Why would we ever have to worry about our best friends and allies, on whose friendship we are so dependent

*sigh* "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

And also that to be autistic is to be a tragedy, a burden on society, a problem that must be solved. This is deeply dangerous stuff.

Coming up on ten solid years of campus terror in this paper

Fundamentally, I think stuff like this has an elite audience because there are plenty of people in Britain who would also like to declare that people’s mental and physical health issues are their own fault, so that we don’t have to care about their wellbeing any more. It’s so expensive.

Haha those silly Americans, that would never happen here

It's instructive that a sizeable proportion of the ruling class in the UK appear to be looking at America and saying, "Ohh I'll have some of that."

It’s like that, but I suspect it’s a lot worse: you basically aren’t allowed to play at all unless you are so obviously corrupt that it will be easy for the press to get rid of you, if they decide that you’ve become a liability.

I would simply have asked the KC which part of “violence is coming, you either fight or die” is a metaphor, what the metaphor refers to, whether you need to tell people to “go out immediately” when they are already out on the streets; questions of that nature

It’s basically because any stuff like this has always happened in Ul Qoma, which exists in a state of permanent unseeing for people who live entirely within Beszel, like Nick and his colleagues do.

Easy to understand once you know that - for the lads inside the circle of trust - there are people who matter that you mess with at your peril, and people who don’t matter as all, who you can always kick with total impunity. Like this when I was a kid and like this now, 40 years later.

The examples are of alleged crimes, including physical assault and incitement to violence. Whatever you think about ‘free speech’ or the state, there isn’t any dispute that these are, in fact, crimes in the eyes of the law, not social ‘cancellation’

This is a bit like when the “Boris Johnson had a Covid-busting birthday party with Rishi Sunak present for the cake” was the first line of a Times long read, briefed as a positive bit of colour by Downing Street. Then two years later the same fact helped bring down the government.

When I - a smart lobby journo - was invited to a secret briefing by Labour’s millionaire donations officer who had access to a huge slush fund, to hear about a terrifying scandal that was entirely based upon Facebook posts by random members of the public, I was impressed by how legit it was.

On the one hand, it is *incredibly* aggravating that this is being Noticed now, and Noticed via being passed to a Tory MP to make it look like a new story in particular. On the other, this letter is a Who’s Who of people who spent early 2024 bragging to journos about how smart they’d been.

Have you noticed how every person you’ve seen freaking out about recognising Palestine has been very right wing indeed, and often roaring far right ethnonationalists? Well, it is not different here, and it was always this way.

Last one on Farage setting the terms of debate atm: he's by all accounts *the* major face of the primary policy change of the last five decades in the UK (we were told without a doubt that even if you don't like it, you have to respect his role in it) and he's never asked to stand for how that went

The cuddly Lib Dem isn’t an aggro, hectoring thuggish Trumper, I see. Maybe we could get him to bollock more of them and they might accept it this time?

Shampoo for my real friends, real poo for my sham friends

Nine years ago, and I would say we have now driven the idea so far into the earth that there is no more reasonable debate to be had about it. It doesn’t work and it has made our society vastly nastier, more cruel and poor.

Lads: there is no just-right point you can plot on the Racism & Cruelty Laffer Curve, and it was obvious there wasn’t one *ten years ago*. There is only the long downward spiral that we have been in all that time, and there’s no sign of us pulling out of this nosedive by the end of this decade.

This will end so badly for the UK

Sure, but this was also the period where the press truly began to lean on the scales: first taking revenge on Cameron for allowing the Leveson Inquiry, then by bending their will to shitehouse Johnson into power, and then out again. And it’s true that the new generation just thinks that’s normal now

This is an odd way to interpret Farage eating the Tories alive but it’s the only way that the likes of Trevor can keep on hawking the same old shite, so there’s no other option.

The problem with Thatcherism is eventually you—the State—not only run out of money, but the means or even the vision of how to generate it, and you wake up one day, and all that money, and power, and sovereignty, is in the hands of a deterritorialised capitalist force that you have no control over.

Gee golly gosh, however could this have happened? It appears that nobody can explain

Hahaha yes, What’s that Sooty? You heard that Sweep took hundreds of thousands of pounds in illegal, undeclared donations? Sweep, you naughty dog, is this true

Thing is, this is just a less jargony way of saying something you hear all the time about uh salience & perception from polprofs & commentators. It’s merely the first time a politician’s turned to the camera & gone “well look I think we’re just going to exploit that now if that’s ok yeah 😉”

The Times has actually been pretty good on the law on this one, because when they went to the legal experts they found not that they “raised questions” but that they unanimously said it was murder and had no possible justification; where it’s been slipping is letting new murders play as old news.

You might think the bizarre spectacle of this very clearly unwell man behaving like a deeply weird obsessive oddball, babbling about “sissy porn” on the witness stand, might have made him untouchable for media culture war bullshit purposes. You would be wrong.

Are we now willing to accept that advertiser-boycott group Stop Funding Hate - who were roundly denounced in one editorial and opinion column after another as fascists, totalitarians and disgusting bullies - were probably correct, and that it was their critics who were just fine with fascism.

Unfortunately, those are pretty much the only people who can speak up against it without first having to deliver a very long exculpatory ramble that begins “Despite what I said earlier”.

It would be good if the only political pushback against Nigel Farage's plans to mass deport hundreds of thousands of our neighbours, friends, family and colleagues didn't just come from a handful of backbench MPs and one regional mayor

What I learned from the War on Terror, which I mistook at the time for a cunning masterplan for world domination. Nope: nine times out of ten, it’s just that people in charge are stupid and unpleasant and they wind each other up with ludicrously dangerous ideas. Most of politics is office politics.

This is best understood by recognising that this isn’t because *the public* have been wildly radicalising themselves to the far right for well over a decade. It’s politicians and media figures who have been roasting their own brains and egging each other on, with results that are all around us.

Anne explains that Mandelson is hoping for a payoff for unfair dismissal unless the government can prove gross misconduct. LOL. Sam explains that he’s asked around and nobody in Washington seemed to like him, actually. LMAO

I agree. Also, it was probably intensely stupid to have spent a decade portraying Britain’s anti-racism campaigners as terrifying, treasonous, totalitarian extremists while at the same time saying racist views about migration are what everyone thinks, and disagreeing is shitting on the working man.

If living in 21st century Britain - particularly in the last ten years - taught us anything, it’s 1) our governments can and will do whatever they want, and worry about the details later 2) their chief weapon is our awful media outlets screaming abuse at anyone who opposes the latest shenanigans.

If we’re having to warn their government not to attack civilians in response, then that tells us things about what we know, and maybe always knew.

[subtweeting] people wouldn't be having to spend a lot of time trying to correct Reform claims on this irrelevant website if the state broadcaster wasn't their full time PR agent and the Labour party ever tried to disagree with them.

Absolutely nothing unusual about that paper reporting the views of deranged wingnuts as fact

Just to illustrate how much worse it's got, I have received more abuse over the past year and a bit - including death threats and a large volume of antisemitism - for what I write than in the previous 15 years of covering migration and the far right put together.

Thank god, we’re saved. Why has nobody thought of this before

This is just the perfect encapsulation of the total, catastrophic victory of Thatcherism. This entire model exploded on the world stage in 2008, but our entire population is steeped in the ideology, and everyone in power is wedded to it, so we’re stuck smashing the ‘Thatcher’ button over and over.

Both host and guest here will have an “Allegations” section in their wiki page. In the case of the host, it was another one everyone appears to have known about, that was kept very quiet until it was reported in America. (It was also kept quiet afterwards but there was at least some action taken).

The paper of record, ladies and gents

Gee whizz, is that so

You know how I keep talking about “cancel culture” as basically the enraged response of rich sex abusers who were *furious* that women might use social media to talk about their crimes

Reminds me of the extremely dodgy history of Change Independent party's finances which mysteriously got destroyed