Unbelievably irresponsible from the shadow justice secretary and a trained lawyer, no less.
South West England via the Midlands but made in NW5. Spurs, Spain and social democracy. I like a hike.
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Unbelievably irresponsible from the shadow justice secretary and a trained lawyer, no less.
Ah, you will know then. There really is nothing like being made to feel like crap by a highly educated lawyer! If that's your world, you do all you can to avoid it.
The Home Office's own (excellent) research summary says a) asylum seekers come to the UK primarily because of social networks/ties b) welfare and labour market policies are *not* a big "pull factor" c) safe routes would help freemovement.org.uk/wp-content/u...
I'm the same age as Starmer, with a similar background. My professional career took me into the same world but in a different way (journalism). There really was nothing like an immensely privileged, well spoken QC or partner, who knew all the rules instinctively, to make you feel like unwanted dirt!
Yep - though there has been some loosening up in the law since the 80s and 90s. Starmer is among the oldest in the cabinet (I think) and would have seen and felt the essentially high Edwardian London legal elite back then in a very full on way. But, you're right, they'll all have their stories.
Imagine the licence if the nationalist right is running the whole country.
Want to feel endlessly judged? Try being a working class kid building a career in the elite legal world of the 1980s and 1990s. It's really no surprise Starmer has ended up as he has. He spent years minding every word and mannerism. You can't just turn that off, unfortunately.
Yep, there was only one danger to anyone in that clip!
This is Starmer to a T. Given where he started, he spent his whole adult life constructing a persona that enabled him to get on in a world totally dominated by the privately educated and highly privileged. It worked perfectly for the law. It's far less good for politics.
Not that I've seen.
We need more strong statements like this from local leaders. Well done Lee:
Most "ordinary Mums and Dads" participating in the asylum hotel protests are a few drinks away from going full on Nuneaton.
I suspect it's very difficult to learn Dutch in the Netherlands, Amsterdam especially. How do you practise when everyone just drops into English?
Of course, in politics, my party - Labour - needs to find its backbone and start calling this stuff out. Or do they think everyone who has 'concerns' about immigration is a racist deep down? Cos that's pretty insulting to a lot - a majority - of those people who really aren't.
Agree with this. Don't shuffle awkwardly when someone is saying something racist push back and say why you disagree, respectfully. Employers, service providers, whatever, all have a role to play. People need to feel there's a *consequence* for racist behaviour -even if it's just losing you as a mate
Sky, ITV and the BBC have spent the last few weeks empowering these racist turds with poor to bad faith reporting of tiny demos organised by far right groups as huge events of national importance, while offering no push back to relentless lies told by Farage and others. The TV newsrooms own it.
This is horrific, but it is also good. It exposes the "ordinary Mums and Dads" bollocks and makes clear who the flag painters really are and who they represent. Same with the Halifax footage.
Everything about the flag discourse is fucking stupid. Absolutely every single thing about it.
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On the ferry. It's a saucy sea. No-one allowed on deck 🤢
Very, very strong Ed Miliband White Van Man vibes
Note to Keir Starmer: you were correct in April. Don't be afraid to be correct again!
Reported by the Daily Mail, which had clearly taken a day off from race-baiting and promoting civil war ... www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...
So the lectern photo is genuine - it was taken at St George's Day celebration earlier this year. This is what Starmer said standing there. Seems spot on to me. He should say it again.
Good point. I also can't see his legs!
As per @politicanimal.bsky.social the photo may be genuine - but from a reception for the women's England football team. Imagine The National's fury if the Union Jack had been used for that!
I think it is a genuine photo - from a Downing Street reception for the Lionesses, I think (where you’re hardly going to fly the saltire…)
What's the most amount of red flags you can fit in a paragraph?
Talk of Britain needing to call in the IMF is absurd. The right-wing political and media class appears to have convinced itself that the country is on the brink of economic and societal collapse. Some even seem determined to bring it about. My latest on what lies behind rising gilt yields
A few observations: 1. This is obviously not a genuine photo 2. An England flag is fine 3. As is a Union Jack 4. Especially if you are the PM 5. These quotes are very selective (as you'd expect from The National) 6. But, really, given the time he's had to prepare, Starmer could have done much better
You would not believe they were British unless they actively told you because they're not white. The vast majority of us in the UK moved way beyond that kind of ethnic profiling a long time ago. Your trenchant opinions on a country you know nothing about mean you could only be American!
I am struggling to understand why any non-racist would deny non-white people a British identity.
Then move onto our last Prime Minister ... www.linkedin.com/posts/rishi-...
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There is a Bluesky I never see.
Was only a matter of time I guess before we became so dead inside that we would start punishing refugees themselves. These are people who *we have accepted* fled violence, torture and discrimination. And our response is what? To bar them from living with their loved ones.
You don’t need outside experts to check what Jack Straw and Policy Exchange are claiming here. You can just read the public text of the Good Friday Agreement to see it relies upon ECHR membership. If the UK leaves, the agreement either needs renegotiating, or it’s been breached. It’s that simple.
People who say you should never trust the government being happy to trust the government absolutely with their most fundamental rights and freedoms really aren't very consistent - or bright!
A good reshuffle for Resolution Foundation alum: - Torsten Bell working alongside Reeves on the Budget. - Dan Tomlinson, former RF senior economist, now Exchequer Secretary. - Minouche Shafik, Starmer’s new economic adviser, co-chaired RF’s Economy 2030 Inquiry.
But, unfortunately, they look like losing the next election.
Whether or not the PX authors consider leaving ECHR amounts to a breach in the GFA - other parties to the agreement would. Which is the only point that matters.
Yep, it’s a review of how it’s applied in the UK as opposed to other member states.
There is a lot of sophistry in the Policy Exchange GFA report, especially parsing sources to give an inaccurate impression. Here I'm cited discussing the impact of the the GFA on the NI legal order as a whole and it is presented as authority for the commitments only binding NI's devolved bodies:
The other night BBC News did a report on Angela Rayner's housing that was based on nothing more than what RW newspapers were saying. It was even implied that the amount of coverage by these newspapers gave credibility to the story. #LBC
Potato, bacon and cabbage done by someone who knows how to do it is absolutely delicious! Americans would hate it!!
This will be decided in an election, not a referendum. It won’t even need 50% of the vote for it to happen. And Boomers turn out.
You start with wanting to sign a trade agreement on the Pacific Rim, and you end up with razor wire stretched across Cumbria and Dumfriesshire. That's how quagmires work when you don't know anything and you want to break everything.
Shall I tell you what's wrong with the Policy Exchange nonsense? Okay: I'm about the most conciliatory Irish unity sceptic there could possibly be among Nationalists. Without ECHR, I would consider the Belfast Agreement, and the compromises and agreements the Union rests on, as dissolved.
He’s very smart, very normal and comes across very well. A real asset. I hope he’s used as such.
Nowhere is perfect. But there’s something about where you’re from embracing xenophobia, racism and authoritarianism that is particularly gruesome.
Probably the kiss of death, but I really rate Darren Jones.
The HMT takeover by the Resolution Foundation is notable. Both Torsten Bell, who's leading on the budget, and Dan Tomlinson who'll now be doing tax, were there.
There is now zero tolerance of racial hatred & harassment in Britain in 2025 in football stadiums. But infinite tolerance for unlawful racist harassment online - with perpetrators boasting about impunity: the police impotent, platform regulators asleep, & government ministers, MPs & media are mute.
Having thrown a lot of crap at Starmer, it’s only right to praise a very smart move. Here is one. Darren Jones in this role is an excellent appointment.
This is a theme throughout Brexit and from the right more generally: not quite grasping that Ireland is a independent, soverign nation now. Goes with, I think, the general ignorance of Ireland in the UK Remember when they were pushing 'well, Ireland will just have to leave as well' as a solution?
This is a tactical, as well as moral, error. Musk is spectacularly unpopular in the UK. There's a chance to take the patriotic high-ground, calling out foreign billionaires stoking up violence in Britain, without being seen to dismiss "ordinary people". And you can challenge Reform to back you.
There will always be places to go. But you’re right, options may be limited.
Such a bizarre pledge from the Tories - which ironically, makes it clear that oil and gas will run out, unlike...the sun, wind and tides. A policy that appeals primarily to potential donors, and those who work in the sector who don't want a just transition www.thenational.scot/news/2542953...
You cannot be British if you emigrate to Britain is just tedious, bog standard racism.
Is it your position that people who emigrate to Britain cannot be British? That’s the mainstream racist view, for sure.
Another Brexit lesson is that no Brexit lesson will ever be learned.
One lesson of the Brexit period: don't listen to politically motivated lawyers (and economists). Seems that certain former ministers haven't learned it.
I suspect there are two problems here: 1.The failure of Brexit makes its proponents more radical, not less. They can't accept it was a mistake, so they have to find new traitors to blame, new barriers to demolish & new powers to amass, to restore the victory of which they think they've been cheated
2. Brexit failed as policy, but it won every electoral battle it faced & was hugely effective at reshaping the Right, redrawing the electoral map & acting as a battering ram for other changes. It's not surprising Farage, Cummings & the Tory Right look back at Brexit & think "that again - but more!"
I turn on my TV and a TV presenter is asking a Govt minister why they are talking about rolling out free childcare when the big issue is asylum hotels. This is objectively insane.
Over the last few weeks I’ve begun to think the same. Labour is in a doom loop of moral cowardice and political ineptitude that it seems to have no idea about how to escape from; or even inclination to address. I keep wanting to be proved wrong. Maybe I need to accept I won’t be.
I mean, this is just so fucking obvious. How stupid do you have to be to think the EU - and Ireland in particular - will blithely accept the UK pulling out of the ECHR, and just agree new arrangements?
I don’t think people like this have been radicalised (they were racist all along) so much as they simply feel less ashamed about it. Control of the media by racists - (X), GB News - is part of why.
It's fascinating watching the same cycle of f%¥£ing around and finding out happening. Some anti-ECHR lawyers in Britain might say this, but Irish and EU politicians think differently, and politics will determine their reaction, not law alone. archive.ph/BpWNN
It’s too scared to.
My main issue with the debate around ECHR is that no one advocating for it seems willing to accept that the past decade of politics has shown us that withdrawing from organisations/treaties/institutions always has more unintended consequences than intended, usually negative.
It’s heartbreaking, contemptible and disastrous all rolled into one.
For the first time, we’ve started to think seriously about leaving the UK. We almost certainly will if the right takes power in 2029. Living in a country that’s declared itself racist and opposed to liberal democracy is not a great option when you’re lucky enough to have others.
After a fantastic month in France and Spain, we’re getting the ferry back to England today. It is not an exciting prospect. Although the media’s longed-for civil war never happened, it seems from afar that something has changed. Racists are empowered. The government is weak. The dye has been cast.
Moral bankruptcy and political insanity walking hand in hand once again. This will not win a single additional vote. It will lose plenty, though.
Why attack Reform for planning to fund the Taliban or Musk for inciting insurrection when you can punch down on refugees instead?
I see that the National is dead excited about that ten billion quid Norwegian shipbuilding order for Clydeside ohwait.
Again - the reason that the Good Friday Agreement locks in the ECHR is that the UK had repeatedly been held accountable by the European Court of Human Rights for human rights breaches during the Troubles - while national courts had failed to do so, even upholding miscarriages of justice
If you can’t condemn a racist billionaire inciting the violent overthrow of the UK government or your political opponents for planning to fund a regime with a long history of killing UK citizens and attacking UK interests, you look weak to everyone but the most blindly loyal. That’s fatal.
See, also, Reform wants to fund the Taliban.
Sickening cowardice
You’ll not get any Spanish PM doing more on defence. Under Sánchez 2% spending has been hit. en.ara.cat/politics/nat...
He’s called Pedro Sánchez. He would be destroying Nigel Farage. Eating him for breakfast.
The LibDems look on the ball again but, in truth, they are only doing all the very obvious stuff Labour should be doing but isn’t.
The Liberal Democrats said Badenoch should reveal the full story behind her apparent offer. A party spokesperson said: “Kemi Badenoch spent months asking questions of the chancellor regarding her CV. It’s now time for her to answer some of her own.”
You don't get an offer from Stanford aged 16 unless you are Nobel prize level bright. Kemi may be many things but she's certainly not that.
Bog standard racist shite aside, does Carswell know it's actually not far from Epping to the sea? (39 miles to Southend)
The truly frustrating thing is how obvious this is. There is no downside. Reform want to pay the Taliban, FFS!!!
Also, again, the aim shouldn't be winning over the 10-15% who are Reform ultras, its getting the 10-15% who are drifting towards them.
I mean, if nothing else, the Taliban are one of the few known entities to currently poll worse than the government - they shouldn't be looking a gift unicorn in the mouth.
“We can’t possibly win the argument on ‘is the Taliban bad?’, but “the NHS is now only as bad a state as it was in 2018”, “immigration still high by historic standards” and “above target inflation”, now those are real winners!
Yeah. This is what is so funny about it, if you are arguing that “giving money to the guys who helped with 9/11” is not something Reform should be attacked over, you are arguing that they can’t be beaten.
It took a huge amount of work for Labour to get people to stop bringing up Salisbury in focus groups (didn’t vanish until *2023*). If your political opponent gives you an opportunity to attack them on national security: take it!
Famously, attacking Corbyn over Salisbury made a bunch of swing voters pro-Russia. Labour people love to go “it’s different this time”, it never is, it’s always just Labour doing what it almost always does. (Losing.)
What do Jenrick, Farage, Goodwin, the Telegraph etc think will be the consequences of their actions? And what does Starmer think will be the consequence of his inaction?
Both the Lucy Connolly and the Epping hotel cases have now taken on a political-media existence of their own, unconnected with what actually happened in court. It doesn't matter there were published sentencing remarks in one and a judge-prepared summary in the other. People want stories instead.
A final walk up into the hills behind Briñas, through a gap between the rocks and into Basque Country oakwoods. Thunder in the distance, sheets of rain across the Ebro plain. Epic. Getting lost in nature. That’s the cure for all the world’s crap.
Carswell now lives in Mississippi. His inner racist has been set free. A truly repulsive man.
I think both of them - Phillipson and Philips - were very poorly briefed on this. Here's what's actually going on: www.ein.org.uk/news/home-se...
