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richardbrophy.bsky.social
RichardB
@richardbrophy.bsky.social
770 followers 1.3K following 1K posts
Bit of a Debbie Downer
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richardbrophy.bsky.social
Labour’s communications policy is based on securing op-eds in newspapers which hate them, for a readership which does not exist. Everything operates according to a schedule which is so dated it is covered in cobwebs: a Sunday morning interview with Laura Kuenssberg, a place on Question Time, and a slot after 8am on the Today programme. There is no fresh thinking about how to reach a new set of voters, there is no attempt to find the people who can operate in that space. There are millions of eyeballs online and yet the vast majority of British political attention is spent on the dwindling audience on TV and in print. It’s mad, on a basic mathematical level. It’ll be even more mad when the voting age is lowered to 16.
November 9, 2025 at 8:45 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
Naturally. The British way.
'In the UK, there is a non-virtual contingency plan, or at least there was. If the internet shuts down, the people who know how it works will meet up in a pub outside London and decide what to do, says Murdoch.'
October 26, 2025 at 3:51 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
#Trump #WhiteHouse
For now, Trump’s priority is the ballroom he’s long demanded. In a sense, I can’t really blame him. It would be the perfect monument to his presidency. Nothing else could capture his arrogant sense of personal ownership over public goods and services; his blithe disregard for legal and procedural constraints; his zealous encouragement of oligarchy, corruption, and personalist rule; his reckless desecration of national sites; his utter lack of basic American civic beliefs; and his self-absorbed priorities.
October 26, 2025 at 3:10 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/9a1d3c1f-ebe8-4a0b-8ad9-e5bb188c00c0 In scale, these proposals would mean deporting greater numbers and a greater proportion of the population than former Ugandan President Idi Amin’s deportation of Ugandan Asians. This scale of population movement is comparable to that which happened with the partition of India and Pakistan and the foundation of the state of Israel.
October 23, 2025 at 7:27 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
Almost broke my thumb I blocked so quick
Image of The White House Bluesky account having been blocked.
October 18, 2025 at 9:21 AM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
#ClimateChange
A report by the New Economics Foundation thinktank has calculated Reform’s environmental policies could cost the UK £92bn in lost revenue and cost more than 60,000 jobs. DeSmog, which researches “global warming misinformation campaigns”, reported last year that between 2019 and 2024, Reform raised £2.3m from fossil fuel interests, polluting industries and climate science deniers, amounting to 92% of its donations.
October 5, 2025 at 8:24 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
#TrumpCorruption
Every China hawk worried about technological competition should focus on Trump selling our AI advantage for crypto deposits. Every Russia expert concerned about influence operations should examine Trump's financial entanglements. Every Middle East analyst discussing regional stability should investigate how Trump's corruption empowers authoritarian regimes.
September 30, 2025 at 8:21 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
#TrumpCorruption
Why This Matters More Than Any Foreign Threat Every serious foreign policy discussion today misses the fundamental reality—Trump's strategic corruption has become America's primary vulnerability. China doesn't need to steal our technology when they can simply buy Trump. Russia doesn't need military confrontation when financial inducements to one person achieve their goals. The UAE doesn't need traditional espionage when a few billion dollars in cryptocurrency deals grant them access to our most sensitive AI chips.
September 30, 2025 at 8:21 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
Social media is not a triumph of free speech. People think it is. This is the great motivating idea behind Elon Musk's various semi-decipherable grunts. And to be fair, it looks like free speech: each voice appearing under the same rules, achieving notoriety by virtue of what it has to say. It's easy to idealise. But if something is ideal, why would it produce something so shit? The answer is simple. It is because free speech is supposed to lead somewhere and social media leads nowhere.
September 29, 2025 at 7:27 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust. My conversations with prospective Enforcement and Removal Operation officers tended to follow the familiar script of engagement with the most banal people on Tinder, the kinds of people who post airplane emojis in their bios. Granting that the banality of evil, as an explanation, has itself become banal, it was hard to know what else to make of all this. The US is filled with “pretty nice guys” who are ready to inflict, who have already inflicted, senseless and life-shattering violence on innocent, impoverished people.
September 25, 2025 at 7:43 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
Social Democracy For A Zero Sum World
An essay on Labour's troubles and how to fix them via @paulmason.bsky.social
I don’t want to sound like Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous 1848 speech to the French parliament – but, comrades: you are sitting on a volcano that is about to blow.
September 17, 2025 at 7:53 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
Social Democracy For A Zero Sum World
An essay on Labour's troubles and how to fix them via @paulmason.bsky.social
There are solutions, but they don’t lie in the repertoire of the Labour past. This is not going to be remedied by a 1990s style ‘move to the centre’, nor by pursuing the chimera of AI-driven growth in a tragicomic parody of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’. Nor, as necessary as it is, will a determined Keynesian rearmament programme be enough on its own. That is because politics is no longer about economics: it is about politics – who gets what, and on what principles resource allocation decisions are made.
September 17, 2025 at 7:53 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
But here’s the truth: Twitter no longer exists. X is something else entirely. It’s a megaphone for extremism, controlled by a deranged oligarch who has declared his hostility to sane, democratic politics. And staying on the platform doesn’t balance things out – because there is no level playing field. Musk can tilt the scales whenever he wants, adjusting the algorithm, boosting the most radical viewpoints, and burying others.
September 15, 2025 at 6:18 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
Beyond the psychological impulse, there is a practical reason that Trump has embraced emergency powers and crisis government through pretense: He can’t do anything else. Look past his boastful claims of deal-making prowess and you’ll see a president who struggles to hold his own in a negotiation of equals and is too acutely solipsistic to persuade a skeptic of his own view. Even his much-vaunted (by subordinates and admirers) trade deals and agreements with institutions of higher education are less exchanges than a form of extortion, in which he uses threats of pain, punishment and legal action to impose a settlement.
August 13, 2025 at 8:42 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
#GazaGenocide #Israel
The time for justifications, arguing about semantics and hand-wringing over the “complexity” of the conflict has long passed. The only question now is, how is it that the world cannot get Israel to allow a morsel of food into a starving civilian’s mouth? How is this a government still not decisively cut off, sanctioned and embargoed? How is this a government, still, that David Lammy thinks he can “urge” to do the right thing? The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, posted on X calling the images from Gaza “unbearable”, and called for more aid to be let in and for Israel to “deliver on its pledges”. This, and other EU social media statements, was described by an Oxfam official as “hollow” and “baffling”.
July 29, 2025 at 7:14 AM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
#Gaza #Palestine #Israel #Media #Journalism
Text reads: Al Jazeera shared a heart-wrenching post from the Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Anas Al Sharif in which he writes: “I haven’t stopped covering [the crisis] for a moment in 21 months, and today, I say it outright … And with indescribable pain. I am drowning in hunger, trembling in exhaustion, and resisting the fainting that follows me every moment … Gaza is dying. And we die with it.”
July 26, 2025 at 6:04 AM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
Keeping millions of Palestinians in Gaza, half of them children, living in ruins for decades is not the sort of goal announced by sane, civilized, ordinary European politicians. At least, not since the 1930s. If a Likud Party stalwart like Cohen openly speaks like this, imagine what the Religious Zionism and Jewish Power cabinet members and members of parliament sound like.
July 17, 2025 at 7:12 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
July 11, 2025 at 5:43 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
July 8, 2025 at 6:12 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
#ClimateChange #Energy #Oil #Conflict
Text reads: The military-fossil fuel complex is not a bug, but a feature of global capitalism. This nexus produces war to secure fossil fuels. It burns fossil fuels to fight wars. It props up authoritarian regimes to maintain access to oil. And it arms those regimes with weapons bought using the profits from oil sales.
July 7, 2025 at 7:50 AM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
🤦‍♂️🤦‍♀️
July 6, 2025 at 9:14 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
via @iandunt.bsky.social #Starmer #Reeves #Labour
It's head-spinning. They do a good thing, they do a bad thing. They behave responsibly, they say something dreadful. They decriminalise abortion one week and then fall apart on benefit reforms the next. And all the while, it feels like we're on this tiny shrinking island, with the populist sharks swimming ever more closely to the shore: Trump, Farage, all the most mendacious bastards, grinning their lifeless dead-eyed smile, every statement an exercise in self–interest, every policy choice an expression of division and ignorance.
July 6, 2025 at 8:08 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
Text on image reads: 'I’m worried Mamdani will be murdered. I’m worried he’s another faker. I’m worried he will spur a political cult, and that worry has already been vindicated: the shredding of the American monoculture has ensured every politician has a cult. Politics is the only shared pastime, which is why American life feels miserable, because the stakes are so high, and the quality of programming so low.'
July 6, 2025 at 7:52 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
Most people deplore “forever wars”, typified by dismal, multi-year western entanglements in Afghanistan and Iraq. Not Netanyahu. Peace is his enemy. Forever war keeps him in power, in the limelight and out of jail. Like Vladimir Putin, he sees continuing war as an opportunity to boost domestic support and outflank his opponents. Unending state violence is deadly for democracy, legality and good governance (and on this note, Americans should worry, too: Trump’s presidency is on a similar trajectory, except his forever war is against the “enemy within”).
June 29, 2025 at 8:36 PM
richardbrophy.bsky.social
Text reads: Trump did not rise to this position alone. US officials have grown a second skin, one that seals their eyes and their deals and their documents. They entered the darkness of the mafia state and did so knowingly. Had they not, Trump could have never run in 2016 or in 2024. Party allegiance indicates whether a US official acts as an abuser (GOP) or an enabler (Democrat). But when they speak, it is often with one voice. Now that voice is calling for war. This is another reason I descend beneath the earth. US officials want war with Iran. They want it because Israel wants it and they do what Israel says. Israel has been planning to strike Iran since 2024: a timeline which makes Kamala Harris’s rehabilitation of Iraq warmongers look less like a campaign and more like an audition, and November resemble less an election than a selection.
June 23, 2025 at 1:58 PM