Lorraine Rogerson

In non absurdly-pointless war news, saw the Tracey Emin exhibition @ Tate Modern today. It was GLORIOUS. Meaningful, deeply feminist, interwoven strands of the effects of racism, classism and sexism, life and death and meaning. Stunning.

This is the point. If your vaunted trillion-dollar military can't get through a few days of airstrikes because you've consolidated the industrial base so badly, then you don't have a trillion-dollar military, you just have contractors in No. Virginia getting rich

It's nearly "When's International Men's Day? Day. Or as it's sometimes known International Women's Day. If you're actually interested in equality for every gender (because equality means equality for all) then please support this terrific festival. (it's November 19th to preempt)

I oversaw counterterrorism at DHS for two years in the first Trump administration.

I’ve never seen DHS less prepared to defend the U.S. against a terrorist attack.

And Trump took us to war five days ago — with a country that is hellbent on retaliating.

I love how Ipsos show the margin of error on their charts. Should be industry standard!

Agree. It's perfectly possible to believe that revolutionary Iran is an awful regime but nothing Trump is doing will do anything other than make things worse. Keeping UK forces out of the direct conflict has overwhelming support in the UK.

Farage and Badenoch are utterly out of their depth.

Be glad of Starmer’s caution over Iran Bellicose critics of the UK prime minister have learnt nothing from the recent past

"pleasing the US is a — not the — test of policy. The extent to which the Conservatives and Reform UK believe otherwise is unnerving." www.ft.com/content/eaee...

Spanish PM Sánchez responds to Trump:

"Spain is against this disaster... Govts are here to improve people's lives... It is absolutely unacceptable that those leaders who are unable to fulfill that mission use the smoke of war to hide their failure, and in the process, fill the pockets of a few."

Donald Trump made trade threats against Spain during an Oval Office meeting with reporters and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Trump: "Spain said we can't use their bases. We could use their bases if we want. We could just fly in and use it. Nobody is gonna tell us not to use it"

Not receiving consent and moving forward anyway is a consistent theme in his life — as E. Jean Carroll can attest

Thread.👇

the Dubai dickheads remind me of how Ballard portrayed the western enclaves in Shanghai in Empire of the Sun

A reminder: Matt Goodwin lost heavily in spite of an almost total lack of tactical voting, not because of it.

The combined Green/Labour vote was 66%, versus 28.7% for Reform.

If Labour and the Greens split the vote 50/50 – a total coordination fail – he'd have finished third, not second.

When I flagged this on the morning after the vote I noted Matt Goodwin had a longstanding reputation in academia as being bad at maths.

I should've added he also had a reputation as a very sore loser when he went for a job and didn't get it (which happened fairly often).

One of the things that really gets me about this policy is that it doesn’t have the impact its supporters seem to think. It don’t affect numbers arriving but it does actively harm integration of those who come. It’s just a really, really bad policy. There’s no case for it being “necessary” at all.

ublications are expected to demonstrate what steps they have taken not to publish inaccurate information – this shows compliance with the Editors’ Code, and a commitment to high editorial standards The publication had not provided any evidence of adequate pre-publication checks, and within hours of publication it had evidently been able to establish that it could not stand by the story. In these circumstances, IPSO found that there was a serious failure to take care not to publish inaccurate information and a breach of Clause 1 (i). The Committee acknowledged that, given the unusual circumstances of the case, the publication could not identify each specific inaccuracy in the article and correct it; this followed from its earlier failure to take care. Nonetheless, the consequence was that the publication could not verify any of the remaining details in the article in a manner which would allow it to adequately correct the record in the manner required by the Code.

Telegraph is forced - finally - to publish a proper apology for simply inventing a story.

Of course they continue to do this about immigrants/immigration pretty much every single day...

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/teleg...

Starmer’s position on Iran pleases no one, but that is because there are no good options | Rafael Behr None of the prime minister’s critics engages with the hard strategic dilemmas arising from Britain’s perilous dependency on US power, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr

#Nutshell

fwiw there is never going to be a good answer to the question "what should a UK government do faced with a mad US President given frightening levels of powers by his own party?"

On Iran, Tim Stanley of the Telegraph admits he's 'far happier that Keir Starmer was Prime Minister, than Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage, who are gagging for America to just invade anywhere in the world, so they can jump on the bus & join in.'

The Right are increasingly all over the place.

Sooner or later, the costs of disinvesting in state capacity become apparent. If you put more money into bombing places you need foreign service capacity more, not less

This is a relatively small but significant development, and it's to the good. The governing party should never be able to rewrite the electoral commission's writ on its own.

Interesting piece from Joshua Rosenberg on the Govt’s unusual move in publishing the legal advice. The Govt statement makes it quite clear what we’re doing and why.

bsky.app/profile/ilik...

Reform's Darren Grimes admits blog post image was AI Darren Grimes says the picture was used for

A council's deputy leader, a Reform councillor, has admitted to using an AI-generated photo in a post about local authorities "shipping" families to the region.

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

Seems I'm not the only one thinking that

bsky.app/profile/spig...

All relief flights from Dubai should be met at arrivals with signs saying "HM Revenue & Customs welcomes you back to the UK"

I don't know who convinced right wing politicians that "sulk and insult the electorate" is political dynamite.

This statement, ironically, is closer to the truth for Farage's own constituency and own voters - where levels of economic inactivity are much higher than the national average.

Again, would love to put some of these questions to him myself, but Reform have banned Byline Times from attending any of their events

Nigel Farage lied multiple times at his press conference today - including saying no-one who voted Green in Gorton and Denton has a job and he's "certain" Reform won most British born voters in the by-election, based on zero evidence, and yet not a single journalist there pushed back on them

Do you *really* think Nigel Farage would do that?

Just go to a press conference and tell lies?

Dear Matt Goodwin, why are you such a bad loser? The Reform candidate in Gorton and Denton tried to blame "woke" ideology and "Islamism" for his by-election defeat. Might it be that actually, he and his politics are just not very appealing? ZOE GRÜNEWALD

Perhaps the deeper problem is that Goodwin and his allies simply do not understand this country. That may not be surprising. They claim to speak for ordinary people while observing them from a distance, through the distorting lens of X, a social media ecosystem that rewards outrage and strips away civility and accountability. They tour Hungary and the US in search of ideological inspiration, nod approvingly at Viktor Orbán's pronatalist experiments and Trump's ICE deployment, and circulate among the uber-wealthy and uber-aggrieved. Their "outsider" insurgency looks, on inspection, rather establishment: privately educated, well-connected, and perpetually resentful. The irony is hard to miss. A party styling itself as the revolt of the "silent majority" was beaten by a candidate speaking plainly about work, public services and the cost of living. For all his accumulated titles and platforms, Goodwin scraped second - and responded not with reflection, but with sour grapes. Blaming "Islamists" is easier on a man's ego, I suppose, than taking a long, searching look in the mirror.

“Gorton and Denton…. was a stress test for grievance politics, and grievance cracked first. Reform’s instinct when challenged is not to persuade but to tantrum; not to build trust but to erode it. That’s the playbook. Win, or cry foul”
@zoegrunewald.bsky.social
www.thenewworld.co.uk/zoe-grunewal...