The Times, and its Sunday edition, presents itself as Britain's flagship moderate newspaper.
It is in fact a rampantly racist and bigoted newspaper, which its leading figures such as @DAaronovitch deny but should be held accountable for.
Thread.
The Times claimed that a Christian child was "forced into Muslim foster care".
This was based on false claims.
The Times constantly publishes articles claiming anti-Muslim hatred is a "fiction".
Imagine a newspaper published an article headlined "Antisemitism is a fiction to shut down debate."
Melanie Phillips was forced to defend herself after far right terrorist Anders Breivik - who murdered dozens of young socialists on the grounds they were complicit with "Islamisation" - cited her extensively in his manifesto.
That didn't cause either Melanie Phillips or The Times to pause for thought.
Indeed, The Times has been forced to pay damages because of its anti-Muslim bigotry.
The Times is publishing articles demanding travellers have their ethnic minority stripped away from them and suffer a "relentless squeeze" on their lives instead.
The Times almost obsessively targets trans people in the most inflammatory way possible.
The Times is an extremist newspaper masquerading as moderate and "liberal". It's a case study in how bigotry and racism is acceptable and mainstream in this country - and until it's challenged, nothing will change.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
There’s not enough discussion about how Israeli apartheid and the racist oppression of the Palestinian people is cheered on by the far right, up to and including Trump, who mixed antisemitism with smearing women of colour like AOC as antisemites for supporting Palestinian justice
Watching right wing extremists with long histories of racism grandstand as anti racists because they support Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people is the most nauseating case study in political gaslighting of the modern era.
When I was targeted by Tommy Robinson supporters wearing MAGA caps in College Green, they screamed at me that I was a Jew hater and a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah.
That’s why, when I was attacked by fascists, I partly held “moderates” who demonise the left responsible.
Responsibility for the Hartlepool catastrophe - and it is a catastrophe - belongs with the Labour leadership.
In 2015, Labour won 35.6% of the vote, less than 2019.
In 2017, Labour won 52.5%.
Even in the 2019 disaster, Labour won 37.7%.
In 2021, Labour won *28.7%*.
The argument "Labour only won because the Brexit Party split the vote in 2019" is completely disingenuous.
In 2015, UKIP won a higher share of the vote than the Brexit Party in 2019.
In 2017, many of those UKIP voters defected to Labour, hence Labour won over half the vote.
If people who voted UKIP in 2015 could vote Labour in 2017, why did Labour fail to win over Brexit Party voters in 2021 - especially given Brexit is no longer the main issue?
It gets worse - Labour has *lost* many of the people who voted for it during the 2019 disaster.
Labour won 52.5% of the vote in Hartlepool in 2017. They won nearly 5 points more than the result below in 2019.
Labour isn't just failing to win back 2017 Labour voters who voted for the Brexit Party in 2019 - it's bleeding support to leftwing parties.
All Keir Starmer's very loud and well connected cheerleaders are currently doing is making excuses.
If this poll is right, Labour under his leadership are doing considerably worse than 2019, when Brexit dominated all of British politics and Corbyn was undeniably very unpopular.
Labour didn't win in 2017, as we are all told a lot. But given it did win 40%, won seats for the first time since 1997, had the biggest surge in votes since 1945, *and* won thumping majorities in seats like Hartlepool, lessons have to be learned from that - or Labour is sunk.
It's extremely insulting to LGBTQ people to be completely dishonest like this. Keir Starmer didn't just visit the church, he made it the centrepiece of Labour's Easter campaign video. What is achieved by knowingly twisting reality like this?
It would be better all round if Labour just said "Sorry, we didn't google it, if we'd realised, we wouldn't have used this particular church as the centrepiece of a campaign video".
But they're so scared of being labelled incompetent they gaslight LGBTQ people instead
Labour's problem is this incident comes on top of not addressing rampant transphobia in the party and parachuting into Hartlepool a candidate who lauded Saudi Arabia after its gay murdering dictatorship paid to fly him over there.
I was going to ignore this, but actually it needs to be addressed.
A gay father who co-parents children with a lesbian couple celebrated having kids, I expressed an interest in also similarly co-parenting, and our timelines are now full of anti-trans activists screaming at us.
The utter obsessive poisonousness of the anti-trans cult on this website is certainly something to behold!
246 retweets for someone dismissing a gay father's co-parents as "reproductive workers" and his children as "human commodities".
Glad to hear that police officers in Bristol did not suffer broken bones or a punctured lung - and given this was widely reported to underline the violent nature of the protests, it's important that these details are publicised.