Neil Atkinson

The more of this gossipy chatter you read (and I mean for years) the more it seems like he just doesn't have a theory for it. For a while I thought he was genuinely in on the hippy punching as a way to victory. Now I am not even sure on that.

Just Nick Robinson casually asking a guest on BBC Today if protests against the war 'should be allowed to go ahead' or 'ought to be banned in this country'.

📽️ All your post-match reaction coming up tonight... ⚽️

Was it perhaps a mistake to make vexatious, truthless wingnut swine the arbiters of what’s sensible, reasonable and patriotic, and then pander like fuck to them for decades

Tory grandstanding about student loans isn't helping anyone Everyone remembers the Conservative Party created this system

We should all welcome the renewed attention being paid to the UK's student loan crisis. But we must remember it's a scandal the Tories created, and which they deserve no praise for cynically, and incoherently, adopting as their cause.

www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

The Conservatives are, after all, well placed to know a lot about this morass, since they introduced it. In 2012, the coalition government launched the Plan 2 system of student loans and raised university fees across Britain to £9,000 per annum. To put Plan 2 in simple terms, loan repayments were laid out via a seemingly innocuous series of calculations. The first to consider is the threshold at which repayments begin. If you left education with, say, £27,000 worth of debt, you would only start paying it back once you met a predetermined salary. On its face, this might not seem like a particularly onerous demand. “Low-earning” graduates would avoid being saddled with repayments before they were financially able to begin making them, while their “high earning” peers could start chipping away at their debt, and provide an income stream for the state.

As any of my fellow literature or history graduates will tell you, however, the devil is in the details. For one thing, the threshold at which someone becomes a high earner was never particularly high and, following years of inflation, is now preposterously low. Rachel Reeves’ announcement that the government are freezing the threshold at April 2026 levels (£29,385) for a further three years only makes this worse. The real living wage for London is currently calculated at £28,860, which means that any London-based graduate making just £40 more per month than the minimum needed to live there will automatically begin paying their debt. In real terms, this means practically any graduate in any form of full-time work will be paying as much as 9 per cent of their income to the state, and for a very, very long time. Worse still, the amount owed by those graduates below the threshold does not remain static – it accrues interest, year on year, whether you’re working for low wages, volunteering, taking a career break or on maternity leave, ensuring that if you do pass the threshold some time later, you will be returning to find your original £27,000 much enlarged.

If the state’s attitude to what constitutes “high earnings” makes you think it’s oblivious to the concept of inflation, let me put your mind at ease. When it comes to the calculation of student loan interest, they are very conscious of inflation indeed. Each year, the interest charged on student loans is calculated by two components. The first is the Retail Price Index (RPI), which generally records a higher number than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Governments prefer the latter, lower figure for many of their other calculations, just not when it comes to adding extra debt to every graduate in the country. To this is added a second component, a percentage tied to each graduate’s earnings, meaning that as your salary increases so too does the interest you’re paying on the loan you took out. If you think this seems like a predatory and punitive way to bilk students for as much money, and over as long a period of time, as possible, then you’re just about up to speed on this scandal, which amounts to a regressive stealth tax on every graduate in the UK. One which, it’s calculated, you would need to be earning £66,000 per year to pay off in anything like a timely fashion.

The debt burden of UK students is one of those things where, the more you look into the details, the more insane and predatory it is. So I tried my best to explain the numbers involved without making my, or your, head explode.

Hello again, Reds!
Following a few weeks’ absence, we’re back on all our social media channels. Due to some copyright issues regarding images on our website, we’ve had to make some difficult decisions. Unfortunately, a lot of our previous content has been deleted.
[THREAD]

Rug pull exit scamlords

The Trump admin did this because they are belligerent idiots, drunk out of their minds on impunity, and because US foreign policy for decades has been a disgusting mess of venal morons urging each other on to arm Israel to the teeth and smash their enemies, as a test of virility.

Patrick Wintour @patrickwintour X.com This from Speaker Johnson seems now to be an official US administration explanation for why it went to war. Rubio has also said the US had to act preemptively to prevent US casualties. Israel was going to attack regardless so the US would then become a target. Netanyahu told Fox News this allegation was ridiculous, and Trump made his own decisions. Iran was rebuilding its nuclear program. He said "This is going to be a quick and decisive action, and we're going to create the conditions first for the Iranian people to get control of their destiny to form their own democratically elected government." So regime change. an objective ruled out by Hegseth. Day 4 and Operation Epic Muddle as to why the US went to war continues. Josh Rogin • @joshrogin .9h Speaker Johnson after receiving a classified Iran briefing says essentially that Israel dragged Trump into the war by threatening to attack Iran: "Israel was determined to act in the...

Netanyahu does not have magical Hebrew-beams that he uses to ensorcel and compel US officials, and it’s wrong and dangerous to pretend otherwise. By all accounts, he personally is charmless and repellent. Nobody has forced the Trumpers to do anything they didn’t want to do here.

We told you so, you fucking fools.

This. New Labour wasn't just wars & media spin. It was a serious attempt to apply an updated social democracy to new socio-economic conditions - eg NMW, tax credits, expanding HE. This govt is making no comparable efforts (maybe coz, given economic stagnation, it's harder.)

Not unsympathetic here as someone who would be thought a critic from the left. But you open yourself up to this chorus growing louder and louder when you fail to show leadership or decency elsewhere, where it is easier to do so, where you have far greater agency.

Look here, Aunty Shabana: if they don't accept Nana Akua, born in Newcastle, as British (and she is a presenter on GB News no less), why do you think they will accept you?
bsky.app/profile/huwc...

Aunty Shabana, you can go on GB News all you like, but their viewers and the Reform/Restore/Reclaim/Advance voters will never accept you. No matter how hardline you are.

Always thought this guy's a prick. Starting to worry he might be genuinely dangerous, an impression only amplified by reading the comments on his substack for the first time and realising that, against all rational expectation, he has a massive fucking fanbase.

The implicit argument of so much of this stuff is that there is no legitimate role for Muslims in public life.

This is the same both sides of the Atlantic, by the way: the empire’s foreign policy is not up for debate and cannot be constrained by the public. All that’s happened here is that the Trumpers have dropped any pretence of democratic oversight.

Badenoch: "Across the UK, there are groups whose political loyalties, when it comes to conflicts in the Middle East, do not align with British national interests." 4 10 2 2 Peter Walker O @peterwalker99.bsk... •15m She goes on: "Separatism is most visible in some Muslim communities, with Islamist extremism its most violent expression." 3 1 2 Peter Walker O @peterwalker99.bsk... • 12m Badenoch has spoken for seven minutes so far about her worries about a lack of integration among British Muslims, but as evidence she has only cited individual anecdotes and one focus group. The research, in contrast, seems to show that the UK is generally quite good at integrating people. ①

Badenoch lamnasts "children being sent home for wearing Union Jack outfits as their choice on culture day, basically telling those children that there is no such thing as English or British culture and the only good things about our country are imported this is rubbish" This was *one* incident 13:45 • 2 Mar 2026 1 repost 11 likes 3 ①1 11 • • • stress Testec Peter Walker O @peterwalker99.bsky... • 9m It was also an incident where the school immediately apologised. 2 ①1 14 ... stress Tester Peter Walker O @peterwalker99.bsky... • 4m Down to the policy: Badenoch says she would set up an "integration commission" to enforce integration to British values. As part of this, she would bar any positive discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics.

As we watch Labour, Reform and the Tories fight to see who can be the most poisonously unpleasant, let’s recall all the lads agreed even suspicion of racism is toxic in politics, and that simply not taking sufficient action to tackle it in other people is totally invalidating for public figures.

Arsenal Dominated The Line Of Scrimmage... An assessment of the Gunners, what constitutes boring football and praise for the game's counter-revolutionaries

An attempt to put criticism of Arsenal into perspective
"They dominated the line of scrimmage..."
open.substack.com/pub/tonyevan...

So we went from "Piracy is a crime" to "AI companies aren't beholden to the laws that govern you and me" real fucking quick, huh?

“We’ve won six out of seven, we’re putting results on the board, you’ve got to be happy with this… it’s not the exact style of football that we all want to see but it’s effective!”

🎥 The Anfield Wrap with Peleton

Liverpool!

I’ll be at your Waterstones on the 14th of May, discussing my new book with @knoxharrington.bsky.social.

Drinks afterwards, maybe karaoke. Who knows.

Tickets here - www.waterstones.com/events/marti...

funny thing with Liverpool is that they've arrived at this *after* firing their set piece coach

which it indicates there isn't a deep set of expertise at play here -- it's just what you see, get bodies in the box, lob the ball in, push a bunch of people

If the rumours are true and the kids and social media consultation opens today, here are two things I think should be banned from
social media:

1) AI bots
2) recommendations algorithms that optimise for time on site

Firm regulation of both of these things is possible and auditable

Mahmood had announced her intention to replace permanent refugee status with 30-month reviews in November. It had been expected that the change would require lengthy legislation but Mahmood will instead implement the policy through a change in immigration rules on Thursday.

It has only been journos/political commentators talking about an "immigration bill" to make these changes, those of us with an actual clue (and Jon Featonby has been especially dedicated) have been trying to make clear that this will be done via changes to the immigration rules,

The true political parties are the Treasury party, the MoD party, and so on.

She is now the convinced leader of the Home Office party.

Reform win a seat: The true Volk have spoken and we all must listen.

Greens win a seat: Early reports that Muslims may have ‘voted’ (an ancient Islamic practice designed to steal elections). How severely should the franchise be limited in response?

Just throwing it out there: telling people that they have legitimate grievances about immigration will never reduce the sense of grievance. This isn't how anything works and a government that paid even the merest attention to social science research would know their approach helps the far-right.

My initial reaction to this was disbelief that they’re actually responding to the by-election loss this way but then I remembered that in her first conference speech as Home Sec Mahmood told Labour members she was going to have to do things that would upset them. Leftie bashing=smart politics to her