Pre-Christmas double bill of The Muppet Movie and The Muppet Christmas Carol. Sublime. TMCC is a more coherent film and makes me cry, but the songs in TMM are terrific, and the cast includes Mel Brooks, Steve Martin and Orson Welles, all giving spectacular cameo turns

“If we hide in our separate silos, opposing only certain kinds of bigotry, or supporting liberty only for certain kinds of people, we will all lose.” My @theobserveruk.bsky.social column: observer.co.uk/news/columni...

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025... Save life now! The collapse into wickedness and incompetence of a government that promised so much is bewildering. Don’t proscribe Palestine Action in name of fight against terrorism and antisemitism. I am child of Jewish holocaust survivors. Don’t besmirch us

Here's what we get when politicians and the media, instead of trying to inform the public, chase after and flatter the "legitimate concerned" of the ignorant

You can just about get a cigarette paper between the far right and what was formerly known as the mainstream right

The obsession with Christmas being cancelled is one of the maddest tropes of the far right. It's obviously not true and will never be true but they need it to be an imminent possibility. Where would they be without their imagined peril?

Eight people who took action in solidarity with Palestine have been on hunger strike since 2 November in protest at their prolonged pre-trial imprisonment, censorship of communications and alleged mistreatment in custody. Five have now been hospitalised. David Lammy must respond.

Tucker Carlson has hosted Hitler apologists on his show. Now he says Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor who tried to kill Hitler, was not being Christian. He isn't making a theological argument. He's just morally inverting World War II and the Holocaust, to make space for their villains to rise again.

Oh, look. A load of coverage about a new government inquiry into "overdiagnosis" that completely blurs autism & mental illness, and ends up leaning into all those tropes about people making it all up.

The UK state pension, worst in the world.

www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/the-... The weaponisation of antiseptic by the political Right including mainstream Jews brings tears to my eyes (born 1946 to Holocaust survivor parents and refugee for years)

In full: Europe's 28-point counter proposal to US-Russia peace plan for Ukraine

Munich 2.0 The fascist twins can fro.

This ties into my recent grumble about the phrases “virtue signalling”, “pearl-clutching” and “purity tests”: the notion that all expressions of moral principle or disapproval are just a performance to impress others - that morality itself is phoney

Whoever replaces Starmer will want some easy wins and one of them would be to ensure that Glasman is no longer a Labour peer

Britain and Germany, 1953. The UK government plans to deport Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany back to the now safe havens of the FDR and the DDR. Having, of course, confiscated their jewellery to pay for their refuge. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

The BBC should serve as an example to all that there is nothing you can give the far rabid right that will satisfy it. It has simpered, pandered, soft-balled and fluff-jobbed, both-sidesed and debased itself into being a platform for liars to look down the camera and lie on, & it still gets fucked.

Be clear, the American far right are coming for British democracy.

Memorial to the Jewish volunteers of the International Brigades. It plays with Star of David and the 3-point of the IB. Around 20% (about 7,000) of Brigaders were Jewish. Fossar de la Pedrera, the mass grave of the victims of the Franco regime in Barcelona, Montjüic cemetery

In 1917 a foreign-born socialist ran for Mayor of New York City. Morris Hillquit, born in Latvia, stood on a platform that included opposition to war, economic redistribution and support for a burning global issue: Irish freedom.

Next time someone tells you that train drivers "just push buttons" show them this from the BBC

Sad to hear that Richard Gott - the journalist who identified Che Guevara’s body - has died. His historical work on Latin America remains hugely important. www.theguardian.com/media/2025/n...

If I said the last of the great twentieth century British film directors died last night, and very few people even remembered him by the time of his death... would you know what I'm talking about? tribunemag.co.uk/2025/10/cryi...

There is not a single political party or mass movement in Palestine that advocates for this idea. Or in Israel for that matter. A British politician making such statement is doing imperialism pure and simple. Giving up on an independent Palestinian state is for Palestinians to decide on. Not you.

James Baldwin: "It is the innocence that constitutes the crime." By which I believe he meant willful/ convenient/ strategic ignorance.

From day one of the full scale invasion the IL has supported the right of the Ukrainian people to self determination, as we do for the Palestinian people.

Excellent thread. Perhaps also @johnmcdonnellMP could weigh in and give a steer to those on the left still adrift on what's meant by solidarity.

Cathedrals, cannons and Cromwell: lessons in power youtu.be/rdWn3XwFjyY?... Economics isn’t just about spreadsheets. It’s about people, power, and place. In this video, filmed in Ely, where I live, I explore what my friend Danny Blanchflower calls 'the economics of walking about'.

Excellent thread. And Tim's remarks on populism could apply to 'nationalism' too.

“Such is the degradation of political and moral thinking wrought by the immigration debate that the brazen overturning of democratic norms is regarded as ‘sensible’ and critics dismissed as ‘hysterical’.” My ‪@theobserveruk.bsky.social column: observer.co.uk/news/columni...

“Legitimate concerns” update

800 words please on why this proves the Labour and Conservative strategy to primarily target Reform voters is working perfectly.

Unsurprisingly, people who actually have to deal with dead bodies in the water are more reluctant to embrace risky and dangerous methods than grandstanding politicians are.

www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/it-w... Peter Beinart shows convincingly that Israel wouldn’t release Marian Barghouti because he had the potential to unite Palestinians and pave the way to a just peace. To be the Palestinian Mandela in short. Where is Israel’s de Klerk?

As long as the Tories were less extreme than Reform I thought better them on the right than the alternative but if they’re going to be another far right party - one with better infrastructure and funding and more MPs than Reform - we should pray for their destruction

I’m totally baffled by how so many English politicians can be seemingly in-awe of a mythical halcyon past that didn’t happen, while simultaneously apparently unaware of historical events that certainly did happen like English Football clubs being banned from Europe, Enoch Powell, or The Cold War.

Judge the next UK budget by how much it improves the purchasing power of the bottom 50%. Can't revive economy without that. 16m live in poverty. 34% of universal credit claimants are in work. Millions rely on food banks. Bottom 50% of population has 5% of wealth; the bottom fifth has only 0.5%.

While the perpetrators of Gaza’s genocide pose as its saviours, survivors return home – to a wasteland | Nesrine Malik

This is extremely dangerous, for individuals and for societies. A very considerable number of people across the whole social spectrum have effectively lost their minds, and the conditions are there for it to get much worse.

I find it weird how people can acknowledge that UK politics is volatile to an unprecedented degree and yet talk very confidently about the shape of an election in 2029. Reform is depicted as a permanent and unstoppable force and Labour as utterly doomed. Doesn't add up to me

There’s lot of Covid going around at the moment, again. I don’t qualify for NHS jabs, which are now very restricted, but I just paid £90 for one at my local pharmacy. As a freelancer, that’s a lot less expensive than having to take a week or two off if I get ill, let alone risking long term issues.

There is nothing Badenoch cares more about than hating trans people so of course she has to throw that in and of course she does it in the crassest, thickest, most nonsensical way possible

The 𝘓𝘙𝘉 published many of Tony Harrison’s poems over the years, including, most famously, ‘v.’ To mark forty years of the poem, and in tribute to its author, live readings will take place in Holbeck on Sunday 12 Oct, in association with Slung Low. More info/tickets: www.slunglow.org/v-a-homecomi...

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

They're abandoning even the pretence to be the party of law and order...

On the dangers of the critique of liberalism descending into illiberalism: My ‪@theobserveruk.bsky.social column: observer.co.uk/news/columni...

@news.sky.com Fact check Anna Soubry on the difference between Palestine Action and Palestine Solidarity Campaign - she's ignorant of it.

It's a miracle nobody was hurt. Sending solidarity to the Muslim community in Sussex and across the UK, as well as the Jewish community who are still grieving from the appalling attack in Manchester. No one should EVER feel unsafe in their place of worship www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

What an admirably clear statement from the Jewish Leadership Council, especially when all of those involved must surely have been dealing with so many other urgent challenges in safety, security and grief + shock today before having this further divisive and distracting intervention to address too.