Rob Swain

No messin'

[Ben Leo @Benleo]

NEW: Sun reporting Downing Street and Foreign Office have contacted the Trump admin for “clarification” on US comments about UK civilisational decline and two tier policing.

What needs clarifying, exactly? Everyone but the Labour government can see it.

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

“Don’t politicise this” means “only MY side gets to be vindicated by events”

And the people complaining about the “politicisation” of Henry Nowak’s murder not only politicised the death of George Floyd, they also politicised a fictional murder in a Netflix show.

[Mookafish @Mookafish]

Living in the UK as a techno-optimist is strange. Every day on internet I see incredible things being built around the world and it feels like humanity is generally on an upwards trajectory. But, when I go outside I see none of that.

In the UK, no one talks about cool engineering projects or new science which could make the world a better place, and there isn't much being built other than more soulless copy-paste houses. In fact, it feels more like things have been slowly declining.

No one seems to have hope for a better future at all. I often find myself wondering if I even live in the same universe as the countries preparing to build bases on the Moon and Mars.

Don't get me wrong, this country is great and I love it deeply. It's not like good things aren't happening either. But, if nothing changes, it will eventually be left in the dust by countries like the USA and China as it fades into irrelevancy.

I do have hope that things will change, though. It's not too late for this little island.

[Rob Swain @RobSwain92]

This is fucking disgusting. I hope those police officers replay this moment over and over again in their heads. It is undeniable that we have two tier policing in this country. They didn’t believe him because he was white and the other lad played the race card. RIP Henry Nowak.

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 BREAKING: Bodycam footage of the arrest of Henry Nowak, who had been stabbed moments prior by Vickrum Digwa

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

A thought experiment.

A white British boy is found guilty of stabbing to death a black British boy.

The police handcuff the black British boy when he is bleeding out and dying.

They refuse to try & save his life. His last words are: “I can’t breathe”.

The police later issue a weak apology.

But no heads roll.

Nobody is sacked.

The police body cam footage is not released.

Now ask yourself:

What would Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper, Sadiq Khan, Jess Phillips and countless other MPs and celebrities be doing right now?

We know exactly what they would be doing.

They would be protesting. Marching. Screaming. Demanding the footage be released.

And dropping one video and statement after another on social media.

Now have a look around at what they are all doing about the Henry Nowak case.

And that is exactly why millions of British people talk about “two-tier Britain”.

[Rob Swain @RobSwain92]

Every year the fan renders are 10x better than the actual kit. This is a shocker 😂

[Derby County @dcfcofficial]

𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞.

Your 2026/27 @PUMAfootball Derby County home kit is here! 🖤

[Rob Swain @RobSwain92]

@Si_Fi_87 I hope so.

[Rob Swain @RobSwain92]

I’d rather not, to be honest. I’ve never felt more connected to the club than these last few years with David Clowes at the helm. I don’t care about getting into the Prem at any expense and losing that connection with a local owner. Please don’t turn us into an Arab’s play toy.

[John Percy @JPercyTelegraph]

Derby County are in talks with Saudi sports supremo Turki Alalshikh over a potential investment deal. Negotations are advanced and now with the Independent Football Regulator #dcfc https://t.co/m3DcEwDhX3

[Talk Derby to Me @richardbking]

#dcfc and #nffc fans arguing over whose owner has the worse alleged criminal record is a new low. Just give me Clowes, an honest club, and an exciting Championship season. Leave the Premier League to the idiot billionaires, their dirty money, and the dense fans who worship them

[Rob Swain @RobSwain92]

@richardbking 100%

[Rob Swain @RobSwain92]

@WalterIsaacson @SpaceX @elonmusk @NASAAdmin I really hope this means you’re writing part 2 of the Elon biography 🤞🏻

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

The heating is still on in May.

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

It costs more to build a train from London to Birmingham (£102.7 bn) than for NASA to return to the moon (£100 bn)

England is so broken.

[Benedict Spence @BenedictSpence]

Elon Musk will have built a colony on Mars before the UK successfully manages to get a standard train from Birmingham to not-quite-central London.

[Sami Gold @souljagoyteller]

Peak woke was a different world

[The Aureus Press @Trad_West_Art]

Wow and we have no idea why.

[Strategic Advisor @BBDaybreakEU]

Assuming you're literate, it's a selfish way of communicating. It saves the sender a small amount of time where they can 'ummm' instead of formulating a point properly. Then the receiver has to sit through it all, spending multiples of the amount of time they'd spend to read it.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

On a desk somewhere in Singapore, a small computer not much bigger than a deck of cards has been running continuously for the past several weeks.

It is connected to its owner's WhatsApp, Gmail, calendar, and a personal library of saved speeches and articles. It transcribes voice notes locally. It runs vector embeddings (the technique that lets an AI find what is relevant in a great big stack of stuff) locally.

It maintains a knowledge graph of every fact, every counterpart, and every piece of negotiating history its owner has ever recorded into it. It is, in short, a perfect mind-out-of-mind. Its owner calls it "NanoClaw, a second brain for a diplomat."

The owner is Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, and he is the Foreign Minister of Singapore. He is a trained ophthalmologist, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and one of the very few sitting cabinet ministers anywhere in the world who writes his own computer code.

My kind of guy. And, I think, everyone's kind of guy.

On 21 April he published the entire architecture to a public GitHub gist. He did not announce it through his ministry. He did not spin it into a productivity-tool startup. He wrote it up the way a working software engineer writes up a side project, and put it in the open. The hardware cost is approximately £80; the running costs are between £5 and £20 a month.

I would invite the reader, gently, to attempt the exercise of imagining a single member of the present British cabinet doing the equivalent. Imagine Yvette Cooper publishing the architecture of a system that tracks her foreign counterparts' priors and negotiating history, on a personal GitHub account, with API keys segregated through a credential proxy because she takes her department's data sovereignty very, very seriously. Imagine David Lammy shipping a working tool that drafts his speeches against the record of his own past statements - haha, no, no, stop! I know, it's beyond the absurd.

Then consider the gap.

This is what your public servants ought to be able to do for themselves. This is the class of governing official Britain could have, being not at all absent the talent capital needed. But Dr B's excellence shows that, while we don't lack the talent, we have been getting recruitment all wrong.

Britain has been recruiting senior public servants for two political generations on the basis of who can speak well at a Tuesday lunch club, not on the basis of who can deliver a working result when everyone's back to work. The country that built the institutions everybody else copies built them with people who could think, and write, and do. We optimised on the first two and stopped caring about the third. The third turns out to have been the one that mattered most.

But that's the golden triptych - people who can think, write, and do. Imagine how much better our national fortunes will be when it is people of that calibre at the helm?

It is coming. It Can Be Done.

[Rob Swain @RobSwain92]

Happy St. George’s Day 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿