Delighted to report that @bylinetimes.bsky.social has been receiving emails and messages from readers asking them why they have given the likes of Isabel Oakeshott, Goodwin and Dan Hannan space to write for them. As such my "On the Record" column now prominently says AS TOLD TO OTTO ENGLISH

“You can't have a proper discussion about immigration without the trade-offs being understood; when the only side being presented is that immigration is bad and if we cut it, everything will be great. Because then, when you cut it and everything is not great, people just turn on the next group.”

#NoToPalantir “Palantir’s £330 million NHS tech platform is “slow and clunky” with a “poor user experience,” according to an internal NHS document…Palantir’s NHS platform is eight to ten times slower at analysing data than the current NHS tool in use.” democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-p...

Father of the year

Tillis unleashed now he's not running is entertaining but also a reminder of how cowardly the party has been in letting all this happen (including him before he decided to quit).

@wulfhelm.bsky.social There must be a crossover plot with 'The Rookie' in here somewhere. Something involving temporal anomalies no doubt.

Looking forward to the X Files reboot.... 'Ah, agent Mulder, what can I do for you?...you need to see the director?...well that might be a problem - he locked himself in his office after going on bender and now can't log into his PC. A SWAT team is being sent in now to see if he's still alive.' 1/2

Farage complaining that info on his five million pound bribe was leaked by Russian hackers is like complaining that your child sex dungeon was discovered by burglars.

Remember the good old days when you just received a casual glance at your passport, or were waved right through? Dover, like so many regional airports across the EU were never meant to handle third country nationals. Then charlatans persuaded just enough Brits to vote for #Brexit

A superpower's guide to losing a war of choice against a country with the GDP of Kentucky:

A total U.S. surrender.

This looks like bullshit stenography to me. Glen Owen also ‘reported’ Farage’s lies about French police & a monoglot mechanic ‘telling him’ his car had been ‘tampered with’ in an ‘assassination attempt’ when he was trying to distract attention from something else. Also, Putin *wants* him to be PM!

There's a story to be told out there about why RAISE THE Colours are banned from both Stirchley and The Penns Lane asylum seeker "hotel" @channel4news.bsky.social - read the threads, we've got loads of video evidence The far right flag measles epidemic is only a few rotten men with dark connections

Is "Putin, for whom I'm by far the biggest champion in the country, hacked my phone in order to publicly reveal the scandalous thing I definitely did... for reasons," really the defense Farage is going with? It's somehow both implausible and... not actually at all a defense?

“an absurd claim & attempt to deflect attention from legitimate scrutiny of his financial affairs…Farage…has repeatedly failed to answer serious public interest questions about the £5m” www.mirror.co.uk/news/politic...

Is Trump having a stroke at the end of the clip? Either that or some sort of epileptic fit...

Hegseth speaking about his job as Secretary to the West Point Class of 2026 Graduation Ceremony: “The bureaucratic nonsense, the political correctness, the red tape that have nothing to do with readiness, warfighting, or lethality. “We are taking a chainsaw to all of it.”

I went through Dover as a foot passenger on a quiet weekday last month and I posted at the time that this was all heading for disaster and chaos. There you go. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

Anyway here's an idea for @ledbydonkeys.org The queues at Dover are massive. Maybe put a poster of a smiling Nigel Farage looking down on it all for the rest of the summer.

In an age of Ebola outbreaks in other parts of the world, it doesn't seem an excellent idea to not treat any sewage. We need to know how soon this situation is going to be fixed, and we already know that now wouldn't be soon enough.

Just unbelievable!! A frustrated Kent County Councillor reveals how Reform blocked a serious 8-point action plan to tackle Kent’s growing water catastrophe — wastewater failures, water supply shortages, and climate-driven infrastructure collapse — using a procedural excuse. #MaximilienRobespierre

🚨 " John Healey, has urged Nigel Farage to provide transparency about the £5m gift he received from a billionaire businessman, in particular over whether any of the sum could have been linked to Russia-connected profits."

David Miliband urges the UK to build a consensus toward rejoining the EU. His intervention follows revelations that Brussels rejected Labour's pitch for a single market for goods, proving minor tweaks won't fix the Brexit mess. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Just because a problem is real and serious doesn't mean we have to pretend all proposals to address it are. In fact, dumb dramatic proposals are doubly harmful in the context of major urgent problems because they crowd out and starve of oxygen the better ones.

Are these the same doctors who don't mask in an airborne pandemic? www.cp24.com/news/canada/...

“Galsworthy [said] joining the single market would be “economically helpful”, but would not solve the question, for the British public, about where the UK is headed as a nation. “We want to be full team players,” he said. “[The conversation] needs to feel democratic and open and constructive.””

So for Brexit 51% is ok But to join the EU, we need 100% www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Labour needs to listen to this and change policy

The most dangerous wrong ideas in public policy are the ones that sound so intuitively true that any attempt to push back or even nuance them can be sneeringly dismissed as academic foolishness that flies in the face of 'common sense'. I... may have written a book about this. 👀

Once again, this shows how British officials and politicians really don't understand how the EU works You cannot have a special deal, without accepting the rules of the Single Market UK pitched single market for goods with EU in pursuit of deeper trade ties but the idea was rebuffed in Brussels

Politicians endlessly blame immigration for their own failures. So, when immigration is reduced, their ‘success’ isn’t recognised. No one’s life has particularly improved. Because no one’s life was ever going to improve by reducing immigration. Because our problems were never caused by immigration.

The Prime Minister described yesterday's migration stats as "great news". In fact, the government's current immigration strategy is both economically damaging and politicallly self-defeating. But there is a better way. Me in @prospectmagazine.co.uk www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/pol...

I know it’s exhausting to do this endlessly but do write to your Labour MP opposing Labour’s bathroom ban. The party does this because it thinks it’s making the problem go away.

Perhaps the Greens should just sit this one out.

Finally, the Uncertainty over how we will be able to live our daily lives in public according to the state is answered: We Can’t. We Shouldn’t. Fuck your government

Once again: I've seen more vetting in an average episode of "All Creatures Great and Small" - which, come to think of it, wouldn't be a bad description of some of the candidates who seem to slip through whatever processes these parties claim to have set up.

I find the level, speed, and depth of radicalisation frightening. This isn't about safety or fairness. Her core assertion is that someone else ticking a box somehow dilutes her womanhood. How is this different to what bigots were saying a few years ago on marriage to exclude people like her and me?

Hundreds of thousands of workplaces use software to monitor employees. Now, a new study has found that many of these tools share data not just with employers, but with digital advertising platforms and data brokers as well. Read more from @laurenfeiner.bsky.social:

(Itamar Ben-Gvir was investigated for incitement to commit genocide along with Netanyahu) How Ben-Gvir’s flotilla video shattered Israel’s multimillion ‘Hasbara’ The far-right Israeli minister’s taunting of abducted foreign activists triggers a global condemnation forcing Israel into damage control

The reality is that because politicians won't shut up about immigration people will continue to believe it is rising and an issue. That reality is that the more governments "cut immigration" the worse of the whole country is.

Absolute state of the Oxford Union for indulging and encouraging these disgusting people. How is this not a major story?

Labour lost almost four times as many voters to the Greens as they did to Reform UK in the local elections, according to new YouGov polling

If journalists were doing their job properly, it would simply not be possible for the public to be labouring under this degree of ignorance when it comes to immigration. inews.co.uk/opinion/immi...

"Really great news today. Job applications are way down at our crappy company."

@wulfhelm.bsky.social he’s worse than Mr Pip. ‘Today Mr Trump has barked at…’

oh golly gee i wonder if that's coz the previous government, Reform, and the current government all push the idea that we're being invaded by swarms of our fellow human beings

Sir Keir Starmer’s team was kept in the loop about Labour Together’s “indefensible” investigation into the background of journalists who had written critical pieces about the loyalist think-tank, according to newly released documents www.ft.com/content/9c56...

Reform dodging serious questions.

@wulfhelm.bsky.social Sounds like the start of an interesting story...

👏🏽 "No one in cabinet has a clearer view of the concrete, daily damage Brexit has inflicted on the creative industries than Lisa Nandy does... Her job is to stand up for those musicians, those touring artists, those students. Not to suggest they are out of step with what voters want." 👏🏽