Dustin Górski

HMRC's new customer system will cost somewhere between £1.7bn and £4.4bn. Give or take £2.7bn. Bold to buy software like it's 2015. The entire sovereign AI fund is £640m.

New world #1 Alexander Zverev is now 3-9 vs. top 10 players in 2026. Such a brutal stat.

Point of the match...and possibly the week 🔥 @carlosalcaraz simply on fire in the final thus far #ErsteBankOpen

Ten million people have watched a comedian accidentally destroy the entire TED talk industry. He filmed the talk once at TEDxNewYork in 2014 and openly admitted he had nothing to say. Speaking coaches charge $5,000 to teach the exact tricks he used in 6 minutes to say nothing at all. His name is Will Stephen. He is a comedian from Late Night with Seth Meyers who was invited to give a real TED talk and used it to prove the format is a costume anyone can wear. Every TED speaker opens with a question, tells a personal story, cites a scientist, and shows a chart. Stephen did all four in six minutes with zero content. His entire formula fits on a napkin. Gesture with both hands. Ask the audience a question anyone can answer. Tell a mildly embarrassing story so they say aww. Point to a stranger on a slide and call them important. Flash a chart of random numbers. Wear glasses with no lenses. The audience will think you are brilliant. That last trick alone has probably cost the public speaking coaching industry a hundred million dollars in sessions clients should have skipped. "If you watched me on YouTube with the sound off, you would think I was a genius." That is Will Stephen on the TED stage, three minutes into the talk he was paid to give. He wasn't lying. Executives pay $15,000 for a keynote coach and still open with a joke the room never laughs at. Founders rehearse their pitch for weeks and still sound like Stephen at minute four, saying "wagga wah, gabba gabba" with authority. The talk is free on YouTube. The method is written across every TED speaker's playbook for ten years. Stephen still writes for Seth Meyers. Almost none of the ten million viewers have stopped nodding at empty slides since. The formula is free. The willingness to actually say something before your next keynote, pitch, or townhall is the entire edge.

Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade. If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade? On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare. There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain. As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again. This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.

From today, charities can apply to sponsor refugees through new, capped Named Community Sponsorship and Refugee study safe and legal routes. Sponsors will provide accommodation, integration support and help finding work. First arrivals are expected in autumn 2027.

Dario is a vegetarian. Sam Altman is a vegetarian. Sundar Pichai is also vegetarian. Let that sink in.

I want you all to know this. There are 650 MPs in Parliament. Yet the one MP chosen by @UKLabour to Chair the Bill Committee for the controversial, dangerous and dismally bad draft legislation, the Conversion Practices Bill, is Alex Barros-Curtis. Until July 2024, when Alex was given a very safe Labour seat in Cardiff, he was the Head of the Labour Party's Governance and Legal Unit in London. This was a department set up to investigate complaints against members of the Labour Party. Complaints of antisemitism, Islamophobia, abuse, and of course latterly, mostly women holding legally-protected 'Gender Critical' (sex realist) beliefs. Alex oversaw the investigation of hundreds of members who liked or tweeted gender critical or feminist views. I was one of them. He investigated me, as a sitting Labour MP, for 13 months. 13 months to 'investigate' one like of one tweet. I had a great lawyer, one of the names we're all now familiar with, and I had to crowdfund to pay for his (excellent) work. They first tried in 2020. But the screenshots crudely attached to that passive aggressive, threatening-sounding email from LP admin staff were so risible that I replied that it was too ridiculous for me to waste my precious time on. They left it. Years of Starmer bumbling and stuttering through interviews about whether he had spoken to me, whether he supported me, etc followed. My feminist sins continued apace. And then I 'liked' a tweet by my GC comedian friend @Glinner. He had mocked Eddie'Suzy' for comparing his choice to wear traditional women's clothing, fake plastic breasts and nails, to those being persecuted by the Nazis during WWII. I found his sarcasm, as a award-winning comedy writer in the face of such offensive narcissism amusing and so 'liked' it. I found it absurd and obscene that Izzard, an extremely privileged and wealthy man, who openly changed his 'gender' at will, should write himself into history falseley as someone who would have been oppressed due to a circumstance beyond his control. We all know the groups who were tortured, starved and killed... There is obviously more to my story, I will tell it all, it's just one chapter of the years of spiteful abusive and bullying practices meted out to me by the Labour Party managers. Not those who'd achieved office on merit, or even unexpectedly, but those in the club, often having failed to be elected themselves. So Barros-Curtis who we were repeatedly told led 'the many *independent* inquiries into women members and MPs like me, now often stands as a trans-rights activist on the Labour backbenches. He has also been gifted the role of Chair of this Committee and is a huge supporter of this Bill. And I am not a part of the Bill Committee, although plenty of TRA MPs are. Does that sound like the democratic scrutiny of legislation to you?

🚭 @DjokerNole 😅😂🤣