@mattforde @novaexhibition I couldn't. Same as I couldn't do tour of Auschwitz. The horror would overwhelm me.
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izzypod
7.2K posts
Everyone needs to go to the @novaexhibition in London.
I have just been and I am completely shaken by what I saw.
As you walk among the tents, awnings and burnt out cars salvaged from October 7, you’re shown footage from the day, filmed by festival goers and bodycam footage of the Hamas terrorists.
The glee with which they murdered innocent people is vile. There’s no glory in it or justification for it.
As well as the brutality and evil of that day, there are also inspiring messages of hope.
If you really want to understand what happened on October 7 and how it felt, please go.
You will l leave deeply affected by it. But also, somehow, with more hope for humanity.
Nova Exhibition@novaexhibition
A festival. A moment in time. Then everything changed. The Nova Exhibition shares the human stories behind that moment, told through those who experienced it. Opening in London from 20 May. Purchase your tickets now: bit.ly/4dxfiIs
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@v_j_freeman @HoraceSpellman9 @willieckerslike And on divorce. DB pensions are worth a lot. Index linked. You look at what you'd have to pay at age 60 for an index linked annuity of £40k. £600k
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@HoraceSpellman9 @willieckerslike Because they’re defined benefit NHS, Education & Civil Service pensions are, I believe. They’re classed as assets when calculating household wealth.
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What’s the biggest wealth asset class in the UK? Property? Financial wealth? No! It’s pensions! And guess what? Up to 40% of the wealthiest owners of this asset class are those in receipt of public sector pensions. The ‘wealthiest’ in the UK inc doctors, teachers, civil servants.
Alex Wickham@alexwickham
EXCLUSIVE: Andy Burnham won’t commit to keeping Labour’s manifesto promises on tax and has opened the door to new tax rises if he becomes PM. His decision to back the current fiscal rules wins him a reprieve from markets, but it limits his options to fund policies like council house-building. It raises the prospect of tax hikes. Asked by Bloomberg if he is committed to Labour’s election manifesto pledges not to raise income tax, national insurance, VAT or corporation tax, his campaign declined to say so. They also didn’t rule out new taxes on wealth. Burnham’s spokesperson says he doesn’t want talk about tax policy during this by-election: “Andy is fully focused on working hard for every vote in Makerfield so he can represent them in Parliament. Andy is not standing on a national manifesto at this election; he is standing to make a difference for the people of Makerfield and to bring the change he has delivered in Greater Manchester to the national stage.” Burnham has recently called for the top rate of tax to be hiked to 50p and a council tax reevaluation to target the wealthy. “We have overtaxed labour and undertaxed wealth,” he said last year. But former Jeremy Hunt SpAd Adam Smith says wealth taxes don’t raise sufficient revenue and it is inevitable Burnham will have to look at the big taxes if he is going to implement bolder policies.
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@BenRamanauskas No, I'm not. I've paid NI from age 21 to age 66 (that's 45 years, thank you very much). I'd have quite a decent pension pot from which to draw my pension. Long term equity returns of 8% pa would see to that. Are you saying the State can't be trusted with our money?
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The only good thing I can see coming from an Andy Burnham premiership is that gilt yields go through the roof, he's forced to resign, the IMF steps in, and we finally get some of this 'neoliberalism' he keeps banging on about.
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Yes, they have. Explicitly since the mid 1920s, recognised in the Labour Govt of 1945. I had to make contributions to top up my wife's pension. What were these but contributions? If you are willing to say that the State lied and is lying now, what else are they lying about? What was NI for (plus a bit of sickness and unemployment if not for old age pensions?
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@izzypod1 That's because they aren't working. No, they haven't paid for it.
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@DuncanStott So, an unelected quango can veto development. Remove veto powers from quangos, or make them democratically accountable.
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Let's be clear - the development was refused due to its scale, nothing to do with affordability percentages. If we can't build at scale next to Zone 2 stations then we'll never get the housing London needs, regardless of the social/market mix.
Peckham Vision@PeckhamVision
SUCCESS! – local people won the Aylesham case. Inspector dismissed the Berkeley appeal against refusal of planning permission. He cited English Heritage objection that it would be ‘an enormous wall of development, thus resulting in harm’. See more here: #May_2026_Huge_Success.21" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">peckhamvision.org/wiki/Aylesham/…
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@BenRamanauskas The State Pension is 50% of a minimum wage employee on a 37.5 hour week. They've paid 40 years for it.
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Unless you've been sniffing glue, I don't know how you can look at the massive taxes, the regulatory burden, the high minimum wage, the price caps on various services, and the very generous State Pension and then claim that the UK has had 40 years of neoliberalism.
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@izzypod1 @Bora_Bingol @OlenaRohoza It’s not. The Turks call that region Anadolu geographically. Anatolia is all in Turkey, but part of Turkey is in Europe too.
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Croatia stormed into the Eurovision final with a song about Ottoman rule and the ancient Christian tradition of tattooing young girls to protect them from Muslim captors.
The song, performed in Croatian, has absolutely nothing to do with the usual “progressive” Eurovision agenda.
It openly condemns centuries of Ottoman Islamic domination over Croatian lands and recalls an old Croatian tradition in which Catholic girls were marked with Christian tattoo symbols in an attempt to protect them from abduction, forced conversion to Islam, and sexual slavery.
The lyrics stating that “many chose the grave because our mothers did not give birth to slaves” were interpreted by many as an act of cultural defiance in an age of self-destructive political correctness — and the audience responded with applause.
Turkey has reportedly already sent official protests regarding the Croatian performers.
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@BMJYorston I thought Labour wanted to build 1.5 million homes in this Parliament. Why was this development rejected?
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We need an immediate shut down of PPEists leading councils until we figure out how they missed all the Economics lectures
Southwark Council@lb_southwark
📣 Southwark Council welcomes news that plans by Berkeley Homes for the Aylesham Centre have been rejected. Berkeley Homes proposed to build 867 homes, including 77 affordable homes, at the site in Peckham alongside retail, leisure and commercial space. Today a planning inspector has dismissed an appeal by Berkeley Homes, saying “benefits do not outweigh the harm to the relevant designated heritage assets important to the area”. Cllr Sarah King, Leader of Southwark Council, said: “This is a great day for Peckham and we welcome the planning inspector’s decision to dismiss Berkeley Homes’s appeal for the Aylesham Centre. “I’d like to personally thank the community who spoke loud and clearly about their concerns. “We shared those concerns and strongly argued at the public inquiry that the scheme was poorly designed and our position has been vindicated. “We will read the appeal in detail and carefully consider our next steps.”
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@izzypod1 @OlenaRohoza What happened to Hitities? Lydians? Frigians?
You are so f*cked up. This is Turkish land, deal with it.
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@Bora_Bingol @OlenaRohoza Why is Anatolia called Turkey?
Because the Turks invaded Christian Anatolia nearly 1000 years ago. Where are the Greeks who were settled in Western Anatolia? What happened to all the Churches? Or the Armenians? Why is Constantinople now Istanbul? Settler colonial Turks is why.
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@OlenaRohoza Just standard hatred policy build with racist lies. Just think a second if Ottomans were colonials like UK, France or Belgium. Ottomans never did that.
And the puny funny part is it’s been hundreds of years.
Get a life.
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@Leedswaccoe76 @v_j_freeman No, that's not the issue. Private sector has social housing obligations imposed on them, that's if they get planning permission in the first place.
Make it easier to build, as was done in the 1950s when the Tories built 300k houses a year and prices will come down.
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@v_j_freeman I agree there will be a lot of practical issues implementing this. But the status quo isn't working. The private sector isn't building enough houses. The real thorny issue is reducing the cost of land or capturing the uplift in value on the grant of planning permission.
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I want a public & private house building bonanza but building council housing runs up against exactly same problems as private housing except tax payer is on the hook for it. Where is this housing going to be built, why isn’t housing being built there already & where’s the money?
Emma Woolf@EJWoolf
Has anyone told him, he hasn't even won the by-election yet
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@paul_d_stevens @v_j_freeman But the infrastructure - shops, doctors, bus, will follow the demand. The problem you identify is the central planners conceit - that everything must be planned. But until after WWII, infrastructure followed growth, and was much more organic.
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@v_j_freeman The money is the least of our worries. The rest are genuine obstacles. For example, there’s a new development on the edge of the village I live in, and another going up. People aren’t happy (including the inhabitants of the first development!). But the real problem is …
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@CapelLofft You can argue about the order.
The Lord of the Rings
In Search of Lost Time is fair.
100 Years of Solitude
Middlemarch is very dull. And why Beloved?
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This list, with some obvious exceptions, is a testament to how ignorant contemporary British liberal 'intellectuals' are of their native literary tradition & what a shallow hold they have on foreign ones despite their pretensions. It has the stink of the A Level reading list
John Podhoretz@jpodhoretz
The Guardian’s panel has chosen the 100 greatest novels of all time and has put BELOVED second. That is among the most ludicrous aesthetic judgments in the annals of Western culture. Embarrassing tokenism.
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UK Police Let a Man Die Because His Killer Said He Was Racist.
Because of course they would.
hotair.com/david-strom/20…
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@SuellaBraverman Peaceful protest? Like all those pro Palestinian, pro Hamas, pro Iran marches, vilifying and threatening Jews?
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The same man who called the majority of the country far-right for daring to be upset after three innocent girls were killed in Southport.
He has no shame.
Keir Starmer@Keir_Starmer
I’ll always champion peaceful protest. But the Unite the Kingdom march organisers are peddling hatred and division. We’ve already blocked visas for far-right agitators who want to come here to spew their extremist views. They don't speak for the decent, fair, respectful Britain I know.
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Southport Hospital staff accessed records to pry.
It won't be just there, or that one occasion.
How can we trust the NHS with our data?
Note.
No-one was sacked.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
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@CutMyTaxUK No, it isn't 'extraordinary'. She's Labour. Just as Labour Durham police found that Starmer's 'pizzagate' did not breach lockdown rules, whereas the Met found retrospectively that cake in No 10 did.
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The Times has quoted various experts who think that Angela Rayner should have issued with a penalty for her failure to pay the right amount of stamp duty. Sean Randall, an independent stamp duty tax expert, said it was “extraordinary” that HMRC had not fined Rayner.
He said: “Penalties can be imposed in two scenarios. A deliberate error, which is akin to fraud, & a careless error, which is akin to negligence. It seemed to me that she was quite clearly careless. One conveyancing firm had warned she get specialist advice, and another firm had recommended it".
“I think if you asked 100 people on the street, 99 would say she was careless by not heeding those warnings. But ultimately, it is HMRC who decides. I find it extraordinary she’s been found not to have acted carelessly.”
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@SalemLola It wasn't in the manifesto.
Ramming it through would be an undemocratic outrage.
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The only assisted dying taking place is that of this useless government, period.
Dignity in Dying@dignityindying
MPs must bring back the assisted dying Bill to restore the public’s faith in Parliament. They have unfinished business - and a democratic commitment to dying people to back this Bill again.
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