RAF Veteran.

@BUTCHERJ75 Stunning my favourite butcher xx

Evening...

@AvroVulcan617 @ROD558 @VictorXL231 @Ayresjo @Bombbayjohn @SiobhanBren @DaveVForce @Lins_Rumbold @JohnWri1 @dalermyers @TonkaGR1 @CCartwright1984 @JohnNicholRAF @Kimbohud @JudeMal @09EA63 Cheers Andy, have a great weekend all. ##VForceFriday

VForceFriday #ff @ROD558 @VictorXL231 @Ayresjo @Bombbayjohn @SiobhanBren @DaveVForce @Lins_Rumbold @JohnWri1 @RobExRAF @dalermyers @TonkaGR1 @CCartwright1984 @JohnNicholRAF @Kimbohud @JudeMal @09EA63 #twitterVforce

@medwaymakem @obbsie @RobertJudd4 Agreed, this government are a bloody disgrace 😡

@obbsie @RobertJudd4 If ever there was a time for the federation to call for industrial action it’s now ! This can’t be allowed to happen without a fight of some sort it’s disgraceful 😡

I can't quite believe this. They want to cut overtime rates & now this. x.com/PFEW_HQ/status…

You might have heard of Maggie Oliver. She's a former Greater Manchester detective who, in 2012, was ordered to abandon her investigation into the systematic rape of children in Rochdale, and decided she would rather resign her warrant card rather than do so. Maggie, as that would imply, is one of the good ones. I constantly ask how our police can consider themselves worthy of the badge if they are not willing to return the badge rather than commit injustice in its name. Maggie did just that; she was asked to cover for criminals, so she told the shirts to stuff themselves and handed back her commission. She won a small but consequential victory in the High Court on Friday. Mr Justice Kimblin granted her foundation a full judicial review of whether the British state has actually done anything about the recommendations it accepted, in 2022, at the end of a seven-year inquiry into the institutional cover-up of decades of child sexual abuse. Maggie Oliver is one woman. She has no political party behind her and no standing in Whitehall. She has no peerage, no chambers, no billionaire foundation footing her bills. She was ordered, by senior officers, to drop her investigation into a network of men who were raping children in industrial quantities in her city, because of the demographics to which those men belong made the whole thing a bit awkward. Fourteen years on, she has done what nobody else in this country has been able to. She has hauled the British state into open court to answer for the choice it made, over four years and under two governments, to hold a seven-year, £200 million inquiry into the institutional cover-up of child abuse and implement, deliberately, none of that inquiry's recommendations. The Home Office accepted those recommendations in 2022. So did the Department for Education, the police inspectorates and the Crown Prosecution Service. And then nothing happened. The recommendations sat. The departments restructured. Ministers rotated. The girls and women who had given evidence aged. More such operations continued around the country, while the men who had run the previous set of them either walked free, left the country, or drew their own pensions. The state, in the manner of every institution Tony Blair ever built, had decided that the writing of the report was the action, and the doing of the report could be handed off to history. That is what Maggie Oliver has now forced into court. And the political class knows what that means. The Home Secretary has not commented. The Prime Minister has not commented. The candidates jockeying through the post-Starmer Labour succession have, at the time of writing, failed even to speak her name, as though they know that, if they do, lightning will flash in the sky and they'll be turned into a pillar of Tesco's-own-brand dishwasher salt. They are silent because they recognise, accurately, that the answers a judicial review will produce - to the question of why their inquiry's findings were treated as ornamental - will, should, must end the careers of every official who was supposed to act on them and did not. That councillors and councils, mayors, indeed entire political parties, will be caught under ultraviolet light and shown for their guilt. It's time a government did what the British state has spent twenty years declining to do. Take on institutional failure. Name the institutions that failed, in public, on the record. Name the officers and officials who covered it up, and the officers and officials who pressed for the cover-up too. Prosecute them under the standards that any other employee of a public organisation defrauding the public would expect to face. The recommendations the inquiry produced must be implemented in full, alongside whatever further measures a second look at the evidence then demands. There will not be another inquiry into the inquiries. There will be the verdicts. Maggie Oliver is one of the bravest people in Britain. She has earned, by her own resignation and by fourteen years and a foundation and a court case carried on her back, the right to expect from a future British government the simple thing that ought to have happened in 2014, in 2016, in 2018, in 2022 and in every other year of this national disgrace. She has not yet been given it; we have not yet been given it. But it will be given, and soon.

Teaching SEVEN-YEAR-OLD children in UK primary schools that they are born with “white privilege” is not anti-racism — IT IS RACISM IN ITS PUREST FORM. Let’s be absolutely clear about what is happening here. These are babies. They still lose their milk teeth, they still believe in Father Christmas, they are only just learning to read and write and tie their own shoelaces. At that age, children are naturally colour-blind — they see only friends to play with, people to be kind to, and nothing else. They do not understand history, politics, or complex social theories. They are innocent, pure, and open-hearted… until adults step in and poison their minds. This is deliberate indoctrination. It is grooming. You are standing in front of vulnerable infants, who trust you and cannot question what you tell them, and you are actively teaching them to judge every single person — including themselves — entirely by the colour of their skin. You tell white children they are born guilty, born oppressive, born with unfair advantages, and should feel eternal shame and guilt for things that happened hundreds of years before they were even conceived. You tell children of colour they are born victims, born disadvantaged, and that the world is stacked against them before their lives have even properly begun. It is a disgusting, insulting lie. Go and tell a white working-class child growing up in poverty, living hand-to-mouth in a cold council house, whose parents work themselves to the bone just to put food on the table, that they are “privileged.” It is an insult to their struggle, their hardship, and their reality. Go and tell a bright, talented child of colour that their future is defined only by their race, not by their effort or character. It is cruel, dehumanising, and destructive. This isn’t education. Education teaches you to think for yourself, to treat others with kindness, and to understand facts. This is brainwashing. This is psychological and emotional abuse, dressed up as virtue signalling and political posturing. You are stealing their childhood, shattering their innocence, and setting them up for a lifetime of resentment, division, and misery — all just to push a twisted, hateful ideology that has no place anywhere near our schools. Shame on every teacher who teaches this, every school that allows it, and every politician who enables it. You are warping young minds and dividing our society for your own selfish agendas. Stop indoctrinating infants with race guilt. Stop teaching racism while pretending to fight it. THIS IS CHILD ABUSE — AND IT MUST STOP NOW. 🤬🤬🤬

Unemployment is forecast to rise from 4.9% to 5.5%. Families will be no better off at the end of this year than they were at the start of last year. Living standards, frozen. Growth, gone.

No Crossing, No Fee. Britain's People Smugglers Now Offer Consumer Protections. Writing in the Telegraph, Home Affairs Editor Charles Hymas reports that a BBC undercover team walked into a phone shop called Afg Mobile Repair in Woolwich last week and found an established, functioning payment system for illegal Channel crossings. A wholesale business in Newcastle and a car wash in Cambridge were also named. The man behind the counter in Woolwich explained the arrangement with the calm of someone describing standard business practice. Money held until the crossing succeeds. Refunded if the boat sinks. No receipt. The smuggler calls when the funds arrive. The people smuggler running this network has been operating out of northern France for more than five years. The British end of his payment infrastructure has been running long enough to become routine. This is not a story about criminal ingenuity. Criminals are always ingenious. This is a story about what successive British governments have allowed to become normal. The same week, Albanian gangs were found advertising Channel crossings on TikTok. Places on small boats offered for £150, targeted at the Albanian diaspora already settled in Britain, with hashtags reading "Albanian in London" and "Albanian in England." One advert was viewed more than 5,700 times before a journalist asked TikTok about it. The account was banned. The next one will be up within days. The platform is not the problem. The problem is that Britain has become a destination so reliable, so lucrative and so difficult to be removed from that gangs can advertise the journey openly on mainstream social media and treat the takedown as a minor inconvenience. Labour will point to recent arrest figures, with NCA arrests up 55 percent in the past year. But the cumulative total tells a different story. The Home Office confirmed this month that more than 200,000 people have crossed the Channel illegally since 2018. Around 46,000 crossed in 2025 alone, up significantly on the year before. A phone shop in Woolwich is processing payments for people smugglers. A car wash in Cambridge is holding funds in escrow for illegal crossings. Albanian gangs are running discount promotions on TikTok. The 200,000 milestone was reached on this government's watch. Smashing the gangs was the promise. The phone shop is the reality. Keir Starmer has spent two years promising to smash the gangs. The gangs have responded by opening a phone shop. The payment infrastructure for illegal entry into Britain is embedded in British high streets, operating alongside legitimate businesses, using British bank transfers and British phone numbers. The criminal market for Channel crossings has matured to the point where it offers consumer protections. The reason this infrastructure can operate openly is the same reason it has always operated openly. The incentive to cross remains overwhelming because the consequence of crossing successfully is, for most people, indefinite residence in Britain. Hotels. Welfare benefits. Legal aid. Healthcare. The right to appeal, and appeal again, through a court system that takes years to exhaust. The gangs are not exploiting a loophole. They are exploiting the entire architecture of an asylum system designed by people who either did not foresee this outcome or did not care about it. Closing that infrastructure requires more than arresting the man behind the counter in Woolwich, though he should be arrested. It requires making the crossing economically irrational. Rapid removal. No hotel. No legal aid pipeline. No years of appeal. The moment a successful crossing stops guaranteeing indefinite residence in Britain, the payment system in Woolwich has no customers. The TikTok account has nothing to advertise. The gangs move somewhere else. Britain has the tools. What it has consistently lacked is the political will to use them. While that gap remains, the phone shop stays open and the boats keep coming.

Toad in the hole is the most successful conversion of cheap protein and beef dripping into a hot dinner that the British kitchen has ever managed. Six fat pork sausages from the village butcher. A pint of batter from flour, eggs, and milk, whisked to the consistency of single cream and rested for half an hour. A roasting tin with a tablespoon of beef dripping smoking hot at 220 degrees. Sausages in first to brown. Batter in after, poured around them, hissing as it hits the fat. Back in the oven. Thirty-five minutes. Out it comes, the batter risen into a craggy golden cliff, sausages half-submerged, the fat sealed into the crust at the bottom. Mashed potato underneath. Onion gravy on top. A heap of cabbage on the side. Tuesday dinner, 1962, for a family of five, at a cost of perhaps two shillings. The dish has eighteenth-century roots. Hannah Glasse published a "pigeons in a hole" in 1747. The name "toad in the hole" appears in print by 1787. Mrs Beeton's 1861 version used rump steak and lamb's kidney rather than sausage. The sausage version became standard in the early twentieth century and was a school dinner staple for generations, in working men's caffs, on British Rail menus, and on every nan's kitchen table on a Tuesday in January. It fed two world wars on a budget and came out the other side. Then sometime in the 1990s the British kitchen lost confidence in batter, dripping, and the butcher's sausage. The dish was demoted to a Tesco ready meal in a black plastic tray, microwaved for four minutes, eaten on the sofa. The sausage is still at the butcher. The dripping is on the supermarket meat aisle for under a fiver a kilo. The flour is in the cupboard. The eggs are on the counter. Thirty-five minutes in a hot oven, on a Tuesday in January, and a working-class dinner that has been on British tables since George III lands intact, exactly as your grandmother served it, except now nobody is forcing you to make it. Make it anyway.

@Keir_Starmer This Saturday two marches will take place in central London simultaneously. The Unite the Kingdom rally, expected to draw over 100,000 British citizens, and the Nakba Day pro-Palestine march. Seven foreign speakers have been banned from attending the first. Not one foreign speaker has been banned from any pro-Palestine march in two and a half years. Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic. It refers to the displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The suffering was real. What the marchers will not mention is that the Arab leadership rejected the UN partition plan that would have given Palestinians their own state and five Arab armies invaded the day Israel declared independence with the stated aim of destroying it. They will not mention that 850,000 Jews were simultaneously expelled from Arab countries, their property confiscated and their communities destroyed. That displacement has no annual march. No UN commemoration. No government statement of concern. The Nakba narrative, as presented on British streets, is half a history. The half that fits the argument. For two and a half years the IHRC led chants of death to Israel on the Embankment. Bobby Vylan led chants of death to the IDF on a London stage and the CPS cleared him. The Together Alliance marched through central London carrying Iranian regime flags days after their proxy network firebombed Jewish ambulances in Golders Green. Thirty six MPs signed a letter to silence Nick Timothy for identifying that coalition. Your government attended an Iranian embassy party and called it diplomacy. Not one of those marches was described as designed to confront and provoke. Not one foreign participant was blocked. Not one organiser faced the kind of language being directed at this weekend's rally before it has even taken place. The IRGC remains unproscribed. The grooming gang demographic remains unnamed in Parliament. Two tier policing has been documented across two and a half years of pro-Palestinian marches held to a different standard than any other demonstration in living memory. And now the same government that watched all of that happen is banning American social media commentators from attending a rally of British citizens concerned about exactly those double standards. You will not allow people to come to the UK and spread hate on our streets. For two and a half years that is precisely what you allowed. The only thing that has changed is who is marching.

Four Resets. A Billion for China. No Answers. Strip away the framing and Starmer's speech this morning reveals more than it intends. "Incremental change won't cut it," said the Prime Minister. He said this at his fourth reset in under two years. The first reset promised stability. The second promised delivery. The third promised a cost of living focus. The fourth promises urgency. The pattern is not a pivot. It is a confession, repeated at intervals, that the previous confession produced nothing. The substance amounted to this: do everything we were already doing, but announced with greater volume. Young people need hope, so more apprenticeships. Britain needs growth, so closer ties with Europe. British Steel needs saving, so nationalise it. Each announcement a repackaging of something already underway or already failing. Take British Steel. Starmer announced legislation this week to bring it into full public ownership. He presented this as bold, urgent action on the side of working people. The reality is that the government has been effectively running British Steel since April 2025, when emergency legislation was rushed through Parliament after the Chinese owner Jingye threatened to close the blast furnaces. Since then the taxpayer has provided approximately £419 million in working capital to keep the site alive. Steel production in Britain remains on a steep downward trend. And now, according to reports, Jingye is demanding over a billion pounds in compensation before agreeing to hand back a company the British taxpayer has been running and funding for over a year. Nationalising a patient already on life support and paying its previous Chinese owner a billion pounds for the privilege is not industrial policy. It is the formalisation of an existing liability with a price tag attached, announced this morning as though it were an achievement. On young people and hope: Labour priced a generation out of work. Youth unemployment surged to levels not seen in more than a decade, driven directly by the employer National Insurance rise, the surge in minimum wages and the consequent collapse in entry-level hiring across retail, hospitality and service industries. The ladder into work was kicked away in the name of fairness. This morning Starmer offered those young people more apprenticeships and a closer relationship with Brussels. Neither addresses what caused the problem. On Europe, the most significant moment was not what Starmer said but what he refused to say. Asked directly whether the next Labour manifesto would rule out rejoining the single market or the customs union, he declined to answer. The 2024 manifesto was explicit: no single market, no customs union, no freedom of movement. Voters were told this clearly and voted accordingly. Today Starmer opened the door and left it open. Not a reset. A destination, confirmed. The response to the speech from his own side told the story more honestly than the speech itself. A senior government source said he had said nothing new and feared the speech had pushed Labour into chaos. David Smith, the Labour MP for North Northumberland, became the 44th backbencher to demand his resignation within minutes of him finishing. Starmer's answer to all of it was that Labour would never be forgiven for the chaos of a leadership contest. It is the strongest card he has left. It is also the smallest one. A Prime Minister who is paying a Chinese company over a billion pounds to leave a business the taxpayer has been running for a year, and who opened the door to single market membership four days after the worst local election result in Labour's modern history, is not providing real answers. He is providing the appearance of them. Britain has seen this before. Three times, in fact. "Nationalising a patient already on life support and paying its previous Chinese owner a billion pounds for the privilege is not industrial policy."

@JamesCleverly Good move, this is the uk, enough money is spaffed away on foreign aid as it is.we have a major cost of living crisis and your upset about a flag. You walloper.

One of the first decisions made by Essex Reform was to remove the Ukrainian flag from County Council HQ. Let that sink in. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@Keir_Starmer @rawlimark You don't speak for me, your such a coward you let the hate and division marches go ahead. Your weak and cowardly. You caused more division and hate, the worst PM in years. Starmer the harmer.

Today the voices of division will be loud. They don't speak for the country I know, one that belongs to all of us. That's our Britain. A Britain worth fighting for. lbc.co.uk/article/keir-s…

@history99917180 No new saddle......yet!

Marry a horse girl they said. It’ll be fun they said. #skint

@turner355 @history99917180 @DeborahWorboys1 Too right👍

@history99917180 @DeborahWorboys1 Ffs Gareth, don’t sit on the fence, tell us what you really think 🤣🤣🤣

If you think this is a woman, you’re a fucking idiot. If you tell me to ignore reality and my own integrity and demand I call him a woman, you’re a fucking idiot. If you try and defend this bloke and call him a woman, you’re a fucking idiot. Hope I’ve made myself clear.

@Ed_Miliband Get stuffed beaker, your full of bs.

After the second fossil fuel crisis in five years, it's clear that clean power is the only route to energy security. The Energy Independence Bill is the next step in our mission: tackling the affordability crisis, creating thousands of jobs and delivering energy security.

Absolutely shocked to find myself in agreement with the monarch during today's King's Speech.

@history99917180 Is that a cat turd floating in that mug......

*Tea update* First cup of tea for Sam after teagate. Sam has just got home from the surgery. When I asked if she’d had a good day her reply was, ‘well, none of my patients died’. This might go very wrong. Wish me luck.

@ChrisVinceMP A clear mandate you totally ignored......you bunch of wallopers

The public will not forgive us if we start turning inwards. We were elected with a clear mandate. When we go into the next election with the question of who should run the country: Keir, Kemi, or Nigel - the answer is clear. Keir delivered 2024, he can deliver again.

@JohnSlinger Bore off.

One thing I’ve not heard much of in the debate about who should be Prime Minister of our country is the human being at the centre of this, & his family, & the effect of this on them all. The vitriol is off the scale. Show some humanity. People we disagree with are not enemies

@BowBellGurl @history99917180 🤣🤣🤣

Funny job memory I’m at a Marina and reminded of the time I found myself on a Police ship. I was the highest ranking person on the boat so I decided to declare myself the captain. I can therefore rightly say that I have commanded a vessel owned by the monarch.