Laurie Dunkin Wedd
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ldw1.bsky.social
Laurie Dunkin Wedd
@ldw1.bsky.social
2.9K followers 1.2K following 9.8K posts
Bought no coal or gas since 1977, no flights since 2006, no petrol since 2015. You can give up fossils too!
PV, EV, domestic battery.
ME/CFS. #UBI
Kent UK.
Sometimes musical.
Posts Replies Media Videos
ldw1.bsky.social
See @scottsantens.com who has made a massive contribution to that goal.
February 10, 2026 at 11:34 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
scottsantens.com
The insistence on hoops to jump through, even on the left, is the bane of my existence as a UBI advocate.
February 10, 2026 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
bestforbritain.org
The hypocrisy exposed 👀

“When was the last time anyone spotted the Reform UK leader 'at work' in his own constituency of Clacton-on-Sea? According to him, it’s 'a couple of days a week'. Sounds a lot like hybrid working, then.”
Nigel Farage is a WFH icon – I can just picture him at his ‘home desk’
The Reform UK leader wants to end remote working, saying it ‘doesn’t make you more productive’. He would know, writes Vi
www.independent.co.uk
February 10, 2026 at 7:15 PM
ldw1.bsky.social
+1
February 10, 2026 at 11:19 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
lewis-standing.bsky.social
@teamlabouruk.bsky.social
What is going on with VED?

Fair enough introducing it for EVs, why are diesel gate era combustion cars not increasing too?

@ed-miliband.bsky.social ?

EV driver's don't mind paying, but if we're trying to encourage a nation to switch, why the mixed price signals?
February 10, 2026 at 12:58 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
elliechowns.bsky.social
The govt is refusing to commit to an inquiry into the MOD's contracts with US-based spy tech giant Palantir despite the web of shady connections between Mandelson, Epstein, and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel - this absolutely stinks.
February 10, 2026 at 7:03 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
bylinetimes.bsky.social
🔴Reform MPs Accused of Pandering to Putin After Skipping Russian Interference Debate

Nigel Farage’s party refused to attend the debate, called after more than 100,000 people signed a petition demanding a public inquiry into Russian interference in British politics

bylinetimes.com/2026/02/10/r...
Reform MPs Accused of Pandering to Putin After Skipping Russian Interference Debate
Nigel Farage's party refused to attend the debate, called after more than 100,000 people signed a petition demanding a public inquiry into Russian interference in British politics
bylinetimes.com
February 10, 2026 at 4:19 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
andychapman.bsky.social
The weather in Devon reminding me of a previous time global warming hit 3 degrees above baseline.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Ld...
That Time It Rained for Two Million Years
YouTube video by PBS Eons
www.youtube.com
February 10, 2026 at 11:00 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
zackpolanski.bsky.social
£240m. With no tender. Palantir.

I wrote to Wes Streeting last week demanding answers.

Every day without any transparency deepens the scandal.

Palantir out.
zackpolanski.bsky.social Zack Polanski @zackpolanski.bsky.social · 5d
Mandelson’s malign influence runs right through the heart of this Government.

Not least in the govt’s NHS data deal with Palantir – a spy-tech firm co-founded by a man who thinks the NHS should be ‘ripped up.’

I've written to Wes Streeting urging him to ditch this dangerous deal.
February 10, 2026 at 1:14 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
zackpolanski.bsky.social
A £240m defence contract without tender.

Their fingerprints all over our health care data.

A meeting in the USA but without any minutes.

Everything around Palantir stinks.

www.thenational.scot/news/2584192...
Zack Polanski pressures Wes Streeting over Palantir after Mandelson texts released
ZACK Polanski has piled fresh pressure on Wes Streeting over Palantir’s NHS contracts after the Health Secretary’s newly-released text messages…
www.thenational.scot
February 10, 2026 at 1:55 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
phillipanderson.bsky.social
Srsly, do not come here for the World Cup. Do not come here for the LA Olympics. Just don't. It's not safe
ICE director refuses to commit to pausing operations for 2026 World Cup
Acting ICE director Todd Lyons told a congressional committee that his agency was ‘key’ to World Cup security plans
www.theguardian.com
February 10, 2026 at 10:29 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
greenparty.org.uk
Meet Hannah Spencer - Green MP candidate for Gorton and Denton, and the only vote to stop Reform.
February 10, 2026 at 6:02 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
carolinejmolloy.bsky.social
Rip them up and start again
UK signed deals with US firms that were clients of Mandelson lobbying company
Clients of Global Counsel, co-founded by Mandelson, included OpenAI and Palantir, which have both signed deals with government
www.theguardian.com
February 10, 2026 at 10:36 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
blytheroad.bsky.social
Well. This vid came along after a pretty rubbish day. Anyone who’s dealt with disability in their family will get what #HannahSpencer says here. I did. And it made a difference to my day. Thanks @boldpolitics.bsky.social. Not your usual politics talk.
boldpolitics.bsky.social Bold Politics @boldpolitics.bsky.social · 6h
Tomorrow's episode of Bold Politics is so so rare in British politics: real people who are unafraid to just be themselves for an hour because they know they don't have to protect any vested interests.

It's time for a clearout of robots in Westminster.
February 10, 2026 at 7:08 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
boldpolitics.bsky.social
Tomorrow's episode of Bold Politics is so so rare in British politics: real people who are unafraid to just be themselves for an hour because they know they don't have to protect any vested interests.

It's time for a clearout of robots in Westminster.
February 10, 2026 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
spinningouttime.bsky.social
Greens: A breath of fresh outlook 💚
boldpolitics.bsky.social Bold Politics @boldpolitics.bsky.social · 6h
Tomorrow's episode of Bold Politics is so so rare in British politics: real people who are unafraid to just be themselves for an hour because they know they don't have to protect any vested interests.

It's time for a clearout of robots in Westminster.
February 10, 2026 at 7:27 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
officer-blackavar.bsky.social
This is a lie..."an ever increasing proportion of our national income on out-of-work benefits”.

As it happens welfare spending as a share of GDP is actually lower than it was in 2010. Indeed it has not really changed much in percentage terms since the 80s.
Graph of UK welfare spending as a proportion of GDP over time.
February 10, 2026 at 6:25 PM
ldw1.bsky.social
In my view the solution to this is #UBI, freeing people up to work without losing benefits, and making less skilled jobs more attractive.
Scott Santens explains: www.scottsantens.com/basic-income...
Frequently Asked Questions About Universal Basic Income
Universal Basic Income 101: A UBI FAQ
www.scottsantens.com
February 10, 2026 at 10:51 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
jdportes.bsky.social
It is slightly irritating that the Guardian uncritically reports his claim that taxpayers are spending "an ever increasing proportion of our national income on out-of-work benefits” without pointing out that it is, in fact, false.
February 10, 2026 at 4:51 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
flyingrodent.bsky.social
I think the Labour right guys will be fine here, so long as they’ve remembered to not say anything horrible in writing in their private communications to each other.
No, of course not. And as a cabinet minister said to me yesterday, this whole process could well end with new labor on trial. A trial at court number one in the Old Bailey, quite possibly is where this is going to end with Peter Mandelson in the dock, Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair and basically everybody else who served in that government probably coming to the witness stand at some point. I mean, it's just crazy. And that's one outcome. Important not to prejudge the outcome, of course, but that could well be where we are headed and that is going to dominate or it's going to be in the background even if Keir Starmer's miraculous recovery turns out to have been real. It is about the entire labour party. We have not even had day one after the nuclear explosion yet. The nuclear explosion is still about to go off. We know it is coming. Everyone knows it is coming. But I do not think people have quite grappled with how significant it is. Those Wes Streeting messages are damaging and they are only like, you wait to see what is to come. And that is even before we get to talking about what these messages say about Donald Trump, about the special relationship. It has got profound political implications, as you say, Gabriel, for the entire labour movement. Starmer might survive till May. He might be succeeded by Raina. Let's say she is going to have the same problem. Every conversation is going to be turning back to Mandelson. Our listeners are probably going to be sick of hearing the name Mandelson in five months time, but I guarantee we will still be talking about it. Well, and as one labour strategist close to number ten and several members of the cabinet said to me yesterday, cabinet yesterday chose death by a thousand cuts because that is what the background hum of revelation after revelation from the disclosure process is going to mean. All of these cabinet ministers at one time or another will have to go out the morning after release and say, what do you think of this? What do you think of that? It's just going to, it's likelier to be a really slow and painful process of death by a thousand cuts now rather than one big bang
February 10, 2026 at 10:45 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
flyingrodent.bsky.social
Mel’s Times colleagues are being very forthright about just how bad this likely to get for the Labour right, as basically every awful thing they’ve said and done for decades is dragged into the light and the lads are pulled in to justify it in live, possibly televised sessions.
Wes bottles it and Labour's left grabs the steering wheel The of lt The State of It > • 6m 贝 Listen to what Labour ministers and MPs are saying about their colleagues in a week of chaos in Westminster. The prime minister thought it was all over for him this weekend, but a scrambled rearguard action has left him looking stronger than he has for some time. But to survive, Keir Starmer may now have no choice but to move leftwards. And there's much worse to come when the Mandelson files are released. Meanwhile, has Wes Streeting missed his moment to challenge the prime minister? Steven Swinford, political editor, The Times Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times Gabriel Pogrund, Whitehall editor, The Sunday Times If you thought last week was bad, dear listener, if you thought that that was tricky, what is coming down the track is really, really damaging. So I will set that out both in the immediate term, which is at some point, possibly this week, Lord Mandelson will be interviewed under caution by the police. Now, that in itself isn't a problem. What the problem is, is what follows, because Scotland Yard will then allow the government to release the due diligence cabinet office report that Keir Starmer saw before he decided to appoint the friend of a paedophile as our man in Washington. So that is going to be a very damaging moment. It will lay out in black and white what Keir Starmer knew. It will also show that he only asked three questions of Lord Mandelson before waving that appointment through. So that is a moment of huge tension to come. And then much more broadly is this insane operation which is going on in the Cabinet Office where they are trawling through hundreds of thousands of emails or private WhatsApps, you name it, to get them ready for publication because the government has, in a kind of moment of sheer madness last week because the political pressure got to them, they have agreed to publish everything that was sent to Mandelson unless there are exemptions on national security grounds or on international relations. Not even on grounds of irrelevance, which is interesting, right? It's remarkable. They're just going to release everything. And that is a ticking bomb underneath the entire Labour Party. Wes Streeting has tried to get ahead of that by putting out his messages, but they are just the beginning. There are suggestions that Tim Allen's departure, who was a close friend of Mandelson, is directly linked to those messages. So that is going to be really damaging and destabilizing. Now, it's going to take time for them to come out, but there is a broad commitment to do so. You've got the Intelligence and Security Committee, which is a body of MPs and peers, which is now charged with overseeing that process. So the government doesn't actually have control over what is published and what isn't. That decision is being taken by that committee. And it's just, I've never seen anything like it in politics. It will make the Epstein files look kind of relatively abbreviated. Marginal for British. It's the Mandelson files and the scale of it. I'm told that they are looking back at messages that go back to 2001, when Mandelson was still in government serving as Northern Ireland secretary. We are talking about 25 years plus of internal government messages and then all of the WhatsApp messages. I don't think people have really looked at how bad this could be.
February 10, 2026 at 10:43 PM
ldw1.bsky.social
Probably not.
February 10, 2026 at 6:26 PM
Reposted by Laurie Dunkin Wedd
drsimevans.carbonbrief.org
BREAKING: UK govt auction secures 4.9GW new solar at £65/MWh and 1.3GW new onshore wind at £72/MWh, 13% and 21% below the price cap respectively.

All due online by 2029.
February 10, 2026 at 7:25 AM
ldw1.bsky.social
Do we need it more than, say, Finland? Or Spain? Quite a number of major nations manage without. Arguably that makes them safer.
I always understood the only reason we kept it was to justify our presence on the Security Council.
February 10, 2026 at 6:24 PM
ldw1.bsky.social
The subs are normally in dock anyway ‘cos they’re flaky. If we’ve got one active somewhere we’re lucky. And you can bet your life Ivan knows all about that.
February 10, 2026 at 6:19 PM