saving a grub in hollow knight and hearing its happy little noises: pure endorphins

People are naturally gravitating to the Trump line, but it’s not the most mental bit. Davey says it’s *almost as if* the BBC is copy and pasting Reform press releases and is then attacked as though he had said they literally are doing that. That question is an insult to the audience’s intelligence.

If Dems want to pivot to "kitchen table issue" in their messaging this is the one! Say he has to come to congress for a vote on the tariffs or you don't vote for government funding bill.

It's noticeable how rattled Mason sounds. He's not making an argument that the BBC has covered Reform well, he's complaining that criticism of the BBC from the left is not legitimate. This feels like a topic where a Culture Secretary could apply a lot of pressure. Wouldn't it be nice if we had one?

Pretty disgraceful for Mason to call Davey’s criticism Trumpian given his disastrous coverage of the Reform conference among other things. Maybe do your job better instead of shooting the messenger?

Amazing that chris mason talks tough the moment someone asks for any amount of accountability

There should be a high bar for politicians attacking the media, but maybe Ed Davey has half a point here? For example, the first three paragraphs of this BBC story repeat Reform's £243bn figure without saying that the thinktank behind the estimate now disowns it. (This is mentioned in paragraph 35)

Very good piece from Meg Hillier on the dangers of political attacks on independent institutions like the OBR on.ft.com/3VV7p5Y The OBR is not to blame for weak growth

Reform's ‘plan’ to revoke the legal status of millions of UK residents is morally abhorrent & economic madness The public believe in fairness & mutual respect, not this cruel Trumpian policy that would leave us all poorer. We are not America - we must resist this dangerous turn in British politics.

Danny Kruger’s defection shows that the Tories have lost the battle to be the country’s leading party of the populist right. Instead, they should unambiguously position themselves as the only party of the centre right. For ConHome. conservativehome.com/2025/09/22/d...

We had months of discussion about "there might be a hung parliament" when Labour were polling 20pts ahead

It is genuinely absolutely bonkers that one year into a massive new government majority, all the discourse is about what will happen under the allegedly inevitable majority by another party. Much of it is the govt’s fault but not all - this very much has not happened under past unpopular govts!

This must be by any standard a minor gripe about BBC News, but I clicked this article from the Scotland section about nominees for an architecture prize, and the coverage of this nominee from Edinburgh Uni doesn’t mention at all that it’s not in the main central campus.

"It is not primarily Rachel Reeves’ fault that the public finances are in such a mess, but it’s her responsibility to resolve the problem." Excellent piece this.

think that realistically I would have always been deeply, deeply worried about the rise of far-right ideas in public discourse but I truly never expected this level of blithe elite complacency, turns out I do feel worried but mostly I feel like I'm going insane, watching them do.......nothing at all

also engenders a dangerous complacency where the mass civil society response that is required to actually push back on this stuff doesn‘t happen because people convince themselves “it won’t happen so why should they have to put their heads above water on it“

really dislike that "Boriswave" used to be something you'd exclusively see being used by racist Twitter accounts but it's now made its way to the political mainstream, including today's Playbook headline

I love that she keeps using the Labour Party font for these.

It was published more than an hour ago but Zarah Sultana’s announcement that she’s no longer suing her own party still hasn’t replaced her pinned announcement that she’s suing her own party.

Speaks volumes that presumably everyone still involved with Your Party believes there's a way back from "MP who announced party launch threatens to sue presumptive party leader"

sooooo funny that the “we’re all friends I promise” statement is issued in one name only

Nigel Farage and Reform are running almost as scared as Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives. Reform is an unprecedented threat on the Tories’ right flank. But Reform and Farage are under pressure too: from Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk. Farage is running rightwards, and fast.

I know it’s no fun to expect Reform to have any kind of consistency or seriousness, but it is sort of ridiculous reading about the horrible Boriswave from someone who was a pro-Boris Tory at the time.

The fact that Jeremy Hunt is good at sounding like an affable moderate, and therefore universally gets treated as one by the media despite deliberately salting the earth for his successors, is really depressing.

does anyone know the source for the YouGov poll of Lib Dem members referred to here?

A political party is a bit different from a birthday party: there's usually no cake and if there is, it doesn't have candles!

(I think a lot of the BBC’s written output can likely be explained by them interpreting “need to write for a reading age of seven” as ”need to write for a moron with an adult reading age”.)

Maybe - just a crazy idea, but bear with me for a moment! - the reason why the Lib Dems should not “get serious“ is that the UK’s most important media organisation covers politics in babytalk so much of the time?

The annual festival of “stop hitting yourself!“ aka the BBC’s commentary on Lib Dem conference.

people are wrong on the internet again! smugly nodding at each other: “Shabana Mahmood (elected 2010) is only in Labour because it seemed like the winning ticket” “no, it’s just because of her… background”

occasionally get an impulse to watch a bit of Strictly - used to love it as a kid! - but it’s so saccharine and self-mythologising these days

you get the sense reading this that actually it’s just quite nice for these people to hang out with others they have a similar worldview to, which you can’t really begrudge them. but the way it’s framed as if this is incredibly subversive is sooooo cringey

something really pleasingly undignified about defeating a boss and watching the achievement pop up on screen, while also dying at the same moment

was looking at polling for Holyrood 2026 for something, and one thing that I’m not sure everyone has noticed is that for all the credit John Swinney gets for stopping the bleeding, he really hasn’t increased the SNP’s vote share since taking over

Everything I read about Biden's decision to run again makes me angrier

wrote about this last year and sure I wasn't in any way the only one but imo people voting for populist politics in the 21st century *is* a sign that they do just have too much faith in institutions, as opposed to not enough - they want to have their little tantrum but assume things will just hold

Ditching the two child benefit cap to try and stop Bridget Phillipson losing a deputy leadership contest she'll probably lose anyway would be the most This Government thing ever

Encouraging. I've always thought that eventually pressure from the PLP will force HMT's hand on the two child limit. Sooner the better.

(a) good! (b) stupid that they’ve created this taskforce to hide behind and now can’t just let her properly announce it being scrapped without undermining it (c) so much for the angry boys briefing after the welfare rebellion that the cap would have to stay now

it is completely insane to write fanfiction about a real person you've never met like this, just because she doesn't agree with you 100% of the time

you mimic the grub? jail, jail for one thousand years

me to everyone around me in zuck's vision of the future: hey can you all please step out for a minute I need to talk to my glasses but I don't want all of your glasses to get confused

Solidarity with Peter and Simon - two very well respected doctors and parliamentarians. It's appalling to see this happen again after Abtisam Mohamed and I also tried to visit humanitarian projects in the West Bank in April before being denied entry by the Israeli authorities.

until we moved house this year my husband’s dentist was called “Your Dentist” and I’m just glad I still have material for incredibly annoying jokes along those lines

A group called 'Our Party' is trying to take over 'Your Party'

IMO one of the biggest changes in social media environment between terms 1 and 2 has been the far smaller appetite for promoting Trump’s stream of losses and far greater appetite for alarmism about how he always wins or even the losses don’t count etc bsky.app/profile/jona...

The Arvo Pärt Song You Didn’t Know Was Dedicated To Benjamin Britten

Minister Jamie Hepburn resigns after assault claim