David Wearing
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davidwearing.bsky.social
David Wearing
@davidwearing.bsky.social
Assistant Professor in International Relations at the University of Sussex (own views, obviously).
Interested in British (and Western) foreign relations in the Middle East and elsewhere, and how they're shaped by legacies of colonialism.
Reposted by David Wearing
Behind the weasel words and prevaricating euphemisms, Britain's politics of immigration are rooted in an antipathy to the presence of negatively racialised people in this country *on any terms*. If we'd confronted that reality decades ago, and faced it down, we wouldn't be where we are now.
the video goes on and on about illegal immigration and yet the new proposal will target legal migration by confirmed refugees
November 15, 2025 at 11:11 AM
Reposted by David Wearing
The only Legitimate Concerns about asylum seekers are concerns for their well being and safety. For a rich country like ours to incessantly whine about these people as if we are their victims is perhaps the single most pathetic spectacle in British politics over the past quarter century.
No, I'd say it's racists and those pandering to them.
November 16, 2025 at 7:19 AM
Reposted by David Wearing
"Vote for us or the far right will get in. Also, we find the far right inspirational"

🤡🤡
Somebody is briefing the Times that the Home Secretary finds inspiration in Kristi Noem's leading the Trump mass deportation effort - which has gone much too far for Americans

What a kamikaze piece of political madness that is on the eve of their asylum package
www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...
Shabana Mahmood threatens Trump-style visa ban on three countries
Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo will face Trump-style sanctions if they do not start taking back more illegal migrants and criminals
www.thetimes.com
November 16, 2025 at 10:50 PM
"Vote for us or the far right will get in. Also, we find the far right inspirational"

🤡🤡
Somebody is briefing the Times that the Home Secretary finds inspiration in Kristi Noem's leading the Trump mass deportation effort - which has gone much too far for Americans

What a kamikaze piece of political madness that is on the eve of their asylum package
www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...
Shabana Mahmood threatens Trump-style visa ban on three countries
Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo will face Trump-style sanctions if they do not start taking back more illegal migrants and criminals
www.thetimes.com
November 16, 2025 at 10:50 PM
The great thing about Anglo-American relations in the 2020s is we get to be each others' cautionary tales.
it is wild that Labour is doing exactly what the reactionary centrists recommend and is absolutely destroying its base of support as a result, and yet reactionary centrists in the US are just utterly silent about the complete failure of their program.
November 16, 2025 at 1:07 PM
If Greens and left independents are thinking about a confidence and supply arrangement with a post-Starmer Labour from 2029, it would make sense to target the seats of leading potential wreckers in the PLP. Any anti-Tory/Reform HoC majority would need to be politically viable.
I say once again, apropos of nothing, Mahmood has a majority of 3500. The Greens got this much behind the independent who is being done for fraud. A strong pro-Gaza, probably Muslim candidate, would be a good move for the Greens to challenge.
“Is it possible that you could have a life here, a job here, maybe kids going to school, a family here, then after 19 years if your country is then considered safe you get booted out and sent home?”
November 16, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Representing diversity in frontline politics. Breaking through that glass ceiling. Just as long as you perform your absolute adherence to the terms of white supremacy.
And the irony that the person currently headlining this drive from the Labour Party comes from the Pakistani Muslim community that has been the most regularly demonised of all of them just makes it all sicker.
Behind the weasel words and prevaricating euphemisms, Britain's politics of immigration are rooted in an antipathy to the presence of negatively racialised people in this country *on any terms*. If we'd confronted that reality decades ago, and faced it down, we wouldn't be where we are now.
November 16, 2025 at 10:10 AM
The only Legitimate Concerns about asylum seekers are concerns for their well being and safety. For a rich country like ours to incessantly whine about these people as if we are their victims is perhaps the single most pathetic spectacle in British politics over the past quarter century.
No, I'd say it's racists and those pandering to them.
November 16, 2025 at 7:19 AM
Reposted by David Wearing
I for one am quite glad my family was not told to go back to Bialystok or Kyiv when they were "safe" in 1922.
November 15, 2025 at 8:54 AM
Behind the weasel words and prevaricating euphemisms, Britain's politics of immigration are rooted in an antipathy to the presence of negatively racialised people in this country *on any terms*. If we'd confronted that reality decades ago, and faced it down, we wouldn't be where we are now.
the video goes on and on about illegal immigration and yet the new proposal will target legal migration by confirmed refugees
November 15, 2025 at 11:11 AM
My most woke opinion is that "woke" at root is a beautiful concept: active socio-political consciousness in the context of the Black American liberation struggle. And the way it's been turned into a sneering pejorative is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen in Western political discourse.
"my least woke opinion is---"

That's enough. We've had enough people indulging in the "thrill of a little conservatism", as a treat. Of considering reactionary thought to be a salacious and taboo in a world descending into reactionary mania.

Give me your MOST woke opinions. We're bringing it back.
November 14, 2025 at 12:54 PM
Join us!
🚨 Transition Security Project is hiring a Researcher!

We're looking for a new researcher to join our transatlantic centre, working at the cutting edge of economic, climate and geopolitical analysis on militarism.

Find out more and apply below. 👇

www.common-wealth.org/vacancies/re...
Vacancies | Researcher — Transition Security Project
UK (London, Manchester, Scottish Central Belt, Belfast)
www.common-wealth.org
November 14, 2025 at 11:05 AM
Difficult to see how a PM Streeting could rebuild Labour's voter coalition when he/his allies hold many of those voters in such visceral contempt. "Trots" is not just a juvenile pejorative. It's a really extreme, bizarre way to describe broad swathes of people to the left of the centre.
So Wes Streeting allies want him to become Prime Minister - for the Labour Government to tank even faster.

We don't have time to play these silly games - people are suffering now.

Keep growing the alternative - they need replacing.

Join.greenparty.org.uk
November 14, 2025 at 11:04 AM
There's a difference between nominal and substantive representation. I want to see people of colour like me in high office to the extent that their life experience imbues them with a substantive understanding of racism and a substantive opposition to it. Who is Mahmood representing here? Its not us.
I do not understand those still attempting to defend Labour. Every day the gap between them and Reform, on immigration, trans and non-binary rights, disabled individuals etc shrinks. Human rights have to apply to everyone or they end up applying to no-one. #r4today

news.sky.com/story/home-s...
November 14, 2025 at 8:14 AM
Reposted by David Wearing
I spoke to two dozen BBC journalists, from frontline reporters to senior staff, about how the BBC came to symbolise the West's failure to prevent genocide in Gaza - and how the row over its coverage fed directly into its current meltdown.
www.equator.org/articles/ins...
Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco • EQUATOR
How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart
www.equator.org
November 14, 2025 at 8:01 AM
We've been on this conveyor belt for a long time. Anyone who at this point doesn't understand where this has always been heading is never going to understand.
If your politics have become “We must do fascism-lite, or the fascists will win”, then the fascists have already won.
This is political blackmail dressed up as pragmatism. Justifying their nasty policies with “Reform will be worse”.
November 14, 2025 at 8:06 AM
Reposted by David Wearing
in online corners like these I think people largely recognize how credulous, unprincipled opposition to "wokeness" functioned as lightly papered over defenses of impunity, but it's one of those drums people should probably start beating for normies
Something absolutely perfect about Larry Summers riffing about the scourge of woke cancel culture being unfair to predatory men in a friendly email to his pal JEFFREY EPSTEIN.
November 13, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by David Wearing
"This woke Me-Too bullshit has gone too far," said the former Harvard President and Secretary of the U.S. Treasury to the billionaire pedophile sex trafficker in a private email that the Justice Department under both parties kept secret for years
November 13, 2025 at 1:46 AM
The Guardian gave Goodwin lots of space in the 2010s to whitewash racism as Legitimate Concerns, imbue those Concerns with faux working class authenticity, and denigrate anti racism as the bleatings of a cosmopolitan elite. Its a bit late to start Noticing now.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Reform UK accused of embracing racism over its pick for head of student organisation
Matthew Goodwin argued people from minority ethnic backgrounds born and raised in UK were not always British
www.theguardian.com
November 13, 2025 at 8:02 AM
Wonderful thread
Personal note: London has been home for a very, very long time, but as of today, I am also officially a Brit - that is to say, a British citizen. I feel relieved and I feel grateful - but not, perhaps, in the forelock-tugging way GB News/Starmer expect a new immigrant to be.
November 12, 2025 at 7:19 AM
Look at the quotes defending Starmer here. They have no positive case to make *even to their own MPs*. Just the same grim menu of blackmail and intimidation they serve up to the rest of us.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Starmer allies say ousting PM would be ‘reckless’ as fears grow over leadership challenge
Exclusive: No 10 said to be in ‘full bunker mode’ over fears of challenge after this month’s budget or May local elections
www.theguardian.com
November 11, 2025 at 7:05 PM
A person is not "qualified" to be PM in the same way as they are qualified to be a surgeon or a mechanic. You can picture Polanski learning the technical aspects of government a lot more easily than you can picture Farage or Starmer acquiring the necessary ethical or humanistic qualities.
November 11, 2025 at 10:44 AM
Reposted by David Wearing
If old farts have gone mean as fuck and viciously reactionary with age, then it’s not clear to me that young people are to blame for this or that it’s obviously them who should shut the hell up.
November 10, 2025 at 11:17 PM
The reason I'm reluctant to concede Remembrance Sunday and the symbol of the poppy to jingoistic scolds and nationalistic chauvinists is that I'm old enough to remember the generation who experienced the horrors of 1914-45. Nothing disrespects them more than what many are trying to turn today into.
I recall around 1990 an elderly supply teacher explaining to my class what war is actually like, macho mythology aside. The sound bullets make. Men crying for their mummys as they die on the battlefield. It's haunted me ever since, and certainly played a role in politicising me.
As a teen or young adult in the 1990s you had constant encounters with people in their 50s-80s who were combatants, victims or perpetrators during catastrophes of the mid-20th century

That direct link to realities of Nazism and other forms of oppression such as Stalinism or colonialism is now gone
November 9, 2025 at 9:21 AM
Read that from Musk closely:

"Civilisations" with seperate and distinct characters are locked in a Darwinian fight for survival, and hearts must be sufficiently hardened to do what is necessary in order to prevail.

Can you name a historical precedent for this worldview?
I helped make a film, out this week, called “Rovina’s Choice,” about the deaths this man without conscience or accountability has caused — already 600,000, ⅔ of them children.
November 7, 2025 at 8:04 PM