Shabana Mahmood identifies Farage’s modus operandi very well.

This analysis lifts the veil on the wealthy and influential people orchestrating today’s powerful trans-national, pro-fossil fuel, white supremacist propaganda. This is where the battle against Reform will be won or lost within the UK. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Normally I couldn’t care less about golf. But seeing a toxic MAGA mob silenced is sweet whatever the occasion.

Congrats to team Europe for winning the Ryder Cup. Historic and well deserved. Our fans were disgraceful. An embarrassment to the US team and the game of golf. No class, dignity or grace…just like their cult leader in the White House.

About time. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

This makes for very interesting reading about the very wealthy men who fund Farage’s ‘Party of the People’ www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-mone...

1. I fear that I & other analysts might have been mistaken interpreting social survey results as a sign that Britons’ increasing, broad progressivism would make them unlikely to support the far right. www.theguardian.com/society/arti...

There’s no easy answers for Starmer’s government confronting Reform. But it should understand the opposition. Not ‘ordinary Britons with legitimate grievances’, but a trans-national, far right propaganda machine built patiently over decades with Russian & US funders among others.

How is this not front page news? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Nathan Gill is no fringe politician. He was the leader of the Reform Party and before that UKIP in Wales. A Brexit Party MEP. A friend and ally of Nigel Farage, who in 2016 called him: "terrific," and "as honest as the day is long." This is a MASSIVE story www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The problem with Chris Mason is that he’s helping to push and shove the Overton Window rightwards. In his mind centrists like Keir Starmer and Mark Carney are now “left wing”. Chris Mason: Starmer unflinching as he seeks to take on Reform www.bbc.com/news/article...

Historians’ corrections to widely circulated misinformation are often delayed by other academic commitments and they never match the reach of the offending piece, but I think they’re worth putting on the record nonetheless: alanlester.co.uk/blog/falsify...

Some comments on the rise of the UK far right in historical context in the current Big Issue: www.bigissue.com/news/politic...

A story that’s attracted surprisingly little attention in our media: Ex-Reform politician admits Russia-linked bribery charges www.bbc.com/news/article...

No better illustration of the far right’s incredible success in re-legitimising racism. No 'pensioner deportations' under Reform, says Kruger www.bbc.com/news/article...

Stephen Mullen's excellent book on this topic, The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy: Scotland and Caribbean Slavery, 1775–1838 is available to read for free from our website: uolpress.co.uk/book/the-gla... #OpenAccess #History #Slavery #Scotland

With comparative histories of slavery so politicised, I suggest that we reject differentiation between ‘Islamic’ and ‘European’ slave trades. Compare 'Islamic' with 'Christian' trades, or 'trans-Atlantic' with 'trans-Saharan, Mediterranean or Red Sea' trades.

Does it really need to be said? Plea for help as donkeys suffer in Israel and Gaza www.bbc.com/news/article...

Nothing demonstrates the sheer stupidity of Trump & the populists who emulate him more than their stubborn adherence to fossil fuels. As they fixate on reviving the white supremacy of the past they are handing future strategic advantage to China. www.thetimes.com/world/asia/a...

Stephen Mullen, a highly regarded historian specialising in Scotland's links with Atlantic slavery, objects to a right wing scholar's flagrant misrepresentation of his own work and that of Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum's curators in @thetimes.com alanlester.co.uk/blog/falsify...

When Germany, Israel and Jewish representatives signed the reparations agreement after the Holocaust, Israel's signatory Moshe Sharett claimed it set a precedent and sent a warning: 'genocide cannot be allowed to go unpunished and the moral debt arising therefrom must be paid'.

Hilarious screenshot. Most of those places were literally European colonies from the late 1800s. The people who "continued to practice slavery" there were their white overlords.

Nigel Farage claims his mass deportation plan would save the UK hundreds of billions of pounds over the coming decades. New analysis of official statistics, forecasts and Reform's own figures suggests it would actually *cost* the UK hundreds of billions over the same period

1/3 Now that the UK far right is receiving more funding & propaganda support from US allies, we’re seeing their Christian fundamentalist extremism creep, somewhat jarringly, into our more secular culture. www.instagram.com/reel/DO_DYhP...

I think the key problem here is a continuing assumption, in traditional media, that when the White House speaks on a major topic, this is a big news story. That model can't cope with a president with no regard for truth, who's in constant broadcast mode, & who veers around from one day to another.

1/2 These lessons from educators targeted by right wing activists in the USA will be all too pertinent here if the media continues to air Reform’s propaganda so relentlessly. www.forbes.com/sites/peterg...

Kimmel: "The President of the United States made it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs. Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he cannot take a joke."

Wouldn’t it be lovely if more of the press stopped scapegoating whoever Trump-leaning wealthy right wing interests want to target next and published more stuff like this? www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

This is very good. I return to the illiberal's epistemic dishonesty: he wishes to participate in liberal discourse yet refuses to play by liberal rules upon which democracy is based: pluralism, empiricism, skepticism, philosophic doubt. For his ultimate authorities are predetermined traditionalisms.

Why are the American president's claims about autism the first item on British news bulletins? He's not our president, the advice doesn't apply here and he's not presented any evidence to support his assertions. So why spread these claims? What make this the biggest story in the UK?

Depressing beyond belief that so many of my compatriots think Britain should follow this moronic conspiracy theorist’s lead. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cp...

Proof that right wing populism is not just ill-informed, it’s bad for your health. www.thetimes.com/us/american-...

1/3 Here’s an irony. @thetimes.com columnist James Marriott berates UK universities forcfailing in the most basic function of improving literacy. www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

@mrjohncrace.bsky.social used to do satire. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

What this shows is that the more the other parties chase Reform along the immigrant-scapegoating gutter, the further Farage will go, emulating MAGA until black & brown British people are being rounded up regardless of their status. www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/...

Big Issue 2023: “The real worry is that true US-style culture war divisions – where our views on a range of social issues become very tightly tied to our political identity – leave no room for compromise and are incredibly difficult to unpick...” www.bigissue.com/news/politic...

This, on late British imperial administrators in Iran & Iraq, looks excellent. Focuses on the intertwining of the personal and the political. www.cambridge.org/core/books/l...

1/3 There’s a strong relationship between Reform / far right support and the Brexit Leave constituency. A continuation of the refusal to accept that Britain is poorer and more unequal not due to immigration but because it is no longer subsidised by an Empire. theconversation.com/brexit-how-t...

UK politics has been restructured over the last few years around anti-trans and anti-immigrant ideas. Not because they’re objectively the most important issues, but because extremist US propagandists have pushed them centre stage. Next on their agenda, religious fundamentalism:

You just know the first draft headline was "struggles" before it got to an ed

Probably the most influential & absurd lie in recent British history: the idea that white people will enjoy a better quality of life only if brown & black people can be prevented from crossing the channel to seek asylum.

Well who’d have thought it? 'It's not easy': Reform council strives to identify promised savings www.bbc.com/news/article...

Just our ‘patriotic’ press pleading for a foreign, authoritarian, sex-offending, compulsively lying man-child to govern Britain rather than the elected Prime Minister.

Here’s a heretical observation: if all the small boats were to stop suddenly and all the people in the asylum backlog disappeared, Britain would still be in pretty much the same situation as it is now.

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.

TV shows cancelled, people sacked or put on black lists... all for daring to speak the truth about "free speech warrior" Charlie Kirk. America has plunged head first into some very dark territory indeed. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Action against the slave trade from 1807 enabled British colonisation, but Jane Lydon shows here how achieving the abolition of slavery in 1833 and expanding territory through conquest were also interrelated, not separate, processes. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

‘What would Orwell think’, Musk had on his T-shirt. My guess is he’d think Musk is a master of Doublespeak. A man who bought his own Ministry of Truth and embodies some of the nightmarish developments he anticipated.