iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 22h

Racists continually insist that black and brown people can never be English. Then they accuse them of 'refusing to integrate'. I mean, make your bloody mind up.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 22h

Lots of talk about 'the lanyard class'. Not enough discussion of the Rolex class.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Capitalism has now reached the stage at which companies openly admit that their products represent 'an existential risk to humanity'. And then invite investors to pump money into them anyway.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Avanti West Coast picked up tens of millions of pounds in subsidies every year while charging passengers the most expensive mile-per-mile fares in Europe. Public ownership is essential to end this egregious example of rip-off capitalism.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

There wasn't a social care crisis when local authorities provided the service free of charge. Then Thatcher privatised it and private equity bosses started charging £8000 a month.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The Economist speculates that the men arrested at RAF Fairford might be nothing more sinister than fuel thieves. If that's true, those who rushed to blame the IRGC, Russia, Islamists, pro-Palestine activists, asylum seekers or Mossad will have a lot of egg on their faces.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

If I had a choice between making pensioners poorer and making billionaires poorer, I'd go for the latter option

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I only wish I could get cancelled the same way people who regularly write for Britain's biggest-circulation tabloid newspaper are 'cancelled'

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Nigel Farage seems to think the best way to represent Clacton in Westminster is by never going anywhere near Clacton and never going anywhere near Westminister

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Nick Clegg is now worth an estimated £100m and has joined the board of a data centre companies with ambitions to become a $1trn hyperscaler. So propping up a Tory-led austerity coalition seems to have worked out quite well for the guy.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I've always favoured abolition of the House of Lords. But appointing establishment worthies unelected lawmakers for life and then allowing corporations bidding for huge public contracts to hire them on telephone number salaries is obviously as bent as a nine-bob note.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

So why don't politicians who argue that Britain can't afford benefits advocate putting up the minimum wage to the point where universal credit no longer has to subsidise low-wage employers?

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Last week the Labour candidate in Holborn & St Pancras put Thames Water 'on notice'. This morning five London boroughs on the company's patch find themselves without water. So when does the notice expire?

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Another massive Thames Water outage. Is there anything this company could actually do before a Labour government finally recognises there is no viable alternative to social ownership?

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It shouldn't be easier to get Oasis tickets than it is to get an NHS dentistry appointment

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Laura Kuenssberg - who is paid over £400k a year - asks Andy Burnham where the money to pay for social care will come from. One obvious answer would be higher taxes on people paid over £400k a year.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Britain's economy is being held back by low wages, underinvestment, rip-off pricing, the housing crisis, lack of affordable childcare and an NHS on the point of collapse. Not because there isn't a third runway at Heathrow.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Grannies face terrorism charges for carrying placards while the Orange Order is free to carry religiously inflammatory banners down the Garvaghy Road. Go figure.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Only GB News would host a commentator who thinks we need to defend British values by the mandatory mass castration of tens of thousands of people accused of no offence

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Trump says he wants to 'take' Cuba because he objects to one family using the state as a vehicle for personal enrichment. Let's just leave it there.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Liz Truss doesn't know the difference between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. She knocked £425bn off the value of pension fund assets. She thinks Tony Blair set up the Bank of England. And major companies pay her £80,000 a speech for her insights on politics and economics.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

House builders say rent controls would 'make housing more expensive'. Water companies say their industry is 'too expensive to nationalise'. Billionaires say wealth tax would 'force them to leave the country'. But as Mandy Rice-Davies observed, they would say that, wouldn't they?

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Liz Truss just claimed on live radio that 'the Bank of England was set up by Tony Blair'. She must surely rank as the most economically illiterate person ever to have held a ministerial position at the Treasury, and her time as prime minister underlined that fact.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Deciding to immigrate as a protest against immigration is perhaps not the most logically coherent thought process

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Erstwhile Labour leadership contender Owen Smith lobbies for Big Pharma, former shadow chancellor Chris Leslie heads the trade association for 4000% interest rate doorstep loan sharks. Now Lord Watson has signed up with Palantir. Such are the moral scruples of the Labour right.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Boris Johnson stuffed the BBC full of Tory placemen, some of whom facilitated six-figures personal loans to support his lifestyle. Now Kemi Badenoch is having a hissy fit because a trade unionist has been given a symbolic place on the Bank of England board.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

So a 20-second TikTok clip in Urdu is 'poisonous' and £76m donations from crypto billionaires are simply 'levelling the playing field'. Or so we are told.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

There's a huge difference between political donations from hundreds of thousands of individual of trade unionists giving a few quid each and trousering £70m-plus from two dodgy crypto billionaires. You'd have to be wilfully blind not to see that.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Democracy means one person, one vote. Not two billionaires, one party.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Anyone know why a newspaper owned by the Fourth Lord Rothermere, who inherited a fortune from the Third Lord Rothermere, who inherited his money from the Second Lord Rothermere, who inherited it from the First Lord Rothermere, is so strongly opposed to inheritance tax?

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Trump wants a united Ireland. At last I agree with him on something.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Reform supporters seem to be delighted at multiple £36m bungs from crypto billionaires and exceedingly angry about ten quid donations to the RNLI

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Billionaires who don't pay taxes give tens of millions of pounds to the racist right while newspapers owned by billionaires who don't pay taxes smear the politicians who challenge them. Because they want to ensure 'a fair fight and a level playing field', apparently.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Taxpayers foot the £2,700 a month rent on Kemi Badenoch's six-bedroom farmhouse in Essex. Then she goes on telly and argues that taxpayers shouldn't subsidise other people's rent.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Stop complaining. Once you survive schools with crumbling concrete roofs and £60k of student debt, you can look forward to a gig economy job and rent that takes half your salary until you get to claim the worst pension in Europe at an ever-increasing retirement age.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I was around in the 1970s. I don't recall even the most rightwing Tory politicians downplaying National Front marches as some kind of justifiable expression of popular discontent.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The Public Order Act 1936 makes it illegal to wear political uniforms. Indeed, the legislation was designed specifically to prohibit Blackshirts. Just saying.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The RNLI isn't subsidised by the taxpayer. Some people seem to be getting them mixed up with Eton, Harrow and Winchester.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The blackshirts are back. It's just that the Daily Mail hasn't endorsed them yet.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

It's a good job the balaclava-clad fascists who closed down Britain's biggest port aren't peacenik grannies holding placards, because they'd be facing terrorism charges then

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

'Ra-ra Vlad Putin/Money from the Krem-a-lin' - Boney M put new lyrics to their classic hit for their gig at Reform conference

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Come On Eileen is a song about youthful rebellion and a protest again small-town repression, written by a man who flirted with transgender identity decades ago. Not an obvious anthem for Reform UK, really.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

That Channel 4 video is very obviously fake news. For a start, it claims to show Nigel Farage actually in Clacton.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

It's a good job Dan Jukes and James Orr didn't overclaim a tenner on Universal Credit, because they'd really have been in trouble then

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

James Orr has been forced to step down from Reform UK for his unethical behaviour. Fortunately he still has his other job, which is teaching ethics at Cambridge University.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Margaret Thatcher did not 'regenerate the British economy'. She devastated the UK's industrial base, put three million people on the dole and plunged entire communities into the kind of poverty they still haven't recovered from four decades later.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I know a guy who teaches philosophy at Oxford University, speaks in an impeccable middle-class English accent and always wears a tie, even when the dress code is smart casual. And he still gets abused on public transport because his skin is brown.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

So long as 'Sadiq Khan's war on motorists' doesn't extend to brutally gunning down Chelsea tractor drivers in cold blood, I'm basically cool with it

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I've asked AI for advice on chess pawn structures and chord substitutions for jazz improvisation. Let's just say I wouldn't trust it to prescribe my medicines.

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David Osland @davidosland.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Electricity in the UK isn't expensive because of net zero. Electricity in the UK is expensive because privatised energy companies are ripping us off.

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