I think this is what you call a high pollen count

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.

No-one gives a damn, but this is a testament to our complete moral collapse on this issue.

Got to be honest, loosening sanctions on Russia before we’ve even tried any basic demand-side measures is not filling me with pride or joy

Max Dowman has won the title before he’s taken his GCSE’s

Brexit increasingly resembles a form of necropolitics through which the will of the living is outweighed by the will of the dead

I see so many BBC articles like this. They almost never lead on people being supportive of solar projects. It is the noisy, angry homeowner opponents who get wall-to-wall uncritical coverage.

In fairness to Boris Johnson, who could ever have foreseen that West Ham might one day get relegated? www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...

I genuinely don't think the right has noticed the degree to which it has radicalised.

I will never understand how Keir reconciles his self-conception as a good man doing a good job as prime minister with “my premiership had to be brought to the brink of death for me to say this”.

This is brilliant...... “Tommy Robinson’s far right march has unwittingly raised over £100k for refugees. “Over 2,000 of you have chipped in to make tomorrow’s far right march the biggest sponsored walk for refugees EVER.”

Still feel May gets off way too lightly by virtue of being followed by Johnson and Truss. Illiberal, weak, rigid, ignorant on issues she had no business being ignorant on. And whatever her personal probity, the collapse in standards we saw under Johnson was already well established under her.

It is astonishing* that Angela Rayner's tax affairs - in which the Standards Commissioner found her to have acted "in good faith", in an attempt to protect her disabled son - is STILL a bigger story than Farage trousering £5 million in secret or Tice's taxes. *It's not astonishing, but should be.

If Starmer is challenged for the leadership & chooses to fight, something wholly new will happen. For the first time, the question of whether a prime minister is removed from power will be decided, not by MPs, not by voters at an election,but by party members. This is democratically indefensible.🧵

An experienced broadcaster saying what many of us have thought for a while

Please retweet.

The greatest thing Starmer can do for his country is to replace FPTP. “In the UK today, the great danger is rather tyranny of the minority, in which a small plurality secures overwhelming power. First- past-the-post has become suicidal. The time to reform the old system is now.” M Wolf FT

Sir Tim Eicke KC, and former Judge at @coe.int shares that of the 46 member countries of the Council of Europe it is only in the U.K. that there are political parties - two - who have in their manifesto leaving the European Convention on Human Rights.

It reads plausibly. I like the little divisive needles like referring to "the extremes on the left" as if the nearly-1/4m strong Greens were all of a piece with the Communists and Marxists. Green policies increasingly fill the centre-left void vacated by the Blairites and even the Libdems.

It is probably worth pointing out to Britons that the immigration proposals now being made in the UK by parties like Reform are far more extreme than anything even Trump has suggested in the US, and Labour has not only miserably failed to oppose them but has actively egged them on.

Labour shouldn't have spent the last two years obsessing over which voters to target, but to make matters worse, they picked literally the silliest group to do it with.

Maybe Starmer should promise to go after the Champions League final and give a young up-and-coming manager their chance.

There absolutely should be sackings at the Electoral Commission over this. A fake party that does no campaigning, will have spent £0, and whose own holocaust denying leader acknowledged is only there to confuse voters, came 7th, only explainable if it did indeed confuse voters.

Top of my current list of ‘untrue truisms’ is ‘if you think Starmer should go, you have to say who you’d want to replace him’. @bylines.scot bylines.scot/politics/wan...

One of my many metropolitan elite opinions is it is actually fine and good for people to go 'I don't know enough to judge but I would rather the PLP looked within itself and found a different candidate from a field of 400'. More people should, in fact.

Strongly recommend this. @jameshawes.bsky.social is always fascinating on the historical and contemporary undercurrents in British politics, and - in this podcast - on how they have informed the UK’s relationship with Ireland.

They have zero ideas. There's just nothing there.

Neither the last govt’s performance nor this one, nor voting patterns of 2024 or 2026, nor the PM’s response so far to Thursday’s results, suggest we’re liberating ourselves from Brexitism. Yet we must. From April 2023 ⬇️ @westcountryvoices.bsky.social www.westcountryvoices.co.uk/state-of-den...

It's like suggestions that the vote should be UK-wide: are people really suggesting that a majority of people in E , W and NI should be able to chuck the Scots out against their wishes? I think many people don't really get the self-determination frame.

I really am scunnered with the excuses being made for Reform voters. Societal problems are complex with no easy solutions. Voters are adults responsible for their own knowledge and understanding. Why do some insist that we have to ‘gentle parent’ other people through their big racist feelings?

Rather than ask if you should change pilot midway through the flight, David Lammy might have done better to ask if you should change manager midway through the season. As a Spurs fan, he’d have known the answer is ‘yes’. Sometimes more than once.

Kellner quietly, heroically pushing back on the narrative that Reform are the unstoppable wave of the future

This thread from @zekuzelalem.bsky.social is very important for understanding the unforeseen consequences of Epic Fury and the end of international rules and norms everywhere Thanks Zecharias 🙏🏾

Somebody close to him please tell him.

The issue here is: A Labour govt has ignored pleas of British citizens, new borns to dying elderly, who did not know border rules it introduced in Feb without a proper campaign at airports, or airline booking sites. People have missed funerals; visits to dying www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Excellent interview by @gideonrachman.bsky.social with former 🇺🇦Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on “The Rachman Review” 4/4 podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/t...

On a structural level, the government is not taking this stuff seriously enough This content is a threat to public order and is driving a disintegration of the social fabric. An administration with its finger on the pulse would understand that a lot of issues run downstream of this

Sharing, without comment, British newspapers’ depictions of the only Jewish person currently leading a UK political party . Times. Mail. Telegraph. Sun.

Can’t help feeling this is true. In my more cynical moments, it seems to me people are quite happy to be told how generous they are, which politicians are only pleased to do. Actually being generous is quite another matter.

Our aid cuts have been just as severe. It won't kill as many people because we spent less to start with, and focused a bit less on health/food programmes. But we've got nothing to be proud of here.

‘What the person we want you to elect to public office in our name and on your behalf actually thinks about stuff is none of your business’.

This is what Ofcom's inaction has been enabling. We all deserve better. 📨 Take action and write to your MP: stopfundinghate.info/get-involved/take-action-on-ofcom/ If you've already emailed your MP, you can help by: 🔵 Sharing this link on socials 🔵 Encouraging those around you to add their voice

This report is truly chilling. We need politicians who will recognise the conjunction of trends, economic and technical, that are the basis of the problem and recognise they need coordinated action in several areas to stop them.

This is probably the most straightforwardly egregious example in the article. This woman is voting Reform in order to strip her disabled stepson of his benefits. You couldn't make it up.

Vote Reform. Or we will house *dangerous migrant centres* in your village. And if you vote Green, it will be even worse for you. It's beyond disturbing. The chill wind of threat, thuggery and menace of a kind never before seen in Britain.

Meanwhile some ‘respectable’ journalists in Scotland who claim not to like extremists are saying that you should vote for this lot over the SNP.

What does normalisation of the far right look like? How about being told that if it’s a choice between the SNP or a party that would send refugees to their deaths you must pick the latter, while also being told the ex-leaders of the Scottish Greens are extremists? www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/...

If I had just gone to the media saying that other parties were putting my party's candidates at risk of violence by calling us "far right", I would give it more than 48 hours before having my Home Affairs spokesperson post about how we'll do detainment camps in areas run by our political opponents

What does normalisation of the far right look like? How about being told that if it’s a choice between the SNP or a party that would send refugees to their deaths you must pick the latter, while also being told the ex-leaders of the Scottish Greens are extremists? www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/...

Thinking about this and the power of language. Why is Farage always described as ‘brushing off’ questions and not ‘wriggling out of’ questions as others might be? Too simplistic just to say media bias. It’s also to do with his persona. But to ‘brush off’ is to dodge the question, let’s be clear.