From a thread last year, after Rod Liddle wrote a column about bombing Glastonbury. Thread also reminds us that these types can get put in the House of Lords and become legislators for life, like Toby Young

George Monbiot@georgemonbiot.bsky.social · last yr.

4. It's the clowning that kills us. It opens the door to the unacceptable, allowing it to spread into public life. Then suddenly you find it's real and it's serious. People like Rod Liddle perform an essential role in Establishment power. They are not an anomaly but an embodiment.

It’s so solipsistic that the media does this. A columnist and former editor of the Today programme dying of natural causes does not merit the kind of full page spread that a former prime minister would get!

Lee Hurley@hleehurley.com · 2d ago

The Times, one of the leading voices when it comes to 'protecting women and girls' calling a man who assaulted his young pregnant girlfriend, said he would rape the kids if he was a teacher and called for child sex abuse porn to be legal, 'brilliant'

perfect illustration of how these people will ignore all sorts of horrible bigotry - often towards women, including domestic violence - if the bigot in question demonstrates the correct level of transphobia

Libby@captainlibatron.bsky.social · 2d ago

Dear god

What I hate about COVID downplayers is… you won okay. In the aftermath of humanity coming together to develop the most crucial vaccines of our lifetime & collectively sacrificing to save lives, we are now less safe, less vaccinated & less empathetic than ever. You won ok. Lay down your swords.

So sick of the narrative that it's 'easy' to claim benefits. It isn't! When they say 'harder' they mean reducing what's available for people who genuinely need it in order to save money. Yet some of you are still dancing around at the thought of this man leading us because he uses fucking TikTok.

Saul Staniforth@saulstaniforth.bsky.social · last wk.

#GMB: "On welfare.. [Burnham] says he wants to make it harder for people to claim benefits.. so in his words 'you might increase the conditions required to receive benefits'"

He can't call the genocide a genocide bc calling it what it is raises a lot of extremely awkward qns for a lot of people who matter, including the previous boss

The New Arab@thenewarab.bsky.social · last wk.

Last week, 80 members of the House of Commons and House of Lords sent Andy Burnham a letter urging him to recognise the findings of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, which concluded that genocide had occurred in the Gaza Strip. But the government rejected the demands.

Again, a uniquely malign influence on British politics and society

flyingrodent@flyingrodent.bsky.social · last wk.

This ex-Labour MP quit, avoiding a sexual harassment investigation; set up an opaquely funded “anti-extremism” campaign that was all over TV and radio in a general election urging the public to vote Tory; was then given a peerage (a non-job for life in the legislature) by Tory leader Boris Johnson…

Also, this can't be stressed enough: the Treasury doesn't have a bank account like people and businesses do, with income and outgoings. When the government spends money it creates it. That's not consequence free, but saying the government's finances are like a household budget was a lie.

Sam Freedman@samfr.bsky.social · 2w ago

It's driving me insane. The govt spends £1.4 trillion a year. Borrowing estimates are often by tens of billions over a year. But we're supposed to imagine money is budgeted to the last penny.

Reminds me of the time a giggling Matt Chorley and colleague asked another Times Radio employee what her favourite Boris The Legend moment was, and she said she didn’t have one, because her mother and everyone on her mother’s floor of her care home were killed by Covid 19 within about three weeks.

I was having a similar thought the other day about why AI gets the "it's the future and we all have to embrace it" line whereas renewable energy, which obviously IS the future and we're well on the way there already, is subject to "are we going too fast on Net Zero" nonsense.

mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social · 3w ago

Big business runs our media and so they're much more excited about AI and the concentrated profits to oligarchs it promises than solar, which has diffuse benefits to all people. In fact, solar will kill one of their favorite businesses (big oil)

Farewell Anne Widdecombe, you were a terrible human being, but you were on telly lot, so who can say what your legacy is?

It's been a point that's been argued to a brick-wall my entire professional life but if you take a cold hard look at the relative successes, compounding economic benefits, and global standing of British industries the treatment of the performing arts is a completely mad kind of self harm

Arts Professional@artsprofessional.co.uk · 4w ago

Performing and creative arts university courses will no longer receive funding from a government teaching grant as part of “difficult decisions” about spending priorities, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has said.

As it was with, say, both Johnson and Starmer: watch how the bullshit completely inverts overnight, somehow without anyone ever having been wrong about anything, at any point.

Like I say: it really is not hard to spot when the Bullshit Machine’s control switch has been flipped from Suck to Blow.

‘Difficult decisions’ is almost always code for ‘punching down’. Fucking STOP IT. The arts sector in the UK is worth £8.5bn per year. That is (just numerically, quite apart from anything else) a FUCKING PRIORITY, you flailing cretins.

Arts Professional@artsprofessional.co.uk · 4w ago

Performing and creative arts university courses will no longer receive funding from a government teaching grant as part of “difficult decisions” about spending priorities, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has said.

We know what they've done: they used her terrible murder by a neo-nazi to hold the peacenik left to account while mainstreaming far right talking points, enforcing Reform style racist immigration policies, & telling every racist in the land they have legitimate concerns

Adam Bienkov@adambienkov.bsky.social · last mo.

Asked about rising racism and hatred in the UK, Keir Starmer says "the very sad thing is I am not able to say that in the 10 years since Jo Cox's death that things have got better because sadly they have got worse. That's on all of us to fix." Well yes, and your government has done what exactly?

the "how dare you care about gaza but not sudan" crowd (david lammy) didn't care about sudan either

Henry Mance@henrymance.ft.com · last mo.

The UK "received intelligence that Ethiopia appeared to be supporting a genocidal militia in Sudan’s civil war as far back as 2024 but did not go public with the news for fear of upsetting the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a parliamentary committee will hear." www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

SoftBank’s investor presentation is one of the greatest things ever made. I’ve been thinking about it all day. These are the real slides shown in a speech where Masayoshi Son said he wouldn’t retire for at least another decade. The goose stuff is truly demented. Bravo group.softbank/media/Projec...

lmao this guy is like the pure distilled essence of everything that makes the Labour Party obnoxious

Prem Sikka@premnsikka.bsky.social · last mo.

Meet James Purnell. Andy Burnham's chief of staff. In earlier incarnation, he supported the Iraq invasion; was chairman of Labour Friends of Israel; said that Winter Fuel Allowance and free bus passes should not be sacred; supported PFI, lie-detector tests for benefit claimants. What next?

GP on the BBC this morning parroting the oft-heard “stay indoors between 11 and 3 because the sun is hottest then”. The sun is *most intense* then, that’s the time of day you’re most at risk of sunburn. The hottest part of the day is usually between 4-6. Thinking you’re safer at 5 is daft.

Our latest blogpost on how car-dominated neighbourhoods are making extreme heat worse, and what we can do about it. www.lowtraffichackney.org/latest-news/...

Cars don't just cause climate change – they make our streets hotter today

​As Hackney braces for more frequent heatwaves, most discussions focus on climate change and carbon emissions . But there's another important reason to reduce traffic in our neighbourhoods: cars...

lowtraffichackney.org

In the end, there were just a lot more human rights abuses than I was expecting from the human rights lawyer.

We could build an entire HS2 for the amount we’d lose through a Heathrow Expansion

Leo Murray@crisortunity.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Government have tried to bury some bad news - for Rachel Reeves anyway - today as *their own* cost-benefit assessment of Heathrow expansion plan finds it would LOSE between £21 to £121 billion! A climate catastrophic boondoggle clutched for by a chancellor with no real ideas for ‘delivering growth’

Analytically, this is why it's important to consistently talk about the political media class, to treat them as a single ecosystem of shared & mutually reinforcing interests, rather than as members of different parties & discreet professions that also overlap or interact

It’s not just Palantir that we should be worried about (and we should be very worried indeed about Palantir).

Joe Noonan@joenoonan.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Prof. Francesca Bria has mapped connections