Once again, I come back to the fact these guys have created a situation where one of the UK's leading, cis female athletes is scared to go to the loo alone, and the fact that they are celebrating this as a step forward for women's rights.

Equality and Human Rights Commission@equalityhumanright.bsky.social · 9h ago

Our code of practice for services, public functions and associations comes into force today. It provides practical guidance on how the Equality Act 2010 applies to services, public functions and associations. Find out more: https://ow.ly/alIf50Zwrkx

In 2011, the UK government response to antitrans provocations was "Don't be so bloody stupid".

Mallory Moore@sexabolition.blog · 6h ago

web.archive.org/web/20260108... Here's an archive link of the original business guidance in case the original goes missing. In pretty clear terms the original guidance used to say stuff like "obviously, so long as the changing rooms allow privacy, trans women should be permitted to use the womens"

we don’t execute people here in the UK, that’s true, but I think here we can make an exception

Gemma Clark 🧿🕯️@gemmaclark.bsky.social · 5h ago

Andrew Tate’s lawyer is claiming they will be executed in the U.K. Unfortunately MAGAs will believe anything so just to be really clear, there is no such thing as the death penalty in the U.K. and there hasn’t been for many decades.

Tyron has said this better than I could, but if you look across almost every area of the economy and society, life is better today than it was 40 years ago. To take just one example, healthcare, you have: GLP-1s, minimally-invasive robotic surgical procedures, mRNA vaccines, new cancer drugs, PrEP.

Tyron@tyron.bsky.social · 9h ago

an unfathomable amount of stuff has got better over the last 40 years - hell, even over the *last 15* - and anyone convinced it hasn't does not remember or know what things were like 15 or 40 years ago.

Feel like these two articles together really sum up well the weird position AI is in in the workplace. Employers want you to use it more. But the more clients/customers see it, the less they want it.

On Joshua Bonehill-Paine...it's quite clear the guy is still an aggy arsehole, just his agg is now directed in a much more sanitised direction for the Tories. I just think if I was a former aggy extremist and claiming to be a reformed character, I'd probably shy away from agginess in my reborn life?

One - ONE - throwaway mention of the extreme right there after several paragraphs waving at the left. I mean come on.

Not an attack on Mark here to say that I simply do not believe that someone who uses his mea culpa to pivot to attacking the left via Marx’s “on the Jewish question” is speaking remotely in good faith.

Mark Wallace@wallaceme.bsky.social · 9h ago

ConservativeHome has always been a critical friend of the Conservative Party, and a place for all of its wings and views to debate and discuss. So in addition to the above editorial, Bonehill-Paine is also in today’s Comment section making his own case conservativehome.com/2026/08/05/j...

The most simple and inescapable ‘better’ is healthcare. We live better for longer and understand better how to keep ourselves safe / healthy.

Even those of us that do drink like fish and smoke like chimneys aren't aging like they did 😭

we’re well underway in the transition to abundant free energy from the sun and wind instead of polluting and expensive fossil fuels, and correspondingly air quality in cities is vastly better

state schools are much better at providing a fair chance for everyone to do well

bsky.app/profile/indy...

Indy@indy.bsky.social · 12h ago

The boring answer is cars in 1986 were much less reliable and took much more care and attention. (You can track the change via how Top Gear evolved from “we help you with this problematic thing” to “cars as entertainment/self-expression”)

I love people posting omg life is so much worse than 40 years ago opinions on the World Wide Web using handheld computers an order of magnitude more powerful than the one which powered the moon landings

Tyron@tyron.bsky.social · 9h ago

an unfathomable amount of stuff has got better over the last 40 years - hell, even over the *last 15* - and anyone convinced it hasn't does not remember or know what things were like 15 or 40 years ago.

an unfathomable amount of stuff has got better over the last 40 years - hell, even over the *last 15* - and anyone convinced it hasn't does not remember or know what things were like 15 or 40 years ago.

Constantine@ajaxsinger.bsky.social · 16h ago

Food, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.

We still at work would rather pay for a quality coat for a kid that their siblings might use long after we are no longer involved than something that will last one winter even if it's 3 or 4 times as much upfront.

I mean I have worked and do work in the area of poverty and however you want to express it, the cashflow management better choices are available with money up front thing is *highly relevant in 2026* but it's more like pay for a year and it's 15% cheaper but on everything.

Do try to remember that the EHRC guidance only affects service providers and not employment, so if you work somewhere where there are toilets or changing rooms for employees that aren’t open to the public then your employers are wrong if they try to stop you from using facilities for your gender

That Joshua Bonehill-Paine is a suitable Tory candidate but Grant Shapps and Gavin Barwell have been excluded is quite a good indicator of how many seats the Tories will realistically regain at the next election.

Apart from this. Handy "This is impossible. You will be sued either way." Letter. Still not the basic fucking point (go back to how it was) but at least it directs annoyance

A big one for anywhere actively enforcing it is how they are planning to a) 'know' and b) log someone's "birth sex", given that you can't tell by looking/hearing, asking someone in a public space could constitute a breach of someone's right to privacy, and sex is special category data under GDPR.

EHRC Code of Practice comes into effect today so remember to be an absolute pain in the arse to any service provider who is trying to actively enforce it.

got a text today from an unknown number asking me if I'd seen Christopher Nolan's Odyssey and if I had any thoughts on it ... it turned out to be from a friend's new number, but for a while I really thought it was a devious new scam targeted at heterosexual men

In such a Marge - American Pie mood at the moment. Gorgeously wistful. Also by far one of the most provocative things possible to play on the jukebox in a muso wanker pub open.spotify.com/track/3afv9T...

American Pie

Madonna · Music · Song · 2000

open.spotify.com

mcdonald's manager: show the new guy the ropes me: yeah no prob *opens drawer* we use them to restrain grimace

I’ve been a Burnham sceptic but - as a non-expert on this area - this seems like a pretty deft way to handle some pretty tough politics

UK Prime Minister Updates@downingstreet.bsky.social · yesterday

🗣️ PM @andy-burnham.bsky.social: "Britain’s prisons crisis has its roots in a failure to add sufficient new places between 2010 and 2024. Just 500 places were added and 23 prisons were closed. As a result, the system is now dangerously close to capacity and we are running the risk of...

truly a man without any principle or idea of the actual big defining challenge the US faces in this moment

Jake Grumbach@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 21h ago

voting republican to pwn leftists on twitter

The problem of "cost shunting" is again brilliantly illustrated with a homelessness case study. Of course, problems of working across departments is a perennial issue in government but I've seldom seen it put so well

My goodness this chart tells a story

"At key moments after 2010, ‘spend-to-save’ initiatives were described to us by a senior official as ‘completely non-negotiable’. The Treasury bias against ‘spend-to-save’ is so pervasive that we heard numerous examples of where departments and agencies self-select against well-evidenced proposals"