Pure distilled essence of 1979-2025, here. I’m loaded and loving it but somehow I can never shake this mortal terror that somewhere, some poor wanker might be eating a free cheese sandwich.

I can remember when it was fun to just laugh at Mel and her hysterical proclamations, and that was about fifteen years ago: before government ministers, senior political commentators and Prime Ministerial advisors started making it very clear that they agree with her.

Call me a cynic, but I'm pretty sure most genuinely oppressed people don't sign off reports about the cruel and racist oppression they're suffering under with links to online stores to purchase merchandise.

One of the main reasons this mess is as bad as it is, is: the press and politicians decided some time in 2018/19 that it was No More Mr Nice Guy and gave themselves free rein to just go as apeshit as the wanted, screaming and roaring. And now it turns out the toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube.

If you’re my age then politics in the 21st century was one avoidable, ludicrous catastrophe after another: disastrous wars, financial collapse, crumbling infrastructure and plummeting living standards, all explained via utterly abject, insulting drivel.The question is, who do you think is to blame.

I’ve previously called British daytime TV “Dabiq for pensioners” but even I can see this was meant to be a heartwarming piece with a confused old man that’s gone horribly Partridge, and now the cranks are going full Good Morning Fascism over it.

Let me explain: what usually happens in Scotland for elections is that the unionist vote tends to cluster around whichever unionist party is perceived to be doing best at that time, and a lot of those voters are not picky about who they vote for.

It looks to me like the squillionaires considered the question “Would you like to 1) live in a semi-functional society, but be a bit less rich and powerful, or 2) get everything your way but everyone despises you and you have to be guarded by a small army”. They have decisively chosen 2).

The world’s first trillionaire initiated a move that has left more than half a million people dead, most of whom are children.

With full complicity of the Supreme Court www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Britain, are you folks okay? In what world is a person using this room or that room a news story in the BBC? Who gives a single solitary fuck which changing room a person uses?

This system of McCarthyist screaming and bullying of unpeople the crank right hates and wants to destroy, by important people and the press in unison, is not new. It seems Britain isn’t even as sane as 1950s America, where Joe was undone because he was dumb enough to target the army.

Just a regular pipeline now of dubiously funded cranks targeting the NHS to enforce their horrific, hateful politics on the public, by seeking out, targeting and harassing the fuck out people who have quietly been going about their business for years without anyone bothering

It's not complicated though, is it? He's a bloodless institutional climber who hitched his wagon firmly to the Labour Right Blairism Redux project under Starmer, acting as one of its most proud and outspoken enforcers. Now, Starmer's a dead PM walking, he's knows he's fucked too, so he's pivoting.

In an only slightly better timeline, we would be in touching distance, globally, of a full transition to renewable energy.

I’d add: if press and politicians were this happy to make bright red, roasting-faced fannies of themselves over football - a topic the public understands far better than they do - then should we conclude that they’ve been reliably honest about other, more complex matters.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-5658... but in 2021...

Yes, many people of my generation really did come of age in the 90s imagining themselves to be the last word in enlightened liberalism. The last man at the end of history. The emancipatory politics of the past decade struck at the heart of that self image, hence the viscerally hard reactionary turn

A fun question. In 5 years time, what looks better? The US’s enormous bet & capex on AI? Or China’s equally enormous bet and capex on renewables?

The person arrested is part of Nick Tenconi's seig heiling Turning Point UK mob, and also affiliated with holocaust denier James Harvey's 'vox populi' media. I don't think they were looking for an honest good faith debate.

What’s happened here is that, by sticking to their guns and refusing to be intimidated and shitehoused, the club and police have thankfully prevented Parliament and the press inciting rioting and running battles in the streets of a major city.

Again, the business of much of the British press is the recruitment of useful crackpots who can be tactically deployed against their enemies and people their staff despise

Cool. What would you call the other wing then? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/u...

It’s always the ones you least suspect

Not taking bungs is really easy, if regular members of the public like you and want to donate

If you ever see someone in politics or political reporting being startlingly blunt about the kind of stuff that has long been very obvious, you can guess “retired”, because you will be right nine times out of ten. www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/one-...

When your politics are awesomely popular with an enthused and passionately supportive public, and you personally are beloved by all

Isn’t it amazing how we can never get the human shit out of the rivers but the right kind of rich grifter can propose anything - downloadable pizza, the 2034 World Cup on Mars, shooting people to work with a railgun - and these clowns will go “that sounds great, you’re a genius”.

Because the lads choose amongst themselves what is news and what is a snooze, and the choice is heavily directed by the Sun, the Mail, the Times and the Telegraph. So that means that it’s usually wall to wall screeching and bullshit, every day of the year.

The whole of the internet is now run on the things that would have not made it past your email junk filter 20 years ago.

I first became aware of it Mandrake, during the physical act of love. Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed.

I assume this has worked brilliantly in France

Also, if Britain is now basically incapable of action without the permission of a bunch of bond traders, is there some kind of long term plan to get us back to a situation where the public can at least theoretically decide? Preferably a plan that is not “another fifteen years of devastating cuts”.

This goes quintuple if said government both has a long track record of destroying villages and towns and building new ones on top, and of driving out or murdering the people who live there. And a thousandfold, when government ministers have been saying genocide and ethnic cleansing is the whole plan

The SNP also claimed there was a £20 billion hole in Labour’s plan, which was rubbished as clearly nonsense, only for that same amount to turn up as the previously unforeseeable gaping maw in the first budget once the election had been safely completed…

🔴REPORT | Israel is preparing a coordinated media campaign ahead of foreign journalists’ entry into Gaza for the 1st time after 2 years of genocidal killing and destruction, according to Israel’s YNET. Officials say the goal is to control the narrative as reporters document... Here’s what to know:🧵

This week on Guardian politics, the lads are awestruck at the Chancellor’s political ineptitude. Reading between the lines of the last two years, I think everyone always knew taxes would have to rise, and they all just assumed Labour had some savvy plan that was being covered up with clever lies.

It should go without saying at this point, but everyone who has been a party to this in even minor ways should either be fired in unemployable disgrace, or imprisoned.

Yes.

You don’t raze entire towns and cities street by street with controlled demolitions and bulldozers for any military objective. You do it because the aim is to wipe those places out of existence forever, and it’s not like they’ve been hiding this.

Imagine a country where hundreds of thousands of legal permanent residents find stripped of their status and forced to reapply for their right to remain. Many no longer meet the criteria, plunged into illegality, subject to deportation. @emile-chabal.bsky.social foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/05/b...

What if understanding isn’t the priority

It’s right of course that Reform’s mad economic policies are scrutinised, but it’s still quite weird to frame “What a Reform government would really look like” as if it was just a bit of trouble making budget cuts, while omitting the ICE-style mass thuggery as they aim to deport 1% of the population

Flying Squirrel Loves It Every Time

if you start from the view that there's a policy compromise you can make that will calm people down, you can end up supporting some very authoritarian stuff very quickly uk labour was elected 18 months ago on a pledge to make trans peoples lives easier, now they're implementing a bathroom ban

I bet these guys thought power and status would be more fun than being widely hated, squealing “nonce-lover” at each other for nobody except for the lobby hacks, who think it’s toe-curling and ignore it in favour of laughing at Lammy for forgetting to wear a poppy thecritic.co.uk/out-for-the-...

It's almost like... like maybe the fascism *never* actually arose from working class "economic anxiety"... like maybe the working class *weren't* actually the ones radicalised by bourgeois resentment of "cancel culture" and "wokeness"... like maybe the working class have... more pragmatic priorities

"'They’re spending more money than I would even tax them,' [Mamdani] said in an interview with MSNBC last week." This is the message. Make it clear that these billionaires aren't just worried about losing money. They're worried about losing the ability to exchange their money for power.

The way all of these people convinced themselves that Mamdani is antisemitic is a subject far more worthy of media examination than any of the ‘groupthink on campuses!’ thinkpieces we’ve been subjected to