As a member of the Committee scrutinising this awful Bill, I am calling on the Govt to abandon its plans for a Refugee Tax. Demanding refugees pay for the vital support received during their hardest days will push them into long-term poverty and there is no benefit for the country in doing this.

Stop the £10,000 refugee tax

Add your name today and call on the Government to remove the refugee tax from the Immigration and Asylum Bill.

refugee-council.movement-action.org

Refugee Council@refugeecouncil.bsky.social · 5d ago

Sign our petition and call on the Government to scrap the refugee tax. refugee-council.movement-action.org/p/stop-the-r...

Great news👏 Curbs on street ads for gambling was one of the very first things I asked the Council to do when I was elected MP. With clear evidence that gambling harm is rising, public health action like this is vital and urgent. www.brightonandhovenews.org/2026/10/16/a...

Ads for gambling and payday loans to be banned from council sites

Ads for gambling, payday loans, cigarettes and weapons will be banned from council-owned sites under new rules voted through yesterday.

brightonandhovenews.org

Campaigns in 2026 have seen an explosion of references to responsible spending, property taxes and accountability. Meanwhile, explicit references to climate change have almost entirely disappeared. www.nationalobserver.com/2026/10/19/a...

We compared ads from over 500 Ontario municipal campaigns across two elections: Here’s what changed

Candidates aren’t just spending more on ads. They are also changing their messaging.

nationalobserver.com

The trade unions resisting a political donations cap in the UK are ragged-trousered philanthropists. Thanks to their delusion that a system allowing limitless donations enhances their power, they're in danger of handing the country to the far-right parties that billionaires support. Burnham must act

Will Labour next week in the budget tell us sad stories about "difficult decisions" and how there's "no money left?" Or will this Labour Government challenge the broken economic thinking that has lead us to this place? And tax the assets of multimillionaires & billionaires? 👀

"Only the Green Party has the policies to address inequality, through taxes on wealth; tackle the cost of living crisis with rent controls and raising the minimum wage; and fight climate breakdown through a nationwide home insulation programme and turbocharging renewables" - @carladenyer.bsky.social

If you think of GB News as the media wing of Nigel Farage’s political project, the total subsidy funnelled his way by its owners and his crypto donors (just four men) tops £200m, writes Alan Rusbridger

Farage and the £130m even his detractors have missed

GB news has provided relentless positive PR for Nigel Farage while racking up tens of millions in financial losses. And now there is a new channel in ...

prospectmagazine.co.uk

Bring back the crime-free paradise depicted in Kings Cross by the Pet Shop Boys and the movie Mona Lisa

Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · 2w ago

I get the appeal of nostalgia, I really do, but I find it specifically funny to get a leaflet from Reform's candidate talking about how when he was in the Met 31 years ago, he would never have dreamed of lawlessness like the kind we now see in Kings Cross.

It didn’t happen to me very often because my journalism was not political but I once offered to help the Boilermakers Union in Canada, only to find they wanted me to write about why Canadian oil was better than Saudi oil 🙄

Dannagal Goldthwaite Young@dannagal.bsky.social · 2w ago

Many of us have been offered lots of money to say/write things that are morally (and empirically) bankrupt. My count to date is $100k that I don’t have because I turned down book propositions and speaking gigs. And that’s just the EXPLICIT financial incentives. Never mind the IMPLICIT ones.

"One side says Zionism equals racism, the other says anti-Zionism equals terrorism. Both take a word that means different things to different people, choose its worst possible meaning, and pin it on everyone who uses it" - @daviddavidi-brown.bsky.social www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/gre...

Okay, John Crace is a sketch writer so he has a license to be a little hyperbolic for effect. But this reads like a Daily Telegraph hatchet job. I expect @theguardian.com to be a progressive publication, not a Labour one www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

At Brighton, Polanski raised his arms in triumph. It felt more like a wave goodbye | John Crace

The Greens’ leader seems long on agitprop but short on ideas – and one byelection away from losing his job

theguardian.com

back in my day intentionally fabricating data for use in scientific inquiry was sternly frowned upon

Hisham Zerriffi@hishamzerriffi.bsky.social · 3w ago

Pew tested AI synthetic surveys against actual survey data. Conclusion: “This experiment taught us that, at this time, AI models are not an adequate replacement for traditional polling on topics of broad public importance.” This is an all time bad idea. No need to hedge with “at this time.”

"We did win elections in greater numbers than ever before. But more than that, we changed this country. You did this. We made this happen.” In his speech at Conference, Zack Polanski reflects on a historic year for the Green Party.

My first session at #GreenPartyConference is about immigration policy - we’re the only UK party that continues to stand up strongly for human rights here even when those humans are not British. And the session is packed. 💚

This graph represents probably more than a hundred thousand hours of work by our community. Every year when I look at it I think our current proposal model is broken.

András Gáspár@andrasgaspar.bsky.social · 3w ago

This was posted on LinkedIn. Looks like a new record, possibly 3500 proposals. Good luck everyone on the JWST roulette. We really should have made two.

A £276 increase in bills in January would be the final straw for millions across the country. The Prime Minister must turn words into actions and stop bills going up on his watch.

It really is interesting how we don’t call, say, a journalist who wrote a pop-sci book on galaxies an ‘astrophysicist’, or a retired banker who wrote a pop-psych book on personality types a ‘psychologist’—but the media call any rando who writes a book on something in the past a ‘historian’.

Kevin M. Kruse@kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 3w ago

Seriously, unless you're going to call me a "scientist" for helping my son with his class volcano project and call me a "physician" because I applied a band-aid successfully, please please PLEASE stop calling any random crank who shits out a book about the past a "historian"

The ZiR motion is terrible, backed by a small group of understandably committed but doctrinaire activists. But @thetimes treats a straw poll of 91 as if it was a settled Green Party decision 🙄 www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

Jewish Greens face sanctions for belonging to ‘Zionist’ synagogues

The Green Party rejected an amendment to protect Jewish members attending self-declared ‘Zionist’ organisations from reports of racism

thetimes.com

The rush to speculate that asylum seekers are responsible for every crime in the news is a sort of opportunistic informational terrorism. Until it’s disproved it stokes fear and hatred. When it is disproved there are no adverse consequences and they know that they only have to be lucky once.

Huge bummer when you’re just innocently trying to join and promote a movement that hates Black people, immigrants, and Jews — but then you discover that they have a dark side. apple.news/A9g-feRPSTme...

Happy cheese day to all who celebrate. And a good moment to remember that our political system is so broken that this woman, who is visibly inane, became prime minister.

Josh Self@josh.politics.co.uk · 3w ago

#Onthisday in 2014: Liz Truss delivers impassioned speech on cheese and apple imports “At the moment we import two-thirds of our apples. We import nine-tenths of all of our pears. We import two-thirds of our cheese. “That is a DISGRACE!” www.politics.co.uk/history/that...

Every private conversation in Westminster: "Well the triple lock obviously has to go at some point". Every commentator on Burnham: "completely mad to propose getting rid of triple lock - political suicide".

Jonn Elledge@jonnelledge.bsky.social · 3w ago

The BBC news summary this morning went seamlessly from "critics warn PM scrapping triple lock would be electoral suicide" to "critics ask if PM has nerve to make tough decisions" and I don't think it's a particularly pro Burnham stance to suggest he might not be the entire problem here.

as a satire on so-called late stage capitalism how could one beat investors pouring a trillion into a company offering to wipe out humankind

I really hope it turns out to be something trivial so all of the premature and borderline racist speculation by the usual suspects will make them a laughing stock.

Ben@gridlock.bsky.social · 3w ago

5+ guys in white vans and balaclavas at midnight - fuel theft, hare coursing, or global terrorism

Does good work for her members I assume but wrong on tax, wrong on political funding, wrong on net zero. Every policy intervention is short-termist and blinkered

It bears mentioning that Microsoft just shut down its Microsoft Research Social Media Collective…because why should they care about the social consequences of their products, right? Including worker harms.

Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts — And They're Horrified

Human contractors are reviewing Copilot users’ prompts and uploaded images, according to internal documents obtained by 404 Media. The contractors are also bombarded with users’ requests for sexual AI...

404media.co

“What is certain, however, is that a vast sum of our money will be wasted, countless Torontonians will find themselves profoundly inconvenienced for extended periods, and, eventually, a cyclist will get struck by a car. But at least the congestion will be worse.”

Spacing@spacing.bsky.social · 3w ago

EXCLUSIVE: Inside the contract to rip out Toronto’s bike lanes Spacing has obtained the RFP for the Ford government's bike lane removal, and it looks even worse than thought. spacing.ca/toronto/2026... #toronto #bikes #torontobike @cycletoronto.bsky.social

For all that it's been barely reported in the UK press, it's still hard to understate the importance of the stance @labourunionsuk.bsky.social has taken on trans and non-binary rights this week. Every single trade union affiliated to the party of government has stood up and said we will not comply.

I really weary of how UK reporters are tiptoeing around the fact that the US president talked absolute shit about the RAF Fairford incident and arrests. "It's possible Trump was talking off the cuff" - no, it's in fact very clear that Trump was just lying compulsively because that's what he does.