About 50, from memory. I bet more stairs are walked up and down at Surbiton per day! More generally, we have much lower standards and expectations at rail stations than tube stations, for no obvious reason.
@timleunig Does Surbiton station have 100 steps between the platforms and the entrance?
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Tim Leunig retweeted
On Thursday I wrote about the 2014 injunction Russell Brand obtained against a woman who accused him of assault.
I've now obtained the final order. It's breathtaking.
She had no lawyer. No trial. Yet she was silenced for life - even barred from speaking to the police.
🧵:
I've now obtained the final order. It's breathtaking.
She had no lawyer. No trial. Yet she was silenced for life - even barred from speaking to the police.
🧵:
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Surbiton station is a lot busier than this and we have never had an escalator!!
How is it that a Zone 2 tube station that has 7000+ embarking passengers a day can be without an escalator for three months? It’s been like this since September. This is the sort of neglect that a fare freeze leads to.
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Tim Leunig retweeted
This is back to the old days where outstanding was all about how something felt. If you can’t quantify what a grade constitutes then something is very wrong and this leads to interpretation and inconsistency.
Ofsted’s top grade – ‘exceptional’ – is not something it can ‘simply define’, a senior HMI tells teacher-training providers
tes.com/magazine/news/…
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Sure, but there is still a lot of conventional teaching in primary schools
@timleunig8@TTRockStarsRockStars is something that’s been and gone here now she knows them. It is a good platform. My issue I suppose is how a lot of teaching these days has been devolved to apps. I don’t think it’s overthinking to raise a question asking if that’s really the best way. Is technology always progress. I don’t know. Folks should ask though surely!
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Yes you should have a proper exam, because you have some intellectual pride. You should also award marks for attending class.
Ok, so the students go full AI on my take home exam on an elective course. It's a completely pointless exercise, and everyone - even those not attending the lectures - will get top marks. A student told me yesterday that all his friends only pick electives with take-homes, don't go to lectures, and ace the exam with AI.
So the question is: should I make it a written sit-in, risking that the course will close down (must have a certain # of students for it to run), or keep everyone happy with a take home?
I'd say about 30% of participants take the course seriously regardless, and learn (and appreciate the course) a lot.
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Tim Leunig retweeted
Next year will be 1,400 years since one of the best SpAd interventions of all time:
aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2012/05/venera…
aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2012/05/venera…
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Now I have heard it all. Am MP complaining that kids are spending too much if their own time, out of choice, learning maths!! @TTRockStars is epic!
Children spending too long on maths app TT Rockstars, MP warns bbc.in/4AaHIk0
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Tim Leunig retweeted
I’ve worked with some fantastic journalists in my 29 years on the job. My pride at @Gabriel_Pogrund knows no bounds for example. But what @RosamundUrwin had to go through to get the Brand allegations past the lawyers and over the line is of a different order from anything I’ve ever achieved in this job. She is brave, principled, a great reporter, a beautiful writer and a gutsy human being. I am frankly proud to know her let alone call her a friend. The KC who lost his rag earlier should rot in hell
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Sometimes politicians ask civil servants to do things that are ill thought through and cannot work. They then blame the civil service when they don’t. I imagine this is a good example
Scoop: Civil Servants at the DHSC & NHSE had an all-staff call on the abolition of NHS England. Safe to say they aren't enthused...
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Thanks for raising this, @DanNeidle. It is offensive in the extreme. I hope she gets justice.
Now Russell Brand's been convicted of rape, we need to talk about Sylvie Berki. Because she can't speak for herself.
In 2014, Ms Berki said she'd been assaulted by Russell Brand.
But if she talks about it, even now, she risks jail.
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Just returning from @berlinairport . What a hassle. Only three non EU passport gates open. Police had to intervene when people who would miss their flight tried to push in. Lots of shouting, looked like a fight at one point... 1/2
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@berlinairport Now sitting on @British_Airways flight 985 at @HeathrowAirport 5. The jetway is broken and the airport does not have enough staff to push the steps the few feet to our plane. The pilot says that there are many jetways broken, and it could be some time. Hopeless. @_NigelMilton
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Tim Leunig retweeted
I'm always stunned by the quantity of money in US politics
Per my estimates: Elon Musk’s PAC donations in one US election cycle alone roughly equal all the money that the 61 French presidential candidates have spent across all presidential elections in the 21st century
Per my estimates: Elon Musk’s PAC donations in one US election cycle alone roughly equal all the money that the 61 French presidential candidates have spent across all presidential elections in the 21st century
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Genuinely interesting from @JDVance
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
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Absolutely brilliant set of tweets from @SCP_Hughes on how to make a brilliant city, architecturally. Read it and you will learn something.
How can we make lovable cities? If you had asked a European architect this question in 1900, they would probably have referred you to a slender, lively book by the Austrian writer Camillo Sitte, translated as ‘The Art of Building Cities’. Published in 1889, ‘The Art of Building Cities’ swiftly came to be revered around the world.
worksinprogress.co/issue/the-forg…
Sitte was repudiated by the modernists and fell into obscurity, but his ideas are beginning to be revived. My cousin @PMArslanagic and I have distilled nineteenth century's finest work on urbanism into five principles:
- Create enclosed spaces
- Keep squares small
- Symmetry is overrated
- Move monuments to the edges of spaces
- Nestle monuments in vernacular fabric
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Tim Leunig retweeted
This is also a tacit acknowledgement that pension freedoms is rather too free for the governments’ long term liking. Near term the drawdown has been a boom for tax receipts, and the lump sum for consumption. But at £91bn/year (more than doubling in three years!) - and likely to is year - it throws up some moral hazard of rapid early-retirement divestment, and reliance on means tested transfers later in life. Speculation that this policy (including the tax free lump sum) will change has amplified this pace of drawdown.
When is an annuity, not an annuity? When it is “using collective assets to buy higher yielding assets”. Will be fascinating to see the regulatory model behind this one.
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The EU allowing in British seed potatoes is very good news. Before Brexit the UK was the main source for European potato growers; we have real strength in this area. So this looks like a win-win. #OnceWorkedAtDefra
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The government is changing the mechanics of self-employed taxation. It could be a fiasco - I set out a better way - timleunig.substack.com/p/how-to-tax-t… (£/free trial)
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