Love being reminded to do this every year. It's a win/win all round

Brexit reduced the UK’s GDP by between 6% and 8%. That is MASSIVE. #ProjectFear #wetoldyouso www.nber.org/papers/w3445...

Trump's White House & fawning hacks here don't really care about the 0.001% that the BBC gets wrong. They care about all the stuff it gets right.

You know that time that a major British news organisation mistakenly sought out a random dude who happened to share a name with a former New York mayor in order to go after a left wing New York mayoral candidate? Did anyone resign?

While going through the proofs for "The British General Election of 2024" (out very soon!) I came across this - Paul Johnson of the IFS's verdict on Labour's manifesto last year. Labour's current attempts to claim the need to break their tax pledges was impossible to forsee don't stack up

Once every 20 years or so, the director-general of the BBC is forced to resign for being insufficiently rightwing. Alastair Milne in 1987. Greg Dyke in 2004. Tim Davie in 2025. The great irony is that the BBC was in all cases profoundly biased towards established power. But just not biased enough …

Glad that someone has finally taken responsibility for the appalling assault on democracy that was the Jan. 6 insurrection. Slightly confused that it's the Director-General of the BBC, but what do I know?

Which one is more English?

1. This is a thread on freedom, and how easy it is to lose. Over the past 2,000 years in Europe, there have been few periods and places of freedom. For much of the time we lived under highly oppressive tyrannies of various kinds, whether small or grand, local or imperial, secular or religious.🧵

The UAE where hugging in public can get you arrested, where human rights barely exist, where foreign workers are routinely abused, where critics of the regime routinely disappear, where an Indian nanny was shot by firing squad in March & where marital rape is not a criminal offence but being gay is.

Next time someone tells you that train drivers "just push buttons" show them this from the BBC

I knew Gill and Farage and the rest of the UKIP crew in the European Parliament They were crooks and shysters to a man They repeated Putin talking points and appeared on Russia Today UKIP then and Reform now are both a threat to our democracy www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Reluctant to give Question Time any time - save for this:

Kemi Badenoch is absolutely right about this. At the time she hacked Harriet Harman's emails it was an offence carrying a prison sentence of up to five years

Farage is asked about another two of his MEPs, who made the same pro-Russia statements that Nathan Gill has now pled guilty to being bribed to make. "Opinions are opinions." Farage's defence seems to be that they arrived at those views independently and it has nowt to do with him. Hmm. 🤔 ~AA

Beth Rigby: "Keir Starmer has changed his top team more than I've had hot dinners." In two years before Starmer we had 3 PMs, 4 Chancellors, 3 Foreign Secretaries, 5 Home Secretaries, 5 Education Secretaries, 5 Cabinet Secretaries, etc. - total 221 ministerial departures. Maybe Beth is on a diet.

I despair. “Her paternal grandfather's family is of Dutch Jewish descent and her paternal grandmother's family were from Germany and included a left-wing senator representing Saxony. Her grandmother's family moved to England to escape political persecution.”

A bleak dystopia where Sharia law predominates, while economic and cultural divisions mean that the different communities live parallel, segregated lives. Oh, wait, that’s Dubai …

"There is no universe in which Sam Ashworth-Hayes – or any of Britain’s array of overpaid columnists, commentators and ideological wonks – is more valuable to this country than a care worker" I wrote for @samfr.bsky.social's Substack on benefits and "contribution" samf.substack.com/p/the-someth...

Same day. Same plenary session. Same visit to Gill’s office. Same Farage, Same Gill, same wife of sanctioned pro Russian agent. Six days after the first bribery charge

Ah, happy 88th anniversary of the day Oswald Mosley tried to sell fascism to Liverpudlians – and someone concussed him with a brick

Grifters gonna grift…

"15 years ago, Polish workers came here to find opportunity. Now Poland is growing twice as fast as we are," says Kemi Badenoch. Any ideas what may have happened in the interim?

Now would be a great time to check out this BBC radio 4 series on the far right and racism in Britain by the amazing Camilla Schofield. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

BBC now suggesting they didn't interview Zack Polanski on Laura Kuenssberg when he was elected because they weren't on air then. Which is technically true because he was elected on a Tuesday. However, they did air just days later on Sunday and featured interviews with Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch

President Macron: “Europeans, let's wake up! We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks.” defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...

Please join me in congratulating Woman on her appointment

Okatsuka posted the censorship rules for the controversial comedy festival, noting how many "You can’t say anything anymore!" comedians have signed on. www.avclub.com/riyadh-comed...

After the former leader of Reform UK in Wales, Nathan Gill pleaded guilty to making favourable statements about Russia in exchange for money, worth reupping the FIVE QUESTIONS Nigel Farage is never asked about his fondness for Putin @bylinetimes.bsky.social

Nathan Gill, Reform's leader in Wales at the last Welsh parliament election, has pled guilty to 8 bribery charges, taking Russian cash while he was one of Nigel Farage’s MEPs to speak in favour of Putin's Russia in that parliament www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

These are precedented times and the precedent is a loud ass warning www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/a...

Written by a doctor at St Thomas' Hospital, London after the Tommy Robinson march on 13/9.

"The Pride of Britain" Fox - Charged under the Sexual Offence act for an upskirt photo on Twitter Hopkins - Detained in South Africa for spreading racial hatred and deported from Australia for breaching Covid Tommy "10 names" Robinson - Serial convict

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/

This happened in full view of Sky News cameras and a bunch of police just standing there. Why is THIS not on the news all day? Why don't we show people what these thugs are turning the country into? I could only find it on the far right TikTok page that proudly boasted about the incident. SHARE!

NEW: We got access to Jeffrey Epstein’s personal Yahoo inbox — more than 18,000 emails. It shows Epstein’s world in his own words: an unfiltered look at how his operation worked, who enabled it, and how Ghislaine Maxwell stayed at the center of it all.

The EU's strategic foresight report 2025 is out and it rings the bell for a "change in the global order" "We're witnessing the erosion of the rules-based international order & fracturing of the global landscape... a return to the previous status quo seems increasingly unlikely"

Angela Rayner accidentally pays less tax than she should have, resigns, and the media gives her hell. Nigel Farage deliberately pays less tax than he should have, and the media gives him a free pass. That, right there, is the problem.

This looks less like a mistake

Sick of BBC continuously promoting Reform U.K. and ignoring other parties with far more representation? Please sign the petition petition.parliament.uk/petitions/71...

Interesting how you never see the head of this school on Question Time or elsewhere opining on the culture-war topic of the day.

‘Tommy Robinson’ frequently rails against the policies of European leaders, which allow “foreign criminals” into their countries. Robinson, who has multiple criminal convictions for violent crimes and crimes of dishonesty, recently landed in Spain. www.thenewworld.co.uk/rats-in-a-sa...

Hunter Biden has a point. And a quite colorful one.

Clause 72 in particular is functionally identical to Clause 28 of the Local Government Act in 1988: "[S]chools... should avoid materials that... could be interpreted as being aimed at younger children, or that... encourage pupils to question their gender."

The judgement of history will be merciless.

Macron to the UK: "Never cede to the temptation of populism which is the denial of science or a travesty of the facts. Populists sold you a response which is through nationalist withdrawal. Budgetary, immigration, growth problems from 9 years ago. Were they solved by Brexit? No."

How does the right tear down progressive societies? It starts with a joke | George Monbiot

It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that Brexit has been slammed as a 'complete disaster' that 'ruined most of the country' in a poll marking nine years since the UK voted to leave the EU www.mirror.co.uk/news/politic...

Bob Vylan update: apparently calling for the mass killing of young people is fine if it’s in the Spectator.

Bezos wedding guest takes us through her extravagant goodie bag from the wedding 💗