If you keep telling social liberals to fuck off to impress the Times, don't act all surprised when they actually fuck off.

There aren't many things that unite the politics of Starmer's predecessors as either Labour lesder or PM - but one that does is a sense the job was to deliver *something* for their people, even if they defined that group very differently. You do actually need a base that likes and supports you!

Fascinating thread but I don't feel it's that complicated? This is what happens when you go out of your way to performatively kick your own coalition in the hope of impressing voters who never liked you to start with.

I dug behind the industry paywall to find out, what *are* the geniusly clever things that AI can predict will increase NHS A&E pressures? You’ll never guess - Flu - Winter - Icy weather - Friday nights - Christmas - New Years Eve Jeez, Dom’s old mates at Faculty AI (o yes) really saw Wes coming

My two main memories of the Fabians are the time a young Fabian openly said "you can never trust an Arab" at a talk in parliament and the time I joined their international development policy making which was chaired by an incompetent Will Straw, who failed upwards to lead the pro EU campaign.

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

"simplistic solutions to challenging problems that just don’t stand up to scrutiny" .... Oh, sorry, you weren't talking about Labour's approach to migrants and refugees then?

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

Alright,it's NYE so my annual major prediction for following year: 2026 will be the hottest year on record

talking of the uk, it's always weird for me as a dual national to hear these descriptions of the dems as forcing the left out, running to the right, arrogantly centrist, appeasing, unpopular, etc have you seen starmer's labour party? we'd kill to have someone with the backbone of the average dem

I guess the one protection the US currently has against the Democrats going full Starmer and openly hating their voters is the primary system.

This was a pretty good one

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.

update: fuck

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.

It'll be like the Labour Party really, which means it could get worse.

The youth of today would rather eat Macaroni than vote for another Macron

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

I always try and work on one project during my Christmas holidays and this year I decided to take apart a CD-ROM containing a Sailor Moon multimedia application I hope that you can all enjoy my hilarious mess in trying to get content extracted from Shockwave cariad.keigher.ca/2025/12/29/s...

Of course Morgan McSweeney spent time on a kibbutz despite coming from an Irish catholic background. Absolutely a child of Nukehurst.

When the NVidia GPU fuses the 12V high power line because the cable wasn't pushed in hard enougn: OMG, its become self aware.

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.

“Self-deport” is a whitewashed way to describe “fleeing the country under the threat of state violence.” I agree with Maria here — it’s important to call that exactly what it is.

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.

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.

Inflation kink shaming the early universe.

But once one concedes that the most important tissue is de facto annexation it becomes far more difficult to defend Democratic policymaking even if one is right to lambast Republican policy. I think this dissonance needs to be confronted really fast, well before 2028.

And I say genuinely because I actually am (relatively) agreeable to the idea that Trump is worse on the issue, but I have always found most of the arguments mendacious and predicated on bad frameworks for understanding Palestine. The critical issue is not de jure but de facto annexation.

Yeah it is certainly possible Israel will cozy up further to Russia or China but it should be emphasized that the Israelis will never get a sweeter deal than what has been given from 1968 to today by the US. There is not and never will be a replicable *ideological* commitment from any other country.

In today’s depraved beyond belief news, Israel is banning MSF (Doctors Without Borders) from Gaza.

RIP. Possibly one of the funniest artists to have ever lived.

It’s the same move that @polphilpod.bsky.social has been discussing in in the UK with the Labour Party. The rightward shift to grab voters at the expense of principles will eventually see the loss of those new voters anyway when they realize you have no principles.

Suzanne Moore in 2020: "As a feminist, I would argue that gender is socially constructed, and it can be reconstructed." And in 2025: "This must be the year Britain finally kills off trans ideology." Transphobia is the engine that pulls the train of fascism.

Every single project is the same and the deciding factor is if politicians can hold their nerve.

Could this have anything to do with the two major parties and all the media hyping far-right narratives and "dining across the divide" increasingly unashamedly in the past couple of years? No, it must be those grassroots "legitimate grievances" I keep hearing about...

There is no general principle in conservatism beyond, I get to do what I want, and you get to shut the fuck up.

Again: they thought they’d win a shattering court victory with the Harry Potter lady’s money, then the public would rise up in gratitude, salute them as heroes and stomp all over transgender people on their behalf. That hasn’t happened, because the public mostly aren’t vicious cranks, like they are.

We will never know *how much* this is attributable to Labour's decision to track not tackle Reform's rhetoric of hate on immigration. But that Labour *helped* render these views acceptable cannot, surely, be doubted.

we need to bring back the WPA so we can give these shiftless guys something to do. build a bridge or something. burn off some steam instead of becoming a Nazi

Should be absolutely discrediting to Keir Starmer that he can't go between Christmas and New Years without another emboldenment of the far right.

There hasn't really been a better example of a Cassandra in @polphilpod.bsky.social 's definition than Judith Butler.

I simply cannot take popularism remotely seriously when nobody involved even tries to answer the question "what happened to keir starmer" at best they point to a few policies they don't like, but "move right on social issues and immigration" is his main platform and look what fucking happened!

it’s fine because the jewish communal establishment has decided that antisemitism against jews who aren’t reflexive israel supporters doesn’t count

I love my super optimistic CO2 sensors that require calibration to 420ppm CO2 every few years, a value that we will never go back down to.

Britain used to revoke the citizenship of women if they married a foreigner. I’m sure someone will suggest it soon enough.

Ok, this shouldn’t be an unpopular opinion tbh

It's easy to get a bit fascistic as a Labour Party moderate when not in full possession of the facts. Happens to even the most unprincipled of us.

I need any Labour partisans to remember that I simply will never forgive a man who stood up as Prime Minister and said Nigel Farage was right and that immigration had caused incalculable damage to British society.