Software development and testing, Scouting, Sailing, Cycling, Walking etc.
United Kingdom
Joined January 2009
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Richard Bishop retweeted
Angela Rayner. 3,177 objections. One letter of support.
You read them. Or someone did. Cherwell District Council said no. Oxfordshire County Council said no. The NHS said no. The Police and Crime Commissioner said no. Four bodies that answer for that ground, and you overruled every one.
You did it with a power that takes the decision off the council and puts it on your desk. The Home Office applied. You approved. Same government, same signature, same afternoon.
Your reason was that demand remains high. Asylum applications fell 21% in the year to June. 85,891. Demand is falling and you are building.
The Home Office says a final decision to proceed has not been taken. So you granted permission for something your own department has not agreed to do.
Piddington has 358 people. No shop. No pub. No post office. The plan is 1,256 men on its doorstep. 285 villagers voted to leave the country. 26 voted to stay.
You gave them six weeks to go to court, and the merits are not allowed in the room.
You decided. They counted. Six weeks.
Richard Bishop retweeted
🚨 GLOBALISM JUST DIED IN DAVOS
Howard Lutnick just walked into the lion’s den — and told the World Economic Forum exactly what they didn’t want to hear.
“Globalism has failed.”
Not whispered.
Not softened.
Declared — on their own stage.
He dismantled the entire WEF doctrine in minutes:
• Offshoring hollowed out the West
• Cheap labor destroyed innovation
• Net Zero made Europe dependent on China
• Sovereignty begins with borders
• Nations must control their industry, energy, and medicine
Then came the line that shook the room:
“Why would Europe agree to Net Zero when they don’t even make a battery?”
That’s the truth globalists can’t answer.
Green agendas without industry.
Climate pledges without sovereignty.
Moral posturing while outsourcing power to Beijing.
America First isn’t isolation.
It’s independence.
And Lutnick made it crystal clear:
The old model is finished.
The globalist experiment has failed.
And the future belongs to nations that put their people first.
Davos just heard the obituary — live.
Richard Bishop retweeted
.@Ed_Miliband Your ministry is not being honest with Parliament or the British people. The Foreign Office here falsely denied the UK's complicity in nominating Iran. The truth is that regional groups only propose candidates, but the official nomination is done by ECOSOC. By not objecting on April 8, the UK officially joined consensus on the nomination of Iran — which was just now ratified by the UNGA. The U.S. did take the floor in April to oppose the nomination. The UK chose silence. This official reply below is deliberately misleading and deceptive.
Richard Bishop retweeted
I have absolutely no idea why my timeline is completely ignoring the suspension of Labour MP Perran Moon today. He was just caught trying to dissolve his private company without paying back a £50,000 taxpayer-funded Covid loan. Right as this government prepares to hammer ordinary families with tax hikes in the Budget.
Here is what they desperately hope stays quiet!🧵
Richard Bishop retweeted
This is true. I don't see AI replacing software engineers in my lifetime. A lot of businesses operate on legacy systems that evolved with their business, each of which have their own idiosyncrasies and bespoke links with third party systems. Before you can be let loose on any mature and established data system, you have to know *exactly* what it does, how and why. AI especially struggles with that last part because it doesn't have the context.
AI can certainly speed up laborious coding tasks within a system, but it all has to be checked and understood before it can be deployed, and tested afterwards. Vibe coders can't do this. When it comes to financial transactions especially, you can't just trust that it works.
AI code might work for 90% of test cases, but there are always unanticipated exceptions, and the test of good software is how well it copes with exceptions. As such, whatever the code your bot produces, you have to be able to read it and understand it, and ensure that it runs as intended.
AI will revolutionise application development and arts and entertainment, but the business world will still require expert human supervision. High stakes business critical software can't take anything on trust.
“AI will replace software engineers because it can write all the code.”
Nope.
Several years ago I built software that unlocked more than $10M a year in additional profit for the business.
The code took less than two weeks.
With today’s AI tools, I could probably do it in under a week. Maybe even a day.
But the code wasn’t the hard part.
The hard part took months:
Understanding a messy domain.
Pressure-testing assumptions with experts.
Working through edge cases.
Deciding what not to build.
Making tradeoffs around risk, complexity, and value, then getting stakeholders to sign off on them.
By the time I wrote most of the code, much of the real engineering had already happened.
That’s why “AI can write code, therefore AI can replace engineers” misses the point.
Code is an output of engineering.
AI makes that output faster and cheaper.
But someone still has to understand the problem, challenge the assumptions, make the tradeoffs, and decide what the software should actually do.
That’s the engineering.
Richard Bishop retweeted
The UK *nominated* Iran to join this committee.
Why @Ed_Miliband? Is this what you shook hands over?
Richard Bishop retweeted
So they're clipping the wings of one of our biggest valuable assets which will ensure we can never progress beyond EU systems.
When we hoped things might improve, they are now guaranteed to be made a whole lot worse.
Labour are proving to be a huge disaster for our country.
Richard Bishop retweeted
Je vous présente une des pires pays d'extrême-droite d'Europe, le Danemark 🇩🇰
- 10 points de moins de dépenses publiques que la France
- Excédents budgétaires et dette publique de 29% du PIB
- Licenciement sur simple lettre du patron. Taux de chômage de 3%.
- Pas de SMIC imposé par l'Etat
- Age de départ à la retraite à 67 ans, bientôt 68
- Retraite partition limitée à un minimum vieillesse égal pour tous. Les compléments de retraite se font uniquement par capitalisation
- Environ 48 % de la population a une assurance santé privée
- Politique d’immigration très restrictive : protection temporaire par défaut, regroupement familial difficile, obligation d’intégration réelle
- Résidence permanente seulement après 8 ans + langue + preuve d’emploi soutenu
- Fin du visa automatique pour les migrants au chômage depuis plus de 3 mois
- « Paradigm shift » sur l’asile : protection temporaire par défaut, objectif prioritaire de retour au pays plutôt que d’intégration définitive
- Contrat ordinaire pour l'immense majorité des employés du service public
- Durée de travail limitée à 48h par semaine par l'Etat. Majorité des conventions collectives à 37h par semaine.
- Un des taux d'activité les plus élevés au monde
- Allocation chômage conditionnée à une recherche d’emploi très active : au moins 2 candidatures par semaine, obligation d’accepter des jobs hors de son domaine, risque de perte des droits si on ne prouve pas sa disponibilité
- Interdiction du droit de grève pour certains fonctionnaires
- Impôts sur les bénéfices parmi les plus faibles d'Europe
- Aucun impôt sur la fortune
- Protection de la propriété et justice parmi les meilleures du monde
- Création d’entreprise en 1 jour, entièrement en ligne.
- Classé 7e à l'indice de liberté économique contre 65e pour la France.
- Classé 4e pays de l'OCDE où il est le plus simple de faire des affaires. La France est avant-dernière.
Ça fait peur, très peur. Un véritable enfer néolibéral.
Les heures les plus sombres, à 1 heure de Paris en avion.
Richard Bishop retweeted
In 2007, Channel 4 secretly filmed hate preachers in British mosques.
So what did West Midlands Police do?
They went after the JOURNALISTS
They accused Channel 4 of "misleading editing" and reported them to Ofcom.
Ofcom threw it out and called it "a legitimate investigation" in the public interest.
The police and CPS then had to apologise in the High Court and pay six-figure libel damages.
A year later Channel 4 went back. At Regent's Park Mosque, one of Britain's biggest, a preacher was filmed telling women that gay people and those who leave Islam should be killed.
Nearly 20 years on… has ANYTHING changed? 👇
Richard Bishop retweeted
Great data analysis here.
Per capita, people ‘born on 1st January’ are significantly more aggressive and sexually criminal than those born on 2nd January.
Why? Turns out for lots of illegal migrants - when the state can’t determine their precise birthday - the default becomes 01/01.
An interesting way to decipher migrant crime statistics even though the government refuses to publish migrant crime statistics.
Richard Bishop retweeted
Look no further than Sophy Ridge’s post this morning to see how easily the Westminster lobby is taken for a ride on Net Zero. Sky’s lead presenter breathlessly announces £12bn for two offshore wind projects "off the east coast of Scotland". They aren’t in Scotland. They are Norfolk Vanguard East and West—50km off East Anglia. No 10 slipped "Scotland" into a press release, and the lobby typed it out without checking a map.
If they won’t check which country a £12bn project is in, they certainly won’t check the balance sheet.
Strip away the slogans from Ed Miliband’s zealots and look at the financial engineering. We are told this is "homegrown British energy." In reality, it is a 50:50 joint venture between German giant RWE and New York private equity firm KKR. Taxpayers are handing over £1bn from the National Wealth Fund to de-risk their equity, while locking households into a 20-year inflation-linked Contract for Difference at £91.20/MWh in 2024 prices—well over £100/MWh today. For two decades, your energy bill will legally underwrite the guaranteed yield of a Wall Street fund.
Where do the industrial jobs go? Not here. The 184 turbines come from Denmark’s Vestas, backed by Danish export finance. Worse, the steel monopile foundations were promised to the SeAH factory at Teesworks in Redcar. In April, RWE pulled the plug on the Teesside contract for Vanguard West—triggering North East job cuts—and outsourced fabrication to Bilbao in Spain and Nordenham in Germany, underwritten by German export agency Euler Hermes. British taxpayers put up the £1bn subsidy; German and Spanish factories get the heavy engineering.
Then look at the environmental reality Net Zero ideologues ignore. Building 184 15MW turbines requires over 400,000 tonnes of virgin blast-furnace steel, thousands of tonnes of copper, and Chinese rare-earth neodymium and dysprosium mined in toxic conditions. To connect it, developers are using compulsory purchase powers to rip a 60km, 45m-wide trench—wider than a motorway—through prime Norfolk farmland from Happisburgh to Necton, pouring tens of thousands of tonnes of concrete into 150 jointing bays and a 300m converter substation.
Before a single blade turns, the embedded carbon from smelting steel, curing concrete, and running diesel jack-up vessels across the North Sea is vast. The switchgear relies on sulphur hexafluoride (SF6)—a gas 23,500 times more potent than CO2 that lingers for 3,200 years. And when these turbines hit the end of their 20-year subsidy life? We are left with 552 epoxy-resin blades, each 115m long, which cannot be economically recycled at scale and end up shredded, incinerated, or buried in landfill, while 400,000 tonnes of rusting steel stay driven into the seabed.
Yet Kemi Badenoch and the Tories now tour studios calling Net Zero "fantasy politics," hoping we have amnesia. Look at her record:
In June 2019, she waved through Theresa May’s statutory Net Zero 2050 target in 90 minutes without objection.
In 2022, she boasted at the dispatch box that Net Zero would cost "under 2% of GDP."
She sat in the Cabinet that passed the Energy Act 2023, expanding the exact CfD subsidy racket behind this £12bn RWE/KKR stitch-up.
The uniparty built this machine together, mortgaging our industrial base to foreign utilities and private equity, giving Britain the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world while paying gas stations to sit on standby when wind drops to 4%.
Only Reform UK—led by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice—will rip up the Net Zero mandates, scrap the CfD racket, fast-track domestic North Sea oil, gas, and modular nuclear, and stop treating British billpayers as a cash cow for global finance.
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Richard Bishop retweeted
If you buy an £800k flat in London, about £200k of that is an implicit subsidy for someone else to live in the same place as you at zero or much lower rent.
A further £200k is purely to meet regulations and bureaucracy.
Government imposed policy costs make up 57% of the clearing price of a new flat in London and 42% of a new home in the Home Counties.
Despite a big housing shortage and positive planning reforms, new home starts in England are declining from 182,000 in 2022 to under 125,000 last year.
While the macroeconomic context has worsened with build cost inflation and high interest rates, the Government is imposing more burdens on new homes, not fewer.
Taxes, levies, planning, and mandates add over £440,000 to the cost of delivering a home in London and nearly £225,000 nearby, with several of these imposed recently like the Second Staircase, Future Homes Standard, Building Safety Levy, Biodiversity Net Gain and Residential Property Developer Tax.
Individually these may be justified, but together they are making new homes unviable.
As a result, large developers are buying less land and small builders are going out of business; nearly 4,000 construction firms went bust just last year.
If we want to build more homes, we should be easing the burdens on them, not adding more.
Making housebuilding viable again is the most important issue in housing policy and my co-author, Edward Donovan, has completed excellent modelling showing how big the challenge is.
Read the full report: cps.org.uk/wp-content/upload…
And simulate what changing the policies does with Edward's modelling here: easing-the-burdens.cps.org.u…
Richard Bishop retweeted
I went through the entire British education system and even got a history degree without ever learning about the Anglo-Saxons. In fact I only learned of Æthelstan through a social media post about the church he is in having a leaky roof.
We MUST do better as a nation.
Richard Bishop retweeted
Labour’s Lucy Powell, trying to explain why she was complicit on Ed Miliband interview with Brand in 2015, says a)it was before social media; and b) there was no easy way of checking on people in these days.
Which is strange since a) she’d been on social media since 2009 and by 2015 it was in full swing; and b) Google has been available since 2000.
Other than that her explanation is entirely credible.
Russell Brand: The shameful truth about those who turned a blind eye
youtu.be/5hfFwqW_e9s?si=2gXy… via @YouTube
Richard Bishop retweeted
Trying to force the abandonment of oil and gas when there's no prospect of renewables ever covering the gap, with no expansion of nuclear or even of end-of-life gas capacity, is utter folly which will destroy ordinary people's lives and for which you will be entirely to blame.
Ahead of #COP31, I spoke to @BBCJustinR for the @BBCPanorama climate special.
The climate crisis is here. We are seeing its impact on communities here in Britain and across the world.
And at a time when some are trying to divide us, this is the moment to come together, not pull apart.
Because we know the solutions. We can break our dependence on fossil fuels, bring down bills and cut emissions.
But no country can do this alone. This is the time for multilateralism and collective action.
Richard Bishop retweeted
Lucy Powell has just been caught out by her own social media history.
Today, she defended Labour's decision to arrange Ed Miliband's 2015 interview with Russell Brand, claiming it wasn't the “social media age” back then.
Unfortunately for Powell, it's been discovered she was tweeting about Russell Brand in 2013.
So she was using social media to discuss Russell Brand two years before Labour supposedly couldn't use it to check him out?
Luckily, in 2026, it's very much a social media age, and we can see these Labour MPs lying to the public in real time.
Richard Bishop retweeted
The BBC’s sudden discovery of a Superpower battle over energy is a convenient fairytale designed to shield Whitehall from the scene of its own crime. British households are not the collateral damage of American gas markets or Chinese supply chains; they are the victims of a fifteen-year bipartisan political consensus that deliberately decommissioned this country’s national defence. The £460 surge hitting domestic bills is not a force of nature. It is the invoice for a political class that views energy sovereignty not as a duty of state, but as an embarrassing relic to be traded away for fleeting applause at international climate summits.
To understand the sheer scale of this betrayal, you have to look at the historical timeline of Conservative capitulation. Long before Rishi Sunak and Claire Coutinho were rubber-stamping the managed decline of the North Sea, the Tory government committed one of the most staggering acts of economic self-sabotage in modern governance: the 2017 closure of the Rough gas storage facility. To save a rounding error in the Treasury budget, ministers permanently destroyed Britain’s primary strategic gas reserve. They stripped the nation of its shock absorbers, leaving British consumers completely naked to the volatility of the global spot market. Having abandoned baseload security, the establishment then perfected the art of the "constraint payment"—a Kafkaesque mechanism where the British taxpayer hands over hundreds of millions of pounds a year to foreign-owned wind farms simply to turn their turbines off when the grid cannot handle the output. We are quite literally paying monopolies a premium to not produce energy.
If the public thought the collapse of the Tory government would end the racket, Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband have swiftly corrected them. Labour’s central manifesto commitment—the supposedly patriotic "GB Energy"—has already been exposed as a bureaucratic mirage. Miliband is not building a sovereign baseload provider to drive down your bills; he is using taxpayer capital to de-risk the investment portfolios of foreign monopolies. We are subsidising the Danish and French states to build intermittent infrastructure on British shores, while Whitehall zealots legally block domestic exploration. Starmer’s administration has bent the knee entirely to the net-zero lobby, prioritizing a radical decarbonisation target that grid operators privately admit is a physical impossibility.
The ultimate insult lies in how the state regulates this misery. Ofgem was theoretically designed to protect the consumer, yet it operates as a taxpayer-funded debt collector for the cartel. Even if a British family turns off their heating and sits in the freezing dark, they are bludgeoned by exorbitant daily standing charges—a regulatory mechanism specifically engineered to guarantee corporate profit margins regardless of public consumption. The state has manufactured a closed-loop system where the supplier cannot lose, the civil service avoids accountability, and the citizen cannot win.
You cannot run an advanced G7 economy by outsourcing your industrial spine to your geopolitical rivals. The British working class has been ordered to swallow this ruinous green ideology for long enough, shivering in their own homes while the political establishment praises its own moral virtue. True energy security requires the courage to drill, to build, and to burn what is beneath our feet. Until we break the Whitehall consensus, you are not paying an energy bill; you are paying a managed decline tax to a parliament that hates the very industry required to keep the lights on.
Richard Bishop retweeted
When a Vanguard-class SSBN slips past the Gare Loch into the Clyde, the Ministry of Defence PR apparatus frames it as the relentless triumph of the Continuous At Sea Deterrent (CASD). The operational reality is far darker. This is a scene of institutional brinkmanship, played out in four distinct acts across the British state.
1. Within forty-eight hours, that 16,000-ton boat will vanish below the acoustic layer. Somewhere in the North Atlantic, another Vanguard is waiting. That returning crew has likely been submerged for upwards of 150 to 180 days—double the 90-day patrol limit the submarine was originally designed for. The handover is entirely cryptographic. Once Northwood Headquarters confirms the outbound boat has the watch, the exhausted inbound crew will turn her bow toward Scotland. They will be back in Faslane within a week. But the crew that just left? They are now entombed until late spring 2027.
2. Who actually makes the decision to lock 140 men and women in a steel tube for six months? The operational order comes from Commander Operations (COMOPS) deep inside the permanent joint headquarters at Northwood, specifically the node designated as CTF 345. But the admirals at CTF 345 are not making a strategic choice; they are playing a rigged hand dealt by Westminster. The doctrine of CASD dictates that one boat must always be on patrol. You need four submarines to maintain this mathematically: one on patrol, one training/working up, one in routine maintenance, and one in deep refit. But the math has collapsed. COMOPS is forced to order 200-day patrols because he simply doesn't have the hulls available in the rotation cycle.
3. Why doesn't the government intervene? Because successive governments are the exact architects of the crisis. To understand why that boat is being run into the ground, you have to look at the Treasury and the civil service managerial cartel. In the 2010s, chancellors like George Osborne and Philip Hammond engaged in "fiscal smoothing"—delaying the Dreadnought-class replacement submarines to save in-year accounting costs. Simultaneously, Whitehall utterly failed to manage the sovereign refit infrastructure at Devonport (Babcock’s Dock 9). They outsourced the deep maintenance (the Long Overhaul Period and Refueling, or LOP(R)) and let the dry docks decay. So, instead of a refit taking two years, it takes four to five.
You cannot rotate four boats if two are functionally trapped in a crumbling dockyard in Plymouth. The politicians did not intervene because intervention requires capital expenditure; they preferred to quietly force the Royal Navy to absorb the risk on the balance sheet.
4. Can it be proven that the Royal Navy is at a drastically elevated risk entirely due to government decisions? Unequivocally.
First, there is metallurgical and mechanical reality. The Vanguard class was commissioned in the 1990s with a 25-year lifespan. They are now being pushed past 30 years. Running ancient pressure hulls, aging reactor cooling systems, and legacy life-support scrubbers on 200-day continuous cycles creates exponential mechanical fatigue.
Second, there is the human capital destruction. You cannot repeatedly subject highly specialized, nuclear-qualified engineers to six-month underwater incarcerations without destroying their family lives. The retention death-spiral in the submarine service is not a mystery; it is the direct, predictable outcome of Treasury penny-pinching.
The politicians delayed the replacements. The civil service botched the dockyards. And as a direct result, the Vanguard crews are now operating at the absolute outer edge of physiological and mechanical safety just to keep the Whitehall illusion of seamless deterrence alive.
Richard Bishop retweeted
Energy policy wonks (the sane ones) have been warning about the stupidity of renewable energy for twenty years. Those in the know have long predicted this level of precariousness on the grid, and each year we creep closer to the winter where the grid simply cannot stake the strain.
I don't know if this is the year when the grid finally does fall over but we are seeing balancing cost spikes that mean we're in for some pretty eyewatering bills.
Regardless, the situation is now so precarious that there is very little resilience against unplanned events. We should prepare for the possibility of rolling blackouts. The government's recent chatter about stockpiling basics is not coincidental, and it's not because they fear an imminent Russian attack.
What's not being properly considered is what a blackout really means. Most people have experienced a few hours outage in recent memory, and know what a nuisance it can be. It is fairly frequent in my rural village, and the power goes down for the or four hours.
This is often problematic because it cuts me off from the internet so I can't do my work, and because the gas boiler is dependent on electronics, the heating stops working and we have no hot water. I can put up with it for a day. I can just go out for a few hours or walk to the pub down the road.
If, however, the power is out for two days, then most of the freezer foods start to defrost. You can mitigate that but after three days it all has to be thrown out. And, if it's a nationwide blackout, so does all the food in the supermarkets and the warehouses.
This, actually could be the best case scenario. We are taking it on faith that restarting the National Grid is a straightforward affair. As I understand it, it isn't and it could lead to two or even three weeks of rationed electricity. That's a long time to go without a warm drink, home heating and hot water.
It is likely that such a blackout would happen in the middle of a wind drought, at the coldest weeks of winter. That means people will die. It also leaves a lot of people stranded because most of us no longer keep cash in the house, and there won't be any working cash machines. They'll soon be emptied anyway.
That means we could see the looting of shops. Some out of opportunism, and others out of necessity. While the grid may take a few days to get back to normal, it could be several weeks before all the supply chains are back to normal. The wider cost to the economy is enormous, not least the collapse of investor confidence. This is a major downgrade in Britain's status as developed country.
At the best of times, it is said that Britain is only three missed meals away from anarchy. I don't think it's quite that bad, and communities will pull together to help each other out, but most places no longer have a pub, and the remaining ones are just as prone to problems that go with having no power or heating.
This is going to require a full emergency response form the government, but our civil contingency capacity is no longer what it once was. It could cope with a regional blackout due to a snow storm, but will rapidly collapse if the whole country is without power.
By this, I do not mean to scaremonger. It is simply a fact that there is very little supply chain resilience, and a quick glance at grid metrics tell you how unstable the grid is becoming.
It should also be noted that the European grid is more integrated than ever. The Ukrainian power grid is close to collapse and if it does, it has serious grid stability ramifications for its immediate neighbours. Mainland Europe may not have enough surplus energy to bail us out in a crunch.
This is the sort of thinking that should have been done before we decided to make our power grid weather dependent - but nobody in receipt of renewables subsidies gave it any thought at all. The profits are private but the losses will be socialised - to the tune of hundreds of billions. Unless you're in the tinned food or rechargeable torch business, you're in for a rough old time of it.