I know what this is actually about but I feel like a sincere wish to end the passage of time hits hard rn

So for them it was a Big Brother scheme. For the NHS, they would have to ask everyone for their ID cards when accessing treatment, to avoid the racial profiling your describe. In the end, the project fell down under the weight of its own requirements. It was either too big or too expensive, or both.

ID cards have got to be used for everything and anything, like proving your right to NHS treatment or your right to work. For the security services, it was about needing to use your ID card when paying for things, so that it can be spotted if you're spending time with known terrorists... 2/

I worked on the ID cards project in the Home Office under Blair. I was charged with coming up with a high-level benefits case for the scheme. Everything you say was discussed at the time back then. To be useful and to justify the massive cost of introducing a universal, compulsory scheme 1/

folk are noting that this is a step in the right direction against elite impunity and that is definitely important but crucially it is also very funny

also "an id card you use to report potholes" is such a "dying days of the Blair government" policy, it's only missing some kind of league table and/or a way to Punish The Youths

"They don’t want to spend hours navigating opaque systems or wrangling paperwork just to get the services they are entitled to." there are cases where the systems and paperwork could be streamlined, but isn't all the basic stuff available through government gateway or gov.uk

The Reform vision of the UK is Dubai but without the glamour. It really is that simple, and it’ll take years for lobby journalists on six figure salaries to figure this out

reading this debate - less than a decade ago - is wild in terms of how much the tenor of discussion about trans people's lives has changed, especially since a certain SNP MP contributes briefly, before she went off the deep end

I feel like at this point even if you're a nailed-on blairite the man himself is the worst possible vehicle for his politics

london-based journalists being normal about anywhere north of the Watford Gap for one second challenge (impossible)

I woke up today to find out that someone has clearly dug up all the herbs in my planter, so that's a great way to start things off

CHOTINER: So your son is 14, is that right? IKARI: It's complex, Isaac. If— CHOTINER: And the “robot” he pilots, that’s actually the child of an alien you keep crucified in the basement, which is possessed by the spirit of his dead mother? IKARI: Look, let me answer the question. CHOTINER: Sure.

the potential edinburghisation of scottish politics has thankfully faded a *little* now Labour's support has cratered, but yeah this was a deeply cynical move that might still have repercussions

my favourite "actually reading the primary source" is the exact opposite - going to read The Tragedy of The Commons and finding it to be a rambling, barely-coherent rant, mostly about overpopulation

beyond everything else, Singal is both monomaniacal and sloppy; back on the other place he was trying to get into it with Michael Hobbes based on something said in the Cass Report, and mistook a reference to NHS England (the public body) to mean "the NHS in England", completely changing the meaning

Consider a simple analogy. Imagine that we are back in Ur. You are Nanni, a trader who has sent your messenger to buy fine quality copper ingots. However, Eā-Nasir has put before your messenger copper-identified metal with blue hair and pronouns

being anti-trans just breaks your brain, man, even as an analogy/thought experiment this just doesn't scan

The Economist was also the first mainstream organisation to give Megan McArdle a position that wasn't just making innumerate claims about the Iraq War, we have so much to thank them for

...knowing Jəsse's the author (& that gender-affirming care practitioners are well aware of his biases & tactics) utterly changes the meaning of the last paragraph. without attribution, it makes it sound like the authors are suspiciously dodging the question. in actuality they know he's a bad actor!

The Economist's house style of not naming their article writers (acknowledged downthread here) has always struck me as a bit of a marketing tactic and/or a good way to launder nonsense - as we can see with using Singal to write about studies on trans people and identities

The "Glasgow should have a mayor" report that also caused a stooshie a few months back was also an 8-page precis with little actual detail, although in that case they did actually include references (mostly to their other publications and articles, but baby steps eh)

The purpose of Reports like these is to get press inches rather than meaningfully contribute to the policy discussion, but the one being talked about here is pretty impressively bad even by think tank standards; it's an 8 page long precis.

The art in the Star Trek Adventures RPG can be variable but "Klingons and Andorians playing ice hockey" is both delightful and my primary example of how the game just Gets trek as a whole

really doing their best to disprove "change through power, not protest" as an organising principle

Just to illustrate how much worse it's got, I have received more abuse over the past year and a bit - including death threats and a large volume of antisemitism - for what I write than in the previous 15 years of covering migration and the far right put together.

it's actually really interesting me that no one who goes on about reaching people through social media has even tried to engage on tiktok or instagram.

I'm not sure they respect academics, but they do respect the cachet it supposedly provides - this might all go back to the status anxiety thing, though I don't want to make that all-encompassing

what happens when we really lean into the "dictatorship" part of elective dictatorship?

I sometimes feel "landfill indie" is a bit unfair as a pejorative but then I remember this steaming turd of a song, just malign on every level

The Trump administration is, in effect, dismantling one of the most successful and effective programmes of building and projecting soft power around the world in modern history, and then when it reaps the inevitable consequences, it will turn around and blame China. You could set a watch to it.

not ever been a massive dance music guy but this absolutely sucks

curd-person shooter

I suspect we are going to find out exactly why chromosome testing was phased out the first time, having learned absolutely nothing

As usual with this issue, Harris is calling for a compromise that already exists. Every sporting body has standards for how long athletes must be on hormones before they can compete as women. The problem isn’t that we’re ignoring ‘reasonable concerns,’ the problem is that republicans are lying.

I would be absolutely fascinated to know where "80 percent of the social media posts that inflamed the polarization [...] were provided by Russian and Chinese bots." came from if it wasn't entirely from Syed's arse

On the Rest is Entertainment Q&A, Richard answers a listener question about why bestseller lists don’t include audiobook numbers and why Kindle is sometime more expensive than print, with some embarrassingly incorrect reckons presented as fact. Prestige podcasting is amazing sometimes.

The town is called Vidor. Here's a story about it from 2022 but it's been notorious for a long, long time. www.newsweek.com/black-truck-... - just in case political commentators want to know what "we are going to have to live here with each other" looks like in real terms, and not just in "debates".

guys is it A Threat To Free Speech when the mods have had enough of my shit

Exhibition opening soon! Combining Efforts: 200 Years of Trade Union History explores the development of trade unions since the 1825 Combination Act, through years of struggle, triumph, defeat, and resilience. With TUC Library @londonmetuni.bsky.social @tuc.org.uk www.lse.ac.uk/library/what...

I thought the borders dark chocolate ginger biscuits could not be improved upon but the dark chocolate raspberry ones are insanely good

Who supported the far right in Australia and Britain in the 1930s? I wrote this post which provides an overview of the scholarship on class support for the British Union of Fascists and the New Guard. Did Anglophone fascism have cross-class appeal? hatfulofhistory.com/2025/09/06/c...

South_by_SouthwestREALby_XxX1337g0dXxX.exe

"like all affirmative action policies, this will mean that at least some hires will be less qualified than their liberal colleagues" is a load bearing conceit for this entire piece and I'm not sure that's actually true

this is sorely testing my resolve not to go full Lego Guy

what is Paradise Lost

sorry to bang on about this and I know I'm preaching to the choir but I am honestly wondering how the Rachel who wrote this article just a couple of years ago squares the new article below? Or this one, explicitly about rape jokes (in the Met) www.newstatesman.com/thestaggers/...

I think it might be a good idea if we had some standards around what The Lads could say at work, yes

this was stuff going around Labour's internal messaging system, which makes it a work issue - Cunliffe trying to turn this into "oh gosh just think about the skeletons rattling around *your* closet" just muddies the water

Me, campaigning against intergenerational inequality: woohoo! Scrap the triple lock! Me, retiring without a defined benefit pension: well this sucks. what the fuck.