Patrick WC @Patrick_WC

A barrister is facing prison just for reminding a jury they have the right to vote with their conscience. This historic right has existed since 1670. We can't let it be silenced now. Please join me in asking the government to protect our juries you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save…

Keir Starmer was not merely a disappointment. He is a mendacious figure of ethical decrepitude, a man who won the Labour Party leadership based on promises that he jettisoned five seconds after winning - a Labour leader who dared banish from the Labour Party not only his predecessor but also remarkable human beings like director Ken Loach - the gentleman who has taken the historic Labour Party and transformed it into a vessel for the very oligarchy it was elected to restrain. Consider the litany of Starmer’s moral and logical failures. He promised a 'different Britain', yet his actions were a masterclass in Tory-lite politics—using the same maxed-out credit card analogies that once served the austerity brigades to justify his own failure of vision. He promised a human rights lawyer’s approach but he embraced a racist-lite version of Farage. On Europe, Starmer promised Brexiteers that Brexit is Brexit yet stood before those who yearn to rejoin the European Union, winked at them to make them feel that Britain would gradually reconnect, even rejoin, with the EU while offering nothing of substance. This is not leadership; it is a fraud. And then there's the manner in which Starmer and his government rushed to offer Israel unequivocal support in pursuing its genocide in Gaza, sacrificing precious political and civil liberties in the UK by imprisoning grandmothers, priests and peaceful activists who dared support Palestine Action, an organisation that Starmer and his minions proscribed as terrorists for practising the usual activist tactics of trespassing to spray paint military planes that had demonstrably aided in the genocide. To add insult to injury, Starmer performed the diplomatic pantomime of recognising a Palestinian state, in a manner that ensured it would never happen. But above all else, this is a government that has learned nothing from the post-2008 era. Starmer and his Chancellor are playing the same tired austerity game while enabling and empowering the Finance Curse perpetrated by the City of London, throwing in forgood measure cuts in international aid to fund a military spending trickle under the guise of a "Strategic Defence Review" . It is the same old doctrine: austerity for the masses, socialism for the financiers and the arms dealers. History will remember Mr Starmer as a man without conviction, a Prime Minister who offers not a shred of honesty, but merely the cruel illusion of change. He is ethically decrepit because he had chosen, consciously, to abandon principle for power. And for that, history will indict him. Good riddance, I say. theguardian.com/politics/live/…

I'd never condone violence against a police officer - this is utterly dishonest. The jury weren't judging them on a terrorism offence. This is an awful sleight of hand. The creeping encroachment of terror laws onto protest & removal of our juries should worry all of us.

Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch

2 months ago

These thugs fractured the spine of Sgt Kate Evans, who spoke in court of the medical and emotional trauma she still lives with. Prison is where they belong. Unlike Zack Polanski, I want serious consequences for anyone who attacks police officers risking their lives to protect us.

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You can vehemently disagree with Palestine Action activists goals, whilst simultaneously be horrified a judge can decide AFTER a conviction if it was terrorism related amd double a sentence. Being able to class an offense as terrorism AFTER conviction without charging them with terrorism should bother everyone. Any protest action that is now determined as trying to "change government policy" can have this applied. So today it's Palestine Action, but next it'll be immigration protests, farmers protests, NHS, tax etc etc.

3 of the 4 people didn’t attack the police officer and all of the 4 were cleared of violent intent. So the only disgrace here is the lie you’re telling to justify a clear miscarriage of justice & the use of anti-terror laws to justify your government’s complicity in a genocide.

Chris Philp MP @CPhilpOfficial

2 months ago

Smashing up property and attacking a police officer with a sledgehammer is not “protest” It’s violence Zack Polanski is a disgrace. Anyone voting Green is supporting this nonsense

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This is barbaric. They were not permitted to explain to the jury why they carried out the attack on the Elbit factory - which makes the weapons that kill Palestinian children. And the jury was never told they would be sentenced as terrorists. /1

Politics UK @PolitlcsUK

2 months ago

🚨 BREAKING: Four Palestine Action activists have been jailed for a total of 22 years for causing £1.2m worth of damage and fracturing a police woman's spine at an Israeli weapons factory

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Bosnia and Herzegovina fans chanting for Palestine in the streets of Toronto on their way to their first game at the 2026 World Cup 🇵🇸🇧🇦 Fans will always save the tournament!

Sentenced and imprisoned on grounds of “terrorism” that no jury ever convicted them of. Meanwhile, the British government continues to aid and abet the greatest crime of our time. A historic miscarriage of justice — and a truly dark day for civil liberties in this country.

Declassified UK @declassifiedUK

2 months ago

🚨BREAKING -- The Palestine Action defendants have been sentenced for a combined total of more than 25 years. Charlotte Head - 6 years Leona Kamio - 6 years Fatema Zainab - 5 years and 8 months Samuel Corner - 8 years and 8 months

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🚨BREAKING -- The Palestine Action defendants have been sentenced for a combined total of more than 25 years. Charlotte Head - 6 years Leona Kamio - 6 years Fatema Zainab - 5 years and 8 months Samuel Corner - 8 years and 8 months

Declassified UK @declassifiedUK

2 months ago

🚨BREAKING -- Palestine Action activists will be sentenced as terrorists by @jmcevoy_2 & @daniaakkad Historic first sees protesters sentenced under terrorism provisions for criminal damage against Israeli arms firm declassifieduk.org/palestine-acti…

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

hasanabi @hasanthehun

2 months ago

sxsw was a minor part of my trip to the uk, they totally didn’t defend me or cenk at all, they’re actual fucking losers and i will never work with them for the rest of my life. if you bought a ticket expecting to see me you should demand a refund.

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Banning Cenk Uyghur and Hasan Piker from entering the UK is an absurd and cowardly decision from an increasingly authoritarian government. Let us call this what it is: an attack on the freedom to criticise Israel, as well as the UK government’s own complicity in genocide.

The National @ScotNational

2 months ago

The UK Government has banned two prominent left-wing US speakers from entering the country ⬇️ thenational.scot/news/26153630.…

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For any British viewer, watching these Irish commentators explain why it is important for Ireland to boycott a football match against Israel is like being thrust into an alternate universe. One where morality – not money – guides the agenda. A different world is possible.

Tom London @TomLondon6

2 months ago

Spot on from these pundits talking about the future fixture of Ireland v Israel and why it should not go ahead Such a truthful conversation is unthinkable on British TV

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You fundamentally just wouldn't be allowed to say this on British TV. Well done to Richie Sadlier.

Oracle’s £250m gift to the Tony Blair Institute appears to buy you an entire Question Time episode.

BBC Question Time @bbcquestiontime

2 months ago

Tomorrow, Question Time is in Dulwich for an AI special Joining Fiona on the panel are Darren Jones, Julia Lopez, Mo Gawdat, Laura Gilbert, and Victor Riparbelli Join #bbcqt, 9pm on @BBCiPlayer, @BBCSounds, and @BBCNews, 10:40pm on @BBCOne Apply to be in the audience here:

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“My name is Amos Goldberg. I am an Israeli Professor of Holocaust Studies. For nearly 30 years I have researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence. And I want to tell whoever is willing to listen that what’s happening now in Gaza is a genocide. A year ago when October 7th happened, like all Israelis I was in shock. It was a war crime and a crime against humanity. 1200 people - more than 800 of them civilians - were killed in one day. Children and the elderly were among those taken hostage. Communities were destroyed. It was outrageous, traumatizing, personal. Like most Israelis, I know people who were killed, who lost loved ones or whose loved ones were taken hostage. But immediately afterwards came Israel’s response and within weeks thousands of civilians were killed in Gaza. It took me some time to digest what was unfolding before my eyes. It was agonizing to confront that reality. I was reluctant to call it a genocide. But if you read Raphael Lemkin – the Jewish-Polish legal scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ and was the major driving force behind the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention – what is happening in Gaza now is exactly what he had in mind when he spoke about genocide. It does not need to look like the Holocaust to be a genocide. Each genocide looks different and not all involve killing of millions or the entire group. The United Nations Genocide Convention explicitly asserts that genocide is the act of deliberately destroying a group in whole or in part. Those are the words. But there does need to be a clear intent. And indeed, there are clear indications of intent to destroy Gaza: Israel’s leaders - including the prime minister and the minister of defence - and many high-ranking military officers, media personalities, rabbis, as well as ordinary soldiers were very open about what they wanted to achieve. There were countless documented incitements to turn the whole of Gaza into rubble and claims that there are no innocent people living there. A radical atmosphere of dehumanization of the Palestinians prevails in Israeli society to an extent that I can’t remember in my 58 years of living here. Now that vision has been enacted. Tens of thousands of innocent children, women and men have been killed. Over a hundred thousand were wounded. There is a near total destruction of infrastructure, intentional starvation and blocking of humanitarian aid. There are mass graves and reliable testimony of summary executions. Children that were shot by snipers. All the universities and almost all hospitals are gone. Almost all the population is displaced. There have been numerous bombings of civilians in so-called ‘safe zones’. Gaza does not exist anymore. It is completely destroyed. Thus, the outcome fits perfectly with the stated intentions of Israel’s leadership. Lemkin - that scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ - described two phases of a genocide. The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called ‘imposition of the national pattern’ of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements. And therefore, I have come to the conclusion that this is exactly what a genocide looks like. We don’t teach about genocides in order to realize it retrospectively. We teach about it in order to prevent it and to stop it. But like in every other case of genocide in history right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world. But reality cannot be denied. So yes, it is a genocide. And once you come to this conclusion you cannot remain silent.” - Statement to Led By Donkeys, December 2024 - Photo: Parliament Square, London, 8.40am, 4th December 2024

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

When you go for a jog?

Andrew Neil @afneil

3 months ago

Just like Andy Burnham, when I go for a jog I invariably find there’s a TV crew in the vicinity. It is SO annoying. 🤣😂

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Repost if you’d like me to represent the UK at #Eurovision 2027.

THIS is how to articulate the argument against the continuing unconscionable actions of the Israeli genocidal apartheid state. My thanks to Dr Myriam Francois for her words of truth. 🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZNRtdGMhF/

Absolutely vile. When will other media organisations report on this story?

NYTimes Communications @NYTimesPR

3 months ago

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