Updating my LEGO White House

One for 🇬🇧 to have look at...

YouTube video by Jeremy Andrew Davis 4 Possible Post-Authoritarian Outcomes

This is a bleak outlook but not without a glimmer of hope youtu.be/6O63Twuu9x4?...

You are one of the few reasons I was still going to Twitter, glad your over here so I don't have to anymore! ☺️

The Truth About Empire | Hurst Publishers Foreword by Sathnam Sanghera Selected as a 'Book of the Year' by BBC History Magazine Sharp, authoritative essays on the dark realities of Empire and the true historian’s importance for democracy, a...

The Truth About Empire. Foreword by Sathnam Sanghera, essays by expert colonial historians. BBC History Magazine Book of the Year choice. Now available for pre-order in paperback:

www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-tru...

Stewart Lee: The thugs have taken my flag. So I’ve taken theirs What do you do with a lot of cheap banners hanging from motorway bridges once you’ve torn them down?

“I’m old enough to remember when mainstream British politicians, who should know better, stirred up racial hatred as a path to power. You’re old enough to remember too because it was last Tuesday. And it was Robert Jenrick”

Cathartic anger at flag-flying racism.

www.thenerve.news/p/stewart-le...

in 2011, the president of antifa hired me to give fashion consultancy to the organization. i recommended everyone wear navy suits with tan shoes, dress sneakers, and golf polos with slim chinos. if you arrested everyone today wearing these things, you'd destroy antifa

Welcome to the capitalist innovation museum we got

- scam machine
- psychosis inducing machine
- weapons of mass destruction
- button you push that makes the planet hotter
- markets that intentionally starve people
- clothes that fall apart after washing them 1 time
- medicine you can’t afford

Thanks, New Yorker

Dad’s books are full of empathy, common sense, and a healthy suspicion of the powerful. But at its heart his work is also about how systems keep people poor while pretending it’s their own fault. So I hope Kemi’s taking notes as well as reading the jokes.

In Discworld, cities thrive because they welcome dwarfs, trolls, vampires, and humans alike. Ankh-Morpork works because everyone belongs. Funny how fiction can seem more humane than policy sometimes.

It’s not that Heseltine has moved to the left, but that the Tory Party has moved to the right.

@dieworkwear.bsky.social lovely story ❤️.
Think as an animal lover, you will appreciate

Tawny owl

Six weeks ago, I picked up a year-old tawny owl with a broken leg off the main road near our home and dropped him off at our nearest vet.

After a few days, I received one of the most bizarre phone calls I’ve ever had, asking “So when are you coming to pick up your owl?” 🧵

Differing political definitions of patriotism 3 of the 6 letters (4th quoted in the post) criticising Phillips 😊 Sir, Melanie Phillips expresses a very specific and slightly odd definition of patriotism as "love for the Crown, the armed forces and the common law, and attachment to faith, family and flag" ("Sorry Keir, you don't understand patriotism", , comment, Sep 30). Perhaps that is why she concludes that Nigel Farage offers “the only patriotic force on the horizon". Personally, I regard someone who had a very direct hand in diminishing the United Kingdom's GDP by 4 per cent — as a direct result of our leaving the European Union — as confirming Samuel Johnson's much-quoted remark that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel". Acts rather than words still count for some of us. Shaun Leavey Sherborne, Dorset Sir, Over thousands of years these islands have been invaded and occupied by various tribes, who, at any given moment, represented some kind of "Englishness". "In 300 years' time there might well be another kind of "Englishness", doubtless defending itself from the incursion of escapees from another foreign disaster, and claiming a threat to its purity". We were never pure, and attempts such as the present one to somehow freeze a manufactured notion of "Englishness" are doomed to failure. Jerry Stuart London SEI Sir, There is a fundamental flaw in Melanie Phillips's article. She talks of British patriotism as "attachment to faith, family and flag". °. She doesn't indicate which faith she is referring to, but presumably means the Christian faith as the traditional faith in Britain. However, the faith of Jesus of Nazareth shares much more common ground with the values she seems to dismiss - decency, reasonableness and compassion - than it does with the militarism and flag-waving she seems to endorse. I surely cannot be the only person getting worried when the Christian faith is conscripted into the support of strident nationalism. The Rev Paul Dowling

“That Brexit has made control of immigration more difficult, damaged our economy and weakened opportunities for future generations should make people think twice before putting Brexit's chief proponent in charge of running the country”

Times letters: a lonely oasis of sanity in the far right storm.

perfect

👇

Hi Internet! I'm Drew and THIS IS MY FACE.

If this GIF has ever brought you joy in the past, I humbly ask you to consider making a donation to the National MS Society. It would mean a lot to me and to those I know affected by the disease!

Donate at blinkingguy.com

A dramatic sky with rain clouds in gray and orange above a strip of sea, the rain coming down in large gusts

The dramatic landscape photographs of Saskia Boelsums manifest a strong connection to the Dutch tradition of landscape paintings. She is inspired by nature, weather and the seasons, clouds and skies. She captures not only the beauty of the landscape, but also a vague sense of uncertainty and threat.

Brexit: how the end of Britain’s empire led to rising inequality that helped Leave to victory The link between empire, inequality – and Brexit.

1/3 There’s a strong relationship between Reform / far right support and the Brexit Leave constituency. A continuation of the refusal to accept that Britain is poorer and more unequal not due to immigration but because it is no longer subsidised by an Empire. theconversation.com/brexit-how-t...

Twitter comment by John Duffield: "The National Trust is a truly repellent organisation. The next right wing government needs to threaten its funding & purge its executive." Response from Celia Richardson, National Trust's Director of Communications: "The National Trust is an independent charity and institution. Threats and purges of institutions by governments of any political persuasion are seriously bad for the healthy functioning of a democracy."

It's that (tiresome) time of year again the National Trust comes under attack, as voting gets underway for the 2025 AGM. If you're a NT member, have you voted yet? Here's the link ⤵️

www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/a...

Bear with me, I anticipate your disagreement. There is a clear pattern to the advice given to those who want to press back against rising racism. What it boils down to is that if you point out that racism is often being dressed up as “legitimate concerns” you will alienate people. /1

I feel (and fear as a Leeds fan) 3 points for you against us
Teams tend to stop the losing streak when playing us

YouTube video by EP W Will Self vs Mark Francois stare off

You have reminded me of this exchange www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOWz...

Leeds came up with some bizarre measures to combat hooliganism in the 1970s. The hand of peace was thrown into the crowd by the players before games in the late 70s but I’d never heard of the 1973 good conduct badge. There were 20,000 made. Anyone still got one?
#LUFC #70sLeeds #ALAW #Leeds

Ask Nigel An anonymous Prime Minister asks 'how can I stop fixating so much on foreigners?'

EXCLUSIVE - ASK NIGEL is back!

This week an anonymous Prime Minister asks, 'How can I stop fixating so much on foreigners?'

open.substack.com/pub/mrhenrym...

Outstanding.

The asylum hotel outrage is all down to Tory party failures - failures supported by Jenrick, and that they and Reform are now blaming on Labour.

And Labour needs to tell that story.

In 2023, the Conservative government “banned” small boat arrivals from claiming asylum. This was the IMA.

maybe instead of asking socialists whether billionaires should exist we should be asking billionaires whether poverty should exist