Fuck the 1% wealth club i want in on this

A British soldier and a brave patriotic penguin vs a penguin held captive by the Argentine invaders:

We are at Labour conference, telling members about the impact of the proposed bathroom ban. It would devastate trans people’s lives, create unworkable business challenges, and alienate voters. This would be Labour’s legacy on LGBT+ rights for a generation. But it’s not too late for them to stop it.

Barbara Gomes Marques is documentary filmmaker who risks imminent deportation to Brazil. Loud voices in the film community could be especially helpful right now.

If this was any other country you'd have Emerging and Frontier Marker analysts circulating thinkpieces assessing the risks of a military coup

The obscenity is too much to stomach. Colonial overlords by another name, and the Palestinians are expected yet again to acquiesce

All to avoid the shame of acknowledging the horrible, psychologically troubling truth. Labour has for a long time been a party of the PMC, by the PMC, for the PMC. It’s just, here’s the thing about the PMC. They are the electoral majority. And they are how Labour won, will win, and can only win. n/n

This is a really key chart. Look at the difference between concern about immigration between Lab to Reform switchers and Lab to LD/Green/don't know switchers. The latter group is five times larger.

If we did that we'd be so far into Wilson cosplay the only thing left to do would be bring back George Brown

reminder that this directive functionally massively discriminates against Black men and should be understood as part of an ongoing campaign to resegregate the military www.military.com/daily-news/2...

the average Telegraph columnist has gone from barking mad in a retired colonel way to barking mad in a 'back away from them in public' way

Is there a reason I ask that the Times are using a picture of asylum seekers in a boat to describe rules for migrants who came on legal routes such as skilled worker visas for doctors?

The government is not popular with Reform voters. It is not popular with business leaders. Being economically leftwing but really, really, really irritating left-liberals might spit out as 'somewhere in the centre' on the political compass but it is not the same as actually governing effectively.

Labour are confusing 'decisions which Labour members do not enjoy or dislike' with 'decisions anyone outside of the Labour party likes or welcomes', I think. www.ft.com/content/f776...

Whoever in Downing Street might have thought that reviving Blair's career by watching Trump turn him into Proconsul of Gaza would be good for Labour and the UK should be sacked

More gifts from Trump like this and a fed up Labour Party membership will help topple Keir Starmer down by Christmas

i am reminded of when matt stoller lost his mind over this column, and saw it as evidence of my “pro-corporate” bias. he literally could not grasp the idea that the smallness of a business does not necessarily alter its relationship to production or to the workers it employs

resolved: sandwiches taste better when cut diagonally

so it's literally just the cyberlibertarian equivalent of a private colony

Jonathan Powell writes of the Blair 2005 speech in defence of immigration 'it didn't gain us any support, but without it our vote would have been driven down', and we're living through the proof that he was right.

In addition to the normative points, I am once again tapping the sign marked 'net immigration to the UK in 2029 will still be, in relative terms, very high, and the government needs to have a position that allows it to defend what the Actually Existing UK looks like'.

yeah, its 2002, i'm hearing limp bizkit in the hallway and some girl in my computer science class is about to say she hopes we nuke the "sand n****rs"

When people see "free speech" and understand that to just mean the freedom of theocrats to lecture queer people any time they're going about their business, rather than the freedom of queer people to eg circulate safer sex education without being prosecuted for obscenity, we're in real trouble!

One of the problems with the fascist movement's abuse of rights around "free speech", "free belief" and "free association" is that much of the left has abandoned these as hopelessly liberal and naive and inherently the ideological property of the right.

Again this is because they have a desired moral economy which has no relationship to the actual economy.

I would like people (nb Stephen is not doing this) to a) stop making up people to be angry at and b) maybe actually visit the North of England before using it as your go to rhetorical example of What Middle Class People Don’t Do. We have middle class people in the North. We eat fish and chips, too.

The author might also be shocked by the possibility that vegan cafes exist in Mansfield and Rotherham

'northern fish and chip shop' is particularly bizarre because fish and chips is very much not a regionalized thing (apart from a couple of weird local items like the infamous chip barm pea wet). they're all across the UK!

All discourse now involves groups of degree-holding middle class people accusing one another of being middle class and holding degrees. I don't make the rules.

And if one of the poorest students wants to study philosophy or music?

Says the party that has been constantly pandering to right-wing populism. You people have embarrassed yourselves with the flag craze and the fixation of appearing ‘tough’ of immigration. It’s Labour, via the Hard Labour/Blue Labour nonsense, which is taking our country down a dark path.

The chief paradox of the next few decades is going to be that aging countries around the world need new people, but can't get them because they don't want the "wrong kind" of people

Americans are (sometimes even genuinely) appalled by the European attitude to free speech rights, but as a Belgian employer I would not be able to fire someone for this.

Enjoying watching the UK trip over own shoelaces on this...

Reminder that Miller once asked an admiral “When a boat full of migrants is in int’l waters, they aren’t protected by the U.S. Constitution, right?” When admiral said that’s technically true, but int’l law still applied, Miller replied: “why can’t we use a Predator drone to obliterate that boat?”

It really is just relentless the constant dehumanisation in this country. Prove you deserve to be here. Prove you deserve to be cared for. Prove your gender. Prove you deserve to have human rights. Prove you deserve to stay after a whole decade. It just chisels away at your humanity

Must be a day ending with 'y'

Pleased to see @sundersays.bsky.social highlight the new @uclpolicylab.bsky.social essay collection on Labour and communitarianism in his response to the anonymous screed being circulated of late amongst Labour MPs

Further to this, all the characteristics mentioned by Mahmood already have to be met to get ILR (salary, English, life in UK test, clean criminal record, no welfare benefits) other than this weird Duke of Edinburgh style volunteering thing that they cannot possibly implement.

Can we stop doing this? There is no sense in debating whether people are themselves racist, or sexist, or homophobic, if the context for this debate is how these people have done racist, sexist or homophobic things

how long before organisations rely on the unpaid labour of people seeking indefinite leave to remain as their business model?

Just fuck off with this. How about start the conversation by highlighting how much immigrants contribute to the UK - not least by propping up the NHS and social care system! Also - forced volunteering is not volunteering, it's unpaid labour.

Another fun angle to this one is that those waiting on a visa in the UK are often prevented from working in the NGO sector - even on a voluntary basis.

“Research by Common Wealth has found that water companies’ operating profit margins are significantly higher than other FTSE 350 companies, including Shell and Sainsbury’s.” Our new project — Who Owns Britain? — featured in @theipaper.com 👇🔗 inews.co.uk/news/where-w...

Somebody give the PM a medal, the most predictable thing happened and he gained nothing

This made me laugh. He could quite easily choose to be hated for being inclusive but nope, he wanted to chase the racists. Doesn't matter what he does, they will always hate him.

Something that seems to be emerging in Germany with generational change is a new kind of GDR nostalgia that is no longer connected to lives experience but a kind of fan culture based on an internet curated mishmash of contextless imagery and state produced texts.

"Contribution" is the great magic bullet of politicos desperate to try and finesse their way through welfare politics The reason contribution quickly faded as a basis of the welfare state is, as Saul alludes to, that those who need the help most may by definition have financially contributed less