Neil Atkinson

I don’t see how this can have happened without someone in politics or political reporting having been at least somewhat wrong, at some point. And yet we seem to have gone between these two events without any of the lads being wrong about anything, at any point in between.

Patrick Maguire of the Times: You had Keir Starmer meeting Andy Burnham. You had Andy Burnham campaigning for the candidate who was taking his place after Keir Starmer blocked him. You had the kitchen sink thrown at it. Loads of socials and attack ads from the labor party. Clearly loads of money, thousands of activists. And what did it get them third place behind the greens and reform? And I think it shows you how serious the labor party's electoral position is in one of its 40, what was one of its 40 safer seats in the country. This is a seat they'd held since 1931. I know people will say, people are getting overexcited because of one by-election. It is yet another data point that tells us the labor party is in an existential crisis.

The public are IMO entitled to ask how exactly Labour could have been rescued from oblivion by outstanding big-brains that the public love and want, and - now that the public have got a look at what these big-brains do with power - are in “an existential crisis”, facing wipeout.

🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work.

This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public.

Please spread the word.

🧵 1/4

Chiesa comes on at 0-1. He didn't want Gomez at right back when chasing the game. Perfectly reasonably.

So this becomes a conversation about tempo and who starts in the first place.

And the fact that Chiesa is dreadful but the only cab left off the rank.

1/ Experts issued some pretty dire warnings about Trumpian tariffs and Brexit, and the result was not nearly as bad as it could have been.

Now they're issuing dire warnings about Iran.

A much smarter friend asked me how I was thinking about the difference.

My short answer: control.

Happy Birthday to The King, Kenny Dalglish 🎂

I see the ‘patriotic’ parts of the press are delighting in a US President having a go at the PM.

Media must stop normalizing the far right Every uncritical mention of far-right rhetoric is an editorial decision with political consequences.

Absolutely correct but at this point, we should understand that this is like demanding your dog stops barking. You can calm it down but ultimately, it is still a dog. It’s never going to stop barking, until one day it finally does stop for good. www.politico.eu/article/medi...

It was, and I was thinking about this earlier - it's no longer just the papers. When Harry Cole thinks he's gotcha-ed Starmer by getting Trump to express disappointment that we aren't bombing the fuck out of Iran, I don't think that's because it's what his readers want - I think it's Twitter-brain.

1908: the Lancet, one of the most respected scientific journals, calls for 18 age limit on reading in bed amidst a moral panic surrounding children becoming "addicted" to novels, which were "designed to keep kids hooked" and destroy their attention/mental health

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...