Bearly Newsworthy: Issue Two
This Week's Nonsense, News That Matters and a Nation Held Together By Spreadsheets and Denial
Welcome to Issue Two of Bearly Newsworthy.
First off, thank you for all the feedback on Issue One - it was far more enthusiastic than I expected (thank you for that, genuinely). I also had a question on timing last week, and enough of you guys suggested that Saturday mornings would be a better time to read than Fridays, so I’ve shifted the timing accordingly.
I would also like to apologise for my radio silence this week - work and life have both been… a lot. It was the sort of week where it felt like my inbox gained sentience and had started gaslighting me, and between the utter carnage that is working for the NHS and some personal chaos thrown into the mix, I’ve missed writing far more than I thought I would, so this post may also carry a faint whiff of relief on top of the usual barely controlled sarcasm.
We also have two brilliant reader submissions from
, whose deep dive into the far right’s links to Moscow is well worth reading in full, and giving us a cultural analysis on how the culture wars have further infected the gaming industry.The rest of this week’s round up feels largely much the same as where we left off last week - scissors are still encouraged to snip-snip-snip, the outrage machine is still being fed on a daily basis by Nigel Farage and the Telegraph remains in a constant state of anxiety about millionaires.
Now, with that said, let’s kick off with what was Barely Newsworthy (i.e. the stories that shouldn’t have made the headlines to begin with because they’re held together with spin, self-importance and sheer nonsense) and what was Bearly Newsworthy, those stories that are well worth paying attention to beneath all the noise.
Verdict: Bearly Newsworthy ✅
Published: 16 October 2025
It would appear that the incessant sound of snipping that I wrote about earlier this week is not going to become any less noisy anytime soon, with the IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies) throwing their 2 pence into the conversation.
They have, this week, given some advice to Rachel Reeves - specifically the advice that if she wants to regain credibility, she’s going to have to Tory her way towards it by reducing the welfare spend.
I do have questions though - questions like by how much? Which benefits? And, most importantly, how, exactly, does making poor people poorer help the government to “regain” credibility. The media is, of course, happy to amplify this message as though the IFS has discovered a brand-spanking new law of physics that somehow translates into “cuts = confidence.”
And so the narrative of the past fifteen years continues unabated - cuts are never framed as cruelty, but as courage - as “fiscal responsibility.” It’s an illusion that’s meant to turn what has become outright economic failure into a sort of moral virtue.
The truth, however, is far simpler - you cannot snip, cut and chop your way into stability when there’s nothing left to cut but floorboards.
Verdict: Bearly Newsworthy ✅
Published: 15 October 2025
Contributed by:
Nathan Gill’s admission that he took Russian bribes while serving as a Reform MEP is not an isolated scandal – it’s part of a broader pattern I began tracking years ago. Around the same time that Gill was accepting covert payments from Moscow-linked interests, Britain First leader Paul Golding was making repeated trips to Russia, posing with Vladimir Putin lookalikes (seriously) and praising the Russian president as a “strong leader” who embodied the “traditional values” that his movement idealised.
Soon after, Tommy Robinson followed suit, touring Moscow and St Petersburg, defending the Kremlin’s allies, and moving his online presence to Russia’s VK platform after being deplatformed in the West. Golding even reportedly advised Robinson to move his money to Russia, while Yaxley-Lennon (jokingly) threatened to move to Moscow. It’s a shame he didn’t.
The fact is that Putin and the British far-right have been singing from the same hymn sheet for years – sharing a contempt for liberal democracy, diversity, and a fetishisation of authoritarian “order”. The likes of Golding and Robinson have been sowing chaos in Britain, and the Kremlin has been reaping the rewards.
That trend has now been put on steroids. Elon Musk has turned X into a megaphone for the same divisive, pro-Russian narratives. When riots broke out this summer, the disinformation spread across his platform – amplified by Britain’s right-wing press – carried Moscow’s message further than the Kremlin ever could alone.
This information campaign may have started with figures like Gill, Golding and Robinson back in 2019, but its influence is anything but historical. The same networks and narratives now underpin much of the modern far right – online, in Parliament, and across the media. Russia’s fingerprints are still visible on the culture war, and the British establishment remains worryingly unbothered by how deep that contamination runs.
Bear’s Note:
It’s become quaint just how terribly shocked people still pretend to be when yet another far-right figure, politician or commentator turns out to have Kremlin shaped fingerprints all over their wallets. The truth, as pointed out in Sam’s linked article, is that this has been an ideological courtship that’s been happening for years now - a mutual admiration between groups who despise liberal democracy but love the performance of strength, oppression and authoritarianism.
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy ❌
Published: 13 October 2025
Reform, in the past week, has finally, finally, admitted what anyone with a basic understanding of arithmetic has understood for some time now - that pretty much every single one of their policies is completely and utterly unworkable on a fundamental level.
It happened somewhere between their announcements of £90 billion in tax cuts and funding it all with “efficiency savings”. Richard Tice, the deputy leader and part-time resident of the UK has now said that the party is abandoning their flagship fiscal fantasy and will instead now focus on cutting the civil service and scrapping Net-Zero, presumably because shouting at bureaucrats and trees cost less than basic lessons in mathematics.
This is, of course, barely newsworthy in the truest sense of the term, with the only surprise being that it took this long for Reform to realise that the £90bn they’ve been loudly pondering about isn’t a rounding error - it’s the damned GDP of Kenya. Everyone knew the sums were imaginary, the IFS said so, the OBR said so, anyone with a damned calculator said so, but, because the UK’s political environment now runs purely on rhetoric and vibes instead of values and policies, far too many people politely pretended that their manifesto was a plan instead of a pub argument typed up in Comic Sans.
Still, this hard pivot does open up Reform’s flank, because without its economic unicorns, the party is left with pretty much only one policy platform: Resentment.
Immigration, Net Zero, “woke” councils, Trans people - all serve as the precarious scaffolding around a political movement with a hollow centre.
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy ❌
Published: 14 October 2025
Sometimes when you come across something in the news, the actual headline is the story - and this headline tells us everything we need to know about Shabana Mahmood’s constant need to sound tough.
This week the Home Office very sternly announced that certain migrants coming to the UK will now need “A-level standard English”. It’s a statement that sounds suitably rigorous - the phrase instantly conjuring up images of young people sweating bullets over Chaucer essays and syntax trees.
Except that the actual standard that’s being referred to here is B2 on the CEFR scale - solidly upper-intermediate and not remotely equivalent to an A-level in English.
By the B2 standard, an English speaker should be able to handle a workplace conversation, write an email or follow a meeting - but they’re not doing a critical analysis of Othello. Conflating this with an “A-level English” standard goes beyond just being misleading and veers itself hard into linguistically illiterate. There have, of course been some excuses - like the fact that it’s comparable to what students in the UK would need to achieve in A-level French or German, except that’s nonsense too, since A-level modern language courses assess translation, literature and cultural context and demand a fluency far beyond B2.
So why did they phrase it in this way, both on the BBC and Press Release headline? Because “A-level English” feels like a higher bar - it flatters the base instincts of anyone who sees immigration as a purity test and is purely about signalling superiority.
The home office could have said “proficient English”, but that just doesn’t sound nearly crackdowny enough - “A-level English does - even if the real test here is just how gullible or easy to manipulate they still believe the general public to be.
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy ❌
Published: 10 October 2025
In another move that has surprised absolutely no one, Nigel Farage has accused “Marxist Teachers” of “poisoning our kids” with lessons on race - a statement that’s so incredibly predictable (and so clearly copied from the post-apocalyptic hell-hole that was once the United States), that I’m starting to suspect that there’s a random grievance generator fed on data from the Daily Mail comments section that he uses to write his speeches.
This is the exact same panto we’ve seen from Nige for years - he finds an institution that’s literally just doing its job (this week it’s education, next week, likely doctors), declares it “woke”, “marxist” or “out of touch” and then starts to perform outrage until he’s been satiated with enough camera clicks. It’s culture wars on a feedback loop, and it thrives not on accuracy but on sheer emotional combustion.
There is, of course, not a shred of evidence that teachers are secretly “Marxist” and what Nigel is truly having a fannywobble about is critical thinking - something that tends to make demagogues look a bit daft.
The reality is that the UK’s educators are holding classrooms (and their will to get up and go to work) together with chewing gum and dedication that this country does not deserve, while politicians like Farage are on a constant mission to generate the angriest headlines possible.
Verdict: Bearly Newsworthy ✅
Published: 9 October 2025
Contributed by:
George Aliferis, CAIA
Video games are the biggest cultural industry in the world - bigger than film, music, and books combined and gamers form a large and diverse group (48% are female and 75% are adults - i.e.not just male teenagers).
For non-gamer there are very few elements that show games are affected by the culture wars. When Ubisoft canceled the next Assassin’s Creed set in post–Civil War America, due to “fears about the current U.S. political climate”, only the gaming press reported it.
Yet, a culture war is raging in the gaming industry. It manifests itself often as “review bombings”. Early reviews are critical for a successful launch. These reviews used to be based on game play and technical aspects, but they have shifted to ideological considerations. The goal is to influence the details of the games and even its releases.
A report from the European Games Observatory shows how these work on the 2024 release of the Assassin’s Creed franchise: “Yasuke”, featuring a black samurai. The game was attacked by the “anti-DEI” community on “out-game” criterias, by a group of interconnected influencers who were not specialised in gaming but with a large audience.
“Despite being a marginal group, they function as a highly effective echo chamber, generating 16% of the digital activity on X. The repetitive nature of their messaging or variations thereof significantly influences the broader digital community’s perception.”
Bear’s Note:
Sadly the fact that the culture wars have now started infecting gaming isn’t necessarily a new one - Gamergate was the prototype for almost everything that followed. What is surprising is just how little the outrage playbook has changed - outrage, mobbing and bad-faith “free-speech” rhetoric weaponised to police and as far as possible suppress diversity. For a group of people who claim to hate “snowflakes” the anti-DEI mob spends an inordinate amount of time crying about pixels. George’s contribution for this week captures how even an industry built on a history of innovation, diversity and largely, inclusion can start orbiting the same black hole of bad faith.
Verdict: Barely Newsworthy ❌
Published: 16 October 2025
In some bad news, we were all made aware this week that the apocalypse had, in fact arrived - for people with indoor swimming pools.
The Telegraph has devoted an entire series of articles this week to what it, not at all dramatically, calls “Labour’s war on wealth”, lamenting the unbearable suffering of millionaires who have, shock-horror, been forced to lower the asking prices on their Knightsbridge mansions. “Lights-out London” is how one estate agent described it, presumably while holding smelling salts and mentally downgrading the trim level of their next Porsche.
This particular article in the series is trying very, very hard to convince everyone that the absence of buyers for a £75m Georgian palace is a national emergency rather than, say, a rebalancing of what has been for decades an overheated property market.
What’s actually happening though, is that the super-rich, many of whom were paying little to no tax under the non-dom regime anyway, are no longer getting a bespoke deal that is completely unavailable to us plebs. A few of them have decided that this is just enough, and they are moving their assets (and their staff in some cases) abroad to avoid contributing to a country they’ve treated as an investment vehicle meets safety-deposit box for decades.
It’s also worth pointing out that one of the well-heeled millionaires who is terribly worried about their multi-million pound mansion has not actually ever lived in London, rather undermining the point that they’re “leaving” as they’ve never actually been in the city in any meaningful sense.
The Telegraph’s series may try to convince readers that the economy collapses when billionaires get slightly cross, but for the rest of us the whole situation is a little bit less “lights-out London” and a little more that housing availability may just be the most credible sign of rebalancing we’ve seen in many, many years.
And that’s it for Issue Two, and it should serve as a reminder that even though it feels like we’re living in a country seemingly held together by spreadsheets and large doses of denial, there are still enough of us paying attention.
Thank you to everyone who has shared, read or sent in their stories this week - this only works because of your contributions and efforts. The world will keep feeling increasingly absurd, but in documenting that absurdity (and sometimes hysterically giggling at it) we can make our days just that much easier.
Best,
Bear
Bearly Politics is powered mainly by mild annoyance, stubborn hope and readers like yourself. There are no corporate sponsors, no donors and, sadly, no billionaire benefactors, though I do remain open to offers from a certain Mr Soros (hint-hint, nudge-nudge).
If you value that, please do consider supporting with a paid subscription.
Or send it to someone else who enjoys shouting “what the hell has happened now?!” into the void.
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
Morning Bear.
Ref: A level English.
I'm involved with a refugee support charity in the West Country.
We have a small workforce that includes refugees, amazing yes.
And we employ people with a minimum os B2 or C1 and they get on just fine.
The HS or whoever is writing her press releases is just engaged in performative signalling to the brain dead far right press.
You bring to mind the old radio and TV series 'What the Papers Say'. The media are missing a trick if they don't give you your own show - What the Papers Don't Say.