Today is climate strike day. Millions of people across the world, according to the organisers, will be marching to save the planet. But having dug into what they're actually marching for, I'm profoundly uneasy. So uneasy, in fact, that it's time for a THREAD.

The latest housing affordability statistics are out and it is impossible to overstate what a horrifying, generationally traumatising shitshow they are. Here is the situation in 1997 vs 2021

Even by the @nytimes 's standards, this is extraordinary. Basically accusing Johnson of being Putin/Erdogan, on the front page of its international edition.

RIP Wandsworth Council, champion of low taxes and ruthless efficiency, 1978-2022. You will be sorely missed, especially when my next council tax bill arrives.

Find it hard to buy the personal liberty argument re refusing to wear a facemask given that the liberty being infringed is your liberty to infect other people with a potentially fatal disease, which surely has an impact on their own liberty, and indeed mortality.

From a friend flying in from the US: ‘If I get COVID, it's going to be from this mess of an immigration line in Heathrow I've been in over an hour now. Everyone packed together. Loads of people without masks and coughing around me. I am genuinely shocked at it all.’

The vaccine passports debate is a perfect illustration of my new working theory: that the most important part of modern government, and its most important limitation, is database management. Please stick with me on this - it's much more interesting than it sounds. (1/?)

It's been eight years since Putin last decided he could just grab bits of Ukraine at will. Utterly bizarre that Germany in particular was perfectly happy to increase its energy dependence on him just a few weeks ago.