Burnham will be more damaging than Starmer. He represents the last flicker of hope for folk still deluded enough to back Labour. But he’s adopting all the rightwing positions that have been Starmer’s undoing. Burnham will pave the way to a Reform government even faster than Starmer. Labour is over.

if you go back to voting labour because it gets a new hat not only do i hate you i also think you're an idiot

This month @emeraldpublishing.bsky.social's Culture Wars in Britain: The Myth of Exceptionalism and the Reality of Division by @thehubble101.bsky.social is out. Explores how cultural divisions shaped British society over the past century. Media copies despatching. DM if you're keen to review!

Reproductive rights come next. In the words of Florence Reece, which side are you on?

The important point to remember is NO SHE DOESN'T. What was published yesterday were guidelines for service providers. They impose NO obligations on individuals and are NOT the law. People want you to believe otherwise, to intimidate trans people. But they haven't yet criminalised their existence.

So excited and proud that the @c21literature.bsky.social special issue “The Century at 25” that I edited with @heyitsdenisew.bsky.social @keeblearin.bsky.social @alicebennett.bsky.social is now complete and out in the world 🎉 So many brilliant contributions: c21.openlibhums.org/issue/1422/i...

Switching between BBC News at 10 and ITV News at 10 is like switching between different parallel universes. The first is the tame biased state broadcaster of an authoritarian state providing a diet of bread and circuses. The second reports national and international news.

⚖️ This guidance is going to be a Section 28 moment for this Labour government, defining their legacy on LGBTQ+ rights. Treating trans people like this puts the UK outside the international human rights norm, and the right thing for the government to do here would be to urgently legislate.

Trans people like me were warning 15 years ago that this would happen as a consequence of the rise in transphobia.

Trans people are not “fighting for unpopular positions that society isn’t ready for.” Trans people are fighting to KEEP the rights we have enjoyed for decades. We have been able to legally change our gender markers since the 70s and before. Same with bathrooms, sports, youth, all for decades.

Overall, it essentially defines trans people as a category of sex of their own (a third sex) in a country that believes sex is binary and only legally recognises two sexes (but of course, now no longer legally recognises any record of legal sex)

horrid horrid horrid thread

Listening to someone else's online meeting and thinking how glad I am not to have to use the horrible words 'originality, significance and rigour' in the cause of a completely fucking pointless bureaucratic and intensely neoliberal process. #escaped

The Team met this evening to discuss PictCon2: The next newsletter will be out soon! We have 109 subscribers now. If you aren't one of them, make sure you sign up, because the programme form will be going out soon. pictcon.com And we have a date for PictCon3! Put 23rd October 2027 in your diaries.

Ah, May. You have brought great essays over the last two years.

Had a great evening launching and talking about my new book Culture Wars in Britain with @emmas.bsky.social at Waterstones in Aberystwyth. Lots of good questions and points to discuss.

Had a great evening launching and talking about my new book Culture Wars in Britain with @emmas.bsky.social at Waterstones in Aberystwyth. Lots of good questions and points to discuss.

Super excited that my new book Culture Wars in Britain is out in paperback today. There is a launch at Waterstones Aberystwyth tonight at 7pm in which I discuss it with @emmas.bsky.social: www.waterstones.com/events/in-co... If you can't make that, the book is currently from Amazon and direct... 1/

Super excited that my new book Culture Wars in Britain is out in paperback today. There is a launch at Waterstones Aberystwyth tonight at 7pm in which I discuss it with @emmas.bsky.social: www.waterstones.com/events/in-co... If you can't make that, the book is currently from Amazon and direct... 1/

And cowardice, don't forget the cowardice. Starmer actually reminds me very strongly of a university senior manager I once crossed paths with.

Over at SH, @kateem.bsky.social on Vonda N. McIntyre's final novel, published on May 15 by @timmi.bsky.social. What emerges, bitter-sweetly, is "an epic fantasy voyage" which adopts a fascinating approach to historical fantasy ... and, in more ways than one, leaves us asking what might have been.

ITV News at Ten helpfully explaining how Rhun Ap Iorwerth helped Plaid reach beyond the heartlands and break through in 'cities like Cardiff and Swansea'!!

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.

No doubt others have said this, but Keir Starmer really did miss his true vocation by not becoming a university Vice Chancellor. The exact same mix of entitlement, managerialism and lack of imagination. No capacity for irony or humility.

Between IGV robbing the real Greens of an MSP again and the continued failure of everyone bar a hobbyist (c'est moi) to properly report on half the votes cast in the election, a real reminder of how unfit for purpose so much of Scotland and the UK's legal and media infrastructure around elections is

Don't forget that it is @massobsarchive.bsky.social diary day. Anyone can contribute to this wonderful social history archive - anyone in the UK can submit massobs.org.uk/12th-may/

The end of the UK is nigh. The Celtic nations will ally to finish the union The old-style politics of Tory and Labour is over, and with it the union they defend. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will not stick around to see Farage become Prime Minister My @heraldscotland.bsky.social column

#RainbowMap 2026 is live! Spain breaks Malta's decade-long hold on top spot. As the rules-based international order fractures and democracy is under pressure, Spain's No’1 ranking stands as proof that political courage remains the most powerful answer. Find out more at rainbowmap.ilga-europe.org!

Remake of The King's Speech in which the Government has to deliver a public address but suffers from a debilitating Starmer.

This looks great - I will be getting a copy

Very positive leader in the Guardian about the seismic nature of Plaid's win and how the victories in Wales and Scotland make an unanswerable case for a new UK settlement. That's a huge change from their position back in 2012-14 period, when they regularly equated the SNP with UKIP. Tide turning.

I agree with this. By all means identify shared interests and build viable coalitions where you can, but there are two camps in the UK now with incompatible preferences for what the country should be and how people should live in it. A 1990s belief in a big middle ground simply will not work.

Thanks to Starmer's underwhelming speech, I now have Judas Priest earworming through my mind. I don't think British Steel is going to cut it. I don't think Starmer can even imagine what a transformative policy would look like. He's just written his own political epitaph.

Yeap bsky.app/profile/theh...

Meanwhile my local council does not appear to have been overtaken by the ReFuk madness. And, yes, it did vote Remain. Here it is Lib Dems that have the huge majority. www.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/news/chelten...

Been mulling over the election results while recovering from being out on Friday night celebrating the last day of the Orban regime in Hungary and the Plaid victory. As I say in my book out next Wednesday (see my pinned post), there is now no chance of the culture-war divide in Britain going away 1/

Britain would be better off as several 'smaller' countries. It's the only way we will break this island free from the pernicious myth of British exceptionalism and get a modern constitutional reset. Having a Plaid government in Cymru is a major hopeful political change after 10 years of reaction.

Just remarkable how suddenly the newfound interest in Welsh politics of the UK-wide commentariat evaporated the second Reform got beaten.

Awful take from right-wing, socially conservative publication.

"More British" is mostly now a liberal left-leaning pro-diversity Remain-coded identity in English cities (held by graduates, liberals, ethnic and faith minorities, Londoners) but it is more often a socally conservative right-leaning Leave-coded identity in Scotland and in Wales!

Reform vote in Wales heavily concentrated among pro-Brexit voters. Its higher among those who identify as more British than Welsh: it is weak among those 'more Welsh than British'. (Strongly "more British than Welsh" people similar on cultural Qs to strongly "more English than British" in England)

NEW PODCAST ALERT This week's episode of our Critical Friends podcast features Hana Carolina @hanacarolina.bsky.social and Alex Kingsley @alexyquest.bsky.social alongside Dan Hartland @danhartland.bsky.social discussing reviews of debut books and authors. Link ⬇️ strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

I have now switched away from BBC 1 Wales in contempt as the BBC's own Welsh politics person claims the electoral system used isn't really any more proportional than FPTP (following a sustained attack by Lib Dem & Labour politicians on how the public don't really understand). Might write a complaint

They're still going with this bread-and-butter topic. It's now such an inbuilt ideological feature of the BBC, which accounts for their inability to report on politics accurately. A commentator has just said the 20mph speed limit is responsible for the lack of drugs in pharmacies.

BBC1 Wales now talking about bread-and-butter issues as the big issue. Yes, everyone needs to pay for bills and food. But if that was the sole key issue you wouldn't have the politics of Wales and the UK as whole governed by a divide between two blocs split on a liberal/authoritarian cultural axis.

What better way to mark a new #Murderbot novel from @marthawells.com than launching our From the Vault series? First published in January 2024, you can read about why Murderbot binges media here: www.speculativeinsight.com/from-the-vault/nice-safe-emotions

Reading all the replies on the latest SH Critical Friends podcast (on a day when an author did DM me on another app about a review I wrote of their work), I found myself wondering how much the BlueSky 'SFF Criticism & Discussion' feed is not just shaping these debates but also changing relationships

Following Labour's election victory in 2024, new Secretary of State for Culture, Lisa Nandy, proclaimed that 'the culture wars were now over'. Today, they are finding out that they are not in part because they walked into every Tory culture-war trap set for them, as I explain in my new book.

🔴SCOOP: Tom Harper, the senior APCO executive who led firm's controversial investigation into journalists on behalf of Labour Together, has left the PR firm. His profile has been taken down from APCO's website. Sources confirmed departure New on D4S: democracyforsale.substack.com/p/pr-executi...

Still time to pre-order my new book Culture Wars in Britain from the publisher at 30% off the £16.99 cover price with code EME30. Comes out 13 May 2026. Also currently reduced on Amazon UK. Tickets still available to hear me talk about it at Waterstones Aberystwyth 7pm 13 May (via their events page)