We've had 24 hour news for nearly 40 years now, and during that time news stories do stick around if the press keep banging on about them. Things that don't stick tend to be stuff where right wing politicians/the wealthy are on the hook.

See my thread above as to why this is a bad idea bsky.app/profile/sgfm...

Summarised all the Budget preview pieces to save you time: Reeves was going to raise income tax but since the forecast is a bit better she won’t. Instead she’ll just do a bunch of tweaks and freezes that will annoy everyone and not leave her enough headroom to avoid the same thing next year. 1/2

Just seen another 'but you don't get it! Raising income tax would be unpopular!' It certainly would. I just am asking anyone who posts that to look at the currently planning departmental spending allocations going into 2028-9 and to explain why they think the *current* plans will be popular:

It was crystal clear that Mel was an absolutely deranged fascist crackpot ten years ago, fifteen, and you’ll notice it has barely hindered her career, not even when the Oslo killer cited her in his crazy manifesto. Quite the opposite, if anything.

happy Jair Bolsonaro got arrested after failing to cut off his ankle monitor day

There's so many horror games about being a lesbian who's trying to find her missing wife.

It's sort of funny how allowing the US tech industry to become so politically powerful has kind of done to it all the things that make armies that are too politically powerful very ineffective armies.

(also of course it makes it harder to take this policy seriously when it is the only thing the government claims to be doing against racism; you can't say "for this reason we must cut migration" while not regulating Twitter)

I feel dirty even engaging with this but whoever wrote this speech doesn't know what "net" means. She surely can't mean it would be better for social cohesion if more British born people left? (I suspect she means the gross flow but is so used to saying "netmigration" it feels like one word)

'If you opt out of our LLM business spying on your mail we'll turn off the categories on Gmail' is an all timer from Google lol

like "how do we give Moron Islanders safe and meaningful lives within the limits of our abilities" is a definite concern but in the event that any of them turn out to be professors, the first thing i'm reevaluating is the Moron Island survey team's competence, not the standards for Ph.Ds

no man. like. i think that one will work itself out on its own. i do not think that we need to ensure that homo erectus does not trick us into being a professor. that is not even in my top one hundred problems if this is true.

Increasingly tired government minister, who dislikes trans people and just wants a reasonable basis on which to discriminate: “So, under this guidance, which I remind you will have to be defended in court, how will trans people exercise their human rights?” EHRC representative, brightly: “No!”

"Do you think the plebs should get a jury trial" is such a thrilling line from Labour, truly great to see this

Same day

"But nobody talks about the good things they do! It's a comms issue!” #Labour

Wouldn't the British plan to repel invasion be 50 tridents go to Moscow? And if that's not the plan, why all the fuss about keeping them?

I fully agree Old Jezza’s failure to clock the very dodgy mural reflected badly on him. I do however contrast the reaction to this against e.g. Sir Keir cribbing from Enoch Powell, the billowing sixty foot union flag crackdowns and Suella Braverman summoning fash football thugs to attack protestors.

Labour’s “we have to do it, or racism will get worse” argument is striking. Any other public policy failures British ethnic minorities should be on the hook for? Can we be blamed en bloc for Rachel Reeves’ budget next week too? www.ft.com/content/37b0...

they will not, because they've been doing the same thing since at least 2010, if not 2000. The wierd flirtations of labour with anti-immigration stuff are a thing they always come back to and never pay them any dividends.

Labour’s contribution to the field of “least surprising opinion poll results” continues to to be very strong.

That the tax pledge has already been broken - in both spirit and letter, given how it was drafted! - is weirdly overlooked

On performative cruelty as a centrist political strategy

It's helpful to think of your first draft as something like a story board.

By coincidence, was just reading this bit in Keith Lowe's Naples 1944 yesterday. It would appear that Actual Proper Fascism is a category that excludes Benito Mussolini's regime at the height of its power.

I go further and say that Labour currently doesn't really think anything is gained in understanding any of the politics of 2006 to 2024. Like their analysis of "why did labour members vote Corbyn in the 2015 leadership" is "they're defective" And their analysis of 2017 is just absent.

Absolutely. An iron law of whether a statement about immigrants is true is that it should also apply if you just use the word “people”. (A test that many claims on the liberal side also fail!)

I'm not indifferent to the political problem here, but Labour, just as with the Conservatives, really seem to be confusing 'here's the political issue' with 'this creates an obligation on the universe to solve the problem for you in a way you'd like'.

Labour's fear of Reform, 'the election is tomorrow' attitude means that they are completely incapable of going 'okay, but what are *actually* the consequences of refugee and asylum policy that people don't like?'

Remembering when Osborne was hired as Standard editor with zero experience in journalism and an obvious partisan agenda, and the hacks were correctly outraged for 5 minutes before realising a word out of place might affect their careers. How times change.

It's true. If Labour raise income taxes, the party might slump to around a quarter of the vote, and its PM and Chancellor might be even more unpopular than Rishi Sunak in 2024 or Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 - wait, sorry, just got an email from Ipsos with some new polling, I'm sure it's nothing important.

To reiterate, this is about making life immeasurably more miserable and stressful for some of the most vulnerable people, in the almost certainly vain hope of winning over the votes of racists. Anything more shabby and shameful is difficult to envisage.

real shades of Saville in the way apparently everyone knew about Epstein but nobody did shit about it.

🚨 Denmark is attempting to force #ChatControl 2.0 through the back door TODAY! Take action now! fightchatcontrol.eu

Why is the only resignation-worthy issue at the BBC one which succinctly but slightly lazily told a basically accurate story about the right? Can we count the number of times "misleading editing" misrepresented the left?

John Le Carre was right about the British establishment and how the alumni of the best schools will sell out their own country for status and money and in particular a desperate desire for American attention

i think the most sick thing about govt going all in on Esther's phone shit after her daughter was murdered in a crime which had not nothing to do with phones ... is that I spoke to Brianna's friends. On Tiktok. They were everything to her - you want to take that away from other kids like Brianna?

Elite institutions across the western world capitulation to trump is both immoral and stupid. It will just encourage him to go further

The administration went all the way to the Supreme Court on Friday night to halt food-stamp funding. 🤡

seems to me that those democrats inclined not to fight perceive themselves as living through a somewhat ordinary cycle of presidential overreach and backlash and not something much more significant and dangerous

The automated problem factory!

The far-right are desperate to destroy Polanski not because they're afraid their supporters will vote Green, but because they're terrified of Greens being invited onto more talk shows where they'll expose Reform lies. (Something Labour hasn't been bothering to do for at least 9 years.)

Reeves should be aiming to get off two cycles: “every budget is an ordeal, every minor fluctuation in the forecast is a nightmare“ and “we did some small tax tweaks to raise £2bn and whoopsydaisy, something has fallen over unexpectedly/inflation is higher”.

Trevor Philips, "What is the implication of the white poppy?" Zack Polanski, "The white poppy began after WWI, mainly from women's groups, who talked about peace and antifascism" "So on the same day we remember the fallen, it's also about looking to the future and saying, we want a world of peace"

no, i think this is a real thing, especially for second gen desis who want to be integrated into conservatism

Help me reach my goal to afford food today? Please anything helps.🙏🏾