Politics

Lisa Nandy could not have been more wrong when she waded into the transgender debate this week. The Labour MP, who has been criticised by JK Rowling over her stance on trans rights, said that ‘when we look at the way we reduce the debate to things like bodily parts, I think when we look back in history we will be utterly ashamed of ourselves.’ Those of us who understand that human beings have bodies, and those bodies matter, have no need to feel ashamed of anything, now or in the future. Men and women have a sex and, in some contexts, we need separate services because of that sex.

As phrases go, ‘Twitter analytics’ is not the most exciting, especially now we are, apparently, meant to say ‘the social medium formerly known as Twitter analytics’. Nonetheless if you dig into Twitter’s user and viewer data, you can unearth some surprising, even mystifying anomalies. In this case, I’m talking about the Twitter account of the recently defenestrated former Home Secretary Suella Braverman. For example, barely 24 hours ago she posted a tweet about the Supreme Court’s judgment on the government’s Rwanda case. The rather dry, technical tweet about necessary new legislation got 2.5 million views. Pundits have suggested this could be Russian or Chinese bots deliberately sowing extra division If

The war in Ukraine, which was until 7 October the only foreign news we could think about, is no longer centre stage but is continuing in an increasingly attritional way. And Ukrainian politics continue, inevitably, to be dominated by the war with the result that fundamental freedoms are now a casualty of the conflict. Specifically, there is a bill before the Ukrainian parliament, which has already passed its first reading, that would ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This historically has been located within the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leader, Patriarch Kirill, is notoriously invested in the war, on the Russian side. He is, moreover, close to Vladimir Putin. The bill would