forgive the double quote tweet, but... I increasingly feel like a big problem is the loss of the language of morality in politics? We're scared of it because awful people have historically used moral condemnation to be awful, but I do feel like you sometimes have to just go "this is just wrong"

It’s odd that there’s all this talk about the “crisis” with NHS drug prices. This is a crisis in which, thanks to good negotiation and bulk buying, the NHS is paying less for drugs than anywhere else. I thought we believed in market foces? www.independent.co.uk/news/busines...

Sir Keir Starmer has no plans to attend the UN COP30 summit in Brazil in November, despite having branded Rishi Sunak’s absence from the world’s top climate conference a “failure of leadership” just a few years ago.  www.ft.com/content/5f8f...

This keeps happening. How many people in the Uk could have told you who Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel were 3 weeks ago? Trump is a Mr Beast-style content production genius, that editors feel powerless in the face of

It's alarming how many people need to hear this: racism is not the natural and inevitable response to the presence of (the wrong number of) racialised Others. It is a learned response, and as such it is contestable and replaceable. This is anti-racism 101. Entry level stuff.

In a sane media culture, this would be the end of him.

Harry Enten: "If Donald Trump's idea was to give Jimmy Kimmel more press and more viewership, he absolutely did so"

So Milei's ridiculous austerian nonsense policies are failing, badly. Quelle surprise. But it's OK because the US is bailing him out. Wonder if they'd do the same for a centrist or left-wing government?🤨 US offers financial lifeline to Argentina’s Javier Milei - on.ft.com/3Kgo3dV

Two related stories in the news tomorrow (h/t Nef): The Palestinian president will address the U.N. General Assembly The UK Court of Appeal hearing takes place on Palestine Action's proscription judicial review

I love how they couldn't cut and paste this one direct from the USA without adding local flavour to make it even more bootlicky than Ohio's version of the same lie, because in order to truly scare and offend British nationalists it can't be their own pets in danger, it has to be the king's pets lol

Apparently tearing down some statutes is fine

Glad to have got this over the line How Tony Blair is lobbying on behalf of Big Tech His Institute (TBI) is pushing AI solutionism on Starmer’s govt, which is embracing it w open arms, as TBI donor & tech billionaire Larry Ellison is set to reap the benefits www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

As well as routinised racism, degradation and humiliation of the British state, this whole “affair” reveals something else about the British state - it barely exists, there’s no care infrastructure: all the state is, is a bank account that feeds various vultures and middle men for shit services

As I was saying…

Newsom: "People ask, 'Are you being hyperbolic?' Bullshit we're being hyperbolic. If you're Black or brown, it's here in this country. And so I'm deeply proud that I had the privilege of signing the nation's first bill to address masking ... these are authoritarian actions by an authoritarian govt"

Francesca Albanese: ".. the impunity that has been granted to Israel.. there are layers of complicity.. Europe is the most disappointing of all, because liberal democracies in Europe have proven the fragility of their own systems in order to protect Israel and Israels crimes"

The suppression of dissent is yet another form of collusion with the genocide, alongside arms supplies, military cooperation, and the refusal to impose meaningful sanctions. All this likely puts the UK in breach of its obligations under the Genocide Convention. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I genuinely cannot believe that Ezra Klein said we should run pro-life candidates in Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri; three states that recently held abortion referendums where the pro-choice side won!

Two problems with the facile and predictable Life of Brian jibes. (1) splits and disputes are common across the political spectrum (Reform v Tories? "Blairites v Brownites"?), (2) sometimes these things are necessary. Should people not have quit the Communist Party in 1956 & 68, for example?

Note the pernicious deployment of the term "identity politics", and who and what it is used to denigrate. If the UK left's civil war of 2025 results in people who do this being consigned to the trashcan of the movement's history, that will be something, at least. observer.co.uk/news/politic...

For bonus dehumanisation points, "addicted to cheap foreign labour".

Just to illustrate how much worse it's got, I have received more abuse over the past year and a bit - including death threats and a large volume of antisemitism - for what I write than in the previous 15 years of covering migration and the far right put together.

The most successful novelist of her generation can't actually enter this country to accept an award for fear of arrest, someone tell the BBC

The state of Western politics in 2025 becomes a lot easier to understand when you acknowledge and reckon with the plain fact that much of the political mainstream - not just the Trumpian right - is racist.

Ed Davey, "It's so frustrating, so infuriating that Nigel Farage gets such an easy ride from the media" "As he lies, as he divides, the BBC and others given Farage so much time and attention" "But they never hold him to account for all the damage he has already done" "The damage of Brexit"

On the money here.

Useful reminder from Peter Kellner on the problems we refuse to acknowledge are getting better, and the politics of hopelessness that this breeds open.substack.com/pub/kellnerp...

Wikipedia is what the internet was meant to be and one of the few online places that hasn’t got worse. It’s a miracle

On the one hand, better late than never. On the other hand: why so late? The case for doing this was just as obvious in May as it is in September.

The even more unbelievable crime fact (which I learned relatively recently) is that burglary has fallen by more than 90% since the 1990s. Did anyone notice? Nope. Does anyone believe it? Nope. But is is true? It is!

This is mainly about AI, but on the way the author makes a great point about how open-plan offices and the backlash against working from home prove that surveillance is more important to managers than success:

Blaming autism on women seeking pain relief during pregnancy - the pain of which these wackos believe is divine punishment for Eve seeking knowledge and falling out of Eden - is like six different types of Christian nationalist eugenics the absurdity of which is irrelevant to its promised horror.

Shanah Tovah, New York City. Here's to a sweet and hopeful New Year.

The idea that the combined MMR is dangerous but separately the vaccines are fine was created out of whole cloth by Andrew Wakefield, a disgraced former doctor who had a patent on a non-combined version of the MMR. We've known his research was bunk for almost 30 years.

I wrote my first investigative piece raising concerns about Covid contracts in *April 2020*. Great to see this finally on screen

Keir Starmer: “we hate immigrants they’ve caused incalculable damage” Also Keir Starmer: “why don’t immigrants want to come and work here? 😌”

Sally Rooney unable to collect award due to threat of arrest for supporting Palestine Action The Normal People author can no longer safely enter the UK without potentially facing arrest, her publisher stated at the Sky Arts awards ceremony last night. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

New post: On the need to create state-owned/supported alternatives to supermarkets, as is becoming a typical popular demand across the world in response to price gouging and rising food insecurity. It could also help fix farming systems. thestruggleforland.substack.com/p/democratic...

Having flashbacks to the pandemic-era pushing of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment.

BBC push alert tomorrow: ‘The Rapture is here. Why this could be good news for Reform UK’

Reform are now coming after people with permanent residency. It'll be citizens next. No one is safe from authoritarian governments.

Monaco formally recognizes the State of Palestine.

"Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that." Looking forward to seeing Jimmy back on the air.

The unravelling of Reform's xenophobic and half-baked proposals on ILR would be ideal time for Govt to say its own proposals, which I described as "not just unfair and vindictive, but economically irrational" will *not* apply retrospectively to migrants already here. ukandeu.ac.uk/immigration_...

'Reform UK leader’s hardline plans were lauded by rightwing press. But are they coherent and will they save money?' I'm never gonna forgive the guardian for this

If a powerful corporation has concluded that kissing Trump’s ass isn’t worth it it also shows that there are limits to what Trump can and cannot do. I hope this further pushes ppl and institutions to understand that bending the knee to the wannabe god king will not protect you.

I generally rate Chris Mason but it would make things easier for all if Robbie Gibb - Brexiter & Theresa May’s director of comms at Number 10 - were not still a non-executive director of the BBC. Everything he touches turns to shit. Including, at the moment, a lot of the Beeb’s political journalism.

Labour have branded Nigel Farage’s migration attacks "unfunded, unworkable and falling apart in real time." And the classic: "Unserious". They seem very reluctant to say "immoral" or "wrong".

Free-market reformer needs a bailout.