In the early days of this blog, the political debate around whether to ban fox hunting was a big deal. Those were, perhaps, simpler times.

I think some would be surprised to read these days that I argued against banning hunting with foxes. It may seem even more surprising that I probably still would—yet I would argue perhaps more forcefully against repealing the ban now that it exists.

My arguments against the ban were essentially liberal: we shouldn’t go around banning stuff, cruelty to animals was already illegal, and we should use the laws that we’ve already got. But there was also a significant dose of priority-setting: it seemed to me that banning an activity as perversely niche as fox hunting could not possibly be the best use of Parliamentary time. There is no way that it could possibly be viewed as ranking among, say, the top hundred problems facing the country.

My arguments against repealing it would be basically the same: we shouldn’t signal through a change of the law that cruelty to animals is okay and it absolutely shouldn’t be anywhere near our list of top priorities.

I think you can read a lot into this. I’m all for a permissive society that tolerates difference. I’d rather see something that I personally disagree with continue than restrict freedoms for us all. And, at least to me, reversing a ban is qualitatively different from being permissive in the first place—even if it’s philosophically equivalent.

I was reflecting on this today when I was trying to figure out why Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to remove tampons and sanitary towels from the men’s toilets at Meta seemed so offensive. After all, I’m not offended when these facilities aren’t offered, as in the vast majority of workplace and public toilets—though I am impressed when a business does offer them, demonstrating that they are thoughtful and inclusive. The same goes, by the way, for sanitary bins in men’s toilets—a rare sight, but one needed by far more than just the trans and non-binary population.

But if I’m not offended when these facilities aren’t offered, then why am I when they are removed?

Well, because while it may return the business to their original position philosophically, the act of making the change is petty, vindictive, persecutory, and fucking cruel. It makes the world a tiny bit worse for all of us—and especially for some of the most marginalised communities in our society. It tells me that the company does not care about the needs of individuals, and would rather see people suffer than stand up for basic values of inclusivity and respect for other human beings.

And that’s not my standard at all.

The FT had a lovely ‘long read’ by Daniel Thomas about the success of the West End last week: footfall is well above pre-pandemic levels and the industry is in rude financial health. But not so on Broadway, where neither footfall nor revenue has recovered from the pandemic.

It feels like we often hear a lot of depressing stories about the financial performance of the arts in the UK, so it’s heartening to read some positive news… and even moreso given the brief mention of Newcastle’s very own Theatre Royal.

It’s less than seven years since Wendy and I wandered along Hollywood Boulevard, comparing it—not entirely favourably—to Blackpool’s promenade.

It’s astonishing, distressing, and tragic to think that, at the time of writing, it’s now in a mandatory evacuation zone due to wildfires. The situation as a whole will doubtless be worse by the time this is published.

Ryan Broderick recently shared the observation that ‘climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.’

LA may be thousands of miles away, but the familiarity makes it feel closer—and perhaps that’s the apt interpretation of the word ‘closer’ for these purposes. It’s hard not to feel a scintilla of guilt about the way that trips like ours might have ultimately contributed to the destruction, just as they contributed to the touristic development of the area in the first place. Flygskam is a complicated emotion.

It was covid that drove me off Facebook, but it perhaps wasn’t until nearly five years later that it left my mind entirely.

Wendy and I were writing Christmas cards last month, and I—perhaps not fully embracing the Christmas spirit—commented that it was a risky business, as some of the families we were wishing well might have divorced in the years since we last spoke.

‘No, they definitely haven’t,’ said Wendy. ‘I’m friends with them on Facebook.’

It simply hadn’t entered my mind that there might still be a social media connection between us. Facebook is no longer in my thoughts.

And yet yesterday’s news that its founder has chosen to remove fact-checkers caught my attention. I was even more surprised to see the company had changed its ’hateful content policy’ to permit ‘allegations of mental illness … based on gender or sexual orientation’, among many other unpleasant changes.

It baffles me that this makes for an attractive proposition. If I were seeking information, I wouldn’t choose to do so on a website that is explicitly designed to make it easier to spread misinformation. If I wanted to socialise, I wouldn’t do so in a place where people are free to hurl around stigmatising accusations of psychiatric illness. And if I wanted to advertise, I wouldn’t do so on a platform where my ads would appear alongside any of this vitriolic effluent.

But… I’m pretty sure I’m in the minority, and it’s not like my objections have any meaningful impact anyway given that I don’t use it in the first place.

It was CP Scott who said that ‘comment is free, but facts are sacred’. It seems nothing is sacred at Facebook.

In 2008, about £1 in every £25 spent in a UK supermarket was spent in Lidl or Aldi. Today, it’s closer to £1 in every £5. These discounters have seen enormous growth, driven by a complex web of interacting underlying forces.

What is undeniable is that shoppers have traded choice for value. An average Lidl or Aldi branch carries 7,500 different products compared with 30,000 at your average Tesco or Sainsbury’s. Many people would rather pay less than have more product choice.

The big supermarkets, meanwhile, have tried all sorts of strategies to bridge the gap—attempting to offer full ranges while squeezing costs. It hasn’t really worked, hence their loss of market share.

You can’t have choice and value: they’re mutually exclusive, because choice begets inefficiency and waste.

Sixteen years ago, I wrote:

Gordon Brown has a fascinating plan for the NHS: Increase patient choice, whilst simultaneously driving the cost of healthcare down to deliver better ‘value for money’. The plan is fascinating primarily because its two aims are utterly contradictory.

Yesterday, Wes Streeting told the BBC that he wants to:

make the NHS easier and more convenient to use, to give patients more choice, to get rid of the waste and inefficiency we see in the NHS.

It’s hard to grasp what’s hard to grasp. Choice requires oversupply, which is—by definition—inefficient.

I suspect what Streeting intends to do is allow patients to choose between location and speed, in an effort to spread demand. If you don’t mind travelling a little further, you might get seen quicker. There is a logical efficiency argument to that, and the process already exists in the NHS, but is perhaps under-promoted.

The problem is that it’s bad for the population’s health. Julian Tudor Hart proposed the Inverse Care Law decades ago, describing how the geographical areas of greatest medical need have the poorest supply of medical care. These populations also tend to be the least mobile, and therefore the least able to travel to shortcut the waiting lists.

Therefore, in the name of efficiency, one might well end up filling the available capacity with the most mobile and least needy patients. This might move the needle on the Government’s pledge to cut waiting lists, but it will exacerbate health inequalities.

What I haven’t quite figured out yet is whether this approach is intended to provide political cover for bolder moves to tackle inequalities, or whether this is the only game in town. Either seems plausible. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.

The Twentieth Century Society is currently running the first iteration of what it intends to become an annual campaign highlighting exceptional buildings which are turning thirty years old. Buildings typically become eligible for protection through listing at this age, and the Sociery argues that early listing is a good thing, because building approaching this age are typically also approaching their first major refurbishment, during which ‘heritage’ features may need protection.

I was struck by two buildings on the list: I was astonished that the Waterloo Eurostar terminal and the station from Blackpool’s Pepsi Max Big One are the same age. The Big One featured in my childhood: I don’t know when I first rode it, but it can’t have been too long after it opened. The Eurostar featured only in my adulthood: I’ve only ever taken it from St Pancras, so my first trip can only have been after 2007.

This also sent me down a bit of a Big One rabbit hole. I never realised that the station was such an architectural achievement. I couldn’t even call it to mind, but perhaps I had other things on my mind when queueing. Anyway, it stores the trains in a vertical stack because of the constrained space on the site, and accomdates two other rides running beneath it: quite the achievement.

I also learned that fully 20% of the cost of building the rollercoaster came from protecting it against erosion. I’d never considered how vulnerable a steel rollercoaster which is just across from the beach could be to erosion, but of course it is.

What a remarkable bit of engineering the whole thing is!

Yesterday, in the context of the first passenger service of the new Metro train, I said:

with the UK’s public realm and infrastructure suffering from long term under-investment, it looks like we’ll be stuck with cascading sets of problems for years to come.

And how. By yesterday evening, the Metro network had been bisected: it has been judged unsafe for trains to travel in the tunnels which live under Gateshead’s 1960s flyover, which has been assessed as in danger of collapse.

This means that the Tyne can no longer be crossed by Metro. The works on the Tyne Bridge, as well as the flyover being closed, make road crossings of the Tyne in the city centre challenging, exacerbated by the closure of the High Level Bridge to most traffic some years ago.

The nearby Swing Bridge hasn’t swung in years, and the car park beneath the nearby Redheugh Bridge has been cordoned off because of the risk of bits of concrete dropping off it.

The Tyne Tunnels are restricted at weekends as one is needing maintenance closures to ’protect its long-term future’ only 13 years after its last nine-month refurbishment closure. The ferry across the Tyne has been closing early for weeks, and is expected to continue to do so for months, due to staff shortages.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m so lucky to be able to walk to work and avoid this chaos.

A lot has been written recently about the development of artificial intelligence tools hitting a wall: that is, we’re reaching a point where the pace of improvement in models has slowed considerably. Some have made the point that this may not matter as we’re not yet close to exploiting even a fraction of what the existing models can do.

I think this is a reasonable take. One of my main uses of ChatGPT has been to help with the finer points of coding. I’m not really a coder, but I occasionally throw together a bit of PHP or Javascript to solve a specific problem: to tweak the output of an ical feed, for example, or to tweak the layout of a webpage, or to use an api to very quickly check public transport departures for a specific stop. This has been made much easier by being able to paste the code into ChatGPT and ask: “Why isn’t this working?!”

But just recently, I’ve been playing with the ChatGPT api and plugging in into some of those small scripts—with great results. When my alarm goes off in the morning, ChatGPT gives me a quick, sensible verbal briefing on my calendar events, tasks and so forth before I’ve even opened my eyes. I plug it into scripts where I’d like the wording to be a bit varied rather than identical every time, with pretty good results each time.

None of these things are lifechanging, but they are the sorts of small quality of life improvements that haven’t yet become commonplace—but will no doubt spread over coming years.

There are few things more likely to make my eyes roll than the headline:

Wallace’s response to MasterChef claims was misogynistic, says No 10

The fact that a television presenter has made people feel uncomfortable by acting inappropriately is serious, and ought to be dealt with seriously by his employer and, perhaps, his employer’s commissioner. The fact that early complaints to the BBC appear not to have been adequately acted upon is worthy of investigation. The fact that people face inappropriate behaviour in workplaces across the country and feel powerless to report it is upsetting, and we can only hope that stories like this help to change that narrative.

However… it is slightly absurd that journalists asked for the Prime Minister’s take on an Instagram video made by the television presenter in response to those accusations, and it is truly absurd that the Government responded to them.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales suggests that around 3,000 people became victims of seuxal assualt on the same day that Greg Wallace recorded his unpleasant Instagram rant. Many thousands more will have put up with inappropriate behaviour that they’ve felt powerless to tackle—or, perhaps worse, that they’ve tried to tackle and yet been ignored.

The fact that the No 10 spokesperson didn’t use the opportunity of the question to pivot to talking about the wider issue is a failure of communication.

The fact that the Prime Minister’s attention is evidently distracted by an unpleasant issue outside of his control is a failure of Government.

But… the fact that BBC One has chosen, of all characters, Wallace and Grommit to feature in idents introducing news programmes where another Wallace features heavily is a divine comedic success.

Wendy and I were both struck by the measured tone of this week’s Parliamentary debate on assisted dying.

It’s a complicated topic. To me, the starting point is certainly that assisted death should be legal, but the practicalities are complicated. They are probably best left to people with more expertise than me.

It strikes me that the medicalisation of death complicates the picture. It is not obvious to me that it should be up to doctors to arbitrate on the processes surrounding the universal human experience of death.

It is, of course, appalling to contemplate that representatives of our state religion, in which only a minority of the population express a belief, will get a Parliamentary vote on the issue… but that’s hardly unique to this topic. It is absurd and unjust that bishops continue to sit in the House of Lords, and if this debate forces a re-examination of that issue, then that will be a welcome side effect.

I was particularly interested to read Richard Smith’s thoughts on this week’s debate, as a former editor of the BMJ who has spent much longer thinking about the topic than I have.