Tory Legacy 14.2m Britons live in poverty, highest in 30 yrs. 6.8m in "very deep poverty". 34% of universal credit claimants are in work. No curbs on profiteering. Poorest 20% pay higher proportion of income in taxes than the richest 20%. 1% have more wealth than 70% of the population combined.

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

It's not the only reason to oppose the language of takers and shirkers and all that, but people have been warning with good reason: when you establish the existence of a subclass of despised, worthless people it's acceptable to hate and abuse, everyone ends up in there eventually.

Shabana Mahmoud is showing Labour’s contempt for democracy as they, once again, clear the path for a fascist government. If Farage ever gets elected he will have most of his oppressive powers already created for him by Labour. We must fight these ghouls.

No correct aspect ratio upload to be found on YouTube, and I could be more rigorous about my editing, but I genuinely think this is some of the funniest 106 seconds in comedy history, and definitely in my top five Simpsons jokes.

There are very few industries in which Britain can genuinely still claim to be a world leader - two of them are the creative sector and higher education. You'd never know it from listening to the Tories, lol.

"Power not protest" is a truly fatuous formulation. Would you rather be MLK or Trump? Gandhi or Stalin? These people are so convinced of their own inherent goodness that they see their mere attainment of high office as a good thing. Even when they're using their precious power to enable a genocide

Apart from the unnecessary hardship this will inflict on individuals, this will be bad for integration and social cohesion, bad for the economy, and will increase irregular migration. [And, as @robfordmancs.bsky.social has shown, it's hugely unpopular and out of step with the British public]

And if you're wondering whether someone getting killed is what it will take for the media and political class to come to their senses, I would just remind you that Jo Cox was murdered in a similar moment of demagoguery and hysteria 9 years ago, and if anything things have got far worse since then.

Thank you to those who have bought/downloaded Classifieds so far! See the link below to get your copy now (free digitally) CLASSIFIEDS is a poster-zine featuring the stories of the citizens of Parving, told through twenty unique classified ads taken from The Parving Echo. ko-fi.com/actualwillsm...

I just don’t think it’s unreasonable to say the public should be worried when a former senior Labour MP, who famously helped General Augusto Pinochet evade facing trial for crimes against humanity including torture, argues that Britain should ‘decouple’ from the European Convention on Human Rights.

A political-media class capable of colluding in genocide has *already proven* itself capable of the dehumanisation of Others that can sustain fascism at home. Aimé Césaire wasn't kidding about the imperial boomerang.

Classifieds is now live! Please follow the link in my bio or below for the shop. Classifieds is available for free or pay what you can as a digital download and available as an A4 print for a minimum of £3.50 + shipping. ko-fi.com/actualwillsm...

Classifieds is now live! Please follow the link in my bio or below for the shop. Classifieds is available for free or pay what you can as a digital download and available as an A4 print for a minimum of £3.50 + shipping. ko-fi.com/actualwillsm...

CLASSIFIEDS: Flight School A tutor teaches pigeon domestication for a reasonable price. See you there? This story and more will be available 22.08.25 as a digital download (free/pwyc) and in print format (paid). Watch this space for links to the store and more stories to come.

CLASSIFIEDS: Rehearsal A young woman seeks an actor to play her father in a pivotal conversation. Do you fit the role? This story and more will be available 22.08.25 as a digital download (free/pwyc) and in print format (paid). Watch this space for links to the store and more stories to come.

CLASSIFIEDS: Big Hole A lonely man invites strangers to dig. Will you return his call? This story and more will be available 22.08.25 as a digital download (free/pwyc) and in print format (paid). Watch this space for links to the store and more stories to come.

Israel has killed approximately 200 journalists in Gaza in just 22 months, which is more than the combined number of journalists killed during WWII and the entirety of the Vietnam War.

A lonely man invites strangers to dig. A young woman seeks an actor to play her father in a pivotal conversation. A tutor teaches pigeon domestication for a reasonable price. See thread below for more information on CLASSIFIEDS...

Israel destroyed a Palestinian seed bank today. This is such a specific kind of evil, targeting literal hope for the future. Attempting to further alienate Palestinians from their home and land. So much destroyed just for the sake of destroying. It's awful.

WCK can use your donations. They are on the ground in Gaza, doing what they can in the face of a staggering and ongoing crime against humanity.

Holding important meetings, lamenting bad things, urging people to do good things. The same routine for 20 months. And all the while the arms exports continue, the surveillance flights continue, trade and investment continues, normal diplomatic relations continue. Complicity in genocide continues.

I'm grimly fascinated by the human capacity - as cogs within systems of power - to participate in great evils such as genocide. And in this case, I'm fascinated by David Lammy's capacity to maintain his characteristic demeanor of pomposity and self regard, even as he follows Israel into the abyss.

Local councils have been reduced to essentially a vehicle that provides social care - and many can’t afford to do that. And yet despite everything we’ve lost in terms of parks, libraries, community centres, youth services etc, we’ve all ended up paying loads more for it.

I’ve been making my way through the Welfare Reform Bill and this paragraph on the gov.uk website is genuinely disgusting. Receiving a decent disability benefits rate “encourages sickness”, does it? Funny, I thought it just enabled severely ill and disabled people to eat.

I'm always saying this

Thousands show solidarity at #TransRightsAreHumanRights Demo in Parliament Square.

Arresting Quaker women for non-violent protest and breaking into a meeting house to do so. The first time anyone has been arrested in a meeting house in living memory. Despicable behaviour from a Labour government’s Home Office/the Met Police.

NASA has announced that tonight is the night www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

telling a customer service rep that their soup burned me through three turtlenecks and they seem fixated on the number of turtlenecks I was wearing instead of my injuries

Either Keir Starmer is the biggest mark to ever live or he's still hoping for a few 'freebies' from his corpo mates. I cannot understate how atrocious this is.

Oliver Burkeman on The Impatience Spiral and reading books (do you have the patience to read it? It's two whole paragraphs⏱)

chat, is this real

So that's now two (at least) big Labour figures - Tom Watson and Peter Mandelson - taking money from Palantir to help it sink its teeth further into the NHS.

🚨SCOOP: UK government spent £450MILLION subsiding bills at one of Britain’s worst performing water companies While South West Water’s owners paid shareholders £1.5 BILLION+ in dividends and company poured sewage into the sea New on Democracy for Sale democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-g...

There's something I need people to understand. The studio that made this released some numbers. They had to produce 85 minutes of footage to find 15 usable seconds for this ad. The machine that creates moving images out of nothing has a failure rate of 340:1 and the best 15 seconds... is this.

saw a pigeon stuck in a Three store earlier and caught this poignant moment of self-reflection