RAF Veteran. @RobExRAF

@stephaniemain2 Sicking it is, absolutely vile.

@history99917180 It definitely wasn't a compliment, probably a complaint..

Badenoch's Purge is a Mercy Killing, not a Massacre For years the Conservative Party's problem was not policy. It was character. It kept promoting people who talked like conservatives and voted like technocrats, who nodded along to net zero targets they privately doubted and treaties they privately resented. Kemi Badenoch has just done something rare in British politics: she has looked at that habit and called it what it is. Cowardice dressed up as pragmatism. Her decision to block former MPs from standing again if they still cling to net zero, or still defend Britain's subjection to Strasbourg, will be painted by critics as ruthless. It is not ruthless. It is honest. A party that lost catastrophically in 2024 does not get to relitigate that defeat by recycling the same faces and the same instincts. Voters did not reject the Conservatives because the party wasn't nice enough to its old guard. They rejected it because it had stopped standing for anything distinguishable from the consensus it claimed to oppose. Net zero and the ECHR are not minor technical disputes. They are the clearest tests going of whether a politician actually believes in national self-government, or merely enjoys the theatre of it. A candidate who still insists Britain must hit arbitrary carbon targets, whatever the cost to industry and household bills, has not learned anything from a decade of rising energy prices. A candidate who thinks Strasbourg's rulings are compatible with controlling Britain's own borders is not being moderate. They are being evasive. What makes this striking is the alternative Badenoch is proposing. Not more career politicians, not more special advisers who have never run so much as a corner shop, but people who have actually built things, taught in classrooms, served in uniform, or kept a small business afloat. It is an unfashionable idea: that competence and conviction matter more than polish. But it is exactly what a party trying to prove it has changed needs to demonstrate, not merely announce. Compare that with the government it is up against. Much of the current Parliamentary Labour Party arrived from the charity sector and NGOs, backgrounds built around advocacy and institutional compassion, not the harder trade-offs of running a country. It shows in the instincts on display: a preference for managing sentiment over confronting problems. Badenoch's bet is that Britain needs fewer people trained to represent a cause and more who have had to deliver a result. There will be a cost. Some of the rejected will go to the papers. Some will drift to Reform, adding to a defection story that has already dented the Tories once. Badenoch's response, "so be it", is the correct one. A party terrified of losing people who do not agree with its direction will never have a direction. Every serious political project involves deciding who does not belong in it. The Conservatives spent the last parliament unable to do that, and the country noticed. Contrast this with the alternatives on offer. Reform's vetting has produced candidates that make its own leader wince. Labour, with over four hundred MPs, could not find anyone better to replace Starmer than a man who once lost to Jeremy Corbyn. Against that backdrop, a party willing to say no to its own former MPs looks less like an act of cruelty and more like the first sign of a functioning institution. None of this guarantees electoral success. Polling still has the Conservatives level with Labour and behind Reform. But recovery has to start somewhere, and it rarely starts with comfort. Badenoch is betting that voters can tell the difference between a party performing seriousness and one practising it. That bet is worth taking.

How about you tell us about that time you were Post Office Minister during the Horizon Scandal then coined £275,000 helping the law firm representing the Post Office? People f*cking committed suicide over it, you utter scumbag Which is why you avoid the press by goofing around on jet skis like a giant pr1ck

Ed Davey @EdwardJDavey

4 days ago

The Government must block Nigel Farage’s resignation until the Standards Commissioner finishes investigating him. The people of Clacton deserve the full facts. If a by-election does go ahead, all parties should stand aside. We cannot give oxygen to this vanity project.

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The BBC's Own Boss Calls It Broken. He Just Won't Let You Choose Whether To Pay For It. Matt Brittin, the BBC's new director-general, told MPs this week that the licence fee is a "straitjacket," "yesterday's model," "a busted flush." Strong words from the man now running the corporation. What he proposed instead wasn't less compulsion. It was more. Brittin ruled out subscription outright, telling the culture select committee it would have "a devastating impact on the economy," the same phrase he used to reject advertising. Samir Shah, the BBC's chairman, was more direct about what he wants instead: a "modernised licence fee" that captures how people actually watch television now, which in practice means extending the £180 annual charge to households that only use Netflix or Amazon Prime and never touch a BBC programme. An organisation whose own leadership calls its funding model obsolete is not proposing to test whether people would pay for it voluntarily. It is proposing to widen the list of people legally required to. The numbers explain why. Ninety four percent of households use some BBC service each month. Only eighty percent pay the licence fee. That gap, roughly a fifth of the country, is already the answer to the question a subscription model would make official: a meaningful share of Britain currently prefers the legal risk of non-payment to funding the BBC voluntarily. Brittin's own words concede the model doesn't work. His own proposal concedes he already knows what the public would choose if actually asked. This is the same institution that spent the past year being caught out repeatedly rather than earning renewed trust. Brittin's predecessor, Tim Davie, left in the wake of the Panorama edit that spliced two parts of a Donald Trump speech together to make it appear he had ordered a riot, an edit now the subject of a ten billion dollar lawsuit. That wasn't an isolated failure. The corporation's own leaked internal memo documented a wider pattern beforehand, extensive uncritical airtime handed to Hamas on BBC Arabic, a unit of activist reporters shaping trans coverage to fit a predetermined line, a report calling car insurers racist that the BBC itself later admitted was thoroughly wrong. This is the institution now asking the state to compel a wider set of households to fund it, at the exact moment its own chosen leadership calls the current compulsory model unfit for purpose. The honest question a subscription model would settle instantly: does the BBC's output justify what it charges, judged by people choosing freely rather than by law. Brittin has already told Parliament what the licence fee's own architect thinks the answer would be. He simply won't let the public confirm it. "Brittin's own words concede the model doesn't work. His own proposal concedes he already knows what the public would choose if actually asked."

@wonky222 On my way😈 😍

On my balcony...having a whisky.

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Labour's Fantasy Economics, and the Reckoning to Come Labour have never quite believed that arithmetic applies to them. Blair borrowed against a boom he assumed would never end. Brown declared the cycle of boom and bust abolished, shortly before both returned with force. Reeves promised discipline in 2024, then discovered within months that discipline and her spending pledges could not coexist, and reached for stealth taxes and an employer National Insurance raid to close the gap. Each time, the party has treated the bill as something that happens to other governments. Andy Burnham is simply the latest name on a very old tab. His defence is that nine years running Greater Manchester taught him restraint. The Institute for Government has already quietly demolished that claim. Mayors, it notes, need only "a limited grasp on fiscal policy." Their budgets are substantively set in Whitehall. Their tax-raising powers stretch to a small council precept that only three mayors nationwide have bothered to use. Most tellingly, their organisations "do not borrow from global capital markets." Burnham spent almost a decade spending money he did not raise, under a scrutiny regime the same report calls underfunded and often inquorate. He built a tram network. He never once had to explain himself to a bond trader. That inexperience would matter less if his instincts leaned towards caution. They do not. Since Makerfield he has promised to nationalise the water companies, settle the WASPI claim, revive the scrapped northern leg of HS2, cut rail fares, and build council housing at a scale unseen since the war. Alongside all this sits a pledge to hold Reeves's fiscal rules and leave income tax, VAT and National Insurance untouched, the exact promise that broke Reeves within a year of making it. His first real test as a national figure, the WASPI question, saw him wobble immediately towards the expensive option. Nine years without market discipline has left him with the reflexes of a man who has never had to justify a decision to someone who might sell his country's debt. The OBR has now spared him the excuse every one of his predecessors enjoyed. Blair, Brown and Reeves each discovered the limits of borrowing after the fact. Burnham has been handed the number in advance, £120bn, dated and published, before he has taken office. He is walking towards it anyway. What that reckoning looks like in practice is worth stating plainly, because Labour has spent three governments avoiding the words. Gilt yields already sit near a twenty-eight-year high. A government that keeps promising more while raising less eventually finds buyers unwilling to lend except at punishing rates, and a Chancellor forced to choose between inflating the debt away or, in the phrase economists now use without embarrassment, financial repression, corralling private savings into funding the state by regulation rather than persuasion. Ken Rogoff has already said the IMF would be called back not because Britain needs rescuing in the manner of 1976, but because politicians always need someone else to blame for the cuts they lack the courage to name themselves. Denis Healey eventually understood the game was up. Whether Burnham recognises the same moment when it arrives is the open question of his premiership, and the one his party has never managed to answer for itself. He is still promising water companies to the state, council houses on a wartime scale, and fares held down by decree, all while the invoice has sat on Labour's desk since Blair first left it there, unread by every occupant since. "Nine years without market discipline has left Burnham with the reflexes of a man who has never had to justify a decision to someone who might sell his country's debt."

@EdwardJDavey @SaraJ_M Get back in your box you utter walloper.

@wonky222 I'll stick to commando...😂😂😘

It's all for your own safety. How can anyone be against that?

Crypto Tice @CryptoTice_

6 days ago

BREAKING: The EU is planning to require a passport to access the internet. And they want to block VPNs to enforce it. "The new age verification system cannot be bypassed via VPN." Read that again. A digital passport. For the internet. Enforced by blocking the tools that

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They are unable to hide the truth on X during elections. So they will hide X instead. I stared down bastards just like this lot back in the Cold War. They built walls, censored truth, spread fear & spied on folk. We beat the bastards then and we will beat them again now 🇬🇧

The Telegraph @Telegraph

6 days ago

Social media sites should be faced with restrictions during elections in a similar way to broadcasters, Labour’s deputy leader said. Lucy Powell, a close ally of Andy Burnham, the probable next prime minister, will seek to tighten the Representation of the People Bill to place

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@SingleNsparklin Thank you, I will give him that gentle pat ❤️

Went to see one of my best mates yesterday..hes got cancer and soon my daughter has to decide when hes put to sleep. It's gonna hurt us and his brother...she rescued him 10 years ago and along with his brother she give him a happy life.

The wife stormed into the room, "Have you been upsetting my mother?" I looked up from my paper, "I don't think so, Why?" "Because she's rushed off crying. Did you say something to her?" "Only that looking at her chin, reminded me I was playing tennis this afternoon." "And what has her chin got to do with your tennis match?" "I'm playing doubles." 🤣🤣🤣🤣

@HannahIamthest1 😂😂😂😂👍

@KingBobIIV @EdwardJDavey In his head....

@EdwardJDavey You can prove this ? Or more shit you spout....

@shorrock_carol Thank you.