Worth mentioning too that escapist fantasy was one of the most popular literary genre in the Middle Ages; Sir Orfeo, SGGK, all the King Arthur stuff filtered through the troubadours.

"Did you hear what this university debate club voted for?" "No! Of course not!"

What level of concern about the pace of cultural change is this www.bbc.com/news/article...

Can someone clip up that "oh fuck" from Nick like it's still 2014 Twitter.

HE'S ONLY GONE AND FUCKING DONE IT! #CelebrityTraitors

Written and observed from a third person perspective, the UK immigration debate really does feel mad. And the Labour Party role in enabling Katie Lam and Nigel Farage’s Idi Amin tribute policies through rhetorical radicalisation - shameful

👇 I don’t get why this is so poorly understood. If you live in a wealthy country, in the event that dictatorship comes to your country, your smart fridge’s manufacturer is not going to say “we couldn’t possibly hand *that* over”.

Great pre-Budget summary from @jessicaelgot.bsky.social and @pippacrerar.bsky.social today but this piece stood out three and a half years before an election

Anyway there's a real problem with basically any discussion about defence policy and it is that quite frankly we have still not gotten everyone on the same board, which is that Europe's ass is burning and that a fascist regime on our eastern border has territorial designs on its members.

This is… basically „he fancied them” right

“Kate Garraway to Kate Go Away” is, to be fair to Alan, a great line

big dog theory < sundried tomatoes theory

Andrew making sure there aren’t any silk scarves in a 50 mile radius

Obviously trusting an estate agent to do *anything* is a serious lapse of judgement. But on the whole, this makes Badenoch calling for Reeves to resign look even sillier.

Until they commit to no further Idi Amin Bills, the Tories deserve no hearing

If "raising the basic rate of income tax to pay for well funded public services" is "basically evil" then I don't know what your conception of being left-wing actually is.

I know some people enjoy pretending economics isnt real but in the real world a wealth tax simply does not raise as much money as an increase in the base rate of income tax. It's just maths.

Zohran Mamdani caught lying that he understood Plato’s allegory of the cave, yet when asked to explain it, he seemed to instead explain Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation where reality has been replaced by symbols and signs, which seems similar to Plato’s theory but is not the same

i believe in austrian economics now. mr powell, purge this malinvestment

It's increasingly obvious that Labour's strategy - call it Starmerism, Blue Labour, whatever - has got it badly wrong. It has alienated the party's core vote while failing to win over those leaning to Reform. There was no shortage of people warning them they were getting it wrong either.

Your Party are basically just the Labour Party’s sedevacantists

the other problem with euro-american online beef is of course that our assessment of each other is completely correct (derogatory)

Sitting on cheap chairs can knacker people's backs, employers should provide good chairs, £200 is not much to spend on an office chair.

This is correct. Also applies lot of food/ cultural discourse.

Also, let’s be clear, this is the Katie Lam “cultural coherence” argument spelled out

Did the parkrun in Portrush today (back in NI) and it was by far the most difficult but most beautiful course ever. Also excellent photo from their photographer Stuart Vaux if I can credit

If I were the Labour leadership, I’d consider these results… Caerphil… [is dragged offstage]

The faithful need to vote as a block to win now right?

This is just a Radovan Karadzic speech in RP. Like I know I’ve posted too much about this, but the British Right going full Republika Srpska is just not something I had considered

The bleakly funny thing about this story is that visibly *this morning* the Conservative leadership had not absorbed just how crackers the policy they had signed up to was.

The Shadow Home Secretary presented the bill to Parliament on 14th May 2025

NEW - Starmer on Katy Lam: "I can't tell you how much I disagree with her. "People who are lawfully in this country, who have been working in our communities, our neighbours... to reach in and remove them from our country - for 'cultural reasons'. That is how far the Conservative party has sunk."

Stephen Bush on the extraordinary draft legislation which Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, Matt Vickers, Katie Lam and backbench colleagues have proposed in parliament It is a proposal that would seek to deport around 5% of the resident population, including over a quarter of a million with ILR

Stephen on top form this morning @stephenkb.bsky.social. www.ft.com/content/9a1d...

Playoff between two faithful? Ah bbc you spoil me

Ultimately the delay, while infuriating, will be forgotten soon enough. Sticking to this stand now it has been made, and repeating it over and over until the Conservatives/Reform back down, or these extreme policies rejected by an overwhelming majority are hung around their necks, is what matters

Correct response, delivered criminally late.

Something very CBBC about those Katy Lam screenshots. Next up explaining the Conservative's new Lebensraum policy using sticky backed plastic

I honestly believe British constitutionalist exceptionalism has reached its purest form in the „no Parliament can bind another not to do ethnic cleansing”. Delicious, much better than the old „Parliament is not made of madmen”

The actual regime that these people are hankering after is Dubai: a small elite of citizens, most immigrants to be transient, insecure and all immigrants to be second-class. In reality they would hate the world they would create and would find ever-more ridiculous scapegoats for their failure.

I’m taking this as a sign that they still know it’s massively unpopular with basically everyone & they’re worried it’ll spoil their fun if people find out now. You could see this how the BBC was phrasing it as “changes to visas for immigrants” when they couldn’t ignore it

I regretfully have to hand it to *sigh* Dan Hodges

(if anyone would like to maybe start some sort of campaigning or pressure group of and on behalf of immigrants with ILR and settled status in Britain then I would be interested in helping, or indeed trying to get it off the ground myself, email in bio, etc)

The draft legislation is crackers. It would fail immediately if we stayed in the ECHR but it disappears the human rights act. if passed after that it would involve mandatory loss of ILR for up to 400,000 people + refusal of 2-3 million others, though without no credible means to identify or remove

The Conservative Party cannot be considered a responsible party of government again until and unless Ms Lam is forced to drop her Idi Amin migration proposal and apologise to those it threatens, or has the whip removed. It is as simple as that.