Alan Rew

Introverts are unique creatures. We want to talk, just not with everyone. We like going out, just not with everyone. We’re fun, but not with everyone. We don’t mind being the center of attention, just not from everyone

If you want us to give Labour credit for stuff like renters reform - yes, it's a good thing - or investment in the NHS, then you have to stop trying to out-do the fascists on immigration.

One last thing. All those Labour supporters posting pretty infographics about all the achievements, this new proposed policy on refugees is the kind of thing that means those infographics don't make any difference to the polls. One piece of vicious xenophobia drowns it all out.

Without asylum:

Marks and Spencer wouldn't exist

Queen would have been without a front man

The other queen wouldn't have had a husband

Judith Kerr would never have written The Tiger Who Came to Tea

And thousands of less famous people wouldn't have been teachers, politicians, neighbours, etc

Each Friday at noon Dartmouth’s Rauner Library turns the page in a ceremony on Daniel Webster’ Audubon’s Birds of America
Yesterday my class and I watched in awe as this was revealed

PAUL McCARTNEY and his Old English Sheepdog ‘Arrow’ - during a 1993 photoshoot at Abbey Road for his ‘Paul Is Live’ album.

And yet the Labour government seem to sit idly by, with an ineffective media secretary, & show no signs of doing anything to sort out the mess.

The real threat to BBC impartiality The BBC has suffered a week of mistakes, resignations and the threat of a $1bn lawsuit. But the biggest risks of bias are in the boardroom, not the ne...

“‘He kept putting Robbie’s name on the list and Boris kept taking it off,’” Shipman reported one of his sources recalling, adding: “The plan to send Paul Dacre, the former editor of the Daily Mail, to run broadcasting watchdog Ofcom is from the same playbook.”

@arusbridger.bsky.social on the BBC

On the link now…

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Question on Monday

Is it now your principle that every Ukranian refugee in Britain should leave, must leave once it is safe + that they will all be made to leave?

And is the government’s principle now that the few European Jews to whom we granted asylum in the 1930s have been returned to Germany, Poland, etc, where it was ‘safe’ in 1945?

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It can't all be about mining, or perhaps it is, because this could just be a rushing river of mud, or the flood caused by the bursting of a tailing pond, causing massive environmental damage. Again, I'm not sure if this is an enduring image of Durham. 6/

It's probably supposed to be a miner's lamp, but it's the wrong shape, more like a Victorian street lamp perhaps.

A silhouette image of a man in an old-style, wide-brimmed mining helmet and a pick-axe with a seven foot long handle.

Don't have FOUR VERSIONS of the same image. And yes, nothing says modern workforce like a pickaxe and an old US-style mining helmet. And let's have a look at that guy with the pick. Why is the handle of the pick so long? Have you never used a pick-axe? It is not for picking fruit. 3/

Let's start with the obvious point. Don't use a technology whose purpose is to enable employers to get rid of workers so they can use an app to do the same job badly. Workers like . . . graphic designers for instance. Next, when using a selection of images, VARY your images. Total rookie mistake. 2/

A post by Zarah Sultana of 'Your Party', that uses a generated image with the words 'Your Party, County Durham Launch', surrounded by nine simple, flat images of images in silhouette with single colour backgrounds, presumably intended to represent Durham, four of which are a man with a weirdly long pick-axe, one is a building, two are gantries of some kind – for a coal mine? – and one is some kind of floating lamp. I will expand on this in the thread.

Okay, I can't let this one go. I live in Ireland, not the UK, but the use of this image by a supposedly socialist party is so stupid and offensive, I'm going to get stuck in.

Let me explain to you why any experienced illustrator/designer could have stopped you making so many miserable mistakes. 1/

Great thread. Don't use generative AI it makes you look pathetic!

Have to say I find the proposals to take away the route to permanent settlement of refugees both shocking and repulsive. It's code for 'whatever you do and contribute you can never become one of us so we won't allow you to try.' Racism, pure and simple.

He seems to thinks 'running a good government' is simply about being an institutionalist and following procedures correctly, almost regardless of policy. Does not seem to realise that being good at governing also requires effective coherent policy, strategy and leadership throughout.

yeah I mean he's not a Glasman style anti-immigration ideologue. he's an increasingly desperate poll-chaser who mistakes that for "pragmatism", and his idiot genius McSweeney reckons this is it.

but a Starmer turd is a Starmer turd no matter what he was thinking when he shat it

Starmer doesn't want anything in particular. He'd like the policy and political problem of mass immigration to go away but doesn't know how to do it, what the effect would be if it did, or how to manage the politics.

He's just grasping for policy because he's been told it'll work (which it won't).

One thing I will say is that this immigration-bashing "strategy" is now indelibly Starmer's. It is Starmerism. Cooper was inertia personified but Mahmood is Starmer's key departmental promotion, brought in to do just this

And given that Starmer looks doomed, what future does this strategy have?

"Even with Britain’s high overall tax take, most people’s labour income is taxed lightly by international standards...Britain’s [labour tax] wedge in 2024 for a single average earner without children was 29.4%, the lowest in the G7"
www.economist.com/britain/2025...

They’re all chanting “Keir Starmer’s a wanker!” (except for the one sad sack who takes three chants to learn that his first name is “Keir”).

It seems Starmer’s 4D chess strategy of appealing to thick-as-pigshit racists is not actually working.

Labour can never be the party of those who reject the asylum principle. Hardline immigration conservatism is owned by the right. Low trust radical right voters will never believe an approach like this because they know it runs against grain of the party’s core electorate and history - so will fail

Labour seem to now come up with a new kamikaze nosedive operation to alienate social liberals while failing to attract Reform curious voters every month. Then back off again in face of anger from progressives and failure among social conservatives. A doom loop which may yet kill them off altogether.

This statement not acceptable and I suspect not sustainable. Large majority of public support principle of asylum, support letting people stay permanently. Majority for that among Labour and other progressive parties’ voters is overwhelming. The Reform voters this is aimed at will never vote Labour

Just some British patriots in Benidorm, taking over a street in Spain to shout in their own language about unwanted foreigners. It’s a blessing that they are too thick to understand irony.