What I hear from multiple sources in the Scottish Government is that it feels defeated by the limitless spending power of the transphobes who, of course, are explicitly or implicitly underwritten by JK Rowling's vast fortune.

Would love to make a post about how Labour are shit without someone going: YOU WANT TO SHAG REFORM

Under UK law, a company can make £200m+ in sales and still hide its profit & loss by calling itself “small”. That’s how PPE Medpro kept its finances secret. A short thread on one of Britain’s daftest loopholes, the 1970s EU compromise that created it — and how to fix it.

Even eldritch undead creatures from the bloodiest parts of medieval history can see it

BBC Scotland seem to have accidentally forgotten to report this good news from NHS Scotland. Funny that. https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2025/10/03/nhs-scotland-hits-five-year-high-for-operations-but-who-will-tell-you-that/

That right-wing cat hysteria screeching bullshit balloon Katherine Birbalsingh was just on the BBC screeching her bullshit for some unfathomable reason.

The Online Safety Act sure has made being online more dangerous.

The Burden of Privilege: Why Greta Thunberg is a Model, Not a Hypocrite. by Karen Orr leftungagged.org/2025/10/03/w...

Wow! Insanity.

For a U.K. equivalent, it’s like sending troops to war-ravaged Bath.

LOL. The UK governments ally, friend and arms customer is hosting Ar Tomay. A blinder. Foreign policy wise Keir has played a blinder. A BLINDER.

I think folk are reading way too much into this candid demonstration that conservative and unionists and unionists as a whole, not only dont give AF what the devolved nations think, dont ever bother to find out and believe that the concept of us having opinions at all is frankly seditious.

Previously on Bylines Scotland "[...] digital IDs could potentially lay the groundwork for more intrusive systems, which could leave the door wide open to data breaches, privacy breaches, and cyberattacks."

When your plans are too authoritarian even for Palantir…. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...

No other country set up a VIP Lane during the pandemic. No other European country came close to spending the £14billion we spent on PPE. £10billion of PPE has been written off. Over 1million pallets of unused PPE have now been incinerated! £billions literally up in smoke.

Surely the first step would be for the Home Secretary and Met to fucking stop it and stfu

I’m gonna say something controversial: I actually don’t think chickpea anxiety is real

"When mass slaughter is happening in Palestine we will not be silent. When govts try to silence dissent we wont be silent & when KS.. recognise[s] a Palestinian state at the same time his govt is an active participant in the murdering of the Palestinians we will never be silent"

"For the next 15 years, give us a subsidy from public money, and remove the disincentive for us to stop dumping raw sewage, so our creditors are rescued from the consequences of their own greed" is not, I have to say, the world's most appealing pitch. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Starmer found his voice on Monday, but it comes too late for Anas Sarwar and Scottish Labour. My latest for @heraldscotland.bsky.social

If you boiled down Scottish Labour's woes to one paragraph, it'd be this:

The only way you could possibly say this with a straight face is if you don’t view Palestinians as human because what the hell are you talking about. “Imagine if you lost a loved one to a terror attack in this country”. What about the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died??? Fuck off

After clashing with Maurice Glasman recently, I've come to realise just how pernicious he and his Blue Labour movement are. We could discuss his chumminess with Steve Bannon and JD Vance, endless pandering to the far right and evident hatred of the Labour left. But there's something even worse. 🧵

Please join me in congratulating Woman on her appointment

This article manages to name her husband before it names… her.

The utter Fucking!! Bastards!!! (and I make no apology for the language) attacking the disabled again 😡😡 Starmer’s latest DWP plan is to target people with mental health issues www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/...

What would our leaders and media dickheads have done this past ten years, if they couldn’t spend half their time writhing and squawking in terror about totalitarian social media abuse cancelling them for behaving like abject bastards? Why, they would’ve had to do some real work instead, intolerable.

A real before-and-after about elite social media terror too, with the Arab Spring. The moment that it became a tool of malign manipulations by sinister actors seeking to destroy our democracy, and this was long before Russia Ate Our EU Membership and before the idiot Nazi Musk bought Twitter.

Wow.

The Arab Spring is a relevant point to pick, because it’s when all the lads joyfully hailed social media as an excellent tool* for people to organise against cruel, unjust regimes that rule by force, propaganda, patronage and inertia. And then they stopped, and had a think about what that meant.

And the fun part is, it’s not like it wasn’t absolutely crystal clear in 2015 that these people were clueless no-hopers sitting crowned upon the gravestone of New Labour. It was painfully obvious back then that they were finished, and that they have nothing to offer that anyone in Britain wants.

TL:DR - These abject clowns united with our utterly poisonous media outlets to burn everything to the ground, to get their important jobs back, but nobody likes them and they have no ideas anyone wants, so now they are standing naked in the burnt out rubble waving a flag, saying: “we want growth”.

Not the most important bit in this story, but what a weird comment. I know 3 guys named Jihad, including a Catholic. Lebanon has Christians named Jihad. The word is in the Arabic bible. It does not have the same connotations that the post-9/11 Western world thinks it does. It's just a name.

You can't park there, mate.

Saying "you can't park there, mate" to someone who has crashed or broken down?

Even now, at this very late stage, there is time and space to step back and admit you’ve fucked it. Just say: We were wrong to facilitate this genocide, which we did in good faith. We were wrong to demonise these grannies. We were wrong to join in the tidal wave of migrant terror. We were wrong.

Yeah well, we all knew what the game was there.

@zackpolanski.bsky.social is asked about the Home Secretarys comments that yesterdays protests about Israels actions were dishonourable (she also said they were unBritish). Zack is spot on.

Now obviously, the British political/media class have enthusiastically frog-boiled themselves into believing that dragging off two hundred old ladies is just normal, regular centrist moderate politics. But you are not them, you should recognise that this is absolutely deranged authoritarian lunacy.

I urge you to note that “The government today arrested 400 anti-genocide protestors, The Ministry For Crackdowns said those committing terrorism would be crushed by the full force of the state” is the kind of thing you see in background news reports in scifi movies about future dystopias.

Isn't it odd* how unionists still insist that the throwaway comment 'once in a generation opportunity' was some king of contract that must be abided by, but BetterTogether's Vow and actual promise of a federal UK within 2 years can be ignored. * By odd I of course mean predictable and dishonest.

This guy. The pish he talks.

It's amazing how linking the wider community to the state of Israel is wrong but also convenient when it suits the government to do so. Also, "Fundamentally Un-British" can go take a run in fuck to itself.

Granted, it maybe isn’t as bad as the Home Secretary urging fash football lads to “protect the cenotaph” from protestors, but it’s in the same league.

I implore members of the public: have the decency to not protest the genocide that we have been facilitating for two years, at this trying time

The Bravermania here, the sheer utterly bleak cynicism of it

Free movement but only if you play the kazoo? This is about getting free concert tickets. Get fucked.

(Hard to explain how disastrous it is, that the government dealing with this horrible situation has been crawling on its belly to these newspapers for five years and shows no signs of changing)

Half of our national newspapers openly choking for racist rioting and Children of Men, and not fussy about who or what they destroy to get it, feels like a very urgent issue that needs to be addressed IMO.