Am sticking with my bet that the right is reading this wrong and that the majority of voters are not at all unhappy Starmer has upset Trump by holding back from a war whose purpose and end game no-one seems able to define.
03.03.2026 17:47 — 👍 1146 🔁 161 💬 52 📌 15
FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?
05.03.2026 07:15 — 👍 16541 🔁 5797 💬 500 📌 485
Reform fury as someone else wins by Our By-election Editor Tim Shipsink The losing candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Matt Goodwhinge, has demanded an immediate re-run of the election on the grounds that he lost comprehensively to someone else. "It's totally unfair and rigged," said Goodwhinge. "I shouldn't be required to sit there and suck it up, just because I lost." Mr Goodwhine continued, *I can't believe that all those voters I demonised failed to back me. Especially after I was endorsed by Tommy Robinson and ten million Russian bots on X. "We have clear evidence of family voting, where people voted in order for me to stop deporting their families." Mr Badloser concluded. "I'm the victim of colour prejudice. They didn't vote for me simply because I'm not green." Reform leader Mr Farage, speaking from a sun lounger on a rock near the Chagos Islands said, "It's a tragedy that the people of Manchester won't see Matt in Westminster, but my constituents don't see me in Clacton either." PLUMBER DEFEATS MATT GOODWIN Photo of Hannah Spencer with speech bubble saying… I've stopped the cock
Beautiful from Private Eye on the massive toddler-tantrum that Matt Goodwin and Reform are having, because they got whooped in Gorton and Denton.
05.03.2026 07:35 — 👍 4191 🔁 1397 💬 89 📌 74
People say Farage has charisma. This isn’t charismatic. This is dismissive and rude. It’s a serious question about BNP-style racism within his party. And Farage can’t cope with that kind of scrutiny. So he lashes out.
Under the spotlight, his ‘charisma’ turns very sour indeed.
As revealed by my colleague @adambienkov.bsky.social last year, the BBC drew up a strategy to appeal more to Reform voters.
Might be waiting a while for them to do the same for Green voters...
It’s not difficult to imagine what Winston Churchill would have made of Donald Trump…
03.03.2026 18:18 — 👍 1837 🔁 247 💬 168 📌 25Does he have to return the FIFA Peace Prize now?
02.03.2026 18:19 — 👍 1942 🔁 213 💬 131 📌 9
Trump faces growing fury within MAGA over his war-of-choice in Iran. And tells Americans that U.S. military casualties are "the way it is'.
Mine with @mrjamesob.bsky.social on the UK's @lbc.co.uk
🎧: audioboom.com/posts/886823...
#Iran #trump
Abysmal, immoral, cruel, small hearted, tiny minded, ineffective, undemocratic, and just generally utterly indecent. What a bitter godforesaken disappointment these people are.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Just naked racism from Farage and the Mail.
Only British and commonwealth citizens are allowed to vote. It's not 'stealing' to legally take part in your own country's elections
Nigel Farage is saying the by-election - which Reform was defeated 41% to 29% by Green Party (14,980 to 10,578) was "stolen". Not "fraud" but on Reform calculating the % of eligible voters born abroad: Farage says it is "shattering news" that naturalised citizens + Commonwealth nationals can vote
01.03.2026 07:40 — 👍 188 🔁 58 💬 38 📌 32A "Labour" government, determined to treat working class immigrant kids worse than their better off counterparts
28.02.2026 11:58 — 👍 72 🔁 28 💬 3 📌 0
"This result shows Keir Starmer's premiership is finished. ... If he had any integrity he would go" (Kemi Badenoch).
Quite the claim from a leader whose party came fourth, with 706 votes - 8,658 fewer than Labour in third.
(The rest of the statement is a disgrace).
Kemi Badenoch’s statement following the Gorton and Denton by election: Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes and yesterday that monster came back to bite them. As I've said many times before, we are a multiracial country, not a multicultural country. If you stir up grievance politics between groups based on religion or race, as Labour have done for decades, as Reform are seeking to do, and as the Greens have done successfully in this by-election, you are pitting neighbours against each other and you start to unravel the culture of tolerance that makes Britain great. Our country is not broken, but this by-election showed that Labour, Reform and the Greens are trying very hard to break it. Labour trying to buy people off with more and more benefits spending. Reform telling people you can't be British if you aren't white. The Greens running a nasty, sectarian campaign while simultaneously wanting to legalise crack-cocaine. Clearly this election was not about who would be the best MP. But there was only one sensible candidate standing in Gorton and Denton, and it was Charlotte Cadden - a former Deputy Chief Inspector, a mother, a woman who fought for single sex spaces and dignity for women and girls. While the other parties race to the bottom, Charlotte embodies the new Conservative Party. This result shows Keir Starmer's premiership is finished. He lost authority a long time ago, a mere hostage at the mercy of a divided Labour Party that cannot decide who to replace him with. He has lost the support of his voters, his MPs and the country. He is in office but not in power. If he had any integrity he would go. Keni Buderach Kemi Badenoch Leader of the Conservative Party
Oh my word.
Unhinged springs to mind!😱
Badenoch’s “only sensible candidate” won just 2% of the vote!
Appropos here's the post I wrote last month on whether the Greens can do to Labour what Reform has done to the Tories...
samf.substack.com/p/whats-the-...
Attention (rightly) is on the Greens, Labour and Reform, but it's a mark of how bad things are for the Conservatives that we're not even talking about their *706* votes.
Contrast the notional result in 2019 (before the current seat existed) or Andrew Gwynne's old Denton seat.
1000 times YES!
26.02.2026 13:13 — 👍 481 🔁 73 💬 16 📌 2Restore Britain's language is not just racist it's now indistinguishable from Neo-Nazi groups.
25.02.2026 11:14 — 👍 831 🔁 178 💬 24 📌 11
would love to be a fly on the wall in Reform HQ this morning
www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...
Gotta say the BBC radio 4 today description of Trump’s State of the Union as some sort of mild mannered, well orchestrated speech doesn’t tally at all with the clips I’ve watched
Listening to Sarah Smith talking so effusively about Trump’s speech can’t help thinking about *that* lawsuit….
An important read, by people who know what they're talking about.
www.bushcenter.org/publications...
Your party leader’s fascist mentor was best mates with Epstein but please, lecture away…
24.02.2026 17:00 — 👍 879 🔁 236 💬 55 📌 6
Extract from the Press Regulations Authority 10th Annual report: Emma Monk, who fights misinformation through her popular 'debunking' Substack and social media profiles, tells us that as news consumption has shifted online and onto social feeds, "the headline is all that you will see, with the article often behind a paywall", ', and that even where full articles are available "many people will not click away from their feed to read the details". She documents techniques used by the press to create misleading impressions without making technically false claims, including omission of vital context and headlines that imply causation where none exists.
It was an honour to be asked to contribute to the Press Regulation Panel’s 10th Annual report into the state of press accountability in the UK a decade after the Leveson enquiry which was published today
www.pressrecognitionpanel.org.uk/10th-annual-...
1/3
Fascinating stuff
24.02.2026 18:20 — 👍 34 🔁 20 💬 1 📌 0A necessary reminder of what is at stake.
24.02.2026 10:21 — 👍 140 🔁 56 💬 3 📌 0
This is exactly right. The Onion quietly left Twitter a month ago and... our weekly subscribers went up. It's because we're doing well here, on Instagram and on YouTube.
As a business, being on Twitter is somewhere between useless or detrimental, unless you're selling boner pills.
support the free press
www.ft.com/content/8cc9...
One of those occasional reminders that Farage's gang are mostly entitled 'Thatcherite+' people.
24.02.2026 06:54 — 👍 128 🔁 43 💬 8 📌 1Environmental protection policies can and do work, but you need a govt to be strong against corporations and lobbyists who put their own profits ahead of the air we all breath and the water we all drink.
22.02.2026 15:47 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
The video from Nigel Farage gives the impression that he was individually refused access.
Farage is in the Maldives.
200 miles away from the Chagos Islands which are not a
tourist destination.
Hasn't got the paperwork and wasn't on the 'aid boat' he's pointing at which is trying to establish a settlement for four people on the islands.
How is this serving Clacton? Who paid?
