A huge victory for Cambridge.

Orwell was the o.g. AntiFa.

Opportunity here for a writer on a low income to get access to a nine week novel writing course taught by the great @silvanhistorian.bsky.social www.curtisbrowncreative.co.uk/course/break...

was just thinking about Your Party, and how it's a shame that there isn't someone who can just come in, tell the left what the plan is and make them all pull together, and then realised it's the XKCD "standards" joke

I love London so much. So much. Did you know that London has the lowest level of ethnic violence of any city of comparable size in the world? Multiculturalism has in fact worked here. They just don’t want it to be true because we happen to have a Muslim mayor.

This technology is so clearly designed to profit off cheating and struggling students--its insidious. And yet universities keep announcing how they're allowing this company into its midst, to exploit and incapacitate our students even more

Brilliant words by Judith Butler which express the fundamental problem with the "gender-critical" ideology - that it misunderstands and distorts what it means to be critical. [Extract from "Who's afraid of Gender", London: Penguin, 2025, p. 141]

I've written to Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, urging them to join me in condemning Elon Musk's dangerous remarks inciting violence yesterday. As leaders, we must stand together and make clear Musk will face serious consequences for these actions.

Govt should take this message seriously. The far right, backed by the world's richest man, is actively stoking racial & political violence. Staying quiet, flattering them, saying "we hear you" won't work. Stand up for decency, for respect, for the best of modern Britain or watch those things burn

Esp given assassination of Kirk in US i find Musk's intervention here, calling for dissolution of parliament and a new govt, really scary . Also UK govt bodies should get the fuck off X.

I need you to understand what this country feels like right now for those of us who look different. I'm sitting here, trying to plan for Saturday, make sure I don't even need to go to the corner shop for milk, like it's Christmas Day or lockdown. Why? Because I live near where Yaxley-Lennon will 1/

Justin Webb just referred on Today to "platforms like Bluesky, where you can see the celebration of the killing" of Charlie Kirk. What I'm seeing on here is overwhelming condemnation; despair at the violence of US politics; alarm at where this might go; & calls for equal horror at other shootings.

Keeping Mandelson would mean Number 10 thinks not following a recommendation to take specialist tax advice is a resigning matter, but believing the world’s most notorious paedophile over his victims and lying about your post-conviction contact with him isn’t. That’s…not a sustainable position.

If anything they've made it even more of an art-work by doing so. Chilling.

I do worry about the implicit argument [people know we are anti-racist] as a defence of going mute this August on dehumanising racism, because of anxiety at being unable to differentiate immigration, integration & asylum political challenges from overt racism, violence, vandalism, neo-nazism

A debate Labour badly needs to have:

National Trust Members. It’s time to vote to keep the Faragists out. Best not to split the vote. Use the QUICK VOTE” link both for people and for motions.

Really pleased and proud to see this. Quakers have already discerned, in a detailed and Spirit-led decision-making process, that genocide in happening in Gaza.

Translated out of Quaker, this is the sound of Arnold Schwarzenegger reloading a shotgun one-handed. www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...

It’s time to resist the DSEI arms fair. This week, Quakers will join activists of all faiths and none in challenging the arms dealers who profit from death and destruction. Find the full information from Quaker Roots here:

My last hope for Your Party goes up in smoke as Zarah Sultana ‘welcomes’ Mark Serwotka. His wife founded a Woman’s Place UK, a TERF group constantly trying to rollback trans people’s freedoms and he even wrote this lovely piece calling for ‘respectful discussion’ about our rights: archive.ph/iPb0L

i met anubis in the realm of the underworld, big strong guy by the way, had a dog’s head, i’m not so sure about that. and he said to me, mr president, you’ve got the heaviest soul we’ve ever weighed down here. can you believe it? they’ve never seen a soul that heavy in all of duat

Today is my 25th anniversary of working for the Open University. It's not all perfect, but it's a wonderful place to work, full of interesting ppl committed to social justice. Here are my reflections on how things have changed over a quarter of a century. presentonearth.blogspot.com/2025/09/a-qu...

Elon Musk is a radicalised extremist openly championing the most racist faction who would deport the Foreign Secretary, the Leader of the Opposition, the Justice Secretary and the last Prime Minister The govt silence about such a level of extremism is craven: infinite tolerance of racial hatred

96 Labour MPs and peers called for investments in arms manufacturing to be recategorised as ‘ethical’, arguing that ESG policies were holding back defence spending. Is your MP on the list? 🥀 labourrightwatch.wordpress.com/2025/06/18/t...

Great Yarmouth is set to host the biggest neo-nazi music festival in over a decade. The Home Office has the power to block entry of overseas bands, which will scupper the promoters plans. But they won’t act unless we demand it. Email the Home Office now: hopenothate.org.uk/2025/08/28/g...

Important reading as you prepare for your semester

This, from the Quakers, is a pretty good example of how to resist pressure from bigot lobbying groups. Effectively “we legally can allow trans people to use the loo, we morally should, and we tried it and nothing bad happened”

ChatGPT has its uses, but I still hate it – and I’ll tell you why | Imogen West-Knights

No10 spokesman not prepared to criticise anything about Farage speech today. Not his description of "invasion", not his prediction that the UK on brink of civil war, not plans to pay the Taliban or Iran to take back migrants, or indeed to rule out doing so themselves.

In general “bimodal but not binary” is something that seems to break brains a lot. Like a specific type of personality really dislikes the idea that something is neither a neat continuous distribution nor a on/off. It’s a type of complexity that just drives some people nuts, not just on gender stuff

“If I said I was wearing a Palestine Action T-shirt would you get here quicker?” From the new Private Eye, in shops now.

This is all becoming very dangerous and the Government's failure to show any kind of resistance to it is a disgrace www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

you know what a real joy of academia is? sometimes you get to give feedback on a proposal or paper or project and it is just *phenomenal*

I haven’t been this excited for a bubble to burst since I was a toddler.

Happy Greenbelt Eve

A prize - that a week ago hardly anybody had heard of - deciding not to run because half the potential awardees & a judge noped out is freedom of association, John. Nobody is stopping you from speaking, as evidenced by the acres of newsprint you've been in for days. We just don't want to listen.

www.reddit.com/r/transgende... Guess what? The story about the trans M&S employee and the bra fitting is a pack of lies and distortions. Want to know what really happened and how colleagues stood up for her? Read her own account here.

It's over - The Polari Prize has been halted for 2025. Sunk by the decision to longlist a proudly anti-trans author. Credit to the other longlisted authors who were willing to sacrifice award nomination to instead stand in solidarity with their community. This really meant something.

Something has gone very wrong with British politics that almost 500 of people have been arrested at a Palestine Action protest, when we should be standing collectively as a society against the cruelty and devastation on the ground in Palestine www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int...

Legally, there isn't the slightest basis to the complaint, even on the most extreme possible interpretation of the Supreme Court judgement. A shop floor is not a single sex space, regardless of whether they sell bras or not. This is just hatred and spite, unleashed.

This is not caused primarily by "screen time". It's been caused by the mass eradication of third places for young people in basically every city over the past three decades - and a society that's hostile to the concept of teens socialising in public spaces. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

Nigel Farage is right about London. I was there yesterday and there was a gang of men armed with sticks, waving them about, while a huge crowd cheered them on.

For too long, the story of Quaker abolition has been told as one of conscience, but it was Black resistance that forced the Religious Society of Friends to confront its deepest contradictions.

Corbyn is doing to the trans community what he does best - avoiding confrontation with his bigoted pals. It’s the same shit he pulled with the Jewish community. Nothing overt just - avoidance. Whether it’s prejudice or cowardice is irrelevant. He’s not and has never been the answer.

If you’re in London this summer please go see the Emily Kam Kngwarray exhibition at Tate Modern. Never seen so clearly there is another, non-western, non-exploitative view of the earth, which seeks deep connection, not domination which, had we followed we wouldn't be in this mess.

With nukes in the news it's grimly fitting to be at Faslane to mark the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and say 'never again'. @quaker.org.uk

This Friday is Bandcamp Friday.

Just finished Mansfield Park as part of the #YearofJane. Slow at times (and was hoping for more exploration of the family's slave-holdings) but very deep and satisfying, and really came together in the end. I think I need to add Fanny Price to Elinor Dashwood as my equal-favourite Austen heroine!

My latest, exploring with numbers how the millennial household budget is basically incomprehensible to retired boomers.