Lee

@I_Am_Yain @rawespresso Driving around a Range Rover isnt a life necessity either. It’s perfectly possible to have a great life on 120k with a Toyota and kids going to state schools. Thousands of people do just this

@LeRoyCrosse3 @rawespresso sure, you drive round in a new range rover while your kids sit surrounded by chavs and thirdies in a knife-addled rape shed doing double award science

Golden handcuffs are the most expensive trap in the UK professional class. You take a £120K job. The salary feels life-changing for the first 6 months. Then the lifestyle catches up — the mortgage on the bigger house, the kids' private school fees, the car finance, the holiday cottage in Cornwall, the partner who's also stopped earning to look after the kids. The £120K, once a luxury, has become the minimum required to keep the life running. The job becomes impossible to leave because the entire structure of your life depends on it. You stop questioning whether you actually like it. You start measuring everything against the salary you'd be giving up. The lads who 'made it' in the City, in law, in tech management are the most trapped people in the country. Their version of freedom is being able to afford to retire by 55, after 25 years of work they couldn't escape from. The lads with no salary and no fixed costs have more genuine freedom at 27. What looks like the prize from the outside is actually the bait. The salary holds you in place better than any contract could.

@therealbigjonno @ListerLawrence Land Rover was sold to ford in 2000, who was in government then??

As far as jaguar Land Rover goes, I still don’t like the ownership being foreign. We should onshore as much as we can of this. The French have always understood that much better than we do. The loyalty of Conservative politicians has been to the international markets (money, from anywhere) as opposed to the good of the nation.

One thing that REALLY gets on my goat is the UK police force buying foreign cars. There are around 40,000 police vehicles on the road and the majority of them are built abroad! That’s approx £1.2bn going off-shore if they’re replaced every 3 years. It’s only a matter of time until we have BYD police cars… If I was in charge of the country the first thing I’d do is mandate that all UK emergency services must buy vehicles built in Britain. 🇬🇧 I mean how obvious is that to help our own economy, job market and above all pride?

@NadiaWhittomeMP It's not all about economics nadia, it's a cultural thing. Britains want Britain to remain predominantly British, like every other country in the world wants for their own country

Net migration to the UK has fallen by nearly 50%. This has not made and will not make a single bit of positive difference to people’s lives. Because the problem was never immigration - it was 40 years of Thatcherism. So rather than endlessly blame scapegoats, why don’t we cut to the chase and put everything we have into fixing the real structural causes behind soaring bills and rents, stagnant wages, and the fact that public services are on their knees? Otherwise, we’ll keep paving the way for Reform and reach the end of this Parliament having run out of people to blame and with nothing to show for it.

@blixberrie Almost 900,000 people arrived in 2023. What on earth are you talking about?

Every single government for the past 16 years has prioritised cutting welfare and lowering immigration and your life hasn’t gotten any better. Yet you want more of the same bullshit and the penny still hasn’t dropped?

@yaqubjulian @SangitaMyska There is absolutely nothing racist about being opposed to mass immigration and wanting to maintain a culture that has been present for hundreds of years. Its racist to want to destroy this

@SangitaMyska No, Sangita. Everyone who votes Reform is racist. 100%. They might not be 'gas them' racists or 'melt them into potholes' racists. Most will be old fashioned 'I'm not racist, but' racists or 'I have a black friend' racists. No one who is anti-racist is EVER going to vote Reform.

Matthew, not everyone who votes Reform is a racist, but every racist will vote Reform (unless Restore is on the ballot). To ignore that fundamental truth serves no one; least of all people of colour.

@treesey Labour Mp's know they haven't got a hope of getting a £90k job in the private sector. They wont give this up easily, despite any grandstanding

This is absolutely hilarious

@matthewsyed Theres nothing racist in opposing mass uncontrolled immigration from cultures diametrically opposed to our own. Until the establishment, be this big business, politicians, academia, charities, etc. realise this, they will continue to be surprised by brexit and reform's popularity

Reform voters are racist apparently. As soon as I saw this insult to millions of British people (one of the least racist nations on earth) I suspected it was from an academic. It’s impossible to exaggerate how western universities became overrun with woke ideology

@labourlewis Finlands defence model works because it’s a largely homogenous society made up of people who put Finland first. this wouldn’t work in the UK, where mass immigration has imported millions who won’t just not fight for us, but actively dislike us.

Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding. If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life. That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience. Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival. But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible? Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there? The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them. Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact. Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source. This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes. This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself. I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state. The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends. The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act. Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity. Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them. The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety. That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.

@PpeterPeter No problem, it’s great people like you care about making better places for everyone to live in, would be good if some of these ideas reached other regions as well. Outside London it seems to be Taylor Whitley estates galore

@LeRoyCrosse3 yes sorry typo

social housing we designed for people in the east around a courtyard

@lalalxve @Heccles94 It’s not furthering an agenda, it’s pointing out policies you support end up with innocent girls being raped. How many more people have to be sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism

@LeRoyCrosse3 @Heccles94 I’m sure this girl and her parents appreciate you spreading her suffering to further your own agenda. I hope this girl has a wealth of support around her. I encourage you to read stories and shout about harm to woman from all men if our safety is your concern.

200,000 people in 8 years. That is only 0.29% of the UK population over 8 years. Yet it’s in the news every single day. In that same time 4,000,000 people have emigrated away from the UK (twenty times as many people). The news is in league with Farage. Sadly it’s working.

@lalalxve @Heccles94 I’m sure this girl and her parents are delighted by the “ contributions to the economy” bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@Heccles94 ah and all the people in the comments who do not understand that even those coming in boats are not “illegal” unless their asylum claim is rejected and many of these people may now be refugees with skilled jobs contributing to our economy but alas!

@WhetstoneSDP @Wayne_Dixon Congrats, didn’t have an sdp candidate where I was voting but would have gone with them if we did. Only party with a credible plan and credible leader

On the left, me and @Wayne_Dixon after winning yesterday! On the right, me and him after winning four years ago! Victories, earned!

@afneil Is this a manufacturing problem? Surely they can't have been made very well, if they are spending spending so long getting repaired?

This is the Royal Navy. We don’t have a navy. Rule Britannia? We can’t even rule the village pond. Or the Serpentine.

@baggieal @emilyhewertson The country have voted time and time again against mass immigration for the past two decades. Why are people now surprised something drastic is being proposed to deal with what is, in many peoples eyes, a massive issue

@emilyhewertson Only took weaponising actual human beings to try and sow divide between people hey Emily? Regardless of what you think of immigrants, they are still people. Weaponising them is an absolute disgusting action. We used to be better than this as a country. Utterly shameful.

Well at least today has proved that the entire country do not want illegal migrants in their communities. Bravo for that one, Reform 👏🏼

@JamesWeston82 @ZiaYusufUK bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@LeRoyCrosse3 @ZiaYusufUK You mean the countries that have gone through war and famine?? Where else do you expect asylum seekers to come from?? And '500,000 in the last week' to Spain?? Please for the love of god go somewhere else for your news my friend!!

I must say I am *shocked* at how many of the highly ‘virtuous and kind’ left wing media and establishment politicians have revealed they view living near asylum seekers is a “punishment”. Whoever would have thought!

@JamesWeston82 @ZiaYusufUK the fact Europe as a continent, against it’s inhabitants wishes, has imported millions of African and Middle Eastern people under the guise of the asylum system. merkel let in 1 million Syrians alone, Spain 500,000 in the last week.

@LeRoyCrosse3 @ZiaYusufUK What exactly are you basing this claim on?

@JamesWeston82 @ZiaYusufUK They should detain them, very humanely in good facilities, and send them back to Africa. The asylum system was not designed to facilitate the movement of millions of people from Africa to Europe, which is currently what it’s being used for

@LeRoyCrosse3 @ZiaYusufUK So I ask again... do you think Italy and Greece should accept every single person?? Because that's where they're arriving??

@JamesWeston82 @ZiaYusufUK thats the whole point though, asylum shouldn’t be a choice, if your situation is truly terrible you would be grateful to settle in the first safe country you arrived at. It’s not a luxury resettlement scheme, it’s to save your life if it’s genuinely in peril.

@LeRoyCrosse3 @ZiaYusufUK Plenty of reasons they might want to claim asylum here... if they don't qualify send them home!! We should be investing in the process and collaboration with our European neighbours because it doesn't get solved any other way.