Robert Saunders

Hello members of the House of Lords 👋 Welcome to the debate on jury trials. Pull up a seat - everyone disagrees and the entire thing is on fire. But, sadly for you, it lands in your lap today👇🏼

💯The case for democracy is not that voters are always right, or wise, or good. It's that they can correct their mistakes. That's why it's so dangerous to have billionaires controlling the media or regulating the flow of information. It shuts down the immune system of democracy.

Exactly right. It's why the idea of "UK PLC" was so grotesque - as if a nation was just a limited company, that could be wound up, taken over, merged or dissolved, with no roots in the past and no responsibility to the future.

I feel sorry for Carrick, who seems like a decent man, with very little ego, who really loves the club and has never joined the "legends" soiling the bed. He's probably not a good enough manager, but United have become the Bermuda Triangle of world football. Even Pep, Cruyff & Fergie would struggle

What’s the betting tonight’s banished player still turns up to breakfast in the morning, having not quite twigged what’s happened?

Some good news (from the National Crime Survey, h/t frasernelson.substack.com/p/lawless-br...)

When the tech-bros and their allies attack "the establishment" or "the elite", what they mean is "any site of power - including the democratic state - that might restrict their own actions". The alternative is not "freedom"; it is power for themselves to make decisions otherwise made by the state.

In case it needs saying, the headline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!" did not appear in the fashion pages.

A "severe" drought has been declared in the UK for the first time in history. #ClimateEmergency www.bbc.com/news/article...

So they're at it again 🙄 Torturing valid HMRC data to create wildly misleading headlines, designed to invoke fear and anger about immigrants. Same old, same old... (and you'll see just how old shortly!) 🧵1/28

Where should a student look for good *primary* sources on Goths and Goth subculture in late-twentieth-century Britain? You don't get a lot of ginger Goths, so it was never really my world.

Really looking forward to speaking on this panel on 26 October, along with Kathleen Burk, @will-davies.bsky.social, and Stephanie Flanders. All welcome, sign up 👇

Catholic Archbishop for the Military Services with pastoral responsibility for US soldiers issues statement saying Catholic military personnel are morally obligated to refuse to participate in a potential livestreamed execution of Nidal Hasan. www.milarch.org/archbishop-b...

"Christian nationalism" in the UK is essentially a post-religious identity. Unlike the evangelical right in the US, it has no theological content, does not require belief in God & demands no moral or religious commitment. It reduces Christianity to a cultural "heritage" to be "defended" from Islam

It's become a catchphrase for Badenoch that "We have to be SERIOUS" - and she's right about that. Yet every announcement is like this: a burst whoopie-cushion of wrong numbers, bungled data and stuff someone found on Google. The gulf between rhetoric and reality is positively cavernous.

Have just spotted the most cataclysmic typo I have ever committed in an email, which instantly turned a blameless sentence into a completely foul one. The recipient must have thought I was out of my mind. I may never go near a computer again.

This will be brilliant! Do come.

The coverage of Badenoch in the Tory press is staggeringly sycophantic. Like @lewisgoodall.com, I suspect this is counterproductive. It cocoons the party within a fantasy world in which it's smashing the polls, laying waste to Labour & preparing for govt, while concealing the peril of its position

I'm feeling bad about the mouse in my office, after taking away the small bag of nuts he'd chewed into. I know he's still in there, as the trail of little pellets demonstrates, but they're getting fewer and further between.

Next month, I'm going to be launching my new @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social book at the @mileendinstitute.bsky.social! Speakers include the voice of Radio 4 Carolyn Quinn, @politicalquarterly.bsky.social's Ben Jackson and a MYSTERY Scottish politician. Do come! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/now-or-nev...

I understand the desire to speak well of the dead, and am sure that Archer, like all of us, was a mix of good and bad. But the tendency to indulge dishonesty, so long as it's by a loveable scamp, has done real damage to British politics. We should be a bit wary of the "isn't he a card?" thing.

Last night, @mileendinstitute.bsky.social co-hosted the first in a new series of lectures by @qmulsse.bsky.social's Professors of Practice. In this special event hosted by @tomchidwick.bsky.social, Lord Clement-Jones explored how universities can shape, assess and showcase graduates for the future.

The ability to pour hundreds of millions of pounds into a loss-making TV channel, bent on wrenching British politics sharply to the right, is yet another of the ways in which extreme wealth is trying to remake UK democracy. It needs to be part of any serious conversation about political funding.

This is an excellent piece - do read.

This peculiar analogy confuses creativity & replication. We already have "machine-made" books: they're not copied out by hand but printed on presses, just as clothes might be stitched mechanically. But getting a machine to do the writing - the ideas, the thoughts, the "design" - is very different.

Burnham's speech marks perhaps the best opportunity to replace First Past the Post since 1918. I joined @jonathanfreedland.bsky.social & @lucyfisher.ft.com recently on "The Long View" to explore the history of electoral reform in Britain - & the lessons we might learn. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...