Dan Hind

How rightwing rhetoric has risen sharply in the UK parliament – an exclusive visual analysis In the past five years, MPs’ attitudes in the House of Commons towards immigration have swung harder to the right than at almost any other time in the last century

It's amazing the contortions that the supposedly progressive and sensible sections of the mainstream media will put themselves through, in order to exonerate and excuse the reactionary, racist and duplicitous sections of the same industry.
www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-...

Getting a lot of replies from Americans today about how Labour’s woes portend doom for the Democratic Party, if they don’t mend their ways. I think that’s right, in one specific way: both wanted so badly, for so long, to claim the centre ground as the party of mean-as-fuck Business Win authority…

Vote Green, whenever you can.

I am not a numbers whizz or anything but I'm pretty sure something has gone wrong with the maths here.

Public media has long been top down and patrician. We need to think through how we make it more egalitarian, more reliable, *more interesting*. The best way to start is through a conversation this year about what we want from the media we pay for.

Imagine if the BBC invested the money it currently spends on (confidential) market research on a public consultation process, and developed TV, radio and digital assets to publicise it, and to enable broad and deep participation through randomly selected panels, open discussion online etc.

It is more obvious than ever that we need a public option in media and communications in the digital age. The BBC is the natural space to develop this. But our establishment seems determined to stop us from thinking together about what that looks like after 2027. Why?

This is a very serious blow to the Charter renewal process. It isn't too late for the Department of Culture Media and Sport to work with the BBC on a consultation that is public, both in the sense of having adequate publicity, and of being open to us all.

And for the avoidance of doubt 'democratic' here means a substantial redistribution of political, economic, social and communicative power, away from the few to the many. It doesn't mean using the threat of fascism to blackmail voters into supporting centrism, which only fuels fascism.

Feels quite urgent that (at a minimum) we look at individuals and institutions with significant influence over politics and public opinion and ask if they (1) democratic (2) anti-democratic or (3) trying to pretend that everything is fine, actually. Keep (1) and drop (2) and (3) immediately.

1. A mixture of digital and real world. Developing a new policy platform needs to be massively participatory; Reform trades in plausible fictions, the left needs to make its factual claims stop sounding implausible. 2. The trade unions and the Green Party, more or less coordinated.

The major media won't move decisively against Farage et al. The urgent questions become: 1. How do we build an information infrastructure that can reach large audiences, with a post-Thatcherite, anti-fascist programme? 2. What does it look like, what institutional actors can and will create it?

If history is any guide the Green Party will likely try to maintain constructive ambiguity about its aims as long as it can, and will not build the resources its needs for a transformative struggle against what Tawney called 'the oldest and toughest plutocracy in the world.' But let's hope not.

In 2015-2019 Labour's leaders could not bring themselves to choose between Tawney's options, and tried to live with the tension instead. After 2020 the current leaders chose - decisively - to manage British capitalism, not to challenge it. The decision is probably final.

As it happens I wrote a commentary on this in 2016 - pointing out that Corbyn's Labour Party had to make the choice Tawney set out. Now it's for the Greens to decide: administrators of the system, or creators of Tawney's (long delayed) socialist commonwealth?
www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemoc...

I've written something on Lisa Nandy's rhetoric of popular empowerment and her record in office. It speaks to a broader problem on the contemporary centre left: politicians seem to think they can say whatever they like, and act completely differently.
modernmediatheory.wordpress.com/2026/02/18/r...

Labour Together’s Smear Operation Made This Government The Labour Together spying scandal shows how Britain’s mainstream press looked the other way when dirty tricks were deployed against the Left — allowing a culture of surveillance and paranoia to take ...

This by @martinoneill.bsky.social is a damning indictment of Labour's degeneration at the hands of the Labour Together clique.
tribunemag.co.uk/2026/02/smea...

yep, with the added bonus that their enablers in the media get to cosplay as Woodward and Bernstein, again.

that outcome feels pretty much inevitable at this point

The People Who Matter want to crash the government, and they have loads of material to work with. But they have to create the - entirely misleading - impression that they had no idea about any of funny business until about 5 minutes ago, and certainly weren't complicit in it. Trickier than it looks.

It's incredible watching widely reported facts become Urgent Public Business as soon as a handful of media outlets decide to start noticing them. Meanwhile Paul Holden has set out in detail how Labour Together went to war on the left, in a campaign that the media are still keeping quiet about.

If Labour Together had limited their intelligence gathering to anti-corruption campaigners and independent journalists the major media wouldn't have batted an eyelid. But they went after People Who Matter, when it's already open season on the Labour Together crew, and well, here we are.

it's her life's work, which she is going to start on any minute now

Now would be a really good time for the “real Keir” that some are claiming exists, to stand up and say yes we’ve had quite enough of this authoritarian Blue Labour tripe, thanks Shabana you can pipe down now, no we won’t be appealing.

2020 "I want to give ordinary people an active and direct role in running the BBC."
2024-5: "Now I am the Culture Secretary, and can actually do what I said I wanted to do, I am not going to do it, or anything much."
2026: "Have I ever told you about how I want to empower ordinary people?"

Stirring stuff from Nandy here. But as Culture Secretary she has dropped her commitment to mutualise the BBC, which would have empowered ordinary people in the way she claims to want. In 2020 BBC mutualisation was a central plank of her leadership campaign.
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

The confusion and drift in Labour in 2018 and 2019 makes more sense if the leadership were trying desperately to prevent a big chunk of their appalling MPs from running for the exits to a new party, a British En Marche, no less. (On Marsh in the AI transcription, which is probably accurate.)

This is true: Starmer was going to go, regardless. But as usual the political journalists are doing everything in their power to obscure the politics of the situation by focussing relentlessly on tragic flaws, surprise resignations, dramatic interventions, all of SW1's moth-eaten stagecraft.

Labour did much to develop a form municipal socialism in local government in the '70s and '80s. The media maligned them as 'loony'. When the party cosied up to developers, consultants and private contractors under Blair the media cheered them on.

Worth reading in full. www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemoc...