I suppose this is unsurprising given his heavy campaigning on behalf of war criminals during Trump's first term.

The former is a measured yet chilling exploration of the rise of one of the most evil movements in human history, and the latter is a crass, cack-handed cartoon with a blaring soundtrack and pointless reconstructions that look like they're performed by an am-dram society.

I feel like one of the clearest examples of the decline in standards, largely because it was made by the same documentary-maker, is the contrast between 1998's "The Nazis: A Warning from History" and 2012's "The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler".

I'm not talking about the stuff NYT Pitchbot satirises, where newspapers go out of their way to avoid stating plain facts, but people simply quoting sources or posting bare factual summaries.

One of the few Bluesky habits that I dislike is the pattern from 2018 - 2020 Twitter of expecting every headline or tweet to contain an explicit condemnation of what is being described. It's infantilising and annoying.

That said, the SPAG tests in English schools are ridiculous and the Francis Review was right to recommend that they be drastically rewritten.

It reminds me a bit of the scene in Poliakoff's "The Lost Prince" where George V says that he bans his children from playing wargames involving actual countries and orders them to use planets instead.

Yes, it can definitely work both ways.

Very good.

Time to post some Robert Badinter clips from his opening remarks on the death penalty abolition Bill:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vCp...

The caveat being that Trump was in a similarly dire position towards the end of 2017, and his polling actually improved throughout 2018.

Counter-caveat: the economy was doing well between 2017 and 2019, and that's looking far less likely this time.

When my first child was born I was struck by how the SCBU was well-staffed and efficiently-run, whereas the main maternity unit was full of trainees from the local university and chronically verging on chaos. I suppose that's preferable to the opposite scenario, but still.

Just pray he doesn't tie for fifth place in one of his meets.

I don't think it's freely accessible, but a paper Nick Thomas-Symonds wrote in 2005 offers a qualified defence of Foot's leadership on this score.

The worst you can say about Foot was that he was suspicious of expulsions in principle and therefore unwilling to take strong action against Militant, but he very much wasn't a sympathiser.

The Blue Labour right have become the Militant of 2025 - a tiny but hyperactive and densely networked sect working relentlessly to drag Labour towards their niche pursuits and away from the values and priorities of core Labour voters.