Michael Shulver

Wednesday WM gave a full page to former Labour SM Jenny Rathbone. Yesterday Drakeford got a couple of pages. Today Skates gets THREE pages to feel sorry for himself. FFS! Here's four words explaining why Labour got hammered: Lying, incompetent, Woke wankers.

I'm not pointing a finger at the nationalists at all.....

For his vomit-inducing persecution of innocent British troops, Hermer should join Starmer in being kicked out of the most unpatriotic government in our island's history mol.im/a/15763549

Starmer and Hermer Built the Machine Together. Now They Run the Country. In 2007, two barristers worked without pay on a case that would change the legal landscape for every British soldier who had served in Iraq. Keir Starmer and Richard Hermer appeared as interveners in Al-Skeini v Secretary of State for Defence, representing eleven human rights organisations including Amnesty International and Liberty. Their argument was that the European Convention on Human Rights should apply to British forces operating overseas. They lost in the Court of Appeal. They appealed to the House of Lords. They lost again. But the legal principle they had argued for eventually prevailed at the European Court of Human Rights, and what followed was the Iraq Historic Allegations Team, sixty million pounds of public money, seven years of investigations, and not a single prosecution. The soldiers it pursued were, in almost every case, found to have acted properly. Starmer believed in it enough to do it for free. Johnny Mercer, who spent years dismantling the consequences, put it plainly. Starmer had insisted on doing it for free. That is not the behaviour of a barrister following the cab rank rule. That is ideological conviction. Hermer's conviction, it subsequently emerged, was not without financial reward once the machinery was running. Documents obtained by the Daily Telegraph show that having helped establish the legal architecture pro bono in 2007, Hermer then used that same architecture to pursue Iraqi claims against British soldiers at £450 an hour, fifty percent higher than the only other KC involved in the group action. He set his success fee at the maximum level permitted, one hundred percent of his normal rate. The MoD's own lawyers challenged his fees as excessive and said he was too junior to command that rate. He is thought to have earned around six figures from the broader group action. The claims he was pursuing were eventually ruled to be deliberate lies. The soldiers were fully exonerated. Sergeant Richie Catterall had been cleared of wrongdoing by the British Army in 2003 for a fatal shooting in Basra. The Army found he had acted in self-defence. The legal precedent Starmer and Hermer established triggered two further investigations spanning thirteen years. A 2016 inquiry again concluded he had acted in self-defence and found a false document had been created to shift blame onto the military. Catterall was finally exonerated. He told the Telegraph he was gutted that Starmer had helped bring the case against him and that the Prime Minister owed him an apology. Starmer is now Prime Minister. Hermer is now Attorney General, appointed by Starmer personally, elevated to the House of Lords specifically for the role, chosen over Emily Thornberry who had held the shadow brief. The former head of the Army, General Sir Peter Wall, has said Hermer's role in the Al-Sweady claims was tantamount to treason. A former commanding officer of 22 SAS said Hermer must step down. The Bar Standards Board has been asked to investigate. Nigel Farage has reported Hermer to the House of Lords standards commissioner. The Troubles Bill that is now subjecting Northern Ireland veterans to the same lawfare is not an accident of policy. The process that drove Fred, a special forces veteran, to attempt suicide after his medical records were handed to terrorists' families was not an oversight. The machine that cost sixty million pounds and produced no prosecutions was not a mistake. Starmer and Hermer built it together, one working for free out of conviction, the other later working for maximum fees out of the same conviction, and now both occupy the positions from which they can ensure the machine keeps running.

D is a former Port Talbot steelworker, almost forty years at the Works (and a former Labour man through and through), and offers his thoughts on Stephen Kinnock, Labour in Wales and the local elections next month.

Excellent thread, this. Something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about… The British state is run by people who have never been fired, never missed a number, never had a client scream at them, never stayed up until 3am working on a deal, or repricing a book because Tokyo opened badly. They have never experienced CONSEQUENCE. Ever. THAT is the single most important fact in British public life. The pipeline is so uniform and mediocre it scarcely needs describing: - School - PPE or adjacent - Civil Service fast stream or a Think Tank research role - Spell as local councillor to appear “grounded,” - Then a safe seat and a red box before 40 At no point has the market ever called them a moron. At no point has a P&L told them their idea was shit. The feedback loop that every private sector professional takes for granted simply does not exist in their world. This matters because policy is NOT an essay. It IS a trade. Every regulation has a cost, every tax has a behavioural response, every intervention has second and third order consequences. In markets, if you misread convexity you get carried out. In government, you get reshuffled to a different department. The incentive structure could not be more perfectly designed to retain the incompetent and repel the capable. Anyone with genuine commercial talent is earning multiples of a ministerial salary by their early thirties. So the applicant pool self selects for people for whom the title is the reward because they could never command that status where performance is measured. The think tank ecosystem makes it worse. IPPR, the Resolution Foundation, JRF and the rest function as ideological finishing schools and revolving doors. They produce people fluent in the language of policy who have never implemented anything. They can model a distributional impact assessment in their sleep but could not run a corner shop at profit. This is NOT intelligence. It is pattern matching within a closed system that never tests its own assumptions because everyone in it shares the same priors. The civil service compounds it further. The fast stream rewards generalism, rotating you through departments every 18 to 24 months to develop “breadth,” which in practice means you never develop depth. A Treasury official who helped design a tax policy in 2019 is working on transport by the time it starts distorting behaviour in 2022. Nobody owns the outcome. The private sector has one thing the state fundamentally lacks: a kill switch. Bad companies go bust. Bad traders get sacked. The state just absorbs failure, reclassifies it as “lessons learned,” and promotes the people responsible. The compound effect of thirty years of this is a permanent class institutionally incapable of delivering growth or even understanding why the private sector they depend on for revenue keeps shrinking under their stewardship. This is what we have, right now. You cannot fix this with better people inside the same system. The system selects against competence, insulates against feedback, and rewards survival over performance. Every parliament is just a fresh rotation of the same profile through the same machine expressing the same surprise when nothing improves. We need parallel institutions to be built by the guy or gal staying up til 3am repricing the book. The risk taker. The entrepreneur. Then we gradually phase the existing sclerotic failed structures out. That’s how we win. Make Britain Great Again 🇬🇧 💪

@samsunguk @sixnationsrugby @itv Putting that ad over a scrum setup was f*****g annoying. An ad guaranteed to ensure that I’ll never buy the phone.

Folks Me & Rhodri are going on the piss in Swansea & for a nice Curry; He was Charged with 8 Offences originally found guilty on 5 today on appeal 4 charges were overturned & dismissed so just 1 charge of force was found (dubious) & still SACKED! Policing is absolutely Fucked👇🤷‍♂️🤬

I sit in Parliament listening to these ministers, and it’s all just so depressing - the vast majority of them have never run a business, and it SHOWS. You would not believe how bad it is. They think ‘work’ means turning up to an office between 9 and 5, answering a few emails, and going home at the end of the day. Nice lunch break, few coffees away from the desk, probably a smoking break or several. It doesn’t - not for the millions of men and women who actually create the wealth that funds the state. Running a small business isn’t a job. It’s a way of life. It is life. It’s 24/7/365. It’s relentless. You are the accountant, HR department, compliance officer, cleaner, marketer, and customer service team - all in one. There’s no sick pay, no safety net, and no taxpayer-funded pension waiting for you. Holiday? Good luck. If you do manage to get away, it’s checking the phone all day, every day. Wife/husband obviously getting pissed off. We’ve all been there... It’s all on you. Every invoice chased, every tax deadline met, every bit of red tape navigated is on you. And if you make one mistake, one error, one small slip-up, the state comes after you - in a relentlessly efficient manner that is never afforded to us when we ask questions of it. Most MPs have no idea what that feels like. They just don’t. We’re going to see more of this in the budget I’m sure. More hurt. More pain. More tax. They don’t get it. They don’t understand that when a small business owner gets hit with another tax, it’s not absorbed by a ‘budget’ - it’s taken straight out of their family’s pocket. There is no ‘deficit’ in the business world - that’s called going bust. And they certainly don’t understand what real risk looks like. Politicians can vote through a policy on Monday and forget it by Tuesday - a small business owner lives with the consequences of that policy for years, decades. The MP monthly salary is safe. It always has been. In the public sector before, and in the public sector after - if not that, some charity/NGO funded entirely by the public sector. GET A REAL JOB. If MPs actually spent a week running a small firm - paying suppliers, tackling VAT, navigating health and safety law, sorting out HR issues, chasing clients for payment, trying to expand while staying compliant with everything from GDPR to local planning regulations - they’d legislate very differently. I can promise you that. They’d realise that most of Britain’s problems could be solved by the state doing less, not more. Cutting tax. Simplifying regulation. Slashing back the HRification of the country. Trusting people who actually produce things to get on with it. Instead, we have a political class that talks endlessly about ‘growth’ while brutally punishing the only people capable of delivering it - especially going after the family businesses/farms, which is a particularly spiteful policy decision. Small business owners are people who work harder than almost anyone in Parliament could imagine - and who are treated worse for it. Britain’s small businesses don’t succeed because of politicians, they survive in spite of them.

@UKLabour Not the UK, but a small deranged part of the UK Labour Party. Go fuck yourselves, and when you think you have fucked yourselves completely, turn around and start again. You are monsters, and come the next general election, your home will be oblivion.

Today, to revive the hope of peace and a two state solution, the UK formally recognises the State of Palestine.

@CeriTho25683386 Hi Ceri. Not sure if this project is ongoing. Just discovered the post today. When I was about six my father took me to the crash site. The ground was quite boggy as I recall. The two engines block were visible, but not much other wreckage … just small scraps of aluminium. Mike

85 years ago today, a Wellington mk 1 crashed in my home village of Glynneath. Thankfully no one was hurt, and I am currently doing research on it for a documentary I'm making on it and others locally. Had some good leads from a local Facebook group last night. 😊

@RedLineReportt In a heartbeat.

Would you switch your internet carrier to Starlink if it only cost $10 a month for unlimited data worldwide? Yes or No

@TalkTV @Iromg Mike, You made my morning. More like that please. Best, Mike

"Give the bloody tw*t a Nobel Peace Prize. Who cares!" Mike Graham blasts Rachel Reeves for promoting Labour MP Torsten Bell who came up with Ed Miliband's 'Ed Stone'. @Iromg

@Keir_Starmer Wanker

In the Rockies, working to deliver for Brits back home. G7 done.

@ljoyce15 Nailed it.

The Senedd is more like a Welsh chapel than a Parliament with its virtue signalling and sermons on Welsh morals, (we do things differently in Wales). Fighting against the sinners that are the Welsh population.

A Fire Service investigator has traced the source of the blaze to his wardrobe where his pants were found to be on fire. #PantsOnFire @Keir_Starmer #FuckingLiar. > BBC News - Police investigate fire at Starmer’s house bbc.com/news/articles/…

“What are you in for?” “Three Douglas Murray books and a Portillo train journeys DVD”

Down there's where you wanna be boys! 😍 Absolutely Fablas work from Luke, Harri and Ieuan and the team at @FablasIcecream 🍦 #TogetherAsOne

@JamesMelville A wisdom tooth.

@musk_news13 .