James Fitzjames Stephen 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

@nhsDirtySecrets Just 40 years ago, he’d have never been a QC/KC, let alone PM. He’d have been, at best, a sociology lecturer at a minor Poly. That’s how far Britain has fallen.

He thinks he can use propaganda and lies to convince us he is: Intellectually gifted A master negotiator A brilliant strategist A leader Honest Brave Patriotic Principled Moral Caring Loyal Intelligent Visionary He's none of these things. He's a conman, who got found out!

Had Twitter existed in 1990, you could have tweeted more or less the exact same thing about Britain and most of Europe.

Contender for the best community note of all time. Descendent of slavers accidentally whines about the British trying to end the slave trade. If anything she should be paying reparations to us.

People have been telling me I’m being overly negative about this country. Too pessimistic. Too doom-laden. I thought I was holding back. So let me lay it all out. Welcome to the age of compounding crises. Housing. Average home costs 8x the average salary. A generation locked out. Prices can’t fall without crashing the banks. Can’t rise without locking out more people. Water. £85 billion extracted in dividends since privatisation. £70 billion in debt loaded onto companies sold debt-free. Victorian pipes leaking billions of litres. Raw sewage discharged for 3.6 million hours in a single year. Bills rising 36% by 2030. Energy. Net importer. No sovereign strategy. One Gulf crisis and it costs the taxpayer £78 billion in emergency subsidies. Pensions. One of the worst state pensions in the developed world. Trillions in unfunded public sector liabilities off the books. Median private pot £32,700. You need ten times that. 43% undersaving. The triple lock ratchets costs up automatically with no mechanism to bring them down. NHS. 7.25 million on the waiting list. Staff leaving. Buildings crumbling. Cancer targets missed. Social care barely exists. A two-tier system emerging. A demographic wave about to make it all worse. Transport. HS2: £66 billion for 140 miles. Spain built 2,500 miles for $70 billion. We pay 8.5x the European average and deliver a fraction of the result. Roads falling apart. The North still waiting. Local government. Over half of councils expect bankruptcy within five years. Funding cut 29% in real terms since 2010. Libraries, youth services, social care… gone or going. Public finances. Debt approaching 97% of GDP. Interest payments exceed the defence budget. Taxes at their highest since the 1940s. Spending plans include cuts the OBR says may be undeliverable. Productivity. Flat for eighteen years. Worst record since the Industrial Revolution. Economic inactivity. 1 in 5 working-age people not working. 2.8 million out sick, a record. The only G7 country with lower employment than before the pandemic. Food. We import 48% of what we eat. 83% of our fruit. 12% of households are food insecure. One supply chain shock and the shelves thin out. We’ve seen it twice already and fixed nothing. Education. School buildings crumbling. Teachers leaving. £267 billion in student debt, most of which will never be repaid. Defence. Procurement Parliament called “broken and repeatedly wasting billions.” Equipment plan £19 billion short. A war in Europe and no money to respond properly. Prisons. 72% overcrowded. Hit 99.7% occupancy. Nearly 40,000 released early because there was nowhere to put them. 23,000 cells don’t meet fire safety standards. Cost to fix: £2.8 billion. Allocated: £520 million. Car finance. Biggest mis-selling scandal since PPI. 12 million agreements with hidden commissions. £7.5 billion in expected compensation. Another bill landing on an industry already stretched. Regional inequality. London pulling away from everywhere else. A country where your postcode determines your life expectancy, school quality, job prospects and access to healthcare. Underneath all of it, the same pattern. Sell the asset. Load it with debt. Extract the value. Defer the maintenance. Hand the bill to the next generation. None of this is unfixable. This country has the talent and the people to turn every one of these around. But that requires a political class willing to be honest about the scale of what’s broken. What we have instead is a political class that would rather keep us fighting each other than confront the structural failures staring them in the face. Because fixing them is hard, unpopular, and takes longer than an electoral cycle. So they commission a review, blame the last lot, and nothing changes. I’d love to be more optimistic. And the history and people of this country still make me somewhat hopeful. But our politics needs to drastically change if we’re going to get anywhere.

True, if you're referring to Scots, Welsh, Irish, Cornish, etc. A lie if you're referring to browns.

Not enough, alas.

Condorman (1981) is fascinating. Disney attempted a James Bond/superhero rival starring Michael Crawford (yes, Frank Spencer from Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em). It didn't fly, but it has moments of brilliance: Henry Mancini's score, the locations, Oliver Reed, and this Porsche chase

Funny, I was told ‘no-go zones’ weren’t a real thing. But I guess that only applies when it’s White people concerned about their cities.

What do you think Marxists do to those who disagree with them?

@peterrhague Worth mentioning to the prosecution at Sir Keir’s trial.

I wonder if trying to wrestle control of the Navy from the monarch constitutes treason?

@ExtraneusT We used to know what British was until the floodgates opened. Some of us still do. Obviously some of us haven’t a clue.

@ZackPolanski He doesn’t need bigger breasts, David.

Nigel Farage is happy to post crap attack ads about me but still too scared to debate with me. That's because Reform are falling. And the Green Party are rising. Join.greenparty.org.uk

@RadioGenoa Save this video for the next time someone on this site bleats about the horrors of 1ynching.

He does this to prove that he is a real man. His IQ probably doesn't go above zero.

@DaniDeli3 If the woman being promoted looks like a pre-pubescent boy, there’s a homosexual behind it (pardon the pun).

@JaFiStephen I am a thinofile and this woman is disgustingly skinny in my eyes-go figure.

If you really want to know what the ideal female body looks like from the perspective of heterosexual men, feel free to ask one of us (hint: we probably don’t work in fashion).

@classiflied77 What about her husband’s contribution? Oh, wait, never mind…

Maff be hard

New euphemism dropped?

'Would Daniel Hannan say British Greeks who support returning the Elgin Marbles “haven’t integrated”?' Yup. Especially if they still called themselves British Greeks.

A friend of mine—intelligent, went to a great school, has a great job—admitted to me that she can’t read anymore. She was a bookworm in her youth, but she struggles to read more than two pages now. I found myself developing this issue about a year ago. I would read a page and then have an overwhelming urge to check my email or open Twitter or text someone. Only solution was to put my phone in another room and commit to reading for a minimum of 1 hour. After about 5 pages I get engrossed, but for the first few minutes I still feel the pull of the smartphone. But I think part of the reason I can still get into a reading flow is because I spent my childhood doing it. I know what it’s like to really get lost in a book; I have the muscle memory. I shudder to think how difficult developing a reading habit might have been if I had grown up with smartphones. Very possible I’d never have read much. What an impoverished life. And yes, civilizationally dangerous.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are responsible for Net Zero? You learn something new every day, don’t you?

@MillennialWoes Didn't this happen to Graham Linehan? He tweeted something while abroad and was arrested when he returned home?

I sometimes wonder... What would happen if a British citizen went to America, recorded himself saying something insanely racist, homophobic, etc., published it online, and then came back to Britain? What would the British state do? The hate speech "crime" would have taken place in another country, but the person keeping the recording available online while in Britain might be regarded as a crime in itself, enabling the state to prosecute.