Peter Ware @PeterWarepmd

@CalamityLammy No police on the streets......

@rcuffy That’s an ice hockey helmet!

@CharliBourne @Nicklezard Don't forget the Chinese embassy and the Mandelson fiasco

@Marcus70672192 Like the Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizers!

@tuckers35 In a Champions League game that would be a handball and probably a yellow card

In Doncaster, the minimum wage is now 82% of the median local salary. In Sunderland, it's 80%. In Wigan, roughly the same. A person in Doncaster who has been in the same job for fifteen years, who did the training, got the qualifications, turned up every morning and did it properly - that person now earns barely more than someone who first walked through the door on Monday. The gap between the floor and the middle has been quietly compressed until there is, for practical purposes, no middle left. There is the minimum wage and there is something fractionally above it, and that's it. If you're a hard-working Brit ready to make something of yourself in the 20s, that is the offer. If you're in, say, Reading, the minimum wage is 53% of the local median. There's a bit of a ladder there. The rungs are spaced apart; you can see the next one from where you're standing. In Doncaster the ladder has been sawn off at the second rung and what remains is a stepstool. The North East pays its workers £200 a week less than London. One in five local areas across the North East, North West, and Yorkshire sits in the most deprived decile nationally. That figure - and this is the bit that should grieve anyone who has ever used the phrase "levelling up" without laughing - has not moved since 2019. Five years. Five years of levelling up, which was a slogan the Conservative Party invented because it tested well in focus groups; and five years of its Labour successor, which dropped the slogan but kept the strategy of doing sod-all and hoping the media would keep to its decades-old pact of not giving a toss about the North and not investigate the numbers. That's fine, as it turns out, because the numbers are exactly where they were. Raising the minimum wage every April and calling it economic policy is the equivalent of painting over damp. The wall looks fine for six months and then the stain comes back and the hazard is even worse, because the problem is structural, and you haven't touched the structure. You move the floor up because you've given up entirely on building anything above it; and the people who pay the price are precisely the ones who did the right thing - who trained and grafted and stayed in their town instead of leaving for London - and are now watching the distance between their fifteen years of experience and a first-day wage compress to a couple of quid an hour. There is a word for what happened to these towns, and the word is deindustrialisation, and it was a policy choice, a deliberate strategy. The mines closed. The factories followed. The skilled trades dried up. What replaced them was logistics, care work, and retail - sectors that pay at or near the legal minimum because the market for that labour was flooded, deliberately, by two decades of unchecked low-skilled migration that meant employers never had to raise wages because there was always somebody else who'd do it for less. I want to build Prosperity Zones all across the North and Midlands - special economic zones with lower taxes and lighter regulation, designed to anchor real industries with real skill requirements, not to attract another distribution warehouse or a spurious spot of gig work. Technical colleges running a dual apprenticeship system on the German model, training people in Doncaster and Sunderland and Wigan, Rhyl and Greenock and Mexborough and Grimsby, for the work that exists where they live. And a permanent reduction in low-skilled migration, so that the labour market is tight enough to force wages up on its own, without the government having to legislate another 20p increase every April so that they have something to call progress. We all know that 'progress' just isn't enough. Only Progress wil do. I think the North has been promised enough. I think it's time it got its own back.

@NewcastleFansTV

Visualization of the distances in astronomy x.com/fluxfolio_/sta…

@daveatherton John Bird in blackface as the chief

@ClaireCoutinho Labour's big donor is Dale Vince He owns renewable co. Ecotricity Which own 1/4 of Good Energy Where CEO is Nigel Pocklington Whose brother Jeremy Pocklington is top dog at the Dept for Net-Zero And the Minister is Labour's  Ed Miliband Who dishes out renewable energy cash

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Really can't imagine why meningitis cases are suddenly soaring in Britain. It's not like we allow unfettered mass immigration from a place called "THE MENINGITIS BELT" or anything.

"The 6th biggest economy in the world is run by infantile fantasists with no understanding of financial markets.... There's nothing progressive about driving the economy of a cliff"📉⛰️ @LiamHalligan @ #BattleFest 2025 "From steel to railways: can the state revitalise British industry?"👨‍🏭🚆 👇

The government is bankrupt and has been for twenty years. Not visibly, not officially, but functionally. The debt is £2.87 trillion. The interest alone is £100 billion a year. The only number that stops the bond market pulling the plug on Britain overnight is the debt-to-GDP ratio staying below 100%. To keep that ratio stable you need the GDP number to keep growing. The fastest way to grow GDP is to add bodies. Not productive bodies necessarily. Just bodies. Because even an immigrant sitting in a hotel in Rochdale eating a meal the government paid for with borrowed money gets counted as economic activity. The hotel revenue goes into GDP. The food supplier revenue goes into GDP. The borrowed pound that funded all of it gets quietly added to the £2.87 trillion and the ratio stays at 96% instead of 101% and the bond market stays calm for another quarter and the Chancellor keeps his job. That is the entire mechanism. The housing crisis, the dissolved infrastructure, the unrecognisable high streets, your children who cannot afford homes, the pensioners choosing between heating and eating.... these are not accidental side effects of a well-meaning policy that went wrong. They are the acceptable collateral damage of a decision made by people who needed the GDP number to stay up long enough to retire comfortably before the whole thing becomes undeniable. The reason nobody in Westminster will explain this is that the explanation ends with a question they cannot answer. If the debt is the problem, who accumulated it, who profits from the interest, and why are the people who had no say in accumulating it the ones being asked to pay for it with their country. So instead they call it diversity and tell you that noticing is racism.

This fella was fined £500 yesterday for buying a uniform and medals online and pretending to be an ex navy officer. Everyone thinks he must be living in some fantasy world and has a mental illness. But if he'd bought makeup and a dress and walked around saying he was a woman, we would be expected to believe "him/her" and go along with it...🤔. It's terrible being my age and feeling so fecking confused. I don't condone Stolen Valour, but there's something radically wrong with society.

I am at the Assembly Rooms in Lincoln today to stand up for our residents against the 2,500-acre Fosse Green solar monster. However, despite being your Mayor, I have just been told I cannot speak at this stage because of bureaucratic "Interested Party" rules. ​If the Government thinks they can shut me up, they have another thing coming. I came here today to deliver a clear message to the Planning Inspectorate and the Secretary of State: ​LINCOLNSHIRE IS THE BREADBASKET OF BRITAIN: We produce 30% of this nation's fresh vegetables. You cannot eat solar panels! Covering our prime agricultural land in glass and steel is an act of strategic self-harm. ​OUR HERITAGE IS NOT FOR SALE: This soil has been farmed for generations. It is a sacred trust. A 60-year lease isn’t “temporary”—it’s a lifetime of industrial vandalism. ​SITE-SPECIFIC DEVASTATION: This project will scar the A46 Fosse Way and loom over Witham St Hughs, Bassingham, and Thorpe on the Hill. Our villages deserve protection, not a "solar gold rush" for developer profit. ​SAFETY FIRST: I will not stop raising the alarm about the fire risks of these massive Battery Storage units being placed on our doorsteps. ​My message to Whitehall: Do not let our pleas fall on deaf ears! ​I may have been stopped from the microphone today, but I will not be silenced. I will continue to fight for our farmers, our food security, and our beautiful countryside. I will be back in March at the open floor hearing, ensuring your voice is heard and I will also be submitting a letter of objection. ​Please SHARE this post to make sure our voice is heard! 👇

yes, asian and african rivers produce 95% of ocean plastic but nobody asks where the plastic comes from. plastic recycling is a scam. always has been. the industry knew since 1974 it “cant be justified economically” they funded the recycling campaigns anyway because the alternative was banning plastic. only 5-6% of US plastic actually gets recycled and europe isnt better. the EU exports 1.1 million tonnes of plastic waste per year, 3 million kg leaving every single day. 31% goes to turkey, 16% to malaysia, 13% to indonesia, all labeled “recyclable” most plastics cant even be recycled to begin with (thousands of types, different chemical properties). and for the few that can, the output is lower quality and more toxic than virgin plastic. you literally degrade the material each cycle until its worthless. so what happens to the other 95%? western countries ship it to southeast asia and africa under the label “recycling exports” with the receiving countries promising to recycle it in their stead for a price, but those countries dont have facilities either. so they burn it or dump it in rivers. every 20 minutes, a 10-tonne truckload of plastic enters the ocean in indonesia alone. it may look like indonesians pollute more but that’s because we ship them our garbage and they have no infrastructure to handle it. china used to absorb it all. when they banned imports in 2018, the west just redirected to countries with weaker regulations. malaysia, vietnam, philippines. the map below shows the result. you sort your trash so you feel like youre helping, the plastic goes on a boat, gets burned in a village without emissions controls, poisons their air and water, flows into their rivers, enters the ocean, and in your food and water. you feel good about the plastic you recycled and never think about it again but you end up eating it anyway. then we ban straws and plastic bags and call it environmentalism

Sandy Petersen 🪔 @SandyofCthulhu

6 months ago

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Brazilian law since 2008: You cannot plant soy on recently cleared rainforest. But there's a loophole the size of Brazil itself. Here's what actually happens: Step 1: Logging companies clear rainforest for timber. Step 2: The cleared land can't legally be used for crops immediately. Step 3: Ranchers move cattle onto cleared land. Not because there's demand for extensive cattle ranching. Because cattle are the legal placeholder that prevents reforestation while the land is "prepared." Step 4: After 2-5 years with cattle, the land becomes "established pasture" rather than "recently cleared rainforest." Legal status changes. Step 5: Cattle are removed. Soy gets planted. The soy is crushed for oil (87% of global production). The leftover meal goes to Chinese factory farms. The cattle weren't the reason for clearing. They were the legal mechanism to launder rainforest into soy plantation. Who's buying the soy oil? Western processed food companies. Your margarine, seed oil, plant-based meat alternatives, biodiesel. Brazilian beef from the Amazon is tiny. Britain imports virtually none of it. Your local butcher isn't stocking rainforest beef. You're buying British cattle raised on British hills grazed for 2,000 years. But "stop eating beef" is easier to market than "stop eating processed food made with soybean oil." The Amazon is burning for your seed oil. The cattle are just there to make sure the burned land doesn't revert to forest before the soy can be planted legally.

@Jenny_1884 Some mornings yes, some mornings no

@putey_pute Yes. They're great with a dash of tabasco on them

Trevor Philips makes such an interesting point and I want to add something to it that I often feel is overlooked. (Indulge me). The feeling that people are “losing something, the story of their lives” is such an important point and it’s deeply related to class. Many working-class people live and die in their towns, the towns their families have lived in for generations, often happy to do so, and the sense of home carries a weight that it might not for the aspirational & educated middle classes who move around for work and treat home as secondary to jobs, education etc. And if you’re wealthy, or grew up in a chocolate box village, you’re often insulated as your birthplace looks the same decades later. And yet some of these very people have the nerve to sneer at the working class for mourning when their own landscapes and communities are unrecognisable. But at the heart of it, some people seem utterly unable to grasp that memories matter to some people. That preserving something matters. That a sense of home extends far beyond the four walls you live in. That we *all* hold things dear to us and for some people it’s that hotel in town that their parents got married in for example. Just because places like Bolton or Grimsby don’t matter to you doesn’t mean they don’t matter deeply to others. Some people need to grasp that the absence of their feelings and attachments doesn’t erase someone else’s. And it doesn’t automatically make a whole group of people hateful. In fact, it simply makes them human.

Jordan Tyldesley @PippyBing

10 months ago

This is so bloody spot on.

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