Michael

“You may be unconvinced by my efforts to defend a racist moron, but perhaps it will make more sense if I explain that I see him as necessary for copying how the other party got taken over by racist morons?”

there should be a Dem Tea Party

huh, wasn’t the Tea Party really bad, bringing in loads of politicians with bigoted beliefs and no experience?

yes, but ours will be good

so your leading candidates have clean records and relevant experience?

you’re not gonna believe this

I think a new Ann Patchett author / Meryl Streep audiobook narrator collab would fix me

the most offensively drippy John Lewis Christmas ad-sounding version of it at that

Center Parcs: the best place to mourn the impossibility of your star-crossed love story

why has Center Parcs got a YouTube advert using “Somewhere” from West Side Story

I think Stephen’s point is the reverse: he loves announcing superficially popular policies, at the expense of a coherent programme likely to lead to popular results

so, what level do you think is right and is it higher or lower than what’s currently forecast for 2026?

and that’s true even if you (not you personally!) found it annoying when people were like “one neat trick to make the Tories never win again!!”

I think Starmer would be doing a bad job whatever the setup… but I think people need to look at the polls and recognise that whatever the pros and cons of FPTP in a 40-40-20-other world, it’s not fit for a 26-22-19-17-16 one

Again - and without in any way making this a personal attack on them, because they are victims here - but I must ask what it feels like to be a Muslim Tory MP at present. Your party leader is absolutely and repeatedly signalling she hates you.

people say it’s because they don’t want to give up on the chance of a majority government and like

(a) they have one and don’t know what to do with it
(b) they are at risk of giving up on the chance of being a going concern never mind a majority government

I think I’d respect Labour’s support for FPTP more if I didn’t think it’s because they found PR campaigners annoying and not sufficiently dedicated to their particular faction on early 2010s twitter

this is wild, lurid stuff.

this is all good stuff and better to do it than not to do it, but there’s one pretty big thing missing

he’s the youngest out of all those and this particular category seems to have a real thing about not going to young men!

"I really believe these reforms are existential for us as a country" I mean, that's just not a view based in reality is it

Refugee status to be temporary as Shabana Mahmood rips up rules on UK asylum Home secretary announces 30-month protection limit, with refugees required to leave if their home countries are later judged safe

This policy is bad for community cohesion.

You don’t build confident, contributing neighbours on rolling 30 month visas. The current 5‑year route is how people plan for the future and fully join our communities.

The Danish model won’t work here.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Not that I’m not morally strongly opposed to this, but also, this is an active step to increase the backlog of cases the Home Office has to deal with by making them re-review people less than three years after granting them asylum.

I mean, if your tweet had said “I think Starmer will in the near future announce some limited support for future US strikes” then you’d have been right and I wouldn’t have commented on it. At the point you said he had expressed resolute support, he had not actually done so.

That doesn’t actually constitute a moral excuse for his pattern of behavior.

you can deny the evidence that there’s a problem, you can say it’s whipped up by his opponents, you can say voters won’t care, you can criticise the alternatives. none of it excuses you from making your own moral judgement

some of the responses to this are giving me flashbacks to Corbyn-era Twitter

I think bluesky would be roughly 300% better if people here were capable of reading “this is an assessment of the empirical reality of a situation” without assuming it comes with an implicit “and therefore I endorse the reality of that situation”

Lucy Powell says the government's proposals om settlement proposals - doubling + tripling how long it takes those on a visa to be permanent or get citizenship - were unpopular, saying that ethnic minority voters who think border control does matter don't think the government's changes are fair

Allies of Hutton reckon that far from welcoming the investigation, Simons probably wishes the whole matter had never come up.

I'm not a 4D chess player myself but I do find it quite curious that "allies of Josh Simons" think they can spin their way out of this by sending journalists - the cohort who probably care most about this story - bullet points on background 🤷‍♀️

I think Dugdale has had a more independent role in academia and has suggested her views are less partisan than before…

Kezia Dugdale (former leader of Scottish Labour) is married to Jenny Gilruth (SNP cabinet minister) although I think they were only married after Dugdale’s front-line career had ended

Correct, that is not support for the US action.