If only the UK were deeply invested in doing a Wizard Of Oz remake he could save us a fortune on actors by combining all of Dorothys companions in being cowardly, brainless and tin eared all at once.
Often wrong. I thought Brexit under Boris was bad, wow.
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If only the UK were deeply invested in doing a Wizard Of Oz remake he could save us a fortune on actors by combining all of Dorothys companions in being cowardly, brainless and tin eared all at once.
Tuesday. Sir Keir Starmer stares like a proud English flag at his breakfast of toast, bacon, egg and beans. "Would racists like this?" he wonders, flagishly. A frown creeps across his face, making him look not like a brilliant big flag at all. He doesn't know. God help him, he just doesn't know.
Point of order. If you look closely (not too closely), you'll notice it is _not_ a Union Jack gimp suit.
Please report and then block this insane conservative anti-semite.
I didn’t realise Kier was rebranding as a flagpole
I think you missed the internal Labour report, complete with evidence, that indicated that the racist right wing of the Labour party intentionally undermined Corbyn and his supporters and briefed against them for the purpose of getting them removed from the party. www.ajiunit.com/investigatio...
The equivalent of performing feng shui using the deck chairs aboard the Titanic
I should also apologise when I said "your attitude", it's how you perceive Labour's approach, not your own. Sorry about that. Obviously my quite apparent rage is directed at Labour, not you!
In short, "let's do what the US Democrats did" will end in the same tragedy. No doubt they'll only discover Keir isn't viable shortly before the next election and put another candidate up at the last second. But then, like the US Dems, it's increasingly apparent Labour are just empty suits.
3. Maybe Labour MPs need to get off X. They're sat drinking at the Nazi bar listening to the chatter of Nazis. Look at what it's doing to them.
2. It's obvious to everyone not stuck inside the tiny Labour echo chamber that pandering to fascism is exactly the wrong approach. The knife edge is of their own creation. They need to start acting how their voting base expected them to, not internalise the policies of the far right.
1. That attitude is of a party seeking power, not one in power. In power seats count, Labour has them, they need to use them. I don't remember the vote count causing the Tories paroxysms of hand-wringing both-sidesism. Act like they have their own ideology and aren't just empty vote-chasing suits.
They still had by far the highest percentage of vote - almost as much as the next two parties combined, so it's still clearly a mandate. I agree that we should move from FPTP to PR, but having said that, I disagree with your general attitude toward why - a couple of reasons.
Why? That just implies he's a dog wagged by its own tail. Either he's just that bad, or he's weak and easily influenced. Neither situation is viable.
It already has been for quite some time.
Most incredibly, Steam require you _retain_ the card on your account, if you remove the card to protect yourself from your card details potentially being stolen in the future, suddenly you magically regress in age and transform from an adult to a child. This is insane.
Censored in the UK: Content unavailable in your region We're sorry — this content is not available in your region. Due to regulatory requirements established by the United Kingdom’s communications regulator (Ofcom), this page has been restricted from access within the UK due to the Online Safety Act
This feels like the Democrats in the US - you feel like screaming and poking them with a stick. Do something! The major difference being - Labour are in power. They have the means, and the mandate to prevent it. And yet they encourage it.
Starmer is a weak, spineless cowardly jellyfish. His flaccid, impotent appeasement is handing the nation over to fascists on a silver plate. Imposing increasingly censorious and authoritarian laws on speech are only providing them with a head start while doing less than nothing to quell the tide.
I no longer understand how we got here. To see a Labour government with a massive majority allow a tiny group of far right extremist political agitators free reign not just to terrorise the streets, but also to directly dictate their agenda.
And if you're wondering whether someone getting killed is what it will take for the media and political class to come to their senses, I would just remind you that Jo Cox was murdered in a similar moment of demagoguery and hysteria 9 years ago, and if anything things have got far worse since then.
Hate to burst the bubble, but any preplanned medical procedure would likely involve this kind of silence. It would be looked on as appearing weak, so the alternative is just to vanish unannounced for a few days instead.
Similtaneously, it has already killed many small businesses and forums while helping to entrech the large corporations it claims to reign in. All this while being so ill-conceived it doesn't even accomplish the task it was purportedly meant to. So no, I don't like the Online Safety Act. 2/2
Which is to say, as a citizen I quite like the GDPR. The Online Safety Act, on the other hand, is a censorship regime with the added bonus of exposing me to identity and financial data theft, and tracking. 1/2
"It's like a 20mph speed limit for the whole internet!"
Having read that Steam are now requiring your credit card details for access, I went and had a look. It is now gating access to *PEGI 12* games on the basis of LGBTQIA+ representation. The Online Safety Act is Section 28 on steroids.
I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)
Meanwhile, it maximises harm to UK citizens and small businesses, exposed to increased risk of data theft, exposure and tracking, while the increased costs of implementing the OSA mean many small adult (note adult does not mean pornographic in this instance) sites have already shut down.
This is one reason why the OSA is so ridiculous. Most of the internet is outside the UK, and unless they are trading here, do not abide by our laws. Unless OfCom is willing to engage in a mass censorship regime as China does, and convince taxpayers to pay the significant costs, it is unenforceable.
You're correct, but I'd be wary of the wording. They're providing a service accessible to, not in the UK - I understand they have no presence here. Without a legal entity in this country, or treaty with the US that overrides their 1st amendment, all OfCom can do is demand UK ISPs censor.
It would be no loss, but I fail to see how it is unacceptable for a US company to follow US law, in the US. If you telephone someone in the US, you don't make them subject to UK law. Reverse the situation: does a Russian connecting to a UK server make the UK subject to Russian law? Of course not.
Two rebuttals to that second point. 1) The level of "control" demanded will always increase beyond whatever Labour implements (see: demanding 1% of the population of the UK is deported) 2) Fascists are shapeshifters and will effortlessly find a new target of hatred that resonates with the banal.
arguing with centrists is maddening. 'oh, i dont like labour but we have to stop the tories and reform!' labour have the exact same fucking end goals as the tories and reform. voting for labour is not stopping the tories or reform. voting labour does fuck all to positively change anything.
It may have escaped your notice, but corporate entities have always been the antithesis of democracy - they're dictatorial top-down. Nearly all have never let morality get in the way of profits in any other area of human endeavour, why show an unprofitable interest in democracy now?
This will be all the careful screening of candidates they're doing. I'd say "as long as it has a pulse" but apparently even that isn't a requirement.
I hate to break it to you, but yes, there are whole swathes of the internet not abiding by the GDPR. Foreign sites that do comply do so because they have presence in the UK/EU or are otherwise exposed by treaty.
Where you might be confused by is that legally, to do business in a country - take payments, buy and sell, you require a legal presence. If you're not doing that, you don't. The internet is extraterritorial by nature, and all that's happening is that people from the UK are visiting a site in the US.
OfCom can block UK users from visiting, because that's within their juristiction, but that's a bit on the nose and reveals the OSA as the censorship it is, so they're hoping to coerce sites they cannot force into complying into just going along with it.
It's not their problem, they're a US company, not a UK company. UK law cannot apply, regardless of the thoughts and prayers of OfCom.
So it just isn't going to cope with the level of censorship they're going to demand of it. They're going to ask industry to "sort it out", and industry is going to present a hefty bill, which they're going to have to present to parliament. Blocking at scale is expensive. Cue political hilarity.
The UK's great firewall was originally designed to block de minimis - individual instances of child pornography, and later because of course censors love increasing scope, mass copyright infringers. It was designed before cloud platforms and content distribution networks were quite as prevalent.
Ofcom has a big problem, because they're fundamentally red-tape bureacrats with no deep understanding of the industry they regulate. The endgame for them would be asking for a court order to block both sites in the UK. Unfortunately, there's a problem there.
Asking someone in the US with no UK presence to "understand UK regulation" is stupid. Did you understand North Korean or Russian regulations when you posted that? Of course not, you're in a different juristiction. As much as I despise the two sites involved, on this point they're absolutely correct.
Ofcom trying to get UK law to apply to the whole world was performative posturing to distract from the obvious gaping hole in the whole shoddy idea from the start. Likewise, 4chan asking a US court to determine UK laws don't apply in the US is also posturing. Likely heading for a political showdown.
Far right christofascists are a dime a dozen, far easier to justify your bigotry when you smuggle it through the tent of religion, it's a story as old as religion itself.
Well, yes, I suppose having the media ignore them entirely would be an improvement.
I'm sorry, I meant 100 microTrusses. 100 milliTrusses is an absurd amount that requires a white jacket with mandatory long sleeves, or a gig doing the right wing speaking circuit in the US.
As anyone that works in a corporate culture and has had to deal with "we're doing the right thing, we've just not communicated it clearly enough" announcements from management before, well, that's where Labour is currently. The "clearly delusional but unpeturbed" stage, or about 100 milliTrusses.
Having spoken to enough enthusiasts of current blue Labour, fat chance. They're right and everyone else is wrong. It's not their fault voters are turning away, it's a holdover from the Tories / Corbyn splitting the vote / media not getting the good things they've done across / you don't _understand_
Grand Jury refuses to swallow Ham Sandwich.
With Reform that makes three cheeks of the same arse, meaning there's a surfeit of arseholes to go around.
Bold of you to assume that Ofcom hasn't already long been captured by those with the same political agenda.
In 2029, after losing the bulk of their MPs in a defeat reminiscent of the one that bought them into power, I'd imagine Labour will be looking for scapegoats to explain why "Operation Just Let Farage Win" did not go the way they inexplicably thought it would.
Clearly and purposefully laying down 50 metre deep solid gold foundations for fascism complete with a little welcome mat. His whole right wing clique need to be forcibly ejected, now.
From taxing private jets to closing offshore loopholes, and more. Here's how we could make our economy fairer and raise £60 billion to revitalise key services to deliver first class healthcare, education and more. taxjustice.uk/blog/how-to-...
To be fair, allowing Donald J Trump to set interest rates is an exceptionally radical step. He is the poster child for all the steps required for exceptionally poor decision making. Many will soon argue that giving control to a raging narcissist interested only in self-enrichment was a mistake.
Seems after rebooting the device it finally allowed a 2FA prompt only to be told, on entering the 2FA code once, "Rate Limit Exceeded". Should I be concerned? Is someone attempting to brute force my account?
About time the English got their own flag instead of unimaginatively reusing St Georges Cross like umpteen other places, to be honest.
One day, Bluesky may fix the bug that logs you out from Android devices and won't let you log back in with the correct password. I won't hold my breath. Absolute clownshow.
It costs the UK taxpayer £3bn increasing a year to store nuclear waste. The more reactors built, the faster that rises. It would cost £263bn to dispose of permanently. If anyone claims to be concerned about the cost of immigration, ask them why they're not concerned about the cost of nuclear power.
At least one Labour MP has the cajones to speak up
My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up. NYT just covered it. 1/n www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...
Let's also not forget this masterpiece of electoral interference.
As I've replied elsewhere on the thread, every accusation is an admission for the right.
When Laura Kuenssberg falsey claimed a Labour activist had assaulted a Tory MP, she should have been sacked on the spot. Now look at the treatment Gary Linekar got. The BBC has been blatantly biased for qutie some time.
For the right, every accusation is an admission. I'm reminded they constantly hammered on about the media being biased and full of liberals/luvvies with a political agenda (a direct descendant of the Nazi lugenpresse slur). So what did they do? Populated editorial positions with their own people.
There was a BBC article on the hotel protests. They used a picture of the area with a family in traditional Islamic wear. I know the street they chose very well; the chance of them seeing that were very small. The photographer must have been waiting days to snap that shot. They're all complicit.
It's aimed at incorporating into processed foods. Very few people have the time to cook everything from scratch, and try remaining diligent and picking apart exactly where each ingredient came from in a product that contains over 50 different ones - nobody is going to be able to.
Not necessarily a Brexit thing - the horse meat scandal happened when we were in the EU, for example. It's inarguable that it's far safer to import from countries with equivalent food standards (and/or a good level of safety enforcement), though.
In the UK, only a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of food imports ever get tested, because we didn't need the capacity pre-Brexit and didn't build it up for post-Brexit. Basically, checks involve a bit of paper that says what something is, and we nod and go "okay, it's that"
I'd be careful not to highlight the chlorinated bit too much, apparently it's already mostly been phased out for other methods. Best to do as you've done, and highlight its because US chicken is all disease riddled.
They're so worried that Trump's PR team has stepped in to handle the response, you can tell because the tweet wasn't IN ALL CAPS, and was relatively coherent. Not that I condone Newsom, only that he's found an effective barb against the insane rants of the Paedophile of the United States of America.
Generally, when one is caught in a lie, normal people experience embarrassment and generally retreat from discourse. I'm not interested in discussing anything with someone obviously acting in bad faith. Good day.
It's the funeral of a police officer, Madison, Wisconsin on December 2, 1924 -- www.bunkhistory.org/resources/ho...
For once this isn't hyperbolic. We can see the fire raging in the US, the alarm bells are all ringing. Yet Labour is sitting on its backside playing neoliberal pat-a-cake, stuck in a toxic bubble of what it believes is its own rightness.
You don't say they have a valid point, you do not pander to them, you do not give them a seat at the table. You deal with them swifty and firmly, they are a cancer on society. Unless something is done right now, our democracy will end and go the way of the US.
The point is they're only a very small minority making a very loud noise, but have backing at all levels not just within the UK but globally. Rather than shut them down, it is precisely because they are aggressive and problematic that Starmer is going for soft, easy targets instead. Weak. Useless.
Groupy -> group. I could proofread before I post this drivel, I just choose not to.
Racist bigots are a very well organised groupy, whose noisy campaigns allow the likes of Farage to claim widespread dissent where there is not, amplified by the politically aligned media. Starmer would need to pull his head out his backside, develop a functional spine and stop pandering to fascists.
No different here. An English flag hanging out of a house window usually means "house prices in the area have been reduced due to a spate of ongoing antisocial behaviour"
It's become more and more apparent that "the rules" are selectively enforced with blindingly obvious favouritism. Step one of any reform should be gutting OfCom from the head down as utterly unfit for purpose and politically compromised. 2/2
If the MSM gave the LibDems or Greens an unbiased level of coverage in comparison to Reform, they'd be plastered all over the news constantly. Instead... crickets. The meda machine feeds on sensationalism, which is why we're meant to rules governing it. 1/2
🚨 In case there's anyone out there that thinks this is a spontaneous, popular uprising... It isn't. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...
There are a lot of exisitng schemes in the US that are socialist, they're just not labelled as such for that reason. The same over here, really. It's difficult to have an adult conversation about politics when people have been trained their entire lives to react in certain ways to certain words.
Sounds like the Labour party in the UK, after achieving power they've been speed running that approach. They did a couple of good things but now they're chasing fascist populism instead and saying and doing whatever the far right political groups say, but harder. They're losing their base.
Given my name on here, so you'd think I'd realise the relativity of what you're saying, I still think the idea of there being an "ultra far left" in the US a ridiculously funny thing to say.
The level of brutality and sadism is shocking. There are people being disappeared, I don't think it's any consolation to them or their families whether the situation is fragile or not.
It occured to me it may be one reason the dems are so passive. Let the fascists get on with it, and rub the populations nose in what they've done. A dangerous game to play. They're rapidly consolidating power to the point that they will never release it again whether the people want it or not.
*Gestures expansively at the entire of the US right now*. There is a saying that when America sneezes, Britain catches a cold. America is currently in ICU running a temperature of 102F.
When they, personally, are affected by it, and they are forced to think perhaps for the first time in their lives, the time for dissent has long, long since passed. What it's commonly blocking now - LGBTQIA+ resources, news on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, makes a lot of them very happy indeed.
A significant proportion of people indeed won't just be passive regarding censorship, they will cry out and demand it.
In the UK, 69% (yes, really) support the Online Safety Act, ostensively bought in to protect the kiddies (always). Its primary purpose is to "regulate services that have a significant influence over public discourse." You are an optimist to my pessimism regarding human nature.
The way things are going, it is no longer a certainty that there will be another American election.
I agree with the sentiment, but the reality is somewhat different. Censorship works not because it erases things entirely, it works when it hides something from enough people that it no longer inhabits the collective public mind and therefore no longer has any influence.
And in a blink of an eye, it will be banned.
100% this. The mistake is in thinking it was a race involving 2 right wing, 3 left parties. The current perception is that it's 3 right wing, 2 left wing parties.
I had noticed!
The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
Google, Meta, and Amazon are among the top companies tracking you across the web. By automatically blocking their trackers, Privacy Badger makes it harder for Big Tech companies to profit from your personal information. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
UK median build time is 7.5 years, planning up to an extra 10 years on top. However, Keir Starmer has "torn up" the regulations to "build baby build". As someone with a degree in physics, this flippancy with parallels to the doomed high rise blocks of the 60/70s scares the shit out of me. 3/3