If you’re listening to eg the Today programme telling you the story of the local elections is Labour losing to Reform, you might want to listen to the BBC’s polling expert… It’s not ‘better’ news exactly for the left electorally, but it is a crucially different picture.

All killer, no filler on the Culture Power Politics feed this weekend. This is very good on the imminent next phase of British political crisis from @jemgilbert.bsky.social & Alan Finlayson. Send it to the ‘low-information Guardian readers’ (JG) in your life. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/c...

For context, this is less than what I received as a PhD student in 2009…

Had an excellent time at the online Decolonial Conference. Here’s what I said… tomsix.substack.com/p/resettling...

Mr Trojan Horse Letter is up to it again

Another excellent and clarifying rapid-response long view from Alan & Jem here… podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/c...

This is really excellent

Here's a counterpoint to this grim revival of climate eugenics at Essex (lots of other great research against populationism is available): journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Quite

Happy birthday to the big man, Bertolt Brecht! 🥳

‘Meat shield’ 😬😬😬

"It is under his [McSweeney's] direction that the party's support has eroded to a historical nadir, to the point where Labour's actual liquidation is on the cards..." - @philbc3.bsky.social

Wild stuff from Jonathan here, contingent as it is upon everyone agreeing to pretend they don’t know him and his mates fought for years to put the Peter Mandelson wing of the party back in charge, and that their core aim in all of their careers was to be much like Peter Mandelson.

Really impressed by the humility and clarity of this reading of @hamayel.bsky.social from @felicitycallard.bsky.social - qualities whose absence from scholarly responses to Palestinian resistance could hardly be more prominent. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This.

Furious clarity from Jude Wanga www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

This isn’t about individuals but the Monarchy as an institution. What is needed is not simply an apology but acknowledgment of this history and action to address its lasting legacy of racism and inequality.

As they knew full well all along www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

IMO, someone should compile a clear video of the critical moments of this interaction, viewed from multiple angles: Pretti was filming from afar, he was approached by agents, he helped a woman who was pushed to the ground, he was attacked in the face with pepper spray, and then he was shot.

*What will it take* for the liberal press to stop it with this idiocy?

This is correct. ICE is there in the first place because of an evidence-free racist conspiracy theory promoted by a 23 Year old YouTube propagandist. They manufacture pretext.

Given ICE’s violent, impunity-drenched core, at a moment when the Trump regime is leaning heavily into a vision of dominance grounded in aggression and lawlessness, such a killing (certainly not ICE's first) was all but inevitable. @theintercept.com theintercept.com/2026/01/07/i...

A DHS agent has reportedly shot dead a legal observer in Minneapolis during an ICE raid, blocks from where George Floyd was murdered... /everyone/ should be banning these fascists

Bay of Pigs 2.0?

Very clarifying read from Alana Lentin… mondoweiss.net/2025/12/unde...

Well knock me down with a feather

New from me in Studies in Theatre and Performance, a short piece about Khalid Abdalla’s Nowhere: identity, globalization, colonialism, Zionist normalization and martyrdom. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I’m old enough to remember when left podcasts had disclaimers before interviews with Roger Hallam.

Want to be remembered as blessed with foresight? Just be a racist imperialist pen for hire and hope your pals in the state are on the winning side.

👀 👀 👀

Hear, hear! RIP

Fascist rationality

Orwell to the power Orwellian bylinetimes.com/2025/11/25/m...

Hard agree. Of course it’s structural too, but academics need to reflect on why we are collectively so hopeless at refusing to accept the structural conditions we are offered.

This is not the way, and @cnygren.bsky.social and I lay out in detail why it isn’t in this essay here. static1.squarespace.com/static/55577...

2 dozen *of the most right-wing and compliant PLP that there has ever been*…

‘We were really concerned about the misuse of potential fur coats as family pets, so we actually managed to rescue 101 dalmatians from ideological capture…’

Edward Wadie Said would have turned 90 today - The central fact for me is, I think, that the [role of the] intellectual... cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), 1/2

Ladies and gents… the not-at-all-authoritarian-dogmatic-racist-ableist-or punitive ‘centre ground’… www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Let’s do something about violence against women and girls by [checks notes] getting yet more (white) men to dominate the public sphere by talking to men about being a man. 🤔

If you've never been to Gaza, you won't appreciate what the yellow line means. Basically Israel now holds most of Gaza's small but important agricultural land. Continued Israeli occupation, which I judge the likely outcome, makes Gaza even more unliveable and more dependent on outside goods.

It's long past time to tackle the British arms industry. I didn't say it on the podcast, but how about a punitive windfall tax on UK arms manufacturers to fund a British reparations scheme for Gaza and Yemen?

👀 🧵 👇🏼

Very sad news. A wonderful director, always gutsy, canny and creative, and the driving force behind some of the best British theatre of the twentieth century.

This was a really clarifying discussion. UK politics folk: have a listen.

I didn’t want to believe it was true. Say his name: Saleh Al-Jafarawi. He had the most beautiful smile. He was not among the 270+ journalists killed prior to the latest ceasefire. He was ebullient that the bombing stopped. And now he’s been killed.

He does a good job here of exposing the reality of someone who claims to have nothing against trans people while laughing at the idea that they could even exist. It’s not that’s hard, but I can’t think of another politician doing it consistently on these kinds of platforms.

Share widely!

How to actually do something about ongoing genocide, a simple guide: www.alanalentin.net/2025/09/18/f...