I believe we term this artwork "where the 2024 Labour vote is now".

The local election results in Norwich – despite Labour’s excellent track record on the City Council – and across the country, make this an existential moment for Labour. This will not be fixed by another speech, another comms reset, or another reshuffle. The problem is now far deeper than that. 1/4

now thats an anecdote with a punch, from Gillian Tett www.ft.com/content/c0ae...

Imagine seeing Labour suffer one of its worst ever election results and your immediate takeaway is "the man whose entire strategy delivered this must have been right"

Evergreen headline.

Farage has played a long game in Essex www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/elec...

Looking like Reform is performing at the top end of expectations. Reportedly taking all seats up in Basildon and smashing Labour across Midlands and North. On track to win Havering too.

State of the media industry: emailing editors who asked me to let them know when I was back from maternity leave, to find that many have been made redundant.

The biggest story in the world right now is that the president of the United States is a demented old man who takes pleasure in torturing and killing people and is committing crimes with impunity. And yet most legacy media outlets are too cowardly to tell it like it is.

thequietus.com/opinion-and-... ‘Connection was key. He was never a solo figure scaling the heights, on the kind of macho solo mission many male writers fall into.’

To which I attribute M’Lud @luketurner.bsky.social’s way of greeting Quietus writers.

Had no idea until @timburrows.bsky.social wrote this reflection on Mark Fisher, and the new film responding to his life and work, that Capitalist Realism has sold over a quarter of a million copies. A great read on how Fisher's work might lead to hope in our awful now thequietus.com/opinion-and-...

I wrote this essay for @thequietus.com about Mark Fisher and the film inspired by him, We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher, which I helped birth. Flashbacks to early noughties computer room scrolling through @simonreynolds.bsky.social's Blissblog >>> thequietus.com/opinion-and-...

Lead story on Bloomberg: Stocks bounce from lows on hopes for US-Iran talks. Second story: Gulf states weigh military options to counter Iran’s escalation, Third story: Israel presses on with Iran strikes at ‘full intensity’.

Entirely in keeping with the Murdoch dynasty. I remember reading when visiting Australia a decade ago about Rupert's dad, Keith Murdoch, who made up a hoax about Germans turning enemy soldiers into margarine in order to force Australia into the first world war www.independent.co.uk/news/media/k...

“I woke up this morning and thought: ‘No, please no…this has always been my Armageddon scenario, the one I didn’t want to happen.”

Scotland’s serial radical nationalist protester Sean Clerkin and his comrades evaded tight security at Reform UK’s Scottish manifesto launch to urge people to vote SNP instead #Holyrood2026 #ReformUK

Hundreds of thousands of Muslims fought in the world wars. The armies that fought+won the second world war against fascism had an ethnic + faith mix that matches the Britain of 2025 more than that of 1939-45, so arrival of Windrush is the story of black RAF servicemen returning to Britain in 1948

Morrissey is such a mad old ham. I love it. He’s like a Victorian- on those posts he does he always sounds like a consumptive aunt in 1896 writing back from travels ‘they presented me with an entirely indigestible mess of stewed aubergine and a wine so rough as to be vinegar….the train was vile’ etc

With talk of oil hitting $100 a barrel, let's remember a pre Radio 2 Rylan getting confused by the concept

Narrator: The Straits, in fact, were in Dire shape.

Kinell, it feels like Igor Tudor's team selection vs Atletico Madrid away will be the subject of the next Moral Maze at this rate

🤣🤣

Tehran is covered with thick dark clouds, and the rain is saturated with oil, per CNN. The city exists surrounded by a mountain range, creating kind of a bowl that is holding in toxic materials that emerged after the US-Israeli bombing of oil facilities.

Our live blog on this shit show is up and running again. Just a mounting nightmare - as.ft.com/r/bbc5b47c-1...

Electioneering isn't what it used to be

'Watching Hegseth rant about limitless killing, I remembered anticolonial poet and leader Aimé Césaire. “The hour of the barbarian is at hand,” he wrote in 1950. “The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.”'

I've had just about enough of this.

It's not up to me to prosecute the US 'fascism debate', but now that ICE has answered the "but there is no armed militia loyal to the leader" objection, Hegseth is now answering the "but there's no glorification of war for its own sake" objection.

Soundtrack to Trump's apocalypse: no surprise the bass work absolutely sucks

TFW you're coming up hard in the Fabric queue

Hegseth: "We are only four days into this and the results have been incredible." - Middle East engulfed in regional war - 11 countries attacked by Iran - Oil & gas prices skyrocketing - Strait of Hormuz now a conflict zone - Terrorism threat raised across the world - No sign of Iran regime collapse

Rhetoric so evil I almost feel like I'm hallucinating.

Can we just boycott the World Cup now please? www.theguardian.com/football/202...

If you want to know how the British print news industry ends (which is, de facto, amazingly still what supports most newspaper websites) it's the distribution channels getting banjaxed. When you lose "TG Jones" etc even people who want a paper can't get one. That'll be the real start of the ending.

My Insta algorithm is now exclusively showing me property mogul influencer ex pats in Dubai telling us (themselves) to keep calm and carry on as missiles are intercepted above their heads. We have reached a very strange stage of content

this is what they said it would be like under socialism

“The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.”

Netanyahu Calls Iran Strikes Necessary To Prevent War He Just Started

Great thread this, particularly this point. Gwynne's behaviour not mentioned at all in most of the post mortem coverage

A thousand times this

This is not a reasoned political response. Labour has spent two years making all the voting groups who backed the Greens feel unwelcome and unheard, and now attacks them for daring to back someone else. They believe Labour isn’t listening and Starmer seems determined to prove them right

We drove out our core activists, presided over a factional war in which the largest, youngest, most progressive group was effectively purged, abandoned our principles to chase far right votes and enact authoritarian policies, and told people who don't like it to fuck off. What are we doing wrong?

Most ridiculous thing about Lab seemingly following Tories into total collapse is that it is entirely self-inflicted and born of needless longstanding contempt for the base Like Mandelson telling Blair not to worry about the working class because "they've got nowhere else to go" Well, now they do.

Struck by how Hannah Spencer's brilliant victory speech is a broadside against neoliberal meritocracy – like so many other (esp. female working-class) voices right now. This is exactly what Bev Skeggs & I discuss in our new article, 'Social Mobility is a Joke': journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

That's the way to do it. So good to see progressive politicians pushing back hard on Reform's messaging. Highly effective and so refreshing and Labour could learn a lot from Polanski in this regard. Take the attack to the Faragists - don't let them get away with it.

The Starmer project is just the worst political vehicle of my lifetime. Inspiring campaign but Greens were given an open goal and ran with the plain speaking leftism that Starmer eradicated (and replaced with nothing). Greens now have the energy of early Corbynism without the PLP trying to kill them