Dave Fitzsimon

Actually it was the British. We fought them for two years alone, defeating them in the air and at sea. Then we supplied Russia with huge amounts of material and intelligence from both North and South, by virtue of keeping the sea lanes open. Then we invaded Italy and Normandy while Stalin wasted whole armies trying to get to Berlin before us, afterwards to imprison half of Europe under communism, while threatening to invade the rest of Europe for the next 4 decades. We stopped the Russians doing that too. America helped.

@joefinney172 Absolute grafter of a player. I'd have him back in a heartbeat.

Everywhere you go…

The great tragedy of the human rights industry as represented by the Attorney General Lord Squirmer is the way in which it inverts morality People who regard themselves as our moral superiors suddenly begin advocating for those who wish us harm, those who defend this country are pursued and harassed, and not only are the participants in this industry handsomely remunerated, but they’re showered with all of the laurels that the establishment can bestow: awards, lecture circuits, lavish dinners, even high political office. When will we turn things the right way up again?

Profound and moving monologue from Trevor Phillips - one of Sky’s greatest assets and the country’s increasingly bravest journalist.

The state pension is not a random government favour, it’s the back end of a 35–40 year compulsory “contract” where people are forced to hand over National Insurance on the clear promise of a basic pension at the end. Politicians and think tanks helped design an unfunded, pay‑as‑you‑go system where today’s workers pay today’s pensioners, then have the gall to call it “unsustainable” as if the public dreamt it up. If a private firm sold you a retirement product on fixed terms, took your money for four decades, then announced at 66 that you “didn’t really need it” and would henceforth be means‑tested or frozen, they would be in court for mis‑selling and fraud. The crisis here is not pensioners “leeching off the young”, it’s a political class that built a Ponzi‑style NI system, diverted the proceeds for other spending, and now wants to default on the people who kept their side of the bargain. You do not blame the victims of a defective product for believing the brochure; you go after the people who wrote it.

You think the bloke who worked hard and built a business is the problem. He is not. You think the boomer who paid off his mortgage in 1998 is the problem. He is not. Nobody holding a pound is your enemy. Whether you have a tenner in your pocket or a million in your account, you hold the same broken currency. The pound has lost 69% of its purchasing power since 2000. That tenner buys less. That million buys less. The man next door did not print £895 billion during covid. The man next door did not freeze your tax thresholds. The man next door did not sell your gilts for a 76% loss and tax you more to cover it. The men who did are on television telling you to have broader shoulders and extracting your wealth to plug the gaps they created. We are being divided so we do not unite against the people who actually robbed us.

The politics of a country in decline. Not a single word about wealth creation, without which none of this nonsense can be financed. It’s deeply pathetic. If people fall for this left-wing populist drivel we’ve ceased to be a serious country.

I'll tell you what I don't like, Darren. I can't speak for everyone, but these are my thoughts… I don't like a tax burden at its highest level since 1948, under your government and the last, producing the weakest growth in a generation. And worsening public services to boot. I don't like a 46% hike in the minimum wage for under-21s in three years that's helped push UK youth unemployment to 16.1%, above the eurozone average. I want young people paid more, earned through growth, not handed down by decree that squashes the rungs above them and tells a skilled forty-year-old their two decades of graft are worth precisely the same as someone walking through the door on Monday morning. I don't like industrial electricity prices that are the highest of any IEA country reporting. Full stop. UK steelmakers pay 40% more than their French competitors. You don't build a future of advanced manufacturing on those numbers. I don't like a planning system that takes longer to consent a pylon than to build one, business rates that punish high-street enterprise, and employment costs that turn every hire into a risk. I don't like watching world-class British research get commercialised in Boston and Palo Alto because the capital, the talent and the regulatory patience aren't here. They're fleeing. I don't like long-term borrowing costs at their highest level in over 25 years, eating into every budget for schools, hospitals and defence before a penny is spent. I don't like the OECD saying that we're going to be the hardest hit economy as a result of a conflict in the Middle East that's got nothing to do with us. All because we've made ourselves weak and vulnerable. I don't like a government that confuses 'raising money' with 'creating wealth'. Or 'standing against unearned wealth' with taxing to death the people who actually make things happen in this country. You don't lift children out of poverty by strangling the economy that pays for their schools. You do it by letting Britain grow again. Letting it play to its abundance of strengths. In this case, I feel the best way is for government to get the hell out of the way.

You’re the energy secretary. Yet you don’t seem to know that BP’s ‘excess profits’ come from its global oil trading division, which is not subject to UK ‘excess profits’ windfall tax, not from its North Sea activities, which are. Remarkable.

When the bloke who runs one of Britain’s biggest retailers looks at Starmer’s Labour and says, “this Government has probably lost the next election”, that’s not punditry – that’s the market talking. Lord Wolfson isn’t some swivel–eyed Reform activist, he’s the long‑serving chief of Next, sits on the boards, sees the spreadsheets, feels the consumer squeeze in real time, and his verdict is brutal: Labour is strangling the economy with tax raids and clumsy, ideological regulation. Business isn’t spooked by “change”, it’s spooked by chaos – permanent U‑turns, unpredictable tax grabs, and an Employment Rights Bill he’s literally called a “wrecking ball” for flexible and part‑time work. If you’ve got the boss of a FTSE retail giant effectively issuing a no‑confidence vote in the government’s competence, you’re not a “Labour government of stability” – you’re an active economic risk premium. Voters can smell it. Investors can price it. Wolfson has just said the quiet part out loud: Labour hasn’t only lost the room, it’s already lost the next election – the ballot box is now just a formality.

@joefinney172 @iancheveau I get your point on that Joe, but Coleman can't have known the loan deal was defo on at the point where he openly criticised Abdul before the Donny game, and we'd just released the other half to Salford.

@iancheveau If you want to an install a culture where your place in the team earned and not given, you have to train. We’ve moaned for years that we’ve felt players had no competition for starting places, we can’t just make exceptions when it suits us.

On the Abdull training point. I recall one of Widnes SL greats, Scarts never training. Or if he did it was light work and captain run. Granted Jordan hasn’t played SoO for NSW but it does happen in sport. Ned used to manage his players properly. The end.

@SkySportsF1 He is spot on.

🗣️ "I've been saying for 10 years, I don't like co-ownership, I don't like A/B teams" McLaren CEO Zak Brown speaks out after Mercedes confirmed they are looking to buy a stake in Alpine.

@iancheveau Whatever anyone wants to say about his weight / fitness, he's easily been the best half back we've had in years. I don't see how his situation has changed since he signed, so what has he not lived up to that the coaching staff expected from him?

The lad divided Widnes. But for me, it’s a gain for Sheffield. Look at this reel. Get him fit and firing. You have a proper quality player.

I grew up in a house where both of my parents smoked, in an era where people smoked, everywhere, and I also had asthma. Unsurprisingly, I've never smoked & don't like being around smokers. Smoking is, overall, bad for your health and the health of those around you. Pubs and restaurants and hotels became much more pleasant places to be after the smoking ban was brought in. For non-smokers at least. Having said all of that, I'm pretty uncomfortable about seeing government bringing in bans like this. Younger generations have, by and large, made their own decisions about smoking (and drinking) and, vaping aside, smoking was dying out pretty naturally, so a statutory ban seems unnecessary. It might even be counterproductive and make young people want to smoke even more. And the big concern I have is if we set a precedent with smoking, what will the next thing be that the Big State wants to ban? It might be something that's a lot more valuable to us than smoking.

If you are old enough to remember driving in Britain in the 1980s, you will remember the windscreen. You could not see through it by July. A journey from Leeds to London in August ended with a front bumper that looked like it had been through a war and a windscreen that needed a proper scrubbing with a sponge at the services. Insects on the headlights. Insects in the wing mirrors. Insects packed into the radiator grille so densely that mechanics had to fish them out. This was simply the weather of the British summer, the cost of moving through a country that was still, in living memory, full of flying things. Get in a car now. Drive the same route. Stop at the services. The windscreen is clean. The Bugs Matter survey, run by Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife since 2004, has been measuring exactly this. Volunteers clean their numberplate, drive a journey, count the splats on a grid. Between 2004 and 2021, the UK average fell by roughly 59 per cent. England alone: 65. Kent: over 70. The 2024 update found a further 63 per cent drop on top of that. The windscreen phenomenon has the data to back it up now. And not just the insects. Between 1970 and 2024, the UK Farmland Bird Index fell by 62 per cent. Turtle doves down 99. Grey partridge down 94. Tree sparrow down 90. A generation of British children has grown up without ever hearing a turtle dove call, because there are, in functional terms, no turtle doves left to call. Defra's own bulletin lists the causes without embarrassment. Loss of mixed farming. The switch from spring to autumn sowing, which took away the winter stubble the small birds had been feeding on since the Neolithic. The grubbing up of hedgerows to make fields bigger for bigger machines. Increased fertiliser. Increased pesticide. Specifically, the pesticides. Neonicotinoids on oilseed rape. Glyphosate sprayed as a pre-harvest desiccant on wheat and barley. Chemicals applied in combinations and volumes that would have seemed psychotic to a farmer in 1950, applied to grow the crops that feed directly into the plant-based shakes marketed to people who believe they are helping the environment. The insects died in the fields where the crops were grown. The birds that used to eat the insects, starved. The windscreen, accordingly, is clean. None of this happened on the permanent pasture that cattle graze. A herb-rich meadow grazed by cattle has more pollinators, more ground-nesting birds, more beetles, more everything per hectare than the arable field next door. The South Downs and the Welsh uplands and the Cotswold commons where sheep and cattle have been grazing for a thousand years are the places British biodiversity is still, just, holding on. The countryside did not empty because of the cow. It emptied because we replaced the cow with the combine harvester, the meadow with the oilseed rape, and the hedgerow with another half-acre of monoculture that needed spraying fourteen times a season to keep it alive. When someone tells you eating a steak is destroying British wildlife, ask them what was on the field before it became the soy farm, the rape farm, the wheat farm that produced the oat milk in their fridge. It was grass. And on the grass, there were cattle. And when the cattle were there, the windscreen needed cleaning.

These comments always wind me up. We've had creeping socialism for 25 years. Every time a left wing Government gets in they ratchet up the social spending and make it impossible to reverse. The general public say "Moar please" and anyone who tries to stop it gets voted out. We had a Government that spent 10 years raising debt SLIGHTLY LESS than before and apparently that was austerity. There's barely a free market left. What we have is the Government's hand up the ass of every single sector while simultaneously taxing the pips out of every business and person that makes money to give the ever ever increasing cohort of fuckwits and layabouts who don't. Give me an island to run and I'll show you capitalism at work.

@WidnesRL I'm sure the lad from Warrington will do a cracking job, but he can go back at a moments notice. We refuse to discuss what's happening with by far our best player and we release another HB without him playing a competitive game. Make it make sense?

Ready to face the Rams 👊 Head coach Allan Coleman has named his 21-man squad ahead of Sunday's trip to Dewsbury in the 1895 Cup 📋

This is the reason why we can never reform healthcare in the UK — or even have a sensible debate about it. The moment anyone suggests alternative/additional ways of funding health Labour rushes out privatisation smears and claims US private health insurance is being proposed. Labour has been doing it for decades. It explains why the NHS is effectively beyond reform. The two worst health systems in the rich world are in America and the UK. It’s why nobody has ever copied them. It would be mad to go from ours to theirs (or vice versa). But Europe is awash with health systems that can call on several sources of funds, including many with compulsory public health insurance schemes. They have better health outcomes than the NHS. They are free at the point of use (like the NHS). Most of them are better funded. But Labour puts them out of bounds, refuses even to discuss or consider. So patient care suffers. NHS struggles on. Labour is always telling us we need to get closer to Europe. It’s where we belong. But not when it comes to health, where it insists no lessons can be learned. Pretty pathetic, really.

@RachelReevesMP Cut VAT, fuel tax and the green energy levy then?

We didn’t start this war. We didn’t want it. And working families in a cost of living crisis shouldn’t have to pay the price for it. That’s why this government is focused on de-escalation and keeping energy bills down. mirror.co.uk/news/politics/…

Hinkley Point C was supposed to cost eighteen billion pounds and start generating electricity by 2027. That was the figure they presented to parliament. That was the deal. In February, EDF announced it will now be 2030 at the earliest. The cost, adjusted for inflation, has reached £49 billionn. That's nearly triple the original budget. The thing has been under construction for the better part of a decade and has not produced a single watt of electricity. EDF, by the way, is a French state-owned company. In other words, we are paying a French government enterprise £49 billionn to build us a reactor that a French government enterprise cannot deliver on time or on budget. Here is what makes this actively maddening rather than merely depressing. Rolls-Royce has a small modular reactor programme ready to deploy at Wylfa, on Anglesey, where a decommissioned nuclear site already exists. British company. British design. A fraction of the cost per unit. The technology works; the site is there; the only missing ingredient is a government capable of signing a piece of paper without convening a fourteen-year consultation process first. That could be your cheap energy. Your money back in your pocket at the end of the month. But that is not how Britain works. Not how we build things any more. Now, our sole industrial output is consultation frameworks. Environmental review stages, which then of course subside it review stages of the review stages, and stakeholder engagement processes whose principal stakeholders are the same consultants hired to manage them. Hinkley is not an aberration, but the system working exactly as designed. The system was just never designed to produce energy. It was designed to produce process, and by God, it has delivered. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. We are rationing petrol at the forecourt. Our flagship nuclear project, the one that was going to secure British energy independence - and, remember, energy independence is independence - will not generate power until the end of the decade, at the earliest, at a cost that has now exceeded twice what parliament was told it would be. £49 billion. Just one cost line on an inventory of failures stretching through the decades, and it will keep climbing for as long as we keep employing the people responsible for not doing them.