This is a good thread on why political parties matter, but wanted to draw out this point as a reason why 'candidate diversity' matters, in that our life and career experiences will shape what the three or four things MPs know about (and are therefore most likely to rebel or be influential on).

Wondering what the longest period between Keir Starmer making a statement about race and Reform that it is not immediately undermined by something done by his ministers or aides has been. Three days?

you can argue against the state monopoly on the use of force, you can argue against the existing liberal international order, you can make all these arguments all you like, but at core there is simply no way to run a society without a Break Glass In Case Of Emergency that contains a sword

The only person to come out of the SPeggie/NHS tribunal vindicated and with a completely untarnished reputation is Dr Beth Upton. Not SPeggie, Not the NHS management, Not Four Women Scotland, Not the media, Just Dr Upton.

Every now and again I think about how, about two weeks into lockdown, it was popular to say that the pandemic had proved everything about cynical post-apocalyptic fiction wrong, and people were actually banding together blah blah blah

"Gender ideology" is a tell by itself, but it's always incredible when these people pop up to tell us gays we don't understand our own history. "Trans/Gender Ideology" is just "Gay Agenda" with a fake nose and moustache. The equivalences are plain as day to us.

On the one hand, I’ve seen Zarah Sultana with my own eyes. On the other, everything else increasingly suggests she can’t possibly be a real person.

I think Beth Upton is a fucking hero for putting up with the shit she put up with in the NHS Fife case, but we seriously need to legislate to make the law on trans people and sex and gender in the UK less nonsense.

When are we to expect newspaper front-page interview features with Dr. Beth Upton about her two-year ordeal of having her right to anonymity removed and her name dragged through the mud and being decried as a sexual predator only for a tribunal to clear her and find SHE was discriminated against?

This is just insane and why Shamima Begum was such a bad precedent. It's possible to be a bad person and to be British in Britain! We need to stop offloading our responsibilities on other countries which these people often have nothing to do with, all for the sake of a cheap public-baiting headline.

Louder for people in the back: the court rules trans women are not prevented from using women's spaces. Also your weekly reminder from a business school professor that trans status is still a protected category under the Equalities Act (2010).

I've written about the Farage antisemitism allegations - and my dismay at the behaviour of some who, now that the accused is more to their political liking, seem keen to sweep this all under the carpet. www.jewishnews.co.uk/farages-scho...

This statement appears to be untrue for 95-99% of British people convicted and imprisoned abroad

Remember when Helen Joyce was called out as "not an expert" by Australian courts - Now Maya Forstater has been told the same in the Peggie judgment! 👏👏👏 The judgement states outright that the evidence submitted by her & Sex Matters was “not skilled evidence.” This is the Tribunal’s exact wording!

I was at a manufacturing SME last week, and before I could even ask, I got introduced to the reps on the shop floor and proudly shown a new safety measure that had come directly from the reps raising it. Engaging with unions is just business as usual across the country. Don’t get the hysteria.

Um, this doesn't seem to acknowledge that you can have dual nationality and not be a migrant...

Sorry, Helen Lewis says it’s stupid to dismiss someone’s opinions because of their identity? Helen Fucking Lewis? How can she post with all of that glass surrounding her in her house?

Also, now that I made my 'but actually' post, I see the original tweet was very dishonest, unsurprising given the poster ia a forever lockdowner. It's the NHS' *reasonable worst case scenario* planning, so of course it assumes a certain level of doomerism. That's the point of the exercise.

Yeah, MPs openly siding with Peggie, BBC giving interviews with her lawyer, etc - all basically taking her winning as assumed. This should be hugely embarrassing for them and prompt a rethink, but of course the one technical winning ground will give them an excuse not to.

Let me try, and I won't turn off replies, and you can quote-post me if you like. Claire Lehman was and is a bad actor. She and the whole Quillette gang used "heterodox" as a way to make it sound sexy that they believed black people are genetically destined to be less intelligent than white people.

love the idea that while ICE won't respect your civil liberties they will totally let you get away with shooting one of them in the head.

Rules on single-sex spaces pose risk to trans people’s mental health, UK charities say

"House of Commons Jerk Seasoning" is 1) an extremely funny concept and more importantly 2) a sign of a complete and total victory for cultural pluralism in a way that is kind of difficult to concieve

The future of England is a Sunday roast with Yorkshire puddings and Jolof rice and that is not a force that can really be slowed

So I don't actually care what the label put on me says as long as people look at the label and know "oh, you're one of the people who works like this".

Almost as damaging as the refusal to do unpopular things is the refusal to admit that popular things can have negative consequences.

This is true, but IMO a big part of how the ALP has been able to do this is that they inherited a growing economy. So they can basically just funnel the proceeds of mining exports into public services and watch while the Coalition goes mental.

They didn't just buy them off, they quite often agreed with them! And they had history together as well, because they'd come up through the 1980s progressivist culture of the LCC bit of the party

cannot begin to tell you how happy I am to have stumbled upon the Paris building shared by metal music fans and the union for metal workers, what a delight

'UK has too many ADHD diagnoses' doesn't pass the smell test as explanation for UK's rising number of young people not in education, employment or training - ADHD diagnoses have gone up at similar rates across our peers, but the UK's rising NEETs are a UK issue.

Call me a wet, but I'm not *thrilled* at the apparently acceptable opinion that people not born in the UK - or those with three generations back of migrant background- should be banned from being MPs or working for the state

"but i was a based heterodox thinker" seems to be the rallying cry of the reactionary centre when encountering actual Schmittian politics

I could really do without the new trend of 'Starmer breaks his Trappist silence on the alarming deterioration in race relations' being greeted not by people going 'what kept you so long?' or the hotdog meme, or but 'what are you talking about?'

This dynamic is in part why Keir Starmer should have a good, regular Substack, because so much of important media is what I think of as 'derived' these days, i.e. it is TikTok or Facebook thread from someone who actually reads journalism repurposed or driving their opinions.

Freeman's going to whittle down the whole of humanity until the only people who are socially acceptable are herself and daughter-marrying elderly filmmakers who have been credibly accused by the children they didn't marry of abuse

This sort of carving up of the national population into discrete ethnic blocks based on familial origins is just so much more profoundly unBritish and antithetical to the Western tradition than *anything* happening in Hackney or Tower Hamlets or Birmingham etc

Again, the illegality of firing on shipwrecked mariners is so absurdly well established that it is used in the manual training material as the example of an order *so obviously illegal* that no further information would be required for a servicemember to be obligated to refuse it.

Three more British MEPs in Nigel Farage’s bloc now alleged to have “followed the script” given to Nathan Gill by an alleged Russian asset, according to prosecutors. At least eight UKIP and Brexit Party MPs were focus of efforts by Nathan Gill www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The thing about Sam Ashworth-Hayes is he thinks it's fine and good for kids to go hungry and live in poverty provided they're brown.

By the way, at least half the time someone proposes a ban on dual citizenship in the US or UK, if you scratch the surface it’s antisemitism

If "Western civilization" has any salience as a contemporary political principle then it is an ideological commitment to rational inquiry, constitutional government, representative democracy, rule of law, civil liberties, separation of church and state, and free markets. Not Granichary brigandry.

It's interesting that British politics has been so slow to master social media/internet distribution, given how quickly British politicians mastered newspapers, radio & TV when they were new tech. Baldwin would have built a podcast studio in Downing Street & be pumping out content all the time

You can change the law! You can change the law! You can change the law!

my great-grandparents arrived in the UK in the 1890s with nothing. they sold pickles from the front room window, took in laundry, worked as tailors. their children were nurses, teachers, salesmen. their grandchildren were professors, designers, opticians, doctors, magistrates, entrepreneurs.

What's just fan-fucking-tastic is that all these horrible immigration policies are designed to win over the white working class. Well they can see non-high earners being called takers not givers too. Bet hero voters just love being called spongers.

one of the most popular book series of the 1950s was about a guy who had a magic ring he inherited and could have used to defend Gondor and he just didn’t

You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.

Lars Porsena of Clusium, by the Nine Gods he swore. That the great house of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more. By the Nine Gods he swore it, and named a trysting day, And bade his messengers ride forth, East and West and South and North, To summon his array

The fundamental problem with this in regard to Russo-Ukraine is that Putin has repeatedly said why he launched the War, and it has nothing to do with energy or resources.