Teach it all, the contradictions, scandals, adventures, violence, connections and complexity. And stop seeing it entirely through the prism of feeling.

Calling all small charities! The Boring Fund is now open for applications. It offers small (£200) grants to UK non-profits, charities and voluntary groups to cover boring running costs like web hosting, admin, insurance etc Apply by 30 Nov #Funding

Dominic Cummings has this racialised take on David Lammy There is an increasingly prevalent kneejerk online rightwing trait to call the presence of any black or Asian person a diversity hire

Guy Fawkes' signature before & after saying on Bluesky that he lets his cat go outside

This investigation from the @sheffieldtribune.bsky.social is absolutely staggering. It is very common in Sheffield (I live in this bit) to have a leasehold, often with hundreds of years left on and pennies in ground rent. This is extortion pure and simple. www.sheffieldtribune.co.uk/a-london-law...

"Let me eat cake"

Tax policy on the British left is pure "anti-bedtime left". Bizarre idea that you can have a big social democratic welfare state without everyone contributing properly www.economist.com/britain/2025...

"There is simply no sign of a fiscal catastrophe from the 'Boriswave'. Recent migrants are very likely to be employed, paying tax and seem to be contributing to British society..it will help, rather than hurt, Britain’s fiscal position." Analysis by @lgilbert.co ukandeu.ac.uk/lower-migrat...

Emails seen by The Lead show the councillor, through Lancashire County Council staff, issuing legal threats after his role in private care was questioned.

The EU is defunding the anti abortion World Youth Alliance, after last year me and @soitakw.bsky.social exposed how its founder compared abortion to the Holocaust! www.opendemocracy.net/en/eu-fundin...

To be clear, what is being proposed here is to axe the main mechanism for getting Britain’s homes insulated - which is by FAR the best way to reduce household energy bills in the long term 🤦‍♂️ …and also, just incidentally, an absolute non-negotiable requirement for meeting UK climate targets 😬🥵☠️

And it comes back to my point from the other day. If Labour want to benefit from bloc-based voting, they do actually have to signal they are in one of the blocs.

Yes I saw this and thought ‘hey have you seen what Birmingham Council is doing lately’.

Can't wait for the torrent of Labour members telling everyone how terrible it is that a Reform council is doing... what Labour councils have been doing for 15 years www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Alright but a broader level the governments line on NY elections being "the words on the red boxes say United Kingdom, not United States" is...kinda valid

Senior UK government figures like Healey, Alexander, and now Lammy claiming that the SNP are a national security threat isn't just infantile, it's dangerously delegitimising a democratically elected government, and is the first step in securitising the issue of Scottish self-determination.

This isn't the only takeaway of Mamdani's victory, but it is the most important one www.ft.com/content/92bf...

British people will complain that Americans on social media simply assume everything is about them, and then spend weeks posting eagerly about “Zohran’s evident affinity with New York vernacular culture”.

if the curriculm review does nothing else, binning the fronted adverbials nonsense in Year 6 (if you know you know) means it was worth it frankly www.theguardian.com/education/20...

British people stop watching the US election coverage and go to bed

just had sex i mean watched van de ven's goal

Being a Brit on BlueSky means seeing 1000x more messaging about an election in New York than your local council. Might as well message Zohran about my bin collection.

🚨 BREAKING: The government has tabled their plan to restrict repeat protests. Demonstrations could now banned based on the 'cumulative disruption' that previous protests have caused in the area - regardless of if they have been organised by the same people or not. This is worse than we feared.

Oh wow did you hear about the mysterious fire next week

no no hear me out, roll the heads of former Conservative candidate Tim Davie and chief dickhead Robbie Gibb, replace them with people who've got nothing to do with the Conservative Party, tell Kemi you followed her wishes

Not sure I've ever seen a zero star review from the Guardian before www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

A good step, but I suppose text to video will soon enable people to generate this stuff themselves. Online porn showing choking to be made illegal, government says www.bbc.com/news/article...

VP Cheney will be honoured with a 21 gun salute accidentally aimed directly at 21 of his friends

Notable in today's YouGov that the centre/left bloc - Lab/Green/LD/SNP are on 54%. With Reform/Tories on 43%. That's the biggest differential in a long time. I think useful to track blocs given instability between parties at the moment.

Late period Osborne: interest rates at zero and 50-80bn of headroom: and his priority was “don’t invest”.

Lots of commentary saying that it's not clear what the point of the speech is. Seems pretty clear to me. It's pitchrolling broad based tax rises in the Budget and making sure - as Reeves did with the fiscal rule change in 2024 - that it doesn't surprise the markets on the day.

It's a misleading nonsense headline from early February. As recently as September Sarwar explicitly ruled it out: www.politico.eu/article/scot...

e.g. “this mother has worked a part time job in order to be home when her kids get back from school. She is now divorced and her ex is consistently unreliable in paying his CSA or alimony” - that is not a problem that her employer can solve! Cash transfers are part of the answer here.

One of the most harmful attacks on New Labour’s record is the idea that “in-work benefits” are some kind of subsidy to business/a sign that an employer is behaving unethically, rather than a reflection of the fact that in rich countries, most poverty is driven in part by your wider circumstances!

Imagine having to sit in prison-like environs for two full days cus your boss didn’t like your hair. The normalisation of this kind of stuff in our schooling system really should be understood as a national scandal #edusky #edpsychs

Reading this, one proposal is to raise state pension age to 70, which is fine except our ageist society routinely forces people out of work in their 50s. Add to that most people can't afford to retire in their 50s and you potentially have a giant fucking crisis right there

There's been a significant fall in obesity rates in the US, linked to weight-loss drugs, according to a recent @gallup.com survey. After peaking at nearly 40% in 2022, the adult obesity rate has fallen to 37%. This means 7.6 million fewer people living with obesity. news.gallup.com/poll/696599/...

The next screen grab on this thread is perfect.

I missed this last week. The new English index of income deprivation includes UC working households who are on low-incomes AFTER HOUSING COSTS. This is a big deal technically & means we now have a hyper local measure of LIVING STANDARDS not just incomes. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

This is true, would add though that the left versions are far better as generally are honest about costs of proposals. Ludicrous as to how we pay for in he long term. But admits it. The right are utterly in denial there is an economic cost to favoured policies. They might as well believe in fairies.

While support for Reform UK is often noted to be higher in “left-behind” areas where deprivation is thought to be more pronounced, the correlation between their vote share and different deprivation measures remains rather weak. Only deprivation in education shows a somewhat stronger relationship.

Even though Labour’s geographic support base is often described as shifting toward more urban, affluent, highly educated constituencies, its vote share remains clearly higher in more deprived areas. Interestingly, there is a slight positive correlation with fewer barriers to housing and services.

Stupidest headline of the weekend: Wins on two separate counts: 1. Management cuts have not happened yet 2. While cutting NHSE might be justified, everywhere else in the NHS needs more managers not fewer...

If you’ve broken in, and deliberately set the stairs on fire, you’re trying to prevent people (including little children) from escaping and hoping that the inhabitants burn to death. Also, this is an attack on a state-sponsored facility. When are we going to call it - it’s terrorism?

Okay so you can escape Making Tax Digital if you are “a practising member of a religious society or order, whose beliefs are incompatible with using digital communications or keeping digital records”. So the question is who wants to start a religion

Extract from more recent Goodwin post. He really should never be allowed on the BBC - or any other reputable broadcaster - again.

I've heard the argument that you can't win an election by opposing a president with a net negative 18 approval—and net negative 39 with independents—and should instead assume the political landscape is the same as before he was in office and had much better numbers. My counterpoint: maybe you can.

Last year, I noticed that the US election was on our fireworks night and the UK election was on theirs.

"The most common response among men aged 18-25, as with their female peers, is to state that they would never consider voting for Reform." Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte & Emilia Belknap argue that most British young men reject the right https://ukandeu.ac.uk/most-british-young-men-reject-the-far-right/