BroughtyBoy🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

The UK is so 'appalled' at events in West Bank that it: ❌refuses to ban trade with illegal settlements ❌keeps military accord w/ Israel ❌keeps 'trade & partnership' accord ❌continues arms exports ❌refuses to mention Israeli nukes ❌refuses to respond to ICJ ruling on OPTs

The UK student loan book - better understood as the aggregate sum owed by current and former students of British universities against the cost of their tuition and their maintenance - currently stands at roughly £267 billion. It is the largest single class of consumer debt held against the British people, and it is held overwhelmingly by people in their twenties, thirties, and early forties. The OBR forecasts it will reach £500 billion in present-day money by the late 2040s. A meaningful portion of it is on the terms of the so-called Plan 5 scheme, under which the borrower will, on the published projections, never repay the principal, and will continue paying interest on it until the loan is finally written off, 40 years after it was first contracted. This, in actual fact, is the point. The economics of Plan 5 work as follows. A British student going to a three-year undergraduate course starts that course with somewhere in the region of £45,000 to £50,000 of debt, breaking down to £9,535 a year in tuition fees alone for 2025/26, plus the maintenance loan to cover rent, food, and basic existence. Repayments begin once the graduate is earning above £25,000 a year, and are charged at 9% of the income above the threshold. Interest, on Plan 5, accrues on the outstanding balance at the rate of RPI inflation. RPI for 2025/26 is 3.2%. The result, mathematically and predictably, is that for the substantial majority of graduates, the size of the debt grows faster, year on year, than they can pay it down. A graduate earning £35,000 makes 9% of the £10,000 above the threshold, which is £900, in repayment for that year. The interest on a £45,000 balance at RPI of 3.2% is £1,440. The debt grows by more than £500 every year, despite the graduate making the maximum repayment the law requires of them. By the time most graduates reach their thirties, the nominal balance on their loan is higher than the original principal. Calling this a "loan," in plain English, is a euphemism. The system is a graduate tax that has been deliberately dressed up as a loan in order to keep it off the headline figures of the public finances and out of the deficit projections that the Treasury cares about. The accounting treatment of student loans is a piece of fiscal sleight of hand designed by Whitehall, sustained by both major parties for two decades, and paid for, in their twenties and thirties, by every young Briton who took the careers adviser's advice that getting a degree was the responsible thing to do. Meanwhile, the money exacted from graduates is funnelled into the government and entrenched civil service's most beloved schemes of infinite entitlements for the economically non-productive, and into Britain's endless array of non-functional money-pit 'institutions of state'. This indefinite debt slavery was, additionally, sold to two generations of British young people on the explicit promise that the degree delivered would lead to a career commensurate with the expense. That promise, on the published evidence, has not been kept. The graduate-non-graduate earnings premium in the UK has narrowed sharply over the last 15 years. A meaningful percentage of nominally graduate-track jobs are now filled by people without degrees. Many of the degrees the loan book funded - the events management courses, the social media marketing courses, and countless other lightweight programs at institutions that employers instinctively do not credit - produced graduates whose labour-market outcomes are barely distinguishable from non-graduates with the same A-Levels. The solution to this is simple, as was laid out in Progress' policy vision for the future-Britain we all want: we must absolve those with outstanding student debts of the duty of paying interest on their repayments. The principal remains payable, on the existing scheme, at the existing percentage of income above the existing threshold. But the part of the debt that grows quietly, every year, faster than the graduate can pay it down - the part that turns the loan into a perpetual machine for extracting compound interest from a generation that took its government's advice so that it can be spent on portions of the economy that will never bear fruit - that part will be removed. The student loan book becomes what it always should have been: an honest debt with an end in sight, not a scam wreaked on youngsters not wise to the fact that they, apparently, should expect that their own state will try to con them in their every interaction with it. This is one of those policy commitments that has the property of being, simultaneously, the morally proper thing to do and the economically proper thing to do. The British state has been quietly extracting compound interest, for the last two decades, from a generation it told to go to university. That generation is now of an age at which it is supposed to be buying houses, starting families, and contributing to the economy in the ways governments traditionally hope young adults will contribute. Britain currently does everything it possibly can to make it impossible for that generation to do any of those things. The student loan book is, in plain operational terms, just one of the instruments it uses for those purposes. If you, or somebody you know, are paying for the privilege of having taken your government's advice: this is your fight.

Israel destroyed the mausoleum of Simon Peter, apostle of Christ, in the village of Shama in southern Lebanon 1,925–1,995 years years old . Christians of the world, Wake up!

‘The essence of our two nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people of all faiths and of none.’ — King Charles🇬🇧 in the USA🇺🇸 The entire global south would beg to differ.

Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure in Tuapse could cause an ecological disaster on a previously unseen scale Of course theres complete silence from the West as Kiev intentionally destroys the Black Seas delicate ecosystem. The impact on Russias oil exports is minimal, the impact on the environment is catastrophic. According to ecologists, the air has recorded an exceedance of the maximum permissible concentration of benzene - a dangerous carcinogen that can accumulate in the body. “A ton of oil spills over an area of up to 12km², so the Black Sea water area will be very polluted. The soil, forest, and water bodies, including rivers, will be contaminated. The consequences will be much greater than from the diesel oil spill in December 2024 in Anapa,” said ecologist Yevgeny Vitishko. The Black Sea ecosystem could be effected for decades.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), whose War Powers Resolution regarding the President Trump’s aggressive policy towards Cuba will come for a vote on the Senate floor Tuesday, told Drop Site’s Julian Andreone that the administration’s strategy is “purely a regime change effort” and that if any country did to the U.S. what we are doing to Cuba, “we would consider it an act of war.” Kaine also noted a pattern in U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America more broadly to pursue regime change against any emerging socialist or communist governments to quell hemispheric rises in leftism. @JulianAndreone | @SenTimKaine

Foreign minister @SDoughtyMP went all the way to New York for a speech on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to berate Iran for its "non-compliance" while not mentioning Israel which refuses to even sign the NPT and has actual nuclear arms the UK refuses to acknowledge. 🤣

🇨🇴🇦🇷 Gustavo Petro asks the question the West does not want answered. "If Argentina is an exporter of quality meat, why can't Argentinians eat quality meat and are stuck eating donkey meat?" That is not just a question about Argentina. That is a question about the entire Global South. Countries rich in resources. Oil. Gold. Lithium. Cocoa. Coffee. Beef. Yet their own people cannot afford what they produce. Argentina exports premium beef to Europe and China. Argentinians eat donkey meat. Nigeria exports oil. Nigerians queue for hours for subsidized fuel. DRC exports cobalt. Congolese miners live on less than $2 a day. Ghana exports cocoa. Ghanaian children have never tasted quality chocolate. The system is designed to extract, not to feed. Produce for the West. Starve at home. Petro is right. This cannot happen in Colombia. And it should not happen anywhere in Africa or the Global South. The question is not why Argentinians eat donkey meat. The question is who profits from that arrangement. It's time to change the answer.

I often take the elite in America to task because of their disconnection from reality and their preference for fantasy outcomes. But there’s another, darker aspect to the elite as well: the absence of morals. When a retired general on national television can openly talk about assassinating leaders of our adversaries that reach conclusions we don’t like, and then he considers that “reasonable“ and none of the hosts on the network so much is bat an eye – that shows how far we have fallen from even pretending to care about morality. This war we chose to start violated the US Constitution, United States law, international law, and any norms of decency: we were not threatened, we did not fight war of self-defense, and utterly lied about the justification of an “imminent threat,” when 100% there was none. And now we’re talking about trying to resolve this war in our favor, by demanding surrender of the other side, and if they don’t comply, we have no moral qualms about assassinating their leaders. Again. Know this: a nation cannot behave like this and make that kind of behavior routine, and think that at some point, it will not come back to haunt us. Life has a habit of returning on your head the very thing that you do to others. I already mourn because of the loss that we’re going to suffer, but will not hesitate to point out at that time, that we ourselves lit the fuse of the day when people start assassinating American leaders.

I heard some commentators say that Harry Kane is the first English player to score 50 goals in a single season. I don’t think that’s right. I’m pretty sure Dixie Dean scored 60 league goals for Everton in the 1920s.

"If there is a decisive exit ... Trump and his team will be wounded but can still survive. If he restarts this war, Kelley, I think he will be gone by the end of the year" -- @DougAMacgregor on my show today, a must watch. youtube.com/watch?v=7yBmSl…

🇺🇸🇦🇪 UAE Out of OPEC: the US Controlled Demolition of Middle East Energy Exports ▪️The Western media is noting the immediate (temporary) effect this has had on oil prices, lowering them; ▪️Analysts are saying this is a US policy meant to manage the damage the US war on Iran has caused; ▪️This is true to a point - the US is causing and managing this damage deliberately; ▪️The US is now amid the same incremental, managed process of decoupling Asia from Middle East energy exports that it had used to decouple Europe from cheap, plentiful, and reliable Russian energy; ▪️The process of cutting Europe off from Russia took years (and is still taking place) and this current process of controlled demolition of Middle East energy exports to Asia will take time too - just as the US has LNG export projects being brought online or beginning construction in the US (Alaska, Texas etc) - projects that until now made ZERO economic sense; ▪️This is why there may be temporary pauses in the US war on Iran but never any end at least until this process is complete - but then again, toppling Russia and Iran are also US objectives in and onto themselves, unlikely to change whether or not this controlled demolition is completed: ▪️If people re-read RAND Corporation's 2019 "Extending Russia" ( rand.org/content/dam/ra… - under "Economic Measures" and "Geopolitical Measures") they basically spell out how the US needed to expand American LNG exports to Europe, that sanctions alone wouldn't make it viable under peacetime conditions, and how another option would be to provoke war with Russia in Ukraine by providing Ukraine with "lethal aid" - and here we are... The US is now repeating this whole process aimed now at the Middle East and Asia.

An Israeli soldier released a video of my city, Beit Hanoun, completely destroyed. Not a single house in the city was left standing, not a single tree survived. Have you ever seen an army film the genocide it is committing in 360° before?

Four things: 1) Iran's economy has weathered sanctions for decades, including the most recent "maximum pressure campaign." It's battered, but if nothing else, adaptive and prepared to weather the "blockade". 2) Before the War on Iran began, the US economy still hadn't found a way to effectively reverse the inflation that was crushing US consumers. 3) Oil prices are now above the pre-ceasefire highs, along with the vast majority of polled farmers saying that skyrocketing fertilizer prices (due to the SOH being closed) will result in smaller crop yields (read: higher food prices). 4) Add in the increase in diesel fuel (used for farming equipment and vehicles that transport goods to market), resulting in even higher food prices. 4) Combine all of the above, and it's clear that average Americans are the ones who are literally paying the price for this war. If these people truly cared about their fellow citizens, they'd find the quickest way possible to end this conflict.

“Lebanon and Israel are not at war.” The Israeli drone that woke me up this morning begs to differ. So do the apocalyptic Israeli detonations of entire Lebanese villages and the ongoing Israeli occupation and airstrikes across the south that have killed at least 38 people in Lebanon since the sham ceasefire went into effect.

BREAKING: Professor of moral philosophy Peter Hallward delivers a letter signed by 1700 people risking Terrorism charges inc. Sally Rooney, Greta Thunberg, Judith Butler, & professors of law to the Court of Appeal. The letter: “We oppose genocide, we support Palestine Action.”

“We lied about Vietnam. We lied about Iraq. We lied about Afghanistan. We lied about Somalia. We lied about Libya..” Former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell exposes the dark reality of US foreign policy and how American weapons ended up in the hands of terrorist groups.

I$rael launches a wave of airstrikes in the south of Lebanon with blasts close to Tibnin Hospital where journalist Zeinab Feraj was being treated after being pulled from the rubble following the strike which killed Amal Khalil last week There is no ceasefire

From November 2024 there was a ceasefite in Lebanon which Israel violated 15,400 times according to the UN. I witnessed 4 months of Israeli violations personally. When Hezbollah finally fired back, the entire western media reported they "initiated" the current war. Now Israel has violated the new ceasefire over a thousand times in a fortnight. Yet today the Guardian reports that Israel is issuing new evacuation orders "in response to Hezbollah ceasefire violations".