After a leak revealed that the British Ambassador to the USA had called Trump "inept, insecure and incompetent" (leading to the ambassador's resignation and a round of Twitter insults between Trump and senior Tory officials), London's Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu publicly warned journalists not to publish government leaks, threatening to imprison them if they do: "The publication of leaked communications, knowing the damage they have caused or are likely to cause may also be a criminal matter. — Read the rest

Boris Johnson — a racist, sexist, homophobic lying buffoon who has been repeatedly caught out using lies to sway public opinion — is now, incredibly, tipped to become the leader of the Conservative Party and thus the Prime Minister of the UK (this is because outgoing PM Theresa May totally bungled Brexit, and the UK's form of parliamentary democracy lets the ruling party fill the PM's seat with a vote of party members, and the British Tories have become the swivel-eyed racist loony party, and Boris is the perfect nominee for King of the Racist Swivel-Eyed Loons).

The world's law enforcement agencies have a terrible blind spot when it comes to far-right, white supremacist terror groups, treating them as unimportant lone wolves despite their prolific and bloody acts of violence.

Sarah Leo is a visual data journalist at The Economist. In this Medium piece, she gives some past examples of Economist charts and graphs that were confusing or misleading and shows her revisions.

Mistake: Truncating the scale

This chart shows the average number of Facebook likes on posts by pages of the political left.

Prime Minister Theresa May's "Brexit" deal with the EU crashed to defeat for the second time Tuesday. Even with the now-likely prospect of Britain exiting the EU without a deal (or not exiting it at all) the sprawling agreement fell 149 votes short in the House of Commons. — Read the rest

The Yellow Vest movement, like a lot of anti-establishment movements, is a complex phenomenon, filled with both right- and left-wing elements, changing character from place to place and even day to day.

Jeremy Corbyn favors a public vote to ”prevent a damaging Tory Brexit.”

I first encountered Jeremy Hardy as a panelist on Radio 4's News Quiz, where he frequently reduced me to tears of hysterical laughter; I went on to buy the full back-catalogue of his old Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation shows and devoured them, going back for several re-listens.

British political satirist Jonathan Pie (previously) has a pointed question for Tory voters on the eve of the omnishambolic Brexit collapse: "Are you happy with your purchase? "Because this is what you get when you vote Tory."

Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit plan was not expected to pass, but it was brutally murdered in a far larger margin of defeat than was expected: 432 to 202. This is the largest parliamentary defeat for a sitting government in history. — Read the rest

Spanish politics have been a mess for a decade, since the financial crisis triggered brutal austerity that gutted Spanish services and quality of life to ensure that bondholders did not suffer an interruption in debt service; then came the Catalan independence vote, the violent suppression of same, then Madrid seized control over the autonomous region of Catalonia.

Prospective voters in Redford, part of the East London district of Ilford, found a flyer from the local Conservative Party in their mailboxes, in which the boilerplate text, which opens with "what we're doing/have done for ward/area name" had not been replaced with local talking points.

Oklahoma teachers will walk out en masse this coming Monday, despite a historic agreement from the ailing state legislature to give them a long-overdue pay raise which will be paid for by increasing taxes on the state's previously untouchable oil and gas industry.

The Getting to the Future First:
How Britain can lead the
Fourth Industrial Revolution report was created by Alan Mak, Conservative Member of Parliament for Havant, and it's a laughable compendium of trickle-down nonsense proposing that if all dividends from automation flow to capital, somehow everyone in the world will share in the benefits.

Thirty years ago, the collapse of the USSR and the ascendancy of the neoliberal policies of Thatcher, Reagan, Pinochet and Mulroney sent the left into retreat, and what has passed for the left ever since has been dominated by Bill Clinton/Tony Blair-style "triangulation" or "humanized capitalism," whose core hypothesis might be summed up as, "Rather than allowing 150 white male CEOs to run the world, we should ensure that at least half of them are women and/or people of color."

In Public opinion in the post-Brexit era, the centre-right thinktank Legatum reveals that 83% of Britons favour re-nationalising water companies; 77% want to re-nationalise electricity, and 76% want to re-nationalize the railroads.

The UK — like most countries — excludes "inactive workers" (students, new parents, people who don't want a job) from its unemployment figures, but "inactive" is such a slippery concept that it can paper over huge cracks in the labor market.

In an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn, Neil Wilson explains how Labour can frame its policy on student debt forgiveness after they take power and abolish tuition fees.

On my first day at Michigan State University in 1992, a fellow student called me a "liberal" and I was shocked: as a Canadian who was often to the left of the social-democratic New Democratic Party, I identified "liberal" with the Liberal Party, a centre-right political party that had once imposed martial law in Canada.

Theresa May, aloof and clueless, decided not to meet victims of the Grenfell tower fire. Her political rival Jeremy Corbyn and the Queen, however, each managed to fit them in. So May, accustomed as she is to politically transparent changes of heart, decided to meet some victims. — Read the rest