Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Syt]

Brits to resist cultural imperialism of American politics--might I suggest you migrate to a new language. Mutual intelligibility with America is not to your benefit.

I suggest reverting to Old English.

They can just wait until the US replaces English with Spanish. It's apparently going to happen any minute.

Or if the American government is accurate, Latin and Greek are about to experience a resurgence of popularity within the US.  Need to get back to those traditional Western roots.

I don't think they're big on Latins

[HVC]

Brits to resist cultural imperialism of American politics--might I suggest you migrate to a new language. Mutual intelligibility with America is not to your benefit.

I suggest reverting to Old English.

They can just wait until the US replaces English with Spanish. It's apparently going to happen any minute.

Or if the American government is accurate, Latin and Greek are about to experience a resurgence of popularity within the US.  Need to get back to those traditional Western roots.

I don't think they're big on Latins

Wait until they find out how dark Greeks can get 

[Jacob]

They're more interested in imagined ancient Greeks than current actual Greeks. I have no doubt that if necessary there are memes (and more academic versions of those memes) that'll explain how the imagined ancient Greeks are sufficiently white, while the current actual Greeks are "not the real Greeks".

[HVC]

I blame marbles inability to remain painted after 2 millennia.

[Syt]

They're more interested in imagined ancient Greeks than current actual Greeks. I have no doubt that if necessary there are memes (and more academic versions of those memes) that'll explain how the imagined ancient Greeks are sufficiently white, while the current actual Greeks are "not the real Greeks".

Can't get much whiter than this.



And obiously popular with a certain kind of account.

[Tonitrus]

Bigs beards and tiny penis'. 

[HVC]

Bigs beards and tiny penis'. 

One out of two for MAGA ain't that bad.

[Sheilbh]

Yes, I think a sudden loss of visa/mastercard services would be catastrophic (until we get the alternative set up) but the sudden loss of twitter could even be beneficial for the UK. It is noticeable, for example, how many British politicians posture as if we were Americans with American problems rather than a different place with different problems, having to switch to a homegrown alternative could help squash this a bit at least.

Yeah I mean you see it across issues. I remember AOC and other Democrats pushing for a $15 minimum wage and that getting immediately picked up by some (I assume, of our dimmer) Labour MPs calling for a £15 minimum wage

The ones that really stick out for me though are the wall-to-wall coverage of Charlie Kirk's shooting and also the amount of coverage about Zohran Mamdani. In both cases I just find it insane - I did enjoy the Times commentator who said of all the Labour MPs talking about the lessons the left must learn from Mamdani (pick a phenomenally charismatic candidate, run against a man accused of repeated sexual assaults, in the most liberal city in the country) few of them seem immediately helpful for Labour in the Red Wall But my basic view is that no British person should have an opinion on the Mayor of New York. It's not our business.

On Charlie Kirk - on the other side I am struck by how little coverage there is of the recent murder of a far-right activist in France. But generally how little and how poor the coverage of Europe (and Asia) is compared to the extent to which we are just mentally Americans.

There's a lot of reasons for it but it is infuriating.

We keep on talking about this but the presentation of London as some sort of lawless hellhole is particularly annoying and inaccurate. It is repeated by some British politicians who must know that it is basically bollocks, a completely fake reality dreamed up to buttress racist fantasies.

Yes-ish. There has been a big uptick on quality of life/anti-social crimes and there are a lot of problems. But you're right in terms of violence - I could be wrong - but I believe our murder rate is the lowest among major cities in the West. It's not just safer than New York or Chicago but than Paris or Berlin.

Having said that I think a lot of British politicians - and British people in general - do believe it. Londoncentric (the fantastic London Substack set up by Jim Waterson of the Guardian - a bit like the Mill in Manchester) uncovered someone who was doing racist TikToks about HMOs in London. It turns out that a lot of it was untrue but he was actually the estate agent letting the HMOs and was making up to £1,000 in one night from his videos on TikTok. He didn't have politics about it really but thought it was content that would perform well and "I just wanted the clicks".

But they then did a follow-up about Londoners being told how much of a shithole their city is and it is wild - I've had this experience of people in other countries worried at how dangerous London is. I thought it was interesting:

From the Amazon rainforest to rural Australia, the world thinks London is collapsing

Thanks to all the readers who got in touch to share their stories of encountering people in some of the most remote corners of the world (which I define as meaning locations ranging from Suriname to Surrey) who think London is in a state of total societal collapse.

This follows our story about the would-be TikTok entrepreneur who said he decided to specialise in fake videos about London homes being given to illegal immigrants because "hate brings views". On Friday night the Met Police told us they are continuing to investigate whether an offence was committed by the individual behind the TikTok account, who wrongly thought they were posting without any potential consequences.

It's increasingly clear that London is suffering a global reputational crisis exacerbated by the incentives of viral video sites. It's impacting tourism, investment in the capital, and the general sense of wellbeing in the city. It's driven by legitimate raw videos that feature highly visible thefts of mobile phones and violent robberies. It's then exaggerated by unscrupulous content creators and social media platforms who incentivise ragebait about the supposed total collapse of the city's society.

First place for the most remote encounter went to London Centric reader Joe Jones:

In November 2025, I was visiting Suriname on holiday. We flew in this tiny plane to a remote jungle outpost in the Amazon rainforest, where we stayed for five days. It is completely off the grid with this small eight-seater plane coming and going twice a week to drop off/pick up guests and drop off supplies. And there was no access to the internet for the guests staying there.

    It was run by this Surinamese bloke of about 60. He'd worked there for about 30 years and would rarely leave, preferring to spend his time in the jungle. He was a super warm and friendly guy, and loved having people visiting so he could share his passion for the rainforest with them.

    When it came time for us to go, just as I was stepping into the small plane to leave, he poked his head through the door and asked where I was going back to, and I said London. He instantly responded, "oh you better watch out. That mayor of yours..."

    I was taken aback and said, "Yeah, what about him?"

    "You'll have Sharia Law by next year, mark my words. It's terrible what he's done to London. Anyway, fly safe!" and he left before I could say anything.

    It was really striking to me that a man on the other side of the world, who'd never been to London, living in a country that rarely even thinks about the UK, and with very limited exposure to the outside world, could have such a strong and distorted opinion about what's happening here. A man who from all the evidence I had seen those few days was kind and thoughtful, but who had clearly had his brain pumped full of racist, far-right crap.

Second place went to the reader who was in remote mountains on the other side of the world:

    I was in Australia back in July last year, and was on a tour of Grampians National Park. Was sat having lunch when the guide, a Kiwi-Aussie guy, came to sit with me. I'd been asking him about the birds but then he asked me if he could ask a question about the UK, and then came out with "so is the UK about to have a civil war?"

    I was just flabbergasted! He said he'd been watching stuff on YouTube, including a guy who goes round old school pie shops in London. I kind of shut the convo down as it was so weird.

Nathan, another reader, got in touch with a report from the United Arab Emirates, where the BBC World Service has been replaced with Elon Musk's X world service:

    I was in Dubai at the end of last year, travelling for the F1 in Abu Dhabi and had a very odd experience with a taxi driver. I mentioned to him that I lived in London, and he immediately started talking about how dangerous it was and how I ought to be careful. He described how crime had been going up, how people were getting jewellery stolen off them in the street and that knives were everywhere.

    The way he talked made him sound very familiar with the place so I assumed he had lived in or at least visited London recently. Only later did he say that he'd never been to London or the UK and that his entire impression was based on what he'd seen on social media and heard from other people in his cab.

    Now London's not perfect, but given the dystopian eight-lane motorway we were driving on at the time and that the smog was obscuring all view of the sky, I was quite glad to be heading back to London a few days later.

The anecdotes from around the world continue to flood into our inbox. There was the person with the relative in Los Angeles who was worried about going to London because their friend had seen a TikTok claiming that knife crime in the capital is so bad you now need ID to buy any cutlery from a shop, after seeing stories about restrictions on buying spoons. Another person said friends in Manchester regularly raised concerns about their safety. Times Radio's Fi Glover got in touch to say one of her relatives now refused to come in from Surrey to central London because "it's a hellish no go area, she'd be mugged for sure and all the shops were boarded up anyway". A common thread was the perception that there are constant, rolling violent riots on the capital's streets.

This isn't about saying that life in London is all fine and dandy just because of the recent news that the murder rate is in decline. If you've read London Centric you'll know we've broken news on how certain forms of theft are effectively legalised in the capital, housing can be infested with cockroaches, and stolen mobile phones are discarded with barely any police interest. Whether you're an illegal ice cream van, a dodgy charity fundraiser, or a triad gang daubing houses in red paint... we're still coming after you.

But the reason London Centric carefully reports these stories and establishes facts is because we think a great city can be made even better – and we want to put pressure on those in power to improve a place we actually like to live in.

For some YouTubers, X posters, or TikTokers who just need cheap clicks, London is nothing more than a filming location that provides them with the background footage for whatever viral ragebait will earn a few dollars in advertising revenue. We'll have more on who's behind these accounts in the coming weeks.

Brits to resist cultural imperialism of American politics--might I suggest you migrate to a new language. Mutual intelligibility with America is not to your benefit.

I suggest reverting to Old English.

I've said it before but I think your namesake is right. The most important fact in British politics in the 21st century is that America speaks English.

Edit: Total by the by but (1) we should return to French and (2) I found this very interesting on language (via Adam Tooze):


Loads more here:
https://thelifeofwords.uwaterloo.ca/etymons/

Or if the American government is accurate, Latin and Greek are about to experience a resurgence of popularity within the US.  Need to get back to those traditional Western roots.

Let's not give credit they don't deserve. Anyone from Thiel down - it's not an engagement with the two thousand years of Christian thought or, for that matter, the Classical World. It's airport bookshop wisdom - the easily digestible, deracinated, decontextualised lessons stoics and Church Fathers can teach business leaders that they use to present a light dusting of culture. It's heritage, thought, history, texts as ornament.

Their traditional Western roots aren't found in Rome, they're found in Gladiator (at best).

[Oexmelin]

I was just about to write something just like that in the other thread re: Marco Rubio - but that's exactly it. The "meme"sis Greeks.

[crazy canuck]

Let's not give credit they don't deserve. Anyone from Thiel down - it's not an engagement with the two thousand years of Christian thought or, for that matter, the Classical World. It's airport bookshop wisdom - the easily digestible, deracinated, decontextualised lessons stoics and Church Fathers can teach business leaders that they use to present a light dusting of culture. It's heritage, thought, history, texts as ornament.

Their traditional Western roots aren't found in Rome, they're found in Gladiator (at best).

It is hard to communicate dripping sarcasm over the internet. Did you really read my post as suggesting Maga land was about to take the study of ancient Roman and Greek texts seriously? After I posted that Plato's symposium had been banned in Maga land?

[garbon]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7v0ev05mdjo

'Smiling' fossil discovered on Holy Island




Christine Clark, 64, was hunting for fossils during a Boxing Day walk on Holy Island, Northumberland when something caught her eye.

A tiny pebble seemed to be "smiling at me", she said. "It looked like someone's fake teeth."

She took it home and posted it to a Facebook fossil identification page.

Thousands of likes and comments later, others seemed to confirm her suspicion that it was, in fact, an ancient marine animal.

Christine holidays every year to Northumberland with her husband Gerard where, she said, they regularly go hunting for Cuddy's beads on the Holy Island.

A spit of land with only 150 residents and cut off twice daily by the sea, it is considered the cradle of early English Christianity.

The "beads" are fossilised parts of the stem of a marine animal called a crinoid, but they earnt their nickname from St Cuthbert, considered the patron saint of the North of England.

"He arrived on the island in 670s as a monk coming to the priory, he is buried here and miracles took place around his shrine," said Dr Frances McIntosh, collections curator in the North East at English Heritage.

Hundreds of years later in the 1300s people were finding these small fossils.

"But they didn't know what they were, they [thought] Cuthbert was making them and it was part of his spiritual process, and by collecting them they could become more spiritual," she said.

And so the tradition has continued and on Boxing Day last year, Clarke was hunting for the beads, but she spotted an altogether very different looking fossil amongst the pebbles on the beach.

"I saw this fossil smiling at me - it's the first set of teeth I have found", she joked.

The BBC has had the fossil identified by the British Geological Survey (BGS) which confirmed it is a larger part of a crinoid.

Crinoids are marine animals that first appeared in the Cambrian period, more than 500 million years ago, making it one of the oldest complex animals on the planet, and versions of it still exist today.

It has a flexible stem, which is attached to the sea floor, with branching arms arranged around the main body of the animal at the top of the stem - although it is an animal, this arrangement has earnt them the nickname "sea lilies".

"The stem consists of these little discs, called ossicles, and what Christine has found is a number of these ossicles connected together, in what is called a columnal," explained Dr Jan Hennissen, senior paleontologist at the British Geological Survey (BGS).

The stem has been split lengthways and been curved round so that it resembles the very unusual "mouth-like" shape.

"It is probably from a rock formation called the Alston formation, which is a dark limestone, and that is about 350 million years old," said Dr Hennissen.

Crinoids are part of the phylum Echinodermata which also boasts sea urchins and sea cucumbers.

It is very rare to find a complete crinoid, but rather the individual discs that make up the stem - these are the St Cuthbert's beads - and often resemble polo mints.

Crinoid fossils are among the most common found on the Northumberland coast. Dr Hennissen said you can usually tell quite easily if you have found one there.

"The biological form is very different from the surrounding rock normally - either a different colour or a different composition," he said. "And you can see these very strict lines, which are very defined as opposed to the [surrounding] mudstone."

You can also get your fossil identified by sending pictures to the British Geological Survey, external or the Natural History Museum id unit, external.

Christine has received offers to buy her fossil, but for the time being intends to keep it.

"It brings a lot of amusement to many people," she said.

I don't think that's quite right. I'm pretty sure his body is said to have been transported away to protect it against Viking raids and eventually ended up in Durham. Odd quote from English Heritage on that.