Tom Halstead 🇬🇧

Married with one daughter, one grandson. Likes Blackburn Rovers, gardening, music (especially opera).

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

I don’t think you have to be English - and, Anglophile as I am, I am not English - to appreciate this.

[BabelColour @StuartHumphryes]

For 4th July, I share this lovely American Autochrome from 1910, capturing a woman darning the US flag (which, at the time, only had 46 stars, as there were only 46 US States). It was taken in colour 116 years ago by Mrs B Russell, using an early colour glass plate process. It isn't colourised.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The BBC Has Ruled. Brexit Damaged The Economy. No Further Debate Required.

The BBC's editorial complaints unit has decided that the negative economic impact of Brexit is now a settled fact. Not a contested judgement. Not one side of a live debate. A fact, in the same category as man-made climate change, requiring no balancing view.

The ruling followed a Radio 4 Today programme segment featuring Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, alongside Liam Byrne and Sir John Gieve, both long-standing advocates of closer EU alignment. All three agreed Brexit had damaged growth. The presenter, Katya Adler, did not challenge the premise or introduce a dissenting voice. A complaint followed.

The ECU's response is the revealing part. It acknowledged the segment failed to "acknowledge the alternative case" for pursuing opportunities outside the EU rather than realignment with it. That part of the complaint was upheld. But the central complaint, that three pro-EU voices agreeing with each other on air is not balance, was dismissed. The reasoning given was that this reflected "the consensus among economists" and there was no "significant body of economic opinion" on the other side.

This is worth pausing on. The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist. The institution that is legally required to be impartial has ruled itself the arbiter of which questions are still open and which are closed, and Brexit has just been moved into the closed file.

The economics itself does not support the certainty on display. The headline figure driving much of this narrative, an 8 per cent hit to GDP since 2016, comes from an NBER paper built on a "synthetic control" model that constructs a hypothetical non-Brexit Britain from a basket of comparator countries. The largest weighting in that basket, over 60 per cent, is the United States, a country currently riding an AI investment boom and a separate fiscal stimulus. The model also weights Estonia and Greece more heavily than France or Germany. On a straightforward per capita basis against France and Germany, the actual comparators, Britain's performance since 2016 sits roughly in line with both. An 8 per cent gap simply isn't visible. This is a model producing a number that then gets reported as "the consensus," which the BBC then cites as the reason no alternative view is required.

That loop, model produces number, number becomes consensus, consensus becomes fact, fact requires no balance, is the mechanism. It does not require a conspiracy. It requires an institution that has decided which conclusions are respectable and which are not, and which then treats its own prior decision as evidence.

The same posture has been on display all week. A government department can decide its diversity targets are lawful without seeking legal advice to check. A police force can decide a book about dismantling "inner white supremacy" is leadership training. A broadcaster can decide an economic question is closed and that deciding so does not breach its own impartiality rules. In each case, the institution marks its own homework, and the mark is always a pass.

None of this requires Brexit to have been a triumph. Britain's economy has genuine problems, most of them unrelated to single market membership. But a state broadcaster, funded by compulsory licence fee under threat of prosecution, has now formally placed one of the most consequential political decisions in modern British history beyond the reach of its own impartiality obligations. Reform's Lee Anderson called it being "blinkered by groupthink." The more precise description is an institution that has stopped being able to tell the difference between its own assumptions and the facts.

"The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist."

[Tom Halstead 🇬🇧 @TomHalstead1]

@KayBurley "global entertainment giant." You say that as though it's a good thing.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.

Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.

The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.

Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

[Tom Halstead 🇬🇧 @TomHalstead1]

@SpeechUnion This means Ofcom will have to unpick every TV interview to see if the right questions were asked.

[Tom Halstead 🇬🇧 @TomHalstead1]

@waychee1 Further and faster please. More taxes, more freebies for illegals.

[𝔻𝕠𝕟𝕒𝕝𝕕 𝕸𝖈𝕽𝖔𝖓𝖆𝖑𝖉 🇬🇧 @GayoCaesar]

When you see footage of Leicester, Leeds and Chelsea players blanking young fans it only highlights how guys like Ryora Morishita put them all to shame.

[Tom Halstead 🇬🇧 @TomHalstead1]

@Witchwalker70 You are right. There were examples of that today. Maybe O'Neill can get the best out of him.

[Tom Halstead 🇬🇧 @TomHalstead1]

@LSPN__FC When I got Sky TV some years ago Messi seemed to score every time I switched on.

[Tom Halstead 🇬🇧 @TomHalstead1]

@timothysolomon @CosmicSkeptic @RichardDawkins @gm_skeptic @RationalityRule @Matt_Dillahunty @AtheistQ @SamHarrisOrg Omnipotent, omniscient and childhood leukemia at the same time.

[Nicole Lampert @nicolelampert]

An ultra Orthodox man doing his job as a building inspector was working in Slough when he was physically attacked by a total stranger screaming ‘baby killer’ and ‘dirty mother f*cking Jew’ at him.
A friend of his has sent me this video telling me the man is now ‘afraid to leave his area, he is terrified for his life.’
As the most visibly obvious Jews, the community has extra security where they live but are increasingly frightened to leave their neighbourhood.
‘It is devastating that Jewish people can’t go anywhere without a high risk of being attacked,’ I was told.

🚔 @ThamesVP are investigating and seeking witnesses to the attack on Monday afternoon in Slough.
(Crime Reference: 43260192511)

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

If you think Britain is struggling now, hold onto something solid. Because the Green Party, currently polling ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives, has published a programme that makes this government's failures look like a golden age of competence and order.

Start with immigration. Not controlled immigration. Not managed migration. Open borders. The Greens' own internal documents describe a system that treats every arrival as a citizen in waiting, entitled to NHS access, welfare benefits and the right to vote in all elections, including those who have never achieved settled status. A Panmure Liberum analysis estimates that under Green government, net migration would run at around 900,000 a year, adding 4.4 million people to Britain's population by 2034. Call it what it is. A demographic transformation imposed without consent.

Germany provides the evidence of what happens when a government throws open its doors and works out the consequences later. Angela Merkel's open borders decision in 2015 was greeted with the same progressive applause the Greens would generate. According to German government statistics by 2021, asylum seekers made up 2.5 percent of Germany's population but 13.1 percent of all sexual assault suspects. In 2023 there were 761 registered gang rapes, almost two every day, nearly half involving foreign suspects. Knife crimes in North Rhine-Westphalia nearly tripled between 2020 and 2023. Berlin's own police chief stated publicly that violence in the capital was young, male and had a non-German background. The lesson sits there, documented, ignored, while Zack Polanski's party proposes to repeat the experiment at four times the speed, in a country already facing an active Iranian state threat and twenty foiled terrorist plots on British soil.

Then there are the other policies. Legalised heroin and crack cocaine. The disestablishment of the Church of England, severing a constitutional settlement that has held for five centuries. A conference that descended into chaos over a motion declaring Zionism a form of racism while party WhatsApp groups contained messages describing Jews as an abomination to this planet. The abolition of immigration detention. Amnesty for every failed asylum seeker. And the scrapping of Prevent, which for all its flaws has kept people alive, at the precise moment MI5 assesses the domestic threat as the most complex it has ever faced.

Picture the Britain that emerges from a single Green parliament. A population swollen by four million, the border a memory, detention abolished, Prevent gone, heroin dispensed on the high street, the Church disestablished, campuses already hostile to Jewish students rendered ungovernable, and the IRGC, which this Labour government cannot bring itself to proscribe, operating freely through networks the state has just defunded its ability to monitor.

Labour under Starmer is a kakistocracy, paralysed by demography and incapable of naming what it can see. That is dangerous enough. The Green Party is not paralysed. It has a programme, a growing membership of 226,000, a youth wing that is the largest in Europe and a polling trajectory built on a generation of left wing progressives processed through captured institutions who have been taught to call this manifesto enlightenment. It knows exactly what it wants and it is acquiring the means to deliver it.

What is happening now will seem like order.

[Tom Halstead 🇬🇧 @TomHalstead1]

@Ed_Miliband You say that as though it's a good thing.

[Cornwall7000 ⛵️🐕 @cornwall70001]

@DavidMcGregorBN While destroying the country and economy. Slow hand clap.

[Tom Halstead 🇬🇧 @TomHalstead1]

@RoversXtra @davidornstein That's not funny.

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

I'm afraid the police are on the wrong side here...

...supporting the people who are carrying out a very offensive act

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

Christopher Hitchens predicted back in 2009 that the term ‘Islamophobia’ would eventually be used to criminalize any speech that is critical of Islam.

The whole concept of Islamophobia is about implementing Sharia blasphemy laws in the West.

[Tom Halstead 🇬🇧 @TomHalstead1]

@simonmontefiore The first person to stop clapping will be taken out and shot.

[Tom Halstead 🇬🇧 @TomHalstead1]

@DPJHodges @AllisonPearson I think the entire opposition should boycott PMQs