Clement Attlee ignored the Balance the Books BS after WWII.
Britain was in debt and on rations. But his government still spent big to create the NHS and a welfare state.
80 years on, those institutions still stand. But today's politicians refuse to follow in his footsteps.
Why is Sadiq Khan @MayorofLondon breaking his promise to make London’s rivers swimmable?
One of the most eye-catching promises the Mayor made to get elected, was to make London’s rivers swimmable. But halfway through his term he has made no progress towards this goal, & seems to be quietly dropping this goal on the basis that it isn’t achievable.
However, as a guardian of London’s third biggest river, who knows the river better than most, I know it is a completely achievable goal with effort & imagination. Further, the volunteer charity I run put forward a detailed plan to make the Roding swimmable, which was rejected by the Mayor’s Grow Back Greener fund without explanation. Here’s a thread, on how the Mayor can live up to his promises 🧵
In the 1980s when playing for Newcastle Utd, Kevin Keegan was horrified to see the National Front distributing pamphlets from the precincts of St James’ Park. So he told the club's board he would leave the club he loved unless the NF were banned.👍✊
Thanks for everything Kev.🖤
Yazd, Iran has kept homes cool for 2500 years, even while it's 45°C outside.
No planet-frying AC. No electricity. Just 700 wind towers using airflow, evaporation and thick mud-brick walls to slash temperatures.
There's a real life Lorax in Wales. Dr Louise Bodnar is the Voice of the Wye. She speaks for and votes on behalf of the river in official meetings.
And The Wye has just been formally recognised as a living ecosystem with the right to flow and to be free from chicken shit 🐔💩👍
Four years ago, Angus Rose sat outside Parliament for 37 days without food. His demand: all MPs should receive the same climate science briefing that had given Boris Johnson his "road to Damascus" moment.
He was prepared to die for his nieces' future. He won.
Fast forward to November 2025: 10 of the UK's leading scientists delivered a National Emergency Briefing to 1,250 politicians, business leaders and media figures - and it is now being screened across the country.
The seed Angus planted.
https://t.co/A7VxZ2U5Lr
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is crippling Asia.
But not Pakistan. 🇵🇰
They already kicked their fossil fuel addiction, building the fastest solar revolution on Earth.
And they've done it despite floods, landslides, 50°C heat, drought, blackouts and militant attacks.
Vean como se ve la lucha popular de los pueblos indígenas de Bolivia, que han llenado de barricadas el pais para proteger sus recursos naturales y evitar que el régimen de Rodrigo Paz los entregue a Trump y a EEUU.
Por lo que sea, esta lucha del pueblo boliviano no la enseñan en TV, vaya a ser que tomen ejemplo en otros países y luchen por el futuro de su tierra, expulsando a la lacra imperialista y fascista del pais.
Today marks the centenary of the birth of Norma Jeane Mortenson, the woman the world knew as Marilyn Monroe.
While the bourgeois press continues to gape at the ghost of a manufactured icon, the Communist Party of Britain reclaims the intellectual and the comrade.
Her politics were born of the assembly line. From the foster homes of Los Angeles to the Radioplane munitions factory, Monroe’s class consciousness was forged in the heat of proletarian survival. She was a woman of fierce intelligence, possessing an IQ that dwarfed the men who sought to manage her, yet she was reduced to a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded by the parasitic studio system.
The FBI files, which tracked her until her final breath, confirm what the establishment feared - a sex symbol who had read Marx and admired the Chinese Revolution. She was a militant anti-racist who used her platform to shatter the colour bar for Ella Fitzgerald, and she stood firm against the cowardice of the McCarthyite witch hunts when she married the blacklisted playwright Arthur Miller.
We must recognise that Monroe’s struggle was the intersection of class exploitation and patriarchal violence. She was a worker whose labour was her own body, super-exploited by a system that demanded she be beautiful and silent. Her life was a constant act of rebellion against the male gaze of capital. On her 100th birthday, we do not celebrate a "bombshell". We honour a clear-minded socialist who understood that the liberation of her class was inseparable from the liberation of her sex.
Happy Centenary, Comrade Marilyn. The struggle continues.
#MarilynMonroe
Cinco puntos clave para entender las elecciones de hoy en Colombia:
1. Elección intervenida desde el Norte: Bajo el actual gobierno Trump (especialmente luego de la humillación sufrida en Irán) no habrá elecciones limpias en ningún país latinoamericano. El plan de la ultraderecha que hoy dirige en Washington es derechizar toda la región latinoamericana para que haya gobiernos serviles (no aliados) que entreguen nuestros países a los intereses económicos y sectores ideológicos que rodean a Trump. Desde el principio ha habido una injerencia profunda del gobierno estadounidense dirigida a inclinar el voto colombiano. El ecuatoriano Noboa, quien es un peón de Trump en esta región, lo dejó claro hace dos días cuando en un en vivo con el candidato del trumpismo en Colombia anunció que quitaría los aranceles que le había impuesto a los productos colombianos. Con esto quieren quitarle votos a la izquierda en territorios claves como la zona fronteriza colombiana. Y a esto se suma la intervención del senador estadounidense Bernie Moreno (de origen colombiano) quien hace poco dejó entrever que si ganaba la izquierda EE.UU. no reconocería estas elecciones. Una guerra sicológica dirigida a quitarle apoyos al progresismo y crear un clima de miedo donde los discursos ultras tengan mayor penetración.
2. Petro se retira con alta aprobación y dejando los mejores indicadores sociales de Colombia en su historia reciente: El primer gobierno de izquierda de la historia colombiana lo ha hecho bien mejorando la vida concreta de la gente. Con un presidente que nunca renunció a la disputa ideológica ni, por tanto, cedió a los marcos conservadores/neoliberales. Este punto, si se da uno de los resultados más probables, podría ser la clave de hoy en Colombia. Es decir, el gobierno Petro habría cambiado las conciencias de una gran parte del electorado; en un país históricamente dirigido por un poder conservador y profundamente oligárquico.
3. El ultraderechista de la Espriella representa una de las características claves de este tiempo político: Puestas a elegir las élites económicas prefieren al fascismo cuando la otra alternativa es la izquierda. Aunque con la izquierda a sus negocios les haya ido bien. De la Espriella, como siempre pasa con las opciones de ultraderecha que llegan como "outsiders", no es más que una apuesta de una parte de los ricos para recuperar el mando. Para volver a mandar y derrumbar el marco de ampliación de derechos sociales que poco a poco nivelan la correlación de fuerzas. Los ricos latinoamericanos, dada la concepción patrimonial que tienen del poder (Lipset), solo saben jugar con cancha inclinada. Donde ellos se queden con todo e impongan las condiciones. Con Petro, al menos simbólicamente, habían perdido eso. Y ahora con De la Espriella intentan recuperarlo.
4. Esta campaña colombiana fue muy intensa en manipulación digital: Dominar el "feed" y con ello ocupar la atención del usuario que solo hace scroll. Ese es el principio que guía el consumo de contenidos digitales en esta era de declive cognitivo. Y ahí las derechas y ultraderechas, con sus discursos fáciles, intuitivos y bajo el encuadre de buenos contra malos, siempre tienen ventaja.
5. Pase lo que pase hoy la izquierda colombiana ha logrado un hito que podríamos calificar de milagro político: El progresismo colombiano ha logrado convertirse en una opción de poder real en un país donde hasta hace poco mataban a la gente por ser de izquierda (en los tiempos de la gobernanza neoliberal-paramilitar). Y encima lo han logrado con Trump en el Norte encarnando un imperialismo sin máscara y desesperado que no respeta nada que venga de latinoamericana. Mucho menos si no es servil a él. Es muy grande lo que han conseguido.
@RedHotWorld I remember when Lawrence Weston was just getting written off by everyone. There's something about that estate — they don't wait for permission, they just get on with it. That turbine's a beauty. Proper Bristol spirit.
En Bolivia, trabajadores indígenas cortan cada carretera y cada calle para tumbar al régimen de Rodrigo Paz, colocando barricadas y paralizando el pais en las más de 3 semanas de huelga general.
La lucha popular y campesina de Bolivia es el ejemplo a seguir, así se para la privatización y el entreguismo de un pais a manos del imperialismo.
Everything was closing - the library, the college, community centre. Bills were sky-rocketing.
Did the people of the Lawrence Weston estate in Bristol give up?
Did they riot?
No, they built the UK’s biggest wind turbine and slashed the community's energy costs instead.
This is what Bolivia's highways look like at the moment.
Each town & village blocks their stretch, and the union members in each community take turns at the barricades. This is part of the general strike against neoliberalism. Now entering week 3.
Your politics were shaped in childhood - not by values but by your nervous system.
Research shows threat-sensitive kids become conservatives. Novelty-seeking kids become liberals.
You can't argue people out of fear. The only thing that works is actually listening to them.
As president of Uruguay, José Mujica gave away 90% of his salary and refused to live in the presidential palace, choosing his wife’s modest shack instead.
Let’s make all presidents live in shacks - it would deter some of the very worst people from putting themselves forward.
A bricklayer in East Yorkshire has spent 35 years putting up barn owl nest boxes on weekends. This year, the region saw 308 owlets hatch.
His name is Robert Salter. He's 56 and does bricklaying full time. In 1990, he saw a piece on the news about a man in Lincolnshire installing barn owl boxes, and decided he'd do the same. He started with five.
He now has more than 350 boxes scattered across fields, farms, outbuildings, and trees in East Yorkshire. Every June, he takes four weeks off from bricklaying and visits them with his wife Sue. Scrambling up ladders, ringing chicks, cleaning boxes, repairing the ones the weather got to. He's a licensed bird ringer for the British Trust for Ornithology.
In 2024, the region ringed 95 owlets. In 2025, the count was 308. The Barn Owl Trust says that nationally, this year was "pretty poor" for barn owl breeding, but east Yorkshire is the exception, and it's the exception because of one man with a ladder.
The barn owl population in the UK was estimated at 4,000 pairs in the mid-2000s and crashed to roughly 1,000 by the early 2010s. The species is still recovering.
Most of conservation is one person who refuses to give up.
Pope Leo XIV: "Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized. The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them." #MagnificaHumanitas