Living as we do in the long aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and a post-meaningful world of growth – coupled with the anti-worker agenda of AI ...

@iandunt.bsky.social in case you haven’t seen already …

🚰 Councillor Ros Brown is quoted in the @theilkleyjournal.co.uk talking about the 'essential' need to bring water back into public ownership.

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Our essay next week looks at how this kind of disturbing racist language is unashamedly being voiced without fear of reproach and no sense of shame …

See the shocking video here: www.instagram.com/reel/DQMBP4X...

Image credit: @politicsjoe.bsky.social

“It’s a proud refusal to be bound by the most basic standard of goodness, a deliberate expression of contempt for everything decent …”

To openly quote Hitler and call all non-white immigration illegal is, to quote the American journalist George Parker writing recently about the “depth of America’s moral collapse”, antihuman:

District council meetings are a big deal.

Especially the full council meetings.

The ones where most councillors turn up.

The ones where lots of important decisions get discussed and debated.

The ones that affect us all.

But ask yourself: when was the last time you turned up to one?

Like Paul Marshall, the very Conservative Christian academic James Orr has mastered the art of political and cultural influence away from the public eye. That’s changing - as his appointment as a senior advisor to Reform UK shows. Learn more about him at the link below by @iainoverton.bsky.social …

“A breath in. A breath out. I thrust myself forward and I’m submerged in the chilled waters of the lake. It’s a shock to the system, but I manage to keep my breathing controlled …”

Discover more from @eibhlisgc.bsky.social by tapping on the link below 🔗

The latest news in Ilkley and West Yorkshire. Link below 🔗

Answers on a postcard …

“Who am I to justify
“All the evil in our eye
“When I myself feel the high
“From all that I despise.”

It remains one of my all-time favourite records, home to one of my all-time favourite songs, too, the wonderfully rhythmic and poetically scathing Devil’s Pie.

… a timeless classic that while very much of its time – a seminal R&B album of the early noughties – it is unbound by its historical conception, free to wander through the speakers and headphones of music lovers for generations to come.

What is true, looking back a quarter of a century on from the LP being first released, compelled into retrospection because of his sad passing, is that it was a once in generation work of art …

I had always thought of D’Angelo’s Voodoo as an R&B album. Years later, this feels a little reductive. Not that it matters. It’s all just labels. It was, if anything, as he said himself once said, black music – all of it. Soul. Funk. Jazz. A little hip hop.

… a timeless classic that while very much of its time – a seminal R&B album of the very early noughties – it is unbound by its historical conception, free to wander through the speakers and headphones of generations to come.

Ever heard of the Budget Reference Document?

The one for 2025–26?

Didn’t think so.

It’s around 375 pages long …

… and packed with approximately 30,000 words (and numbers).

It’s an important document about the council’s finances.

Which directly affects you.

Yet, we bet, no one knows about it.

… very effectively exploit age old insecurities around race and ethnicity and the spurious threat of “the foreigner”, is a symbol not of patriotism but of cold, irrational, disquieting fear.

Video credit: Shifty, Adam Curtis (BBC)

The flag mounted as it is today (as it has been), with a confused sense of anger and hopelessness with one’s sad lot in life that has been whipped up by right wing politicans and agitators who …

“There was, as you’d expect in a small, reasonably well to do town like Ilkley, outrage when it was revealed that the household waste and recycling centre on Golden Butts Road, along with two other waste recycling sites in the district, were at risk of closure …”

Read on by tapping the link below 🔗