They’ve been active participants in and laundered a genocide, demonised asylum seekers, given their support for flag-shagging racists, taken support away from disabled people and are violently transphobic. Happy to help Duncan!

One thing you get out of this is that this project has been being foisted on the public for 47 years now, and at no point has the fact that people fucking hate it ever made any of the important people think maybe it's time to stop.

And now I'm remembering the late great Benjamin Zephaniah writing Bought And Sold, about how the state uses honours to tame influential radicals, and then him getting offered an OBE for services to poetry and asking "did you... not read my poem?"

Calls to strip pro-democracy activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah of his British citizenship pile torment on top of torture. New piece by me on a dangerous and manufactured storm: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is one of the best articles on this subject.

Massive respect for Tressa Burke www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

At 3pm on @boldpolitics.bsky.social YouTube Channel: I talk with Gary Lineker about Calais, Palestine and the BBC. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

Even after years of this stuff it‘s still shocking that what passes for IndEpTH analysis from the BBC’s Political editor actually subtracts from public understanding of important issues, and yet

The deepest analysis of Labour’s woes Chris Mason can offer involves poring over polling %ages, wibbling about comms & halfhearted gestures at y’know, social media & stuff. If you’re after anything about its wildly unpopular policies or strategy of wooing people who hate it, sorry, he’s not your man

There are case studies to be written on why Labour has become the fiefdom of several families, and how its structures keep elevating their progeny to prominence.

For once, I say listen to these focus groups.

the very very simple answer that even a PolProf could understand is "they aggressively and deliberately antagonized the people who want to like them, while ridiculously and hopelessly pursuing the people who hate them"

I think part of this is that all the pundits said, in their podcasts, which they put out in public where people could hear them, "these guys are just lying to get elected." But when *they* said it, it was smart and savvy politics by their mates, so they're confused it hasn't worked out well.

Can't do much better than this really. A more interesting question is why people find it surprising.

The clear pattern here is: completely ignore the reason why you lost Scotland, the people must be insane; ignore the reason why you lost control of the party, the members must be insane; ignore the reason why the public hates you, everybody must have gone insane.

Also clumsily and transparently lie a lot, which journalists regularly praise and then imagine people aren’t supposed to notice simultaneously

My theory: it’s one thing to suck at your job, it’s another to suck and have no charisma, and it’s a whole other thing when you suck at your job, have no charisma and also have no convictions or guiding principles to speak of

I'm sure that the EU and UK will now take decisive action in response to Israel starving Palestinians of aid and support. Won't they? Won't they?

I notice how - whether it’s war, austerity or this particular shitshow - nobody ever asks the people who correctly predicted they would be disastrous why they got it spot on, while the smart politics understanders repeatedly fucked it. Could this be because nobody wants to know the actual answers?

If you crawl for years on your stomach to people who hate you, begging for their indulgence, while relentlessly insulting and deliberately offending people who might be inclined to support you - while offering almost nobody anything they want - then you are going to be deeply unpopular.

One of the reasons he's so disliked, imo, is the constant wide eyed, wounded innocence thing where they have no idea why being such gleefully sadistic shites wouldn't go down well with people.

“This could look like a user asking how much ibuprofen to take for a headache receiving a promoted ad for Advil in the chatbot’s response. Meanwhile, actual results on correct dosage may be brushed to the side, or buried under a mountain of ad text…”

There are going to be people who unironically praise this and say banning Doctors Without Borders and OxFam is necessary because they're Hamas. And worse, folks will nod and agree as though that's a legitimate position and not absolutely batshit. www.npr.org/2025/12/30/g...

Fascinating poll where 15% of New York Democratic voters have a favorable view of AIPAC but only 10% have a favorable view of Netanyahu. Netanyahu favorability, for context, is 4 points higher than Trump's.

Open up this picture fully. Then look at the surface of Mars. Then look up to the top right. Spot Mars' moon Phobos high in the sky. Then notice the bright spot beside Phobos. That's Earth.

As @entirelyharmless.bsky.social has pointed out Mary-Anne Stephenson in her interview with Libby Brooks perpetuates a simple lie about the hideous Supreme Court decision: that it regulates single sex spaces. We can know it's a lie because Lord Hodge, who presided over that decision, has said so.

Oh, we do. Since her appointment Mary-Ann Stephenson has declined to recognise that trans women are women, has affirmed the hideous guidance drawn up by her predecessor, and has proven correct the two Select Committees who rejected her appointment because she was hopelessly out of her depth.

Don't forget that the UK supreme court ruling on trans issues was, though ridiculous, merely a ruling on what the legislation said and a labour government with an overwhelming majority could fix that in 5 minutes but they don't because they like being bigots with 12% approval

Well, Starmer and Reeves rather remind us of bosses most of us have had, don't they?

Quite poor of the BBC this, relaying Robert Jenrick’s interpretation of what a social media “like” means in order to keep this story simmering.

Elites must now shitehouse fascism more and more for their beloved ethnostate which has been used for 20 years as the standard bearer for the definition of "liberal democracy" against its one true enemy, the Muslim. Centrists got absolutely pilled on clash of civilisations bullshit.

Polling suggests Israel is historically unpopular in the demographic corresponding with people likely to have small children, so I need someone smarter than me to explain how picking a fight with Ms. Rachel of all people makes any sense whatsoever. nypost.com/2025/12/26/o...

LOL they have finally got their British Macron, deliberately flying the plane into the mountain while giving the finger with both hands. They fought for *years* to get him! And now they have one, they think he’s shite and they want a different one. Never change lads, never change.

Here’s the post I was quoting, that the author has rather hastily detached my quote from!

Nothing beats Mandelson standing up and loudly threatening to bring down the whole Labour plane - opening his jacket to reveal a suicide vest of receipts for hilariously corrupt bungs, electoral fuckery and other disgusting shenanigans - only to be loudly shushed into sitting down and keeping quiet.

Day three of anxiously discussing whether the country’s most abject charlatans have a point when calling for bad tweets to be a cause for losing your citizenship, and it’s hard to overstate how fundamentally corrosive this is for our democracy

Remember when the reprehensible Shabana Mahmood suggested those who continued to protest about Gaza after the 'ceasefire' had bad motivations ie, as I read her, were antisemites?

Saying "Some TERFs made their own awards called "TERFies" & voted Donald Trump "Best Politician (Non-UK)"" would get you accused by "Reasonable Moderates" of making up stuff to smear their side but they actually did it. They had even more Awards than this & they get more & more unhinged.

terfs are literally like: the worst politician in the world is @bphillipsonmp.bsky.social bcos she isn't segregating trans ppl quickly enough. 😠 the best politician in the world is donald trump, infamous child rapist tho he may be, bcos he's murdering trans kids and we love that. 😌 yay ✨feminism💫

Think @sundersays.bsky.social is accurate here. The UK has not suddenly become much more racist. However the (re)normalisation of open racism by "respectable" right-wing media and politicians has led to both increased visibility for open racists, & radicalisation of some "soft" racists/xenophobes

the terfies have been awarded. ( the terfies are annual bigotry awards the terfs hand out ) anyway i couldn't stop laughing when i noticed that @bphillipsonmp.bsky.social is their pick for worst politician in the entire uk. even i don't think that and she's literally persecuting me.

This might tell us things about the abject state of actually existing liberalism, as it materially affects politics

Israel says it will suspend several humanitarian groups, including Doctors Without Borders, in 2026 for failing its new vetting rules for groups working in Gaza. Some international organizations have said that Israel’s rules are arbitrary and could endanger staff.

Doctors Without Borders is also Hamas, just like Human Rights Watch are, like Amnesty International and indeed every aid and civil liberties organisation on earth that comments. Mercenaries firing machine guns at starving civilians scrambling for bags of flour though, that is just fine.

Gardner's one of the most valuable people out there for reading between the lines of what immigration policy actually means under this government. 'Safe routes' are what we need, they're being promised, but...

It’ll go lower, but they are actually now approaching the base level of their support within the country. If you had asked me in 2015, in 2020, in 2024 what proportion of the populace actively likes these people and wants what they’re selling was, I would’ve answered: around ten percent.

This is, to be clear, 100% it. It’s indeed very West Wing; I call it the Thanksgiving Dinner Theory. There’s just something ingrained in libs’ minds where they simply refuse to believe Republicans, even in their family, are just stupid, evil assholes. bsky.app/profile/rick...

I hate these charts so much because they imply chatgpt is comparable to the internet or phones You could create the same graphic for full screen pop-up advertising on websites and make them look like ultra-rapid technology adoption when really they were just baked unavoidably into the internet

(1)Starmer very likely to face leadership challenges in 2026. Lucy Powell represents potential Soft Left challengers, so her telling Starmer critics to 'put a sock in it' suggests any Soft Left challenge will be politically limited - she didn't even go for a 'both sides must help'

The BBC currently can't be bothered to put together a Christmastime lineup that doesn't have Would I Lie to You starring a sex pest as a load bearing component, so I'm not sure what you expect me to do