Here it is: my 2026 manifesto for the #Makerfield By-Election. Makerfield Great Again! #VoteBinface #MakeYourVoteCount

RT @Islandcroft: In May 1845, 90 men, women, and children were evicted from the glen of Glencalvie in Ross-shire. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 They had nowhere…

Almost every single word. The fact that it needs to be said in 2026 still boggles my mind. Thank you.

Dostoevsky understood the modern crisis before it became normal. A man can study truth, praise progress, and speak about humanity while still failing to help the child standing in front of him. This is the central wound inside Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. The man had spent years thinking about life, yet he had no strength left to live it. One winter night, after sitting with friends who spoke grandly about truth and progress, he walked home with a revolver waiting in his room. He had decided that this would be his last night. On the way, a little girl grabbed his coat. She was wet, frightened, and begging for help. Her mother was sick. The man understood enough to know she needed him, yet he pushed her away and told her to find the police. When she kept pleading, he shouted at her. She ran off into the cold. He reached his room, sat before the revolver, and prepared to die. Then the girl’s face returned to him. Her fear disturbed him. Her pain followed him into the silence. He wondered why guilt still hurt if life had no meaning. Then he fell asleep. In the dream, he saw himself dead. A bright being lifted him from his grave and carried him beyond the stars to another world. The people there looked human, yet they lived without greed, envy, lies, or cruelty. They loved naturally. They had no need to explain happiness because they lived inside it. Then he corrupted them. One lie led to another. Pride entered. Envy followed. Soon they competed, deceived, punished, and killed. When he begged them to remember who they had once been, they mocked him. They said they had science, knowledge, and the laws of happiness. They believed understanding happiness mattered more than happiness itself. He woke at six in the morning. The revolver still sat before him. He threw it away. The dream had given him a task. He would find the little girl. He would tell people the truth. They would call him ridiculous again, but this time he knew something they had forgotten. A life without love can know everything and still understand nothing. Dostoevsky’s lesson attacks one of the modern world’s favorite lies that knowledge alone can save us. The man in the story has thought about life so much that he has stopped living it. He can judge society, expose hypocrisy, and explain despair, yet one suffering child reveals the poverty of his soul. That is the force of the story. A little girl does what philosophy cannot do. She brings him back to responsibility. The dream shows the same truth on a larger scale. A perfect world falls when deceit enters it, then its people begin to defend corruption. They suffer, yet call their suffering wisdom. They lose happiness, then comfort themselves with theories about happiness. Dostoevsky noticed that a civilization can become brilliant and still become cruel. It can build systems, write laws, praise progress, and lose the simple moral instinct that tells a man to help a child in the rain. His final lesson is severe and necessary. Truth begins with love in action. Love begins with the person in front of you. That is why the ridiculous man becomes wise. He stops studying life from outside and accepts the burden of living it. For more content like this, subscribe to the Culture Explorer… newsletter.thecultureexplore…

Craig, I've read your article and the simple and fundamental problem here is highlighted in your last paragraph, where you say “A lot of people voted Green . . . . . . . This member of the Scottish parliament, elected by the Scottish people, must be defended against any attack from the London-based UK Home Office”. This is nonsense, because none of the Scottish people actually voted for Manivannan in any meaningful way. If you ask the question “Why did the voters of Edinburgh and Lothians East choose Manivannan?” the only honest answer to that question is that they didn't. He was elected because the Scottish Green Party put his name third on a regional list which was chosen, and ordered, by a small group of Green party activists. The Scottish proportional representation mechanism puts parties in charge, not voters. This is presented as democratic because constituency votes are supposed to be proportionately balanced with with members from the party lists. But, in practice, it is profoundly undemocratic because the party machine decides who sits where on the list and, in practice, voters have no way to approve or get rid of list MSPs. . If you go back to Tony Benn's five questions to ask people in power - What Power Have You Got? Where Did You Get It From? In Whose Interests Do You Exercise It? To Whom Are You Accountable? How Can We Get Rid Of You? - it's obvious that Manivannan's election fails most of the tests. He got his power from the party, he is there to serve the party's interests, he is not accountable to voters because they have no direct say in his election and, for all practical purposes, he can't be voted out “A lot of people” voting Green is not, in any way, equivalent to them voting for or endorsing Manivannan. Do you honestly believe that a foreign national on a student visa, with a minimal connection to Scotland, would have been voted for if the Edinburgh and Lothians East voters had been choosing actual candidates? There is a reason that he was third on the list and not standing in the constituency election. To suggest that there is a strong “democratic mandate” supporting his election is simply Orwellian Newspeak. And please don't tell me that he's a “pleasant and gentle soul” who's done nothing wrong – no-one forced him into standing and he must have known perfectly well what he was doing when he agreed to take part in this profoundly undemocratic charade.

One interesting detail is that the Good Law Project’s failed attempt to challenge EHRC draft guidance has helped create binding case law so that “an employer who permits trans women to use the women’s toilets in effect no longer provides single sex facilities for women”.

Facebook never fails to disappoint. Stevie's comment re Iris Duane.

???

Women's nipples have holes in them that absorb our babies' saliva during breastfeeding and our bodies detect the vitamin levels of our babies. Based on those results our bodies begin to produce extra of the nutrients that our babies are lacking.

Creepy blokes announcing they will follow me to tell me, eventually, that they will be proved right. Weird.

Farrow & Ball’s new colour: Green Tit

At last, the trade union movement is to be challenged in the courts over its support for gender ideology, as Community - whose members include leading @UKLabour ministers - faces a judicial review over its ‘equality’ policies.

Gender idiot lost their argument & couldn't cope with reality of life. Runs to victimhood, while lying their head off. Don't start what you can't finish. Women have no choice but to stop this nonsense.

Genderwoo idiots, olympic level.

Gender woo idiot sealioning at olympic level. Can't google for toffee & pretends his gender religion is true. Nobody can change sex, sweetie & you can google the SCJ in your own time. Your ignorance & pretence is your own problem.

If you’ve spent any time at all observing Scottish politics in the last 15 years you would know that Christine Jardine is an absolutely reliable moron (0.989 on the Dugdale Scale) and therefore any policy she supports you should automatically oppose.