a thing. So it really isn’t clear to me why replacing crops with solar panels mounted on frames is particularly different here, not least because solar farms tend to place panels on frames on top of grass fields anyway.8

But what about the food production point above? I’m not sure if the respondent here is making an argument that it’s better to grow locally for environmental reasons, or an argument about food security.

If it’s the former, then we can immediately discount it. There isn’t a link between the distance from farm-to-table and emissions, because we live in a world of industrial production and container ships. Hannah Ritchie wrote a great piece about it, arguing that if you really care about carbon impact, it’s more important to think about what you eat. So if you actually care about the carbon impact of your food, you should become a vegetarian or vegan.9

But what if the food argument is more about security? Well, the reality is that Britain has not been self-sufficient for literally hundreds of years. By 1870, we were only 60% self-sufficient in terms of food, and we are only 65% self-sufficient today.10

So I guess I’m left wondering, is this really a problem? Unlike energy (more on that in a moment), food imports are not subject to any particular bottlenecks like the Strait of Hormuz, and the overwhelming majority of our imports come from 27 of our closest democratic allies in the European Union.

And finally, the numbers are what really make this non-issue the most stark. A full 69% of Britain’s land area is agricultural land, and as of December 2024, just 0.1% was solar farms. So what problem are we actually trying to solve here?11

Argument 4: Energy sovereignty is a good thing

This is the argument I find the funniest. One easy way to land in a bad place when arguing on the internet is to transpose an argument because it feels like it is the right shape, even though the context is completely different.

An obvious example of it now is how sometimes people try to argue that AI is not a major technological breakthrough, following the template set by cryptocurrencies and NFTs – even though AI is, obviously, a massive deal.

Anyway, I think something similar is happening here with the argument for ‘energy sovereignty’.

In principle, controlling our own energy system is hugely important. Recent years have taught us how precarious it is if oil and gas prices are set by Russia and events in the Middle East.

But this argument does not transpose well from fossil fuels to renewables.

Why? Because unless Putin follows Mr Burns’ lead and attempts to block the sun, who owns the solar farm does not actually matter all that much as long as it is physically located in Britain.

This is for obvious reasons. Unlike our gas power plants, our solar farms do not rely on a steady stream of raw material getting shipped in from some of the world’s most volatile regions.

And even if we were to go to war with Australia for some reason, the physical energy generating infrastructure will remain intact and will continue to work as the sun will continue to shine. So the biggest problem in that scenario will be a severe lack of bar staff in London.

However, more seriously there is a real energy sovereignty argument – it’s just not the one being made above. But let’s quickly steelman it for good measure.

And that real argument is, of course, China.

If a Chinese company owned a solar farm in Britain, I would definitely be slightly more concerned. Let’s imagine if a Chinese firm bought East Pye from Macquarie. I don’t want a strategic adversary of Britain to potentially have an ‘off’ switch for thousands of homes.

But even if this were the case, in a crisis the infrastructure is still ultimately in Britain, so there would be little to stop the government taking control – as it did with the emergency nationalisation of British Steel last year.

But that is just operations. What about manufacturing? It’s not clear where East Pye will be sourcing its panels from, but given that 80% of global photovoltaic manufacturing is in China, Chinese panels are pretty much an inevitability.

So is this a case for caring more about energy sovereignty? Perhaps. But if it is, it’s also a case against building any solar at all.

Take climate change seriously

The reason I’ve spent upwards of 3,000 words getting mad about this is because unlike many Green activists and politicians, I take the energy transition seriously. If we want to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, not to mention secure our energy supply against global instability, we need to move to renewable energy with a sense of urgency.

“Emissions must peak in 2020 and start stabilising, reaching net zero by 2030. The urgency of the situation should not be underestimated,” wrote the authors of Energising The East, a report on energy transformation in East Anglia, published in 2020.

It was commissioned by the aforementioned Catherine Rowett, back when she was an MEP, and I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment.12

However, it is now 2026. The 2030 deadline she endorses in the report, and the one set by Ed Miliband for decarbonising the grid, is now only four years away. So what are we going to do?

If we’re serious, we cannot let perfect be the enemy of the good. We don’t have the time to indulge unworkable fantasies about community ownership, or waste time pretending there are get-out-of-jail-free cards. We need to to build more renewable energy at an industrial scale.13

And if we want a grid in the future that isn’t just occasionally net zero, but is permanently net zero – then we need to start building now.

If you’re interested in politics, policy, and actually being sensible about things like energy and climate, then make sure you subscribe (for free!) to my newsletter to get more like this in your inbox.

Subscribe now

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• Why it’s patriotic duty to switch on our air conditioners this summer.

• The NIMBY battle against a cancer hospital (!!!)

• And we speak to Maxwell Marlow from TYI Strategy about why phone signal in Britain is so crap – and how we can fix it.

James’s newsletter is here, and his latest is about his most left-wing opinion.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his latest video, visiting the actual Bat Tunnel, is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I get extremely mad about the delays to the Leeds Tram, and we speak to Andrew Greenway about his ideas for fixing the Civil Service so that it actually… works effectively. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting things I’ve seen lately – plus some shorter takes.

I hope you don’t mind the strange Sunday scheduling – I needed to fit it in between my big, surprisingly left-wing take from Friday, and a new YIMBY Pod dropping tomorrow.

Anyway, this time I’m featuring:

• My review of a 37 year old TV show

• Why we shouldn’t nationalise Thames Water

• An actually good SNL UK sketch

• A new word to describe Britain’s pathological inability to build infrastructure

• A depressing reflection on the rise of antisemitism

• And a very satisfying takedown of Mr Beast

Read more

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I get extremely mad about the delays to the Leeds Tram, and we speak to Andrew Greenway about his ideas for fixing the Civil Service so that it actually… works effectively. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

As I get older, I can feel my political views becoming more boring and moderate.

The way I describe my politics now is that I used to think I was quite left-wing – then Jeremy Corbyn happened.

So over the years, I’ve become decidedly more milquetoast and centre-left-leaning.

I can see this when I look back. Though I never started out on the very, very far left – I was never an annoying Marxist as a student1 – I was into plenty of far left cultural output. I grew up listening to punk bands who wanted to smash the state, and some of my favourite comedians were people like Marks Thomas and Steel.2

However, today, aged 38, my views have evolved, and as a balding adult with a mortgage, I’m more into reforming the state, and I now find a lot of people to my left quite annoying.

For example, when I see Zack Polanski making absurd spending commitments and unworkable promises, rather than find him inspiring, I just think it destroys his credibility. And when I see middle-class conspiracy theorists like Jolyon Maugham and Carol Cadwalladr promoting distrust in institutions, it makes me depressed.

So broadly speaking, today I’m much more of a shill for the centrist establishment than I was. My broad view of economic policy today is basically “economics is real but we should help poor people”, and on social policy it is “biology is real but no need to be an arsehole about it”.

And on foreign policy I’ve now made peace with the arms industry, and would very much like Ukraine to have access to all of the missiles and bombs they could ever need.

However, there is one area where I haven’t moderated.

Try as I might to chill out about the issue, I still find my blood boiling, and transform Hulk-like into a raving Marxist whenever I think about it.

And that issue is private schools.

So I thought that this week I’d write about why I haven’t moderated away from the position that really, private schools shouldn’t exist.

Read more

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James and Martin get unusually mad about the latest developments in the West Yorkshire team saga. We just want a tram!

• Then James speaks to Andrew Greenway, a partner at Public Digital about his fantastic essay on fixing the Civil Service, titled ‘In Permanence Crisis’.

Noah Vickers’ reporting on the West Yorkshire tram is here.

James’s newsletter is here, his latest is not as billed on the show, but actually all about Artemis II, and why he’s still inspired despite, well, you know…

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his latest video, visiting the actual Bat Tunnel, is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, I talk about Tory plans for a ‘National Pothole Patrol’ and how AI can be used to spot potholes and Martin tells the story of a big NIMBY campaign to save a car park. Plus we speak to Asif Ghafoor, CEO of EV charger company BE.EV, who explains to us why building out the public charger network can be a nightmare. Listen here!

The contrast over the last ten days has been almost too much to bear.

On the one hand, we watched as NASA’s Artemis II astronauts travelled further from the Earth than anyone ever has before. It was an incredible feat of science and engineering. A tangible manifestation of what humans can achieve when they work together.

But at the same time we witnessed the worst person on the planet threatening to wipe out Iranian civilisation in its entirety. Whether the ceasefire has held or not by the time you’re reading this, it was another grim milestone in the unravelling of the post-1945 world order.

Given the latter, along with everything else Trump has done, some people had a very understandable reaction. They were keen to make it clear that they did not feel the same sense of excitement and wonder about this latest moonshot, as we associate with the Apollo missions of the 1960s.

And it wasn’t just the people you might expect saying this.

In fact, despondency was the response of a couple of Britain’s highest profile science communicators – the sorts of people you might expect to be particularly excited by the Artemis programme.

Read more

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, I talk about Tory plans for a ‘National Pothole Patrol’ and how AI can be used to spot potholes and Martin tells the story of a big NIMBY campaign to save a car park. Plus we speak to Asif Ghafoor, CEO of EV charger company BE.EV, who explains to us why building out the public charger network can be a nightmare. Listen here!

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of of the most interesting links I’ve seen, plus some shorter takes.

Apologies for the lack of longer essay post so far this week – it’s nearly done, and I’ll hopefully be dropping it as a rare weekend post, either tomorrow or Sunday (it has been one of those weeks).

In the meantime, here’s some links, where this time I’m featuring:

• Martin’s visit to a notorious tunnel

• Psychic James striking again

• The infuriating reason the Leeds Tram was delayed

• Why “Kebabs” are stopping Britain building trams

• A valiant attempt to kill a new bullshit claim about data centres at birth

• Why I’m mad at a billionaire philanthropist

• And my brief power-user review of the new MacBook Neo

Now let’s get on with it!

Read more

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James talks about Tory plans for a ‘National Pothole Patrol’, and explains how AI can be used to detect potholes.

• Martin tells the story of a big NIMBY campaign to save… a car park.

• And we speak to Asif Ghafoor, CEO of BE.EV, about the bureaucratic and political challenges of rolling out electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

James’s newsletter is here, his latest on the AI/copyright debate is here.

You might also like his written piece on how AI can be used to spot potholes is here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his latest video is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we speak to former TfL head of innovation Thomas Ableman about why Swiss buses and trains work in perfect harmony – and why we need to build our own ‘mini-Switzerland’ in Britain. Plus Martin digs into the wild success of the British wine industry, and how it’s all thanks to robots. Listen/subscribe here.

I thought I was going crazy during the Brexit wars.

For several years as Britain attempted to negotiate its exit from the European Union, the connection between the political debate and material reality seemed to be completely severed, to the point that there was a real sense of unreality about it.

If you followed the coverage closely, like I wasted my life doing, you’d have witnessed politicians and lobby journalists getting bogged down in Westminster parlour games about backstops and Malthouse Compromises, yet once you pushed the bullshit aside, the reality was an alarmingly simple, binary choice.

Britain had to either choose to draw the customs and regulatory border on the island of Ireland, separating Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic with a hard border, or it had to choose to place it in the Irish Sea, keeping Northern Ireland in the EU’s regulatory orbit.

One option would result in more internal trade friction with the rest of the United Kingdom. The other would result in border infrastructure dividing the island of Ireland. Both were pretty unpalatable, but those were the only options on the table – and everything else was just noise.

This remained true, even when the Windsor Framework was eventually agreed, seemingly settling the issue. However, this was not a magic solution that somehow subverted the binary choice; it just obfuscated it, with procedural mechanisms like the ‘Retail Movement Scheme’ and the ‘Stormont Break’.

This is because, fundamentally, the ‘Framework’ only holds because Northern Ireland remains de facto in the Single Market for goods, and Britain has implicitly accepted a degree of permanent regulatory alignment to ease border checks and avoid significant physical infrastructure. What nobody wants to really say aloud is that if the British government did, for some reason, decide to diverge significantly from the EU, it would just reopen the same wounds and the same divisions, and the status of Northern Ireland would be a crisis once again.

Anyway, I mention this not because I want to give us all trauma flashbacks, but because there’s another binary choice that Britain is currently weighing.

Like the status of Northern Ireland, this choice sits on a red-hot culture war issue, and is the subject of a deafening amount of noise and magical thinking.

That’s right, I’m talking about the interminable question of what to do about AI training on copyrighted works. And it’s time for everyone to get a grip, as like Brexit there is a clear choice – and in my view, only one credible decision we can make.

Press subscribe now before you know my opinion!

Subscribe now

The question at hand

For Britain, the AI/copyright debate is not an academic debate. It’s a live policy issue.

As things stand, we do not have a settled legal regime to handle what is technically referred to as Text and Data Mining (TDM) – the act of scraping existing works to train AI models.

That’s why since 2021,1 successive governments have been attempting to figure out the best way to do it. Should we protect the creative industries with tight intellectual property protections? Or should we unleash the AI companies to train on whatever they’d like?

It’s a question with vested interests on both sides, and in recent months as it seemed as though a decision was going to be made, both opponents and proponents have been flexing their lobbying muscles.

For example, on the pro-TDM side, Microsoft hired the agency Public First to make the case for a more permissive training regime, putting together a slick website that outlines the different policy options along with a calculation of how each would impact the British economy. It claims that under the most permissive training regime, it could add £510bn to Britain’s GDP – that’s around a 15% boost. Conversely, if training is highly restricted, the uplift could be limited to just £290bn.

And on the other side, the News Media Association, which represents publishers who want to retain strict copyright protections, hired Oliver and Ohlbaum to make the case that the supposed economic uplift is overstated – and they’ve put out a long document taking issue with many of the assumptions in Public First’s modelling.

So this is basically why there’s a binary choice. Whatever the government decides to do, whether it likes it or not, it is going to make a whole bunch of people extremely unhappy.

That’s probably why last month, just as it looked like the government might take a firm position it decided to… not make a decision.

This was notable in itself, as it marked a backtrack from being quite keen on a permissive TDM regime. And it means for the time being at least, the government’s official position is “¯\_(ツ)_/¯”.

However, it wasn’t a total non-event, as at the same time it also published two important documents: a report on AI and copyright, which rounds up responses to the earlier consultation, and an impact assessment outlining the different policy options the government will have to choose from.

And to be fair to the government, I do understand why this feels like a difficult decision. The creative industries represent around 5.5% of the British economy in the here and now,2 and are an area where we punch well above our weight on the world stage – whereas conceivably, a permissive TDM regime would be placing a bet on a promising, but not-completely-proven technology.

In other words, doing anything that might disrupt this major sector of the British economy might feel unwise. And that’s before you even think about how it would inevitably lead to clips on the news of Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, and Mark Rylance et al slagging off the government.

So you can understand why Ministers may be reluctant to do anything which could conceivably harm one of our biggest cash cows.

However, I’m not sure the decision is actually that difficult once you strip away the noise.

The more I think about the issue, and the more heated I see the debate become, the more I can’t help but see the startling unreality in the discourse, that reminds me so much of the bluster and bullshit during the Brexit process.

And though I’m about a trillion times more sympathetic on an emotional level towards the creative industries than I was towards the Brexiteers, I can’t help but conclude that the only real option we have is to let the AI companies train.

Worst opinion alert

Hold your pitchforks steady – hear me out first!

Let’s imagine a world where the rights-holders get what they want, and training AI models using copyrighted data is banned or heavily restricted in Britain. Does this prevent British creative works from being ripped off, or protect the creative industries from the AI tsunami?

Assuming the rest of the world continues to exist, no.

The reason copyright has worked effectively over the last century or so is that it has been governed by a series of international treaties like the 1886 Berne Convention, and more recently the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organisation treaty. These agreements enshrined mutual recognition of intellectual property rights across 180 countries, including all of the largest and most important players like the United States and China.

But there is no equivalent consensus for TDM. There is no similar agreement, and several major jurisdictions have already enshrined extremely permissive training rules. For example, Japan, Singapore and the United States all variously allow AI training on copyrighted works, under the rules they have set.

And this reality means the die has already been cast. If a model is trained in one of these more permissive countries, if a British work is also available there (and it likely will be because this is the modern world), then it will be fair game to sweep it up for training a model, whether we like it or not.

The only way to stop it would be for Britain – a middle power – to talk the other countries into changing their rules, and forge some massive new international agreement. And it should go without saying that, obviously, this isn’t going to happen because… why would anyone go along with it? America is home to the major AI companies, China is also competing to be the AI leaders, and even in the fantasy reality where the superpowers could be persuaded to restrict training, every other country would have a strong incentive to stake out a more permissive position in order to attract some of that AI cash.

To think otherwise is, I think, like when the more delusional Brexiteers claimed that the German car makers would somehow save us, and persuade the EU to compromise the integrity of the Single Market for our sake.

Anyway, let’s go with the fantasy for one last point, and imagine a world where the British government was magically able to protect British creative works from AI training, by putting some sort of forcefield around Abbey Road, Pinewood Studios, Rockstar North and the Bake Off Tent.

Would this stop AI from transforming Britain’s creative industries? Of course not.

The reason the creative industries are such a big part of our economy is that British-made stuff is extremely popular around the world. So when AI changes what people consume, or how cultural works are produced, it is inconceivable that it won’t have a profound effect on Britain too. Regardless of whether we allow training or not, the reality is that jobs are going to change, business models are going to have to adapt, and the economics of creativity will shift.

The AI opportunity

I want to be clear, I’m not saying that creative types are wrong to feel aggrieved by the turmoil that AI will unleash on their industry. Or that it won’t feel like a violation to have your work scraped and trained on, if that’s not what you want.

But my point is that the real policy question here is not whether the anger is legitimate, but whether a restrictive TDM regime would actually protect the creative industries. I’m just not convinced that it will.

And anyway, equally importantly, the feelings of creators are not the only thing that matters here. The more important reason to allow training is that, without it, Britain would hobble its ability to take advantage of the opportunities presented by AI. Restricting training would carry real costs, to no advantage.

So why is this so important? The problem as things stand – and the entire reason the government wants to establish a legal regime for TDM in the first place – is that if an AI company wanted to train a model here in Britain using copyrighted works, it would carry huge legal uncertainties, compared to countries where the rules are clearer.

Without clearer permissions, the fear then is that it would push innovative AI companies abroad, and make Britain a less attractive place to build a tech business. Whereas if we get the rules right, there’s potentially a huge economic boost.

And this is not just an academic debate. At the moment, the government in Westminster, and Sadiq Khan in City Hall are currently courting Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and are trying to persuade it to move its headquarters to London.

This could be an easy win. The company definitely has a strong reason to want to move out of the US – just weeks ago there was the spectacular fall-out with US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who threatened to punish the company for not allowing its tech to be used for mass surveillance.

So this is a big opportunity. If Britain could persuade Anthropic to make the move, it would be a huge win for the British tech industry, not to mention future tax receipts if the company continues rapidly scaling. But will it make the move? Maybe, but it will surely be significantly less likely to do so if training its frontier models could land the company in hot water.

However, this argument isn’t just about the big names in AI. The uncertainty is also affecting AI deployment in ‘normal’ companies too. For example, the Treasury Select Committee has already identified a lack of clarity over liability as a problem for the financial sector. The government’s own impact assessment, linked above, concludes that “under the status quo, UK copyright law would continue to act as a significant constraint on competitive general-purpose model training in the UK and could inhibit wider AI development and adoption.”

And the assessment also reveals why a much hoped for potential compromise option – requiring AI companies to licence content from creators – does not really work in the real world either.

Leaving aside the technical difficulty (and arguably impossibility) of identifying what training data was used when generating AI responses to prompts3 (which would be required to pay royalties), the impact assessment concludes that even this compromise wouldn’t be good for the economy, concluding that:

“This could dampen UK development and adoption of AI, reduce the productivity benefits of AI and hold back economic growth across the whole economy, including the [creative industries].”

We should take this point seriously. It doesn’t mean that the creative industries should simply suck it up and just take the pain. But it does mean that we’re going to have to think more carefully about what policy tools we do have to support creators – rather than reach for something which won’t work, and will harm the broader economy in the process.

We don’t have to like it

I’m writing this knowing that some people reading will likely be raging by this point.

To be absolutely clear, I don’t love that we face this difficult, binary decision either. I, too, am a normal human who enjoys watching human-made films and reading human-written books. And hell, as you can tell from reading my newsletter, I have a direct vested interest in people continuing to pay for human-created content in the future! (Don’t forget, it’s your last chance to get 25% off annual subscriptions!)

But the above is my honest analysis of the world as it is, and will continue to be. The fact is, we are in the midst of a technological transition, and even if OpenAI, Anthropic et al fail, and the current bubble bursts, the fact is that we are never going to un-invent Large Language Models and generative AI.

So the disruption is coming for better or worse, and the British government alone cannot hold back the tide. Whether we like it or not, our creative industries will be reshaped by forces much bigger than ourselves.

Given this, then, the real choice is not about whether to ‘protect’ the creative industries or not by restricting TDM. The choice is whether we let this transformation happen to us, or whether we try to adapt to the new reality, and seize the opportunities created by the change.

And that’s why creating a legal regime that reflects this new reality makes sense. We should try to capture the potential economic uplift from AI here in Britain – so that if the technology does prove as transformative as expected, we can use some of that extra cash to, say, subsidise things that are nice to have but unprofitable, like the arts and creative works.

Creatives are not doomed

All the above said, I don’t think that even if we accept the reality of the AI situation, it means that human-made creative works are doomed.

That’s because I think what will prove most valuable in an economy transformed by AI won’t be the visuals on the screen, or the noises coming from the speakers – it will be the connection between the artist and consumers of their art.

I genuinely believe that even if generating ‘content’ carries zero marginal cost, and Hollywood-quality visuals can be spat out with a few taps on a phone, people will still want to pay a premium for human-made works, both online and in real life.

This is because what’s going to matter most isn’t the art in and of itself, but the parasocial connection we feel with the artists and creators we like. It’s human nature to crave connections with people, and personalised AI can never replace collective experiences like being in the crowd at a gig where everyone is belting out the same song.

I think there’s already strong evidence of this. Look at the explosion of YouTube as a platform, which makes the direct connection between artists and fans way more tangible than traditional media. If you enjoy someone’s work, you become invested in their success.

And you can tell I mean this, because this is literally my business model too. I’m betting that people will still pay to hear my opinions, not because of a utilitarian desire to obtain factual information, but because you are interested in what flesh and blood human James O’Malley has to say.

So let’s get beyond the unreality of the current debate and admit what is real, and what the choices actually are in a world reshaped by AI. Let’s not be like the Brexiteers, denying reality because it is inconvenient. And let’s figure out new ways to support the creative industries, instead of making doomed attempts to cling on to the old.

Whether you’re nodding furiously in agreement or are simply just furious, you read all the way to the end. So support human content by subscribing to my newsletter (for free!) to get more politics, policy and tech takes direct to your inbox.

Subscribe now

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we speak to former TfL head of innovation Thomas Ableman about why Swiss buses and trains work in perfect harmony – and why we need to build our own ‘mini-Switzerland’ in Britain. Plus Martin digs into the wild success of the British wine industry, and how it’s all thanks to robots. Listen/subscribe here.

Hello, it’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen this week, plus some shorter takes. Don’t worry, I’ve got a new essay post dropping tomorrow – I just need to add the finishing touches and brace for the reaction.

So in the meantime, here’s some links. This time I’m featuring:

• Why running a council is a nightmare game you simply cannot win.

• Everything you need to know ahead of the imminent launch of Artemis II.

• An awesome map revealing how grimly expensive your local area is.

• Why the Iran war makes things… even worse than you thought.

• A prototype for how the National Data Library could work.

• How hearing aid technology is about to become dramatically better.

• What happened when a practicing Mormon was given $10,000 to gamble.

• And a guy who is attempting to speed-run Tesco.

And don’t forget, this is your last chance to take advantage of my biggest special offer ever – click this button and you can bag yourself 25% off an annual subscription so you can read Odds and Ends every week! If you value my work, I really appreciate the support.

Get 25% off for 1 year

See me on a panel with... Jimmy Wales!

One last plug before we hit the links, as it’s pretty mad – I’ve been invited to join a panel discussion on AI at King’s College London on 24th April, with Professor Elena Simperl and none other than... Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia!

It’s an event to discuss Jimmy’s new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, and tickets are free. So do come along and watch as I try to think of something clever to say in the presence of an internet legend and an eminent academic.

Now let’s get on with the links!

Read more

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we speak to former TfL head of innovation Thomas Ableman about why Swiss buses and trains work in perfect harmony – and why we need to build our own ‘mini-Switzerland’ in Britain. Plus Martin digs into the wild success of the British wine industry, and how it’s all thanks to robots. Listen/subscribe here.

Today there is very big bin news! In England, new rules are now in force requiring councils to provide weekly food waste collections, which in practice means that you now need to have a fourth bin outside your house.

So to, er, celebrate, I thought I’d send out again this fantastic guest post that my partner, Dr Liz Lutgendorff, wrote for me just over a year ago. (Don’t worry, a brand new essay on an extremely controversial topic and your regular Odds and Ends links newsletter will be landing later this week. So stay tuned!)

Anyway, back when Liz wrote this, she was working in local government, attempting to digitise London’s waste management, so I had to ask her… How many bins do we actually need? Why do some people think we need seven?! And how many bins is too many?

So here she is with… the seven things you need to know about seven bins.

1. It’s easier if you separate at source

How many bins do we need? The answer… is complicated.

Generally, from the perspective of the waste management industry, the more bins we have the better. The best way to increase recycling is to separate waste at source, because it means that you do the hard work.

This is because it’s very difficult to separate different types of waste when they are all mixed together, and the more work the local authority has to do when it receives your waste, the more expensive it gets.

And it is especially the case when there's ‘residual’ waste – basically everything that doesn’t go into your recycling bin. It just isn’t economical, safe or sanitary to separate out food waste from random plastic wrappers, nappies, cat litter, or ‘Free the PAF’ badges.

This is why I think new rules that mandate separate food waste collections from next year are a good thing, because if food is properly separated, it can be composted and therefore turned into something that can be reused.

2. It’s all about money

Legislation prescribes the types of collections that can be made available in your local authority, but what happens to waste in your area is mostly up to your council. And that can be dictated by a number of things, but one of them is the cost of disposal.

Recycling is better to dispose of because there’s often a commodity at the end that can be sold on, so the overall cost of the disposal of your grass clippings or baked bean tins is lower than the disposal of your kitchen black bag waste. 1

But not everything is as saleable or easy to dispose of.

For example. extracting metals from waste electronics is, in theory, valuable. There are people willing to pay for copper, aluminium, and so on. But the problem is that the disposal cost might still be relatively high if the device requires multiple different recovery processes to be run.

So if you want to recycle something that is hard to recycle, the cost of this disposal is also higher.

3. Dirty power is better than the alternatives

When your bins are collected, the trash is taken either to a Materials Recovery Facility for recycling – or sent on for either landfill or incineration. Crucially though, the latter is now the cheapest way to dispose of waste.

Big items, like a knackered old sofa, can be shredded first, but ultimately everything sent to the incinerator is going up in smoke.2

And this can be controversial.

There was an article on the BBC in 2024 on how incinerators are now the UK’s dirtiest form of power.3

That might sound bad, but it’s important to remember that an incinerator is not an intentional energy source. Energy is just a byproduct of the most environmentally friendly and lowest cost method of disposing waste that doesn’t have any saleable value after processing or recycling.4

And there are safeguards on this. All incinerators have permitted levels of what pollutants they can release, it’s heavily monitored, and anytime there’s a breach of those levels, the Environment Agency needs to be notified.5

That’s why nitrous oxide – laughing gas – is so annoying. Lately there’s been an epidemic across the country of nitrous oxide bottles ending up in incinerators, exploding during incineration, and instantly breaching the emissions allowed for the day.6

Incineration then is not perfect, but landfill is worse,7 and it’s what we’ve got to work with right now if we don’t want rubbish piling up in the streets.

4. Capitalism is garbage

If you want to get philosophical about things, you might wonder why we have to pay for so much waste disposal?

The answer is because of the way that products are manufactured and sold to us.

Most things (or the packaging they come in) aren’t recyclable8 and the companies that produce them generally don’t have to care about that. The end result is that the cost of disposal is passed on to us, through councils, who have statutory obligations to reduce waste and to ensure it’s properly disposed of. So pound shop tat, fast fashion and Temu purchases aren’t the deals they appear to be, at least when looked at from a whole-systems point of view.

One small step that the UK is taking however,9 is the introduction of Extended Producer Responsibilities for those companies that have plastic packaging. Essentially, companies will have to pay the government when they use certain types of plastic, and the government will give councils a proportion of that cash, as they will have to pay for its disposal.

But the problem is not just plastic packaging, it’s the entire ecosystem that encourages excessive consumption. And working out what is the least wasteful way of doing things is often tricky.

For example, there’s a popular idea now about ‘cost per use’ - not just from a monetary point of view but from the environmental cost associated with production. If you buy a canvas bag, the materials and production costs mean that you probably have to use that bag about 1,400 times for it to have a net environmental benefit.

Similarly, buying glass or (even worse) metal containers is not necessarily more environmentally friendly than plastic because of the greater effort / processing involved in its creation.10 Driving across a city to go to that one store that allows you to fill your own containers may not be worth it for the petrol you are using to get there.

And if you want some tragic news about your compostable cutlery, it’s often not actually compostable. Common recycling processes like anaerobic digestion or open row composting don’t break down the materials in the same way as organic matter. In fact, most ‘compostable’ packaging needs a specialist recycling facility, so your ‘biodegradable’ spork will probably be treated as a contaminant and will be incinerated.

So there’s mismatches between what is perceived to be environmentally friendly and what is perceived as the least friendly.

However, this doesn’t meant that trying to be sustainable is impossible. The best way to deal with your trash is not to ‘wishcycle’11 by throwing stuff in the recycling, and hoping that the material processing facility will be able to deal with it. Just throw the spork in the bin, as at least it’ll be turned into energy.12

5. It’s commodities trading all the way down

The best way to think about waste is as an industry. Everything around the disposal of your household waste is big business.

Firstly, your council will have one or multiple contracts for the disposal of what is picked up from your kerbside. Then there are more specialised recycling organisations for more niche recycling products, like paint, ink cartridges, car batteries or even used oil.

These organisations will either be the place where these commodities get recycled, or they will be a middleman, selling it onto another company, who can turn it into another product.13

There has been a lot of consolidation in this space, and today many waste organisations are huge multinational conglomerates. And this means that there is a trade-off.

On the downside, this consolidation could mean that waste will travel further to be processed, as we’ve seen with waste being shipped abroad just to be incinerated. And it could conceivably be bad news for local democracy, as it means there is less choice and competition for your council to get the best deal for their residents. 

But there is a potential upside too, as having a larger company involved makes it easier to aggregate difficult materials, thus making recycling more profitable – meaning that in theory, more stuff will get recycled.

And of course, there are also a lot of community led organisations that will recycle niche products that are hard to deal with too.14 But these tend to rely on the good will of individuals, councils or grants to continue operations (not to mention space to store stock).

6. Recycling rates are class war

To bring it all back to bins, recycling is arguably the pastime of relatively affluent, sometimes rural, middle-class people.

The way local authorities are measured on recycling is with a ‘waste data flow’ return.15  This is a statutory obligation to report the final disposal destination of every type of waste that is collected.

So it might record, for example, that your residual waste ends up as ash and gets turned into some aggregates, or that your paper gets shredded and ends up in Indonesia.16

But one other thing that gets included in a local authority’s recycling rate calculation is ‘green’ waste: Your lawn mowing clippings or garden pruning. And this can hugely impact top-line recycling figures.

For example, rural areas with large gardens and fields have a much higher recycling rate. But inner city boroughs generally don’t have sizeable gardens or lawns to mow, so their recycling rates are usually lower.

However, this isn’t the only coefficient on the figures. Something else that affects whether your local authority has a higher recycling rate is how many people ‘participate’ in recycling programmes, and follow the rules instead of just dumping everything arbitrarily into their bins.

Some of what drives participation is socio-economic - some people don’t have space or time to bother. And some of it is also cultural - where handling waste is not culturally acceptable. So those communities will have higher recycling ‘contamination’ rates. 

And this means that even if we have more bins, it wouldn’t necessarily lead to more recycling, in every case.

7. We need to build better to recycle more

If you want to help your council and feel virtuous about your impact on the environment, then you have to learn to love your bins, and also your local recycling centre. You should want more bins, as it will mean more things will get diverted from incineration.17

However, more bins is not practical for so many people - namely because they have no space, live above shops or just have really poor collection cycles.18

So if as a society we really want to minimise waste to the irreducible core, we’re going to have to think about the practical everyday lives of people and the built environment. The UK’s housing stock wasn’t built for multiple bins, and even today new builds aren’t prepared in many cases.

This means we’ve got to live with the trade offs of waste incineration if we don’t engineer our built environment to store multiple types of recycling in a straightforward way. That needs to be balanced against the cost of collection for local authorities and whether that can be reasonably collected in a time that people would find acceptable.

So in the end then, the number of bins isn’t the point. The real takeaway is that we all need to separate better—and that includes food waste, plastics, and our unrealistic expectations about compostable sporks.

Liz Lutgendorff is a digital transformation leader. Follow her on LinkedIn, Bluesky – and make sure to subscribe to her Substack, where she’ll be writing irregularly about how technology can drag institutions into the twenty-first century. You might also like this other one she wrote for me on why fixing the government can be a tech nightmare.

Liz Lutgendorff

Just a person on the internet doing digtal transformation things.

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James gets annoyed his new build was saddled with old technology.

• Martin tells the story of the surprisingly futuristic British wine industry

• And we speak to Thomas Ableman about his proposal for Mini-Switzerland, a plan that could make rural trains and buses… actually good?!

James’s newsletter is here, his latest picking a fight with Dorian Lynskey is here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his latest video is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, how mayors could soon be receiving a slice of income tax, more BBC NIMBY bias, and why we need to redraw London’s boroughs! Listen/subscribe here!

Dorian Lynskey, whose work I mostly really like,1 has written a piece for The Nerve, Carole Cadwalladr’s new outfit.

It’s a publication that I’ve only previously encountered when looking for a reminder that Stewart Lee is a much better stand-up comedian than he is a political thinker.

Anyway, in a polemic titled “In a world of war, abuse and rising fascism, ‘woke’ was never the enemy”, Dorian makes the case that the writers and intellectuals who spent time worrying about ‘wokeness’ were wrong. The real enemy all along has now clearly been revealed to be, of course, Trump, Farage and right-wing authoritarianism.

Dorian writes:

It seems absurd to lambast “snowflake” students when Trump is strong-arming universities; Critical Race Theory when he openly promotes white nationalism; leftwing hostility to free speech when he targets everyone from student protesters to talkshow hosts; politically correct language-policing when words such as “equity” and “oppression” have been scrubbed from government websites; or Black Lives Matter when ICE is murdering people in the street.

He then goes on to look back at the culture wars of recent years, and ends by concluding that:

[C]entrists, too, need to confront reality and ask themselves if truffling out low-stakes campus controversies and bad tweets was the best use of their time when fascism was hurtling down the tracks. What unites the woke and the repentant anti-woke is an urgent need to get their priorities straight and identify the correct enemies. With fundamental values such as decency, solidarity and justice under savage attack, they can’t afford to make the same mistakes again.1

Now, I don’t think I’m one of the ‘centrists’ Dorian had in mind when writing the piece. If he knows who I am at all, it’ll be as a second-tier character on British Politics Bluesky – a face he occasionally scrolls past on his timeline.

But politically, I am a member of the class of people he has in his crosshairs. Over the years, I’ve unwisely waded in numerous times on culture war issues, and have punched left towards a number of ‘woke’ positions, even though as a centre-left type, I’m on the same ‘team’.

And worse still, I’ve done this despite the fact that I share Dorian’s view that Trump, Farage, Goodwin, and the rising tide of fascism is – obviously – a wildly more significant threat to our society than anything ‘woke’ ever was.

But where I disagree with Dorian is that I don’t think this means that criticism of ‘woke’ ideas and their proponents were absurd, misguided or disproportionate. In fact, I think these criticisms from within the left-of-centre coalition are critical if we want a left that can stand up to the threat posed by the worst people in the universe.

So please join me below the paywall as I breakdown Dorian’s argument and explain why, in my view, it doesn’t really hold up.

Read more

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, how mayors could soon be receiving a slice of income tax, more BBC NIMBY bias, and why we need to redraw London’s boroughs! Listen/subscribe here!

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen this week, plus some shorter takes.

This time I’m featuring:

• My take on SNL UK

• Rachel Reeves is doing some good (maybe)

• Why HS2 is being slowed down

• How to pay for an energy price cap

• A brief review of Project Hail Mary

• How irony is fuelling the Trump regime

• A major YouTuber talking about address data!

Now let’s get started!

Read more

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James talks about how Rachel Reeves’ plan to give mayor a slice of income tax could help get infrastructure built.

• Martin digs into two more BBC Local Democracy Reporting Service stories with an alarming NIMBY slant

• And we speak to Simon Kaye, Director of Policy and Research at Re:State, about his new report, arguing for a more powerful London Mayor and fewer London boroughs!

James’s newsletter is here, his latest on our geospatial data mess is here.

Martin’s newsletter is here, and his latest video is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week: I rather controversially arguing that Reform has a point about one, very specific policy proposal. Martin tells the story of a playground that has been closed for over two years for a maddening planning reason. And we speak to Laurel Boxall and Neil Ross from Public First, who make the case for opening up the copyright laws for AI training. Aim your pitchforks at them, not me! Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

ESSAY! Don’t forget to catch up with my big essay this week, arguing that Britain’s geospatial data is a total mess.

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen this week, plus some shorter takes.

This time I’m featuring:

• How the government is going to fix something I complained about just this week!

• Why good government is about choosing winners and losers

• The news you may have missed from Rachel Reeves’ EU alignment speech

• Why the unprecedented AI investment may not be a bubble after all

• The strange nature of open source software in 2026

• Robots playing tennis

• What to do with NCP car parks now the company has gone bust

• And I bravely tell the truth about David Hockney (that his most recent art is crap).

Now let’s get started!

Read more