Mark Appleby

Fears for free speech as crackdown on Slapps is shelved The editors of The Times and The Sunday Times have urged No 10 to end the use of strategic litigation against public participation

Govt shelves law to stop rich people stifling criticism by journalists and commentators. Why? To help pass law to halve the number of criminal cases that go to a jury trial bit.ly/4rZjZ2p

no foreign foe has ever dreamed of being able to sack and pillaging this country the way Trump admin and its congressional and scotus enablers do every day.

Who’d have suspected that Britain’s worst banker is also its worst climate scientist.

Deacon caught the anti-woke mind virus off Allister Heath in the Telegraph offices a few months back. Lots of nasty bugs going round this time of year.

Net migration high - 'Terrible! Send 'em home! Etc.'

Net migration low - 'Terrible! Bring 'em back! Etc.'

Farage is and always will be a complete charlatan.

The US administration’s insanity on vaccines continues to have ramifications across the world – it is not that America will miss out on these potential new vaccines. It is that they simply won’t happen at all. (Or at least they’ll be indefinitely delayed.)

Newspaper Headline that says Maggie Is Right from 1978

Headline from 1978 - why we must call a halt

Zahawi agrees with Ratcliffe. He arrived in the UK in 1978 when the opposition leader Thatcher warned “people are really.. afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”. They didn’t want ‘coloured’ people here. But his family’s right as refugees allowed it.

UK ban on Palestine Action unlawful, high court judges rule Protest group’s co-founder wins legal challenge against decision to proscribe it under anti-terrorism laws

A total, total humiliation for the government www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

SCOOP - FROM REFORM TO PALANTIR: My Playbook colleague Andrew McDonald texts in with the news that former Reform aide Charles Carlson — and the nephew of U.S. rabble rouser Tucker Carlson — has left Nigel Farage's team for Palantir, the always-controversial tech firm. Carlson was a Reform press aide, and now resides in the Palantir press team inundated this week with queries about Peter Mandelson.

🔥 this is fine ☕️

A nasty, KGB-style twist in the most important European election this year: Péter Magyar - substantially ahead in Hungarian polls ahead of April’s crucial vote - says his former girlfriend set a honey trap to secretly record them having sex and claims Victor Orbán’s camp plans to release it soon

Missed opportunity for a Rocky Mountain survival selection process to choose the US ambassador. Would have filtered Mandelson out nice and early, unless he’d managed to pick up some very surprising skills on Epstein Island.

"Hegseth's Pentagon gives CBP an anti-drone laser and they almost immediately misuse it to fire on a child's party balloon, shutting down local airspace," would be rejected as a side plot in Veep for being too unrealistic and too on the nose as a metaphor.

Yesterday: we exposed the terrifying extent of corporate capture in British politics

Three Labour select committee chairs came out calling for urgent action in response

Today: Labour government's Elections Bill lands. Does almost *nothing* to tackle any of the issues we exposed. 🤦

Imagine thinking even for a second that Bear fucking Grylls could do a better job in a wildly complex geopolitical envrionment that a seasoned diplomat who already had a track record with the administration.

It's quite extraordinary that they thought any of these people would do a better job than Karen Pierce, who did not need to be replaced! It wasn't like there was a vacancy that had to be filled.

Thoughts and prayers for investors in Musk’s fabulist bullshit, how long can he keep all the plates spinning?

He is right to question it, Romeo‘s record at MoJ and time as Liz Truss ‘bezzie’ at DIT could have been disqualifying in a competent selection process.

A bigoted hypocrite who voted for Brexit, then moved to Europe and now spews out hate-filled misinformation.

Reminds me of Simon Hoggart's story; www.theguardian.com/theguardian/...

It is so embarrassing that it has taken nearly a decade for a British minister to say this, a statement of the absolute bloody obvious

Trump is in the unredacted Epstein files "more than a million times," Raskin alleges One document recounts that Trump said he "never" asked Epstein to leave Mar-a-Lago.

What Jamie Raskin saw in the unredacted Epstein files

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told Axios in an interview Tuesday that when he searched President Trump's name in the unredacted Epstein files the previous day, it came up "more than a million times."
www.axios.com/2026/02/10/t...

I'm amazed at how liberal views are about the economic and cultural impact of migration given all the screaming.

Tory/Reform increasingly only hear the screams- as the Cummings missive self-servingly shows.

The Government has been badly distracted too.

Voter attitudes by party to migration since 2011

What has happened is that since 2011 voters have reordered themselves around values with polarisation increasing.

And the right block group and their media/social media have shouted as loud as humanly possible for a decade and a half.

The UK drops a point because Lord Ali was given a Downing Street pass. The US drops a point after the Trump family helps itself to $4bn of public money. 🤔

Hence my complaint that leaders are not taking people through an intense period of change, indeed as an example their proselytising about AI demonstrates a total lack of understanding at the dislocation that people are feeling.

This is a failure of politics.

The MoJ continues to be truly terrible for transparency and open data.

They haven’t commented for this article, but I will bet money that the reason turns out to be they want to licence the data out to a company that will then charge a *massive* markup on it, making it inaccessible to the public.

Peter Mandelson – the great genius at the heart of New Labour.

Dominic Cummings – the great genius at the heart of 'Leave'.

Nick Timothy – the great genius at....

Morgan McSweeney – the great....

Steve Hilton...

Can we ban all alleged great geniuses and cast them into outer darkness forever?

On which note - inevitable I feel. And maybe we can rethink the idea of a Number 10 guru which doesn't seem to have been going terribly well for some time. bsky.app/profile/pipp...

And Labour ‘loyalists’ still tell me Labour aren’t aping Farage.

Star Wars: Why the Left Should Protect the Status of Space as Humanity’s Commons Wealthy countries and corporations are seeking to rewrite international law to undermine the neutrality of space and privatise its land and resources.

Great overview by @cibled.bsky.social for @cmmonwealth.bsky.social here who is also writing an excellent chapter on the convergence of “space libertarians” and venture capital for a volume we are working on.

www.common-wealth.org/publications...