Dewi Jones

@SaulStaniforth Let alone condemn it.

After the world has watched two & a half years of genocide in Gaza Yvette Cooper is deeply concerned about what is continuing to happen there. But not concerned enough to actually do anything.

A ‘ceasefire’ for Netanyahu 🇮🇱 is keeping Lebanon 🇱🇧 land & rejecting a ‘quiet for quiet’ agreement: ‘A security zone’ ‘10KM deep in Lebanon 🇱🇧’ ‘From the sea to the Syrian 🇸🇾 border’ It’s never been ‘defence’ It’s always been a land grab It’s always been about a ‘Greater 🇮🇱’

Forgive us if we don't trust Keir Starmer. Do you?

Exactly. The biggest driver of actual AS is the weaponisation of AS by Zionists. This includes Starmer, LFI, BBC editors etc.

Trump 🇺🇸 announces a ‘ceasefire’ and: Israel 🇮🇱 hits southern Lebanon 🇱🇧 with more than 50 airstrikes in a matter of hours For 🇮🇱 it’s all about ethnic cleansing All about land theft All about a ‘Greater 🇮🇱’ Expel 🇮🇱 from the UN now.

Peter Mandelson failed his Government security vetting. Starmer appointed him as ambassador to the US anyway. No more buck passing, no more mysteriously vanishing mobile phones, we need the truth. Starmer must go.

Kick Palantir out of our NHS!

@ALTcentristALT @MothinAli It must be difficult to accept that your government is fundamentally a violent, racist entity, but once you do it will be easier for you.

@DewiMJones @MothinAli So if the IDF mothballed their modern equipment and resorted to Gazan style warfare: Iranian supplied rockets, gangraping Muslims at music festivals, and chopping off Gazan's heads with shovels that would make it not genocide? You're not correct. It's not genocide factually.

The establishment is unloading both barrels, the trolls were one thing, the bots, the likes of the daily mail, but now the state itself. This is the UK, we don't want or need foreign interference in our political system!

@ALTcentristALT @MothinAli Israel has the might of whatever weaponry US and other states decide to send it. Hamas has v little. Israel deaths & collateral damage to buildings is minimal. Gaza has been destroyed beyond recognition and huge populations killed, exact nos. unknown. It is genocide, not war.

@MothinAli Israel is factually not committing genocide in Gaza. But you get to pretend it is because you are grifting on old antisemitic stereotypes.

@BeckettUnite Terrifying for the innocent people in that building. = Terrorism. That's what terrorism is.

Israel 🇮🇱 is doing to southern Lebanon 🇱🇧 as it did to Gaza 🇵🇸 Bombing it to rubble It’s never been ‘defence’ It’s always been ethnic cleansing It’s always been land theft It’s always been for a ‘Greater Israel 🇮🇱’

BREAKING: MP in a party with merely 8 MP’s spends over £2.9 MILLION on expenses!?!?!

Israel just blew up a public high school in Marwahin, South Lebanon. Not a military base. A school.

@peterkyle I listened to Peter Kyle saying how angry he was that people were claiming to be gay to gain asylum. It's a shame the butchering in 6 figure numbers of Gazans by Israel doesn't fire my MP's ire so much. Lying (his party does this daily) boils his blood, genocide seemingly not.

Morning! I’m across TV and radio this morning talking about our plan to cut energy bills for over 10,000 manufacturers. This is a government of action - giving businesses certainty and stability in an unstable time.

@JKWarren234 @MattStirner @iAmJoshHunt Of course I can't print bank notes. But the UK govt (in a fiat economy) can and does. Just doesn't want us to know it does.

@MattStirner @DewiMJones @iAmJoshHunt Try printing some bank notes or hacking your bank account to add some zeroes to your balance and see what happens. As a private person you can’t create new money.

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.

@MattStirner @JKWarren234 @iAmJoshHunt MMT happens, regardless of me. Just wondering why you don't accept this.

@JKWarren234 @DewiMJones @iAmJoshHunt I'm sorry MMT happened to you.

@MattStirner @iAmJoshHunt Taxes don't pay for govt spending. Govts create currency/print money to pay for hospitals, rosds etc., they don't borrow it. Taxes are levers the govt pulls to control inflation.

@iAmJoshHunt The government should be under a strict requirement for a balanced budget. All additional expenses should be serviced by levying higher taxes. I'd say normally this would contain the state, but under current conditions even this may not...

🚨 PAKISTAN DROPS A BOMB ON ISRAEL AT THE UN 🔥 Pakistan’s ambassador just destroyed Israel in front of the entire United Nations: “Israel is a rogue state, an occupier, and a state terrorist that violates UN resolutions, commits genocide in Gaza, and practices state terrorism even on Palestinian land.” He didn’t hold back. This speech is now going viral across the Middle East. The world is watching. Share before they try to hide it 👇

I don’t think many people realise how desperate the situation is. Labour are sacrificing our democracy for the interests of another country. Vote every single one of the treacherous gits out. They betrayed their party and now the country.

Yesterday, the government passed a law effectively banning repeat protests. The government is fed up with people protesting about genocide. Well, we are disgusted by its complicity in the greatest crime of our time. The government wants to silence us. It will never succeed.

The right to protest isn’t a gift from government. It’s a democratic principle, hard-won and easily lost. Last night the government tried to smuggle through a “cumulative disruption” power that would let police ban protests simply because other people had protested in the same area before. Think about what that means: your right to march could be extinguished by someone else’s march on an entirely different issue. They knew this wouldn’t survive proper scrutiny - so they denied MPs the time to give it any. I supported the cross-party motion to oppose the cumulative disruption amendment. The government used its majority to force it through regardless. Protest is supposed to be disruptive. That’s the point. From the suffragettes to the anti-apartheid movement, it was cumulative, persistent, inconvenient protest that changed this country for the better. One of the most authoritarian political parties in modern British history is leading in the polls. As I said in the chamber when the government proscribed Palestine Action - a progressive Labour government should be building firewalls for our democracy, not tearing them down and pitch-rolling for Reform. This Bill isn’t law yet. It now returns to the Lords, and this fight is far from over.