When the last Tory government tried to do good, they were so incompetent the result was to harm those they set out to help, and to unleash a fraudsters’ bonanza. How many other examples are yet to be revealed? www.theguardian.com/environment/...?
Hi all, @olddogua.bsky.social and I just did a Substack live. Shaun talked about the reality of the war from a perspective inside Ukraine, which is rather different than you often hear in the western press. open.substack.com/pub/phillips...
One of the quiet successes of social policy was the provision of youth and community services, particularly social spaces. Drivers of community-led change, integration and personal development. But austerity… you know this story. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...?
Coe was teasing me. The character is a version of him. A poet in fiction, the writer of short stories IRL. The surname is his, with an additional consonant.
Did the left leave Twitter? I don’t know, and I scarcely care. I left because it was horrible. Is BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon any better? It feels less stressful, but I look at BlueSky less than I used to look at old Twitter. Though this may be because politics is bigger & more scary now.
The tragic flagmen descended on our High Street and covered the lampposts with Union & St George flags, which soon started wrapping themselves around CCTV cameras. Yesterday the council removed the flags from the commercial stretch of the street, and these homespun efforts started to appear.
"A message of neighbourly solidarity is thriving in Birmingham against a backdrop of racist intimidation" #antifa#StGeorge#racism#flags www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...
Jonathan Coe discusses his hugely enjoyable novel, The Proof of My Innocence at the Birmingham Literature Festival tonight, with me. If you haven’t yet read it, do it.
It’s the first in the long awaited series, The Tufton Street Murders.
The first caller on the show is a very interesting woman. She was an active Labour councillor who was going to stand as a PPC in last year’s general election. She was banned by the apparatchiks because of her heritage. She is now a Lib Dem councillor.
‘Badenoch’s leadership has been the worst of all worlds….She understood the need for a boundary between traditional Toryism and populist demagoguery but lacked the clarity of thought, strategic acumen and political courage to enforce one.’ www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...?
‘The stench of decay is overpowering….During a fringe Spectator event, everyone was so bored that the interviewer asked Robert Jenrick if he would fight a horse-sized duck. It was by far the most interesting point of the day.’ www.theguardian.com/politics/202...?
