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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

It's hardly a break with tradition for her. The Tories, especially the last gaggle, were constantly framing policy by working backwards from an ideological position rather than identifying areas of need and working towards rectifying them based on evidence rather than a predetermined outcome.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

As a politician, I find Farage repellent and odious on an Olympic level and suddenly, perhaps because she's thankfully on our screens a lot less these days, I'm reminded that he doesn't hold a candle to Braverman. She truly is a malevolent and carcinogenic force in public debate.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Farage is right you know, you can prove what you want with opinion polls. Especially those you commission yourself, backed by dicey foreign donations. He's really a subject expert on the matter.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Hardly surprising, Trump has shown his default operational approaches are to bully, intimidate and where needed throw money at his problems (see Republican midterms, data centres) with bribes thinly disguised as dividends. It's, as brighter folk than me have long remarked, the Mafioso playbook.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Is it too early to name the citizens of this new city-state Dinguses? Declare their currency piddles, since they're coming off the pound presumably?

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Second this. The River of Shame was a most unwelcome discovery at the airport.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Pack some serious moisturiser and lip balm. Beijing's air destroyed the skin on my face in 6 hours flat when I went.

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Reposted by Ben Belshaw

Peter Geoghegan @petergeoghegan.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Wow. Watch Channel 4 News now Nigel Farage discussing elicit funding for reform U.K. from a foreign donor All on secret camera

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I wouldn't assume for one second that there aren't people within the press who were fully aware of what the ramifications would be.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

And the moment a small crack appeared, that frothing racism and resentment roared forward with a "SEE?!? He doesn't belong here and never did." As it will again, left unchecked. It's using a bazooka to swat a fly - that's inside someone else's house - from the sidewalk outside.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

It happened specifically because this was a black man in a profession and institution that white privileged classes have always seen as their exclusive domain. It's snarling, sneering covetousness over intellectual fields, over academia, over "elite" institutions, over class and belonging.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

This is a regular, mundane occurrence in academia. Imagine if we were to apply the same standard of scrutiny to every time the national broadcaster allows a political figure to regurgitate hate-filled, antifactual ideology unchallenged or equivocate about an inherently disprovable argument? #bbcqt

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

They should not have been asked in public, or amplified to a national stage. They should not have been asked about the man himself, about his entire history, about his identifying qualities. The British press took an internal personnel matter and warped it into a public vivisection.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

This gentleman's rage is so appropriate for this moment. Questions should have been asked about the integrity of Arday's work. They should have been asked privately, in the forums of human resources, and oversight of academic integrity and discipline, within the institution itself.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

What it looks like when you try to work backwards from a patently absurd point you're determined to make, immediately run out of logical thread and have to start riffing. We see it with Trump V2, if you're dependent on fabrication to sell your brand you need a certain mental acuity to make it work.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

You're giving her altogether too much grace. The accuracy is less important than the potential outrage she can farm off a false narrative and the other, shallower and more tangible benefits of dancing for the oil lobby. She's a reverse Hanlon's Razor, tempting as it is to point to incompetence.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I was trying to be restrained, but your sentiment is shared 😉

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

The absolute brass balls of this twit, architect of the Brexit deal that has actual cross-party consensus as a failure and which impoverished the country, to suggest that any dead, shrivelled thing faintly resembling an idea to fall out of his head has any merit, forget superiority, is astounding.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

You stumbled onto one of their annual conferences, where they share intel on our movements and discuss timing for the first wave of their invasion. You were lucky to escape with your life.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Not only does it not need her in it but you'd think that someone among the 400+ MPs they have is more suited, has an actual economics background, doesn't enjoy cosplaying an Indiana Jones villain, etc. That this doesn't appear the case signals we've not seen the end of the win Reform voters strategy

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

We've been too quick to dismiss pillories/the stocks and rotten produce as a viable interim solution to prison overcrowding - particularly with the weather we're having.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Interesting and out of character that BBC explicitly identified it as a right-wing terror plot in the headline. That sort of specificity has been either buried or obfuscated for years. Maybe I'm being naive, but wouldn't it be nice if this was a sign of a proper divorce from endorsing Farageism?

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

There's an alternate universe where Labour challenges Farage's lies with facts, spends as much time criminalising Tommy Robinson et al as Palestine Action, doesn't declare war on universities and vulnerable people, etc. etc. Starmer, McSweeney and their brain trust deserve this rancid legacy.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Definitely. The way Labour has equivocated about racists, inciters, grifters and criminals while throwing them red meat under the smug auspices of Mahmood and comments like the island of strangers drivel has created the conditions for Reform to spread like a fungal infection.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Be really nice if he'd drawn a straight line in PMQs between Farage's "cold rage" nonsense and similar language from the same parties leading up to Cox's murder. Or held Reform to the fire on anything in that forum, really. Labour's strategy of appeasement is as much to blame.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Those suits have got to look really strange in the wardrobe next to all the joggers and balaclavas

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

This is the aspect of Farage that should be getting the most scrutiny. He's the basest kind of opportunist and will say anything to play to who he thinks his audience is in the moment. In a way, that makes what he's said this week worse because he's just trying to make hay, maximise his own benefit.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

It's certainly incompetence on the scene, but it also says something about police sensitivity to the existing culture of ethnic discrimination and racism....which Farage ironically has a massive hand in engendering.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Ah, so it's OK for the anthropomorphic cantaloupe to openly and unironically celebrate death (Mueller) and murder (Reiner), but not to poke fun at the POSSIBILITY that his wife (and the overwhelming majority of the rest of us) would be delighted if he met his maker. Got it.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

This is like the Pope telling Vance he should be more careful when talking about couchfucking.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Kubrick literally built a career out of those anxieties. We'd best get used to that feeling, acknowledge and accept it, because this feels like the thin end of the wedge.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

And yet forecast is for nearly 20 degrees on Tuesday...never change, Scotland.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

The spirit, the pacing, the lived-in feeling of the town and mundane ugliness of its inhabitants. To me it's that it has the time to indulge in the character-driven world building that is the strength of King's best books. IMO the next best Salem's Lot adaptation is actually Midnight Mass as well.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

I dunno, I guess I just didn't expect the people who forced ra-ra, 'Murica, land-of-the-free suffocating patriotic propaganda down the rest of the world's throat via every cultural mechanism available to let themselves get wedgied and stuffed into a locker by a petulant tangerine pedophile?

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

More blatant lies. No message from 36p Lee (adjusted for inflation) is actually important.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

As I permitted that moldy propaganda piece to steal 3 minutes of my life, the header for the Guardian's usual donations ask clung to the bottom of the page throughout the read - arrow pointing upwards at author and article with the unintentionally poignant message "this is what we're up against."

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Rather than a Muslim family, it would be shouted down as an unrepresentative caricature, not permitted to take root in the public consciousness as a prototypical Reform voter, certainly not amplified by the mainstream media to foment moral panic and ideas of sectarian warfare. Just seems odd (2/).

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

I just find it funny that if the example of family voting we were given was a gurning, porcine old white fart who looks like 36p Lee (adjusted for inflation) mated with a pastrami, who fervently believes migrants/refugees steal from him, twisting his wife's arm into voting the way he wants (1/)

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Hard to think of a better outcome. The wretched Goodwin catapulted into the sun and a thunderous rejection of the arrogant, cynical Starmer/McSweeney strategy that progressives would just hold their noses and come along to stop Reform, no matter how far the party drifted in Reform's direction.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

Rather than an invitation to interview or less visible and evocative strategy tells us something about the nature of the evidence, what they thought may still have been in his possession and and the complete lowering of the shields of privilege that Andrew has benefitted from to-date (3/)

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

Uncover with relative ease that level of evidence of wrongdoing. It speaks to the magnitude of evidence of serious criminality that the police were empowered to make such a politically delicate and significant arrest in such a short period of investigation. Not to mention, the arrest itself (2/)

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

A few thoughts spring immediately to mind. One, to make such a high-profile arrest the police and CPS obviously have to be incredibly confident in the evidence they've already secured. Two, the investigation was announced, what, two weeks ago? So in such a short time, they've been able to (1/)

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

What he probably meant was Braverman wasn't a minister for very long in each of her various appointments. She did get canned and brought back so many times one could almost excuse that being the only thing Farage might genuinely remember about her.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

The restraint and self-control showed by the Epstein victims in Congress to not rush Pam Bondi after hearing that torrent of verbal diarrhea and rend her limb from limb like the conclusion of Weapons is one of the most remarkable displays of human strength I've ever seen.

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

It is very specifically perilous to Starmer because of how he staked out the ethos of this Labour Party. Adults in the room, no more mendacity or cronyism, stable and predictable politics. It so profoundly contradicts the terms of definition he set for himself that it has to be a mortal blow (5/).

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

None of this means that the Mandelson dynamite wouldn't go off regardless of scenario, it just explains why the fuse is shorter. Nor does it excuse, as you rightly pointed out, the double standards and normalising of scandal and criminality, enabled by the client press, under Johnson et. al. (4/)

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

Means there is less latitude, led good feeling with the public. It is a magnitude worse to be a bumbling, vascillating administrator in this situation than it would be if you were a competent politician presiding over better conditions, stronger policies and ideological consistency (3/).

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

Though I agree with you that none of the policy decisions in themselves rise to the level of scandal and that George had this wrong, the things he was agitated about contain the answer. Mandelson is likely an existential problem for any prime minister, but Starmer's political ineptitude (2/)

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Ben Belshaw @benbelshaw.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

@mrjamesob.bsky.social having a retrospective listen to the Friday show and, much as you found yourself at loggerheads with caller George, I think you were both circling the answer of the question of why Starmer is, at this moment, in such political danger despite the lack of misuse of office (1/)

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