Bernard Mees

@JosephM48859659 @Narcomania None of those lists are are anything more than accusations. You may not like it, but the only legally competent judicial bodies that can adjudicate the accusations are the Israeli courts. Hurling inane insults at people does not change facts.

@BernardMeesPhD @Narcomania There’s a long list of war crimes investigated by international bodies and human rights organizations and, in several cases, Israel has been charged. They refuse to comply with international law. There’s nothing anyone can say that will make you stop supporting killing kids.

When people correctly point out the rise in antisemitic attacks in the UK are linked to Israel’s mass slaughter in the Middle East, they are not saying, it’s ok, of course it’s not, they are just stating the truth.

@JosephM48859659 @Narcomania No there aren't "confirmed war-crimes". Stop making things up. The Israelis will do a full survey of allegations when things finish - it's what they always do. And it doesn't matter what people like you and I think, its only a matter for the Israelis.

@BernardMeesPhD @Narcomania You’re wrong. There are many confirmed war crimes. And most people don’t think Israel has acted appropriately. Support for Israel has plummeted to its lowest ever number in the USA. You genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re just here to defend killing kids.

@policy_uk @visitcamberwell @NealOKelly @ClarkeMicah Balance between car and other forms of transport is needed. But that's not what the UK has at the moment. They are still proudly building motorways in places like Wales.

@BernardMeesPhD @visitcamberwell @NealOKelly @ClarkeMicah But your side of the debate also needs to accept we need cars for some journeys… this isn’t a binary debate

.@policy_Uk Have you not heard of induced demand, disovered in the 1930s in the USA and confirmed many times since? The more roads you build, the more traffic you get. See the M25, from road to car park in three years, and Peking's 7 (so far) ring roads.

@policy_uk @NealOKelly @ClarkeMicah Yes, I think that HS2 is a waste of money. But when you are 50 years behind on properly funding things, catch up is going to be expensive. Privatising the railways has been a total stuff up - it was an attempt to avoid properly investing in rail and has made things worse.

@BernardMeesPhD @NealOKelly @ClarkeMicah But we are in the process of throwing £100 billion at HS2… and the public subsidy to the railways tripled in real terms 1993-2007

@JosephM48859659 @Narcomania We have no idea whether war crimes occurred or not, and I've never been pro-Israel. Most people commenting on the issue really have no idea what they are talking about, but the military people seem to mainly think that the Israelis acted appropriately.

@BernardMeesPhD @Narcomania Justifying war crimes now. No one thinks Israel should have done nothing. Evil people think killing 20,000 kids is right. You can continue to pretend the world is wrong to dislike Israel though.

@visitcamberwell @NealOKelly @ClarkeMicah @policy_uk Yes, it was the move to buses that was the key problem, and the idea that running unreliable and infrequent bus services was a great idea. Road freight could have been handled differently, too, and I think you are spot on about the push for cycling being lifestyle-led.

I think the pivot from trams to buses from the 30s to 50s had a lot to do with increasing road freight into cities, which clashed with light rail on London’s slender main roads. Even today there is little to no policy focus on reducing this. Everything is lifestyle-led, which is why the cycling lobby is so defensive of car ownership. Both buses and trams have excellent records of modal transfer from cars. Unfortunately current London policy is to replace bus lanes with cycle lanes, and accordingly the self-imposed target of 80% trips by public transport, walking & cycling by 2041 is set to be missed. But that is what happens when you marginalise the two most popular sustainable modes (buses and walking) to push a niche mode that most are reluctant to use. standard.co.uk/news/transport…

@JosephM48859659 @Narcomania It wasn't indiscriminate slaughter - and whether it was effective or not time will tell. Palestinian terrorism has been getting worse with every outbreak, however, and doing nothing wasn't an option for the Israelis.

@BernardMeesPhD @Narcomania Yes the best way to get rid of anti-Israel ‘terrorists’ is to indiscriminately slaughter women and children. That will definitely work 👍 It’s like trying to put out a fire by throwing gasoline at it.

@NealOKelly @ClarkeMicah @policy_uk The problem has been that 99% of the investment has been in roads - it's become a self-perpetuating problem. People who specialise in this stuff now recognise that it was a mistake, difficult to unwind now.

@BernardMeesPhD @ClarkeMicah @policy_uk "New roads lead to less use of public transport, cycling, walking etc." Sure. Not sure that contradicts my point.

@Jasva1105Jasva @Dr_W_E_Bulmer How?

@BernardMeesPhD @Dr_W_E_Bulmer you're the main character of my daydreams now 🫠

The British Empire at its 1900 peak was full of slums, sweatshops, workhouses, brothels, paupers' graves, and people working long hours while living off bread & dripping. The post-1945 settlement shouldn't be taken for granted; it was a hard won achievement bought by brave blood.

@JosephM48859659 @Narcomania Israel do care. But they see Hamas as an existential threat and they expect us to act more reasonably towards our local Jewish populations.

@Narcomania Yep. If there’s a Jewish state and that state slaughters 20,000 kids, it will tanish Jews across the world. It’s not right, but it’s inevitable. And Israel knows this. They don’t care.

@Narcomania But they are leaving out the anti-Semitism bit and engaging in victim blaming. British Jews are not responsible for the actions of the Netanyahu government.

@HinterDee @Doylech I think you may be on the side that has a hate problem. Phillips is a bit of an extremist, but its difficult to find any hate in her books.

@Doylech Ms Phillips is full of hate. No one representing Palestine would be allowed to air their views in this extreme way. She is part of the cancer that is zionism.

Why is Phillips who denies the existence of Palestinians as a people, who is an apologist for genocide and apartheid and blatantly anti-Muslim being platformed? Such extremism should not be broadcast.

@rjowelsh @Doylech Why tell lies about people whose political opinions you disagree with? Why bother? We all know you are lying.

@Doylech Melanie Phillips uses her public platform to incite racial hatred. This is a criminal offence for which she should be investigated along with those giving her this platform knowing exactly what she is going to use it for.

@Doylech I find Phillips's views over the top, but she is more focussed on facts and understanding than half the opinion pieces in the Guardian.

@AlexTurlais @RollingHedge @Dr_W_E_Bulmer @RokoMijic The difference is poor management and poor planning. Other countries do these things better than the UK, but UK governments ignore them.

@RollingHedge @Dr_W_E_Bulmer @RokoMijic The difference is how we consider staff. The railways were built by private companies, nowadays that spending and those staff are considered state employees. If you made the NHS into a charity, the number of state employees would drop on paper but nothing would be different.

Just because so many on here commenting similar toss really don’t have a scooby what they’re talking about: A pastry-and-coffee-only independent in 2026 needs an average coffee price of around £4.20 and roughly 130 cups a day to pay the owner properly, but the market ceiling for a flat white in central London now sits at £4.00-4.20 for dairy and £4.60-4.70 with oat, meaning the price lever is exhausted, the operator cannot raise it further without losing the volume that makes the model work, and the only remaining variables are owner hours and closure, which is why anyone still selling flat whites at £3.80-4.00 is quietly subsidising their customers out of their own wages. The model is now viable in maybe 15-20% of the country by geography because a daily £4 coffee is a habit only the top 15-20% of earners can sustain, and that population lives almost entirely in central London, the Oxford-Cambridge-Bristol triangle, Edinburgh, and a handful of affluent commuter pockets, leaving the provincial independent to chase 40 regulars and a weekend treat-trade that has to carry four dead weekdays, on a cost base that has been Londonised by the national wage floor while the revenue base manifestly has not. All of which is downstream of the 2020-2022 M2 expansion that reset the UK price level across every input from beans to rents to wages, compounded by the deliberate policy choice to load the adjustment onto small employers through a 43% rise in the wage floor in five years, tighter employer NIC at a lower threshold, and tapered rates relief, meaning the coffee shop owner pays for the money printing twice, once in costs and again in the tax and wage structure built to redistribute its consequences. What the classic leftist position misses, when it claims “an inability to pay £12.71 an hour proves the business was never viable”, is that viability is not a fixed property of the business but a moving target the state itself controls, and the policy stack has deliberately moved it beyond reach for most of the country by loading non-wage costs onto small operators while pretending the wage is the only variable, in a system where wages are paid out of the marginal productivity of labour applied to capital in a given location, and a barista in Stoke cannot be paid London wages out of Stoke revenues without the owner working for nothing or the shop closing, both of which are routinely observed and dismissed as commercial failure rather than recognised as policy outcome. The fix - these same mouth breathing cretins would vehemently oppose on tribal grounds before substance - is the only one that actually works at the unit-economics level: cheaper energy via nuclear and North Sea gas to compress the input stack, planning liberalisation so commercial rent stops functioning as a rentier tax on every transaction, employer NIC reduced and its threshold restored, a personal allowance raised to £20k that would put roughly £1,500 a year into every minimum wage worker’s pocket without costing a single employer a penny and would do more for real take-home and discretionary spend than any further wage floor rise, and a lighter compliance regime for sub-£2m turnover businesses where fixed regulatory cost is most disproportionate to revenue, because the real project being defended is not raising worker incomes but expanding the regulatory and redistributive footprint of the state, and the wage floor is attractive precisely because it is coercive and visible rather than because it is the most efficient way to lift living standards, which is why the closure of the provincial independent sector is treated as collateral damage rather than recognised as the predictable consequence of the policy mix on offer, and why the coffee shop on the closing high street is functioning as the most reliable leading indicator of which towns the current settlement has decided shouldn’t have a discretionary economy at all.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​.. Duh…🙄 🤦🏻‍♂️

@STLD98 @RollingHedge @Dr_W_E_Bulmer @RokoMijic You are right - Singapore was much poorer in the 1960s.

@RollingHedge @Dr_W_E_Bulmer @RokoMijic Anytime I hear someone saying we should be like Singapore I just assume that are a bit stupid. A city state is obviously going to have different needs than a place like the U.K, there is no part of Singapore that is even close to the poorest parts of the U.K

@ZaidJilani But Israel is considered by the US to have a legitimate right to defend itself against 70 years+ of Palestinian violence. So you are being hyperbolic, aren't you?

There's nothing special about Israel. If America had cut off weapons to Pakistan in the 1970s so it couldn't brutally oppress Bangladeshis (as Israel does to Palestinians today), that would not require severing "any attachment" to Pakistan. Don't be hyperbolic.

@MarcCar21836277 @Simon_Nixon @snowleopardess @TrevorPTweets @itvnews @ZackPolanski They represent a tiny minority - they haven't been erased.

@Simon_Nixon @snowleopardess @TrevorPTweets @itvnews @ZackPolanski They've massively erased the Jewish voices critical of Israel

Seen this clip several times now. A truly shameful piece of interviewing. Still not clear what point @TrevorPTweets was trying to make, but if he and @itvnews had any self-respect they would apologise to @ZackPolanski for what came across as deeply unpleasant bullying

@Simon_Nixon @TrevorPTweets @itvnews @ZackPolanski What, a dissembling, bumbling politician falls apart in an interview? I've never seen that before!