To understand today’s ruling from Scotland’s highest civil court that trans women [with a GRC] are women, we have to wind back a little bit, to when the @Women5050 campaign launched, aiming to ensure that half of the people who represent us are women… They did a lot of great work, including putting pressure on every party at Holyrood to ensure it did a better job of getting women elected. Partly because of their work, 2021 saw a record number of women elected to the Scottish parliament: bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla…

Desmond Tutu was perhaps the great moral leader of his era. He refused to share a stage with Blair, calling him a war criminal. He called Israeli apartheid what it is. He said he’d rather go to hell than worship a homophobic God. Global celebrity never bent his morality. I was lucky enough to meet him once, and ask him if the honourary degree he was getting from @EdinUniMedia was a ‘Desmond’. He had the good grace to laugh like the joke was hilarious.

Much of the debate on the left has been about how Labour lost. But it’s just as important to understand how Johnson won. This is how: opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocra… Thank you for all the nice feedback about this piece. It’s my last piece of work this year, and it’s a summary of much of what I’ve been working on this year. But, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, as it’s Christmas, I’d like to say something else about it all...

This has been a pretty amazing election for @openDemocracy, and I’ve been really proud of all my colleagues & our contributors. Here’s a quick thread of some of the highlights. Enjoy! We (@PeterKGeoghegan & @SAThevoz) revealed how disaster capitalist Russian oligarchs have stepped up their funding of the Tories: opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

EXCLUSIVE: The Metropolitan Police have passed a file of criminal evidence against @BorisJohnson and Dominic Cummings' Vote Leave campaign to the Crown Prosecution Service: opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-… @BorisJohnson For us, this story began more than two years ago, when we got a tranche of Electoral Commission internal emails which revealed they had thought the Vote Leave/Darren Grimes relationship probably broke the rules. But they'd decided not to investigate: opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

“Humans” are to blame for environmental collapse says the most travelled human being ever. Not “capitalism”, or “the super-rich”. “humans”. Attenborough is allowed to be heard because he never challenges the people & systems which cause the crisis: metro.co.uk/2019/10/19/dav… Ok, we’re talking about Attenborough. In 2013, he argued that Ethiopians should be allowed to starve to death because there are, apparently, too many of them. google.co.uk/amp/s/www.inde…

EXCLUSIVE: @openDemocracy has been leaked documents from the Bolsonaro regime showing their strategy to destroy the Amazon Rainforest: opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaa… The slides, uncovered by our Latin American section @demoAbierta, show that Bolsonaro’s hate speech against indigenous Amazonian is a key part of their strategy to burn down the Amazon. #FightForTheAmazon

Priti Patel - a former lobbyists for British Tobacco and the murderous government of Bahrain - was forced to resign in 2017 because she’d effectively continued to act as a lobbyists while in office. If she becomes Home Secretary, expect more of the same: opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-… Boris Johnson’s campaign was run by a corporate lobbying firm which, until recently, was running a secretive global effort on behalf of Glencore to undermine environmental campaigners and renewable energy, & which brags about its ability to shape Brexit: opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocra…