Harry Metcalfe

The spectator at the desk On the troubling emptiness of extraordinary productivity

New writing! On finding meaning in work, and the effect AI will have on that, and what to do about it.

blog.harrym.com/p/the-specta...

Some thoughts on AI “Anyone who tries to tell us they know the future is simply trying to own it.” — Margaret Heffernan in her introduction to Uncharted Take a deep breath. Nobody knows what is going to happen with AI…

More pondering on AI as I wrangle with what it means for public servants... Here's where I've got to so far: There is a useful path to take between hype and doom. It's time to keep experimenting and learning as nobody knows what the future will bring. jasonkitcat.com/2026/03/02/s...

Reason 4: Why haven’t you written that novel yet? Virginia Woolf knew it: money, money, money

A new post on something I've been wanting to talk about for a longgg time #writing open.substack.com/pub/lanaharp...

Cannot tell if satire

Oof sorry! That sounds really hard and horrid ❤️

Brilliant, geeky, healthy news... well done to @bengoldacre.bsky.social et al.

How can it possibly be the case that a fresh Ubuntu install, in 2026, still doesn't understand what monitors I have and what resolutions they support? This was annoying and weird ten years ago

I'm not generally pro people wrecking shit to make political points, but I'm glad this lot got found not guilty. They seem like a good bunch. And they make a pretty compelling case that JP Morgan aren't, and that breaking a few windows was, in this context, fine. So good for them 👍

This feels like a case were the law doesn't really fit the situation to me: or at least one where professional obligations, legal obligations, realpolitik and personal principles all collided in a way that precludes there being an obvious ethical answer.

In Case of Emergency | Southbank Centre

I went to see a play based on transcripts from the first trial, it was extremely good and (although clearly curated) the transcripts made a pretty powerful case for the idea that these medics did in fact have a "lawful excuse" for their actions

www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/in-...

Doctors cleared of criminal damage Six healthcare workers, including four doctors, say their climate activism has been vindicated after being found not guilty of criminal damage for breaking glass windows at the offices of JP Morgan th...

The lack of coverage on this story is surprising, but ho hum. TL;DR: the medics who broke windows at JP Morgan as part of a climate protest, and who suffered a mistrial two years ago, have just been retried and found unanimously not guilty.

thedoctor.bma.org.uk/articles/hea...

The machines that will predict the criminals of the future The Ministry of Justice will deploy machine learning to identify at-risk children for early intervention and to help prevent them falling into a life of crime

"The Ministry of Justice will deploy machine learning to identify at-risk children for early intervention and to help prevent them falling into a life of crime"

<- focus on structures and causes, not individuals, and look deeper than just "data"

[repeat forever]

www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

I’m pretty confident in calling this fake. The user who posted it seems to be part of a substantial network of accounts with similar usernames all posting and commenting on each other’s content. Ironically it’s a great example of an AI agent making stuff up to tell you what you want to hear

Hold the security: a vibe-coding story Vibe-coded doesn't mean vibe-secure, so we should try and stop the internet being full of even more broken things

A certain campaign website launched last week was a bit security-broken, in a way that has wider lessons for AI-coded stuff. Writing 👇

blog.harrym.com/p/hold-the-s...

The High Court rules the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful. What next? This is a big judgment. But not everything has changed

NEW

The High Court rules the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful.

What did the judgment say and not say, and what has changed and not changed. And what happens next.

Quick explainer by me at @prospectmagazine.co.uk

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/th...

Yes I did feel like some of the multiple choice ones I could answer properly because there wasn't a "just don't" option. But I tried to get my points to fit in the 200 words boxes.

👇Just an hour left to go on this! Go on and pop a quick response in before bed. Every little helps.

ETA: I forgot to mention one of the worst things - that it's retrospective, and will apply to people already here, already working towards settlement but not there yet. People who've moved here, put down roots - only to have this government yank them out. An extraordinary breach of faith. Awful.

I agree won't stop them trying though 😔

If you haven’t quite yet found the time to do this, please scrape together a few minutes this evening - the consultation closes just before midnight UK time.

If time is tight, skip the 200-word open answers. Your votes on closed answers matter.

www.gov.uk/government/c...

I've had a couple of people say the same 😔

Here's a word I don't use often: shameful. But this policy is shameful. I'm ashamed that my government has proposed it. It's arrogant, it's cruel, it won't work in any meaningful way, but it will make our country a worse place. Please respond (before midnight). It's so, so bad gov.uk/government/c...

Instead we have one that starts from suspicion. Settlement should be a sensible process of integration that recognises a migrant's future as being here: but under this policy it's a hostile, exclusionary, decade-long++ trial. It presumes that a bureaucracy can judge who deserves to belong. It can't.

What ‘earned settlement’ tells us about belonging, character, and the country we are becoming - bmwelby's blog Over the weekend I spent some time responding to the Home Office consultation (it closes in mid-February) on proposed changes to settlement and what it calls “earned residence”. Please engage with it....

Like @bmwelby.bsky.social said: this should mostly be a policy about how to help people to feel at home and build a good life here, with a bit of sensible protection to help us to avoid letting in too many murderers. bm.wel.by/2026/01/14/w...

And then there are the children. A child brought here at 3 whose parents face a 15-year wait could grow up entirely in this country and still face years of uncertainty about whether they can stay. Children don't choose to migrate. Treating such a child's belonging as provisional is terribly cruel.

Across the whole thing, they mistake measurability for meaning. A person who's raised kids here, made friends, participated in local life is integrated whether or not they can pass a (fatuous) multiple choice exam. Real integration is lived and worked, but lived things don't fit on forms. Don't try!

The word is revealing and it matters. If you tell people this is about "character" you're saying those who fail it are deficient as human beings. Not that they didn't meet a practical requirement: that they weren't a good enough person. Who do they think they are, to presume to say such a thing?

The first pillar is "Character". But what the policy actually measures is criminal records, English, and earnings. Those are things you can observe: character is not. Character is morals, resilience, humaniness, the capacity for growth. The state cannot assess it and shouldn't pretend to try.

We begin with the Home Secretary's foreword, which is something else. She opens with her own family's migration story, declares herself a patriot, then lays out a system designed to keep people like her parents in constant limbo for a decade or more. The lack of self-awareness is kinda mindblowing.

I've just responded to the Earned Settlement consultation. It closes tonight. The whole idea is dreadful but what stuck with me most is the gross arrogance of the whole exercise. A (cross) thread 🧵