We are about six to eight weeks away from someone saying that this country was destroyed by the Empire Windrush in a public forum

The natural home, just from an 'what is the audience' for Doctor Who outside of the UK is 'what streaming service has Star Trek' and IMO Doctor Who also consciously benefits from the awareness it should be more 'domestic' than Star Trek.

This is absolutely right. It’s about creating a permission structure for violence, whether that violence is conducted by the state directly or simply permitted by the state.

None of these people believe that Richard Ayoade, Cole Palmer, Zadie Smith and David Olusoga are going to form a squadron of “The Fighting Miscegenates” and start a war against their own parents.

LMAO. If you think this is true of Star Trek (or any sci fi), it is because you affirmatively pushed non-male Trekkies out of your group with sexism and you should work on that.

How does this timid quote tally with what Keir Starmer said in his speech - and in his interviews - just a fortnight ago?

A putatively nationalist movement is being built upon rejecting everything that made Britain actually distinctive and turning it into a particularly shitty toxic version of online America.

As Yom Kippur ends, sending my support to all those grieving and/or frightened after today's horrific attack in Manchester

yet again the only person in the Labour Party who understands comms is Ed Miliband

I think this media habit has become such a problem it needs an embarrassing nickname - 'bookie journalism' or 'Mystic Meg' or something - which should be thrown back at journalists every single time they do this.

"it's your own time your wasting"

I don’t talk about this publicly, but hegseth drives me out of my silence. I attended West Point from 1998-2000. I left, along with about 5 other young women, as a direct result of the military’s then-shameful (non) policies addressing sex harassment and assault.

The level of drug abuse in this White House must be off the charts compared to previous administrations.

Wait. So he knew about the island and refused to go, but didn’t say anything to anyone about what he knew was going on there?

nobody expects the Fabians

8. If you select Tuvix lives in that new Voyager game you should have your Steam/Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo account banned

The radicalisation happening of UK elites is bad, bodes ill for the future, but is also, to be clear, really really funny quite a lot of the time.

What is the point of this government? I cannot imagine many Labour members, supporters or voters thought “what this country needs is a de facto ban on civil service staff networks”. I’m so damn tired. www.gov.uk/government/n...

Yes! This! I want Labour politicians to be honest obsessed with carpet bombing reform. I want true, deep, passionate hatred for that party and all it stands for. I want “if Reform declares war on hell, I will have good things to say in the commons for the devil.”

Repost for Irish Film Classifications by Damien Owens, because it's just come up in FB memories and it's still *brilliant*.

my kingdom for a moral argument

The annual festival of “stop hitting yourself!“ aka the BBC’s commentary on Lib Dem conference.

This person is called Pissshitter because their takes are both piss and shit. Asking the average American to engage with “revolutionary leftists lit” is like trying to draw blood from a rock, just ain’t gonna happen. You meet people where they are, not where you want them to be in your imagination.

Where the separate divisions of ANTIFA landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944:

Our party is poorer for not having Angela Rayner out in front.

Have faith people, have faith

Suspect the precedent of having breached the ministerial code, despite having acted with integrity, might be problematic for more than just Angela Rayner

If Rayner had set out to minimise her tax bill, she could have waited til her son turned 18 before buying the Hove house. She didn't because she wasn't trying to minimise her tax bill.

Having followed the Rayner saga over the past week and a bit, the main sense I've gotten from the press (and not just the right wing outlets) is that working class people (myself included) aren't welcome in politics, should keep away from it, and if we do get involved will be hounded out!

The Rayner thing is just the turd on the icing of a shitty fucking week for news. Utterly depressing. Hounded out by the nothing-to-declare Tories and the morally unimpeachable Mail and Telegraph. Fuck it all. I've had enough news now, thanks. I'm fucking full up.

Tax aside, this is objectively a very sad end to Rayner’s political career: a teenage single mum from a deprived family who went onto be deputy prime minister. The right wing press detested her for not knowing her place. Their glee at her downfall will be palpable in tomorrow’s front pages.

get why she had to go but irksome she lost her job to something quite complex and, let's be honest, reasonably minor in the grand scheme of things, when shadow cabinet members get to merrily hang out with Eddie Swastika without any repercussions

Angela Rayner has resigned but Nigel Farage who uses Tax Havens to pay almost no tax hasn't. Time for Farage to go too.

This is one of those irregular verbs You, working class oik, are dodging your responsibilities to the nation I, middle class striver, am shielding my wealth from grasping socialists

On the same day in the Telegraph:

I think this is it. Despair is easy and you get to feel wise, and it doesn't really place any obligations on you or force you to speak out or do anything, really.

I don't see an alternative to trying, I mean, what else is there?

Gonna start getting quite sharp about this kind of thing, people who have *zero* to lose from lying back and going 'well, what can I do? *Try*?'

I don't disagree with the first two sentences, but I think in general there's been far too much movement from 'not really noticing the problem' to 'despair'. Let's experiment with 'people and organisations try and enforce the norm' and then see if it is actually hard for it to be re-bottled.

in this week's newsletter! I realised I'd been pretty serious for some weeks so I wrote quite a daft list on the things which make me realise that, at heart, I'm still extremely French, even after 16 years here: youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/10-ways-in...

It's important to assume that Reform in Government would indeed try to do this. The right thing is not to tell the public that this won't happen - so they can therefore vote for Reform without guilt - but rather that a vote for Reform is a vote for the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people.

One of two very good threads by Adam on this. A startling number of people - responding, in part, by the tone set by their government - just have this very complacent 'oh, no, this plan will never work'. I mean, 1) it could but also 2) they will definitely try.

A day of shame for the UK. A political party proposes mass deportations and the response from other political parties is not to condemn this as going further than even Mosley or the National Front.

unintentional funny moment on the news: "Labour said Reform's plans had been written on the back of a fag packet. The Conservatives said that Reform were recycling their ideas."