ANorris

@labourlewis Russia recruits solders into its military by paying them handsomely, while the rest of the population is left impoverished.

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.

@unherd That’s a pretty low bar for calling him democratic.

“Viktor Orbán is a democrat. He isn’t an autocrat” UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers and Aris Roussinos discuss why the downfall of Viktor Orbán at the hands of Péter Magyar is not the victory for liberal #democracy that many commentators are claiming.

@RupertMyers So true

Dumbest president of all time

@RupertMyers There are many more of them than much of the online world would suggest.

These are the sorts of young boys the world needs

@Raywin @WW3finalboss They made thier own.

@WW3finalboss Spring and Summer should be telling, now's the time to give Ukraine LR weapons.

@GBNews23653867 Garth from wane's world?

🚨These two left a country because they didn't like its government jailing people over social media posts... ...to live in a country who's government jails people for social media posts.

@wil_da_beast630 How can anyone say whether the handling of Iran it's working yet? Way way too soon for any assessment. Remember Iraq and Afghanistan?

Objectively, any normal aggressive person can look at Trump's handling of Iran, Venezuela, the border, and the drug boats, and say "This seems to be working." A high-IQ rabbit that somehow had vocal cords could engage this same tax-payer for a while about "morality" and "empathy," but probably not change the basic conclusion there.

@steve_exotic @KonstantinKisin @GeorgeWept @grok what has Tucker Carlson lied about

@KonstantinKisin @GeorgeWept What has Tucker lied about?

OK, it's time. I want the credit for telling you Candace and Tucker were grifting, lying, manipulative, unprincipled scumbags more than 2 years ago when a lot of you either didn't believe me or criticised me for it. Insert apologies below 👇

@MsMelChen What about if it’s Cuba next, then Panama, Greenland and Canada? After listening to the press conference yesterday I did get the sense that if he could he would.

The internationalist centrist boomer takes are out and as expected, they're furious about the "illegal action" against Maduro and spouting on about international law, saying this gives a green light to the likes of Putin and Xi to attack other countries with impunity. My sweet sweet summer child. One can simply just post the spider man pointing to spider man gif and be done with it. Because international law is kaput. Those who have been paying attention know that we have been at war for YEARS, just not the kind you read about in history textbooks. These are not industrial scale wars with armies but non-state actors locked in low-boil proxy struggles and hybrid campaigns that span the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. These militias, insurgent groups, terrorist organizations, and proxy forces operate with the covert backing, funding, or direction from powerful states who provide them with plausible deniability. This allows sponsoring states to pursue geopolitical goals - territorial influence, resource control, or ideological dominance - without risking direct confrontation or full-scale war. And believe me, they've been pursuing it. The idea that Trump's actions will give Putin a pretext to annex territory (lol) or Xi permission to say, seize Taiwan, is LAUGHABLE. They don't need permission and never did. They act on their own accord, and on their own timeline.

@PhysEngicist @DrewPavlou Well there’s 90–100 countries where elections are rigged, manipulated, or do not provide real choice (including hybrid or semi-competitive systems). That’s about half the world! Trump gives the red carpet to many of these countries.

@andrewhnorris @DrewPavlou I’m tired of these asinine comparisons. The Venezuelan’s already voted for a president. Maduro stayed in as a dictator. It isn’t our goal to install a puppet.

Fuck any leftist making excuses for Maduro right now simply because they hate Trump Maduro runs a murderous brutal dictatorship that completely destroyed Venezuela and sent 7 million people into exile Fuck Maduro and fuck communism

@garyseconomics @JAGrinnell @RoryStewartUK @campbellclaret I've heard you say about yourself that you're one of the world's top economists. Is that true?

@JAGrinnell @RoryStewartUK @campbellclaret He said both.

.@RoryStewartUK @campbellclaret

@MsMelChen @Texamigo Is like tapering for a marathon. The body adapts to what it has been asked to do after you’ve done it. Always take rest during practice

@Texamigo Interesting. This non-linearity fascinates me, and I think that if we can understand what causes it, then we’ll all get better at getting better

I don’t know what this phenomenon is but it is so counter-intuitive. I’ve been working on this Liszt piano piece for months now - it’s a daily grind to get the fingering right, nail the dynamics, memorize the score, etc. Every day you see a little incremental improvement and it’s really very satisfying. Then I stepped away for a whole month because of travel. Didn’t touch a piano the entire time. On returning home, I sat back down at my piano and not only did I NOT regress, I made a… quantum leap?! What is this sorcery?! Why is it that daily practice begets small barely noticeable progress but actually stopping everything - for a while - leads to a giant leap? What’s the reason for this? And does this apply to other human endeavors?

@ultras_antifaa No one seems concerned about Sudan

This video seems to have shocked Zionist supporters and racists across Europe, especially in the UK. It’s truly a powerful video.

@andrew_lilico Incitement to violence

I don't approve of these artists' views or message, but they should be free to express those views in our country & if people want to pay to hear & cheer them, that's up to them. Our commitment to free speech & free expression is only truly tested when we find views we detest.

@RupertMyers @jk_rowling Agreed.

If there was an election for UK president next month and @jk_rowling used this as her poster she’d win

@RupertMyers Absolutely. I can recommend Fauda on Netflix. Not Mossad, but fascinating, shocking and entertaining in equal measure

If Mossad was in charge of stopping the boats crossing the channel, there would be zero boats.

@RupertMyers I find it interesting what the omni-activists concentrate on. No one is saying sailing towards Sudan.

@andrewhnorris That’s only a problem if you think that activism for a cause shouldn’t involve publicising it

Baffled by the outpouring of criticism against Greta Thunberg for trying to go to Gaza. Why aren’t journalists trying to get in? You don’t have to agree with her to admire the fact that she’s not just tweeting, or ripping down posters, or marching thousands of miles away

@MsMelChen I'm assuming your post is tongue in cheek?

In exchange for Britons being able to use the E-gate at airports in the EU, to save 25 minutes of waiting in line, Starmer has given.. 12 YEARS of access to British waters to the EU for fishing Once again privileging cosmopolitan jet setters over working folks & local industry