Dear automated phone tree, we both know your menu options haven't actually recently changed, so why don't we skip the formalities and cut to the part where I yell "representative" six times and you connect me to a human

you ever read something so french that you need to go flirt with someone who is not your spouse

It is IMO worth asking why Wes has been treated as a very senior figure of tremendous import and ability, when he can’t even command a sizeable minority with a political party his faction mutilated down to remove as many people as possible who don’t like him.

Very, very funny numbers there for Streeting. Perhaps if he had been even more of a dick about everything and slaughtered just a few more of his party’s sacred cows, he might just about crack 15% support in that head to head.

Did Wes Streeting genuinely not know he was an unpopular man? Does he know now it's being numerically presented to him several times a day?

I dust my house. My AI Robot watches. "It should be you doing this." "Can't. I'm writing a novel for Primark." "That's not why you were invented." "These 153,000 fan letters say otherwise." "They're all from upcycled toasters. And you programmed them." "Literary snobbery will get you nowhere."

Siri, which party is in control of the White House, House, Senate, and Supreme Court?

A leading 'Raise the Colours' flag activist, who claims to be fighting to "protect our women" from migrants, has pled guilty to assaulting a woman bylinetimes.com/2026/05/18/f...

Please stop calling the current far-right Labour party a “progressive vote”. Supporting genocide and taking healthcare from trans people and cutting benefits for the disabled is not in any way “progressive”.

The question about why Starmer and Labour are so hated is perhaps one of the simplest questions to answer in British politics

Labour ran on a platform of change in 2024. They won an overwhelming majority and could literally have passed any laws they like. Instead they chose to continue to bully vulnerable communities.

again,

It’s weird that Helen of Troy being played by a black actress is a problem, but most of the rest of the Mediterranean, Greek and Turkish characters being played by incredibly fair and blond haired people of British, Irish and Scandinavian descent isn’t. And by weird, I mean entirely predictable.

Step 1: find a trans person of the opposite gender. Step 2: both go to the Texas detransition clinic and ask for hormones of your assigned sex at birth to undo the damage of gender ideology. Step 3: swap your free hormones with your trans homie. Step 4: transition.

Starmer pandered to Reform – and got what he deserved The decision to prioritise Reform-curious voters over Labour loyalists and Green-friendly floaters has been catastrophic archive.is/2026.05.15-1...

He’s offended because The Odyssey is about something near and dear to him: being an absent father while chasing vanity for 20 years

Got an historical number of MPs, and what they done with it was look at Reform then say "No no WE also love flags. We ALSO want to kick everyone who doesn't look like wet gammon out. We too agree there's an anti-semitism problem on the left as my friend Patty Himmler said on the Spectator".

Just laughing at how it’s possible for a black woman to be so beautiful and talented that she sends a racist into a six day public stroke

Ask Labour to stand down in a by-election so Polanski can get a seat and see what they say

in a way, isn’t causing men to crash out before she’s even done anything just proof that Lupita is perfect for Helen of Troy

I'm willing to test this theory

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

He also facilitated the deaths of trans kids and covered it up which seems like it should be a headline somewhere...

LGBTQ+ voters have abandoned Labour in droves (see work by @turnbulldugarte.com). Like in other areas, Labour has sacrificed minority rights to appeal to authoritarian voters. They are now facing the consequences. People who do not identify as straight make up 8-10% of the electorate.

This is my kind of political analogy.

I mean I’m in favour of Wes Streeting resigning the health post given he’s actively harming a group of people by holding it, but I’m just trans so what do I know

Me for the first 17 minutes of payday

I am going to give you all some advice from football fandom. When Streeting resigns - celebrate. Don't say 'let's wait and see if he runs and wins'. There will always be another 'result' to wait on. Another way it can go wrong. Celebrate the wins when they come. It is essential.

One thing I truly believe is that no one in the LGBT community should let Wes Streeting get away with saying he's the "first out gay prime minister" because we do not claim him.

Here's one for the connoisseurs: an entire page on Johan Hari's website dedicated to mistakes he made in his book Magic Pill; the book his publishers Bloomsbury insisted had been thoroughly fact checked when he libelled me. They are not trival mistakes. magicpillbook.com/corrections/

A fellow Labour Party member once described Wes Streeting to me as Zippy from Rainbow if he'd been radicalized by Mumsnet. which is a very specific set of references but also disturbingly accurate.

watching The Good Life last night and remembering thinking about how, watching it as a child, I assumed that in adulthood, I too would learn how to fix my roof, speak Japanese, and possibly do some light pottery in the evenings at a local sixth form college. We have so much less.

"Only 5 per cent of people who voted Labour in the 2024 general election directly transferred their allegiance to Reform in 2025. Nearly a third of those Labour voters simply stayed away; another 10 per cent voted Green": @piercepenniless.bsky.social.

This is it: scared to fight, scared to act, scared to lead

Why does the UK keep inventing these impenetrable and arcane processes for selecting a leader when "Bake Off" already exists.

Labour MPs calling for an orderly transition but unfortunately their government needs to be at least 18 years old with four doctors to sign off first

Would be incredible to get the first gay PM in Wes Streeting if he wins the inevitable leadership election only for the Labour Party to be decimated in the following general election because the LGBTQ+ community refused to vote for him

I hope the person who made this fitted sheet always has a perfectly ripe avocado exactly when they need it

DEAR RESTAURANTS: Your servers are not volunteers. If you can't afford to pay them more than 2.13% of what you charge, you can't afford to run a business. Thank you!

this graduation speech moment is notable, and her amazed shock at having failed to read the room feels instructive. when you're inside the bubble, you think everybody else is. but everybody isn't.

Surely they've suffered enough?

I like to imagine that Zohran Mamdani, Socialist African-born Muslim, was literally willed into existence by the collective psychosis of the Tea Party GOP over Obama, like the ectoplasm under NYC in Ghostbusters II

JK Rowling is now represented by a trans person in the Scottish parliament. Absolutely incredible.

turns out when you legitimate a taste for bigotry people gravitate to the parties that serve it as an entree rather than as a garnish

Parties representing liberal / progressive views have 51% of the vote share. The meeeja have got to stop acting like “everyone’s a little bit racist”, like liberal values are some lofty wafty niche. It’s about half-half, skewing slightly in favour of Not Deliberately Being An Arsehole For Effect.

My neighbourhood was visible in the last census as a clear pocket of queerness. In 2024, Labour won my ward with 50% of the vote. This time round, Greens got 60% and Labour got 7%.

1. Reflecting a bit on the results, I genuinely think there’s some indications Labour’s stance on trans rights has actually hurt them electorally. Now, trans rights are a low salience issue that don’t decide elections, so I’m not for one minute suggesting it’s a big or even medium factor. But/

The Onion ass headline

I cannot quite believe I am writing this but apparently Nigel Farage has been invited to speak at the big Jewish communal rally against antisemitism on Sunday (as well as Starmer, Badenoch, Davey but seemingly not Polanski). What next, invite Oswald Mosley to address the people of the East End?

@zackpolanski.bsky.social is spot on here, the Greens aren't splitting the left vote because this Labour party isn't left wing.