High Priest of the Sun God: consign more first-borns to the fiery altar to maintain the cosmos on its correct axis. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Put all the purchases from the SNP fraud case in a museum and call it the Murrell Collection

bought and sold for, eh, a Husqvarna robotic lawnmower. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

We don’t yet know how capable Holyrood’s new far right bloc will be, but Scotland’s consensus on supporting hybrid languages and cultures will need robust defence from a new breed of divisive culture warriors bsky.app/profile/pros...

What does localised public control mean? Don’t know, because you only get 1 q in a press huddle and I took the piss and asked three so was out of time. @andyburnham.bsky.social is welcome to outline what it means here - but he hasn’t said utilities nationalisation, he’s said stronger public control

really hungover so can't express this well but something about being at the emirates last night with everyone celebrating just felt like the complete antithesis of everything the right has tried to imagine london is. people want to get along, they just need a reason to be happy and have purpose

You’ll not read a better piece on Andy Burnham than this by @jenwilliamsft.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/9dd4... Can Andy Burnham, Labour’s charismatic chameleon, reinvent himself again?

Delighted to share that @edinburghup.bsky.social will publish The Glasgow Herald: Journalism, Culture, Memory. This book will build on my PhD and continue to foreground the voices of Scottish journalists and the communities they built - from the pub to the print room - on a bigger historical canvas.

Yesterday Kier Starmer announced Labour will nationalise British Steel, and save 2700 jobs. Today, the Uni of Nottingham put 2700 staff at risk of redundancy. This is just one university. Across the UK 15,000 higher education jobs need saving. Where is the rescue package for our universities?

Help stop another attempt to use the present crisis in higher education to roll back the academic study of black history and culture in the UK.

We're celebrating 20 years of delivering high-quality independent journalism: comment, analysis, and opinion bellacaledonia.org.uk/2026/05/12/b...

Terrorist convictions mean you serve your full jail term. You can't travel to another country. The police decide if you get bank accounts, phones and computers and they have open access to all of them. For life. Absolutely insane to secretly use this on kids convicted of criminal damage. Deranged.

Another endless doom loop news cycle in which one guy refuses to resign! = morbid consequence of stripping politics of meaning. All a deeply apolitical leadership can do is talk “management” “delivery” and “change” like KPMG stooges cause that’s the crushing smallness of their imaginative horizons.

Imagine if Andy Burnham ran in the Arbroath & Broughty Ferry by-election and won, but then lost the subsequent leadership election and had to spend 3 years just being the MP for Arbroath & Broughty Ferry.

AOC on possibly running for the Senate or President: They assume my ambition is a title or a seat. My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, elected officials come and go, single payer healthcare is forever.

Blue Labour will say “better to turn Camden into a marginal in order to win Barnsley” and then get absolutely destroyed in Barnsley.

Remarkable that BBC are allowed to switch off televised coverage of a national election while the counting is still underway.

Shetland going SNP. I can’t even begin to tell you how seismic this is.

Neither the left or right are prepared to face Britain's grave energy crisis. I've written for @theguardian.com on how decades of complacency cannot be magicked away by drilling in the North Sea – or even by hoping that renewables will quickly power everything.

"Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane."

I do think it sums up “the weird way the Internet shapes politics unnoticed” that “some chants that people should knock off but are mostly an ignorable part of an in-person march” are given more explanatory power than “the website that is full of antisemitism of every stripe that MPs hang out on”.

Today in the public history column: Municipal dreams and street battles, ‘why drown’ and the twenty-five year struggle to reopen a 19th century swimming pool in Glasgow. www.thenational.scot/news/2607715...

A bit dubious about this premium drama on toxic masculinity that features evil lesbian mums and gay bashing

I fundamentally believe that higher ed reform needs to begin by protecting the mission and labor of libraries

I’ve been hearing so much anger and disappointment from frontline workers about the BBC investigation into fraudulent asylum claims. One of the most damning responses has come from one of the experts they interviewed, solicitor Ana Gonzalez. It’s really worth reading her response in full:

University management spent £80 million on new building that wasn't needed (presently for sale at £14 million) and now decide 600 staff should go to 'save' £50 million. This is the math currently shaping future of UK HE. Staff paying the price for mismanagement. Govt looking the other way

Hey, look at Substack promoting Andrew Tate as the #1 new bestseller. The company's amoral leadership & backers will platform anyone, even ludicrously toxic rapists & human traffickers.

“Just stop oil”‘ doesn’t sound so mental now eh

This issue here is that you’d read these headlines and think he’d said something vaguely off colour. The vitriol and hate implicit in what he actually said means he has no place in public life - @scotnational.bsky.social 100% correct to publish.

Not really a “joke” though is it.

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

The US President casually announcing his intention to commit war crimes on social media. That's where you're at, America.

Seems to be a vast silence everywhere about the likely reality that we are in the early weeks of a global conflict. Maybe it was ever thus, but all I hear is avoidance and acceptance; maybe because this empire’s terminal phase was always likely to take everything down with it.

Here is a lukewarm take on the Louis Theroux doc : the core of the “manosphere” isn’t really misogyny, it’s ego. Every interviewee on this documentary thinks entirely about themselves, and operates in a system where that is constantly rewarded

I’ll save you a click it’s public speaking

It is actually possible to regulate gambling advertising, and while designing such a regulatory regime could be complicated, it can also be very simple, such as "there shall be no gambling advertising".

I did a 360 turn after taking this and saw the vacant former Herald building. The clearing of central Glasgow through neglect, apathy, and greed continues.

Added shade of grim to an already bleak Glasgow day was seeing kids take selfies and a guy live-streaming it harvesting comments.

This is what ecocide looks like.

Radical change and investment needs to follow or Glasgow as we know it will die

We’re reaping the harvest of a 40 year revolution which has elevated the most vain, selfish, and cruel among us into positions of previously unthinkable power. They rooted out socialism, and barbarism is all that remains. The political question that remains is who and what we protect from collapse.

The question any sane media system would be posing rn is what can be done to restrain the US & Israel.

Reflecting today on the Green Party’s remarkable electoral innovation of selecting a candidate who is broadly likeable and is capable of making statements that sound vaguely human.

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.

Everybody to Kenmure Street! What an experience to see it for the first time with the people of Glasgow. So proud!

You can see more images of that day in Kenmure Street, May 2021, here, in a new publication: www.jeremysuttonhibbert.com/photography-... #KenmureStreet #Glasgow

Love the glimpse into the beautiful mind that notated this used copy of Moby Dick I got

Full review of Everybody Kenmure Street for Scottish Left Review here. It’s a poignant, funny and politically vital film. It’s also about the street I was raised on and a day of infectious, unforgettable, freedom. So quite an emotional piece to write ❤️✊ scottishleftreview.scot/buying-time-...