Paul Hebden

In 2016, following the Leave vote, Angela Eagle resigned from Jeremy Corbyn's cabinet in tears, stating in her resignation letter that, "Too many of our supporters were taken in by right-wing arguments and I believe this happened, in part, because [of] your leadership"

16% of the UK population was born overseas (21/22 census)
12% of UK prisoners were born overseas
Therefore people born overseas are less likely to be in jail than people born in the UK.
That should be the headline.

The "respectable" media and centrist commentariat are back to their playground "playing the idiot" approach to a new left party.
Like them or not, the default to elite sneering is unedifying and fuels the very populism these people claim to so abhor. One of the very worst features of centrism.

Contemporary politicians often hide this "who" with phrases like "fairness for the taxpayer" to justify benefit cuts (popular with Tories). Or "fairness for hard working families" (beloved of Labour politicians who want to avoid any accusation of being in the business of politics.)

You'll often find Conservatives and Labour politicians using words that speak to the same settled "universal" values. But eg - with the use of "fairness" or "justice" it's not the value that matters but the "who" fairness or justice they imply it ought to be applied to.

It's not a bad name. It speaks to a definite ideological position that ppl will instantly recognise as being "for" them or "about" their values.
Words like "equality" or "people" or "justice" are useless because everyone in politics believes in a version of "equality" etc.

Protesting over Gaza’s starvation feels like screaming into a void – but we mustn’t stop | Nesrine Malik Political platitudes and a few trucks of aid won’t save the children dying now. But they show leaders can’t ignore public opinion for ever, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik

Israel is committing genocide and it's unreal MPs aren't resigning over it. It's a stain against every MP's name. I hope people never forget how our media and political class sat on their hands and let it happen.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Interesting that Steve Richards, who I'd consider to be on the centre left, agrees with this and devoted a whole podcast to it this week.
open.spotify.com/episode/3aXK...

In fairness this would work. If it was acknowledging that there are actual material, economic, climate causes of small boats

"The best way to learn is to teach"

So I set off trying to learn #python by adding some pythonic content to my overwhelmingly #rstats courses.

Here are my impressions so far.

Mr. McMahon (miniseries) - Wikipedia

As we're talking about Hulk Hogan, Just wanted to flag this great documentary about WWE on Netflix.

You can learn so much about the US, culturally and politically by WWE.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._McM...

You might want to start budgeting for your Halloween candy now.

Rising prices are coming for you - and unlike ghosts and ghouls - they’re very, very real.

"You want sum....? I'll giv it yer."

Yeah, exactly

A Venn diagram showing three circles overlapping, one says I bet you think this graph is about and the other two say Don’t Dont and the middle says You

You’re so Venn

I think they kinda know there's no route to a more just society without higher tax, higher wages and an economy that empowers people. But don't seem to believe any of that is popular.
Also, they're technocrats committed to fiscal conservatism and pro-business, even as these erode our democracy.

They use "working people" as a safe and politically uncontentious collective "we".
Our political / media class are in agreement that "working people" is sufficiently unpolitical and therefore easy to align with as an in-group.

It's meaningless.

See also "the taxpayer" and "hard-working families"

Yeah, the beneath the line comments are a.... fascinating. I get the sense no-one in the Labour Party gives them the slightest notice, which I think speaks to an important point in itself.

thankyou!

hahah, I want to see this picture, cos this will happen!

Ironically the image is, I think, Bedruthan Steps on the North Cornish coast, which last time I checked was still closed to the public, not because of water quality but because the access became hazardous.

Crews in Cyprus battle huge wildfires, villages forced to evacuate Wednesday's fires broke out on the first day of a heatwave in Cyprus with forecasters expecting temperatures on Thursday to hit 45 degrees Celsius, making it the hottest day of the year.

Members of my wife's family have evacuated their home as these wildfires inside 500 metres of their home.

A friend was burned out of her home in LA during the wildfires earlier this year.

2025 is the year climate change became very real for westerners.

www.euronews.com/2025/07/23/f...

I mean, I often see AI get things wrong, but usually in a: "that's not what I subjectively wanted you to do" kind of way.
Of course it gets logic questions wrong, it gets coding wrong, but that pretty instantly becomes apparent when you run code and the software immediately fails.

You know, if you want AI to make a new app or code a cure for cancer, there's only really one marker of success - it codes an app that works or creates you a cure for cancer. For genuinely big things like this, there really is no second best.

There are a number of tasks that AI gets miserably wrong, but for logic tasks that require a correct answer ALL THE TIME, it's hard to see how AI gets off the human leash? Unless it literally is systematically re-writing the whole of the world's code, in secret as we type.

Is the current AI moral panic real, or have a few influential journalists and politicians just upgraded to GPT 03, noticed the deep research model iterates in a live manner - that superficially looks like reasoning - and then noted it regularly comes up with shit results?

When you’ve lost the daily express

Two second social media window for politicians

Well this struck a chord!!
So I've written up what I think in a bit more detail at my... LinkedIn (ducks)
www.linkedin.com/pulse/labour...