On January 1, 1804, revolutionaries established the independent country of Haiti, the first nation to permanently ban slavery. As we begin a year engulfed by the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, it’s worth reading the Haitian Declaration of Independence in full. 🇭🇹

give it Tony Pulis til the end of the season

There is no mystery here: vaguely left wing people don’t like being mocked, kicked and insulted; the permanent reactionary spite voter (now Reform) does not respect people they already despise sucking up to them and fawning over them, and nobody likes the project, full stop.

If you crawl for years on your stomach to people who hate you, begging for their indulgence, while relentlessly insulting and deliberately offending people who might be inclined to support you - while offering almost nobody anything they want - then you are going to be deeply unpopular.

My theory: it’s one thing to suck at your job, it’s another to suck and have no charisma, and it’s a whole other thing when you suck at your job, have no charisma and also have no convictions or guiding principles to speak of

Brilliant article that not only paints a more honest picture of this human rights defender but puts our right wing press to shame. The arc of this story proves their willingness to foreground racist far right activists’ propaganda. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

amusing that a club so obsessed with its Class and History branding consistently scores such snide goals

I think the way the players around Gabriel celebrate that, turning towards the ref as they do so, suggest they know what’s up with the goal

This is what they have taken from you. RETVRN

Tweets sent 15 years ago by a person who was then living in a different country and was not a British citizen, should make that person liable to prosecution, apparently.

This latest shitshow is another reminder why Starmer needs to go - not in May but now. He is not willing or capable of playing the role of PM. He is vindicating the far-right and demoralising the left. He should be removed for being bad for the country not merely losing Labour elections

In this day and age it does my head in that there are news and opinion articles which consist entirely of 'this person's tweets are controversial / objectionable', where the content of all of the contested tweets is not shared in full.

There should be literally no circumstances, ever, where citizenship is can be revoked. If you literally sign up to fight for an opposing army in a war, then we should prosecute you for treason not revoke citizenship

Ah, what happened to the concerns about wasting police time over tweets?

“The main way the genocide has been actively supported by our democracies is less the flow of weapons and intelligence to Israel, than the organised repression and punishment of everyone who dared to call attention to events in Gaza or offer criticism of Israel’s conduct.” — Bruno Maçães

Today, 1.25 million kids will spend the holiday without their parent because of mass incarceration.

“Since the announcement of their hunger strike on 20 October till 10 December 2025, the hunger strike by jailed Palestine Action activists was mentioned a total of 12 times in the British mainstream newspapers.” That is so damning and grim.

Car drivers have unilaterally decided that pavements are for cars, then get annoyed with you when you walk on the road with a pram because they have left no space

when your "Innellekshuals! Learn from Amurka" text opens with 3 paragraphs citing the Great Mind Thomas Friedman whose 40+ yr career of mangled tech-metaphor belching is taken seriously only by the kind of crashing transatlanticist bore who knows nothing about contemporary American political thought

Absolute *chef's kiss* to put these two things in the same editorial "Death to Arabs" - welcome to England, friends "Globalize the Intifada" - get in the van, scum

Don't steal pies this Christmas.

Great example of half-arsed provision for parents. (Read closely)

If you believe this list, Gyokeres is better than every one of his Arsenal teammates bar Declan Rice...

I think that would be a worthwhile contribution to what should be a mutually respectful dialogue in which no one is talked over and in which everyones humanity & fears are acknowledged and understood. I'm sure no one appealing to those principles would want to exclude Palestinians from that dialogue

Bearing in mind what Edward Said had to say about who has "permission to narrate", it would be good to hear from Arabic speakers in general and Palestinians in particular about their word and concept for "uprising", what it means to them, and what they make of the Western debate about that word.

the only thing more ridiculous than a professional Yorkshireman is a professional Yorkshireman who’s actually from Watford www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Includes me exposing the myth that Cambridge somehow earned its way into its leadership position in UK life sciences. It didn't. Leeds was in the lead, and then the Medical Research Council in London picked Cambridge and London as winners because it was their mates.

For those of you just waking up - Leeds mass transit has been cancelled.

Interesting numbers, but how will this play with the imaginary voter Morgan has made up in his mind

unbelievably tinpot "Russia Russia Russia" is a highlight for me

Police (under extremely blatant political pressure) have announced that they will arrest people for an “offence” that the CPS has told them they can’t prosecute. The situation potentially developing here sounds a lot like Berlin at the moment. 🧵

my solidarity over a gap of 238 years to the men I just wrote about who escaped from the Philadelphia prison in 1787 via the city sewers, and were only recaptured after "a long and vigilant subterraneous pursuit."

At the risk of hugging the third rail, the truth of the academic job market, at least in history or classics, is neither DEI or anti-DEI. It is that that 1) there are no jobs and 2) our hiring culture treats candidates like they 'spoil' after a few years. No one knows who is mediocre or not.

Everyone who matters is now 100% committed to lying about what has happened until everyone implicated in it is retired or dead. And that’s going to be a long time, because every new escalation in lying and crackdowns is going to incriminate a whole new swathe of important people, for years to come.

Labour needed to govern like they had a landslide majority (because constitutionally they did), whilst also being very aware of how fragile their vote was. Instead they’ve acted like they had votes to burn, whilst governing like they’re in a hung parliament.

If you tell your voters over and over that you hate them and repeatedly emphasise that you oppose their politics and are working to destroy them, replacing them with the horrific politics of a different electoral bloc, then those people will stop voting for you. The end.

I wonder what goes through the head of someone who parks like this

I think if a viral article is as straightforwardly based on fantasy as you say it is, you ought to be able to parse the argument it's actually making without losing anything in your condemnation of it.

I was happy when a friend told me she gave my novel to her brother 'who has read probably 2 novels in his entire life' and he loved it. So I'm using my seasonal self-promo post to suggest you give Poor Ghost! as a Hanukkah or Christmas present to the latent, unrealised novel-lover in your life.

Oh man

Further reading... untoldmag.org/germany-tria...

He’s laundered a genocide. He demonises desperate people seeking asylum. He panders to Reform at the expense of people of colour. He’s implementing transphobic policies. He cuts benefits for disabled people. “Inoffensive”? He’s deeply offensive if you are affected by any of this (Lewis isn’t)

Impunity is an enabler of criminality. And again, I suggest that we spend some time reflecting on the radicalising effect it must have on British politicians to be so deeply and directly complicit in such monstrous, racist crimes. These people have crossed a threshold into a truly dark place.

Excellent new report on the need to defund the Berlin Police. (Available in English)

Ich habe über ein weiteres Beispiel geschrieben, bei dem Berlin die Staatsräson über das Gesetz gestellt hat.

‘The police got carte blanche,’ Amjahid told me. They ‘were finally liberated from everything to just beat people up’.

"Die Häufigkeit, Intensität und Sichtbarkeit der Gewalt lassen nur zwei mögliche Schlussfolgerungen zu: Entweder agiert die Berliner Polizei außerhalb demokratischer Kontrolle, oder die Stadtverwaltung will, dass sie sich so verhält." Ich schreibe hier (auf Englisch) über Polizeigewalt in Berlin.

For more than 2 years, police in Berlin - encouraged by city and national politicians - have systematically used excessive violence in an attempt to beat the Palestine solidarity movement into silence. I wrote about this phenomenon for the @lrb.co.uk