Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Yeah, the Scottish Greens are separate and all that. But they're close enough for Zack to go up and campaign for them. Here they and the SNP show their commitment to openness that they demanded of Labour on Mandelson. And lots of Labour backbenchers went along with it.

And here's an SNP MSP getting stuck in on Mandelson. Note the massive issue of statecraft not involved.

And there's more. How can this possibly be a resignation offence? Like the bloke who had already held three Cabinet roles under Brown and been Shadow Foreign Secretary for 4 years would have been a no hoper without Mandelson recommending him?

There's no longer even any pretence that there are serious issues involved. It's pure red meat for partisans to shout "pedo" on social media.

More of the sunlight is best disinfectant principled politics from the people Labour rebels happily joined up with.

More advice for the Government from the Guardian. You might have thought you saw the actual Blair pop up and tell the Government it was doing everything wrong, and the actual Prime Minister respond fairly robustly to it. But apparently, the problem is that "Zombie Blairites" are in charge.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... their-grip

Zombie Blairites still have British politics in their grip – it’s time to break free
Aditya Chakrabortty

This government is the worst ever, Part 203, by The Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... port-warns

The poorest and most nature-deprived communities in England will be further left behind in their access to green spaces if proposed changes to planning laws go ahead, a report finds.

More than 7.4 million people in England live in areas completely devoid of immediate biodiversity, including 1.4 million children under 15, the report commissioned by a number of wildlife and environmental NGOs says.

The severe nature poverty is driven not by the rural-urban divide, but by extreme environmental disparities within towns and cities, and new “loopholes” for developers will exacerbate it, it says.

So where's the most unequal borough? Croydon. Which you might have noticed is inner city on its inner side and green belt on its outer side. So we can make all of the borough inner city density, right? Something tells me The Guardian would be less than happy with that too. What should they do? Knock down a load of homes in the more urban parts of Croydon?

As ever, building homes is presented as a sinister lobby group, who con their way to loopholes. Elsewhere in the paper we'll doubtless find something about how awful it is to reduce net immigration.

Richard Benwell, chief executive of the Wildlife and Countryside Link, said: “Nature should not be a luxury reserved for the wealthy. England’s poorest communities are already being left with the worst access to nature, and biodiversity net gain loopholes are further exacerbating this problem.

Now consider the effect of a lack of homes. Anything about "luxury reserved for the rich" come to mind in that context?

George Monbiot is a great one for talking about digging beneath narratives of think tanks and the media. But if he likes the headline, he laps it straight up.
As soon as I saw that bit about Croydon being supposedly the worst place, my sensors were twitching. I haven't spent much time in Croydon, but I have been through it on the train and did notice that it had a fair bit of green space at one end of it, and not very much at the other. You could change a few lines on a map, and put inner Croydon in Lambeth and put outer Croydon into Surrey. All those inequalities within the borough would be gone. I don't get what the importance of these fairly different areas both being in Croydon is supposed to be.

And that picture. Looks deprived, but there's lots of grass. Is it nature deprived? Looks like a poor part of any town. What's the implication? Greedy developers coming for that grass, to whack up luxury flats?

Talking of George, this was another goody of his. He's never heard of the Cabinet and Cabinet responsibility apparently. Not that Streeting was unique in his perceptiveness, I'm sure. Lammy knew it as well, but the decision was likely taken that they had to be careful because of Trump.

Monbiot is good on some stuff, but so relentlessly right on he verges on parody. It takes some real ego to slag off David Attenborough for not being environmental enough.

I'm finding him increasingly bad. A consultation where the government said it might be prepared to agree mutual standards on import of chemicals with some trade partners was a race to the bottom. And an advisory group with some people from rightwing think tanks on them on growth (where they do have some good ideas) was handing the keys of the Treasury over to the people behind Liz Truss's budget.

I give Monbiot credit for taking on war crimes apologists on the left, and he did get lots of nastiness about that. I wonder if he's increasing stridency is about that.

I'm struggling with the FFS here. Ed Davey, Zack Polanski, Jeremy Corbyn are all on Twitter. All they do is fire out opinions. The Government has to impart information on what's happening. And they're supposed to do that without somewhere where people get information? What's Lammy said that's wrong?

When Polanski, Davey, Corbyn and all the rest decide to try and win a competitive by-election without Twitter, then I'll believe it's viable to get off it.

I'm not aware of any frontline politician who isn't on Twitter, why should the UK government be the only ones who aren't?

It's a cess pit, but a necessary one for HMG - unfortunately.

The replies to this. Government does something most people support, and all they get is silly comments about Scotrail (like there's some implicit insult to Scotland in what she said), and criticism that they haven't renationalized rolling stock and freight, and water, whatever the relevance of that is. I keep hearing that you can't get any of the Reform curious voters, but on this evidence there's no point bothering with this group either who doubtless see themselves as being the voters who should get everything they want from the Labour Government.

I dunno, maybe Andy Burnham can get the message out better.

Trivial I know, but <a> I'd be happier if it was just "British Railways" (none of this Johnson-style boosterism) and <b> the chosen livery didn't look like a GB News strap/lower third...

Loads of people on Bluesky demand that the government decamp and post there; if this is the response they get, frankly, why bother?

The Weeping Angel wrote: ↑Sun Jun 07, 2026 10:54 am Loads of people on Bluesky demand that the government decamp and post there; if this is the response they get, frankly, why bother?

Well, quite - the phrase "out of the frying pan and into the fire" comes readily to mind.

Bluesky seems to be - from what others are saying on here, anyway - turning into as much of a cesspit as X: just filled with a different kind of shit.

Meanwhile.