There was a point in British politics when we just stopped talking about push factors and only talked about pull factors

This rules - @raskin.house.gov straight up called out Roberts to his face. democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center...

Similar to my rule that the North/South divide begins ten miles south of wherever a given northerner happens to live.

The South Korean Ministry of Defense has awarded medals of merit to 11 officers for disobeying direct orders of superiors during the martial law fiasco, orders that they deemed to be contrary to the constitution and endangerment to democracy. www.chosun.com/english/nati...

do we think the new archbish would be amenable to flogging church house and moving everything up north

Hard to book Mill for a talk these days, but you might be able to get Bentham

Genuinely think if the Prime Minister had just sat this one out and the announcement about ID cards had been made by releasing this video, they’d have had a better reception youtu.be/vf01zgxraOE

Rachel Reeves, at IPPR, says the idea of the populist right that foreign workers depress domestic workers’ wages is simplistic and wrong…

There is a story about how Donald Dewar was asked to pick his top ten books for a book festival once and the reason you knew there was no marketing angle was that when the festival team tried later on to get a selection for the bookshop they discovered not a single one was in print.

Every one of his videos is just spot on. I know that’s not a new thing to say but I do think it’s notable how much *substance* is in each of these videos, even as many focus on the style. youtu.be/4ZDWz4UFJnI

"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...

Choose Your Fighter

I had somehow missed that Sarah Pochin, before she was a Reform MP, became the Mayor of Cheshire East when the previous Mayor had to resign after his role in the Handford Town Council zoom meeting

Presumably JD Vance has already asked his mate George Osborne if he can borrow the Elgin Marbles

Rutte: Lavrov has been Foreign Minister of Russia since the birth of Jesus Christ, and nothing useful ever came out of his mouth. Let's not pay too much attention to Lavrov. 😁Fair point.

The government can’t even get its various databases to talk to one another and provide realtime info in a crisis so I am not that expectant that we’ll get ID cards doing all sorts

Maybe just more Hegseth idiocy, but if this were happening in another country where an authoritarian leader was trying to consolidate power, we'd be very nervous

If the govt wants to sell its ID policy, it needs to call it Your NHS card and they’d be off

We’re back online! (Mostly) Thanks, Obama

Sat in a café. Small kid in school uniform walks in by himself, orders a huge hot chocolate with the works (cream, marshmallows, chocolate flake). Wolfs it down in minutes, wipes his face with his sleeve, walks out. 1/2

Thank you for the reminder of the time Jason Manford issued a notes apology because his tribute to Brucie being under the Palladium unintentionally sounded like he is in Hell.

Never bring a theory of victory to a gunfight

I first discovered this fact in a piece written by John Morgan who helped design Common Worship. Sadly Morgan died earlier this month. Many have seen his work without even knowing it. I'm not in love with Common Worship but I do love Morgan's part in it. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Yet another Church of England funded project that provides zero salary transparency. Not good enough. www.emmaus.gg/job-opportun...

Cannot stress enough how it is already possible to report potholes www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

Well, that's one way to open a programme.

Quite content to see Andy Burnham described as the King in the North but do his supporters know how that story ends?

Kind of amazing how UK news media still remains obsessed with the structurally limited impact in economic terms of small boats even as this potentially terminal havoc works its way through key UK industrial supply chains on.ft.com/3Ihb8YF

Nothing says delivery like delay www.bbc.com/news/article...

"There isn’t a lot of support for a person who ran away from Westminster when the going got tough" I too, would be immensely jealous of anyone who avoided the Brexit Years. Jammy.

Having a very high anxiety day. Ta, brain.

Autumn days when the grass is jewelled

A BBC investigation finds asylum seekers trapped in dilapidated hotels, spending years in administrative limbo, indebted to criminal gangs and yes, moved arbitrarily so that they have to take taxis across the country for routine GP appointments. Government response? Stop the taxis.

The far right don’t care about facts. Immigration numbers could be at an all time low and they’d just force the stats to say something they don’t. You can’t defeat them by changing the facts (reducing immigration), you can only defeat them by showing people who they really are: racists.

It's alarming how many people need to hear this: racism is not the natural and inevitable response to the presence of (the wrong number of) racialised Others. It is a learned response, and as such it is contestable and replaceable. This is anti-racism 101. Entry level stuff.

My Anglo-Catholic friends, always

They really want him to go, huh

this is the most chotinered a chotiner interview has ever chotinered

I can't disagree with Dan here...

we don't talk enough about how this paranoid freak released virtual insanity in 1996. years before the average person in the uk had even sent a text message, he was dancing like a maniac in his big moving gaff, enraged to the point of song by faxes, teletext and encarta 95.

This keeps getting likes. Worth watching the full video www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQC...

Currently on day two of dirty, unusable water coming out of the taps 🙃 Hopefully it gets fixed today

Rapture.

I find the language of “will this translate into a rise in the polls?” really odd. The question is “will this change minds?” Polls aren’t a thing. People are the ones with agency. Polls just record the views of the people. I think reporters’ language should reflect this.

Vertical rows are the agrivoltaic winner! “The vertical panels produce slightly less electricity—but with higher value, as generation peaks coincide with morning and late afternoon demand…The crops don't seem to mind the presence of solar panels and they like the wind protection they provide.”

There should be a high bar for politicians attacking the media, but maybe Ed Davey has half a point here? For example, the first three paragraphs of this BBC story repeat Reform's £243bn figure without saying that the thinktank behind the estimate now disowns it. (This is mentioned in paragraph 35)

This year’s SIAMS report describes Religious Education as having a “downward spiral of baked-in decline” and states “the responsibility for this rests at the macro, system level. In schools, RE teachers and leaders cannot be held accountable for systemic challenges.”

I'll have more to say on Reform's proposals to scrap ILR at some point but for now I'll just note this - anyone telling you this is a popular idea doesn't know the polling. Overwhelming majority of public back giving people who work and pay taxes most or all rights after 5 years or less

Currently imagining a medieval relic: the Holy Wheels of the True Cross

We know who made this number up - it was the Centre for Policy Studies. However, after I pointed out two major errors, they have admitted it is completely wrong and have withdrawn it - see note on their webpage here. cps.org.uk/research/her...