Richard Price, novelist (The Island, from Salt) and poet (Lucky Day, Moon for Sale, Late Gifts from @Carcanet), Views own. Website: https://xitter.cf/t.co/NWsMAXMRbO
London
Joined October 2020
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paintedspoken retweeted
In Serbia the incumbent *and the official opposition parties were defeated. The Student List has *remade politics there using hyper-democratic methods devolved across the country. It is a triumph of grassroots organisation. Something that has to be shared and learned in the UK.
paintedspoken retweeted
Lula was only 33 when he led the strike alongside the metalworkers’ union that challenged Brazil’s military dictatorship. He secured wage increases and was imprisoned.
His rival, the far-right Flávio Bolsonaro, on the other hand, has had only one occupation since the age of 21: spending his wealthy family’s money and engaging in far-right thuggery.
paintedspoken retweeted
Been waiting for my move rightwards with age. Yet I find myself more shocked by world than whenyounger, more angry with open rigging, the lies circulating on a vast scale, the brazen exploitation. When I was younger, I believed it would all be exposed & justice served in the end.
paintedspoken retweeted
Much like the Cass Review, the Bell Review cloaks ready-made conclusions in the guise of pseudo-academic inquiry, only this time the government preempted critique by feeding friendly media agreed lines before anyone could comb through it. The truth is out but the damage is done.
paintedspoken retweeted
This is absolutely insane.
The UK seems to have been involved in the kidnapping of Maduro - and the story spiked by an MOD D-Notice.
The kidnapping was the most brazen act of criminality, and UK involvement would almost certainly have been given with Starmer's sign-off. A wretched, wreck of a PM. An unforgivable assault on international law.
paintedspoken retweeted
🚨 A UK defence editor had information that UK Special Forces operating in Central America were involved in the US kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in Jan 2026
Article was never published after UK military's 'D-Notice' censorship body told the editor to spike it
paintedspoken retweeted
'Security' doesn't mean hand UK resources to multinational companies & guarantee our kids and grandchildren fry or flood. Well seen you kept this news back before the byelection. Total fearties -- & with that majority you could even have nationalised energy, least you could do.
paintedspoken retweeted
Is this true @mtpennycook; you have dumped your election pledge & commitment to making lease extensions & enfranchisement cheaper for leaseholders? Seems @AngelaRayner needs to keep a closer eye on her dept, to ensure it's genuinely delivering.
@NickFerrariLBC @Victoria_Spratt
paintedspoken retweeted
The media onslaught and debate around the Green ZiR motion has clarified many things:
Who our MSM are and that there is a political party we can vote for with a strong, principled leader speaking about:
Affordable housing
Public ownership
A sustainable planet
An end to genocide.
🟢 I've written this week's @NewStatesman Politics Column on the Greens' pledge to 'replace Labour' which, though fitting for the moment, was clearly unsustainable.
The problem with this promise might not have been its ambition, but the assumption that the Greens were ready to fulfil it. Events over the past three weeks - the fall out from the Zionism is Racism motion and the Holborn and St Pancras by-election - could all be seen as evidence of that.
And now, exclusive polling by @Moreincommon_ and shared with the NS shows Polanski's personal approval his personal net approval rating has hit a low of -35 per cent and one in four people now think the party has a serious anti-Semitism problem. Some polls have the Greens on 7 per cent, lower than before Polanski was elected.
So, where does the party go next? With Andy Burnham as prime minister, Polanski & the Greens' strategy can no longer be exclusively about criticising an unpopular Labour government - it will need to be about convincing voters they are a realistic alternative. There are figures within the party who are beginning to do this thinking. As several sources told me, for the first time Green factions are likely to form.
Read more online & in this week's magazine:
paintedspoken retweeted
Jackdaw and Aberfan trending together as both represent the pursuit of profit that did end and will end in disaster.
paintedspoken retweeted
the President targeting a sitting member of the opposition party for arrest and deportation three weeks before the midterms would normally be a major story but it was ignored entirely by all four Sunday shows yesterday because the target is The Wrong Race, Religion and Ideology.
paintedspoken retweeted
The End of the Shia-Sunni Wedge
An important development that seens to have gone unnoticed and unremarked upon is the end of the Shia-Sunni wedge. What do I mean by that?
Ever since the Islamic Revolution, the Gulf Arabs have used the Shia-Sunni divide to isolate Iran. Since the Shia are a minority in the Islamic world, this suited their purposes very well. They milked it whenever and wherever they found it useful.
The entire political order dominated by the Al Khalifa in Bahrain was built on Shia exclusion. Oman was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Bahrain. The others were in between.
Even though Shia Iraqis had fought for him against Iran, Saddam crushed the Shia Intifida in southern Iraq with great brutality, under the watchful gaze of General Schwarzkopf and in full knowledge of the Bush Administration, using West German chemical weapons to boot.
The greatest threat to Saudi Arabia was posed by the inconvenient fact that all the oil sits under the Shia-majority region in the east. Here the repression was severe but not by the standards of the Al Khalifa or Sadddam.
Into this regional context, the US invaded and dismantled Saddam's regime. That unleashed the first great wave of sectarian war. The ensuring violence destroyed any chance of what the US hoped to build in Iraq. It took years of counterinsurgency and the Anbar Awakening to get the violence somewhat under control.
A second great wave of sectarian violence began with the Syrian civil war. Sectarian polarization intensified as the civil war evolved into a proxy war between Iran and Hezbollah on one side, and the Sunni states on the other. It is hard to overstate the degree of sectarian bloodletting. Millions were slaughtered by both sides.
What has happened this year is a great twist in the tale. The US and Israel attacked Iran after Bibi gave Trump a bully boner. This naked act of aggression, and Iran's heroic resistance to it, neutralized the great Shia-Sunni wedge that the Gulf Arabs had been working all these decades.
As it pummeled US bases and Gulf states, Iran became the hero of the Islamic world across the Shia-Sunni divide, including in the Gulf states that came under Iranian fire. The defeat of the United States cemented Iran's status. Iran's heroic war against the empire dissolved the sectarian divide.
And then came the Houthis. They had already won great respect and admiration for being the only power to have dared to attack Israel for the genocide. Their confessional identity, never really coded as Shia to begin with, became totally irrelevant. The Arab street and the Islamic world simply feel in love with them. They are being described as 'the only real Muslims in the world'.
This is a world historic development in its own right. It is part and parcel of the end of Iranian isolation, undercutting a central component of the Gulf Arabs' strategy to contain Iran. In Yemen, it undermined the Saudi-led coalition's strategy to contain the Houthis.
Central to this historical turn was the genocide in Gaza. It was Gaza that exposed the hypocrisy of the authoritarian Sunni states allied with Washington.
This development is right now playing an important role constraining the Sunni states intervention in Yemen. For the Pakistanis, the Egyptians and the Turks, going after the Houthis to protect the Saudis threatens the stability of their own regimes.
There is no doubt that it will have wider ramifications still. A very big development that almost no one is talking about.
paintedspoken retweeted
Andy Burnham and the Labour Government are handling over all your personal data and our public services over to these guys btw - as the result of an off-the-books meeting organised by Peter Mandelson.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp: I told the Israeli government from the beginning, maximum violence to the people organizing violence, minimal violence to the people on the front end.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Do you think that they lived up to that?
Karp: You know, you, you, you, I could tell you, I feel that if, somewhat ill-modestly, if people listen to me more actively in Germany, on migration, on Israel, on these issues, and on lots of other things, we'd have a better world
Sorkin: In other words, you don't think that they have done it as well as they should?
Karp: Well, you know, it's, well, I'll put it this way. In a world where people didn't have so much derangement syndrome, I would, would be a lot more critical. In this world, I think you have to compare them to what, the competence level of any other country. And you say, yeah, these things are very hard and brutal, and watching these things happen is very difficult. But, you know, yeah, it's a very hard world, because in the end, we are in a world where the, there really aren't high-integrity partners on any side of the debate.
paintedspoken retweeted
The American Revolution is the clearest example of the selective memory at work.
The Founders are celebrated as visionaries who understood that some conditions make revolution not just permissible but obligatory.
They wrote this down. In detail. In a document that is treated as sacred.
"When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government."
Duty.
They used the word duty.
And then built a country that, over the next two and half centuries, made it its business to prevent exactly this principle from being applied by anyone else, anywhere, to any power the United States supported.
The right to revolution is the founding document.
The prevention of revolution is the foreign policy.
Hold both of those in your mind at the same time and tell me what you see.
paintedspoken retweeted
Nigel Farage gave a conference platform to the woman who tweeted 'set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards' in the middle of the Southport riots. He's suprisingly less supportive of burning buildings in France.
paintedspoken retweeted
Quiero que sepáis que todo esto empezó porque cuando un grupo de chavales protestó por tener ratas y goteras en su instituto, la policía respondió reventándole la boca a uno, mutilandole la mano a otro y ahogando a otro.
La represión ha sido brutal y ha encontrado respuesta.
Des véhicules de police sont prises pour cible par la foule dans le secteur République à Paris.
#Paris #17octobre
paintedspoken retweeted
Sounds strikingly to me like young people are going to be made to work for free stacking shelves for Sainsburys, subsidised with meagre benefits, which are withdrawn entirely if they don't.
Can't imagine how grim it must be to be young and know that your future is in the hands of arch-Blairite Alan Milburn.
Exclusive:
Britain is facing an “economic catastrophe and moral failure” because a generation of young people is being written off to a life on benefits, the prime minister has said.
Andy Burnham writes for The Times that the time has come for Britain to “invest in the success of our young people” rather than “pay for failure through the benefits system”.
Setting out his vision for the fundamental reform of welfare, he said the present scheme provided “an assessment, a payment and, after that, a goodbye”, with no support, skills or help getting a job.
In future, Burnham promised, the government would offer a “clear guarantee” of support, starting in schools, to address the almost one million 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training, known as Neets.
Every young person would be guaranteed a technical pathway, work placements, apprenticeships and the skills they needed to find a job, Burnham said.
However, he cautioned that this would be matched by an expectation that young people would take up the opportunities available to them. He added that under the new system, benefits would become a “backstop” rather than the “starting point” for young people.
His comments come a week after the launch of The Times Welfare Inquiry, a six-month investigation into how the welfare state is working and failing.
