(1) The prime minister should call out racism whether or not it’s politically convenient to do so. (2) I absolutely do not believe this is a vote loser for Labour, especially if done right and with conviction

Labour are confusing 'decisions which Labour members do not enjoy or dislike' with 'decisions anyone outside of the Labour party likes or welcomes', I think. www.ft.com/content/f776...

Getting mighty tired of the meme on here of “oh, it is just so difficult for the government to set the agenda”. The government (which literally employs thousands of press officers) is setting the agenda - it’s just that it is setting it on toxic ground it can’t win.

If they don’t pull someone in & fire them by the end of today over this then they might as well give up now. Mass deportation plans are how Reform describe them so this is clearly a sweaty failure panicking at his people finding out what his special friends are actually like

It’s 2025 and we still have the fucking useless COVID glass absolutely everywhere. WHYYYYY

Most rail journeys in Britain will be under public ownership by the middle of next year, Labour’s Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has announced. By the middle of next year eight in ten services will be run "by the public, for the public" Alexander says.

this is an extraordinary canary in the coal mine

Completed on the house purchase! Just the wait for the keys and the go-ahead to move in now 😁

PS absolutely nothing to do with immigration whatsoever ID cards are just, functionally, the most useful thing ever

Moving day tomorrow! Can’t quite believe it’s finally here! It’s been a long process…

Genuinely fascinated by why this was the line?

a serious, ethical media industry could leverage modern op/ed sections to amplify revolutionary, thought-provoking, under-platformed ideas instead it's all been converted into lazy, engagement-chasing contrarian trolling by the least remarkable thinkers and writers imaginable

Good, but also the fact this is being asked as if it's a foregone conclusion that Reform are going to win the next election when it is *four years away* is insane.

I consider Wakefield a mass murderer and the fact he was never jailed with the key thrown away a fundamental reason why we're all in the mess we're in.

It is possible to cherish the BBC as an institution while also saying that BBC News is failing very badly, day after day, in its duty to inform and that it always fails in a right-wing direction. It desperately needs to recover its integrity

There should be a high bar for politicians attacking the media, but maybe Ed Davey has half a point here? For example, the first three paragraphs of this BBC story repeat Reform's £243bn figure without saying that the thinktank behind the estimate now disowns it. (This is mentioned in paragraph 35)

Truly facile, awful analysis by Nick Robinson normalising hate speech by 'ordinary people' and equating it with free speech. The boiling point is too many of Britain's commentators unthinkingly wading in the toxic swamp of X and believing it is what passes as normal.

Finally, finally exchanged contracts yesterday after many months of being in this house move process! Going to be moving on Friday 😁

The British Labour government has: Recognised Palestine Normalised relations & lifted sanctions on Syria Secured the release of Alaa Abd El-Fattah While I still have my criticisms, these are things they should be praised for, & I remain proud to have voted for this government.

It is genuinely absolutely bonkers that one year into a massive new government majority, all the discourse is about what will happen under the allegedly inevitable majority by another party. Much of it is the govt’s fault but not all - this very much has not happened under past unpopular govts!

this place has a lot of flaws but i have zero tolerance at this point from people that won’t leave X complaining about it

Making the UK more like an authoritarian plutocracy based on fossil fuel wealth where women are second class citizens and foreigners have no rights is certainly pretty on brand for Reform

If the Democrats ever get back into power, they need to go full hellfire and brimstone against absolutely every single person involved in the current administration. They won’t, but they absolutely should.

Reform are filth. They represent hatred, extremism, ignorance and irresponsibility. They'd make us a wretched vicious hateful little island. If people don't stand up to this, they won't stand up to anything.

ORANGE

Every leftist who ever made fun of Change UK now forced to concede their own Change UK is worse

Having a named, organised faction before you have a named, organised party is the most far-left thing Ive seen. Amazing scenes. Congrats guys. You really are a self-parody

Alrighty, I'm getting back into the swing of things now. Going to carve out some time to actually get something out there for this... Still needs an absolute *ton* of work to work anything like what I'd be happy with, but I'm going to make progress!

I wonder if the reason there are so few third-party Bluesky apps is because the API for interacting with it is so... shall we say, complex? I get that there's a lot going on, but the layering and nesting of types make it really quite difficult to work with at times.

These are the same people who get up in arms about using council time on things totally unrelated to local government (e.g. foreign wars).

Exhibit 8712.

I cannot stress enough how purely evil anti vaxxism is. There’s no excuse. You just are pro mass suffering and death.

Kemi Badenoch refusing to acknowledge that Tommy Robinson is "far-right", now on LBC, and refusing to condemn Elon Musk's words. In fact she says what Musk said *isn't* incitement. So what would be incitement then? How violent would his words have to be before he was deemed a threat to this country?

What the actual fuck. Free speech categorically includes speech which “undermines the dignity of others”

This reveals the total double standards of the right. Every time some right winger has been “reported to their employers” and fired for stuff they’ve posted online, the right throw a shit fit. And what happened to freedom of speech? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Damn it, I just lost The Game 😓

If I were Kemi Badenoch I would go out and make a speech that absolutely destroyed Danny Kruger, it would be quite easy to do, but it seems she's decided the best way to compete for votes with Reform is to never upset anyone associated with the party.

Stephen is correct as usual but also i'm glad he's called out the utter bullshit about eCoNoMiC aNxIeTy

My secondary concern about this stuff is that it makes me worry that the various ways generative AI can save time and improve efficiency are in practice quite dangerous, because 'this turns an hour long task to a five minute one you have to check rigorously' really dependents on 'check rigorously'.

I also am going to be openly frank and say that 100% of all American "gun leftists" are just people who enjoy guns who happen to be leftists. All the ideological excuses are just padding for justifying your engagement with a profoundly antisocial, murderjacent hobby.

The 'aww, so sweet'/'hello, human resources' meme but it's Clive Lewis and Zack Polanski's takes on why people become ethnonationalists

It melts my head that X is still used for official Government communications, and, catching up on today's news and the fact we have a foreign billionaire inciting violence on our streets, it's clearer than ever that this should end. I raised this in Parliament last week 👇

Another thing I love about the present moment - Musk regularly goes 'don't worry, we are going to change THAT' whenever Grok produces an answer that doesn't align with his priors, yet the British Labour government thinks that they are going to be able to land an argument on there in 2029.

Ed Davey is right. Musk’s abuse of social media ownership to destabilise our democracy should now be treated as a serious national security threat, resulting in appropriate countermeasures. I have little faith that Starmer will rise to the challenge, however.

I’ve expressed enough anger at this last night, so I’m instead just gonna say it is genuinely farcical at this point

Fucking hell, sack Peter Kyle. There’s a difference between free speech at protests and calling for fucking far-right insurrections.

It's a tad concerning that columnists who five years ago would've condemned today's marchers as racist thugs, are today implicitly or explicitly supportive

Look I know it's a sjot inheritance and we have deep rooted structural economic and political problems and switching PMs won't solve them. But saying "fascist hooliganism is bad and we're gonna nick the culprits" is the easy part, and yet he is just. Not. Doing. It.

Keep thinking of arguments for why it would be completely insane to dump a prime minister with a huge majority just 14 months in, and also about how if he's not going to say a single word in opposition to the kind of shit we saw today then I no longer feel convinced by any of those arguments.