When the wealthy vote for low-tax parties, it’s logical When men vote for ‘family values’, it’s common sense When Muslim citizens vote against being deported, it’s an illegitimate bloc

Starmer’s entire approach, from his project’s earliest days, rested on the new core coalition of younger, more urban and ethnic minority voters had nowhere else to go. That idea is in tatters. As I wrote yday, it arises from Labour not valuing the coalition it has and romanticising one it does not

Reform, which spent its by-election campaign warning about the UK's "Christian heritage" being under threat, while proposing a ban on visas from predominantly Muslim countries, now accuses their opponents of engaging in "sectarian politics"

In the focus group of Muslim voters I sat in on, the Greens' policies on trans rights and drug legalisation were brought up. Participants either supported those positions, or didn't much care. Not what you'd expect from an unintegrated, socially conservative bloc www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

Great piece from @rmcunliffe.bsky.social who sat in on focus group of Muslim voters in Gorton/Denton. Lots of groups bleak right now, but even more so as they felt racism had basically been legitimised recently & were angry govt esp PM, weren’t standing up to it www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

When white citizens vote the same way, that’s just normal When Muslim citizens vote the same way, that’s sectarianism, a conspiracy and breaks election rules

UK elections: Polls close 10pm GMT (5pm EST). Results ~2am GMT / 9pm EST All ballots are brought to a local rec centre and counted together. Candidates line up on stage to hear the result Highlights include giant rosettes and novelty candidates like Count Schnitzel von Crumb who is a giant dog

🚨🚨Biggest European Politics news of today: A midst ongoing crisis with #trump and #Greenland #Denmark will hold a snap election next month, PM #MetteFrederiksen announced today during a plenary session of the Danish parliament in Copenhagen. 🧵 www.politico.eu/article/mett...

UK is trying to deport a vulnerable woman who has been in the UK 50 years. Because she was pushed into pleading guilty to a misdemeanour, an incident in which she was exploited She is the sole carer to a disabled partner Apparently she's a threat to UK security www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

white voters get their legitimate concerns addressed, non-white voters are pandered to. it's an irregular verb.

When systems are their own entire complex world, the incentives are torqued towards people who work in the system. Which leads to perverse outcomes the general public would find unpalatable or unacceptable. But the public doesn’t know about these outcomes. Until the system breaks then it’s a scandal

The knowledge gap between experts who work in complex global systems, and the general public, mean it is hard for ordinary people to engage in discussions about their lives There is a power imbalance between the people and the experts, and it’s a challenge to democracy

The result is a) the public is fine with destroying essential global systems because they don’t see these systems as important to their lives Or b) well-meaning but mind-boggling ideas from the general public about how to fix global systems gaps

As systems have become more global and interdependent, we haven’t done a good job at bringing ordinary people along. We developed deep expertise in these systems, and that’s been enough. But now we have a democratic deficit, and the gap between experts in the system, and the general public, is huge

It is very difficult to get people to understand why destroying parts of complex global systems is bad. Because they do not know such systems exist They will eventually understand when the system collapses and they feel the end result directly. But then it’s too late

You see this conspiracy thinking in other countries too People experience the negative impacts of a large, complex system with its own motives, in which they're almost an after-thought, and they can't understand it And then the internet offers them a convenient, easy, paranoid reason

The UK has a significant by-election today in Manchester. It's a three-way split between Labour, Greens and Reform Like most by-elections, it's been ugly. But made significantly worse by the flagship Reform candidate; a professional alt-right commentator www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

As aid budgets gets slashed & the US withdraws from global institutions, this is an excellent opportunity to finally bring in a non-American leader for WFP (and please stop with the plastic press releases...)

Breaking: World Food Programme Executive Director Cindy McCain is resigning. She released a video announcement to staff today.

Theory: One major reason Trump wants to destroy storied institutions where brave, thoughtful people have done great things for others, is because he knows deep inside he is a small, small man who could never possibly belong in such places

This is a bad dream

A global feminist organisation that received $100m+ in philanthropic funding, advertising a senior leadership role at $94,000 I'm sorry, that's a hard no

Meanwhile, Greece is prosecuting its former finance minister because he mentioned he once took ecstasy on holiday 36 years ago Laser focused on critical, topical issues, Greece is www.politico.eu/article/gree...

Not another far right party that campaigns against corrupt, elite cabals, acting exactly like a corrupt elite cabal Almost like a pattern or something www.politico.eu/article/germ...

The side effects of pregnancy and childbirth, followed by at least 18 years of parenting, are famously negligible

Police in 'you keep demanding more funding, yet you're incapable of not being the Keystone Cops for a single day' challenge www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

British schools too often value control and conformity over learning. Nowhere is that more evident than with children with special educational needs This piece on what SEND children really need out of the education system will resonate with parents helenlouisechandler.substack.com/p/the-proble...

"500 metric tons of high-energy food, intended for child refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan under the age of five, were incinerated, as were ten million dollars of contraceptives"

Zimbabwe is the first country to publicly refuse the one-sided US health deals being pushed on Africa Zim objected to US demands for sovereign health data, exclusive access to critical minerals, and attempts to undermine multilateralism www.zimlive.com/zimbabwe-rej...

www.policyalternatives.ca/news-researc... 'Observers are awaiting further details of Canada’s cuts to global health...but the government remains tight-lipped even on assuaging fears about helping people caught in the most vulnerable of circumstances' @policyalternatives.ca

My only contribution to the discourse is that I Swear is a heartbreaking film about a little boy who spent his life being almost incessantly punished, ostracized and subject to the most cruel treatment by everyone around him, for something they didn't bother to understand and he couldn't stop

I am being somewhat flop but right wingers should realise that when we let them back in to power it’s not just because we’ve got sick of the excesses and idiocies of the left but also because we’ve house-broken the right out of their little tics, foibles and manias and I can’t see much evidence here

Once again, at the heart of pro-natalist policies is coercing or trapping women into having more children than they want

There's a point in this where he is clearly trying to argue that married women should not have finances independent of their husbands and also that they shouldn't be allowed to get divorced and you do basically realise this is a war against all of modernity, but particularly women.

This is what the rubes who think AI is some whizz bang solution to work fail to get. The point of the work in education isn’t the output. The point of the work in education IS THE WORK.

More than 600 people have died trying to cross Mediterranean in 2026, UN says. Deadliest start to a year in more than a decade Every one of these deaths is a political choice www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Scott Galloway is wrong about dads and childbirth. He called it “disgusting and unnatural” for fathers, but that’s not what research says "Birth experiences were deeply meaningful for dads. Many said that they felt transformed by their experience" darbysaxbe.substack.com/p/scott-gall...

There's plenty of technology "the left" is excited about. And as important, is excited to extend the benefits through humanity, not just rich people or "consumers". www.pbs.org/newshour/hea...

Absolutely grim account by a 15 year old girl on the swamp of online and offline misogyny girls are swimming in www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This explains so much of the visceral discomfort I feel reading AI responses and interacting with AI devices, with their default feminine voices responding in stereotypically feminine ways.

Britain plays such a weird role in US discourse. The US right imagines us as a fallen nation, under Sharia law and with streets not safe to walk on. The US left seems to need to imagine we're wildly more racist even than the US, and seem willing to throw disability advocacy under the bus to do it.

Everyone who works on reproductive health knows what happens when governments restrict healthcare access to 'emergency, lifesaving care' Spoiler: It's dead women nationalnewswatch.com/2026/02/23/c...

I enjoyed this interview with @tomfletcherun.bsky.social . And, as a woman who writes about international affairs, it is good to hear a male colleague speak so openly about his emotions in the face of the deplorable state of the world. Empathy is the opposite of weakness. We could use more of it.

Carney said nothing that Lula, Mottley and Ramaphosa haven't said a million times over It is the north that is in crisis. For the south, the north is finally catching up and they see opportunity www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/16/02/2...

In the latest move that will kill people, the US will immediately end all lifesaving aid to Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, and Zimbabwe because "there is no strong nexus between the humanitarian response and U.S. national interests” www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

This is a massive shift which would upend the lives of millions - not just the nearly half million directly threatened but their families. It would abandon a basic principle of law that changes are not retrospectively applied.

This is the equivalent of deporting Canadian permanent residents or US green card holders, based on race and religion People who have been approved to settle permanently and are often on pathways to citizenship

"The only way we can defeat ethno-nationalism is by deporting all the black and brown people" suffers from one small logical flaw...

Zia Yusuf is a practising Muslim. He's currently fasting because it's Ramadan. And he tells The Times this.

This has long been a challenge in Africa too, where women’s rights particularly get framed by traditional leaders as ‘un-African’ and colonial impositions