Imagine spending years proving you belong here, paying thousands, following every rule - only for Nigel Farage to threaten to tear up your status. This is not policy - it’s cruelty, it’s showmanship, and I for one, am sick to the damned back teeth of it.

Reform hold a press conference every Monday, for which they trail a policy announcement in that morning’s papers. Given Monday is a slow news day, that often means they lead the papers – and so the breakfast shows, and so they set the agenda for the week. It’s a good trick, but easy to counter!

This is a good idea - also I would urge those with large accounts who did starter packs to update them for later discoveries and recirculate.

Reform's plans to end indefinite leave to remain go to the post I wrote last week on their slide towards chaotic authoritarianism. The British constitution would allow them to do it if they had a majority but at vast cost to our society and way of life. samf.substack.com/p/the-route-...

So if you have Leave to Remain and your benefits are taken away, you get all your National Insurance contributions back right? Right?

In which, remarkably, while talking about the fiscal bind, and even after Jeremy Hunt goes on about acting in the interests of the country, no one brings up the TWO NI cuts carried out largely if not solely for narrow party political ends. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/h...

First of all, how dare you.

An excellent pair of recommendations.

And suddenly Friday seems a lot brighter! b'witched #totp

Friday Family Cocktails definitely back! A new one - & delicious - Hotel Nacional Special (Havana 1930s) Another Richard Godwin rec #cocktails

A lot to agree with here. Many good policies (on any coherent definition of good) are unpopular, many popular policies are not good.

Good to hear this from a member of the Treasury team. The sky will not fall in if ministers speak for their politics,nor indeed against the legitimisation of violence against migrants, minorities and democratic politicians.

So, just to try and cheer myself up and put numbers into context, over 375,000 tickets have been sold for the Women's Rugby World Cup 2025.

Encountering the fascists outside Waterloo iandunt.substack.com/p/encounteri...

A very good piece. Given that Labour have seemingly abandoned those of us from diasporic communities it’s up to us to think about how we organise. Zero tolerance for Trots, racists and useful idiots essential.

It's very good to have a Minister saying this. But the Prime Minister needs to say it, loudly and unequivocally, now.

Musk is inciting violence on London's streets.Tommy Robinson is financed by US tech bros. These are all very direct attempts to destabilise the British state. Starmer needs to stand up to this. A government that doesn't defend its country's values against these blatant attacks is not doing its job.

Today's cocktail of choice a melancholy spritzer - seemed the right vibe #fridayfamilycocktails Thanks to Richard Godwin

Almost rare these days - a statement regarding Russia signed by all 27 EU member states, thus including Hungary. This explicitly names Russia as the aggressor regarding Poland, vows further support to Ukraine and declared full solidarity with Poland. I guess not even Orban dared block this.

We don’t yet know who killed Kirk or why. Not that you’d know it from the endless numbers of accounts on X with huge follower numbers, including British politicians, making as yet unknowable claims about the motivations behind the murder. Exhibit A. Extraordinary stuff.

This year's Mercury Prize - a refreshingly strong list! Hard choice #Mercury2025

A textbook case of how not to report polls. '50%? Oh my god!' 'Oh, you mean a 9-point increase'?

Correcting the reports. UK withdrawal from the ECHR absolutely breaches the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. ukandeu.ac.uk/explainers/t...

'The Greens and Corbyn to the left and Reform to the right peddle utterly incoherent, populist economic policies yet are taking large shares in opinion polls. Goodness knows where the Conservatives stand'. @pjtheeconomist.bsky.social unleashed.... ukandeu.ac.uk/what-can-rac...

I’ve never felt so disheartened. My small business means everything to me and I want to keep going. Please have a look at my website. Buy things, commission me or repost. www.gailmyerscough.co.uk Thank you.

Improvement to London gothic monstrosity. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Whenever Nigel Farage is properly challenged, he reminds me of those 1920s burlesque entertainers, whose act consisted of swapping the position of fans or balloons, really fast so nobody could catch a glimpse of their fanny.

Once again: even if vacating X is too much of a leap for the government to contemplate, cross post! There are apps (Fedica, Buffer, others) that allow you to send the same message to every site with no more effort. Call it being "platform-neutral". Help non-death-threat platforms to grow.

The end of an era 🫡

When Farage makes such claims people should recall that this is exactly how the Brexiters dismissed the NI border issue pre-referendum. 'Oh it will be easy, nothing will change, don't forget there's a CTA' etc. It then became maybe the central & still enduring problem for delivering Brexit.

What a fab episode - needed that after today's shenanigans #totp

What on earth was the brief for this eps Legs & Co costumes?? #totp

Teardrops then Gary Numan - still some nice things being fed thro the airwaves #totp

The most important news from today's reshuffle:

It is sad but I doubt it's the end of her political career. She's one of savviest politicians I've met and will be back. This resgination has been done in a way to maximise the chances of that.

Since this is apparently a resigning matter, I’ll just leave this here… www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Worth rereading as the commentariat decends on Birmingham

The power of teachers ❤️

IT'S OUT! @ukandeu.bsky.social brand new survey of the policy challenges confronting the UK, done in partnership with the wonderful @resfoundation.bsky.social ukandeu.ac.uk/reports/poli... 1/???

The Government is doing its best at the moment to imply it has no problem with the ethnonationalism now rearing its ugly head. And I don't understand why. 1/5

The lesson is clear: you can’t outflank the far right by borrowing its language. You only validate its narrative, undermine your own authenticity, and make democracy more fragile in the process.

Everyone should stop reading politics and listen to the new CMAT album and everything will suddenly seem a bit better.

This is a tactical, as well as moral, error. Musk is spectacularly unpopular in the UK. There's a chance to take the patriotic high-ground, calling out foreign billionaires stoking up violence in Britain, without being seen to dismiss "ordinary people". And you can challenge Reform to back you.

In my view it’s clear that the Good Friday Agreement requires membership of & participation in the ECHR. But even if there were valid legal arguments about that, no think tank can wish away the political & real-world consequences for NI of watering down those commitments /3

Again - the reason that the Good Friday Agreement locks in the ECHR is that the UK had repeatedly been held accountable by the European Court of Human Rights for human rights breaches during the Troubles - while national courts had failed to do so, even upholding miscarriages of justice

Apparently “leading” lawyers and “experts” say that the Good Friday Agreement is no obstacle to UK leaving ECHR. Me, being neither, merely sets out what the Good Friday Agreement expressly says. davidallengreen.com/2023/07/why-...

Both the Lucy Connolly and the Epping hotel cases have now taken on a political-media existence of their own, unconnected with what actually happened in court. It doesn't matter there were published sentencing remarks in one and a judge-prepared summary in the other. People want stories instead.

This how the framing is going. That a president has no power in the US constitution to do a thing is now being recast as the president having “no explicit power”. Subtle, devious, dangerous, treacherous shift. Sad and bad to see NYT adopting this spin on a headline.

Reminder that small boat migration is c.5% of all UK immigration. And asylum-seeking generally is far lower per head of UK population than most other west European countries e.g. 🇩🇪 🇫🇷 🇮🇹 🇪🇸 🇧🇪 🇳🇱 🇦🇹 🇮🇪. Yes even Ireland takes way more. Yet none have the same sense of crisis and moral panic as the UK.