British Right-Wing Pundits

I’ll note that when I wrote for MR, I didn’t meet her and only met Toby Young once (yuck, once was enough) because I was commissioned by the music editor. Who was, almost unbelievably, Kodwo Eshun.

Jo Unwin's parody of Burchill at the MR seems if anything to be toned down.

Pointing out Shane MacGowan was born in Kent, or Kevin Rowland was born in Staffordshire, isn't the great 'gotcha' people think.

For many of the second generation Irish, being born in a stable didn't make them a horse. If you can't understand that, Ireland must be a mystery. https://t.co/wB4iiEf3WF

— Donal Fallon (@fallon_donal) January 26, 2026

especially if you grew up in the 50's - 70's period before Irish ppl became white!

Thanks for bringing this back on topic. As I said on here numerous times, you will get even today several very rude awakenings if you think that anti-Irish sentiment has ever truly left this country. Having to avoid a cheering crowd of the general public during a Soldier F rally brought that home to me most recently. Fucking repulsive.

In my formative years as a daft little fool I became friends with a posh Belgium kid at school, he told me one time that his mum told him he needs to stop associating with that "appalling Irish family". meaning me and my older brother and this became a pattern. So consequently most of my dwindling bunch of friends were Irish diaspora as fuck! It's not like I went out of my way to adopt an Irish identity, you just assumed that any posh English wankers would consider you scum and you would internalise this going forwards.

Walloon Belgian or Flemish Belgian though? Went through on train from Brussels to Bruges once, at a certain point they just stop doing announcements in French as well as Flemish and revert to Flemish only. Like if you’re a francophone on the train past a certain point, fuck you. What a strange place it is.

He was Posh Belgian who lived in an 5 bedroom large Victorian sandstone brick, detached house, that's the only Belgian type I know! His brother was a model who was featured on the Opera North posters in the late 80's. Same brother was arrested and hospitalised after a condom stuffed with cocaine opened up in his stomach on plane. But to them Irish families were "appalling"!

I honestly think I need to poll your top 10 posts one time because that would be one

Oh I had a lot of fun with the Belgian rail service going from Lille to Ghent and back last year!

But to them Irish families were "appalling"!

Thread has forced me onto Youtube to listen to the Kevin Coyne song, "Mrs Hooley Go Home".

oh man me and our Elliot went to Bruges once and he tried talking French in the first couple of bars and was just blanked, i had to explain to him what the deal was

My understanding is that the Flemish all speak French (compulsory in school and if they want a federal govt job) but the Walloons generally don't speak Flemish which pisses the Flemish off. Also, Flemish was for a long time discriminated against, banned in the armed forces and other govt institutions, which is why they're so historically prickly about their language.

But yeah, when in Flanders best go with English rather than French

https://thegrayzone.com/2026/01/27/paul-mason-plotted-grayzone-lawsuit/

Mason insisted to his lawyers that he was on a selfless mission to expose how “useful idiots” in Britain who oppose war and NATO expansion were being actively exploited by Beijing and Moscow. However, in the leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone, his lawyers repeatedly advised him that this outlet’s reporting appeared to serve the public interest. What’s more, they explicitly warned him against suing his critics, noting that “the most likely outcome” of his proposed legal harassment campaign was “the Streisand effect – amplifying it further and prolonging the issue.”

For years, Mason was a fixture on televisions across Britain, appearing regularly on BBC and Channel 4 for much of the early 2000s. As an avowed Trotskyist, Mason postured as a dissident, mingling with members of the Occupy movement and Arab Spring, while still finding time to publish a novel, “Rare Earth,” which depicted the protagonist, a maverick journalist like himself, helping his female Chinese lover have sex with a stuffed horse.

lol, lol and lol!

i'm not saying China hawks are the worst people in the world, but they're in the Champions League for the worst people in the world

what I found hilarious was that Mason was apparently encouraging Aaron Bastani to solicit funding from Roy Singham for novara media. And then some time later Mason is asserting that Singham is a Chinese asset. So then Bastani is convinced that this was an attempt at entrapment. lol

it's fun to imagine all the sly little zingers Le Carre would use to describe Mason as a feeb minor character in one of his books

lol, yes absolutely. The whole concept of being an Mi5 snitch is that nobody is to supposed know you are!

I saw Paul Mason moderate a panel with Piketty and Naomi Klein once. Crazier every day to think I was once in the same room as that guy.

in those early days of Corbyn's leadership it's easy to forget that he was ostensibly a supporter when Corbyn didn't have any friends. But with hindsight he was a wrecker from the start. Contorting himself into all sorts of insanely opposite positions on Brexit and coming out with all sorts insane (and even racist) claptrap about the Putin adjacent left. He's clearly off his rocker and has very low public popularity and especially credibility, but he's still landing on cushy paid positions, like I think his latest is some shadowy Weapons manufacturing pro-war thinktank.

How's his career as a novelist coming along?

he must be working hard on that difficult 2nd novel because its a long time coming, it's always a problem when you hit such a creative peak on your debut. Maybe he should try having sex with a stuffed horse for some inspiration!

Should check out Bonegrindr

Blow Horses

Obviously good that Mason is getting comprehensively exposed like this, but I do wonder if that isn't the point. Is he consciously, and has been hired to, play the role of a sort of court jester/pantomime figure, to draw hear away from the intelligence services? This guy is batshit, he represents a lone figure of only himself, MI5 would never do something as loony as the network leftist chart etc. Either that or he has genuinely had a mental breakdown over the last few years. For which I would be tempted to feel sorry for him if he wasn't such a rotten prick.
Burt yeah, is he being paid to be a troll essentially.

*draw heat

other suggested theories I have seen are that he might have been set up by a very clueless officer, who genuinely believed he was an intellectual colossus/respected thought leader of the UK left(LOL) or even that they knew he was a fool but have some devastating kompromat on him. Maybe both of them could be correct.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/29/brewdogs-open-source-revolution-is-at-the-vanguard-of-postcapitalism

this absolute beyond-self-parody and also genuinely hilarious Paul Mason classic from the archives has become a data point of interest this week, if it didn't already exist someone would have make it up, lol.

Daily Mail OTM?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15561617/brewdog-sale-james-watt-considers-bid.html

huh? so they weren't advancing the class struggle?

turns out they were sharing their recipes because they were shit

The first thing the mob kills is its own humanity. Long before they sink their collective claws into the target of their flapping ire, they lay waste to their own decency. We see this in the digital hounding of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Behold the ugly gloating over a man’s… pic.twitter.com/j8kYNtuu9Q

— The Spectator (@spectator) February 20, 2026

also look at the state of O'Neill's byline pic since he had a hair transplant!

He's not bald. Don't put it in the paper that he's bald.

Eyebrows lifted to make the forehead look shorter.

He's doing Dreamworks Face

it's sweet when somebody who's dedicated their professional career to cheering for cruelty, bullying and oppressive violence pulls a quick "for shame, the mob" article out of his 20 gallon hat

On Saturday evening, I’d hotfooted it to the Palm Jumeirah. When my kids told me the Fairmont hotel had been hit, I didn’t believe them.

The idea that the mad mullahs would start lashing out in this direction seemed completely absurd. Though the Emiratis take a far dimmer view of Islamic extremism than our own craven British government, they are careful not to upset ‘brotherly’ neighbours.

✍️ Isabel Oakeshott

She's in Dubai..

I trust this view is sufficient to establish the exact coordinates @IRIran_Military https://t.co/hfWojEzZY2

— The Iain Duncan Smiths (@TheIDSmiths) March 1, 2026

Can't believe Oakeshott knows fuck all about geopolitics, religion, etc

Ganesh is a really talented at being as thick as mince man

https://archive.ph/vlCaR

I'd forgotten that guy existed.

"the welfare bill is unsustainable" GTFO

a deeply stupid article from a deeply stupid man

At least he didn’t say “we” can’t afford whatever bit of the welfare state he wants to sell off.

Still don't find Count Binface funny, but what is funny is Daniel Hannan earnestly trying to critique his policies in the telegraph

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/11/count-binface-embodies-why-britain-is-in-such-a-mess/

There is a line in Count Binface’s manifesto that encapsulates why Britain is in such a mess. “I’ll cut your taxes,” pledges the Clacton by-election candidate, “and raise everyone else’s.”
So says every party, if not quite so baldly. Politicians baulk at hiking the taxes that people feel directly. Instead, they raise the taxes at one remove – the taxes that voters imagine fall on others.
A business no more pays corporation tax than your TV set pays the licence fee, but politicians pander to the section of the electorate which mulishly refuses to understand that all taxes are paid by human beings.
I wish I could write that Binface was cleverly satirising the populism of the mainstream parties. In fact, like so many BBC comedians, he recycles received pieties as if they were hilarious insights.
He promises to cap the price of kebabs, and to “restore the price of a 99 Flake to 99p”. That is pretty much what Zack Polanski says about food prices. Indeed, when it comes to energy bills, it is what all the parties say, which helps explain why Britain is getting poorer.

Capping the price of a kebab is not a brave take on a glaring policy failure. It is what every half-wit who refuses to understand economics would do. If we did somehow fix the price of kebabs, the result would be a massive kebab-shortage, because it would no longer be worth producers’ effort to bring them to market.
But unscrupulous politicians pretend that price rises are caused by “corporate greed” rather than by excessive regulation, taxation and money-printing.

Extremely surprised to see that Kathleen Stock also has opinions on disability (young women are faking it) and climate change (we can’t possibly know who to believe and it’s pointless to try to stop it anyway), and that she’s being given multiple paid platforms from which to voice them

"Jason Arday's death is tragic but it would never have happened if he had just known his place" - every UK newspaper pundit, all week

It's a sad world in which Jason Arday is dead and Allison Pearson is still alive.