Have CCLA shut up shop? They still seemed to have newish-looking posters up in Enniskillen when I went through a few weeks ago.
Nobody very important. Ferrets, greyhounds, poorly thought-through opinions. Englishman living in rural Northern Ireland. he/him
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Have CCLA shut up shop? They still seemed to have newish-looking posters up in Enniskillen when I went through a few weeks ago.
I’m convinced that people generally want much more intellectually interesting content than most media producers want to provide
Is the metaphor "under the surface" perhaps?
CAN YOU IMAGINE CALLING FOR SOMEONE TO BE ARRESTED FOR A TWEET?!?!
Especially on a day when the Shadow Justice Secretary has been criticised by a judge for almost causing a mistrial with his tweets.
Also, if you pick today to say that Linehan shouldn't have faced consequences for trying to incite violence, you are implicitly saying Farage is right that there's a free speech problem. It is in fact helpful if Cabinet members think before speaking.
I don't want Linehan in a cell I want people to acknowledge that if this call to punch trans women was made instead about Rowling or someone who people actually give a shit about the government would have a very different attitude.
We're seeing a massive acceleration in radicalised hate speech and incitement online and you think *now* is the time to make the laws looser on it? Take a running jump you complete husk
Fairly confident Farage wouldn't be doing this if the government attacked him more, because he'd realise that asking Americans to harm Britain comes across poorly with the general public. Failing to act makes the government's problems worse.
this means you can post as brutally and defamatorily as you like about Streeting
The average conveyancer makes no mistakes. Conveyancing Georg, who completes 10000 transactions a day and fucks them all up, is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted.
"That is not in fact the price we agreed to buy the house for."
Perfect encapsulation of the Trump administration: The guy suing Harvard for alleged antisemitism is a straight-up Hitler-admiring Nazi. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/02/m...
I would struggle to see evidence that the average university elsewhere in the UK is better managed than the average English uni.
Richard the Lionheart.
Also, when the numbers come down it'll still have to be a substantial inflow of people and you still need to convince people this is good and necessary.
Then again, this is a man who clearly believes that the problem with the Liz Kendall campaign was that it had too many ideas and wasn't controlled from the top enough, so his understanding of left of centre voters has always been idiosyncratic.
I'm not convinced that is the problem, but if it is then it demonstrates that the man is incapable of reading a poll because he's ignored the voters they have lost in favour of ones who never supported them in the first place.
Yes, they inherited a shit situation and difficult choices were always going to be likely, but they've ducked a bunch of them and in the rest they've gone for things that Labour supporters hate but which don't win over people who hate Labour.
Listen, I know this man's brain is leaking out of his ears, but can we talk about how impressively unhingeda response like this is from a guy who was literally shot and almost got shot a second time.
Thing is, even in a holding pattern crouch you should be attacking on that one, because attacks mean you don't have to spend as much time absorbing blows.
My sister has five and this is somewhat true, but there is a twenty year gap between the oldest and youngest (and fairly large gaps between them generally) so that makes it easier.
And it's not like the early 1990s helped there either.
Like if you're a believer in the theory that the worst Labour government is better than the best Tory government, you have to have a reason why that is the case. It seems like Starmer just believes having a Labour government is an ambient good thing, not an opportunity to improve things.
The charitable reading is that he believes that this is just what you have to do to get a Labour government, but if you're going to be the PM you a) need a reason for that to be worth it and b) have to notice when it isn't working.
And even as mayor, he doesn't have a great record of standing up to pressure to deliver necessary change.
Not that Starmer has been anything but appalling on trans issues, but that Telegraph piece is a really obvious attempt to rewrite the quote given to say what they wanted it to rather than the more anodyne statement it was.
What is it even building the political capital to do and would he even notice if it did?
And in the meantime it feels like Starmer is sitting there and not noticing that the buttons he is pressing aren't connected to anything. It's like every time he says something anti-immigration he expects the press to clap and it's a surprise to him that they still hate him and think he's a Trot.
And it's not like that was off the table early on - the largest provider of arms to Israel in the 1948 war was the Czechs.
Jesus, what's the dog like? My parents' dog is a completely feral lockdown rescue and spends half its time trying to knock me over and bite me and it's still substantially easier to deal with than my nephews. (Mostly because I'm not allowed to headlock them until they calm down.)
Probably also makes it easier for businesses if you aren't hiring maternity cover for 9 months but for 36 in terms of getting and retaining good staff (though obviously you need to deal with cost side of things.)
Dealing with costs is good, but that doesn't deal with time; or the effect on careers; or consequences for your lifestyle; or fertility; or poor labour experiences; or just that one kid who is such a nightmare toddler you don't want him to have any more siblings like him.
I also suspect that most approaches dealing with a single-cause are going to fail, because there are a whole list of reasons not to have (more) children and any one of them is enough to turn a Maybe into a No.
Wanting in theory, and wanting to go back to the period of getting functionally no sleep or of having to work out how you're going to afford childcare are very different things.
The Mid-Ulster Brigade of the UVF was in many ways spiritually UDA, except for the ways in which it was spiritually Interahamwe.
There are enough wet nose marks on every window in the house as it is without encouraging him to do that to the TV too.
Some of the UDA were just thugs, but in fairness some of them were thugs who were also drug dealers and active neo-Nazis.
Oh fuck off BBC, stop doing paramilitary thugs' PR for them. The UDA barely touched Republican paramilitaries during The Troubles - they killed a grant total of 11 of them in 25 years. They killed three times as many *other Loyalist* paramilitaries, and *twenty* times as many random civilians.
It's annoying when the dog wakes me up an hour before my alarm goes off demanding to be let out, but at least he only does it occasionally rather than consistently for years and I can swear at him when he does without negative consequences.
I mean the federalism doesn't really count as a plus-point, given the disproportionate weight Prussia had in the system and what its constitutional arrangements were.
Not a single Reform UK MP attended today's Commons statement on child rape gangs.
I suspect the rest would have got a similar deal to Alsace-Lorraine, except in those areas where there were enough Baltic Germans for a three-class franchise system to maintain uncompetitive elections?
Given the lack of uniformity between the states of the German Empire in terms of governance, there are probably a wide range of outcomes. A lot of Poland would obviously have joined Prussia, but it couldn't eat the whole thing without having competitive elections, which Germany couldn't afford.
Kaiser Wilhelm had a lot more influence over Germany than George V had over Britain, though. I'd probably class Germany as a managed democracy where free elections were allowed precisely because the outcome didn't threaten imperial power.
The Lib Dem membership trends extremely establishment and that's the section of society that's seen the greatest transphobic radicalisation. Plus a lot of LDs on quangos end up becoming very detached from the party mainstream - see also Lord Carlile as independent reviewer of terror legislation .
It had universal male suffrage for those who weren't on poverty-related benefits. It was a wider franchise, but that's a long way from universal male suffrage. Plus the Reichstag had significantly less power than the Commons.
Have to disagree on the contrast. I think it works really well with the Faroes flag, because there you've got something between the red and the white, but I think on the English flag it dooesn't work.
Oh, that would definitely be the outcome, but it wouldn't be the starting offer for precisely that reason so it would be a point of contention.
Pity the Hungarians nicked it, because otherwise the British Republican flag would slap.
It wouldn't solve their crapness over this, but it is a shame that the English flag is a bit rubbish in vexillogical terms. Kind of like the national anthem, in that it would be a lot easier to have widespread ownership of it if it was better.
Doing it year round suggests that you put it up for a sporting event and forgot to take it down. Borderline disrespectful.
Less of an issue now that the SNP are no longer anti-NATO, but Faslane would be a point of contention.
I've got better things to do with my life than add two syllables that function solely as a shibboleth.
As Yvette Cooper pushes forward new laws to make it harder for child refugees to get safe passage to join their parents in the UK, here's a picture of her from 2020 campaigning for the complete opposite.
On the one hand the Derry flag is almost certainly sectarian in origins, on the other hand it is metal as fuck.
Wick is market, surely?
Question to Zach Polanski at the leadership announcement: "Q: How can you take on Nigel Farage when your policy on immigration is so different?" Everything wrong with British politics and media summed up so succinctly in a single absolutely unhinged question.
There are people who prefer spending time with dogs to spending time with children - I'm one of them. But the thing about these people is that they really are not the people you will persuade to have children.
Even leaving aside the terrible gender politics, a society where getting a cat or dog is a reward for having a child is not actually one that likes children, is it?
It's also a lie, as he keeps claiming that the British South Asians telling him they're British and he's racist are actually white nationalists.
It's still pretty contested as a symbol, at least in Tyrone where I do find myself having to look twice at flags to work out whether it's indicating support for paramilitaties or the county GAA team.
Absolutely the greatest sport for names that can’t possibly be true. (a thread)
Although maybe Macron was a bit too charismatic, so perhaps we should try to borrow from the electoral strategy of Lionel Jospin.
me to hollywood screenwriters: please stop making childhood trauma the only possible explanation for adult character traits, it's simplistic, reductive and dull the leader of the opposition: literally my entire personality and career is defined by one thing that upset me when I was 16
I suspect if we were doing the exact same thing there would be a lot more Russian plane crashes, given standards of maintenance.
I think unfortunately the party works with a simple heuristic for feedback - if it comes from the left, it's presumed to be wrong and ignored up until about 3 days before it looks like they might lose a vote in parliament.
A government which was on top of the situation would realise that it's not a good idea to act like you have no problem with ethnonationalism when your voting coalition contains a lot of ethnic minority voters and they aren't all in safe seats by a long shot.
You can't rush writing your enemies list - it ruins the calligraphy.
The secret is to decide what quantity of butter you would consider to be beyond excessive and to triple it.
Fresh turnips are pretty good and they're extremely dependable if baked. The variety I've been growing this year have a lovely mustardy tang to them. Swede on the other hand is pretty difficult to raise above mediocrity.
Coded as, but they sell just as well on both banks of the Foyle.
So was I. You can learn some things from it, but not very much about social policy.
Yeah, but whilst that might suggest that the Biden strategy of doing inflationary industrial policy was flawed, I don't get how it suggests reactionary social policy is popular in the UK - Ohio and the East Midlands are very different places.
Yeah, I guess they are still trying to place comment pieces in the Telegraph and they haven't referred Tony Gallagher to Prevent.
Something very odd about the fact that on the one hand the government is offline enough not to have realised what Twitter is like these days; and on the other hand online enough to think that there was an electoral downside to throwing the book at rioters last year.
Reading Europe's Tragedy and whilst I'm enjoying it, it's really slow going because I have to fight the urge to see a passing reference, think that sounds interesting and look it up on Wikipedia.
Wait, are we allowed to do those?
The comparison is unhelpful, but equally "better than the Nazi bar" is not exactly a challenging yardstick to meet.
What's Jones relationship with Reeves? Is this likely to produce any of the creative tension, or are they too simpatico?
See also urban-rural discourse in the US, or anybody in England talking about provincial Reform strongholds.
I would suggest that the few nationalisms where this isn't true are the ones that had already done it to their peripheral peoples.
There are spicier takes, such as that it's what happens when you don't like proper mustard and when you have access to a lot of sugar for I'm sure entirely innocent reasons.
Baked beans are also an import of an originally North American concept, which was then homogenised for mass production.
Baked beans is functionally equivalent to British Mexican food - an import from the US which was devised by people without a good understanding or appreciation of the original.
Especially since the people protesting and those backing them don't want to be understood, they want to get their way and that's not happening.
And it demonstrably isn't working, but leadership don't want the risk if doing something to move the conversation on, even if it's a free hit like asking what the Shadow Justice Secretary was doing with Eddy Butler.
Neither of them hold any government post though, nor are they ever likely to. Some in the government clearly don't mind what they're saying, but it's exacerbated because those who don't aren't allowed to point out it's fucking insane.
If there's one thing that defines the administration, it's an all-encompassing distrust of its members. The assumption is that if people are given freedom to act, they'll use it to undermine No 10. See also the obsession with leaking.
Pretty clear that every minister has been instructed that they are to say they "understand people's frustrations" and to avoid condemning any behaviour and that no thought has been given to changing this even as it's become ever clearer that some of those who are frustrated are just Neonazis.
The Labour Party is argumentative and unreasonable. I've been on social media before.
And this is exacerbated by our somewhat chequered electoral history, because there's nothing like repeated defeats for building a bitter, inward-looking camaraderie.
Though if the plan was to spread prizes around, somebody should really point out that's already happened. Ayuso and Vine have both won a stage, that's not exactly a minor bauble (and whilst Vine might want KoM, he's already won it once and a second one doesn't burnish the palmares that much.)
And it doesn't help that this is Pogacar's philosophy too. He wants everybody to have prizes once they've helped him and there aren't enough to go round.
Ironically, given she clearly blames Labour for the quality of education she received at a sixth form she started in 1996, it seems like she would have benefited from AS levels. If she was let down by the school, she'd have realised earlier. And if she was just lazy, she could have had retakes.
You have to hide it away before Starmer has it shot.
I do think the fact that the Dunkirk spirit still has such political pull isn't just about nationalist mythmaking, but also about an idea of shared sacrifice and that this is actually something you can leverage for a lot of necessary change.
'More in Common' was set up in honour of her and now spends most of its time either lecturing 'the left' or trying to work out how many shandy drinkers will vote Reform
Jo Cox was murdered by a man with a house full of neo-Nazi agitprop and this was then retconned into a vague narrative about social media abuse
Good afternoon, Jox.