Christine Burns MBE 🏳️‍⚧️📚⧖

Creator of good books such as Trans Britain and Pressing Matters. Lifetime Achievement Award PrideOfManchester 2021. Drove two Nissan LEAF EVs for ten years and is now enjoying a BYD Dolphin called Hattie. Posts about #climate mitigation, #trans moral panic, #books and now #fascism.  #Retired. She/Her.

Buy Trans Britain online: https://www.queerlit.co.uk/collections/non-fiction/products/trans-britain-our-journey-from-the-shadows
Bookstore UK Affiliate ‘store’ listing trans-related books: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/christineburns
Location: Manchester UK

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Last Notes

2026-03-19 17:47:47 UTC

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There are other options. Communal housing suggests a communal solution but the experts would be able to tell you what’s best. I wouldn’t use an air source heat pump to bake a cake but the unsuitability doesn’t prove anything.

2026-03-19 16:14:04 UTC

Rather than argue with the naysayers all over the internet who’ll claim that heat pumps don’t work, the boffins at Octopus have produced a live dashboard to chart the online data they get from all the thousands of systems they’ve installed. This is a fantastic resource. Looking at the numbers for the fleet as a whole I’m pleased to say that ‘Rosy’ (my Cosy) is bang on the norm as far as performance goes. https://octopus.energy/cosy-heat-pump-performance/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-92N1fVWdFAehre8wYictiCqGgrnpGeD9V5_EB3att0qPTctKB8kOeNTffe3KS1P7Gv41P9c_5XE4noQ-RqhVWDvpjwnA&_hsmi=131414226&utm_content=131414226&utm_source=hs_email
https://files.mastodon.green/media_attachments/files/116/256/721/169/831/943/original/62533acdaeaf7cc7.png

2026-03-18 12:16:49 UTC

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I hope this isn’t wishful thinking but I think I detect early signs that Reform’s totally charmed existence is starting to get challenged. There’s a noticeable uptick in scrutiny from some quarters, although it is miles short of the questions that should be coming for a party that likes to portray itself as a government in waiting.

2026-03-18 08:21:46 UTC

A thought… Could we tax Overton Windows? It’s high time that bloody window was bricked up.

2026-03-18 07:52:51 UTC

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So, what I guess I’m hoping for is that a more finished and polished economic policy agenda starts to address the easy criticisms but still adheres to the quality of being different. I know that the broad brush upsets the status quo and brings on fierce criticism but I’d like to see him win that argument.

2026-03-18 07:50:29 UTC

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To me, as someone without any orthodox economic grounding, I find Polanski’s broad brush ideas refreshing even though I know that exposes me to accusations of naivety and of succumbing to Polanski’s skill as a populist of the left. I’m cautious because I recognise Polanski’s success is that he’s harnessing the tricks of the populist right to advance a leftist policy agenda, but his economics seem to make refreshing sense. After all, the orthodoxy hasn’t been working for yrs.

2026-03-18 07:45:27 UTC

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I was struck by how the generally amiable Rory Stewart really went for Polanski over his (at that time) unfinished economic policy ideas when RS and Alaistair Campbell interviewed him in depth for their ‘Leading’ podcast. Over time I’ve come to view RS as more left-leaning than he’ll admit to himself but something about Polanski’s ideas really upset him and brought out the fiercer Tory side because what Polanski talks about really undermines a cross party orthodoxy in UK.

2026-03-16 20:29:14 UTC

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It’s bizarre. Since the advent of number plate scanning barriers the car parks essentially need no staff. It’s a business that essentially collects fees without human intervention. And parking isn’t cheap. It seems hard not to make that pay. The sites may not be at full occupancy but they’re far from empty. I’d suspect there’s been sale and leaseback of the properties, filling the bosses pockets and gutting the balance sheet. And then… oops, oh dear, they’re insolvent.

2026-01-28 07:06:40 UTC

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A European security alliance incorporating Ukraine as a valued source of innovation and strategic prowess may have a tough belt-tightening few years as it builds Ukraine-style border defences across the rest of the eastern flank but it’s doable given the will that an aggressive threat instills. The new alliance would have a purpose whereas NATO has come to seem like a solution for yesterday’s threats.

2026-01-28 07:00:11 UTC

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.. Add to that, the USSR’s military capability relied heavily on Ukraine managing and servicing the nukes. There’s some doubt whether the remains of that arsenal (given up by Ukraine in exchange for security guarantees) is even serviceable. The Ukraine conflict exposed the dire state of Russia’s tanks and the weaknesses in its military organisation. Plus, the Ukraine conflict has significantly weakened Russia’s infrastructure and fighting capability after nearly 5 years.

2026-01-28 06:56:14 UTC

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I’ve felt for a long time that the west has been deluded by the myths of Russian power. I vividly remember back in the seventies/eighties all those diagrams of soviet missiles and tanks and warships and inventory. That Cold War fear is deeply ingrained. But Russia alone is a shadow of the USSR. My biggest shock was the realisation that (for all its apparent size on the Mercator map) Russia is only about 135 million people — less than two UKs and a minnow against EU’s 500m..

2025-10-10 18:14:49 UTC

Today I learned that there are only three English cities with an electrical consumption greater than 200 megawatts: London, Manchester and Birmingham. By comparison, the people who want to build AI data centres here, which nobody asked for, want a supply of up to 1 gigawatt (1,000 megawatts) for each one. That’s how skewed this whole nonsense is.

2025-09-25 16:20:58 UTC

Starmer to introduce digital ID cards. You just know it’ll be used to out trans people as well as the stated purpose of harassing anyone who doesn’t look white enough. Starmer to announce plans for digital ID scheme https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g54g6vgpdo

2025-09-19 06:42:58 UTC

At a time when there is precious little reporting at all, this long read provides a deep dive into what our unexpectedly repressive Labour government is about to inflict on trans people. If accurate, the EHRC’s wet dream will create a state in which people who operate toilets for use by staff and the public will be turned into toilet police and trans people may be unable to pee safely anywhere outside their homes.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/britains-bathroom-ban/

2025-09-19 06:34:54 UTC

Britain’s Bathroom Ban
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/britains-bathroom-ban/

2025-09-13 07:42:46 UTC

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The upshot is that the more extreme the right becomes the more likely it is to want to murder anyone perceived as a stranger or outsider — to the point where they ultimately end up attacking their own for not being extreme enough. Being on the right is a spiral towards the depths of human depravity. The more extreme the left becomes the more likely followers are to believe in communitarian ideals and the most memorable of Christian invocations: to love thy neighbour and be kind to strangers.

2025-09-13 07:42:46 UTC

I can’t help laughing when some commentators try to distract from the extremes of the right by claiming there’s an extreme left. Let’s unpack that… The right is characterised by a belief in individualism and ‘winning’ at life as though it’s a contest. It breeds selfishness and calculated cruelty. The extreme of that is zero empathy, more selfishness, more cruelty. The left starts from kindness and mutual support. It believes in sharing. The extreme of that is extreme kindness. Extreme empathy.

2025-08-11 16:15:06 UTC

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For context, Britain’s whole grid currently carries 30-50 GW between the generators and the regional distribution networks. The UK national grid looks a lot like a mainline railway map. Generators were either coal (placed next to the big coal fields and pits) or nuclear (placed away from population centres). The whole grid doesn’t have to carry the whole load. It mostly..
https://files.mastodon.green/media_attachments/files/115/010/982/571/365/671/original/e2ddb2123cbd0076.jpeg

2025-07-24 08:02:48 UTC

In 1986 the BBC’s ‘Micro Live’ did a whole programme on connecting your computer to the phone, sending emails and accessing other services. You could be forgiven for thinking it would never catch on. One service it shows was BT’s Telecom Gold and, at the time it was screened, I had just delivered a whole project doing data collection from supermarkets and collating it through Telecom Gold rather than build a whole ton of infrastructure
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GL1NaenGPdw&si=ueRB43rMgaSKl02w

2025-07-18 10:12:39 UTC

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They were so scared of what the press would do to them that it’s as though they’ve got Stockholm Syndrome. It says the press are so powerful that a party of the left is afraid to breathe a word of a remotely social democratic idea. It begs the question of what are they for if, as the government, they are too afraid to stand for anything their abusers wouldn’t approve of.

2025-07-18 09:44:49 UTC

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They came to power a year ago virtually unprepared for government. It’s as though 14 years in opposition had led them to forget the need to have a strategic set of policies grounded in a moral and principled worldview. They’d come to think that being “not the Tories” was enough. A possible exception has been Ed Miliband, who got the job he wanted with a clear vision of what he wants to achieve for the good of the species.

2025-07-18 07:29:48 UTC

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I detect a pattern:
Labour claims to know more about racism than a prime target of racism.
Labour thinks it knows more about disability than disabled people.
Labour believes it knows more about conversion therapy than LGBT folk.
It’s the party that vilified a critic of Israeli oppression of Palestinians by starting an ‘antisemitism’ witch hunt.
And I’ll leave another one hanging awkwardly unmentioned because I hate being predictable.

2025-07-01 06:28:48 UTC

“The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security would like to bring attention to and condemn recent judicial and governmental developments in the United Kingdom, which attempt to harm transgender and intersex people in the UK by stripping them of privacy and segregating them as ‘others.’ The Lemkin Institute believes these moves are part of a broader process of erasure.”
https://www.lemkininstitute.com/red-flag-alerts/red-flag-alert-on-anti-trans-and-intersex-rights-in-the-uk

2025-06-04 17:12:20 UTC

Nicest view today. On the lower of the two roads on the Dingle Peninsula in Western Ireland earlier today. And, before any aficionados ask me, yes I did the Connell Pass route coming back, although it was hard to see the road let alone the view in the low cloud.
https://files.mastodon.green/media_attachments/files/114/626/187/720/701/499/original/4d446ecbbe84e41e.jpeg

2025-05-15 06:47:46 UTC

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The excuse of choice in the past has always been that our pipes leak. That was the explanation in the summer of 1976. The only other factor (maybe) is that the ubiquity of the front loading washing machine means people use considerably more water in more loads for convenience (despite newer washers being designed to waste less). I’m the sort who saves up the washing for a ‘proper load’ and puts only enough water in the kettle to boil exactly one mugful of water for tea.

2025-04-26 08:52:26 UTC

Guardian: "Rights can be lost in a second -- Older trans people reveal their fears after supreme court ruling"
https://files.mastodon.green/media_attachments/files/114/403/380/796/052/586/original/64f39f88cf9d79c2.jpeg

2025-04-23 11:48:45 UTC

One thing that beats me about the Supreme Court's shenanigans is this. The Equality Act is just fifteen years old. I still have my copy of the massive 'Discrimination Law Review' report that constitutes the policy starting point for every aspect of it. The people who drafted it are still alive. Many of those who voted for it are still in Parliament. The extensive debates and committee meetings are all in Hansard. The Bill Managers can be interviewed. So why did the SC resort to 'guessing'..

2025-04-16 13:08:19 UTC

Statement from Jo Maughan of the Good Law Project following today's Supreme Court decision re trans women. Jo says rights have been put back 20 years but, personally, I think it could be argued to be 26 years, since Labour enacted the Sex Discrimination (Gender Reassignment) Regulations 1999, protecting trans people under the Sex Discrimination Act (and, crucially, trans women as women). If you can afford to support GLP go here: https://goodlawproject.org/donate/?utm_source=Good+Law+Project&utm_campaign=00b8d6504d-EMAIL_ForSomeWomenScotland_2025_04_16_12_03
https://files.mastodon.green/media_attachments/files/114/347/765/185/175/233/original/539a6e392738bd1a.jpeg

2025-03-26 18:30:40 UTC

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There is no stopping the fall of the republic now because it has already -- to all intents and purposes -- fallen. The rule of law is so badly degraded that there are no consequences for those responsible for the breach whilst there's every chance Trump will declare The Atlantic an illegal enemy of his state. The cabinet are fools. The country's reputation is tanked. Trust is gone and the money soon will be. Even if it were stopped tomorrow there's no easy repair.

2025-03-22 09:10:50 UTC

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... A lightning strike caused a generating station to trip out (something that can happen occasionally) but the spike from this trip caused a couple of other generation sites to protectively trip too ... and suddenly most of the south of England lost power. Worse, some electric trains lost power in a way that drivers couldn't restart them. Engineers had to travel out. This example of a cascade effect is very rare in Britain but the effects just pile up.

2025-03-22 09:10:50 UTC

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Remember how the railways sufferred a crisis in the nineties? A large system can be starved of maintenance for years by the bean counters. In their eyes the cuts are warranted as nothing breaks ... at first. Then we had things like Potters Bar and had to ride around in trains restricted nationally to 40mph because nobody knew what would break next. Another example is a few years ago when we actually had a cascade failure in the high voltage grid...

2025-03-22 08:34:57 UTC

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..a national political issue, engineers will have been pressured to go with expanding the original substation for the area rather than create a new political problem to build another one on someone else's doorstep. And that all plays against the background of everone taking the reliability of the grid for granted. The engineers may warn otherwise but engineers get ignored when the political chips are down. And so Heathrow's power link grew ever more precarious till now.

2025-03-22 08:34:57 UTC

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..when you throw a switch, but they assume it always will be. It's even got easier as our electricity demand has decreased in the last 10-15 years as we waste less on incandescent lighting. An installation like Heathrow has meanwhile grown out of all proportion to its original design. It has sprawled both sides of the runways. At each convulsive expansion people will have been told by engineers that independent supplies really needed to be commissioned. But Heathrow's..

2025-03-22 08:34:57 UTC

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..Load shedding became a thing of the past as the national grid transmission network was completed. The point of the grid (rather like the internet) is that it forms a mesh so that power can always be routed around a single point of failure. I contend that the grid was so successful in eliminating precarity (except in remote rural areas) that people have largely come to take an almost 100% reliable supply for granted. Nobody knows how it is that power is always there..

2025-03-22 08:34:57 UTC

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..demand is like that of a small city. All that lighting, heating, aircon and baggage handling takes enormous power -- and a new major grid connection would not have looked cheap. You're talking tens of megawatts, a new substation, new runs of high voltage pylons that everybody resists building in a built-up environment. The knock on effects of placing a large load in a different part of the network ripple out. And, since, the budgetary cost of a major airport expansion is..

2025-03-22 08:34:56 UTC

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The window of time when we ever had a robust level of redundancy in the power system was quite narrow. I remember being a small child in East London in the fifties and early sixties and power cuts were a feature of winters as the system was insufficient to deal with nascent demand for electric heating (encouraged to displace coal fires) and everyone buying new fangled appliances like TVs. (This is distinct from the 70s rolling cuts caused by industrial action)...

2025-02-04 07:32:00 UTC

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The problem for the first hypothesis is that Trump keeps caving as he finds that, far from wilting in the face of tariffs, countries are really gung ho about retaliiating in ways that sting. He's deferred the tariffs now for both Mexico and Canada. Canada's retaliation is already real and unlikely to switch off that easily and China has preemptively raised tariffs on US imports too. If Trump thought he could bully the world he really gambled badly.

2025-01-26 10:00:45 UTC

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What the fancy schools teach, above all, is how to sound right and perform a simulation of authority. And, unfortunately, a lot of people fall for it, especially when peppered with a bit of Latin.

2024-12-31 08:58:20 UTC

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Unless it’s for sailing across the Pacific, I’m not sure of the utility of a map where the land where people live is consigned to the edges and it’s impossible to accurately infer which way is north. If you’re desperate to accurately view the relative sizes of land masses then buy a globe. It’s definitely a sign of the times though that the British Isles is virtually off the edge of the map.

2024-12-27 17:13:41 UTC

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I was one of the kids lucky enough to go to a well-regarded (and self-conceited) grammar school but our history teacher was absolutely appalling. No skills at bringing history alive. Homework assignments that meant joylessly memorising a chapter for a test. Most of my appreciation for British History has come from TV or film drama watched as an adult and by getting steeped in family genealogy spanning five hundred years.

2024-12-07 22:18:21 UTC

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That argument presupposes that no tipping points are passed before stopping the emissions. Also, temperatures won’t stop rising immediately because warming has a kind of momentum. Finally, just stopping emissions is a precarious state unless we also do something to help the existing CO2 we’ve dumped in the atmosphere transform into something else non-warming.

2024-11-18 09:54:35 UTC

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This is where you have to admire the vertical integration of Tesla. They’re building a plant to process the stuff that comes out of the ground from territory they bought in the US. They’ve built a plant to process the Lithium Hydroxide that comes from that plant and turn it into battery cathode material. They’ve built the plant to roll batteries from that material and make them straight into packs that they’ve built markets for. But more than that..

2024-11-18 09:54:35 UTC

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..they’ve innovated at each step so their batteries aren’t just the same as everyone else makes. They’ve gone well beyond trying to make a commodity product and the vertical integration means they have margin control because very little of what they spend goes to third parties as profits. Granted they also work with partners to get the volumes up but I liken this to the days when car manufacturers made key elements of the product. Ford had a giant..

2024-11-18 09:54:35 UTC

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..foundry in Dagenham casting engine blocks and my grandma sewed together the seat covers. I see none of that integrated vision in the way our politicians look at building battery assembly plants.

2024-11-18 09:42:08 UTC

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I don’t know. Buying the machines that spread mixtures of minerals on metal foils and stuff the result in a can or pouch is the easy part. We could buy our way into ASSEMBLING batteries. But I don’t know where we’d get the raw materials because China has inserted itself into key parts of the supply chains. I don’t think we’ve got a true strategy for using what we make in stuff people buy, aside from some vague notion that it goes in cars.

2024-11-18 08:12:20 UTC

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possibly, but any strategy to build competitive Sodium ion batteries needs to simultaneously establish a local supply chain for the cathode and anode minerals and (since the batteries have lower storage density) a whole range of downstream applications to keep the factory supplied with volume customers. I think politicians fall into trap of thinking about the cell factory in isolation.

2024-11-18 07:33:59 UTC

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I can’t see anyone succeeding from scratch in a market where the entry cost is so high and the unit price keeps falling. Chinese manufacturers like CATL and BYD are on course to get the price of a kilowatt hour of batteries down to around $50 and the lead time into volume production for anyone else is such that by the time you get numbers up you’ve been beaten on price. The early mover advantage is locked in.

2024-08-31 08:55:02 UTC

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Four long days and then, of course, the boss rings up or texts you on days 5, 6 and 7. When I left the big IT/business consultancy I used to work for the young bucks had started trying to out-do each other for how early they could schedule a ‘breakfast meeting’. I told them where to go.

2024-08-19 17:05:44 UTC

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The democrats won the popular vote in 2016 but Trump won because of the country’s bizarre ‘electoral college’ so the real measure to watch is how she is down in those states where she needs to win to get enough of those (with everything designed to give more sway to the southern slave owning bits).

2024-08-13 10:01:34 UTC

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Wars are essential to the arms industry. They’re also the dynamo of invention for new types of weapon. Prolonging this one has shown that all those big expensive weapons we were used to are outclassed by smaller cheaper stuff you can deliver more accurately.

2024-08-10 19:56:24 UTC

Question. A three part work is a trilogy. But is there a single word like that for a two part work? How do you describe a work that’s two books or two films or whatever? And I wonder if that omission has led to artistic creations sometimes being stretched to three parts when two would have been just dandy.

2024-08-05 10:46:43 UTC

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I notice that Diesel sales are down by almost 22% in July. Registrations have fallen a further 1.4% market share since last year and, since this attrition has been going on a while, you have to wonder how long such low numbers have to go on for before the overall population of diesels starts to shrink and filling station operators start making decisions about how much of the stuff they hold on site. Fossil fuel sales are low margin and rely on volume sales to justify holding stock.

2024-08-05 10:19:29 UTC

The first of the analyses of July’s car sales is now out from the industry body SMMT. Almost 200,000 EVs have come on the road in the first seven months of the year — 27K in July, representing 18.5% of sales and 18.8% up on July 2023
https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/
https://files.mastodon.green/media_attachments/files/112/908/869/384/813/505/original/af61dfeae6bdacca.jpeg

2024-08-04 20:50:29 UTC

Whenever I watch The Proms I’m reminded of the time, back in August 1997, when I was doing an IT consultancy visit with the contractors who were renovating the Albert Hall at the time. I remember looking down from the highest circle on the musicians rehearsing that night’s Prom. And then my colleague took me up on the roof outside for lunch and literally poached me for the much bigger company he was going to join. It was audacious but frankly one of the best moves I’ve ever made.

2024-07-31 13:52:06 UTC

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Michael Collins

2024-07-31 09:24:21 UTC

The warm months add about 40 miles to the range of my car. This month I’ve averaged 4.78 miles per kWh (about 280 miles range on a full battery) whereas, in the coldest months, it can dip to 4m/kWh or just below, giving me a smidge below 240 miles. In absolute terms, I’ve driven 143 miles in July and the car has used 29.9kWh (about 50% of a full battery). I’ve charged just once, at a public charger on the motorway services for £13.26. More detail in the alt text.
https://files.mastodon.green/media_attachments/files/112/880/359/774/641/628/original/c90900f3179eacf7.jpeg

2024-07-28 12:39:04 UTC

Right now, 37% of British mainland electricity is being generated by solar. Just think if David Cameron hadn’t kneecapped a burgeoning rooftop solar industry eight years ago and successive Tory leaders hadn’t done their best to stifle utility scale rural solar. https://grid.iamkate.com
https://files.mastodon.green/media_attachments/files/112/864/137/985/973/024/original/cefd567f5dda4305.jpeg

2024-06-08 06:45:44 UTC

A new poll in the US reveals that 77% believe their politicians use transgender issues as a distraction.
They’re treating YOU as fools.
They’re treating US as disposable pawns.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/norc-poll-77-say-elected-officials

2024-06-06 08:06:20 UTC

So here comes Day#4, starting in Galway. Olga has been on the juice overnight so her battery is stuffed full of Irish electrons.
https://files.mastodon.green/media_attachments/files/112/568/642/802/345/078/original/14d5cad39852ab5f.jpeg

2024-05-17 11:49:38 UTC

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OK… An update. I swiftly determined that authenticator apps like Microsoft Authenticator want to take over and manage all your login credentials, which apple’s Passwords/Keychain feature does far more securely and across devices, so I wasn’t having any of that nonsense. So then I went looking to see whether Apple had implemented an authenticator in Apple Passwords. Turns out it does. So then to set it up PatientAccess displayed a QR code which it wanted me to point the camera of my iPhone at, ..

2024-05-17 11:49:38 UTC

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..except that I was using Passwords on the same iPhone. So, I had to screengrab the QR code, let iCloud sync it to my iPad and then I could do the camera thing. Did nobody ever think that through. Anyway, that worked and I’m back in. However, I was using the lifetime skills from two degrees in Computer Science and work as an IT consultant and I really wasn’t sure what I was doing. Had I been ill it would’ve been a non starter. These developers need taking out to be shot. Or poke their eyes out..

2024-05-17 10:52:44 UTC

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I wouldn’t mind if there was much you can do when you sign in to PatientAccess but, apart from reordering repeat meds and booking an appointment, there’s precious little. So why the Fort Knox obsession? It’s bad enough that the app doesn’t stay logged in between repeat meds orders. It has notifications that won’t go away. It’s clunky. The only thing it offers is a pathological level of security which is going to become more of a barrier the more I age.

2024-05-17 10:52:44 UTC

I can’t believe it. I went to use the PatientAccess app and suddenly, without much explanation, it wants me to CHOOSE and set up an authenticator app — making the service even harder to log in to than it already was. The NHS and its surrogates are so obsessed with security (far more than banks) to the extent they’re making their useless app, with almost zero functionality, practically unusable. Suppose I was in a panic to book an appointment? This is a huge senseless barrier to usability.