David Osland

David Osland

@davidosland.bsky.social

Forty-year veteran of British leftwing politics. Not the opinions of any publication for which I write.

9,263 Followers 262 Following 582 Posts Joined May 2023
2 days ago

Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks food banks are 'rather uplifting', Grenfell Tower victims 'lacked common sense', Partygate was 'just fluff'. And that the US/Israeli illegal war on Iran is entirely justified.

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2 days ago

Republican presidential contender John McCain once sang the words 'bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran' to the tune of the Beachboys' hit Barbara Anne. 165 dead schoolgirls later, Trump has given him his wish.

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2 days ago

The US/Israeli attack on Iran is a pointless, nasty and illegal war. Whatever Kemi Badenoch may think, the 'patriotic' course is to keep Britain well out of it.

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2 days ago

As the vulgar English saying goes, 'don't piss on me and tell me it's raining'. The political version is 'don't piss on me and tell me to vote for you'.

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2 days ago

Crown Courts have a backlog of 80,000 cases because the justice system has been underfunded for decades. Not because people have the right to a jury trial.

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2 days ago

I'd just about buy the argument that Labour is planning to end the right to jury trials because of financial constraints, although I wouldn't support the measure even then. But to dress this policy up as somehow progressive is simply laughable.

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1 week ago

How can Hannah Spencer plausibly claim to be working class when her father wasn't even a toolmaker?

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1 week ago

Starting to wonder if Trump's Board of Peace has been inaptly named

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1 week ago

It's almost as if the Labour Party is getting bored with losing activists they've had for 50 years and is now turning its best efforts to losing seats it has held for a century

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1 week ago

As extreme leftists who want to turn school playgrounds into crack dens go, many Green activists are quite personable when you meet them face to face

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1 week ago

A Labour prime minister with an ounce of political nous would look at the Gorton and Denton result and think 'mmm, I wonder if the electorate are trying to say something?'

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1 week ago

For much of my political lifetime, Hannah Spencer's views would have qualified her to be an unexceptional Labour MP. For Starmer to castigate the Greens as 'extreme left' is risible.

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2 weeks ago

MPs are not allowed to question the integrity of King Charles III. This is the guy who accepted a suitcase stuffed with £2.6m in cash from a dubious Qatari politician.

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2 weeks ago

They say the royal family is a tourist attraction. So is Legoland, and last time I checked, it hadn't leaked trade secrets to predatory billionaire paedophiles.

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3 weeks ago

Appointing Robert Jenrick as Reform UK's shadow chancellor should raise a few tens of thousands of pounds in donations from billionaire property developers keen to avoid £45m tax bills

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1 month ago

Given how much Nigel Farage hates working from home, it would be nice to see him turn up at his workplace a bit more regularly

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1 month ago

I've just learned that all self-respecting superyacht owners buy second vessels known as 'support yachts' just to carry their jet skis and helicopters. And we still get told that inequality doesn't matter.

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1 month ago

It's really unlucky that the people charged with vetting Mandelson's Washington appointment didn't think to try a basic Google search. It would have saved them a lot of work

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1 month ago

The Mandelson scandal will probably topple Starmer. That must be the first time he's ever done anything positive for the Labour Party.

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1 month ago

At a single stroke, Lord Mandelson has completely destroyed his hard-won reputation for honesty. Tragic.

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1 month ago

Supporters of the House of Lords should tell us why Lord Mandelson, Baroness Mone, Lord Houchen, Lord Lebedev and Baroness Owen deserve to be unelected lawmakers for the rest of their lives

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1 month ago

To rewrite the words of the great Barry Manilow, Mandy came and he took without giving

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1 month ago

Britain must be the only country in the world where politicians get more stick for mispronouncing Epstein's surname than for making use of his services

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1 month ago

Springsteen's anti-Trump song is probably better than any anti-Springsteen song Trump will ever write

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1 month ago

The Daily Mail describes Sarah Ferguson as 'homeless'. If I see her begging outside the local shopping centre, I'll probably bung her a couple of quid.

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1 month ago

What Lee Anderson hasn't pointed out yet is that in 1930s the Daily Mail supported the British Union of Fascists and in the 2020s the Daily Mail supports Reform UK

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1 month ago

The big difference between fraudulent covid loans and student loans is that fraudulent covid loans are happily written off

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1 month ago

If VAT on private school fees is 'class war', what's the right term for 8% compound interest on student loans?

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1 month ago

Suella Braverman announced her defection to Reform at a rally for veterans this morning. Maybe she also used the speech to condemn Trump's slur that the audience were cowards in Afghanistan and it just hasn't been reported.

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1 month ago

We absolutely don't need the Chinese embassy tapping British citizens' phone calls. We've already got the Daily Mail doing that for us, thank you.

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