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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 8h

There is a secondary narrative here as well: that the "left" (however defined) is beyond the pale of acceptable politics. It is a banal characteristic of people who advocate proportional representation that they don't think the left should have any representation.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 8h

The poll will eventually come, but only after the pitch has been thoroughly rolled. Statements like that of Chowns must be seen in that context as simple propaganda: instead of simply saying the motion is wrong, that she disagrees with it, she suggests that it is illegitimate.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 8h

It's interesting that one thing that hasn't featured in the media coverage of the Greens' motion is a poll of public opinion on the subject. Instead we're are assured that it is an "extreme" view supported by a tiny percentage of people. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

theguardian.com

Greens must avoid ‘capture by extremists and racists’, says party MP

Ellie Chowns says vote for ‘Zionism is racism’ policy by 0.4% of members shows party processes are not working

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 9h

The BBC long ago stopped being a public service broadcaster, but publishing this corporate PR really is going too far. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

bbc.co.uk

Boots has a new owner: Three ways it could affect you

The stalwart of Britain's High Street has been sold to a Canadian billionaire family. What will that mean for you?

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 20h

And if you were in any doubt ...

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 20h

Pretty obvious who else is determined to help him.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Amusingly, this is probably the reverse of the results you'd get by polling journalists, pretty well all of whom have now decided that Polanski must have a figurative stake driven through his heart.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

To be fair, she does allude to their presence in her opening line: "The first time the window-rattling roar of a B-1 bomber woke me up this summer, I thought for one crazed second we were under attack." However, she forgets that other people who heard that roar later were literally under attack.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

What he wants is for the Greens to return to their prior state as an ineffective conscience on the margins of UK politics with no interest whatsoever in matters beyond our island horizon. It is not just gesture politics. It is conservative, pessimistic and implicitly xenophobic.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

What Harris will not acknowledge is the idea that the climate crisis is ultimately a crisis of capitalist imperialism, both in terms of the historic aggrandisement of Western powers and the defensive adoption of industrialisation and aggresive trading by the rest of the world.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The subtext to any John Harris column is localism, which he associates with virtue and (quite explicitly here) middle class decorum. He doesn't go so far as to dismiss Polanski as a rootless cosmopolitan, but that's the direction of travel. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

theguardian.com

A promising future now looks perilous for election loser Zack Polanski. He sowed, now he reaps | John Harris

There was a real chance of a Green byelection win in Holborn and St Pancras. He made bad decisions and cost his party dear, says Guardian columnist John Harris

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Correction: We must kill our cherished liberal principles in order to defend them against hostile foreigners.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Was that really what the "war on terror" taught us?

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Even a textbook utility maximising approach would note that yer man is ignoring that *he* might actually get some value out of reading to his kid.

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Reposted by David Timoney

Mallory Moore @sexabolition.blog · 08/10/2026

Seeing people joke about software engineering in the wake of Margaret Hamilton's death. Obviously there's a difference between what's largely euphemised as software engineering presently and the discipline she strove to create.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The issue with Badenoch is that she isn't so far from the centre today, which reflects the long-term influence of Thatcher and the steady erosion of norms around overt racism and bigotry that we have seen over the last quarter century.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This means that Badenoch must be judged relative to other contemporary party leaders. Thatcher was the most rightwing leader in history because she was furthest from the then centrist orthodoxy (symbolised by her antipathy towards the "wets").

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

You cannot judge a party leader in absolute terms across time unless you are prepared to insist that a collection of aristocratic racists, antisemites and anti-democratic reactionaries are somehow to her left. The political spectrum is contingent and relative.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Calling Kemi Badenoch "the most rightwing Tory leader in the party’s history" is bad history, but it also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the political spectrum - i.e. what right and left mean. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The subtext to all this is uncertainty around electoral reform and what that would mean for party strategies. Do you focus on your core vote or do you aim to build a wider coalition. For now, the Tories are going for the former, Labour for the latter.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Labour are engaged in a similar exercise, eagerly supported by the Guardian, to recapture younger and progressive voters who have drifted to the Greens, or who simply abstained in 2024, by making promises (EU reaccession, utilities) that will be watered down come the manifesto.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This rather misses the point that we're probably 3 years out from a general election. Policy announcements by the opposition today are about shoring up its core vote, which for the Tories means the comfortable middle classes that defected to the Lib Dems. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

No surprise that the Guardian has come out strongly against the Greens for today's byelection, but reminding me of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson duetting on the piano is just going too far. Say what you like, but Steve Bell would never have done that.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I guess if you own a car, you're not allowed to have an opinion on road congestion or pollution.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The belief that leftists are not only hypocrites but traitors who hate their own country and wish to advance the interests of malevolent foreigners is central to reactionary conservatism, but it is also the firm belief of centrists, or at least a substantial portion of them.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

"My enemy's enemy is my friend" (an example of stupid-smart) makes macro sense, but it rarely appeals to the individual. During WW1, Germany attempted to recruit Irish POWs in support of Roger Casement. It was a damp squib. Some who declined would later join the IRA.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Note the studied vagueness of "substantial portions". I suspect if you managed to round up the European and US Left and quizzed them individually, the vast majority would also condemn Hamas, though they might also tell you to fuck off with your silly games.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

In contrast, building a cross-party coalition post-election in a PR system is far more opaque. There is no obligation to publish the full terms of the deal and party members are rarely allowed any say (recall the Tory-LD coalition govt in 2010). That's the attraction.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

If anything, they are excessively illuminated and over-analysed by the media, essentially because they wish to tip the scales (typically against the left). The paper's current attempt to build an anti-Polanski coalition in the Greens is an obvious example of this.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This, from a follow-up letter in the Guardian, does raise an interesting point. But the interest is not in the competing charms of FPTP and PR. Rather it lies in the mistaken idea that internal party coalitions (aka the "broad church") are opaque. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

On the anti-intellectualism of contemporary politics ... chrisdillow.substack.com/p/who-needs-...

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

In economic terms, what this does is: a) maintain demand, b) maintain profit margins, and c) maintain the fiction that the govt can control public utilities through regulation.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Amusingly, the report then almost concedes this: "Energy officials are working up more radical changes to bills, however, which could be implemented after the budget and would change how much companies could charge customers, rather than subsidising their bills."

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

When talking about the govt giving out money, it is always worth asking precisely who ends up with the cash. For example, "the bulk of which is likely to go towards increasing the discount given to households on certain benefits" means energy companies. www.theguardian.com/money/2026/o...

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Behr is fundamentally a reactionary writer, with his tendency to hyperbolic doom and his belief that improvement is futile. The faux-Olympian style fits with his weary pessimism. It's tedious to read, but it must be just as tedious to write.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

He is explicit about the parallels between Polanski and Corbyn (and the "itinerant caucus of militant left activists"), but he has employed the same dismissive register in his assessments of Keir Starmer (no vision, no nous) and Andy Burnham (nice ideas, no clear plan).

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

There's nothing that will surprise you in Rafael Behr's latest pompous harangue, but it is interesting to note the consistency in his judgement on the calibre of leadership across the prograssive end of the political spectrum. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

On the political economy of theory-free AI ... pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/n...

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The argument for a single-state solution has to be understood less as a practical proposal than as a clear-eyed rejection of the delusion that a two-state solution is possible while Israel remains a Zionist state. The resistance to the idea is all about maintaining that fiction.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The result was a deeply disproportionate partition that led directly to the Arab-Israeli war and the Nakba of 1948. Jewish leaders at the time, such as Ben-Gurion, made it clear their ultimate goal was to take over all of Palestine and expel all Arabs: political Zionism.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It's important to remember that division into 2 states wasn't a given, but it was the preferred policy of Jewish groups and crucially of the UN Mandate power, the UK. For the latter, the fear was that an independent, Arab-majority Palestine would align with Egypt and the USSR.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It says something about the way the discourse has been channelled over the years that the idea of a unitary state is now considered "insane". Palestine was a single state up to the UN-approved parition in 1947.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The Guardian's hunt for the Good Tory continues ...

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The extreme passions that the Man City judgement has given rise to reflect the egregious nature of the offences and the extent to which the failure to clean the stables would jeopardise the integrity and attraction of the EPL. You don't need to rope in social media to explain it.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It's like you've never seen Glasgow on an Old Firm derby day, or listened in as some bloke down the pub outlines a conspiracy theory about bent refs going back to Clive Thomas in 1978. To judge from this bizarre snippet, you've also never heard of Beatlemania.

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The latest epsiode of the Guardian's series "Social media is to blame for everything". I genuinely don't know how a sports reporter can claim that extreme partisanship is a new development in football, or that its spread beyond spectators is novel. www.theguardian.com/football/202...

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David Timoney @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And you can't understand Brazil's history without appreciating the class and racial divisions arising from the differential development of the North East and the South and West of the country, and the continuing salience of land reform. www.fairobserver.com/history/big-...

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