The Watcher

🇬🇧One of greatest scandals of post-war Britain: UK “won the oil lottery” in 1970s and unlike Norway, the winnings were spent fast and upward. 🇬🇧 Britain won the oil lottery and spent the winnings on breaking its own society. Thatcher used oil wealth to fund tax cuts for the few, bankroll mass unemployment, and underwrite the City. 🇳🇴Norway built a sovereign wealth fund for its children; Britain bought a decade of neoliberal revolution. Today, the fund is gone, the oil is running dry, and the public is left with nothing but austerity. But who actually benefited: 1. Thatcher Government (1979–1990s) •North Sea oil revenues peaked in 1980s at 10% of government receipts. •Thatcher used them to: •Fund tax cuts (especially for wealthy). •Finance costs of mass unemployment caused by deindustrialisation. •Cushion impact of breaking the unions during the miners’ strike. •Oil wealth effectively bought time for the neoliberal revolution. 2. Private Oil Companies & Investors •BP and Shell, plus American majors, made huge profits. •Oil fields were licensed largely on generous terms, especially compared to Norway’s Statoil model. •Shareholders: concentrated in the City of London and abroad captured much of the surplus. 3. The City of London •Oil wealth helped strengthen the pound, finance deficits, and feed into the financial sector. •Rather than building a sovereign wealth fund (like Norway), Britain effectively used oil to underwrite financialisation, feeding City profits. 4. Consumers (short-term) •Oil and gas revenues did help fund some public services and temporarily held down taxes. •But because no fund was created, ordinary people got no lasting benefit. By the 2000s, the “lottery money” was gone. 5. Politicians & Elites •Oil revenues reduced the need for governments (both Tory and Labour) to confront long-term industrial decline or build a coherent economic strategy. •Political elites benefitted from having “easy money” to paper over deep social fractures. Who Didn’t Benefit •Future generations: no sovereign wealth fund means no oil inheritance. Norway’s Oil Fund is now worth over $1.5 trillion; the UK has nothing. •Industrial workers: oil financed deindustrialisation rather than protecting jobs. •Communities in Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 & the North East: production wealth flowed to London/City, not reinvested locally.

How it started vs how it’s going… All because @ebehdad @Loz_Stew @paulwinstanley9 & @clearlake can’t put their massive egos aside and make it work with Enzo Maresca. #BlueCoOut

Brexit has cost the UK perhaps 10-15 times more in economic losses than we have gained from not paying subscription fees to the EU. The Boris red bus won't get far next time.....

As a European, I am not afraid that the USA will leave NATO. We already know that they do not have good intentions to Europe and that we, therefore, have to build our defence to be able to fight without the Americans. We are well on our way and it will happen a lot faster if the USA leaves NATO officially. Russia is too weak and small to be a long term threat to Europe. They simple can not match what we can produce. As long as we keep Ukraine from falling, Russia is also not a threat to us in the short term. So if the USA leaves NATO, it is simple for us: Keep Ukraine from falling at all costs and build up European defence and weapon production as fast as humanly possible. We can and we will do that and Europe will be absolutely fine and safe.

Please, please...leave NATO It doesn't work at the moment because the strongest military member is helping Russia NATO was formed to confront Russia, remember ? But once Putin got kompromat on Trump. America changed sides So now NATO doesn't work because its strongest military member is working for the enemy Good bye. Please

🇬🇧 @MichaelMorpugo is so right! 🔥 Brexit is the greatest mistake this country's made since the war! “We had an arrangement with Europe which came out of something very important. It came out of war. That was finally why the French and the Germans got together and said, ‘Look, let's do this thing. Let's sell each other things rather than throw bombs at each other.’ I thought that was quite a decent idea, and we were part of that, and we walked away. Newman, “And would you like to see one thing that comes out of this war to be the UK rejoining the EU?” “Somehow we have to understand that when we make a mistake, it's a really good idea to admit it and change. And … it's important to say our royal family is relatively connected to Europe.”

Do you know how bad Chelsea’s ownership has to be to have their fanbase feeling more negative about the club than Tottenham?

ZELENSKYY to BBC: We went through difficult relations with Iran. We did nothing to them. They shot down our plane, killed our passengers and crew, didn’t admit it, and didn’t let experts in. Then the full-scale war started. They handed Shahed drones to Russians to kill our civilians. I asked them to stop. They promised there would be only one batch. They lied and kept supplying weapons. That’s why I consider them accomplices of Russia.

Billionaires say they can't afford to live in a Britain with a wealth tax. NHS workers, school teachers and retail and hospitality staff can't afford to live in a Britain without one.

*Russia banned from football for attacking Ukraine* *USA, host of the World Cup, attacks Iran and kills its Supreme Leader* Infantino:

‼️ @bbclaurak “UK could be worse hit than almost any other developed economy.” Then skips the reason why! BREXIT Brexit weakened the economy, hammered resilience and increased exposure. Rejoining the EU Single Market will help us all survive this crisis. 🔥 The promises of control are like Cinderella’s fairytale - gone by midnight. #bbclaurak #TrevorPhilips

Brexit was a lie. Some of you are still paying the price for it. You are paying through your teeth for food, energy, rent, mortgages, council tax, everything. And yet you are still denying what happened and who made you poorer. And now you want the same man who brought you the Brexit Party to do it all over again. You could not make it up.🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿☕️🫖🪆

Another misery caused by Brexit voters Geneva airport: EU citizens queue for passport control empty. Brits queue for over an hour Brexit voters should have to pay a £5,000 tax surcharge for the misery they have inflicted on the rest of us: Higher prices, job & trade losses

Enzo Fernandez 🗣️ “We lost a manager who gave us identity, structure, and direction a Club World Cup winner and no one, not even the players, understands why. Mid-season, everything changed. The system collapsed, the stability went with him. So So sad”

Chelsea missed out on the chance to bank a further £45.4m from the knockout stages, and would've been awarded £10.8m if they had progressed to the quarter-finals of the Champions League. (via @Football_LDN) More lost revenue under @clearlake due to poor recruitment decisions.

Britain is 6% Muslim. Germany 5%. France 10%. Sweden 9%. Belgium 7%. At this rate of Islamic conquest, Europe will be majority Muslim sometime around the year 2847. I’d pencil in some mild concern for around 2600 and see how things look then. Now. The refugees. Since someone asked who’s paying for all this. Let’s follow the money back a bit further. America invaded Afghanistan, spent 20 years there achieving absolutely nothing, then left in such breathtaking chaos that people were literally hanging off aircraft. It then invaded Iraq over weapons that turned out not to exist, killed somewhere between 150,000 and a million people, and converted a functioning country into a sectarian hellscape. This is before we even get to the drones over Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. The people washing up on European shores are, in very large part, the direct human wreckage of American foreign policy. America created the disaster. Europe is housing the survivors. And America is on the internet asking why Europe keeps letting people in. Remarkable cheek, really. As for eliminating indigenous culture: the United States actually eliminated its indigenous people. Deliberately. With rifles and government paperwork. Europe took in Syrian doctors. These are not comparable situations, and pretending they are requires a truly heroic indifference to history. The culture is fine. France still has the cheese. The Louvre is still there. Bach is still there. Nothing has been eliminated except, apparently, the ability to read a percentage.

When the government tells you: “We’re in the same boat”

Pedro Sánchez on The Rest Is Politics podcast: “I would definitely like to have the UK back on board in the EU. I think societies can make mistakes, but they can also correct those mistakes.” I'm loving these signals. The hope for a future together is still alive 🇪🇺🇬🇧