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One for @Leon, if the maggots haven't done for him...


(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges

Slightly long post. But there's a lot of concern on the moderate Left today about the Robinson event. Fine. But if you actually want to do something about it you have to understand four things:

1) To deal with the underlaying causes requires hard policy proscriptions on areas like immigration. And you will have to endorse positions that make you instinctively uncomfortable. But they are unavoidable.

2) The Blue Sky experiment has failed. You may hate Musk. But this is the most influential platform on the globe. If you abandon it to Robinson and his allies you have already lost.

https://x.com/DPJHodges/status/1967502268833403136

The last point is very true. Abandoning X en masse is huge mistake for the Left. There's many non-politically aligned people around the world, for whom it just represents their daily reality, and are posting on other issues.

If you abandon the political dimension of that global meeting-space entirely to the hatd right, that just becomes many politically unaligned people's sense of objective reality, and also majority opinion.

Musk has so twised the algorithms to repeat what he wants them to that I don't think the absence of some people on the left makes any difference.

Starmer’s new position is that he “knew about the emails from Mandelson to Epstein after Epstein’s conviction” but HE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WAS IN THEM

So he didn’t think to ask?

Next it will be “yes I read the emails where Mandelson praises Epstein as the worlds greatest pedo but AS I READ THEM SOMEONE COVERED MY SCREEN WITH VASELINE SO THE ACTUAL WORDS WERE BLURRED”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/15/did-morgan-mcsweeney-hide-mandelson-evidence-from-starmer/

It’s a very lame defence. I knew this person was chummy with Epstein, he proved to be even more chummy with Epstein which was absolutely beyond the pale (not beforehand though, no) and I knew there were some emails doing the rounds but I hadn’t read them so I wasn’t quite sure how chummy they were so I didn’t bother finding that out until after I had to publicly defend him.

It’s a classic politician’s excuse, in the real world there’s not much of a fag paper between it all.

The reason he appointed Mandelson isn't sayable by him - he judged the need to suck up to Donald Trump to be more important than maintaining normal standards of propriety. State visit, the same. Lammy Vance, the same. Rutte "daddy", the same. Euro leaders dash to Washington after Alaska, the same. Pakistan and the nobel peace prize, the same. There's hundreds of examples from around the world. It's a big global theme right now. All a bit pathetic, if you ask me, and counterproductive, but they're all at it so I suppose I must be wrong and it's very worthwhile.

Kruger was a big beast inasmuch as there were any left in the Cons party. Good thinker, not my cup of tea but I get it.

Perhaps he thinks he can shape Reform around himself and the "drunken sailor spending" comment was one thing that made Reform approach him to define their spending plans rather than criticise them.

I doubt Nigel gives a flying fig about spending plans. His voters are all convinced that the mass expulsion of immigrants will rectify every financial problem. When that particular panacea fails to work under a Reform government, its leadership (as they did with Brexit) will just move on to something else.

(Guardian)
..The last question at the press conference came from my colleague Aletha Adu.

Q: [To Kruger] Do you take back your claim that Reform UK would spend money like drunken sailors?

Kruger said he was confident that the party would be able to come up with fully-costed, workable plans.

He said when he criticised Reform’s spending plans recently, he was referring to their welfare plans. But at the Reform conference, Farage committed the party to welfare reform, he said.

...

Farage ended by saying there would be a press conference next week where “we will show you how we propose to save huge amounts of money”.

Nigel needs to be careful there. What stops Labour from nicking his ideas?

I think he'll guard against that by making sure they're not worth nicking.

I really want a Charlie Kirk hater to post a video clip of Charlie being vile or hateful

I wasn't a big fan, but I'd seen a few clips of his videos. He seemed intelligent and friendly, but rather self assured and too Christian for my liking

Since his death I've seen more videos than I could ever watch. But where I have watched he was never hateful, or in any other way vile

He has a self or Jesus assured arrogance that he's right, but he's also kind and friendly to everyone he debates

I struggle to understand how he could have possibly inspired such deadly hatred

I am not a Kirk hater.
His politics were very far from mine, but I don't think he was a genuinely evil man in the manner of a Trump or Miller.

And while you characterisation if him isn't a million miles from the truth, it's also wrong to pretend that he was the kind of right wing paragon some describe.

For example.

Charlie Kirk: Joe Biden should be “put in prison and/or given the death penalty for crimes against America”
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-joe-biden-should-be-put-prison-andor-given-death-penalty-crimes-against

The thing that really annoyed me about Charlie Kirk was that - after demonising transgender people as mass shooters - he was asked how many school shooters had been transgender, and he replied:

Too Many

He wasn't interested in the truth. He was interested in pushing his angle.

Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.

Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).

To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.

Would be interested to know (though probably unknowable) how many of the marchers on Saturday attend religious events of any kind. In my own part of the world sectarian marchers tend to identify along religious lines but I hae ma doots about how much genuine religious observance is attached. The Christian nationalism (in the UK at least) seems emptily performative, though I'm willing to be surprused by news that Tommy Robinson cuts up his coke with a communion wafer.

Pro-Christian is an alternative way of saying anti-Muslim.

'I'm no of fan of Christ our saviour and lord, but at least he never said anything positive about Muslims.'

Phillips sounds a bit confused, it seems very unlikely that many immigrants, christian or otherwise, were on the TR march.

It's an attempt by the terminally online to import American style political Christianity, the Charlie Kirk tendency.

For a bunch of "patriots" they seem very keen on us copying America.

It is partly that but perhaps also that many marchers feel the loss not of Christianity per se but of what we might call cultural Christianity. They do not go to church but want to know it is there, and has not been turned into a mosque or posh flats.

ETA and replacing HMQ with HMK probably has not helped in this regard. Another mistake by Liz Truss.

If you watch the rally though, the Christianity they're pushing is not cultural Christianity that anyone in Britain would recognise. It wasn't a rousing rendition of Abide with Me, it was hyper evangelical Christianity that is being imported from America. When I was watching it some of the speakers were trying to get the audience to chant "Christ is King" and most of them just looked baffled

I was confirmed into the C of E by the Bishop of Durham and was a server for a few years attending many communion sevices, and at one time was able to recite the whole communion service without reference to the prayer book

My wife was a member of the Brethren, but found them too extreme not least when they would not allow a piano at our wedding, notwithstanding my wife had played regularly at the Deep Sea Fisherman's Mission

It resulted in us being married in the Church of Scotland

We both have Christian upbringings and outlooks, but simply reject narrow minded prejudiced opinions largely taken out of contact from the Bible

I do wonder if these so called Christians really stop and ask

'What would Jesus do?'

Yes I'm a lay preacher and (non serving) Elder of my local United Reformed Church. The Christianity that is being pushed at these rallies is not one I recognise either. It's the kind of Evangelical political Christian Nationalism that we see in the States. It seems to me that the bigwigs in the alt right are swallowing it as part of the whole MAGA package.

I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.

Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.

https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-British-people-have-never-been-outside-the-UK

More startling (to me at least) is that the proportion who have moved in their lives actually seems to be declining:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=proportion+in+uk+who+have+never+moved&udm=50&fbs=AIIjpHxU7SXXniUZfeShr2fp4giZ1Y6MJ25_tmWITc7uy4KIeqDdErwP5rACeJAty2zADJjYuUnSkczEhozYdaq1wZrEheAY38UjnRKVLYFDREDmzxDQH5cf73Nv5SUwLly1WG01kd0x6xwqRzi4OBnEW65tn62XvLTlOVUiuqU_-c52rQSPbzBVwa4gwPo8bjR3cgzknkm5OeDockKv0WDUfN-v0gyB1Q&ved=2ahUKEwjuov_8uNqPAxWYXEEAHZRtBCkQ0NsOegQIJxAA&aep=10&ntc=1&mstk=AUtExfAgBu8TSUCBA5AbdV9puUIn33i5GC3Iw97kdlmw1YWbQLeJSm9KI6RMgPs2MgXr61ae5boVs5ItsO99FhBdwcSZmpDgbJLM5h5ClODIh2DeyhujPEz5Xzdm0ds5KSywGOnQdykqpy12BO8hlQjaGUxXt60EhgkRk9Y&csuir=1

As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.

I don't want to eat any of this foreign muck. I'll stick to pizza, kebabs and curry.