Gaby Hinsliff's Blog, page 10

The exodus from X to Bluesky has happened – the era of mass social media platforms is over | Gaby Hinsliff

There’s comfort in being surrounded by like-minded people, but challenge is important, and we may have to look for it elsewhere

Hell is other people. Or, more specifically, other people on social media. Hell is millions of people who would avoid each other like the plague if they met in real life, but who are shoved into each other’s faces and essentially egged on to punch each other online; it’s people endlessly winding each other up out of boredom or frustration or desperation to be part of some gang, which ends in viral bullying, death threats, children ripping other children to shreds on platforms they are legally not old enough to join.

Hell is a social circle so vast and remote that human brains just aren’t wired to cope with it: it’s sociability without accountability, and it was making us miserably stressed long before Elon Musk bought X and drove it at a wall. But even then, people stayed for the reasons people do stay in toxic relationships – inertia, fear of being lonely, misplaced hope it may get better – and because it seemed intrinsic to many working lives. You had to be on X because everyone else was, a circular logic that this week finally snapped: a stampede away from X has seen rival Bluesky add 1 million users since the US election, with several prominent Labour MPs joining the charge. What’s the point, the chair of the women and equalities committee, Sarah Owen, asked, in being on a site that’s “gone from cat memes, to sharing Wordle scores, to calling people whores just for having a different political opinion”?

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Why on earth do the rich keep bankrolling Prince Andrew? | Gaby Hinsliff

Despite his fall from grace, the royal always seems to find a pal to pay his way. In a world awash with murky interests, it is rather important that we find out why

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a fortune is usually dead keen to throw it at Prince Andrew.

Because they keep on doing it, don’t they? They just can’t help themselves, from the oligarch son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s then president, who so obligingly paid £3m over the asking price for the Duke of York’s former marital home at Sunninghill Park, to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who so famously lent the duke’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson £15,000 to help clear her debts. Even after King Charles stopped paying his security bills, Andrew is believed to have found what the royal journalist Robert Hardman’s biography of the king delicately calls “other sources of income” related to his contacts in international trade – a phrase that makes you long for the good old days of Fergie gamely doing WeightWatchers ads to pay off her overdraft or Princess Anne’s son-in-law going on I’m A Celebrity to discuss her reaction to his novelty boxer shorts.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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‘I never want you around your grandchild’: the families torn apart when adult children decide to go ‘no contact’

Some cases of estrangement stem from a traumatic childhood. But in others it can come as a shock to parents who believe they did their best. People on both sides of family rifts share their stories

It’s a year and a half since Jody last spoke to her mother, and the conversation ended badly. Though their relationship was always fractious, with long spells of not speaking, Jody had been feeling anxious about some big changes in her life and was craving comfort. Listening to some old voicemails from her mother made her nostalgic enough to pick up the phone. But the call quickly degenerated.

“My mom has a proclivity for expressing her emotions in really extreme, volatile ways. She lashes out and insults people,” says Jody, who is 29 and in the process of moving overseas. Her mother has suffered long-term mental health problems, she says, and sees herself as a victim conspired against by others: Jody learned young that if she didn’t beg for forgiveness when her mother started hurling accusations, she would be frozen out. But not this time. “When it finally clicked that my mom weaponised her own emotions to manipulate mine, I stopped feeling a reflex to defend myself.” She hung up, blocked her mother’s number, and decided they would never speak again.

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It is galling to see Starmer ingratiate himself with Trump – but it would be horribly negligent if he didn’t | Gaby Hinsliff

The PM has a duty to pull any levers he can to ameliorate the president-elect’s global impact. And the war-gaming is well under way

Dawn had barely broken, and nor had Kamala Harris publicly conceded, when Keir Starmer tweeted his congratulations to the not-quite-officially President-elect Donald Trump.

Britain would, he said, stand “shoulder to shoulder” with its old ally, as it always does. Though he got the early opportunity he wanted to congratulate the new president-elect even more fulsomely down the phone, those words will have been gut-wrenching for many people. How can it be business as usual, with a president whose own former chief of staff said he met the definition of a fascist? What on earth makes Starmer think he can influence Trump for the better, the usual rationale for engaging with unsavoury leaders, where Trump’s own advisers repeatedly failed? The only people he ever really heeded, the British-born former White House adviser Fiona Hill once told one of Theresa May’s aides, were the now late Queen and the pope.

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Fur and loathing: do America’s ‘childless cat ladies’ hold the key to the US election?

When JD Vance dismissed Kamala Harris as a ‘childless cat lady’, it sparked controversy, brought Taylor Swift into the presidential debate and focused attention on right-wing political pressure placed on women to have children

When writer and artist Alice Maddicott’s beloved rescue cat died, she was understandably bereft. Dylan was a proper character, she says, the kind of gregarious cat that follows you to the pub or for a walk. But mourning him made Alice, who was then in her late 30s and single, feel faintly self-conscious. What if people thought she was a mad cat lady, weeping spinsterish tears for her pet?

“If I’d had a dog, there would be no stereotype. But as a single woman approaching 40, it could be seen very differently,” says Maddicott. Curious about the origins of such a kneejerk prejudice, she started digging into its history. The research became a book, Cat Women, reclaiming an insult long used to belittle older women (especially non-compliant ones) or frighten younger women into settling down, lest they end up like the crazy cat lady from The Simpsons: once a high achiever, now a burnt-out drunk.

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Jenrick’s Southport comments mark a new low. That matters for us all, not just the Tory party | Gaby Hinsliff

In our poisoned politics, the Conservative leadership race is a reminder of how social norms can wear away in a democracy

Nigel Farage has an echo. A rather tinny one, admittedly, but it’s uncanny all the same. Whatever he says, somewhere from the cavernous depths of Robert Jenrick’s ambition those words come floating back.

Farage spends his summer campaigning for Donald Trump to be president? Back in August, Jenrick said he too would vote for the man whose own former chief of staff calls him a fascist. Farage endlessly portrays migrants as violent and dangerous, threatening to leave the ECHR because apparently Britain is being “walked all over by foreign criminals”? Jenrick too complains to the Daily Telegraph of what he calls “an institutional cover-up about the costs of mass migration” (by which he means ministers won’t keep a public record of crimes committed and benefits claimed specifically by migrants) while saying that leaving the ECHR would help “remove dangerous foreign criminals like rapists, murderers and paedophiles”.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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Are you a fat cat or a working person? Find out in tomorrow’s budget | Gaby Hinsliff

The debate over how to define workers will come back to haunt Rachel Reeves if she cannot convince the public that she’s acting in their interests

Workers of the world, unite. Nothing’s too good for the workers. You know what it means, instantly, when you see “worker” in a phrase like that – what kind of working people, exactly, is being addressed.

You know it doesn’t mean billionaires, even if they spend every waking hour in the office. It doesn’t mean people who own a string of buy-to-lets either, no matter how long they spend managing their property empire. Conversely, you can identify as working class in this sense even if you’re currently not actually doing any work but are on strike, or looking after small children, or even retired. Being a worker is more a virtuous state of mind than a socioeconomic definition, and like all feelings it doesn’t always make logical sense. But when wrapped inside a clear political ideology, somehow it works.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Armed police have a dangerous job, but that doesn’t mean they should be less accountable | Gaby Hinsliff

The home secretary mustn’t let herself be held to ransom over the Chris Kaba case. Officers need her support, but so do the public and grieving families

Dalian Atkinson was a gifted Premier League footballer in his youth. But by the summer afternoon that he died, he was a vulnerable man in the middle of a breakdown, standing outside his father’s house in Telford, shouting about being the Messiah. Two police officers summoned by neighbours were “terrified”, a court heard. Atkinson was Tasered for far longer than guidelines allow, and when he finally hit the ground, PC Benjamin Monk kicked him hard enough in the head to leave bootlace imprints. It later turned out Monk, who was convicted of manslaughter in 2021, hadn’t disclosed criminal cautions for theft and drunkenness before joining the force.

A black sporting hero; a white officer with a history of dishonesty; a degree of violence that turns the stomach. in 34 years involving police officers facing murder or manslaughter charges, Atkinson’s is still the only one to meet the bar juries seemingly set for convicting in morally troubling cases that often elicit little public sympathy. Jurors seem particularly willing to give officers the benefit of the doubt over split-second judgment calls few of us might want to make, with no on-duty officer in history convicted of shooting a suspect dead. This week a jury took only three hours to clear Met firearms officer Martyn Blake of murder over the shooting of Chris Kaba, an unarmed black man driving a car linked to a firearms incident the night before, who had tried to ram his way free from a police stop. (The jury wasn’t told that Kaba was a gang member also captured on CCTV shooting a man in a crowded nightclub the week before, because Blake didn’t know that either when he fired).

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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Why can’t politics in the UK or US get to grips with Taylor Swift? Because she is a force in her own right | Gaby Hinsliff

On each side of the Atlantic, so much rests on what she says, positions she takes and who meets her approval. She is where pop meets politics now

When people say that music can change the world, they don’t usually mean songs that capture with bright, sharp intimacy how girls feel.

They mean protest songs, political songs, anthems against the Vietnam war; not the soundtracks to aching teenage summers or to eight-year-olds’ dance routines in the playground. They don’t, in short, mean Taylor Swift songs. But that was what Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel peace prize-winning campaigner for women’s right to an education, used to sing with her friends growing up in Pakistan. Music, she posted on Instagram, after attending one of Swift’s London gigs this summer, “made me and my friends feel confident and free”. Which is why, in Afghanistan, the Taliban bans it.

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Should MPs legalise assisted dying? Our panel responds

Today Westminster begins its scrutiny of a bill that could for ever change the way we live or die in England and Wales

Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the world’s first heart transplant, vividly skewered the notion of patients “freely” choosing to have such dangerous, experimental surgery. They were, he wrote, like someone chased by a lion to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, who decides to hurl themselves into the water: “For a dying man, it is not a difficult decision because he knows he is at the end … But you would never accept the odds if there were no lion.” Barnard captures a fundamental flaw in libertarianism that is horribly pertinent, whether we like it or not, to Kim Leadbeater’s choice at the end of life bill. The freedom to choose, so superficially seductive, can disguise all manner of coercion.

Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and the author of Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic

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