‘Terrible things are happening outside… Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return… to find their families gone.’ Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

This is official Reform Party policy. 👇🏻

I'm increasingly convinced that if social media existed in the 1930s Germany, there would be endless videos of Jews being hauled out of their homes while people watched like this. People let this happen because they can't fight the state and it effectively encourages learned helplessness.

Appalled to your core by what Trump's fascist henchmen are doing in the United States? Well, read for yourself: Nigel Farage wants to repeat it in the United Kingdom.

Love this.

24% of people who voted Labour at the last general election now plan to vote Green or Lib Dem. 0% of those who voted Reform at the last election now plan to vote Labour.

I feel bad for all of us who have to be good at our jobs when the answer is to be sufficiently white, rich and powerful and then you can just drool on yourself and the press will be like “audiences intrigued by his unusual communication style”

Banning children from using devices won't stop kids going online. It creates secrecy, it will stop kids from talking to trusted adults when they come across dangerous content. It also takes the responsibility from companies like X cleaning up their act on misinformation, abusive/dangerous content.

Without America, "right now, you'd all be speaking German" Trump tells an audience in Switzerland.

"China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet, I haven't been able to find any wind farms in China" says Donald Trump. China generates more power from wind than any other country on the planet

This is quite the thread.

not saying Trump isn't entirely with-it but he has just claimed that the current row is over control of "Iceland"

Pastors working for ICE Sex workers running mutual aid for immigrants Which one looks more like Jesus???

youtu.be/ft0vkKCadgk The chorus to this song’s been bouncing round my head all week. It surfaced in my brain after having not heard it for many decades - and today my friend Diana posted it on FB. Seems like we’re thinking the same things about the US currently.

Yesterday I taught a class about the historiography of Stonewall. I used the official defacing of the Stonewall National Monument - removing the TQ+ by the administration - to illustrate how public memory and debates about history, aka historiography, have relevance today. Next year I'll use this.

In a speech to the World Economic Forum, Mark Carney says middle powers such as Canada must accept that the rules-based international order is effectively dead, and great power rivalry with is here to stay. Key excerpt:

After one day of unity over Trump the Mail, the Telegraph, Times and Badenoch have decided the Chagos are more important than the destruction of the western alliance and backed the insane ramblings of a rogue president who was fine with the deal last year. We see you #collaborators

When more of the usual accounts are up late, talking obliquely

Billionaire wealth has risen to a record £13.6 trillion after rising at triple the recent average rate last year, according to Oxfam research ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos

Last chance to tell us how we could better serve our community ⬇️

Spectacularly Freudian typo from the lovely Paul here… or is it? 😁

Say what you like about Chinese State Media, but this is a straight up banger

Don't really have a dog in the ban-social-media-for-under-16s fight, but seems utterly irrational to demand it now. A country which is comparable to Britain has just done so. Surely, if you were remotely committed to evidence, you would take a year to see how it goes before proposing we copy them.

Straight women can't even get any peace when they're in orbit

Worth listening to the 'If Books Could Kill' podcast episode on Jonathan Haidt ('The Anxious Generation'), the 'expert' Wes Streeting has selected to investigate a smart phone ban. Spoiler alert: once again, this is policy based evidence making.

Compare & contrast. This is Trump’s demand for Greenland. And this is Hitler’s for the Sudetenland. There is no difference. The language. The unstoppable need to dominate. The megalomania. It’s the same. And Keir Starmer’s response is appeasement. We are in that moment. 1/

The dog is all of us. www.ft.com/content/73c8...

It was through MSN, MySpace, Napster and LOTR forums in my early teens that I first spoke with other queer teens like me. I found community and felt less alone. I don’t want any child to be denied community. Yes there are problems with social media. Regulation is the answer. Banning it is not.

Denying under 16s the chance to develop critical thinking, build community, explore how they fit in with the culture choices they make all seems sad, when we could focus on regulating platforms, prosecuting content creators, fining tech vendors. Little incentive to improve if we make it adult only

A lot of these political editors see Starmer/Trump and Mamdani/Trump as unexpected bromances, rather than what the rest of us see, which is someone trying to gamely manage a lunatic.

Transphobia really does rot your brain.

A reminder that Rosindell claimed more than £125,000 in second home expenses for a flat in London, while designating his childhood home 17 miles away - where his mother lived - as his main address. https://news.sky.com/story/conservative-mp-andrew-rosindell-defects-to-reform-uk-13496013

Feeling a bit low today? That’s human. Being told it’s the most depressing day of the year? That’s marketing. Blue Monday is not an actual thing. I should know. I wrote a book explaining why our brains fall for it. The Idiot Brain - Million-selling 10th Anniversary edition out now.

Palantir is working with ICE. Why the hell are we giving Palantir our NHS information. Palantir need to be banned from UK Goverment, just like the Swiss banned them from theirs.

This is probably the most accurate description. Someone in their mid-50s today told me that this is the first time he had thought about or been affected by politics. And that guy is actively guarding buildings and his coworkers from ICE.

We need to tax them. Tax their assets, tax their wealth. Take their money out of politics. Tax them until there are no billionaires left. That we allow anyone to accrue this much is as great an existential threat as climate change and atomic weapons.

So, if you ever wondered why people who understand surveillance are salty about video cameras on doorbells... It's only a matter of time before they get co-opted into mass surveillance. And if the regime you live under changes that's you spying on your neighbours.

This is a good lesson, no matter how you come to learn it

After careful consideration, we accepted Andrew Rosindell into Reform on the strength of his record of voting against LGBT rights, including same sex marriage and scrapping section 28. Reform needs more homophobes.

I'm pleased to welcome Andrew Rosindell to Reform. With any luck most people will have forgotten he was a Tory MP, because he didn't come into Parliament for nearly two years while he was being investigated for sexual assault and rape.

As Pratchett said:

I can't trust politicians who are anti-trans. Not because I'm "only searching for perfection" which is what centrists will be accusing me of for the rest of my life, it's because if you're not pro-trans you'll be garbage on lots of other issues too. Being anti-trans NEVER exists in a vacuum.

Utterly gorgeous stories about an utterly lovely man.

Makes me feel insane to live in a world that's persecuting trans folk while simultaneously doing big billboards advertising gender affirming care to cis people???

Loving the way some people have started calling Farage’s little gang Conform now so many power hungry deadbeat Conservatives are joining.

So many totally inadequate people have risen to the top. Look at this ridiculous man Thinks he could and should be Prime Minister. Not an original idea in his head and all the charisma of a potato.

One of my upcoming History Month events...

Chair of EHRC seeking a meeting with Sex Matters to discuss not only ‘mutual priorities’ but also ‘ways to work together going forward’! 🤔 Utterly inappropriate from a supposedly neutral Chair of the EHRC. Interested to see what will @commonswec.parliament.uk have to say?

🇷🇺 "MEPs of UKIP opposed a resolution in 2008 condemning Putin’s invasion of Georgia. Farage also opposed a resolution in 2011 which criticised the conduct of elections in Russia that were widely regarded as rigged." Farage has always had a soft touch to Putin. https://econ.st/3Nm9yXA