Glenn

mostly in turmoil

[Tim Walker @ThatTimWalker]

Jim Ratcliffe in a nutshell.

[Brendan May @bmay]

To be a ‘royal expert’ you basically have to say the blindingly obvious but in a slightly mysterious fawning voice with a hint of deference in case they bring back the tower, whilst giving the impression of an inside track despite everyone having already read it in the Mail.

[North Dorset Hunt Saboteurs @NDHuntSabs]

So sorry the Devon and Somerset Staghounds brutally killed this poor stag today. This is him exhausted, minutes from death, after he entered the River Barle in a desperate bid to cool himself after a relentless 2 hour chase.

[Simon Harris @SimonHarrisMBD]

As you may be aware, the RNLI College in Poole is a hotel and restaurant / bar that serves as accommodation for crew members that are in training at the adjacent headquarters. Any surplus rooms are bookable by members of the public and it generates valuable extra income for the charity.

Unfortunately, they’ve had to put out a statement confirming that no migrants / asylum seekers are currently staying on the premises thanks to various ‘in the know’ individuals on social media who were convinced otherwise.

They very kindly had us down there in 2022 for a couple of nights because of my fundraising for them. As part of the experience we had the tour that included a go on a fully functioning lifeboat simulator where we raced to a shipping collision and inferno just off the coast of Dover. It’s well worth checking them out if you fancy a break down that way.

SUPPORT THE RNLI - https://t.co/ddUTbh62sR

[GET A GRIP @docrussjackson]

The Mask Slips: Lowe’s Elite Populism at Dover and Portsmouth

Rupert Lowe’s public defence of the intimidating masked anti-migrant protests at Dover and Portsmouth is chilling. It rests on a specific characterisation of who took part in them: he describes a young plumber, bricklayer or factory worker, someone with “a wage packet they cannot afford to lose,” who risks losing his livelihood if identified. This figure is invoked repeatedly throughout Lowe’s tweet.

Let’s examine this characterisation.

Many people know by now the identity of the man who organised and led these protests, but many do not know that he doesn’t fit Lowe’s description. The mismatch is not incidental. It follows a pattern with a long history in British and European right-wing politics, one most clearly associated with Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s. Below, I set out that pattern and examine how closely Lowe’s rhetoric, and the movement it defends, reproduce it.

The man leading the protests is Daniel Thomas, 37, known publicly as ‘Danny Tommo’. He, like Lowe, was privately educated, and before committing to full-time activism he worked as a bricklayer (as did I, although I’m not privately educated), in sales and marketing, and ran his own web design company, according to published reporting on his background. He was previously a tank driver with the King’s Royal Hussars, medically discharged before seeing active service, and is a former bodyguard for far-right repeat offender with a history of violence and drug use, Tommy Robinson.

In 2016, Thomas was jailed for two years for attempted kidnapping, having entered a man’s home with two other men, armed with knives; the dispute arose after Thomas accused the homeowner of stealing £10,000 worth of drugs from him, and the victim was punched and forced from his own living room.

This is not the hard-working salt of the earth working class lad Lowe describes. The discrepancy matters because it is structurally identical to a move Mosley made ninety years ago. It’s a comparison others have drawn: the Guardian’s reporting on the Dover and Portsmouth protests, not opinion writing, described the uniformed, black-clad gathering as recalling “the black shirts of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.”

Roger Griffin, the Oxford historian whose 1991 work established the standard academic definition of generic fascism, went further in a Times Radio interview, describing the coordinated, uniformed occupation of Dover as “totally reminiscent of the Nazis” and characterising the wider far-right scene it emerged from as “a very wide underground network that occasionally pops up” in this way. That is a comparison of tactics and organisational form from the person best qualified to make it, not a claim that Patriot Platform meets his own technical definition of fascism, a distinction addressed later in this piece.

Class ventriloquism and elite populism

Mosley was a baronet, educated at Winchester and Sandhurst, and one of the wealthiest and best-connected men in interwar Britain. This did not prevent him building the BUF around an appeal to the ‘betrayed working man’, the small trader, and the returning serviceman failed by ‘a corrupt establishment’. The vast class distance between Mosley’s own position and the constituency he claimed to represent wasn’t a weakness in the movement, it was part of how the movement functioned: a man insulated from the consequences of his own divisive politics could present those politics as a defence of people who were not.

Lowe occupies a comparable position today. He was educated at Radley College, one of England’s oldest and most expensive independent boarding schools, before working in the City of London, initially as a commodities broker, then at three City firms (Morgan Grenfell, Deutsche Bank, Barings Bank), later becoming an MEP then MP. Nigel Farage, whom Lowe both quotes and criticises in the same tweet (below), attended Dulwich College, another expensive independent school, and also worked in the City as a commodities trader before becoming an MEP then an MP.

Both Farage and Lowe, who masquerade as ‘anti-elite/anti-establishment’ figures have spent their entire lives at the very heart of Britain’s privileged establishment elite.

Political scientists use the term ‘elite populism’ to describe figures shaped by elite institutions who adopt anti-establishment rhetoric while advancing divisive exclusionary politics. The pattern is not unusual on the British right, but Lowe and Farage illustrate it clearly, arguing between themselves about who better represents part of a working class constituency neither of them belongs to.

Farage performs proximity to ordinary life for the cameras, regularly photographed with a pint at a pub. Days before this tweet, he was secretly filmed at a private meeting over oysters and champagne, discussing how to bring foreign money into Reform UK. Lowe’s own words, by contrast, drop the performance and state the class gap outright: “I don't witness the consequences in the same way as working class communities do,” he writes. “Neither does Farage.” Having acknowledged the gap, he then claims the authority to speak across it, on behalf of men he does not name and, in the single case that can be checked, has misdescribed

The protests in Dover and Portsmouth were not led by an anonymous bricklayer with a wage to lose. They were led by a man who gave up paid work “to dedicate everything to the cause,” whose middle-class background is well-documented, and whose criminal record reveals an armed home invasion rather than economic precarity. This is a verifiable claim about one person: Thomas, the documented founder and leader of the movement, whom Lowe’s tweet never names. It’s not a claim about who makes up the wider crowd, which no one, including Lowe, can actually document.

The distinction matters: Portsmouth reportedly began as a separate, pre-existing local demonstration against the dinghy landing, which Thomas’s Patriot Platform then joined and pushed further. What can be documented is the disciplined, uniformed, cell-structured overlay that Thomas’s network imposed once it arrived, described as operating in a “cell-like structure” resembling football hooligan “firms,” with Thomas as “leader of the firm” directing a network of regional groups. That structure, not the unknowable make-up of the crowd, is what Lowe’s tweet is actually defending.

There is a further inconsistency in Lowe’s argument about face coverings specifically. A standing religious garment worn in daily life and a tactical mask worn at a port blockade are not the same policy problem. But that doesn’t rescue Lowe’s position. Farage’s proposed ban is not limited to balaclavas or to protest settings: it is a blanket ban on “all full-face coverings in public spaces,” explicitly including religious ones, with “no ifs, no buts” (despite the distinct possibility that banning the burkha could isolate some Muslim women whose husbands and male partners may not allow them to leave the house without a face covering). Restore Britain has separately campaigned to ban the burkha on the same general terms. A principled objector to a blanket ban would object to it being applied to anyone. Lowe objects only when it is applied to what he calls “working-class patriots” who just happen to share his ideology.

Lowe’s position is not that concealing one’s face is a civil liberty as such. It is that concealing one’s face is acceptable when done by people he supports and unacceptable when done by people he opposes: the anonymity argument is being deployed instrumentally rather than held as a matter of principle.

A New Lowe? Just Stop Oil vs Patriotic Platform

The same inconsistency appears, in sharper form, in Lowe’s position on protest and policing more generally, and it predates the current protests by several years. In April 2023, when Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists were blocking roads, Lowe posted: “Why on earth are they allowing these cretins to block up our streets? If you or I tried it, we’d be turfed off in minutes!”

In May 2023, sharing footage of a member of the public physically pulling a protester out of the road and then being restrained by police, he wrote: “This is a scandal. The police manhandling a bloke who’s doing their job for them. Removing these climate loons from blocking up the roads. What the hell are the police playing at?” In June 2023 he posted similar footage with the caption: “The police protecting these eco loons blocking up the road. Yet they leap into action when a frustrated member of the public intervenes. The police are losing so much credibility. Which side are they on?”

In each case, Lowe’s position was that police should act against the protesters rather than protect them, and that a member of the public taking physical action against demonstrators blocking roads was justified rather than a matter for police intervention.

JSO’s protests involved sitting in roads and slow marching, without the use of face masks; none of the incidents Lowe cited involved protesters assaulting police officers or damaging property. The Patriotic Platform anti-asylum seeker protests he now defends include, in the case of Portsmouth, seven assaulted officers and multiple damaged vehicles, discussed in detail below. The contrast is stark.

Lowe’s 2023 standard, that police should intervene decisively against disruptive protesters and that public frustration with them was legitimate, is the reverse of the standard he applies in 2026. The determining factor across both cases is not a consistent position on protest rights, policing conduct or civil liberties. It is whether Lowe personally agrees with the protesters’ cause.

Anticipatory victimhood

A further recurring feature of the tweet is one of the oldest devices in this kind of political communication. Lowe describes the likely consequence of unmasked protest as “a knock on the door at 3am, and then prison. Unfairly locked up, for months and months.” At time of writing, no participant in these protests had been arrested for peaceful attendance. Unlike with JSO and Extinction Rebellion protesters, the ‘persecution’ described here has not occurred; it has been anticipated in advance, so that any subsequent state response, however proportionate or appropriate, can be absorbed into a narrative of victimhood and martyrdom that predates the event.

Mosley’s Blackshirts used a comparable structure, presenting their own actions consistently as reactive self-defence against a state and public that were, by their account, the real aggressors.

The parliamentary motion and the ECHR

Lowe has applied a version of the same technique to Parliament. On the day of the Portsmouth protest he tabled an Early Day Motion asserting “the right to peaceful protest against illegal immigration,” and within minutes of tabling it posted that it had “no support from any other MP,” describing “the disconnect between this parliament and the British people” as “staggering.” At time of writing, the motion (EDM 753) had four signatures according to Parliament’s own record: Rupert Lowe, and three Northern Irish MPs.

Two points are relevant here. First, Early Day Motions are not debated or voted on; they function as a register of MPs’ declared positions rather than legislation, and signatures typically accumulate over days or weeks. An absence of co-sponsors within minutes of tabling is not evidence of parliamentary indifference, since that outcome was guaranteed by the mechanism itself.

Second, the right Lowe is asking Parliament to affirm already exists in UK law, under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as incorporated by the Human Rights Act 1998, and in common law prior to that. Leaving the ECHR would not, by itself, erase every domestic protection for peaceful protest overnight; some would likely persist through common law and other statute. But Restore Britain’s own platform does not stop at leaving the ECHR: it proposes repealing or rewriting the domestic human rights legislation that currently incorporates those articles into UK law, which is a more direct threat to the right than exiting an international treaty in isolation would be. Lowe has told Parliament directly that Britain “should leave the ECHR.” Withdrawal from the ECHR would place Britain alongside Belarus, which has never been a member, and Putin’s Russia, expelled in 2022, as the only states in Europe outside the convention.

The same individual is therefore campaigning to remove the legal framework that currently protects the right he is asking Parliament to affirm exists. This is not merely an abstract inconsistency: at Portsmouth, Thomas himself was reported citing Article 10 and 11 of the Human Rights Act to police in defence of his group’s right to assemble, the same statutory protection Lowe’s own party wants to repeal.

This suggests the right to peaceful protest is functioning here as rhetorical material rather than as a legal principle held consistently: invoked when it supports a narrative of ‘persecution’, set aside when it conflicts with the deportation agenda.

Evidence from the organiser’s own words, and from Portsmouth

Lowe’s account of the protests depends on a single characterisation: that they were peaceful. This claim can be checked against both the events themselves and against statements made by the man who organised them.

At Portsmouth, seven police officers were assaulted, two were pushed from their motorbikes, and officers were struck with thrown stones and bricks. Police, Coastguard and Border Force vehicles were damaged, including a police car. Thomas was present throughout, livestreaming, sometimes from the water. Hampshire Police Federation stated that officers had “become the target” of the protest. These facts are drawn from the police force’s own statement and from the federation chair’s public comments; they are not contested. Whatever occurred at Dover, the Portsmouth protest involved documented violence against police officers, not merely the possibility of it.

This matters for the timing of Lowe’s own account. His tweet was posted at 6:54am on 8 September, in direct reply to Farage’s Telegraph article calling for a face-covering ban, an article which itself referenced the Portsmouth clash and the injuries to officers as part of its justification. Lowe was not describing the protests as ‘peaceful’ in ignorance of what had happened at Portsmouth. He was doing so in a reply to a piece that had already put the Portsmouth violence on the record.

Thomas’s own statements are also instructive, and there are two relevant videos rather than one. In footage filmed in the North West days before the protests and reported by the Guardian, Thomas told a gathering of supporters: “Something is about to go down and it’s about to send a fucking shock wave... It is to start something that will then snowball. Once we pull this off it will then snowball across the country.”

In a second video, posted to his Patriot Platform YouTube channel and recorded at an outdoor gathering of supporters in August, he tells the group that they will not act illegally, and then explains that this restraint is tactical. He refers to a clash in Southampton in which protesters who threw objects at police and fought with officers were subsequently imprisoned and draws an explicit lesson from it: “Anyone that knows anyone that’s got something about them will know that the threat of the violent act is more powerful than the violent act itself. Because as soon as you show your hand, that’s it. That’s over.”

This is an argument, addressed to supporters, that violence is strategically counterproductive because using it forfeits the leverage that the threat of it provides, rather than a renunciation of violence as such. He goes on to tell the group they will be organised into vetted groups ahead of what he describes, over the following three to four weeks, as one of the biggest “pushbacks this country has seen from its men since World War II.”

Read together, these statements describe a strategy built on cultivating menace while remaining within the bounds of the law, which is precisely the calculation Lowe’s tweet does not acknowledge. Portsmouth indicates what happens when that calculation does not hold: officers were assaulted and vehicles were damaged regardless of the stated strategy. Lowe’s claim that “a peaceful protester should not be forced to surrender his anonymity” is, in the case of Portsmouth, factually inaccurate, and in general terms describes a movement whose own leader has told supporters that anonymity and the implicit threat of violence it carries are the point.

Structural parallels with the British Union of Fascists

Several features of Lowe’s rhetoric and of the protest movement he defends correspond closely to the BUF’s methods, beyond the biographical parallel already discussed.

Migration is framed in existential rather than policy terms. Lowe’s vocabulary in this tweet, “invasion,” “colonised,” “bastardised,” “overrun,” belongs to the same register as interwar claims of a nation under racial and cultural threat, and elsewhere he has gone further still: he has repeatedly described migrants as “third world savages” in tweets threatening officials and politicians with prosecution.

National decline is attributed to a combination of external threat and internal betrayal by elites. Lowe writes that it is “THEY,” meaning the protesters, who “have to live with the decisions. Not us. Not the MPs,” setting himself and the political class apart from the people he says are bearing the cost of national decline. Reform’s broader “uniparty” framing performs a similar function, casting the political establishment as complicit in national harm, a contemporary version of the BUF’s own betrayal narrative.

The tweet under discussion here does not use the word “traitor,” but it performs a related move: Reform MP’s criticism of the protesters is dismissed as “arrogant and offensive” rather than engaged with on its merits and attributed to their not witnessing the consequences “in the same way as working class communities do.” Disagreement is treated as a symptom of elite distance rather than a position that could simply be right or wrong, a milder version of the delegitimising function that “traitor” performs elsewhere in Lowe’s political vocabulary, and that Mosley’s movement performed against dissent within its own political camp.

Lowe’s use of “traitor” itself is worth setting out separately, since it recurs frequently enough to count as a fixed part of his rhetoric rather than a one-off. He has described Alastair Campbell as one of the “traitors” opposed to Restore Britain, and separately told Campbell directly, “I called you a traitor in that boardroom 20 years ago and nothing has changed since,” a specific claim Campbell has publicly denied as something that never happened.

Lowe has also called for a Labour MP who backed reparations to Jamaica to be expelled from her party as “this traitor,” told people who travelled to Calais to assist migrants that “you are a traitor to this country” and “should go to prison,” and described officials who placed “unvetted” migrants near communities as guilty of “traitorous behaviour” that a Restore Britain government would prosecute.

Coordinated street mobilisation functions primarily as pressure on the state rather than as an appeal to public opinion. The Dover and Portsmouth actions, involving several hundred masked participants disrupting a working port and a beach landing, are better understood as attempts to force an institutional response that can then be presented as evidence of persecution, consistent with the strategy Thomas describes in his own recruitment video.

This is not simply an inferred pattern: Joe Mulhall, director of research at Hope Not Hate, describes the organisation behind it as operating in a “cell-like structure,” comparable to football hooligan “firms,” with Thomas as “leader of the firm” directing a network of regional groups. Mosley’s marches through Jewish neighbourhoods in London’s East End operated on a comparable logic: provoke a reaction, then present that reaction as proof of victimhood.

Finally, there is a conspiratorial undertone common to both. Phrases such as “colonised” and “a very different Britain now” gesture toward a narrative of demographic replacement without stating it directly, while more explicit versions of that claim circulate in the online networks associated with these protests.

This gap between the coded language used publicly by a sitting MP and the more explicit language used elsewhere is a recognised technique in radical-right communication, allowing the public figure to retain plausible deniability while the wider movement communicates the fuller claim.

Where the parallel does not hold

It would overstate the evidence to describe Patriot Platform, or Restore Britain, as straightforwardly fascist: public messaging is framed around legality and discipline rather than explicitly declared racial hierarchy; Thomas tells supporters directly that the group will not break the law and frames the movement’s aims in terms of protecting communities rather than an explicit racial doctrine.

As already noted, more explicit material circulates in the online networks around the protests without being stated as openly by Thomas himself, which is the same gap between coded and explicit language discussed above.

That distinction is harder to sustain for Restore Britain specifically. Its paid membership has, on the documented record, included Jared Taylor, the American founder of the white-nationalist publication American Renaissance, who is barred from entering the UK and joined the party from abroad; Simon Birkett, who leads an organisation acquiring land in Wales for exclusively white settlement; and Sam Melia, a Patriotic Alternative organiser convicted of stirring up racial hatred.

This is not material originating outside the party and being loosely associated with it. It is present in Restore Britain’s own membership. Lowe’s proposed bans on cousin marriage, and on halal and kosher slaughter, already extend well beyond civic nationalism, and the party he leads has retained members whose stated views go considerably further.

The clearest point of difference concerns the state itself. The BUF proposed a corporatist model of government and treated parliamentary democracy with open contempt. Restore Britain operates as a conventional, if hard-line, party within electoral politics, publishing policy documents and giving interviews, and Patriot Platform, despite the violence that occurred at Portsmouth, has not called for the abandonment of the democratic system itself; Thomas’s own stated strategy depends on staying within the law rather than replacing it.

Political scientists distinguish here between the “populist radical right,” which is nativist and authoritarian in disposition but works through electoral and legal channels, and generic fascism, which seeks to replace the democratic order itself. On the available evidence, Lowe, Restore Britain and Patriot Platform belong to the former category.

What they embrace within it, however, is illiberal rather than liberal democracy: majority rule with fewer constraints from pluralism, minority protections, and independent institutions than liberal democracy is usually taken to require. Restore Britain’s proposal to leave the ECHR, and Lowe’s habit of describing officials, opponents and critics as traitorous, are examples of that orientation rather than exceptions to it.

This distinction should not be read as reassuring.

Everything that defines the underlying commitment, the existential threat narrative, the disloyal elite, the scapegoated out-group, the treatment of internal critics as traitors, the use of street mobilisation to provoke and then claim victimhood, and the coded replacement language, is already present and operating.

The one thing that separates this from Mosley’s project is whether that commitment is pursued through electoral politics or by rejecting the electoral system outright, and nothing in Lowe’s record suggests this is a fixed principle rather than a choice of means currently judged effective.

A choice of means can be abandoned the moment it stops serving its end. Nothing in the record shows this movement has taken that further step, but nothing in it rules the possibility out. That risk lies in the future. What is already true is damning enough without it: an MP defending an unnamed plumber with a wage he cannot afford to lose, in order to cover for a named organiser with a conviction for armed kidnapping and a stated theory that the threat of violence works better than violence itself. The wage packet was the mask. It slipped.

[David Yelland @davidyelland]

And he’s got a lanyard on…. seriously though…. what an important contemporary image…. old attacking young…. anger versus idealist…. bullying hatred…

[Shaun Lowthian @SLowthian78696]

@parkcommunicate

[Glenn @glennwarren63]

@Theleaguemag Roger Fry !

[Robert Hutton @RobDotHutton]

How could an associate professor in divinity at Cambridge be expected to know that lying is bad?
https://t.co/VhW1Ys38CH

[Steve Hall @ProfHall1955]

In the UK, the latest addition to the Thatcherite cult established in the 1980s is non-drivers hiring out their parking spaces to city workers facing eye-watering charges in corporate car parks. Should the neoliberals win outright - and they're too close - they'll fulfil their principal politico-cultural ambition, which is to dissolve all forms of public ownership and collective solidarity, atomise populations and turn us all into competitive yet rule-bound investor-rentier mini-capitalists. The only collectives able to survive and reproduce will be those adept at hiding their nepotism and inherited social advantages behind the veil of exaggerated 'talent' and fake meritocracy. The upper classes are very good at this, but because their claims have little substance we've ended up with the degenerate warmongering clowns we have now.

[Glenn @glennwarren63]

@wself @peterjukes I think the last paragraph would be called “the topper” in some circles

[Glenn @glennwarren63]

@wself Very good piece - quality and depth. Should put the trivialisers to shame ….

[Will Self @wself]

After the death of Jason Arday, Will Self asks what happens when newspapers, platforms, editors and audiences become components in a machine nobody admits to controlling.

The public interest is not the same thing as the public being interested. https://t.co/FwczdbQWsY

[Carolyn Barber, MD @cbarbermd]

Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain's 2008 campaign for president, was interviewed on MSNOW. In response to a very general question regarding the Trump presidency, Mr. Schmidt spoke for two minutes and gave the most insightful and brutally honest response of what the Trump presidency has done to our great country: "Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And, I don't say that hyperbolically. He is.

But he is a consequential president. And, he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And, there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.” "When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile.

An idiot. And I don't use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We've never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.” "It's just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City.

Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he's the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he's brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale. And, let's be clear. This isn't happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter.

We are the place where you're the most likely to die from this disease. We're the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are, because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk." @SteveSchmidtSES r/t Ron Tipton

[Un Étrange En Terre Étrange @LoinDuTribu]

Never forget that a few weeks ago half this fucking ecosystem was holding a state funeral for Rod Liddle.

Suddenly every professional shit-stirrer in Britain was Cicero.

- He was a great satirist.
- He was a fearless polemicist.
- He was Jonathan fucking Swift with a fag hanging out of his mouth.

All the murkier bits were quietly folded underneath the tablecloth.

The sexism, the misogyny, the domestic violence, the endless misanthropic trolling, the whole career spent behaving as though civilisation would collapse unless somebody periodically wrote something revolting in The Spectator and called it courage.

But Jason Arday?

Apparently his great unforgivable crime was that he may have been a bit of a fucking blagger.

He told tall stories. He embellished things. He convinced prestigious people that he was more extraordinary than he actually was.

He may have blagged his way into rooms full of clever white people who then enthusiastically told everybody how wonderful he was.

STOP THE FUCKING PRESS.

A charismatic man exaggerated his achievements and important institutions swallowed it whole.

We have apparently discovered fraud.

And Christ, look at the difference in cultural treatment.

A white male provocateur like Liddle can spend decades being obnoxious, offensive, self-mythologising and professionally irritating and it gets repackaged as roguishness.

We celebrate him as a maverick. A rogue, A dangerous wit. Bit of a bastard, but what a writer.

A Black academic allegedly embellishes marathon times and elements of his biography and suddenly Britain develops the investigative appetite of fucking Woodward and Bernstein.

Every claim checked.

Every former student interviewed.

Every old job excavated.

Every anecdote cross-examined.

Every institution dragged into the dock.

And hovering over all of it is that poisonous little insinuation:

DEI.

How did this man get there?

Who lowered the standards?

Which deserving person was displaced?

Funny, because British academia has never exactly suffered a shortage of white plagiarists, cranks, bullshitting grandees, hereditary mediocrities, eugenicists, financial scandals and people whose professional altitude substantially exceeded their intellectual horsepower.

Where was this incandescent concern for institutional standards then?

Where were the fucking torches?

Where was the tedious national inquiry into how some spectacularly mediocre white bloke had acquired a chair, three honorary fellowships and the confidence to explain civilisation to everybody else?

Apparently the system only became an existential emergency when a Black man may have blagged it.

I have spent years telling people the scar under my eye came from fighting a grizzly bear with a penknife. It actually came from playing rugby when I was ten.

Nobody appointed me Professor of Ursine Combat because of it, admittedly, but the principle stands.

Sometimes people bullshit.

Sometimes institutions are stupid enough to believe them.

The Arday story deserved scrutiny.

What it did not deserve was this extraordinary racial pantomime in which one possibly fraudulent Black professor became evidence that the entire project of allowing Black people into prestigious institutions had somehow gone horribly wrong.

Because if bullshitters occupying positions above their station discredits the system that elevated them, Britain is going to have to close Parliament, half the newspapers and several fucking universities by lunchtime on Monday.

[Spirit Of Attlee @SpiritOfAttlee]

I've had enough of this. Zia Yusuf, Reform's multi millionaire "shadow" home secretary, is threatening to jail Vodafone directors because the company gave a few thousand free SIM cards to a charity. Not for some beach operation in Calais. For asylum seekers already locked up in places like Wethersfield. UK only. So they can ring their families or find out what the hell is happening to their case.

He calls it an invasion. Military age men. Endangering British women and girls. The full dog whistle package. Classic Reform. Stir the fear, split the working class, and hope nobody notices the real mess.

This is the same Zia Yusuf whose parents came from Sri Lanka and spent their lives in the NHS. Dad a paediatrician, mum a nurse. He got the private school, the LSE, Goldman Sachs, then built a luxury concierge app so billionaires could book private jets and rare wine. Sold it, pocketed around thirty one million, and now lectures the rest of us about patriotism while threatening prison for a company that handed phones to people in a camp.

That is not defending Britain. That is a rich man using migrants as a punchbag so you stop looking at the landlords, the energy companies, the stagnant wages and the broken NHS. The real invasion is the one where ordinary people get shafted while the elite write the rules and then cry about SIM cards.

Democratic socialism does not criminalise basic human contact. It builds proper housing, fast processing, safe routes and green jobs so people are not forced to move in the first place. It treats working people and the vulnerable as allies against the same class enemy, not enemies of each other.

Reform want you angry at the desperate. Stay angry at the powerful instead.

[Will Self @wself]

Count Binface took 27 per cent of the vote. Nigel Farage took back Clacton. In a Norman church in Sussex, Will Self encountered the modern stab-in-the-back myth.

It was wearing beige trousers. https://t.co/HV717D61A2

[Spirit Of Attlee @SpiritOfAttlee]

Jason Arday is dead.

They spent weeks stripping him bare. The race realist who started the fire. The Telegraph. The Spectator. Every line of his thesis, every fundraising claim, every mile he said he ran, every threat he described... forensic, relentless, turned into sport. A Black working class autistic man who reached a Cambridge chair became their perfect scalp. “DEI darling.” “Fraud.” The glee was the point.

He resigned under the weight of it. Said the unrelenting scrutiny and personal attack had reached the limits of what any person should endure. Nine days later he was found unresponsive at home in Battersea. Unexpected. Not suspicious. Forty one years old.

This is how the right works. When someone from the estates, the wrong skin, the wrong neurotype climbs into their institutions, they bring the full apparatus. Every error is a national scandal. Every exaggeration is proof the whole project of equality is a lie.

Meanwhile their own misdemeanours and crimes get the soft treatment. Boris Johnson lied to Parliament about parties while the country locked down... process, delay, shrug. The PPE VIP lane handed billions to Tory donors and mates for kit that never worked while NHS staff went without. Michelle Mone and the rest still counting the money. Serial sexual misconduct and bullying by Tory MPs protected until the last possible second. Farage’s endless grifts and contradictions waved through by the same papers that demanded Arday’s head.

They don’t care about integrity. They care about hierarchy. Accountability is a weapon they point downward. The powerful stay protected. The climbers get destroyed.

Jason Arday faced the spotlight they never shine on their own. The rest of us saw it. We remember. The real scandal was never one academic’s record. It was the double standard that keeps the powerful safe while breaking anyone who challenges the order. That is the fight.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

[Tim Walker @ThatTimWalker]

Farage made fools of a lot of journalists — as Johnson did — but what makes Neil especially hard to forgive is that he sought to ridicule and disparage brave journalists such as Carole who a decade ago and since were subjecting him to legitimate scrutiny as Neil brown-nosed.