Alexander Jouan

@osesthegoat @NuriUtd2 Indeed Kayode too good for MU

@NuriUtd2 braindead fans. mazraoui, no dalot. let's not even talk about kayode and summerville.

pls make this happen ffs

@Mo5855293596588 @PolitlcsUK Oh dear, someone needs to go back to history class

@PolitlcsUK this dictator is literally laughing at democracy lmao the wipeout next time is going to be epic

🚨 WATCH: Keir Starmer makes a dig at the list of over 90 Labour MPs calling for him to resign "Her list of endorsements is truly impressive, reaching well over 100 [MPs]. At last, Mr Speaker, a list we can all get behind!"

The ministers urging Starmer to go are feeding the hysteria. The next leader will be subject to instant leadership speculation and the next, and the next, whether Labour, Reform or Tory. Britain is becoming ungovernable. And the media fixation on this tittle tattle is not helping

@Heywood83487886 @tomhfh Imagine being so short-sighted into thinking Rayner and Reeves fucked the job market

@tomhfh I’ve a 19 year old son, he’s looking at a job market that’s fu€ked (courtesy of Rayner and Reeves), no prospect of being able to afford housing and the Government paying for the upkeep of insane numbers of illegal migrants. Starmer’s answer? Rejoin EU 🤷🏻‍♂️

Until someone bites the bullet, slashes spending, and does the difficult pro-growth reforms this country desperately needs, we will continue to have a ridiculous carousel of Prime Minsters. The truth is the Prime Minister could have survived the Mandelson scandal if people felt better off in their pockets. While there’s no growth, there’s no longevity of political tenure. Blair survived plenty of scandal, and plenty of Mandelson, ultimately because everything in life’s wider context didn’t feel so desperately shit. Until we have a political class brave enough to end the overspending, liberalise the labour market, and *actually* overhaul the planning system - we’re going to be stuck in this same psychodrama of doom.

Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding. If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life. That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience. Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival. But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible? Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there? The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them. Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact. Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source. This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes. This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself. I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state. The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends. The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act. Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity. Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them. The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety. That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.

The challenge for political broadcasting is enormous, and rather satisfying to watch. After years of personality-driven and chaotic, shallow politics coverage across much of the media, which was largely about instability, gossip and leadership crises we now have a govt with massive majority, widespread internal agreement and no likelihood of massive instability anytime soon. A great environment for a programme like #c4news full of policy nerds and people who prefer to argue about what ideas work than who should be the front person.

@InvertTheWing Go touch grass man

Is that the worst, most corrupt decision in football history? I think it has single handedly diminished the overall perception of the league. That must have been people’s last straw.

@GeronimoMorgans Peter’s confused about a player standing still and a arm across the chest/hands

“Arsenal have been blocking the opponent’s goalkeeper all season long, they would NEVER be on top of the league if we disallow these goals!” Peter Schmeichel thank you for calling them out. have your cheating title VARSENAL. 👏

@propsMCFC Standing in front of a goalkeeper is not wrestling them ya numpty

but Arsenal got handed all those goals after WRESTLINg the keeper btw. this league is a joke.

@InvertTheWing Thought you supported Stockport mate?

I don't care if it a fucking foul. Every. Fucking. Set Piece routine Arsenal grab, block, and completely impede the goalkeeper. But absolutely FUCK ALL HAPPENS. GOAL IS GIVEN. INCOMPETENT.

Best explainer of the results I’ve seen so far. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@elonmusk Oh man you are thick.

Hitler was a socialist, therefore all socialists are Hitler

@Nigel_Farage Great policy and all Nige, but if we’re going to play games…me and fellow constituents didn’t vote for Brexit, so can we have our European rights back please? Cheers 🍻

If you vote Reform you will not have an illegal migrant deportation facility in your area. We will hold migrants awaiting deportation in constituencies that vote Green instead. You get what you vote for.

This is a mad thing to announce

@GarySmithJnr Since when was control over the ball important?

The hysteria and victim playing by Arsenal fans about the Eze incident is absolutely staggering. This is not a penalty. He has no control over the ball, plants his foot waiting for some kind of contact that didn't come, then flings his left leg round and goes down theatrically.

#Bills GM Brandon Beane on his approach with pick No. 26: “You do a rundown. These are the guys we are pretty sure there’s less than a 1% chance they’ll be there, barring something like a gas mask or something popping up. So if you guys want to put any players who are really talented using AI to help us get them, we’ll take them.” 💀

Let’s punish kids from having fun.

@Billy155363105 @danielstorey85 One is the PM mate.

@danielstorey85 Would you have said the same if Kier Starmer or Polenski done it?

Interesting PR decision from Ipswich Town here

@TomRalph1 @danielstorey85 Except when you go there and can read the signs I assume

@AlexanderJG90 @danielstorey85 What other countries do is not my concern.

Ah there goes John Terry

@TomRalph1 @danielstorey85 You ever been abroad and read signs in English?

@danielstorey85 What does this mean Daniel? Is it a good thing that signs in England are written in foreign languages? If so, why?