Abster for PM

He/Him.
🦕🦖

[Daniel Lambert @dlLambo]

Amazingly light headline because it's Israel.

"The correct headline is "Israeli forces murder a Palestinian baby on lands they illegally occupy. Nobody will ever be brought to justice."

[Andrew Feinstein @andrewfeinstein]

You are a shameless liar: Polanski is calling for a list of British citizens who have fought in a probable genocide & possibly committed war crimes & other atrocities to be compiled. This is what any civilised lawful country should do

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Are you happy that more than 2000 people who have served with the IDF in Gaza committing War Crimes are allowed to come and walk around in the UK with no checks at all?

Zack Polanski isn't and neither am I.

[Nadia Whittome MP @NadiaWhittomeMP]

Henry Nowak is the latest victim of a policing system that frequently abuses its power and strips people of their humanity. It is utterly despicable and it is not new.

In one sense, I’m glad that the likes of Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe finally care about police brutality. But their analysis of a “two-tier” policing system (in which the police favours racialised communities at the expense of white people) is a wilful distortion of reality. It is designed to turn us against each other and it lets violent policing off the hook.

Henry Nowak and his family deserve justice. Every victim of police brutality and their families deserve justice.

[Cory Archibald @CMArchibald]

Every single time, without fail, when I'm researching details about [insert latest Israeli atrocity], I am overwhelmed by evidence of the exact same atrocities being committed by Israel over and over again for decades, and every time the western media reports from the time of the incident is a breathless defense of this criminal apartheid regime and a list of all the reasons the Palestinians are the real problem, actually.

Writing up a piece about the Mavi Marmara right now (16 years today) and it's just stunning.

I can't believe I was as blind to this as I once was. Even more I can't believe how many people still are.

More soon.

[Waqas🔶️ @m0w4q45]

I was a prison officer, Nick. You can't preach "tough on crime." Your lot cut nearly 7,000 prison officers since 2010 and handed our jails to G4S and Serco. You broke the system, then act shocked it doesn't work.

You know what actually works? Lads out on licence getting their track tickets, learning a trade, coming home as taxpayers instead of reoffenders. That's using human capital, not warehousing it. A lad sat in a cell doing nothing helps nobody.

And funny how quiet you all go on the tax dodgers and the oligarchs bankrolling Putin's war. Boris took a Russian ex-KGB man's hospitality at his Italian villa, dodged his own officials, then made the son a Lord. Where's your "lock them up" energy for that?

[Annabelle Sanderson 💜🤍💚 @WiltsAnnabelle]

When I worked for Nigel I cannot remember him being in the slightest bit interested in this subject or meeting any survivors.

Neither can Jane Collins, the lady who did the work. In fact, he all but abandoned her .

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

A few days ago, Ben Habib claimed that both Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson each received £1 million from a foreign-based crypto billionaire in November 2022

These alleged payments came years after the 2019 election, which Habib has linked to a deal where the Brexit Party stood down in key seats to help the Conservatives

Yet the media storm quickly moved on from Farage and the donations to Reform candidate Robert Kenyon and his offensive racist, misogynistic, and sexist social media posts

And not a peep about Boris Johnson receiving £1m in what is effectively foreign influence in the UK's democracy, the exact thing he said Brexit would stop

Why?

Is it normal for British politicians to receive £1m gifts from foreign based billionaires?

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

Facts matter.

The far-right want you to believe that this guy got away with punching two female police officers.

He was convicted, and he's on remand waiting for sentencing.

[Abster for PM @OctagolGod]

@osavage323 @mikecmorgan He's been convicted on three charges, only the fourth had no verdict.

[Abster for PM @OctagolGod]

@n_dorries @daniellismore "Terfed out", perhaps.

[Julia Willemyns @jujulemons]

Blair, Burnham, Streeting and Starmer all wrote essays this week. Here’s a summary of what they said for those who can’t be bothered to spend an hour reading about Labour’s favourite pastime: fighting about what it means to be Labour.

Blair's thesis is that Labour lost its nerve after 2007 and needs to rediscover the radical centre. Markets work, the private sector is your friend, competent technocratic government is still the answer, and the biggest transformative force on the horizon is AI, which he sees as a positive revolution that a serious centre-left government should embrace. Miss that wave and you miss everything. TLDR; the model isn't broken. Labour just needs to run it properly and stop indulging the perennial delusion that losing votes to the right means the country secretly wants you to go left.

Burnham, Streeting and Starmer think this misses the point. And they broadly agree on the diagnosis but disagree on the cure.

All three locate the origin of Britain's political unravelling in 2008, not 2007. The financial crisis broke the implicit bargain of modern capitalism: work hard, things get better. When that bargain collapsed and the banks got bailed out while wages stagnated for a decade, people got poorer – but also angry in a deeper, harder-to-satisfy way. And then austerity poured petrol on everything.

The more philosophically interesting disagreement is about what the crisis was actually a crisis of. Blair frames it as a delivery failure: the wrong policies and the wrong positioning. Starmer and Burnham both reach for ‘dignity’. The idea that whole communities (post-industrial, working class, people who didn't go to university) were made to feel invisible. That implies a fundamentally different kind of politics.

Burnham argues that New Labour never actually took Britain off the Thatcherite track. He blames deregulation, privatisation, leaving things to the market for the cost of living crisis. The centre failed people. You can't win them back by reasserting it more confidently. On AI, Burnham calls for tougher regulation of big tech and signals that an active, interventionist state would govern how AI develops rather than leaving it to the market. For Burnham, ungoverned AI is just the latest mechanism by which powerful interests extract value from everyone else.

Streeting is more moderate but lands in similar territory. Inequality is the organising fact of contemporary politics, and treating it as secondary is what produced the crisis in the first place. When the rules stop rewarding effort fairly, resentment grows.

Starmer agrees Britain should be an AI superpower, but where Blair frames AI as an opportunity to be seized, Starmer frames it as a force to be governed. The question isn't just whether AI grows the economy but whether Britain is a rule-maker or a rule-taker, and whether the gains flow to Blyth and Castleford or just to London.

The deepest difference, underneath all of this, is a question about whether the post-war and post-Thatcher economic settlement is fixable or finished. Blair thinks it needs better management and AI is the tool that makes better management possible. The others think the settlement itself was the problem, and are open to the possibility that AI (if ungoverned) compounds it by concentrating power further.

[Abster for PM @OctagolGod]

@djbradshaw64 @OldMackIsBack There was a pretty good early analysis of that account, but you need to use Wayback.

https://t.co/eBkjMCWrSN

Almost certainly bought a lot of followers early on to reach a large audience.

I genuinely think it's someone with a political agenda to push, but not sure what agenda!

[Flying_Rodent @flying_rodent]

Sure lads, but look: if you ever find yourself implicated in somebody else’s serious crimes and the cops are wheedling with you to incriminate yourself, then I too would advise you to no-comment every question. *Especially if* you are innocent and had nothing to do with it.

[Abster for PM @OctagolGod]

@TherealDaveGee @MichaelLCrick @MarkSeddon1962 Maybe the "plan" was to use it once lockdown was over?

One of the charges is creating an entirely false paper trail on the campervan, so who knows?

[Abster for PM @OctagolGod]

@TherealDaveGee @MichaelLCrick @MarkSeddon1962 The cover story was "bought for party use, then COVID hit".

So, never any doubt that it was bought with party funds.

Once you see that, you see (a) how the remaining money over 20 years was easier to hide, and (b) how shit some of our journalists are.

[Abster for PM @OctagolGod]

@flying_rodent @SmollettMatthew Could be.

That being said, it feels a bit like press kompromat, to me - much like Partygate.

Held onto until it was needed.

But, like I said on a different comment, I didn't think he'd done it at all, initially.

[Abster for PM @OctagolGod]

@flying_rodent Exactly the same here, tbh.

[Andrew Hardy @AndrewH54227028]

@LeeHurstComic You have insulted, the whole of Manchester with this. Crawl back under whatever rock you have come from under. Never use my innocent child to spread your hate.

[Abster for PM @OctagolGod]

Worth sharing far and wide, I think.

[Alicia Kearns MP @aliciakearns]

🧵Today in Parliament I used privilege to expose @EnoughToEndRape - the company behind self-swab rape kits.

They use lawyers to intimidate rape charities and threaten young women into silence.

Today that stops. #EnoughIsEnough