iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

From what I see he's correctly seen the Green vote is a lot more persuadable than Reform, in contrast to the Starmer strategy. Hard to see him diverging so much from Starmer had the facts on the ground been different, and Green leaners weren't a factor.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Yes but there's why Starmer was ousted, and why Burnham has pursued the particular strategy he has. You may say he was always going to out of personal conviction but obviously there is also a political strategy.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

How much was it due to Greens is debatable but hard not to see it atleast in part about consolidating the left bloc, which would be unnecessary had it not been for the Green challenge.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Does Burnham not represent a counter argument to this? Trans rights aside, we've seen movement on Palestine, electoral reform, EU, etc.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Would recommend the Years of Lyndon Johnson chapter "The Sad Irons" for a vivid depiction of the drudgery of life before electricity and modern appliances

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I think his response would be that only China is the peer competitor so takes priority. But then he appears to contradict himself when he says Russia, China and the US are the only 3 great powers in the world.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Is it not that FPTP still creates a pro Brexit majority even if rejoin would probably win a referendum? And ofcourse it runs the risk of uniting the right bloc...Seems to me moving to PR maybe a necessary preliminary step.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Is there not a history of "the UK" displacing "Britain" in official usage post WW2? Might be attributing to much depth to their thinking, but perhaps there are connotations of a past imperial grandeur.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Its disappointing the connection isnt made more often. Its not that one or other minority group has particular issues, but rather the liberal ideal of a plurastic society which is being undermind.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Whats funny is in her select committee interview she made out like trans stuff was a minor issue, like she had other stuff to focus on and it was kind of beneath her. But low and behold her priorities in office

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

The voters that have left for Reform are much less persuadable to return than the others. Not to mention the gov has already been pursuing that strategy. But if at first you dont succeed!

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

The political culture of the Spectator garden party

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Im sceptical of how comprehensive this proposes to be. They seem at pains to emphasise the granularity of it and target things that "obviously, clearly actually come from the settlement areas" when that is difficult in practice as its so interwoven with the wider economy.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Everyone mocking Kemi's "do nothing and hope Reform implodes" strategy are real quiet right now

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

A case in point could be the Milibands, and the long pining for David. Ed may have been the stronger politician on many metrics - but David looked the part

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Reminds me of asking my Canadian mum what she thought of Jordan Peterson and her inscrutable response was "you need to understand he's from Alberta"

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

i think the rightward shift of young men maybe overestimated, and unfortunately being left wing does not preclude someone from being an abuser

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

The story is often framed that way; the right wing turn of young men. But what gets far less attention is the leftward turn of young women themselves (See suppport for Der Linke for example).

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Its like you said before, Polanksi is easier to dismiss if youre not on sharp end of Labours worst offenses; if you're not trans for example. Yes he's not perfect but gloating over his faults is giving a level of complacency over how bad Labour has been for many people.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

"Stupid, sexy Ediburgh" I think to myself whenever I get off at Waverley

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Alexander Clarkson @aphclarkson.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

A society where someone is adult enough to join the army at 16 yet too much of a child at 16 to use social media is one with a governing class that has lost touch with reality

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Lawyers and judges have ideologies just as everyone does. And it is worth scrutinising them, even as we focus on make a broader political argument and changing legislation. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

lrb.co.uk

Conor Gearty · Unwelcome Remnant: Erasing the Human Rights Act

The Supreme Court is quietly editing the Human Rights Act out of existence. None of this is being done in secret – the...

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

I think you cant remove the SC decision from the context in which advocacy for trans rights were largely abandoned by much of media and politics, but it would be a mistake to think it was itself inherently non political because it came from a court.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

As a result they have been passive and reactive in the face of anti progressive agendas pursued by those institutions. So yes legislative politics is crucial, but it would be a mistake to assume these institutions are inherently apolitical and therefore irrelevant to pursuing progressive goals.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

A counter point I would make is some have spent too little time considering institutional power even as those institutions have been politicised: the EHRC, BBC, the OfS, Ofcom, even the Supreme Court.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I think as well it undermines some of their foundational beliefs: that capitalism/free markets are an unambiguous good. With this and the post 08 failure of their economic model to even deliver growth in many instances, the tendency has been to focus on culture war issues instead.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Or they could just be judging that many of the public may think that. So it makes the politics much harder, even if they wanted to. "Labour changes law against Supreme Court judgement" could easily be used against them.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Aside from the obvious motivated reasoning, there may be something on the influence of American poltiics on British MPs. They may assume it has the same constitutional position.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Amazing that they looked at Kuwait and thought "this is the model for us!"

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Corbyn was always a symptom of a deeper malaise within Labour, but the PLP could only see him as the disease itself.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

So every GCC country included except Oman and Kuwait? Fascinated to learn why.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

British journalists consider intersectionality for 5 seconds challenge: impossible

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

I would echo Adam Tooze in arguing that government in yoke to bond markets is bad for democracy and unnecessary in a country that is a monetary sovereign. While attention is focussed on the bond markets, the real centre of the issue is an uncooperative Bank of England.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

The LRB had a good article on this www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Domestic judges cannot undo the case law of the Strasbourg court that so irritates a section of the political class and its journalist outriders. But they are doing everything short of that to make human rights as much of a domestic legal irrelevance as possible

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

I was thinking of this exactly in his response to the EHRC guidance "We've got to move into the next phase and not constantly re-running the arguments. I think Britain has done this too much in recent times, you know, with Brexit and other things. We've got to stop arguing with each other."

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

It does seem like there's a digital sex id card hole in the middle of this guidance. I wonder to what extent the scuppered plans for that impacted the drafting process.

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Mark Grimshaw @markgrimshawtism.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

I don’t think anything sums up how ridiculous the new EHRC guidance is than the fact it describes those protected by the characteristic of gender reassignment to be those undergoing a process to “reassign their sex”, a thing the exact same part of the document says isn’t legally possible. Nonsense.

Gender reassignment
2.36 The Act defines gender reassignment as a protected characteristic (section 7, paragraph 1). People who are proposing to undergo, are undergoing or have undergone a process (or part of a process) to reassign their sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.

Gender Recognition Certificates (GRC)
2.49 The Supreme Court in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers (For Women Scotland) [2025] UKSC 16 has ruled that a GRC does not change a person's legal sex for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010. The judgment held that 'sex', ‘woman' and 'man' mean, respectively, biological sex, biological
woman and biological man for the purposes of the Equality Act. The judgment uses the expression 'biological sex' to describe the sex of a person at birth.
The phrase 'biological sex' has the same meaning when used throughout this
Code. This is also referred to as 'sex at birth' in this Code.

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Reposted by holly

Tom Roberts @tpgroberts.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Fundamentally, the structure the Supreme Court has built is that we have a whole act prescribing how you change gender (GRA2004) and a protected characteristic of changed gender (EA2010) which combine to provide no legal protection for having changed your gender.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

They refer to Bellinger v Bellinger [2003] UKHL 21 at paragraph 5 for a definition.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Does it not also say, you can offer exclusively single sex service, but if you offer mixed sex, you *must* also offer a single sex service?

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Wouldn't using the men's potentially amount to discrimination against cis men? Ala trans men being excluded from both facilities.

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Allan Faulds @afaulds.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

The Labour Party is institutionally transphobic, it is an outright enemy of the UK's LGBT community, and none of us should even consider giving it our vote for a second so long as that remains the case.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

iirc he also has financial links to the Sarwar Foundation & Jackie Baillie

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

I was in a cab where the driver was listening to LBC, discussing whether to ban strikes, and he looked at me in the mirror and said "at the end of the day, everyone should have a right to withdraw their labour". Mic drop for that glasgow cabbie.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

A baffled Abraham bringing more and more sons to be sacrificed as the Reform God wasnt satisfied with Isaac.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Something I dont understand is are they not left-liberals themselves? If not in ideology, then atleast in their social background. Its hard to grasp how they're so alienated from their own tribe.

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

But didnt she agreed with the supreme court ruling recently? So even after that concession they still hate her!

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holly @arnuba.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

The temptation for countries and companies to do this will only increase. Unappreciated I think is the possibility that the purpose of the US blockade is as much to remove Iranian oil from temptation to 3rd countries as it is to harm Iran itself.

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