BORDER NERDS: BUY THIS BOOK

Since it's the equinox again... Seasons lag. This is why

they're not even bringing a knife to a gun fight. they're bringing one of those joke guns which fires out a hankie reading "Bang" except it doesn't read "Bang" it reads "he's right, vote for us", this metaphor doesn't work at all I know I'm just really fucking mad okay

Ed Davey, "I'm afraid Nigel Farage should be apologising for helping cause this problem in the first place" "Before Brexit we didn't have a small boats problem because we had 27 return agreements with EU countries and we could return people" -Maybe we should call them Farage's Brexit Boats

Retrospective removal of Indefinite Leave to Remain from "hundreds of thousands of people" in the Reform plans is obscene. They talk about "preventing disruption to businesses" but have no regard for what this means for the people themselves, their families and communities which will be torn apart.

"All this happened so quickly that few of those below deck made it off the ship. But most of those who did make it out literally drowned in raw sewage." Last week's New World column was about the history of British sewage.

on the one hand I get annoyed when they don't send me my book in translation, on the other I do not read a word of Korean, thanks Joan Elledge, to whom the parcel was for some reason addressed

The fact that Reform hates the United Kingdom really does need to be made more forcefully by its political opponents.

I quite like immigration.

I wish Bluesky critics would acknowledge this simple, somewhat horrifying fact

It would be good if the only political pushback against Nigel Farage's plans to mass deport hundreds of thousands of our neighbours, friends, family and colleagues didn't just come from a handful of backbench MPs and one regional mayor

I'll have more to say on Reform's proposals to scrap ILR at some point but for now I'll just note this - anyone telling you this is a popular idea doesn't know the polling. Overwhelming majority of public back giving people who work and pay taxes most or all rights after 5 years or less

This. Everyone has been trying for a decade to win with this One Trick (it's illegal, it's immoral, it's harmful for muh bond yields, etc) because they're afraid to take the fight to the core argument: we are a country of agreements, and you need to have a process to rip them off

They’ve already blown up the economy once. Why wouldn’t they do it again? (Obviously morality, legality and economic harm are all arguments to deploy, no disagreement here, but at some point you just have to be able to say: no, not allowed, and you are bad people)

Since it's the equinox again... Seasons lag. This is why

we have gone from a world in which we were told not to cite wikipedia because it was unreliable to a world where wikipedia might be the only reliable source left on the internet and we all owe a lot to the pedantic nerds who got us there

Those ghouls are lining my friends and my family up in their sights and labour have nothing to say for it

If everyone referred to X as "kissy" do you think all the Nazis would find it a bit gay and leave?

Wikipedia is what the internet was meant to be and one of the few online places that hasn’t got worse. It’s a miracle

Reform are now coming after people with permanent residency. It'll be citizens next. No one is safe from authoritarian governments.

a decade has passed since I bullied Ian Steadman into writing this on a sleepy friday, and certainly LibDems who i WON'T name got really grumpy with us www.newstatesman.com/politics/201...

Some years ago I went to the National Archives to see the original of this map, drawn by TE Lawrence and presented to the British war cabinet in November 1918. Proposes a divvying up in which Faisal getting Syria and Transjordan, and Abdullah gets Iraq. Always struck by the ?? over Kurdistan.

The annoying thing here is that the Lib Dems talk policy quite a lot and get ignored by the media, which is what Davey's stunts were a response to in the first place. I don't think he's addicted to stunts. I'm sure he'd love it if his policies got covered www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

@tom-phillips.com relevant to your interests

shout out to @katharinehorgan.bsky.social who is mere inches away from finishing the Berlin marathon. I walked half that distance yesterday and I'm knackered so, kudos (Repost and follow her eh? so i can say i did something useful)

"In the far future an alien writes a book called The History of Humankind. On which page would you find the year 2025? Are we in the middle or near the beginning?" What shape is history? An extract from The Cultural Tutor: 49 Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School, by @culturaltutor.bsky.social

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

The corporation was happy to use our exclusive about Elon Musk and the Royal Society - but failed to acknowledge where it came from ✏️ Rats in a Sack 🐀

I have rarely seen such unadulterated bollocks. I loved Twitter, it was so important for my job. Then a mad megalomaniac took it over and made it so no one would see my posts unless I paid him money - and even if I did that I would be submerged in nazi hate. But yeah this is our fault.

Hi - so you have walked right past the youth centre I run (Unitas Youth Zone in Montrose Park - yes, it's fab!) and where I live (the Pulse estate). In the case of the latter, the land used to be Colindale Hospital. It stopped being a regular hospital years ago, but a small part is still a UKHSA lab

Apparently it's an old pavilion that they're hoping to turn into a boxing gym </ex-librarian> harrowonline.org/2024/01/10/p...

Surely this should be at the Reform conference.

it's not even just what he says, I don't rally understand how looking at this guys face isn't triggering a widespread "Hans, are we the baddies" moment, fucking look at the guy

Really want to know why there’s a memorial to the French Resistance of Vincennes in suburban SE London (and several roads named after parts of Paris e.g. St Cloud, St Denis.

People getting the internet at home meant young men no longer got a basic grounding in arthouse cinema while looking for nudity on TV.

I can't afford a house in which to keep all my avocados

incredible piece of writing

For those who pay attention to UK politics, the Liberal Democrats and #LDConf A bunch of TERFs tried first thing this morning to impose a transphobic policy on our internal elections (they wanted to exclude trans women from the gender balance criteria) They failed, spectacularly.

"In the far future an alien writes a book called The History of Humankind. On which page would you find the year 2025? Are we in the middle or near the beginning?" What shape is history? An extract from The Cultural Tutor: 49 Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School, by @culturaltutor.bsky.social

guy on my floor said his room smelt like that because he was next to the toilet. did not explain why his room smelt substantially worse than the toilet.

yeah man that's literally the entire point: I don't get off on being radical. it is not an emotionally important identity to me. I do not like that many of political beliefs are outside the mainstream. I consider that bad. I would be happy if that changed.

not saying politics has broken me but we were just talking about Andy Burnham and I started yelling "THE KING IN THE NORTH" like Tim McInerney

okay this is clearly a bot, it's replied four times, but also what the fuck

okay this is clearly a bot, it's replied four times, but also what the fuck

Compromise leader unveiled

fuck it I might log off I'm not writing anything better than that this week

recorded a podcast earlier in which we talked about Your Party and also Project 2025 and I am now in a massive funk, because obviously the latter is evil but it does fundamentally speak of a movement that can make a plan in a way the entire left hand side of British politics is entirely unable to do

This is funniest possible headline for a song literally called "Song for Bob Dylan"

Polanski-supporting Greens are going to have to learn to be a lot less sensitive about the whole hypnoboobs thing. You might even say they need to “grow a pair”! #sidewayslookattheweeksnews

sure being a bestseller is great but have you tried having multiple coffee places where they know your order without you needing to ask