The questioning here is so vapid, and they react to the idea of a public health approach to drugs like he's coming out with some mad shit that should barely be entertained Prohibition doesn't stop people taking drugs, it just fuels crime and drives people to more risky behaviours. We can do better!

TLDR the normative idea of ‘good politics’ that Peston et al endorse is tautological Centrism—“what most people will like is the centre, because the centre is what most people will like”—and they refuse to recognise that it is precisely this politics, both the project and product, that people hate.

I was talking to a friend recently about how you hardly ever see that weird “walkable cities are ableist” discourse anymore. So this is honestly kind of nostalgic

Ending political prosecutions of pro-Palestinian activists would be a pretty basic start here

This gets to my suspicion of Burnham’s expression of mild regret around Gaza. You’re the party who dragged Britain into Iraq. If you want to show you’re serious about ‘mistakes’ over Gaza then tell me who’s facing arrest or which Israeli arms manufacturers you’re going to kick off British soil.

Surely can't be too many more of these summers before people start realising there's a serious, urgent problem that needs addressing

It was clear from the very start that what Israel was doing in Gaza was genocide (every clip in the compilation below is from October 2023) And yet over two & a half years later Andy Burnham still refuses to call it genocide. Why? Because if he did, he'd have to take action as PM

She’s ready to be hurt again!

I do think a lot of Starmer-friendly journalists underestimated how bad this made him look tbh. I think they expected anger from disgruntled Corbynites, but didn't factor in that even people who weren't at all sympathetic to Labour or the left were basically getting introduced to this guy as a liar

This is it lads. I can feel it. *This* is the little piece of ostentatious cruelty that finally kills off Reform. They're done for now, practically no point in them even running. More good work by the political geniuses of Blue Labour!

This is the consensus of every major Israeli party, it's just completely forbidden to acknowledge that in American discourse or suggest that it should influence our policy towards Israel.

Yes that’s the definition of a child, well done

we really don't talk about how centrists have gone insane in the past 4 years

the purest artifact of high millennial cultural is broad city imo

Quite annoying how debates around adaptation don't emphasise that unless you reach net zero, the planet just keeps getting hotter and you just keep having to adapt until we can't survive! Adaptation is a response to our failure, it is NOT the solution to climate change

Heaven forfend anyone think that the last 40 years of policy making might not have got us to a brilliant place. Now, off to pay this massive PFI bill on all our hospitals and wag our finger at a water exec pumping sewage into our rivers who will definitely do something about it

Called my landlord to ask him if he would consider installing the AC. He told me that he would not, as his atavistic cultural impetus to reject non-European solutions compels him to scorn on the technological boons of our Atlantic neighbours. He added something about needing Catholic guilt to work.

The actions Starmer said Israel had "the right" to take are precisely those cited by the ICC when issuing Netanyahu's arrest warrant "depriv[ing] the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival, including ... water, ... and electricity" www.icc-cpi.int/news/situati...

For those of us who see Palestinians as human beings, this was Starmer's defining moment. It is not sustainable to behave in this way while leading the nominally progressive party in a two party system. Starmer's unpopularity is not one of life's great mysteries. www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8_s...

This is the 'fairer' UK Starmer says he is leaving us with.

Nobody wants what they’re selling, and this is a democracy, so the system should reflect that. But, what they are selling is non-negotiable and keeping it is not up for debate. Better hope Burnham is a better salesman for it, or else.

telling trump before the public he nominally represents is perhaps the ultimate 'he died how he lived' lmao a CIA bitch to the last

Putting everything else aside, the past few years have amply demonstrated that Keir Starmer is a vacuous careerist who didn’t have any actual ideas for governing, but simply believed he had earned it like the final promotion, so it’s both hilarious and pathetic of him to bring his kids into it now.

Four people in hospital after knife attacks in Edinburgh. An arrest made. BBC report say man shouted about "protecting the country". Sone signs the attacks near a mosque at petrol station & pizzeria may have had anti-Muslim or anti-migrant/minority motives (tbc) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Mona Khalil, Lebanon’s most well-known sea turtle conservationist, died of her wounds today after being injured by an Israeli strike I feel sick

RNN: The IOF carried out waves of strikes on #Lebanon in the moments before the 4 PM [ceasefire] deadline, totaling 150 strikes in one day. The IOF then continued to bomb Kfar Tebnit and Nabatiyeh after it had passed.

my Middlemarch book group is coming to an end after 8 months (because we are about to finish Middlemarch) & we are beginning the process of choosing our next book. The only criteria is it should be big. I’m considering War & Peace (not read) or Portrait of a Lady (read as a teen but not since).

Two days ago, a man in Hull was sentenced to 26 months in jail (suspended for 18 months) and 250 hours of unpaid work for selling CDs containing "unauthorised remixes of well-known tracks"

it is kind of funny in very bleak way how the pro-Israel lobby and Bibi burned massive amounts of political capital to get this, probably the worst non-catastrophic outcome for them. whoops.

Don't laugh. "Memorandum of Understanding" is how we say inshallah in my culture...

Really insightful interview with Shady Lewis, who, as some of you may have seen, won the James Tait Black Prize this year - in somewhat complicated circumstances that he reflects on generously in the piece. Loved the discussion of comedy and power. Thanks to @pastachips.bsky.social for the heads-up!

we're becoming a literal police state. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Entirely related, because nobody does effective policy around tech. Nobody.

That's right.

i do think we should probably have some kind of societal reckoning about how phones are designed to be incredibly addictive (maybe involving some kind of regulation of tech companies idk) but this is simultaneously extremely ludicrous and extremely authoritarian .... classic starmer really

I’m so high and I’m looking at my cat. Just look at him

hard to imagine a more obscene travesty of justice. a disgusting undemocratic stitch up, carried out in defence of the most barbaric war crimes of my lifetime. this judge and this government are the lowest of the low

The gulf between the treatment of Labour's proposals, which are very extreme and would result in the deportation of the c.250,000 care workers here on those visas, and the coverage is incredibly stark.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The story of Icarus provides us with a valuable lesson: never fuck up real bad

What a lovely story this is, I had completely missed the viral original but all of it is absolutely wonderful:

The houses of ethnic minorities in Belfast didn’t ’go on fire’ last night - as my radio has told me - they were set alight

Asked about Belfast Mark Rowley talks about people overseas whipping up division to create disorder & he specifically mentions Russian & Iranian state actors Its not Russia & Iran orchestrating the far right violence we're seeing, but Rowley has a job to do & he's doing it

This is what a pogrom looks like: men in masks coming to drive you from your home. This is a collective failure of our political and media class because we did not have the courage to say no, and because too many were allowed to embrace this without shame

Free Speech Champion(tm) Bari Weiss demanding CBS News smear an American executed by her government for protesting bsky.app/profile/elio...