Robert

@KayBurley Many people like me voted for both their constituency mp and Kier Starmer at the last election. What the detractors need to remember is that we may never want to vote for someone to the very left of centre. We never supported the Corbynisters and will not in the future.

I have never been a fan of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. Top politicians need to realise it’s not just the message, but how you sell it that cuts through to the public psyche. His policies may well have been among the best for the country and some undoubtedly were but Sir Keir never seemed able to land them with the public. Voters rarely reward policies they don’t emotionally connect with. Yesterday’s reset speech didn’t help. What exactly was he trying to tell us. Now, in what could be the death throes of his tenancy in No 10 after less than two years at the top, I do find myself feeling for him. He pulled himself up by his bootstraps and reached not one but two of the highest offices in the land. So, as the wannabes circle the Cabinet table this morning, positioning for what may come next, spare a thought for a man who genuinely wanted to make a difference, but never quite mastered the art of making his case. Fair?

@LeeAndersonMP_ @reformparty_uk Don’t tell me Nigel has a £5M pot of gold to pay for them provided it’s cash in hand with no accountability

Vote @reformparty_uk and get your roads fixed. It's simple.

@RobertJenrick Does JCB make donations to your party?

It's arrived. As promised the JCB pothole machine is now in Newark. It fills them in ten times faster. And it’s made in Britain 🇬🇧 Only Reform UK County Councils are serious about fixing our roads.

@labourlewis Don’t disagree with you but it’s the electorate that decides a way forward. Do I take it you will be resigning your seat for Andy Burnham? Is a 13000+ majority safe enough?

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.

@JackElsom @BethRigby Not wanting to disagree with you/Jess Phillips but we shouldn’t forget that in the not too distant past people were not happy with her performance but she didn’t resign. Never bodes well when the elected leader is forced out. Remember Brown, Major, those after Johnson.

That is one of the most blistering resignation letters I've ever read. Up there with Suella Braverman in wanting to burn the house down on her way out.

@CatharineHoey @reformparty_uk @Nigel_Farage So what’s your view , as a parliamentarian, if it is found that the £5M payment he received should have been declared? After all it’s not the first time he has failed to declare payments received to parliament.

Just like the entire establishment used every tool they had to denigrate those campaigning to Leave the EU they will now turn their fire on @reformparty_uk and especially @Nigel_Farage But it will not work - the genie is out of the bottle !

@montie @TiceRichard @bbclaurak Is that true? Think it didn’t resonate with voters beforehand but will now. No one gives that kind of cash and expects nothing for it. Not only that I for one want to know who paid for that house.

That was a waste of an interview of @TiceRichard by @bbclaurak. Questions that were asked before the election and being repeated now about eg the donation to Nigel didn't concern voters who gave us nearly 1,500 gains. The BBC needs to move on.

@RobertJenrick Are you still advising on immigration and the use of hotel rooms to house those applying for asylum?

Genius. Bring back the guy who gave away our gold reserves to advise on ‘economic resilience’. What could possibly go wrong.

@zatzi How many businesses closed whilst your husband’s party was in charge ?

Thanks Labour - looks like Rachel’s growth is strategy is going really well 😡😢 In last 6 months alone: 🚫239 Brewers Fayre/ Beefeater 🚫150 TG Jones (WH Smith) 🚫270 William Hill 🚫39 River Island 🚫88 Cancer Research 🚫5 GAME 🚫23 Quiz 🚫137 TOFS 🚫9 The Real Greek 🚫35 TGI Fridays 🚫22 Leon 🚫68 Pizza Hut 🚫21 Revolution 🚫10 BrewDog 🚫33 Russell & Bromley 🚫20 Fired Earth And now up to 300 Poundstretcher / Poundland stores Estimated impact is between 10,400 and 13,000 jobs, with several thousand more potentially at risk. Fewer shops, fewer restaurants, fewer jobs a bigger benefits bill. Socialism at work. 🤦🏻‍♀️ “Poundstretcher faces ‘no choice’ but administration as discount giant begs for restructuring lifeline to save 300 shops” thesun.co.uk/money/39039128…

@kelvmackenzie Guess from your time on the Sun you know where the door is. Stay or go it’s your decision.

This country is an effing joke. Nothing ever effing works. The railway don’t work. The signals don’t work. The staff don’t work. The radios don’t work. On stations across the UK there’s an announcement from British Transport Police saying if you see “ something out of the ordinary” contact them. How about a train running on time, a train arriving on time or a train turning up at all. They are all “ out of the ordinary.” Why am I paying for this shit system. Designed and run by Socialists.

@DanielGoldersUK Isn’t that the same type of question as how much does the government get from closed coal mines, pubs etc. Closures of businesses happen all of the time and I seem to remember that many private schools over a number of years closed because they couldn’t make a profit.

Question to all the people on the left who were screaming for "VAT on Private Schools": How much VAT is the government now getting from the 100 schools that their idiotic spiteful tax raid has shut down forever?

@toryboypierce @RachelReevesMP Is that true or is this fake news? In 2009 the rate of closure per week was 52. In 2015 it was 30 per week. Substantially more than now.

Two pubs a day have closed this year as a direct result of robber @RachelReevesMP disastrous Budgets. Time to call Last Orders on her chancellorship

@RodDMartin Think you will find it’s the Kings Navy and warships take between 3 - 10 to build and commission a warship so why do you say it’s Starmers Navy? Trying to create a political point that’s not there. For info Thatcher used the Nott review to cut MOD spending

In 1982, Margaret Thatcher heroically sent 127 ships to take back the Falklands. In 2026, Keir Starmer, whose navy has more admirals than warships, was unable to successfully send even one destroyer to defend the RAF base on Cyprus. Incredible.

@BenGrahamUK Didn’t he say a similar thing about @trussliz who if I remember correctly was the @Conservatives PM at the time.

Rishi Sunak warned us exactly what would happen. People laughed it off, and voted for Labour. Now his prediction looks spot on. Call it what it is, he was right.

@Ben_Bradley_32 Also remember individuals who changed party in the hope they would get re elected. Anyone ?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't a certain Prime Minister have an absolute hissy fit about a previous Prime Minister who prorogued Parliament - allegedly to avoid scrutiny and having to answer questions at PMQs during a difficult period.... I vaguely remember that. Anyone?

@EstherMcVey1 Isn’t all if this reminiscent to @BorisJohnson

Starmer’s continued insistence he knew nothing about Mandelson’s failed vetting is beyond implausible, it’s embarrassing.

@LeeAndersonMP_ Can see why you spend most of your time in the pub.

Appalling Conduct? Your boss employed the friend of a notorious paedophile. You need to grow a pair you pathetic man.

@robprogressive I’m interested who moves your rubbish from outside of your house, looks after aged parents, lighting in your street etc. Don’t tell me you want all of this for free or someone else should pay for it.

@afneil Just a question - with you living in a number of places UK/France/US could you let us know where you get your primary healthcare and how much do you pay for it and do you ever use the NHS.?

This is the reason why we can never reform healthcare in the UK — or even have a sensible debate about it. The moment anyone suggests alternative/additional ways of funding health Labour rushes out privatisation smears and claims US private health insurance is being proposed. Labour has been doing it for decades. It explains why the NHS is effectively beyond reform. The two worst health systems in the rich world are in America and the UK. It’s why nobody has ever copied them. It would be mad to go from ours to theirs (or vice versa). But Europe is awash with health systems that can call on several sources of funds, including many with compulsory public health insurance schemes. They have better health outcomes than the NHS. They are free at the point of use (like the NHS). Most of them are better funded. But Labour puts them out of bounds, refuses even to discuss or consider. So patient care suffers. NHS struggles on. Labour is always telling us we need to get closer to Europe. It’s where we belong. But not when it comes to health, where it insists no lessons can be learned. Pretty pathetic, really.

@johnredwood What a rubbish comment. Iran and the US are both breaking international law and other nations including the UK are unable to do anything other than stand by and try and use quiet diplomacy to try and help.

Iran is breaking international law by preventing our ships going through the Strait. What is the PM going to do about that? Is this another case where he and international law does nothing effective, only being enforced by the PM when he says we are breaking it?