We have so much good evidence for cash transfers but so many just refuse to accept that those in poverty can make good decisions.

Yeah this is a good point - it's very small numbers of people as a portion of the country which is great, except for some reason our media and political class have decided that they are objectively the most important segment of the electorate and must be appeased at all costs.

As I said recently in The Guardian: "Despite their hopes to the contrary, anti-trans campaigners have not won the hearts and minds they believed the Supreme Court would give them" So they turn to this; desperate, fascistic calls for the destruction of those they hate (framed as ideas, not people).

It’s worth mentioning, though it’s been said repeatedly: the Lizzie Line carries 1/6th of UK daily rail passengers (not including the Tube) and has already paid off its entire costs. And if HS2 had been committed to, without plans being tweaked every 5 minutes, Phase 1 would be opening next year.

Much like Labour, the BBC has burned its natural supporters to chase the populist right, who inevitably continue to despise it

there are many horrible brainworms you can catch online but none of them are as all-encompassing in their destruction of you as a human being as transphobia start down that road and you become incapable of normal human interaction

Poorest Britons lose right to financial privacy. The Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Act 2025 empowers the state to 24/7 snoop on the bank accounts of recipients of universal credit; employment and support allowance; state pension credit. No court order needed. No right of appeal.

If you didn't know Wes Streeting was a lying sack of shit, read what he says here and compare to what the BMA say. www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-s...

Canceling the northern leg of HS2 was an act of insane self-harm

In August, after 6 years of planning, £80m spent, and a nimby campaign, the government cancelled plans to relocate a sewage treatment works north of Cambridge Now, as a result, a much-needed housing development might be half the size originally planned www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

They did this shit when I was trying to approve a payment for a taxi, never felt a stronger urge to hurl my phone into the sea

This is unhinged and unworkable and must not become law

New post that I hope anyone who cares about human rights/the rule of law reads. If the UK Govt can use a 30 year old threat of terrorism to conceal the release of *outline* information about its agents' connection to murder, it really can act with impunity: ukconstitutionallaw.org/2025/12/18/a...

A very thorough drubbing in which no single part of the TERF case is given any quarter, and it is ruled to be a pile of bollocks from beginning to end.

CJEU, border controls 🚨 MASSIVE defeat for Frontex in two judgments - the agency is liable if it assists Member States to do pushbacks etc in breach of human rights; rules of evidence are simplified for migrants curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/Jo...

December 17th and 300 postgraduate application files just dropped, to be read, evaluated, scored, commented, and ranked by mid-January. Why is academia

That old stick about the Roman Empire, and how the actual sign of the collapse was a bridge falling down and nobody coming to fix it.

Still 1.8% more than the higher education pay offer this year

Looking forward to the government ignoring this entirely and doing what they were going to do anyway (giving the UK creative sector up to US tech companies for free)

So much of the commentary on the FWS judgment has been driven by reflexive responses to the outcome, but there are so many gaps and leaps in its reasoning that it will spawn litigation for years to come - @aoifemod.bsky.social and I flag some failings in judge craft: nilq.qub.ac.uk/index.php/ni...

Oh, the Nazi site is full of Nazis and also everyone normal who goes there turns into a Nazi? And now you want us to go there?

This has popped up on my feed again so your occasional reminder that, if your business cannot turn a profit when acting within the law, you don’t have a legitimate business

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss Doubling down on effectively excluding trans and non-binary individuals from public spaces. www.bbc.com/news/article...

It was 22 years ago that I unmasked the highest placed spy for British military intelligence inside the IRA This week, the British state tried to say it was all over It’s not. Justice will remain denied until the army is forced to reveal exactly what it did My story in @heraldscotland.bsky.social

The fact is no presenter has ever had to leave the BBC for expressing conservative views, or even explicitly endorsing a right-wing party. Was never a problem for Jeremy Clarkson. Was never a problem for Andrew Neil. Was never a problem for Alan Sugar

Robin Ince once more showing what an amazing person he is. It's tragic that we are in a world where opposing transphobia and hate means having to resign, while being transphobic and hateful means getting regularly featured by national media outlets.

Sam Altman: hey I made a machine that stole literally all your stuff in order to make CSAM of your child actors, sometimes it encourages people to kill themselves Disney: Holy shit here's a billion dollars Altman: the machine loses more than that each week but thank you. Soon it will become god.

Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content

The divergence between what the Master of the Rolls thinks AI can do for litigation (left) and the reality of it (right) is stark. I wish he spent more time dealing with cases infected by it. (The 2nd quote is from Re: D [2025] EWCA Civ 1570, handed down yesterday).

Tighter visa rules will cost UK up to £10.8bn giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

This entire grift relies on convincing people that they don't know how to do the things they have always known how to do, and ironically, if it works, we will, in a very short amount of time, forget how to do all the things we have always known how to do.

Radio 4 and BBC and Channel 4 News and all the papers completely skewing the Peggie story so your average person will have no idea what actually happened. Doesn’t this make you furious? Integrity in journalism is dead, not just in the US

The latest Kenova report details how MI5 prevented Stakeknife investigations, but we continue to see claims of "lawfare" being used against the UK in conflict legacy cases. The manifest failings in many Troubles investigations is what is driving current legal actions: www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cv...

Both the "Continue" button and the "Try it now" button do *the same thing* in what is the clearest example of a dark pattern I've ever seen. Imagine someone is getting metrics about the "number of Google Docs users who are using AI" and all the numbers are total bullshit.

Is this a new thing? Bluesky on desktop just now asking me to give them my date of birth - not for messages, for the home feed

BBC News at Ten coverage of this was all about how Sandie Peggie won, quoting her legal team's description of the case, taking Peggie's perspective throughout, calling it a victory, talking about the "competing rights of women and transgender people" - and not one mention at any point of the below

Bernie's a Luddite (complimentary)

My thread earlier focused on the discussion re. FWS - but I just want to draw this out really explicitly: The press absolutely monstered Dr Beth Upton in the most appalling way – only for the Tribunal to find that Beth had done nothing wrong, but that Sandie Peggie had harassed her.

The real victim at the centre of this absurd case is very clearly Dr Beth Upton To witness the way in which she’s been dehumanised and vilified by Peggie and their (Sex Matters) legal team, the tribunal judge, the British media, and UK politicians has been beyond horrifying Solidarity Beth

The “Labour” Party finds itself arguing ordinary workers, carers and others are “takers”.

For non-Brits: one of these people has for years been held up as a lion of personal courage, bravely standing up to vicious bullies, and the other was denounced at astonishing intensity as a Stalinist thug imposing their crazy beliefs on others by force. Would you like to guess which is which?

On the other hand, think of all of the time which has been wasted attempting to regulate something which is getting wound up before it even got built.

This is what happens when you view human creative expression not as something to be experienced and appreciated and savoured, but as just content to be consumed

My @politicshome.bsky.social story from the summer about the AI-generated "I rise to speak" phenomenon in Parliament has made it into @nytimes.com 🇺🇸 (sadly, without credit)

We're watching the wholesale burning of every scrap of dignity afforded to trans people in the UK, their rights, their medical services, their employment, their place within society, their bodily functions. It is a disgrace, and a disgusting stain on the government and media of this country.

The WI has been trans inclusive since the 70s, before I was born. Do you see who in this scenario was innocently minding their own business, coming to their own arrangements locally? Do you see who is forcefully imposing themselves and their demands upon others, via threats.

For non-Brits: nobody can afford to get sued by revved-up wingnuts and crackpots armed with JK Rowling’s money, and nobody wants to be the next organisation protested by the far right and monstered into the heart of the earth by the world’s most poisonous media outlets. So they are folding.

(It’s here:)

Royal Mail have written a GDPR policy for their letter to Santa scheme that is a) pitched at children explaining how their data is used and b) fully committed to the existence of Father Christmas and it’s just… really cute