Perhaps I'll do the very specific calculations this evening. But I don't think it's good news for the "cut welfare" crows. You need a growth plan for England outside the South East. And currently I don't think the ASI, IEA, and their crowd have one, or even care about having one.

The FT comments section does not auger well for the survival of this United Kingdom.

Should be an interesting read this,... will I actually read it or should I get AI to read it to me like I did with Kemi Badenoch's "the right way".

Delicious. Cannot wait for those attendance figures to begin starting with a 5.

The canonical meme on this topic.

Thanks for all the votes, but sadly we failed. While my comment got to second places, it was eclipsed by a comment which, while good, doesn't highlight the important local aspect of the tourist tax and mixes together all UK taxpayer money and subsidies, which is unhelpful.

[u]

Since the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th British city regions by population started out in 1998 with identical strength economies it's a nice physical way to see how differently things can turn out, economy-wise, over nearly three decades now.

While in theory it doesn't change the story that "Greater Glasgow's economy has performed just as well as Greater Manchester's since devolution to Scotland" I know from experience that without the latest year of data that will be the line instantly used to reject the data.

I set an alarm for the first weekend after the six weeks longest estimate the ONS gave for fixing their regional GVA dataset and,... I think it's still not fixed.

Time to leave the GPU on room-heater mode and go to support my local hospitality industry.

"absurd" has a meaning. If you think that every single US city --- every single one with a stronger economy than its equivalent in your country --- has taken an unreasonable, illogical, ridiculous decision that is contrary to common sense then perhaps you should think again.

You should recommend my response to this bad opinion piece.

@freeagent Not bad at all. AI speeds up this kind of thing quite a lot by telling which things to worry about and which to ignore (my business is listed as "Business Name to be supplied", this is a known bug, best ignored). Because I recently did my tax return, everything was up to date.

@freeagent Oh no. I really do feel like the fact they messaged me about this yesterday and I already have missed deadlines is a bit rude. Perhaps they sent me a letter but, just to repeat, I am opted out of receiving letters. I get digital messages.

@freeagent Here we go,...

@freeagent Tax comes at you fast.

I still think Windows is the best Operating System.

@freeagent Did they hear me tweet that I didn't get my letter?

ScotRail trains are slightly older. But they're much more electric, and thus it's much less of a problem them being a bit older.

I didn't get the letter. But perhaps I just tried to kid myself that I didn't get the letter. And then coped myself into believing it would be an online message, as I'm opted out of letters. Self delusion is not unheard of. Either way, I'm now caught by the man. No escape now.

And for existing businesses, almost all of us in Leeds agree that we could grow more with better transport. Yesterday my colleague, a new Dad, spent an hour on in gridlock on a bus home because the trains were cancelled. Today, this is the service to my home. How can we fix it?

I found the reports that Revolut has switched to local models interesting. And I found the pushback against it even more interesting. So I asked ChatGPT (what I currently use to organise my local AI work) how much just the last 24 hours of my work would have cost with Opus 5.5.

They always do a nice render do those lot.

At coding, Mistral is 5 months behind the two leading labs. In other areas it might be 12 months behind. I'm very happy calling that "near-frontier".

"Awarded best in the year Leeds College of Building 2007" might be as highly aligned as you can get to my opinion about skills in the economy in that few words. Absolute banger.

Anyways, thanks Microsoft for the gift cards to thank me for reporting bugs in Copilot and helping them fix them.

"Marks & Spencer E-Gift Cards are an irreplaceable way to unlock thousands of unique products, found only at Your M&S" > I mean, surely they're replaceable by cash or any major payment system aren't they?

🫡

That lovely Patrick Stewart memorial by Ian McKellen has reminded me of the high street back home, in the town where my Mum was a teacher for a long time, and the ratio of various flags put up. No worse than most attempts to measure popular attachment to "national identity".

I'm enjoying the @dantomlinsonmp reddit AMA so far.

@NeilGarratt I know there are many definitions of affordable, but this just feels so likely to be a massive part of why it makes no financial case to build in London at the moment. Land owners possibly need to take a hit too and there are, sadly, negotiations to be had. But this is fixable.

@IGMansfield The broader answer - across all education and the whole period since Thatcher - is that these lines go up overall, to higher levels than in our neighbours, and that money came from other places. The dire state of our infrastructure outside South East England is a clear candidate.

@IGMansfield Scotland (and other devolved nations) did badly on education. Much worse than England. But on the economy, they did better. Sometimes much better. And education was promised by many to be a growth strategy, often the biggest growth strategy, in England. That failed badly.

I didn't buy own brand gherkins, or cornichons, or the brined-only gherkins (sorry Polish people, I don't like them nearly as much pickled ones).

Bought two items twice, because they were at both supermarkets and I wanted to see how much more expensive Waitrose is and the answer is,... a lot more expensive.

Might have got carried away.

The question one asks in Waitrose when one has quite a lot of toothache trifle to finish.

The cut through line from the budget in this house.

@GjMcGowan Ominous.

@GjMcGowan It *was* a three minute delay. But yeah it's fine.

@GjMcGowan Just local. I don't want to sound pathetic, but I did need a ten minute sit down. And then yes, cycled to Brough and on the (delayed natch) train home now.

Contrition.

U wot m8?

It gives a good answer.

<parody of American economists tweeting about Britain> it's amazing that the USA has any economic growth at all when everyone and everywhere is a NIMBY like this! </parody of American economists tweeting about Britain>

@t__and__p Even Milton Keynes, which feels big within the South, is small compared to small Northern places like Hull and Middlesbrough.

Lol no. You're the party of retirees.

Nope. Just delusional.

I can't even massively blame the authors. How can they know?

This booklet was written in the South. We know that. It's a Tory booklet. And nowhere does it hit as hard as on this 82 minute diesel train from Manchester Victoria to Leeds, just 35 miles. An average velocity of 26mph. Tax is NOT the main mechanism here. It may be where you are.

Yeah be candid about it!

FRS 17 on karaoke mode. Unreal.

Yawn

The Spotify Karaoke view absolutely slaps.

Hell yeah.

My train back from Manchester to Leeds is via Rochdale and Bradford. What better time to listen to Kemi Badenoch's future of the Tory party pitch at 1.5x speed on Spotify via AI narration?

Gotta be honest, I'm not tempted to outsource my software development to them.

I think I was quite clear.

Because of the dentist, I have my phone on today. Just got my first cold call. From a company I've already asked not to contact me. That'll be a 1-star review on Google Maps.

I am still shook that Boston* has turkeys just walking around.

Windmill! In York. TIL.

Sadly the tooth is "probably fucked". On the upside, a quick visit to the city where the Roman Empire began its turn to Christianity, the town where England won the battle of 1066, and Britain's reigning best Fish and Chip shop.

@andrewglynch Still one of the all time greats.

Always room for improvement.

I'm enjoying the @SMCommission new Local Innovation and Economic Dynamism tool. Favourite finding so far is South East England is so un-entrepreneurial. People just don't start businesses. I've written this up with lots of details before. tomforth.co.uk/entrepreneuria…

@freeagent I'm quite impressed with my accountants. Over a dozen years of really quite complicated business (including such complexity as Finnish withholding tax and French business loan cancellation), AI checking it all back reckons we've paid pretty much precisely the right tax.

Because of how I run my businesses, I have my bank accounts synchronised in one place (thanks @freeagent) and because AI is so smart now I can figure out how much I spend on journalism in a year. Which is quite a lot. But I think I get good value for it.

A much more "we have lost growth" story is this one. Microsoft are backing the building of huge capacity data centres on old power stations in Yorkshire now. They're flying through local planning and getting built. But when they got big enough to require national permission?

Unfortunately this is an incredible Twitter news summary.

The Yorkshire Post is registered in London. #FML (it's just the registration of the new name for whatever big holding company holds this set of regionals).

Genuinely just cancelled my Yorkshire Post subscription because of the headline on this Leader. We are well past being able to afford such luxury thinking.

Many people saying "if you think the Made in Britain socks are expensive, try buying some shoes". And I have some tough news on that front,...

I drop a lot of cope online about how actually Leeds is a bigger city than Stockholm. And it is by population. And football. But by GDP, the value of what people do, Stockholm is twice as big. moneymap.jjpcodes.com/?lat=59.34459&…

@johnvohlen It would.

@jasoneccles Ask any AI. Challenge yourself. I'm not asking you to change your opinion. I'm only asking you to respect mine.

When I do the modern version of this map I will correctly label it Britain and I will not cut off Shetland, nor Orkney, nor put either in a box.

Me: "I want to support British manufacturing"
Me next: "Oh they look nice, but it's a bit expensive for a pack of three, okay then, I'll go for it"
Me seeing it's for one pair: "I want to support British manufacturing somewhat".

>£1m of GDP per resident for central London. moneymap.jjpcodes.com/?lat=51.51173&…

New updates to population around a point.
1/ Direct link to @jjpcodes' GDP around a point tool at the top.
2/ 20% speed improvement and 3x efficiency improvement (thx AI).
3/ A new section on how the code *really* works in 2026 (it's not SQLite any more).
tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulati…

Industrial Revolution Megaregion vs. The West Netherlands
10 million people = 10 million people.
$50k GDP/person < $85k GDP/person.
So good.
moneymap.jjpcodes.com/?lat=52.13352&…

OMFG this thing that @jjpcodes had built is unreal. He's found some gridded GDP datasets lovingly assembled by amazing economists. And built a fork of my population around a point tool. And the data agrees (enough) with the version I built just for the UK a few years back

If you were using Claude or ChatGPT in March or April and thought it was good, that's what you get from Mistral now for a fifth of the cost. I don't know how much those 7 months matter. Or how much the 3 months for Chinese models matters. And nor does anyone really.

Problem solved.

You need not, ideally, want a web server running at 100% CPU use constantly.

The tool (which is used by quite a few third parties via the API) is very efficiently written, but it's actually quite a complicated calculation. I just run it up on a very cheap (£1/day) Azure web app, shared with all my other (a dozen) websites. Usually 30req/minute. 900 now.

Thanks to @Msamalam for messaging me about the enormous number of people they'd pointed at the population around a point tool. Which made it unreliable. And also thanks to Gemini 4 for walking me through using the Azure Web App scaleup tool, which seems to have fixed it.

@jonathan_lutes @Msamalam It tells me to turn learn more about this part of the Azure Web App control panel.👨‍🎓

@jonathan_lutes @Msamalam ☠️

It should be this easy to meet @thijsniks' feature request.

Nice. Perfect ChatGPT app clone. Convergence is beautiful to see.

So long since I opened Antigravity App that all the suggested models are the not-Google ones.

Hmm,.... is the Antigravity App the preferred way for me to do stuff now?

It's been a while,... might be a big update.

The area is called Sheepscar now. Skinner Lane is just nearby. Still some of England's finest suede comes from there. A long gone pub The Skinner's Arms.