Catherine McBride OBE

Here is my new paper for the Great British Business Council on the importance of oil, gas and coal to the UK economy. The UK’s industrial decline is not inevitable, but the result of decades of deliberate policy choices that have undermined domestic energy production and driven manufacturing offshore. Lowering UK employment and tax revenues, while increasing the UK trade deficit. The paper also includes a plan to reverse this. gbbc.uk/uk-deindustria…

MASSIVE: 🇩🇪🇪🇺 The leader of Europe's largest economy just declared the EU a failure. Friedrich Merz. German Chancellor. In front of global elites. "We have wasted incredible potential." "World champion of over-regulation and zero growth." Energy lockdowns. 26 countries failing grid requirements. Ursula telling citizens to drive less and use less electricity. Now Germany's own leader calling it a complete failure. The EU is not being attacked from outside. It's collapsing from within.

@ukJ0N @danny__kruger Germany advertising that EU is not the land of milk and honey, especially as its in 3rd recession. His advice appears don't rejoin, as since Brexit UK economy has grown 11.6% and Germany only 5.5%. x.com/MerlijnTrader/…

@PaulEmbery He needs to watch this one

Under 30 arrests at the last Unite the Kingdom rally (Met Police: exactly 23, mostly from the march itself). Compare to Palestine Action protests: 523 arrested in one day, 890 in another. This time? 4,000 cops, live facial recognition deployed only on the UTK crowd, armoured vehicles, and 7 people banned from even entering the UK. Yet the peaceful low-arrest one gets branded ‘far-right hatred’. Two-tier policing on steroids.”

Trevor Phillips attended the previous 'Unite the Kingdom' rally. Keir Starmer ought to have watched this video before releasing his own.

Shell's biofuels flagship just hit reality. In Rotterdam, Shell was building what was meant to be Europe's largest biofuel plant at a cost of €1.2 billion. The annual output target was 820,000 tonnes of so-called "sustainable" aviation fuel and "renewable" diesel. The feedstock was supposed to be used frying oil, vegetable oils and animal waste. The sales pitch was "clean aviation." Then the numbers broke. Construction costs soared and demand stayed weak. So Shell paused the project. Then killed it. Three thousand piles went into the ground. Millions of work hours spent. Hundreds of millions of euros already sunk. Now the unfinished plant is up for sale, set to either be dismantled, shipped abroad or sold for parts. That is the biofuels fairy tale.

Starmer ORCHESTRATING police surveillance with Khan. Control room. Live coordination. Full state machinery for tomorrow's march. Pro-Palestine march TOMORROW? Same day. Same city. Radio silence. No Khan. No control room. No coordination. Nothing. Watch the video. See them both. This is the SURVEILLANCE STATE on tape. Two marches. Two standards. One gets tracked. One gets ignored.

Burnham Is Running. So Are The Markets. On Friday, as Labour's succession drama consumed Westminster, the gilt market delivered a verdict that none of the leadership candidates appears to have noticed. Britain's 30-year borrowing costs hit a 28-year high. The yield on 30-year gilts leapt to 5.8 percent. Markets were not reacting to Starmer's survival. They were pricing in what comes next. Andy Burnham has been approved by the NEC to seek the Makerfield candidacy. The by-election is expected on June 18. If he wins he becomes an MP and triggers a leadership contest. Rayner and Miliband are expected to stand aside and back him. The coronation narrative is already being written. The numbers on the ground are being studiously ignored. Reform won 50 percent of the vote across Makerfield's eight wards at the local elections. Labour won 22 percent. The Electoral Calculus MRP projects Reform winning the parliamentary seat with 46 percent to Labour's 35. Reform's likely candidate is Robert Kenyon, a local plumber, army veteran and NHS worker who won a council seat last week. Burnham is a former Cabinet minister arriving from a mayoral role he will have to vacate to stand. The optics of that contrast in communities that voted Reform so decisively are not in his favour. Burnham's personal popularity is real and it may yet carry him over the line. But personal popularity has limits when the structural collapse of Labour support in the North West is as severe as the May 7 results demonstrated. In neighbouring St Helens, Reform seized a majority winning 71 percent of all seats. These are not marginal drifts. They are historic realignments happening in real time. And then there is the economics. Burnham has repeatedly argued that Britain must stop being in hock to the bond markets, claiming governments have become too timid about public spending. His answer is an additional £40 billion in borrowing alongside looser fiscal rules. The bond market heard that argument on Friday and responded by pushing 30-year gilt yields to levels not seen since 1998. A politician who dismisses bond market discipline as timidity is precisely the kind of politician whose anticipated arrival in Downing Street accelerates the crisis he claims to want to resolve. But there is a question nobody in the Westminster succession commentary is asking. Before anyone in Makerfield votes for Burnham, they deserve an answer to what happened to the 57 children abused by a grooming gang of up to 100 men on his watch as Mayor. Operation Augusta was shut down. The minutes of the key meeting disappeared. Of 97 identified suspects, three were imprisoned. His response to parliamentary challenge was described in Hansard as supine. The Rochdale review identified 96 men still deemed a risk to children who remained at large. These are not historical footnotes. They happened in the communities Burnham is now asking to send him to Westminster as a future Prime Minister. The voters of Makerfield and the surrounding area deserve to know what he intends to do about the 96 men still at large before they are asked to make him their MP. The gilt market is watching. The grooming gang survivors are watching. Reform is watching with 50 activists already on the ground and a local candidate with genuine working class roots. Burnham may yet win the race. But the coronation being prepared in Westminster has not consulted the people who actually live there. And the bond market, which has no interest in Labour's internal politics, has already told you what it thinks of what comes next. "Burnham Is Running. So Are The Markets."

This bizarre Leftist tendency to anthropomorphise the markets, to treat them as if they had preferences and prejudices. The bond markets don’t care whether you are Left or Right. They don’t even care whether your spending is high or low. All they care about is whether it is in balance. If you want to borrow money, creditors will assess whether they will get it back, and will ask a premium to lend to risky prospects. That premium means that Britain is now spending £110 billion a year on servicing past debt – more than on education, and twice as much as on defence.

@Keir_Starmer You say we are a "fair, tolerant and decent" country. Then you turn around and brand the very people who built and defended that decency as "far right thugs." The fathers, mothers, veterans and families waving the Union Flag in Whitehall weren't preaching hate. They were demanding the most basic duties of government: borders that mean something, streets that are safe, a culture that isn't despised in its own land. You talk about the "fight of our times." But let's be honest - this fight wasn't started by working men and women waving flags in Whitehall. It was started by politicians like you who opened the borders without consent, imported grievance, and silenced debate with smears of "racism." It was deepened by police forces that indulge Islamist mobs while clamping down on patriots. It was entrenched by schools and universities that rewrite history and teach young Britons to be ashamed of their country and its history. And it was made lethal by councils and MPs who covered up industrial-scale grooming gangs because the truth was too awkward for Labour's dogma. You want to cloak yourself in "patriotic national renewal." But you have already hollowed out patriotism by redefining it as diversity politics. Your renewal is a façade - more migration, more quotas, more slogans about tolerance while the country fragments into enclaves. That isn't renewal. It's managed decline in moral disguise. And as for "toxic division" - who divided this nation? Who taught citizens to see themselves as "communities" first and Britons second? Who elevated every imported identity as sacred while sneering at the British identity as dangerous or extremist? Not the crowd in Whitehall. Not the people you smear as "fascists." It was the progressive Left. It was you. So don't talk about choosing between renewal and decline. You and your party chose decline long ago. You chose it when you traded duty for dogma, history for guilt, and loyalty for imported votes. Now the people are stirring, and you call it division because you cannot admit the betrayal. We are a fair, tolerant, decent country - that much is true. But we are not fools. We know who broke Britain, and it wasn't the patriots on Whitehall. It was the political class that despises its own flag, sneers at its own people, and congratulates itself while the nation rots. "It was started by politicians like you who opened the borders without consent, imported grievance, and silenced debate with smears of "racism.""

The lax treatment of Angela Rayner by HMRC has brought into focus how arbitrary the tax authority can be in its treatment of ordinary citizens. Too often, HMRC has pursued individuals and small businesses for vast sums of money in error. HMRC are masters of using process as punishment, making themselves increasingly difficult to contact while torturing people with demand letters and bankruptcy notices. Victims of these errors are often forced to spend huge amounts of time and money to prove HMRC wrong. This sometimes runs to hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal fees, many times the actual amount in dispute. They also find their names and details published in a list of deliberate tax defaulters, in effect a "name and shame" list. I have to question whether this meets citizens' privacy rights, since these do not appear to be court rulings but HMRC opinions. HMRC's excesses must be brought under control. It is time ministers took a grip of this. telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/news…

The by-election in Makerfield will be a mini Referendum on rejoining the EU or not. Andy Burnham is an extreme Rejoiner who needs to be told that disrespecting democracy comes at a great price - the end of his political career. express.co.uk/news/politics/…

🚨 Ed Miliband has just delivered the final nail in the coffin of British energy independence — and Keir Starmer’s Labour regime is cheering it on like it’s a victory lap. In a move of staggering economic treason, Miliband has vowed the permanent shutdown of the North Sea oil and gas fields. Not a pause. Not a review. A deliberate, irreversible death sentence on one of Britain’s last remaining strategic assets. The very resources that could be powering homes, fuelling industry and filling the Treasury are being strangled in the name of net-zero dogma while the rest of the world laughs and drills. This isn’t “climate leadership.” This isn’t “green transition.” This is managed national decline on steroids — the systematic demolition of Britain’s economic engine by the same Labour ideologues who’ve already torched manufacturing, gutted farming with inheritance raids, crushed small businesses with sky-high energy bills and driven a wave of bankruptcies not seen in a generation. Look at Norway — same North Sea geology, same resources — yet they used their oil and gas intelligently, built a sovereign wealth fund worth £1.7 TRILLION and secured their future for generations. Britain? We choose self-sabotage. We choose to import expensive foreign energy while our own sits untapped. We choose blackouts, soaring bills and working families choosing between heating and eating — all so Starmer and Miliband can virtue-signal to their Davos masters and the UN Agenda 2030 crowd. Meanwhile investment flees, factories close, farmers go bust and the only thing booming is the welfare bill for the mass migration experiment Labour refuses to control. Two-tier Britain in full destructive glory: British workers and British industry sacrificed on the altar of green ideology while illegal arrivals get 4-star hotels and the elite jet off to climate summits. Reform UK has it exactly right. A Reform government would urgently repeal this negligent insanity, reopen the North Sea, back British industry, slash energy costs and get the country producing again. Britain does not need more austerity preached from the mouths of multi-millionaire socialists. Britain needs ambition. Britain needs sovereignty over its own resources. Britain needs politicians who put British jobs, British bills and British energy security first — not globalist green lunacy that leaves us dependent on foreign dictators and Chinese solar panels. The silent majority has had enough of this deliberate economic vandalism. We demand: ✅ Immediate repeal of Miliband’s North Sea death warrant — no more permanent shutdowns, no more ideological suicide. ✅ Full reopening and expansion of North Sea exploration with British-first contracts and a sovereign wealth fund for the British people. ✅ An end to the net-zero madness that is bankrupting families and industries while the rest of the world laughs. ✅ Starmer, Miliband and the entire Labour cabinet held to account for choosing managed decline over national prosperity. This isn’t governance. This is economic treason dressed up as environmentalism. Labour isn’t just failing Britain — it’s actively dismantling it, one closed rig, one shuttered factory, one broken family at a time. The British people are watching. Reform is rising. And the next election can’t come soon enough. Reopen the North Sea. Restore British industry. Britain first — or watch it freeze and fail.

It's not vegan leather. It's plastic. It's not oat milk. It's a beverage made by enzymatically processing oat starch and emulsifying it with rapeseed oil. It's not vegan cheese. It's coconut oil, modified starch, and titanium dioxide pressed into a slice. It's not plant-based meat. It's pea-protein isolate, seed oils, and methylcellulose extruded into a patty. It's not a butter alternative. It's an industrial spread invented by a soap company. It's not a milk alternative. It's water with oats and additives, sold for double the price of milk. Every product on the plant-based shelf has been linguistically rebranded to borrow the legitimacy of the food it replaced. The cow has not been consulted on the use of her name. The sheep has not consented to the term vegan wool. The marketing department in London has consented to all of it. The animals predate the marketing department by ten thousand years. The marketing department will be gone before the animals will.

'To stand Maggie Oliver against Andy Burnham could really knock the wind out of him...' @PatrickChristys and his panel react to calls for grooming gang whistleblower Maggie Oliver to stand as Reform's candidate against Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham in Makerfield.

How dare this charlatan talk about other people’s council tax when he’s ‘forgotten’ to pay his own for 3 years! Oh the hypocrisy…. ‘Do as I say not as I do’. They always get found out eventually, in the world we live in today. What else next?

"No, I don't subscribe to this 'kindness' - I'll tell the truth instead." I spoke at the Cambridge Union last night about LGBs, children's safety and women's rights. Full video here:

“Disastrous for our politics with no economic benefit”. Michael Gove schools a pro-EU questioner and audience on #bbcqt as to why Labour’s pre-election lies about respecting Brexit and their actions since, threaten to undermine, rather than help our economy.

𝗦𝗵𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗥𝗖𝗣𝟴.𝟱 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝘀 ‘𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆’ 𝗥𝘂𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗡𝗲𝘁 𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼 𝗙𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝗧𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 IPCC just declared RCP8.5—the doomsday climate scenario—'implausible' after it fueled 15 years of panic. But NYT, BBC, and Guardian are stone silent. Roger Pielke Jr. calls it the biggest climate story in decades. Could this unravel net zero fearmongering for good? You won't believe the fallout. Read the full article: wattsupwiththat.com/2026/05/14/sho…