Unbelievable stuff between van Veen and Anderson here in the darts.

These days you can’t even use your column in one of the UK’s preeminent left liberal newspapers to demand rightwing border solutions, without somebody comparing you to Dracula. So much for the tolerant left 😔

It's telling in a lot of this they never engage with any sort of institutional or political theory beyond the sorts of books you see at airport WHSmiths.

I do have to underline here: Britain is internationally unique in having a national press that acts like a protection racket run by the most disgusting and repellent people in the country. It isn’t like this elsewhere, it’s just us.

This is it: you don’t give this guy a column unless the point is to grind it home that there is no escape from horrific people like him, ever, because our newspapers - the world’s most joyously poisonous media outlets - will rescue them and relentlessly force them down everybody’s throats.

“Stakeholders” didn’t tell this govt to cut fuel payments to pensioners or oppose raising the benefit cap, nor did “stakeholders” tell this govt to use reform chasing rhetoric on immigration, nor did “stakeholders” tell Labour to reject broad based tax rises in favour of narrower measures

Fundamentally, he used the wrong meme. 0/10 'Paul Ovenden was director of strategy in No.10 Downing Street from July 2024 to September 2025'

Not only that, they've also managed to make their talking points an obsession for the mainstream media and politicians, thus feeding their panics It is a small, unpopular movement by and large but it's been given incredible agenda setting power for various reasons and that is extremely concerning

This is sub-Cummings shit. "stiffened spine and renewed purpose". Oh yeah? To crush the saboteurs, is it? The government has run aground because it lied repeatedly, promised the earth, didn't do its homework, kept saying "change" without knowing what it meant, and then repeatedly shat its own bed.

What the fuck is he on about? When has the government got distracted by demands for colonial reparations?? How does a diplomatic meeting with a foreign leader count as a derailing distraction?

Just like the Tories, Labour's centrist hacks think themselves omniscient and infallible - they cannot fail, they can only be failed. So when they do fail, they blame everyone else. We saw it with the Tories, and it's already started from the Starmerites with this idiotic dreck: archive.ph/rHoXA

this is such an important thing to recognize and call out the fascism is mostly done being nice at this point, but it got here through well dressed men politely asking questions while the rest of us were scolded for pointing out where those questions led

Here I am on the 0-0, 19 game Reds. mailchi.mp/theanfieldwr...

This is both entirely correct and misses the point completely, which is that the 'online weirdos" are effectively writing Conservative and Reform policy & have significantly influenced the government's own worst and most xenophobic policies. Trump should have taught us not to laugh this stuff off.

Part of the problem is that so many people are allergic to making a non-technocratic argument. If this citizen, whose claim to citizenship is 'because my mother is', why not anyone else? The question that broadcasters need to ask and the argument the government needs to make.

expanded edition 📽️

So many of these incredible mysteries and conundrums can be immediately resolved by simply recognising: they are very right wing reactionaries, and they are personally mean, selfish, spiteful and unpleasant to boot. Explains the whole thing in one go, no further questions required!

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

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.

You mean: where might Labour politicians and staff have got the idea they could achieve incredible personal success, just by screaming abuse at their own core supporters while regularly falling over and pretending to be injured? Gee whizz, it sure is a mystery why they’d have formed that impression.

Honestly,the lady ghostbusters movie is the second best ghostbusters movie behind the original. My big issue with it is my issue with most Paul Feig movies: it desperately needed an editor to cut down the improv to just the best jokes and to better draw out its emotional arcs. Buts it’s damn funny.

This take is more accurate than anything you would read in a mainstream outlet. Yet instead we get open displays of cluelessness or takes that border on performative innocence.

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.

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.

It is astonishing to recall this but yes: professional politics commentators, people who theoretically rely on public trust for their livelihood, were queueing up to praise the excellence of the opposition’s relentless lying. Which perhaps tells us things about how we got here, does it not.

Can be legitimate criticism of the Greens but "twin populisms" can fuck off. One is the far right and equating them shows an inability to recognise the challenge let alone meet the challenge. Why bother reading more?

Politicians are terrified of an electorate they think is far more authoritarian and angry and right wing than it actually is, because they are out of touch because the literal media - the thing that mediates between public and polity - is corrupted

ALL OF YOU PEOPLE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE UNIONISTS FFS

Finding a new centre-back for Liverpool on my Substack this week.

This is hardly surprising since the relentless promotion of far right views on social media, large parts of the traditional media and GB News www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Our last 6 PMs have not been up to the job - some of them very much so. The time has come to think not about individuals but the system: why does it consistently select inadequates?

An astonishing article in the Daily Mail. Not only does it admit that some Romanians have left Britain because of growing discrimination after Brexit, but it also talks about the EU grants they've been able to access to start or boost their businesses back home. archive.md/2025.12.29-1...

If immigration is high, the government has lost control of our borders. If it's low, it's because the country is in such a mess that nobody wants to be here. Labour is never going to win these people over, and it should stop trying.

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.

I'm hoping we don't remember 2025 as the year it just became completely normalised for mainstream politicians to be openly racist and instead it's a blip. I'm not hugely optimistic.

We'd be in the midst of 1000 years of Boris. There would be books on Johnsonism. Extended pieces on whether Labour could find their Johnson. Wes Streeting would, indeed, have to hand it to him.

As previously noted: if Rebecca Long-Bailey had won that leadership election then it seems quite likely to me that we would now be in the second term of the Johnson government, oblivious to the scandals, and “Partygate” would still just be some photos saved on a phone in Dominic Cummings’ desk.

Do you not notice how he was Teflon Boris for decades, the man scandal could not defeat, right up until he was a hated imbecile who couldn’t open his mouth without making an arse of himself? What changed, do we think. Did he suddenly get dumber, less skilled and astute, less tactically wise talented

The MPs’ second jobs scandal is IMO the pick of the bunch here: literally just the lads realising they could consult the register of members’ interests then use CTRL+F in Hansard, suddenly discovering more ludicrous, overt corruption in one afternoon than they had over the previous eleven years.

Where Sanders is right, in the window between invention and deep application, serious political energy is needed to regulate firms who are just throwing out technologies with no regard for negative consequences. And we need to articulate a strategy for AI which isn't just "it's magic, ooo".

Chris Philp repeatedly repeatedly and exclusively referring to Alaa Abd El-Fattah as “this scumbag” while calling for him to be stripped of his citizenship on the Today programme feels like a deliberate and dumb coarsening of rhetoric

Prompted by a "your memories on FB" thingy today to recall that eleven years ago The Times chose Nigel Farage as their "Man of The Year" for 2014 and reacted to criticism like this. A good reminder PM Farage has been a much longer and more sustained project than we often credit.

Literally no arguments about what kind of society we should be beyond positioning, assertive comments to look bold and strong but with no substance. Absolutely no talent or ideas - just all posturing and nonsense. So damn depressing.

It’s crazy to me there’s not been *one* decent intervention by a senior politician on AI, what it’s for, should be about and our society. Unless I missed it? It’s just people saying ‘productivity’ and ‘jobs’ with literally no thought, thinking or ideas. But then I suppose same on everything.

Not much, but I would say I am considerably less worried about the hereditary peers than I am about the ones who were given non-jobs for life as a payoff for burning their careers, or just to keep them amused and quiet. Which is about half of the ones appointed in the last decade.

It was painfully obvious Crick was right about this at the time. Do we think these questions are not being asked now because a) nobody knows the answers, or because b) everyone knows the answers very well?

You’ll recall all the lads agreed this is the shit-hot awesome politics the public wants, and that these are the Sensible adults whom are now back in charge. If that now looks comically wrong - farcically incorrect! - then it must be because there’s something wrong with the public.

The UK government back to blackmailing other countries, this time to be able to force people to return to objectively unsafe ones. Labour proving once more to be as bad, if not worse, than pretty much any previous government for decades in relation to immigration. news.sky.com/story/angola...