I have done very little today except shelter from the heat and I am making a conscious decision not to feel guilty about it

Many more than five, surely?

This is just like, most of the UK lol

Sorry Stephen, I am not calling it "mezze"

Both German and Welsh have pretty consistent sound-to-symbol correspondences, which is more than can be said for English lol

The degree to which the BJP argument has always been that the Nehru republic is western colonial and essentially white because of things like parliamentary democracy, freedom of religion and multiculturalism sometimes does make a bit icky about certain online decolonisation language

Not to pick on folks but people are genuinely shocked when they find out how anti-Hindi language and pro-English some Southern Indian communities get and it could literally be averted by 5 minutes of cursory reading about Indian history

Help, I feel I'm being radicalised by the 'just chuck more money at the NHS' people

To be blunt, the people who were saying a few years ago that 'the last thing we need is another NHS reorganisation' have been proven wrong. The government has poured money into the NHS (at the expense of other departments) and outcomes have barely improved.

My word, we are so desperately in need of a health secretary in the mould of Alan Milburn

I mean, this is true of government at the moment more generally, is it not? A ton of areas where you don't actually *need* to keep chucking cash at the problem, if only you can open your mind to liberal reforms

Oh wow

It might be problematic that dozens of bits of Europe are literally called 'foreign', but trying to rectify that now would be too complicated lol

Delia Derbyshire didn't spend weeks in the bowels of Maida Vale splicing and looping tapes of noise to create something utterly timeless so you could tell me that AI is "inevitable".

It may have been equally as hot today as the past few days, but there has been more of a breeze and the night-time temperature is lower which is lovely

I mean, all these allegations were lobbed at Blair as well

Trying to visualise what this is referring to and failing (I'm borderline aphantasic)

Disagree – terraces are often some of the densest housing in British cities, and have higher build quality than much of the housing that came later. By all means explore knocking *some* down, but only if you're sure you can replace them with something denser.

A relatively sane person I know who has stayed on X has ended up reposting nonsense like this:

guy on a bike called out to me ‘you look so beautiful!’ and i was steeling myself for it to get weird but then he called to a guy on a different bike ‘that’s a great bike man!’ and then ‘smoothie looks fire!’ to a third guy who was drinking one. so i guess i found him. Johnny Compliments

Moving it to Edinburgh would be a great way of trolling the SNP.

guy near me in this café drinking one of those iced abominations ("coffee" with layers of cream and syrups and heaven knows what else) while eating from a supermarket bag of plain lettuce, do really see all of life when you're out and about, don't you

I'm sorry, WHAT

Sick of these people being wheeled out every year who seem to think the ideal solution to climate change is to shrink the population through thousands of avoidable deaths

Alnmouth, Harrogate, Marske-by-the-Sea – all places which literal official railway announcements pronounce incorrectly!

Yeah this is a really detrimental mindset because it makes people think the costs of inaction are lower than they actually are. It's already bad, so it can't get too much worse etc.

Beginning to think Charli XCX had good deal of foresight in calling her new lead single 'Spring/Summer '26' – has the potential to go down in history as iconic

I'm sorry it's not a fucking 'reflecting pool', it's just a big pond

My dad was saying this just the other day

The way I initially read this not realising that I am just the Labour version of this

Smh I am none of these

The odd thing in Labour's case is that the party *never was* particularly successful in the era of the industrial economy! Our average electoral performance has actually *improved* in the knowledge economy!

credit to Sally Nugent who just, in normal circumstances, brought Nigel Farage's political career to an end. If polls don't plummet after this, I will be truly astonished.

Nugent is a very talented journalist who might never have been given a chance to front a major programme had it not been for vacancies arising during the move to Salford. I'll admit I was wrong, and @stephenkb.bsky.social was right: moving all of BBC News to Salford is a great idea.

Don't do it this way though, it never works in Westminster systems! Far better to copy Canada/Australia/Ireland and create a new ministry that combines the spending review function of the Treasury with the Civil Service management role of the Cabinet Office

Think this is an oversimplification, because politics that's ostensibly centrist can come in so many different varieties

Very bizarre how US-based accounts on here will act as if we Brits wouldn't have any idea of how bad trans rights are in the UK, were it not for them having informed us personally

Not naming any names here, but it strikes me that there are many Brits, both on this site and IRL, who are in a lot of denial about the scale of poverty and insecurity in the UK compared to our neighbouring countries in continental western Europe

Okay this kind of does exist in India though

Have seen quite a bit of commentary recently about how the fact we're an ageing democracy means we can't have nice things, because it makes our politics more risk-averse, short-termist, pessimistic etc. And while I think there's some truth to that, I think I depart from some of you on the solution?

500ml coke cans should become a permanent feature IMO

I mean, Stancil is just straightforwardly wrong here, and I wonder if that's because the authoritarian turn and the abject failure to oppose the far-right just doesn't register abroad

Starmer's embrace of Labour First has to go down as one of the first signs he was going in the wrong direction. In doing so he put himself in the same position as Corbyn – a prisoner of hard-line factionalists with no space to carve out a broad and distinctive base in the party.

Yep, and Blair admitted that he himself was quite liberal on most things, just not justice and policing. Which is just about as perfect a fit for Labour's coalition as you can get, and he authentically believed it.

I do think it's interesting that you could not have predicted that the Conservative Party would own the 20th century from the first PM of that period, Bonar Law – a narrow, reactionary sort of politician 1/4

Ngl if you thought there was even going to be a contest I don't know what to say to you

Hey, some of us aren't even economic radicals

I would like to be able to wear more second hand stuff, but being such a skinny guy makes that difficult

Just finished watching Timelash. Not exactly a good story, but neither is it as bad as its reputation, I thought.

More broadly I think she's so reflexively critical of the Labour Party, even when it does things she actively wants, that she's lost all credibility within it, which is surely not in her members' interests when its the major party most likely to give her a hearing