David Chester - The Wolf of Wokeism

100% this.

Trump, MAGA, Farage, Reform and GB News hate the UK and want us to believe the UK is a failing state compared to the USA. The facts disagree. On practically every measure of quality of life, health, safety, education, environment, the UK would rank as the best state in America. The land of the "free " (where people get yanked off the street by masked men) is also the land of half a million medical bankruptcies a year and the world’s largest prison population. This is the reality.

We need to decarbonise. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes from the past *100,000 years of Earth history* have been when the Amoc has changed. Anyone arguing we don’t - that we must expand oil drilling, that it’s a hoax, that technology will save us - is choosing to risk their grandchildren in food deprivation, extremely cold winters, summer droughts, and rising sea levels. The planet is simply not worth the risk that these predictions are wrong.

Oxford University has done the maths on "drill baby drill" vs a fully renewable UK. Maximum North Sea extraction: saves households £16–£82/year. But ONLY if the government takes every penny of tax revenue and hands it back to households. If they don't, zero benefit. Full renewables: saves households up to £441/year. Recurring. Every year. Indefinitely. The North Sea runs out around 2040. Renewables don't. The analysis was done using January 2026 prices — before the Iran war sent oil to $116 a barrel. Even with cheap fossil fuels as the baseline, renewables win. This isn't ideology. It's arithmetic. Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford. March 2026.

As wealth concentrates, so does power — the power to influence elections, shape policy, tilt markets and define the terms of public debate. That’s why we’ve been told for far too long that tax reform is politically infeasible, too complex, and too radical. Taxing billionaires is not radical. What is radical is allowing a system where extreme wealth exists alongside widespread hardship — and where billionaires can in effect opt out of contributing to the society that made their success possible. 
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

This is Trevor Fisher, an inpatient in @ArthurRankHouse in Cambridgeshire, speaking to @Channel4News this week. I am a palliative care specialist and Trevor’s interview has devastated me. His hospice has just found out that in 6 months, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust will withdraw its £800k funding. This means that 9 of the hospice’s 16 beds will close, denying patients like Trevor the precious end-of-life care they need. In total, 200 people a year in Cambridgeshire will now be forced to die in an overcrowded hospital instead of the hospice environment they so longed for. Some will doubtless end up dying on trolleys in corridors - we witness this far too often, these days & I can tell you, it is barbaric. @CUH_NHS says it has made this “very difficult decision” following a “value for money assessment” - confirming what I have long known as a doctor, that too often, patients with terminal illnesses are treated as second class citizens whose lives simply don’t matter as much as other people's. Yet the real responsibility here lies not with the NHS trust but with the current government, who is forcing the NHS nationwide to cut clinical services in order to meet impossible “efficiency savings” (what weasel words those are). These cuts were necessary, say @CUH_NHS, “in order to maintain core services within a reduced budget” - that is to say, the reduced budget they are now receiving from this government. So this is on you, @wesstreeting, and on you @UKLabour. You've chosen to do this & now patients like Trevor must live - and die - with your choices. I believe that the measure of a civilised country is how well it cares for its most vulnerable members. The difference between politicians and me is that I look the palliative care patients they are failing in the eye. So I will put it to you directly, Mr Streeting. We are still a rich country capable of affording decent, humane palliative care for all. Do you really care so little for dying people that you are happy to fail them on your watch? Thank you @channel4news for covering this story. #palliativecare #hospicecare #NHS

The police are under no obligation whatsoever to inform the general public of the progress of a live investigation. Why? Because if media (and social media loons) get hold of the wrong suspect's ID and details and spread it around, not only will it impede the police investigation, but it will also potentially ruin the life of an innocent person. In extreme cases, even if they have identified someone that police believes is the right person, publicity can be so overwhelming that their defence team could argue that there is no possibility of that person ever getting a fair trial as a result of the pre-trial publicity. We have "innocent until proven guilty" as a concept for a reason. Tommy the Sniff ended up being convicted of contempt of court in 2019 for interfering in trials, not just once but after he was already warned that it was dangerous to do so. This is what the High Court said about his case: - His online publication of details about the criminal case involved a breach of a reporting restriction order imposed under s4(2) of the Contempt of Court Act 1981. - The content of what he published online gave rise to a substantial risk that the course of justice in the criminal case would be seriously impeded, thereby amounting to a breach of the rule of contempt law known as “the strict liability rule”. - By aggressively confronting and filming some of the defendants in that case as they arrived at court, he interfered with the course of justice. He has set a trend in the UK of a) virtually any numpty with a phone and a blazing rage about something now calling themselves a "Citizen Journalist" with no training, no qualifications, no accreditation and, crucially, no understanding of journalistic ethics and rules and b) "Citizen Journalists" believing their own nonsense so much that they think they deserve to be told whatever they want to know, again with no concept of the damage that might do to the investigative process or the subsequent legal process. The police will issue CCTV and/or details of the Epsom suspects when it is safe to do so for the purposes of their investigation. Going on social media to rally the troops, turning up at the police station in numbers, blocking and lobbing projectiles at the police will not make them change their Standard Operating Procedures just because self-declared "Citizen Journalists" who don't know their arses from a hole in the ground believe they have a "right to know". Finally, and most importantly: have any of you self-important self-entitled men thought for a minute about what your actions would do the victim of this terrible offence if, through your behaviour, the investigation is impeded or a trial collapses? Of course you haven't. Because your "right to know" and "right to publish" as a self-appointed "Citizen Journalist" - and above all, your determination to spread racial hatred - is all that drives you.

@0Calamity Sigh. Must we go through this every time something happens? The same thickos and paid agitators post the same rabid conspiratorial nonsense every time to their echo chamber of nonsense and are always proved wrong when the process has played out. Some folk really never learn.

@MattStirner @iAmJoshHunt The PFI scam exposes the supposed efficiency of private investment as a myth, except we didn't just get inefficiency but daylight robbery too. Still, I guess some people got rich while the majority suffered, and that makes Tories happy.

@iAmJoshHunt When you let the government spend and borrow, you should expect nothing less than the most inefficient outcome.

This one will require a stiff drink. In the early 1990s, the government came up with a clever idea. Instead of borrowing money cheaply to build hospitals, schools, and roads, it would get the private sector to build them and then pay the private sector back over 25 to 30 years. The Private Finance Initiative. PFI. The attraction was obvious. You got a shiny new hospital today. The bill didn't show up on the government's books. The cost was deferred into the future. Politicians got ribbon-cutting ceremonies without the awkward conversation about borrowing. It was, in effect, the nation's credit card. Buy now, pay later. Except the interest rate was extraordinary. The total capital value of everything built under PFI was around £50 billion. As of March 2024, there were 665 PFI contracts still running across the UK, with roughly £136 billion in remaining payments stretching out to the early 2050s. These are payments public bodies are contractually locked into. Hospitals, schools, councils, government departments. Paying for buildings that in many cases were constructed twenty or thirty years ago. And the terms are extraordinary. PFI contracts were structured so the private sector would not just build the facility but manage its services. Cleaning. Maintenance. Catering. Portering. These services are bundled into long-term contracts with built-in inflation increases that the public sector cannot renegotiate, cannot exit without paying massive penalties, and often cannot even fully scrutinise because of commercial confidentiality clauses. In one case raised in Parliament, a hospital was charged £333 to change a lightbulb. That isn't an urban myth. It was cited in Hansard. The NHS has been hit hardest. According to parliamentary analysis, the capital cost of NHS PFI projects was around £13 billion. The total repayments are estimated at around £80 billion. And the peak of NHS PFI annual repayments isn't even here yet. It arrives in 2029. The bills are still going up. In 2020-21, NHS trusts paid £457 million purely in interest charges on PFI contracts. Not services. Not maintenance. Interest. In the last five years, NHS trusts have handed over more than £1.8 billion in PFI interest alone. We Own It calculates that money would have covered the starting salaries of over 50,000 new doctors. One NHS trust, Essex Partnership, has reportedly paid back 27 times what was originally borrowed. Some hospitals are spending more on PFI repayments than on medicines for patients. And remember, these repayments come out of the same NHS budget that's supposed to fund patient care, staff, and equipment. Scotland got it just as badly. Audit Scotland reported that Scottish taxpayers will pay a cumulative £40 billion for PFI assets worth just £9 billion. North Ayrshire Council will have paid £440 million by 2038 for four schools that cost £83 million to build. Now here's what makes this worse. Many of these contracts are starting to expire. The buildings are being handed back to the public sector. And the NAO has warned of significant risks around the handback process, including cases where public bodies were dissatisfied with the condition of assets being returned to them. Decades of payments. And some of these buildings may come back needing significant further investment. So what actually happened? The government could have borrowed money at significantly lower rates to build these hospitals and schools itself. Sovereign borrowing has always been cheaper than private finance. Instead, it paid the private sector to borrow at a premium and passed the inflated cost on to the taxpayer. The private sector took the profit. The taxpayer took the risk. The buildings are now ageing. The debts are still being paid. And the services that were supposed to benefit are being squeezed partly because so much of their budget is locked into contractual obligations they cannot escape. PFI wasn't investment. It was an accounting trick. A way for governments to build things without the borrowing showing up in the national debt figures. It made politicians look fiscally responsible while loading future generations with obligations they had no say in and no ability to renegotiate. Both parties did this. The Conservatives created PFI in 1992. Labour massively expanded it after 1997. More than 700 projects were signed. The coalition eventually wound it down. The current government scrapped the latest version. But the contracts remain. The payments continue. And the damage is already done. This is what it looks like when a country chooses to buy its infrastructure on hire purchase instead of investing properly. You lock in above-market rates for decades. You lose control of the assets. You tie the hands of future governments. And when the bill keeps coming due, you're told there's no money for doctors, teachers, or social care. There was always money. It just went somewhere else.

I love this clip where Michael Parenti points out capitalism requires poverty to function as the wealth of the elite is produced by the deprivation of the many. It uses poverty as punishment to maintain low wages and keep people afraid of losing their jobs.

The “life on benefits is luxury” myth needs to DIE. 💀 People aren’t trapped on benefits because they’re lazy scroungers. They’re FORCED onto them by disabilities, chronic illness, or wages too LOW to cover rent and food in this rigged system. ❌ NO-ONE chooses a life on benefits.

If you’re evicted by a private landlord and can’t afford to privately rent… your council will likely tell you not to leave and wait for you, your family, and your belongings to be turfed onto the street by bailiffs. If you don’t they’ll tell you they won’t help you as you’ve chosen to make yourself ‘intentionally homeless’. That’s how skewed tackling homelessness in this country is.

They want to turn every human interaction, from a private email to where and how you drive your car, into a transaction they can track, predict, and sell. We're not even living anymore, we're just livestock in their digital farm.

Only a small exaggeration

It came to this because the faction that has captured the Labour Party under Starmer is utterly intolerant of dissent, debate, free speech and democracy. They run the state like they run the Party, as a blunt instrument to advance the interests of their mega-rich donors and the seething mass of mediocrities who are happily selling their political access to whichever corporation pays best.

Merica’ 🇺🇸