Tom Ough retweeted
🚨Please subscribe to Undercurrents like your life (and my livelihood) depends on it. 🚨
It's a FREE, fun and (I hope) interesting daily briefing on all the big stories happening beneath the surface 👇👇👇
unherd.com/undercurrents-new…
Tom Ough retweeted
Maybe building our entire economy around services wasn’t a good idea. But at least we can pivot to physical AI in manufacturing & data centre buildout with our cheap energy and permissive planning system
Big data centres aren’t plug-and-play; instead, they need a town’s worth of electricity, with the infrastructure to match. New transmission lines, new substations – installed by thinly-stretched engineers.
The Government, then, is now discovering that announcing plans for an exciting new data centre is very different from actually cutting the ribbon.
On the fiasco that was supposed to be Britain's largest data centre – and different approaches that might work better.
unherd.com/2026/10/why-is-br…
If British governance is to be drastically improved, I expect that many of its reformers will have come through a Civic Future programme. Glad to see this parallel institution take a more permanent form.
Since 2022, Civic Future has grown from a single Fellowship into policy courses, workshops, crisis simulations and two Talent Programmes.
It’s a school in all but name.
So today we’re making it official: the Civic Future School for Government 🏛️🧵
civicfuture.org/school-for-g…
Tom Ough retweeted
What’s striking Mamdani's time in office is not what he has accomplished, but what he hasn’t.
Despite all the predictions of an Islamo-communist revoltuion, NYC today doesn’t look all that different from, well, 2025, as I argue below 👇
unherd.com/2026/10/zohran-ma…
Tom Ough retweeted
Tonight both Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron spoke to the nation once more. She stole a march by going first, at 6pm.
Gone were her binders of notes and fluster: she sat behind a desk, with a French flag behind her, president-like, and spoke with authority. She didn’t offer solutions, but she didn’t have to.
While looting was still taking place on city streets, she talked of a ‘profound crisis of trust and authority posing a threat to democracy’, which was both true and deeply ironic (Macron kept her out of power by naming her as the threat to democracy).
Then, two hours later, Macron started his personal struggle-session, managing to sound utterly unrepentant, and promising to create an online ‘platform’ where students and teachers could express their grievances — which rather seems to suggest that he hadn’t really been listening to them at all.
Read more from @moutet:
buff.ly/xLQSlR6
On essaie tous de retrouver le type qui a fait ça
Dans Paris, le commandement aberrant a ouvert la porte au chaos. Les chefs ne savent plus que faire, la troupe a peur et se déchaîne.
Je ne sais pas qui entendra ma voix dans de telles circonstances, mais mon message est clair : ceux qui partagent notre combat n'ont rien à faire dans le pillage, le saccage.
Quelles que soient les responsabilités du pouvoir et de ses incompétents et leurs violences, nous devons refuser de participer à des actions sans signification politique et contraire à nos méthodes.
Tom Ough retweeted
For @UnHerd, I wrote about Britain's teddy-bear obsession, AA Milne, and the 100th anniversary of Winnie the Pooh. 👇👇👇
The Pooh stories were an exercise in adult interference from the very start. Milne pillaged his son Christopher Robin’s imagination and his stock of cuddly toys, only to impose an entirely new meaning onto them — an official and inflexibly grown-up interpretation of what childhood is really about.
And this accounts, in part, for Milne’s success. This was how adults wanted childhood to be, how they misremembered it: comfortable and stable, with no horrors lurking out there in the dark. Pooh lulled his adult readers “bump, bump, bump, on the back of the head” into the silly innocence of the Edwardian summer. The Hundred Acre Wood, after all, is a place where the trees haven’t been blasted bare by artillery fire, and the word “Somme” could only be countenanced as a plausibly Poohvian misspelling (“I want Somme hunny”).
Read more from Cosmo Adair (@cosiadair): buff.ly/qAKb8MU
Tom Ough retweeted
No, he has been on the most excellent @anglofuturismco podcast hosted by @tomough
youtu.be/5d8zD5gpeTc
Scoop: Britain is removing its military presence from Sierra Leone, citing security concerns.
@AHABDiggins breaks the news in UnHerd today – and argues that we are wasting an economic opportunity.
"It sits in a key position geographically, with the largest natural harbour on the west coast of Africa...
"English is widely spoken and Britain, unlike the region’s other former colonial masters, is largely looked on fondly...
"Into the breach, Sierra Leone has welcomed other partners... the Chinese have rebuilt the old British railway to neighbouring Liberia, which last ran a passenger service in 1975; its massive, 90-carriage long trains now ferry gold, bauxite and coltan."
An excellent bit of longform reporting.
Travelling through Sierra Leone 25 years after its war, you can’t help but call to mind other, more recent conflicts, such as Afghanistan and Iran. So what went right in the 2000 Sierra Leone intervention — and what is going wrong with more recent Western interventions?
Read Alex Diggins (@AHABDiggins) on the legacy of the Sierra Leone civil war:
buff.ly/kkjRAMa
It would be trivial to complete the set. Sweden would put up a good fight, and Mongolia will be impossible to access via land. But the bar – invasion rather than conquest – is low. Could do it within a year if we really wanted to.
Tom Ough retweeted
It’s 2040 and everyone is running on @VaireHQ chips. What do we do with all that cheap compute?
Speaking to Anglofuturism, @rodolfor traces computing from room-sized machines to minicomputers, PCs and phones. Every time computing gets cheaper to run, the number of devices jumps by orders of magnitude. Push further and today’s fastest supercomputer wouldn’t need a battery, just a capacitor fed by light, heat or motion.
As for what we’d use it all for, he isn’t worried. Someone will always find a use, whether that’s Spacewar on a military PDP, an AI hallucinating Minecraft, or a chip in every robot finger.
@rodolfor explains why the stakes are higher than gadgets. On his reading of one paper, half of the West’s economic growth over the past 50 years came from better computing and communications, and both curves are flattening:
“At any given time in human history, we have never not allocated 100% of the computing power to something.”
Sponsored by Isembard. If you want to own and operate a factory in Britain, America, Germany or France, email [email protected].
0:00:00 - It’s 2040 and everyone runs on Vaire chips
0:00:41 - From one computer to billions
0:01:41 - A supercomputer that doesn’t need a battery
0:02:36 - What do we do with all that intelligence?
0:03:33 - Show Turing your phone
0:03:53 - Very good Candy Crush and AI Minecraft
0:05:40 - From Spacewar to curing cancer
0:06:46 - A chip in every finger
0:07:14 - Arm cores in batteries and image processing on drones
0:07:49 - Why the West’s economy depends on computing growth
0:08:34 - The mill, the piston and the car that keeps going
0:10:16 - Keeping Moore’s law alive
0:10:52 - China, India and the demographic bomb
0:11:09 - Half of 50 years of growth came from computing
0:11:30 - The fastest phones we’ll ever have
0:11:55 - Keeping the curves alive
Britain needs a gilts crisis, argues @DamianPudner in his pugnacious UnHerd debut.
It is not that pain is desirable. It is that we need a trigger to clear away some of the distortions built up over fifteen years of near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, a borrow-and-spend mentality within government, and political reluctance to change. Such an outcome would force a repricing of the state itself.
John Healey has three weeks before the markets could force the issue. He could put welfare on a falling path and cut the public-sector paybill, and do voluntarily what his namesake was made to do in 1976.
But nothing in fifty years of British politics, nor in the Prime Minister’s speech last week, suggests he will, and I’m not expecting much in the way of radical change on 28 October.
Read more from @DamianPudner:
buff.ly/Jr10tLR
Tom Ough retweeted
For UnHerd, I’ve written about the problem at the heart of the Kemi bounce: her approval is going up, but voters still don’t trust the Tories.
Tom Ough retweeted
In brazenly self-deceived mode, one CCHQ staffer speculates loudly that the visible improvement in the attractiveness of the young men in attendance, as compared with last year, is a surefire indicator of a coming recovery in the party’s electoral fortunes.
I strain my eyes to see whether I can follow his reasoning. From what I see, I infer that the standalone moustache has finally made a fashion comeback (a long-awaited recovery, perhaps, in the face of the near-fatal countervailing influences on male grooming provided by AIDS and Adolf Hitler); but beyond that, little improvement is obvious.
Read more from John Maier (@johnmaier_):
unherd.com/2026/10/the-baden…
In UnHerd today, @FilippaLentzos's definitive take on the Russian outbreak:
"The more disturbing hypothetical is not that this was ordinary plague, but that it was an engineered form of the pathogen, deliberately altered to make existing defences less effective. Modern biotechnology raises possibilities that 20th-century biological weapons programmes did not possess.
"Pathogens might, in principle, be altered in ways that change their disease-causing properties or reduce the effectiveness of existing medical countermeasures."
unherd.com/2026/10/the-lesso…
Tom Ough retweeted
Me in Unherd arguing that the Tory death spiral is continuing and all of the blither about a recovery is largely hot air. It's not even particularly Badenoch's fault, it's just that the Tories' predicament, which has been brewing for years, is perhaps now irresolvable
Has Kemi killed the Conservatives, asks George Owers (@CapelLofft)
What might have saved the Conservatives was doubling down on Boris Johnson’s abortive re-alignment, and becoming the genuine party of the left-behind blue collar areas that are now, post Makerfield, trying to decide between Burnham and Reform.
Unfortunately, between Johnson’s open-door immigration policy and the Truss debacle, the Tories blew that opportunity so comprehensively that the only thing that might save them is Reform’s implosion, or Ed Davey remaining Lib Dem leader. Meanwhile, recent Tory policy ideas, such as abolishing inheritance tax, are little more than an attempt to cling on to what little is left of their base.
And their fresh appeal to affluent professionals — best evidenced in their plan to end the £100,000 childcare "cliff edge" — seems much the same. Andrew Griffith, their new Shadow Chancellor, is putting a lot of faith in a reheated Thatcherite tribute act. His ridiculous pledge to abolish a new tax in every budget failed to convince even his own party faithful, let alone any Tory-curious floating voters.
Read more:
buff.ly/b7wEGAY
