Dear Shabana, I notice today that you referred to me in your speech on immigration at the IPPR think tank. You said: “A party leader should not be on the beaches of France encouraging people to make a perilous crossing on small boats.” I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised especially after the hateful Labour campaign in Gorton and Denton, but this is just the latest in a string of lies peddled by a discredited Government who intentionally fan the flames of racism and division. When I went to Calais, I was not there to encourage people to travel to the UK. I was there to see at first hand the suffering your Government and successive Governments have done in demonising migrants in a pathetic bid to pander to the base instincts of Reform and the flawed strategy of Morgan McSweeney. As you will know, if you even bothered to research my visit instead of taking Reform talking points, I was there to witness the brutality of families living in tents in freezing temperatures. I filled water tanks and picked up litter. What that visit did do is confirm my belief that if we are to smash the boat gangs and stop the boats, we need to offer safer and managed routes for migrants to come to this country. Showing compassion as a politician is not a crime. In fact, we need to see much more of it. It reminded me of a young MP who in October 2015 spent three days in Lesbos helping migrants fleeing war-torn Syria. She posted videos on X, talked about handing out water and croissants to refugees and food parcels. When she returned to the UK, she wrote a very moving piece in the New Statesman. She said “we have to work with our European partners and create new, safe, and legal routes for refugees to get to Europe. We cannot abandon them to their fate, left as prey for smugglers whilst risking death on the seas.” She said “maybe we can make ourselves feel better by saying no-one is making them get on the boats. And again, the Home Secretary is not entirely wrong when …

Dear Shabana,

Let's clear some things up around migration and remember we're talking about people's lives.

Dear British journalists, when talking to politicians of parties that want to make big changes to the way current and future foreign residents are to be treated, I wish you would go further than the big claims and policy announcements.

Keep sharing the words of Akinola Davies Jr that the BBC would not broadcast. Keep repeating them. Keep amplifying them.
Words matter.

Screen shot from Paul Embery’s X account: Respect to this police officer. Confronted by radicals demanding the arrest of a Christian preacher on the grounds that Whitechapel "is a Muslim area" she was calm and professional and gave them short shrift. Let's see more of this from the police. Has a video of a woman police officer talking to a group of Muslim men

This clip is all over the other place and has made its way onto GB News and Talk TV so I’ll do a bit of an explainer here too!

The clip doing the rounds is of a fantastic police officer telling a group of Muslim men that a Christian preacher nearby is entitled to freedom of expression.

🧵
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I spoke to students at Sciences Po on moral ambition in a driverless world.

Watch in full if you want my proposals on how we fight back for solidarity and humanity bit.ly/4aIBdKa

Part 4: Every time you hear the powerful attack UN, ask what they gain by weakening us.👇

1. Pointing out that the Iranian regime's actions are horrific does not in any way subtract from the horror of the Israeli government's genocide in Gaza, or from other atrocities. There are, unfortunately, plenty here who seem to believe we should be partisan in our denunciations. They are wrong. 🧵

Swedish opposition politician compares the country’s government to… Tottenham 😆

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson has passed away at the age of 84. My thoughts are with his family.

I wanted to share this clip from his appearance on Sesame Street in 1971. His important words ring just as true today as they did back then.

Is anyone else just totally despairing about the amount of AI slop everywhere you look? From fake social media accounts to fake videos, badly written press releases and companies racing to remove human creativity and passion from all aspects of their work. It all feels very bleak.

and you won't be able to see that that's what's happening.

the park should not be full of broken glass.
you can't just ban children from the play area and call the problem solved.
1) they now have no play area
2) everyone else is still getting cut to ribbons

FWIW, after 2+ decades in 🇬🇧 diplomacy my settled view is that BBCWS is *the* (not *a*) vital element of British soft power and the continued attacks on its funding are nothing short of barbaric and self defeating.

Gary Lineker, "Jim Ratcliffe is a migrant himself, an economic migrant, he lives in Monaco"

"A lot of the immigrants contribute enormously, and the facts show you that, in terms of revenue, paying tax etc"

"Whereas Jim in Monaco, is doing everything he can to avoid paying tax"

Some PR advice for the Andrew-stricken royals – try something that look less like a $12m cover-up | Marina Hyde A big loan to keep the case out of court doesn’t quite add up to ‘thoughts and prayers to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’. Working with the police might be a start, says Guardian columnist Marina Hyde

#Epstein

I don’t really pay attention to charges of doomerism. I don’t know what it means offline.

I do know that refusing a version of how the future will unfold forecloses on the power that actually shapes that future. That’s not disavowing that tech changes are happening but they are in now a given.

The political spectrum in the UK has been driven so far to the right that the Labour Party of today is far to the right of the Tory party before Thatcher came along with her radical agenda of privatisation, financial sector deregulation, and deliberate deindustrialisation.

Hate-filled fake videos about London are everywhere. We've obtained a recording of a TikToker confessing to secretly filming Londoners in their homes for clicks.

He says it's not political. He just wants to make money from far-right anger.

Read what he says: www.londoncentric.media/p/london-tik...

We all live in Jeffrey Epstein's world The most disturbing revelation so far

We all live in Jeffrey Epstein's world now. That's what we can't face. It's our world. Where sexual desire for children is protected, victims receive no justice & the President of what used to be called the free world is Jeff's friend. This is Jeff's World now.
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open.substack.com/pub/broligar...

Peter Mandelson is telling the truth on one thing: the idea he was bought for a $4k “bursary” or a $75k gift is ridiculous

The real incentive was a post-government payday - one so big he *rejected* a $3–5m-a-year offer

And Epstein enabled that payday

Here’s the evidence. 🧵

❤️

We are opening an investigation into Grok because we believe that X may have breached the DSA.

We have seen antisemitic content, non-consensual deepfakes of women, and child sexual abuse material.

In Europe, no company will make money by violating our fundamental rights.

link.europa.eu/Fh8h84

The BBC coverage is absolutely terrible.

It leads on "sharply contested narratives"

It has a dramatic skew to the US government

It has posted the video but has failed to report on what it shows: it shows the US govt account is untrue

This one?

Where is the “believe what you see” from your original post?

This is extremely similar to your previous post with the sentence: “Believe what you see.” Deleted. This looks like you have been censored.

Sometimes you get a few minutes on live TV with a billionaire. I tried to make them count! 😅

On Isherwood posts:

Cabaret is a great film and an outstanding play, but to get a real feel about early 1930s read the Isherwood source material: the Berlin stories and diaries.

Like Zone of Interest the menace and horror is what you can sense off-page/off-screen.

And it was written at the time.

Listening to a discussion about AI in university education with Amol Rajan & Prof Duncan Iveston on Radio 4 Today. Too short to get into the nuance of course, but an observation that copilot can do a literate review for you very quickly perfectly illustrates one of my main concerns with AI…1/1