Peter Garbett

Starmer urges Europe’s leaders to curb ECHR to halt rise of far right Exclusive: PM calls for members of European convention on human rights to allow tougher action to protect borders

How many times do we need to point this out?
By appeasing the far right, you do not weaken it. You strengthen it.
While weakening your own position.
There's a vast amount of academic research showing this.
But Labour will not listen.
www.theguardian.com/law/2025/dec...

You know, infuriating and a shameful betrayal though the BBC and other media's misreporting of the Sandie Peggie judgment is, it also doesn't really matter.

What matters is the judgment which lawyers will read, use to advise their clients, and inclusion will be the winner.

We have to be careful with this. Jeremy Warner, who wrote the article, voted Remain and he's written a few such articles since 2016. Also, he quotes a study supporting his line of thought but in the same breath questions its credibility (to keep Telegraph readers semi-happy). It's not Saul/Damascus.

#BBCLauraK interviews the Chancellor about her budget tax rises, but oddly fails to ask her about the £90 billion shortfall in receipts for the Exchequer as a result of Brexit. And Reeves doesn’t volunteer the point either. There’s a surprise.

Headline on The World at One just now:

"Sir Keir Starmer has denied putting the Labour Party before the country by ending the two-child benefit cap".

Can we please go back to reporting the actual news, not someone's partisan take on it?

As political scandals go, a grubby backroom deal to, errrr, lift 450,000 children out of poverty is at least a novel one.

...

Rachel Reeves says she’s ending “Motability tax breaks”.
Sounds like she’s cracking down on luxury cars, right?

That’s not what’s happening.

These changes raise costs for all disabled people on the scheme, including those with the cheapest cars.

Here’s how. 👇🧵

The honest truth is that our entire political spectrum (bar the Greens, the SNP, and the Lib Dems) are wholesale bought into racism. Lies about foreigners, conflating refugees and immigrants, just stuff that twenty years ago was a deal breaker

"The honest truth is"

I feel sick

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

The BBC's has responded in The Guardian that this was a routine editorial decision, but also that it was made on legal advice. Those two explanations don’t fit together. /1

Here's the transcript. When I say ‘we had a convicted reality star’, you can add ‘who now rules as the most openly corrupt president in American history’ in your head.

downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith...

I think this sums up Blue Labour to a tee: someone experiences, or shares a human tragedy, and you feel sad for them, but equally it doesn’t give them license to tear up 600 years of information about what drives prosperity and replace it with saying the word “relational” a lot.

Look what I found yesterday. Our copy of this, sent to every household.

This is a clown-car government elected on a seriousness ticket iandunt.substack.com/p/a-clown-go...

I’m particularly angry today with all those people who attacked us for daring to challenge Laura Kuenssberg, implying we were misogynistic and unfair.

No.

She, together with Peston et al, played a key role in Boris Johnson’s ‘success’.

This government has not taken a single meaningful step to tackle the causes of the horrendous inefficiencies in the criminal justice system, instead rushing to dismantle trial by jury.

Legal professionals have offered numerous alternatives to address the backlog.

Ministers are not listening.

One does wonder what passes for intelligent human activity when its only parsing what's being said and extrapolating . As per the advert where the chap has an internal voice that says "Say something businessy"

There's a paper that suggests that methods that leverage huge computational power are going to win out. Which is true if the leverage acts on the problem in hand. LLM s don't . Everything is a hallucination but they have managed to persuade us that its only hallucinating when it's wrong

Ages back when language translation was being developed there was a debate over statistical brute force vs actually understanding the world. As it turns out, the statistical methods worked surprisingly well, possibly because there's an underlying common reality which you don't have to construct.

Ooooooof

Plans to leave refugees in a state of perpetual uncertainty about where and if they can rebuild their lives are not just performative cruelty, they are counterproductive to integration and the economy. It doesn’t have to be like this - 1/2

Obviously, the way to understand this is as an avant garde performance of post modernism in a political context. Imagine the political world is entirely constructed from a series of different moving planes that - crucially - lack any sort of referential depth. In other words, it’s pure performance.

Nature not a blocker to housing growth, inquiry finds Commons committee report challenges ‘lazy narrative’ used by ministers that scapegoats wildlife and the environment

This is what many of us have been saying. Part 3 of the Planning & Infrastructure Bill is based on a myth: that we don't have enough homes because wildlife and green spaces are protected. It will solve nothing, and inflict terrible harm on our remaining ecosystems
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

As Marx would have said:

Musk has only read these books in various ways; the point, however, is to understand them

The fact that Joyce Carol Oates clearly loves beating the shit out of Musk invites us, the readers, to revisit and reconsider our assessment of her famous work, "On Boxing".

I also wish people would spell out the alternative proposal here.

"We should have kept tariffs and capital restrictions on China skyhigh in the hopes it never became a competitive industrial producer, trapping hundreds of millions in subsistance poverty and raising the cost of everything."

Very interesting piece, including the extract below which has the ring of truth

It also means a substantial amount of detailed factual programming ends up spiralling off into the world of niche podcasts and Youtube channels rather than formats that are accessible for a mass audience