Decided to provide some budget counter-programming, here’s some London transport trends over the last year. www.londoncentric.media/p/tfl-london...

I wrote 4000 words about Nuzzi/Lizza/RFK, please read it before it gets taken down by HR

‘The chill wind from the White House is already rippling through New Broadcasting House.’ @lewisgoodall.com reacts after the BBC edited out an anti-Trump line from a historian’s lecture.

So we are clear welfare spending in this country is NOT “out of control”. It’s risen very little in 10+ years. Small increase due to ageing & ill population. But benefits to working age families & children have been cut severely. Over 70% of children in poverty live in working families #Budget2025

The government’s decision to halve the time limit for refugees to leave Home Office accommodation is driving people into homelessness and exploitation, according to migrant rights campaigners and homelessness charities By me, for @theleaduk.bsky.social national.thelead.uk/p/new-asylum...

WTAF? Orwell is spinning in his grave. I think he wanted his works to be satire and warning, not prediction.

Given that the BBC endlessly gives platforms to lobbyists from the dark money junktanks without revealing their interests, shouldn't we be seeing such apologies every day? Better still, how about not doing it? If they want to appear, we should know on whose behalf they are speaking.

Can’t believe the coup that has taken place in the citrus section of supermarkets. The massed forces of Easy Peelers have rolled in everywhere, and taken up occupation. Tangerines utterly vanquished and vanished, even from Lidl, which seemed to be the last redoubt.

Imagine coming up with a proposal so stupid, so unworkable, so thoughtless, that it makes Robert Jenrick look sane by comparison. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture. They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

All the supposedly progressive people saying 'Nigel Farage's racism doesn't matter. His fans love it'. It matters whether the leader of the party leading all the opinion polls is an outright racist. It matters if he called black people 'wogs' and said 'gas them' to Jews. Not everything is a game

Auntie In The Dock: my SKETCH of Today in People Who Love The BBC And Definitely Didn't Leak Anything To The Telegraph.

Brilliant thecritic.co.uk/auntie-in-th...

Truly stomach churning. What's esp disturbing is that this is completely normalized all over the west. Our govts and our press insist, that Israelis are 'civilized' and 'moral', while their victims, Palestinians are barely considered human. Their endless mass slaughter is reported as a 'ceasefire'

Gibb; “ I had no editorial role whatsoever at the Jewish Chronicle”. Lee Harpin, reporter at the paper; “RG made a habit of calling into the office on print days to check up on what stories were topping the news list, and offering a view’”

Trevor Philips in the Times, calling for a Trump/Miller-style of random deportations based on skin colour. archive.ph/RlXPj

PUNCHBOWL: “.. GOP members messaged us over the weekend saying that they, too, are considering retiring in the middle of the term. Here’s one particularly exercised senior House Republican: @punchbowlnews.bsky.social

BBC board member Robbie Gibb, whose previous jobs have included being Conservative communications director to Theresa May, and helping to set up GB News, tells MPs that he is "hugely impartial"

this is abhorrent

What's happened to council tax over the last 30 years? Has it really doubled? Yes. Here's how, and here's why: buff.ly/7HSGJij

Bob sings better when he has a proper song to sing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B2Y...

youtu.be/PQiWL0HfIJs?... Morning. It's now late November so we all have to watch this amazing clip of Sandy Denny. It's the law.

My favorite Sunday jazz album. I like to imagine sitting on a Sunday morning in an apartment on Nob Hill in 1958, with a cup of coffee and the Chronicle pink section, looking out over the Bay. And this is the soundtrack for that fantasy. (And hey—it's on Fantasy! And on red vinyl!)

Just saw the list of gritter names for this year and they have outdone themselves These always make me smile

The kind of review that’s impressive in its way but also absolutely exhausting to get through. thefm.substack.com/p/clouds-of-...

Sunday, sweet Sunday, with nothing to do.

Newmarket MP Matt Hancock gave a £37bn Covid testing contract to Jockey Club director Dido Harding, who subcontracted it to Grand National sponsor Randox, employer of Tory MP Owen Paterson, whose late wife chaired Aintree racecourse. That's how the Tories handled the pandemic.

I flew to Canada this week to go to a Paul McCartney concert and I wrote about it here: open.substack.com/pub/naomiald...

The economy has not been pretty since you've been in charge", Laura Kuennsberg tells Heidi Alexander. So was it a bed of roses before that then?

It’s way past time that qualifying nations refused to attend the World Cup. This is just yet another reason. None will though.

"My NHS colleagues & I weren’t willing to let the bodies pile high in their thousands. Boris no longer mentions them at all." My piece on the responses to the UK Covid-UK Inquiry report that try to airbrush the dead away. Sincere thanks, @theobserveruk.bsky.social. observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Girl, you gotta love your man Girl, you gotta love your man Take him by the hand Make him understand The world on you depends Our life will never end Gotta love your man, yeah Riders on the storm Riders on the storm …”

It's infuriating to see so much of the media give Kruger the same kid gloves treatment that Rees-Mogg used to get because he is posh and polite and able to wrap his bigotry in enough intellectual tissue paper to make it seem like a political philosophy rather than an expression of white supremacy.

On the plus side, Nick Clegg's house in California looked terrific.

I also write about how little the floods have been covered in national newspapers, and how appalled I am that the Prime Minister has said nothing to the people of Monmouthshire directly. Please read and share. www.thenerve.news/p/storm-clau...

So the line is that he wasn't getting paid for any of this

For Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, making ‘Hamnet’ was ‘something bigger than the moon’ www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

Something about The Bob Dylan Center for people who do and don’t spell it that way. americanahighways.org/2025/11/21/i...

And yes, he did smoke a cigar throughout: “it’ll help me relax.”

as Phillips O'Brien also points out, this plan has been in negotiation for a long time, probably since Trump took office. open.substack.com/pub/phillips...

This is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future. In the meantime, it benefits unnamed Russian and American investors, at the expense of everyone else. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

The excellent @birminghamdispatch.bsky.social (which has done such great reporting on the flag epidemic over the last few months) delivers the goods again today with this deep dive into the Midlands mythology of Penda's Fen.

"Call My Bluff is a model of understated entertainment and - God forbid in the present day - maturity." @benfinlay74.bsky.social on the delights to be found over on BBC Four. thelionandunicorn.com/2025/11/22/l...

Daily Mail's parent company agrees a deal to buy Telegraph for £500m! Media consolidation, let's go, ya gonna blink and stop this competition regulators? Over to you, Nandy? Strong potential everyone just waves the sale through to STOP HAVING TO READ OR THINK ABOUT IT. www.ft.com/content/cd8e...

It's wonderful when two sociopaths with the mindset of serial killers find each other.

Even though I’m enjoying this, my main take-away is that a big part of their “greatness” was choosing the tip-top version to release originally. Almost none of the versions quite as good as the ones you already know.

Breaking News: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he personally instructed the CDC to abandon its position that vaccines do not cause autism. The move underscores his determination to challenge scientific orthodoxy — in this case, that vaccines save lives — and bend the health department to his will.

Trump's audience in calling for sedition charges against Democrats isn't just them, it's also members of his own party. He must intimidate anyone thinking of walking away from him because of Epstein/economy/Ukraine with threats of arrest/violence. He's keeping people of his OWN party in line.

Implying that the "cause of our division" is too many care workers, as Mahmood does here, is both absurd and sinister.