Alex Dunnagan

History nerd.

[BBC Newsnight @BBCNewsnight]

"You're spending something like £65 billion on defence and £360 billion on welfare. Lucky you, you must not feel any danger..."

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski on Britain's defence spending.

#Newsnight

[Sky News @SkyNews]

"I swear I'll move to Makerfield if I win."

Count Binface talks to Sky's @joncraig at the vote count at the Makerfield by-election.

Read the latest on Makerfield 🔗 https://t.co/PecSXmF31b

📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube

[ScotlandSays #Defacto26 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @scotlandsaysyes]

WOW
I got a wee bit emotional watching this...🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇺🇸
#Scotland
#TartanArmy
#MLB #BostonRedSox #TexasRangers
#independenceNOW

[Jack Watling @Jack_Watling]

HMG is lining itself up for a punishing month with its allies. The UK has been at the heart of designing NATO's defence plans. Those plans specify what allies agreed was necessary to ensure deterrence. Allies made commitments as to what part of the plan they would resource. 1/9

[Patrick Fox @RealCynicalFox]

Still not over Capt. Miller, who supposedly had as much combat experience as a US company grade officer possibly could have by that point in the war, putting two of his force multipliers in one of the most obvious places possible.

Which isn't even the most egregious part of the final battle scene in this movie.

[adidas Scotland @adidasUK]

CHOOSE SCOTLAND 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏆

@ScotlandNT @LewisCapaldi

[Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn]

A rant. There’s a misunderstanding about just how short the government’s Defence Investment Plan will fall, when we do finally see it. Sadly, it’s so much worse than the general conception.

It’s not just the gap between the £28billon that the chiefs asked for and the £13.5bn Rachel Reeves is offering. The chiefs’ £28bn was actually just the minimum they think defence needs to get through the next four years. To pay for the full transformation that the SDR prescribes, and insists is vital, I’m told internal MoD estimates put the real sum needed at 4.5 or 5% of GDP (which btw is also NATO’s new annual spending target). The UK currently only spends 2.3% of its GDP on defence, rising to 2.5% next April.

In cash terms, that means defence actually needs an extra £60bn, and not just over 4 years but EVERY year. That’s the true scale of the task, and what our allies like Germany and Poland are now well on their way towards. So the Treasury/No10’s current sticking plaster offer is not just woefully thin, it doesn’t even touch the sides.

To defend Britain properly in the frightening modern world that we now live, the next Prime Minister (Burnham, Badenoch or Farage) is going to have to start all over again. And unlike the current government, they will have to have this debate publicly and honestly.

[Larisa Brown @larisamlbrown]

The situation inside the MoD is so bad that Britain is second bottom in a Nato league table that ranks member states based on the extent to which they are meeting their rearmament promises.
The UK is currently 31 out of 32 countries on a list — which may be published by the end of the month — detailing how each country is progressing in hitting the alliance’s capability requirements. The only country below the UK is understood to be Iceland, which does not have a military.
https://t.co/9ElwHkYPL6

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

I’m making a show about buildings.

The concept is simple: do for the man-made world what Planet Earth did for the natural world.

But, when I pitched the idea, the answer was that nobody would watch it.

So I released a pilot episode on YouTube. It’s got 5.4 million views, 379k likes, and 23k comments.

People are interested, and now it’s time to make the full show.

Six episodes, filming in the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the USA, and releasing on a streaming service like HBO, Netflix, or Prime.

Why does this show matter?

First: we’re surrounded by buildings all the time. Look around yourself, right now… what do you see? Buildings are the logical conclusion of everything a society believes in. That’s the real focus of this show: not the buildings themselves, but what they say about us.

Second: there’s global dissatisfaction with modern architecture. This feeling gets written about online, but nobody’s given a voice to it on film or TV. That’s what this show will be. But this isn’t just about criticising modernity. That’s easy. This is about learning from the past in order to understand and improve the present, for everybody.

Third: there’s a drought of high-quality culture shows. When I spoke to film executives they said that only documentaries about sports, music, or true crime get funded. That’s a colossal missed opportunity. Galleries are always full, content about architecture goes viral online all the time, and people spend their precious holidays visiting beautiful cities.

Why no shows about architecture, then?

Tourists flock in their millions to see (for example) the buildings of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. But, if you asked those same people if they’re interested in “architecture”, they’d probably say no.

To put that another way: not many people want to watch “a show about architecture”, but lots of people want to watch a show that illuminates the real world they’re living in, each and every day.

What will the show be like?

Six episodes, going chronologically through history and arriving at the present, each focussing on the architecture and design of a specific period:

1. Middle Ages
2. Renaissance
3. Enlightenment
4. The Nineteenth Century
5. Art Nouveau & Art Deco
6. Present Day

But, in each case, the point isn’t just to learn about that era; the point is to learn about our modern world through those eras and what they’ve left behind. If you watch the pilot episode (included below) you’ll see what I mean.

So the show’s not really “about” the past; it’s about the twenty-first century.

That’s why it’s called The Modern World.

When you think of a typical history show there are loads of interviews, stock footage, archive photos, historical recreations, and graphics. We’re doing none of that. Everything will be filmed on location, because we’re telling our story only through the real world that exists right now. And, rather than going to the most obvious places, we’ll focus on buildings that aren’t well-known but should be more famous.

But that’s all big picture; what will it be like on screen?

Buildings used to look different in every country, and now they look the same. Why? Because the weather is different everywhere, and buildings were always a way of dealing with that weather, using local materials. Now we have air conditioning and we ship concrete around the world, so we don’t need to design our buildings with regard to local weather or rely on local materials.

Look at really old clocks and you’ll notice something: they don’t have a second hand… because it was only invented 300 years ago! Then you look at the present and you realise we’re surrounded by timers, by seconds ticking down and ticking up relentlessly. If we’re looking for a cause of our anxiety-inducing culture, that might be it.

When you spend time with the sun-softened bricks and time-warped timbers of old cities you notice that synthetic materials like plastic have taken over. When we’re surrounded by things that feel temporary, how do you think it makes us feel?

It’s only by seeing 19th century train stations, designed like cathedrals, that you realise tradition and technology aren’t enemies. New things don’t have to look boring: if the Victorians had designed AI data centres, they’d look like Medieval castles.

In the 1920s, at the zenith of Art Deco, people believed technology would uplift humanity. That’s why they decorated their buildings with statues inspired by electricity. Only by seeing their enthusiasm can we realise our own cynicism, and perhaps begin to fix it.

All of that… and much, much more.

But, above all else, this show is about a way of seeing. If you want to understand any society then you need to look at what it creates, not what it says about itself.

There’s a worldview in every single object; our skyscrapers are designed the same way as our phones. Learn to look at this world, to notice its details, and everything else starts to make sense.

What now?

I’ve been quiet online recently because I’ve been researching and working on scripts for six full-length episodes. Production begins when we’ve raised the funding.

The Modern World is coming.

[AW @AthleticsWeekly]

WORLD U20 RECORD

Gout Gout creates even more history by winning the 200m final at the Australian Athletics Championships in 19.67 (1.7) 🇦🇺

Not only does he lower his PB from 20.02 but he breaks Erriyon Knighton's world U20 200m record of 19.69 🤯

[Thomas C. Theiner @noclador]

I have criticised Germany, Sweden, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, and also Ukraine under Poroshenko for rearming too slow... but in no other country has the government's lied as much about defence as in the UK.

There is an immeasurably wide
1/3

[Alan Couzens @Alan_Couzens]

If someone tells you that you need HIIT to improve your VO2max, jog slowly away from them.

[Ed Davey @EdwardJDavey]

I think it’s fair to say the Kremlin’s not happy

[Alex Dunnagan @Dunnagan90]

@Jack_Watling Book tour?

[Britsky @TBrit90]

If you think the Royal Navy struggles to deploy 1 ship, wait till you see the Army try to deploy 1 brigade.

[Channel 4 @Channel4]

For various boring reasons we have to say that these are Hugh Grant’s views not ours, and that we definitely haven’t printed his post out and put it in a little frame on our desk

[Deborah Haynes @haynesdeborah]

The expansion of Donald Trump’s war against Iran to a British base in Cyprus is a nightmare for the UK, which lacks adequate air defences and only has a limited capacity to fight back.
Sir Keir Starmer talks reassuringly about how his military has bolstered its forces in the Middle East, including with the deployment of Typhoon warplanes to Qatar, while F-35 fighter jets are operating out of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.
But these aircraft have very limited stockpiles of munitions and neither of model is the sort of thing that should be used for shooting down drones – they are far more sophisticated, designed for much more capable enemies and their air-to-air missiles are vastly more expensive that the contraption they’re up against.
The jets can take down cruise missiles but a much more effective piece of equipment for that task is the army’s Sky Sabre air defence system.
It is unclear whether one of these has been deployed.
The Ministry of Defence by contrast has confirmed that ground troops specialised in countering drones are in the region – though they failed to take out the single attack drone that crashed into a runway at RAF Akrotiri on Sunday night.
Then there is the threat posed by Iran’s ballistic missiles.
The regime does not any capable of reaching the UK mainland, but they could fly as far as Cyprus as well as across the Middle East.
Yet, the only piece of UK kit capable of blasting this kind of weapon out of the sky is the Type 45 destroyer.
The Royal Navy has six of these warships but only three are available for deployment and it is not thought any were in the region.
If you rewind a decade, Britain had a much bigger naval presence in the Gulf, with one, if not two warships operating out of Bahrain, along with four minehunters and a vast support ship.
Today there are none.
Instead, when it comes to Cyprus and other British Middle East interests, the UK is relying on the US President’s “armada” of aircraft carriers and other warships to deal with the ballistic missile threat.
With Iran lashing out in response to the American attacks, Mr Starmer on Sunday U-turned on a decision not to allow US planes to strike Iran from British bases. He justified his change of heart by saying he now thought it was a legitimate request in self-defence provided the Americans only go after Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities.
He said Britain was not taking part in these strikes – but clearly this could also change, especially if more UK interests are hit.
Though, that too raises awkward questions about the UK’s ability to launch strikes.
The Typhoon jets and the F-35 warplanes carry bombs that could destroy Iranian missile launchers.
If fitted with Storm Shadow cruise missiles, the Typhoon jets could also blast the entrance of heavily protected storage depots where the Iranian military keeps its missile stocks, well protected underground. This would make it impossible for them to be used.
But a larger weapon would be far better for that kind of offensive operation.
The best option for the UK would be a Tomahawk cruise missile launched from one of the navy’s attack submarines.
Yet, problems with the maintenance of the five Astute-class boats in the fleet and a shortage of crews mean there have been chunks of time when none of these submarines were at sea.
The situation has improved slightly and earlier this year the government made a rare announcement about the deployment of one of the boats, which is usually kept secret.
It said HMS Anson was visiting Australia - not particularly useful for a war in the Middle East.
Defence insiders say the sorry state of the UK armed forces is the hard reality of a failure by successive governments over decades to invest in more weapons to blast missiles and drones out of the sky as well as the munitions to strike back.
It is now all looking a bit too late

https://t.co/9nZlKXWabx

[ShinyMcShine: Simpsons Quotes @ShinyMcShine_]

"Can we get rid of this ayatollah T-shirt? Khomeini died years ago."

"But, Marge, it works on any ayatollah-- Ayatollah Nakhbadeh, Ayatollah Zahedi. As we speak, Ayatollah Razmara and his cadre of fanatics are consolidating their power."

"I don't care who's consolidating their power."

[The Lobster @LikeableLobster]

There may have been a few miscalculations on The Lobster’s part.

[Oz Katerji @OzKaterji]

Entire Day: Wasted. ❌
Household Chores: Unfinished. ❌
Other responsibilities: Ignored. ❌
Situation: Monitored. ✅