James

"deferentially impudent”

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Keir Starmer hits back at Argentina after their players held a “Falklands are Argentine” banner

“The World Cup might not have been ours but the Falklands Islands are”

[David Baddiel @Baddiel]

I’m including in this those who seized on the opportunity to gloat on posters who had initially celebrated her death then when realised it was a murder, retracted. It’s all shit. It’s all an example of empathy being utterly lost in the itch for tiny online triumphalism.

[Ben Brittain @BenABrittain]

ITV intro to the England v Argentina game

[nathan @_nathanf38]

can’t explain how much better this is than AI slop

[Old Gassy @OldGassy1984]

"Monday. I'm really enjoying my role as FIFA Special Adviser to Gianni Infantino, and pleased that it seems to be going so well."

[Pelagius 🦁 @pelagiusreborn]

Two very ancient phenotypes will be at play this Saturday

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

On Saturday, after nearly a century, the long-wave transmitter at Droitwich fell silent, and the two old masts at Westerglen and Burghead with it. Most people won't have noticed. But something left the country on Saturday worth marking before it slips out of memory as well as off the air: the Shipping Forecast, in the form millions have grown up with, one of the primi among British institutions, read out on long wave to the fishing fleets and the insomniacs and anyone else still awake at the rim of the day.

If you've ever heard it, you know the odd power of the thing. "Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty" - a litany of sea areas most listeners will never lay eyes on, in a cadence that hasn't altered in generations, read with the calm of a voice that assumes you are out there somewhere in the dark and means to see you home. It carried far more than the weather. It was among the last things the whole of Britain still heard at the same hour: the same words, the same rhythm, meaning the same thing to a trawlerman off Rockall and a sleepless accountant in Surrey. A aesthetic paradigm of our culture; supreme utility and sublime superfluity. A country that now shares almost nothing in common still shared that.

And there's a stranger fact again, one that lifts the whole business clear of nostalgia. By long-standing account, the Royal Navy's nuclear-missile submarines, hidden somewhere beneath the Atlantic with the nation's last deterrent aboard, used Radio 4 on long wave as one of their signs of life from home. If the broadcasts kept coming, Britain was still there. If they ever stopped, and stayed stopped, the commander was to open the sealed letter the Prime Minister had written out by hand, and learn what his country wished of him in a world that no longer contained it. The same mild signal that told a fisherman the wind in Dogger was, by that account, a pulse the end of the world would have been measured against.

It is fitting, and bleak, that a broadcaster which has spent years forgetting who it was ever for should choose this, of all things, to switch off. The BBC never seems short of money for the things it wants to do. It decided the cost of the old signal was no longer worth bearing, and silenced the one transmission that asked nothing of anybody and reassured everybody. The fishermen, the old, the sleepless, the men under the sea - none of them were an audience it cared to keep.

The forecast itself survives in other forms, on other frequencies; this is not the end of it. But the signal that carried it for a hundred years, and the idea it quietly stood for - that a nation is a thing held together by small shared rituals, faithfully kept, that ask nothing and bind everyone - that has fallen silent, and it fell without a fight. We let these things go one at a time, each too small to defend on its own, until we glance up and find there is nothing left that we all still do together.

How many more will we let go?

How many more will you let go?

[Ed Campbell @edcmpbl]

Tell you what it must have been class if Peter Murrell got your name in the SNP secret Santa

[big slug 🇵🇸 @keithposting]

Sir Keir Starmer woos Reform voters, unveils 'Pea Dog' as new national dish

[Anon Opin. @anon_opin]

Hereditary peerages are a good thing. They serve as buffers against the short-term opportunism of those who care solely for being elected into positions of power at the expense of the populace they serve.

[Mr B @laziolabubu]

Keir Starmer taking his anger out on the weather machine this afternoon

[Jon Tonge @JonTonge]

Thoughts with the PPS infantry who went over the top whilst the officer class said ‘we’ll be right behind you’.

[Matthew @MatthewTorbitt]

Deleted tweet no doubt supposed to be a DM from the government’s newest appointment.

[James @jrhilsl]

@Chri5toph3r_ @MathewHulbert What do you propose has changed?

[James May @MrJamesMay]

I’m sure we have all now seen the footage of Metropolitan rozzers kicking a suspected terrorist in the head, repeatedly, when he was down.

We can all play a part in putting an end to this sort of police brutality. Mainly by not going around stabbing people.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

In the midst of all the news today, and with Parliament prorogued, many people may not have noticed that this was the final time the hereditary peers sat in Parliament before being forced out by Labour.

I want to pay an extra special tribute to them.

Combined they had 1784 years of parliamentary experience, wisdom and service to this country. That is not something easily replaced, and it should not be casually discarded.

Most were Conservatives. All were public servants.

They have brought to public life judgment shaped over decades, deep expertise, institutional memory, and a sense of duty that has strengthened Parliament and, very often, improved legislation in ways the public will never fully see.

Their record speaks for itself. They have served in war and peace, in government and opposition, in defence, diplomacy, farming, business, science and public service. They have not merely occupied seats in the Lords, they have contributed to the life of the nation.

That is why what has happened matters. Hereditary peers are a living part of Britain’s constitutional inheritance that Labour is casually tearing up.

Labour has rubbed away another part of our heritage, not to strengthen Parliament but to replace it with political appointees, four of whom it has already had to suspend the whip from because they were so inappropriate. That contrast says rather a lot.

At a time when public trust in politics is fragile, I think it is worth saying plainly that experience, seriousness and tradition still matter. Service still matters. Duty still matters.

So today, as an era closes, I want to put on record my profound gratitude and admiration for our hereditary peers. Britain has been better governed because of them. The Conservative Party has been stronger because of them. And Parliament will be poorer without them.

Their contribution will long outlast the petty politics that has brought this moment about.