Mark Wills (All thoughts my own)💙

@Gosleepriya 162

If you solve this, your IQ is high 🔥 fill the missing number.

@Vintage77Ball Rijkaard

Many are still wrong to guess! Who spat on the German player (Rudi Völler) in the 1990 World Cup, Frank Rijkaard or Ruud Gullit?

@BenGrahamUK @pauldbowen Prioritising our Country should come before any money leaves these shores, FULL STOP

The UK is still sending hundreds of millions in foreign aid to countries including: – Afghanistan: £192m – Ethiopia: £182m – Syria: £109m – Somalia: £100m – Iraq: £50–£100m Meanwhile, at home: • NHS waiting lists near record highs • Councils are cutting essential services • Infrastructure is visibly declining Serious question: How do we justify this balance of spending? At what point do we prioritise Britain?

@JohnCrookes7 🤡

I think most people are now tired of the witch-hunt of our PM over the Mandleson affair which by comparison with other current world events is of no great consequence. They want him out because of his ongoing success in turning the country around after years of Tory corruption.

@PeterStefanovi2 Should you not have asked??

BREAKING: “That I wasn’t told that he (Mandelson) had failed security vetting when I was telling Parliament that due process had been followed is unforgivable. Not only was I not told, no minister was told” - Keir Starmer Absolutely staggering

@iAmJoshHunt I’ve always said that this is one of the biggest scandals of our time

This one will require a stiff drink. In the early 1990s, the government came up with a clever idea. Instead of borrowing money cheaply to build hospitals, schools, and roads, it would get the private sector to build them and then pay the private sector back over 25 to 30 years. The Private Finance Initiative. PFI. The attraction was obvious. You got a shiny new hospital today. The bill didn't show up on the government's books. The cost was deferred into the future. Politicians got ribbon-cutting ceremonies without the awkward conversation about borrowing. It was, in effect, the nation's credit card. Buy now, pay later. Except the interest rate was extraordinary. The total capital value of everything built under PFI was around £50 billion. As of March 2024, there were 665 PFI contracts still running across the UK, with roughly £136 billion in remaining payments stretching out to the early 2050s. These are payments public bodies are contractually locked into. Hospitals, schools, councils, government departments. Paying for buildings that in many cases were constructed twenty or thirty years ago. And the terms are extraordinary. PFI contracts were structured so the private sector would not just build the facility but manage its services. Cleaning. Maintenance. Catering. Portering. These services are bundled into long-term contracts with built-in inflation increases that the public sector cannot renegotiate, cannot exit without paying massive penalties, and often cannot even fully scrutinise because of commercial confidentiality clauses. In one case raised in Parliament, a hospital was charged £333 to change a lightbulb. That isn't an urban myth. It was cited in Hansard. The NHS has been hit hardest. According to parliamentary analysis, the capital cost of NHS PFI projects was around £13 billion. The total repayments are estimated at around £80 billion. And the peak of NHS PFI annual repayments isn't even here yet. It arrives in 2029. The bills are still going up. In 2020-21, NHS trusts paid £457 million purely in interest charges on PFI contracts. Not services. Not maintenance. Interest. In the last five years, NHS trusts have handed over more than £1.8 billion in PFI interest alone. We Own It calculates that money would have covered the starting salaries of over 50,000 new doctors. One NHS trust, Essex Partnership, has reportedly paid back 27 times what was originally borrowed. Some hospitals are spending more on PFI repayments than on medicines for patients. And remember, these repayments come out of the same NHS budget that's supposed to fund patient care, staff, and equipment. Scotland got it just as badly. Audit Scotland reported that Scottish taxpayers will pay a cumulative £40 billion for PFI assets worth just £9 billion. North Ayrshire Council will have paid £440 million by 2038 for four schools that cost £83 million to build. Now here's what makes this worse. Many of these contracts are starting to expire. The buildings are being handed back to the public sector. And the NAO has warned of significant risks around the handback process, including cases where public bodies were dissatisfied with the condition of assets being returned to them. Decades of payments. And some of these buildings may come back needing significant further investment. So what actually happened? The government could have borrowed money at significantly lower rates to build these hospitals and schools itself. Sovereign borrowing has always been cheaper than private finance. Instead, it paid the private sector to borrow at a premium and passed the inflated cost on to the taxpayer. The private sector took the profit. The taxpayer took the risk. The buildings are now ageing. The debts are still being paid. And the services that were supposed to benefit are being squeezed partly because so much of their budget is locked into contractual obligations they cannot escape. PFI wasn't investment. It was an accounting trick. A way for governments to build things without the borrowing showing up in the national debt figures. It made politicians look fiscally responsible while loading future generations with obligations they had no say in and no ability to renegotiate. Both parties did this. The Conservatives created PFI in 1992. Labour massively expanded it after 1997. More than 700 projects were signed. The coalition eventually wound it down. The current government scrapped the latest version. But the contracts remain. The payments continue. And the damage is already done. This is what it looks like when a country chooses to buy its infrastructure on hire purchase instead of investing properly. You lock in above-market rates for decades. You lose control of the assets. You tie the hands of future governments. And when the bill keeps coming due, you're told there's no money for doctors, teachers, or social care. There was always money. It just went somewhere else.

@FOBRacing Mind blowinginly incompetent clown

This is Jane Dodds who is the politician responsible for getting greyhound racing banned in Wales This level of abject incompetence should not be allowed in public service Frightening

@Jennnyyyyyy Or 28

What comes next? 🤔

@Jennnyyyyyy 30

@sophielouisecc Have been saying this for years and was victim of it for many

You know what I think is broken That children of working parents have to pay for holiday club, breakfast club and after school club, in order to be able to keep working when children are off school etc But the children of parents who don’t work, get those things for free even though they don’t need them because they’re home and can look after their children These ‘benefits’ should be for those who work full time. Not the other way round

@Vintage77Ball I’ve said it a million times, Maradona was and always will be the greatest, END OF

When many people debate GOAT between Messi, Ronaldo, or Pele... Maradona comes with a ball at his feet and reminds us all: football is an art, not just statistics. Who do you think is the player with the highest pure talent in history? Maradona or something else?

@HoodedClaw1974 Incompetence off the scale, in what other walk of life would you get away with it

Do you know how many migrants are not following through with their asylum claims and are just going missing?? Watch this and prepare to get angry. What a shitshow.🤬

@MaxineFothergil @AmaxEstates All councils are terrible at replying, out of office e- mails are the norm and nobody ever gets back to you, if a private company was run like that it would be out of business in no time

For 24 years, I have run @AmaxEstates, a small independent business in #Gravesend. I’ve always paid my dues, supported the local economy and worked hard to build something sustainable. Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to resolve a serious issue with my business rates — and despite multiple emails and attempts to engage, I have received no response from @graveshambc I have been told one rateable value (£12,750) which was also confirmed over phones calls, yet billed another (£15,000), resulting in an increase from £147 per month to £642 per month — a rise of over 340% For a small business, this is simply not sustainable. I have also been unable to access the official system to challenge this before the deadline, despite repeated attempts. I am now left in a position where: • I cannot get clear answers • I cannot challenge through the system • I am facing a bill that could put a 24-year business at risk I have also contacted my local MP, @drlsullivan, and to date have received no response. This is not how small businesses should be treated. I am now working with the press to get answers — not just for myself, but because I suspect I am not the only one facing this. If you are a local business experiencing similar issues, please get in touch. This needs addressing. @VOAgovuk @HMRCgovuk @LauraTrottMP #SmallBusiness #Gravesend #BusinessRates #SupportLocal

@Jennnyyyyyy 66

Can you guess what comes next? 🤔

@pollo_va Also Gole, the 1982 World Cup video

𝗛é𝗿𝗼𝗲𝘀, la película oficial del Mundial 86, es por escándalo el mejor registro que exista de una Copa del Mundo. ¡40 años! La edición de Argentina-Inglaterra es insuperable.

@David__Osland Always puzzled me, Government tell you the minimum you must pay to get by, so you’d think that the minimum wage x 37.5 would be what is the minimum pensioners should get, or am I thick

When I started paying National Insurance contributions in 1976, the deal was that I'd get a pension providing for a basic standard of living in a then-unimaginable 50 years' time. But now I've finally got there, it's just half the minimum wage.

@Jennnyyyyyy 20

Can you find the answer? 🤔

@Z9Priv_ He was the greatest I’ve ever seen

You’re lying to yourself if you genuinely believe Cristiano Ronaldo ever played football on this level

@MrPitbull07 Would the map not have blown away at some point

@Labourheartland @NickFerrariLBC They are all so inept it’s worrying, worrying that any sane person would vote for what quite frankly are a load of individuals so incompetent at their jobs that in the private sector they wouldn’t last a month, protected with no accountability 😡😡😡

They Don’t Even Know the Price of Milk You have to take your hat off to @NickFerrariLBC , if for nothing else but asking simple questions to people who should know the answers. 👉Not trick questions. 👉Not political traps. Just the basics. The kind of basics that are the political equivalent of asking the price of a pint of milk or a loaf of bread. And again and again, ministers don’t know. 👉A homelessness minister who doesn’t know how many homeless people there are. 👉A defence minister who doesn’t know how many ships we actually have available. 👉A Business Secretary who doesn’t know how many people are unemployed. 👉A Treasury minister whose answer to a fuel crisis is to offer a website to find cheaper petrol while the government makes millions a day in fuel duty. These are not difficult questions. These are the numbers that define their entire jobs. Imagine a shop manager who doesn’t know his stock. A farmer who doesn’t know how many animals he has. A site manager who doesn’t know how many workers are on site. They wouldn’t last a week. But in British politics, not knowing your brief is normal now. Because modern politics isn’t about running the country. It’s about media lines, slogans, and surviving interviews. This is what managed decline actually looks like. Not bombs and chaos. Not dramatic collapse. Just a slow lowering of standards where the people running the country are less competent, less experienced, and less serious with every passing decade. An ivory tower political class that has never run a business, never managed a payroll, never built anything, never fixed anything, now running an entire country. 👉They don’t know the numbers. 👉They don’t know the scale of the problems. 👉They don’t know the cost of living. 👉They don’t know the price of milk. 👉They don't know the people they are governing. And that tells you everything about the state of modern British politics. Not even a hard question like what's the cost of a pint of milk... #Costoflivingcrisis #FuelPrices #IranWar‌ #LabourOut