What really strikes me is their utter inability to see how this sort of language is not just morally wrong, but very clearly helps their opponents.

Oh look. They’ve actually drawn a diagram for all the people stupid enough to need a bloody diagram.

Time to panic www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Another excellent piece from @jonathanfreedland.bsky.social “If and when Donald Trump and those who serve him, and themselves, are eventually called to account, they will be confronted by that single word [corruption], in all its shades – and all its force.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Well worth a read. There must surely be a treatment for Truss’ condition. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Because, you see, buying influence is only a worry if a Labour peer donates a couple of "freebie" outfits to close friends. When a man, whose business is literally DARK MONEY, single-handedly rescues a near-bankrupt far-right party, leading in the polls, he's doing it because he believes in Nige.

Crypto investor Christopher Harborne, who has just donated £9 million to Reform, is also an aviation fuel entrepreneur. In other news Reform, which has pledged to scrap all Net Zero plans, just declared a £36,000 donation from Heathrow bylinetimes.com/2025/12/04/c...

My radical opinion is that we should have a regulator whose job it is to ensure broadcast television is legal, honest, decent and truthful.

I absolutely do not care about Rachel Reeves’s junior chess competition. I absolutely do care about whether Farage is racist or not. And, given the deranged but distinct possibility that he may become PM, we all should. Ps… Narrator: there was no Damascene conversion. inews.co.uk/opinion/expo...

Nigel Farage was a racist bully at school but Rachel Reeves won the wrong chess championship so who can say who is worse?

If you ever wondered what GOP gerrymandering looks like in red states with blue cities, I present:

Pleased to discover that slightly misnaming the national chess championship you won as a school child is a much more serious offence than repeatedly racially abusing your fellow pupils and telling them they should go to the gas chamber

Surely you’d type this number, this initial line, and you’d think “hang on a moment, what on earth am I claiming here?”

1. The European Parliament’s attempt to ban plant-based foods from being sold as “sausages”, “burgers” etc is a direct response to livestock industry lobbying. This is a short thread on how utterly bleeding ridiculous it is. 🧵1/6

Very good piece from @rafaelbehr. But what Starmer and Reeves are missing in their pursuit of growth is that growth depends on people en/masse spending more on goods and services that aren’t just day-to-day necessities. This requires more disposable income… tbc www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

So, what was the point of the second strike at all, then?

TWO THINGS 1 - "Hundreds of thousands of lives saved"? There are about 72,000 total deaths from all opioids annually - an awful tragedy, but not one averted by blasting small boats in the Caribbean. 2 - Fentanyl does NOT come from Venezuela by boat or any other way.

On the one hand, anything to distract from reports of his increasingly well-documented, lifelong racism. On the other, if he's told some donors this (& the FT will have sourced this properly) you can be sure that he'd've told others the polar opposite if he thought that's what they wanted to hear.

People get extremely annoyed when I point it out (I think they think I’m endorsing the other guy, cause we don’t do nuance) but if this was Biden, it would be the cover image of literally every American newspaper tomorrow.

🐞

Brilliant!

That’s probably how native Americans viewed the successive waves of white settlers, all in their turn fleeing persecution, danger, oppression, or poverty and hoping to make a new start in America. Like Somalians, Afghans, Haitians and Central Americans today…wait, oh, but they’re not white. 😡😡😡

I love how all the Air Force One interviews with Trump look like he’s just coming out of the toilet after a horrific dump.

For context the 'Middle England' referred to here is the 0.5% of households living in homes worth more than £2 million

I must have missed the wall-to-wall coverage of demands for an investigation into Nigel Farage's lies about being a racist Or about whether he knew Nathan Gill Or about who bought his house in Frinton

Paging Robbie Gibb and Michael Prescott: if you’re pulling together another of those little dossiers on political bias at the BBC, I’ve got a submission for you.

This is the most alarming story I’ve read today. Giving up the fight before it’s started

Under Mahmood's current proposals, presumably would have been deported to Czechoslovakia in 1945, when it was "safe" again.

My cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com books. Lots more here: www.theguardian.com/books/series/tom-gauld-s-cultural-cartoons

Let's hear it for the unashamedly selfish elderly who really don't care about the nation's finances as long as they don't pay a penny extra.

Excellent piece

Latest Graun toon up already www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Christmas on the BBC www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

They think they can balance the country being totally hostile to a relatively small number of asylum seekers; marginally hostile to migrants needed to fill work in key sectors (health, care etc) and international students; and very attractive to high skilled migrants in high pay sectors. They can't.

Today's 70% fall in net migration to 205,000 was not one of the six stories in BBC ten o'clock news. Ta massive assymetry in whether rises in immigration and falls in immigration are considered newsworthy by broadcasters Down by 140k isn't thought to be. Up by 140k undoubtedly would be.

The UK, where the day after a decision to take half a million children out of poverty, the media & political world has been full of sneering at those same children & their families, labelling them as ‘Benefits Street’, while the same people are moaning about a tax on £2m mansions. Shameful stuff.

A quick reminder of who Nigel Farage was most concerned about when Putin's tanks first rolled into Ukraine

Never let it be said that the British press is out of touch

Today's migration stats illustrate the migration doom loop in action... (from my presentation at the IMF last week)

I'm hearing criticisms of the end to the two child limit, because it was done just to mollify Labour backbenchers, at a cost of £billions. I remember another govt delivering a referendum on EU membership, just to mollify restive backbenchers. That's costing way, way more... A little perspective?

Bad news for anyone thinking of responding to the consultation on the new electric vehicle duty. The consultation opens today, and closes last March.

My cartoon for this week's @newscientist.com

“making [Brexit’s] failure a refutation of the whole edifice of Eurosceptic argument that had been assembled over decades.” For Eurosceptic read Europhobic. Another excellent piece from @rafaelbehr.bsky.social (got the right author this time). www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

the price of populism

"By 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%" Read the Stanford report: siepr.stanford.edu/publications...

I’m a past winner of the Orwell Prize & won partly because I exposed Vote Leave’s unlawful activities. Michael Gove was its co-convener & refused to answer a single q. He’s now a judge of the prize & our world is truly one that Orwell would recognise bylinetimes.com/2025/11/25/m...