Our media is so broken. The Labour husband of our Labour Home Secretary spending 3 mins on a flagship breakfast TV programme as presenter attacking the new leader of the Greens with a Labour briefed attack line from yesterday. It's maddening.
Our media is so broken. The Labour husband of our Labour Home Secretary spending 3 mins on a flagship breakfast TV programme as presenter attacking the new leader of the Greens with a Labour briefed attack line from yesterday. It's maddening.
Guys, what are you doing? You all agreed this was the world’s most awesome shit! We’re doing it now, we’re doing the stuff we agreed was brilliant, that *you said* the public would love. Look at all our flags! Where are you going? Why are you all looking at me like that
They can see it isn’t working and they’re baffled. They’re doing all the same shit that, as recently as last year, everyone they spoke to agreed was awesome, very smart and incredibly popular shit-hot politics, and they’re still the brilliant political minds everyone they know always said they are.
I know we have goldfish memories now, but it really is only a few months since the US vice president stood up before Europe’s leaders and told them they were a bunch of Muslim-loving Marxist homosexuals who deserved to get rammed by Vladimir Putin, and that does feel somewhat relevant here
Instead of your tired by-numbers stuff, here's one with a bit of actual analysis and a genuine curiousity. averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-...
Newly elected Green Party leader @zackpolanski.bsky.social is asked, would he ever work with Keir Starmer?
It's appalling. If somebody 'pretends' to be a racist, they *are* racist. This is an obvious truth (tho I'd be interested to hear someone try to refute it...), but in Starmer's case there's a lot of people who don't want to acknowledge that they voted for one. That's what's going on here.
Marie, like many on here, just cannot accept the obvious, because to do so would require acknowledging a bunch of uncomfortable truths... bsky.app/profile/bedf...
How are the predictions working out? Let’s see
Cooper in 2021: "If there arent the safe legal routes for family reunion we end up with more people being driven into the arms of criminal gangs" Cooper yesterday: "we are bringing forward new rules to temporarily suspend new applications under the existing family reunion route"
If the position is “Britain’s subservience to America is non-negotiable and will be enforced if threatened via elections” then I’d like to have that out in the open, where everyone can see. If it’s not true, I’d like to understand why the former Chancellor believes that it is.
I think George Osborne openly musing to the air that the security services probably wouldn’t have tolerated Labour winning in 2017, because of our relationship with America, is quite helpful and I’d like to hear more.
I feel like there should be at least some concerted attempt by professionals to explain how something like this could possibly happen, rather than the eye rolling and quiet “what the fuck”s we’re currently getting
But, it's not that surprising - and journalists need to be much clearer in identifying this as an ongoing pattern of behaviour, rather than seeing this stuff as an aberration... bsky.app/profile/bedf...
Asked by the BBC how he would feel if "your daughter was having to walk past one of these [asylum] hotels every day?" Keir Starmer replies that "I completely get it". "I understand why people want the hotels closed. I want them closed".
It is, what, three or four months since *Gary Lineker* was hounded off TV because of his vile racist hatred.
A lot of smart commentary types went real quiet with that horseshoe theory bullshit, didn’t they
absolutely rotten stuff. horrible. fuck off
I am already judging everyone in politics and media who is just sitting on their hands and hemming and hawing while this bullshit is going on, quite harshly, and I suggest that you also do this.
If MPs don’t want to be tarred with this brush, then they can start by suicide bombing their careers in protest at Starmer’s Enoch Powell speeches and vile Menacing Black People Terror tweets. They’ve already shown they are willing to do that, when it suits them to do it.
I don’t know man, I have a dull office job and you are a professor of politics. I can explain it quite easily within a frame of national politics and the internal politics of the BBC, as well as the influence of the British press, so I feel like you should be able to work it out.
The problem is that it *has* to be this way now; they have to double down on both-sides equivocation in pursuit of 'objectivity', because the fact of the genocide and every antecedent event contributing to it from October 8th onward is so glaring that to change tune now would be to admit complicity.
Adam, in his response to the Forde Report; the abuse that Abbott, Begum etc suffered; the discriminatory differences between the way he treats Lab candidates; his attitude to the Palestinians - he's not a 'coward', but a racist. Why not acknowledge it? www.thenation.com/article/arch...
On the contrary, the ONLY ones I've seen overtly attacking the racism that feeds Reform are Sultana, Polanski, Corbyn, Lewis, Abbott etc - whereas I've seen almost diddley-squat from Labour MPs, including the PM and Cabinet...
It's a common dynamic - 5-10 years ago, this was the view of the Corbyn left, before that the SNP Reffers; some among both were warning of an undue deference to establishment interests within the BBC, but were generally dismissed as tin-foil hatters. Yet here we are. Doesn't augur well for the Beeb.
My goodness me, this is the most facile, surface-level, wash-my-hands nonsense I've read in a long long time. How on earth does she get away with it? archive.ph/Wk1n2
I try not to be too abusive even to the air on here, but setting riot police on your own students because they’re protesting genocide is straightforward Scum Of The Earth behaviour, so naturally she’s already a baroness and has now been summoned to work in government in Britain.
What was it that first attracted Number Ten to the former President of Columbia Univeristy who infamously set heavily armoured police on protesting students, calling them “a clear and present danger”, and then resigned
The genocide has been a joint venture between the far right (Netanyahu, Trump) and the conventional centre (Biden, Sunak, Starmer, Macron, Scholz, Merz). The West's de facto pro-genocide consensus has been strikingly broad, notwithstanding some disagreements among the culprits over implementation.
SOMEONE AT CCHQ HAS FOUND THE RHYMING DICTIONARY
Yes 'the Lib Dems and Greens' push back on it, but is no mention of Sultana/Corbyn - and their 600,000+ sign-ups - who have been very clear on their anti-Reform stance. It's striking, but not surprising.
What were the lads doing throughout the decade when we could’ve been organising broad resistance and pushback against the advance of the far right’s openly hateful projects, particularly within the political/media elite, where it’s strongest? Important stuff I’m sure, a really useful contribution
Jessica - one of the more enthusiastic screechers and chewers upon of sofa cushions, on the topic of the Left’s Empire Of Terrifying Hitlerian Racial Hatred - is somewhat perturbed to see that something ugly has happened to mainstream political discourse since 2016
Honestly, I think you could write a whole book just on Lisa Nandy's political donors 🤯💰🥀 labourrightwatch.wordpress.com/2025/06/11/t...
This is all of us really, everyone who grew up being correctly told the Saddam Husseins and Milosevices of this world were unforgivable monsters, now watching our own state facilitate far worse crimes at much greater intensity, with considerably more cold blooded calculation.
Even the mere suspicion of racism in public life is so shocking and unacceptable to me, an honest person, that anyone suspected must be ruthlessly eradicated. Also, fascist roundups of hundreds of thousands of people? An interesting tactical quandary, let us explore the theory in detail
There is a real phenomenon - v prevalent on Bluesky - with liberal/centrists being absolutely unwilling or unable to acknowledge what Starmer actually is. I think it's likely that they voted for him, and now just can't accept that they - the Good Guys - endorsed a racist. Hence, 'accidental'...
I can certainly promise you that, were a progressive grouping formed in part specifically to combat this type of rhetoric, then Rafa and his centrist mates will do their very best to ignore or undermine it. Rafa, clearly, got the person and government he wanted in 24. This is them, and what they do.
I’d add: again, it is not the public who have decided they want mass deportation, or that this should be an acceptable idea within the mainstream. It is our horrifying political/media class, who have roasted each other’s brains on social media. It is *elite radicalisation*, not popular politics.
MPs and commentators! Why not skip over the bit where you noisily try to convince everyone this isn’t your fault and it wasn’t largely inflicted on everyone due to your belligerent, self-indulgent stupidity, and move directly onto the bit where we fire and remove everyone who refuses to fight this?
The full range of political/media responses appears to be “uh, they’re not serious are they” to “yes, yes! Deport them all, in hundreds and thousands, full Children of Men tower block raid and cages now”. Which is why we told you politics needed to be kinder and gentler, or it would become this.
So we’re going with the politically and morally disastrous “mass deportation of populations will be difficult and expensive” rather than the more natural “these people are racial supremacist fascists who should be shunned by any half-decent human”. Do I need to tell you why they’re doing that?
When Labour in the future say you have to vote for them to stop Reform – remember there are countless reasons that argument is equal parts absurd and offensive. But 26th August 2025 should stand out for their complete capitulation to the right. Absolutely shameful.
Told you they were exactly like this, didn’t I? The Times paywall has been like an ancient door in the cellar that smart people are afraid to open, for well over a decade. archive.ph/78dcP
the juxtaposition of 'let's enjoy Paddington bear!' and 'let's deport human migrants to the Taliban!' is too perfect
Paul is a belligerent idiot but he isn’t wrong here: “Hey you scum, vote for us or fuck you!” is for real the entirety of the plan for the next four years.
Somebody decided Labour didn’t need libs or the left, because they were going to construct a crushing electoral bloc of centrists and Reasonable Tories. Bragged about it at length! Except it turns out there are very few Reasonable Tories, and they all vote Tory or Lib Dem. Who was it that did that?
it is absolutely possible for these companies to hard-line this stuff and just refuse to continue interacting, even when users ask them for "help writing a story." The model developers refuse to do it because they don't want any possible limitations. Evil.
We'd like to thank @bcmerchant.bsky.social for his work. His "AI killed my job" series is an important one, and we're really grateful for this piece on the translation field. It's precise, in-depth and well documented, a must read ⬇️ www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-killed-...
When punters start telling them e.g. Sir Keir hates white people and is trying to get rid of them, to replace them with migrants - I’m pretty certain that’s already happening - then that is going to spring directly from 2016-19, and the insane stuff all the lads were quite happy to go along with.
We are, what, not even five years past an FT reporter telling readers members of the public he interviewed were telling him the leader of the opposition was a terrorist. Not “affiliated with” or “sympathetic to”, but literally, himself, a terrorist. A thing his colleagues greeted with shrugs.
subscriptions >>> shop.viz.co.uk/viz348bs
I see. That's very clear, thanks for explaining. So, if/when Farage gets keys to No.10 - with the left, by then, having been out of the picture for nearly 10 years - that'll be *the left's* fault? It won't be anything to do with - to take an entirely random example - Keir Starmer going all Enoch?
Hang on...Reform got 14% at the last election, with the left nowhere in sight. They're now at around 30% in the polls, with the left still nowhere in sight. How is that the left 'setting the stage for' or 'handing the keys' to Farage?
there should be criminal consequences for companies and executives releasing these products when they have such horrific consequences. we’ve evolved from “move fast and break things” to “move fast and kill people” and the tech billionaires could not care less.
Ah well, here we are... bsky.app/profile/bedf...
I really want to be gracious and welcoming to centrists who are now rightly up in arms at all this. But I do also think that people who are well paid to understand politics should have seen it coming from day one. And I would like, putting it extremely gently, to see some accountability for that
This is very much what most of the lads meant when they said they wanted Moderate, Sensible Politics. This is as good as it will ever get.
You were warned over and over again who these people are. You chose not to listen, or you chose not to care.
"The west’s failure to have a reckoning over the Iraq catastrophe made Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people possible." My column from Baghdad 👇 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Your and Sunder's category error is to assume - or even hope - that said MPs fundamentally disagree with the narrative. They don't.
This one Dril tweet in December 2023 was a more accurate depiction of actual events than anything you’d have got off newsstands, from broadcast media or out of the mouths of politicians. It hasn’t got much better since.
Ashworth: "I've been coming on programmes, its been going on for nearly 2 years now, saying we need a ceasefire" Liar. For months after Oct 7th you & the Labour leadership said a ceasefire would be wrong. In the vote for a ceasefire in November 2023 you abstained.
As I said in 2023: it’s going to be a closed circle on this with all guns pointing outward until everyone involved in this, everyone who made supportive statements and denounced protestors, is retired or dead. Then, maybe, we might find out about some of what they did.
Is it typical for the entire press to ferociously deny there were bent shenanigans going on, only to start admitting it five years later because the PM’s chief of staff has been bragging about it, so there’s no point in lying about it any more? That does not feel typical, to me.
In this clip, Rory says “Labour MPs put their careers on the line to stop (Old Jezza) becoming Prime Minister”, a thing that up until last year was an absolutely deranged conspiracy theory, but has now become an obvious fact, somehow without anyone having been wrong about anything at any point.
Really it is up to these people’s colleagues and friends to ensure there are social consequences for this type of behaviour, but I’d say the last decade or so have not filled me with confidence that this will happen.
Cross-post again. Have a good day.
I don't remember any specific commentators - bar some tweets from nobodies - saying that there was no anti-Jewish racism on the left (though I do remember a lot of folk amplifying its extent, in the actual media). There obviously was, and is - on the left, centre and right. Same with the latter.
On the other hand, I don't think you should spend the BH replying, life's too short. My point was 'if you vote for racists' - and it was clear in 24 that they were - 'then don't be surprised when they do a bit of racism'. Have a nice day, thanks for the discussion.
No relitigation needed. But I'm not sure what you're referring to by 'bad things being denied', if you're referring to political commentators. What were those 'bad things', and who specifically were 'denying them'?
The only 'name-calling' I see in the OP is 'Keir Starmer' and 'David Lammy', followed by a suggestion that they belong in the Hague - and it is indeed entirely possible that that is a viable scenario, should international law be properly upheld. So I'm not sure why you're clutching your pearls.
Keir Starmer and David Lammy belong in The Hague.
I'd be interested in some examples of the first part of your sentence (and I'm not sure of the latter...) But I take your point. And it's good that Anand is now seeing what is true.
Fair enough, and a cross-post. It's definitely not Starmer-specific. But as an aside, the people I mentioned were very much 'they don't know what they've voted for, the idiots' in 2016, but are now getting paid to write that they themselves didn't know what they were voting for, the idiots...
It's the 'progressive/stand up for minorities' stuff that grates - they weren't/aren't, 'progressive', and didn't/won't 'stand up for minorities'. It wasn't part of their project. Yet I fear we're in for years of the Sensibles writing pieces about 'this wasn't what I voted for' - when, *it was*.
It's not that there was no enthusiasm, it was that there was no analysis at all of what was to come, by the very same people who decry the left for being Not Sensible. The direction was v v clear. As to last July - even less total votes, so that the project lacked even the legitimacy it has?
It's so dismal that Dunt, Dittert, Henig etc are posting the same response, when every left shitposter told them this is who they are. As noted elsewhere '“I have given my support to bleakly cynical racist swine” is too painful to say aloud, and “I have absolutely fucked it here” is unthinkable.'
It is moving - but 'under a supposedly “progressive” Labour government that seems strangely reluctant to stand up for ethnic minorities' is naive. Nothing leading-up to GE24 indicated they would be anything other than 'anti-progressive' in this area (but too many idiots ignored that, & voted 4 them)
I bought the Indy from the 1st day, for about 20 years. John's analysis has been stale for ages - no curiosity; no wanting to find out why things happen; just surface fluff - and that he's still a Pol Editor testifies to the stasis and vacuousness of our media ecosystem. We're so badly served...
Yeah, it’s weird: we were just innocently bullying the fuck out of Britain’s notable anti-racism campaigners by pretending to be terrified they are all Hitlerian hate-mongers, and then suddenly the streets were full of fascists going crazy and nobody who matters will utter a word of criticism 🤷🏼♂️
Do you notice how half of parliament and the entire press unified for five years to hound the fuck out of Britain’s dwindling set of prominent antiracists, and now there is no brake at all on all politics going full National Front circa 1974 all day, every day? Could these things be somehow linked
And, erm, how's that going, John? bsky.app/profile/left...
And, and - get this - they’ve most recently done it at the behest of Morgan McSweeney, the gigantic-brained warrior who defeats the far right by adopting their rhetoric and policies. Everyone agreed it was his one excellent skill! And now everybody hates them, and they’re way behind Nigel Farage.
I’ve got twenty quid here to stick in a legal fund, if this guy needs suing
Actually, it is a stone-cold, dead-eyed, nailed-on certainty that he won't lead Labour into the next GE. It's clear to everyone that he's a liability, who'll lie to your face for power - and the more people see of him, the less they like him. He also has no core politics to run with. He's a goner.
'...it is no longer certain that Keir Starmer will lead Labour into the next election...' Blimey, nothing gets past these guys.
It is indeed a lovely story, and fitting that I came across it before I myself head to the 'charity shop barn' mentioned therein...
Despite the many claims of our 'free and fearless' media - whom nobody tells what to write - that topic is very out-of-bounds. No sirree. Ain't gonna happen. You see, the Overton Window just shifted, organically. It was no one's fault - particularly not the members of the UK's right-wing press.
It's easy, you are Rushanara Ali. It's the same sense of entitlement as Jas Athwal, and James Frith (to take one example) with his long list of freebies. They are an MP. This is what they're due.
Vicky Spratt - who broke the story - is a long time housing and renters' rights campaigner, and has written books on the subject. Don't blame the messenger.
You've asked 3 completely irrelevant questions there Laurence. And, you really don't need to. You could drop the conspiracy theories, and look at a politician - of any party - and think 'no, that behaviour, *which is soon to be made illegal*, is not good, for an MP who is absolutely rolling in it'.
That's just not true. And it wasn't the RW media, it was the i that broke the story, followed up by the BBC then Guardian. You don't have to automatically jump to defend her you know. Last year, she had to step down after connections with Grenfell contractors... bsky.app/profile/bedf...
The tenant would have been waiting, month by month, to be evicted (the two in our bio have been there), which is no way to live; in the meantime Ali got income while she waited to sell. On 1 of her 2 properties...earning well over 100 grand a year... The media should be chasing her down the street.
You can get as tired as you like Annette - this is what he always was (remember the immediate dropping of FoM once he was LOTO?) and what the Sensible Moderates voted in. He will carry on like this. Those of you holding on to residual hope that he's going to get better are, I'm afraid, delusional.
I pay close attention, and I’d say that - with the exception of Andrew Marr - anyone who said this publicly did so in language so heavily coded that it would zoom right over the average punter’s head. Which is not to say the lads were not saying this to each other constantly, offline.
"Being the object of Rachel Reeves's criticism is like getting gummed by a toothless sheep. "
Thanks for your considered replies. The first line in your 2nd one was me, 20-21 - sceptical, but willing to try. For me, his 1st betrayal was FoM - I saw what he was then. As for history, I think (hope...) it'll damn him for, at v best, deliberately ignoring a genocide; at worst, complicit in it...