Self-styled ‘patriots’, festooned in flags and poppies, cannot wait to euthanise a public British institution in favour of private news organisations funded from who knows where, and by God knows whom✍️ Ben Wildsmith buff.ly/XAwF35X

Archiving our experiences whilst they are ongoing is part of a new normal that sees us becoming detached from our own lives ✍️Ben Wildsmith buff.ly/WPLQ5m1

As the UK heads towards the 2026 devolved elections and a likely 2029-30 general election, Caerphilly offers a blueprint for resistance to Reform’s national surge✍️Thomas Lockwood

From here on, the monarchy dances to a new tune. Without magic blood, the performance will have to be up to scratch or new dancers will be found. That’s showbiz ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-18fr

The electorate in Caerphilly proved that 21st century politics is a sophisticated business and that people have grown past tribal loyalties to prioritise values that are under threat from populists ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-1863

Reports routinely describe Andrew as ‘entitled’. Well, he literally is, isn’t he? Every moment of the man’s life has been experienced from a protected, privileged vantage point so removed from ordinary lives as to preclude empathy for them @WildsmithBen wp.me/p8Mk4U-17Rr

By now, the Reform suits had been joined by Laura Anne Jones MS, whose permanent smile had a long night ahead of it. It was a lonely night too, as by midnight the men at C&A had faces like half a tin of condemned veal ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-17Kq

Reform UK fanatics, with their laughing emojis, ‘legitimate concerns about immigration’, and belief that the 2.2% of our population intend to turn Wales into a Muslim state, are unreachable via reasoned debate ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-17rH

As our politics sinks into toxic rancour, essentially reduced to a choice between scapegoats, we are facing monumental change that is proceeding with little or no democratic input ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-17ie

As information becomes concentrated in the possession of a handful of billionaires and sold to us as a utility, it is vital that we produce human beings who can think contrary to those interests✍️ Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-1762

Reform-friendly influencers are actively calling for the Senedd’s abolition now, even as the party is contesting a seat in it. The Brit-Nat, racist fanatics who shout loudest on social media, however, do not win elections as yet✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-16WK

We have reached the point where Labour and Reform are riding the same train. It’s time to change tracks ✍️Ben Wildsmith

As Reform peddles its lies against a background of Putinism and personal disgrace, our governing party misleads electors in the service of a Westminster leadership that impoverishes us as a matter of reflex ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-16L6

Labour is now unable to change course credibly because nobody trusts the man at the wheel. If he stays, the coming rout in May’s elections will be UK-wide and quite possibly final ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-16Ct

From the doof, doof, doof of AI-written dance music, to the blue and orange tyranny of Greggs on every High Street, life is battered into familiar shapes through which our primal needs – sex and sausage rolls – are marketed to us ✍️Ben Wildsmith

If the Green Party’s vanity is responsible for Reform UK winning in Caerphilly, much of the left in Wales will never forgive it ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-16hD

Plaid’s job is to reveal the Reform UK project as Brexit MKII- another deregulatory con trick intended to line the pockets of the wealthy. Nigel Farage’s Wat Tyler meets Arthur Daley act has been allowed to run unchallenged for too long ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-15Xa

From QUANGO-sitting apparatchiks to green energy millionaires to £800k seaside flats and rental empires, Labour represents everything it was founded to upend ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-15Kb

The higher ground of politics is prone to give way suddenly when your time is up, and this week’s events suggest that serious slippage is starting beneath the Prime Minister’s feet ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-15C6

This week’s conference has revealed how extreme, undisciplined, and downright weird Farage’s party is ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-15p7

From subscription libraries, union scholarships, and the NHS, to the miners’ buyout of Tower Colliery, Cymru can point to a culture of cooperative action that has often led the world in social innovation ✍️Ben Wildsmith nation.cymru/opinion/cymu...

Whilst flying a national flag is, of itself, a neutral act, the loud support for this movement from anti-immigration politicians suggests motives beyond benign love of country ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-153j

Now is the time to condemn, to shun, and to ostracise. If that seems harsh, particularly if you are related to them, well sorry, but decent people have legitimate concerns ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-14VK

Reform UK plan on capturing our politics for flags that don’t represent us, with a leader who neither lives here nor intends to participate in our governance ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-14Jt

As Yaxley-Lennon promotes his ‘festival of free speech’ in September, and the provinces of England are illegally plastered in flags, we shall see where the strange, sinister journey that Lucy Connolly has taken to infamy will lead her next✍️ Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-14Bk

The politicians & influencers driving division in our societies are riding two horses at once. They ‘love’ a United Kingdom of flags, & beer, & bacon but hold its population, languages, institutions, environment, & even laws in contempt ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-14p0

Silence in the face of naked authoritarianism has legitimised it for politicians who are increasingly reaching for its tools to remedy their inability to persuade the public ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-14eM

Fringe parties are almost always the authors of their own destruction. Formed to be anti-establishment, they are forced to choose between ideological purity or electoral appeal and end up fighting like rats in a shoe ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-144p

Voting for Labour nowadays is like driving one of those Chinese-made MGs. The only item left from the original is the badge, and on closer inspection, it’s plastic ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-13We

Devoid of anything hopeful to sell us, our politicians evoke fears and then offer us solutions to them. If those solutions seem to have leapt from the pages of a science fiction novel, then all the better ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-13I6

I imagine that Starmer will be jettisoned at some point. Watching him cringe and acquiesce at the Court of King Donald suggested that even he must realise he’s not cut out for this ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-13Ad

The shameful state of affairs in which the stockbroker reactionaries of Reform UK have somehow posited themselves as the sole conduit for radicalism in England is being challenged. That must be a good thing ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-13n9

What Israel is doing is a barbarous offence against humanity and anybody who claims not to see that now is either a fool or a liar ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-13fM

If an independent Wales were to be ‘extremely poor’, and I don’t believe it would be, then it would, I hope, reflect the values of the people here. We would organise our resources according to those values and make it work ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-1343

"If the understanding of tech billionaires takes precedence over our own questing,then our lives become meaningless &, inevitably,dispensable." nation.cymru/opinion/smas... Increasingly my view is that AI's present path will make humanity redundant. @benwildsmith.bsky.social has not altered my view

The PM’s bizarre claim that Plaid Cymru would attempt to govern Wales with the Tories and Reform betrays the total ignorance and lack of interest that he and his team have in the election ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-12zv

As much as this cabinet isn’t full of real socialists, or real patriots, it’s startlingly short of capable centrists too. Its presentation is poor, its policies fall apart, and its personalities are loathsomely self-obsessed careerist hacks✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-12m1

When Labour’s vote collapses at the Senedd election next year, you can point not only to the party’s disloyalty and callousness in Westminster, but also to its blundering incompetence ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-11Y6

The broader the brush Farage brings to paint his disingenuous fantasies across our nation, the finer the pencil we should use to expose them ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-11Ok

If Cymru is to signal its distinctness next year by electing a Plaid Cymru-led government, then we should find the independence of spirit that has characterised the Irish response to events in the Middle East ✍️Ben Wildsmith buff.ly/4OWUMkA

My belief is that Wales is overwhelmingly against this war. If our politicians will not express that, then we must do so ourselves and never forget that we were so obliged ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-11q2

We are nowadays plagued with a class of politician whose chief skill is to plausibly excuse people from their responsibilities. Anything that is inconvenient can be waved off as ‘woke’ ✍️Ben Wildsmith wp.me/p8Mk4U-11bF

The ‘Welsh launch’ was nothing more than a press conference to move the news agenda on from the clearly fractious state of internal politics in Reform UK ✍️Ben Wildsmith buff.ly/7UgTMpq

Labour’s disappearing act during the miners’ strike revealed the unsettling void where its heart ought to be. From here on, its defining trait was negative. It no longer mattered what the party stood for, only that it wasn’t the Tories ✍️Ben Wildsmith

It seems likely that a Plaid Cymru led government will be installed next year and its radicalism needs to extend beyond social justice and the advancement of independence as the cure to all ills ✍️Ben Wildsmith buff.ly/aYfWMvz

With so many pubs gone, police stations no longer open to the public, libraries scarcer, and youth clubs largely consigned to history, we are being individualised into vulnerability ✍️Ben Wildsmith buff.ly/IBig9Ni

Reasoned debate has been reduced to a frantic game of musical chairs, with parties rushing to jump on policies that seem to be popular, whether those policies align with their professed values or not ✍️Ben Wildsmith

Keir Starmer, whose political instincts are rivalled only by Orville the Duck, noted the passing of Tory Britain today and opted to officially recognise Reform UK, with its five MPs, as the de facto opposition ✍️Ben Wildsmith

We’ve never been the luckiest nation on earth. Now it seems that our day in the sun might occur just before it implodes. ✍️Ben Wildsmith buff.ly/o4dwyuK

Appeals to reason have no currency in a nation where foundational trauma has been finessed into murderous paranoia by a Prime Minister who will be facing criminal charges the moment this war ends ✍️Ben Wildsmith