Ray Nixon

@Ponz55 @MartinG1492 @LoftusSteve @ret_ward @Conservatives I get the feeling you are wasting your time!

@MartinG1492 @LoftusSteve @ret_ward @Conservatives Of course it will. We can expand renewables ad infinitum but will still need gas as a balancing item when it is not windy or sunny. Producing that gas internally is better and less carbon intensive than importing it.

I am sorry but this is plain wrong. The goal is to reach net zero emissions globally. Extracting every last bit of oil and gas from the North Sea is not consistent with that goal. Why can’t @Conservatives be straight with the public on energy and climate?

@FUDdaily That alone would have a greater "positive" impact on productivity than Labour and Tory have had in 14 years.

Cut benefits to non-Brits and cut fuel taxes.

@WayneSmyth6 @AaronBastani Indeed, why don't we trust the market? If renewables are currently viable, why the need for subsidy?

@AaronBastani The right isn't deranged on this. One issue is that the economics of renewables is almost always misrepresented by people pushing them and net zero. When it genuinely makes economic sense to build and use them, we should do. We also need to take into account intermittency.

Correct position. Serious question: why is so much of the right deranged on this stuff? See so few sensible takes like this. It feels similar to the Israel stuff and negative polarisation. You support X so I must hugely overcompensate and become a fanatic for Y!

@FUDdaily I'd argue that you actually need a 3rd for green utopia, storage for excess wind. Current technology doesn't seem plausible for battery, and hydro really means Norway, with just 1.4GW interconnectors. I only mention it, because it's exactly the sort of thing Mad Ed would do.

If wind energy is producing 20GW that means you have to have 20GW of conventional generation or interconnector imports on standby for when the weather drops off. You are paying for two energy systems. You have to have a serious brain injury to not understand this.

Good to see our salt story followed up here👇 The slow motion collapse (actually no longer slow motion) of Britain's chemicals industry is a BIG deal. But NB it's not just salt. Ammonia, sulphuric acid, ethanol, and a host of other foundational chemicals too. All going or gone

@mahmoudelephant @ReemAmirIbrahim @SohoKenchie As per normal, politicians provide simplistic silver bullet solutions. There is good and bad immigration, the challenge is to identify and encourage the positive and eradicate the negative. NI and pension contributions should certainly be one factor.

@ReemAmirIbrahim @SohoKenchie I'm one of them. It took ten years of working and paying extra visa and health surcharges. And I've paid it to the pension for 20 years. But sure, immigrants are the problem

Britain must either allow mass immigration or abolish the state pension. Immigration is plummeting into the net negatives. 25% of working-age Brits don't work. Fertility has collapsed, and the state pension is soaring. So, which do you pick?

@spikedonline @WilliamClouston This is crazy. Strategically Cheshire sits on millions of tonnes of salt, has a high tech chemical industry, the future is supposed to be renewables, renewables needs batteries. How do you make sodium based batteries? Anything to say @Ed_Miliband

The factory that produces half of Britain’s salt could soon be killed by Net Zero. For the first time in history, England is set to be a net importer of the world’s most important mineral. This will be catastrophic for UK manufacturing, says Ruari McCallion buff.ly/M8o8O6P

@KathrynPorter26 @hernebaybob @Ed_Miliband Dunning-Kruger at work?

@hernebaybob @Ed_Miliband What he is saying is not true He might believe it is in which case he's wrong rather than a liar

So what you are basically saying is @Ed_Miliband is quite frankly lying 🤥

@AndyOopNorthGB @FUDdaily SDP desperately need an MP or at least a Lord, to break onto MSM, a few locals in Leeds just isn't enough to generate interest, sadly. UK politics just isn't serious, media prefer agendas to investigative journalism and the population want warm words rather than harsh truths :(

@FUDdaily It’s clear that the SDP have at least a few impressive people, but without the enthusiastic support enjoyed by Restore, or the numbers already in Reform’s camp, aren’t they effectively just an academic vote?

Regardless of my "extreme" views on immigration, I would actually vote for the SDP if they were standing in my area - chiefly because I am seriously sick of the slop right. If we're going to fix Britain we need an active state. We're going to need an army of Environment Agency inspectors, tax inspectors, probation officers, EHOs, housing inspectors, trading standards officers, HRMC auditors, better police, more magistrates courts, more border force officers, and more back office support to expedite prosecutions and removals - and to take red tape away from frontline practitioners. On that basis, I am not going to vote for slop right parties who approach civil service reform from an accountancy point of view, deleting entire departments just because they don't personally benefit from them. I want to see the civil service brought into sharper focus through better policy and better leadership. You can't expect the state to deliver on any of your agenda if you're inherently hostile to the public administration tier. If you want a functioning state you have to invest in it, and you have to take the time to understand it. The mission is to worst performing departments up to the standard of the best, but you won't get that kind of analysis from lazy nihilistic populists who think the state is "the enemy of the people" - who would just end up imposing more austerity. The last thing this country needs is more half-baked Thatcherism. Just recently we've seen the National Food Crimes Unit and the Environment Agency given police powers to get on top of food fraud and illegal waste. This means there is no more buck passing. If something is reported, they have to investigate. Labour has done a good thing there. These are important reforms that will get results in the coming months. But we have to go further. We need more specialist enforcement with teeth if we're going to take on deliveroo drivers, bad landlards, illegal car washes, vape shops and Turkish barbers. We're going to have to come down on back street solicitors to tackle remittance fraud and visa laundering. We need political leadership that will put a rocket under the civil service rather than stripping their departments bare and shuffling deckchairs. To give Restore their dues, their mass deportations paper alludes to some of this, but none of that is reflected in the slop-posting from the party leader, whereas @WilliamClouston genuinely understands the need for policy, and takes the time to understand the issues rather than churning out slogans. I might agree with 90% of the sentiments driving Restore and even Reform, but I do not believe for a nanosecond they would have the first idea how to govern effectively. I'm not going to vote for slop merchants who don't think about what they say and don't have a plan for government. I don't think they'd last five minutes in office. I've spoken to a few SDP people now, and they're all very sensible pragmatic people rather than ideological zealots taken in by generic right wing tropes. I might not agree with their entire prospectus but I can take them seriously. As much as anything, it's a party that could withstand the departure of its leader, which is more than you can say for any party of the slop right. That in itself says a lot about them.

@james406 Lol. "Is there correlation and causation?" That's always the question!

110-year-old Turkish grandma shares her secret to a long life: "i never once used Microsoft Teams"

@libfederalist @nfergus @Dr_Keefer They could, but that requires understanding of the inverted Maslow pyramid. This is unlikely to come from mass population enlightenment. The driver came from institutions and media, so realistically until they reverse there deindustrialisation aganda we're stuck.

@nfergus @Dr_Keefer European voters ultimately owns this mess. The good news is they can fix it by demanding a different approach.

"A society that has secured abundant energy, industrial production, and physical safety creates the conditions in which political attention can migrate upward into questions of identity, moral positioning, and self-actualization." 1/6

1. The price cap is not a response to the war in Iran. It existed anyway (based on incorrect analysis by the CMA) 2. If you cared about the cost of living you would... (i) lift the drilling ban and cancel the EPL. And create incentives for opening new fields ASAP (ii) call for gas companies and suppliers to import on long term fixed price contracts rather than doing everything on a just in time basis (iii) cancel the RO, AR7 and future renewables auctions until prices are under control (iv) abolish carbon taxes... They serve no purpose and just make energy expensive and industry uncompetitive (v) cut the fuel duty... Half the pump price of petrol is tax. It's greedy profiteering by the government But you won't because you actually care more about your net zero ideology than the cost of living or anything else

@ThePersecutdOne @JamesMelville Summary of the change Start (1979): ~42–46% of GDP End (1990): ~23% of GDP (a reduction of roughly 19–23 percentage points)

@ThePersecutdOne @JamesMelville x.com/i/grok?convers… If you want to use national debt as a criteria for success, Thatcher was very successful,

We aren’t being governed. We are being looted. Applicable to so many countries.

@FUDdaily #averageCustomerReviewsAnchor" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">amazon.co.uk/Suicide-Nation… 28% - 5 star rating, pretty much what Reform have been polling. 71% - 1 star, everbody else. I've no idea if this is a reflection of the book, his target audience or the dire binary state of UK politics.

"The lesson for his colleagues in Reform is not to let short-term popularity make them complacent when it comes to political and intellectual seriousness." No-one in that party has ever achieved either - nor will they.

@travelingflying Addendum: This is his statement on why you should not give a shit about being called an "islamophobe".

@ObjectinSpace16 @mr_james_c Much worse, Thatcher at least had the finance sector as a growing industry. What's the next growth industry? AI What does AI need? Lots of cheap power. He's killing the future as well as the present.

@mr_james_c Or, indeed, doing arguably much worse. The job losses for Thatcher were predominantly in uncompetitive (subsidised) industries (eg coal vs oil / gas whereas Milband is destroying otherwise competitive / self-sustaining jobs in favour of subsidised ones.

It's odd that the "Thatcher is evil because she destroyed industrial jobs in Northern England" people seem to be very very quiet about Miliband and Labour doing *exactly the same thing* to Britain's oil and gas industry, steel industry, petrochemicals industry, farming, pottery industry, hospitality industry... basically any industry that uses electricity.

Criminally Negligent. Andrew Neil's Words. Britain's Reality. Andrew Neil does not use language carelessly. Writing in the Daily Mail this morning, he describes Britain as stuck in an energy emergency with an oil and gas policy bordering on the criminally negligent, delivered by a bunch of clueless inadequates at the tiller. He is not reaching for effect. He is delivering a verdict. And the evidence he marshals is unanswerable. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for the first time in history. Oil is heading toward two hundred dollars a barrel. Britain is facing the worst energy crisis since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The International Energy Agency has described the supply disruption as the largest in history. And the government overseeing this catastrophe has spent the past year doing everything in its power to ensure Britain would be maximally exposed when it arrived. It closed North Sea oil and gas production. It borrowed against already strained public finances. It built an economic strategy on OBR forecasts that the energy crisis has already rendered obsolete. And it put the man most responsible for Britain's energy vulnerability, Ed Miliband, in charge of the response. The Miliband contradiction has been hiding in plain sight for months. He stood at the despatch box during the energy debate last year and warned that Britain was a price taker not a price maker in international fossil fuel markets, leaving it exposed to their volatility. He was right. He was also the man who ensured that exposure would be as severe as possible by closing down the domestic production that could have cushioned the blow. The North Sea fields that could have been producing. The coal beds that remain untouched. The nuclear capacity that was decommissioned in pursuit of net zero targets that now look like a luxury policy designed for a world that no longer exists. Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences. The fiscal headroom she has been defending against every request for defence spending, every demand from the Treasury and every warning from military chiefs, is being wiped out not by defence costs alone but by the energy price shock her own government's choices made inevitable. Her foundations, as Neil puts it, are built on quicksand. The borrowing costs are rising at the fastest pace since the Liz Truss mini-budget. Foreign creditors are watching. The bond markets are watching. And the Chancellor is discovering that the numbers she has been citing as proof of fiscal responsibility were always dependent on a stable world that this government's foreign policy paralysis helped to destabilise. Neil makes one observation that connects the economic catastrophe to the political one with surgical precision. A stronger Prime Minister would have fired Miliband. He is right. The man who led the Cabinet revolt against supporting America, who blocked the use of Diego Garcia, who has spent a year dismantling Britain's energy independence and who stood at the despatch box admitting British households would pay the price, is still in his post. Still in the Cabinet. Still in the room. The reason Starmer has not fired him is the same reason he needed a drone on his own runway before he would act, the same reason he consulted his team on minesweepers and the same reason Britain is now a diminished, exposed and strategically paralysed country being described in its own press as a nation of clueless inadequates. He cannot afford to. The coalition that put him in power will not allow it. And so the inadequates remain at the tiller while Britain heads for the rocks. "Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. [...]. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences."

@Harmsyx @LoftusSteve @KateFantom If batteries are part of the solution, I'd have thought sodium based would be more sustainable for the UK, not sure what the latest is on that.

@rx4ray @LoftusSteve @KateFantom Agreed, we've got a long way to go. I was just pointing out to Steve that he is mistaken - batteries are already in use, and there are plans to use more.

Whatever you read on the internet, please remember the facts. So far this year renewables have supplied over 42% of our grid energy. That’s more than any other energy source.