Fibberd

Political commentary, claims explored, excuses and lies laid bare.

Fibberd: A running account of what they promised, what they did, and the gap in between.

The White House has a brand new press secretary, and lots of good news
Watercolour illustration of Katie Zacharia speaking at the White House briefing room lectern.

Katie Zacharia read out the brochure.
I checked the small print

Fibberd goes to Washington. Katie Zacharia was a cable news guest eight days ago. This morning she read out fourteen minutes of good news from the White House podium. Some of it is even true, which is how the trick works: real numbers, rounded up, measured from the kindest month, with pledges sold as delivered. Nine true, six false, twelve misleading. It’s a brochure.
The ethnicity argument has gone mainstream. The honesty hasn't
Illustration: three question marks in one trench coat on a rainy high street.

Who gets to be English?
Restore has its answer.
Reform and the Tories mumble.

The row about whether you have to be white to be English is really three questions wearing one coat. The public answered them a while ago, and calmly. Restore Britain has answered them too, rather less calmly. Reform and the Conservatives have spent the autumn picking the question up and putting it down again. I'll give you my answers, and then a question of my own. Who keeps asking?
Rupert Lowe has found a new kind of British citizen
Illustration: a clerk on a ladder brings a giant rubber stamp down on a tower of passports in an echoing government hall.

“Crimes against our people”.
Is anyone still in doubt what Restore represents?

Rupert Lowe would like you to know that some British citizens are only technically British. His party would review the citizenships it thinks were handed out too freely, strip the ones it finds wanting and deport the holders. The case he leads with is already the law. The reasons behind it get broader every month, and one of them has been written down before.
Restore Britain’s best brains have released another “policy paper”
Illustration: at a passport office counter, a clerk ignores the passport and studies a huge family tree through a magnifying glass.

Did you know you can be British but not a Briton?

Rupert Lowe and his Restore Britain “fellows” try to promise equal citizenship, but really only so they can define a two-tier system of the “British” and the “Britons”. I went through the whole document to pull out the interesting bits: twenty-seven notes, five of them checking a fact, three saying he is right, and nineteen on how the argument is built. It’s pretty grim reading.