The McSweeney strategy - which was always meant to be judged by its ability to maintain public support - is a complete and utter failure, remarkably so, and that fact should be drilled into Labour's consciousness as a warning to the future.
PSA: Every NHS Trust has been required to have a Freedom to Speak Up Guardian since 2016, whose contact details should be available on the organisation's intranet. They are independent of HR, and often report straight into the Board.
“Brexit betrayal” - oh for god’s sake..
Every day, we’re paying to be poorer. We’re paying to be second class citizens on our own continent. We’re paying to queue. We’re paying for more red tape. We’re paying to be less secure and less trusted.
Brexit IS the betrayal. And so is defending it.
Even if Magyar is no liberal, this is why it is still a huge defeat for illiberalism.
For it shows that a powerful illiberal political machine and methodology can be defeated.
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Le dessin du jour, par Félix
Trump is facing the biggest US humiliation since Vietnam:
The American empire has been shown to be vulnerable, incoherent and profoundly unreliable inews.co.uk/opinion/trum...
since we're apparently on day 2 of "Bluesky discusses Bluesky" I would personally like to tell the "eh who cares, everything dies" crowd that actually a lot of media and creative types rely on social media to do their jobs, and already got shafted by Twitter getting Musked, and frankly: ahhhhhh!
You may recall the serious allegations by Reform about voting offences at the Gorton and Denton by-election.
This detailed thread sets out what happened next.
All too late, and this won’t get the same circulation as the original allegations.
Many thanks for the new gecko.
The lunatic quality of these proposals is persistently underestimated. They are far, far worse than people recognise.
Loved this episode. Gives one Michael Gove a right royal fisking!
McKinley was the 25th president, not the 15th.
Finely-detailed, mixed media illustration showing a canal in early spring with a barge, bridge and towpath
Other work by the Ladybird artists
‘The Canal at Islington’ (1977)
Artist: SR Badmin
Of all Osborne/Cameron's cynical and divisive policies, this act of pointless cruelty was probably the worst.
The Government's decision to abolish it should be welcomed by everybody who cares about children in this country.
www.gov.uk/government/n...
A welcome blast of honesty. And it’s good that Labour is finally acknowledging how rubbish Brexit is. But the elephant in the room remains. It’s immigration and the racism Brexit unleashed. Until we can have an honest public debate about that, we stay stuck.
www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/labour...
“As Tice surely knows, the law sets the floor of our obligations, not the ceiling. A society cannot function on the basis that everyone does the bare minimum they can get away with”
Very good on the mean but intensely - selfishly - greedy politics of Reform.
open.substack.com/pub/theleadu...
‘As a couple, Andrew and Sarah Ferguson have always been too stupid to understand the vulnerability of the institution that supports them, and they began wrecking it from the inside as soon as they met.’
Andrew O’Hagan on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, in the next issue.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Trump bombs.
The Telegraph screams humiliation.
The Mail screams betrayal.
GB News screams weakness.
And all of a sudden a complex global crisis becomes yet another loyalty test to American power.
The UK deserves better than this performative war hysteria.
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First anniversary of a really outstanding public service. Do follow this newsletter and @monkemma.bsky.social, if you don't already do so, for reliable, painstakingly researched rebuttals/ debunks of false/ misleading news stories.
I've never observed a wider gap between self-confidence and lack of any actual understanding than in Badenoch. On other topics it can be comical, but when it extends to undermining gov't on matters of national security, in breach of established conventions, it is profoundly dangerous. #PMQs
Ask the public what services they want to cut, or what services they're happy to be rubbish, and you get a very different set of answers.
They'll say cut foreign aid, ofc, but that's all but gone already. What next?
Our world-class court system.
OK, the Gorton and Denton by-election, I have some thoughts!
Let's take a look at some of the FACTS and burst a few of the more ridiculous takes doing the rounds
But first up, can we acknowledge just what bad losers Reform are?!🤣
Right, let's get started...
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So the Telegraph is taking this well
Another splendid 'debunk' from @monkemma.bsky.social. It's hard to overestimate just how much work it takes to excavate, accurately and in detail, the layers of half-truth, falsity, misinterpretation etc. of these kinds of stories: monkdebunks.substack.com/p/the-500k-b...
Honestly: anyone telling you polling “clearly” shows you should vote either Green or Labour to stop Reform in Gorton & Denton probably has a vested interest in that party winning.
It’s a toss up. There isn’t a guaranteed move here. You might choose wrong. So just vote the one you like best.
Today's by-election is another illustration of the problems with FPTP.
The result may tell us less about what voters want to happen than whether they can game the system effectively to stop a result most *don't* want.
The electoral system should not be an obstacle that voters have to work around.
