The experience of Chingford & Woodford Green in 2024 tell us the Labour machine is 100% prepared to sacrifice a parliamentary seat to sabotage an internal opponent.Labour will lose the Gorton by-election but that's not the game the McSweeney faction are playing. They won today, that's the main thing

To see how amazingly daft Reform UK would be to think Simon Danczuk would be a good party candidate, compare the Feb 2024 and July 2024 Reform results in Rochdale. Danczuk's 6.3% in 6th place could be the worst candidate underperformance against the party's "par" score in a by-election since 1945.

Where’s my kink room decked out like the crossroads motel reception

One of my ex-councillors talking here, and as solidly Labour as you could get. This is telling.

"The coal train is a motherfucker!" Hugh Masekela on the role of coal trains in the economic exploitation of South African miners during the apartheid years, the inspiration behind his 1974 song 'Stimela (Coal Train)' 📸 Ermelo, South Africa, date & taker unknown

Happy birthday to John Cooper Clarke. Here's Beasley Street, performed with The Invisible Girls including Vini Reilly on guitar. It's taken from the 1980 Granada TV documentary "Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt" which you can watch in full at 📺▶️ youtu.be/tYK1-AJ4BSU

AltNPS posted about Alex Pretti's murder 25 times since this morning. During that time, they spread misinformation about the shooting, lied about knowing the shooter's name, and generally flooded the zone with shit. They're trying to milk this story for all it's worth.

I just want to say that 1) AltWatcher is doing the lord's work and 2) the altnps account, in my opinion, needs to be outright banned - and I don't say that merely because I loathe it, but because it's unbelievably unhealthy for this fake, plagiarizing, qanon-lite account to have this influence.

I don't generally tell people who they should or shouldn't be following, but dear god please block the altnps account. It's a scummy grift.

Maybe UK journalists could ask why our government is so keen to get into bed with with this company.

1969, W 79th St, NYC. Laura Nyro on her apartment's fire escape📸Stephen Paley

i assume going to the hospital is considered the highest honor for a bolsonaro supporter

RIP Mark Tully. Born in Calcutta in 1935, under the British Raj, he returned as the BBC's voice in India for thirty years after 1964 trusted not just by British but by so many in India as the chronicler of a country & of Anglo-Indian relationships transformed in many ways during his lifetime.

Just no fucking words for this. Has someone left an intern from the Home Counties in charge of the PM's Facebook account for the weekend? Jesus Christ.

"was formerly a partner at strategic communications company Consulum, founded by former employees of lobbying firm Bell Pottinger. According to his LinkedIn page, he has also worked for Tony Blair Associates"

🚨Ladbrokes have the Greens as the favourite to win Gorton and Denton by-election

Happy birthday John Cooper Clarke. "Hooker goes up to a Yorkshireman and sez: "Will you sleep with me for a £100?" He sez: "I'm not tired but I could do with the money" Photograph by Gerald Jenkins 2015.

For those who missed it, the Labour NEC is only able to block Burnham from standing in this seat because they invented a new rule, just last year, specifically so that they could do this.

I quit the Labour party after the immigration mugs. Seems a lifetime ago now.

The level of own goal stupidly on display here is breathtaking, never mind Yvette Cooper's enthusiasm for an Orwellian surveillance state. This lot are fundamentally not anything recognisable as a Labour Party anymore.

To be clear, the answer is Morgan McSweeney

I think we need a corollary to Betteridge’s Law where any headline beginning ‘Meet’ features someone you would rather not exist

I was a sensitive kid. I loved cats. I had OCD, undiagnosed. When I was 9, a fraternity brother tortured a cat to death in my hometown. The details even now are beyond imagination. archive.is/xdmUL I was traumatized for years from reading the news story. The torturer? Now the head of the NRA.

Very sad news (although Mark Tully definitely had “a life well lived”).

Absolutely terrible decision - fundamentally anti-democratic and a sign of utter weakness. It will come back to bite them …

Turn Gorton Green. Don't allow Labour to let the far right in.

Your Guardian AI criti-hype for the day appears to be a thing nobody's heard of, promoted by a company doing PR, and the thing they're talking about is actually a cryptocurrency scam archive.is/t7LjO

i have learned that the photo i posted was from a film recreating the event, *but* descriptions of the event are matched by getty images of a crushed dodge dart sitting in a courtyard as well as the street crater created by the bomb

in 1973, basque separatists killed spain’s fascist prime minister with a bomb so powerful it launched the car he was in clear over a five story building. he survived the initial attack but died in the hospital

Incredibly cynical shit this. Under this logic, why are we having trials at all?

Worth remembering when looking at the horrific scenes in the US right now that both Reform and the Tories have pledged to bring in ICE-style organisations to the UK if they win power

on the issue of “who scored more goals, bournemouth or liverpool”, differing perspectives are emerging; on the one hand, video evidence suggests that bournemouth did. however, sources inside anfield say these images “lack context”, and it seems to be becoming a footballing litmus test

Fucking *HELL*, BBC. Worse than useless. Shameful, complicit.

“Hundreds of immigrant mothers” in Texas concentration camp uprising

Ten minutes later, police escorted Barry from the fruit and veg aisle in Asda.

Not could. Have. Fred Hampton.

Yeah, I would suspect if it's Burnham, the sensible stance is to run a token campaign, as the central dynamic becomes Burnham as the vote to a) stop Reform and b) change the government, which risks the Greens getting squeezed and looking like they've underperformed if they actually try.

I’m old enough to remember Burnham being ‘centrist blancmange’ in the leadership campaign against Corbyn.

To circle back to this, I do think you can best understand it as a game of brinksmanship between a group of people playing an entirely different game that is primarily about who said what to who at a fringe event at the 1996 Labour Party Conference. bsky.app/profile/tpgr...

That's six words you insufferable piss gargling cunt.

This. I had a "good" job, and I have the "normal" mental health problems and ND conditions Milburn talked about in the article that prompted this. That job *broke* me, and that was a decade ago when things were less bad.

Carnegie Mellon’s literature PhD is being liquidated in favor of “computation,” casualized labor, and AI. That has profound ramifications for, students, faculty, and program alums like myself. I wrote it about it (w/ Catherine Evans, a current PhD student). www.chronicle.com/article/a-co...

On a downtown street in Minneapolis, as people stream out from the massive march, Mary Tyler Moore says “fuck ice.”

It's like a jive bunny mega mix of past moral panics. "NEET young people, social media, generational benefit families, strivers not skivvers, anarchy in our schools, the young are swinging the lead, there's too much of that mental illness about, it's for your own good" <Ah yeah! sample>

I'm old enough to belong to the last generation of people being morally failed by not making the benefits system a nightmare of conditionality. We don't even have a public health strategy for ensuring the best mental heath for all anymore. If you want fit workers, help people don't bully them

Holy shit. We're back on the moral crusade against people who live with mental ill health revival wagon. Once every ten years like an ancient curse. 'it's our moral duty to make people already struggling feel much worse for their own good. Activate the reserve workforce for jobs that aren't there!'

Haidt is the man Wes Streeting selected to give evidence for his social media ban. He is spreading the widely-discredited pseudoscience about trans “social contagion”. Is it transphobia that is the root his proposed social media ban?! If so he is a looong way down the conspiracy theory rabbit-hole.

instead of lashing out at "coups" and "plots" by Burnham, Streeting etc, have Team Starmer considered just... being less shit at governing?

A message from Eliza Carthy about her dad, #MartinCarthy