That's a really strong response from the council! 💪

If this were a Labour council, we all know they'd put out some crap about "legitimate concerns", etc, etc, and some minorty group would then be shat on from a large height.

I'm a bit wound up about it, as someone who's done her time as an Eastern European immigrant kid in a working-class town - the sort of people who key your parents' car with slurs or egg your house are usually the same people responsible for antisocial behaviour towards everyone else anyway!

Frankly I thought Mahmood's line in the Commons, rebuking a Lib Dem critic, about her being the one to have actually suffered racist abuse was absurd - those people will hate you for as long as your govt gives them permission to.

Which, you know, is exactly why Labour's new asylum policies won't work, because they'll worsen integration and won't address the racist element of immigration backlash.

Come on, a finite sun can't support infinite growth, or something

The default response to ideas from outwith the inner circles of political leaders has become "no, that will lose votes" even if untrue, or at least unproven.

It's been a theme under successive PMs. May, Johnson (esp. harmful during COVID), Truss, Sunak, Starmer.

The last PM to have an '-ism' was Brown. Cameron did have one, austerity, but that was really Osborne-ism if we're honest.

I mean, I think you're right, but it's become endemic.

I'd say the problem is more Labour leadership's lack of attention to the thinkers in their midsts. Even IPPR, whose 1994 Commission on Social Justice reshaped social policy, struggles to cut through to them despite Carys Roberts now being a Starmer SpAd...

When Millennials get our own nostalgia-bait Netflix series and sci-fi films, a la Stranger Things, I will simply rewatch our noughties Six Nations 'highlights' to remind myself that some things have got better with time.

Yeah, not a fan of that.

Aw, sorry - I take my dog's happiness excessively seriously!