George Pontikas

Photo of Sarah Pochin MP captioned 'remove the whip', overlaid with the Times' headline: Reform MP: ‘Adverts full of black and Asian people drive me mad’

If racism has no place in his party, then Nigel Farage should prove it by withdrawing the whip from Sarah Pochin immediately.

Broadcasters - especially the BBC - have been working hard to ensure they give a voice to the 25-35% of people willing to vote Reform (and harder groups within that, like anti-asylum protest and Tommy protest)

Need to pay as much attention to the unheard majority who fear that form of politics

Will Hayward: "Beyond this campaign, the aim of the party to appeal to Reform voters that are never coming back (and often were never Labour voters anyway) at the expense of left and centre left traditional supporters has been a catastrophe."

To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?

Badenoch's speech wasn't that bad, but listening to the punditry and you'd think it was Gettysburg Address.
Like declaring the school Nativity Play a success because Joseph didn't wet himself.

To everyone in Britain's Jewish Community: you are not alone. We will not let hate or those who spread it win. We stand with you.

On Yom Kippur many Jewish people in Britain have their phones off to mark the holy day.

As it ends at 723pm, some will hear the tragic Manchester news for the first time.

At that time, please join many of us to send a message of solidarity to British Jews.Thanks Together coalition for proposing.

Reform's ‘plan’ to revoke the legal status of millions of UK residents is morally abhorrent & economic madness

The public believe in fairness & mutual respect, not this cruel Trumpian policy that would leave us all poorer. We are not America - we must resist this dangerous turn in British politics.

I've said this before, but the next election will be the most consequential of my lifetime. Fascism v political norms will be on the ballot. If you don't vote for whichever party is most likely to stop Reform in your constituency, you share responsibility for what happens next.

It gets better, his constituency includes the Wroughton & Wichelstowe ward of Swindon, Wichestowe being one of the largest housing estates under construction in the country. By 2028-29, there will be a few thousand more voters very unlikely to vote Reform...

100k or more marching for a violent racist, the head of X live-streamed in to incite a violent overthrow of the government. And that same government can't find in itself the decency or even the instinct for self preservation to call this out. I despair.

'I decree today that life
Is simply taking and not giving
England is mine, and it owes me a living
But ask me why, and I'll spit in your eye'

(Morrissey/Marr, 1984)

And I wonder if this cycle then becomes BOTH the result AND the source of the politics we see. If progressive or left-leaning voters make ourselves, essentially, impossible to please and very easy to lose forever, doesn't that make it rational for parties to compete for right wing votes? 6/6

Higher rates of Stamp Duty Land Tax Check if you have to pay the higher rates of Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) when you buy a residential property in England or Northern Ireland.

That would normally mean that the higher rate of stamp duty should have been paid.
www.gov.uk/guidance/sta...

The state of the BBC and lack of media regulation reform & enforcement is going to be a major reason for Labour's (likely) failure to recover.

Angela Rayner accidentally pays less tax than she should have, resigns, and the media gives her hell.

Nigel Farage deliberately pays less tax than he should have, and the media gives him a free pass.

That, right there, is the problem.

Honking endorsement for Farage, Johnson et la, without a moment’s reflection that 10 years of UKIPified Tory govt created the mess they’re railing about — booming benefits bills, bond market routs, immigration surges, trade slump and investment slumps. Bring back Boris and Nadine! That’ll fix it. 🙈

Rep. Jamie Raskin tears into Nigel Farage as a "far-right pro-Putin politician" and a "Donald Trump sycophant and wannabe".

A day of shame for the UK. A political party proposes mass deportations and the response from other political parties is not to condemn this as going further than even Mosley or the National Front.

Just for perspective, a few weeks ago roughly 100,000 turned up for the London Trans+ Pride march. By contrast fewer than 3,000 ACROSS THE WHOLE COUNTRY, have turned up to anti-asylum "protests". Yet we are meant to take the latter as "the voice of the people" and the former as "the minority".

kinda hard to forgive the first one

Putin must have given very detailed instructions....

(From https://htsf.substack.com/p/corbynsultana-the-fiasco-party) I understand why people are frustrated at Labour’s first year in office. It was first hidebound by timidity and confusion under the Sue Gray regime. Then, just as it made a new start, Trump was elected and began to threaten the UK with dire economic consequences, at the same time as threatening to pull out of NATO and nuclear deterrence. With Trump in the White House Britain has lost all leverage with the Israeli government over Gaza. Meanwhile, the need for rearmament means it has had to rob the aid budget. But if you are going to join a party with no actual policies, led by people who want to abolish NATO, let Putin annex Ukraine and jail Keir Starmer for genocide, you should think very carefully about the consequences. The strategic consequence will be to split the progressive vote, at the precise moment it will need to unite to stave off the one problem nobody in the Corbyn/Sultana movement wants to engage with: the mass radicalisation of people towards racism and fascism. There is a self-deluding argument coming out of the far left, that says Starmer has somehow fuelled Reform’s rise, by acknowledging the challenges of immigration. Unfortunately, Reform doesn’t need any help: it is riding a real and virulent radicalisation, that’s being driven on social media and by ludicrously lax regulation of broadcasting.

@paulmason.bsky.social summed up the dangerous situation in which we now find ourselves:

the #newsnight discussion on AI in UK HE could not have been more trite if it was generated by AI - really disappointing 😮‍💨

This is England. They don't hate. They don't rage. They don't riot. They stick together. This is England. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

We are now at the stage at which alt-right posters utilising social media are a threat to Britain's race relations, public order and potentially even national security. Still the Rip Van Winkle of the UK state does sweet f-all.

But most of the one-in-five do speak English.

They missed that bit in the dash for clicks.

Night.

I have been promoted to Associate Professor

They view all trading relations with Europe as humiliation and all humiliation with Trump as trading relations.

Even worse, it would send a strong signal that this government is for turning whenever privileged groups of people are unhappy.