I spent half of my life living under mandatory ID laws in several countries, and I can tell you from experience, you won’t like it. These laws are designed to give police arbitrary power to stop, question and search anyone they choose.

Democracy dies in darkness 🤡

Props to @wearequeeraf.com for continuing to report on the influence groups like Bayswater have on policy in the UK. The government's continual refusal to comment on abuse allegations is damning. www.wearequeeraf.com/section-28-2...

Power is the rock on which truth founders. The mainstream media, with a few exceptions, is a single-issue lobby group, whose purpose is to assert the rights of capital. Here's what I've learnt about the industry in 40 years in journalism. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The main story on BBC 6 Music News this morning is that a ‘boat carrying migrants is on its way to France’ Delivered in the same upbeat tone as England winning the women’s Euros. The migration ‘debate’ in this country is unmoored from reality, and the media-political complex is feeding it

I’m sure there’ll be corrections in equally prominent positions in each of these papers, yeah?

There are so many unforgivable actions of capitulation being taken by the institutions most well-positioned to stand up to Trump’s authoritarianism if they wished to do so. A must-read from @samtlevin.bsky.social:

A woman's rape is being treated by police as a "racially aggravated attack". The perpetrators reportedly told the woman during the attack: "You don't belong in this country, get out." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Air France is aiding the cruelty of the British and French governments in their barbaric deportation deal on multiple flights next week. Call them on +44 207 660 0337 and tell them to refuse to fly! Visit this link for script and more info! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

More lives lost including 1 woman & 2 children. Government have just closed refugee family reunion (RFR) safe route. 56% of grants for RFR were children & 37% were women. So the number of women & children crossing, and dying, is going to soar. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Research on LGBT pupils removed from Stormont's education department website www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

So The floatilla did not safely reach Gaza with aid According to all the news outlets you've heard of in your life before, "organizers" "claim" and "Tunisian authorities" deny that the fire on the lead boat Greta Thunburg and others were on was "caused by drones" and definitely not by "IDF drones"

the statements issued by the cabinet and senior police officials have the effect of legitimising violence against trans people.

TSN do not believe that transphobic violence can be solved by policing tweets, but contrasted with the hard line the UK government have taken criminalising non-violent protest in the UK,

Statement from Trans Safety Network on the Linehan arrest. TSN understand Linehan's tweet to be an unambiguous call for vigilante violence against trans women in toilets. And yet senior government figures and police have jumped to find a way to make excuses for it.

Today @tbij.bsky.social joins other media organisations in calling for an end to the killing of journalists in Gaza #ProtectJournalistsinGaza #LetReportersIntoGaza

This is terrifying. It's impossible to overstate what an immense threat to our human rights this Labour government poses.

It is in fact wild that the actual experts on migration, i.e. service providers, caseworkers, advisors and migrants themselves, are the only people who Downing St is ignoring on migration. Everyone else has a Legitimate Concern, except those Legitimately Concerned.

Starmer et al have repeatedly said that national security is the government's first responsibility. Last year's racist riots prove that the "dark turn" described below represents a clear, physical threat to minority communities. So why aren't they defending us now? Are they not our government too?

No10 spokesman not prepared to criticise anything about Farage speech today. Not his description of "invasion", not his prediction that the UK on brink of civil war, not plans to pay the Taliban or Iran to take back migrants, or indeed to rule out doing so themselves.

A reminder that the UK has actually been deporting people to Taliban-run Afghanistan since, er, August 2021: hyphenonline.com/2025/04/24/f...

Four journalists were killed by an Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital today, including Mariam Dagga, a freelancer with the @apnews.com. She has a 12-year-old son, who was evacuated from Gaza earlier in the war. She was a true hero, like all of our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza. tinyurl.com/3cn5c9vb

Trans people have been prosecuted for non-disclosure in the UK since the 90s - but this is the first case I have heard of in which a trans woman is being charged, it’s usually transmasculine ppl. The UK is the only country that charges trans people for this, and it’s difficult to prove innocence.

I spent the 2010's arguing with my white colleagues that we were facing a crisis in newsroom diversity. The smart, dedicated, talented cis white journalists I thought of as my friends didn't want to hear it. Most of them ignored me. At least one of them told me to go to hell.

The thing you don’t see about lengthy libel cases like this is the mental impact on witnesses - and on news outlets’ willingness to do similar stories. Respect to all the women who chose to go to court to defend this story - plus Sirin Kale, Lucy Osborne, Paul Lewis and the Guardian team.

Outdated laws and benefit cuts: Why women can’t leave sex work

Seething as the BBC uses the World at One to manufacture consent for the UK pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights and Refugee Convention. Not an iota of consideration given to the humanity of asylum seekers.

Zoe Gardner: asylum seekers should be able to work while their claims are processed. Yes! It was the last Lab govt that removed their right to work, talked about bogus asylum seekers swamping our schools, introduced vouchers & opened Yarls Wood. And here we are #GMB

Still waiting for the widespread outrage over Robert Jenrick at a racist pogrom here pictured with founder of neo-Nazi group Combat 18

Can’t find much outrage this morning about Robert Jenrick joining a bunch of racist intimidators outside a hotel where people seeking asylum live apart from this LBC article. Labour’s attack lines are that it was his policy www.lbc.co.uk/article/jenr...

Heart-rending that this UK government does so little when even a little can do so much. Avi Shlaim makes the case with powerful simplicity: Why can’t Palestinian students from Gaza take up their university places in Britain? www.independent.co.uk/voices/pales...

Literally laughing out loud 🤷🏽‍♂️

We asked Sudanese people to explain what the war is about. What emerges is clear: there is no such thing as a war about nothing. continent.substack.com/p/is-the-sud...

I am one of the 14 authors who chose to leave the Polari Prize, and I find myself frustrated and saddened at the way this entire story has been represented. 1/

It does seem very worth pointing out that several of the most reactionary currents in our culture and politics market themselves on the basis of "protecting women and girls". With transphobia this is sometimes called "feminism", here there is no such pretence, but they are the same.

Why should non-binary teachers not be afforded same respect other teachers are granted? Why should they be denied recognition and made to feel excluded? It makes no difference to anyone else's life if they are referred to as Mx. Yet again, this government goes down the route of embedding bigotry.

The NHS are forcibly detransitioning trans kids in Brighton and calling it “managed withdrawal.” Their own impact assessment acknowledges trans kids will be at increased risk of harm as a result, don’t want this, and are likely to just use DIY hormones instead

Assigned Media tracked down every single queer author who withdrew from the Polari Prize after they longlisted a self-proclaimed TERF, and linked to all their books. These authors showed solidarity and our story is blowing up with traffic from people who want to support them in return.

a specific skill I've developed over the past ~20 years is crafting responses to emails sent to me, but intended for that other Naomi Wolf

A reminder that the Israeli government does not allow any international journalist into Gaza. That’s how they have killed more journalists than most conflicts combined since WWII while claiming that all the journalists they’ve killed were actually enemy combatants.

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

2019: "In the name of fighting illegal immigration, the EU, the United States, and Australia are emboldening authoritarian regimes, fueling abuses and corruption, and stoking intolerance at home" West’s Obsession With Border Security Breeding Instability foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/16/b...

Makes sense Boyne would defend Rowling. They both oppose trans rights and engage in Holocaust revisionism. Honestly, the massive harm Boyne has done to Holocaust education alone should render him ineligible.

I am begging media outlets to actually try “making a movie from a prompt” for themselves before parroting the AI industry’s fantasy framing that “anyone can make a movie from a prompt.”

Please write to your MP and demand that the Home Office act to help these students make it out of Gaza to study in the UK this September. Time is running out to get the government to move on this; they absolutely could take action and are — so far — choosing not to.

Israel is using Microsoft Azure to store recordings of every phone call made by Palestinians in the occupied territories, then using AI to analyze the contents and select targets. Microsoft is (dubiously) claiming ignorance.

NEW: Two US citizens jailed in LA ICE raids speak out. Andrea Velez + Adrian Martinez were both grabbed outside their workplaces + say agents refused to believe they were citizens. Andrea was unsure the masked men were officers as they dragged her into their car: “I thought they were kidnapping me”

The world's biggest company enabling a genocide through the use of data storage technology: where have I heard that before?

🧵 1/2 NEW INVESTIGATION: The Israeli army’s elite cyber warfare unit is using Microsoft’s cloud servers to store masses of intelligence on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — information that has been used to plan deadly airstrikes and shape military operations. www.972mag.com/microsoft-82...

And yet they still won't help any of the Gazan students who have won UK scholarships to take up their university places.