Not for nothing, but I think a lot of people have wrongly settled on “Twitter became a right-wing cesspool because all the cool people left” instead of “All the cool people left because Twitter became a right-wing cesspool.”

This is dead on. If the Democrats retake the House and Senate--or even just the House--it could mark the beginning of the end of a 50-year Republican project. If they can't? The GOP will spend the next 2 years destroying all remaining guardrails. Most important midterms of our lives, no question.

Roberts dropping that “we’re not political actors” quote and doing this 96 hours later is nasty work

Absolutely right. It is not “addiction to drama” or “personality politics” - there are fundamental problems of policy or governing that these protagonists either failed at or inflicted on the country and got their comeuppance.

Ed Miliband, correcting the timeline, ten years later

anyways, I hope Diane Abbott is enjoying this

People using “Zionist” as a nickname for “Jewish people” are being very inaccurate and inappropriate. There are way more Christian Zionists in the world than Jewish ones.

this is an actual Bluesky Rule: if you have ever so much as exchanged a single like, you are required to hold up the book in the shop and say "hey my friend wrote this"

I'm not saying this because I particularly think he should stand for leader but it does feel Quite Interesting that Labour actually has this other mayor who's been successfully running a much bigger city for a longer period of time but for some reason no one's waiting for him to save the party

Horus Lupercal spotted entering Downing Street

Yo momma so old, Labour MPs speculate about her standing down to create a vacancy for Andy Burnham

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.

Think some of you are starting to do the Corbyn thing again with Polanski (making an individual the sole paragon for progressive politics despite flaws and dismissing or getting defensive over repeated instances of questionable character or judgement that you wouldn't accept from other politicians)

👇One of the reasons why the Starmer era is The Way It Is, is there was until v recently a “seniority is decided by how many scars you have from the Corbyn era” attitude, which structurally advantages campaigners over policy wonks. Which means as Duncan says, Labour’s socdem tendency has got dumber.

Apologies to all you millennials who didn't already have The Llama Song stuck in your head, but if I am forced to have "Starmer drama fuck" as an incessent earworm today, so do you

This causes multiple problems. Short gigs, lack of time to build momentum and audience, the crew trained to make this specific show are let go, hard to survive or feel safe. Show quality suffers, stories don’t have time to develop.

Seems 105 Labour MPs are really keen on Andy Burnham rejoining Parliament before things progress any further.

It. Is. Time.

We used to be first. That’s why people’s vibe is still “this was a good place to be yourself”. Then we had 10 years of attacks on human rights, total institutional failure and a roll back of rights… …including the claim we never had human rights protection in the first place.

Keir Starmer has really internalised his position as "alternative to bad things" (be it Corbyn or the Tories) which really makes sense of his incapability to step down before a good alternative is mustered.

This letter is incredibly unusual for a ministerial resignation in that it actually spells out in plain English why Phillips is resigning, and why she thinks Starmer should go. With worked examples. Genuinely quite refreshing.

This is a *phenomenal* thread on what's been going on lately.

I understand where Labour MPs on the “it’s too soon, best thing is for Keir to govern well and go in 2028” train are coming from. I used to think that myself. But the core problem is Keir won’t and can’t govern well.

of course all the chaos is funny and I'm glad that Keir Starmer, a bad person, is having a bad time. but jfc what a waste of two years, what a waste of a majority, what a waste of a once in a generation window to improve things. and now it's just 24/7 infighting, briefing, backstabbing. pathetic

We lost Douglas Adams 25 years ago today. This has made a lot of people very sad and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Nobody understands what this government is for or where it is taking us - least of all the government itself. There are excellent people in the Labour movement and on the Labour benches, but until that fundamental problem is fixed, they're lurching from one badly handled crisis to another.

There aren’t many ways I think Labour should mimic the Conservatives but the secret file of resignation letters is absolutely one of them, a really stellar way to make a leadership campaign simultaneously very dramatic and very funny

If AI doesn’t simply evaporate in a cloud of financial fraud, skepticism and discernment are going to be survival skills, and I don’t think they’re common enough. Especially because early adoption of LLMs selected AGAINST those attributes.

Slightly increase a band Sum 42

Agreed. But I’m having trouble getting the concept across to reformers. Attention question actually. We have to work on this.

The British public love banning stuff, and Musk is perfectly cast as a foreign billionaire villain (who is going to argue for foreigners calling for civil war or distributing CSAM?!)... and it would have showed the government wasn't going to be pushed around.

The government's cowardice in failing to aggressively respond to X/Musk after the summer 2024 riots and the 2025 Grok CSAM scandal are illustrative of why it finds itself struggling even with ideologically sympathetic voters.

It is clear the PM does not have a credible plan. He must now set out a timetable for departure. But the process to replace him cannot be a coronation. Our next leader must be chosen in a real democratic contest. Otherwise we risk ending up right back where we started.

If in doubt, and you're old enough for this to mean anything: consider whether "Blair cabinet 'childish' for excluding BNP, Nick Griffin says" seems like a headline you'd ever expect to see from a flagship national broadcaster, back in the day

I do think Politicians can help bring more life into town centres. Public backed 3rd spaces like libraries and the like. That a town centre has to solely be about commerce and consumerism is daft but if we can encourage people there for other reasons there'll be commercial opportunities naturally.

Starmer: "I've spent too much time talking about what I'm doing for working people, and not enough time talking about why, or who I stand for" There you have it. They're going with, its a comms issue.

Rare that you see an IRL "are they saying boo or boo-urns"

Also, can I just say, personally, I think it is fully insane that a lot of soft left MPs have decided that Louise Haigh doing something daft at the start of her career re: a lost mobile phone is electoral Kryptonite but Angela Rayner's May 2025 home purchase is no big deal.

A few minutes back two young Jewish women appear to be repeatedly booed and removed from the rally by police for carrying a sign that reads ‘Jews are not safe until all minorities are safe’

[i want it on record] i predicted Starmer will still be PM in 2029 six weeks ago they have no bench. none. there is nobody who could beat him in a leadership race, every single one of the contenders is loathed by the electorate. they haven't just lost the dressing room, they fucking knocked it down

It's hard to understate how extremely difficult it is to tell if an LLM is analyzing data you feed it, or just predicting a likely response based on its training data. I've had so many problems with analysts doing this and not realizing the LLM just guessed the answer.

I get that what we're hearing from the govt/no.10 are holding pattern lines today ahead of The Big Reset Speech + Kings Speech - but I get absoloutely no impression there is a understanding of what has gone wrong and what needs to change. Its all very much the same direction of travel and line

Still tickets available for MANCHESTER on Monday www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/robin-ince... #comedy #poetry #neurodiversity

Former Tory secretary, turned plucky "startup insurgent party Reform" down-with-the-eStAbLiShMeNtZ rebel, Nadine Dorries, says the quiet part out loud: "I don't feel it's unfamiliar. I feel very much like it's back to 2009-2010, when Conservatives were about to win power." #VoteReformGetDorries

unfortunately, kim il sung's clothes hang a lot better

lol, they gave Artemis II astronaut (and Philadelphia sports fan) Christina Koch an astronaut Gritty

The most incredible thing is that he literally concedes in the first sentence that she is "a decent bit" antisemitic, only to then immediately ridicule the obvious conclusion of that in the very next sentence!

I think both Labour and Conservatives are reading the votes for Reform as full throated support for Reform's policy agenda rather than just an expression that things are shit and folks don't want them to be shit any more.