At least something is going right in the world 🎉 #Strictly

Even by my low expectations for Kemi Badenoch ‘violence against women and girls is something done by immigrants and nobody else’ has shocked me.

Oh

Turns out all the flag waving and shouting isn’t for King and Country. Well ours anyway… So just which country is Yaxley Lennon and his buddies in Reform working for?

WHY ARE YOU ANNOYED THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED TO HAPPEN

National Populism: Puppets of Putin AND Trump? A quick response to the new US National Security Strategy and its welcome in the Kremlin

NEW: Hospital productivity growth is beating the government’s targets. So why hasn't the NHS made more progress on cutting elective waiting times? In a new @theifs.bsky.social comment, we examine what’s driving the divergence between two of the government’s biggest NHS priorities. 1/11

The new US National Security Strategy calls Europe's national populist parties 'political allies of the USA'. This makes Europe's need for a new vision of stronger nations and deeper cooperation the more urgent, as I argue here:https://buff.ly/EYyDshG

this story isn’t going away www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

GB News now broadcasting calls to remove the ethnic minority MPs from parliament

Old ideas allowing national populism to grow, but there is little energy behind the search for new ones buff.ly/UkQUdkW

Englishness is a contested identity: we must engage - or lose open.substack.com/pub/nationst...

It's through national populism that malevolent ideas, funded by those with no interest in or connection with the nation, pass into mainstream politics. From latest post buff.ly/R0XfEFD

Trigger warning. “In crashes, SUVs are more likely to strike vital organs in the core of adults’ bodies & heads of children. Hitting pedestrians above their center of gravity means they’re more likely to be knocked forward & down and then be driven over.” Plus more likely to hit in the 1st place.

Full refund on my trip halfway up the country this weekend (for ultimately a fairly minor inconvenience). 50% refund on a trip to London last month. Delay Repay is A Good Thing but it doesn’t seem… an entirely sustainable way to run a rail network.

Conservative Shadow Culture Secretary Nigel Huddleston tells GB News that the BBC should "grovel" to Trump. Amazing how many British 'patriots' are spending their time telling our national broadcaster to prostrate itself before a hostile foreign leader

Without DEI, we would only make merit-based hires, like the genius strategist who decided to pick a fight with his boss’s new young wife.

This New Yorker documentary about the 1988 UK government ban on broadcasting the voices of Sinn Féin and I.R.A. leaders is pretty good but they show *that clip from The Day Today with no explanation and no indicator that it is satire. www.newyorker.com/video/watch/...

My latest: Move over bat tunnel, here’s the wild story of how HS2 were forced to build a multi-million pound bridge for a road that… doesn’t actually exist.

The fact that one of the two men arrested has now been cleared and released is a pretty huge "STOP" sign to everyone who's spent the last 24 hours rushing to interpret the attack. Facts, like trains, are sometimes slower to arrive than we'd like. But you just have to wait for them.

Quite a lot of premature (& often casually/overtly racist) commentary like this two Black "British" men from ex-academic Matthew Goodwin, or comments of Advance leader Ben Habib inferred the existence of 2 suspects/perpetrators must mean police were covering something up about terrorist motives

Train attack update: - The police have one single suspect under arrest. (The second 35 year old man arrested was not involved in the attack). - A single person train staff member remains in critical condition, having intervened to save lives

The sheer thirst for hate, violence and chaos displayed by many of the Vastly Online is terrifying.

Matt Goodwin attributes a crime that he now knows appears to have been committed by people born in Britain in the early 1990s to "mass uncontrolled immigration"

The HPV vaccine has been a public health triumph. Very depressing to see this potentially unravel while we're on the verge of essentially eradicating cervical cancer. As the article says, the problem is as much about the service as it is about parental attitudes.

National populism rests on exclusive ideas of who can belong to the nation, but it frames its appeal much more widely than that. nationstateandpolitics.substack.com/p/national-p...

We haven’t come all this way, Katwala says, “just for Elon Musk, a man born into an apartheid state, who’s polarised America, to come and try to start a civil war here". X breaks our laws by actively protecting racial hatred & harassment, while Musk promotes extremism and socialises violence

Just as an aside: tell EVERYONE you know about this. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I’ve joined with civic and faith leaders from across #Exeter to reaffirm our aspirations for our city - where everyone lives in peace, free from intimidation and discrimination, and where we continue to prosper by working together. Unity over division, hope over fear.

Over the next 3 months, I am hoping to get somewhere on the questions of - how do end the impunity for racist harassment? - what are the mechanisms for X operating its legal duties, under the 2010 Equality Act, as well as new online laws - what kind of coalition of pressure is needed for action

Sunder is a consistent, measured voice of reason and he shows admirable calm in dealing with appalling attacks like this - this is more than “worrying”, it is shocking and outrageous

One reason why the government is in a mess is that “is that true tho?” doesn’t get anywhere near enough weight against “what do the public think?”

A policy this expansive would certainly mean mass stripping of permanent residence status from people with ILR (including pensioners and parents of British children) on a scale far beyond anything any democracy has ever done before. There is no public support for such an extreme policy.

Here Lam explicitly sets out her proposal - which is official Conservative Party policy - to deport long-standing legal permanent residents who have *ever* claimed any benefit, including the state pension or child benefit (even if the child is British), or who earn less than £39K.

Peston tells Lam that she said something that he "genuinely didn't understand". "But who are these people who came legally who should leave?" This does not look like faux naivety. He should know the answer! She misleads in her answer to him. So he gives a misleading summary of her policy on air.

The chronic, systemic, morbidity of many European nation states is the background to the rise of sovereigntism and national populism eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

It's apparently perfectly fine for senior political journalists to call for the deportation of British Muslim politicians now, with zero consequences

Really the only downside to having an electric cargo bike is inevitably becoming boringly evangelical about how good they are 😅 If you’re thinking about it, do it. Zero regrets.

There is no need for a moral panic about the UK's welfare system. Far from perfect but recent discourse is nuts Spending is controlled, not spiralling Worklessness is near record lows My column www.ft.com/content/ee67...

Anti vaxxers and new world order people will latch onto any other conspiracy theory going except an actual, known conspiracy by massive global corporations 😭

An example of the government not having a project: only yesterday the government was trumpeting new measures to make it easier to build things. We'll work out who actually builds stuff later on.

Governments and political parties that lack a nation-building project seem inexorably drawn to the agenda of those most hostile to change. The diverse and multicultural nations that are western Europe’s future are not the historic norm. They will not build themselves.

So Farage wants to scrap double council tax on second homes - a policy that's been working well to raise more money for councils and also free up more homes for locals. And instead ban new homes from being sold to anyone not already local - a policy shown to grind housebuilding to virtually zero?

A new FT analysis has revealed that the majority of all houses in England are in the wrong council tax band, with many homeowners paying too much or too little. You may well be one of them! Modest homes are often paying more than mansions.

Once again, I am asking where on earth the Short money *goes* and what they are spending it on. They are not doing meaningful parliamentary scrutiny. They are somehow less credible, spending-wise, than Reform, who are are a shoestring operation!

And we have even less protection here. Trump can't fire judges who have constitutional protection. A government here could pass a law allowing them to do so with a majority of one in the Commons.

Opposition to national populism is often framed as a defence of the values of liberal democracy. But to the extent that liberal democracy was associated with sovereign democratic nation states, it remains an idealised view of nations that hardly came into existence before it began to be eroded.