Graham White, Esq.

@amuse @johnmdonnelly @CNN Which regime?

@johnmdonnelly @CNN You realize that CNN is actively spreading regime propaganda?

Approximate estimates of percentages of U.S. munitions expended in Iran war, per @CNN : 50% THAAD interceptors 50% Patriot interceptors 45% Precision Strike Missiles 30% Tomahawk missiles 20% Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles 20% Standard Missiles (SM-3 and SM-6)

@HussainShafiei lols, safe seat for Labour, no such thing anymore.

Another israeli agent in the halls of the british establishment getting prepared as a councillor before they are put into a safe seat to get in Parliament so they can make sure all votes are for Israel first, not Britain. We are occupied. Yes she is also one of the people who were involved in the abortion hit piece by the BBC panorama program on "antisemitism' crisis" which they manufacturered to attack @jeremycorbyn.

@SpainOnAPlate @miffythegamer OnlyFans I think.

@miffythegamer You can order them?

I’d rather pre-order a prolapsed rectum.

@flying_rodent I'm sure the Sensibles will find a way to either postpone elections or stop young people from voting. The White People World orthodoxy can not be changed in the slightest.

It is incredible to hear these numbers and then hear Sensible politicians and commentators explain it’s time to slash public spending and buy American weaponry for wars. Even if they’re 100% correct, that shit is *poison* that is going to choke them like Game of Thrones Joffrey.

Listening to this has done very little to dispel my perception that what’s happening here is: young women have been paying attention to what has been happening in politics and internationally, in a way that young men have not.

@Muinchille Difference being most medieval countries did chevauchées as part of their military campaigns. For the English a military campaign was just an excuse for the chevauchées. Got to give the nobles an excuse to loot or they started plotting against the king.

@gcw09 In fairness, everyone in Europe did chevauchée. The popes declared crusades mainly to get the proponents to go elsewhere and do it. The English upper class probably did it longer than anyone else, though.

An interesting way to measure wealth. Once England started paying Danegeld in the Viking crisis, it developed a uniquely effective system of exaction from its population, making its nobility & institutions fabulously wealthy and its people very poor. Unlike the rest of Europe, there was no middle class, and no intellectual life or scientific development.

@GyllKing When we phoned relatives in Scotland we had to go through the operator to get a long distance line.

Blast from the past. When we first got a telephone it was this one and it sat in the hall on top of the storage radiator where it was safe because the storage radiator was just for show. It was on a party line & as kids we loved trying to sneak up & eavesdrop on ‘the lady’.

@jemgilbert How many of the authors are LFI?

I've read this and you will be staggered to learn that there is not one proposal here that would move the dial back in Labour's favour by one millimetre and not one sentence that indicates they actually understand what the root causes of the problems are. theguardian.com/politics/2026/…

@flying_rodent Post "but I don't want to cure cancer" dinosaur meme here.

Again: progressive tax hikes on incomes over thirty grand, rising to punitive levels at the very top tier. Boom! Now you can buy as many missiles as you want from American arms companies, and for once it won’t be the least well off getting fucked over. On you go, get started.

@MattStirner @JKWarren234 @DewiMJones @iAmJoshHunt Governments don't borrow money, they sell debt and have to do this even if the current account is in surplus (see Norway,etc) because government debt is bought by banks and other financial institutions and is a vital part of the global financial system.

@JKWarren234 @DewiMJones @iAmJoshHunt I'm sorry MMT happened to you.

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.

@Muinchille The Hundred Years War was basically a series of plunder raids carried out by the English. They even had a name for it - chevauchée.

In Europe, English soldiery were feared above all. They tortured to find money, stole everything that wasn't nailed down, and burnt the rest. Ruled by a French speaking nobility, they hated foreigners, blaming them for their poverty. Such theft was their only hope of wealth.

@LilyBolt38c @KarishmaPatel99 @TheGreenParty Interesting how the racists have come up with new euphemisms for their racial slurs. Low IQ = not white Low IQ inbred = South Asian. Think Trump started it.

@KarishmaPatel99 @TheGreenParty Oh look a low iq inbred who is still talking about a fake genocide! Tell me how you are moral when you only ever speak out against Jews???

The Mail has included me in a hit piece on @TheGreenParty. Their criticism? That I left the BBC over its coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Let me be clear: I’m proud I left and I stand by everything I’ve said (I’m also not entirely sure they needed to use this photo…)

@WarriorSpeech28 lols, I'm so old that I can remember as an underage drinker going in a rough city center pub in Leeds and getting a pint of Tetley's bitter for 10p.

Last night I walked into a quiet little village pub. Just low beams, old carpet and a bloke in the corner who’s probably been sat on the same stool since 1998. I ordered a pint, nine quid, got the missus a large wine. Fifteen quid for two drinks. I just stood there for a second like I’d accidentally ordered shares in the building. I remember being 20 and getting pints for £2.50. The economy is so cooked we’re paying luxury prices for nostalgia.

@flying_rodent @Rulkuch Had forgotten all about Mark, had to go on Wiki to see what became of him. Interesting the number of countries he's barred from.

@Rulkuch Famously thought she was creating a country for prudent men like her father; actually created a Utopia for thieving bastards like her son.

We have tested this shit to destruction. How are you enjoying your nice town, your clean river, your cheap consumer goods, the house you own, your good quality employment, intelligent boss, your merit-based career, your driverless car and your labour-saving computer companion?

@paulmasonnews Still not going to get selected for a safe seat.

The Green Party has become a magnet for antisemites. The Labour left learned the hard way how to deal with that - seems Zack isn't bothered - and thousands of decent Green Party members now getting the reputational blowback ...

@martinrw PS I'm not a member now because I now live in Spain, no other reason. If I was still in the UK I would definitely support Zack.

@martinrw As someone who was a long time member of the GP it's noticeable that older members who have left because of "extremism" turn out to be transphobes, homophobes or zionists, or all three, mentioning no names.

This is such nonsense. Are a few older figures with the party slightly miffed at Polanski's approach? Possibly. But traditional green voters are not going to start voting for the Tories, Reform or Starmer. They know that the Green Party is still a green party. More to the point, even if a handful of them inexplicably quit the party, why would Polanski care, considering the massive overall increase in membership and polling?

What if Britain were ever to elect a loud, belligerent idiot and his clown allies on a platform of incredibly destructive policies and plainly fraudulent promises, with an explosion of all-channels McCarthyist screaming accusation and regime opponents publicly hounded

@dalesdipstick @Richard00487851 It was imaginatively called "Here's Harry" originally then changed to "Harry Worth". Over 100 episodes in total.

@Richard00487851 Harry worth. That’s it, can’t remember the name of the sitcom and its proper bugging me

This came up out on the bikes today. Reminiscing: Did your Dad do this, and without cheating, who was it?

@PogoSkyBlues42 @Richard00487851 Nearest and Dearest is also much underrated imo.

@Richard00487851 I thought this was Harry Worth. He's one of a number of the big stars of the 60s that never get a mention nowadays. Charlie Drake is another. Its interesting how posterity gives a false account of the past. Noddy Holder always points out Slade sold more records than T-Rex/Bowie..

@ejhchess @mynnoj Brilliant film, Vincent Price allowed to be at his absolute haminest.

@mynnoj You know Theatre of Blood, where Vincent Price and Diana Rigg have the former's critics killed off, each in a manner taken from Shakespeare? I'm thinking somebody wants to find a way of doing the same with the writers of articles like this.

Imagine what a monumental prick you would have to be to write this piece. Imagine what a monumental prick you would have to be to publish it. Imagine what a monumental prick you would have to be to agree with it.