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Stephen Bush

@stephenkb.bsky.social

73K followers 4.5K following 57K posts

Associate editor and columnist @financialtimes.com. Post too often about culture, public policy, management, politics, nerd stuff, Arsenal, wosoc. Try my UK politics newsletter for free here: www.ft.com/tryinsidepolitics

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · Feb 22

I sat through that so when my column gets factchecked I can say “yes, that line is accurate”. Such is the FT’s commitment to bringing you our best understanding of the truth. Subscribe here: subs.ft.com/products

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 4h

It's the high point of the film IMO, tied with *that moment* with Alana Haim's wig, though that to me speaks to the basic incoherence of the movie, in that it is 50 per cent an incredibly stylishly realised stupid movie, and 50 per cent a really good PTA film.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 4h

A thing I find funny about this movie is that people were making memes like this and very early in the movie there is *actually* an incredibly forced 'now to work the title into dialogue' moment.

☀️ Starshine @starshine.bsky.social · 11d

woagh

One battle after another

Shit. Hold on honey. I swear its like…One Battle After Another

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 9h

Screengrab hasn’t loaded but I feel confident even from what has that you are 100 per cent correct on this one.

Reposted by Stephen Bush

Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 9h

NEW: How mega batteries are unlocking an energy revolution

Our story today on how storage is changing grids and extending the use of clean power

ig.ft.com/mega-batteri...

How mega batteries are unlocking an energy revolution

Vast battery units are shoring up grids and extending the use of clean power

ig.ft.com

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 10h

Not really - we know what works in schools!

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 11h

But you didn’t start by saying “people had different experiences“ - you made a sweeping statement on behalf of ALL black and brown Londoners, when all the evidence is we were as, if not more relaxed about the whole thing as everyone else in the capital.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 12h

Howard identified talent and promoted it - I think the worst since IDS but also IMO the worst ever because I don't think you could even fairly say she was trying her best.

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Reposted by Stephen Bush

John Oxley @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 1d

Think this tells you more about commentary than politics. At the point this was said, the rise in immigration, Johnson scandals and inflation were all at least foreseeable if not knowable.

Which is why the intelligent question now is "Will Labour's policy platform work?"

James O'Malley @jamesomalley.co.uk · 1d

It's almost exactly four years since Tim Shipman's notorious "Boris Johnson squats like a giant toad" tweet.

Seems like important context given how we often talk as though the next election – four years away – is a done deal.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 13h

He's the mirror image of David Johnston, whose defeat was a huge loss to the Conservative party, but because he has a London accent and backed Leave, he codes as 'not moderate'.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 13h

Yeah, I think he has always both benefited and been hurt by* the 'well, he's posh and charming and backed Remain so he's a lovely moderate'

*cf. him backing Truss, which was covered and treated as if it were him being unprincipled, when it was the obvious choice given his foreign policy positions

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 14h

I don't think this is fair - I think it's actually the failure of large parts of the media, because so many of us are Remainers, to write up 'pro-European and urbane' as 'moderate'. He has never pretended not to be a massive neocon and China hawk. And maybe he's right and I'm wrong, I dunno.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 14h

So many of her statements are 'I am not [a serious philosophy I have decided I am beneath from a cursory glance at Wikipedia]. I am actually [a much dumber version of that philosophy]'.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 14h

There have, I believe, been some issues with her refusing ones that don't fit her schedule or something like that.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 14h

There's just something particularly grating to me about the combination of her deepseated belief that she is a great thinker coupled with the reality that she has a proto-brain, that can barely process if the speaker has a red tie or a blue one and makes value judgements accordingly.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 14h

I will *slightly* defend Tom Tugendhat in that while I think his China position can't be reconciled with being a country of our size and position in global affairs, he has at least consistently stuck to it. Whereas Badenoch, who not long ago was claiming to be a 'conservative realist'....oy vey.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 15h

I think they are about as good as it is possible to make a straight adaptation of those books work (the best solution is just to make the kids all older, have the letter arrive midway through secondary school).

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 15h

It doesn't count! He had done so many kids' films by then!

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 15h

Yeah, I definitely watch too many movies, because it was only at 'atrocities' that I clocked that this wasn't, in fact, an over-the-top denunciation of one of the great directors of children.

George Gantsoudes @pedsortho.bsky.social · 18h

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 15h

Not every piece of beautiful art can be in a museum, let alone just one museum. They are great pieces but they also are for the most part not *better* than what is in permanent collections elsewhere.

Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 15h

Every leader of the opposition to win a general election has supported their opponent on something significant, even in 1970, 1974 and 1979, when the winning party had shifted *away* from the centre ground in that time.

Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 15h

There is just a weird dynamic of, look, I know plenty of 'I am a tribal Tory because of Right to Buy, or because I'm opposed to something Labour did', that makes sense, but there's this weird thing of 'partisan journalists where it's not clear what they *liked* about 2010 to 2024'.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 15h

(Tho of course the big 'Thatcher supporting Wilson' is 'campaigning for an In vote in the EEC referendum')

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 15h

I don't think it's even about 'coming across as reasonable'. If you are a serious politician, over the course of five years, there ought to be one big thing that you agree with the government on, even if it is as basic as 'Margaret Thatcher supporting Wilson on Northern Ireland in 1976'.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 15h

(Also, I know it's gauche to care about policy not just do red team blue team, but Calgie, the foreign policy that would fall apart is functionally identical to the one held by the governments you were a cheerleader for!)

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 16h

Agree. (Even before 'uh, would it?' - quite frankly the domestic politics of 'you are at odds with the US' are easier than what we have now -it's not something anyone should be wishcasting about!)

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