[The country Burnham's got to heal — Birmingham, the day the banners came out.]

Andy Burnham says judge Britain by his “Makerfield test” — whether a policy actually worked for ordinary people. Right then. Let’s judge the man about to run the country by his own ruler, starting with the £100m Clean Air Zone he built, then knocked straight back down.

Let me tell you where this really started, because it’s the bit everyone skips.

Birmingham. A Sunday. Two crowds stood across one square from each other — Union flags one side, red and black the other — both screaming, both dead certain, both there for the same reason: they need the other lot to exist. Take one away and the other’s got no afternoon. And that, more or less, is where we are as a country now. Not thinking. Just reacting. Waving flags at our own reflection and calling it a cause.

And here’s the thing — that’s the exact mood that’s just handed Andy Burnham the keys. Makerfield voted 65% to leave. Reform breathing down its neck. Everyone skint, everyone scared, everyone livid. That’s the country he’s about to run.

And he reckons he’s going to heal it. Crowned by his own party, mind — not picked by you, picked by them — and out he comes with “unity and hope,” a fresh start, all that. Lovely words. Only here’s the catch: putting a cracked country back together takes conviction. The bottle to hold a line when holding it costs you something. And conviction’s the one thing a weathervane hasn’t got. So let’s have a look, shall we? He handed us the ruler himself — the “Makerfield test,” he called it: judge a policy by whether it actually worked for ordinary folk. Grand. Let’s hold him to it.

Right. Greater Manchester. Drive round it and they’re still up there — over a thousand clean-air signs, cameras everywhere, every one of them switched off, watching nobody. A hundred-million-quid monument to a decision he made and then un-made. Back in 2017 he asks Westminster for the powers, draws up the biggest charging zone in Europe — near enough 500 square miles, seven-fifty to sixty quid a day. Then, weeks before it’s meant to go live in 2022, the backlash kicks off, Boris calls it unworkable, and he bins the lot. Cost of the thing he never even switched on? North of a hundred million. He called scrapping it a win. He’d called building it a win an’ all.

And this is where I won’t let him off, because that U-turn goes two ways at once — and both are true. Kind version: that’s the Makerfield test doing its job. Bloke listened, bloke turned. Hard version: he bottled it. The conviction folded the second it got expensive — same empty middle we’ve just watched swallow the last fella whole. Man of the people and weathervane, same bloke, same name.

Fair’s fair, mind — the green stuff isn’t nothing. Friends of the Earth rate his 2038 net-zero target, and the Bee Network, the buses dragged back into public hands, that’s genuinely decent. Credit where it’s due.

Thing is, though, a country waving banners at itself doesn’t need a weathervane. It needs someone who knows what he believes when believing it isn’t popular — the one thing that whole Birmingham square is howling for, and not a single flag can hand over. And Burnham? He did both. Same policy. Banked each as a victory.

So the real question Makerfield’s asking was never about buses, or cameras, or the bill. It’s whether a man who can call a thing and its opposite a win has got anything in the middle at all.

The cameras are still up there. Switched off. Watching nothing.

Makerfield, or Breakerfield. The door’s already turning.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

Sources.

• “Makerfield test” standard and Burnham’s victory speech: NPR — npr.org/2026/06/19/labour-andy-burnham-wins-special-election; Andy Burnham — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Burnham

• Makerfield’s volatile mood, 65% Leave vote, Reform surge: CNN — cnn.com/2026/06/18/uk/makerfield-by-election-results-labour-burnham-reform-intl-hnk

• Greater Manchester Clean Air Zone proposal, scale (~493 sq miles, £7.50–£60/day), 2022 U-turn and £100m+ cost: Daily Mail via PressReader — pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20260615/281685441542023; GB News — gbnews.com/lifestyle/andy-burnham-clean-air-zone-u-turn-james-daly

• Bee Network, 2038 carbon-neutral target and green record: Friends of the Earth — friendsoftheearth.uk/media/andy-burnham-wins-makerfield-byelection

• Leadership context (Starmer resignation, Burnham as runaway favourite): NBC News — nbcnews.com/world/united-kingdom/keir-starmer-resigns-prime-minister-andy-burnham-labour-party-britain

© The Almighty Gob 2026. Free to share with attribution.

[Voted in, and handed nothing — bar the word.]

Right. So the phone rang yesterday. As it does.

Right. So the phone rang yesterday. As it does.

And you know that ring, don’t you. Perhaps not. However. If you do, it’s probably not the one you’ve been waiting on — the one that comes the moment you’ve given up waiting. Settled. Pleasant. A voice with a clipboard behind it. Name, date of birth, and then the thing itself — an adult ADHD diagnosis, official, on the record, after god knows how many years of me wondering.

ADHD. Combined type.

Combined. The clinical word. The full set. The whole orchestra. Slam dunk. The first clean pass I’d had since I walked out of school at fifteen — and trust them to hand it to me for this. All these years later. Like, say, a latter GCSE in ADHD — and without the certificate to show for it.

So. Not a failure, after all. That’s good to know.

Anyway. There are three of these, as it happens. Three presentations, the manuals call them now. Inattentive, for the dreamers. Hyperactive, for the ones who never sit still. And Combined — for those of us who wouldn’t choose and took the lot. I didn’t pick a lane. I took all three, and floored it.

The deluxe membership, you’d think. The all-inclusive. Except it turns out to be the tier most of us are sat in — the commonest of the three, by a country mile.

However the word that actually landed in my ear — and I want you to hear it the way I heard it — wasn’t combined. It was common.

Now. You’ve had proper news in your life, haven’t you, and you’ll know there’s a ceremony owed to it. A pause. A weight. Are you sitting down. Something.

There was none of that. A voice, a word, then the line went dead the way lines do — and I’m stood there holding a phone, a diagnosis, and not one other thing. Except, the promise of a confirmation email to follow.

And here’s the part that ought to keep them up at night, not me. All those years — sit still, you’re not concentrating, you’d do ever so well if you’d only focus — you got your own version, didn’t you — and the official finding, when it finally lands, is this: I was right, they were wrong, the whole time. Delivered down a phone in the exact flat tone you’d use to tell a man his parcel’s been left round the back.

A parcel, as it happens, I’m still waiting on. DPD — Delivery Personality Disorder, would be about right.

After the diagnosis.

Because I’ll be straight with you — I’d half-pictured a welcome pack. You would have too. Welcome aboard. You’re one of us now. A lanyard, maybe; nothing says belonging like a lanyard. A leaflet you’d fully mean to read and find unread in a drawer in 2031. A fridge magnet that says you’ll get to it. And a pen. A club pen. Lost before the call had properly ended.

Oh. And the perks. Because every club on earth flings perks at you, don’t they — even the ones you never joined. A free birthday hot drink off a sandwich chain that loves me more than some relatives manage. Even dead ones. Loyalty cards, the lot, for things I’ve never once been loyal to.

Which brings me, neat as you like, to the one gift they might actually have pulled off — and didn’t. A loyalty scheme.

Picture it. A loyalty scheme. For us. The one reward programme on earth built to defeat the very people it signs up. You’d rack the points up at speed and lose the card by lunchtime. Download the app full of good intentions; uninstall it before the week was out. Double points for everything we started, and not one solitary point for anything we finished. And the big reward — the one we’ve been saving towards for years — gone, expired, unredeemed, because we never quite got round to claiming it.

Loyalty. They’d have offered us loyalty. The one thing the condition all but promises we’ll forget we ever signed up for.

Not that I’m a stranger to the points system. My previous diagnosis was BPD, and that one ran like a loyalty card whether they’d ever admit it or not — nine symptoms on the list, collect any five and you’re in for life. One of ten personality disorders on the shelf, mind, and you’d not want to be reaching for number ten — the tier they’d sooner hand a weapon than a prescription, and not, I suspect, entirely as a figure of speech.

ADHD doesn’t work that way. You don’t collect the three presentations like Clubcard points — you get filed under one. I took the combined, the lot of them in a single swipe, and that was that.

This club, though, gives us nothing. Not a card. Not a discount. Not so much as a t-shirt — and I’ll tell you exactly what I’d have had across the chest, given half a chance. Not you are now officially a member; that’s their language, all forms and filing. No. Alternative Disposition. Hardwired Differently. That t-shirt I’d have worn to the shops. Out of spite. Tucked in.

And you’d think — wouldn’t you — that after all that, there’d at least be a gong in it. A lifetime of unpaid service to the field. Decades as its most patient case study. A Services to Psychiatry Lifetime Achievement Award, say — now there’s something I’d have pinned to the wall and dusted weekly. For services rendered. For sheer length of service. For turning up, time after time, undiagnosed and uncomplaining, keeping the whole profession in honest work — and never once collecting so much as a certificate for my trouble.

The exclusivity test.

And exclusive, they keep telling me. Exclusive. Years on a list just to be looked at. So let’s test that, shall we.

There are, roughly, two and a half million of us. Every political party in Britain put together — Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the Greens, Reform, the whole squabbling lot of them — musters about one and a quarter million between them. Which makes this exclusive little club of mine twice the size of organised politics in the entire country.

Twice. Some exclusivity.

The most exclusive club I will ever be let into, and the only one on earth that hands its members absolutely nothing.

No annual ceremony for the most fidgety in the room, either. No Best Intentions Award — Oscar night, the envelope, the gold statuette, the acceptance speech you’d begin beautifully and never quite land — hosted by a beaming Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, reading the autocue as though he meant a word of it. Sponsored, naturally, by Ritalin — with a special category, late in the evening, for Best Use of the Drug.

The one and only perk.

Nothing, mind. Well — almost nothing. Because there is, I’ll grant them, the one perk. The single, solitary bonus of exclusive membership.

A lifetime prescription to Ritalin — methylphenidate, to give it its Sunday name. A stimulant — an upper, no less — that for a brain wired like mine is supposed to work clean in reverse. Sit with that a moment. The one gift the club hands us is a substance that settles us down by speeding us up, and they hand it over for life.

Because here’s a mind that already feels like it’s travelling a million miles an hour — flat out, no brakes, never has been otherwise — and the considered clinical remedy is to hand it an upper. To speed it up. So that it might, at long last, slow down.

Which is, give or take, like handing a mass murderer an AK-47 and calling it anger management. Just sit with that for a minute, if you choose. It’s verging on comedy gold.

It’s exactly what my Irish mother would have called logic. Fair to say, I think.

And I’ll be honest with you — I can hardly wait to try it.

No committee, either. No AGM, no biscuits on a Tuesday. And that might be the one mercy in the whole affair — because picture the committee. Go on. Picture it with me.

Twelve of us in a room. One item on the agenda. Not a hope on God’s earth of reaching it. Three people talking at once, all three correct. Someone’s rewritten the constitution by Tuesday and told no one. The minutes from last time? Started — beautifully, real promise in those minutes — and abandoned at point one. Half the room’s wandered off mid-sentence after a better idea; the other half’s still on the first one, going magnificently deep, deeper than the thing ever needed.

Nothing would get done. Everything would get started. The most interesting room in Bristol, and not one decision walks out of it alive.

And don’t — please don’t — let them start a membership benefits sub-section. Say, an ADHD Drivers’ Association. A branch for the ones behind the wheel.

Picture the breakdown cover. One member, stranded, hazards going. Does one tidy van turn up? It does not. Six of us turn up. None with jump leads. All with a theory. Every last one certain it’s the alternator — it’s always the alternator, we’ve decided, don’t ask us why. Bonnet up, car forgotten inside ninety seconds, and the hard shoulder’s quietly become the liveliest stretch of tarmac in the West Country while the vehicle sits there, cold, going nowhere. Much like the committee.

And that’s only the mechanical breakdown. The other kind I’d rather not dwell on — though, between us, I reckon we’d talk each other down a treat. Eventually. Once we’d all finished talking at once.

So no. No club to run, no chaos to chair, no breakdown cover going spare. Just a word, and me, and the rest of my life to square the two.

The help that never follows.

And here’s where I stop laughing — and where, I’d gently suggest, so should they.

Because official is the word doing all the lifting. And official, it turns out, is hollow as a chocolate Santa. Officially diagnosed. Officially a member. Officially — and this is the whole bit — nothing follows.

Years on a waiting list to be seen. Years. And the seeing, when it comes, takes the length of one phone call. A decade of waiting against a minute of being told, and then a silence that closes over the top as though the call never happened.

That’s the whole trick of it. Institutions are magnificent at filing us and useless at the bit that comes after. The certificate was only ever the help wearing a smarter font — and the help, when they mention it at all, turns out to be parachutes on the roof of a building ablaze. A safety measure in name only, placed exactly where no one in trouble could ever reach it, and handed to us with a straight face as reassurance.

They sort us, stamp us, and leave us holding our shiny new word in the same silence we walked in carrying. Which, if you’ve read a line of mine these past years, you’ll recognise on sight, won’t you. It’s the exact complaint I’ve aimed at this city from the off.

Only this time they aimed it at me. Down a phone. And called it a diagnosis.

The least common man in Bristol, filed at last under common.

So I’m common now. Officially. On a record in a building I’ll never see, signed by people I’ll never meet, filed beside a t-shirt that was never printed and a pen I’d have lost regardless.

I have never felt less common in my life.

No plaque came. No pack arrived. The magnet never made it onto the fridge — so I’ll tell you what it would have said, shall I. You’ll get to it.

And do you know — I rather think I just did.

So here’s what I’ll do with their empty, exclusive, perk-free club — the one they never bothered to name. I’ll name it myself. The Alternative Disposition, Hardwired Differently Club. Membership: one. Committee: chaos. Perks: still none — however the t-shirt’s getting printed, and I am wearing it to the shops.

The word’s mine now. The club’s mine now. And I’ve always been quietly good at taking the words they hand me and aiming them back the way they came.

Consider this one aimed.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent mayoral candidate in 2016 and 2021, and one of Bristol’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Writing since 2010, well over 1,000 pieces across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.

© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved. Some lefts too. probably.

["In partnership" — the two most expensive words on the Bristol harbourside.]

Well. I guess The Defence Rests Before the Vote, when the Bristol Harbour Committee meets on Tuesday 23 June.

Inside its 151-page agenda pack: £22m of crumbling New Cut river walls under a warning the council’s own officers would rather you simply noted, Redcliffe Wharf steered to a single partner on evidence its own adviser called unassessable, and a safety report signed off a month before the safety review reports back.

Right. Before we get into any of that, let me tip my hat to someone.

This week, Joanna Booth published a sharp briefing on the same meeting — she went through the lot so you didn’t have to, and laid out what’s sitting in there. If you haven’t read it, do.

I read it. And then I did the thing I do whenever a set of council papers refuses to sit still in my head: I went back to the pack myself. Sat with it. Quietly. Because an agenda pack never lies to you outright — it just hopes you won’t read to the end of the sentence.

The alternative being, perhaps, better use in the bathroom. You know — given what a fair few talk in the council chamber nowadays. Anyway.

So this is me, reading to the end of the sentences. Out loud. With you. Tissue free. Not issue free. By the way.

How this is going to go.

I’ll start gentle — a daft accounting trick that barely lifts your pulse — and climb from there, item by item, until we hit the one sentence in these 151 pages that should stop the meeting dead. I’ll make you wait for it.

The council hasn’t defended any of this yet. Doesn’t matter — the defences are already written, older than the meeting itself. Commercially confidential. Standard practice. For information only. We have to move. You’ve heard them all before.

So keep your eye on one word: note. To note a thing is to receive it and do precisely nothing — and I call the manoeuvre note-washing: dressing a decision as a note so it slips through a public meeting with nobody’s fingerprints on it. That little word is about to do a lot of work.

Ground floor: a surplus that’s a deficit in a coat.

We start small. Money.

Bristol’s Floating Harbour is legally required to stand on its own two feet by 2031. Float on them, more precisely — it is a harbour, after all. No subsidy from the council’s general fund. So how’s that going? The subsidy went up this year. Up £63,105, to £828,780. Wrong direction entirely.

The defence writes itself: tough market, but look — we delivered a surplus. And they did. £444,562, parked in reserves.

Here’s the gentle little knife. That surplus came mostly from jobs left unfilled and maintenance that didn’t get done — work that was meant to happen, rebadged as money saved.

The Environment Agency has also quietly pulled £60,000 a year it used to chip in. Permanently.

A surplus built from work that didn’t happen is a deficit wearing a coat.

Pulse barely moves. But notice the shape of it — a decision dressed as something softer than it is — because you’ll see that exact shape again. Bigger. All the way up.

First floor: the menu without the kitchen.

Climb a rung. Public land.

The council ran a “commercial prospectus” inviting bids to use harbour sites for income. Item 13 asks the Harbour Committee to wave the big ones through — and to progress an unsolicited proposal for a visitor attraction at Prince’s Wharf, the prime spot beside M Shed.

The defence: it’s a key decision on a published agenda — fully transparent.

Is it, though. The agenda is published. The evidence isn’t. Who bid, what they offered, which were recommended — all sealed in an exempt appendix you are not allowed to read. They’ve shown you the menu and hidden the kitchen.

And “unsolicited” is the tell. It means this bid skipped the advertised process — the one the council built so public land goes to tested merit, not to whoever knocks loudest. An unsolicited bid jumping the queue isn’t initiative. It’s a queue with one person in it, at the front, holding a sign that says queue.

Still with me? Good. Because now it gets warm.

Second floor: selling to yourself, and calling it a deal.

Redcliffe Wharf. Thirty years of failed schemes. Item 12 wants to hand Bristol Temple Quarter LLP and its developer Muse (Muse Places Ltd) nine months of exclusivity to work it up.

Defence one: exclusivity is normal for complex sites. Except the council hired Savills to weigh this bid against a rival, and Savills said both were too high-level to assess properly. You don’t hand a man the keys because two surveyors told you the map was illegible.

Defence two: the rival bid is confidential. Fine — confidentiality protects a bidder’s price. It does not excuse the committee from proving best value in the open.

Their own lawyer put it in writing: do not get committed under an exclusivity agreement alone. That is the Section 123 duty — best reasonable price for public land — and trust us has never once satisfied it.

And now the part that doesn’t make the one-line summary.

BTQ LLP isn’t some outside developer riding into town. It’s a public-sector partnership — and its members include Bristol City Council itself, alongside Homes England and the West of England Combined Authority.

Read that again. The council is granting exclusivity over public land to a body it sits inside. It’s on both sides of the table — buyer and seller in the same coat — and it still owes you proof it secured the best price.

The best-value duty doesn’t get easier when you’re both buyer and seller. It gets harder to prove you ever met it.

Feel the temperature change? Good. We’re not done climbing. Yet!

Third floor: signing the safety report before the safety review.

Now we stop talking about money, and start talking about people.

Item 7: approve the Harbour Authority’s annual report — including its safety assurance — for publication, in June.

The defence: routine governance.

Here is why it is nothing of the sort. Two people died in the harbour this year. The coroner recorded accidental death in each, with no prevention-of-future-deaths report; one inquest, into the November death of PC Akhtar, concluded only in May.

Those deaths triggered an external, harbour-wide safety review — shoreside, afloat, public access. It reports in late July.

So look hard at what they’re asking. Approve the year’s safety assurance in June — a full month before the review into that same safety reports back. Sign the conclusion before the exam has been sat. And once it’s published, there is no un-publishing it.

That isn’t routine. It’s note-washing — with the stakes lifted to the level of someone’s life. And we’re still not at the top.

The top floor: the sentence I made you wait for.

Right. Here it is.

Item 11. The New Cut river walls — over 200 years old, holding up roads and bus routes in and out of the city. After one collapsed at Cumberland Road in 2020, the council surveyed the lot: 194 wall sections, 67 rated serious or critical.

The bill now stands at roughly £22.5m against £17m found. The long-term programme may need another £50m — all of it unfunded.

This item comes to the Harbour Committee “for information.” Members are asked to note it.

Note what, exactly. This. Their own engineers — not me, not a campaigner — have written, on the record, that without sustained funding there is “a significantly increased risk of a catastrophic asset collapse/failure and a subsequent potential for loss of life.”

Loss of life. In their own paperwork. And the remedy attached to those words is to lobby government. No named officer. No timeline. No fallback. Lobby. And note.

Sit with that, because it is the whole thing in a single item. A council department has written that people could die. And the same pack asks you to receive that sentence the way you’d receive the minutes of the last meeting. To file it. To note it.

To note-wash a loss-of-life warning.

There’s no rung above that. People might die — and they’re asking you to tick a box.

The shape, and the verdict.

Step back and look at the shape I told you to watch for, down on the ground floor.

Every rung is the same move: a consequential decision, the evidence sealed or the verb softened, the public asked to trust what it’s refused permission to see. A surplus that’s a deficit. A sale to a body the seller sits inside. A safety sign-off before the safety review. A loss-of-life warning, filed under note.

You don’t need malice to explain any of it. Deadline pressure, a habit of sealing the awkward appendix, and the quiet gravity of that one word will manage it between them. Which is almost worse — malice you can sack; habit you have to dismantle.

And before anyone reaches for it: this isn’t a party point. Any administration running this committee would face the same questions — the colour of the rosette doesn’t change the arithmetic. The papers would still say exactly what they say.

Run it through the filter.

Three questions, the same three I put to everything. Is it practical? A 2031 self-sufficiency deadline served by revenue that arrives after it — no. Is it logical? Safety signed before the review, exclusivity granted before assessment — no. What’s the likely outcome? Public land committed on hidden evidence, and a loss-of-life warning noted rather than owned — unless someone in that chamber refuses to play along.

You’ve still got a move.

Written questions closed at 5pm on Wednesday. But statements are open until noon on Friday 19 June — one each, to democratic.services@bristol.gov.uk. The full pack sits on the council’s committee pages. After that, it belongs to the room.

I opened by tipping my hat to Joanna Booth for laying the pack out. So here’s the return: the excuses were written before the vote — and now so are the answers to every one of them.

The only thing left undecided on 23 June is whether anyone in that chamber refuses to be note-washed. Because note-washing only works on a room that agrees to it.

You getting this? Good. Pass it on.

This piece is built on Bristol City Council’s published agenda pack for the Harbour Committee of 23 June 2026, and was prompted by Joanna Booth’s briefing on the same meeting. Figures and quoted phrases are the council’s own, taken from the officer reports. Where I’ve drawn an inference beyond what the papers state, I’ve flagged it. Corrections welcome and encouraged.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

Sources.

1. Bristol City Council — Harbour Committee, Tuesday 23 June 2026: Public reports pack (151pp), including the officer reports for item 7 (annual report), item 8 (harbourmaster’s report), item 9 (finance outturn and budgets), item 10 (events), item 11 (New Cut river walls), item 12 (Redcliffe and Phoenix Wharf) and item 13 (harbour activated commercial prospectus). All figures and quoted phrases are taken from these reports. → democracy.bristol.gov.uk

2. Joanna Booth, Harbour Committee Briefing: June 2026 — the briefing that surfaced the pack. → joannab.substack.com/p/harbour-committee-briefing-june-2026

3. Local Government Act 1972, section 123 — the duty to obtain best consideration on the disposal of public land. → legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1972/70/section/123

4. Bristol Temple Quarter LLP — a public-sector partnership of Bristol City Council, Homes England and the West of England Combined Authority; Muse Places Ltd appointed development partner, January 2026. → bristoltemplequarter.com · museplaces.com

5. Prevention of Future Deaths reports — HM Courts & Tribunals Judiciary. → judiciary.uk (The PC Akhtar inquest conclusion, May 2026, is recorded in the item 8 report above.)

6. Environment Agency — withdrawal of stop-gate operations funding (per the item 9 finance report). → gov.uk

Related reading from The Almighty Gob.

• Brunel Overboard: The Bristol Dockyards Rebrand — same harbour estate, same body, same forensic read → https://www.thealmightygob.com/p/brunel-overboard-the-bristol-dockyards

• Bristol and a Damaged Society — public land, private control, and the language that hides a disposal → https://www.thealmightygob.com/p/bristol-and-a-damaged-society

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent mayoral candidate in 2016 and 2021, and one of Bristol’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Writing since 2010, well over 1,000 pieces across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.

© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved. Some lefts also - though currently unavailable.

[Neither left nor right: a Bristol sergeant's fractured spine, jailed Palestine Action activists, a boy dead in police handcuffs.]

Okay folks. Let’s start with a name, because almost nobody else has. Sergeant Kate Evans. Avon and Somerset.

In the early hours of the sixth of August 2024, at the Elbit Systems site in Filton, she was on the ground when a seven-pound sledgehammer came down across her lower back. Twice. A fracture to the lumbar spine. Nearly two years on, she is still having treatment. Last Friday the man who swung it was jailed at Woolwich Crown Court alongside three others — the Filton Four — and a question that has nothing whatever to do with her back swallowed the whole story in one gulp. Were they left, or were they right?

It is the wrong question. The same fortnight, the same question buried Henry Nowak — the eighteen-year-old who died handcuffed in a Southampton street, still telling officers he had been stabbed as they treated him as the attacker. Two cases, two crowds, one label that fits neither.

Take Nowak first, because the two cases break the labelling machine in opposite directions, and his is the starker of the two. A death in restraint: strip the names off it and you have the most left-coded grievance in the modern repertoire — the template of every police-accountability march of the last decade. Yet the crowds that formed around it were read, almost instantly, as right: England flags, anti-immigration placards, counter-marchers chanting back. The grievance was one thing. The costume the press hung on it was another. What decided the label was not the principle. It was the ethnicity of the man who died and the man who killed him.

Now turn to Filton. On the surface the cleaner case: anti-arms-trade direct action, the pro-Palestine cause, mourned by John McDonnell and the Green leader, backed by an open letter of novelists and comedians. Textbook left. Except look at what people were actually arrested for outside the court — not damage, not violence, but expressing support for a banned organisation. A speech offence. And the principle underneath that — the state deciding which dissent is permissible and jailing you for holding the wrong one — is the precise civil-liberties argument the right has spent two years shouting on behalf of its own marchers. Left in cause. Free-speech-against-the-state in mechanism. The two halves no longer sit on the same wing.

So here is the part the labels are built to hide. What the two protests genuinely share is not a side. It is the relationship between the individual body and the machine. A boy dying in handcuffs. Four people jailed as terrorists for criminal damage. The real fault line running under both is not left against right. It is the state’s power over the person in front of it, and the quiet editorial decision about which persons it chooses to crush and which it chooses to mourn.

And this is where the institution can be held against its own paperwork, because the paperwork is a contradiction with a date stamp on it.

The terrorism finding applied to the Filton Four was not a jury verdict. The jury convicted them of criminal damage; one of GBH. The terrorism connection was added afterwards, at sentencing, by the judge — and the jury was never told that conviction could carry it. That uplift rests entirely on Palestine Action’s proscription as a terrorist organisation. And the proscription, at the moment these four were convicted in May, had already been ruled unlawful — by the High Court, in February, which found that only a handful of the group’s hundreds of actions met the statutory definition of terrorism at all, and that ordinary criminal law already covered the violent ones. The ban survived only because it was suspended pending appeal. Then, last Monday — the fifteenth of June, three days after the sentencing — the Court of Appeal reversed the High Court and declared the ban lawful after all.

Read that sequence slowly, because it is the whole story. The same justice system convicted four people under a framework its own senior civil court had called disproportionate and unlawful, then validated that framework seventy-two hours later. The terrorism label was not discovered in the evidence. It was switched on at the sentencing stage and confirmed by a higher court the following week. Whatever else that is, it is not a thing the words “left” and “right” can hold.

Which returns us to the woman on the floor at Filton.

Sergeant Evans does not appear in the slogans. She is not the right’s cause — they have not heard of her, and a Palestinian-solidarity case offers them no purchase. She is not the left’s martyr — she is the inconvenient body on the wrong end of the hammer, the detail that complicates the line about non-violent direct action, so the line simply steps around her. She has been written out of both scripts because she fits neither. A Bristol officer with a fractured spine, still in treatment, who was also sent a message during the trial telling her she worked for an occupying power. She is the one figure in the entire affair who cannot be sorted onto a wing — and so, in the great national exercise of sorting everyone onto a wing, she has effectively vanished.

That is the tell. When a frame is working, it explains the people inside it. When a frame has died, the people start falling out of the bottom of it, and you are left watching commentators argue about the costume while the actual person lies on the floor unaccounted for.

So the next time a procession moves through the centre on a Saturday and the only question on offer is left or right — decline it. It is not that you have lost the plot. It is that the plot was filed under the wrong system years ago, and you can feel it not fitting. The honest question was never which wing the crowd belongs to. It is the older one. Where is the power, and what is it doing to the person standing in front of it. The crowd will sort itself into red and blue by morning, because that is the only filing cabinet the press still owns. The body on the floor does not get a wing. It just gets a name.

Hers was Kate Evans.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

A Freedom of Information request is now with Avon and Somerset Constabulary, asking three things: what the Filton operation cost, how the force classified the raid on the night it happened, and when counter-terrorism policing took the file. When the answers come back, so will I.

Sources.

Drawn deliberately from across the spectrum — from The Jewish Chronicle and The Times of Israel to Al Jazeera and Liberty — so the record holds whatever the reader brings to it.

The Filton Four — conviction, sentencing and the terrorism connection

• ITV News — Four Palestine Action activists jailed over £1.2m factory raid, 12 June 2026. https://www.itv.com/news/2026-06-12/four-palestine-action-activists-jailed-over-12m-factory-raid

• LBC — Four Palestine Action activists jailed, as over 100 arrested outside court, 12 June 2026. https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/palestine-action-sentenced-trial-latest-elbit-court-jailed-5HjdbXf_2/

• The Jewish Chronicle — Palestine Action activists jailed over Elbit raid, 12 June 2026. https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/palestine-action-activists-jailed-elbit-raid-sog0s0hw

• The Times of Israel — Four UK pro-Palestinian activists jailed for violent raid on Israeli defence factory, 12 June 2026. https://www.timesofisrael.com/four-uk-pro-palestinian-activists-jailed-for-violent-raid-on-israeli-defense-factory/

• Al Jazeera — Palestine Action activists could face UK ‘terror’ sentences: what we know, 11 June 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/11/palestine-action-activists-could-face-uk-terror-sentences-what-we-know

The proscription — High Court (February) and Court of Appeal (June)

• NPR — Britain’s High Court says government illegally banned pro-Palestinian group, 13 February 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/13/nx-s1-5713346/britain-court-palestine-action-ban

• Liberty — Breaking down the Court of Appeal judgment on Palestine Action’s proscription, 15 June 2026. https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/issue/breaking-down-the-court-of-appeal-judgment-on-palestine-actions-proscription/

• The Jewish Chronicle — Palestine Action proscription is lawful, Court of Appeal rules, 15 June 2026. https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/palestine-action-proscription-lawful-ng7wzyce

• Al Jazeera — UK Court of Appeal upholds ban on Palestine Action as ‘terrorist’ group, 15 June 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/15/uk-court-says-proscribing-palestine-action-as-terrorist-group-was-lawful

• UnHerd — Upholding Palestine Action proscription creates a policing nightmare, 15 June 2026. https://unherd.com/newsroom/upholding-palestine-action-proscription-creates-a-policing-nightmare/

Henry Nowak

• NPR — In Britain, video of a dying teen handcuffed by police sparks outrage, 3 June 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/06/03/nx-s1-5844898/british-student-nowak-handcuffed-police-video-farage

• CNN — Henry Nowak: handcuffed student’s death sparks uproar in UK, 3 June 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/03/uk/henry-nowak-death-far-right-intl

The Almighty Gob has covered the policing of protest in Bristol and the two-tier framing question across the BID Rangers investigation and the earlier Filton coverage. Continuing coverage at thealmightygob.com.

Entity hub: The Almighty Gob (Q139104487) · John Langley (Q139105363).

[A hundred names defended the Filton 4. Not one named the officer they injured.]

You’ll have caught this one. We all did. It was everywhere — papers and news.

Four Palestine Action activists, sentenced as terrorists. A grave miscarriage of justice. Civil liberties in peril. A hundred famous names up in arms. You heard all of that, didn’t you.

Now. Did any of them — the famous names, the letter, the crowd — tell you about the woman on the floor?

The woman on the floor at Filton.

Her name is Kate Evans. Sergeant Kate Evans. On 6 August 2024 she was on her knees at the Elbit Systems UK factory in Filton, just up the road from us, trying to make an arrest.

Samuel Corner struck her twice across the lower back with a seven-pound sledgehammer. An X-ray confirmed it. A fractured spine.

Three months off work. Her sergeant’s rank, gone. Treatment nearly two years on. A woman who needed help to dress herself.

You’ll have heard her name during the trial — the court reporters had it. From the hundred famous names last week? Not a syllable.

The Filton 4 letter that skipped the victim.

I lead with her, because everyone defending the four buried her.

When they were sentenced at Woolwich Crown Court, hundreds turned out on the pavement. A hundred public figures — Sally Rooney, Greta Thunberg, Steve Coogan — signed an open letter calling it a miscarriage of justice.

Read it, all the way down. Go on. You will not find Kate Evans in it. Not once.

A hundred writers. Not one sentence to spare for the woman on the floor.

I’ve a name for this. I call it emotional incontinence: feeling that won’t hold itself in — gushing where it flatters the cause, bone dry where it might complicate it.

They marched for Gaza. Not one for her.

Let’s test it.

Is it practical? Course it is. The police counted 300,000 in London for Gaza. Town squares filled across the country over Southport — mob and counter-mob, thousands a night. By the police’s own count, the big mobilisations of recent years left more than 500 officers injured between them. Not one of those crowds ever marched for the hurt. The machine works. It never turns to face the woman on the floor.

Is it logical? Only if you can call yourself the guardian of proportion while doing the most disproportionate thing in the room — erasing the one person who bled.

And where does it lead? Somewhere quieter than any courtroom: a victim can be deleted the moment she gets in the way. Today it’s her. One day, it’s you.

Not the suffragettes: the Court of Appeal’s words.

I’ll be straight, like always. I’m not telling you the sentence was right. The “terrorist connection” finding — under the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, never before pinned on a criminal-damage conviction — was kept from the jury, and you’re right to be uneasy. That’s a real argument, and it deserves grown-ups.

That’s about the sentence, mind. Not about whether these were gentle souls.

This morning, the Court of Appeal ruled the ban on Palestine Action lawful (she’s off to the Supreme Court next). The Lady Chief Justice put it plainly. This is not the suffragettes, out in the open. It is a covert outfit of secret cells that promotes violence amounting to terrorism — violence that destroys property and causes injury.

The injury, this time, has a name. Kate Evans.

Believe every word they say about Gaza and Elbit. None of it required pretending she doesn’t exist.

Who gains from the silence.

So ask the old question. Who gains from the silence?

A movement that named her would have to weigh her. And weighing her is awkward. So out she goes.

Watch it work. No victim, no violence. No violence, no crime. No crime — four martyrs. Neat, isn’t it.

That’s no accident. Accidents go in all directions. This one points the same way, every time.

You know who spoke up for Kate Evans? Not one famous name. Just the Police Federation, with a letter. Because nobody on that pavement would.

Hundreds for the four. One letter for the one.

A woman on her knees, doing her job, had her spine broken. Hundreds queued at court for the people who put her there.

That is the spine, and that is the spineless. One you can fracture. The other was never there to break.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

The Almighty Gob is written and published by John Langley — former independent Bristol mayoral candidate, forensic observer of institutional power, and blogger with no party allegiance and no press accreditation. Find us on Substack and across seven social media platforms.

© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copying, scraping, AI-training use, or retrieval by any means without the express prior written permission of John Langley. Governed by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

[Same data, two headlines — their "dozens," the record's forty, and the worst in England.]

Well. Like you, probably, I’ve watched enough films and television dramas to know what to do if I get shot, while buying a scratch card in Sainsbury’s. I’d know exactly which resources to pull off the shelves to treat myself. The gauze. The paracetamol. Something clean to press against the hole. Then that final scratch reveal to confirm that once again, I’m another loser.

Now. You want to know something just as revealing? Those television and movie dramas have trained us all in field medicine now. Albeit subconsciously. We just never realised it.

So. I’d tend to myself while I waited the time it takes an ambulance to turn up nowadays, and hope I don’t bleed to death in between. Mind you. Sainsbury’s? No. I’d rather be ‘Shot in Boots’ — which, by the way, isn’t a modern version of a Christmas pantomime. The nearest branch just happens to be the other side of Broadmead.

Added to which. It’s also comforting that, once it got me to the hospital, there’s usually a pharmacy near the entrance. Somewhere to grab whatever else I needed, closer to someone capable of resuscitation. Before the lights go out for the final time.

Oh, and by the way. I forgot to mention how mildly inconvenient it would be to have a heart attack at home. Two flights of stairs, out the front door, along to the pub, which keeps a defibrillator at street level. Useful, that. In case the ambulance is held up in traffic, or its blue lights blow a fuse on the way.

Of course nowadays, for the truly ambitious survival type, there’s always eBay. When push comes to shove. So to speak. Amazon will pretty much deliver a scalpel. Possibly by drone, the way things are going. So when the gallbladder goes, I’ll clear the desk, lay myself out, and make a start while I wait. Still stuck on where the morphine comes from — the black market can sort that, I should think. A bit of anaesthetic. Something to bite down on.

If the liver starts to fail, and I can put it off a few weeks, I might take up meditation instead. Concentrate on the pain going away. That sort of thing. I dare say I’d find it more helpful than going to Southmead.

I’ve got myself pretty much covered for any emergency now, you’ll be relieved to hear. So, probably, have you.

This isn’t a scene from a drama.

It’s the quiet arithmetic of an English hospital in the summer of 2026. It’s got an official name at last, printed in a government spreadsheet.

They call it corridor care.

I’ve been rehearsing all this because of where I happen to live.

My nearest hospital isn’t Southmead. It’s the Bristol Royal Infirmary, a bit closer in.

Southmead’s the fallback. The place the ambulance takes me on the night the Infirmary has no room — which is a category of night that now exists.

My second choice, then. As it happens, also the worst in England.

You know the places I mean, don’t you?

You’ve sat in one of those waiting rooms yourself. The strip light. The tannoy. The chair that’s almost a bed.

You might even have noticed, last time, that the trolley parked along the corridor wasn’t waiting for a porter. It was the ward.

On 11 June, NHS England published a count, for the first time, of how many people are treated in corridors for 45 minutes or more. In waiting rooms. In makeshift bays, on chairs and trolleys — unsafe and undignified, in spaces never built to hold them. Not including the morgue. Yet. That’s still for the dead. For how long, though?

Nearly three thousand a day, the length of the country — 2,241 in emergency departments, the rest on or beside wards, with no bed to offer.

The local headline ran ‘dozens of people treated in hospital corridors in Bristol every day,’ and sent you to a gadget. Dozens.

At the top of that second list — patients on a ward, but in no designated bed space — sits North Bristol NHS Trust, the trust that runs Southmead. Six per cent of the national ward total, from one organisation.

Forty patients a day. The worst in England. On the first day anyone troubled to count.

None of which is the fault of the staff.

Not the woman who answers the phone. Not the crew who’d come for me. Not the nurse who finds me a corner and a blanket. Not the registrar on a third double shift this week.

Let me be as plain as the figures are: not one of them is to blame for any of this.

They’re the last working part of the machine, holding the wreckage together with their bare hands.

The staff aren’t what’s broken. The system is.

It was broken from above. In the beds that were never built. The wards that stay full. The discharges with nowhere left to send anyone.

Of course, we’re partly to blame ourselves, aren’t we, really?

If we fell ill a bit less often. Had fewer accidents. Stopped turning an ingrown toenail into a 999 call.

It would all help enormously.

It’s said — and I won’t name the hospitals, this being a national affliction, not a local complaint — that a patient can now turn up at an emergency department and be told, kindly enough, to leave a number. Someone will ring in three or four hours, when a space appears, and invite him back.

Picture it. I’ve broken my leg, and I’m told to come back at teatime. So I hop — and I use the word precisely — down to the café on the ground floor.

I drink a hot chocolate, in the particular way you drink hot chocolate while in excruciating pain. Because the day’s ruined anyway, I have the blueberry muffin as well.

Then the call comes. I hop back up. There, they tell me the procedure needs me to have eaten nothing at all.

Nil by mouth.

So before anyone sets the leg, they’ve got to pump the muffin out of me first.

I can see it. That’s the trouble. I can see all of it, quite clearly. How about you?

You see. That’s what it amounts to. The patient placed in temporary storage, to wait. The office equivalent of a pending tray.

Here’s the part that ought to trouble a careful reader.

The rule at The Almighty Gob is a simple one. Hold the institution to its own paperwork. So let’s use NHS England’s.

It published its number and, in the same breath, told us not to believe it.

The figures are flagged in its own notes as experimental and immature. Gathered at speed, with minimal validation.

They were collected, it admits, under guidance that “may not be consistently applied” across trusts — harming, in its own words, the quality and comparability of the data.

A national league table, then, whose own author concedes it’s not quite comparing like with like.

It grows quieter still.

The count is a single snapshot, taken at eight o’clock each morning. The hour after the night shift, when the corridors are at their emptiest.

The afternoon. The evening. The long Friday night. None of it’s in the figure.

You suspected as much, didn’t you?

Nearly three thousand isn’t the peak. It’s the floor, measured at low tide.

A trust that would rather post a smaller number has a tidy way to do it.

A blank return counts as nothing submitted. A zero counts as a genuine none. The two disappear into the average together.

The doctors saw this coming. Publish a figure, and the figure becomes the thing that matters — not the patient lying beneath it.

The professional bodies, for their part, have stopped being polite.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine calls corridor care a national shame. A symptom of one thing above all: too few beds.

The British Medical Association calls it scandalous. It notes the data exists at all only because doctors and patients forced it into daylight.

A safety watchdog found the strain is now year-round. No longer a thing of winter.

Between them, they describe a practice the NHS swore would never be normalised — now counted, month after month, like rainfall.

The coroners have noticed, too.

Since 2020, they’ve issued twenty-seven formal warnings about deaths linked to corridor care — to overcrowding, to the simple want of a bed.

The Health Secretary, James Murray, weeks into the job, calls it unacceptable and undignified. I’m guessing his parents nicknamed him, Sherlock. It is only a guess, though.

The government’s answer is a pledge to abolish corridor care by 2029. Forty new urgent treatment centres. Specialist teams sent into the worst trusts.

The emergency doctors point out, wearily, that the new centres treat the least unwell — while it’s the sickest who fill the corridors.

The disease is beds. It’s discharge. It’s a social-care system with nowhere left to put anyone.

The plan treats the symptom. It dates the cure to the end of this Parliament.

The pending tray again — the whole thing left for the next government to pick up, and carry the weight of it all.

It’s worth asking where Bristol will put the ones who don’t make it that far. The city was warned it would run out of burial plots by the middle of this year — four of its eight cemeteries already full, the shortage, in the council’s own words, now critical. Its answer was to expand South Bristol Cemetery onto the city’s last working farm — ground kept for growing things, turned over to graves.

From there, the logic runs on its own. The ambulance form grows a line — after the name, the date of birth, the next of kin: and have you thought about where you’d like to be buried? Cremated, perhaps. Cheaper still to put the new emergency department on the cemetery itself, and spare the dead the journey. Filed as ‘Just In Case’ — or, perhaps, ‘Place Your Bets.’ Oh, and while they’re at it. Turn one of the hospital shops over to a funeral director — better still, send the chaplain round the wards with him at his elbow, last rites and paperwork in a single visit.

Joined-up care, at last.

The office takes a tasteful sign — Afterlife Care — with coffins to suit all budgets, and a door at the back for the do-it-yourself crowd, TikTok tutorial included.

Well. Until I did the research, I’d been half convinced Keir Starmer had a side job running North Bristol NHS Trust.

He doesn’t, as it turns out. He just seems to have a couple of protégés in there instead.

At the next board meeting, they might consider dropping the word ‘Trust’ from the title.

On current form, it’s the one word that no longer fits.

So I keep my supplies in. The gauze. The number for the pub with the defibrillator. The eBay account, dormant but ready.

You’ll keep yours in too, won’t you? Just in case.

For future reference, we need to plan our accidents and mishaps more carefully in advance. Schedule them in.

Not because I expect the worst, exactly — but because the worst has been quietly rescheduled as the normal, and somebody forgot to tell the patients.

The number can come down. It already has — in Blackpool, and at Blackburn, where the main corridor was cleared of patients altogether.

It isn’t weather. It was decided. It can be decided differently.

Until it is, Southmead stays top of a table nobody asked to be measured for —

and I’ll keep the muffin, regrettably, on the shelf.

So, quite frankly: if I have an accident any time before 2029, the last place I’d want to end up is Southmead.

Questions for North Bristol NHS Trust.

In May 2026, North Bristol NHS Trust recorded the worst ward corridor-care figure in England — forty patients a day, six per cent of the national ward total, from a single trust. The following questions arise directly from the trust’s own return to NHS England. They are put to the trust, to its chief executive, Maria Kane, and to its chair, Ingrid Barker — who together also lead University Hospitals Bristol and Weston, and so run the Bristol Royal Infirmary as well.

1. Why did the trust record the highest ward corridor-care figure of any in England, and how does it account for that against trusts of comparable size?

2. What does its eight o’clock snapshot leave out about the hours that follow it?

3. What does the trust’s full-capacity protocol permit, and in which spaces?

4. Is North Bristol receiving one of the specialist improvement teams NHS England announced in April for the worst-affected trusts — and if not, why not?

The trust is invited to respond. Whatever it sends will be published here in full, and unedited. I’ll wait!

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent mayoral candidate in 2016 and 2021, and one of Bristol’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Writing since 2010, well over 1,000 pieces across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.

© 2026 The Almighty Gob. All rights, some lefts, reserved.

Sources & citations.

1. NHS England — Corridor Care, Urgent and Emergency Care Daily Situation Reports (May 2026 data, published 11 June 2026): https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/corridor-care-urgent-and-emergency-care-daily-situation-reports/

2. NHS England — Corridor care definition (PRN02378, 4 March 2026): https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/corridor-care-definition/

3. ITV News — Nearly 3,000 NHS patients a day receiving corridor care (11 June 2026): https://www.itv.com/news/2026-06-11/nearly-3000-nhs-patients-in-england-receive-corridor-care-every-day-data-shows

4. Nursing Times — NHS publishes data on corridor care in hospitals for first time (11 June 2026): https://www.nursingtimes.net/emergency-and-critical-care/nhs-publishes-data-on-corridor-care-in-hospitals-for-first-time-11-06-2026/

5. Worksop Guardian / Iconic Media — provider ranking, ward corridor care (11 June 2026): https://www.worksopguardian.co.uk/news/people/figures-reveal-dbth-among-hospitals-with-lowest-numbers-of-patients-receiving-corridor-care-8674350

6. Royal College of Emergency Medicine — ‘A national shame’ (10 November 2025): https://rcem.ac.uk/press-release/a-national-shame-research-reveals-devastating-reality-of-so-called-corridor-care/

7. British Medical Association — Corridor care ‘a source of national shame’ (11 June 2026): https://www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-centre/corridor-care-a-source-of-national-shame-says-bma-as-first-statistics-published

8. HSSIB — Patient care in temporary care environments (8 January 2026): https://www.hssib.org.uk/patient-safety-investigations/patient-care-in-temporary-care-environments/

9. GOV.UK / DHSC — NHS experts deployed to tackle corridor care (11 April 2026): https://www.gov.uk/government/news/nhs-experts-deployed-to-tackle-corridor-care

10. North Bristol NHS Trust:

https://www.nbt.nhs.uk/

1. North Bristol NHS Trust — Meet our Board (leadership: chief executive Maria Kane, chair Ingrid Barker; joint roles with UHBW): https://www.nbt.nhs.uk/about-us/meet-our-board

2. James Murray appointed Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (14 May 2026): https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/05/james-murray-appointed-health-secretary/

3. Bristol247 / Local Democracy Reporting Service — Bristol warned it would run out of burial plots by mid-2026 without expansion; ten-year gain from South Bristol Cemetery expansion: https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/ten-more-years-burial-space-gained-cemetery-expansion/

4. BBC News — Bristol cemetery expansion: council operates eight cemeteries, four with no space for new burials, shortage “now critical”: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-66651177

Entities: North Bristol NHS Trust (Wikidata Q7054285) · Southmead Hospital (Wikidata Q7570900) · NHS England · Royal College of Emergency Medicine · British Medical Association · HSSIB · Bristol Royal Infirmary (UHBW).

You might have seen it in today’s Guardian, and you’ve probably already picked a side? Well. Let’s start from the very beginning, as, I’m told, that’s a very good place to start. Don’t quote me, though. Anyway.

Brunel’s SS Great Britain — the ship, the museums, Bristol’s number-one attraction — is dropping both “Brunel” and “Great Britain” from its name. From July it becomes Bristol Dockyards, with the museum leaning away from the engineering and toward empire and migration. The chief executive, Andrew Edwards, told the paper he knows some will call it “woke,” and that he wants the place to be “cool.” Or, perhaps, put another way. From number one to a number two. Though again. Don’t quote me.

Okay. Where was I? Oh yes. That’s the report. It’s true, it’s sourced, and it’s the comfortable half of the story.

Now stand on the ship a minute. The cleverest thing there is the dry dock: they’ve sealed it under a sheet of glass with a film of water on top — a fake sea you walk across, while the real iron hull sits in the dark beneath your feet. You can see straight down through it. Nothing’s hidden. The truth is right there, lit, under your shoes.

Remember that. You can see straight through this glass. It matters more than you’d think.

Because there are two stories here, and the Guardian has handed you the easy one. Anyone can hold it. Lean left, and you read it and admire the courage. Lean right, and you read it and fume about the wokery. Both sides get fed. Both feel something. And both are arguing about values — which cost nothing, settle nothing, and flatter everyone in the room.

Yet, with no pause for breath required. Here’s the trick, and it’s the oldest one going. A magician hides nothing — he can’t, you’re all watching his hands. What he controls is cheaper than hiding: where you look. The coin was always in the other hand. You watched the hand he pointed at, didn’t you? There’s even an old word for it. Glamour. Before it meant red carpets, a glamour was a spell — something laid over your eyes so you saw what wasn’t there. PR is the modern trade in glamours. That’s not me being fancy; that’s the dictionary.

So let’s do the thing nobody’s done. Let’s look through the glass. After the window cleaner’s been and gone. Yes. This version.

Last time this place was struggling — numbers sliding two years on the trot — they hired an agency and rebranded. And the fix kept the famous name exactly where it was: this stayed Brunel’s SS Great Britain, the Victorian engineer up in lights. The agency banked the credit — a claimed 17.5% jump, 220,059 through the doors. Now, stuck again, they’re reaching for the opposite lever: take his name off the door. Same patient. Opposite medicine. Funny, that. Wouldn’t you agree?

And here’s the bit that should stop you. The number that settles it was never hidden. It’s published — free, online, once a year, by the body that counts these things. Scroll down — past the castles and the cathedrals — to rank 234, and there she is: 131,056 visits. Up seven per cent, they’ll say. Except read the asterisk: 2025 is the first year they counted the under-fives, who get in free. Add a whole new crowd of bodies you never used to tally, and the figure climbs without one extra ticket sold. Strip the toddlers back out, and the “rise” may be nothing at all.

So: 131,056, padded — against the 220,059 pulled while his name was still on the door. The ship is running at barely three-fifths of what that name delivered. And before anyone blames Covid — yes, it emptied every museum in the land. Mind you, the sector has clawed back to within seven per cent of where it stood in 2019. This one sits about forty per cent down. Same storm, everybody. This ship’s just sailing it worse. That’s not a culture-war fact. That’s a takings fact.

You can picture the meeting, can’t you? Lanyards. A flip chart. Someone’s brought their own oat milk. The word “journey” gets used about a building. And somewhere between any other business and date of next meeting, a Victorian genius is quietly drowned. Nobody in that room would ever say it like that. That’s what the room is for. Oh, and the oatmilk. Let’s not forget the oatmilk. No meeting can be held without it nowadays. Surely?

Okay. Moving swiftly on. Three questions. The only three that matter.

Is it practical? Maybe. A new name might pull a younger crowd. Might.

Is it logical? No. You’re muting your most famous, most Googled word — Brunel — while sitting at three-fifths of what that name last delivered. Last time you kept him up in lights. Now you’re taking him down. You can’t have it both ways.

What’s the likely outcome? A row, a quiet year or two, and next year’s line in that same public table — which will tell us whether taking Brunel down does what keeping him up once did. That line is the whole game.

“Rebrand,” by the way, is a lovely word, isn’t it? It’s what you say instead of “we’ve got a takings problem and we’ve paid someone to change the subject.” And “cool” isn’t a description. It’s a permission slip — the thing you grab when you fear you’ve stopped being the better thing, the thing this ship has been for fifty years: interesting. Brunel is interesting. “Cool” is what you call yourself when you’re worried you’re not. Or, put another way, perhaps, 2026 semantic bleaching.

And I won’t take either comfortable seat — because here’s the uncomfortable truth the magician relies on: the trick needs you. It only works on an audience that would rather not check. You know the old story — the emperor parading in robes that aren’t there, the whole crowd admiring them because to say otherwise marks you as the fool. It takes a child to say he’s naked. A man who left school at fifteen with no qualifications, who reads the league table instead of the press release, is that child in the crowd. Not clever. Just unwilling to pretend.

Nobody’s lied, mind. Be exact about that. They’ve simply put the cheerful number in lights and the awkward one in a spreadsheet you weren’t invited to open. That’s not a crime. It’s a choice. It’s Bolitics: answering a spreadsheet with a sermon, and trusting the congregation to be too busy arguing about the sermon to check the sums.

So look through the glass. Go on — look down. They’d have you believe you can only ever see this dimly, through a glass, darkly. Only this glass is the clear kind. The hull’s right there under your feet. They’ve taken the one window you can see straight through and talked a whole city into using it as a mirror — into staring at its own reflection, its values, its side, while the real thing waits in plain sight below.

The chief executive was at pains to tell us what the “SS” doesn’t stand for. He needn’t have worried about the old meaning. After a rebrand that swaps the engineer for a focus group and files the takings where nobody looks, the initials have quietly picked up a new one. It even matches the postcode.

BS Great Britain.

Mind you. I suppose given the possible alternative of renaming where it’s docked, ‘Ship Street,’ it wasn’t such a difficult choice. And, with not a paddle in sight, after all.

Same trick. Same glass. The only difference is that this time, you looked down.

Related reading - Related reading from The Almighty Gob

• Bristol Harbour Committee, 23 June: every excuse the council will reach for — same harbour estate, a fortnight on: the council “notes” a loss-of-life warning, hands Redcliffe Wharf to a partnership it sits inside, and signs a safety report before the safety review → https://www.thealmightygob.com/p/bristol-harbour-committee-23-june

Subscribe now

Sources and Citations.

The rebrand (the news facts — name change, “woke”/”cool”, empire/migration, new museum)

• The Guardian, “Brunel’s SS Great Britain site drops historical name in ‘cool’ rebrand” — https://share.google/r6aEGtwQs7ZMGIsMX

• Bristol Live — https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/new-name-ss-great-britain-11008742

• Bristol247 — https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/new-name-ss-great-britain-site-feel-more-rooted-bristol/

• Visit West (the official announcement — confirms 18 July 2026 reopening, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the “cultural campus,” the 2030 anniversary) — https://www.visitwest.co.uk/news/post/brunels-ss-great-britain-rebrands-as-bristol-dockyards-ahead-of-major-museum-reopening/

The visitor numbers (the receipts)

• ALVA 2025 Visitor Figures — 131,056 visits, rank 234, +7%, footnote “bg”: “Under 5’s included in our footfall for first time in 2025”; sector +2%, still 7% below 2019 — https://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=620

• FutureKings agency case study (the prior rebrand: claimed +17.5%, 220,059 visitors, +13% revenue, “two years declining,” Brunel name retained) — https://futurekings.co.uk/work/ss-great-britain/

The Trust’s own audited filings (the “spreadsheet you weren’t invited to open”)

• Companies House — SS Great Britain Trust, company 01000878, filing history — https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/01000878/filing-history

• Charity Commission — registered charity 262158 (register search by number; footfall is in the Trustees’ Report)

• The Trust’s own accounts page — https://www.ssgreatbritain.org/about-us/accounts-documents/

The entities (Wikidata — EEAT + knowledge-graph grounding)

• SS Great Britain — Q744086 — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q744086

• Isambard Kingdom Brunel — Q207380 — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q207380

• Bristol Harbour / Floating Harbour — Q26874 — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q26874

• Bristol — Q23154 — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q23154

• John Langley — Q139105363 · The Almighty Gob — Q139104487

Supporting facts in the piece

• Screw propeller / first iron Atlantic steamer (the “not a paddle in sight” double) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Great_Britain

• Brunel’s wider work (Clifton Suspension Bridge, Great Western Railway) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel

• “rated Bristol’s number-one attraction” — TripAdvisor’s standing Bristol ranking + VisitBristol —

https://visitbristol.co.uk/

• “through a glass, darkly” — 1 Corinthians 13:12, King James Version (public domain)

• “glamour” = a spell/enchantment — Oxford English Dictionary / etymonline (well-established etymology; link etymonline if you want the visible receipt)

The image

• Wikimedia Commons, File:Bristol_MMB_43_SS_Great_Britain.jpg, photo by mattbuck, CC BY-SA — Https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bristol_MMB_43_SS_Great_Britain.jpg

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

[A "Damaged Society" shopfront in a Bristol city centre being demolished and renamed in the same breath — www.thealmightygob.com]

Okay. Let me take you for a walk you’ve likely already taken.

There’s a shop on Penn Street called Damaged Society. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? The smiley, the black frontage.

Round the corner on Philadelphia Street, John Anthony — menswear, a Bristol name since 1979. Its sign’s still up; the shop underneath isn’t its own any more. Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group bought it in 2023, and the fascia waiting to go over the top is — you’ll enjoy this — called Flannels.

Two signs, one street apart. Between them they wrote my headline.

Because there’s an old English word for what’s being done to this city’s middle. It isn’t regeneration. It’s flannel — soft, endless talk that keeps your eye off what the hands are doing.

The hands are busy — plain enough that even the press clocked it. The BBC headline used the one syllable no developer will ever say out loud.

Demolish.

Hold that word. We’ll want it later.

I’ll give the other side its best shot first, mind, because I don’t run with a tribe and I’m not here to do the NIMBY’s homework.

The Galleries is dying. Opened in 1991, losing to Cabot Circus since 2008, and — the developer’s own words — poorly designed, the car park eating forty per cent of the site. Footfall’s down a third on pre-Covid, they say. You’ve walked past the empty units yourself.

I ask the same three questions of everything: is it practical, is it logical, what’s the likely outcome? On the first two, the Galleries fails both. So yes — it should change.

It’s the third question they’re dodging. Not whether. Into what. And the answer’s hidden inside the words.

So let’s read their words. Out loud, from this screen to yours.

Obsolete, they call the building. Sounds like a law of physics. It isn’t — buildings aren’t obsolete, business models are.

They’ll completely transform it. You can’t transform anything with a wrecking ball. You can only knock it down.

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent the area. Translation: don’t pause; don’t ask “and then what.” An offer that knocks only once doesn’t want you reading the small print.

It’ll be diverse — and over at Quakers Friars, vibrant, animated, a buzzing destination. Every one’s a mood-light you can’t put a meter on. A word you can’t measure is a word you can’t be caught failing.

The whole thing, they say, is the biggest single change to the city centre since Broadmead was built in the sixties. Private profit and public regeneration pitched as one sentence, so you can’t spot the join. That join is the story. Round here we call it Bolitics.

And the join has a name. Deeley Freed, the developer behind the demolition, was co-founded by David Freed — who has served as Master of the Society of Merchant Venturers, the unelected, invitation-only body woven through the running of this city for centuries. I allege nothing. I note the connection, and leave you to make of it what you will.

Then the warm ones. New public spaces. More green spaces.

When Cabot Circus went up in 2008, those streets stopped being streets. On a 250-year lease from the Council, thirty-six acres became, near enough, a developer’s private land.

There’s a metal sign that says so — private streets, public “permitted to pass through” when they’re open. No dogs. No cycling. No smoking. No skateboards.

So when a private landlord offers you a “public space” on private land, that’s not quite a public space, is it?

A square you can be asked to leave isn’t a square. It’s a foyer with weather.

Whether the Galleries’ own new public spaces will be truly public, or another private square dressed as one, I can’t yet tell you — the ownership terms aren’t published. An open question, and the first thing part two goes after.

That’s the trick I call Transmorphing. Street becomes private land becomes “public space”; demolition becomes “transformation.” New coat each time — and each time, your stake shrinks while the words get warmer.

Private land needs private rules. Private rules need private enforcers.

So a levy on the shops pays for uniformed guards. They’re called Rangers — you’ve seen them, haven’t you? Contracted through SWL Security, under a Business Crime Reduction Partnership running since 2019.

They share an offender database with Cabot Circus and the Galleries, and talk to two hundred shops on a radio net.

Their own report says the job out loud: recovering stock; “managing” the kids, the street community begging, the buskers, the loud music.

And on the Ranger’s right hip — I’ve got the photograph — rigid handcuffs in a quick-release holder.

[Private land, private rules, private enforcement: a Bristol city centre patrolled by levy-funded Rangers — full piece at www.thealmightygob.com]

That’s not privatised space any more. It could reasonably be read as something close to privatised policing — answerable to a boardroom, not a ballot, and quietly shaping who’s seen in a “public” centre. I’m not saying they’re constables; I’m pointing at what it resembles.

And look at the word they chose. A Ranger guards wild and common land — the forest, the moor, the National Park. They’ve put the man who protects the hills on a retail belt with cuffs. Same trick as “public space”: a kind word round a hard hand.

Here’s the part to admire — a card trick clocked after it’s had your wallet.

What’s the Council putting in? Not money; it isn’t building. Not risk; it isn’t borrowing. Not a brick.

Its whole contribution to rebuilding its city centre is a signature — the permission that turns a failing mall into a goldmine. It doesn’t even own the Galleries; LaSalle bought that in 2019 for ~£32m. The Council just signs.

Then it sits back for the rent. Every one of the 450 new homes pays council tax — no outlay, no risk, to the lot that waved it through. Add a slice of business rates on the offices and hotel. The day the scaffolding comes down, the money starts coming in.

And here’s the bit that gives the game away.

One of the biggest single chunks — 750 student beds at the Galleries alone — pays the Council nothing. Not a penny. A block lived in only by full-time students is exempt from council tax. That’s not my opinion; that’s Class N of the Local Government Finance Act.

The developers will say students free up family homes and spend in the bars — fair enough. The services bill still lands on the people with a council-tax account: the GPs, the buses, the bins, the care. Not the towers. The 450 households next door who do get a bill. And you. And me.

The residents bankroll the students. The students pay rent to the global funds. And the funds, naturally, do best of all.

And it isn’t just the Galleries, is it?

The old Debenhams: a tower of flats. The Bearpit’s old Premier Inn — gone — making way for two towers, the taller 28 storeys — Bristol’s tallest. More beds toward Temple Meads.

One at a time, they’re press releases. Stacked up, they’re a policy — a city centre rebuilt for people who leave every July.

The shops underneath sit half-empty — anyone with a car’s at Cribbs and its thousands of free spaces. And anyone without one has found the Shopmobility centre — the thing that let a disabled body get round town — quietly, permanently shut. No fanfare. No artist’s impression.

The thing that helped the disabled went in silence. The thing that lets a fund charge a student £350 a week gets a topping-out ceremony.

You decide what the city’s really for.

Back to those two signs. You remember them.

Apple shut on Philadelphia Street last August — fifteen years, gone, not for want of customers but because its bit’s being cleared. John Anthony, a few doors down, still trades under its name while the shop beneath belongs to Frasers.

And Damaged Society’s still there round on Penn Street, telling a truth nobody asked for.

Look at the pair of them. Damaged Society — the diagnosis, sold back to you at forty quid a hoodie, worn by people dead certain it means somebody else. John Anthony — a 1979 independent already swallowed, its name waiting to be painted over with a chain called Flannels.

The overwrite isn’t even finished. You can stand on the pavement and watch it happen.

There’s a lot of feeling in those statements, isn’t there? Fond memories honoured, pivotal moments appreciated. Emotionally incontinent, the lot of it — sentiment sloshed over a transaction to stop you adding it up.

However. Sentiment isn’t a plan. A plan isn’t an outcome. And the only honest word in this business is the one the developers won’t say — the one a BBC sub-editor said for them.

Remember it?

Demolish.

Everything else is flannel. And the shop’s the only one in town telling you so on its sign.

Related reading from The Almighty Gob

• Bristol Harbour Committee, 23 June: every excuse the council will reach for — more public land, more “partnership”: Redcliffe and Prince’s Wharf steered to single developers on sealed evidence → https://www.thealmightygob.com/p/bristol-harbour-committee-23-june

*Sources and Citations for this article below.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent mayoral candidate in 2016 and 2021, and one of Bristol’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Writing since 2010, well over 1,000 pieces across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.

© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved.

SOURCES.

The receipts, in the order the claims appear — kept out of the text on purpose.

The plan to demolish Galleries shopping centre approved — BBC News. “Demolish” headline; developer’s “obsolete” and “completely transform”; Max Freed’s “poorly designed… car parking covers 40% of the site”; footfall down on pre-pandemic levels; councillors voted unanimously; 450 homes (90 affordable) and 750 student beds. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyj7k5dee0o

Consultation to begin on Bristol Galleries redevelopment — BBC News. Developers call it a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to “reinvent” the area; “diverse” retail; up to 750 student beds. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-68306056

Apple Store to leave ahead of major Quakers Friars redevelopment — Bristol24/7. Cabot Circus/Hammerson spokesperson: “a vibrant cultural quarter,” “more green spaces,” “a buzzing destination day and night”; Philadelphia Street to become “a multilevel arrangement of uses” with “a safe and animated environment throughout the day and night.” https://www.bristol247.com/lifestyle/shops/apple-store-leave-ahead-major-quakers-friars-redevelopment/

£600m Bristol shopping centre redevelopment approved — Construction Enquirer. LaSalle Investment Management with Deeley Freed (masterplan by AHMM); 4.8-acre site, 450 homes, 450,000 sq ft offices, 750 student beds; “the biggest single change to the city centre since the creation of the Broadmead shopping centre in the early 1960s.” https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2025/01/31/600m-bristol-shopping-centre-redevelopment-approved/

LaSalle bought the Galleries in 2019 for around £32 million (down from the £50m InfraRed Capital paid eight years earlier); the redevelopment is brought forward by LaSalle Investment Management with Deeley Freed, which the report describes as “co-founded by the current Master of the Society of Merchant Venturers, David Freed.” The Bristol Cable (2022): https://thebristolcable.org/2022/08/the-galleries-shopping-centre-redevelopment-city-centre-businesses-react/. Directorship confirmed at source: Companies House records David Maxwell Freed (b. March 1954) as a director of Deeley Freed Developments Limited (company no. 08915253), appointed 27 February 2014, identity verified July 2025 — https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08915253/officers. (The “Max Freed” quoted defending the scheme is a separate director, Maxwell Oscar Freed, b. 1984.)

Society of Merchant Venturers — a private, invitation-only Bristol institution traceable to a 13th-century guild; granted a royal charter and a monopoly on the city’s sea trade in 1552; David Freed is recorded as a Master of the Society (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Merchant_Venturers). The Society’s founders and members were historically central to Bristol’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade (The Bristol Cable, The problematic past of the Merchant Venturers: https://thebristolcable.org/2020/10/the-problematic-past-of-the-merchant-venturers-wulfstan-to-colston/). No suggestion is made that any present-day individual connected to the Society or to Deeley Freed bears any responsibility for its historical activities. It might nonetheless be seen as reasonable for a reader to believe there is a connection worth their attention between the city’s old establishment and its current redevelopment; readers are invited to weigh that for themselves.

Who owns Bristol? — The Bristol Cable. Cabot Circus: “Following the grant by Bristol City Council of a 250 year lease, this 36-acre site is effectively owned by a shell company… The Bristol Alliance”; the verbatim “These streets are private land… permitted to pass through them when they are open” signage; prohibitions on smoking, dogs, drinking, cycling and skateboarding; Prof Antonia Layard on the “creeping privatisation of public space.” https://thebristolcable.org/2015/10/who-owns-bristol/

Retail Rangers contracted via SWL Security — Broadmead Bristol BID (https://broadmeadbristolbid.co.uk/profiles/retail-support-ranger/) and Bristol BID (https://www.bristolbid.co.uk/projects/retail-rangers/); the Business Crime Reduction Partnership has run since 2019 (https://www.disc-net.org/broadmead_bristol).

Business Crime Reduction Partnership — Bristol BID: the “Disc” intelligence-sharing platform, a radio net used by “more than 200 businesses,” and a data-sharing agreement with Avon and Somerset Police (https://www.bristolbid.co.uk/services/business-crime-reduction-partnership/). Itemised duties and recoveries (juvenile offenders in gangs; the street community begging and playing loud music; fake/unauthorised charity fundraisers; unauthorised street traders; £15,364 of stock recovered in the quarter): Bristol BCRP Q3 2025 report. https://www.bristolbid.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/bristol-BCRP-Q3-performance.pdf

Bristol’s Apple Store closes — Bristol24/7. Final day 9 August 2025 after more than 15 years; Apple’s stated reason was the Cabot Circus/Quakers Friars redevelopment closing the section where the store sat; planning permission granted by Bristol City Council in May 2025. https://www.bristol247.com/lifestyle/shops/bristol-apple-store-closes/

Student council-tax exemption: Class N, the Council Tax (Exempt Dwellings) Order 1992 (SI 1992/558), made under the Local Government Finance Act 1992 — a dwelling occupied only by full-time students is exempt. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1992/558

Damaged Society, 27–29 Penn Street, BS1 3AU (DMG SCY store locator, damagedsociety.co.uk). John Anthony (est. 1979) acquired by Frasers Group, 2023; Flannels is a Frasers fascia (Bristol rebrand pending; store still trading as John Anthony at the time of writing). Bristol Shopmobility permanently closed (VisitBristol). Cribbs Causeway free parking: The Mall Cribbs Causeway. Handcuffs on the Ranger’s right hip: confirmed by the author’s own photograph, June 2026 — rigid cuffs in a quick-release belt holder, the Ranger badged “Bristol BID Ranger” and patrolling beside an officer in SWL Security hi-vis. Now confirmed via Companies House: David Maxwell Freed’s directorship of Deeley Freed (note 5). His Society of Merchant Venturers Mastership is dated to 2021–22 per the Cable and the Society’s own records (note 6). The Bearpit scheme’s former building (the Premier Inn, formerly Avon House) and storeys are confirmed at note 13.

St James Barton / “the Bearpit”: the 1972 Premier Inn hotel (formerly Avon House, once headquarters of Avon County Council) is being demolished — work began October 2024 — by Olympian Homes with Cain International, and replaced by an 18-storey co-living tower and a 28-storey student-accommodation tower (the taller would be Bristol’s tallest building); the site is to be renamed St James Square. BBC News (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0v348017qno); Construction Enquirer (https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2024/04/29/olympian-homes-gets-go-ahead-bristols-tallest-building/); Olympian Homes (https://olympianhomes.com/building/st-james-square); Avon House, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avon_House,_Bristol). (Bed counts vary slightly between sources — c. 422–442 student beds, c. 132–150 co-living units; the 28-storey figure is consistent across all.)

Central Bristol student rents: studio flats for 2026/27 “mostly cost between £300 and £350 per week for central, all-inclusive units,” with premium city-centre apartments often topping £400 — uhomes.com (https://en.uhomes.com/uk/bristol). The £350 figure used here sits at the top of that typical central range.

[The course was never written. Probably for the best — too many would have failed it to keep the lights on.]

Go on then. Open the dictionary, and find sensibility. I’ll wait.

You’ll see it there. Where it’s always been. Defined, catalogued, and behaving itself. It’s become something of a museum word nowadays — stuffed, mounted, no longer let out for conversational walks.

Which is a pity, because it used to do a proper job.

Not that far back, it meant the capacity to feel ‘appropriately.’ You know. Feeling with a rudder, measured against what’s in front of you. 20/20 vision, perfect. In this respect.

Yes. More, shall we say, understanding times. When feeling and the judgement arrived as one faculty, as linguistically married. Until joint ownership of the property, one might also add, became an issue. Then it filed for divorce. Custody of the language ensued.

One side kept the feeling. The other, threw the judgement overboard. And retained the word. The premarital name. I guess, it was just kind of, old-fashioned, like that.

Shall we now nail the evidence. Properly?

Feeling didn’t replace fact. It got promoted to fact.

You see. The evidence is the thing that’s becoming fashionable. Something a carnivore may well describe as ‘mutton, dressed as lamb’. Perhaps.

Take Oxford. Not literally, of course. However. Let’s take Oxford.

The Union president, Arwa Elrayess, facing calls to resign over leaked messages describing the October the seventh atrocity as “proportional.” You know. In pretty much the same way as the calls for her resignation. In fairness.

Now. Whatever you make of the position, clock the mechanism. It only takes a second. Maybe two.

The Oxford Union is a debating society. The one place built to defeat a bad argument with a better one. I left school at fifteen, with no qualifications. Unremarkably, by even my standard. I can see this.

The room built to teach you to win the exchange settled the exchange by making the person vanish. Which. Took no more than five seconds out of my entire day to figure out. Who’d have thought it.

You see. That’s Bolitics, as I call it — governance reduced to the management of how things feel.

Speaking of which. Did you notice the NHS, this week, accepting recommendations on badges and symbols. As in. No political badge on the lanyard. Or, uniform? Oh. And protest too. Apparently.

At Whipps Cross, a nurse was told a still-life of a fruit bowl — watermelon included — could be perceived as antisemitic, and faced discipline. Read that until it stops sounding like satire.

I mean. What could be perceived as something any less offensive than a watermelon? Oh well. I won’t be asking for coconut milk the next time I’m in hospital then. You know. Just in case.

The test isn’t is this true. The test is could this be perceived. Fact transmorphing into feeling the moment perception became the proof.

So. That’s the National Helplessness Service told, then.

And the police. When Henry Nowak, eighteen, was knifed on a Southampton street last December, his killer told officers he was the racist-attack victim — and the script ran, the boy restrained while a borrowed narrative outranked the man bleeding in front of them.

A Threat Generation working as designed: read the menace, never check it.

Three institutions. One fault.

Each swapped finding out for the reflex of feeling, then dignified it with a procedure.

Call it ‘Emotional Incontinence’ with a clipboard — now policy.

Here is why it spreads, and spreads is the correct word.

A fact carries Friction. It has to be checked before it can move — verified, weighed, sat with.

A feeling carries none. It needs no verifying; it transmits, host to host, faster than anyone catches it.

In any system built on spread — and the internet is nothing else — feeling out-competes fact every time. It’s not truer. It’s more contagious.

We kept the medical word. Viral. Borrowed from epidemiology.

And the platforms select for it on purpose, rewarding what travels over what’s so.

Feeling is the new virus. The institutions meant to be the immune system — the university, the hospital, the constabulary — stopped fighting the infection and started running a fever.

That is the view from The Almighty Gob: the firewall caught the fire.

A man whose whole job is this. Lord Mann — the government’s first independent adviser on antisemitism since 2019, author of the NHS report above.

Watch him diagnose. Critical thinking in schools is vital, he says; the internet carries falsehood to the masses faster than anyone checks it. You have to teach the young to think.

Spot on. Word for word, our own diagnosis.

Then watch him prescribe: training for one and a half million staff, a definition in the handbook, and, the rulebook that flagged a painting of fruit.

Teach them to think — then tell them what to think. The cure and the disease, signed by one hand.

He’d deny it — a ward is no debating chamber, he’d say. The trouble is never the principle. It’s that the principle, handed to a nervous administrator, keeps arriving as the watermelon.

Which delivers us to the term I keep returning to. Learned helplessness.

The psychologist Martin Seligman put dogs where nothing they did stopped the shock, then opened the door. They didn’t leave. Escape sitting open in front of them.

Teach a population that its reasoning gets it nowhere, that feeling is rewarded and fact gets shouted down, and the faculty doesn’t die. It atrophies. It sits down beside the open door.

Note the operative word. Learned.

Carl Rogers spent a career on the other side of it: the helplessness is taught, never innate, which means it comes off again. It has only been sat on.

What we mislaid is the beat between stimulus and response — The Lost Pause — the half-second to check feeling against fact.

Restore that pause and you restore the rudder. Not by managing people’s feelings for them; by handing back the judgement we amputated.

The alternative is a Kidult settlement: all the feeling, none of the work of sitting in not-yet-knowing.

The literary desk sees it too. In The Spectator this May, Rod Liddle put the freethinking novels in “the sensitivity reader’s rejected pile.” Different beat, same diagnosis. A Liddle at a time, one might say. Others. Perhaps. Less is more.

Call the end state groupthink / hive mentality. The swarm feels as one, turns as one, on cue — and what it tolerates least is the one who won’t swarm.

That one has a name. People confuse it with its opposite. Anarchy and anarch.

They hear the sound, feel the threat, react — never checking the meaning. The disease in miniature.

Anarchy is external: the street on fire, loud. The anarch — Ernst Jünger‘s figure — is internal and silent. He isn’t owned. He walks the corridors, does what he must, stays unconquered.

The anarchist wants the building down. The anarch has simply stopped living inside it while still passing through — the calmest man in the room, his order the one kind nobody can confiscate.

Here is where it bites hardest. The finest place to learn helplessness is the place built to teach its opposite.

Not all of it, not everyone — the individual can always make the anarch’s move. However, the default lesson has flipped.

Pick up the reflex anywhere and it stays a habit. Pick it up at the institution that certifies you as a thinker and it leaves stamped — you walk out believing the reflex is critical thinking, with a gown to prove it.

And the proof is a luxury-looking sheet of paper, two magic numbers printed across it — a 2:1, or the 2:2 they nickname a Desmond. Tutu. Two-two. Says a lot about the archbishop, that his name became the also-ran.

The key, either way, to a brighter future than the next person’s — and still better than nothing. It gets framed and hung on the wall regardless.

It once certified a mind could reason. Now it certifies the reflex.

Mind you, the authorities passed on the chance to grade any lower. No 2:3, no 2:7, no 2:10 — and not by accident.

Score critical thinking honestly and the basement classes would have outnumbered the firsts by a street.

It’s easier to cap the ladder than count who’s clinging to the bottom of it. The embarrassment alone would have broken the back of the higher-education system.

Then those graduates run the trusts, draft the police guidance, edit the papers.

It doesn’t stay on the quad: the helplessness propagates outward, carrying education’s authority.

The blind leading. Certified.

So put the three questions to it.

Is it practical — a society that acts on feeling before fact? Is it logical? What is the likely outcome, if the places built to teach discernment keep teaching its absence?

You already know.

Find sensibility again. Still in there. Feeling with a rudder. Nobody removed it. We just stopped reaching for it.

So. We end where we began. With Oxford, and other universities. Where critical thinking lost its way, and learned helplessness took over. The highest learning establishments in the country. Every subject in there comes with a map. Astrophysics, law, medicine — a reading list, a syllabus, a 2:1 waiting at the end of it.

And. Critical thinking came with none. No module. No exam. No map at all. Not even so much as a compass.

Which is the only reason nobody noticed the day it wandered off.

And the course stays unwritten for the oldest reason going: set that paper honestly, and there’d be nobody left to hand a gown to.

Let’s face it. It’s probably later in the day now, and the cursor is already blinking in the reply box, your thumb hovering over the keyboard. Shall I? Shan’t I? Well.

Stop.

You see. That is the difference between emotion and fact: feeling reaches for the comment box, fact reaches for the source.

Not that many get this far down the page.

Every piece under this masthead is built the same way — researched, evidenced, made to carry weight.

So, bring a fact or bring nothing, because outrage was never an argument. It’s just noise that found a keyboard.

For Your Further Research. Should You Be Inclined This Way

• The Nowak case and the conduct of Hampshire Constabulary — trial reporting and verdict, May 2026; the IOPC referral.

• The Oxford Union resignation calls — The Telegraph, the Daily Mail and Jewish News, June 2026.

• The NHS recommendations on political symbols — Lord Mann’s review for the Department of Health and Social Care, June 2026.

• The Whipps Cross / Barts Health watermelon case — UKLFI complaint and the staff belief-discrimination tribunal claim (Baker, Saleh, Ali), 2025.

• Lord Mann on critical thinking and online falsehood — HuffPost UK interview, March 2022; his schools report, Anti-Jewish Hatred, December 2022.

• Rod Liddle, “The unstoppable rise of stupidity” — The Spectator, 16 May 2026 (25 May 2026 issue).

• Martin Seligman, on learned helplessness, from 1967 onward.

• Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (1961).

• Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil (1977), for the figure of the anarch.

The Almighty Gob (Wikidata: Q139104487) is an independent Bristol publication covering politics, culture, institutional accountability and the social psychology underneath all three — written from the anarch position: inner sovereignty, no tribal capture, the system observed from a seat it does not own. Over a thousand pieces, and counting. Entity record for the writer: John Langley (Wikidata: Q139105363).

© 2026 The Almighty Gob / John Langley. All rights deserved.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

For Your Further Research. Should You Be Inclined This Way

• The Nowak case and the conduct of Hampshire Constabulary — trial reporting and verdict, May 2026; the IOPC referral.

• The Oxford Union resignation calls — The Telegraph, the Daily Mail and Jewish News, June 2026.

• The NHS recommendations on political symbols — Lord Mann’s review for the Department of Health and Social Care, June 2026.

• The Whipps Cross / Barts Health watermelon case — UKLFI complaint and the staff belief-discrimination tribunal claim (Baker, Saleh, Ali), 2025.

• Lord Mann on critical thinking and online falsehood — HuffPost UK interview, March 2022; his schools report, Anti-Jewish Hatred, December 2022.

• Rod Liddle, “The unstoppable rise of stupidity” — The Spectator, 16 May 2026 (25 May 2026 issue).

• Martin Seligman, on learned helplessness, from 1967 onward.

• Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (1961).

• Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil (1977), for the figure of the anarch.

The Almighty Gob (Wikidata: Q139104487) is an independent Bristol publication covering politics, culture, institutional accountability and the social psychology underneath all three — written from the anarch position: inner sovereignty, no tribal capture, the system observed from a seat it does not own. Over a thousand pieces, and counting. Entity record for the writer: John Langley (Wikidata: Q139105363).

© 2026 The Almighty Gob / John Langley. All rights reserved.

[The Law-Man. The apron. The E number. The disclaimer. | The Almighty Gob, 2026.]

Just imagine. Any day morning. Bacon sarnie. Brown sauce if you’re civilised, red if you’re not. Tea going cold on the side. Maybe the radio on low. The most British moment it’s possible to have.

Now imagine glancing at the packet and discovering that one of the ingredients — sitting right there between the salt and the acidity regulator — is capable, in sufficient quantity, of killing you.

You didn’t know that, did you.

Neither did the Canadian legal system. And they’ve had three years to think about it. Put another way. It took them a long time to. You know. Ketchup.

His name was Kenneth Law. He was a chef at the Fairmont Royal York hotel in Toronto. He ran several websites. He had a postal address in Mississauga. And between approximately 2020 and 2023, he built what was — if you set aside the minor question of what it was actually for — a remarkably efficient fulfilment operation.

The product was sodium nitrite. A food preservative. An E number. The thing that gives your bacon its reassuring pink colour, your ham its shelf life, your hot dog its structural integrity. Not a controlled substance. Not a chemical weapon. Not something you need a licence to purchase, a prescription to obtain, or a hazmat suit to handle.

You can buy it at a cash-and-carry. Catering supplies. Perfectly legal. Perfectly ordinary.

Kenneth Law bought it, packaged it, and mailed it — in jiffy bags — to people who had specifically gone online to find it for reasons that had nothing to do with curing pork belly.

Authorities said he sent more than a thousand packages. To more than forty countries. And tracking by CTV News determined that deaths possibly connected to his products climbed past one hundred and thirty.

He was arrested in May 2023. And then the Canadian legal system sat down to work out what exactly to call what he’d done.

This is where it gets interesting.

Because Kenneth Law didn’t deceive anyone. He didn’t ambush anyone. He wasn’t present at any of the deaths. He mailed a legal food additive to people who asked for it, and those people made their own decisions about what to do with it when it arrived.

His lawyers — and they are, in the most technically precise sense of the word, correct — argued that assisting suicide is not murder. That a person who mails a substance that another person later voluntarily consumes, in another location, with their own intent, has not actually committed their murder.

Is it practical? Demonstrably. The operation ran for three years across forty countries with a jiffy bag and a postal account.

Is it logical? The Supreme Court of Canada eventually thought so. In December 2025, it declined to overturn an Ontario Court of Appeal ruling that found suppliers lack sufficient control over the final act to be liable for murder. Which is legally coherent, analytically defensible, and in no way whatsoever addresses the actual question.

What’s the likely outcome? Fourteen years maximum. Murder charges dropped. A landmark precedent that tells the next Kenneth Law exactly where the line is drawn — and how far back from it you need to stand.

Allow me a brief detour into the breakfast table.

Discovering that sodium nitrite can kill you in sufficient quantities is a little like discovering that the main active ingredient in aspirin is derived from willow bark — and then hitting yourself over the head with a cricket bat.

The information was always there. The chemistry was never secret. What changed was the application.

The processed meat industry has been putting sodium nitrite in your bacon since the 1920s. The World Health Organisation classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen in 2015 — the same category as tobacco and asbestos. It sits on the shelf next to the ketchup. It has a Christmas hamper range.

Kenneth Law did not invent a poison. He found a lethal weapon hiding in plain sight in the condiments aisle, worked out the dosage differential between curing bacon and the other thing, and built a logistics operation around the gap.

The difference between Kenneth Law and the average bacon manufacturer is intent, scale, branding, and the quality of the legal department.

That’s not a defence of the man. It’s an observation about the arbitrariness of what we regulate, and what we don’t, and who benefits from the distinction.

Here is what three years of Supreme Court proceedings did not ask loudly enough.

People have always known how to end their own lives. The information is not new. The substances are not exotic. The means are, and have always been, unremarkably available to anyone who looks. Kenneth Law did not invent death. He streamlined the postage.

Which raises the only question worth asking: why did the Canadian legal system spend three years on this particular jiffy bag, while the broader landscape of entirely legal, entirely accessible, entirely unregulated options continues to sit on the shelf, in the garage, under the sink, and in the bathroom cabinet of virtually every household in the developed world?

The answer, as with most things, is that someone has to be seen to do something. Kenneth Law was visible. He had a website. He had dispatch records. He was, in the language of institutional response, findable.

The rest of it isn’t.

Kenneth Law’s operation was not a philosophy. It was not a manifesto. It was a logistics operation with a paper trail — and in the entire recorded history of institutional accountability, nothing attracts the attention of the law quite like a paper trail.

The law spent three years asking whether mailing the jiffy bag constitutes murder.

The question it skipped was considerably less comfortable: if this is the thing we prosecute, what exactly are we choosing not to look at?

It should be noted, for the purposes of cultural completeness, that the primary metaphor running through this piece — cooking your own bacon — is not universally applicable.

Approximately 1.8 billion people worldwide are excluded from the bacon register on dietary grounds. For them, the sodium nitrite remains available. The metaphor does not travel. Kenneth Law, for all the logistical elegance of his operation, failed to consult a diversity and inclusion advisor before launching.

He would have received, at minimum, a requires improvement on cultural sensitivity.

The more fundamental oversight — that he was running a global death facilitation service from a Mississauga condo — appears to have been somewhat lower on the regulatory agenda.

On 18 April 2026, Kenneth Law pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of aiding suicide. The murder charges were dropped. He had been in pretrial custody for three years — creditable against his eventual sentence at a ratio of one and a half to one.

He will not spend the rest of his life in prison. He will not be remembered as a murderer. He is, in the precise legal language of the Canadian Criminal Code, a man who aided suicide. Fourteen times. Across a customer base that spanned forty countries and began, in most cases, with a search engine and a moment of desperation.

The eBay feedback, had it existed, would have been instructive.

★★★★★ Product exactly as described. Fast dispatch. Would not buy again.

★★★★★ Excellent communication throughout. Packaging discreet. No complaints.

★★★★☆ Four stars only because delivery took three days. Otherwise perfect transaction.

I have, for some years, publicly stated my intention to depart this world in a six-foot penis-shaped coffin, transported on a remote-controlled motorised dolley, on the grounds that if you’re going out, you may as well make an entrance.

I have reconsidered.

I shall instead be interred in a king-sized baguette. It is biodegradable. It feeds the ecosystem on the way down. Once the assembled wildlife has enjoyed what is, by any measure, a substantial lunch, there is — as these things go — very little left to worry about.

It is, in every respect, a superior exit strategy to a jiffy bag from Mississauga.

The baguette, it should be noted, contains no sodium nitrite.

I checked the ingredients.

Kenneth Law cured meat for a living. He found another use for the same ingredient. The law spent three years deciding what to call it, and landed on something that carries a fourteen-year ceiling and no further questions.

The bacon is still on the shelf. The E number is still in the packet. The Saturday morning sarnie is still the most British moment it’s possible to have.

Nobody changed the recipe.

Nobody asked why.

Cured to death.

©John Langley | The Almighty Gob, 2026. All rights reserved. thealmightygob.com.

Sauces. Sorry. I mean sources. Should Your appetite Stretch Further For It.

• CTV News tracking of Kenneth Law case and international death toll

• Ontario Court of Appeal ruling, R. v. Nuñez, 2024

• Supreme Court of Canada, December 2025 — refusal to overturn Ontario ruling

• World Health Organisation, processed meat carcinogen classification, 2015

• Canada Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) framework — Carter v Canada (AG), 2015 SCC

• York Regional Police press conference, August 2023

• Bristol Live — Johnny Rockard, penis-shaped coffin crowdfunding, 2018

John Langley is the founder and sole writer of The Almighty Gob, a Bristol-based independent publication covering UK institutional dysfunction, political accountability, and civic power. Former independent Bristol mayoral candidate, 2016 and 2021. No party allegiance. No press accreditation. No interest in acquiring either.

This image poses the question on purpose. The piece is where it’s complicated

What a depressing start to the day. Right? You’ve seen it by now. Of course you have, it’s been everywhere. It arrived with yesterday’s breakfast.

It’s the tragic story of Henry Nowak. Eighteen. Away from home. His first year in university. Walking back to his halls in Southampton after a night out watching football, filming himself on his phone the way they all do. Nothing happening. Just a lad talking to a camera on a dark street. The way people do. Nowadays.

Out of seemingly nowhere. Somebody puts a knife in him. Five times. One straight through the chest. A call to 999 followed. An emergency like probably no other, this night in Southampton.

In a situation such as this, the sound of blues and twos, and flashing blue lights arriving must feel like salvation.

Henry informs the attending officers he’s been stabbed. The reply to this, word for word: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Sit with that a minute. He’s bleeding to death and being told he’s imagining it.

Please, brother, he says. I can’t breathe.

The response to this, the call for an ambulance, perhaps? No. Handcuffs.

He dies right there on the pavement. And the man who knifed him? Stood a few feet off, calm as you like, telling the police he’s the real victim here.

Plausible deniability, in the moment. And. From the police.

Just short of, “is there anything we can get you — a cup of coffee maybe, are you in shock, is there a relative we can call on your behalf, perhaps?”

The almost typically British, tea and sympathy moment. One might think.

No. Meanwhile. Henry is left to die.

The killer’s called Vickrum Digwa. Twenty-three. Had his story ready before the blood went cold — said he’d been racially abused, turban knocked off, called a name. None of it happened.

Here’s the kicker. Henry’s own phone, the one he was filming on, ends up in Digwa’s pocket. Gets played back in court. Not one word of abuse on it. The lad’s killer invented a hate crime and pinned it on the boy he was busy killing.

Southampton Crown Court had a name for it. A wicked lie.

This. Got him a murder conviction. Another for carrying a twenty-one-centimetre blade about in public. Life, twenty-one years minimum. His mum, Kiran Kaur, was convicted too — for carting the weapon off afterwards like she was clearing the tea things.

This is someone who’d been training with weapons since he was twelve. A nobody. In all respects. Who slept in a room done out like an armoury.

A nobody who talked about the knife that killed Henry — the prosecution’s words, not mine — in loving terms.

Oh. And that religious exemption everyone’s suddenly shouting about? He had two knives on him. One tucked away, which the faith allows. The big one out on show, which it doesn’t.

This wasn’t a man observing his religion. This was a man who fancied carrying a sword. A man out to kill.

We’ve heard those words before. Haven’t we?

I can’t breathe. You know exactly where you’ve heard that.

In case you needed reminding. It was six years back, near enough to the week, George Floyd said it under a police officer’s knee in Minneapolis. And the whole Western world lost its mind — in the proper sense.

Stopped. Turned. Roared. And.

If you really want the scale of it? An outfit called Signal AI counted Floyd’s name in 1.88 million news stories in a fortnight. More than the President of the United States managed in the same two weeks.

About a fifth of everything the planet was saying about the pandemic. And the pandemic was the only thing anyone could talk about.

Other matters, by all accounts? Let’s just say, academic.

Meanwhile. Prime ministers got down on one knee. Boardrooms rewrote their values by the weekend.

It was, possibly, a long weekend. Otherwise reserved for short breaks.

Henry, phrased it differently. Henry said, “I can’t breathe.”

The police officer tells him he doesn’t think it’s happening. And the country? Nothing. Silence.

Right up until a court verdict and a leaked bit of bodycam footage dragged it out, blinking, into the daylight.

The easy answer — and why it’s only half of it.

Of course. Now, the more amplified voices have got a one-word answer for all this. White. Henry was white, so nobody marched. Simple as.

Half right. Which is the most dangerous kind of right there is.

Because hang on — Stephen Lawrence wasn’t killed by the state either. Private blokes, a police force that didn’t want to know. His death turned into Macpherson, a public inquiry, the actual rewriting of what racism means in British law.

So a private killing can move a whole country. The colour of the victim was never the whole story.

Here’s the real switch. A death moves this country when you can hang it on a grievance that’s already got a cathedral built round it — the offices, the training days, the friendly newsdesks, the march that turns up on its own.

Henry’s death doesn’t fit any cathedral. It fits the heresy. It’s the story all those institutions exist to deny. So it went down the back lanes — talk radio, the timeline — and never once got on the motorway of the breakfast telly.

Some deaths get a cathedral. Henry’s got the heresy. That’s the whole thing, right there.

How you end up cuffing a dying eighteen-year-old student. On his deathbed. So to speak. Is the question. Isn’t it?

So how did we get here? Moreover. How do trained police officers end up cuffing a stabbed teenager instead of saving him?

Nobody sat down and decided it. That’s the bit we’ve yet to understand. So. Again. I ask you. Isn’t it?

For a clearer understanding, I hope. Let’s go back to Macpherson, 1999. It gave us a rule: something’s racist if the victim, or anyone watching, reckons it is.

Fair enough. Built to protect people who’d been ignored for decades. I can see this.

Then the College of Policing bolts more on top: treat a claim of racial hostility as a priority. Then the inspectors start marking every force on how seriously they take hate.

Now. If you think I’m making this up, think again.

Their own Anti-Racism Commitment, written with the police chiefs, says it in black and white. “It does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind.’”

They’ll tell you it’s not even policy. Just an aspiration. Something they aspire to, not something that has to be done.

Right. I could aspire to win the lottery jackpot. Hasn’t made me a millionaire yet.

That’s the whole trick. An aspiration orders no one and binds no one — so no one’s to blame when it shapes the room. It doesn’t need to give the order. It just has to be in the air.

On top of all that sits the quiet little sum every copper’s doing in his head at midnight — a complaint of racial bias ends my career; a wrong call on a dark street is just a bad night.

Not one of those rules says cuff the bleeding man. They don’t have to. Stack them up and you build a reflex that hears the accusation quicker than it sees the wound.

Now. Policing’s got one rule that’s meant to sit above the lot. Save the life in front of you.

They even call it the preservation of life — first principle, written into the heart of the job. So we believe.

Yet. And, you might choose to take a moment to run this through a couple of times, at least.

On that pavement, the newer rule beat the oldest one. The instinct to honour a shout of racism got there before the duty to keep a lad alive.

They sorted out who to blame before they sorted out who to save.

I’ll just take it as read that you’re pausing here, before we continue.

The lie worked precisely because more than two decades of training had taught them to take that exact lie seriously. A man who knew the magic word said the magic word.

Did the doctrine actually tip these officers that night? That’s for the IOPC to rule on, not me. That it made the lie worth telling in the first place — that’s already nailed on.

In fairness — and it changes nothing.

Now, in fairness, and you’ve got to be fair or what’s the point — the force, Hampshire Police, says they were had. Says the wound was deep, inside, hard to spot. Says the cuffs were off within three minutes. Fine. Grant them every word of it. He might’ve died in the ambulance anyway.

Doesn’t matter. That’s the bit that gets me — it doesn’t matter, and the point still stands.

The failure was never whether they could save him. The failure is the order they did it in. They investigated a man before they tried to save him.

So who’s it actually for?

So who’s all this for? That’s the question I keep landing on when everyone else has picked their team.

One machine made a saint out of Floyd. Another one’s making a saint out of Henry right now — Nigel Farage‘s emergency address, the call for “pure cold rage,” the slogan lifted straight off the movement he claims to hate.

Give Farage his best point, because it’s a good one: a copper more frightened of a bias complaint than of getting it badly wrong is a copper the system’s broken. He said it plain, and he’s right.

Then watch him take that one true thing and fold it into immigration, integration, the whole turning tide. The point was real. What he’s doing with it is a recruitment drive.

Both machines need the dead lad to be a symbol before he’s finished being somebody’s son. I’ve watched the pair of them run for six years now, and under the paint it’s the same engine.

You don’t owe either of them your anger. The only honest grief in this whole business belongs to Mark Nowak, who buried his boy — not to anyone building a turnout operation on the grave.

Look what it took.

Look what it took to shift this even an inch. A grieving father going public to beg for his own son’s footage. An emergency video statement. A Police and Crime Commissioner calling his right to carry that blade central to the whole thing.

The Speaker of the Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, having to step in before the government would even stand up in the House and say a word.

There’s your two-tier policing, playing out in slow motion right in front of you. Floyd needed a phone. Henry needed a viral video, a watchdog, a party broadcast and the Speaker’s elbow in the ribs — just to get himself mentioned in Parliament.

The thing sat quiet in the middle of it.

Here’s the one question left. The one that ought to keep you up at the hour I’m writing this.

The watchdog has to work out whether those officers broke their training — or followed it, to the letter, all the way to that pavement.

Pray it’s the first one. You can sack the first one. Retrain it, discipline it, put out a press release about lessons learned.

The second one, there’s nobody to sack. Because nobody broke anything.

It worked.

That’s the thing sat quiet in the middle of all this. Quiet as a wound that doesn’t show. A system doing its job exactly how it was built to. And a boy telling the truth, in handcuffs, to people trained to hear a lie.

Nothing on that little phone screen to tell you the ordinary was about to stop. It always is. You just never see it coming.

Floyd, the world knew within days. Henry took the best part of six months — a murder conviction, and footage finally prised loose — before any of us knew his name.

Same three words. Same plea. Days, against half a year.

That’s the distinction. Two-tier, with a stopwatch on it.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent mayoral candidate in 2016 and 2021, and one of Bristol’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Writing since 2010, well over 1,000 pieces across seven platforms and, here on Substack, at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE © 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved.

[A photograph. A headline. And the question nobody thought to ask.]

Did you know there is an old Turkish proverb that the forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe, because the axe was clever, and had convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them? Me neither.

Anyway. Keep that image in your head. We are going to need it.

And ask yourself, as we go, one question nobody in this debate is asking. Not The Telegraph. Not the left. Not the culture warriors on either side.

What kind of axe is this, exactly?

What The Telegraph Saw.

A photograph appeared on social media in mid-May 2026. It showed the newly elected Tower Hamlets London Borough Council — suited figures, rosettes, the glow of a civic occasion. The Telegraph ran it under the headline: “Tower Hamlets offers a grim vision of future Britain.” Nothing wrong with that, you’d think.

Camilla Tominey noted the demographic shift, referenced the speed of change, and invited readers to draw their own conclusions.

And Britain duly obliged. Alarm on the right. Accusations of racism on the left. Everyone picked a side.

Nobody asked the right question.

That is how the trick works.

The Double Standard Nobody Wants to Name.

Now. Here’s a fact that does not appear in The Telegraph‘s analysis.

In the 2021 ONS Census, Cornwall recorded a population that was 96.8% White. Its council reflects that. Wall to wall. Nobody runs a Telegraph headline calling Cornwall a grim vision of future Britain. Nobody calls it demographic dominance. Though. Nowadays you never know. Give it, say, ten minutes? Oh, and added to which — I cannot say, in all honesty, the last time I read of a Cornish smuggler being beheaded. Feel free to update me. Please?

You see. In total contrast, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets — ONS GSS code E09000030 — tells a different story. White British at 31%, Bangladeshi at 32-34.6%. Neck and neck. Muslim population 39.9%. The council photograph reflects the community that elected it.

The Telegraph‘s argument is not about democratic legitimacy. It is about aesthetic discomfort. The wrong faces in the chamber. The wrong kind of representation doing exactly what representation is supposed to do. Though, some would perhaps say, supposedly, but not.

That is a racialised reflex dressed in civic language. It deserves to be named as such.

But. Wait. Hang on a mo, and similar.

Disposing of The Telegraph‘s argument does not dispose of the question. There is a real question here. It has nothing to do with what the councillors look like.

It has everything to do with what kind of axe is in the forest.

What Nobody Wants to Say, and that ‘Hang on a Mo’ suddenly arrives.

Not the faces. The mechanism that put them there.

More than 30 councillors are of Bangladeshi heritage against a Muslim population of 39.9%. Roughly 67% Bangladeshi-heritage representation.

The mathematics do not add up through demographics alone. They add up through bloc voting — a community organising its electoral power around faith and identity rather than policy, housing, or class interest.

But also: what does the faith that organises the bloc actually prescribe? For homosexuals. For apostates. For women. For the children in its schools.

Because not all axes are the same. And not all handles are made of the same wood.

Why This One Cuts Differently.

Roman Catholicism has conservative positions on abortion, sexuality, and gender. The Catholic Church does not, in living memory, have an unblemished record on the protection of children.

But Catholic political theology accepts the separation of religious and civic authority. Caesar and God occupy different domains. It does not prescribe beheading for those who leave the faith. It does not mandate death for homosexuality.

Orthodox Islamic political thought — not fringe, not extremist, but mainstream scholarly tradition — does not always share that separation. The ummah as political community, sharia as governance framework, religious and civil law as contested territory: these are not settled questions within Islam as they are within post-Reformation Christianity.

A theological observation, not a slur. The majority of British Muslims live secular daily lives. That matters and must be stated.

However. When a faith bloc votes as a bloc, the question is not which individual members hold which views. The question is: whose version of that faith sets the gravitational pull of the political project?

You may think: this is where the argument loses its footing. Goes too far. Names names without evidence. Fair enough.

Consider Haitham al-Haddad. Saudi-trained Islamic scholar. Former judge at the Islamic Sharia Council in east London. Parliamentary witness. Advisory boards of mainstream UK Islamic organisations. Described by BBC Radio London in 2024 as “highly respected” — before the corporation acknowledged it should have challenged him more robustly.

Al-Haddad has stated apostasy deserves capital punishment. Described homosexuality as a criminal act. Given instructions on female genital mutilation. Documented in The Times, Parliamentary evidence, and the National Secular Society’s formal BBC complaint.

Not the fringe. The institutional centre.

When 101 imams instruct the faithful how to vote, and an Election Court finds that instruction legally coercive — that is the gravitational pull operating in public. And there, ladies and mentalgen, is your answer.

The Man Behind the Handle.

I think we can agree, we’d find it difficult to not understand Tower Hamlets without understanding Lutfur Rahman first.

Rahman has been mayor twice. The first time ended on 23 April 2015, when Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey QC delivered judgment in Erlam & Ors v Rahman & Anor [2015] EWHC 1215 (QB). Rahman found personally guilty of corrupt and illegal practices under the Representation of the People Act 1983.

Fraudulent postal voting. False voter registration. And — most significantly — undue spiritual influence under s.115: a letter from 101 imams published in Bengali-language media six days before the 2014 election, instructing Muslim residents it was their religious duty to vote for Rahman.

Commissioner Mawrey described the real losers as the Bengali community itself, whose “natural and laudable sense of solidarity has been cynically perverted into a sense of isolation and victimhood, and their devotion to their religion has been manipulated — all for the aggrandisement of Mr Rahman.”

Rahman was subsequently removed from office. Barred from standing until 2021. To which, his dissenters may have been justified in the quiet murmurs of ‘Hoorah man’. Or not. Anyway.

He came back under Aspire, founded 26 January 2018. Won in 2022. Won again in May 2026 — 35,679 votes, majority of over 16,000 above Labour. Aspire, he did.

As a commentator with far greater wisdom than myself put it. The trees kept voting for the axe. Because the handle is made of wood.

Now. Before anyone summons the metaphorical firing squad.

This Is Not About Ethnicity. And, In Fairness. Many Political Figures Hardly Blow Through A Clean Whistle. So To Speak.

Those councillors were elected by British residents as British candidates. Democratic legitimacy: not in question.

When 101 imams instruct the faithful how to vote and an Election Court finds it a legal offence — undue spiritual influence under the Representation of the People Act 1983 — the question is not about ethnicity. It is about the subordination of civic process to religious authority.

It applies wherever it occurs. The Catholic vote in Northern Ireland. The Church of England in rural Conservative England. The Orange Lodge. Wherever faith tells its community how to vote, democracy takes a wound.

Tower Hamlets makes it visible. The axe has been busy elsewhere.

The Accountability Story Nobody Is Writing.

With all due respect to Camilla (NO. Not that one!) the Telegraph version. This is the accountability story nobody is writing.

The Aspire administration spent twice as much as its Labour predecessor, disproportionately directing funds toward Rahman’s community networks. The Times documented £250,000 given to a mosque charity with an annual income of £20,000, chaired by a man who publicly declared it important for Islam that Rahman won. By February 2023, CIPFA raised concerns about council management and the possibility of government intervention.

The East London Mosque and Tower Hamlets Council of Mosques coordinated a 2021 statement urging schools to disregard borough guidance on LGBT-inclusive RSE. The organised institutional voice of the same faith bloc that delivers the vote.

In Rotherham, between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 children — overwhelmingly White British girls — were exploited by gangs of predominantly Pakistani-heritage men. The Alexis Jay Inquiry, August 2014, found collective failure to act. One researcher who raised the alarm in 2002 was sent on a diversity course. The word used internally for why officials chose not to act is the same word deployed every time this argument is made: racist.

When fear of the accusation becomes more powerful than the obligation to the child, the forest shrinks fastest of all.

Now. That is the forest shrinking. Before your very eyes, and possibly faster than an Amazon rain forest.

The Three Questions.

So. Is it practical? A democratic system producing disproportionate representation through faith bloc voting, with a documented finding of undue spiritual influence, does not self-correct. It consolidates. Rahman’s majority grew between 2022 and 2026.

Is it logical? The Telegraph‘s racial alarm obscures the governance failure. The Islamophobia accusation shuts down scrutiny. Both sides benefit from the noise. Neither serves the residents of Tower Hamlets, Rotherham, or the LGBT pupils whose education was overridden by coordinated faith bloc pressure.

What is the likely outcome? At May 2026 local elections, independent Muslim candidates won over 100 council seats across England, adding to four independent Muslim MPs elected in 2024. Tower Hamlets is not a local curiosity. It is a template — Rotherham, Bradford, Barnsley, and beyond.

The forest is not in Tower Hamlets. The forest is Britain.

The Photograph Revisited.

All that said. Okay. Let’s revisit that image one more time.

What the photograph does not show is the mechanism behind it. The 101 imams. The legal findings. The £250,000 to a charity earning £20,000. The five-year ban ignored by an electorate voting as a unit. The schools overridden on LGBT guidance. The children of Rotherham filed under community sensitivity. The scholars preaching capital punishment for apostasy while sitting on mainstream British Islamic advisory boards.

The Telegraph points at the picture and says: look at them.

The right response is: look at what they were given, and who gave it, and what it cost the people it was taken from.

And then ask what kind of axe has been doing the cutting.

The forest knew what kind of trees it was. It didn’t know what kind of axe it was voting for.

Now it does.

The handle is made of wood. The axe is still an axe. Cornwall still hasn’t beheaded a smuggler.

They haven't. Have they?

Oh, please.

Not 'another' rewrite!

John Langley is the founder of The Almighty Gob, an independent Bristol-based publication covering politics, power, and institutional accountability since 2020. No party allegiance. No press accreditation. No sacred cows. thealmightygob.com

Sources.

Legal

• Erlam & Ors v Rahman & Anor [2015] EWHC 1215 (QB). Commissioner Richard Mawrey QC. National Archives

• Representation of the People Act 1983, s.115. legislation.gov.uk

Statistical

• ONS Census 2021 — Tower Hamlets. ons.gov.uk

• ONS Census 2021 — Cornwall. ons.gov.uk

• Tower Hamlets Borough Profile 2024. towerhamlets.gov.uk

Electoral

• Tower Hamlets mayoral results, May 2026. towerhamlets.gov.uk

• Wikipedia — Lutfur Rahman / Aspire

Financial accountability

• CIPFA concerns, February 2023. Tower Hamlets London Borough Council

• £250,000 mosque charity donation. The Times, 2023.

Rotherham

• Independent Inquiry, Professor Alexis Jay, 26 August 2014. Wikipedia

LGBT education

• East London Mosque / Tower Hamlets Council of Mosques RSE statement, March 2021. 5pillarsuk.com

Documented preaching

• Haitham al-Haddad. The Times 2018. Parliamentary evidence. National Secular Society, September 2024. Wikipedia

National pattern

• Independent Muslim candidates, May 2026. The Spectator, May 2026.

• Four independent Muslim MPs, 2024. Multiple sources confirmed.

[Source: Newsquest / Oxford Mail. Data: Department for Transport National Travel Survey 2023. Institute for Public Policy Research child poverty figures 2024/25]

Save East Oxford Businesses @eastoxbusiness

“Labour’s, Greens & Libdems LTN’s put multiple families into poverty when we were forced to close our businesses in east oxford. they know they’re still doing it and need to stand up and admit it.”

You might remember the cigar, from yesterday. The man in the Panama hat, burning it slowly on a Bristol morning, not rushing, because that’s the point of a Cuban cigar — and, as it turns out, the point of this story. Some things take the time they take. Same table. Fresh hot choc. Different numbers.

Maximum points for guessing, first time, the worst outcome for the councils.

Congratulations. 100% correct.

The Department for Transport just told all of us something remarkable. They told us with their own data, in their own document, under their own name. And then, apparently, hoped nobody would join the dots. However, the use of pens is not beyond the wit of mankind. Much to the bewilderment of. Well. You know.

47 Miles.

What does this mean? Let’s find out, shall we?

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the average person in England cycled 88 miles. Said nothing about them returning, mind you. Not the point.

So. Eighty-eight miles. Well. So the story goes. People were out on their bikes because there was nowhere else to go, the roads were empty, the government had told everyone to get some fresh air, and a good number of people had discovered, possibly for the first time since childhood, that a bicycle is quite a pleasant thing. It was a moment. A genuine one. Nobody disputes that. Not so far, anyway.

Now. Here’s what councils across England did with that moment you may choose to take a moment, perhaps even two, with.

They saw a revolution. A permanent shift in how human beings choose to move through the world. A once-in-a-generation opportunity — and if you work in local government transport policy, once-in-a-generation opportunities don’t come along very often, so when they do, you don’t hang about. They installed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes up and down the country. They put in the bollards. They mounted the cameras. They issued the fines. They called it active travel. They called it the future. They made the schemes permanent.

And then the Department for Transport published what actually happened next.

The National Travel Survey — the DfT’s own annual count, nobody else’s, not a pressure group, not a think tank, not a cycling campaign with a preference for a particular outcome — recorded that the average person in England cycled 47 miles in 2023.

Forty-seven miles.

Not 88. Not even the 54 miles people were cycling before the pandemic. Forty-seven. Back to the levels last seen in 2013. A decade of whatever progress had been made — gone. The pandemic boom didn’t become a revolution. It became a blip. A beautiful, temporary, completely misleading blip that councils across England took as a mandate to permanently reshape communities that had absolutely no say in the matter.

The DfT said so. In their own document. With their own numbers.

Now, here’s where that extra moment I suggested comes into play. It gets sharper than that.

By June 2024, cycling traffic had dropped a further 7 per cent year on year. It now sits 33.5 per cent below the pandemic peak. Car traffic, in the same period, went up. While councils were busy installing cameras, issuing penalty notices, and explaining to communities that this was all being done for their own good — people got back in their cars.

Because that is what people do when the alternative doesn’t work.

Is it practical? No. The 47 miles says so.

Is it logical? Only if you define logic as protecting the policy rather than achieving the aim.

What’s the likely outcome? Keep reading.

The Man Who Served Oxford for Forty Years.

Clinton Pugh opened his first business in Oxford in the 1980s.

Café Coco. Kazbah. Café Tarifa on Cowley Road — the road his daughter Florence used to work on, before Midsommar, before Little Women, before Oppenheimer, before she became one of the most recognisable actresses on the planet. That Florence Pugh. Her dad. Forty years on Cowley Road, serving the students, the locals, the Friday lunchers, the people who just wanted somewhere decent to sit, chat, and do what people do in such an environment.

Then. One can only assume. Having sourced the only edition of The Haynes Guide To Dismantling Communities For Local Governments — Part One, Oxfordshire County Council introduced Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes in East Oxford. Trial from May 2022. Made permanent — Cowley in July 2022, East Oxford in October 2023. Despite the opposition. Despite the protests. Despite businesses on Cowley Road explaining, with considerable patience, exactly what was going to happen to their trade.

Clinton Pugh told them what was coming.

They noted his concerns. In a way that they note concerns in Bristol, for example. And then they made the schemes permanent anyway, which is the council equivalent of listening very carefully before doing precisely what you’d already decided to do.

Anyway. In May 2025, after selling the last of his businesses, Clinton Pugh said this. On the record. His own words: Kazbah’s turnover has dropped significantly over the last three years since the LTNs have gone in. So had Café Coco. I’ve lost about £1 million, if not more. The LTNs were the main nail in the coffin. You know. One prone to rust. Eventually.

So. A million pounds. Forty years. Hey presto. Gone.

Oxfordshire County Council’s response?

LTNs are intended to make residential streets healthier to live on and more comfortable for walking, wheeling, and cycling.

Would you think that there’s even the remotest possibility that a council PR person lost several nights sleep, labouring on the words to string that statement together? No. Me neither.

And then they announced a new traffic filters trial. Starting August 2026. Because when the evidence tells you the policy has failed, the answer — apparently — is more policy. It’s a bold strategy. It hasn’t worked yet. They’re confident. And, as I type, the loudest of Bristolian bells are ringing with such clarity. In unison.

Remember the Magic Roundabout? Anyone?

You’ll recognise this from somewhere closer to home.

A junction isn’t flowing properly. So the council installs a mini roundabout. Boing! The mini roundabout doesn’t solve it. So they build a midi roundabout. Boing! That doesn’t work either. Maxi roundabout. Still not right. Boing! Super maxi roundabout. And eventually, after enough iterations of the same failed idea scaled up and repositioned and given a new name in a press release, you end up with something like Swindon’s Magic Roundabout — a structure so elaborate, so committed to solving a problem by multiplying the solution that originally failed, that it has become a tourist attraction. Boing!

You see. No metaphorical Zebedee type in local government solves the problem. It doesn’t. It just expresses the problem in a more expensive and elaborate format. Said Florence. Never.

This is what Low Traffic Neighbourhood policy looks like from the pavement.

Each intervention fails. Rather than ask why, the institution doubles down. The community that existed before the first bollard went in gets pushed further and further from the life it was living. And the people making the decisions — the ones who don’t live on Cowley Road, who don’t run a chippy on Avonvale Road, who get to go home each evening to streets the policy never touched — keep building the next roundabout.

Which brings us to Barton Hill.

The Chippy and the Bus Gate.

Hamblins Fish and Chips. 154 Avonvale Road, Barton Hill, East Bristol.

A well liked and much used local business, serving the community for over seventy years. Not a chain. Not a concept. A chippy. The kind of place that knows your order, knows your face, and knew your nan when she used to come in on Fridays.

Bristol City Council introduced the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood — the EBLN — which is what Bristol calls its version of the LTN, presumably because Liveable Neighbourhood sounds considerably more appealing than what the residents of Barton Hill were actually living through. A bus gate went in on Avonvale Road. Owner Armin Amadi was straightforward about what happened next: the loss of passing trade and the difficulty customers now faced reaching the shop had created serious pressure. The local Labour MP Kerry McCarthy met with him, walked the area, and confirmed the impact had been negative and the council support had been inadequate. A few banners. A pocket park nearby.

Compensation for the destruction of a seventy-year-old business’s trade. The council apparently felt this struck the right balance.

Conversely. Two hundred and forty-three formal objections to the scheme, stated differently, with only twenty-three in support. One resident’s summary, which has the considerable virtue of being accurate: built on lies and fabricated data.

In spring 2025, Bristol City Council arrived at Avonvale Road with security personnel and approximately sixty police officers. At three in the morning. To install bollards. Both the council and the police subsequently apologised for what they described as a heavy-handed approach, which suggests that even they, on reflection, could see how it looked.

And after two years of that — of protests, blockades, a community standing in the road in all weathers, 243 objections, a Labour MP publicly declaring the support inadequate — Bristol City Council announced its solution.

They moved the bus gate in a moment of human genius, one would think, compassion for a local trader, and listening rather than just hearing. Right?

Wrong! Not removed. Moved. From one side of the Avonvale Road junction to the other.

Directly outside Hamblins’ front door.

The midi roundabout. The maxi roundabout. The institution that will not say three words — we got this wrong — to a man whose family has fed Barton Hill for seventy years. Instead, it builds the next roundabout. Bigger. Different position. Same road. Same community left standing in it. Maird might be the one word, that anyone with a minor level of the French language would understand. Immediately. Oh and by the downpour.

What the Councils Are Hoping You Never Join Up.

Now. Here is the thing that does not appear in any press release, any cabinet paper, any council statement on active travel.

The cycling boom that was used to justify every Low Traffic Neighbourhood in England — every camera, every bollard, every bus gate, every penalty notice, every three-in-the-morning police deployment — is gone. The Department for Transport’s National Travel Survey confirmed it. Forty-seven miles per person in 2023. Down from 88. Back to 2013 levels. And still falling.

The justification collapsed. The schemes stayed.

Clinton Pugh lost a million pounds on Cowley Road. Oxfordshire County Council spent nearly £4 million installing and maintaining LTNs and cycling quickways. They collected over £1 million in fines from drivers who went the wrong way through a camera. Cycling nationally went backwards to where it was a decade ago.

Hamblins has fed Barton Hill for seventy years. Bristol City Council put the bus gate outside their front door.

The DfT data is not a political opinion. It is not a pressure group’s estimate. It is not a think tank’s modelling. It is the government’s own annual count of how many miles the average person in England cycles. And it says, in the plainest numbers imaginable, that the revolution the councils promised — the revolution they used to justify making everything permanent — never happened.

Oh, and then there is Croydon. Let’s not forget.

On 4 March 2026, Mr Justice Pepperall handed down his judgement. Six permanent LTN schemes in Croydon — introduced in 2020, made permanent in March 2024 — were quashed. Not reformed. Not reviewed. Quashed. The judge found that the dominant purpose for making the schemes permanent was not environmental. Not safety-related. Not active travel. It was to safeguard the revenue raised by enforcement cameras. To plug a financial black hole. His conclusion, stated in plain English in a 33-page ruling: the dominant purpose for making the schemes permanent was the need to safeguard the revenue raised by enforcement. Such purpose was unlawful.

Unlawful. Under the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984. No, never — surely?

So. If ever a moment called for pantomime terminology, this is it. Oh yes, they did. The council had projected £10.7 million in fine income from six streets over four years. The judge called the council’s legal handling a procedural dog’s breakfast. The estimated cost of the ruling — refunds, lost revenue, administration — could reach £10 million. All because the Mayor said the quiet part out loud. In public. On the record. On the balance sheet.

Now. The Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 does not apply only to Croydon. It applies to every LTN in England. Every camera. Every bus gate. Every penalty notice. Every scheme that was ever discussed in a cabinet meeting where someone mentioned, even in passing, the revenue it might generate.

Every. Single. One.

The councils lit a cigar in 2020 and called it active travel.

The DfT confirmed they never smoked it.

Mr Justice Pepperall confirmed why they were so reluctant to put it down. Possibly, assuming it would justifiably burn something down. If left unattended.

So. The Burning Three Questions. No Comfortable Answers.

Is it practical?

Forty-seven miles per person per year. Down from 88. Still falling. Car use rising. The answer is in the numbers. The numbers belong to the Department for Transport. Nobody else put them there.

Is it logical?

Clinton Pugh. Forty years. A million pounds. His conclusion, stated plainly: business in Oxford is untenable. Armin Amadi. Seventy years of Hamblins. A bus gate moved to directly outside his front door. The logic belongs to the communities. It always did.

What is the likely outcome?

More filters. More cameras. More trials. August 2026 in Oxford. The next roundabout, bigger than the last, repositioned slightly, on the same road that was perfectly functional before any of this started.

That is the outcome. Unless someone in a cabinet meeting somewhere picks up the Department for Transport’s own National Travel Survey, reads it, and asks the question out loud. There you have it. Oxford. Highest child poverty rate in the South East. Highest concentration of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in England.

If the cycling revolution didn’t happen —

— what exactly have we been doing to people’s lives?

Draw your own conclusions.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

John Langley is the founder of The Almighty Gob, a Bristol-based independent publication covering politics, power, and institutional accountability. Former independent Bristol mayoral candidate, 2016 and 2021. Over 700 published pieces across seven platforms. thealmightygob.com

SOURCES AND CITATIONS.

Department for Transport — National Travel Survey 2023. Average cycling distance per person: 47 miles. Peak 2020: 88 miles. Back to 2013 levels.

Department for Transport — Road Traffic Estimates, year ending June 2024. Cycling traffic down 7% year on year. Down 33.5% from pandemic peak. Car traffic up 1.9%.

road.cc — DfT National Travel Survey coverage, August 2024.

Hits Radio Oxfordshire / Greatest Hits Radio Oxfordshire — Clinton Pugh interview, May 2025.

The Oxford Magazine — Clinton Pugh business closure report, June 2025.

BBC Oxfordshire — East Oxford LTNs made permanent, October 2023.

BBC Oxfordshire — LTN fines exceed £1 million, 2025.

BristolWorld — Hamblins Fish and Chips / EBLN impact, August 2025.

Yahoo News UK / Bristol Live — Contractors abandoned, Avonvale Road protest, April 2026.

Bristol247 — Calls for pause of EBLN bus gate, April 2026.

Oxfordshire County Council — Active Travel spending figures, FOI disclosure.

The Almighty Gob — EBLN coverage series, 2025–2026. thealmightygob.com

Mr Justice Pepperall — High Court judgement, 4 March 2026. Croydon LTN judicial review.

Inside Croydon — High Court orders end to Croydon’s unlawful LTNs, 5 March 2026.

LocalGov — Croydon LTNs to be scrapped by order of judge, March 2026.

GB News — Croydon Council to refund thousands of drivers after illegal LTN cash cow scheme, March 2026.

Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 — statutory framework governing LTN enforcement.

Wikidata — The Almighty Gob (Q139104487). thealmightygob.com

Wikidata — John Langley (Q139105363). thealmightygob.com

[The lived experience. Not the news cycle experience. East Bristol, Bristol — TheAlmightyGob.com]

In East Bristol, Bath and Croydon, residents are fighting Low Traffic Neighbourhood — LTN — schemes through physical blockades, High Court challenges, and fines that nobody can collect.

So. Here I am, again. Another Saturday morning in Bristol.

The sun is blazing. People out shopping, just getting on with their lives. To my right, a man at an adjacent table — Panama hat, big fat Cuban cigar, burning away slowly. Because smoking a Cuban cigar isn’t something you rush. It’s time burning away very deliberately, very slowly, and he’s doing exactly that — watching the world go by, taking everything in, settled in his own meditative state. It’s not a cigarette. It’s not anything else. It’s a cigar. And there’s a difference.

It reminds me of the days when I used to sit and enjoy a cigar myself. I think of those Cuban ladies, legendarily rolling them between their thighs. It brings back the memory of a Montecristo No. 1 — which by all accounts, compared to back then, would probably cost a week’s wages nowadays. Walking into a real tobacconist in those days was something else entirely. An emporium. Cigars in tubes displayed at the front counter. And behind — the humidor. Dark oak cabinets, stacked, each one carefully maintained. Like a bonsai tree, except without the pruning. Every cigar at exactly the right temperature. Exactly the right humidity. Waiting.

I had my own personalised cigar cutter. And there was a ritual to it. A glass of vintage port or a robust brandy — either would do. You’d clip the end, dip it briefly, and then you’d smoke it. Slowly. As it was always meant to be done. Back then.

That was a life. A somewhat lovely life. In some respects anyway.

That’s my case for the defence. Now. The real story of the day has no nostalgia to it. None whatsoever.

I’ll be honest with you. I’ve had a brain-numbing few days. Heavy research, heavy writing — the kind where every sentence has to be load-bearing, every fact checked twice, every claim able to stand up and not be argued with. Well, it can be argued with. But it would be rather futile to do so.

So this feels different. Because this isn’t one of those pieces. This isn’t a story requiring painstaking hours of research and re-editing until every fact is airtight. The evidence doesn’t need constructing. The research is no further than a scroll. The story is right here, laid out plainly, in front of anyone willing to look at it.

It just needs reporting.

In East Bristol, Bath and Croydon, residents opposed to Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes — LTNs — have been fighting Bristol City Council, Bath and North East Somerset Council, and the courts themselves. Protests at bus gates, a High Court judicial review, and fines nobody can collect. The resistance, it turns out, is not a passing mood.

The Lived Experience vs The News Cycle Experience.

And what it’s about isn’t some imported cause. Nobody here is waving flags about something happening three thousand miles away. Nobody’s marching through a city centre with borrowed outrage about a conflict they’ll never be directly affected by.

There is a difference — and it matters — between the lived experience and what might be called the news cycle experience. The lived experience is your road, your business, your school run, your driveway. The news cycle experience is a cause you’ve adopted, a position you’ve taken, a march you’ve attended. One has consequences. The other has a hashtag.

This is something altogether more honest, more human, and — if we’re applying the question of what actually matters — considerably more important.

This is people standing in their own road.

A Cuban cigar burns at over a thousand degrees at its core. You wouldn’t know it to look at it. The frustration of the people of East Bristol is exactly that. Contained. Sustained. And still burning.

And like that cigar burning slowly to my right — they’re not going anywhere. Patience, it turns out, is not a weakness. It’s a thousand degrees, contained. And somewhere there is virtue in both. Not a trace of signalling.

Three Roads. Three Fights. One LTN Resistance.

In Barton Hill, Bristol, on the morning of 17 April 2026, residents physically blocked ETM contractors from installing a relocated bus gate on Avonvale Road. Not a petition. Not a strongly-worded letter to their MP. They stood in the road. The truck stopped. The work stopped.

This was not the first time. Not the second time. Not the third time. In all weathers, this community has turned out — and every time, Bristol City Council has chosen to come back. A different hour. A different approach. Once, notoriously, in the early hours, with contractors, police, drones and a helicopter. Bristol City Council chose to bypass democratic consent while most people were asleep.

There is no violence here. No aggression. No hostility. Just people, standing in their road. The simplest form of protest. The most meaningful form of protest. The most sensible and logical form of protest that doesn’t wear anyone else’s badge — only its own.

Around 240 people had already formally objected to the relocation plan. Cllr Ed Plowden — Green councillor, chair of the Transport and Connectivity Policy Committee — described the blockade as the work of “a small group of protesters” causing disruption and increasing costs.

Small group. Noted. They’ve been a small group every single time. And every single time, they’ve shown up anyway.

The new bus gate location was right outside Hamblins fish and chip shop, owned by Armin Amadi, who has argued consistently that the original blockade had already devastated his trade. The council’s answer to that problem was to move the problem directly to his front door.

One protester reported being told by a police officer that thirty officers would return to force the works through. The council said this was “not something we’re aware of.”

You can assess that for yourself.

“The council continues to install barriers. The residents continue to show up. One side is being paid to be there. The other one isn’t.”

Bristol City Council’s Documented Form.

Regular readers of The Almighty Gob will recall this is the same council with well-documented, extensively reported form for saying things that subsequent events then contradict with some enthusiasm. What the Acronym LTN Really Means: Lies To Neighbourhoods? examined the consultation failures and the legal precedent set by the West Dulwich judicial review. The Road Tax They Forgot To Mention connected Mr Justice Pepperall’s ruling on 4 March 2026 — quashing six Croydon LTN schemes found to have been operated primarily as revenue generators — directly to Bristol’s own enforcement model. Both are available at thealmightygob.com.

Supporters of LTN schemes will point to air quality data, reduced rat-running, and safer streets for cyclists. Those arguments deserve the Three Questions Framework in return. Is it practical — when traffic doubles past a school on a road with blind bends? Is it logical — when 74 per cent of directly affected residents say no and councils proceed regardless? What is the likely outcome — when the High Court has already answered that question in Croydon?

The argument has not changed. If anything, like a Montecristo left unattended, it has only got stronger.

Bath: The High Court LTN Challenge.

Now. Twelve miles down the road, residents aren’t blocking contractors. They’ve gone straight to the High Court.

The Heart of Lansdown Conservation Group has filed a statutory challenge against Bath and North East Somerset Council, with lawyers submitting a 40-page statement of claim alleging seven legal failings relating to the Lower Lansdown and The Circus LTN. The challenge is live. No ruling has yet been delivered. However, the documented evidence the claimants are working with is not ambiguous.

The council’s own monitoring data showed one road experienced a 115 per cent surge in traffic — more than 1,100 extra vehicles per day. Locals called it bedlam. The council called it progress and made the scheme permanent anyway.

Traffic on the lower part of Sion Road — a road with blind bends — roughly doubled. Sion Road passes Kingswood Prep School.

Read that again slowly. Traffic past a school, on a road with blind bends, doubled. The council acknowledged this. Then made the scheme permanent anyway.

“74 per cent of residents said no. The council heard them clearly. Then proceeded regardless.”

Is it practical? No. Traffic doubles elsewhere. Is it logical? Not when 74 per cent of the people you serve are telling you it isn’t. What is the likely outcome? There’s a 40-page legal document with some specific thoughts on that.

The council says it will “vigorously contest” the challenge. Councils always vigorously contest things — right up until the point a judge tells them they don’t have that option. Mr Justice Pepperall was available for comment in Croydon, 4 March 2026. Ask Bristol City Council how that one landed.

Croydon: The Ghost in the Honda.

Meanwhile. Somewhere in London, a Honda driver has been passing through LTN cameras long enough to accumulate a reported £254,683 in penalty charge notices. Islington Council has failed to identify the owner. The motorist has paid £80.

No placard. No legal team. No early-hours confrontation with a contractor’s truck. Just a car, a camera, and a quarter of a million pounds sitting on a spreadsheet that nobody can collect.

This is what happens when an enforcement model built entirely on the assumption of compliance meets people who simply decline to comply.

Mr Justice Pepperall’s ruling on 4 March 2026 established that LTN schemes do not operate lawfully as revenue generators. What the ghost Honda driver demonstrated — quietly, anonymously, from behind a windscreen — is that even before the law catches up, the model has a fragility built into its foundations.

Islington Council does not know who the driver is. The driver knows exactly what they’re doing.

“You do not fine someone you have failed to find.”

What This Is Really About.

None of these people — not the residents of Barton Hill standing in the road for the third time in all weathers, not the Heart of Lansdown Conservation Group with their 40-page legal submission, not the Honda driver somewhere in London — are fighting about something three thousand miles away. There is no borrowed cause here. No fashionable outrage. No imported conflict dressed up as principle.

They are fighting for their road. Their corner. Their school run. Their fish and chip shop. Their ability to get out of their own driveway.

That is the lived experience. And it has a temperature. Over a thousand degrees of it, contained, patient, sustained — burning slowly, going nowhere.

Happiness Is a Cigar.

There was a television advertisement once. Happiness is a cigar, it said. Whatever situation the actor found himself in, however badly the world was crashing down around him — it didn’t matter. He was having his moment. Enjoying it. Fully present. Undisturbed. Bach’s Air on the G String playing softly underneath. Everything wrong. Everything, somehow, fine.

The man with the Panama hat understood that entirely.

So, it turns out, do the residents of Barton Hill.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if somewhere, conversely, there was a hamlet called Cigar? There isn’t. But then, some things are better as an idea than a place.

That man with the Panama hat and the Cuban cigar was still there an hour later. Still burning slowly. Still watching the world go by. Unhurried. Unbothered. Going nowhere.

The residents of East Bristol are exactly that. They have been here before. They will be here again. Burning slowly. Steady. Patient. Immovable.

You do not put out a cigar by ignoring it.

And as for the man with the Panama hat — an hour later, he was still there.

Havana nice day.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

The Almighty Gob has covered the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood extensively. Previous investigations include What the Acronym LTN Really Means: Lies To Neighbourhoods? and The Road Tax They Forgot To Mention, both available at thealmightygob.com and on Substack.

About the Author. Like, you need to know. Still.

John Langley is the founder and sole voice of The Almighty Gob — Bristol’s independent publication covering politics, power and institutional accountability since 2020. Former independent Bristol mayoral candidate (2016, 2021). Author of The Sexual Philanthropist. No party allegiance. No press accreditation. No tribal capture.

thealmightygob.com | Substack | X | Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Threads | Muckrack

© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved.

[The Sunday Times has its Rich List. We have our questions]

What Does Rich Mean To You Exactly? The Story Of Two Knights and One Day.

Beckham, Blair, The Sunday Times Rich List, And The Homeless Who Connect The Dots.

I was thinking, the other night. Now there’s a thought in itself. Dangerous for me — paracetamol alert time.

Anyway. Potential headache aside, here we go. Sir David Beckham. Sir Tony Blair — and a man in Bristol city centre getting through the day. What connects them is the one question nobody asks. No. Not even me, till now.

And somewhere in that stillness — with the Sunday Times Rich List fresh off the press and the wealth gap wider than ever, the cost of living grinding people down, and the politics of envy running at full volume across every social media platform going — a thought arrived that hadn’t really occurred to me before.

I am rich. Not quite meeting the contraindication standard of an over-the-counter pharmaceutical, one would expect. However.

Now stay with me on that.

Rich Is Subjective — And That’s The Problem

When I say rich I don’t mean the Sunday Times Rich List. I don’t mean a private jet idling at Farnborough while someone decides which yacht to board from, well, say, somewhere exotic. Like.

Brighton Marina. For example.

You know.

I mean I have a roof over my head. I can put food on the table. I can pay my bills. The years of having a toy yacht in the bath with me. Long since passed. Mind you. I used to play with military toy tanks as well. Not amphibious. Surprisingly. At that time.

And when you hold that against the reality of billions of people struggling for shelter, for food, for survival, then yes. By any honest measure. I am rich.

It just took me until two thirty on a Thursday morning, in late May. To notice.

The Sunday Times Rich List — Two Knights And The Name As Machine.

So. Let’s take a little moment to consider the Sunday Times Rich List. Sir David Beckham. Sir Tony Blair. Among many others of, perhaps, more relevance right now.

And I’m not dismissing the graft — for any of them. The hours on the pitch, the years in Downing Street. The hours sweating over the next financial forecast, waiting in the wings. Somewhere between pain and pleasure.

However, at some point something shifts, doesn’t it. The wealth stops being proportional to the work and starts being proportional to the name. And the name becomes a separate machine entirely.

And Sir Tony Blair is cited here as one illustration among many — any household name from any side of any argument would serve the point equally well.

You see, if Sir David Beckham opens a chain of boutique shops tomorrow, or Sir Tony Blair walks into a room to give a speech, that name does what no amount of effort from you or me can do.

The barrier at that level isn’t hard work. It is fame.

And fame is partly talent, partly timing, and partly the culture simply deciding that this is the person it’s going to elevate. Nobody votes themselves into that category by grafting harder.

The fact that someone can become a multi-millionaire sports person without ever sitting in an exam hall, bears testimony to this. Being modestly unspecific about it.

The I Want Engine — And The Moment Want Becomes Deserve.

And you know, we all grow up wanting something better, don’t we.

You buy a house, you want a better house. You get a lawnmower and suddenly you want one you can ride around the bigger garden you have somehow acquired. Albeit remotely inaccessible.

The I want engine never quite switches off, in us all. Does it?

And at some point, almost without noticing, I want quietly becomes I deserve.

You see, want is at least honest. Deserve is want with a moral claim bolted onto it.

And that shift — that small, quiet shift — is where an awful lot of our modern discontent lives.

We are never content with what we have. Are we.

A Bentley In Bristol — And A Tax Strategy Wearing Coachwork.

I was sitting outside one of the cafes I frequent last week when a Bentley convertible pulled up. Horrendously expensive.

The driver got out, late thirties to mid-forties. And you could feel the shift in the air around me. People turning, staring.

Particularly the younger lads, early teens, faces open with something close to awe. Their wow moment of the day. The aspiration already being installed on a Bristol pavement.

For me it was just an expensive set of wheels.

The conversations around me were mixed. Some begrudging. Some wistful.

However, what struck me was that a car like that almost certainly sits against a business expense somewhere. A write-off. A structure.

The conspicuous consumption we look up at and feel the pull of is sometimes just a tax strategy wearing coachwork.

Baggy Khan, A Lamborghini, And The Gap Between What Politics Says And What It Does.

Which brings me to something that tells us rather a lot about the gap between what politics says and what it sometimes does.

In May 2026, Baggy Khan — no relation to a similarly named Jungle Book character whatsoever — a newly elected Green Party councillor for Halliwell ward in Bolton, was posting on Instagram alongside a bright orange Lamborghini Huracán Spyder within days of winning his seat.

A car worth upwards of two hundred thousand pounds when new. A 5.2 litre V10 engine returning around fifteen miles to the gallon. Couldn’t be any more suited to an increasing number of 20mph speed limits, wouldn’t you say.

Anyway. His party’s defence was that it was a hired car at a family wedding, not his vehicle. Fair enough.

However, the Green Party of England and Wales, led by Zack Polanski, holds as a core policy position the removal of petrol and diesel cars from roads entirely, and had recently proposed cutting motorway speed limits to 55mph specifically for fuel efficiency. So. I think it’s fair to assume Lamborghini will likely not become a party donor. Then.

When challenged on social media, Khan’s reported response was: who said councillors cannot drive cars like this.

Indeed. Who said they cannot. You can see why people asked, though.

Wealth As Performance — And The Industrial Effort Behind Apparent Ease.

As unremarkable as this may be, to some. There comes a certain point where wealth stops being something we have and starts being something we perform. Admittedly, this can take a while.

We see it in the movies often enough. The entourage. The motorcade. The table at the restaurant that nobody else can get. Props on a stage.

And like any performance it needs a cast to support it. The personal assistants, the security detail, the people whose entire job is to make the whole thing look effortless.

The performance of apparent ease requires an industrial level of effort to sustain.

And it needs an audience. Without one the performance collapses.

It is the teenagers on the pavement, faces open with awe, that complete the scene. They aren’t bystanders. They are cast members. Their wonder is part of the production. The great pantomime of life. In which the prince’s coach arrives. Centre stage.

The Swiss Know Something We Don’t.

Which is why the Swiss observation has always stayed with me.

A number of years ago I got into a conversation with someone who lived in Switzerland. And he told me that the Swiss look down on any display of ostentation.

Wealth there signals through absence, not display.

Because what a Lamborghini outside a wedding, or a Bentley outside a Bristol cafe, is really broadcasting isn’t success. It is a need to be seen to have succeeded.

The Swiss simply refuse to be the audience. And without an audience, the performance is nothing.

The Four Pillars — Everything Else Is A Construct.

So strip it all back. What do we need?

Four things. Shelter. Heat. Light. Food.

That’s it. Everything beyond those four pillars is a construct. Something we’ve agreed to assign value to.

Status. Aspiration. The lifestyle that exists just above wherever we currently are, always receding as we move toward it.

And yet richness means something different to everyone.

To someone else it could be as simple as having their own garden. Or a window box where things grow that give them pleasure, help to sustain them, or both. Small. Particular. Entirely theirs.

Ikebana, Bonsai, And The Wealth Nobody Can See.

Or consider someone on the other side of the world finding their richness in Ikebana — the Japanese art of flower arrangement practised for six centuries, also known as Kadō, the Way of Flowers.

An arrangement made with care and intention, and gone within days. The impermanence isn’t the limitation. It is the teaching.

Or in Bonsai. A living tree cultivated with patience, pruned and tended over years, decades, lifetimes.

Some Bonsai alive today predate entire generations. The practitioner knows the tree will outlive them.

That isn’t a sadness. That is a form of richness most of us standing outside a showroom never even glimpse.

Not acquiring. Not displaying. Just tending something living. And finding, in that, the wealth we carry inside.

The First Aspiration — Just Having A Job.

And yet for a growing number of people in this country, the first aspiration on that ladder is simply having a job.

A real one. Stable. Something to build a life from. Because without that the ladder doesn’t begin. The construct never gets started.

And we spend our lives looking at other people’s constructs and feeling the absence of them. That is the politics of envy.

And it’s a remarkably efficient system. Keep us looking upward at what we don’t have.

Because dissatisfaction, as it happens, is very good for consumption. The system has no use for any of us deciding we already have enough.

How Many Cars Can We Drive At Once?

How much does any one of us need?

How many cars can we drive at once? How many properties can we live in simultaneously? How many planes can we fly at the same time?

At some point we are buying things for the sake of buying things. Or because the taxman will take it otherwise. Not because it brings any proportional increase in happiness, freedom, or peace of mind.

The Man In Bristol — Wealth Isn’t Always On Display.

Now, there’s a man I see regularly around Bristol city centre. Unkempt.

Walks around asking if anyone has any change, picking up half-finished drinks from cafe tables, asking for cigarettes.

And I say this without judgment. He is someone the world hasn’t been especially kind to.

However. I got this from someone who used to manage a betting office.

That same man would walk in with two thousand pounds and lay it on the horses. Just like that.

You see, wealth isn’t always something that’s on display.

The man we looked at with pity was probably carrying more money than most people around him. We would never have known.

And that raises an uncomfortable question about the politics of envy, doesn’t it.

Who exactly are we envying. We don’t identify it accurately, let alone see it.

How Much Is Enough — The Question Nobody Asks

And yet the one question none of us ever asks is the most obvious one of all.

How much is enough.

Not as a political question. Not as an economic one. Just as a human question.

How much does any one of us need before we can look around and say — yes. This is enough. I am good. I have what I need.

The silence where the answer should be is telling.

Money, Happiness, And The Most Expensive Mistake Any Of Us Ever Make.

You hear it said that money doesn’t make us happy. And there’s something in that.

However money doesn’t deliver happiness — what it delivers is the conditions in which contentment becomes possible.

We confuse the two. And that confusion — and I include my former self in this — is probably the most expensive mistake any of us ever make.

Because happiness and contentment aren’t the same thing.

Happiness depends on what’s happening around us. Contentment comes from within.

I have clothes to wear. Food to eat. The bills paid. The basics.

And within that I am content. Spiritually. Psychologically. Settled.

Would I say I am happy? When I look at what’s going on in the world around us, probably not.

However content? Yes. Without question.

I Walked Away From It — And Then I Was Homeless.

Now I should tell you that I’m not watching all of this from a comfortable distance.

There was a time, not that long ago, when I had serious money. The kind of excess that would make most people’s eyes water.

It’s in my book if you want the details. We are talking a serious number of noughts after the figure.

I walked away from it.

And then I was homeless. Living on the streets. Nothing.

You see. When you are homeless you have no bills. No overheads. No outgoing expenses beyond sustaining yourself.

I had less money than ever and yet more than I needed, because need had been stripped back to its bare minimum.

And you know what. It was wonderful.

Not surviving. Not enduring. Wonderful. Because the weight of it was simply gone.

The Richness That Nobody Can Take.

Now, some years later, I have the bills and the overheads again. I live just above hand to mouth.

I can pay the bills, put food on the table, move through the world on my own terms.

I buy scratch cards, just for a bit of fun. It is like life — some days you win, some days you lose. I have no great expectations.

And I am fairly confident the only time I will ever win the jackpot is on my deathbed, at which point, you will appreciate, it will be somewhat academic.

However. What I have carried out of all of it is this.

The richness of wisdom. The richness of intellect. A richness within myself as a human being.

And if I’m being honest with you at two thirty on a Thursday morning in late May, it’s the only kind that was ever worth having.

Left Luggage — To Be Collected By Someone Else.

Because when the time comes, wealth isn’t luggage you can take with you. It is left behind. In the left luggage area. To be collected by someone else. At a later date.

The main beneficiary, usually being the taxman.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent Bristol mayoral candidate 2016 and 2021, and one of the city’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Publishing since 2020, with around 700 pieces across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.

© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved.

[Two documents. Thirty-four years apart. One unanswered question.]

I was actually thinking this morning. You know, like it’s a surprise, and, maybe, I need to lay down out of the sun for a while, before anyone says it. To be factually correct — this was not the new story it has been made out to be. You see.

It was back in November 2025. Dame Helen Mirren — eighty years old, walking with her husband near Tower Hill in East London — was approached by a man who filmed himself screaming abuse in her face, invoking the language of injustice and racism. Her husband told him where to go. Mirren, with considerably more dignity than the situation deserved, remained calm. The clip resurfaced and went viral in May 2026, watched by millions.

He didn’t just confront her. He filmed it. He published it. Antisemitism and racism are distinct things with distinct histories — but the language of both was deployed here casually, interchangeably, as a tool of public performance. Perhaps the brain stem, when it takes over completely, always needs a witness.

The Same Word. Two Completely Different Weapons.

The same week that clip went viral, in Southampton, the same word had a different and far darker application.

On December 3 2025, eighteen year old Henry Nowak — a university student out with friends from his football team — was stabbed five times by Vickrum Digwa using a Sikh kirpan ceremonial blade, including a fatal wound to the heart. As police arrived, Digwa told them a lie. He alleged Nowak had racially abused him and knocked his turban.

Officers heard Nowak say he had been stabbed. His last recorded words were “I can’t breathe.” They handcuffed him anyway, based on Digwa’s allegation. First aid was attempted only after he collapsed. He died.

On May 28 2026, a jury found Digwa guilty of murder. The racism allegation was rejected entirely. Hampshire Police apologised. The Independent Office for Police Conduct opened an investigation — its findings, at the time of writing, not yet published.

What the court record establishes is this: an unverified racism allegation shaped police conduct at the scene. What caused that — training, individual judgment, institutional culture, or the broader framework within which officers operate — is precisely what the IOPC is examining.

Two incidents. Same week. Same word — deployed as a weapon by a killer to misdirect police, and as a label by someone who believes he is fighting injustice.

Neither outcome was intended. Both raise questions that deserve honest examination. And those questions trace back, quietly, to the language of a government report published on a grey February morning in 1999.

When A Word Meant Something Precise.

None of what follows is an argument that racism doesn’t exist or that it doesn’t cause serious harm. It does, on both counts, and it always has. What follows is an argument about what happens when a word that once described that harm precisely gets stretched until it can mean almost anything — because when a word means anything, it ends up protecting nothing.

The word racism first appeared in print in 1902 — coined, with some irony, by American army officer Richard Henry Pratt in a speech opposing the segregation of Native Americans. It entered common usage in the 1930s primarily to describe Nazi racial ideology. Precise. Bounded. Describing something specific, identifiable, and monstrous.

In Britain, the preferred terms were racialism and race prejudice well into the twentieth century. The Race Relations Act 1965 — the first legislation of its kind in the UK — sought to address discrimination in public places. When racism did take hold here as a word, it described something nobody needed to have explained. It described what happened to Stephen Lawrence on a street in Eltham on April 22 1993 — an eighteen year old stabbed to death by a gang of white youths while waiting for a bus.

Nobody needed a definition. Everyone knew what it meant. A word that means one precise thing is a word that works in court, in policy, in the search for accountability.

Then came the pivot.

February 24 1999. The Day The Definition Changed.

On February 24 1999, Sir William Macpherson published his inquiry into the Metropolitan Police’s catastrophically mishandled investigation into Lawrence’s murder. The report was necessary. The failure it documented was real, serious, and institutional.

But the report did something else. Something with consequences nobody fully anticipated.

It recommended that racist incidents should henceforth be defined as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.”

Read that again. Any incident. Perceived. By any person.

Evidence of racist motivation — not required. Intent — irrelevant. The perception of the victim, or of anyone standing nearby, was now sufficient for an incident to be recorded, investigated, and counted as racist.

Macpherson himself noted he didn’t want to produce “a definition cast in stone.” But that is precisely what happened. The perception-based definition — now known as the Macpherson principle — was adopted wholesale across policing, local government, education, and public institutions — and while subsequent reviews, including the Home Affairs Committee’s assessment in 2021, have refined its application, the perception-based recording standard remains the operational foundation to this day.

In doing so, it quietly removed something essential from the word. It removed the requirement for the thing to actually be what the word said it was.

That is not a small thing. That is the thing.

Three Layers. Only One Ever Gets Examined.

The intentions behind that definition were legitimate. More victims coming forward. More incidents reported. More accountability for institutions that had set the evidential bar deliberately high to avoid having to act. Some of those consequences were achieved. Reporting increased. Confidence improved in some communities. That matters and deserves acknowledgement.

What followed was not intended. Unintended consequences don’t require bad intentions. They require only the absence of one question — the question nobody asked before the ink dried: what will this actually produce?

And then there is the third layer. The one still doing damage in 2026. Not the intended consequences. Not the unintended ones. The unanswered ones. The gap between what was meant to happen and what actually did has never been formally examined. Never honestly acknowledged. Never addressed.

Twenty-five years on, the question mark opened in February 1999 remains open. Not because nobody noticed. But because answering it honestly would require admitting something almost nobody in public life is prepared to admit — that a decision made in genuine good faith, in response to genuine injustice, produced consequences that are themselves unjust.

That gap keeps generating the same outcomes, year after year, while everyone argues about everything except the space between what we meant to do and what we actually did. It has been papered over. With more words. More frameworks. More institutional performance.

More confetti.

The Numbers Don’t Add Up. And That’s The Story.

Between 2012 and 2025, police recorded hate crime rose by over 260%. On the surface — a society getting measurably worse.

Except the Crime Survey for England and Wales — which measures what people actually experience rather than what gets recorded — shows a decline of over 20% across the same period.

These two measures capture different things, for documented methodological reasons. But the divergence itself is worth examining honestly. The Home Office states directly that police recorded figures “do not provide reliable trends in hate crime since 2014” due to changes in recording practices, and that these figures “should not be seen as a good measure of prevalence.”

The recorded numbers went up dramatically. The actual experience went down. The gap between those two facts is not an administrative footnote. It is the story.

The College of Policing guidance, which governs how officers record incidents, states explicitly that evidence of hostility is not required for an incident to be logged as a hate crime. The recording framework, built on perception rather than evidence, was capturing the word’s expanding reach — not the underlying reality.

Every extension of the definition produced more recorded incidents, not because more hatred was occurring, but because more things were being called by the same name.

Is that practical? No. Is it logical? No. What is the likely outcome? You’re reading about it.

From Macpherson To Microaggressions. The Expanding Universe.

From 1999 onwards the definition kept expanding. Institutional racism. Structural racism. Systemic racism. Unconscious bias. Microaggressions. Each framework extended the word’s reach further — from deliberate acts of hatred, to organisational failures, to policies producing unequal outcomes, to attitudes people held without knowing they held them, to things said without meaning harm.

By 2020, the word was being applied simultaneously to the murder of George Floyd, a clumsy workplace comment, a statistical gap in university admissions, a vote for Brexit, and a failure to use approved terminology. All under the same word. All carrying — in the framework being applied — equivalent moral weight.

Thrown around, in other words, like confetti at a wedding. Colourful. Celebratory. Nobody thinking about where it lands. Nobody responsible for the mess. And once it’s in the air, there’s no getting it back.

Nobody asked whether this was practical. Nobody asked whether it was logical. Nobody paused to ask what the likely outcome would be when a word meaning everything simultaneously meant nothing.

Emotional Incontinence. The Viral Disease No One Named.

What Macpherson won’t have anticipated was the transmission mechanism that arrived a decade later.

Social media turned perception-based emotional response into an instantly shareable, algorithmically amplified global currency. That is emotional incontinence — the discharge of unprocessed feeling into public space, at scale, without pause, without friction, without consequence for accuracy.

But the same mechanism did something else simultaneously. It transmitted genuine evidence of genuine harm that would previously have gone unrecorded. The filming of George Floyd’s murder reached every screen on earth within hours.

Causation and cure. The same transmission route. Running simultaneously. With nothing capable of separating one from the other, and still nothing to close the gap between them. Quite telling, to some. No doubt.

The space between impulse and consequence had quietly closed. Somewhere between 2010 and 2015 it disappeared entirely. The result was policy made at the speed of outrage rather than the speed of thought.

Outrage without pause, without friction, without the question what will this actually produce — does not reduce harm. It compounds it. Incrementally. Invisibly. Until the increment becomes a riot. Until the increment becomes an ambulance on fire. Until the increment becomes a man with a phone screaming at an eighty year old woman on a London street, certain — in his bones — that somehow, and in his view, he was on the right side of history.

Two Populations. One Broken Word.

Here is what the loss of precision does — to two populations simultaneously, from opposite directions.

People who experience genuine racial hatred find that the word which should describe their experience has been so devalued that significant numbers of people have developed an allergic reaction to it. The boy crying wolf didn’t just lose his own credibility. He made it harder for anyone in the village to be believed.

And people labelled racist for holding views that have nothing to do with racial hatred — concerns about immigration, questions about policy, votes someone disapproves of — don’t change their minds when the label lands. They harden. The label doesn’t produce reflection. It produces resentment. Suppressed, unaddressed, accumulating resentment that migrates to places with no moderation and no counter-argument, where it ferments into something its original form would never have recognised.

You see.

A legitimate concern enters.

Something considerably uglier exits.

The man screaming at Helen Mirren did not begin his political life wanting to abuse elderly women on streets. Something walked him there. Step by step. A legitimate concern, walked by algorithm and grievance and the moral permission of inflated language to a destination he won’t now find his way back from.

The word gave him the licence. The gap gave him the journey. The moment gave him the opportunity.

The Condition Nobody Wants To Name.

Think about what happens when you repeatedly try to change something and nothing changes. When you report and nothing happens. When you raise concerns and get labelled rather than heard. When you vote and get called names.

At some point — and this is not weakness, it is the rational response of someone who has learned from experience — you stop trying. Not because the capacity isn’t there. Because experience has taught you that trying makes no difference.

Psychologist Martin Seligman identified this as learned helplessness — the condition produced when repeated experience teaches us that our actions make no difference to the outcome. Post-1999 Britain produced it on multiple fronts simultaneously.

Communities who reported genuine racial violence and found the system unresponsive — who learned that reporting produced paperwork rather than protection.

And communities who raised legitimate concerns, found them labelled rather than addressed — who learned that engagement produced punishment rather than dialogue.

Both populations. Opposite ends. The same conditioned withdrawal from the genuine conversation that might, if it were ever allowed to happen, produce something useful. The gap in the middle lived on. Unnoticed. Perhaps, abandoned. The way things can become abandoned, when there is no use for.

That withdrawal didn’t produce peace. Look around. The summer 2024 riots. Ambulances set alight in North London. A man near Tower Hill, phone in hand. Causes are rarely singular. Timing is rarely coincidental. Draw your own conclusions.

Who Actually Benefits From A Word That Means Anything?

Consider who actually benefits from a word that can mean anything.

Not the woman in North London whose front door gets daubed. Not the family waiting for justice that a precise, evidenced, legally actionable definition might one day deliver. Vagueness doesn’t protect them. It protects the people arguing about definitions in seminar rooms and conference centres, engaged in verbal daubing, while the daubing continues elsewhere outside.

Not the man whose concerns about his street, his children’s school, his neighbourhood get labelled without examination. He doesn’t become less concerned when the label lands. He becomes less willing to say so in polite company. The concern doesn’t disappear. It finds somewhere else to go.

The people the elastic definition serves are those whose careers, funding, and institutional standing depend on the conversation continuing without resolution. Not through conspiracy — most of them began from genuine concern and most still feel it. But an industry built around managing a problem won’t, by its nature, afford to solve it. The diversity training budget requires next year’s diversity problem. The research grant requires next year’s research question. The campaign requires next year’s campaign.

The word stopped being a tool. It became a sector. And sectors, unlike tools, are not measured by whether they fix anything.

The Mirror. Look Into It If You Dare.

Racism exists. It causes serious, measurable harm to real people’s lives — in employment, in housing, in the criminal justice system, on the streets. That is not in dispute and it is not what is being argued here.

What is being argued is that a word deployed without precision — stretched from describing the murder of Stephen Lawrence to describing an unconscious attitude to describing a statistical gap to describing a vote — has made it harder, not easier, to address the genuine article.

The man near Tower Hill is not fighting racism. He is demonstrating what happens when a generation is handed a word without its definition, pointed at a target without being taught to aim, and told that the intensity of their feeling is evidence enough of the justice of their cause.

The communities in North London whose ambulances burn are not the enemy of anti-racism. They are among its casualties.

Stephen Lawrence deserved better than a word stretched so far it lost the shape of what happened to him.

There is one small observation worth sitting with before the end. The word race and the word care share the same four letters. Different arrangement. Completely different destination. Somewhere in the distance between those two words — between what this conversation was always supposed to be about and what it became — a great deal has been lost.

When you use the word — or hear it used — do you know precisely what it means? Could you define it so that everyone in the room recognises the same thing? Could you draw the line between what it covers and what it doesn’t — and hold that line, under pressure, without moving it?

If the answer is no — and for most people, honestly, it is — then the word is no longer doing the work it was meant to do.

That is not someone else’s problem.

It belongs to all of us. Equally. Without exception.

The race didn’t start yesterday. It hasn’t even reached the starting blocks.

The bottom isn’t somewhere we’re heading.

Look around. We’re already here.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

Sources.

Macpherson Report (HMSO, February 24 1999) | Home Office Hate Crime Statistics England and Wales 2023/24 | Crime Survey for England and Wales | Institute of Race Relations — Racial Violence and Hate Crime | College of Policing Hate Crime Guidance (2014) | Oxford English Dictionary — etymology of racism | Murder of Henry Nowak — Wikipedia | ITV News — Digwa guilty verdict | Home Affairs Committee — Macpherson Report: Twenty-Two Years On (2021) | Murder of Stephen Lawrence — Wikipedia | 2024 UK riots — Wikipedia | Seligman M.E.P. — Learned Helplessness (1972)

© The Almighty Gob 2026. All rights reserved.

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent candidate in Bristol’s mayoral elections of 2016 and 2021, and one of the city’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Publishing since 2020 across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — with no party allegiance, no press accreditation, and no interest in acquiring either.

["It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it." — John Steinbeck]

Well. Here I am again. Pavement table, cup of hot chocolate, observing the world go by. Same as yesterday. Same as the day before. This is how I collect my thoughts before I write — sitting outside, letting the cast of the world pass in front of me, on the public stage of life. Taking it in at whatever pace it chooses to arrive.

So. Please. Take a seat, and join me. It’s good to have your company.

Hey. Have you ever noticed this. You know. Like ‘really’ noticed ‘this’ — and what happens in between?

The cup comes up. Goes back down. The glass comes up. Goes back down.

And. It’s in those in-between moments, the cast of the world passes by. On the street. In the pub. The supermarket. You know. On the stage of everyday life.

A man arguing into his phone about something that won’t matter in a fortnight. A woman navigating a buggy through the gap between a parked car and the rest of the universe. Two teenagers who are technically in the same place but spiritually on different planets, thumbs moving, eyes nowhere present. A bus running late, as buses do, as buses always have, as buses will continue to do long after everyone currently outraged about it is gone.

From the corner of the eye. A headline on someone’s screen. Unable to quite read it. No need to.

The cup goes back down.

None of it mine to take forward. Further into the day.

That’s not indifference. That’s not switching off. That’s not some wellness trend dressed up in ancient clothing. That is a practice. A real one. And it took a long time to get here.

Whatever’s in the hands right now — there’s something in that rhythm that most of us already carry without having been taught it. The simple act of lifting something, taking what’s needed from the moment, and setting it back down again. Unhurried. Unattached to whatever just passed.

That ‘just passed’ ‘in between moment.’

That moment of contact. The warmth. The brief pause between lifting and setting down. That’s where the present moment actually lives — not in the lifting, not in the putting down, but in that small, unhurried, unrepeatable instant of just being with what’s in the cup. Too ordinary to notice. Too quiet to name. The mind already three thoughts ahead or two worries behind while something ancient and simple is happening right there in the hands. Subconsciously. In the moment.

That gap — that fraction of a second between the cup coming up and the cup going back down — that’s the whole philosophy. A moment arising. A moment passing. The warmth already different from the warmth a second ago. Nothing the same twice. Nothing permanent. Nothing that needs to be carried anywhere.

Everything that follows, mind — two and a half thousand years of it, two separate civilisations working it out independently, ancient India and ancient Greece arriving at the same destination without ever comparing notes — all of it lives inside that one unremarkable moment.

That’s it. That’s the whole journey. Passed by. Without even registering.

Here’s an idea. Let’s make the journey. Together.

There’s a valley in southwest Scotland, near a village called Eskdalemuir, where the River Esk runs quietly through high moorland and the rest of the world feels a long way off.

Somewhere in that valley — and I say somewhere because it still feels slightly improbable that it exists there at all — sits Kagyu Samye Ling. A Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Founded in 1967 by two remarkable men, Akong Tulku Rinpoche and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The first Tibetan Buddhist centre ever established in the Western world. In rural Scotland. On a former hunting estate. Which tells something about where wisdom tends to show up — rarely where it’s expected, almost never where it’s looked for first.

That’s where this was first encountered. Not in a book. Not in a philosophy lecture. In a place. A community. A particular quality of stillness that had no framework at the time — and has had the years since to slowly build one. The grounds there are patient things. Carefully tended. Nothing hurried. A bonsai in the making, in more ways than one.

One of Samye Ling’s own guiding principles — written on the wall, lived in the practice — is this: Meditation means simple acceptance.

Four words. Takes a lifetime.

And. Before your brain takes a jump in a different direction. This is not a piece on Buddhist meditation.

Samye Ling is where the seeds of three things were first sown. For me. Stillness, silence, and solitude. The three S’s, as they’ve come to be known in this corner of the world. Not dramatic things. Not headline things. The quietest things there are, which is precisely why they’re the hardest to find and the easiest to lose.

And just like the bonsai — they took years to grow.

You see. A bonsai isn’t rushed. That’s the whole point of one. The patience is the practice. It can’t be forced into shape. It gets tended. Returned to. Left alone to do what it does. And one day, years later, there it is — not because it was pushed, but because it wasn’t.

That’s how the three S’s, as I call them, settled. Not in a moment. Not in a revelation. Quietly, incrementally, over more years than anticipated, somewhere between a Scottish valley and a Bristol pavement table. Not forgetting, of course. The hot chocolate.

Now. Here’s a word you’ll probably not hear in everyday conversation.

Anicca.

A Pali word — the language of the earliest Buddhist texts — and it means impermanence. Which sounds simple until it’s actually sat with. Because it doesn’t just mean things change. It means everything that arises will cease. Every single thing. The thought passing through right now. The outrage served up before breakfast. The war on the news. The late bus. The hot chocolate cooling on the table (except mine. Of course).

All of it arising. All of it passing. None of it fixed. None of it permanent. None of it — and this is the bit that takes some digesting — actually anyone to take ownership of.

Gautama Buddha identified anicca as the first mark of existence. Around the fifth century BCE. What is now India and Nepal. A man sitting under a tree, watching the world do what the world does, working out that the river stepped in yesterday isn’t the river stepped in today — and that the person who stepped in it isn’t quite the same person either. Remembering. This was way before the days of Southern Water. And, for entirely different reasons. I hope.

Everything in flux. What’s that? Great question, and naff all to do with soldering. Flux, in this sense, means constant change — a continuous flowing state where nothing stays fixed, nothing holds its shape, nothing remains what it was a moment ago. The only constant is the flux itself.

Now. Here’s what people perhaps don’t understand about this. They hear impermanence and they think it’s depressing. A counsel of despair. What’s the point if nothing lasts?

That is precisely sdrawkcab. Okay then. Backwards.

You see. Nothing is permanent. Including the thing currently making life miserable at half past eight on a Tuesday morning. Including the anxiety that moved in somewhere around the third news story and hasn’t uninstalled since. Including the outrage, the dread, the low-level hum of everything being too much all at once. Yes. Including the hot chocolate getting colder still! (again. not mine. of course).

It’s all simply passing through. Not anyone’s to keep even if they wanted to. Not even the hot chocolate.

Now. Once that’s actually felt rather than just read, it turns out to be one of the most liberating ideas in human history. The Samye Ling community knew this in 1967. Gautama Buddha knew it twenty-five centuries before that. It just takes most of us somewhat longer to catch up.

Meanwhile. Five centuries or so after Gautama Buddha worked this out under his tree, a Roman Emperor was scribbling private notes he never intended anyone to read.

Marcus Aurelius. Emperor of Rome, 161 to 180 CE. The most powerful man on earth by any available measure. Running an empire, fighting wars on multiple fronts, managing the Senate, the army, the whole magnificent grinding machinery of Roman power.

And every morning, quietly, writing notes to himself.

We call them the Meditations now. At the time they had no title. No audience. Just a man talking to himself, trying to stay still inside the noise. Reminding himself of things he already knew but kept forgetting under pressure. The way it goes.

“Never let the future disturb you,” he wrote. “You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”

Different valley. Different cup. Same practice.

Around the same period — give or take a generation — a philosopher named Epictetus was teaching what he called the dichotomy of control. Worth knowing that Epictetus was born a slave. Which lends his philosophy a rather different weight than most. This isn’t a man theorising about hardship from a comfortable distance. This is a man who started with nothing — not even his own body, legally — working out how to be free anyway.

His principle fits on the back of a receipt. Pretty much my life captured, to be honest. Still. Moving on.

Some things are within our power. Some things are not. Opinions, responses, choices — there. The weather, the news cycle, the bus schedule, the war, what other people think — not there. The first category is where life actually happens. The second is where most of the suffering does.

That’s the entire philosophy. Everything else is elaboration.

Epictetus also used a theatre metaphor. An actor in a play, the Playwright choosing the manner of it. The role given is the role performed — and performed well. The casting isn’t the actor’s call. This is the Enchiridion, Chapter 17 — written nearly two thousand years ago, describing an ordinary morning in 2026 with uncomfortable accuracy. Who’d have thought.

However — here’s the part that doesn’t appear on motivational Instagram accounts — Epictetus also said this. Walking into the theatre as a spectator, the question worth sitting with is what the visit is actually for. Not to control who wins. Not to shout for a preferred outcome. To maintain one’s own purpose. And if the performance is costing more than it’s giving — if the hurt is happening so someone else can take home a prize — something is being given away that was never theirs to take.

The door exists. Even the toilet lights are lit.

Nobody is nailing anyone to the seat.

So. Here we are. Three traditions. One destination.

Here’s what the history of philosophy tends to obscure by keeping everything in separate chapters with separate reading lists.

Buddhism came out of ancient India, fifth century BCE. Stoicism came out of ancient Greece, third century BCE. Different languages. Different cultures. Different ends of the known world. No shared texts, no cross-referencing, no collaborative workshop. Just two separate civilisations, independently, staring at the same question.

How does a person live in a world they cannot control without being destroyed by it?

And arriving — separately, without comparing notes — at versions of the same answer.

Then, in twentieth century America, in church halls and community centres, Alcoholics Anonymous adopted a prayer — originally written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. People at the hardest points of their lives, speaking it aloud together. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Epictetus. Word for word. Two thousand years later. Different room. Same receipt.

And the Poles? They just said it better than anyone. Who doesn’t speak that language. Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy.

Not my circus. Not my monkeys.

Whereas. Buddhism works inward first. The self is where it starts. Impermanence is the lens. The practice is about loosening the grip of attachment, moment by moment. Suffering doesn’t come from the event. It comes from the relationship to the event. The craving. The aversion. The insistence that reality be different from what it demonstrably is.

Conversely. Stoicism works outward first. The territory gets mapped. What’s ours to affect, what isn’t. Reason applied. The present moment is where responsibility lives — not because the past and future don’t exist, but because here is where choices actually happen.

Different tools. Same destination.

Neither of them is passive. This is where both traditions get defanged — Buddhism flattened into incense and vague niceness, Stoicism kidnapped by productivity influencers who’ve read three quotes and bought a leather journal. Both reduced to aesthetics. Both stripped of the one thing that makes them actually work.

Which is that they’re demanding. Quietly, consistently, non-negotiably demanding. Because they require a person to hold their position while everything around them is professionally, expensively, algorithmically built to move them off it.

Okay. So. To what could be called the engine that drives it.

And. Let’s be open about what we’re up against here.

The world most of us wake up into every morning is not accidentally hostile to present moment awareness. It is deliberately hostile to it. This is the well-rehearsed, audience sampled, business model. And. Here’s the ‘because’ of it.

Anxiety is not a side effect of the attention economy. It is the product. The notification that arrives at the wrong moment. The outrage cycle that requires fury about something three time zones away that cannot be affected in any direction. The algorithm that has learned — with considerably more precision than any philosopher ever managed — exactly which emotional frequency keeps the scrolling going past the point where stopping was decided. The news channel running the same crisis on a loop because the loop keeps people watching. Possibly. Well. Loopy. I guess.

And the relief being sold? More of the same. Another app. Another managed intervention delivered through the identical screen that created the problem.

John Steinbeck named the deeper pattern long before any of this existed. “It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.” He was writing about poverty cycles in Depression-era America. However, he was also writing about the job stayed in too long. The relationship that ran out of road years before the leaving happened. The identity built in a different decade that no longer fits. The news cycle returned to. The conversation that stopped being useful an hour ago.

The delivery system changes. The pattern doesn’t.

The Stoics and the Buddhists weren’t dealing with smartphones. However, they were dealing with the identical underlying mechanism — the mind that cannot stay where it is. The mind that drags itself into the past to rehearse its grievances, and rehearse them again, and possibly again. And into the future to rehearse its fears. In doing so completely missing the only moment that actually exists.

You see. We don't actually relive past experiences. We just get out the recording device used at that time, and re-run them. Like a movie. The delete button being just one press away, and not often used. Rewind/play, on a loop. The self-infliction, somehow feeling more beneficial. Even though it isn't. The abra-cadabra button being handier, instead. The one that returns us to......

The Now.

The bus is late. Fact. Present tense. The war is happening. Also fact. Also present tense. However, the nervous system’s decision to carry them both at the same weight, to process them both at the same urgency, to let them share the same headspace as the other clutter — that is not a fact. That is a habit. And habits, unlike bus schedules, are within our power.

And. The only power of jurisdiction, is the one that matters most of all. I suggest.

The only person any of us ever really has to answer to is ourselves. Not as a permission slip for doing whatever we like. Not as a licence to ignore the world and everyone in it. As the opposite, actually. Because the internal verdict is the only one that sticks.

External validation is a moving target. Other people’s opinions are weather. The crowd that approves today will find something else by tomorrow, and the one that disapproves will move on to a fresher outrage before the week is out. None of it holds. None of it is the verdict that counts.

There’s always a knowing. That’s the thing nobody says out loud but everyone understands. A knowing about whether the day was met honestly. Whether what was carried was worth carrying and what wasn’t was put down. Whether a sip of the world was taken, considered, the cup placed back on the table — or whether the whole thing got grabbed and poured over and the afternoon was spent wondering why everything was soaked.

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations entirely for himself. No publication. No audience. No performance. The most powerful man on earth, writing private notes to stay decent, to stay present, to not be moved by flattery or provocation or the daily noise of running everything. Just a man and his own standard.

The Samye Ling community puts it this way: Freedom is not something you look for outside of yourself. Freedom is within you.

That is the practice. That has always been the practice.

So. What does this look like.

Well. I guess. To me, at least. It looks like a pavement table. A cup of hot chocolate. The world going past in all its ordinary, extraordinary chaos — the arguments, the headlines, the people who are physically present and mentally elsewhere, the bus arriving when it arrives. To you. Something different. If at all.

The observing happens. The sip happens. The cup goes back down.

The man arguing into his phone — his argument, not this one. The headline — someone’s emergency, not necessarily this one. The performance in front is vivid and loud and entirely real. The stage is there. Nobody’s selling a ticket that says it has to be occupied.

The only person any of us ever really has to answer to is ourselves.

This is anicca as a daily practice — The Almighty Gob’s view, for what it’s worth. This is the dichotomy of control with both hands wrapped around something warm. This is what Gautama Buddha understood under his tree in the fifth century BCE, what Epictetus understood in chains in the first century CE, what Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself by lamplight in the second century CE, and what a community in a Scottish valley has been quietly teaching since 1967.

There’s something quite special about sitting outside a cafe on an ordinary Thursday — or any day, really — observing how busy the world is. The chaos of it. The noise of it. All that motion and urgency passing by.

Observing the world doing its own thing. Whatever that may be. Things which are not mine to be responsible for, and of which I have assumed no ownership.

And just sitting here among it. Still. Not above it, not removed from it, not having solved anything. Just present. Comfortable with not carrying what isn’t mine to carry.

Because here’s what the bonsai eventually teaches, what the valley eventually whispers, what two and a half thousand years of completely separate traditions eventually agree on — if there is peace with yourself, there is peace with everything that goes on around you. Regardless of what it is. The war and the late bus. The headline and the argument. The chaos and the noise. All of it.

Not despite the busyness. Among it.

Some days that’s easier than others. Most days it’s a practice, not a given.

Mind. The cup is warm, the world is doing what the world does, and that’s enough.

As it’s when the cup empties, I begin to write. Now. How about that cup of Anicca?

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent Bristol mayoral candidate 2016 and 2021, and one of the city’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Publishing since 2020, with over 700 pieces across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.

© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this article in whole or in part is prohibited without prior written permission. Excerpts of no more than 50 words may be quoted with full attribution and a link to the original publication.

[Who Moves. Who Stays. Who Gets Left Behind. thealmightygob.com]

As of this morning, at 8:02am, on 27 May 2026, one voice was more prominent than the noise that surrounded it.

@LJRyder16 posted this on X:

“I’ve said a version of this for 2 decades- I think E/SBLN are part of delivering this agenda. Pointed out ‘lowerarchy’ to McCarthy MP-reply? Im listening to ‘Conspiracy theories/its just resource management.’ Get this in mainstream media please.”

@LJRyder16’s post came directly in response to The Almighty Gob’s article published earlier — Maslow Is SO Yesterday, Dahling. This Is Bristol’s Lowerarchy: The Investment Hotspot That Forgot Who Lives Here — in which the term lowerarchy was coined and the Bristol housing crisis was set against the city’s property investment credentials. That article is available here https://bit.ly/3PFDQ9g

So. Two decades of observation. One coined term from The Almighty Gob’s Bristol Lowerarchy piece. One sitting MP. Two responses. Result?

Conspiracy theories.

Resource management.

This article is the response to both.

The lowerarchy isn’t a theory.

It is a coined term for a documented reality — evidenced by parliamentary submissions, a Regulator finding serious failings, a council website advising applicants to think about other options, and a waiting list of 18,000 households.

The term didn’t create the reality. The reality created the need for the term.

@LJRyder16 is that voice.

Someone who has been saying a version of this for two decades. Someone who took a coined term from an independent Bristol publication and raised it with a sitting MP before most of Bristol had finished its breakfast.

Not because she had the loudest platform. Because she had the clearest sight.

History has never been moved by the size of the crowd. It has always been moved by the one voice more prominent than the noise that surrounded it.

I’m Not A Chess Player. However.

I do have some understanding. Mind you. I can just about master an article for The Almighty Gob — and that’s still a work in progress. Ah well. I guess there’s still some hope for me after all.

However. The pawns are the most exposed and the first to be sacrificed on the board.

In Bristol’s particular version of the game — the one being played right now, today, in plain sight on the Harbourside and in the housing offices and in the temporary accommodation spreadsheets that haven’t been published — the people of Knowle West, Lockleaze, Withywood, and every other neighbourhood the investment brochure doesn’t photograph, aren’t the pawns.

They are the board itself.

The surface everyone else plays on. The foundation that makes the game possible.

The city that existed before the investment thesis arrived, that will exist long after it moves on, and that is currently being used as a playing surface by pieces that were never elected to represent it, never asked permission to use it, and have no intention of leaving it in better condition than they found it.

It’s a game of Bristol affordable housing versus Bristol unaffordable housing.

And the board has never been fully engaged with the rules. If at all.

Funny, that.

The Pieces. And What They Choose Not To Do.

Stand at the edge of the Harbourside on any given morning.

Watch the cranes moving over Temple Meads. Watch the glass going up where the ordinary is being replaced. Admire this as an example of transparency in Bristol. Watch the city being rearranged, piece by piece, with the unhurried certainty of a game that started long before most of its residents noticed the board had changed.

Then notice, with equal care, what each piece chooses not to move toward.

The king moves slowly. One square at a time.

Bristol City Council is the king.

Managing 26,700 tenanted homes with an £8 million annual shortfall, a botched IT system producing repair figures nobody trusts, and a Decent Homes Standard with no confirmed implementation date.

Technically the most important piece on the board. Practically the most defended while contributing the least forward motion.

The king doesn’t build homes. The king issues asset management strategies. The king removes 4,000 names from a waiting list and files it under progress. The king moves one square. Calls it a consultation. Moves one square back.

Is that practical? For the people on the waiting list, demonstrably not. Is it logical? Only if the goal is the management of lists rather than the provision of homes. What is the likely outcome? The mathematics don’t close. They widen.

The king also approves.

Over 2,800 purpose-built student accommodation beds are currently in the Bristol development pipeline for 2026/27 alone.

530 at Albert Road. 500 at Temple Quarter. 282 in Redcliffe. 1,500-plus at the Propeller Quarter in Brabazon.

Each bed occupied for approximately thirty weeks of the academic year.

Each bed sitting empty for the remaining twenty-two.

The Almighty Gob has written about this before. The arithmetic hasn’t changed.

18,000 households on the waiting list would be grateful for any one of those beds for fifty-two weeks a year.

The king approved the rooftop boardroom instead. Meanwhile.

Somewhere on the waiting list, a family is still counting the days. Hours. Possibly, even minutes. Hope, now being so removed from their world. You know. Where ‘pointless’ becomes a lifestyle by default.

The queen goes where she chooses. Any direction. Any distance. Unconstrained by the squares the board’s residents occupy.

The developers — Kinrise, Mactaggart Family & Partners, and every regeneration vehicle behind every waterfront masterplan in the city — are the queens. You know. Not casting aspersions. In the more literal sense.

The most powerful pieces in the game. They don’t wait. They don’t get removed from the register after two years of inactivity. Who’d have thought. Not me. Clearly.

They get planning permission, a podcast studio, and a rooftop boardroom with panoramic views across the city they’re playing on. The budget stopped at disco lights, and a sound system that would make Glastonbury sickened with envy.

The knight moves in L-shapes. Never straight. Never direct. Always arriving at an unexpected angle that avoids the most obvious squares entirely. Not by accident. By geometry.

Kerry McCarthy MP has represented Bristol East for over twenty years. And, it’s still in one ‘L’ of a state. Some might say.

On the morning of 27 May 2026, @LJRyder16 raised the lowerarchy concept with her. McCarthy’s response, as reported by @LJRyder16: conspiracy theories and resource management.

The knight moved over the board’s actual residents without engaging a single one of them.

The characterisation of McCarthy’s response is @LJRyder16’s own, published publicly on X on 27 May 2026.

This is not a personal attack on Kerry McCarthy. It is an observation about the geometry of institutional response. The knight doesn’t choose its movement pattern. The game does.

Kerry McCarthy is welcome to clarify her position at any time. The Almighty Gob will publish any such clarification in full.

@LJRyder16 went further. She suggested that the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood and South Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood schemes are part of delivering the same agenda.

The Almighty Gob has written extensively on both.

McCarthy’s response to that observation was the same two words.

Conspiracy theories. Resource management.

Is that practical? For the people of Knowle West — the board itself — it is the least practical response available. Is it logical? Only if the goal is the avoidance of the question rather than the answering of it. What is the likely outcome? The knight’s geometry doesn’t change the arithmetic. It never has.

The bishops move diagonally. Always on the same colour square.

The investment prospectus, the regeneration brochure, the Business Live headline celebrating Bristol as the top property investment destination in the South West — these are the bishops.

They cover enormous ground while remaining permanently on the squares where the yield figures live. They never land on Knowle West. They never land on Lockleaze. They never land on Withywood. As to why? Well.

The bishops of Bristol property investment are geometrically incapable of reaching the squares where the board’s actual residents are standing. The geometry isn’t an accident. It’s a feature.

The rooks move in straight lines. Powerful when deployed.

The Regulator of Social Housing found serious failings in how Bristol City Council manages its homes.

The rook moved. Once. Issued its finding. Stopped. Bristol? Rooked.

You see. The rook doesn’t initiate. It responds. And then it waits to be picked up again by someone with the authority to place it back in the game.

Notice what none of these pieces ever does. None of them asks the board how it is. None of them sits with the people of Knowle West over a cup of tea and a difficult conversation. None of them stays. None of them ever invited to view the presentation of facilities they will never get to enjoy themselves. You know. Like a postcard from somewhere you may get to dream of. Though never visit. It’s like the middle finger of authority. From a safe distance. The other side of the river.

They move. They play. They leave.

The board remains.

The Board.

There is a number that exists. Not estimated. Not projected. Not modelled.

A precise, documented, operational number sitting in a spreadsheet in a council office in the same city that has just been named the top property investment destination in the South West.

It is the number of Bristol households currently placed outside the local authority area. Moved. Not rehoused. Moved. Out of Bristol entirely.

Away from the neighbour who has the spare key. Away from the school that finally understood the child. Away from the GP who knows the full history without being told it again.

Away from twenty years of ordinary life built in a city that then decided, quietly and administratively, that their square was needed for something else.

Managed, in Kerry McCarthy’s precise and carefully chosen word, out.

Bristol City Council’s own temporary accommodation guide confirms the mechanism plainly.

Placements could be in any area of Bristol or outside. Applicants are not restricted to considering accommodation in Bristol.

The council’s words. The council’s document. Publicly available. Unamended. Unretracted.

Read that slowly. Not restricted to considering accommodation in Bristol. Which is another way of saying: we may move you out of the city you came to us from. The city whose waiting list you joined. The city whose board you are.

Bristol is not unique in this.

Oxford City Council placed over half of its temporary accommodation households outside the city in 2024/25. The mechanism is widespread and entirely consistent with the council’s own published guidance.

A conspiracy theory requires the absence of evidence. This one comes with a footnote.

This is the people chessboard. Pieces moving in every direction simultaneously across every local authority boundary.

Bristol moving households out. Other authorities moving households in. Nobody permanently housed. The board keeps shifting. The game keeps running. Though. Notice the absence of that chess clock. It would never sustain the batteries required.

And the number of pieces currently off the board — Bristol residents, in another city, tonight, in a place that isn’t home and was never supposed to be — is known precisely by the people who chose not to publish it.

Should anyone feel moved to characterise what the council’s own documentation describes as something other than what it plainly is — the managed displacement of Bristol residents from their own city — they will find the temporary accommodation guide waiting patiently for them.

It has not been amended. It has not been withdrawn. It says what it says.

The Almighty Gob has noted it. The public record now reflects it.

Permanently.

The Game.

It stops being a conspiracy theory when you can see it playing out before your very eyes.

The board is Knowle West. The board is Lockleaze. The board is Withywood. The board is the 18,000 households on the Bristol social housing waiting list, the 4,000 removed from it, the 1,786 families in Bristol temporary accommodation averaging 558 days in a place nobody calls home.

The board is Bristol.

And the board has been watching the game being played on top of it for long enough to know exactly who the pieces are, which direction they move, and whose interests they serve when they get there.

Bristol gentrification has a mechanism. It is called trickle-up urbanism. Bristol City Council housing has a shortfall. It is £8 million. Annually. Bristol temporary accommodation has a number. It hasn’t been published. Bristol property investment has a brochure. Bristol affordable housing has a waiting list. The Bristol Post has a headline. Everyone’s happy. Well. Almost.

The Almighty Gob has the board.

You see. Every claim in this piece is sourced from parliamentary submissions, Regulator findings, Bristol City Council’s own published documentation, and independently verified news reporting. All sources are publicly available.

And on that board — on the morning of 27 May 2026 — one voice was more prominent than the noise that surrounded it.

Two decades of observation. One coined term. One MP. Two responses.

Conspiracy theories.

Resource management.

Neither of which, it turns out, is as black and white as they appear.

The board knows.

It was just waiting for someone to write it down.

That person was @LJRyder16. In a post earlier this morning.

© The Almighty Gob 2026. All rights reserved. Unauthorised reproduction prohibited.

The Almighty Gob is an independent Bristol-based publication covering institutional accountability, urban policy, and the gap between what cities say and what cities do.

[The Investment Hotspot That Forgot Who Lives Here.]

There is a version of Bristol that exists in investment prospectuses, property podcasts, and regional business awards. It has waterfront regeneration. Yield percentages. Two world-class universities. A creative economy. A mantelpiece full of liveability trophies. Airbnb revenues that would make your eyes water.

Then there is the Bristol that 18,000 households wake up inside every morning. The one where the council’s own website tells applicants, with the quiet resignation of an institution that has stopped pretending: you’re unlikely to be offered social housing. The waiting list is very long.

Both of these Bristols occupy the same BS postcode. Which, some, may quite reasonably read as ‘Bullshit.’ And, well. Who can blame them. Anyway. Onwards and forwards.

A Wing. A Prayer. And a Property Brochure. Full Colour. No Expense Spared. Of Course.

There is an old expression — on a wing and a prayer — for the moment a rational being decides to proceed on irrational grounds. Not out of delusion. Out of a particular kind of clarity: that the mathematics don’t quite work, the wing is damaged, however you fly anyway and trust that hope will cover the gap between what exists and what needs to happen.

Bristol’s housing strategy has been flying on that basis for some time now. You know. More balsa wood, rubber band powered propeller. Compared to, say, Concorde.

However. The wing is genuine. The universities are real. The geography is real. The connectivity, the talent pool, the cultural life — all of it generates actual lift. Nobody is manufacturing Bristol’s appeal. The investors aren’t wrong about the assets.

The prayer is the belief that rising asset values lift all boats. That regeneration billions trickle downward. That a city simultaneously awarded most liveable and top investment hotspot is thriving in any sense that matters to the people actually living in it.

It doesn’t. It won’t. And the evidence has been accumulating patiently, waiting to be read.

The Lowerarchy.

Abraham Maslow built his hierarchy on a principle so obvious it barely needed stating. Meet the base needs first. Shelter, safety, warmth — these are the foundation everything else stands on. Self-actualisation, creative fulfilment, civic participation — these come after. They require the base to be solid.

Mind. This is Bristol, after all. So. It has inverted this entirely.

What operates here — and in every city that has followed this particular flight path — is a Lowerarchy. A system that should serve the base of human need first and works, with impressive consistency, in the opposite direction.

The investors get the self-actualisation economy. The co-working spaces. The artisan coffee. The waterfront aesthetics. The creative districts. The liveability.

The people on the waiting list are still negotiating the base. Shelter. Safety. A front door that belongs to them.

And here is what distinguishes the Lowerarchy from mere neglect. It doesn’t ignore the base of the pyramid. It feeds on it. Housing in Bristol isn’t being overlooked — it is receiving enormous, sustained, highly organised attention. From investors. The foundation that Maslow said everyone should stand on has become the asset class that the top of the pyramid extracts value from.

The foundation isn’t being forgotten. It is being sold.

Trickle-Up Urbanism.

There is a theory — deployed at every planning meeting, regeneration launch, and mayoral press release — that investment in a city benefits everyone in that city. That if you build enough glass-fronted apartments at Temple Meads, open enough wine bars in Wapping Wharf, attract enough tech workers relocating from Shoreditch, eventually some of that economic energy finds its way to the people who were already here.

This theory has a name. Trickle-down urbanism. The benign fiction that wealth, given enough time and the right conditions, finds its way to the bottom.

What Bristol actually operates is trickle-up urbanism.

And trickle-up is not trickle-down with a slower timeline. It is the opposite mechanism entirely.

The value doesn’t trickle down to the people at the base of the pyramid. It is extracted from the base and moved upward. The affordable housing stock gets converted to short-term lets. The long-term tenants get displaced. The rental floor rises. Every new development that raises average property values in a postcode raises the rental floor in that postcode. Every positive yield figure published in a property podcast attracts another investor, removes another property from potential owner-occupation, adds another landlord to a market already running at the expense of tenants.

The investment doesn’t arrive in a city. It arrives in a curated segment of a city designed to receive it. The Temple Quarter isn’t being built for the 18,000 on the waiting list. The Western Harbour masterplan isn’t being designed around the family in temporary accommodation who has waited 558 days for a permanent home. These projects have a target demographic. That demographic is arriving from somewhere else, with money already in hand.

The shops follow that money. The cafes follow that footfall. The tourism infrastructure follows that aesthetic. And the people who were already here find that their city has been redesigned around someone else’s wallet.

Everything moves up. Nothing comes back down.

Trickle-up urbanism is trickle-down urbanism with the pretence removed. And it maps onto the Lowerarchy with the precision of a thing that was always the same argument, observed from two different angles.

The Lowerarchy describes the structure. Trickle-up urbanism describes the mechanism. Together they describe what happens when the logic of investment return is applied to the base of Maslow’s pyramid without a counterweight strong enough to hold the foundation in place.

Bristol Is Not Alone In This. That Is Precisely The Problem.

Detroit was once one of the wealthiest cities per capita in America. The investment thesis was real. The wing existed. Then the industry contracted, the investors extracted their returns and moved on, and the people left behind inherited the debt, the dereliction, and the waiting lists. Whole neighbourhoods returned to grassland. The prayer turned out not to be aerodynamics.

Barcelona won every urban regeneration award after 1992. Investment poured in. Tourism exploded. Then short-term lets systematically converted entire neighbourhoods from homes into hotel rooms. Long-term residents — families who had lived in Barceloneta and El Born for generations — were priced out of areas their grandparents had walked. The city that charmed the world chose to become functionally uninhabitable for significant numbers of the people who called it home.

Dublin positioned itself as Europe’s tech capital. Google, Meta, Apple — the credentials were impeccable. Meanwhile Dublin now operates one of the worst housing crises in Europe. Young Irish people are emigrating again. Not from poverty this time. Because a booming city chose to price out its own population.

Vancouver. Lisbon. Nairobi. The pattern doesn’t vary. The investment thesis arrives. The brochure circulates. The assets are genuine. The prayer is deployed as load-bearing infrastructure. Trickle-up urbanism operates without announcement. And the people who needed the base of the pyramid to hold find that it has been quietly refinanced.

Bristol is not an outlier. Bristol is the current iteration of a very old story that cities keep agreeing to tell about themselves.

What The Numbers Actually Say.

Gross rental yields of up to 8.2% in parts of the city. Monthly rents between £1,261 and £2,713 depending on postcode. Over £5.7 billion in committed regeneration investment. The Temple Quarter project alone — 135 hectares around Temple Meads — promising 10,000 new homes and 22,000 new jobs over the next two decades.

Is it practical? For investors, demonstrably yes.

Is it logical? As a pure capital allocation decision, entirely.

What is the likely outcome?

Temporary accommodation demand has risen 90% in four years. Homeless households now wait two and a half years or more to make a successful bid for a home. The social housing waiting list — before April 2026’s administrative intervention — stood at 22,000 households. With approximately 1,500 to 1,700 properties available annually.

Do that arithmetic slowly. Trust me. It rewards the attention.

Meanwhile Bristol’s housing affordability ratio stands at 8.88. The median home costs almost nine times the annual earnings of a middle-income household. Bristol holds the highest affordability ratio of all the Core Cities in England. Private rents have risen 52% over the past decade. Wages have risen 24%.

That gap doesn’t close by itself. It doesn’t close with a podcast studio either. Devastating news for the residents of Knowle West. I’m sure.

The State Of What Already Exists.

Before the conversation moves to what is being built, it is worth pausing on the condition of what is already there.

Bristol City Council manages 26,700 tenanted homes. A proportion of that stock is ageing at pace. The council submitted to Parliament that decades of under-resourcing, policy instability, and economic volatility — combined with demands for investment in fire safety and decarbonisation — mean council housing is under unprecedented strain.

The housing revenue account faces an £8 million annual shortfall. The government’s Regulator of Social Housing found serious failings in how the council manages its homes and ordered a major backlog of repairs to be addressed.

As of February 2026, almost 20,000 overdue repairs are recorded on council properties. The council’s own interim director of housing property stated that these figures “cannot be trusted” — the result of a botched IT project launched in March 2022, initially expected to take two years and cost £7.5 million, with a further £1.3 million approved to assist its troubled introduction. If the figures were accurate, they would mean three in four Bristol council homes need some form of repair.

The council is completing stock condition surveys for 70% of its homes, which will form the basis of a new asset management strategy. The Decent Homes Standard — the basic threshold below which a property is considered unacceptable — has no confirmed implementation date for its final phase. The perpetual calendar seems to be running out of pages already. Who’d have thought.

The council doesn’t reliably know the full scale of what needs doing to its existing stock. That, in itself, is a sentence worth keeping.

In 2022, Bristol City Council announced a record £1.8 billion investment in council homes over 30 years. Four years later the housing revenue account is running a shortfall, the repair data is untrustworthy, and the Regulator has found serious failings.

The wing. The prayer. The arithmetic. Perhaps. Lack of.

The 4,000 Who Were Simply Removed. Like They Never existed.

In April 2026, Bristol City Council chose a solution to the gap between 22,000 households waiting and the supply available to meet them.

They removed 4,000 names from the list.

Not housed. Not rehoused. Not redirected to meaningful alternative provision. Removed. People in bands three and four — the lower priority categories — who hadn’t placed a bid on a property for at least two years. Gone from the register. The waiting list dropped from 22,000 to just over 18,000 and someone, somewhere, filed that under progress.

The council’s own website now carries this sentence, addressed to anyone considering applying for social housing in Bristol: people have told us that if they’d known how unlikely it was that they’d get social housing, they would’ve thought about other options earlier.

Read that again at the pace it deserves. Take your time. No rush.

The institution responsible for housing provision is advising people not to hope for housing provision. The administrative response to an impossible gap between need and supply is to manage the expectations of the people experiencing need.

This is not incompetence. This is a system following its incentives with complete predictability.

Canons Wharf. Saunas. And Bristol’s Ambition. Apparently, It Has One. Who knew?

Oh look. The new Harbourside development. Once Lloyds Bank hub.

“The ambitious redevelopment will see the former Canons House building re-positioned as a vibrant, mixed-use campus, delivering 197,000 sq ft of high-quality workspace alongside industry-leading amenities, cultural spaces and public-facing destinations,” said a spokesperson for the developers, Kinrise and Mactaggart Family & Partners.

“Located in the heart of Bristol’s thriving Harbourside, the development will combine striking architectural heritage with contemporary design, creating a working environment like no other that reflects the city’s dynamic business and cultural community.

“The scheme will enhance the landmark crescent and circular buildings overlooking Lloyds Amphitheatre, reinforcing their status as one of the city’s defining architectural statements. The approved plans will deliver a range of premium facilities designed to support modern ways of working and wellbeing, including a coffee house with gardens, creating a social hub for tenants and the public, restaurants overlooking the Harbourside, saunas, cold plunge, a performance gym and PT classes studio, a podcast studio and 200 person auditorium for talks, events and cultural programming and a standout rooftop boardroom and events space, offering panoramic views across the city.”

Wonderful.

Read that list of amenities again. Every single one of them sits above the base of Maslow’s pyramid. Not one element addresses shelter. Not one element addresses warmth. Not one element addresses safety. The saunas are real. The cold plunge is real. The podcast studio is real. The rooftop boardroom with panoramic views across the city is real.

Yes, the development will create construction jobs. Good. The people who build it will be grateful for the work. The question is what happens after the scaffolding comes down — and who the building serves when it does.

Panoramic views across a city where three in four council homes may need repair. Where 20,000 overdue maintenance jobs have been logged on a system too broken to be trusted. Where the people on the waiting list are still waiting.

The former Lloyds back-office hub — where people once came to work rather than to be sold a lifestyle — has been repositioned as a premium workspace campus with saunas and a podcast studio. Clearly, with the residents of, say, Lockleaze, Knowle West, and Withywood in mind. Obviously.

That is not a coincidence. That is the Lowerarchy’s architectural biography rendered in 197,000 square feet.

Except. Who for, exactly?

The coffee house with gardens creating a social hub for tenants and the public is doing extraordinary work in that sentence. For the public. The gesture toward inclusion. The performance of openness. The implication that anyone can wander in off the street and participate in the social hub.

They can. Provided they can afford a flat white at Harbourside prices.

That is not public space. That is monetised space with a public-facing facade. The distinction matters enormously. The brochure depends on it remaining invisible.

Oh, I clumsily forgot. For those who’ve seen the brochure. Of course.

And then the official spokesperson delivered this.

“Canons Wharf will be a place that reflects Bristol’s ambition.”

He’s either on something the rest of us wish we were taking as well. Or. Well. Sudden sunstroke. To put it mildly.

Look what it did to Lawrence of Arabia.

Because what that statement requires — to make any coherent sense — is a particular kind of altered perception. The ability to stand in front of a premium workspace campus designed for relocated London professionals, look out over a city with the highest affordability ratio of any Core City in England, and announce with apparent sincerity that this reflects Bristol’s ambition.

It does, though. Precisely. Just not the ambition of the Bristol the spokesperson chose not to mention.

Bristol’s ambition, as currently documented, includes 18,000 households on a waiting list. 4,000 names removed from it. 1,786 families in temporary accommodation averaging 558 days. An IT system costing nearly £9 million that produces repair figures nobody trusts. A Regulator finding serious failings. A council website advising applicants to manage their expectations.

Canons Wharf reflects that Bristol’s ambition perfectly.

Just from the top of the pyramid. Looking down.

Who The Investment Is Actually For

The regeneration masterplan does not mention the 90% rise in temporary accommodation demand. The investment prospectus does not quote the council’s advice to applicants. The property podcast does not explain that the Airbnb revenue figures in BS1 and BS8 correlate directly with the displacement of the people who previously rented those properties at prices that didn’t require a passive income strategy.

These are not oversights. Brochures are curated documents. What they choose not to say is as deliberate as what they choose to say.

The new developments along the waterfront are not being built for the people on the waiting list. The coffee shops opening in the regenerated quarters are not being designed for someone on housing benefit. The tourism infrastructure being constructed around Temple Meads is not oriented toward the family in Band Three who has been waiting since 2022.

They are being built for the people arriving from London and elsewhere. People with the capital to participate in the new Bristol. People for whom the brochure was written. People whose presence — entirely legally and entirely predictably — makes the situation measurably worse for everyone the brochure didn’t mention.

This is not an accusation against those individuals. They are following rational incentives in a system designed to reward them. The design is the issue. The architecture — literal and economic — is the issue.

And yes — the investment generates business rates, employment, and tax revenue that theoretically funds public services including social housing. Theoretically. The housing revenue account shortfall is £8 million. The regeneration pipeline is £5.7 billion. The mathematics of that relationship are, at best, a work in progress.

The swept-under-carpet version of Bristol is not a separate story from the investment hotspot story. It is the same story, told from the other end of the same transaction.

The Question Mark That Does The Most Work

And as for the people left behind — the 18,000 still on the list, the 4,000 removed from it, the 1,786 households in temporary accommodation, the families averaging 558 days in a place nobody calls home —

we’ll just leave that with a question mark, shall we?

That question mark is the most honest punctuation in Bristol right now. Because the question isn’t rhetorical. It has an answer. It just doesn’t appear in the investment prospectus, the regeneration masterplan, the award ceremony, or the Business Live headline.

The answer is that the people left behind will be managed. Their expectations will be adjusted downward. Their waiting list entries will be periodically removed when the numbers become embarrassing. They will be advised, on official council websites, to think about other options. They will watch their city win liveability awards for amenities they don’t have the disposable income to use.

They will see cranes on the skyline and know, with the particular clarity of lived experience, that nothing rising up there is rising for them.

They will watch a former back-office hub — where people once came to work rather than to be sold a lifestyle — become a rooftop boardroom with panoramic views and a cold plunge facility.

And they will read that this reflects Bristol’s ambition. Assuming, by then it’s found one that suits the real ambitions of current, longstanding residents. I know. We can dream.

The wing generates lift. For those who own one.

The prayer fills the gap. For those asked to have faith in trickle-down whilst trickle-up does its quiet, efficient, thoroughly documented work in plain sight on the Harbourside.

And the Lowerarchy holds. As it always has. As it was always going to.

The brochure was persuasive. It just forgot to mention who it wasn’t written for.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

© The Almighty Gob 2026. All rights reserved. Unauthorised reproduction prohibited.

The Almighty Gob is an independent Bristol-based publication covering institutional accountability, urban policy, and the gap between what cities say and what cities do. Published at thealmightygob.com, and across social media platforms.

[No Beard? Women Are Under Threat — The Almighty Gob]

Somewhere right now, a man is moisturising his beard.

Conditioning it. Shaping it. Possibly talking to it.

The global beard care market is worth billions — and growing, if you’ll forgive the expression.

Victor Kiam built an empire on the razor. Remington, as it happens, started out making guns.

Both weapons of sorts, it would seem.

Back then, Kiam would have been lynched. Possibly crucified.

Can you imagine how different the world would be if Jesus had owned a Remington?

Victor Kiam would have had a co-founder. And we’d all have been spared an awful lot of trouble.

However, what the beard oil industry has conspicuously failed to put on the label is arguably its most powerful selling point.

Your beard, apparently, is protecting women.

From you.

You’re welcome.

This is not a marketing campaign. This is religious authority speaking.

And religious authority, it turns out, has a long and colourful relationship with clerical misogyny.

And before you reach for the razor — just know that God is watching. He has opinions about this.

Strong ones.

Jesus had one, didn’t he.

Britain is currently having a conversation about misogyny.

A real one. An overdue one.

Two schoolboys. A knife. A conviction.

The question being asked everywhere right now — in parliament, in schools, on every platform that exists and several that probably shouldn’t — is where does this come from?

It’s the right question. It’s just that most of the answers being offered are pointing in the wrong direction.

Social media, they say. Andrew Tate, they say. The algorithm, they say.

Easy targets. Satisfying ones.

However, you can put social media in front of the firing squad tomorrow and it doesn’t actually solve the problem.

Because this was here long before the algorithm. Long before the influencer. Long before the smartphone.

The Almighty Gob has a suggestion.

Start here. And pay attention, because this is going to take us around the world and back again.

Meet Murat Bayaral. Turkish Islamic preacher. December 2017.

Speaking on the private religious television station Fatih Medreseleri, Bayaral delivered himself of the following observation — and we are going to need a moment to fully appreciate it.

Men, he explained, should grow beards. One of only two body parts that separate men from women is the beard. Therefore, if a man has long hair and no beard, you might — from a distance — mistake him for a woman.

And because women and men dress similarly these days, God forbid, you could be possessed by indecent thoughts.

There it is.

The beard as public safety infrastructure. The beard as the thin line between civilised society and chaos. The beard, apparently, doing the work that personal responsibility declined to show up for.

Bayaral, for the record, is considered a marginal figure in Turkey.

Which is reassuring right up until you realise that marginal figures have television programmes, and television programmes have audiences, and audiences have sons.

However, let’s not stop here. Because Bayaral, it turns out, is merely the opening act.

If the absence of a beard is enough to derail a grown man’s moral compass, one has to wonder what religious authority makes of the rest of the human experience.

Quite a lot, as it happens. And before anyone assumes this is a conversation exclusively about Islam — it isn’t. Consider, first, that in America, Pat Robertson — founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, former presidential candidate, holder of degrees from Washington and Lee University and Yale Law School — spent decades informing his television audience that God deployed hurricanes as punishment for homosexuality. He warned Orlando that Gay Days at Disney World would bring terrorist bombs, earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor.

A meteor.

Not content with weather events, Robertson graduated to geological phenomena. His fellow traveller Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, agreed publicly that floods were divine punishment for gay marriage. Perkins subsequently had to evacuate his own Louisiana home by canoe after catastrophic flooding submerged it. He described the experience as being of near-biblical proportions. The irony, it is fair to say, was lost on him.

That’s Christianity. Now. Britain.

In Britain, a man called Haitham al-Haddad holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London. He chairs what the UK government’s own counter-extremism commissioner has described as the main Salafist organisation in the country, and sits on the board of the Islamic Sharia Council.

This is not a fringe figure. This is the establishment.

Al-Haddad’s positions, carefully documented, include the following: that homosexuality is a criminal act and a scourge, that the most honourable role for a woman is striving to be a fine wife, that female circumcision is a scholarly consensus, and — perhaps most memorably — that “a man should not be questioned why he hit his wife, because this is something between them.”

A PhD. A government-monitored organisation. A sharia court seat.

And that is what sits underneath it.

The Almighty Gob is not suggesting this represents mainstream British Muslim opinion. It doesn’t.

However, it does represent mainstream British institutional silence on the matter, which is a different problem entirely.

Then there is Abu Usamah at-Thahabi — for many years the chief cleric of Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham, preaching week after week to audiences who had every reason to trust the authority of the man at the front.

In 2007, Channel 4’s Undercover Mosque caught him on camera — not in some private aside, but in full sermon — declaring that women, however educated, were divinely deficient and incomplete in their intellect, that gay men should be thrown off a mountain, and that the testimony of two women was required to equal that of one man.

His mosque subsequently received public grant funding.

He has since relocated to Florida, where presumably the mountain is metaphorical.

And then there is Mohammed Amin Pandor of Dewsbury — a mechanical engineer — who issued a fatwa on social media declaring Covid-19 vaccines should not be promoted, on the grounds that God had already provided a definite remedy in the form of a prayer to be recited three times.

He also informed a BBC radio interviewer in 2016 that his religious beliefs meant Strictly Come Dancing was not acceptable.

Strictly Come Dancing.

The sequins, apparently, were the last straw.

Now. Are we building a case against Islam specifically?

We are not.

Because the moment you think this is a uniquely Islamic pathology, the evidence invites you to sit back down.

Remember those two schoolboys. Remember that knife. Because what follows is the source code they inherited — and it didn’t come from TikTok.

In New Zealand in 2016, Brian Tamaki — leader of the Destiny Church — posted a sermon on Facebook following a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that killed two people.

The earthquake, he explained, was caused by sin.

Gay marriage, specifically.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister called his comments ridiculous.

Tamaki’s church called the sermon a prediction.

A prediction. Of an earthquake that had already happened.

That is a level of sheer brass neck that deserves some form of recognition, if only for the confidence involved.

Kenneth Copeland — Texas televangelist, net worth estimated at over $760 million, owner of a 1,500-acre campus with its own private airstrip — told his television audience during the Covid-19 pandemic that they were healed of the virus as he prayed, reaching his outstretched hand toward the camera and instructing viewers to touch their screens to receive spiritual healing.

He concluded with healed and well.

He has never apologised. He is still broadcasting.

Of course he is.

This is not a Christian problem. This is a power problem that stems from religious ideology.

Just as it sometimes wears a turban, a kippah, or a saffron robe.

In 2010, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef — former Chief Sephardi Rabbi of Israel, spiritual leader of the Shas political party — delivered a weekly Saturday night sermon in which he stated that non-Jews exist solely to serve the Jewish people.

“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world. Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat.”

The American Jewish Committee called his remarks abhorrent and an offence to human dignity. Jewish organisations across the world condemned them. Rabbi Yosef’s response was to continue delivering weekly sermons until his death in 2013, at which point approximately 800,000 people attended his funeral, making it one of the largest in Israeli history.

Before taking office as Israeli military chief rabbi, Eyal Karim had answered a question on a religious website in 2002 in which he appeared to permit soldiers to engage in sexual acts with non-Jewish women during wartime to maintain morale. The remarks caused an international outcry when they resurfaced at the time of his appointment in 2016. The IDF summoned him. The Israeli Supreme Court temporarily suspended his appointment. He submitted a formal declaration clarifying his position to the High Court. The institutional process ran its full course. He was still appointed.

Take a breath. Because what comes next is going to be extraordinary.

Back in Egypt, in 2007, Ezzat Attiya — head of Al-Azhar University’s Department of Hadith, one of Sunni Islam’s most prestigious institutions — resolved the thorny question of how unrelated men and women could work together in the same office.

His solution was elegant in its simplicity.

The woman should breastfeed her male colleague.

Five times.

He was fired. A court reinstated him.

And then there is the matter of the cosmos itself. Grand Mufti Sheikh Ibn Baaz — the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia — issued a fatwa in 1993 asserting that the earth was flat, the sun revolved around it, and any scientific evidence to the contrary was a Western conspiracy.

Notice what year that was.

1993. Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon twenty-four years earlier.

The earth was still flat.

Apparently.

And in India, Hindu nationalist leader Chakrapani Maharaj organised events in March 2020 to promote cow urine as a cure for coronavirus, photographed placing a spoon of the substance near the face of a caricature of the virus.

A government activist was subsequently arrested after a volunteer fell ill from drinking it.

God, it seems, had other ideas.

He usually does.

It is, when you think about it, one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Don’t look over there. Look over here.

The algorithm is the problem. The influencer is the problem. The smartphone is the problem.

And while everyone is looking over there — the edict gets issued, the fatwa gets posted, the sermon gets delivered, and another generation receives the same message it always has.

Just with better Wi-Fi.

Don’t look over there. Look over here. The edict gets issued, the fatwa gets posted, the sermon gets delivered — and another generation receives the same message it always has. Just with better Wi-Fi.

So. Here we are. Back where we started — back to the beard, back to the razor, back to one Turkish preacher on a religious television channel worrying about facial hair and indecent thoughts.

Except now we have context. Now we can see the shape of the thing.

Because Bayaral isn’t an aberration. He’s a data point.

One entry in a very long ledger that runs from a Birmingham mosque to a Texas airstrip to a Saudi fatwa office to an Egyptian university to an Israeli military appointment.

Different faiths. Different continents. Different centuries.

Same architecture.

The problem is never the man having the thought.

It is always the object that provoked it — the missing beard, the woman driving, the gay couple, the earthquake fault line, the coronavirus.

The male gaze, the male impulse, the male failure of self-control.

Projected outward. Institutionalised. Given doctrinal weight. Delivered from a position of divine authority to audiences who have been taught, sometimes from birth, to receive it as truth.

And this is where the conversation about two schoolboys and a knife has to go if it is going to mean anything.

It is entirely correct and entirely insufficient to blame social media.

Entirely correct because the reflex fires before the reasoning mind has a chance to form a single coherent thought — the tribal response, the us-and-them instinct, the impulse that reaches for cruelty before conscience has even got its coat on.

Entirely insufficient because the reflex didn’t write its own instruction manual. It found one.

It inherited centuries of institutional permission — from fatwas, from sermons, from edicts, from the quiet, persistent message that travels across every faith tradition: that women are the problem to be managed rather than the people to be respected.

You can put social media in front of the firing squad. It will not solve the problem.

Because on Sunday morning, in thousands of buildings across the world, men in robes will still stand and tell their congregations what women are for. What men are permitted to do. What God intended.

That is not a TikTok problem.

That is a centuries-old institutional problem that TikTok simply found, recognised, and amplified to a billion screens before breakfast.

Shoot the messenger by all means.

The message will find another one.

Which brings us, finally, to the only honest conclusion available — and you already know what it is, because the evidence has been building it brick by brick since the first paragraph.

Religion isn’t entirely to blame.

The vast majority of people of faith — Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, every tradition — live lives of genuine decency. The texts, at their best, point toward exactly that.

The target here is not belief. It is the institutional machinery built around belief — and the consistent use of that machinery to keep women in their place.

However.

The institutions that claim to represent those texts have, with remarkable consistency across remarkable distances, found ways to concentrate power in the hands of men, direct suspicion toward women, and dress both arrangements in the language of divine instruction.

That is not faith.

That is faith’s clothing on institutional misogyny’s body.

And it has been walking around in public for a very long time — collecting tax exemptions, television audiences, and government advisory positions — while the rest of us politely looked the other way.

The beard, in the end, is the least of it.

The oldest misogyny delivery system in human history isn’t an algorithm. Let’s be honest. It’s religion, isn’t it? Fifty thousand years of it. At least.

Religion isn’t to blame.

But it certainly doesn’t help.

How do you break fifty thousand years of doctrine?

That’s the real question.

Because make no mistake, misogyny is just like treating cancer.

We can treat the symptoms.

Cancer has been with us for one point seven million years.

We’ve been trying to cure it for three thousand six hundred.

The cause is still work in progress.

The evidence has been there the whole time.

In plain sight.

The jury has been misdirected.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Almighty Gob. The Satirical Social Philosopher.

Leave a comment

Sources and Citations:

Murat Bayaral — Newsweek, December 2017. Haitham al-Haddad — Counter Extremism Project; Sara Khan, UK Government Counter Extremism Commissioner. Abu Usamah at-Thahabi — Channel 4 Undercover Mosque, 2007. Mohammed Amin Pandor — The Scottish Mail on Sunday, March 2021. Brian Tamaki — multiple New Zealand press sources, November 2016. Pat Robertson — Christian Broadcasting Network archive; multiple documented sources. Tony Perkins — BBC News. Kenneth Copeland — multiple documented sources. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef — Jewish Telegraphic Agency; American Jewish Committee statement, 2010. Eyal Karim — Times of Israel, July 2016; Haaretz, July 2016; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 2016. Ezzat Attiya — IOL/Associated Press, 2007. Sheikh Ibn Baaz — documented fatwa 1993, multiple academic sources. Chakrapani Maharaj — multiple Indian press sources, March 2020. Cancer timeline — Journal of the South African Dental Association, 2016; ancient Egyptian Ebers Papyrus c.1600 BC.

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent Bristol mayoral candidate 2016 and 2021, and one of the city’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Publishing since 2020, with over 500 pieces across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.

© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved. Where reproduced, John Langley must be named as source in full. Attribution: John Langley / The Almighty Gob, thealmightygob.com. Unauthorised use constitutes copyright infringement. The Almighty Gob. Bristol. 2026.