The Great Russian Spirit.

Wow - this guy must be really, REALLY bad with money if an extra £208 per month will “ruin” his retirement. Let’s take a look at his situation based on what he told the @Telegraph Because this does NOT add up! No, this is not a “poor pensioner” scrabbling around for pennies… 🧵1/9

My attendance record in the European Parliament was the 4th worst out of 751 MEPs, yet I managed to turn up to vote AGAINST plans to tackle Russian misinformation. Thankfully this is of no interest to the media.

(Once again) this is a Brexit reflection. ‘Global’ Britain was meant to mitigate losses from Brexit and surpass EU membership. That ‘vision’ was based on trade deals and liberalised ‘fair’ immigration. The latter is now being dismantled and the former relies on no defunct liberal multilateralism.

It's January 31st, 2020, and Nathan Gill is celebrating our imminent departure from the EU.... and that terrible idea of a European Army. Hmm, now I wonder who else would have been delighted about that.

Sometimes, a front page can sum up quite a lot that’s wrong with the world. Including the paper itself which has been so complicit in getting us to a place where children born to refugees could be deported, Trump celebrates despotic wealth and Boris Johnson’s sister moans about not being rich. Ugh.

Quite interesting that Fraser Nelson - who has done his fair share of stoking and facilitating far right agitprop as Spectator editor - is out there combatting the far right hell fiction about London.

Who murdered British science? Farage and Johnson, in the laboratory with the toxic test tube marked Brexit. www.science.org/content/arti...

As I’ve seen this confused a few times, please note that Robin Gibb was a much-beloved member of the Bee Gees, whilst Robbie Gibb is the BBC board member who also, totally coincidentally, was editorial adviser in the set-up of GB News. I know, Bee Gees, GBeebies, a bit confusing…

Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

The ultimate plot twist

"The very people who pledged that Brexit would result in surging levels of non-white immigration, now froth with rage that their promise came true." open.substack.com/pub/writesbr...

PS think the US and EU would actually enjoy laughing / punching down on a UK once again thinking it could do what it wants internationally, one of the few things on which they agree and could distract from their own problems for a while.

Rep. Jamie Raskin tears into Nigel Farage as a "far-right pro-Putin politician" and a "Donald Trump sycophant and wannabe".

Raskin: "The dictators of the world have got nothing to fear from this hearing. Republicans called it to attack our democratic allies in Europe. The star witness is not a human rights leader like Navalny, but a far-right pro-Putin politician who leads the UK Reform Party."

How dogs replaced children in Italy on.ft.com/45OCbTY | opinion

15% tariffs, breaches of WTO rules, more tech dependency – the US deal is a far cry from what the EU wanted. This was not a one-off accident, but exposes longstanding structural weaknesses in EU trade policy that will affect any future negotiation. My analysis🧵 bst-europe.eu/economy-secu...

Once you realise there are only 8,760 hours in a year, it makes yearly constituency sewage discharges of over 13,000 hours all the more shocking!

Border Force chief who ‘suggested game of Naked Attraction’ with colleagues was able to leave civil service with unblemished record

Macron: "He's a very clever cat" Merci monsieur le président x

Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

Project Here.

“This is Trump’s war now.”

I remember staggering, pissed, out of a nightclub with my friends to get a kebab. And we still did a better job of marching than the US Army.

Think the awkward thing for all will be when the conclusion is that state services were just terrible at, and totally uninterested in, caring for vulnerable young girls from troubled and troublesome backgrounds.

Political volatility has been taking us by surprise for a while now. Here’s little exercise to illustrate. Rewind two years and take a look at where the polls were, what people expected, and what they failed to anticipate. You have to go back a while before politics is predictable even 2 yrs out 1/

Well. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

In a democracy, *should* the question we ask ourselves be "Am I better off?" What about "are other people better off?" "Are the laws fair?" "Are we more secure?" "Are we trashing the planet for the future?" The left, in particular, should be really wary of transactional framings of democracy. 1/3

Dafuq?

no, this won't lead to Reform imploding or slumping in the polls

Trump starts to close America off to the world.

For anyone who missed it. This is beyond parody!

Fish & shellfish caught in British waters will now be processed and sold into the EU without veterinary checks, eliminating huge red tape, checks, costs and delays created by Brexit. Given that 70% of seafood caught in UK is sold in EU, this is a big win.

The hysterical reaction of certain commentators to today’s UK-EU agreement is something to behold. The “surrender” of using e-gates when you go on holiday. The contempt for the “will of the people” of making education abroad more accessible. Rigorous debate is good. This nonsense is a waste of time.

OK, this is wild. In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them. It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL? 1/

One of the strangest ironies of the last ten years has been watching Britain immersing itself as deeply as ever in memories of WW2 while proudly turning its back on the project that emerged from it.

Rubio publicly criticizing an ally for cracking down on right-wing extremism. And Germany hitting back. We are in a new world

An illustration of how FPP goes from sandbag to springboard - Reform votes and seats in different councils: Oxfordshire: 18% vote, 2% seats Cambridgeshire: 23% vote, 16% seats Devon: 27% vote, 30% seats Leicestershire: 33% vote, 46% seats Derbyshire: 37% vote, 66% seats

The actually existing main Labour base of support is younger middle class professionals with degrees. They may not have much patience with egging on the destruction of the institutions they care about in the name of pursuing voters who aren't Labour now and often haven't ever been Labour.

What British politics really doesn't need now is any more people wondering if some hybrid of "national" and "socialism" might be the recipe for a new, wide-reaching electoral coalition of the disaffected.

John Curtice notes on Today that mayoral races could be won with as little as 25% of the vote. But it's worse than that: if turnout in (eg) the West of England race is the same as in 2001 - 36% - a party might win with 9% of eligible votes. First Past the Post is an absurdity in these conditions.

Gold hits $3,500 for first time as Donald Trump’s attack on Jay Powell rattles markets https://www.ft.com/content/2ebab5f0-8d8a-4f3a-b7be-f489abca3dde

Art of the Deal my ass.

In addition to giving the contract to himself and so stealing public money the very concept of this thing is a crazy level boondoggle www.reuters.com/business/aer...

UK big supermarkets calling for a “veterinary deal” with the EU…via @financialtimes.com …a point of reference next time Lord Frost is saying it would be a “sell out”. Letter sent to Sefcovic as a “spine-stiffener” lest Labour gets Trump/Reform collywobbles. on.ft.com/42kTdHN

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked, "If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?" Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

You don’t have to be particularly sharp to decipher the code here. But if you need someone to say it, this is a major technology company and a sizable defense and intelligence contractor publicly declaring, with only the thinnest patina of deniability, that its cause is white nationalism.

We're in The Bad Place, folks. The existence of an overseas gulag to which you - yes, you personally - can be sent with no recourse marks the end of a whole period of American history. There's no going back after this. Even if these guys are defeated, the new order will have to look much different.