Michael

@GeorgeAylett @Calderbank This is pretty revisionist given that, even with a green surge, Labour received 25% of the vote (narrowly behind reform) and it was a labour held seat. Greens would rather fight Labour than Reform because they're a party built on virtue-signalling.

@Calderbank Given the circumstances, everybody knew it was a straight fight between Greens and Reform. Even if you refuse to admit it publicly, I think you have to admit to yourself that this was the case. At least be consistent.

Some Greens really are a bit unhinged. I suggested that it might not be a great idea for them to stand a candidate against Labour in a clear 2 way fight vs Reform >

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.

@BeyondOutsider @Alonso_GD They do. The point is they still use the service- the original post is suggesting that they shouldn't be using the NHS even if they pay for it.

@Alonso_GD Tourist should get charged for services used via NHS, just like all other countries would. Tax payer should never pay for tourists treatment, we aren't a charity.

Tourist visits England. Tourist has accident. Tourist goes to A&E. NHS treats tourist. It’s not hard guys

I’m a lefty anti-imperialist, but Argentina is wrong on the Falklands The islands have never had an Argentinian population. Falklanders predate Argentina, and 99% voted to stay British This isn’t a colonial issue. It’s used by ARG's far right to distract from domestic problems.

It's not whether I *believe* that vaccines cause autism or not It has been scientifically proven that they don't

@Gabriel64869839 If replacing the US nuclear umbrella a UK-lead development with funding sought from partners (current US nuclear sharing partners e.g. Italy, Germany) could be invited to share costs. Sweden and Poland I imagine would also be interested?

British armed forces are an endangered species on way to extinction for lack of money and nuclear already devours 25% of the insufficient budget. All these proposals are therefore ultimately suicidal, unless allies contribute enough money to reduce, not increase than percentage.

Has an arsenal season ticket , takes his son to the football , goes to the pub without PR , plays 5 a side , worked his entire life More in common with the working man than the grifters @reformparty_uk

🇬🇧MADE IN BRITAIN: Lockheed Martin is set to build a new £85 million satellite manufacturing plant in the UK. The US aerospace giant is in contention for a major UK contract that is due to be awarded later this year, and if successful, plans to build the assembly plant at County Durham's NETPark site, creating at least 500 jobs.

@25598da44080 @nicholadrummond @CommonsDefence @TanDhesi SAMP/T needs to be in the mix but current capability only covers SRBMs, expected to increase to MRBMs but still leaves us short for IR/SL/IC BM defence.

Does the UK need to invest more in air defence systems? Chair @TanDhesi asked the Prime Minister that question yesterday.

@71Tonka @nicholadrummond @CommonsDefence @TanDhesi An uplift to 9 of each group is unrealistic but arguably the *minimum* we need to meet UK commitments (Carrier, NATO and deployment) at any given time.

@nicholadrummond @CommonsDefence @TanDhesi I dont disagree about any of this, but expecting the current government to increase the number of destroyers, frigates and OPVs you state is pure fantasy. I wish it was otherwise but just dont think this government has the balls to do whats needed to generate the cash

@Langworthy_47 @PolitlcsUK The prices are still tied to the international market. It's absolutely irrelevant if we extract our own or not.

@PolitlcsUK If only we had our own oil and gas extracting industry to be self-sufficient in some of our energy needs.

🚨 NEW: Keir Starmer will address the nation tomorrow morning about the war in Iran

@FennellJW Probably an easy scapegoat as well- The biggest issue at every level is the poor availability of our Navy and dearth of other essential assets (GBAD).

Rabbit in the headlights?

On 21 March I’ll be walking 22 miles to the @EvertonStadium before they face @ChelseaFC. I don’t even have a ticket - I’m doing it all to raise awareness of AHC, the 1 in a million life threatening condition my son Rupert has. I’m hoping to raise £7,000 (7 colours of the rainbow) We need to raise £1.5m to help get him to the USA for a cure 🌈 Please donate & share. justgiving.com/crowdfunding/r… @reid6peter @TonyBellew @ToffeeTVEFC @PED7 @ALANMYERSMEDIA @MeatballMolly @NevilleSouthall @KevRatcliffe4 @joe_thomas18 @LivEchoEFC @Lea_EFC @EFCdaily_ @efc_mo @ATNCAST #NSNO #COYB #EFC

A series of remarkable photographs have documented Great Crested Grebes preying on Common Chiffchaffs in Spain: bit.ly/4sDCsBB

@DabberThoughts @BO3673 I get that completely- and it looks like thats what the gov has chosen, but then we can't complain that we can't fulfil our NATO/International commitments. If we can only deploy 2 ships then we can't do 2 NATO missions and protect our interests abroad.

@LeafKings @BO3673 Delaying maintenance, unless operationally essential, causing a whole host of problems

And this was the dilemma for Dragon.

@BO3673 Does make sense to a degree. Seems odd not to delay the maint on Dauntless but regardless of who is deployed where shows the weakness of the RN, with no additional DDs in the pipeline either

@LeafKings Couldn't tell you but from what I understand Duncan was for FIRECREST and Dragon was for this tasking. FIRECREST and E/Med obviously came out top in the prioritisation.

I have no control over me. He's gone. Let's fucking celebrate. The cunt is dead. Live it, love it

@McmeekinIan @Gabriel64869839 That's exactly it- of the units involved last summer only a few caused issues but they were severe, and regardless of tests the trust in the vehicle is gone. If we don't know that these particular vehicles were tested to army use standards users can't and won't trust the results

@LeafKings @Gabriel64869839 Well said Michael it is already clear some hulls appear to be particularly problematic. Have any of the problematic hulls been tested? Or just hand picked hulls that are known not to cause crew suffering?

National Armaments Director written evidence supplies additional information on all organisations involved in measuring Noise & Vibration on AJAX. 7 distinct assessments (since 2021), with "most trials executed by independent contractors, rather than General Dynamics". list:

@Gabriel64869839 Out of interest, how many vehicles were tested out of the fleet, and were any of the vehicles involved in any incidents tested? I can't find the answer on a quick scan but I think it's an interesting consideration.

NAD written evidence submission is available here: committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidenc… Whatever issue is, there is not one world in which all those outsiders are somehow not finding clear Noise & Vibration readings if the horror stories are even just "close" to truth. It's just impossible.