“Dear Ed Sheeran, fence-sitting is so last century: musicians can no longer opt out of politics”, writes Zoe Williams in the Guardian.

Macklemore, both onstage and in his own statement, has rebuffed the argument that voicing support for Palestinians and criticising Israel and its actions in Gaza and the West Bank is antisemitic. (In 2014, he apologised for a costume he wore on stage, which critics said was antisemitic, saying: “I respect all cultures and all people.”)

So musicians “can’t” opt out of politics, but political opinion journalists opting out of either stating their own opinion as to whether Macklemore’s grotesque “Jewface” costume shown in this BBC article from 2014 might be a teensy-weensy bit anti-semitic, or of linking to a picture of it so that readers can decide for themselves, is just fine, apparently.

Macklemore should be free to throw Nazi salutes while prancing in his fake black beard and prosthetic hooked nose. He should be free to insult the general public’s intelligence and flatter his own public’s bigotry by saying with a smirk that he had no idea that anyone might think he was caricaturing a Jew. Zoe Williams should be free to pretend that she didn’t see the pictures in that BBC article despite having taken her “which critics said was antisemitic” line straight from it. And I’m free to say that for Zoe Williams, who was once longlisted for the Orwell Prize, to write an article demanding that Ed Sheeran take a side while averting her own eyes from blatant racism and concealing it from her readers makes her a worthy successor to Squealer.

The charge that followed was not that I phrased it badly. It was that my position was racist.

Suella Braverman, Sunak’s own former Home Secretary, responded to the row about my comments by penning an article in which she argued that as a proud British Asian she herself is not English. Is she racist against herself or is there perhaps more of a substantive discussion being had than people would like to pretend?

– Konstantin Kisin, responding to Rishi Sunak

“BBC removes 11 Mitchell and Webb comedy sketches from iPlayer,” reports the BBC.

You want to see the sketches more, now, don’t you? Thank you, “Basil the Great”.

NEWS: The BBC have removed a number of sketches by Mitchell & Webb as they are now deemed offensive

This sketch which features a Burqa and Blackface purposefully to make fun of how offended people get has now been ironically axed, because people may be offended. pic.twitter.com/jEy3QJ5Cvv

— Basil the Great (@BasilTheGreat) September 21, 2026

Edit: And here’s the Civil War re-enactors sketch, courtesy of Giop Saus on YouTube.

Season 2 of “That Mitchell and Webb look” was made in 2007. At that time, TM&WL’s style of comedy was seen as mildly left wing and definitely anti-racist. They certainly saw themselves that way. Almost twenty years later, the Civil War sketch is genuinely thought-provoking comedy. Within the context of the sketch, I instinctively get why Mitchell’s character stops the re-enactment after Webb’s character says, “I am going to kill you with this big machete” in an African accent. I think the fake accent coupled with a portrayal of motiveless savagery tips it over to being racist (remembering that the whole thing is a act within an act, and the man waving the machete is portrayed as being frightfully worried that his portrayal of a “real” Sudanese machete-waver might be racist). But if asked to point out exactly why the whole idea of white British people re-enacting the Second Congo War is racist, my hand does several mid-air circuits without ever quite coming in to land. Why is it perfectly OK for a man to put on a great big wig and wave a sword about in order to play a Royalist officer in the English Civil War but not OK to put on a great big wig and wave a machete about in order to play a militia leader in the Second Congo War? Is it because the re-enactor played by Webb is white and presumably is descended from ancestors who might well have fought in the English Civil War but no one (so far as I know) looking like him fought in the Second Congo War? If so, would it be equally unacceptable to have a black British re-enactor play the Cavalier – as seems to be the fashion these days?

Related post: The fact that a British person’s ancestors were not British is not shameful and need not be concealed

Interesting factual summary from Commander Salamander…

This is where it scratches the old Cold War itch while addressing the very real fact that regardless of what happens in the Russo-Ukrainian War and with the demographics of those nations in the coming decades, the geography is not changing.

Russia is not going to disappear.

Months before Starmer’s departure, Dominic Cummings appeared on Michael Gove and Madeline Grant’s Quite Right podcast and issued Nigel Farage with an extraordinary warning. Cummings predicted that senior figures around Whitehall would conclude that they had made a historic mistake by allowing Brexit to happen and would not repeat it with Reform. In the imagined voice of this establishment, he said: “Let’s smash the absolute living shit out of Farage and make sure that he doesn’t win it by fair means and foul.”

Cummings went further. He predicted leaks of medical records and tax records, phone bugging and the disclosure of private information.

– John Hardy (£)

The economist who says a policy will probably raise employment, other things being equal, is telling the truth as far as it goes. The one who says employment will rise by exactly 2.3% has mistaken a guess for a measurement, and dressed the guess up in a suit it did not earn.

Markets do not work because they are mathematically optimal but because they let millions of separate judgments, made by people with knowledge no central model could ever gather, correct each other in real time. That is not a formula. It is closer to a conversation, conducted in prices instead of words, and no economist has yet written an equation that listens as well as a market does.

– Madsen Pirie