If this intends to make it legally compulsory for every adult in Derry to carry something called a "Brit Card", then I'm willing to offer some high-paid consultancy on why this plan might be flawed.

It can never be stressed enough how different the practical rules of politics are for the right and the left. People used to say that this was just bias sensitivity, or cherrypicking, but nobody does any more, cause you just can’t ignore it.

Cannot stress enough how it is already possible to report potholes www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

For-profit age-verification providers are now pushing for "continuous biometric monitoring" — AI scans of your face, your voice, your behavior — while you're online to protect children. Every session. Every website. Every keystroke. Monitored and recorded.

Fox demands farmer scraps chicken wire

The McCullough Review on the PSNI's covert measures against journalists, lawyers etc... www.psni.police.uk/sites/defaul...

🤨

Suspect this New Statesman deep dive into the Tony Blair Institute makes the case that the correct "Economist descriptor" for the TBI is now "Oracle dealership" rather than "think tank" www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

Incredible stuff

It is possible to cherish the BBC as an institution while also saying that BBC News is failing very badly, day after day, in its duty to inform and that it always fails in a right-wing direction. It desperately needs to recover its integrity

The most successful novelist of her generation can't actually enter this country to accept an award for fear of arrest, someone tell the BBC

What on Earth is this? An "in depth" BBC article about free speech in the UK that only cites examples of right-wing/ 'anti-woke' speech being suppressed. How can you mention Lucy Connolly but completely ignore Palestine Action / Just Stop Oil? Gob-smacking. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Truly facile, awful analysis by Nick Robinson normalising hate speech by 'ordinary people' and equating it with free speech. The boiling point is too many of Britain's commentators unthinkingly wading in the toxic swamp of X and believing it is what passes as normal.

why did you buy a slop machine if you didn't want slop

Useful reminder from Peter Kellner on the problems we refuse to acknowledge are getting better, and the politics of hopelessness that this breeds open.substack.com/pub/kellnerp...

Nick Robinson credulously wonders how the UK got to the point where Farage and Vance and Steve Forbes compare it to North Korea and a "tin-pot dictatorship" And it's all about Lucy Connolly and Graham Linehan and young people doing cancel culture What the actual fuck is this

My new piece in @the-independent.com on the UK's tech prosperity deal: The deal does not only leave the UK even more dependent on US tech companies, it also once again shows how out of step the country is with tech sovereignty debates in the rest of Europe. www.independent.co.uk/voices/starm...

It would be good if the only political pushback against Nigel Farage's plans to mass deport hundreds of thousands of our neighbours, friends, family and colleagues didn't just come from a handful of backbench MPs and one regional mayor

Also this week, in an interview with Mumsnet, Streeting advocated for trans segregation. www.mumsnet.com/news/wes-str...

Lot of people dunking on this, but it's good to see Mark Zuckerberg getting back to the thing that first made him passionate about coding: rating girls online.

Woah. It's one thing for Trump to ban journalists from White House press conferences; it's another for Downing Street to do his bidding on UK soil.

UK meritocracy and social mobility update from The Guardian

Bemoaning the cost of UK electricity and in the same breath promising to do the one thing guaranteed to cause that cost to stay sky high is the sort of intellectual brilliance you'll only get from the world's leading tech moguls.

This is good on the utter incoherence of the government's tech policy - which essentially amounts to: fuck the UK tech sector, give it all to the Americans Bad for Britain, great for US tech oligarchs

The people who *make this tech* can't get it to work in a simple demo, and their magical thinking about it has convinced them that they didn't need to do the most basic level of preparation for their demonstration. So it is, in fact, an excellent demonstration of what genAI will do for society.

Over the weekend, the world's richest man appeared on screens in central London to call for a race war and for the UK government to be overthrown. No arrests were made in connection with that communication.

Fantastic work here by @transsolidarity.bsky.social, highlighting the ridiculous burden the EHRC’s new Code of Practice would place on UK business, forcing them into trans-exclusionary practices that are “incompatible with modern business values”. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

So right-wing oligarchs now control X, Facebook, TikTok, WaPo, Fox News, CBS...and others not controlled by them are capitulating. Do I have that right?

@consilium.europa.eu to prepare common position on simplifying data rules for AI Attachés will also raise the ePrivacy Directive in an upcoming working party to address “cookie consent fatigue” - @euractiv.com www.euractiv.com/news/council...

"Every country was put on notice by the ICJ that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza.. every country became obliged under the law.. not to speak fine words, to take action to prevent genocide.. that obligation was activated on 24th Jan 2024" Chris Sidoti spells it out

Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, says UN inquiry

Another thing I love about the present moment - Musk regularly goes 'don't worry, we are going to change THAT' whenever Grok produces an answer that doesn't align with his priors, yet the British Labour government thinks that they are going to be able to land an argument on there in 2029.

100,000 people attended Trans Pride in London. It didn't almost immediately descend into chaos with attendees launching projectiles at police in order to get to those counterprotesting to try and beat the seven shades out of them. Yet, this lot are treated as the "legitimate concerns" brigade.

And this has happened *without* a massive sea change of actual popular opinion in favour of these thugs; the elite flip has not been responding to the public, but to social media

Still absolutely nothing to say about far right thugs rioting and attacking the police while a US tech billionaire calls for a violent insurrection on our streets

"sovereign" has lots of different meanings when people talk about tech, AI, cloud, etc so it can be a bit unclear what people mean - but as far as I'm aware none of them include this

Someone at the BBC needs to learn about the far right and internet culture, quickly

For the day that's in it, read Conor Gearty's piece from 2014 on the fantasies that underpin English public law: ukconstitutionallaw.org/2014/11/13/c...

For the day that's in it, read Conor Gearty's piece from 2014 on the fantasies that underpin English public law: ukconstitutionallaw.org/2014/11/13/c...

Juliet Samuel in The Times today, giving a remarkably selective account of the ECHR's development, especially when the UK was using torture techniques in the 1970s in NI, and was only held (partially) to account under the ECHR. The sort of triumph of forgetting in which London columnists specialise.

Post doc opportunity on computational infrastructures "How do computational infrastructures expand into sectoral organizations? Are current (digital) policies adequate in responding to their impact on administration of justice?" careers.tudelft.nl/job/Delft-Po...

OpenAI’s projected cash burn is EIGHTY BILLION DOLLARS higher than it previously expected?

Clever british lawyers with big names can make as many tortured arguments about GFA and ECHR as they like, but none of it changes the political reality that other parties view it as essential to the project for peace in Northern Ireland and will not accept changes

The world would be depressing anyway at the moment, but there is something peculiarly crushing in being on a bus that's heading straight for a cliff and everyone screaming to change direction and the guy at the wheel maintaining that only he knows how to save everyone and it's definitely this way.

I see all the media organisations endlessly parroting the "free speech under threat" rhetoric of the right are now staying completely silent as Reform and the Conservatives openly ban news outlets that criticise them from covering their events bylinetimes.com/2025/09/04/k...

this is insanity and the speed with which 'sensible people' have decided this is normal discourse is completely terrifying www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

This may be true, but for me it's still a much less useful place for *finding* new and interesting work than twitter was Better for dissemination, sure - but worse for discovery

The speed with which Labour came to the, at least implied, defence of Linehan, despite a track record of abuse and threats from him, exemplifies just how embedded the dehumanisation of trans and non-binary individuals has become as government policy. They really don't care who gets hurt.

Very much not excited to see the Americans trying to do Ireland identity discourse