flamingos

Two years on and we're still here, go us!

The BBC’s Director General Tim Davie and other senior bosses at the corporation have drawn up plans to win over voters of Reform UK, due to a belief that their news and drama output is creating “low trust issues” with supporters of Nigel Farage’s party.

Minutes of a meeting of the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee in March, seen by Byline Times, show that BBC News CEO Deborah Turness gave a presentation in which she discussed plans to alter “story selection” and “other types of output, such as drama” in order to win the trust of Reform voters.

The committee also identified “the importance of local BBC teams” to their plan to win over supporters of Farage.

Members of the committee, which includes former GB News executive Robbie Gibb, discussed the presentation and agreed to give an “update on progress” towards their aim at a later date.

The UK's Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) recently published interim update to their code of practice that seeks to segregate trans people from wider society and is trying to press this through with an illegally short six week consultation period.

As part of this consultation, the EHRC have to take responses from the public about how these changes will affect them or people in their lives. The people at the Good Law Project have put together a form to make this easy, so if you live in the UK (trans or not) then I kindly ask you to go through and fill it in:

https://action.goodlawproject.org/ehrc

The Labour faction influencing Downing Street’s pitch to Reform UK voters has urged ministers to “root out DEI”.

An article from the Blue Labour campaign group, titled What is to be Done, calls for the government to legislate against diversity, equity and inclusion, echoing the rightwing backlash from Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.
[…]
Urging the party to renew its “covenant with the British people”, Blue Labour’s article said: “We are proud of our multiracial democracy and we utterly reject divisive identity politics, which undermines the bonds of solidarity between those of different sexes, races and nationalities.

“We should legislate to root out DEI in hiring practices, sentencing decisions and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.”
[…]
Blue Labour calls for lower migration in the same article in which it takes aim at DEI, saying: “Immigration is not a distraction or a culture war issue; it is the most fundamental of political questions, a cause of social fragmentation, and the basis of our broken political economy.

“We should drastically reduce immigration, reducing low-skill immigration by significantly raising salary thresholds; closing the corrupt student visa mill system; and ending the exploitation of the asylum system, if necessary prioritising domestic democratic politics over the rule of international lawyers.”

In May, it emerged that net migration almost halved in 2024.

A Reform UK election candidate standing in the postponed North Northants Council (NNC) election for Higham Ferrers could trigger an immediate by-election if he wins the seat after he moved to China.

Alan Beswick had been on the ballot paper as one of the two Reform UK candidates for the May 1 elections but, due to the death of Liberal Democrat John Ratcliffe just before polling day, the election in the two-seat Higham Ferrers ward was postponed until June 12.

Names of four nominated Reform candidates were submitted to NNC’s election team. A party spokesman says Mr Beswick’s circumstances changed but they were unable to remove his nomination.

Toot

Bluesky

Labour has called on Nigel Farage to take action after an image emerged from a Reform local election stunt depicting female cabinet ministers as cows in an abattoir.

The roadside setup in Hertsmere, Hertfordshire, shows deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, chancellor Rachel Reeves and education secretary Bridget Phillipson depicted as cows waiting to be slaughtered.

The stunt, pictured by a passerby and passed to The Independent, was damned as “dehumanising” and “misogynistic”. Reform local election stunt depicting leading female cabinet ministers as cows in an abattoir.
[…]
Reform did not initially answer questions on the issue, but responding to The Independent at a press conference in London, Mr Farage said: “All sorts of appalling things get said and done by people fighting in elections, at local and national level, and we get it done to us.

“If one or two of our people do it to them, maybe they think it’s funny. It probably isn’t very funny.

“I can’t pretend we’re perfect. What I can tell you is that one of the ways in which we have professionalised this party is to put people through a vetting process. And I think we’ve come up with a slate of elected councillors and mayors and a new MP that we can genuinely be very proud of.

“If there is the odd lapse in taste, then I regret it, but it’s kind of called politics.”

Good day all, in response to the increase in transphobia we've experience since the For Women Scotland v Scotland Supreme Court decision, seemingly a mix of genuine malice and people tripping up with a topic they're unfamiliar with, I've taken the initiative to write some guidelines on how to engage in the topic and clearing up some common misconceptions.

https://guide.feddit.uk/politics/transphobia.html

I'm not all that happy with them, I want something more comprehensive but my time has been pretty taxed lately and I don't want my perfectionism to stand in the way of having these out. If there's any issues, glaring omissions or whatnot, then please let me know or make a pull request here.