The Burn Bullock pub in Mitcham is yet another example of a pub that had been closed by its developers for 10 years, which they tried to turn into accommodation (breaking planning permission), and has now burned down. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/… In 2023, the owners were issued with a planning enforcement notice after breaching planning permission due to "unauthorised material change of use of the public house main building and ancillary car parking to a large House of Multiple Occupation". merton.gov.uk/system/files/E…

Counter protesters starting to gather at the Great Exhibition pub to stop Turning Point and Laurence Fox having a free hand to harass people. No sign of the far right yet. Too cold and wet for them maybe? Nick Tenconi, Turning Point’s leader has turned up.

Tomorrow morning fake vicar Calvin Robinson and failed actor Lozza Fox are pitching up in South London for the latest round of their culture war grift targeting a drag show that is not even taking place. If you're in the area, please come and counter protest these villains. Apparently they are putting leaflets through the doors of places in the neighbourhood.

Who funds Turning Point UK? Well, probably some cash from US dark money funders who fund TPUSA, like the Donors' Trust. But in the UK, they're so strapped for cash that the UK arm runs an ongoing 'emergency' Crowdfunder. Lots of people donate small amounts to it, and you can see many of their names in the supporters' tab. Mr J Dale is the only person who has donated since April 2022, and seems to have a monthly direct debit for £5.

Pleased to announce that after navigating Italian bureaucracy for only a year and a half, I now have Italian residency and will be taking unearned pride in all aspects of Italian culture (forza azzuri!) except for fascism which was a mistake by guys who didn't love pizza enough. Shame that my beloved Azzuri did not qualify for Qatar where we could whip the English once again, but I believe that they intentionally failed to qualify as a protest against the use of slave labour by the Qatari state.

Worked on this story with @WritesBright about how we got endless threats of legal action when looking into the business interests of Tory peer and lingerie tycoon Baroness Mone. bylinetimes.com/2022/05/31/cha… Thanks to Sam and the Byline lawyers for stewarding this one over the line. There's a good public interest in showing how threatening some businesspeople can be in an effort to dampen freedom of the press with threats of expensive legal action.

Quite pleased with the @LeftFootFwd newsletter I did this week on the local elections in Essex, where independent parties are attracting disillusioned Tory voters angry at local issues. Sign up to the newsletter here: leftfootforward.org/the-look-left-…

Presumably he will not be talking about the criminalisation of protest or the discrimination suffered by minority groups, but about how he's not allowed to make fun of gay people.

https://twitter.com/pressgazette/status/1372605331482755072

Freedom of Speech does not protect hate speech. It is a right that guarantees your freedom to criticise power and authority without ending up in jail, as many thousands of people around the world do every year. To debase this right to mock the powerless is a perversion of it.

So few people understand how racism works. Everyone's afraid of being called a racist, yet they often repeat racist tropes and then go 'but i can't be a racist because...' Sharon Osborne did this the other day. Racism is a system which we can all fall into the trap of repeating. Stop thinking that racism is a disease you can catch, it's a system of power which you can repeat parts of unwittingly unless you constantly analyse your actions and behaviour. It's the fascism inside your head that makes you love and want power.

I have been compiling a giant spreadsheet of government contracts responding to Coronavirus since the end of May, and the data available on them from the contractsfinder site is opaque and partial. The lack of transparency smells of corruption.

https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1289945852228689923

Not only has the government no released enough public data, but it's tried to centralise data in a way which may be politically useful to the government and its cronies later. The government doesn't seem to care about the pandemic as much as the political capital it can make.

Getting to know our new Tory overlords part 1:

The guy who wants 'problem tenants' to do forced labour.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Ander… Part 2: Sally-Ann Hart

Being investigated by her party for anti-Semitism.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally-Ann…