Nothing is more symbolic of Europe's inherent weakness of resolve - EU and UK - than the failure of governments and institutions to leave X/Twitter en masse. It's easier to stay, so stay they do. Pathetic.

What I always hear: “We can’t afford to pay our workers more than $15 an hour.” What I never hear: “We can’t afford to pay our CEO millions of dollars a year.” Funny how that works.

Farage hopes he can breeze into power without scrutiny. But his racism, corrupt donations, shady links to Russia and MAGA… make it harder for him to hide. And his tantrum reactions to being challenged reveal him for the nasty inadequate he really is. #NeverPM www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/the-wheels...

Keir Starmer Observer interview with @rachelsylvester.bsky.social articulates opportunity for young people as his defining mission for his government

This is pretty much exactly like a European saying the United States should be abolished, so that the governments of individual states can better represent their people. It’s a take, you’re entitled to it, but what’s it got to do with you, buddy?

this shit is just beyond parody, man

The most important line in a solid piece by @iandunt.bsky.social "And yet for all its flaws, Bluesky offers something which is becoming vanishingly rare in the modern world: a vision of life without the algorithm. What I see is what I have chosen to see. We own our own destiny on Bluesky."

"He so exactly reminds me of the Farage that said those things back then." Peter Ettedgui says he has to switch off the TV when the Reform leader is on because of how much it reminds him of his schooldays.

🚨 BREAKING: The EU has slapped a €120 million fine on Elon Musk’s X, straining ties with the US. Read the story: www.politico.eu/article/eu-s...

Finally someone says it.

This is quite unhinged, not least because Farage keeps calling them his “alleged” remarks when he’s already admitted that he said them (including earlier in this press conference)

Farage has been dismissing evidence of Russian ties to the Salisbury Novichok attack since 2018 🧐

A key question to Nigel Farage is this You have said your schooldays were 40+ years ago. Can you say categorically that you never used the most offensive racial slurs - words like the n-word, p-word and wog - as an adult?

'Perhaps' does some lifting here but ask yourself what would happen in the right wing media if Chris Mason ever expressed the equally plausible *opinion* that Farage is 'perhaps' the most obviously racist MP since Enoch Powell.

But we’ll price the UK out because we don’t value security more than protecting our industries?

You will be shocked to discover after reading these stories that while Rachel Reeves claimed to have been the "British girls under-14 [chess] champion" she was in reality merely the "Under 14s British Women’s Chess Association (BWCA) Girls" Champion. This is getting utterly ridiculous now

This year's Christmas special is pretty dark

Labour: let people use nectar points to buy baby formula, it'd be slightly cheaper The very online right: THIS IS COMMUNISM The very online left: NATIONALISE BABY FORMULA NOBODY SHOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR IT Just need 'everyone should breastfeed anyway' to complete the deck

Pleased to discover that slightly misnaming the national chess championship you won as a school child is a much more serious offence than repeatedly racially abusing your fellow pupils and telling them they should go to the gas chamber

The "Rachel from accounts" thing is sexist, classist, misogyny, and anyone who uses it should be utterly ashamed of themselves. Too many dinosaurs in this country who cannot abide women who succeed. Conservative Deputy Chairman Matt Vickers MP should do better 👇 #PMQs

This is the main thing the resident doctor strike action is about, not the pay - though that helps retain doctors. If resident doctors cannot get posts, which is the case currently, they cannot progress and may leave our NHS. Down the line we will have a shortage senior doctors such as consultants

Truly shocking that Rachel Reeves had the audacity to call herself the U14 girls chess champions when she won the U14 girls chess championship but some bloke thought she was talking about something else.

This is the point where the anti-Reeves stories tip into madness. Criticise her performance all you like but what the hell is this?

My extremely simple heuristic for the current political system is that until you can go food shopping and think prices haven’t increased / things aren’t expensive etc don’t expect any material political continuity.

This is how Chris Mason, like a child filled with wonder, described "the choreography and theatre that surrounds a Budget" in Feb 2024, when a male Tory Chancellor was in post. "Plans, or even just options, can be floated... Reaction to them can be tested. Opponents can be teased or wrongfooted." 👀

This is grim. Richard Murphy is where he's getting his MMT views from.

Pinched this video from @cjsnowdon.bsky.social on Twitter because Bluesky has to see it. Nothing can prepare you for the punchline here.

Chris Mason seems to be taking his time doing the BBC News blog about how we weren't misled by the Chancellor after all? Surely this is his time for a huge splash.

But I’ve been assured by people having 5 day twitter meltdowns on this subject that this isn’t true

according to their rules, should Mason et al now all resign

So much for all that bleating about being misled by the Treasury from the BBC's political editor Chris Mason ..... www.ft.com/content/48c2...

BREAKING: “The idea that leaving the EU was the answer to all our cares and concerns has clearly been proved wrong." Keir Starmer says that "wild promises were made" about Brexit. He adds: "The same argument is now being made about the European Convention on Human Rights"

Watched BBC 6 o clock news. Just a completely unserious broadcast. Chris Mason, acting like a children's entertainer, giving a prolonged impenetrable editorial. Not a whiff of informative content about the Budget or what it means for the country. Just playschool blah blah bollocks.

The OBR is run independently from Government. It literally was somebody else's fault. You'd think Kemi Badenoch would know that given her own party created it in Government, but apparently not

A reminder of how the BBC covered Boris Johnson's long record of lying, as being a "complicated relationship with the truth". www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-poli...

Precisely. We have an ageing society, a productivity problem & a crisis in local govt. The costs of defence & climate change are all growing, & we have a US president addicted to tariffs, who may be about to start a war in Venezuela. The budget was *not pessimistic enough* about the public finances

👏🏽"We must all now confront the reality that the Brexit deal significantly hurt our economy. We have to keep reducing frictions. We have to keep moving towards a closer relationship with the EU. And we have to be grown up about it. To accept that it will require trade-offs."👏🏽 Music to my ears. ~AA

Indeed. This is not the BBC's job and to make it worse, in the same piece, Chris Mason again lurches into opinion and gives government carte blanche when he absolutely should not have!

I thought journalists in the BBC were supposed to be impartial and not give opinions? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Two more Conservative MP rejects hop over to Reform UK. Jonathan Gullis and Lia Nici. More and more, Reform UK looks simply as if the Tories ran off stage, then came back on two minutes lates, wearing a comedy moustache-and-glasses disguise. ~AA uk.news.yahoo.com/former-tory-...

It was the most botched budget briefing since Truss… but this is increasingly wild. It is not an unsubstantiated “claim” that the OBR priced the productivity downgrade at £16bn in foregone revenue!

As someone who criticised the government back in January for not having a clear growth strategy it is good to see Torsten set out in plain language what the govt’s strategy is and how it hangs together. This is much better and clearer communication.

This story is starting to make me feel I’m going slightly mad - maybe RR overdid the gloom, but the tax rises are paying for a) the welfare U-turns b) the £10bn-plus increase in headroom c) scrapping the two child limit d) bits of other spending eg higher local gov costs 🤷🏻‍♀️

I've been extremely critical of Labour's comms lately, but this is much better from Starmer. It's critical that he now should relentlessly hammer this same message away for the next two years... it is the only way that voters will start to hear it.

I must have missed the wall-to-wall coverage of demands for an investigation into Nigel Farage's lies about being a racist Or about whether he knew Nathan Gill Or about who bought his house in Frinton

I’m quite enjoying the 180 turn on a six pence from “you’ve wrecked the economy and created a black hole” to “there was no black hole and this is even worse”.

On every public policy committee I sat on - gambling, drugs, animal experiments, law of homicide and others - someone would ask ‘But what would the Daily Mail say about our recommendations?’ I now regret that we never gave the right answer. ‘We shouldn’t care.’

Good Morning to you too.

Again, I would advise people to go read the media from 50 years ago. Sure, there was absolutely an awkward stiffness that the death of deference got rid of and I prefer it but they talked to you like adults in a way that very few newspapers do today.

Poor Josh won’t be able to save more than £12k a year tax free! However will he cope?