Horrendous. Feeling this morning for survivors, victims and their families. For people in Manchester and for Jewish families everywhere who will be feeling less safe.

The kinds of circs where you can get benefits (with difficulty) when on a visa with no recourse to public funds are eg. fleeing your home because of domestic abuse or your spouse dying. So this means brutalising and trying to deport people who have already had the worst things happen to them.

"Guys, got another idea to take back the agenda and show we're a sensible progressive party of government. Duke of Edinburgh, but we force all the foreigners to do it."

Getting mighty tired of the meme on here of “oh, it is just so difficult for the government to set the agenda”. The government (which literally employs thousands of press officers) is setting the agenda - it’s just that it is setting it on toxic ground it can’t win.

And you wouldn’t propose it explicitly as a means to crack down on today’s [insert unpopular minority group]. More to the point, if you design something for the purposes of a crackdown on rights then that is what it will be built for. To a hammer everything is a nail and all that.

“Guys I’ve got such a good comms idea…Let’s spin something as vaguely progressive for the Guardian and then let’s do it as a right coded dog whistle for the Telegraph. Because most people don’t have the internet, so nobody will ever see both or figure it out.”

Of course the only occasion on which we'll offer a critique of the Blair government is ... if it's just an opportunity to punch down on migrants again. Keir, you aren't going to reconnect with the public if you don't have a critique (and replacement) for the entire economic consensus of that era.

In the weeks between the 2016 US Election and Trump's first inauguration, I spoke to a lot of Federal employees who had thought the massive expansion of digital surveillance powers was safe because they liked the incumbent regime. Until they didn't. But by then it was far too late.

In a corporate owned care home, charging £1,800 a week. Residents face neglect/cruelty. Left in urine-soaked clothes, wet bedsheets, calls for help ignored, not showered for weeks, excrement in corridors, staff shortages. Cruelty is the norm when profits come before people.

Once again for everyone in the back: The appropriate response to fascist or fascist-adjacent policy is not “that’s unworkable and here’s why it won’t work”. It’s “that’s monstrous and here’s a strong statement of our values and vision”

Elite institutions spent years waging war exclusively on what they find annoying, because what was dangerous seemed abstract, unlikely, or too vast to tackle. If fascism were a loud college student confronting a NYT journalist at Le Diplomate, they'd deploy like SEAL Team 6.

If folks are going to try mounting a radical, progressive challenge to the creaking centre and the looming far right, please note: It is far too late in the day, and the stakes are far too high to be pulling shit like this.

think if you're broadly a centrist and were suuuuuper concerned about attacks on free speech from the left and so you decided to give the right a hearing then you need to realise you were taken for QUITE the ride (and don't really have anyone to blame but yourself)

Pointing out the hypocrisy in Conservative/ Right double standards for what counts as free or protected speech is important but its effect has a ceiling. The double standard isn’t an oversight, it’s the point. Message: we will have dominion over you and you will comply.

The important thing to note about Karen Attiah or Jimmy Kimmel or Mahmoud Khalil or any of the voices being expunged by the regime *isn’t* that the regime and its outriders called for their silencing. It’s that powerful, allegedly liberal institutions voluntarily complied. These were choices.

Now say it on camera.

Trump/Vance/Stephen Miller are busy spreading blatant lies and glossing over violence committed by the far-right. They're establishing a justification to unleash the government against anyone who opposes MAGA. All of this must be understood against the backdrop of Trump’s declining popularity.

An entirely predictable outcome of closing the skilled visa route for care workers: more and more commissioned agencies are filling growing workforce gaps with young people with no relevant experience but who can work part time on their student visa. Minimal training, high turnover. Disaster.

Excellent oratory: “People with selective rage… tell me I ought to have compassion for a man who had no respect for my own life…. How you die does not redeem how you lived…. I can abhor the violence that took your life - but I don’t have to celebrate how you chose to live.”

I've written to Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, urging them to join me in condemning Elon Musk's dangerous remarks inciting violence yesterday. As leaders, we must stand together and make clear Musk will face serious consequences for these actions.

Want to be clear that the predictable violence against the police wasn't the only problem with yesterday's march It's that 100,000 angry racists gathered in London for the biggest racist march in 50 years, and anyone not white had to steer clear The govt can't see that because they are inadequate.

There’s lots of attention on #Epstein & his victims but here’s another cracking story that’s closer to home: the ongoing saga of the women abused by #AlFayed at #Harrods and their struggle for justice. Nice one @sianushka.bsky.social www.opendemocracy.net/en/al-fayed-...

The right isn’t gaining ground because their insights are unique or their messages more effective. They have momentum because their leaders are working, consistently, to connect with their base, while social democrats wave a white flag. They aren’t political geniuses and they aren’t unbeatable.

It is completely unfathomable that in a media environment that litigates every editorial decision made by the BBC or other legacy media … the state, the press corps and so much of civil society look at the hellscape owned by this man and are just like “yes that’s fine let’s keep playing”.

Nothing good will come of this.

This feels like another fork in the road.

Love to bribe a demented game show host with big beautiful aircraft only to have my capital city bombed anyway

If anyone was still labouring under the belief that Netanyahu’s government is negotiating credibly or in good faith: He just bombed the negotiators. In the sovereign territory of a US ally. In the country that is hosting and facilitating negotiations. In broad daylight.

It's very hard to exaggerate how awful this is.

If Farage wins the next election, it will be down to one person. His name is Keir Starmer. This thread explains why. 1. Destroying faith in democracy. The UK decisively voted out the Tories, only for Starmer to give us a Continuity Tory government, shamefully beholden to economic power. 🧵

Pandemonium is the only word that comes close to describing the SCENES on the geriatric ward for half an hour after the government tested the national emergency warning system today …

Gonna say this til I'm blue in the face: wind and solar are inherently cheap forms of energy, but we are not benefitting from that because the energy market isn't working www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Hugh Bonneville started his live ITV London News interview on Downton Abbey by talking about Gaza.

Timeline cleanse

Today in “we just want our women and girls to be safe”.

Let’s see what the ethics adviser says, but maybe instead of all this jumping up and down, now would be a good time to discuss how we look after disabled children and build a more caring country.

Tbh I think Angela should pay stamp duty on all the space she occupies in the heads of right wing editors and journalists.

As an extension of this my theory is that the fracture of the extended family over the last 50 years or so has made what is only manageable as a group care and financial pooling effort become a solo endeavour and so the only component that can be adjusted now is how much you decide to put in.

Insane on so many levels, not least because Yvette Cooper chaired the 2018 Select Committee hearing into Windrush that we gave evidence to and which precipitated Rudd’s resignation. It’s not that people don’t know what they’re doing. They just don’t care. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Delhi & Beijing have done the on-again-off-again thing for about 70 years now. But I think that when future students of history piece together the story of how the unipolar moment ended slowly and then all at once, this will be one of the defining moments. www.ft.com/content/890c...

And we’ve decided to do nothing about this because ceding unregulated power over the digital commons to a narcissistic, ketamine-addled fascist with unprecedented wealth seems like something with no downsides.

Communities are being terrorised and terrified. I’m on a WhatsApp group where folks are talking about streets to avoid. Streets we grew up on. And yet it’s apparently unreasonable to hope that a theoretically centre-left Prime Minister might offer some moral clarity and moral leadership.

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)

Very hard to spend entire days, nights at someone’s bedside in a hospital corridor waiting fruitlessly, with hundreds of others, for urgent care, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world - and not conclude that this world is broken.

In which the political centre fails to realise that if you try to out-Farage Farage, he will very happily take that bet.

Too much focus on the appeal end imo, rather than the fact that almost half of Home Office decisions fail their own internal quality checks....

Genuinely baffled as to what Bertie Jenrick would have to do for any of the one in ten Tory MPs from an ethnic minority to go “steady on”. Turn up at their house in a Klan robe?

Much the largest UK protest on Friday was a Palestine solidarity protest in London at the Embassy of Israel, with a small pro-Israel protest. That isn't being covered as newsworthy by UK mainstream print/broadcast outlets who are following the smaller asylum protests www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/pr...

It’s been truly astonishing to watch Starmer’s team fail to learn from one of Sunak’s biggest mistakes: DO NOT RAISE THE SALIENCE OF ISSUES YOU’RE WEAK ON. Particularly in cases like this where there is nothing you can ever do to be seen as “tough enough” by those you’re trying to win over.

The lesson that should be taken from this is that people are influenced by the dominant conversations in their political/media environment. The lesson that will be taken is that this proves we just need to keep on talking about immigration.