The Labour leadership is now positioning itself to the right of the Tories on economic policy and refusing to rule out opposing Rishi Sunak hiking taxes on big businesses - and specifically those who have profiteered from the pandemic.
The Red Wall? The polling consistently shows Labour to Tory voters are to the left on economics - which the Tories are adeptly exploiting.
So even by crude political logic, what on earth is the strategy
There's growing frustration among shadow ministers about this, who fear the Labour leader's office lack politics and veto any talk of Labour supporting tax rises, even if it means being outflanked by the Tories from the left.
It's exhausting debating lockdown sceptics who point to economic damage to prematurely cut restrictions.
We have one of the world's worst death tolls AND recessions because we repeatedly locked down too late.
The virus is the threat to the economy. How has this not been learnt!
When people say "It's easy to support lockdown measures when it's not your business or job you're worried about."
But not locking down quickly means infections spiral out of control, so you have to impose longer, harsher restrictions which cause more damage to businesses or jobs
It's ridiculous that I still find myself debating this on TV after nearly a year of this total nightmare. How is it not completely obvious that not suppressing the virus leads to a worse economic shock in the medium and long term?
One of the most important themes in 'It's A Sin' was about gay/bi people and shame - caused by growing up in a society that saw gay/bi people as would-be sexual predators, violators of biological reality, threats to children, immoral, deviants, and generally undesirable.
That sense of shame afflicts lots of gay/bi people to varying degrees, and fuels higher levels of mental distress and, as a consequence, significantly higher risk of abusive relationships with drugs and alcohol.
While HIV rates remain significantly higher among gay and bisexual men, treatments now allow those with HIV to live healthy lives.
Alcohol and drug abuse as a response to shame and trauma caused by homophobia is today a bigger problem in Western nations. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
One of the reasons Britain has one of the worst death tolls on earth is that senior journalists not only actively defended our government's catastrophic strategy in March 2020 - they actively ridiculed anyone who challenged it.
The government only got away with its catastrophic handling of the pandemic because so much of our media is servile to power, and will swallow anything the government feeds it.
Genuinely painful to read.
COVID-19 is the most lethal example of what happens when you live in a country where so much of the media acts as the propaganda arm of the Conservative Party.
Here's a thread about how completely impossible it is to have a rational conversation about Brexit.
In the 2016 referendum, I campaigned for Remain. Here's a speech I gave 3 and a half weeks before the referendum. A clip of it appeared in TV drama 'Brexit: The Uncivil War'.
I'm now told that actually I'm not a Remainer, despite campaigning for Remain in the referendum campaign in rallies in, say, Wolverhampton, London and Greater Manchester, arguing for Remain on Question Time, and writing multiple columns supporting Remain.
Here's a viral video I made before the referendum result, warning about the consequences of Tory Brexit.
Diane Abbott was wrong to share an online platform with apologists for China's atrocities against Muslim Uighurs. But this saga again underlines the grotesque double standards applied to a) the left and b) a Black woman.
Tony Blair is a former Prime Minister - obviously far more influential than Diane Abbott - and is guilty of two things:
1) Direct apologism for Chinese atrocities in Xinjiang province
2) A relationship with China's regime
In 2014, in an interview with a mouthpiece of China's regime, Blair made common cause between the West and China's "counter-terrorism" drive in Xinjiang, and denounced "double standards" applied to China which "is facing the same problem as we are facing." globaltimes.cn/content/866551…