Kay Watson 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

BREAKING: Labour Party officials Joel Bodmer, Shila Bodmer, Gabriel Leroy and Cllr Carole Bonner charged with conspiracy, computer misuse and rgging Parliamentary candidate selection process for 2024 General Election (via @RachaelBurford @StandardNews) standard.co.uk/news/politics/…

🚨CHAIR DROPS THE BOMB🔥 Committee Chair reads out loud: “Just fucking approve it.” Direct from Morgan McSweeney / handover notes to Olly Robbins on Mandelson vetting. This hearing is burying Starmer. 🇬🇧 #StarmerOut

🚨 BREAKING: Olly Robbins says he was asked to find an ambassadorship role for Keir Starmer’s then comms chief Matthew Doyle, who was recently suspended from Labour over links to a paedophile "I felt quite uncomfortable about it. I kept giving advice that this was very hard... for me to defend"

I wrote to Keir Starmer warning him not to appoint Matthew Doyle to the Lords due to his connection with a convicted paedophile. He ignored those warnings. And it now turns out he had even higher hopes for Doyle. Just extraordinary.

💣Graham Simpson has just told me Anas Sarwar came up to him THREE times at Holyrood to say Labour and Reform should 'work together' to get the SNP out. Says Scottish Labour leader's comments to us today are 'preposterous' and that he 'thinks he's lost the plot'.

We are shocked to have been informed of the risk to the Ice Rink at the Time Capsule. The fact this is even being discussed is an absolute travesty. A rink which is in constant use with many local clubs. Ice hockey, figure skating to name a few. It is the home rink to our 'wee siblings' at Lanarkshire Lightning Junior Ice Hockey Club. Please, whether local or just an ice hockey fan from any where in the country who understands the importance of not losing another ice pad - sign this petition and SPREAD THE WORD 🙏 change.org/p/save-the-tim…

Joani Reid should go back over her timeline and be mortified.

#Poverty is biggest single driver of ill-health & #Austerity is a key driver of poverty! We used to call it #Tory Austerity but, after ~2 years of the same, #Labour now own it! People living in poverty could spend 1/3 of their lives in poor health. Also = ⬆️ pressure on #NHS!

This account has just been set up. The profile picture is visibly AI generated. Scottish Labour’s General Secretary immediately followed the account and reposted the AI character endorsing Labour. One of the other 4 followers is a Labour candidate. Whats going on here?

38% for the Brexiteer parties was enough to drag the 62% pro-European Scottish voters out of the EU. Don't lecture us on mandates!

😮 CEO of Octopus energy on Sky News yesterday morning - “If we did location pricing, every region would be cheaper Scotland would go from the most expensive electricity in Europe - to the cheapest.”

MUST WATCH: Olly Robbins confirms that Starmer personally chose Mandelson and that the FCDO was told to make it happen. Security officials said he shouldn’t get clearance. They were overruled. Starmer then told the public Mandelson had “clearance for the role.” He must he take responsibility and resign.

At a @CommonsForeign session in November 2025, I directly asked Sir Oliver Robbins whether the FCDO had a different view of who should be recommended for the posting of US Ambassador. His response? "It was clear that the Prime Minister wanted to make this appointment himself."

Just pointing out that I broke the story 7 months ago that Mandelson failed vetting from the security services and put it to Downing Street...so the idea that Downing Street only found out on Tuesday is complete nonsense. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

👉NEW -- Minister misled parliament over arms exports to Israel by @jmcevoy_2 Chris Bryant told a parliamentary committee that UK-made aircraft parts would not benefit Israeli fighter pilots. His briefing said otherwise. declassifieduk.org/minister-misle…

Starmer on 5 Feb: "There was... security vetting carried out independently by the security services, which is an intensive exercise that gave him clearance for the role, and you have to go through that before you take up the post."

NEW: Foreign Affairs select committee intends to summon Sir Oliver Robbins over his previous evidence on the vetting process. Emily Thornberry, committee chair, says: "Looking at the evidence that was given and the letters that have been written, to be charitable, there are glaring holes. It really is a question of whether we were knowingly misled."

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.

The SNP has protected NHS Scotland from both the austerity of the Tory Govt and the privatisation of both Tories and Labour. Over 10% of the NHS in England is now privatised. The SNP have kept privatisation to less than 1% in Scotland. All while maintaining lower waiting lists, higher doctor to patient ratios, no charge prescriptions, no hospital parking charges, no charge personal social care and more hospital beds. All for about £100 a year extra in tax. I think @theSNP have done well with limited powers.

The British government has wasted more money on failed projects than some countries spend building their entire infrastructure. After hearing about the cancellation of the Stonehenge Tunnel project, yet it still racking up £179 million in cost, I wanted to look at other projects and costs to see what the picture looks like this century. Every number here comes from official reports, the National Audit Office, parliamentary committees, and ministers' own admissions. Let me show you where your money has gone. HS2 was sold to the country as a £37.5 billion high speed rail network connecting London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. The first phase was supposed to open this year. In 2026. Here's where it actually is. After six years of construction and £46 billion spent, tunnels have been bored, earth has been moved, viaducts have been built. But there is no railway. Not a single metre of track. The legs to Manchester and Leeds have been cancelled entirely. What's left is a line from London to Birmingham with no confirmed opening date, no confirmed final cost, and estimates so unstable that Parliament's own Public Accounts Committee has warned the cash cost of Phase 1 alone could reach £80 billion. Some industry forecasts put it above £100 billion. The Transport Secretary stood in Parliament last year and called it "an appalling mess." She said billions had been wasted on scope changes, ineffective contracts, and bad management. Fraud allegations have since emerged in the supply chain. Three times the original price. A fraction of what was promised. And still years from completion. But HS2 is just one example. The NHS National Programme for IT was supposed to create a unified electronic health record for every patient in England. Launched in 2002 with a budget of £6 billion. Abandoned in 2011 with the Public Accounts Committee putting the expected cost at £12.4 billion. It delivered a fraction of its promised benefits. Only 13 out of 169 hospital trusts received the systems they were meant to get. Then one of the contractors sued the government and won a settlement of nearly half a billion pounds. On top. During Covid, the government threw billions out the door with almost no checks. The Covid Counter Fraud Commissioner's final report, published December 2025, found that fraud and error across pandemic support schemes cost taxpayers £10.9 billion. How much has been recovered? £1.8 billion. The Commissioner's words, not mine. The previous government "left the front door open to fraud." Bounce Back Loans were rolled out in under two weeks with no independent verification. PPE contracts were handed to companies with no track record. Defective gowns, masks, and visors weren't inspected for two years. By the time anyone checked, the money was gone. Universal Credit was supposed to simplify the benefits system. The original programme was budgeted at around £2 billion. The National Audit Office has flagged massive overruns repeatedly as the project ballooned in scope and complexity. Total costs have run many times higher than planned. Nobody was fired. The smart meter rollout was supposed to be finished by 2020. It wasn't. Costs have hit £13.5 billion. The programme has been dogged by meters losing functionality, missed deadlines, and a failure to deliver the energy savings that justified the whole thing in the first place. One many of you will be familiar with. The Post Office spent £600 million on a computer system called Horizon. It was fundamentally flawed. Its defects led to more than 900 wrongful convictions. Sub-postmasters lost their homes. Their businesses. Their families. At least 13 people took their own lives. Compensation has now reached £1.4 billion and is expected to hit £2 billion. Fujitsu, the company that built the system, has not paid a single penny toward that bill. It is still collecting government contracts. The Fire Control project. £469 million. Seven years. An attempt to modernise fire service control rooms. Scrapped. Nothing delivered. What a waste. The electronic tagging programme. Five years late. Tens of millions spent. Abandoned. They ended up buying off the shelf tags that could have been bought for a fraction of the price years earlier. The Garden Bridge. £53 million of public money. Not a single piece was built. You might ask what £53 million was spent on exactly. The Rwanda deportation scheme. £715 million. Four people went voluntarily. Not a single forced deportation was carried out. Then the whole thing was scrapped. Now here's the part that ties it all together. In 2019, the Prime Minister's own Implementation Unit looked at the government's £432 billion portfolio of major projects. Only 8% had proper plans to evaluate whether they were working. 64% of that spending, £276 billion, had no evaluation at all. None. The government was spending hundreds of billions of your money with no way of knowing if any of it was delivering. The National Audit Office has said there has been a "consistent pattern of underperformance" spanning 25 years. Twenty five years of reports saying the same thing. And nothing changes. Add it up. HS2 overruns. NHS IT written off. £10.9 billion in Covid fraud. Universal Credit ballooning. Smart meters over budget. Post Office compensation approaching £2 billion. Fire Control. Rwanda. Garden Bridge. Tagging. And those are just the ones that made the news. The total runs into the tens of billions. More than the entire annual education budget. Approaching what the government now spends on debt interest in a single year. And here's the scary part. This is only what we know about. The NAO has been clear the real picture is worse because most projects aren't properly evaluated in the first place. These are the failures too big to hide. Imagine the ones that aren't. This is the same government that says there's no money for public services. That raises your taxes every year and delivers less every year. That can't build a railway. Can't roll out a computer system. Can't buy protective equipment without losing billions to fraud. And every time it happens, the pattern is the same. The project fails. The minister moves on. The civil servant gets a knighthood. The contractor gets the next contract. And you pick up the bill. The UK doesn't have a funding problem. It has a competence problem. And until that changes, no amount of tax rises, borrowing, or spending reviews will make the slightest difference.