Guy Leppard @backstagebites

No one can argue this is an accurate reflection of reality. Or deny that for the sake of our viability as a nation it needs sorting, urgently.  But the slightest suggestion of reform results in shrieks from politicians with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The sad irony is that if support was reserved for people with genuine need, we’d not only be a happier, more prosperous and productive country, we’d be able to provide for those in need in a far more satisfactory way. It won’t happen until we have been driven into the ground because of the utter mediocrity of our politicians, but change will eventually be forced upon us by circumstances.

Harriet Sergeant @HarrietSergeant

6 days ago

What’s going on here? Human biology stays the same. But in this OECD graph, it’s geography that dictates disability prevalence - and seems to peak where state support is most generous. It must be something in the water.

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This is so awful these highly intelligent marine mammals locked in a fish bowl prison looking out at squirrels with such wonder

Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and Greens: I demand you stand down in Clacton. I will be a unity candidate and pledge to build at least one affordable house. Nigel Farage says he wants The People versus the Establishment. So be it. Leave him to me.

I know @RoyalNavy and @DefenceHQ will never own up, but isn't it time to 'fess up to the fact that UK Plc now is relying on @MarineNationale, @USNavy and @kon_marine to do deterrence sanitisation? This ought to be a matter of alarm and shame...

Navy Lookout @NavyLookout

3 weeks ago

🇫🇷 French Navy Suffren-class submarine outbound from Faslane today. Via @SheilaLWeir

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"I'm leaving this platform because I said male sex offenders should be placed in female prisons and people keep reminding me."

Lisa Nandy MP @lisanandy

4 weeks ago

I've decided to leave this platform and my Department will too. A platform originally designed for free speech and expression now favours abuse and misinformation over meaningful debate. It isn't healthy for our democracy or our communities and I don’t want to support it.

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Soon everyone who lives north of Manchester will have to head south to "change their perspective" too. This performative nonsense is already very trying.

Politics UK @PolitlcsUK

3 weeks ago

🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham's Chancellor will have to spend part of their working week in the North to "change their perspective" [@Telegraph]

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@giveashitnature Back to the future

@ajwillshire @rorysutherland Salad cream is ok surely?

Moscow's instantly-iconic exploding fuel storage tank is resulting in a flood of memes. I'll add a selection below...

A bricklayer in East Yorkshire has spent 35 years putting up barn owl nest boxes on weekends. This year, the region saw 308 owlets hatch. His name is Robert Salter. He's 56 and does bricklaying full time. In 1990, he saw a piece on the news about a man in Lincolnshire installing barn owl boxes, and decided he'd do the same. He started with five. He now has more than 350 boxes scattered across fields, farms, outbuildings, and trees in East Yorkshire. Every June, he takes four weeks off from bricklaying and visits them with his wife Sue. Scrambling up ladders, ringing chicks, cleaning boxes, repairing the ones the weather got to. He's a licensed bird ringer for the British Trust for Ornithology. In 2024, the region ringed 95 owlets. In 2025, the count was 308. The Barn Owl Trust says that nationally, this year was "pretty poor" for barn owl breeding, but east Yorkshire is the exception, and it's the exception because of one man with a ladder. The barn owl population in the UK was estimated at 4,000 pairs in the mid-2000s and crashed to roughly 1,000 by the early 2010s. The species is still recovering. Most of conservation is one person who refuses to give up.

Email of the day…

#VictoryDay. How it started. How it's going.

A minimum wage of £15 would end my coffee shop, it would have to close, as would many other businesses. I’ll explain for the economically illiterate. Staff costs are currently half our costs, a £15 minimum wage is actually more than £15 an hour for the company, because you have to add: - 12.07% holiday - Sick pay - Maternity pay if and when required - National insurance - Pension contributions These costs would mean the shop loses money because remember, energy costs are up, rates are up, regulations are up. Now you can pass these costs onto the consumer - that would mean charging a lot more for coffee, people won’t pay it. The likes of Starbucks and Costa can, because they have economies of scale. The independent doesn’t. Now the little socialist will say well this is your fault, if you can’t run a business that can afford to pay its staff properly, but the little socialist has never run a business and does not understand the dynamics. Now I could pay some staff off and fill those hours myself or reduce us to one staff member during certain periods - but this proves the point that a minimum wage costs jobs. There was a time when these jobs were done by kids, perhaps on the weekend, paid a lower wage, no holiday and no silly employment rights. Perhaps they were even paid cash. The dynamic worked and small businesses like this could operate. It was also a great first job. Sadly now it isn’t worth employing entitlement youngsters at this level of pay. So alas, I don’t need the stress, the business would close, a number of jobs would be lost. Economics is about understanding these dynamics, no vibes. The cost of living is not solved through passing on inflation to the business, it is solved by ending high inflation and creating prosperity. This is what socialists don’t understand, they can’t create prosperity, they can only destroy it.

Harry Eccles @Heccles94

3 months ago

The Greens will raise the minimum wage to £15 for all workers 💪

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I'll tell you what I don't like, Darren. I can't speak for everyone, but these are my thoughts… I don't like a tax burden at its highest level since 1948, under your government and the last, producing the weakest growth in a generation. And worsening public services to boot. I don't like a 46% hike in the minimum wage for under-21s in three years that's helped push UK youth unemployment to 16.1%, above the eurozone average. I want young people paid more, earned through growth, not handed down by decree that squashes the rungs above them and tells a skilled forty-year-old their two decades of graft are worth precisely the same as someone walking through the door on Monday morning. I don't like industrial electricity prices that are the highest of any IEA country reporting. Full stop. UK steelmakers pay 40% more than their French competitors. You don't build a future of advanced manufacturing on those numbers. I don't like a planning system that takes longer to consent a pylon than to build one, business rates that punish high-street enterprise, and employment costs that turn every hire into a risk. I don't like watching world-class British research get commercialised in Boston and Palo Alto because the capital, the talent and the regulatory patience aren't here. They're fleeing. I don't like long-term borrowing costs at their highest level in over 25 years, eating into every budget for schools, hospitals and defence before a penny is spent. I don't like the OECD saying that we're going to be the hardest hit economy as a result of a conflict in the Middle East that's got nothing to do with us. All because we've made ourselves weak and vulnerable. I don't like a government that confuses 'raising money' with 'creating wealth'. Or 'standing against unearned wealth' with taxing to death the people who actually make things happen in this country. You don't lift children out of poverty by strangling the economy that pays for their schools. You do it by letting Britain grow again. Letting it play to its abundance of strengths. In this case, I feel the best way is for government to get the hell out of the way.

Darren Jones MP @darrenpjones

3 months ago

What is it that the Conservatives and Reform don’t like about a Labour government standing against unearned wealth? What is it they don't like about raising money for our state schools, our hospitals, our police, and to lift children out of poverty?

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Spirit Airlines died tonight at the hands of the socialist crusader, Elizabeth Warren She must be so proud to add another casket to her achievements. Tonight at 3am, Spirit turns off the lights. 14,000 jobs gone. 30+ smaller airports lose service. JetBlue offered $3.8 BILLION in cash to buy Spirit in 2022. Shareholders, flight attendants union, literally everyone voted yes. The combined company would have held 9% of the US market against a Big 4 that already owned 80%. For anyone who understands numbers: 9% isn’t a monopoly against 80%. Warren said no. She wrote letters. She pressured Buttigieg. Biden’s DOJ sued. A federal judge killed the deal in January 2024. Her argument: the merger would cost consumers $1 billion a year. Now look at her collateral damage she dusts under the rug. 510 pilots gone in the months after. 1,800 flight attendants furloughed in December. 14,000 jobs in 2023. 7,500 last week. Zero tonight. And that’s just the people in Spirit uniforms. Catering goes. Fuel guys go. Baggage crews, gate agents, airport coffee shops, hotels and rental cars in 70 cities Spirit flew to. Every airline job carries 3 more on its back. 40,000 people out of work because of one woman’s moronic crusade against the market. And the math ain’t mathing. Spirit abandoned 90 routes during the death spiral. Fares on those routes are up 14% on average. Oakland to Newark: $135 to $288. Fort Myers to San Juan: $92 to $219. Kansas City to Newark up 66%. That’s reality. Not some BS number from a “study.” So @SenWarren tell me how this saves the consumer money? Cheap carriers in a market drop fares 21% across the board. Southwest did this in the 90s and saved Americans $68 BILLION over 20 years. Warren killed it. That’s what moronic politicians led by socialism do. Then with her own blind arrogance, she tweeted Spirit’s collapse is “a Biden win for flyers.” A win. 14,000 people are reading termination letters tonight. And she’s taking credit. This is socialism in 2026. A senator who’s never made payroll thinks she knows how to run a market better than the people who own and work in the company. She saved you a billion on imaginary paper. She cost you ten times that in real life. She didn’t protect consumers from anything. 14,000+ will go from working to welfare. She will make sure to blame billionaires, hardworking tax payers, AI, capitalism and whatever monster they will make up tomorrow hiding under your bed. Higher taxes. Fewer jobs. More expensive everything. She called it a win. I hope you enjoy winning.

@hannahapexfit Team it with an Onigiri 🍙 and Vitamin/Ginger shot in a £5 meal deal from Waitrose.

We have reached an era where some people have not touched a steering wheel and have simply let their cars drive them around for a whole year, whereas others do not know this is possible at all.

Sadly this is 100% correct

Is there a small silver lining watching the just stop oil people understanding what happens if you do indeed just stop oil.