Bearly Newsworthy: Issue Four
Good reporting, bad politics, and one very flammable flag situation in Kent.
Happy Friday Afternoon, everyone.
You will all undoubtedly be pleased to know that while the chest infection I had last week prevented me from doing my weekly Bearly Newsworthy feature, I have (finally) won the war, and I am well and fully back at it.
Much of my focus in Bearly Newsworthy to date has been on the ridiculous, barely newsworthy news that gets fed to us on a nearly daily basis by the likes of The Telegraph, The Daily Mail and much of the right-wing and mainstream press.
I would like to do things differently for this issue.
I’ve written a few times before about the new media landscape we find ourselves in and how our consumption of news is being changed from relying on traditional broadsheets to a far more diverse (and often far more interesting) ecosystem of independent voices.
Some of the best, thorough and most courageous reporting in the UK isn’t only happening in the glass towers and on Fleet Street anymore, but increasingly in newsletters, podcasts, local newsrooms and on the timelines of people who still believe that journalism should mean something.
So, on that note, this week’s edition of Bearly Newsworthy will aim to do just that - highlight some of the best independent writers, reporters and investigators who are telling the stories that traditional media either misses or mangles.
There will, of course, still be a bit of the usual batshittery (it is the UK after all), but this week I will highlight more of the good stuff - articles, opinion pieces and posts that made me think, swear approvingly - and sometimes both.
Verdict: Bearly Newsworthy ✅
Published: 4 November 2025
Deborah Frances-White this week published an article in The Nerve which is one to pay rapt attention to because it so vividly exposes a growing threat that’s being pretty much completely ignored by mainstream press who are far too distracted by Farage standing in a pub and Reform’s polling to notice what’s going on.
In the article, Frances-White meticulously joins the dots between the American Christian right and its increasing foothold that it’s gaining in UK Politics. It’s a culture import that’s already funding, advising and motivating movements here in the UK with the intent to roll back reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ equality and, pretty insanely, even women’s suffrage.
The warning is sober and urgent - what initially looked like a bit of fringe US theocracy is now an organised export strategy, and UK politicians are buying in.
It’s also not only due to the content that I’m including this article this week - but also where it’s been published. The Nerve - which was recently launched by former Observer journalists and led by
represents the exact journalism we need far more of. It’s independent, unflinching and completely uninterested in access-based flattery1. I thoroughly recommend giving them a visit and signing up to their excellent newsletter.
Verdict: Bearly Newsworthy ✅
Published: 3 November 2025
On Monday this week, I wrote a piece celebrating the moustaches that proliferate over the course of Movember - but how while we are now able to talk about mental health, we still haven’t quite managed to make the actual help we need to give people accessible, affordable, or frankly, like less of a bureaucratic assault coarse.
We happily post selfies wearing our novelty facial hair and share hotlines in the name of awareness - but when it comes to getting actual honest-to-god treatment, people are still stuck at the back of a queue2.
Which is why
’s magnificent piece in which she discussed, with warmth and wit, about taking anti-depressants and how there is still a lingering fear, even in 2025, about the stigmas and misconceptions around this.
It’s a fantastic reminder that talking about mental health progress is great, but living with it is still the hard part - and that medication (just like therapy or stupid mental health walks) is not “an easy option”, but sometimes the only option. Jo managed to capture that message in a way that very few writers do - with humour, self-awareness and honesty that makes you feel just a little bit less alone and more human.
Verdict: Bearly Newsworthy ✅
Published: 4 November 2025
If you ever got the impression that Nigel Farage’s speeches sound a little bit like someone has gone and stitched together the comment section of GB News and read it aloud over a pint… well, that’s because they pretty much are.
On Tuesday this week,
, ’s Westminster Editor vivisected Farage’s speech that he gave this week to the City - and to absolutely no one’s surprise found nothing more than the usual cocktail of hypocrisy, nostalgia and tax-cut fantasies underpinning it.The article is razor sharp, unsparing and refreshingly free from the deference that seems to shield Farage from proper scrutiny.
When I reached out to Zoe about why this piece was Bearly Newsworthy, she told me:
Because populists like Farage essentially rely on short memories and shallow coverage. His speech was absolutely riddled with contradictions: talking about standing up for “alarm clock Britain” while calling for cuts and deregulation that would make those very workers’ lives immeasurably worse. The danger isn’t just what he says, but how easily he’s allowed to get away with it, despite being a man who has always served one master: himself!
Or, in other words, he’s still loudly flogging the same snake oil he’s always done, just in a slightly smarter bottle.
The article reminds us why independent outlets like The Lead matter so much - because they’re ultimately the ones who are still doing the job that so many in the press lobby have forgotten how to do:
Calling out bullshit before it curdles into policy.
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy ❌
Published: 6 November 2025
And now, as we pivot over to the completely absurd, we have “Top Tory” Susan Hall facing backlash - again. In and of itself already, this shouldn’t be new considering the fact that Susan Hall is hardly the paragon of any sort of stability.
Her offence this time round? Her suggestion that victims of hate crimes should just “toughen up.”
«BIG AUDIBLE SIGH»
During a time where we are seeing increased hate crimes against minorities, and in a city where LGBTQ+ commuters, disabled Londoners and ethnic minorities are still routinely harassed on public transport and elsewhere, her big solution to this is somehow not “we really should address dickheads who are still out there actively discriminating against our friends and neighbours” and she instead went with “try not to be so damned sensitive about it.”
In response to the (well earned) backlash, she told The Standard that this was a “common sense” approach, which is about as deluded as you can expect from someone who claimed that she had been robbed on the tube when it turned out that she’d merely lost her wallet - which was subsequently returned to her.
All in all you would think that for someone who is so keen for other people to “toughen up” that she would have learned to handle backlash a bit better.
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy ❌
Published: 29 October 2025
This is a story that is technically not in this week’s news - but since I was actively coughing up a lung at the time, I feel I have a moral responsibility to drag this back into the spotlight for the utter shambles it is.
In, yet another, Reform UK press conference held on the 27th of October, 30p Lee Anderson decided to show off his mental health and clinical literacy by declaring that people with “non-major anxiety” should be stripped of disability support and shoved onto a “Fast Track to Work” programme. Beyond there being no diagnostic criteria that exists as “non-major anxiety” the whole thing just smacks of something that could be said by a Victorian Workhouse advocate.
With mental health being largely in focus this week, his comments show the exact same ignorance that has kiboshed political discussions about mental health for decades - the firm belief that anxiety, depression or panic disorders are just personality quirks that can be cured with a firm handshake and a job centre appointment.
The reality is though that these conditions are chronic and debilitating that cost lives - not “moods” that can be scheduled around a benefits reform press conference.
Verdict: Bearly Newsworthy ✅
Published: 5 November 2025
Taking a break from the batshittery and moving on to something that’s important, a piece by
this week in gave us an exploration of the economy through a different lens - our voting system.In The Price of Powerlessness, Mark makes the very compelling argument that the UK’s cost of living crisis is more than just about money - it’s about mathematics.
The specific arithmetic of First Past The Post is what he discusses, and how when a government can win total control with barely a third of the popular vote, the majority of voters become politically invisible. It’s framed not as a constitutional quirk, but as a structural cause of economic inequality - a system in which millions of us pay the price, but barely any of us get a say.
The article is Bearly Newsworthy because it skips the usual, milquetoast reformist jargon and discusses Proportional Representation not as a nerdy civics dream, but being about rent, heat, food and fairness. It creates a convincing link between how we vote and how it impacts how much our bills go up, how little our wages increase.
It’s an argument that’s as blunt as it is brilliant - you can’t fix the cost of living if you don’t fix who is being listened to3, and until every vote truly counts, the only thing in the UK that’s proportional is the suffering.
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy ❌
Published: 4 November 2025
No week in the news would be complete without the hysterical breathlessness of a Daily Mail article, and this week really is no difference.
Over the past week, history was made in New York when the inhabitants of the City That Never Sleeps elected Zohran Mamdani as their mayor with an overwhelming victory.
Naturally, the Daily Mail reacted exactly as you would expect it to in the lead up - by declaring that if he won it would trigger one of the largest “mass exoduses4 in American history.” They, of course, have a poll to support this claim - a poll of 500 people with a margin of error that reads “just trust us, this is bad”, but a poll nonetheless.
According to their barely contained panic, up to a million New Yorkers are already packing their bags, ready to flee at the first sign of those sinister words of “affordable housing”.
It honestly reads like apocalypse fan-fiction that was written by a Manhattan real estate agent having a wobbly - billionaires are selling their penthouses, streets are crumbling and Boca Raton is being positioned as humanity’s last hope and refuge, with the Mayor, Scott Singer, standing magnanimously ready to welcome refugees fleeing the socialist scourge.
The reality is, of course, that the city is most likely to keep standing, the lights will be kept on and the only exodus worth noting is the brain cells that fled midway through my reading of the article.
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy ❌
Published: 4 November 2025
To close off this week’s round-up, a story that’s going to cause rather a few people all sorts of contradictory feelings - the village of Harrietsham in Kent has announced that there will be no Chrimbo lights this year unless the St George’s and Union Flags that are currently strangling every lamppost are promptly removed.
It’s honestly the plot twist that the closing months of 2025 deserves - the exact same people who love nothing more than having massive “CHRISTMAS IS BEING CANCELLED” conniption fits from the moment Halloween decorations come down are now discovering to their horror that their summer-long crusade to hang cheap nylon patriotism on every available surface has literally made Christmas impossible.
The detritus of this summer’s campaign of “Operation Raise the Colours” are, in a development that should shock absolutely no one with opposable thumbs, blocking the installation of fairy lights.
To add to this, no one really seems to know what to do about it - on the one hand you have Kent County Council who initially promised everyone they would never touch their flags now calling for them to be taken down, and on the other you have the Parish Council saying they have neither the funds nor the authority to remove them and that their contractor that needs to fit the lights have rightly told them it’s not their problem. It has all the makings of the panto for this year - The Flag Who Stole Christmas.
I can already hear the overture - the “common sense” chorus clearing their throats, ready to belt out their rendition of “woke war on Christmas” led by sinister looking health-and-safety elves, Brussels bureaucrats or whichever spectral enemy is on rotation for the week.
Never you mind that this is not a cancellation of Christmas (which has never been a thing) or any sort of real censorship - it’s literally just that you can’t drape highly flammable bunting over a streetlamp and then act appalled when it poses a fire risk next to the fairy lights.
What I love about this whole story is that the village of Harrietsham, in miniature, has taken all of the bits and pieces of the UK’s decade long identity crisis - the performative patriotism, bureaucratic inertia and an inherent and chronic national inability to connect cause and effect - and turned it into a luminous, messy metaphor.
God bless ‘em for that.
Thank you for reading to all the way down here. Bearly Politics is run by me - the Bear - in between NHS meetings, half-cold cups of tea and whatever passes for free time. It’s proudly independent - even if that’s mostly because no think tank has yet been foolish enough to offer funding (despite how many times I’ve asked).
If you are able, please do consider a paid subscription which helps support the work.
If you’re not keen on yet another amount pinging off your bank account on a monthly basis, I will also happily accept a cup of coffee.
And if you’d rather just share this with someone you like (or someone who’ll hate read it, I’m not particularly picky), that helps too.
I’m just imagining to myself trying to flatter Westminster for access - I’d likely have more luck openly flirting with a parking meter.
Right behind Wes Streetings latest tech pilot and another empty promise of “streamlined pathways.”
At this point it feels like far too many MPs have their hearing tests calibrated exclusively to hedge funds.
There’s always a bloody exodus of billionaires - the problem being its usually just their money that’s being moved around.
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Bearly is a bloody great furry breath of fresh hair (fur?). A must read. Still remember Susan Hall's car crash cringe and laughter inducing LBC interview. The Flag Who Stole Christmas, hahaha.... Genius!!
Great roundup Bear. Lots of punchable faces named in there with their usual bullshit and cringing 🙄. I was interested to read of the attitudes that still exist around antidepressants. I know a few people with such attitudes and can only pity any of their friends and family whilst I have the choice to steer well clear of such people. They never learn that they too may experience depression. When they do, it's always the end of the world but only because it affects them. And the other piece about American "Christians". I do hope the UK churches speak up and call them out for what they really are - imposters and monsters. I expect if God and Jesus really existed, they'd be horrified about what's being said and done in the name of Christianity! Have an excellent weekend Bear x