There's nowhere else to go for a lot of us and, for all its flaws and hostility, this is actually home. We are rooted. But every so often I feel this brief flicker of spite and think "fuck them, let's all leave, take everything we've built and given, good luck to them." And I hate that I feel it.

Ok but this is totally something Charlotte Church would do

VERY funny that Labour are being pointlessly cruel and haemorrhaging support from their base and yet none of what they're offering is ever going to be enough for the people whose approval they're seeking, WHO could have predicted it

I swear a lot of the Government's problems would be solved by just taking themselves off of Twitter

"Aha!" said the comms guy. "If we do something the right craves then they'll cover it and like us too!" Multiple news channels on at the leisure centre. Lots of rolling coverage of the asylum crackdown. Not GB News - they had a discussion about how Reeves "plans to tax the sugar in milkshakes". 🙃

Leaders of today's political centre will turn their noses up at bold, radical economic policies and say "that won't work, it's performative to suggest otherwise". And yet they have no such hesitation about performative cruelty that ruins lives and still fails to meet their stated goals.

The very idea that Wes Streeting could/would provide the kind of values-based leadership and oratory that connects with human beings and brings back voters lost to the left and right is peak Westminster bubble brain rot.

Yes, the cashier on their feet full-time should be able to afford rent, groceries, and healthcare with their paycheck. And the custodian. And the fry cook. And the waitress. And and and.

The "why do you care so much about the NY mayoral election" takes strike me as pretty obtuse. The world's sole superpower is being taken over by fascists, and this was part of the struggle to define what the opposition to that will look like. That obviously has major implications for all of us?

Cuomo's gift to us is the debunking of the myth that racism, oligarchy and entitlement are the preserve of the parties of the right. Never forget that the harshest treatment of a 34 year old Muslim of unimpeachable integrity and raw talent came from the Democratic establishment's favoured son.

left-winger wins: BUT WILL HE DELIVER right-winger wins: WHY ARE THE LEFT SO OUT OF TOUCH

A great day for the golden rule of political analysis: when the right wins it is a resounding ideological victory that humiliates the left and when the left wins it is a precarious fluke that will surely end up humiliating the left. Conservatives are power’s landlords and the left merely tenants

23 things on my to-do list before a flight tonight but all the Christmas ads (and associated takes) are dropping everywhere I look...

There was a moment after the Trump-Zelensky Oval blowout, and then again after the tariff war began, in which even fiscally conservative finance ministers saw an opportunity to say "the world has changed, so must our policy frameworks". That logic doesn't really work as well eight months later.

Jesus Christ. We go mad about one bloke we wrongly released, yet hear next to nothing about this horror? www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

⚠️ ICYMI: Our new report shatters mainstream consensus on voters' priorities and reveals that concerns around immigration are being inflamed by media exposure and political discourse, rather than being based on experience. https://www.bestforbritain.org/the_uks_biggest_challenges

How short our memories are. Just a few years ago, nurses carried this country through a pandemic, and now they're suffering a 55% surge in racist abuse. To every nurse: London stands with you. You are loved and valued, and always will be.

It‘s going to be a wild ride tomorrow when pundits around the globe explain to us what kind of party D66 is and why they did exactly what they have always told us their favorite strategy is And just to emphasize it again: yes, PVV is down by a lot but the other two far-right parties are up by a lot

Reposting my @theguardian.com piece on today’s election in the Netherlands. Since then, PVV & CDA have dropped and D66 has risen in polls. Biggest 3 parties will be small and probably close together. If Wilders doesn’t come first, “peak populism” will be media frame — it will again be nonsense.

This is absolutely right. It’s about creating a permission structure for violence, whether that violence is conducted by the state directly or simply permitted by the state.

The “pushback” here is that Zohran refers to his Dad’s cousin as his aunt. Which leads me to ask … how is your dad’s cousin not your aunt? Have I missed something? Truly one of those moments when Anglo/ Western European culture feels incredibly quaint and not remotely intuitive.

Nothing on the BBC Radio news this morning. Nothing I could find on their website. This is an MP from the party whose lead in the opinion polls normally ensures them wall-to-wall coverage. She spouts racist nonsense for which even she feels obliged to apologise. What on earth are they playing at?

Best canvassing they've managed all by-election

Why do right's odious lies & horrifying claims break through not merely as rhetoric but policy? Because center-left keeps wielding thermometers to take temperature while right power up flame throwers to change it. New evidence from Germany: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?

Joking in your Young Republican group chat about the mass murder of 6 million people who'd been scapegoated for decades as morally degenerate ethnic/religious outsiders is just locker room talk. Speaking lightly of the murder of Charlie Kirk to your 400 friends on Facebook is a fireable offense.

We are at the stage of institutional/state decay where: The nurse tells you that you have to stay the night because there aren't enough nurses to care for your loved one. And then another nurse tells you to leave the hospital in the middle of the night because visiting hours are over.

We should all hope upon hope that the ceasefire holds. And it's also ok to be skeptical about Trump's intentions here. But Biden/Harris dems would do well to reflect on the fact that the tools available to Trump (making US support a tiny bit more conditional) were all available to his predecessor.

If you can spell/pronounce Cuomo you can spell/pronounce Mamdani.

Even just a couple years ago, Jenrick would have already been sacked for this and would be a pariah from across the political spectrum, including most of the media. The change we’ve seen over the last ten years is incredibly stark. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

"Polarisation may be an unhelpful term .... It implies that both sides are becoming equally extreme. Arguably the real dynamic is that elements of the right have hardened, embracing positions that would have been unacceptable a decade ago" on.ft.com/46TGRHs by @henrymance.ft.com 1/

JUST IN: A UK mosque was set ablaze with two people still inside in a suspected arson attack that police are treating as a hate crime.

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.