Andrew at Dalby

@GBPolitcs But did it? Unite the Kingdom that is Can we quantify the results?

🚨NEW: The Met police say although arrests were made, the "Unite the Kingdom" rally proceeded largely without any significant incident

@FUDdaily AS long as it's Cleverly holding the flagpole I'm on board

Perhaps Ukraine should fly the flag of Essex County Council on the front lines?

@Artemisfornow If there's extra court capacity now, why the abolition of jury trials?

What an odd and divisive thing to say. It seems to me that the only part of Britain David Lammy is proud of is a narrow minority view one that excludes the Britain built, defended and funded by millions of ordinary hard-working people. This is the same man who demanded reparations from the very country that did more than any other on Earth to abolish and suppress the global slave trade. Weird.

@hainanchili @paulmasonnews Ahem

@paulmasonnews The Labour Party are bad - I agree. But I’ve not seen them urinate their way to Whitehall. They shit all over the country from within there though.

Tomorrow, we should stand WITH the government, WITH the Metropolitan Police, AGAINST the fascist drunks and hooligans who will urinate their way from Euston to Whitehall in support of an insurrection fantasy - a moment of peril for our democracy...

@beatrismouse @ClarkeMicah And Nigel Gresley!!

@ClarkeMicah Although it was actually slower with the 'air-casing'. It was all about marketing. Mallard, however, which sits next to her at the NRM, was genuinely aerodynamically better. And faster.

When Britain was genuinely modern, rather than pretending to be.

@ClarkeMicah @johnstretch But the 1921 mergers started the removal of passenger services. These losses speeded up after 1945. Lines were lifted mostly after 1963, which was an unenforced error. I give you exhibit A, The Titfield Thunderbolt

.@johnstretch Trams are railways. And perhaps you are unaware of the dense network of railways which covered this country until the Marples vandalism of the 1960s.

@ClaireCoutinho But YOU STARTED IT. Apologies for the capitals, but FGS

Ed Miliband’s Energy Independence Bill includes… Banning new oil and gas from the North Sea. He is not making us more independent. He is making us more reliant on foreign imports. He is utterly deluded. We will fight him every step of the way.

@GuidoFawkes Just how many Ministers are there? And Why?

HEALTH MINISTER ZUBIR AHMED RESIGNS

@CharlotteCGill The most disappointing fact is the nose ring being AI. Hey ho

Wrong

@Conservatives Fool me once.......etc

Leave the ECHR and repeal the Human Rights Act to secure Britain’s borders. Scrap green levies and ideological net zero targets to deliver cheaper energy. Hire 10,000 more police and increase stop and search to make our streets safe. Restore the two child benefit cap, and face-to-face PIP assessments to get Britain working. Increase defence spending by £50 billion, using savings made to the welfare budget to defend our country. Scrap the 3% interest added to Plan 2 student loans and get under 16s off social media to help young people. That’s what the Conservatives under @KemiBadenoch’s leadership would do.

@toadmeister FFS. Did you read the story, not just the headline. The (unclassified) road is built over peat beds, has a history of subsidence and this happens regularly (just not with a highway repair vehicle).

A pothole repair lorry has been swallowed by a pothole it was sent to fix in an image that aptly sums up the dire state of the country. dailysceptic.org/2026/05/11/pot…

@LeeHurstComic AI? No, Bird's Eye

Our saviour.

@kelvmackenzie The article says that the road is under-laid with peat, and swallow holes are a feature of this unclassified road. I've not believed headlines for a while now. You?

Just when you thought the UK couldn’t go further down the plug hole along comes a story (The Telegraph) which confirms everything you feared under Labour.

@LeeHurstComic Quango's are a difficult problem. Agreed, some are a waste of space, and most over-zealous, but do we really want no monitoring of river water quality? Do we want Indian levels of H&S?

Policies that I would like to see Reform adopt. Abolish the TV licence. Abolish Inheritance Tax. Raise the Personal Tax Allowance and tie it to the annual Minimum Wage. Replace all benefits with a single payment equivalent to the annual minimum wage. Paid to people for 40 hrs per week Community Work or Skills Training. Paid to full time University Students for 3 years. Paid to people too disabled or too sick to work plus to one family member as a full time carer where necessary. Paid as the State Pension. Abolish National Insurance and have one flat rate Income Tax to simplify things. To pay for all the above? Cuts. Stop wasteful spending. A recruitment freeze in the Civil Service. Abolish all Quangos within six months. Abolish Overseas Aid. Abolish Net Zero. Get people back to work building Social Housing for rent with private investment and set rent controls within these new units. Withdraw from all pointless global bodies.

@JChimirie66677 I'm sure he's the best of the available candidates, but the Stafford and Morecombe Hospitals reviews will tar him forever

Before Anyone Crowns Burnham, Ask Him About Operation Augusta. The Westminster commentary has settled on its preferred narrative. Andy Burnham is the answer. The King of the North. The popular, relatable, effective politician who can reconnect Labour with the voters it has lost. Union leaders are backing him. MPs are championing him. The NEC has cleared his path. Nobody is asking the question his own record demands. Operation Augusta was a Greater Manchester Police investigation into a grooming gang of up to 100 members who abused at least 57 children, some as young as 12, all in the care of Manchester social services. The operation was shut down. The official reason was lack of resources, despite Greater Manchester Police having gained over 1,000 additional officers in the preceding years. Of 97 individuals identified as suspects, three were imprisoned. That was recorded as a success. When the subsequent review was published and MPs wrote to Burnham challenging him on the failures, his response was described in Hansard as supine. He accepted the lack of resources argument without challenge. MPs noted there was no sense of injustice in his reply. The minutes from the meeting where the decision to end Operation Augusta was taken had disappeared. The minutes from Manchester City Council had disappeared at the same time. The Rochdale review, which Burnham also commissioned, identified 96 men still deemed a potential risk to children who remained at large. That review covered failures between 2004 and 2013, documenting multiple failed investigations and apparent institutional indifference to the plight of hundreds of girls, mainly white, from poor backgrounds. Burnham described it as a lamentable strategic failure. He expressed anger. He called for a duty of candour on public servants. What he did not do was explain what his mayoralty had done to locate and prosecute the 96 men still identified as dangers to children. To be precise, Burnham commissioned these reviews. But commissioning a review of institutional failure is not the same as confronting it. The reviews documented failures that occurred both before and during his mayoralty. His response to parliamentary challenge on those failures was judged inadequate by MPs who examined it. Now the same political class that failed to press him on those questions is preparing to hand him the keys to Downing Street. Union leaders who represent workers in the communities where these failures occurred are backing him without condition. MPs who sat through the Hansard debate on Operation Augusta are championing him as the clean candidate. The media is treating his popularity as a sufficient qualification. The parallel with the Mandelson affair is not superficial. The central argument of this affair has been that institutional accountability has been systematically avoided by a political class more concerned with managing consequences than confronting them. The grooming gang failures in Greater Manchester represent exactly that pattern applied to the most vulnerable children in the country. Girls in care were failed. Suspects were identified and not prosecuted. Evidence disappeared. The response was described as supine. A political culture that cannot ask these questions of its preferred successor has not learned anything from the crisis that is forcing the current Prime Minister out. Changing the leader without changing the culture of institutional evasion simply reproduces the problem with a more popular face attached. Before anyone in Westminster, in the unions or in the media decides that Andy Burnham is the answer, they should read the Hansard record of Operation Augusta. They should ask what happened to those 96 men. And they should require a better answer than the one he gave the last time he was asked. "Operation Augusta was a Greater Manchester Police investigation into a grooming gang of up to 100 members who abused at least 57 children, some as young as 12"

@SRHNarborough @LiamHalligan @elerianm You're most kind

@AtDalby @LiamHalligan @elerianm Functionally retarded comment.

You are quite right to keep highlighting these issues @elerianm It seems to me that so much of the UK's political and media class is in denial about the fragility of our public finances – and the related systemic dangers. They think "the public doesn't get it" - so why should politicians and journalist care either? This is, of course, a profound misjudgement. Voters, in my experience, as a whole, are so often ahead of most MPs and commentators. There is a growing sense, among the UK's mighty "silent majority", that we're living beyond way beyond our means – and only some kind of reckoning will impose reality and finally bring us to our senses ...

@FUDdaily NHS Dentistry isn't free anyway. Each procedure (and check up) costs not far off the going rate.

I need some persuading that this is the crisis we are led to believe. I've not had any problems finding a private dentist, and even on my pathetically low income, I can afford the £25 a month for the basic service. There's no real reason why basic dental care should be free. The people who say they can't afford to go private seem to be the same ones who have at least one foreign holiday a year and don't think twice about pissing £30 away in the pub on Friday nights. There should be free emergency dental care available in hospitals for basic extractions, but everyone else can jog on.

@afneil Brilliant idea. Where are the teachers/lecturers coming from?

Establish 100 world-class technology schools in 100 towns in the Uk, each one with 1,000 pupils and open purely to merit, on a par with the best in Germany/Austria. Aim to place each pupil on graduation into the very best apprenticeships, like BAe, Rolls Royce, Airbus, or STEM university courses. Double the fees for anybody who wants to do media studies at university 😂

@afneil It's almost as if the UK did something silly in early 2020 then compounded it in the middle of 2024. What could that have been?

I have never claimed that Brexit has increased our GDP. I do not rule out that it might well have been a drag. I have never argued one way or the other. But this is really the economics of the kindergarten.