Have you read The Incandescent by Emily Tesh? The best magic school story I have read by a mile - from the point of view of a magic teacher. According to Weasel's Law you can't make magic make sense because so much about the world would be different but this comes closest

One of the top 5 cities (*) London, Rome, NY, Berlin, Jerusalem
(Not necessarily in that order, but probably in that order actually)

(*) Obviously I have not been to all cities

And Twitter is IRC with deliberate perverse incentives to make it as deranged as possible: one namespace and optimised for starting pile ons via hashtags, likes, retweets and "The Algorithm"

We don't want him !

There is no excuse for Slack. Or Discord

Also dare I say an somewhat shall we say un-tempered Green Party as a major player in the Lib-Dem Green minority government (with a confidence deal with an extremely sulky Labour party)

Also occurred to me earlier, as with the US why would anyone invest in the UK given the danger of a Farage government? This is how we go Argentina

There is an exhibition of hlLe Carre stuff at the Bodleian at the moment

So I suspect a year of lag, then four years of it clearly becoming a problem, and then two years of screaming at anyone who notices the problem, before turning on a dime shamelessly.

What sort of plant? Triffids?