Palestine Action have WON their judicial review in the High Court! A massive victory for free speech, freedom of association and the right to protest. A massive defeat for the draconian attempts by Keir Starmer's government to curtail our fundamental rights.

A court has ruled that the government's authoritarian ban on Palestine Action was unlawful. Time to stop criminalising the people protesting a genocide - and start ending the UK's complicity.

Good of Starmer to call out Ratcliffe's racism. Now do the corrosive political influence of tax-avoiding billionaires.

The UK Supreme Court's decision to ban Oatly from using the word "milk" is shilling for an ecocidal industry concerned it won't be able to destroy the planet with impunity and nothing more. Banning the phrase "post-milk" isn't even internally consistent. It's just fossils and tobacco on repeat.

Before I wrote this last year I knew a lot about the horrors of dairy but didn't truly know what it means to be a herd animal. We think humans are intensely social, but cows are another level entirely I think it's pretty much impossible to do dairy farming humanely, but the way we do it seems 1/

The sudden realisation that the last UK PM to complete a term unaided was Tony Blair, over two decades ago.

Just for context: Tel Aviv Macabi withdrew their request for tickets to the Aston Villa games after their fans rioted in their own stadium.

Can we infer from the Maccabi debacle that West Midlands Police haven't developed a policy on AI use? Either way, such staggering incompetence has turned what should have been a completely reasonable, defensible position into a stick to beat both anti-hooligan and pro-Palestine actors. Good work.

US Senate advances resolution asking Trump to consider not committing any more war crimes.

You'd have to be incredibly naive to still believe anyone associated with the Trump administration is planning for free and fair elections or respected term limits in 2028.

Or even: How's advancing unpalatable candidates in every general election cycle, in an endless cycle of superiority and tone-deafness, working out for the Democratic Party?

For a lot of people, particularly in the global south, the international rules-based order was obviously a facade but such open, proud, outright criminality, hooliganism, and banditry almost defies analysis. It's hard to find the words but we really do need to.

I’m a *lot* fed up with the constant gaslighting about what this Labour government has been like. I’d love a good Labour government. I’d be right behind it - if it stopped the xenophobic bollocks, started treating disabled people with respect etc etc. Currently, Starmer is Farage’s best recruiter

If the leader of the Fabians, a purportedly leftist think tank, can't have a serious conversation about the impact of billionaires, what does that tell us?

Medecins Sans Frontieres are now apparently Hamas, so I think we can all agree it's time for some more anti-genocide pensioners to be arrested.

4 up, top of the league, and still singing about Emi Martinez. Is that a complex?

Direct action gets you policy shift if you're a tax-avoiding landowner and prison if you're against genocide or climate change.

The new collective noun for rich farmers is an ‘avoidance’. An avoidance of rich farmers.

Something conspicuously missing from the Jeffrey Epstein discourse is that a billionaire had unfettered access to and influence over all the major global levers of power purely by virtue of his wealth. That's a dynamic that didn't begin or end with him.

Weird that complaints the education system is too 'woke' come from exactly the kind of people who, 150 years ago, didn't want anyone else to be educated at all.

Those with power and wealth have absolutely zero inclination to inconvenience themselves in order to save the rest of us, and every potential climate solution has to be approached from this perspective.

The intellectual vacuousness of centrism means a willingness to throw your own purported human rights ideals under the bus, all to emulate a far right only emboldened by your fighting on their turf, rather than addressing the fundamental failures of capitalism. www.theguardian.com/law/2025/dec...

This club, man. Unreal. #AVFC

When energy companies can legitimately 'smooth' your monthly bills to the extent you're required to pay double your monthly average, there's no way nationalisation can be more expensive for the taxpayer.

So obviously not a corner that Brighton were guaranteed to score.

We've just had a decade of ideologically motivated, unnecessary austerity that's only served to destroy the social fabric while enriching the wealthiest, followed by Boris Johnson. Any moralising on Rachel Reeves' motivations by either the Tories or the press rings, at best, pretty hollow.

The biggest impediment to emergency vehicles is the endless proliferation of private cars, not the mechanisms designed to ameliorate this.

A controversial opinion in the UK: having a standard emails job then sitting in a house you bought for a song and watching it rise exponentially in value due to political choices that have nothing to do with you is not it fact “working very hard to get what you have”

The super-rich doubled their wealth in the wake of the crash and subsequent austerity, so it makes absolute sense that they bear the burden of redressing that balance and rebuilding public services. The problem is Reeves' budget doesn't do that, and won't win over the right-wing press regardless.

*Kemi reading the bible* "suffer little children" well that's enough for today, think I got the gist of it

If you're gonna constantly platform billionaires with vested interests on shows like Question Time, it's surely only fair to, at some point, give panel space to the people on minimum wage creating their profits.

It should be obvious, but every tax change has winners and losers, including some cases on the edge that appear to be anomalous. The idea of a perfect and perfectly fair tax is impossible. The question is whether and if so how you treat those who lose (and to a lesser extent those who win). 1/3

Even if he wanted to, Farage couldn't condemn racism without a lot of his base considering it 'woke'.

After today's Sunday Mirror exposé about Ryan Bridge, Simon Murphy is unsurprisingly being attacked by Raise the Colours who accuse him of "talking shi*t about our movement". Thank you to Simon for exposing these people for who they really are.

The only positive from that half is it's only 1-0 despite Villa still being asleep.

The Green Climate Fund needed $100bil pa in '09, and at COP30, $120bil for adaptation and mitigation by '35 is supposed to be a success? A deal that appeases petrostates and omits fossils is beyond worthless - without even thinking about agribusiness. Another wasted year and we've run out of years.

This rhetoric underpins every dismissive and hostile attitude to cyclists and cycling infrastructure: only drivers are legitimate road users.

I feel like a broken record but honestly, what is the point of Ofgem? A captured 'regulator' for a broken, privatised system.

When Labour are done watering down human rights and vilifying asylum seekers, and public services are still crumbling, wages stagnating, and the wealth gap increasing, where do they go next?

Pointless, monstrous, dehumanising cruelty towards those forced to flee the most dangerous places on Earth. Alongside the interference in jurisprudence on Article 3 and 8 rights, what is this Labour Party other than a gift to Farage? www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Shabana Mahmood's despicable rhetoric and asylum system changes only lend legitimacy to the far right, and damage hard-won human rights provision for *everyone*. They'll never attract the voters Labour are desperately courting.

You gain nothing by apologising to fascists.

Sickening rhetoric by Home Secretary. Denying access to human rights isn't "protecting the public". This is Labour further demonising those seeking asylum in language very reminiscent of the far right. Yes, some break the law, so should be prosecuted within the law. Removing rights is not the answer

Finally. Overt politicisation of this role was always a terrible idea.

Let's stop pretending that the billionaire media, endlessly attacking the BBC, has the slightest interest in balance, impartiality and accuracy. They won't be happy until the BBC is more rightwing than Vlad the Impaler. And then it still won't be enough.

NEW | if the BBC *is* biased, it’s not against the right… Arsonists cosplaying as fire fighters: Why the right-wing war on the BBC is succeeding brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/arsonists-...

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 …

Bias against the right is a resigning matter for the Director-General. Bias against the left is BBC News policy.

Unelected commissioners mandating the ideologically-motivated, illiterate sale of hundreds of millions of pounds worth of civic assets, for a Section 114 order erroneously issued, responsibility for which shouldn't lie with the public anyway. What's happening in Birmingham is a national scandal.

Remember this, whenever someone says "alternative proteins - yuck!" www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...