The first time I spoke up about trans rights, I talked about my own hormone stuff & how the term “people who menstruate” was actually more inclusive for me, someone who at the time didn’t. I knew barely anything about trans issues but I remember clearly the vicious bullying that followed.

NEW The extraordinary ‘settlement’ agreement between Trump and his own government A complex high-value fund is being created without legislation or oversight by a court By me, at @prospectmagazine.co.uk www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/th...

If I'm honest. The reason why I think gender critical belief was allowed to become a protected belief is that it is the default belief of the patriarchal cisgender citizen. And one of the reasons why it shouldn't be protected is default beliefs (ie prejudices) have plenty of protection already.

In the space of around ten years UK politics and media (all of it) have switched their language to normalise bigotry. They have switched from “Trans Women Are Women” (or just trans women) to “Trans Women - males who identify as women” at every opportunity, even when totally unnecessary for the point

It’s this bit I can’t get over. Perfectly encapsulates the GC mentality. ‘Here are all the ways in which I’m going to make you feel subhuman, but oh, don’t forget that I’m actually a good person and you can’t be mean to me’

Repulsive; just imagine someone writing "because they are worried about sharing a service with someone who appears to be of a different ethnicity" No one would agree that, even if there is discomfort, or distress, the racist should be pandered to, would they?

Fundamentally, the structure the Supreme Court has built is that we have a whole act prescribing how you change gender (GRA2004) and a protected characteristic of changed gender (EA2010) which combine to provide no legal protection for having changed your gender.

So the EHRC guidance has been updated from "Fuck trans people's rights" to "I'm terribly sorry but fuck trans people's rights", and it remains glaringly obvious that the government's response to the Supreme Court judgement should have been to fix the law rather than cower in fear of bigots.

Feels like a very long time ago that Keri Starmer criticised Tory transphobia (for point-scoring in parliament) after Brianna Ghey's transphobically-motivated murder

Less than a decade ago

Labour is out of touch with women's sports, international human rights norms and with many other areas of life.

Remember to call it Labour’s bathroom ban as they love to claim ownership of progressive legislation they’ve brought in so they need to claim ownership of segregation as well

Not sure this is a huge surprise, but would be good to be accurate about what’s being backed. It’s not just that they “double the length of time it takes for some people to achieve settled status from five years to 10” - for most people it will start at 15 years. For most refugees, it’s 20 years.

I don't really understand the passing the buck here - the decision was formally made by the Secretary of State for Business and Trade and if it wasn't just a departmental decision then it falls to the PM. Trying to blame DESNZ or the Foreign Office is just pathetic.

Write the book you would like to see someone pull from a higgledy piggledy pile in a secondhand shop 63 years after your death and say, "This looks fucking weird. I think I will buy it for Joan

In April when the SNP suggested caps on the price of some goods at supermarkets, Labour described it as "incoherent" and "undeliverable" One month later ... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I’m amazed anyone needs reminding of this, but local government spending power per person fell by 18% from 2010 to 2024 (would have been 26% but for increases in council tax). At the same time, social care pressures on local govt have grown a lot. The decay of the public realm is NOT a mystery

Stephen's right of course. One of the most jaw-dropping pieces of information which emerged as the project fell on its arse was that the boss of HS1 offered to help on HS2 and was turned down. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

But then last week we saw suggested, as part of the Starmer defence, that the government would entirely shut down because of the same restrictions on govt activity we see during elections. Maybe just someone over-egging the precedents that do exist, but there are impt distinctions.

I'm not opposed to MRPs in principle. They constitute a sophisticated set of approaches with a lot of potential. But it appears that such approaches are being tested "in the wild" rather than privately, and misleading coverage when we have little confidence in them ourselves as pollsters.

Why can we never have fun food discourse? Why aren't we talking about the fact that Ciabatta is younger than Beyonce?

Anas Sarwar winning in 2026 was the last proper chance Scottish Labour had to address its dearth of talent in Holyrood. The party has a neglible well of talent to draw on for 2026-31.

Very odd that the one chart included in this article directly contradicts the article's fundamental premise (that current/future welfare spending is "unaffordable")

Matthew Goodwin, a Reform politician who stood in the byelection, praises Tommy Robinson's rally saying "by all accounts, there was no violence, no extremism, no racism". [Reform bar Robinson from the party, as he was a BNP member, who says the Mayor of London is an "invader"]

"What’s driving me crazy, then, is not the idea that AI exists or that people are using AI. It’s that I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings." www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...

I will never understand how Keir reconciles his self-conception as a good man doing a good job as prime minister with “my premiership had to be brought to the brink of death for me to say this”.

Nigel Farage insisting "I cannot be bought," after being exposed for secretly trousering £5 million from a crypto billionaire, buying a house with the money, and then immediately launching a lobbying campaign for the crypto industry, is quite something

Ofcom have secured voluntary commitments from the X platform to take down illegal hate and terror content on the platform, after a six month investigation www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safet...

If you totted up the sums for every financial scandal in British politics (£2k per parliamentary question for cash-for-questions, £200k for Johnson’s No 10 renovation, the cost of that very nice campervan) even with second tier stuff like Rayner and Polanski, would you get close to £5mn *in total*?

We are definitely in “constitutional crisis” territory here — just unclear if it is UK or Labour

From @scotnational.bsky.social Aye, awa a this

PSA: @samcoatessky.bsky.social on the pod this morning said a leadership contest would mean government would be restrained on decision making because gov would be 'effectively in government purdah and that principle that big government decisions go on hold'. That isn't accurate.

The largest ever settlement or jury award for government violations of constitutional rights to a single person is $100 million, or 1 percent of what Trump demanding for the leak of his tax returns. That case -- a killing by police -- was reduced to $1 million on appeal.

People missed this because she was informed Tuesday. Not that surprising she decided not to publicise it on the day of the KS -- see the kicking Streeting's taken for manuevering then. She does seem to have released it pretty swiftly

The people who use these ponds want them to be trans-inclusive. Sex Matters want to tell them who they can and can not have at their own ponds. Time to see them for what they are: a bunch of mean-spirited curtain-twitching Mary Whitehouse busy-bodies. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

ADHD: the disease that makes broke SNP supporters start trying to buy "Chaos with Ed Miliband" T-shirts at 1:23 am.

I would subscribe to juror 96’s newsletter bsky.app/profile/mm-j...

Kemi Badenoch notes that this is the first parliamentary session in history without the hereditary peers. She laments it. She's right to lament, but for the wrong reason. It's a political and democratic embarrassment it's taken this long.

A good example of this is how the term "Boriswave" has become shorthand among a lot of UK political people across the spectrum, despite the vast majority of people having no idea what it is/means.

Really good news. The EHRC has lost its way over the last decade - most obviously, but by no means exclusively, over trans rights. Let's hope these appointments mark a turning point.

For UK politics it’s generally had a good effect I’d say? There’s an actual substantial ecosystem of journalists and policymakers here who aren’t in the radicalisation soup of X. That’s a net positive I’d say. Although somewhat limited by numbers

Yesterday Kier Starmer announced Labour will nationalise British Steel, and save 2700 jobs. Today, the Uni of Nottingham put 2700 staff at risk of redundancy. This is just one university. Across the UK 15,000 higher education jobs need saving. Where is the rescue package for our universities?

If this happened in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, you'd have commentators musing whether devolution was a mistake and whether direct rule would be preferable. Absolutely clapped political system.

there's something really interesting about the rot having really set in after the scottish indyref. the unionist parties absolutely used the snp's decent support for trans rights as a stick to beat them with, thereby aligning themselves with an ultra-conservative anti-lgbt faction

This was also a high point of government delivery. Yes, because of Michael Barber, but also because Blair made sure there was a team in place working on delivery which could not be distracted by events/his own piss-poor decision-making on foreign policy.

Civil society is gonna have to start punching back at the far-right bullies in politics and the media, and a big part of that is having a government that gives people confidence that it will side with them as they stand up for social liberalism rather than try to appease its political enemies

If you win a massive majority in parliament, people expect you to get shit done. It’s no good grumbling about the fiscal situation, or international politics, people expect to see stuff happening. The whole “uwu, but I is a smol bean” attitude is so weird for a government with a majority of 156.

On Liz Truss's wiki page, (started wondering if Starmer is worse), I found this beautifully-aged sentence, 'On 19 October, in response to a question by the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, Truss said that she was a "fighter and not a quitter", quoting a 2001 phrase by Peter Mandelson.'

This is one of the things I *hate* about the UK. We have some absolutely fucking incredible people working in our media, not just the creatives writing things but the people putting the nuts and bolts together and it's like the government just never invests in it.