I hope that the publication of this year's Index of Deprivation is the catalyst for Jaywick - and the other places at the bottom of that league table - to get the funding they desperately need. The incredible community of #Jaywick need and deserve it.

Contrast Stephenson's care and knowledge of the community with Farage's weak comments. If Farage really cared, he would be lobbying night and day for the £100m+ needed to deliver the flood defences and housing improvements that will secure Jaywick's future and make further regeneration possible.

I am proud to have helped contribute, with our work on Sunspot, now a buzzing heart to the community. But the more important piece of work we did was a long-term regeneration and #floodresilience strategy - the Jaywick Sands Place Plan - that was adopted by the Council last year.

The sub-400 word version of the 1100 word rebuttal I sent in (complete with links for fact checking 🤣) is now online www.ft.com/content/f635...

Bancogiro also fun to stand in the street and snack and drink and watch the world go by.

Food wise... Corte Sconta never gets old. Expensive but a wonderful treat. Ciccetti at All'Arco, Do Mori, Cantina Schiavi. Vini da Gigio for super old school. I have a long list...also consult Russell Norman (RIP)'s cookbook if you have it.

Happy to talk more if helpful!

Boringly, I'm actually a fan of building regs in general. Not perfect but better than planning policies which attempt to cover a lot of the same ground now. Would rather have more regs and less planning. But my least favourite contradiction is stairs, part K vs part B vs part M.

Oh. Just read today's Guardian, seems I should clearly have a well paid columnist job or else Polly Toynbee just plagiarised me.

In my view the BMA would have done better to argue for the value of a highly trained and skilled worker doing high risk and life saving work, vis-a-vis other similar jobs, i.e. a pay equality question not a pay rollback to 2008.

I'm not saying, btw, that their pay is appropriate or not. I'm really not in a position to judge that. But the sentiment out there is very negative and that has consequences in hospitals when patients come in for treatment. They don't trust the doctors.

Which I feel is entirely reasonable. Regardless of whether it is effective, it makes them feel less valued and like their teachers are taking shortcuts. And it undermines their trust in teacher's subject matter expertise if they ask AI to help answer subject matter questions.

@edconway.bsky.social would love to know your thoughts...having been there recently.

This was super interesting reading. www.uksteel.org/scrap

So surely govt needs to (like the EU) bring in controls on exporting scrap steel. Which would bring down price and stimulate domestic investment in arc furnaces, and make their own investment in Scunthorpe a real winner, and secure domestic production capacity not reliant on imported material.

Currently 80% of our scrap steel is exported at inflated prices which reduce the viability of domestic arc furnaces. Plus obvs going to countries with terrible environmental regs and carbon intensive plants. We reimport the scrap once processed, as raw steel to use in buildings and manufacturing.