Badenoch: "While Britain was redefining what a woman is, China built five nuclear reactors." A perfect summary of conservative idiocy. Glorifying authoritarian post-communism for its efficiency while vilifying democracy for seeking nuance and respect. It is the Right who hate their own countries.

Spot on from @stephenkb.bsky.social. And the other aspect of this nasty turn is the eliding of British ‘culture’ with ‘white British’, which will shock anyone who has watched TV or football, or listened to music, or read a book, or indeed breathed since 1980.

Still I'm sure it'll be fine. It's not like those expectations are based on a completely unproven product with deranged costs and hysterical levels of hype.

One significant - & dangerous - thing to watch for is professional commentators objecting to words rather than examining the evidence. It's pearl-clutching & cowardly, obviously, but also a deliberate attempt to avoid confronting exactly what they themselves are facilitating and often cheering on.

Calling English a 'rip-off degree' is one of the most blatant exhibitions of personal barbarism I've ever seen. You've demonstrated nothing but the poverty of your own mind.

"AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations" pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e... What do you think?

This stuff is so tiresome. In a world where hard skills like coding are getting replaced faster than they can be taught, it’s the soft skills that arts degrees teach you that remain valuable. Me for the i Paper when Sunak tried this very same nonsense last year: inews.co.uk/inews-lifest...

Just to be clear, an English degree - learning to critically assess texts - is actually one of the most dangerous for people such as Badenoch. An educated population, able to bring hundreds of years of context to statements in a dawning age of AI slop and attention-seeking dishonesty is also vital.

Badenoch’s only achievement is to have shrunk the Tories to a low-wattage Faragist think tank and warehouse storing future parliamentary candidates for Reform www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Exactly this. Who looks around and thinks it's starving budgets of cash that'll fix this country? She might want to look at Argentina to see how that's going.

It would take the average UK earner 52 years’ worth of earnings to join the richest 10%. Up from 38 years in 2006-08. Rich buy political influence. Govts help the rich. Bottom 20% pay higher proportion of income in than the richest 20%. Inequalities obstruct economic growth, fuel social unrest.

The Green surge continues ... We’ve just passed 90,000 members! 💚 People everywhere are joining the movement for real change. Want hope to be normal again? Join the Green Party today ↩️

She's nothing if not predictable, is she? I know the Tories aren't keen on anything Green these days, but pretty much all they've done this week is recycle stuff they've been banging on about--for the most part fruitlessly--for the last decade and a half. And today it's "Mickey Mouse" degrees. 🙄

Lords Heseltine & Kinnock seem more alive to these self-evident truths than most members of the Commons. Similarly, I find thinkers with direct lived experience of far right dictatorship, Greeks of a certain age for example, crystal clear about what’s happening now.

All these people really want is to pay no taxes and be treated with floor scraping deference. Everything else is just bullshit in pursuit of that goal.

Irony being that the entire Farage-isation of British politics is built on the phenomenon of white right-wingers who don't want to "integrate" with the reality of multi-ethnic Britain, don't want to accept migrants as their fellow citizens, and don't want people of colour moving into their street.

Lethal skewering this, in particular this paragraph skewering the idea that Handswortg is an integration failure when it is a multi-ethnic integration success story. As Mrs Merton might say “what is it about this 9% white ward that led you to frame it as an integration failure?”

Do watch this. It’s very good. Sound absolutely on.

Divider GOP Denial that their constituents will pay a Big Beautiful Bill @aoc.bsky.social talks off-camera to a GOP House Rep who refuses to believe that his district will lose 2 rural hospitals despite the data. #DemVoice1 #ProudBlue #Voices4Victory via @teamaoc, www.instagram.com/reel/DPe2Y3u...

A fine piece of writing there from Sam Leith

Some frustration among Conservatives either directly about Jenrick's comments, or about the amount of attention they are getting. Many were saying they have not seen them in detail. I wonder if "closest I have seen in this country to a slum" may be amore damaging than didn't see any white faces

While I agree that it wd have been a sign of empathy and respect towards the Jewish communities in Britain to pause the protest on this very day, I also do find these attempts to declare who is British and who isn't increasingly worrying. Who is Starmer to define that ?

Our movement is living rent free in the heads of Telegraph journalists at the moment. Join me in being ‘a threat to the right that they never saw coming’. join.greenparty.org.uk

“You described Reform and other parties across Europe today as among the 'right wing equivalents of the fascists in the 1930s'. Why?” “Because that’s what they are” @vicderbyshire.bsky.social asks Lord Heseltine about remarks he made at Conservative Party Conference. #Newsnight

'On the whole, in the long run, [the far right] is becoming more vocal, more angry and more dangerous because it is shrinking, but it definitely doesn’t think it is shrinking.' Sunder's brilliant book could not be more relevant to our present moment: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/how-...

The greatest symbol of this disastrous conference....

The Bishop of Birmingham has written to the Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick about his comments about Handsworth

The "values we grew up with here in the west" can not in this interpretation include anything on democracy, freedom of speech or freedom of religion. So primarily order + hierarchy. Candy (born 1973) does seem 10-35 years too young to recall v socially conservative attitudes to women + gay people

I'm increasingly convinced this is a huge driver of dissatisfaction with govt Council tax is one of the most visible taxes that people pay, it goes directly out of their bank account and they get a letter about it going up every year Yet bin collection frequency falls and libraries close

Reform pushes for 85% migrant population certainly is a new direction for the party.

Wish I could say I was shocked, but here's the Labour government constraining the right to peaceful protest again... 'You can protest but only according to our rules. The rules are: you're not allowed to use any of the tactics that make protest effective.'

Yes, yes I know I keep banging on about my fucking book! However, if you want one repost this and I’ll do a random winner pick thing by the end of the week because I’m great like that. ♥️📚 #amindofmyown

I know statistics are poorly understood and are misused. But facts matter Between the 1991, 2001, 2011 and 2021 Census *every* ethnic group in the UK has become *less* geographically segregated and *all* groups, majority and minorities, are more likely to interact with people not like them

Important thread ⬇️

Thank God there is a political leader finally speaking up loudly for basic bloody decency and not following Farage down his racist rabbit hole into whatever hate-filled hell he wants to drag Britain. We all need to stand with Zack and say "enough" before we end up in the same mess as America.

Jenrick could have visited Handsworth to listen to residents – he chose to pass through and make a judgement based on the colour of their skin. Instead of getting to know our nation of neighbours, he chose racism. The Tories, Reform and Labour want to divide us. The Greens say enough is enough.

The UAE is an authoritarian autocracy, a petro-state with no income tax for citizens, to bribe them for the lack of democratic voice or free speech It is 85% migrant, a segregated society with a ban on integration in principle and practice, few rights, equal opportunities, nor voice for incomers

Birmingham, my home city, is a fantastic city, with fantastic people- a success story. It has its problems, like anywhere. But the obsession the online right has with it is as transparent as it gets.

This guy is the King in the North 👊 Good to hear a politician telling it like it is, standing up for ordinary people, for unity and for a stronger North. We need leaders like @mothinali.bsky.social to stand up so everyone outside London gets their fair share. #TaxWealth youtu.be/A5t4-haZBW4?...

I wrote a personal piece last week about anti-semitism in Britain in the last two years and how it felt to be Jewish. It was repromoted today, on the anniversary of October 7, five days after an attack on a British synagogue in which two Jews were killed. This is the immediate reply.

Dad’s books are full of empathy, common sense, and a healthy suspicion of the powerful. But at its heart his work is also about how systems keep people poor while pretending it’s their own fault. So I hope Kemi’s taking notes as well as reading the jokes.

The ventriloquist act they booked for the Tory Conference looks a bit shit.

People like Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage are increasingly looking at people who are not white and suggesting that they can't be British. That in itself is fundamentally un-British.

What’s happening in Gaza is horrific - as I write in the piece. But it’s interesting that that’s the immediate response when a Jewish person discusses what it’s like to be Jewish. It’s interesting which minority groups are encouraged to discuss their lived experiences, and which are not…

I’m curious what the optimum level of Conservative>Reform defectors is for Reform. Too many familiar faces and big beasts would erode their ‘not-the-Conservatives’ brand.

Am wondering if all of those suddenly deciding they’re against communities living “parallel lives” might reconsider their support of religious schools? Or indeed private ones?

No sudden rupture is now required for the far right to take power in this country. For what we're seeing is a steady normalisation of extremists by the Conservative and Labour Parties, BBC, Telegraph, Mail and others. A shift once considered unthinkable beings to look acceptable, even inevitable.🧵

Robin Williams' daughter has some quality thoughts on AI slop