Twitter account for me and St Pancras Clock Tower - context should make it obvious which it’s for. Tower isn’t especially interested in economics or politics.
London
Joined June 2009
- Tweets1.7K
- Following326
- Followers434
- Likes4.1K
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
Other countries might be defined by blood, territory or language. America has always been creedal, an ideal of liberty turned into a state.
Its critics back-handedly recognise as much. The reason that anti-Americanism is a force in world affairs (unlike anti-Algerianism or anti-Armenianism or anti-Albanianism) is that America’s enemies acknowledge that it stands for something. That something is the package represented by personal autonomy, limited government, constitutional rule, regular elections and private enterprise – in a word, freedom.
A bias towards freedom has, until now, characterised US foreign policy. A people habituated to liberty immediately saw what was wrong with Nazism and Communism.
Which is why current US foreign policy is so shocking to pro-Americans.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one of those rare occasions when we can clearly identify the aggressor. Vladimir Putin sought to annex a neighbour that offered him no threat – a neighbour that had given up its nuclear weapons in return for a promise that its sovereignty would be respected within its existing borders. Who guaranteed that promise? Britain, the United States and (never forget) Russia.
Donald Trump is backing a belligerent dictatorship against a beleaguered democracy. Putin is the one leader he never disparages. He threatens annexation against Denmark, muses about handing away British territory, wages economic war on Canada. But not Russia. Never Russia.
Now Trump is buying diesel from Russia, potash from Belarus, minerals from China – all because he doesn’t want to buy them from Canada, which has stood at America’s side in war after war.
American friends, can you not see what this is doing, not just to America’s standing, but to the free world which your fathers have built since 1941? Trump is bringing down the international system from which the US has been the chief beneficiary. And for what? To drink liberal tears? God help us.
Messages like this are powerful for those like us who welcomed those refugees from earlier pogroms. What it must feel like for people like Jeremy who share the suffering that a new generation is inflicting like others imposed on their unfortunate ancestors.
I stood this week in the abandoned Palestinian community of al-Mu’arrajat in the Jordan Valley and cried.
A community of 600 people is gone. Homes destroyed. A school and mosque in ruins. Olive trees uprooted. Family after family driven from their land by years of settler violence and intimidation.
I thought of my great-grandparents, who fled persecution in Czarist Russia and made aliyah to Palestine in the 1880s. How can Jews who know so intimately what it means to be driven from our homes stand by while other Jews do this to another people?
Moral outrage is not enough.
Israel must enforce its own laws. If it will not, international courts must act. Those who organize, finance or facilitate forced displacement should be held accountable – sanctioned by the U.S. and other governments or brought before international justice.
If we truly care about Israel, we must confront and defeat this enterprise.
jstreetdotorg.substack.com/p…
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
Both HS2 and Hinkley Point C have now hit peak construction phase.
That means the workforce for each project will be declining in the coming years and months.
These are the only two megaprojects being built in Britain at the moment. Thousands of apprentices were trained for each job.
HS2 specifically had a tough time finding the skilled workers able to construct a high speed railway, and trained many itself.
Now that we have passed peak construction, there is no other project for many of these workers to go to. Some will go overseas, others will retrain in other specialisms, still more may end up out of work entirely.
This is the issue with our feast and famine approach to infrastructure. Without a steady conveyer belt of projects we have to train up new workforces from scratch when we decide to build something new.
Other countries have workforces that can move seamlessly from project to project, developing new skills and keeping costs low.
Starting from scratch every time is one of the many reasons why British megaprojects are so much more expensive than everyone else's.
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
This is one of the most beloved paintings in America, and it puts its finger on something we all pass through, first as the child, and one day as the parent left behind...
The painting is Breaking Home Ties, by Norman Rockwell, on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1954. A father and his teenage son sit side by side on the running board of a battered farm truck, waiting at a railway stop. A single track runs along the bottom of the picture. A ticket pokes from the boy's pocket. His suitcase is stacked with schoolbooks and wears a "State U" pennant. The train is coming to carry him off to college, away from home, for the first time in his life.
Everything is in the way they sit.
The son sits upright, scrubbed and dressed in his best, eyes fixed on the horizon, on the track, on the future rushing toward him. He is already half gone. For him that train is the beginning of everything.
His father sits beside him in worn work clothes and scuffed boots, looking the other way, down the line, as if he cannot bear to watch it arrive. The same train means the opposite thing to him. For the son it is the start of a life. For the father it is the day the house grows quieter, the chair at the table sits empty, and the person he built his world around walks out into a life that no longer has him at its centre.
Look at his hands. He is holding two hats. His own battered one, and resting on top of it, his son's crisp new one, held carefully together, because it is the last small thing he can still do for the boy...
And then the dog, its head laid in the son's lap, gazing up, refusing to look away. Rockwell knew exactly what that was for: "The father couldn't show how he felt about the boy's leaving," he said. "The dog did."
It has moved people for 70 years because every leaving is a beginning for one person and an ending for another. The child steps out into the world, as they should. And someone stays behind, watching them go, and loving them enough to let them go anyway...
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
The Red Arrows flying up the Hudson River past One World Trade streaming our flag image. What a thoughtful and wonderful sentiment from our closest allies, England.❤️ teapawt.net/TodayinHistory/status/…
It was a door chime.
If the insides are still functioning and the old plastic is intact it might have an eBay value to someone who likes that period. I don’t personally and found that 3-D Perspex thing rather ugly.
Blair’s essay was masterful and timely. Britain will be poorer if we end up going back to old Labour and the folly of believing that you make the country richer through Robin Hood fantasies. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgp…
This is a timely reminder of how people should think about their politics. His use of the phrase Radical Centre chimes with @Radix_UK
Excellent piece by Evan Davis on the lucky baby boomers but why we are unfortunate to live in a struggling economy. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj6p…
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
This video is less than two minutes long and I implore everyone to watch it. It is indeed rather extraordinary.
As Holocaust Awareness Ireland says, Patrick Kielty exhibits utter callousness with respect to the attacks on the Jewish community, astonishingly saying ‘the backdrop of that is obviously the horrors in Gaza, this is a complex thing.’
Boy George remains calm and says ‘if you don’t know any Jewish people maybe that’s the problem.’ He then asks the audience ‘do you know any Jewish people?’
Boy George is visibly taken aback by the ensuing silence, and vocalises his shock twice, remarking that it is ‘weird’ and ‘surprising me a little bit.’ Patrick looks uncomfortable and ends puts an end to the topic with a dismissive ‘mmm’.
Extraordinary viewing. Just extraordinary.
Quite an extraordinary interview on @RTELateLateShow last night.
@BoyGeorge lived in Golders Green and speaks about his life long relationship Jewish people, explaining how his support for Jews has resulted in him receiving much abuse. Two defining moments come when he asked the audience if they know any Jewish people and is met by stone cold silence. The silence represents a combination of fear that admitting such relationships publicly might cause difficulty and the reality that most Irish people don't know any Jews. As he said himself, the silence is deafening.
The second incredulous aspect of the interview is @PatricKielty's singular lack of empathy when speaking about Jews. Here is a public figure who has been rightly applauded for his brave public confrontation with the tragic sectarian murder of his father and the manner in which he has engaged with the loyalist community in the North. How is it that a man capable of extraordinary courage is blind to the persecution of another minority in the city of London where he calls home? Has he been corrupted by the RTE hive mind where the narrative around the issue of Israel and Jews is disturbingly unbalanced? So disappointed.
Segment begins at 10.30. H/T @ElmaRyder
rte.ie/player/series/the-lat…
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
🗣️ 'No one cycles when it's cold!'
Kids & parents of #Oulu🇫🇮 didnt get that memo.
At –20°C, 7-year-olds in Oulu bike to school alone.
Not because they’re tougher—but because the city made it safe & easy.
This isn’t about weather.
It’s about priorities.
(🎞: @harrivaarala)
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
Perhaps the greatest failure of the economics profession has been our inability to sell the idea that we should tax "bads" like congestion and pollution. One reason building is so expensive is that we have so many regulations instead of just prices.
Source:
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
You’ve been lied to about Africa.
@MagatteW: “Africa is not poor because of colonialism. Africa is poor because we have made it impossible for our people to create wealth.”
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
It's hard to talk about peace after the last two years, but I want you to know that people in Israel do. And one of the clearest voices out there in Israel right now is that of hostage survivor Gadi Moses.
He said, “We can at least try to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, with Syria and with Lebanon. It is good to live for our country, and we must spare no effort so that our children, grandchildren, will no longer know war. Yitzhak Rabin, who was a soldier and a commander for a long time before he was Prime Minister, also believed in these things and he paid for it with his life.”
Thirty years ago, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Rabin was Israel's prime minister, a military commander turned crusader for peace. He knew that you make peace with your enemies and he fought hard for his and Shimon Peres' vision of a new Middle East.
He tried to implement the two-state solution to create a Palestinian state which will live peacefully side-by-side with Israel. The Palestinian resistance movement, which calls for no Israel from the river to the sea, did not like it, and extremist Jews did not like it either. And on November 4th, 1994, thirty years ago, he was assassinated.
I was young at the time, and idealistic, and I also believed their dreams of peace and I was devastated when that dream was shattered. And after 30 years of blood and extremism and of the Palestinians consistently refusing peace offers again and again, I, at times, also lost hope. But we can never lose hope, and people like Gadi Moses should be our north star.
If a man who was kidnapped by Hamas saw members of his community and family murdered, spent two years at the hands of the Islamic Jihad in captivity in underground tunnels, tortured, abused, starved, if he can still talk about peace and still strive for peace and dream of peace, so can I, and so can you.
We remember Yitzhak Rabin, and we keep our focus on peace. Am Yisrael Chai
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
The High Court today rejected Freeholders’ bid to overturn legislation effectively barring them from demanding excessive payments for ‘ground rents’ or lease extensions which otherwise make leaseholders investments worthless. Sanity & fairness have won! caselaw.nationalarchives.gov…
Today and tomorrow a group of pianists is collaborating on playing a work by Erik Satie (d.1925) repetitively around the clock. People are welcome to dip in or watch the stream and please donate to help musicians. projectvexation.github.io/40…
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
Parts of my body lie scattered
on the asphalt. An arm has landed
on the rubble of a neighbor's house,
a leg rests on a burning tent,
and my head has rolled
under a horse cart.
I wish I could rise to gather
my body parts and bury them,
but I cannot find my hands,
and it is growing dark,
and I’ve lost my eyes.
Yet I can still feel
the weight of the darkness.
I can still hear the angel of death
collecting my dismembered soul.
And I can still feel the cold at night.
Bury me tonight,
oh angel of life!
Mosab Abu Toha
Oct 3, 2025
Peter Tompkins/St Pancras Clock Tower retweeted
To all those observing Yom Kippur in the UK and around the world, we wish you a meaningful fast.
G’mar Chatima Tova.
ALT Square graphic with white text that reads YOM KIPPUR - DAY OF ATONEMENT on a blue background laid over an image showing Torah scrolls, with the UK Government logo at the bottom.