Oh, the grand old duke of york He ██████████████████ He ██████████████████ And he ██████████████████

Big problem with the BBC is its sheer credulity and lack of intellectual curiosity about stuff. It feels like it has lost the will to interrogate (with rare exceptions)

What did the Queen know

"What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Pizza Express meal?"

Crucial - and generally totally overlooked part of this story - is *what* the journalists that Labour Together smeared were reporting on How Labour Together used £730k in illegal political donations to boot strap Keir Starmer’s political rise That’s why they were targeted

This is emblematic of the consumer culture that fees have engendered. What the hell did the students expect? It was a ONCE IN A CENTURY PANDEMIC. There were LAWS against congregating in public. Staff worked themselves to the bone to get online delivery working. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Ignore them for weeks until the public outcry becomes so overwhelming that you're forced to order a largely toothless regulator to launch a multi-week investigation with no actual consequences while continuing to use the platform the images were posted all-over as it poisons society? Go off, king.

Technology discourse is so unhinged at the moment. Just zooming out, beyond specifics, the fact that there are multiple movements to "protect" kids from smartphones at the same time as there is increased pressure to AI everything all the time is bananas

So glad we have massively restructured transgender care on based on the works of someone who believes absolute nonsense.

Everything you need to know about the end-goal of groups like For Women Scotland: celebrating a trans woman being forced out of her career for doing nothing other than exist in public. All part of making life unlivable for trans people

In 2005 Rod Liddle was arrested and accepted a caution for assaulting his pregnant girlfriend. He continues to have a career in journalism because the British press is fine with violent misogynists.

Keir Starmer has got a nerve lecturing other parties on security when his government appears to have no qualms about making every aspect of the UK’s essential infrastructure more & more reliant on Trump-supporting tech firms that have clearly shown themselves hostile to liberal democracy.

The Guardian's Jillian Ambrose unpicks the many tens of millions in state support that Jim Ratcliffe's businesses have accepted, after the billionaire railed against people on benefits (and claimed Britain was being "colonised" by immigrants while himself having moved to tax-free Monaco).

Another win for former human rights lawyer of the year Keir Starmer

The transphobic press have no incentive to give Labour credit for their transphobia and every incentive to push them to go further. Labour gain nothing by caving to them, and yet cave to them they will, out of a potent combination of hatred for trans people and political ineptitude.

Been clear for years, of course, but Chris Mason really is far out of his depth

People complained (that they couldn't get treatment expediently/were worried that it would be taken away by the supreme court), and these complaints were used to justify removing the system www.thepinknews.com/2026/02/11/n...

Can't believe Brexit Jim turned out to have terrible views on immigration

Jonn Elledge @jonnelledge.bsky.social sums up why Starmer is responsible for voters hating him after such a short time:

People Keir Starmer has hired, then fired for stuff he knew about when he hired them, a thread and a list: 1. Tulip Siddiq, given the economic crime brief, despite her aunt being PM of Bangladesh and mired in corruption allegations. Siddiq herself had faced questions over London properties.

The way Chris pincher has been basically been erased from boris downfall is really instructive in Westminster culture and how these people get away with it

Yeah I’m looking for my dog (girlfriend who has a restraining order against me and she has a dog) and here’s the picture of the dog (she walks this dog and I can use it to figure out her schedule) thanks for sending all footage my way

Yes, this - Streeting would make me less likely to vote Labour, not more, both now and in the long-term Not only is he himsef a ghoul who would continue the worst of their policies, it would show that the rest of the party hasn't learned anything about why they're in the position they're in

Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons commissioned PR firm to investigate journalists and their sources Why? Because they were digging into the dark money behind Labour Together, and Keir Starmer's rise Me on D4S, on why our revelations matter so much: democracyforsale.substack.com/p/labour-tog...

bro just one more ‘the left is bad’ speech bro, I swear one more speech shitting on the left and it’ll fix politics bro

What's the deal with the new EU Curia website? Why are there two other columns taking up most of the screen with the judgment squeezed into a little frame on the right. This is unusable!

Do they understand how mad they sound? As if anyone has ever decided to cross the Channel in a small boat because, if they make it, they might get to take a free taxi to a doctor's appointment? "Pull factors" on steroids. www.bbc.com/news/article...

The Economist's Bagehot column captures how awful the Epstein disclosures are, but also how much of this was dogs-on-the-street level known. And ministers looked right past it until it was there in their face and couldn't eye roll "morals are for little people" any more... econ.st/3NZFam4

Interesting to see which bits of normal parliamentary procedure the Guardian thinks are arcane (humble address) and which bits are archaic (Parliament Act)

Rockets and nazis, together again at last

Worst possible Monday 9am vibe

New Epstein emails show Peter Mandelson secretly advising JPMorgan’s CEO on how to fight Labour’s 2009 bankers’ bonus tax - even suggesting he “mildly threaten” the Chancellor. Mandelson was Business Secretary at the time. A year later, he was seeking work with JPM.

Data protection, as a concept, grew out of post-war legal scholarship in Germany which reflected on the use of data about people by the Nazi Govt, and formulated a set of limits on data use which recognised that to collect and use data about people was to impact the people’s lives.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle... This is just so weird.

Labour utterly determined to make sure nobody votes for them in 2029

The British press at its most normal

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

Most of the focus is on Plan 2 student loans - because they're the biggest, with potentially highest interest - but this also applies to anyone with a Plan 1 loan Plan 1 has lower repayment thresholds, but the same repayment terms - 9% of income over the threshold, until it's paid or written off

Please tell me the Greens aren't actually supporting this WASPI nonsense

A depressing catalogue of failures in the extremely shit AI skills courses the government went on telly to promote yesterday. Useless UI, constant corporate branding, abysmal privacy protection, and at least one bit of weird anti-climate messaging(?!) all to service your ability to lie on a CV.

On almost everything – fraud, polarisation, radicalisation, misinformation – evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagers. But that issue gets zero political attention, and is a total non-starter. Nothing good will come of it.

Tell me again how this BBC editorialising is just my cognitive bias... This isn't a quote from anywhere. It's just the BBC's description of this disgraced, divisive politician.

Usually UK companies base operations in other countries to get over barriers *their* governments impose, not ours.

We cannot aim at Digital Sovereignty or even some degree of digital autonomy if both students and workers are trained to serve the interests of Big Tech. And they are influencing every curricula and capacity building program in private, public and social sector!

In 2022 I started tracking changes in how news outlets were describing trans people, and set up a bot to record every article pushed to the Google News index based on a handful of search phrases, including “biological sex” in both the US and UK. The amount in 2023 alone was absolutely staggering.

I would say this findings shows women are more AI literate than men, because the majority of non-magical beings have no innate ability to "judge truthfulness"

New(?) Instagram consent or pay interface

Calling transphobia a 'gateway drug' to the far right undersells it. It's pure accelerant. Grimly fascinating to guess what crankery becomes any famous transphobe's secondary obsession, cos they all have one: 15 minute cities are fascism! Grok noncing is cool! ICE are good! We should kill all dogs!

Age gating VPNs is a truly horrible idea. Teenagers deserve some kind of private access to the internet – which might mean LGB resources, or access to contraception or abortion advice, or resources to help with parental abuse. Shutting them off puts them in greater danger. This is just bad policy.