Pride, the old proverb warns, comes before a fall. And so it has proved. You can measure the fall precisely. Among Britain's largest corporations, social media posts mentioning Pride have collapsed by ninety-two per cent in two years. Manchester Pride, forty years old, went into liquidation owing creditors three million pounds. Reform councils in Durham, Gateshead and Staffordshire have cut the grants and hauled down the flags. The sponsors who once queued to wear the rainbow are walking away, and the names on the departure list read like a stock index. The easy story is that Britain is turning against gay people. The polling says otherwise. Only seven per cent of Britons hold a negative view of gay and lesbian people. The right to love your own sex, to marry, to live openly, has never been more widely accepted. That war is over. It was won. What the public has turned against is what Pride became while nobody was watching. Capital rented the flag and turned a riot into a retail opportunity. And behind the corporate floats came something worse: an ideology that brands same-sex attraction itself a heresy, that saw lesbians removed from a gay rights parade by police "for their own safety," and that watched eight Darlington nurses dragged through a tribunal for wanting a female changing room while their own union posted clenched fists against them. In 1984, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners stood on street corners with collecting buckets for the coalfields, and the miners repaid the debt by carrying gay rights into the heart of the labour movement. That was solidarity of the old kind: it cost something, and it came with no sponsorship deal attached. Compare it with the unions of 2026, who found twenty-five thousand pounds for a Pride float and called women bigots for wanting to change in private. That is not solidarity. That is capture. So let us be clear about what is dying and what is not. Rainbow capitalism is dying, good riddance. The ideology that recast same-sex attraction as a heresy and women's rights as an obstacle deserves to die with it. What cannot die, because it was never for sale, is the thing underneath: people standing with people, the right to your own body and your own desire, and the solidarity that makes the demand stick. They built a movement so a man could love a man and a woman could love a woman. Then they called that love a heresy and rented the flag to any corporate taker. Pride comes before a fall. But the cause beneath it, love without shame, truth without fear, solidarity without sale, remains. Read the full article: labourheartlands.com/pride-a… #Pride #womensrightsmatter

A great explanation of why making cycling easier helps everyone else (including motorists) by easing congestion. By Oxfordshire LibDem Councillor Nathan Ley (but it's a looong read): cllrdrnathanley.substack.com…