Morning walk

We’ve just moved into an old house where the carpet underlay seems to consist entirely of copies of the Times 1965-1970, and it’s kind of reassuring to find the headlines (arms sales to Israel, teachers’ strike, rows about some MP calling another MP a drunken buffoon) are so utterly relatable

www.bbc.com/news/article... (From Mastodon): You know your plan is garbage when Alliance, DUP, UUP, SDLP, and Sinn Féin are all on the same side. With one fell swoop, Keir Starmer unified Northern Ireland (against his BritCard).

I’m honestly kinda morbidly fascinated by this idea. The Gang Reinvents Mandatory Palestine. It’s an idea so bad it goes past so bad it’s genius and right back to being bad.

This High Court judgment confirms what @humanists.uk has long known: faith-based admissions in state schools can result in 'indirect race discrimination'. The government has a duty to fix this. The admissions system should be fair for everyone, not entrench segregation.

SIR MIX-O-LOTL

until there's a Republican congress and a Democratic president, in which case it will suddenly be very important. the country cannot function as a real democracy with corrupt, partisan serial liars controlling the Supreme Court; it has to be the first priority of a new administration.

We don't live in a world anymore where you can do one piece for the Telegraph and an interview with the Guardian + appeal to two different audiences with different messages. Anyone interested can see what you're doing.

Also, people who go "oh but European countries have ID cards and they're fine!", please remember that those ID papers were exactly how the Nazis were able to easily and efficiently round up and murder almost the entire Jewish populations of some countries.

Spotted at @themerl.bsky.social today. #TheArchers

So Starmer is backing ID cards - which I do not like - in order to facilitate this government’s ugly immigration policies - which I also do not like - and in doing so is apparently spiralling down the electoral drain and throwing votes to Farage - whom I do not like? Fan-fucking-tastic.

'You will not be able to work in United Kingdom if you do have digitial ID' says Starmer. As if you don't already need a passport as part of the "compliant Environment". Guess what, people still work on an irregular basis. This is up there with the Tories proposing national service. Idiotic.

Menzies Campbell seems like a thoroughly decent human being who lived a very good life, and it's very sad he's no longer with us. However, thanks to the BBC one of my earliest political memories is this absolute fever dream of a breakdancing hologram of him in a tracksuit. youtu.be/Rh3UlZcRQrY?...

"on a technicality" Not really. A failure to get necessary consents to a terror charge is not a slight error. They are safeguards when a person faces a serious charge. Prosecutors should take such safeguards seriously: this is terrorism law they are using. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/s...

You would assume that anything sensitive held on such a database will be restricted to those who need to access it, but the truth is that, somewhere up the line, an IT person in a basement with a degree in an unrelated field will have admin control over absolutely everything because they know Excel.

Time for me to deploy my expertise from having worked with databases of individuals and their data in the public sector: whatever you might imagine will be happening behind the scenes of a digital ID card, the actual reality of that dataset is going to be an information governance nightmare.

Tuesday.

He's essentially saying 'I didn't agree with the 1993-2016 economic model, and I didn't agree with Boris Johnson's either'. Okay, but you didn't agree with Corbynism either. What is yours, to hope that it turns out that 'the easiest route in every poll' turns out to drive growth?

An MRP that predicts how many of the electorate will be dead by the next election. (They will be the lucky ones, because they'll be spared from future MRP discourse.)

COUNCILS DON'T NEED YOU TO PROVE YOUR IDENTITY IN ORDER TO REPORT A POTHOLE. THEY DON'T EVEN NEED YOU TO *REVEAL* YOUR IDENTITY.

Could politicians stop putting major policy announcements behind a paywall please?

When we introduced gender recognition certificates, a paper warned about the potential misuse of the closed register by future governments. Now, the Ministry of Justice is treating it as the “trannies register” to out prisoners as trans. They are introducing a mandatory ID scheme. Haha, hahaha.

BREAKING The backlog of cases in Crown Courts in England and Wales has reached a record high of 78,329.

the fact that you need to post about how final your decision is speaks to a fear that your decision is distinctly un-final

Comey didn't do what they accuse him of under *either* version of events. Comey said McCabe wasn't forthcoming about it. McCabe says he told Comey he'd done it after the fact (IG concluded he was lying). But neither is what the indictment alleges: that Comey authorized and directed McCabe to do it.

"experts say" www.cnn.com/2025/08/11/b...

"please rate your package delivery" i mean ill click the smiley face because i assume it impacts the poor bastard who delivered it but i must impress upon you that forcing both him and i into this situation is an act of utter inhumanity and furthermore that god frowns upon your deeds

"Additionally, we will be charging a 30% Tariff on Upholstered Furniture"

Not even 20 minutes later and I guess we’re doing 50% tariffs on IKEA for some reason. He’s a man with a plan to make life more expensive and he can’t be stopped.

(They're not going to call it the BritCard, because the government and the Labour party are aware of the existence of Northern Ireland, and the name of this country.)

I do not think this is a useful application of ChatGPT, to be honest.

Inside you there are two wolves. There is the Anti-Monarchy Wolf and the Irish Nationalist Wolf. Normally they get along fine but someone brought up Oliver Cromwell and oh boy are they fighting now.

Clear what the future of UK polling is going to be

Only half joking when I say you can calculate a Safety Score (tm) for a hobby shop by dividing the total number of women who show up at least once a month by the total number of Black Templars players. If it’s at least one, you’re probably safe.

My contribution to The Loneliness Discourse is that we see D&D, Warhammer, etc, going mainstream because they‘re Third Space Provider Games so we should all talk more about such things to save America.

"Pope Leo XIV said a proposal to create an AI-version of him so people could have a virtual audience with the pope pretty much horrified him."

Also, inevitably "Our FOI reveals a year of correspondence showing how ministers and senior officials at the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) met repeatedly with the anti-rights group Sex Matters while shaping the government’s new digital identities framework"

They should call UK IDs UKIDs. Then, if the govt row back on the policy, the headline can be UKIDS ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK. I. Will. Not. Get. Me. Coat.

Pete Hegseth has summoned every general and admiral in the US military around the world to an *in person* meeting next week. And he’s given no reason. That’s basically unprecedented. There’s lots of reasons you don’t do it, too – not least that it’s bound to make the rest of the world twitchy.

The last time they tried to implement ID cards they estimated the cost at about £18 billion. No magic money tree for the NHS though.

We‘ll never know, but I half-suspect more people will transition under Trump II than they would have under Harris because there’s the “last plane out of Kabul” undercurrent to it with the constant anti-trans push, harder to think about other stuff when trans is never not on the headlines, and spite.

Every time Dawkins tries to use his science "expertise" to defend bigotry we just need to repost this

Republicans, Trump included, are zeroing in on transgender people and blaming us for the looming government shutdown. They are demanding that Democrats cave on transgender rights. Many of them are copying the same talking points in their messages.

I worked on the ID cards project in the Home Office under Blair. I was charged with coming up with a high-level benefits case for the scheme. Everything you say was discussed at the time back then. To be useful and to justify the massive cost of introducing a universal, compulsory scheme 1/

One thing that should be noted: There was absolutely no mention of ID Cards in the Labour Manifesto. At all. So there's no mandate to do this, and the Lords can (and should!) repeatedly block it.

My mother cleaned toilets. We never had money growing up. I'm disabled so I have no money now. I'm opposed to ID cards because I don't trust the bastards running this country, or the bastards who will replace them. It'll be used to enforce racism, and transphobia. "Centrists" can get to fuck.

Can't help but notice that the media breathlessly reporting on the messages that shooters write on their bullets seems to have been followed by a surge of shooters writing messages on bullets