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My @thetimes column: An incredible tale of how an ancient royal charter charity founded to look after London’s bridges was hijacked by left-wing causes
We may not have feral youth on the street, but make no mistake: this is looting
With @lfg_uk
times-comment.com/3b6d00ae
Juliet Samuel retweeted
Board of Deputies to vote on motion declaring Green Party racist
thejc.com/news/uk/board-depu…
Juliet Samuel retweeted
City Bridge Foundation (one trustee: the City of London) is also a big funder of Gendered Intelligence, which provides training to the City of London and to staff of Hampstead Heath (also a charity with one trustee; the City of London).
Sharetoken. The City Bridge Foundation, run by the Corporation of London, has also funded transgender activism - see screen shot.
Smaller "LGBTQ+" projects approved at higher-than-average rates in some analyses. Smaller projects funded include Rainbow Migration (services for LGBTQI+ asylum seekers), Stonewall Housing (advice), and Queer East CIC (outreach activities).
The Small Grants Programme has included “Working with the LGBTQIA+ community” as a priority area (alongside older people, disabled people, migrants/refugees, and environment) eg £320,000 to Micro Rainbow for safe accommodation for LGBTI asylum seekers and refugees and earlier funding for the Albert Kennedy Trust (akt) for LGBT+ youth homelessness.
ALT Major LGBT+-related grants Anchor Programme (long-term core funding for equity-led infrastructure organisations tackling inequality; first round ~£14m in 2023): Consortium LGBT: £1,408,400 over 10 years for core London team roles, member engagement on policy/strategy, advisory board participation, and LGBT+ sector leadership development. Galop: £993,700 over 8 years for its policy and research team to map specialist LGBT+ abuse and violence support services in London (identifying gaps by identity and borough, modelling future provision). A separate £300,000 grant supported expansion of one-to-one and group therapy for survivors of hate crime, domestic abuse, sexual violence, and so-called conversion practices (combined figures often cited as ~£1.3m). Spectra CIC: £1,003,000 over 7 years to build capacity among charities supporting trans communities and sex workers. Strategic Transition Awards (2026, £10m .... https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMi1jb3B5_d612caef-8dd1-4a8a-bba3-de9dc1ccbd1c
Juliet Samuel retweeted
Is there a better columnist writing today than @CitySamuel ? Extraordinary story
She explains how a charity intended to pay for bridge repairs could be persuaded to do its day job rather than throw money at woke causes;
“These victimised, liminal structures at the intersection of London’s most profound, alluvial divide suffer from deep-rooted, systemic inequity at the level of foundational bedrock and beg humbly that they be granted a zillion pounds to rethink the transgression of geomorphology and strengthen the deepfelt solidarity between northern and southern stakeholders.” Ker-ching.
My @thetimes column: An incredible tale of how an ancient royal charter charity founded to look after London’s bridges was hijacked by left-wing causes
We may not have feral youth on the street, but make no mistake: this is looting
With @lfg_uk
times-comment.com/3b6d00ae
Juliet Samuel retweeted
Shocking shocking shocking. The U.K. establishment is a mess.
My @thetimes column: An incredible tale of how an ancient royal charter charity founded to look after London’s bridges was hijacked by left-wing causes
We may not have feral youth on the street, but make no mistake: this is looting
With @lfg_uk
times-comment.com/3b6d00ae
Juliet Samuel retweeted
Why is the City Bridge Foundation funding “social justice” instead of fixing all of London’s bridges?
The charity was set up in 1282. Today, it’s worth almost *£1.5 billion*.
Yet… London’s bridges are falling apart.
Why?
The Foundation’s rules only require it to maintain 5 bridges. Funds can also be spent on “other charitable purposes” for the benefit of Londoners.
So what are some of these “other charitable purposes”?
👉 A “poet-in-residence”.
👉 Trans and sex worker sector capacity.
👉 A historian examining connections to the slave trade (they found links were “limited”).
👉 “Systems change”, islamic charities, migration support, climate crisis research… and a group campaigning against a new river crossing.
ENOUGH. Governments have failed to fix London’s bridges and one of our oldest institutions has not been directed to step in.
The City of London Corporation is the sole trustee of the Foundation. They have changed the rules before. The rules must change AGAIN to make all of our bridges the priority.
Change the rules. Fix the bridges.
Our research in The Times 👇
My @thetimes column: An incredible tale of how an ancient royal charter charity founded to look after London’s bridges was hijacked by left-wing causes
We may not have feral youth on the street, but make no mistake: this is looting
With @lfg_uk
times-comment.com/3b6d00ae
Juliet Samuel retweeted
Call me old fashioned, but I think a charity established to maintain London's bridges should maintain London's crumbling bridges.
Instead, £840 *million* of its endowment has been spaffed on spurious “social justice” causes.
Juliet Samuel retweeted
Good write up. Should also give credit to @Hrushworth who has been writing about this for a while: xitter.cf/Hrushworth/status/2104…
Juliet Samuel retweeted
This is appalling
My @thetimes column: An incredible tale of how an ancient royal charter charity founded to look after London’s bridges was hijacked by left-wing causes
We may not have feral youth on the street, but make no mistake: this is looting
With @lfg_uk
times-comment.com/3b6d00ae
Juliet Samuel retweeted
Insane.
My @thetimes column: An incredible tale of how an ancient royal charter charity founded to look after London’s bridges was hijacked by left-wing causes
We may not have feral youth on the street, but make no mistake: this is looting
With @lfg_uk
times-comment.com/3b6d00ae
NESO latest: National grid operator accused of “cover-up” over near-blackouts
times-comment.com/8f5a59e8-1…
Juliet Samuel retweeted
It’s been covered a lot but an utterly mad situation. While bridges genuinely deteriorated. And everyone applauded the looting of a charity pot for special interest causes.
My @thetimes column: An incredible tale of how an ancient royal charter charity founded to look after London’s bridges was hijacked by left-wing causes
We may not have feral youth on the street, but make no mistake: this is looting
With @lfg_uk
times-comment.com/3b6d00ae
It’s official: a legal investigation has found engineers in Britain’s electricity grid control room are stressed because renewables make it so hard to keep the lights on. And when they raise concerns, managers won’t listen - they only want “good news”
thetimes.com/article/413d547…
See also
My @thetimes column: Four/five incidents in 2 weeks on the UK electricity grid. We’re begging France for power. Why are the grid bosses gaslighting us?
times-comment.com/72547570
And now this: Grid operator accused of “cover-up”
times-comment.com/8f5a59e8
Juliet Samuel retweeted
According to @thetimes, @neso_energy CEO Fintan Slye who earned just under £1 million last year admitted he knew about the control room concerns but failed to act on them saying Neso may have incorrectly prioritised other things at a time when there was a “huge amount of change happening in the organisation”
How does the Times know this?
Because somebody inside NESO recorded the meeting and gave it to the press
Clearly NESO staff have lost confidence in their execs and have no issues embarrassing them in public
Although it's fair to ask why Fintan didn't make his mea culpa public himself. Perhaps he simply didn't want to admit either to getting it wrong or to allowing the focus on CP2030 and keeping the government happy to get in the way of keeping the grid secure
There's a clear public interest in knowing this so I hope Fintan and NESO don't respond to this by trying to hunt the people who made and released this recording
The more productive approach would be to repair trust with staff, listen to and act on their concerns over grid security, and ensure cultural change so future concerns can be raised and acted on internally without staff feeling they have no options other than to leave or go to MPs and the media
@Miatsf @mgshanks @AndrewBowie_MP @ClaireCoutinho @harrietc @ColinMoynihanUK @drlukeevans @ashley7fox @TiceRichard @cmackinlay @DavidGHFrost @mattwridley @Iromg @AllisonPearson @MerrynSW @EdConwaySky @afneil @mattotele @jonathan_leake @julietsamuel @energygovuk @ofgem
thetimes.com/uk/environment/…
Juliet Samuel retweeted
To illustrate Claire's point about grid security, frequency has veered outside normal operating limits on each of 17, 18, 19 and 20 October. Balancing costs so far today almost £18m, compared to an average of about £2.3m. Link to Enact in reply.
It is extraordinary that NESO’s takeaway is that the core allegations made by the whistleblowers are unsubstantiated.
As I’ve always said, the core allegation is that the electricity grid is not being run securely. In that respect, the Eversheds report is utterly damning.
Not only does it say that renewables are making our grid more difficult to manage, but it says that several engineers in the control room profoundly disagree with NESO management’s claim that the grid was secure on 23rd June.
There are multiple serious problems highlighted - from a culture of managers only wanting to hear ‘good news’, to poor record keeping, and, most concerningly, a reluctance to action complaints from engineers because of the need to 'keep stakeholders happy'.
In other words, managers are failing to improve the security of our electricity grid because keeping Ministers in DESNZ happy is seen as more important.
NESO's Chief Executive earns close to £1 million a year and the whole organisation costs the better half of a billion pounds to run. The country and billpayers deserve better.
Government should be holding NESO to account, but instead, Ministers spent their time attacking me for raising the control room engineers' concerns and for making sure that any kind of investigation took place at all.
If this had been washed under the carpet, then where would we be?
A grid that is increasingly at risk and Ministers who, frankly, preferred to be asleep at the wheel rather than to do their jobs and protect our electricity supply.
With regards to the engineers' concerns on corporate affairs and record keeping, Eversheds did not give a clean bill of health as NESO is claiming. They found that a culture of 'reputational sensitivity' does indeed affect operational decision-making, and recommended several changes to correct significant failures in record keeping practices.
While I am on maternity leave, the Conservative team will continue to press the Government on this issue, because the bottom line is this: if we cannot trust NESO management to be honest about our ability to keep the lights on, how can they stay in their roles?
I look forward to the release of Ofgem's investigation on whether the grid was run securely on 23rd June. But we do now know that the control room strongly feel that it wasn’t.
Juliet Samuel retweeted
You can't run a system with millions of variable consumption and generation and storage devices the way you ran it when you had 150 fossil fuel generators and a handful of nukes.
It's not the new technology (wind, solar, batteries, EVs) that's the issue - it's the total failure to change the way we manage the system.
This is why locational wholesale market (which is automatically dramatically more flexible) was so powerful - and is increasingly used in the OECD. We need decentralised signals so the system self-optimises.
Octopus already processes 300,000 data points a second to do this for the many GW we control - but the brute force of the main system management just doesn't have this granularity.
It is increasingly urgent to reform our electricity system. These control room issues, the £50m spent balancing the system in a single day, the £3bn a year on curtailment, the prospect of £7-9bn a year of curtailment by 2029/2030.
It's all avoidable but not with the tools of yesterday
It’s official: a legal investigation has found engineers in Britain’s electricity grid control room are stressed because renewables make it so hard to keep the lights on. And when they raise concerns, managers won’t listen - they only want “good news”
thetimes.com/article/413d547…
Meanwhile, the energy secretary is… er, criticising her colleague’s Immigration Bill
Energy Secretary attacks Mahmood’s migrant crackdown telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
Juliet Samuel retweeted
Entirely obvious from the outside. The political constraints put on NESO aren't compatible with engineering reality.
It’s official: a legal investigation has found engineers in Britain’s electricity grid control room are stressed because renewables make it so hard to keep the lights on. And when they raise concerns, managers won’t listen - they only want “good news”
thetimes.com/article/413d547…