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“We fought in the Second World War. We liberated France, we liberated Belgium. We beat the Germans. And what we got now? Trying to tell us what we can and can’t do."
Former miner Danny Gillespie, who voted Leave, says the situation is "absolutely ridiculous"
#newsnight
The Brexit MEPs are all the worst people I’ve ever met in my life Frankensteined into a many-headed monster of mediocrity, bigotry and spite. They’re an art installation called Britain Is Shit. A Wetherspoons Bosch.
If Boris Johnson were a new candidate instead of PM, and if his racist jokes had been in old tweets uncovered last month instead of in major publications and common knowledge for years, then he would have been deselected and suspended by now.
After nearly twenty years serving the wonderful people of Surrey Heath and over a decade in Cabinet across five government departments, I have today taken the decision to step down as a Member of Parliament. Read my letter here 👇
After four years of being told that leave voters knew exactly what they were voting for, you condescending remoaner, I don't know how to feel about financially capsized leave voters queuing up to tell the media that they did not, in fact, know what they were voting for.
So it takes a footballer and mutinous Tory backbenchers to persuade the great populist Boris Johnson that feeding children is popular. Ah, that common touch.
Weird shit for a British conservative but totally normal for an American conservative and she’s decided that’s where the money and acclaim are. One of the most grotesquely cynical career moves you could imagine.
Former UK Prime Minister
@trussliz
: “The left are aided and abetted by our enemies overseas. That includes Russia, it includes Iran and most of all, it includes China…they don’t want economic competition, they want to undermine our very way of life, they want to undermine our
Shocked to hear an unpatriotic chap on the radio this morning undermining a British diplomat to curry favour with a foreign leader. Clearly he hates Britain. Didn't catch his name. Nigel something.
For me Grant Shapps is the totemic figure of 13 years of Tory rule: a profoundly unserious mediocrity who has held eight ministerial roles and made his mark in none of them.
BREAKING: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak declines to apologise for transgender jibe despite calls from Brianna Ghey's family
More:
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube
If I could reform one UK institution it would be the tabloid press rather than the monarchy. It has a much larger blast radius and the cruelty is the point.
Graham Linehan is one of the most blatant examples of online radicalisation I've ever seen. He was (as far as I could tell) a funny, well-liked man who became utterly consumed by one cause, which seems to have broken him. (I don't think this process is cause-specific.)
Orwell on fascism, 1936: "If you pretend that it is merely an aberration that will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon.”
“As for the 10,000 ‘private’ schools that England possesses, the vast majority of them deserve nothing except suppression... They merely exist because of a widespread idea that there is something disgraceful in being educated by the public authorities.” - Orwell, 1941
What a filthy campaign this has been, with most of the filth coming from one direction. Labour's not spotless but you can't really "both sides" this. And to see high-profile journalists carelessly enabling disinformation is a low.
"I think the government is putting the integrity of the United Kingdom at risk"
Former PM Theresa May says the ministers' willingness to "renege" on parts of the Brexit agreement could result in a loss of trust that could threaten the integrity of the UK
Labour’s Richard Burgon is asked to name mistakes in the party’s election campaign
“The mistake we made was being persuaded that people did not quite want to get Brexit done as their top priority”
#politicslive
This is a clever joke because it doesn’t work on multiple levels. Sure it’s unfunny but anyone can do unfunny. Creepy? Not so hard. It takes real craft to make it totally incoherent as well. It achieves pure laugh-annihilating anti-comedy.
Praise for Piers Morgan suggests that most people don’t in fact have inflexible personal grudges and that if someone ceases to act like an arse they’ll get credit for it. Strikingly, he is an exception and most high-profile arses have simply become bigger arses during this crisis
"We all feel bad for the Ukrainian people, of course we do, but why should we have to suffer when it's nothing to do with us?"
Chelsea fans fume to
@charlotterlynch
about the Abramovich sanctions
I know that it's terribly boring, in September 2020, to say that Brexit remains a garbage idea fuelled by incompetence, lies, jingoism and needless destruction, but it hasn't got any better has it?
“Why didn’t they come forward earlier?” ask men who refuse to believe multiple detailed allegations, extensively reported, against a man who actually joked about this stuff on stage and on air
Re: Pitchfork, I was told 20 years ago that print would die out but don’t worry, there would be lots of great music journalism online. But most of the great websites have been shut down or gutted and nothing has replaced the magazines. We’ve just ended up with less.
I try not be a grammar pedant but the entirely unnecessary replacement of "you" with "yourself" (cf everyone on The Traitors) seems to have become the norm. The shorter word is right there guys. It worked for centuries.
I belong to the “media elite” because I’m a left-wing remainer. However, even if I earned five times more and had a much bigger (some might say elite) platform, I could leave the “media elite” simply by supporting Brexit and Boris Johnson. What a magical category that is.
Having a meltdown about Starmer when Labour are well ahead by every measure reveals that it's not about getting the Tories out, it's about ego and hurt feelings.
I'm only 24 pages into Liz Truss's book and I'm already reminded of the quip misattributed to Dorothy Parker: “It is not a book to be lightly thrown aside. It should be thrown with great force.”
I love the intellectual curiosity of the 1975 and their fans. It's generous, not exclusive - it's about discovering and sharing culture. Reminds me of the young Manics.
If you’re feeling down and self-critical, remember at least you’re not the guy who spent weeks crowdfunding and making a crappy balloon of Sadiq Khan that Sadiq Khan doesn’t give a shit about.
How many times do people need to be told that incitement to violence is not protected speech? This is not a new legal principle, or one specific to the UK.
It's ridiculous that the health secretary can't appear on Today to talk about the coronavirus because of the government's petty boycott. What a tawdry, self-indulgent crew.
Yeah that’s not what witch hunt means. This is like if a single genuine witch held a press conference to tell everyone she’s definitely a witch and she’s not sorry because the spell was reasonable.
Darren Grimes' account/life is pure kitsch. The performative working-class lad routine. The fainting-couch sentimentality. The weepy victim complex. He's barely a real person.
As Minister for Women and Equalities I've done all I can to ensure we have take the heat out of the debate on LGBT issues while being clear about our beliefs and principles.
Keir Starmer’s behaviour today shows Labour are happy to weaponise this issue when it suits them (2/2)
BREAKING: Iain Dale tells LBC he has now abandoned his bid to become the Conservative candidate for Tunbridge Wells, after this clip of him telling listeners he 'never liked the place’ and ‘would happily live somewhere else’ was revealed
I'm endlessly fascinated by the popular reading of The Great Gatsby as the story of a cool rich guy who throws sexy parties and has a great time. It's like basing a river cruise on Heart of Darkness.
If you were going to feel sorry for Nick Boles resigning - Don't.
He has consistently:
🚫 Voted for raising tuition fees
🚫 Voted against raising benefits for disabled people
🚫 Voted against higher taxes on the rich.
Bye 🖐️
I wonder what female MPs on the left and the anti-Brexit centre have to say about the idea that Cummings was so uniquely threatened that he had to flee town and keep his new location secret.
An underrated point by Starmer and one which strikes me as authentic: There are debates that are genuinely difficult to tread. Politicians will not always get it right but their motives matter. Whether mistakes flow from a wish to be kind or from performative cruelty matters. ~AA
Imagine being seriously ill and having most of the nation behind you despite your colossal errors and then pissing away all that goodwill to defend someone that nobody likes.
Yah, sure, babe! It was just a natural process of "seeing sense". Marrying a billionaire property developer and Tory donor had absolutely nothing to do with your change of heart.
Imagine watching a series of former Labour members and staffers talk about being traumatised by antisemitism and then complaining about the music and camera work.
Four types of headline I can't believe I'm still seeing in 2018:
1. Fascists are hip now!
2. A woman "provoked" a man into killing her by not sleeping with him
3. A massacre, but in the passive tense so nobody's to blame
4. Something non-racist happened so racism is over now
Do people who obsessively hate Meghan Markle realise how mad they look to everyone else? Scrutinising every second of body language like Kevin Costner in JFK. Take a break.
My heart goes out to Paris. Notre Dame is a symbol of our ability as human beings to unite for a higher purpose—to build breathtaking spaces for worship that no one person could have built on their own. I wish France strength and shared purpose as they grieve and rebuild.
Jones predicted a Labour landslide on day one, before Farage entered the race, then spent the whole campaign trying to drive down Labour’s vote share and defeat Labour candidates
Everyone who was already terrible — cranks, conspiracy theorists, Tim Martin, Allison Pearson, Trump — is even worse now, except for Piers Morgan, which is very confusing.
@JuliaHB1
Or this: "I'm such an entitled arsehole that I can't even wear a mask for a few minutes to go to the shops during a pandemic without whining about it"
I sincerely apologise to anyone who may have been offended by my pronunciation of GIF as JIF on the podcast. Even though this is how the inventor of the GIF says it, I now realise that this is a sensitive subject that has caused great distress. I will be taking time to reflect.
The left may carp but Boris appeals to every decent patriot’s understandable desire to funnel huge amounts of public money to his mistress and then lie about it.
I can only conclude that James Melville is like the bus in Speed. Somebody planted a bomb in his head some time ago and if he stops tweeting bad takes for a day it explodes.
The “Labour didn’t really win” narrative = standard anti-Labour media bias + contrarian pundits + bitter Corbynites + some Labour supporters’ chronic inability to feel good
I don’t see how the Royal Academy’s decision not to sell Jess de Wahls’ work can be justified or tenable unless every single artist in the shop is subjected to the same criteria.
If the biggest cheer at your biggest event is one of your leader's closest allies swearing at your deputy leader for addressing racism in your party, then you're probably screwed.
I can see a lot of people furiously criticising Israel without being antisemitic and I can also see a bunch of antisemites and it's not hard to tell the difference. It's not such a fine line that one can cross it unwittingly.