Director @CivitasSchsUK I Formerly @debatingmatters I FRSA. All views personal and not employers/associates. Tweets auto delete - it’s a fleeting conversation.
Hebden Bridge, England
Joined April 2009
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Justine Brian retweeted
Être « antifasciste » sans savoir ce qu'est le fascisme, c'est ce qui permet de taguer la plaque d'un résistant juif abattu par la Gestapo. Tué par des fascistes en uniforme, sali par des fascistes en costume d'antifa.
I am disposed to like @arisroussinos writing anyway, but this is a fine and beautiful piece.
For Halloween, an essay about doubt and belief, that may, or may not be, an Irish ghost story: unherd.com/2026/10/a-hallowe…
Justine Brian retweeted
The fact that you feel justified in effectively claiming murder by scrutiny is why people like me who wrote about him feel obliged to defend the truth of what we wrote. The truth can be unpleasant, but it should still be told.
Justine Brian retweeted
Pretty grim stuff from an estate in South London where a housing association sold the homes to a property management company which is now attempting to push through evictions and convert the houses to HMOs
Justine Brian retweeted
I think the discomfort is less to do with the antiwoke movement and more to do with how you fear being perceived because of the people who happen to agree with you on this one issue.
Many of us don’t have the luxury of caring how others perceive us.
As I’ve already explained, many of the GCs you dismiss as far right are working class who have watched their neighbourhoods and communities change beyond recognition. There are parts of London that make me think Ireland is the most salvageable country on earth.
These people don’t have another ten years to waste waiting for Labour or the Greens to get their shit together and call a spade a spade.
So when Reform or the Conservatives come along and start addressing concerns that the left has spent years either dismissing or demonising people for raising, of course you’re going to find those with otherwise liberal views supporting them.
What exactly did you expect?
You claim to understand women’s struggles regardless of who they are, where they’re from or which God they believe in, yet so much of what I see from you is contempt for women who don’t share your political allegiances.
You cannot claim to understand people while refusing to understand the circumstances that have shaped their politics.
And that’s exactly where I think you’ve failed.
In Ireland, we’ve had gay men murdered in recent years in attacks involving men who came here from outside Europe. I’ve been contacted by gay men who say they’ve been attacked, chased and harassed by newcomers.
Do you seriously think these gays have the luxury of waiting for the left to stop calling them bigots for raising concerns and start taking their experiences seriously?
Do you think the working class women who feel their communities have become less safe are concerned about whether their opinions might upset somebody at a feminist conference?
It is an extraordinarily privileged position to sit comfortably above all of this, deciding which political concerns are respectable and which people deserve to be cast out of the movement.
As with gender ideology, the consequences of migration policy are not distributed equally. Working class communities experience the changes most directly, while the people lecturing them about tolerance and writing essays are insulated from those consequences.
And the irony is that people like you have spent so long throwing the label far right at anyone who refuses to toe your political line that you’ve helped make the term practically meaningless.
Which is a whole other can of worms.
You don’t have to agree with these people. You don’t have to vote the way they vote, but if your entire understanding of their politics begins and ends with the assumption that they’re ignorant, hateful or morally defective, you haven’t understood them at all.
You’ve just found a convenient excuse not to listen.
Justine Brian retweeted
The reporting by @jgro_the was factual, fair, proportionate and in the public interest. Smearing him for doing his job and doing it well is anti-journalism - anti-democracy if you really want to get into it - and people like Carole should think about where that line ends.
Not a single news outlet has reviewed its coverage of Jason Arday, for accuracy or proportionality. Zero attempt has been made to conduct any inquiry into the media’s role in his death. Instead, the industry has moved into self-congratulatory mode. This isn’t just tone deaf, it betrays a systemic failure
Grace is such a seasoned political operator she struggles with challenge.
I was about to reiterate that I don’t trust her on the question of who is and isn’t a fascist, as already stated before her appeal to her own authority.
Limiting free speech to save it doesn’t work. It makes the voices you want to silence louder. More importantly, it’s not your prerogative to decide what I can and can’t hear, read or see or who others can platform,
Ah, this thread makes sense of a number of things floating about on here the past few days.
Perceived loss of political control, sidelining and influence: efforts to define a cause as left-not-right so voices declared not ‘left’ enough aren’t believed genuine and are rejected; not being invited to political events but spotting others you know there; then you see your own book in a photo at one, sold by a bookshop who in the space of three days on here has moved from ‘sells dodgy publishers, owner a bit dodge’ to full blown ‘fascist’ (when it turned out it was a just a bookshop, and not a conspiracy).
Some voices from the right filled the spaces largely vacated by the left, on this and other issues. ‘Captured’ allows conspiracist thinking, which in turn allows one to blame others’ apparently all-powerful and nefarious machinations for a state of affairs, rather than consider one’s own political decisions and failings.
Jane dismissed in another thread the idea of left and right not being a useful measure of political allegiances and beliefs today as a tired trope. Perhaps. But when my left-wing, union-organising, feminist Mum got called ‘far right’ for stating men can’t be women, and men’s needs shouldn’t be centred in women’s limited single-sex spaces, she got called far-right. At which point it became meaningless.
Grade A use of the colloquialism ‘mental’ here.
Shout out to another fine product from South London ✊🏼 distillers Asterley Bros. Cracking rhubarb begins (pre-mixed). Good for lazy Saturdays whilst the lasagne bakes.
I’m talking to the ‘woman’ I’ve made my Chat-GPT voice to create an event stage plan (for speed as I suggest form blank page paralysis) and it is freakily ‘real’.
Justine Brian retweeted
And if you really want to talk about speech-suppression, the case of the teacher in Yorkshire who has spent the last five years in hiding is a much better subject for discussion.
I’m not from or of the Right, and I’ve only read one Scruton book (Beauty, 2009) but Perrin’s X-bibliography of his published work does make Bastani’s point seem churlish at best, if not downright ignorant.
I have always thought you were one of the more thoughtful commentators on the left. So I’ll explain. Scruton is explaining his instinctual revulsion of violence. This is an excellent instinct to have. Instincts can sometimes be wrong and on further reflection an opinion can change but he was correct on this. Then Scruton said, “It was a lifetimes work to find out what the opposite is.”
And for Scruton it was a lifetimes work to explain this instinct to conserve. They are:
· Art and Imagination (1974)
· The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979)
· The Meaning of Conservatism (1980)
· The Politics of Culture and Other Essays (1981)
· A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981)
· A Dictionary of Political Thought (1982)
· The Aesthetic Understanding (1983)
· Kant (1983)
· Untimely Tracts (1985)
· Thinkers of the New Left (1985)
· Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (1986)
· Spinoza (1986) republished as Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction (2002)
· A Land Held Hostage: Lebanon and the West (1987)
· The Philosopher on Dover Beach and Other Essays (1989)
· Conservative Texts (1992)
· Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (1994)
· The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism(1995)
· Animal Rights and Wrongs (1996)
· An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy (1996); republished in 2005 as Philosophy: Principles and Problems
· The Aesthetics of Music (1997)
· An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998)
· On Hunting (1998)
· England: An Elegy (2001)
· The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the Terrorist Threat (2002)
· Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (Oxford University Press, 2004)
· News from Somewhere: On Settling (2004)
· The Need for Nations (2004)
· Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (Continuum, 2005)
· Animal Rights and Wrongs (2006)
· A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006)
· Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Need to Defend the Nation State(2006)
· Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter Books, 2007)
· Dictionary of Political Thought (2007)
· Beauty (2009)
· I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine (2009)
· Understanding Music (2009)
· The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope (2010)
· Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011) ISBN 9780199229758
· Green Philosophy (2011)
· The Roger Scruton Reader (2011)
· How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012)
· The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures (2012)
· Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England (2012)
· The Soul of the World (2014)
· How to Be a Conservative (2014)
· Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015)
· The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung (2016)
· Conversations with Roger Scruton (Notting Hill Editions, 2016) ISBN 9781910749128
· Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays (2016)
· On Human Nature (2017)
· Conservatism: Ideas in Profile (2017) ISBN 9781781257524
· The State of Britain Now (2017)
· Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (2018)
· Music as an Art (2018)
· Living with Beauty (2020)
· Wagner's Parsifal: The Music of Redemption (Penguin, 2020) ISBN 9780857423498
· Against the Tide: The Best of Roger Scruton's columns, commentaries and criticism (2022)]
Your instinct was to mock this clip. I think you should revise that on further reflection.
teapawt.net/AaronBastani/status/21…
Justine Brian retweeted
Also applies elsewhere.
Brutaler Leitartikel im konservativen Le Figaro. Eine Abrechnung mit Frankreichs politischem System und seiner Elite.
„Eine Justiz, die gegenüber Straftätern nachsichtig ist, gegenüber anständigen Bürgern aber unerbittlich. Das unbegreifliche Privileg dieser linksextremen Milizen, die ungestraft zerstören, Brände legen und töten. Eine unkontrollierte Einwanderung, bei der sich ein Teil der Einwanderer gegen das Land auflehnt, das sie aufgenommen hat. (…) Eine politische Klasse – die verschiedenen Spielarten des Sozialismus, die uns seit fünfzehn Jahren regieren –, die sich Leichtfertigkeit, Blindheit, wenn nicht sogar wohlwollende Duldung vorwerfen lassen muss.
Die Ermahnungen Emmanuel Macrons an eine Polizei, die seiner Ansicht nach nicht genügend „Empathie“ gegenüber jenen zeigt, die sie mit Schrauben, Pflastersteinen oder Feuerwerksmörsern angreifen, werden als unauslöschlicher Makel in Erinnerung bleiben. (…)
Wenn die extreme Linke, Straftäter und Plünderer Frankreich innerhalb weniger Stunden völlig auf den Kopf stellen können, dann liegt das vor allem daran, dass eine von sich selbst berauschte technokratische Monarchie systematisch sämtliche moralischen, sicherheitsbezogenen, kulturellen und wirtschaftlichen Schutzmechanismen eingeebnet hat, die eine Gesellschaft zusammenhalten. Die nützlichen Idioten Jean-Luc Mélenchons tragen nicht nur die Kufiya, sondern auch die Krawatte.“
The obvious question is why this man’s safety is the U.K.’s concern.
He’s not a British national, he belonged to terror groups the U.K. fought against, and he arrived here illegally. What are we doing?
The British state breaks the social contract again. metro.co.uk/2026/10/18/al-qa…
I think they guys just have a feel-good crib sheet of things to say, without thinking about what they are saying.
How can it simultaneously be the case the EU needs the UK in order to stand independently against Washington, whilst aruging the UK needs the EU to have a voice on the world stage?
The rest is wishful fantasy.
teapawt.net/marcosagusstinn/status…
🇪🇺🇬🇧 The UK is back.
The UK will soon reintegrate into the EU, paving the way for Europe's full economic and military integration.
Britain is essential to ending Europe's dependence on Washington and forging an independent foreign policy.
For the UK, reintegration would mean greater economic prosperity and global influence
Britain's biggest mistakes of the 21st century is finally coming to an end.
This is an interesting article. I particuarly like this point:
"These teenagers are delusional. To some extent, they have a right to be: adolescence is a time for illusions. But what about the adults?"
spiked-online.com/2026/10/15…
