You may have noticed that I’ve been a little bit more quiet.

It is unfortunately not because I’ve been too busy getting my sleeve tattoo for my 40th birthday/chosen midlife crisis (I can’t at this stage, have you seen how expensive they are?!), but rather because I have a slipped disc actively trying to destroy my will to live.

A different kind o…

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If you did feel the need to listen to a very nearly 40 year old South African speak at his laptop, you can do so at the link below:

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It started with Farage losing his rag at the airport on his way back from the States when approached by Sky News, led to his bombshell, somewhat pompous grievance-fest dressed as a press release, and then to that bombshell turning right around and blowing up directly in his face.

The political atmosphere in the country, rather nicel…

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Well, sort of.

Not resigned in the traditional sense of leaving public life, spending more time with his family, or finally being sealed in amber inside a golf club bar. No, Farage has resigned in order to force a by-election, one he intends to contest himself, over the growing scrutiny of all …

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I don’t know if it’s just me, but it feels like there’s something in the air.

And no, I’m not talking about the immense levels of pollen currently suffusing absolutely everything right now and leaving me looking like I’m a fountain frog, dripping from every visible crevasse in my face.

I’m rather talking about the political…

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Reform UK have a serious problem with women.

Now, from the outset, I’m fully aware that I’m writing this as a near 40 year old man, and that there is sometimes something deeply suspect about men who solemnly explain misogyny to women as though we’ve just discovered it hiding behind the good plates. Women, as a group, do …

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Look, I moved away from South Africa for a reason.

It wasn't just the politics (though yes, that too). It was the heat. The smothering, oppressive, wall-of-fire summer heat that melts your will to live faster than ice cream on a braai plate. Growing up in SA, I spent December through February basically hibernating indoors, emerging only when absolutely necessary, like a sweaty vampire with a deep appreciation for air conditioning.

I came to Britain expecting drizzle, cardigans, and seasonal affective disorder. I wanted grey skies, wet pavements, and an entire national mood that could be described as "slightly damp." I was promised a country where people apologise for the weather and carry umbrellas as a religious practice. Where the most exciting meteorological event would be someone saying "bit nippy today" while wearing three layers in July.

What I absolutely did not want - what I most certainly did not sign up for - was a June in London that feels like I'm being slowly roasted in a microwave built by Satan's middle managers. It was 31 degrees yesterday. It’s set for 29 degrees today. Tomorrow it will be 32. I am 6'3", heavyset, and made almost entirely of sarcasm and sweat glands. I am not coping.

I have taken to lying very still on the sofa like a Victorian invalid, occasionally making pathetic groaning sounds for sympathy. My cat has abandoned me for the cooler bathroom tiles, shooting me judgmental looks as if this is somehow my fault. My husband keeps cheerfully suggesting we "go for a walk" or "sit on the patio," which I can only interpret as a hate crime.

The inside of my thighs feel like they should be classified as a heritage site. My desk chair has developed what I can only describe as a permanent human-shaped puddle. I've started rating my days not by productivity but by how many times I've had to peel myself off various surfaces.

And this is just June. June. We haven't even reached the bit where the government starts issuing heat warnings and the tabloids run headlines about "BRITAIN BURNS."

And yet - and yet - here comes the inevitable tweet. Every single time. Like clockwork. Like a particularly irritating cuckoo clock that only tells the time in bad takes.

Right.

Let's talk about that.

Why '76 Isn't the Smoking Gun You Think It Is (And Why That Narrative Persists Anyway)

The summer of 1976 was, yes, very hot. It was dry. It was unusual. And it was an outlier. That's why people still talk about it. You know what they don't do? Talk about the summer of 1983. Or 1994. Or that bank holiday in 2002 when it rained sideways for six days straight. Because those weren't weird enough to remember.

Here's what '76 actually looked like: it was the hottest summer Britain had recorded at that time. Temperatures peaked at 35.9°C at Cheltenham. It was also, crucially, a single year.

Since then, we've smashed that record multiple times. 2022 hit 40.3°C in Coningsby. We're not talking about slightly warmer weather - we're talking about temperatures that break critical infrastructure and kill vulnerable people. The problem isn't that we're having a hot summer - it's that we're having them every single year. 40°C is no longer a freak outlier but something we now plan for.

But here's what's particularly insidious: the "remember '76" narrative isn't just wrong - it's deliberately cultivated. This is weaponised nostalgia.

Every heatwave triggers the same media cycle. Telegraph op-eds about how "the Edwardians had it just as bad." Mail photo galleries of children in fountains captioned "When Britain knew how to enjoy the sun." Radio phone-ins flooded with melted ice lolly memories.

It’s climate denial rebranded as heritage - a Union Jack comfort blanket pulled over the eyes while the planet burns.

This serves two purposes: it shifts responsibility backwards (why worry about something that's "always happened"?) and immunises against future action (why spend billions on adaptation if we "coped fine in '76"?). The media amplifies this because nostalgia performs brilliantly. Politicians enable it because it's easier than governing.

The result? We're sleepwalking into a crisis while telling ourselves bedtime stories.

Weather ≠ Climate - But Climate Shapes Weather

Let's do the basics, with actual numbers.

Weather is what you get. Climate is what you expect. And what we should expect has fundamentally changed.

The UK's average temperature has risen by 1.2°C since the 1960s. That might sound modest, but in climate terms, it's seismic. The difference between our current climate and the last ice age was only about 6°C.

Here's what that 1.2°C increase actually means:

Frequency changes: The probability of 40°C days has increased tenfold since the 1970s. According to the Met Office, without human-induced climate change, the 2022 heatwave would have been virtually impossible. The odds have shifted from 1-in-300 years to 1-in-15.

Intensity changes: The UK temperature record has been broken three times since 2003: 38.7°C in 2019, 40.3°C in 2022. The 1976 record of 35.9°C stood for 27 years. We've shattered it multiple times in four years.

System changes: UK winter temperatures have risen even faster, by 1.7°C since the 1960s. Spring arrives earlier, growing seasons extend longer, and rainfall patterns are shifting toward more intense but less frequent events.

The crucial point: a 1.2°C rise doesn't mean "slightly warmer summers" - it means the entire probability distribution has shifted. What were once extreme outliers become regular occurrences.

I’m in no way saying that 1976 didn’t happen. But it was a statistical outlier in a stable system. What we're seeing now are outliers in a rapidly changing system, occurring with increasing frequency in a new baseline reality.

Even the Hot Countries Are Breaking

If you need proof that this isn't just "weather being weather," look at what's happening to countries that actually know how to handle heat.

India hit 50.5°C in 2024 - temperatures so extreme that airports had to suspend flights because planes couldn't take off safely. Roads literally melted. The power grid collapsed under air conditioning demand. These are people whose ancestors have lived with serious heat for millennia, in cities designed around surviving summers that would kill most Europeans. And they're struggling.

In Pakistan, temperatures reached 53.3°C while the country was already dealing with devastating floods - the kind of extreme weather whiplash that climate scientists have been warning about for decades.

Even Canada - Canada - saw temperatures hit 49.6°C in British Columbia, literally cooking entire towns off the map. Lytton, a town that had stood for over a century, burned to the ground the day after setting the national temperature record. The heat dome was so intense it created its own weather system.

Australia, a continent that built its entire national identity around surviving hostile weather, recorded its hottest day ever at 50.7°C. These aren't places that shut down because of a bit of sunshine - they have infrastructure, culture, and centuries of experience dealing with extreme heat. And they're being overwhelmed.

Meanwhile, we're sitting in Britain debating whether 40°C is "really that unusual" because someone's granddad once had a memorable sunburn in 1976.

The countries that know heat are struggling. The countries that don't know heat are in crisis. And we're still arguing about whether this is normal because we remember a single hot summer from nearly 50 years ago.

The Heat Is Real. The Denial Still Isn't.

I’m very sorry to say that your soiled childhood shorts, the tar on the roads, and the bollocking you got from your mum aren't data. They're not a peer-reviewed study. They're not even helpful. They're just a memory. And if we're being honest, one that's been polished and repeated so many times it probably owes more to folklore than fact.

We're not living in 1976 anymore. We're living in 2025, where heatwaves now threaten critical infrastructure, hospitals don't have cooling systems, and vulnerable people actually die from preventable overheating while politicians wax nostalgic about hosepipe bans and garden paddling pools.

This isn't just a bit of weather. This is what climate collapse feels like at first: uncomfortable, uncanny, and wrapped in denial that looks suspiciously like national identity.

And if we don't snap out of it, it gets worse. Not just hotter, but harder. Harder to grow food. Harder to stay healthy. Harder to keep the systems running that make modern life even remotely bearable.

So yes, remember '76 if you want to. That’s fine. But remember it properly. Not as an excuse to dismiss the crisis, but as a warning of what a single hot summer once did to a relatively stable system. Then multiply it by every year from now on.

That's where we are. That's what we're living through. And no amount of nostalgic bollockings or melted tarmac memories is going to get us out of it.

Start paying attention.

And for the love of god, someone install air con on the Northern Line.

It appears that we are on the cusp of yet another new Prime Minister.

You would think that with the past decade of experiencing a rotation of them we’d be used to it by now. That this would feel like just another turn of the political musical chairs we’ve become so used to.

Cameron to May, May to Johnson, Johnson …

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Tomorrow, a year ago to the day, I came to all of you with an ask. At that time, there were approximately 2,700 of you guys subscribed to what was, up to that point, a vehicle for me to shout into the void.

The ask was whether I should add a soft Paywall as a way to help me get to the point of making this, my writing in…

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As I wrote last week, we decided to come to Spain, very specifically to Sitges, during Pride week. I didn’t actually know it was Pride week when we booked it, it was sort of semi-coincidentally booked, but God, what a week it turned out to be. Just the gayest, most fabulous, most queer, lovely, friendly week I …

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The overt negative influence on X has only grown more apparent since then, and my feeling that it should be banned as a platform has only increased.

The government should have acted then. I’m not optimistic that they’ll act now

Something decidedly odd was happening on BlueSky last night. No, it wasn’t a new influx of patrons celebrating their departure from X as usually happens when Musk’s platform does something particularly horrific.

It was different - slightly more low-key, but potentially far more telling. It was first picked up (by my reckoning at least) by Alex Ip from Xylom, who noticed that the BlueSky team was working particularly late doing masses of verifications - very specifically, verifications of political parties in Canada. This led him to speculate that there may be a coordinated move happening between the governments of Canada, Australia and the UK to potentially ban X.

A move like this would be, and I’m not underselling this, monumental. Since its founding in 2006 (20 years ago?!), X was the go-to platform for breaking news across the world. It has been instrumental in the communication strategies of nearly all governments globally, played incredibly important roles in the mobilisation of revolutions, specifically in 2011 during the Arab Spring.

X, however, is no longer that platform. Now more than ever, with X’s robot happily allowing for the creation of non-consensual sexual imagery of women and children, I think it’s time for our government to depart the platform - or, even better, ban it completely.

Which brings me to the meat of this piece: the possibility of a ban. The idea first started growing legs late last week when The Telegraph reported that a ban was under consideration. This came off the back of comments made by Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, who commented that:

“Sexually manipulating images of women and children is despicable and abhorrent... I, and more importantly the public, would expect to see Ofcom update on next steps in days not weeks.”

She also noted that the Online Safety Act:

“…includes the power to block services from being accessed in the UK, if they refuse to comply with UK law” and that “if Ofcom decide to use those powers they will have our full support”.

At the time of writing, there have been no official announcements about a ban, however, as Alex Ip noted, where there is smoke, there is most certainly fire - and this potential fire could be a full-on conflagration, especially in certain parts of society that have become increasingly dependent on X.

I would personally be very much in favour of banning X - there is no good reason for it to still have a presence in the UK.

The lack of moderation, an algorithm that amplifies far-right conspiracies and this most recent scandal clearly demonstrate that the once go-to platform has become a shell of itself. I am likely not alone in this. YouGov found in 2025 that only 12% of Britons have a favourable view of the platform, with 63% being unfavourable. I can’t imagine that has improved over the past year given the multiple scandals (”Mecha-Hitler”, EU fines and now unregulated AI image creation) swirling around not only the platform, but its billionaire owner.

Many of X’s proponents will argue this week that this is nothing more than an authoritarian crackdown on free speech by the UK government. They’ll be, if I’m honest, uncomfortable arguments, because who really wants to defend a platform that has become as ignominious as X has - and I discussed a few of these on the very first episode of Bear and Monk Debunks.

The primary defence will be that there is undue focus by governments around the world on X, and that crime is prevalent on all the other major platforms. This argument was rolled out by the Telegraph in a piece written by Jake Wallis Simons this weekend, who noted that:

“Grok is not the only AI system able to carry out such intrusions. Clearly, this is part of a much larger problem involving the helter-skelter pursuit of super-intelligence with scant regard for the human consequences... TikTok is widely exploited by human traffickers, while paedophiles are known to target children using Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. None of those are facing a ban.”

What he’s saying is not untrue - there have been major issues across all major social media platforms. But he’s leaving out three things that make the situation X finds itself in stand out:

Scale, design and response.

Yes, crime happens on all platforms - however, there is a fundamental difference between a crime happening on a platform and a platform being architecturally optimised for harm, and what we’re seeing with X isn’t a failure to prevent abuse - it’s the systematic removal of the infrastructure specifically designed to stop it.

Independent researcher Genevieve Oh found that Grok was producing between 6,700 and 7,000 sexualised images per hour during peak periods in early January. By comparison, the top five dedicated deepfake pornography websites combined produced only 79 such images per hour. That’s 84 times more abuse content than platforms specifically designed for this purpose. The scale is just staggering.

In terms of design, when xAI launched Grok’s image generation tool, they made a conscious choice to include “spicy mode” - a feature explicitly designed to allow NSFW content with minimal restrictions. This wasn’t an oversight - it was marketed as a selling point, positioning Grok as an “unfiltered” alternative to what Musk characterised as overly censorious AI systems.

Competitors like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic all implement strict filters against non-consensual intimate imagery.

Grok deliberately didn’t, which was a design choice, not a technical limitation.

The most damning aspect of this all though, is the response - or rather, spectacular lack of one.

When journalists initially contacted xAI for comment, they received an automated reply:

“Legacy Media Lies”.

When Elon Musk himself was confronted with AI-generated images of women and children in sexualised scenarios, he responded with laugh-cry emojis.

When the Internet Watch Foundation confirmed finding criminal images of children aged 11-13 that appeared to have been created using Grok, xAI’s solution was to put the abuse tool behind a paywall - in effect monetising harm rather than preventing it.

When other social media companies discover child sexual abuse material, they report it and take immediate action.

They do not send snarky auto-replies.

They do not laugh.

They do not charge people for access to the tools creating the abuse.

What’s absent from Simons’ assessment is that X didn’t only fail to stop this abuse. Under Musk’s ownership, the platform systematically dismantled the infrastructure that could have and should have prevented it.

Musk fired 80% of the engineers working on trust and safety.

Musk disbanded Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council.

Musk reduced full-time content moderators from 107 to 51.

Musk was warned that Grok’s image generation function was essentially a nudification tool waiting to be weaponised.

Musk then proceeded to ignore those warnings.

So when we’re asked why X is facing potential bans whilst other platforms aren’t, the answer is simple - because X made deliberate choices to remove safeguards, to ignore warnings and to respond to criminal content with contempt. The very foundation upon which X is now built is architectural negligence at best, and complicity at worst.

Which leads me to the ultimate question: should the UK government ban X?

Five years ago, I would have said that question was unthinkable, and banning it would have been similar to shutting down the telephone network.

But, crucially, X is no longer that platform - and it hasn’t been for some time.

What we have now is a service that has systematically dismantled its safety infrastructure, deliberately designed AI tools to bypass industry-standard protections, and responded to the creation of child sexual abuse material with mockery and monetisation. This isn’t about one scandal, however horrific, but a pattern of choices that demonstrate fundamental contempt for user safety and the rule of law.

The inevitable cries of “censorship” and “free speech” ring exceedingly hollow, because a ban on X isn’t about silencing dissent or controlling the flow of information.

It’s about holding a platform accountable for enabling criminal content at industrial scale. Free speech and the freedom of expression has never included the right to create non-consensual sexual imagery of women and children - this is explicitly illegal in the United Kingdom, and there is no legal or moral framework under which what Grok has been doing is defensible.

Two countries have already acted - Indonesia and Malaysia implemented bans on Grok over the weekend, determining that X’s responses were insufficient and that the platform’s design posed inherent risks to women and children.

France has opened a criminal investigation.

India issued a 72-hour ultimatum.

Ofcom has made clear it’s considering all options, including a ban, with the full support of the UK government.

Would a ban cause disruption? Without a doubt.

Government departments would need to find alternative communication channels, journalists would lose a tool they’ve relied on for nearly two decades and public figures who’ve built audiences on the platform would need to migrate elsewhere. None of these are trivial concerns.

But the alternative - allowing X to continue operating with gross impunity - sends an equally powerful message: that platforms can architect harm, ignore warnings, fire their safety teams, and face no meaningful consequences as long as they’re sufficiently embedded in our digital infrastructure. This is a precedent that no reasonable government should be comfortable setting.

This is a watershed moment for tech accountability, and what happens next will determine whether we live in a world where platforms answer to the law, or where the law bends around platforms too large to fail.

I, for one, know which world I’d rather live in.

I wanted to send a quick note out to say a quick “totsiens!1”

After an absolutely non-stop few months since my dad’s funeral in South Africa, starting a new job that’s had me up and down the country like a blue-arsed fly, and politics in the UK (and the rest of the world) deciding to self-immolate on a nearly weekly basis, I am taking my…

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If you have any ideas that you would like to contribute to Bearly Politics, please feel free to send those to iratusursusmajor@gmail.com.

The UK’s mainstream legacy press is predominantly right to far-right wing. Despite reductions in all physical newspaper sales and the shift online, right-wing media (RWM) still dominates the news arena with a significantly larger reach than left and centre news publications.

This right-wing ascendancy has been further boosted by the advent of the GB News “soapbox” which, together with the usual suspects (the Express, Sun and Mail), provides a Reform mouthpiece. But there’s also been a shift further right in previously more neutral publications, notably the Telegraph and Times.

Adherence to standards of impartiality and proper scrutiny is now often token and in “power struggles over our ears and eyeballs” shared by influencers like Mr Beast.

Unsurprisingly, the UK now ranks a rather shameful 18th in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index with uncomfortable similarities to Orban’s Hungary. 80% of UK press media is owned by right-leaning wealthy oligarchs, as was Orban’s. Journalists have been censured using SLAPPS, regulatory appointments, digital surveillance and smear campaigns. And just as Hungary’s media became promotors of Orban’s party, Fidesz, so IPSO’s infamous toothlessness has hastened the corrosion of editorial neutrality, paving the way for predominantly right-leaning media to become ‘left-bashing’ Reform cheer leaders.

The heavily concentrated ownership of our news media by right-wing oligarchs is well documented. But it’s also worth considering how the RWM manipulation of social attitudes works, and how we should respond.

Construction industries

The leading social media platforms (X, Facebook and Tiktok) enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the RWM in which news is mutually amplified and mediated. But despite algorithmic tailoring, much online content still flows from what the RWM decides to headline. It’s a primary lens through which we experience our political world on a day-to-day basis. We understand politicians not so much through what they do in the raw, or through social media noise, but through how the RWM frames them.

RWM framing uses laser-guided tactics like labelling, suppression, selective exposure and normalisation, all especially powerful where we lack independent experience for comparison. Most of us are largely dependent on the media to shape our understanding of figures like Andy Burnham, Nigel Farage and Zak Polanski. With a clean slate, the RWM is essentially free to construct political reality around these figures from scratch.

Playtime

This freedom is harnessed to a destructive rationale within the dominant RWM - the gladiatorial “sport” of making or breaking politicians whose audacious profession renders them ‘fair game’.

This nihilistic modus operandi is common amongst the political commentariat. It’s perhaps inevitable though in a culture whose contributors, often from the same privileged education stables, are relegated to the side-lines. If their professional purpose is to comment rather than act, what’s left except to gameplay, exercising their tribal power over the actions of others?

This sport isn’t confined to the RWM, but the effects are proportional to its considerably greater reach, and its influence is pernicious across the RWM spectrum from the more subtle Times to the explicitly rage-baiting Daily Mail.

Display stand politics

The RWM is viscerally contemptuous of Polanski. Predictably, as a leader who threatens the right-wing status quo, there’s a gaping contrast between how he’s portrayed and the indulgent treatment of Farage. The RWM quickly wrapped Polanski in insinuating labels, deploying ‘hypnotist’ as an early identifier. This formed the basis of further understanding, solidifying into beliefs about ‘untrustworthiness and inauthenticity’ through repetition and familiarity, and attracting other consonant labels which together formed a consistent mental ‘Polanski’ map.

Related high frequency descriptors the RWM flogged were: ‘actor, tax dodger, antisemite, drug legaliser, ‘narcissist’. This spicy wordplay assembled a mesh of attributes that lodged itself within social discourse, further shaping ‘Polanski’ as a faulty political type. Even as a debate, seeds were successfully planted. Splashed daily across supermarket and garage forecourt display stands, these labels are the only prompts for some on how to vote.

With Polanski thus sculpted, counter-information can’t then land. Humanitarian concerns about Gaza or wealth inequality can legitimately be discussed by bodies like the UN. But out of Polanski’s mouth they are dangerous rantings. He’s a ‘press clay pigeon’, a brittle flyer projected high into the political arena, to be shot down.

Artistry

Other key tactics are information suppression and reinterpretation. Dismissing Farage’s antisemitic behaviour and dodgy donations as ‘boyhood japes’ and ‘innocent gifts’ presents him as a blameless victim hounded by the left.

Meanwhile, behind the staggering level of voter ignorance about Reform’s ‘‘Great Repeal Bill’ is the RWM’s wilful determination not to spell out its implications for worker’s and women’s rights.

The RWM’s interpretive dance around Raynor downing pints was a reminder that ‘she’s unfit for office’; conversely, Farage and Johnson downing pints shows they are ‘solid, relatable men of the people’.

Similarly, the Times and others present the self-confessed ‘sexism’ of Robert Kenyan, not as the outright disqualification for becoming an MP it should be, but as showing he’s the ‘kind of normal bloke we need in politics’.

Portrayals like these are the core brush strokes via which our understanding of key politicians is drip fed and fleshed out.

A good kicking in the name of scrutiny

Polanksi’s popularity, like Burnham’s, is a RWM red rag. It’s an excuse to set both up as resilient and able to ‘take the hit’. Hence it affords a licence to discredit them under the guise of ‘extra hard-hitting scrutiny’, i.e. Trevor Phillips style ‘rottweiler attacks minus balance’.

Such grillings, delivered to a public who know little about either man, create impressions, piece by suspect piece, strongly predisposing them to negative evaluations. The Times’ strenuous efforts to portray Burnham as an unprincipled shapeshifter, for example, minimally sows doubt amongst voters whose beliefs about him are less than rock solid.

Some consequences

The RWM feasted on Raynor’s minor tax issue for months whilst their response to Farage’s £5mn donation from Christopher Harborne was sluggish.

As Luke Tryl notes, Raynor’s “tax scandal” caused a “tangible fall” in her popularity. Despite her being found not guilty, the damage was done - the media assault worked.

Similarly, even if repeatedly kicking someone in the head is police protocol, Polanski’s response, though politically hasty, was probably natural, humane concern about brain-damage. But the RWM skipped this justification, instead briskly spinning it as ‘anti-police’ and, by initially omitting the third Muslim victim, absurdly, also as ‘antisemitic’. They spotted a pre-election attack fissure in the left and leapt in with the zest of piranhas.

Again, it worked. The ‘antisemite’ and ‘anti-police’ tags caused Polanski’s approval rating to plummet 14 points, shifting from positive into the red overnight.

The RWM can’t seriously be said to mirror political reality since it constructs chunks of the content in the first place that it then claims to ‘reflect’. Much of the doorstep Corbyn hostility it ‘found’, for example, was its own regurgitated narrative.

Starmer has, in reality, made serious mistakes that aren’t simply conjured from press manoeuvres. But the RWM sets the ‘success and failure’ agenda. Starmer’s sticky ‘lame duck’ persona was consolidated by prioritising negative labels (weak, indecisive) and amplified by pointed failures to highlight positive achievements: knife crime down 10% in the last year, the stock market outperforming the US, NHS waiting lists lowest in 3.5 yrs, GDP up every quarter since 2024, the new Renters Rights Act, 30 hours weekly of funded childcare.

This RWM silence is why, when asked, voters famously ‘stare blankly, struggling to find a good word for Labour’.

Doorstep antipathy is also because Starmer can’t relate to voters, is no storyteller (and should go). But ruthless RWM manipulation of success and failure narratives have massively intensified voter contempt. Labour’s 2026 local election performance would have been poor anyway. But media puppeteering turbo-charged the preposterous fall of Starmer’s popularity below Trump’s, and the catastrophic election results.

Weaving social understanding

Starmer is just another in the latest round of left-winged clay pigeons. This isn’t a Starmer endorsement, just an observation that our media could have played it very differently.

Starmer’s opponents, Johnson and Farage, are notorious censure escapologists. But it was the RWM that carefully curated the unscrutinized, charming, Teflon personalities we’re familiar with, and who orchestrated their success by cultivating fear narratives that shoved immigration to the top of the social issue league table.

The key point is that the portrayals of all these political characters by our dominant RWM have not only penetrated our social consciousness but are working supremely well in furthering Reform’s trajectory as the new preferred political tribe.

These portrayals don’t just consolidate the views of the already converted. They create political reality for others and sow doubt amongst the undecided. Our RWM, like Orban’s, constructs political understanding by omitting, redefining, insinuating and quietly eviscerating whatever it wants to obliterate.

This isn’t information delivery, or even ‘mildly politically biased’ news. It’s social engineering – on a massive scale, with deeply dysfunctional consequences.

Stop the sane washing

Yet we continue excusing our media because we cling to the idea that it must somehow be working in our interest. Consequently, we despair when it keeps failing, as it does, every day.

It took Hungary 16 years to remove Orban, a process greatly assisted by their independent media. For UK politics to function, we must turn away from our right-wing dominated mainstream press towards independent political journalism.

This largely Impress-regulated ecosystem, though economically fragile, speaks truth to power with integrity, producing responsible, exacting investigation and analysis. We must start fostering this vital independent voice because it belongs to us, not oligarchs, and has our human rights and our democracy as its lode stars.

For more on how citizen journalism plays a role in the media ecosystem, I have previously published the piece in below.

Byline Times

Citizen Journalism and the New Ecosystem of Truth-Telling

I am not a journalist…

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a year ago · 59 likes · 2 comments · The Bear

Barely 24 hours after I made the note that Nigel Farage had been conspicuous in his absence, out he came, scurrying in front of a camera.

With an “emergency address” no less, sounding for all the world like he was not only measuring the curtains for Number 10, but already waving away the movers who had just decamped all …

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Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been a little quieter over the past week or so, and I’ve had a few messages of concern (which I find both deeply touching and slightly worrying, in that it suggests I may, in fact, have been online far too much in recent years).

I just wanted to give a quick update that all is okay here. Very, very busy…

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