Edward Bearcroft

Digital. Technology. Financial Services. Politics. Running. Likes to understand both sides and engage in debate.

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@AlistairCarns A very alarming diagnosis which rings true from someone who should know. Who else is actually serious about protecting the citizens of the UK? If they are not in Labour where is the opposition on this subject?

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

We can't keep pretending a defence budget is the same as a national security plan. It just isn't. The DIP avoids areas that actually decide whether this country is secure or not.

Critical National Technologies.

We rightly treat power stations, pipelines and telecoms as critical national infrastructure. We do not yet treat nuclear, advanced manufacturing, AI, sovereign compute, semiconductors, data and quantum the same way. That is a mistake we cannot afford to keep making.

Germany is building a sovereign AI and compute stack alongside its industrial strategy. France has a 2030 strategy. The Americans and the Chinese are running national industrial mobilisations we haven't seen since the Cold War. Britain is inventing brilliant things, but then letting other people build them, own them and then decide what happens with them. Data is the new gunpowder. Right now we don't have a national plan to make it, own it or protect it at the scale that truly matters.

Create a Critical National Technology Category. Give those companies privileges and benefits, in exchange for their support towards national security.

If we don't create, scale and support the technologies of the future, we become vulnerable to others that will.

Home defence and national resilience.

Sweden sends every household a "If Crisis or War Comes" pamphlet. Finland runs its Comprehensive Security Model that plans, in advance, for national mobilisation across every ministry and every sector. Germany is standing up civil defence, bunker capacity and reserve infrastructure that would have been unthinkable five years ago.

Britain has nothing comparable. Build the plan now, build the resilience, integrate it across every level of government.

Ask yourself the real questions…

What happens at the next Covid? The next cyber attack that shuts down a factory or an entire NHS trust? The next energy shock? A coordinated hybrid campaign against our grid, our supply chains, our food, our water? Who is in charge? What do businesses do? What are the Reserves for? What should the public do? What do you need to do?

Prior planning prevents piss poor performance. We do not have serious answers to any of that. The state should.

The next generation.

The country that produces the next generation of engineers, scientists, cyber operators, service personnel and grafters wins the next thirty years. The country that doesn't, doesn't. Right now we are the country that doesn't.

A guaranteed offer of employment, education or training. Not a scheme, not a pilot, a promise every young person in this country will get when they leave school.

A debt-to-deposit scheme that turns student loan repayments into a housing deposit. If you're working hard, if you're paying your way, the state should be helping you build your life up, not just taking more and more from it.

Free transport for under 25s. Because opportunity means being able to physically get to it, and right now we're pricing young people out of the jobs.

A cultural change that puts as much emphasis into master tradesmen and women as it does masters degrees. Why do we have student loans when we don't provide equivalent financial support for apprenticeships? We support education but we don't support education in work.

Talent is everywhere in this country. Opportunity isn't. Fix that and you fix half of everything else.

Service.

Britain used to understand service. Not as a slogan on posters but as a habit. Something you did because you were part of something bigger than yourself, matched with the country doing something for you in return.

We've lost some of that.

Volunteers hold this country together. I don't just mean the ones in the headlines. The ones doing the litter picks, running the youth clubs, driving the community bus, keeping the church hall open, running the food bank. They are the quiet infrastructure of every place I've ever lived, from Aberdeen to Selly Oak. Without them, half the country would seize up in a week.

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

Excellent:

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

💯- give this many a cabinet position @andyburnham and sort out defence procurement. I’ll donate my first edition of Paris by Basil Liddell-Hart if you need a retrospective prediction that we missed

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

What's happening in Ukraine right now is rewriting modern warfare. We need to be paying more attention and learn from our friends in Kyiv.

- Over 12,000 drones were operating over a city the size of Hereford in a single day. Yes… one day.
- 90% of casualties are caused by drones. Not artillery or rifles. Just drones.
- Russia is close to building a million drones a month. Ukraine is trying to match them.
- Russia's uncrewed systems force is 80,000 strong. That is bigger than our entire Army.

Britain has to catch up and we don't have the luxury of time to do it.

We MUST:

- Treat drones as ammunition.
- Build up always-on drone production here in the UK.
- Centralise the data. Use AI to make them smarter.
- Stand up an uncrewed systems force now. Not after a review at some point in future… but now.
- Cut the rules choking off trial and testing.
- Joint ventures between British and Ukrainian industry. They've learnt more in a few years than most countries learn in thirty…
- Work with Ukrainian veterans to test how we exercise and operate.

Remember: A £4000 drone can take out a £4million tank.

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

RT @AlistairCarns: THE FIVE TESTS

For weeks I've argued that this party, and this country, needs a proper debate about where we go next. N…

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@AlistairCarns 💯- @Nigel_Farage needs calling out a lot more often. He’s a poseur in a flat cap and a Barbour and can only succeed if he is allowed to divide this great country. We need the kind of leadership offered by @AlistairCarns not Farage flirting with fascism and billionaires

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@AlistairCarns I hope you stand to be PM

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@rorysutherland Not exactly. The original blackberry was a revolution in its time but it was never better than in its version 1 form from a UX perspective. The 2007 iPhone was better than blackberry for consumer UX but not in a business context. The rest is history.

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@rorysutherland @ClarkeMicah We are about to have the Bodiam to Robertsbridge section of the Kent and East Sussex railway restored. This against the wishes of the A21 car lobby and the local farmers. Small victory. Despite the slow speed and high cost I’m determined to start my commute from Bodiam!

[quibble @quibbleUK]

Hello, we are Jonathan and Abigail - unashamed pedants who want to bring this affliction to bear on all things public policy and practice.
We believe that details matter, especially in public administration. This is why today we are founding quibble: a campaign to fix the small stuff.
Think, for example, about the cookie banner that we click on every webpage. Each instance is not a big deal, so we just put up with it. But its cumulative impact adds up - on average we press it 5 times per day. The European Commission estimates that it costs EU citizens 343 million hours per year.
And who is there to represent the impacts of seemingly minor issues like this in a systematic way? We want quibble to be the answer. In the case of the cookie banner, lots of advocacy has rightly focused on privacy, but has this meant that user experience has taken a backseat? We believe there are ways to improve user experience without compromising on privacy. We will share more about this soon.
Consider another example. Did you know that in some government-run car parks you can be fined for a minor keying error, such as accidentally typing a zero instead of an “o”? Again, we will come to the detail of this quibble in the coming weeks, but for now just consider again the question: who? Who is there currently to systematically represent the interests of the parker who is given an unfair ticket?
An inherent feature of consumer interests is that those who have them rarely have enough other things in common to make collective organisation and representation feasible. This is the gap that quibble seeks to fill. Now of course excellent consumer interest groups exist. But understandably quibbles might not be at the top of their lists. Our hope is that quibble will be complementary; picking up the bottom-of-the-list issues faced by various groups - the stuff they are almost too embarrassed to raise because they are too small.
We are not embarrassed about detail. If you’ve ever had a splinter, you know small things can have a big impact. This is what quibble is committed to tackling, and our wider hope is that by doing so we will also incentivise policy makers to be even more careful about detail.
Check out our website here, including our first four campaigns: https://t.co/gZiqqHbhIL

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

This is a good piece about how Brexit has cost the UK its growth advantage compared to most of our European peers.

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@elonmusk Especially for the Billionaire class

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@robfordmancs @AllisonPearson Good luck with that Manchester!

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@Scarlett__Mag @Dominic2306 I don’t think that’s a good description. Centrists are people who aren’t ideologues. People who believe iin understanding both sides of a debate. People who believe in quiet progress. They are people who don’t vote for narcissists - e.g. Farage, Polanski.

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

Teeet of the decade!

[Benedict @carto_graph]

Next up, we need Johnny English to run for PM. The man who will save Britain.

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@rorysutherland I used to love getting on at Ashford. Especially the Eurostar to Skiing. Instead of this most people now fly. Completely mad.

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@jk_rowling @GeorgeTrefgarne I admire you for dealing with the vile people who troll you here. It’s a lovely thing to share!

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@RupertLowe10 I only know about Denmark. My sister has lived there for 30 of her 60 years and she and her community consider her to be Danish. I’m still English and live near Hastinngs. We can trace our family tree to the Normans who moved to France from Scandinavia before the conquest.

[Edward Bearcroft @ebearcroft]

@rcbregman OpenAI is yesterdays tech - Claude and Gemini wipe the floor with it.