There does come a point at which pinning your hopes on "vote for us, we're not Reform!" runs into difficulties as you gear all your policies towards Reform voters.

Tearing the country apart? Just keep ratcheting up the salience of immigration, guys, keep telling everyone how important and terrible it is, that will definitely stop people voting Reform. Honestly. What on earth are they playing at. Don't they get people voted for them to stop this shit.

If Reform is seen as a threat to democracy because of their far-right politics, then it is impossible to see this Labour government as an alternative to it Their discourse and policy either mimic Reform's or legitimise it and pave the way for it www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

It can't be emphasised enough that the Government's current approach: - Increase ILR to 10 years, - Increase Asylum ILR to 20 years, - Removal "immediately" if your home country becomes "safe," - Loss of permanent refugee status, Is exactly the sort of thing they dismissed as radical extremism.

this pope’s got bars

Appeasement. Isn't. Working

I think it’s erroneous to call Labour’s strategy ‘appeasement’. Labour is dominated by its right-wing, reactionary centrists who share the far-right’s analysis and solutions, subtended by a drive to eliminate the left and a belief in their electoral inevitability. It’s affinity and arrogance.

As I’ve said from 2022 or so: we are absolutely fucked and no help is coming, not for a decade at least and probably not even then, because the careers of important people who matter take priority over the lives of everyone in this country, and nobody whose opinion counts is trying to change this.

So basically, we’re where we were post-Brexit, post-Johnson and post-Truss: absolutely fucked and we cannot ever get unfucked, because unfucking ourselves would require too many important people to annihilate their own careers by enraging the wealthy and their servants.

The John Cale/Charli XCX song is great isn't it.

Last night at a fashionable media party (tm) someone introduced me to their dad, for whom she'd bought a copy of 47 Borders and got me to sign it. Happy smiles all round! Aww. If a dad YOU know would like a signed book this Christmas, then the lovely people at Backstory Balham can help:

Speaking as a dad, I really do recommend this book. It is absolutely brilliant.

Would repost this 100 times. Key quote: "And, worse still, neither politicans not the media are interested in why this might be or how we might change it."

Terrific, thought-provoking piece by @chrisdillow.bsky.social:

There's a lot to think about here. One of the things - from the outside - about American sports is that they just happen. They are entertainment events. They mostly don't matter until they really do. Switching gambling on in this way gives them a load of meaning they aren't built to carry.

This is the Home Secretary's video about "why" A government which had the principle of *defusing* the salience by getting a grip with control, while maintaining compassion, would not use the rhetorical devices here to stoke up the salience of the issue they hope to defuse x.com/ShabanaMahmo...

👇on public services, defence, schools and higher education funding, healthcare, industrial strategy, EU market access, green transition, utilities regulation, tech oversight/investment etc etc etc

This is excellent on the parallels between the disasters currently unfolding at the BBC and on the front bench.

the video goes on and on about illegal immigration and yet the new proposal will target legal migration by confirmed refugees

Wes Streeting accused of ‘chaotic and incoherent approach’ to NHS reform

If the government really intends to seize jewellery and other valuables from refugees, either - it is staggeringly ignorant of the historical precedents or - it's aware of the precedents, and thinks, yeah, we'll have some of that. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

If we accept someone is a genuine refugee and they build a life here, perhaps have children born here, what is the advantage to us of expelling them once we’ve persuaded ourselves that their country of origin is safe?

Because, again, they *want* to do crackdowns, flag-fucking, migration terror, ugly culture war squealing, belligerent war speeches and scything cuts to benefits, and these are the voters you have to impress and win over to do that in perpetuity. Also, they think libs and progressives are arseholes.

Cuarón said that the political/social landscape of his adaptation of Children of Men, esp. re refugees & migrants, was shaped by looking at the UK (under Labour) at the time (2004-6), and just extrapolating from there. The ongoing cruelty of Mahmood (below) & the rest of Labour brings that to mind.

This is exactly what they're saying

This is as bad as anything proposed by Reform. Leaving refugees in permanent limbo and unable to build a new life in the UK would be a complete abdication of our humanitarian responsibilities www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is the politics of blackmail. The alternative is not a Reform government. The alternative is maintaining our international commitments to being a compassionate nation

On Tuesday, Keir Starmer said he was concerned that racism was returning to British politics. This morning, his Home Secretary is loudly letting the world know that the government intends to make the lives worse of even those found to be genuine refugees.

never forget how they reported on us

"History ended in a sealed file, history ended in a silent scream, history ended with the last man warning you that if you tell anyone, you'd end too." -- HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT (2020) RIP Virginia Giuffre

It is 1998. I am at the kitchen table writing Batman fanfic but I keep getting distracted by breaking news about a Bill Clinton sex scandal It is 2025. I am at the kitchen table writing a canonical Bat-book but I keep getting distracted by breaking news about a Bill Clinton sex scandal

This last part in particular is so poorly understood. Part of winning an election is “appealing to your lot”, part is “not upsetting or terrifying the other lot”.

This has always been been argument against our fiscal framework. You need some kind of debt rule but this kind of last minute flailing around is toxic for policy development.

Is there a clearer example of how broken our politics is than this? Snap polls on Budget leaks that most of the public have not been following. This tells you literally nothing about how popular the govt is going to be in 2029 and even less about what the right choice for the country is.

i actually hate this feature of british politics so much, where when they kick you they also feel the need to spit in your face just to performatively pretend that what they did was Smart Politics and not the acts of a desperate, flailing person

okay but we all know that this isn't what you honestly believe lol. this is just making up nonsense reasoning and sending it anonymously to the press to cover your ass for the fact that you can't figure out where to get more funds in the treasury from

What Americans don't understand is 'crassly forgetting Northern Ireland' is a core part of British culture, like cueing and only being able to communicate via laconic understatement.

Why all the talk about leadership challenges misses the point that the biggest problem facing this Government is not just a lack of leadership but a lack of clear ideas about what a Labour Government is actually for Until that changes, the question of who sits in No 10 will remain a hollow one.

From @sianushka.bsky.social. www.opendemocracy.net/en/british-a... Everyone alright with these sponsoring Sky Sports's coverage of live football in order to reach more young people?

"Hamish saw boys punched in the head during fights or whipped with belts during initiation rituals... staff said they didnt need to know about such incidents, encouraging them to physically fight it out." How the army treats teenagers, by @sianushka.bsky.social www.opendemocracy.net/en/british-a...

A total system failure, in other words: everyone who matters just yammering drivel at each other, for at least two decades. And it’s likely to be followed by Farage, and more of the same shit with the vicious idiocy turned up times one hundred.

Kind of crazy that evidence is mounting that the world is run by a group of rapists, pedophiles, and men convinced of women’s inmate natural inferiority, and the pundit class is trying to convince us that the real social crisis is that men are victimized and lonely because women have too many jobs.

I truly believe that Wes Streeting has the ideas, the charisma, and the likeability to be an even more historically hated Prime Minister than Keir Starmer

Wes Streeting has received £225k from private healthcare donors in the past year and I just don't think my morals could be bought for the price of half a London flat. I don't know if I have a number that would make me sell my country's health service down the river but Wes and I are different.

The Guardian gave Goodwin lots of space in the 2010s to whitewash racism as Legitimate Concerns, imbue those Concerns with faux working class authenticity, and denigrate anti racism as the bleatings of a cosmopolitan elite. Its a bit late to start Noticing now. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

(I am aware that the role of social media in the Arab Spring may well have been overstated but it is IMO to understand that wealthy and powerful people appear to have believed it was all Twitter and Facebook. And well, look at what has happened to Twitter and Facebook).

As @flyingrodent.bsky.social has pointed out repeatedly, the Harvey Weinstein scandal directly challenged the elite impunity and degeneracy that Jeffrey Epstein typified, and the response was a deranged, all-channels backlash to make clear such uppity behaviour wouldn’t be tolerated from the plebs.

The fact that this person remains Health Secretary is objectively one of the most significant British political scandals of the post-Covid era. But because he's doing something the media barons like, everyone has decided it's fine.

The only threat to the NHS is Wes Streeting. Solidarity with the BMA. There are also big problems with the way the Guardian has reported this. Basically a puff-piece for their centrist golden boy. 1… archive.is/t1BJO

Maybe it's just me and I'm being unfair but every time I have seen Streeting speak on anything he came across as profoundly insincere, calculating and a ball of barely supressed rage.