Yeah, nah. Done. Lost my membership in 2022, lost my vote in 2025.

Give it a month and Keir Starmer will tell someone interviewing him that he hadn't read this morning's speech before delivering it.

You can disagree about whether a given microaggression is inconsistent with Black Lives Matter but you can’t disagree on whether or not Black Lives Matter.

I don't think the correct reaction to (rare instances of) political violence from the left is to immediately denounce it. The correct reaction is to say "I wouldn't do this personally, but it's what you should expect if you push people too far".

I think what editorial people in the media need to understand is that it’s a lot more subversive nowadays to say people need to take care of one another than it is to say that everyone should be a dickhead

When I see calls for inclusive patriotism I remember my friend, Ealing Sikh, whose dad carried the flame for a bit before the 2012 Olympics. It wasn't jarring at all then, but now I remember it increasingly painfully to remember her entire family beaming around him with Union Jacks on their faces

And the Labour Right are the worst for this because they are the *most* partisan. The soft left dislikes partisanship in general, revisionists have ties to the radical centre think tanks, and the Labour Left are part of the wider leftist movement. The Labour Right is almost proud to walk alone

Strikes me this is very likely to be the case, but maybe on the current trajectory the 'republican front' could become the Lib Dems...

Running against Mussolini by agreeing with him on everything except the org-chart of his proposed train reform taskforce.

I know it is very "my preferred policies also solve new salient issues too!" but I really don't think we would have had the summer of racism if we had been full tilt into rearmament

I feel like a madman pointing this out but the plausible, real world explanation for the marked uptick in work visas after 2019 is quite simply that in the previous year, the UK blew up its entire labour market by getting rid of FOM, on which it was intrinsically and inherently dependent.

Retrospectively removing indefinite leave to remain would be immoral and economically damaging. It would tear families apart. Attacking it as ‘potentially illegal’ is completely beside the point. Argue with the (awful) idea. Don’t try ’well, actually you can’t do that’.

This might serve them well for a year or two but they will absolutely fuck this up in the medium term. TikTok 'works' because it ruthlessly shoves more of what you like in front of you, not because you can shove what you want in front of people.

If we could reconcile ourselves to it we would be a lot happier as the world's bankers and payroll administrators.

To follow up on this apparent virality, I think it's worth getting our head around the reality that Britain seems to be a country deeply angry about the sectors in which it has comparative advantage: universities, finance, creative industries. Aye, 'ampstead wasn't good enough for you?

there's a sort of pundit disease, made worse by the platform split, where everything is still framed as being the fault of the losers, and not as exercise of agency by the winners. If we're going to live in a world of shit, can we at least give them credit for the fact that it's what they truly want

We've done a great job fighting pensioner poverty. This was the whole plan. I'm really not sure this is a bad thing. Read any old book and elder poverty is rampant and we're beating it. Obviously pensioners have repaid us by GOING FUCKING MENTAL, but that was unforseen.

November 17, 2021 www.mypanhandle.com/news/local-n...

A very bitter pill for me to swallow in the past year or two, as a socialist, has been to realise that in our current era not only is politics mainly about "spirit" as opposed to material conditions but that opinions about material conditions often flow from feelings about "spirit"

If Starmer is replaced this time next year then his successor gets to have a premiership of similar length to about a 1/3 of all PMs. They would be tasked with beating back a right that is the most extreme relative to public opinion since at 1914. And the party should still be hungry for government

I would settle for the UK option reliably appearing in the Us and not either the Gs or the Es.

One of those things that I think British people don't 'get' about America is that fundamentally Americans just don't have much contact with the federal government directly until they retire except for doing their tax returns and occasionally interacting with the postal service.

What the fuck is going on with these guys?

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

go ahead. keep screaming "Bluesky Is Dying" at me. it only makes my posts Worse

"social media" is doing this? According to LBC??? the absolute bloody neck of it

I'd say this sounds like he doesn't believe it but then I remember how he talks about football despite sincerely loving it.

IME Brits tend to have a view of America that is weirdly foundational to the views they have about the UK but also just not really that connected to the reality of the US.

This is, frankly, embarrassing and a very clear articulation of where Labour's cowardice has taken it. As Phillips gets at, Starmer has defended the ECHR previously, he's rightly dismissed reform as unserious, but Phillipson is now forced into pretending this doesn't contradict Cooper trying to.

The British public is a lot more authoritarian and conservative than I would like, but I think something the right has bizarrely forgotten the past two years is that is rooted in a desire for orderly normality not a sort of American herrenvolk libertarianism.

Given we have been kicked about for quite a while now I suspect Labour might be surprised to find out how easy other people might find it to woo left wing voters.

It shows such a basic lack of political understanding that Labour didn't go straight on the attack over this. Just because most people are worried about immigration being too high it doesn't mean they're psychopaths.

About sixth of the public hold extreme/toxic views on mass deportations even beyond asylum. This is not larger than a decade ago. Elites are shifting *much* more than the public (which is liberalising longterm & frustrated about asylum/boats in the short-term).

The thing is that Labour *doesn’t* agree with that Farage speech. They’re not doing the things in it. Their actual approach to asylum is to try and clear the backlog faster and open up a one in one out safe route with France. So where is the political leadership that would let a spokesman respond?

Key to the argument for why a state media company is a good idea is that such an organisation can behave substantively differently to other organisations (and thus improve the offering to the public) The BBC does very little differently to its competitors, yet asks to be funded totally differently.

A radicalising and repulsing conclusion I have come to is that not only is there a significant appetite for simply inflicting pain on people and the eagerness of the far right to feed that is the source of their success, but that our elites are particularly susceptible.

As Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo put it: "A city where you can get let go of your child's hand"

the other thing is that they were very invested in the idea that a "canceled" person like Cuomo could come back.

Pee troughs on the floor are among my 4yo boy's favourite things. A recent meltdown was in fact caused because we came across one and he had peed too recently to be able to pee in it again.

I don't pretend to know which way it will go but I do suspect that if AI doesn't break through the barrier to profitability under current assumptions that a lot of people's current reliance on it will end up being yoinked away.

You can argue about the fairness or unfairness of inheritance tax, however, the idea that it carries less political risk than 2p on NI or Income Tax is...courageous.

The NL West is incredible, 4 out of 5 teams have a positive run differential but the combined run differential is -200 thanks to the Rockies

Annoys me so much how often people reminiscing over the Opening Ceremony get shut down with "austerity was happening". Yes, and the opening ceremony was the last gasp of the pre-austerity political culture

The NHS are forcibly detransitioning trans kids in Brighton and calling it “managed withdrawal.” Their own impact assessment acknowledges trans kids will be at increased risk of harm as a result, don’t want this, and are likely to just use DIY hormones instead

There is an underlying vibe to a lot of this government of not actually liking the public as they are, and it seems appropriate that they dislike a project that was actually pretty happy with how the British public was in the late 90s.

I quote this not to criticise but because it neatly states something I think a lot of people in influential positions are feeling, but: A starting point is to get that Israel as they knew it has not existed for a long time, and that critics of Israel have understood this for a while