Noghar
banner
noghar.bsky.social
Noghar
@noghar.bsky.social
Screenwriter, scribbler, short-order cook, time-waster, not quite smart enough to qualify as a smartarse
Reposted by Noghar
This is a good outline
December 8, 2025 at 10:47 AM
I had that bloody Donna Tartt pestering me over the weekend. Now it's Ian McEwan. How these people ever get any writing done beats me
December 8, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Reposted by Noghar
It’s really simple…

- Cap all political donations
- Ban foreign donations
- Strict conflict‑of‑interest & anti‑corruption laws with penalties
- No titles, honours or peerages for donors
- No govt contracts for donors
- Publish every donation/lobby meeting

…that’ll do it.
December 5, 2025 at 8:37 PM
Reposted by Noghar
We can't ditch the Tories' NI cut because it was the OBR's job to stop it. We have to cut foreign aid because Trump said so. We can't protect copyright because OpenAI will be sad. We have to fiddle with Motability because Christian Calgie got 500 retweets.
December 2, 2025 at 11:01 AM
Good God
A wonderful example of why disinvestment in arts and humanities is too clever by half. These are fundamental to a society's curiosity and imagination!
Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard
December 2, 2025 at 10:58 AM
Reposted by Noghar
If you're old enough to remember a million people on the streets protesting Britain's rubber-stamping of Bush's illegal war, and Tony Blair's response - 'a million isn't that many, really' - you won't be surprised by anything happening in 2025.
As a now old man I recall my incredulity when the Serious People admitted that the Iraq war was based on a series of lies, but then went to “of course, there is no way we could have known at the time.”

Hundreds of thousands of people were in the street telling you so at the time. How did they know?
December 1, 2025 at 12:23 PM
Reposted by Noghar
This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥
December 1, 2025 at 11:09 AM
It's taken me time to notice, but just as we now pay far more to multiple TV streamers to see the best shows, so it is for journalism. Once all the best journos wrote for a few big papers, but now they've all gone indie with their own subs, following informed, intelligent writers costs a fortune...
December 1, 2025 at 12:41 PM
Reposted by Noghar
This would be a war crime even if there were an actual war and these people were actual combatants, which there isn't and they weren't.

It's unquestionably an unlawful homicide under any form of law you wish to apply: military or civilian, domestic or international, federal or state. ...
Textbook war crime/extrajudicial killing

"Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck. The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack ... ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions."

Report by @alexhorton.bsky.social @ellenwapo.bsky.social o.bsky.social
Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a verbal order to kill all crew members in the Sept. 2 strike on a suspected drug boat. Navy SEALs fired a second missile.
www.washingtonpost.com
November 28, 2025 at 8:12 PM
Reposted by Noghar
I think that somewhere along the way something in Stephen Miller got fundamentally damaged. This is neither an excuse nor a mitigating factor; the dude is genuinely fucking evil and he and everything he stands for should be fought against and stopped. But he is something beyond mere sociopathy.
Since Stephen Miller is in the midst of another of his Aryans-only trantrums, we should note that his family are 20th century immigrants from the shtetl of Antopol (Антопаль) then in the Hrodna gubernia of Russia. Applying his immigration rules, they would all have perished in the Holocaust.
Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.
If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.
www.politico.com
November 28, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Reposted by Noghar
BOOM! Now over 90,000 signatures. Let’s get it to 100,000 and get this done!

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74...
November 28, 2025 at 11:04 PM
Reposted by Noghar
They think they can balance the country being totally hostile to a relatively small number of asylum seekers; marginally hostile to migrants needed to fill work in key sectors (health, care etc) and international students; and very attractive to high skilled migrants in high pay sectors. They can't.
November 28, 2025 at 8:32 AM
Reposted by Noghar
Kinnock voice - "I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions....and you end up in the grotesque chaos of a Labour government, a *Labour* government, rejecting visas for homeless 8 yr olds trying to joing their parents"
November 28, 2025 at 10:43 AM
Reposted by Noghar
i know WHY this is but that just makes it even more of a kick in the pants lmao
November 28, 2025 at 3:28 AM
Reposted by Noghar
And still, there are those who say that Americans can’t do irony.
November 28, 2025 at 7:24 AM
Reposted by Noghar
I really wish we'd stop calling them climate "skeptics" or "vaccine skeptics", if you jump off a cliff we don't call you a "gravity skeptic"
November 25, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Reposted by Noghar
Given that the BBC endlessly gives platforms to lobbyists from the dark money junktanks without revealing their interests, shouldn't we be seeing such apologies every day?

Better still, how about not doing it? If they want to appear, we should know on whose behalf they are speaking.
November 25, 2025 at 8:40 PM
Reposted by Noghar
These posters for the South Korean stage production of Macbeth are the greatest thing ever? #art
November 23, 2025 at 10:56 AM
Reposted by Noghar
Has no one in the BBC heard of the Streisand effect?

Did everyone think, "oh, Rutger Bregman, he'll be cool with this"?
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1
November 25, 2025 at 9:56 AM
And it will all be the fault of immigrants immigrants in small boats... So they can get further inland, or something...
🔴Drowning in Denial: One in Five Homes in Reform UK Heartlands Could Be Under Water Within 25 Years

As Nigel Farage’s party scraps climate schemes around the country, new data shows flood risk surging across the ten councils it leads, reports @nafeez.bsky.social

bylinetimes.com/2025/11/20/d...
Drowning in Denial: One in Five Homes in Reform UK Heartlands Could Be Under Water Within 25 Years
As Nigel Farage's party scraps climate schemes around the country, new data shows flood risk surging across the ten councils it leads
bylinetimes.com
November 25, 2025 at 10:46 AM
Reposted by Noghar
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1
November 25, 2025 at 9:26 AM
Reposted by Noghar
Mahmood/government should say explain *objective* of increasing time to settlement for 15 years for care workers who arrived 2022-24

Is it

A) to get them to leave? Why?
B) to save money? Then why not just restrict benefits?
C) to "encourage integration"? How? Will do opposite.
15 years for people in medium skilled jobs and care workers too. I believe this goes down to 10 years if they earn over £50,270. Someone in a high skilled job earning over that qualifies in 5 years.
November 21, 2025 at 10:04 AM
Reposted by Noghar
It remains insane to me that DOGE was treated at the time as an impressive shock and awe accomplishment - “you can’t deny he’s getting stuff done!” - and then instantly memory holed by the press once if became clear it was a total failure by every possible standard including Musk’s own
Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was. Spending in FY2025 was not only than in FY2024 – but higher than it was projected to be when Trump first took office.*

The little bit of spending DOGE cut has already killed hundreds of thousands and will eventually lead to millions of deaths.
Bye bye, “DOGE”.

It no longer exists as a “centralized entity”, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

@reuters.com
www.reuters.com/world/us/dog...
November 23, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by Noghar
I'd love to see the evidence that traffickers are giving asylum seekers a completely factual course in UK immigration law as part of their fee too. One might argue their business model requires them to do very much the opposite.
November 20, 2025 at 7:10 PM