Sharon Hills 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

@Felixseasiders Just found out that Sam Ford has signed for Bury Town! Why aren't we getting any squad news please?

🇬🇧 There are 79 vape shops on the Home Office’s public register of licensed visa sponsors. ‘Guardian Vapes Ltd’ in South Shields is licensed to sponsor overseas workers via the ‘Skilled Worker Visa’ route. 🧵1/3

@Felixseasiders Any chance of getting some player news on the horizon? Any snippet would be welcome, PLEASE.

@Felixseasiders Well done lads on being runners up xx

What a fantastic effort by the EJA U14 lads! 9 x 35 minute games in a blisteringly hot two days in Düsseldorf saw the team eventually defeated in a penalty shootout to FC Den Bosch in the final.

@Felixseasiders Good luck lads, go and win it!

The Seasiders U14 EJA side won two and drew one game on Saturday, winning through to the finals day today. They’ll play 6 games Sunday……. In 32 degrees heat! ☀️ Thanks again to the sponsors of the trip, Boardley & Roberts Ltd, G&A Fire Protection and oneofeleven.co.uk

@Charbroil Ordered some spares that I need to return for a refund, but not getting any response from customer service to enable me to proceed with a return. Shocking lack of service for the UK market.

Price Controls. 1970s Answers. A Government That Has Run Out of Road. Rachel Reeves has a proposal. Supermarkets should cap the price of bread, milk and eggs. In return, the government will suspend some of its own regulations. Not permanently. Not because they were wrong. Temporarily, as a transaction, in exchange for retailers absorbing costs the government has imposed on them and cannot now bring itself to remove. This is what the end of the road looks like. The British Retail Consortium has named the problem plainly. The challenge facing retailers, it said, is a combination of higher energy and commodity costs from the Middle East conflict and the soaring cost of the government's own domestic policies. Both. Not one or the other. The Iran conflict lit the match. This government built the bonfire, as I preficted when Exercise Turnstone first came to light. The war made the damage visible. It did not cause it. The costs pushing food prices up are documented and domestic. The April 2025 National Insurance hike. The minimum wage, up 40 per cent since 2020. The net zero packaging levy, which charges retailers per tonne of materials. Business rates. Every one of those is a policy choice made in Downing Street and the Treasury. The Food and Drink Federation has said so explicitly. The retail sector has said so repeatedly. And the government's own offer confirms it: in exchange for price caps, Reeves will relax the net zero packaging regulations and delay the obesity crackdown. She is suspending her own policies because she knows they are part of the problem. She will not say so. The structure of the deal says it for her. A retail analyst, asked to assess the proposal, cited the Soviet Union unprompted. The former chief executive of John Lewis called the SNP version of this policy the economics of a madhouse. Reeves has adopted a version of a policy that her own retail sector compares to Soviet price controls and describes as a return to the failed policies of the 1970s. These are not Conservative attack lines. They are the industry's verdict, in its own words, delivered this week. The proposal also threatens to compound the damage it claims to address. Price caps incentivise supermarkets to source cheaper food from abroad. British farmers, already driven to the brink by NI hikes and inheritance tax changes that hit family farms directly, will face a further squeeze as retailers seek cheaper foreign alternatives to stay within the cap. The government will have used a food security crisis to accelerate the destruction of domestic food production. The instrument designed to help will make the underlying problem worse. This is where the Callaghan parallel lands with full force. In 1976, a Labour government that had spent beyond what the bond market would tolerate reached for emergency instruments: price controls, incomes policies, interventions that addressed symptoms while the disease advanced. The IMF arrived. The humiliation followed. What is happening now is slower and more diffuse, but the logic is identical. A government that has foreclosed its own fiscal options, constrained by bond market discipline on one side and a restless parliamentary party on the other, reaching for 1970s instruments because every modern lever has already been compromised by a previous decision. The bond market is watching. Gilt yields are already close to their highest level in 28 years. Morgan Stanley has told its clients the economy will flatline. Asset managers are advising clients to avoid long-dated gilts. A voluntary cap on the price of milk will not change any of those judgments. It will confirm them. Callaghan's ghost is not a metaphor. It is a destination. "Reeves has adopted a version of a policy that her own retail sector compares to Soviet price controls and describes as a return to the failed policies of the 1970s."

@TonyToony31 @GraysAthleticFC You’re most welcome, see you at Felixstowe & Walton FC next season!

@Gertie58 @GraysAthleticFC Thank you

Non League Bible Awards nlbible.weebly.com/youtube-over-1… I have been nominated in the award for Best Non League Youtuber over 10K & would appreciate your vote please. Every vlog except one on my channel this season is all Non League as I even went as far as Step 6. My channel is a dedicated Non League channel only. @BuryTownFC @MildenhallTown @BrentwoodTownFC @GraysAthleticFC @QuornAFC @Lakenheath_FC @OFCLTRAWLERBOYS @Felixseasiders @StanwayRovers @fc_peterborough @TheMotormen @CockfostersFC @afc_stoneham @Brightlingseafc @SohamTownRanger @cambridgecityfc @Downham_TownFC @ElyCityFC @needhammktfc @IsthmianLeague @SouthernLeague1 @spremcentral @tjrothery @Paul_Muzzy #nonleague

I read that this trans Indian migrant who has managed to get elected to the Scottish Parliament has backed calls for Scots to pay reparations to Palestine. Here's the official Restore Britain response. Piss off.

Britain Is Sleepwalking Into Lebanon. Lebanon did not fall overnight. It was once the most cosmopolitan, pluralist state in the Arab world. Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East. A functioning democracy. A free press. A Christian majority that built a nation generous enough to welcome those who came. It believed that openness would be met with openness. That tolerance would be reciprocated. That good faith was a universal language. It wasn't. It never is. The Palestinians arrived after 1948 and in their hundreds of thousands after 1970, expelled from Jordan with their militias intact. The Lebanese state, too timid to enforce its own sovereignty, allowed armed factions to operate as a state within a state. Then Iran exported its revolution westward and Hezbollah was born, funded from Tehran, running its own hospitals, schools, courts and welfare networks. It made the Lebanese state optional for an entire community. Every accommodation encouraged the next demand. Every retreat was read as weakness, because it was. The civil war that followed lasted fifteen years and killed 150,000 people. But the war was merely the violent expression of something that had already happened. The state had lost its monopoly on violence. Communities had retreated into armed confessional blocs. The centre had hollowed out. Lebanon was already two countries sharing a flag but not a future. The Christians didn't lose because they were cruel. They lost because they were naive. They believed demographic generosity could be squared with political stability. They believed armed factions could be absorbed into a civic order. Power follows population. Identity hardens under pressure. Every community with a coherent creed will eventually act on its interests. The moral high ground is not a defence. In Lebanon it became a grave marker. Now look at Britain. Since 2018, boats have arrived on the Kent coast carrying tens of thousands of men, the overwhelming majority unvetted and undocumented, from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Eritrea. They are housed and supported at public expense while the state performs the pantomime of processing them. Anyone who raises the subject is accused of racism before the sentence is finished. This is not immigration. It is the progressive dissolution of Britain's right to determine who enters its own territory. The parallel institutions are already here. Sharia courts operating alongside civil law. Educational environments teaching loyalty to the Ummah rather than to Britain. Areas where policing is negotiation, investigations are quietly dropped, and the state modifies its own behaviour for fear of communal reaction. In Lebanon they called it accommodation. They kept calling it accommodation right up until the checkpoints went up. The electoral bloc pressure is already here. Candidates selected on the basis of foreign conflicts. Representatives answering to communal leaderships rather than constituents. The institutional failure is already here. The Charity Commission investigated the Islamic Centre of England for three years. Little changed. Universities host vigils for mass murderers and hold nobody accountable. Prevent is applied selectively. Everyone knows it. Nobody says it. Lebanon did not collapse because its enemies were strong. It collapsed because its institutions were weak. Because it confused tolerance with the abandonment of standards. Because it believed the centre would hold without anyone holding it. Britain is not Lebanon yet. But Lebanon wasn't Lebanon yet, once. It drifted. Demographics shifted. Parallel loyalties hardened. The state lost the nerve to enforce a single standard of law. Bit by bit the centre hollowed out. We are drifting. The question is whether anyone in authority will admit it. Before the drift becomes a current too strong to swim against. "Power follows population. Identity hardens under pressure. Every community with a coherent creed will eventually act on its interests."

The UK personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since April 2021. That's the bit of your salary you keep before HMRC starts taking 20% off everything above it. In 2021, £12,570 was a reasonable tax-free bracket. Inflation since then has been roughly 25% cumulative, and the price of basically everything you actually spend money on has gone up — energy, rent, food, council tax, fuel. If the personal allowance had simply tracked inflation, it would now be closer to £15,700. Instead, the threshold sits exactly where it did when Sunak set it five years ago, and is locked there until 2030. The cost shows up everywhere except on your payslip. Every shop, every bill, every bit of your monthly budget feels tighter — while the threshold that's supposed to protect the first slice of your wages from tax just sits there at 2021 levels. The official line is that they 'haven't raised taxes.' They haven't needed to. Inflation does the job for them, every single year, until 2030.

@CleanerDartford Thanks for letting me know.

@Gertie58 Hi Sharon, thank you this is on our waste contractors list to clear and we're aiming to have it sorted in the next couple of days.

Britain is slipping into something ugly, and Birmingham has torn the mask off it. Politics is no longer anchored in shared citizenship or equal obligation. It is being bent around sectarian pressure, grievance bargaining, and fear of unrest. When that happens, institutions stop enforcing the law and start negotiating with whoever can make the most noise. This is not about belief or free expression. It is about power. When elected officials act as brokers for religious or ethnic blocs rather than servants of the whole public, the state fractures. Loyalty replaces law. Fear replaces judgment. The language of tolerance becomes a cover for the abandonment of standards. The growth of MPs, councillors, and mayors elected primarily through sectarian mobilisation has altered how Britain is governed. Voting power is no longer used to argue policy but to extract concessions. Police, councils, and public bodies learn quickly which groups must be appeased and which can be ignored. Decisions stop being made on principle and start being made on risk management, and once that habit sets in, unequal policing does not need to be announced. It is simply practised. The Birmingham policing scandal followed that pattern precisely. It did not begin with falsified intelligence or manufactured evidence. Those were symptoms, not causes. The collapse came earlier, when threats against Jews were treated as a problem to be managed rather than crimes to be confronted. Intelligence showed hostility, mobilisation, and plans for violence. Enforcement was not directed at those making the threats. The targets were removed instead. That single choice explains everything that followed. Intimidation worked. Cause enough trouble and the law bends. Apply enough pressure and rights become conditional. Stay quiet and you are told to stay away "for your own safety". The law remains on the books, but its application depends on who is willing to disrupt. When politicians like Ayoub Khan dismiss scrutiny as a "witch hunt", they are not defending fairness. They are asserting ownership. They signal that accountability becomes illegitimate when it threatens the political settlement they rely on. Authority is captured not by rewriting the law, but by redefining what institutions are prepared to enforce. This pattern is no longer confined to one city. Hesitation replaces firmness. Consultation replaces enforcement. Language is softened to avoid offence. Decisions are justified after the fact. When it fails, no one is responsible. Process absorbs the blame. Committees replace consequences. Sectarian politics rarely destroys institutions outright. It corrodes them by habit. Officials learn that calm is bought through concession. Politicians learn that grievance can be recycled indefinitely. Police leaders learn that neutrality carries more career risk than appeasement. Corruption no longer needs envelopes or bribes. It runs on fear, convenience, and self-preservation. The most dangerous lie underpinning this drift is the claim that enforcing the law causes unrest. History shows the opposite. Unequal enforcement radicalises. When pressure works, it escalates. When silence is rewarded, retreat follows. The social contract thins until only power remains. Britain once believed it was immune to this kind of politics. That belief held only while public office meant public duty rather than communal advocacy. That line is now fraying, and Birmingham shows where this road ends: evidence bent to fit decisions, Parliament misled, Jews excluded from public life, and responsibility dissolved into timelines while the institution closed ranks. This is not simply a policing failure. It is a national warning. A country that enforces different rules for different groups does not become tolerant or diverse. It becomes brittle. Brittle societies do not break loudly. They crack quietly, until one day the law is still written down, but no longer believed in. Ayoub Khan MP

@IsthmianLeague @NonLeagueCrowd @dartfordfc @townsendaround Shame the board won't leave too!

isthmian.co.uk/articles/penno… Pennock departs the Darts Ady Pennock leaves Dartford #IsthmianLeague #PitchingIn #Dartford

@Felixseasiders @MildenhallTown What a great team we have, onwards and upwards

FT - @Felixseasiders 3 @MildenhallTown 0 The Seasiders signed off the regular season with a comfortable 3-0 win over relegated Mildenhall Town, but missed out on the title on goal difference, despite finishing level on points. With Tuesday’s home play-off semi-final against Redbridge in mind, Felixstowe rotated their squad and rested several key men, including goalkeeper Harry Wright, yet still proved too strong on a sunny Suffolk afternoon. The hosts were ahead after five minutes when Sam Ford calmly converted from the penalty spot. Felixstowe doubled their lead on 24 minutes as Jacob Lay finished precisely after good work and a cross from Ethan Garcia. Ford then turned provider in the second half, delivering a teasing ball that Tom Warren headed home at the far post on 63 minutes. Garcia almost added a fourth, while Josh Curry’s late red card capped Mildenhall’s miserable afternoon as they dropped through the trapdoor to step 5.

@dartfordfc Don’t panic all you DFC supporters, the mighty DFC Board have a five year plan!!

Thank You & Goodbye Ady! Ady Pennock will step down from his position as manager after the match tomorrow. We hope supporters will give him the send-off he deserves. dartfordfc.com/2026/04/thank-…

The Warning Came in 2023. The Ignorance Defence Was Always a Lie The claim at the heart of Keir Starmer's survival strategy is simple. He did not know. He was not told. The system failed him. Set against that claim is a single reported fact that, if confirmed, ends the argument entirely. The Mail on Sunday is reporting that the security services handed Labour a dossier in 2023, while still in opposition, detailing Mandelson's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and raising concerns about his links to hostile states. Senior shadow ministers received it. The warning was formal, documented and delivered more than a year before Starmer announced the appointment in December 2024. If that report is accurate, the ignorance defence does not merely weaken. It disappears. A Prime Minister cannot claim he was kept in the dark about a security risk that his own party was formally warned about before he even took office. Set this alongside what is already on the record. Lammy has admitted his department was under time pressure to complete the appointment before Trump's inauguration. Civil servants treated the announcement as a fait accompli before vetting was complete. Robbins told a Commons committee in November that it was clear the Prime Minister wanted to make this appointment himself. Helen MacNamara, former Whitehall ethics chief, said Robbins's job was to do what the Prime Minister wanted. And the vetting process, working exactly as designed, subsequently said no. Now Liz Kendall and David Lammy are telling us Starmer would have blocked the appointment had he known. The claim requires us to believe several things simultaneously. That a Prime Minister so invested in the appointment that civil servants treated it as beyond question would have reversed course on the word of a vetting recommendation. That a man who knew about the Epstein connection, who had been warned about reputational risk in the formal vetting advice, who received the 2023 dossier through his shadow ministers, somehow remained genuinely ignorant of the security services' conclusion. And that Lammy, whose department sponsored the vetting, overrode the recommendation and admitted to time pressure, played no conscious role in ensuring the appointment proceeded. None of that holds together. The Kendall defence is hypothetical assertion dressed as character witness. The Lammy admission is the most revealing detail in this morning's reporting. Time pressure is not a justification for overriding the security services. It is a confession that the political timetable was placed above the security assessment. The appointment had to happen before Trump's inauguration. The vetting outcome was therefore, in practical terms, irrelevant to the decision. Robbins understood this. MacNamara has said so explicitly. The Prime Minister wanted the appointment. The civil service's job was to make it happen and manage the risks. When the security services said no, the Foreign Office reached for exceptional powers because the alternative was telling the Prime Minister that his chosen ambassador could not take up his post days before the new American administration arrived in Washington. Kendall and Lammy are asking the country to believe that same Prime Minister would have calmly accepted that news and cancelled the appointment. The man who sacked a civil servant for following the rules. The man who told Parliament three times that due process had been followed. The man whose own officials recorded in writing that they believed he had inadvertently misled the Commons. The 2023 dossier, if confirmed, closes the last door. Starmer was warned before he took office. He was warned during the appointment process. The security services said no. The appointment proceeded. The ignorance defence was always implausible. It is now, on the available evidence, unsustainable. Monday's statement will not save him. It will be measured against everything the documents have already established.

🚨NEW: The number of people on Universal Credit has hit 8.4 million, up 63,000 in a single month, according to DWP data published today