Keith Jordan 🛡

The Representation of the People Bill — a piece of legislation the Free Speech Union has identified as being of significant concern — has been delayed at the last minute, as speculation grows that Andy Burnham will rewrite it. This effectively confirms that Labour Deputy Leader Lucy Powell intends to press ahead with her plan to impose new restrictions on political debate on social media during election periods. Powell wants to impose new restrictions on open political debate on platforms such as Facebook and X, creating a chilling effect on free speech and treating private citizens like broadcasters. This is also the same piece of legislation that would give 16-year-olds the vote — enfranchising an additional 1.7 million people — while, at the same time, the Government plans to ban under-16s from accessing content that could help inform their decisions at the ballot box. While Keir Starmer may be leaving Downing Street, Andy Burnham could yet prove even more hostile to free speech. Read more below 👇

Feminism is an utterly useless word. There are so many flavours of it ranging from 1st wave, 2nd wave, sensible women's rights advocates, loony lefties, and worst of all 'intersectional' feminists. It's easiest to damn the whole lot. The good lasses need to differentiate.

Elon Musk was asked by a room full of Stanford students what single trait separates people who change the world from people who don't. Everyone expected him to say intelligence. Or work ethic. Or vision. He said pain tolerance. The room wasn't sure if he was joking. He wasn't. He explained that intelligence is common. Ambition is common. Even good ideas are relatively common. What is genuinely rare is the ability to absorb punishment day after day, year after year, and keep building anyway. He said most people he's met who are smarter than him quit after the first real failure. Not because they weren't talented. Because the pain of failure exceeded their tolerance for it. They found something easier and redirected their intelligence there. He said the entire history of SpaceX is just a story about absorbing explosions, literally and financially, and refusing to interpret them as signals to stop. Nobody writes that on a motivational poster. Nobody puts "pain tolerance" on their LinkedIn profile. But it's the actual filter. Not who can dream the biggest. Who can bleed the longest.

1 year ago. This belongs in a museum.

Here’s what she wrote about it to parliamentarians: “There was considerable discomfort in the House and more widely on social media about my account of ‘Jo’, a biologically male child who was socially transitioned to a girl at 2½ and presented at around 10-11 afraid to go to secondary school for fear of being ‘outed’, later retreating to their bedroom and developing weak bones due to inactivity. ‘Jo’ is not a specific case, but represents a group of similar children being seen in the new services, and previously at the Tavistock. Although social transition is usually later (from 4 onwards), I was told during the Review about children who had been transitioned at Jo’s age and younger. “I have been asked why safeguarding procedures would not have been initiated when ‘Jo’ was a toddler, but these children are frequently living in stealth (i.e. those around them do not know their biological sex) and do not come to medical attention until much later as puberty looms. A male child who has socially transitioned at 4 and presents at 11 will have next to no recollection of being a boy. They are not making a decision to be a girl – by that time they just believe themselves to be a girl and have no frame of reference to think differently. Even with input from the very skilled therapists in the new services, encouraging them to think more flexibly about their identity is rarely successful, regardless of what their natural trajectory would have been if they had not been socially transitioned at that very early stage.”