Top recent posts by Global News and Politics Professionals on Bluesky

Do they though

I am tired of this world-these people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.

my god I need to wake up Friday morning to the news that Matt Goodwin is not an MP, I can't bring myself to feel strongly about who wins but I really, really need him to lose

Another example of AI slop as the aesthetic of modern fascism: lazy, ugly, moronic

This lawsuit seems appalling to me, honestly. I feel for people whose student experience was lousy due to Covid but that's not the fault of universities. "I wanted in-person study." I'm sure you did. Nobody gets what they want in a global pandemic

Matt is doing an excellent job here of convincing us that he is in absolutely no way bitter at all about his failure as an academic.. 😉

It’s on Google, even though it is making search worse. It’s on WhatsApp, even though I absolutely do not want “homework help” or “relationship advice” from my messaging app. In the year of our lord 2026, it is everywhere. And it *doesn’t work*.

🔴 NEW - Farage is losing steam and the data proves it 👇

I had actually forgotten this hilarious episode until now! For the record, I think Goodwin is unstable to be an MP because he is now an extreme racist/white ethnonationalist who wants to import Trumpist extremism/fascism to the UK. But it's true he can't add up! www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

Another story from Gorton & Denton...

Condemning Reform, Ratcliffe and Lam's racist rhetoric is an important and very welcome shift. But it means little unless accompanied by changes to the government's own *policies* -especially the vindictive and counterproductive earned settlement proposals. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Was talking to a friend last night about how hard it is to reckon with the US president being a lunatic thug. It’s a fact the brain, and the world, doesn’t know what to do with

Full of admiration for what Emma does in threads like this one. Read it, it’s interesting.

For this weekend’s long read The fights Starmer has started to pick with billionaires and and the hard right - and whether a brutally honest, wholesale revaluation of why Labour won in 2024 is the thing that could revive their fortunes. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Travelling to the US is just not worth the risk these days.

Trump increases tariffs to 15% www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... If added to other tariffs this would breach the deal with the EU

I can do whatever I want, waaah waaah waaah 👶👶👶. Spoilt brat throws toys out of the pram.

It’s really not *inexplicable*! As soon as you’ve gone full on anti immigration, you age no longer a progressive party!

about that "eighth in line to the throne" thing

This is either deliberately misleading or just ignorant/confused. Ratcliffe's "colonisation" is worse than Starmer's "incalculable damage". But they are points on a (bad) spectrum Reform/Tory settlement proposals are worse than Mahmood's. But they are points on a (bad) spectrum. Not hard.

With lots of sport on the telly, I’m once again very happy to be nap-trapped this afternoon

Pretty much everyone loses out of this. The students suing had a terrible experience and very little thanks for the sacrifice they made for older adults. The people who worked like mad to keep education going feel kicked in the teeth. And institutions just cannot afford these lawsuits.

A man who’a devoted his one and only life to writing the worst possible takes for standard word rate

Exc: Matt Goodwin rails against the elites but is paid to fly around the world to speak with them. The Reform candidate says he's “not part of establishment”, but has given talks at the London Stock Exchange, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Asset Management and Google www.mirror.co.uk/news/politic...

This looks increasingly desperate from Labour. Just embarrassing. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

We don't test new antibiotics against placebo for the same reason. Or new cancer drugs.

(That's because large food poisoning outbreaks are pretty unusual in the UK, rather than a regular occurrence like they are in the USA. Because we have functional food safety rules.)

Lowe's position on removing all Afghan refugees from Britain - including those whose record of helping the UK military he accepts - would be very toxically unpopular indeed outside his core group

'Our ancestral land'? Leave us out of it!

I've been meaning to run this analysis for a while: the probability of voting Labour at GE2024 in seats *gained* by Labour was higher for people who were younger, more liberal, on the left economically, more likely to favour immigration, do not think immigration is the most important issue, etc.

Fun though it is to identify all the flaws in the image, I think that misses the point. If someone had taken the trouble to tweak and correct the image, then it wouldn't be fascist slop. The essence of the aesthetic is that they don't care

More news from the Gorton & Denton by-election...

Entirely the wrong approach, explains a lot. www.bbc.co.uk/sport/articl...

In case you missed it:

The man is a fucking monster.

Great piece from @rmcunliffe.bsky.social who sat in on focus group of Muslim voters in Gorton/Denton. Lots of groups bleak right now, but even more so as they felt racism had basically been legitimised recently & were angry govt esp PM, weren’t standing up to it www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

Alba Party, founded by late Alex Salmond, unable to fight 2026 Holyrood election + likely to fold. “That brings also into question the viability of a party which neither has financial resources nor the ability to contest elections" says leader Kenny MacAskill www.heraldscotland.com/news/2587543...

Interestingly, this prominent piece on the BBC cites no polling evidence at all for its contention. Instead, the contention is based entirely on media chatter.

Just finished Chapter Five of this. You gotta play this game, and you should do it now, because the feeling of the various choices I've made on various playthroughs, ending in some very different places, while still not knowing what happens next, is really very special.

Great Janan www.ft.com/content/9247...

"Blaming the poorest for Britain's woes would be right up Jenrick's street. There has never been a group of vulnerable people he didn't want to punch."

Has he not heard of a duty solicitor?

The great noticing has finally worked its way through to the cabinet.

Very much choosing to invoke my Irish citizenship today then #SixNations

Formally, this requires legislation (+ across Commonwealth). I suspect could also be done without legislation, de facto. (An idea of how follows). It could be done without legislation, de jure & automatically, if Andrew became a Roman Catholic!, due to the religious discrimination in the Act.

Rupert Lowe claims Nigel Farage's claim misrepresents him. Farage: "When he stood up and said that we've got to consider the mass deportation of 'entire communities', including those born in the United Kingdom, that was the moment at which I realised we just had to get rid of him" Lowe

The genocide deniers were always going to deny the mass rape & trafficking of girls by powerful men. They pretend to be left wing and yet over and over again their alliance is with power and patriarchy.

Former Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, who has joined Restore UK to support Rupert Lowe, has posted this message. This would appear to be Bridgen's openly racist response, presented as a joke/satire, to the appointment of Zia Yusuf as home affairs spokesperson for Reform x.com/ABridgen/sta...

Vg: I do hope BBC Verify can clarify this

It's also absolutely terrible auction design. Whoever thought of this must have flunked econ – have they even heard of adverse selection?

It may be his way of making up to them after forcing them to go to Epstein's Island when they were little

Most nervous I’ve been about sweeping since my wife said she would be closely inspecting my dustpan and brush efforts in the kitchen #winterolympics #curling

Where are my Brendan O'Neill meme guys at

It's remarkable that an American president can talk about destroying their own country and bear no political cost. A truly broken society.

Scope for someone to do some incredibly niche Heated Rivalry spinoff fanfic here.

I find this whole thing weird. Reading is good and should be encouraged but I’m not sure you’re reading for the right reasons if you’re chasing some arbitrary target. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/f...

Battering England then going behind against this Wales side with an extra man is exquisitely Scottish rugby...

Delightful piece this: since we moved we've got a mobile stand and the option of having the TV move rooms with you is wonderful.

Has an electoral coalition ever been so misunderstood?

Douglas Murray is worried about the People's Front of Judea splits on the right - though his attempt to navigate through them is rather opaque and unclear. spectator.com/article/brit...

Does Nigel Farage have a problem with women? 'Reproductive rights and equality campaigners reacted in horror after Farage hired James Orr, a rightwing theologian who opposes abortion even in cases of rape, incest or serious risk to health, as his head of policy' www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I actually did pay more for a dishwasher the other day that (I thought) didn't have WiFi. They all have bloody WiFi now. I really do not want my boring domestic appliances to have WiFi. ((The new one apparently does, it was just less prominent in the marketing spin. I despair)

X spaces: "Young Bob" + Steve Laws Rupert Lowe supporters say all Jews + those of mixed Jewish heritage must be deported + can go to Israel. Restore's initial position is no form of public racism, antisemitism, Nazism is incompatible with Restore party membership + activism x.com/JackxJewell/...

I would update this projection for Alba not running candidates but it'd make zero difference...

"Blaming the poorest for Britain's woes would be right up Jenrick's street. There has never been a group of vulnerable people he didn't want to punch."

This interview with the curling lads is heartbreaking. They gave it everything. The country is proud of them.

If only there was a book about this!

We've seen Holyrood at its best recently, for instance in the debate over assisted dying. This has been Holyrood at its worst.

I really love the new “consider Greenpeace in your will” advert, really well executed and perfect for its target market:

A clearer conflict of interest is seldom seen.

If you watch carefully you can see him going through all the stages of grief…

Can someone check on Howard Lutnick?

"Weiss’s tenure as the CBS News boss, then, is not so much the fulfilment of some lifelong ambition for her, then, as a requirement of a $150 million deal that has already made her a multi-millionaire. The contractual terms of the sale require her to run this newsroom. She’s not there for fun."

I don’t vibe with this type of film for the same reason I dislike the Craig Bonds: I just think “either make a straight film about the big theme OR make a genre allegory”. Don’t go “yeah, the film doesn’t have a proper plot or consequences, but it has A Big Theme”.

"In many ways, Bari Weiss’s critics are right. She is not qualified, by any traditional metric, for the job she holds. She has never reported nor edited a truly major scoop … "But to judge her against those benchmarks is to miss entirely the game Weiss is playing."

Erm why is my algorithm serving me videos of a baby monkey being beaten up? What kind of radicalisation pipeline is this, I want out already

An oldie from me on some of Goodwin's junk.

A man noted the renewed efforts of Labour canvassers: “They’re sending people into mosques lately.” A woman quipped, quick as a flash: “They must be desperate if they’re doing that.” Notes from a @moreincommonuk.bsky.social focus group in Gorton and Denton… www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

open.substack.com/pub/davidaar...

Juliet Mitchell is the second wave feminist who challenged her peers on Freud and went on to become a psychoanalyst herself. At 85, she still sees things others miss. Read on for how she changed the way we think about siblings and why feminists hated Freud www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philos...

you have mere MOMENTS to claim this discount

Reform could finish third, second or first in the by-election. The route to a not very close second place is clearest

Long read on how Labour rebalances its voice, political strategy + policies This is often tone of voice - but also content too: the settlement reforms do real harm to a million people, create a major constituencies of grievance that would be v hard to repair www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

How do you find out you’re good at curling? Like are you someone who enjoys ice skating and also sweeping the kitchen? Did these two hobbies accidentally merge at some point?

An uncomfortable truth: Bari Weiss has already won. www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-b...

More than a little ironic that just before this current bout of le gastro 🤢 descended I did my hardest swim in years (3k and lots of sprints) so now every single one of my muscles aches as well as the more errrr colourful aspects of the malady.

I’ll concede this to the Trump administration. You can no longer get Lapsang Souchong at Waitrose. That’s civilisational erasure right there 🤯

It’s not entirely obvious England are going to win here

Not convinced by this headline + Times news report late in a by-election. Whatever the issues of this Legatum Prosperity Index methodology, Goodwin actual academic career in universities (becoming a professor in early 30s) was strong + good impact outside academy too www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

It is by focusing on “the details of the present world” that she might spot what peers have missed. It is “the minutiae… the relationships between people… that tell you so much about the bigger things” Read my interview with Juliet Mitchell from the upcoming issue of @prospectmagazine.co.uk

bloody Operation Golden Age

Gregor Townsend

Going to start watching the big curling final after Wales v Scotland ends

Norstat will still have Alba on 4% in their next poll...

I am so blessed to have wonderful people in my life who do things like this.

Are Team GB going to be able to rescue this? (Not super confident)

So some not great news. I slipped on the ice earlier. Currently in the hospital waiting for an x-ray on what they think is a dislocated arm. :(

Should be given a yellow card for that haircut < mutters >