Johnny Lowden 🇺🇦

The Home Secretary says "we have become the destination of choice in Europe, clearly visible to every people smuggler and would-be illegal migrant across the world"

That is a factually untrue claim: the Home Office shows that the UK is fifth, getting 1/10 claims, while Germany gets 1/5 claims

My Dad escaped the Nazis in 1939 on the Kindertransport.

He went to night school then University, trained as a physicist. Married my mum, brought up 3 kids, all work in public sector.

Under these proposed rules, he would have been deported.

100% 'performatively cruel' @stellacreasy.bsky.social

Plans to leave refugees in a state of perpetual uncertainty about where and if they can rebuild their lives are not just performative cruelty, they are counterproductive to integration and the economy. It doesn’t have to be like this - 1/2

Someone should ask Starmer and Mahmood whether they think the Kindertransport, for example, should have been a return ticket. Whether Alf Dubs, rather than becoming a Labour MP and now Lord, ought to have been sent back with his family to Czechoslovakia once it was liberated from German rule.

Trying to imagine what this policy would have meant for my grandfather and his friends, facing the constant uncertainty of when and whether they would have been deported, after fighting to save this country from the Nazis

UK set to limit refugees to temporary stays Shabana Mahmood is expected to say the era of permanent protection for refugees is over, in major changes to the UK's asylum and immigration system.

This is as bad as anything proposed by Reform.

Leaving refugees in permanent limbo and unable to build a new life in the UK would be a complete abdication of our humanitarian responsibilities

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where laws end, there tyranny begins.”
The Great Commoner, William Pitt the Elder, born #OTD 1708.
Portrait by William Hoare c. 1754, National Portrait Gallery London

At the

I like cars *as things* (design, engineering, etc.) but I cannot stand car-dependent infra, and especially Irish roads. I'd much rather have an extensive, reliable, and affordable rail network. Then I could take my car out for safe drive that's actually enjoyable.

Buuuuut we all know the reality is big publishers will use the extra efficiency to make their bloated soulless trash even bigger and blander.

Those who make good games already will probably avoid AI-use, I reckon.

Best case: the VO actors and writers whose work is used to train the thing a) have given their written consent, and b) get substantial royalties. On top of this is could conceivably reduce crunch?

Nowhere in the hysterical pile-on against the BBC in the British press has anyone mentioned that BBC News now has 77 million viewers & listeners in the US and has established itself as the second most trusted news source there.

In reality I would probably cancel every single celebrity travelogue and use the funding for more investigative journalism, arts programming, and aggressive positive-discrimination to break the stranglehold London-based talent and Oxbridge unis have on the Corp.

Make me the new DG of the BBC and I will make it wall-to-wall history documentaries, and then spend the other 50% of the budget on paying Aardman to make Wallace and Gromit films for the next 100 years.

A man stands in front of his shop with a bus very clearly having crashed into it, with the caption "Ninoshan Jeyaseelan said the bus crashed into his shop".

I, for one, believe him.

The world’s first trillionaire initiated a move that has left more than half a million people dead, most of whom are children.

It turns out that our dystopian corpo-feudalist future aesthetic will be less Blade-Runner and more B and M Bargains.

'Lest wo we...' on the arch too.

War crime btw

TIL that Americans don't have fireworks on Halloween. In Ireland it's fireworks galore, which is not nice for pets.

The names for the nations of GB as Gaelige make it perfectly clear that in the Irish mind the English are just German interlopers and that the Scots and Welsh are the real British.

A perfectly historically accurate assessment.

Agree, and I would say it's also like Puritanism without God. The need to avoid 'even the appearance of evil' leaves many, usually American, leftists unable to recognise that there are *degrees* of problematic-ness. Instead they just fill a big bucket labelled 'Fascist.'

This whole thread has been worse than the Kitchen Discourse.

I rarely get legitimately angry, but this...this really made me furious.

A disgusting perversion of the work of Tolkien *and* Jackson.

As Sultana and co know very well, it is perfectly possible to support a people's struggle for national freedom while opposing the govt or political leadership currently at the head of that struggle. They do not apply this here for a simple reason - they do not support Ukraine.

Treasury minister leading budget plans spent £900 on desk Torsten Bell, who is working with Rachel Reeves to fill a £30 billion hole in finances, also used his parliamentary expenses to claim £600 for three chairs

Totally untrue garbage from @thetimes.com & @dailymail.co.uk today - smear dressed up as journalism. Some facts:
- There is no “£900 desk”
- my constituency office has Ikea desks/chairs
- we significantly underspent the new MPs allowance to set up an office
www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

It won't change anything, but as someone who has only recently moved across the border, it has opened my eyes to the fact that I am a bit politically homeless here and that's honestly quite deflating.

My lukewarm take is that CC's win is not a 'political earthquake' because 1. Uachtarán na hÉireann is a ceremonial/diplomatic position anyway, and 2. the withdrawal of JG meant that she hoovered up much of the FF vote.