The Guardian view on the BBC World Service: this is London calling | Editorial

A bit long but here’s Marx from the 1844 manuscripts providing an exposition of Goethe and Shakespeare on the power of money that all happens to sum up exactly where we are right now. (Reminded of this passage by Epstein’s capture of prominent academics.)

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026... There are no unplumbed depths to Trump. He's the Mariana Trench of politics.

SMS. Selective memory syndrome.

Bullock’s Wager: An atheist choosing to believe in God for the sole reason that it opens the door to the possibility of beelzebub and all his little devils spending an eternity going to town on fascists who hid their venal lust for power and inflicting misery behind disgusting appeals to faith.

The main business model of Silicon Valley from Uber to AirBnB to Spotify is: skim profit off others' goods and labor. Often in ways that are exploitative of individuals or destructive of larger forces (as with Amazon and the retail that kept people heading out in public).

ASLEF condemns the Russian drone attack that killed at least 5 people on a passenger train in Ukraine. Targeting civilian passengers is abhorrent and unjustifiable. Solidarity with Ukrainian workers, millions of whom are without heating or electricity in the middle of winter.

"'What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist,' Tracht said, running out of breath as the car turned the corner. 'If I’m not going to act and resist now, then I shouldn’t call myself a rabbi and I can’t be a proud Jew.'" religionnews.com/2026/01/22/h...

Stalin notorious for making sure you could walk to the shops

On passing through the veil into fascism

I’ll say it again: social media destroys reading comprehension. It’s depressing how often seemingly intelligent people misread even short posts. And it’s not down to education because schoolkids do get taught how to interpret tone, context, word choice, etc. It’s brainrot

Two days ago it was Elissa Slotkin. Last week it was Jerome Powell. Before that, Mark Kelly. Weaponizing the justice system against your opponents is an authoritarian tactic. The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.

It will not surprise you to learn that Toby Youngs 'Free Speech Union' has obtained a High Court injunction banning the publication of a list of its donors open.substack.com/pub/democrac...

Robert Jenrick is like someone who was planning to leave his wife for his mistress but got kicked out first and had to turn up at his mistress's house in the middle of the night with a suitcase pretending it was his decision

This is simply a lie. There was no “open borders experiment” and what he’s talking about affected legal migration, not illegal. The attack seems to be that this racist used to be insufficiently racist

Statement on the struggle in Iran from Ukrainian democratic socialist organisation Sotsialniy Rukh. And you can read a longer article / statement on their website, linked from this thread.

I stand with Ian Byrne on this. The government must fulfil its promise to introduce the full Hillsborough law. No half measures.

For non-German speakers: “Dear media, I can’t stand the headline "No agreement between the US and Denmark” any longer. If an armed man storms a bank, you don't run the headline: "Robber and cashier can't reach an agreement on money transfer." Stop framing imperial aggression as normal diplomacy.”

Still see quite serious people saying “Nah, he’d never *actually* invade and occupy Greenland.” That’s fine if it’s just for diplomacy’s sake. But the real answer to any question of whether he would actually do something extreme, stupid, ignorant, harmful and beyond the pale is *always* yes.

Ibsen!

Guess it shouldn’t surprise us that the richest man in the world should agree that apartheid and white minority rule represent “high civilization”.

We have cleaned up the crime scene and blocked a local investigation and hidden the perpetrator and invaded the state and that is how you know that we are acting in good faith and that everything was the victim’s fault. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

As I was saying: "The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages."

If you don’t want your people to be called murderers, instruct your people not to murder people and prosecute them as murderers if they do, so as to further discourage the rest from going around murdering people like that Ross guy did when he murdered Renee Good.

He lucidly explains why the first targets of fascists have been (and still are) 'the left' (communists, socialists, social democrats) and why the traditional right is very happy to side with fascists if that means they eliminate the power of the left.

Trump is weak at home, and he can be stopped – so long as the domestic political logic of foreign intervention is recognized and turned against him. This act of war is about regime change in the United States. It only succeeds if Americans allow it to do so.

Really sorry to hear of Gerry's death. A true giant of antifascism and a lovely man, I last met him when he spoke at Max Levitas's memorial almost exactly seven years ago. RIP

This year the "AI" bubble is going to burst and it will be really weird to watch what happens when the blowback from it hits the ongoing storm of billionaire funded fascism.

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.