Scottish Davy 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

@RoKhanna Your reading the room wrong. Nobody gives a shit about Israel. Fuck you and any other politician bending over for a genocide state. Best hope your citizens don’t suddenly start using the 2nd amendment against you

Chuck Schumer was one of 7 Senate Democrats to vote to send bulldozers to Israel. 40 Democratic Senators voted no. Mr. Schumer, you are out of touch with our base and the nation. Step aside.

There is no rise in anti-Semitism. There is a rise in the number of people who are very angry at what Israel is doing. Your inability to separate the two is equally problematic.

🚨 US Senate votes against stopping arms sales to Israel, 40–59. Every single Republican voted against it. America is an occupied country.

This one will require a stiff drink. In the early 1990s, the government came up with a clever idea. Instead of borrowing money cheaply to build hospitals, schools, and roads, it would get the private sector to build them and then pay the private sector back over 25 to 30 years. The Private Finance Initiative. PFI. The attraction was obvious. You got a shiny new hospital today. The bill didn't show up on the government's books. The cost was deferred into the future. Politicians got ribbon-cutting ceremonies without the awkward conversation about borrowing. It was, in effect, the nation's credit card. Buy now, pay later. Except the interest rate was extraordinary. The total capital value of everything built under PFI was around £50 billion. As of March 2024, there were 665 PFI contracts still running across the UK, with roughly £136 billion in remaining payments stretching out to the early 2050s. These are payments public bodies are contractually locked into. Hospitals, schools, councils, government departments. Paying for buildings that in many cases were constructed twenty or thirty years ago. And the terms are extraordinary. PFI contracts were structured so the private sector would not just build the facility but manage its services. Cleaning. Maintenance. Catering. Portering. These services are bundled into long-term contracts with built-in inflation increases that the public sector cannot renegotiate, cannot exit without paying massive penalties, and often cannot even fully scrutinise because of commercial confidentiality clauses. In one case raised in Parliament, a hospital was charged £333 to change a lightbulb. That isn't an urban myth. It was cited in Hansard. The NHS has been hit hardest. According to parliamentary analysis, the capital cost of NHS PFI projects was around £13 billion. The total repayments are estimated at around £80 billion. And the peak of NHS PFI annual repayments isn't even here yet. It arrives in 2029. The bills are still going up. In 2020-21, NHS trusts paid £457 million purely in interest charges on PFI contracts. Not services. Not maintenance. Interest. In the last five years, NHS trusts have handed over more than £1.8 billion in PFI interest alone. We Own It calculates that money would have covered the starting salaries of over 50,000 new doctors. One NHS trust, Essex Partnership, has reportedly paid back 27 times what was originally borrowed. Some hospitals are spending more on PFI repayments than on medicines for patients. And remember, these repayments come out of the same NHS budget that's supposed to fund patient care, staff, and equipment. Scotland got it just as badly. Audit Scotland reported that Scottish taxpayers will pay a cumulative £40 billion for PFI assets worth just £9 billion. North Ayrshire Council will have paid £440 million by 2038 for four schools that cost £83 million to build. Now here's what makes this worse. Many of these contracts are starting to expire. The buildings are being handed back to the public sector. And the NAO has warned of significant risks around the handback process, including cases where public bodies were dissatisfied with the condition of assets being returned to them. Decades of payments. And some of these buildings may come back needing significant further investment. So what actually happened? The government could have borrowed money at significantly lower rates to build these hospitals and schools itself. Sovereign borrowing has always been cheaper than private finance. Instead, it paid the private sector to borrow at a premium and passed the inflated cost on to the taxpayer. The private sector took the profit. The taxpayer took the risk. The buildings are now ageing. The debts are still being paid. And the services that were supposed to benefit are being squeezed partly because so much of their budget is locked into contractual obligations they cannot escape. PFI wasn't investment. It was an accounting trick. A way for governments to build things without the borrowing showing up in the national debt figures. It made politicians look fiscally responsible while loading future generations with obligations they had no say in and no ability to renegotiate. Both parties did this. The Conservatives created PFI in 1992. Labour massively expanded it after 1997. More than 700 projects were signed. The coalition eventually wound it down. The current government scrapped the latest version. But the contracts remain. The payments continue. And the damage is already done. This is what it looks like when a country chooses to buy its infrastructure on hire purchase instead of investing properly. You lock in above-market rates for decades. You lose control of the assets. You tie the hands of future governments. And when the bill keeps coming due, you're told there's no money for doctors, teachers, or social care. There was always money. It just went somewhere else.

Capitalism and everyone’s mate getting a cut

@wesstreeting @GMB @VickyPattison The campaign could be funded by the £1.6bn in private profits that’ll never see the nhs @wesstreeting

Great to be on @GMB with @VickyPattison this morning talking about the launch of our Women's Health Strategy, and her campaign against medical misogyny. And I can confirm: no we aren't expecting 😂 #iykyk

Doesn’t look like you were taught self control

This £1,600,000,000 is counted as part of the ‘record amount of funding’ going into the NHS btw. It’s a scam.

@CigsMake iPhone doesn’t beat og hardware. Not even close

Crazy that this was all replaced by an IPhone

@BBCNews Why not tax these capitalist parasites instead?

Households could get free electricity for doing washing on sunny weekends bbc.in/4mwK9Ib

@Amockx2022 Starmer still helped by allowing air bases to be used. Get off his cock blue ticker

Trump wanted to isolate 🇮🇷 Iran from the world But this is what happened : Trump begged 🇬🇧 UK 17 times to help him in the war, Starmer REJECTED 17 times 🔥 Trump begged 🇫🇷 France 13 times to help him in the war, Macron REJECTED 13 times 🔥 Trump begged 🇮🇹 Italy 8 times to help him in the war, Meloni REJECTED 17 times 🔥 Trump begged 🇪🇸 Spain 5 times to help him in the war, Pedro REJECTED 5 times 🔥 Never in the history, any leader has been humiliated like that. He is losing control of everything now Mistake? Just one : He underestimated Iran He is now Isolated, Lost and completely alone in the process. As he deserves

@FrancescaLabour @ScottishLabour @AnasSarwar We’re not giving you fuck all after pfi

The SNP has had 20 years. Give @ScottishLabour and @AnasSarwar 5 - to fix the SNP’s mess, get the basics right and build a better future for Scotland.

@owenjonesjourno Yip next election that’ll show em 👊

The modern Labour Party. Where the Deputy Prime Minister boasts of being "friends" with a far-right US Vice President committing war crimes. You don't have to vote for this!

@SkyNews Does this mean the tolls will be paid like other passages in the world?

BREAKING: Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron are set to co-host a summit on the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz this Friday in Paris, Downing Street has announced. trib.al/sxFo53o 📺 Sky 501 and YouTube

Shifting profits for decades. We need a party to stop the bleed

@wesstreeting How can you say that with a straight face when you take money from private interests?

We’re investing more in the NHS and delivering differently. I'm investing £237 million in 36 new and improved Community Diagnostic Centres. This means shorter waits for tests and scans closer to home, more convenient services, and more footfall to our high streets.

Cena de grupo. Sois 6. Tú pides una ensalada y agua (20€). El de enfrente pide chuletón, 2 copas de vino y postre (70€). Llega la cuenta. El del chuletón coge el ticket, hace un cálculo rápido y suelta la frase mágica: —"Chicos, pagamos a medias. Sale a 42€ cada uno". Silencio incómodo en la mesa. Las miradas se cruzan. Nadie quiere ser "el rata" del grupo. Dos personas ya están sacando el dinero de la cartera. Tú dejas la tuya sobre la mesa y dices: —"No. Yo he consumido 20€. No voy a pagar el doble". El del chuletón te mira, suelta una risa nerviosa y eleva el tono para que todos escuchen: —"Venga ya, no seas miserable, tío. Por un día no pasa nada, no vamos a estar contando céntimos. Siempre lo hacemos así". Sientes esa vieja presión en el pecho. El miedo a romper la armonía. El miedo a la etiqueta de tacaño. Lo miras fijo: —"No estoy contando céntimos, estoy contando mi dinero. No soy miserable, es que no voy a financiar tu cena. Si querías comer por 70€, me parece perfecto, pero págalo tú". Resultado: Tensión en el ambiente. De repente, la chica de tu derecha dice: "Yo también pedí solo un plato de pasta y eso es lo que voy a pagar". El castillo de naipes cae. El del chuletón acaba pagando su parte real con mala cara. La cena termina. Reflexión: Existe un tipo de gente que utiliza la "cultura de grupo" como un subsidio personal. Piden lo más caro porque cuentan con diluir su gasto entre los demás. Y cuando los frenas, su mecanismo de defensa es atacarte moralmente: te llaman "miserable" o "tacaño" para proyectar su propia avaricia sobre ti. Juegan con tu miedo a la exclusión social. Confunden tu generosidad con sumisión. Pero recuerda esto: defender el valor de tu trabajo y de tu dinero no te hace egoísta. Exigir que tus amigos paguen por tus lujos, sí lo es. Poner límites incómodos es el mejor filtro para saber quién te respeta y quién solo te usa.

We’re told we can’t afford doctors. But we can afford £1.6 BILLION in profits for private companies. These are deliberate choices to move NHS money into private hands, not frontline care. The government's privatisation of the NHS isn't so secret anymore.

£25m a year you pay to Prince William. And still he charges you £2.5m a year because he 'owns' the land on which a prison stands. Land that he never bought, but was stolen by the Royal Family 1000 years ago. It's time to end this con.

We need to know where these donations go. Nobody gives money for free, what did he give in return?