Gnarls Darwin

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

I still don’t think many people have clocked how massive this story actually is.

Thames Water is carrying £19.8bn of debt, up 2 billion in a single year, and it will run out of money before Christmas.

£19.8bn against 16 million people who cannot switch, can’t leave, and cannot stop drinking water.

That’s about £1,240 per head. 5 grand for a family of four. In some way, shape, or form, they’re on the hook for it.

That’s the part that I don’t think has landed yet. This isn’t a story about sewage in the Thames, or bonuses, or another regulator caught asleep. The actual event is 30 years of a monopoly being used as collateral by people who knew its customers could never walk away. The bill has now come due… and it’s a big one.

The pipes and the infrastructure were never the real asset. The 16 million captive water drinkers were.

What’s going to really sting is the fact there’s only two ways this gets settled. Your bill goes up, substantially, or your taxes do. Most likely both, and it’ll be on a schedule designed in a way so you don’t notice the hit, in an attempt to suppress the rage you should rightly be feeling.

And before anyone tells me the creditors are taking a 30% haircut, look at what they’ve asked for in return. Fines waived until 2030. Pollution targets “significantly modified.” Bills raised above what the regulator allows. That isn’t exactly them eating the loss now, is it. That’s them buying a regulatory holiday, on debt most of them bought at distressed prices.

Nobody voted for this, nobody borrowed it, and nobody saw the benefit of it. The debt was loaded onto a captive customer base over 30 years and paid out to shareholders who have long since gone.

16 million people are about to find out that they co-signed something they were completely unaware of.

Now, this is what should worry us all. Thames isn’t a rogue outlier, it’s just the first one to fully hit the wall. English water carries north of £60bn of debt. Southern is already junk rated, needed a £1.2bn rescue from its shareholders, and its customers are looking at a 48% bill rise this decade before you count what the CMA added on top. Every one of these companies borrowed heavily when money was free and now have to refinance it all in a world where it isn’t, while being told to spend billions on infrastructure they left rotting for 30 years. Thames is just the first and most visible of what will likely end up being a line of dominoes.

Maybe Burnham nationalises Thames Water. But ask yourself… how many more will need to be nationalised? And who do you think pays for that?

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Mamdani just unlocked the rarest political achievement, actually scaring a final boss.

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

It’s very obvious what Nigel Farage is doing with the murder of Ann Widdecombe.

He wants to shut down scrutiny of himself and his fellow Reform politicians by claiming that holding any of them to account threatens their personal safety.

[Hüseyin Karakurt @vekilkarakurt]

80 yıl boyunca her yıl 120 gün ve günde 24 saat 12.000 btu bir klimayı çalıştırırsanız ömrünüz boyunca doğaya yaptığınız co2 salınımı 100 ton olacaktır.

bir süperyat haftada 109 ton
bir özel jet yılda 810 ton
co2 salınımı yapar.

yani ömrünüz boyunca yazları terleyerek geçirirken bir milyardar sadece bir haftada sizin ömrünüz boyunca kaçındığınız zararı doğaya verebiliyor.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

NEW: Boris Johnson failed to declare to parliament a gift of private jet flights from the same cryptobillionaire, Christopher Harborne who gave £5m to Nigel Farage, leaked documents reveal.

New #HarborneReceipts investigation from @thenerve_news
1/

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

Greta Thunberg has warned that 40C heatwaves in the UK are “only the beginning” and says Britain’s leaders have “their heads completely buried in the sand” regarding climate change.

Her comments follow revelations that Labour ministers met fossil fuel industry lobbyists more than 500 times during the party’s first year in power, while Labour MPs took tens of thousands of pounds in donations from oil and gas lobbyists.

The activist, 23, was speaking as the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) issued a rare red heat-health alert for the first time since 2022, with temperatures forecast to reach as high as 40C later this week.

“This is what experts have been warning about for decades,” Thunberg told Metro. “This is unfortunately only the beginning.”

She added: “We know that the climate crisis is here and now, and not a faraway threat in the future, and those suffering the most are the ones who have contributed the least to cause it.”

The red alert – which indicates heat that is life-threatening for even the healthy population – covers the East and West Midlands, London, and southern and east England from 1am on Wednesday until 11pm on Thursday.

The heatwave could also disrupt transport infrastructure, food and water access, energy supplies and force businesses to close, UKHSA warned.

Thunberg said: “What is most concerning about this is not only that we continuously shatter heat records and destabilise the entire biosphere way faster than models have been predicting, but that it is not treated as the existential crisis it is in media and politics.

“The UK’s responsibility for the climate crisis cannot be overstated, still its leaders continue acting as if there was no tomorrow.”

Research by UKHSA published last year found that as well as the elderly, the very young and people with pre-existing medical conditions, people experiencing poverty, overcrowded housing or difficult economic circumstances are also at far greater risk in the heat.

Thunberg’s comments were echoed by climate scientists, including professor Friederike Otto of Imperial College London, who said politicians had failed to respond to the first red heat-health alert in 2022.

“Our first 40C day was supposed to be a wake-up call, but clearly someone hit snooze,” she said.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

This is a really grim decision alongside Cenk.

People often talk about dangerous road we'd go down under a Reform government - this is another clear warning we're down there already.

A Labour government doing everything possible to silence criticism of the Israeli Government.

[RMT @RMTunion]

@KathyParr101 The current #tubestrike has nothing to do with pay, however, a decent pension in retirement should be the norm for all workers.
Punching down until we’re all left with nothing is a peculiar contemporary trait that will only lead to the return of the poor house and destitution.

[hauntedmachine1817 @hauntedmchn1817]

It's time to take the contract for Question Time away from the company that produces it for the BBC. A company that has persistently overrepresented right wing ideology, has been actively enabling creeping Fascism and is now shilling for the Tony Blair Institute and its funders.

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

‘My phone was hacked by the Kremlin who exposed the £5m bung no-one is supposed to know about’ is certainly an interesting new angle..

I wonder if the journalist involved has broken any other major scandals? 🤔

Oh!

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Here’s just one detail from @thenerve_news #HarborneReceipts timeline.

On the *exact same day* Christopher Harborne gives Reform £3m, Nigel Farage says Reform will lift cap on stablecoin ownership.

Where does Christopher Harborne’s money come from, you ask?

Stablecoins!

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

Sadiq Khan has blocked the Metropolitan Police from signing a £50m deal with US spytech giant Palantir and accused the force of breaching procurement rules.

Khan’s spokesperson said Londoners only want to see public money being paid to companies that “share the values of our city”.

Palantir – which provides military tech to the IDF and bespoke tools to facilitate ICE raids in the US – already holds more than £670m in government contracts in the UK, including a £240m deal with the Ministry of Defence and a highly controversial £330m patient data contract with the NHS.

The Met was in talks with Palantir to buy its AI tech in a two-year deal to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations. Khan stepped in to block the contract – which would’ve been the biggest yet in British policing – on 21 May.

While the Met has its own procurement team, the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) has final sign-off on contracts worth over £500,000.

Mopac withheld its approval of the Palantir contract, saying Scotland Yard had only seriously engaged with a single potential supplier – Palantir.

The Met failed to get Mopac’s approval for its procurement strategy without “acceptable explanation”, which Khan’s deputy for policing and crime, Kaya Comer-Schwartz, said in a letter to the Met commissioner Mark Rowley she regards “as a clear and serious breach of the applicable procedural requirements”.

Comer-Schwartz added that the procurement process created “legal and reputation risks” for both Scotland Yard and the mayor.

Khan’s office warned that the Met risked getting locked into Palantir’s tech and that the proposed deal had not “ensured or demonstrated value for money”.

A recent Met Police trial of Palantir’s AI tech to root out corrupt or poorly performing cops was carried out under a directly-awarded contract with no advertising or open competition, Mopac found.

Palantir was a client of disgraced former US ambassador Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel. Mandelson accompanied prime minister Keir Starmer on a visit to the company’s Washington DC headquarters in February 2025. There is no record of what was discussed.

[Ell 🌱 @rdg_elliott]

My thoughts are with Farage and the Daily Mail at this difficult time 🫶🏼

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

In 2019 MPs voted on including a Customs Union in the withdrawal agreement. It was defeated 276-273. If 2 MPs had voted the other way it would have passed

Among those who voted against were 5 LibDems, including Ed Davey. Why? They didnt want to do anything that helped Corbyn

[Liam Nissan™ @theliamnissan]

Hey @elonmusk, why did you cancel all of the global Ebola prevention programs?

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The last time an El Niño this strong hit, it killed 50 million people. That was 3 to 4% of the entire world population. Scale that to today and you're looking at 250 million equivalent.

The 1877 Super El Niño triggered simultaneous droughts across India, China, Brazil, and East Africa. Crops failed on four continents at the same time. The famine lasted three years. Researchers have called it "arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity."

NOAA's latest update gives a two-in-three chance this one reaches strong or very strong by fall. European models are even more aggressive. Sea surface temperatures need to exceed 2°C above normal to qualify as "super." The trajectory is pointing directly at that threshold.

Here's what makes 2026 structurally different from every previous Super El Niño: there are two independent supply shocks converging on the same crop cycle.

The Iran war has shut down roughly a third of the world's seaborne fertilizer trade through the Strait of Hormuz. US fertilizer supply was at 75% of normal in mid-March, right when the Corn Belt needed it most. Fertilizer prices hit their highest level since 2022. That input shortage is already baked into the 2026 growing season.

The El Niño yield shock operates on a 6 to 12 month lag. India is forecasting below-normal monsoons for the first time in three years. Indonesia and Malaysia carry 90% of global palm oil, and El Niño production declines in those countries take 6 to 24 months to peak. Every strong El Niño in the past 55 years has reduced global cocoa production.

So the fertilizer shortage weakens the crops El Niño is about to stress, and the El Niño yield collapse hits in 2027 on fields that were already under-fertilized in 2026. Two shocks with nearly identical lag structures, converging on the same harvest window.

The difference between 1877 and 2026: we can see this one coming six months out. The commodity futures curve is barely pricing either shock. Whether that's rational discounting or willful denial depends entirely on what the Pacific Ocean does between now and October.

[Sonny @thehonestletter]

The UK personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since April 2021.

That's the bit of your salary you keep before HMRC starts taking 20% off everything above it.

In 2021, £12,570 was a reasonable tax-free bracket. Inflation since then has been roughly 25% cumulative, and the price of basically everything you actually spend money on has gone up — energy, rent, food, council tax, fuel.

If the personal allowance had simply tracked inflation, it would now be closer to £15,700.

Instead, the threshold sits exactly where it did when Sunak set it five years ago, and is locked there until 2030.

The cost shows up everywhere except on your payslip. Every shop, every bill, every bit of your monthly budget feels tighter — while the threshold that's supposed to protect the first slice of your wages from tax just sits there at 2021 levels.

The official line is that they 'haven't raised taxes.' They haven't needed to. Inflation does the job for them, every single year, until 2030.

[nazir afzal @nazirafzal]

Reform Latest
2 councillors died before election
Several now suspended for various bits of bigotry
At least 1 doesn’t exist
Others want to stand down cos they didn’t know it’s unpaid
1 thought he would be in Parliament

They don’t need a Whip, they need a Missing Persons Officer

[Micah Erfan @micah_erfan]

Incredible how every “pro-life” policy actually leads to a large amount of unnecessary death.