Shay

Consultant. Formerly transposing AI Ethics at the Oxford Internet Institute & arguing for the importance of Institutions in the Cambridge History Department.

[Rishi Sunak @RishiSunak]

I was a very fortunate kid. My dad's GP surgery sat between the Dell and Hampshire's County Ground, so at weekends I could go to a game and get a lift home afterwards. It left me with a passion for both sports and a belief that sport opens a window onto who we are.

When I was growing up, the Tebbit test was a matter of intense debate. Which side did you cheer for at the cricket? For all the criticism it received, it was a test anyone could pass. If you supported England because you saw it as home, you were part of the team regardless of the colour of your skin. Born in Southampton, 10 year old me passed it without even knowing about it.

Giving the @MCCOfficial's Cowdrey Lecture on Thursday made me think about cricket's place in our national life and the current arguments about identity.

In Britain we've built the world's most successful multi-faith, multi-ethnic democracy. I was a beneficiary of it. Whatever issues people had with me as PM (and there was no shortage) my race and religion weren't among them. I could read a lesson at the King's coronation or light Diwali diyas on Downing Street with my daughters without controversy. Foreign leaders assumed these must be huge symbolic moments. For most Brits, they just weren't that big a deal.

But Britain's democratic achievement is now under strain. Some of the challenges are ones I've written about before, like Islamism, and the failure of governments, including the one I led, to adequately control immigration. But something else is going on - a risk that we start equating skin colour with nationality.

After I left office, a debate kicked off here on @X about whether I was English at all, because I was a "brown Hindu". During the election campaign I'd been shocked when footage was broadcast of someone calling me a "Paki." It was shocking precisely because it was so unusual. That kind of abuse had simply not been a feature of my political life. But the Englishness argument was stranger still. Call it the reverse Tebbit test. If you're not white, it no longer matters who you support at the cricket, because you can never be English. It's a test no non-white person can ever pass.

I have no truck with people who offend our sense of fairness and come here illegally; I spent half my premiership trying to deport them to Rwanda. I think the bar for legal migration should be high. It is entirely possible to want a radical reduction in immigration and a far more robust approach to integration, and still totally reject the attempt to turn Britishness into a DNA test.

If you're born and brought up in England and view it as home, what are you other than English? Denying people their Englishness or their Britishness because of the colour of their skin is a recipe for alienation and a two-tier society. How are children who hear this meant to feel?

Sport can play a small but significant role here. Cricket is played by nearly every major ethnic group in this country. Ask what my largely white rural constituents in the Dales and the British-Asian kids in Bradford have in common, and the answer is cricket. If cricket can produce England teams in which every kid can see themselves, the impact reaches far beyond the boundary.

As I write in @thetimes today, we must all be on the same side, cheering for the same team.

We cannot allow race to be reintroduced into our politics. We cannot allow Briton to be set against Briton.

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

100+ journalists, including Cory Doctorow, Rachel Maddow and many more, are backing the Internet Archive’s #WaybackMachine as essential to preserving the public record 🗂️

Read more at Fight for the Future 👇
https://t.co/xZKCrJuyZs

🧵⬇️

@doctorow @maddow

[Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist]

Almost 5% on 10 year gilts. Not good. Those still clamouring for higher spending and/or lower taxes funded by additional borrowing should take note. There is a big price to pay.

[James Wise @Jameswise]

The steam locomotive. The electric motor. Portland cement. The electromagnetic induction coil. The electric telegraph. The fax machine. The synthetic dye. The Bessemer steel process. The electric light bulb. The steam turbine. Pneumatic tyres. The discovery of the electron. Aspirin synthesis. The thermionic valve. Stainless steel. The tank. The television. Penicillin. The jet engine. Radar. The programmable digital computer. Foundational theoretical computing architecture. The discovery of the structure of DNA. The hovercraft. Carbon fibre. Fibre optic communications. The ATM. The ARM processor architecture. The World Wide Web. Lithium-ion battery commercialisation. The Raspberry Pi. RISC computing architecture. Graphene. Deep reinforcement learning. The Higgs boson mechanism. The MRI scanner. The CAT scan. Dolly the sheep. In-vitro fertilisation. The monoclonal antibody technique. The discovery of pulsars. The BBC Micro software ecosystem. The cyclone vacuum cleaner. The structure of insulin. Constraint and logic programming. Prolog. AlphaFold.

[Xander Davies @alxndrdavies]

UK AISI's Red Team tested both OpenAI + Anthropic's models released today! We jailbroke GPT-5.3-Codex (and the conversation monitor) in 10 hours & conducted an alignment audit on Opus 4.6. 🧵

[roon @tszzl]

this is actually the end stage of what @nearcyan is describing, an age dominated by vice signaling, a nihilistic rw voice that says well someone gave me an annoying moral lecture in the past, so actually virtue is obsolete now

[Andrew Bennett @andrewjb_]

the lesson here is not that UK shouldn’t impose age verification per se — I can see args for/against — but that you build & scale widely adopted, privacy-preserving identity infra before you regulate this way

it’s trivial today to create trusted, private credentials — eg ‘over 18’, ‘right to work in UK’, ‘real person’ — without revealing personal info, but instead we’re building new regulatory structures on top of insecure digital foundations

[thatadult @rianphin]

you’re smarter than AI and you’re capable of anything

[JSTOR @JSTOR]

Exciting news! #JSTOR is now free in 1,000 correctional facilities worldwide, benefiting over 500,000 incarcerated individuals, demonstrating JSTOR's commitment to inclusive #education.

Learn more about the #JSTORAccessInPrison program: https://t.co/GXUplF3Q5x

[Sunk Cost Pharisee @Liamjsm]

Newer: analysis of millions of books published over the centuries suggests western society has never been so optimistic as it is now

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

We will appeal.

#DigitalRightsForLibraries #EmpoweringLibraries
https://t.co/qAwI4tbrNX

[Shay @ShayG1019]

@vogonjeltz101 Also this image has earned you a lifetime subscription to my store's services - congratulations

[Shay @ShayG1019]

@vogonjeltz101 I will use this image almost every day until I die