Englishman in New Jorts

Fitness freak | Security expert | Father to three or four wonderful young boys | Written for @NextLevelSketch and @DMsAreOpenBBC | Improv with @michelleimpro

[Devutopia @D_Raval]

Starmer speech: I’m not sure comparing the Greens and Zack Polanski to Reform and Nigel Farage is quite the winning pitch to progressive voters he thinks it is.

[Sangita Myska @SangitaMyska]

No, Camilla. @ZackPolanski & over 60 politicians, human rights lawyers + others are not calling for a “list of Jews”. They are supporting a letter asking the UK Govt to secondary screen returning dual nationals & Britons who have served with the IDF since Oct’23. The aim is to find out whether they have fought in Gaza. This is bec Israel is accused of Genocide at the ICJ. It would fulfill the UK’s commitment to the Genocide Conventions. You appear to be defending Polanski being called “human trash” by Goldsmith. Is that the case?

[Marl Karx @BareLeft]

This is not serious analysis, this is a projection of desire from right wing cranks, for whom regular crackdowns and authoritarianism have become a bit too boring.

[Thanos Angelopoulos @Th_Angelopoulos]

You say that post-Floyd DEI training created the policing culture that killed Henry Nowak. This is testable. If you're right, the pattern should begin after 2020. It doesn't.

Christopher Alder, 1998. Falklands veteran. Dragged handcuffed and unconscious into a Hull custody suite. Left face down on the floor. Officers stood around while he choked to death. Ten minutes before anyone helped. Inquest: unlawful killing. Five officers charged. All acquitted.

Sean Rigg, 2008. Schizophrenic man, died at Brixton police station after restraint. Inquest found "unsuitable and unnecessary force" and police failings "more than minimally" contributed to his death.

Robert Edwards, 2011. Died in a Suffolk cell. The IPCC found police "failed to take appropriate care" and didn't carry out proper welfare checks. The coroner said he should never have been deemed fit for detention.

Wayne Couzens, 2015–2021. Reported for indecent exposure in 2015. Kent Police had his name, address, and plate number. The investigating sergeant knew his brother, also a police officer. No action. Failed vetting twice, still became a Met officer. Exposed himself days before murdering Sarah Everard. The investigating officer lied about CCTV. Three forces had twenty years of red flags. Nothing to do with DEI

Post-Floyd, still no DEI involvement: Stephen Reardon, 2023, had seizures in a police van while the officer said he was "playing games". Died. Jerome Cowan, 2022, found unresponsive in a library, officers failed to provide first aid. Died. A man at St Erth, 2022, left drunk and vulnerable outside a railway station on a cold night, officers drove past without stopping. Died. All officers dismissed or facing gross misconduct.

Same pattern every time. A person in distress needs help, officers dismiss it or walk away. It happened in 1998, 2008, 2011, 2022, 2023, and 2025. DEI didn't create it. It predates it by a generation.

You also claim "determined, institutional silence". The Speaker acknowledged the case on 1 June. The Home Secretary called it "a horrifying act" and Digwa's false accusation "an evil act" in an oral statement to the Commons on 2 June. Debated in both Houses. Starmer and Baddenoch clashed over it. Front-page news for a week. There is no silence. You invented it because your baseless argument needs it.

You ask pretentiously what you call a system where a dying teenager's word counts for less than his killer's.

I'd ask you: what do you call a system where Christopher Alder choked to death on a custody floor in 1998 while officers stood around, and twenty-seven years later Henry Nowak bled to death saying the same words?

That is an ideology. But not the one you're describing. It's an institutional ideology of indifference to people in police custody, and it has been killing people for decades.

Blaming a training course that's existed for five years for a rot that's existed for hundreds of years isn't analysis. It's a deflection that protects the actual dangerous ideology.

[alex lei @alexL_E_I]

checking in with the goat

[angry cher horowitz @chorowitzxxx]

The case is “political” because we are ruled by institutions (police, the state and the media) who act with impunity and have no care for anyone they deem a potential criminal and demonstrably this happens to people of all ethnicities to this day

https://t.co/MzZH9iruWn

[Dr Iain Darcy 🍉 🇮🇪 💚 @doctoriaindarcy]

Wonder if the Chief of Hampshire Police will be writing to Farage to complain about him inciting a riot which saw his officers get attacked and local communities smashed up, like Mark Rowley wrote to Zack Polanski for retweeting something something

[Marl Karx @BareLeft]

Fines are just a cost of doing business for the privatised water companies, and the industry-captured regulator is now allowing payment to be delayed into the 2030s because they're paying back private equity "debt".

Nationalise. No compensation.

[hauntedmachine1817 @hauntedmchn1817]

He was incapable of staying in government because his desire to enrich himself by abusing positions, ignoring codes of conduct and trying to subvert accountability regarding the unelected networks of power and influence he was really working with were what really mattered to him.

[B O G ~ D W E L L E R @real_bogdweller]

remember like a month ago when zach polanski retweeted a member of the public's concerns about police conduct and all of politics came screeching to a halt for the day to condemn such a wholly inappropriate political interference into operational policing?

[Flying_Rodent @flying_rodent]

When Lord Danny’s friend David Cameron got busted trying to suborn ministers for a zillionaire, he spent the first half of his column saying it’s jolly tough being retired from politics, then concluded by saying we need a new law making it illegal for ex-PMs to commit crimes.

[Peter Mitchell @_bezpilotnik]

This is dead good by Juliet Jacques - on the cruel and stupid theatre of transphobia, its role in the authoritarian rolling-back of democratic rights, and how to hold the line in the current context:

[Flying_Rodent @flying_rodent]

Yeah, the problem here isn’t that the lads are pretending the government is shit and deeply unpopular. Anyone with eyes could’ve told you that would happen. The problem is more the press shitehousing them into command of their party and then power, when nobody likes or wants them

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

When Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens kidnapped and murdered Sarah Everard, Nigel Farage released a five-minute video urging people not to attack men or the police.

Today, in response to the murder of Henry Nowak, he called for "pure cold rage."

[Flying_Rodent @flying_rodent]

Is the idea here that Mandelson was - at very least - badgering ministers offscreen and they were seeking his approval and support, and that this has come as a big shock to everyone? Was Peter not, say, phoning up and hassling the lobby journos throughout the last decade or so.

[George Wallace @MrGeorgeWallace]

Imagine being so unable to love your child that you set fire to the whole damn world instead.

[Marl Karx @BareLeft]

A misconstrued comment that will be used to justify attacking the poor, sick, and disabled, while the rich laugh?

[Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar]

I pulled out of SXSW London, and I hope other speakers and chairs do too.

[Chłoddy @OfSymbols]

It was probably a bad idea for people who hate Labour politics to run Labour I suppose. Likely does make it somewhat tricky.

[Mark Oosterveen @MarkOosterveen]

Just a reminder, before people start minimising this, that almost the entire Labour Party in its current form was meticulously shaped and staffed by Peter Mandelson. Almost every new MP elected in 2024 was personally hand-picked by him. They are all his kind of people.