Stuart McCarroll 🇪🇺 🇬🇧 🚴🏻‍♀️🛶

🗼WELL I NEVER🗼 Would you believe that Ray and June, who won the Reform UK energy bills prize, go back all the way to the Brexit Party with Farage? Here they are with Farage, Widdecombe and Bull [a truly awful supernatural detective thriller]. What a coincidence [increasingly unlikely] h/t, and thanks to @linfitlass for pointing this out to me. These images are from a Brexit Party rally in Fylde on the 4th May 2019. [credit Getty Images I believe, but Google for me].

Fergal explaining in under 30 seconds what govt has spent two years telling us is impossible. From nationalisation we'd then make the transition to a genuinely, publicly owned, mutualised model.

Yesterday, Reform UK dropped a billionaire bombshell via their pet [paid] media channels. Ben Delo — one of the UK's youngest self-made billionaires, declared that he would re-migrate to the UK in order to donate to Nigel Farage's pension fund. I had questions — I went looking. A mathematician and tech entrepreneur, he made his fortune in cryptocurrency as co-founder of BitMEX alongside two others in 2014. By 2018, he was reportedly the UK's first Bitcoin billionaire. So far, so standard for this type of guy. But when you start reading about those he has donated money to, and the circles in which he moves, things become a bit murkier. There are few firm details about Delo's philanthropy, but among other things, he helped fund Toby Young's Free Speech Union. He maintains a suite of offices called The Sanctuary, close to Westminster Abbey, in which he allows 'guests' to use his facilities for free. Podcasts, office space, networking events. The notorious Triggernometry podcast, hosted by Konstantin Kisin, records from the Sanctuary. From which he told the world that Rishi Sunak could not be British because he is a brown Hindu. Other notable purveyors of Ben Delo's generous office complex are: Rupert Lowe, Ben Habib, Kemi Badenoch [multiple times], Claire Fox [and her Academy of Ideas] and his close friend, Jordan Peterson. A genuine smörgåsbord of right-wing, free speech warriors. Another feature of Delo's philanthropy is his summer party in Westminster Abbey. Attended last year by such notables as Matt Goodwin, Maurice Glassman and Paul Coleman — director of ADF International, the Christian law firm that opposes abortion. When Nigel Farage gave testimony to the US Congress last year, he was flanked by Lorcán Price from ADF. The ADF helped topple Roe V Wade in the US and have cosied up to Farage in recent years. Watch this space for Reform UK's forthcoming anti-abortion stance, I'd suggest. Of course, it's widely reported that Delo pleaded guilty to financial crimes by failing to implement anti-money laundering controls within his company and received a 30-month probation sentence alongside a $10 million fine. In 2025, the crypto president pardoned him. According to the Guardian, Delo has been biding his time, burnishing his reputation since receiving the seal of Trump approval [and by extension, of course, Farage's]. He is now launching himself into the UK political sphere as the latest white knight to attach his steed to Nigel Farage's rickety bandwagon. The timing yesterday was not coincidental, nor was its method of delivery. It's no secret that Reform UK have been fighting to keep the spotlight in recent weeks. Dropping poll numbers testify to that. Farage and Delo coordinated their announcement yesterday to coincide with a lull in the war [supposedly] in order that they maximise the headlines. And it worked. But, as you can see from the examples above, Delo runs in the same right/far-right circles as all the others. Propping up some of the most hardline anti-immigration and Christian Nationalist figures. This isn't a story about money — these people run together. It's an assault on our British freedoms. We need to be VERY wary of them.

Ben Delo was pardoned by Trump last year, after pleading guilty to violating US money-laundering rules via his crypto firm. He's now moving to UK to donate to Reform - in a move set to deepen its financial dependence on crypto-billionaires. My analysis: thetimes.com/comment/column…

“If electricity prices were decoupled from gas, household bills could be reduced by up to £203 a year ... Common Wealth proposes an alternative ‘single buyer model.” Our briefing on how we can protect households from the energy crisis @guardian 👇 theweek.com/environment/re…

Fucking outrageous. And highly illegal. "Trump has grifted his entire life. Now he’s just taking it. The State Department transferred $1.25 billion in foreign aid to Trump’s Board of Peace, pulling $1 billion from international disaster assistance, $200 million from peacekeeping operations, and $50 million from international organizations. Money that Congress authorized for hurricanes and refugees, moved without a congressional vote, into a fund that Trump created by executive order and controls personally. When reporters asked the State Department about it, a spokesperson said they had nothing to announce at this time. The Board of Peace has one defining characteristic. Trump controls it forever. He named himself chairman for life. No audits. No transparency requirements. No conflict of interest rules. Countries pay $1 billion into a fund he runs to get a seat at the table. It has transferred nothing to Gaza, disclosed nothing about its spending, and received $1.25 billion of your disaster relief money without a word of explanation. When he leaves the White House he keeps the fund. That is not a loophole. That is the design." He’s Not Grifting Anymore. He’s Just Taking It. open.substack.com/pub/meidastouc…

Shall we tell her? I was in rehab with a recovering drug dealer whose client list had an entire section for the Cotswolds… this was nearly 21 years ago mind… but if the Daily Mail and Nadine Dorries think the media class and/or the Cotswolds is not awash in Class As they need to get a life…. where do I start? My advice is life is better with no mind altering help and that includes the Daily Mail!

They’ve also contributed to the NHS through NI all of their lives but you want that to be insurance based @Nigel_Farage? 🤷🏼‍♂️

James Dyson is framing his own financial interests as if they were about national security. As farmers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, founders of energy companies, and business leaders we say Dyson is 100% wrong. We millionaires who love the UK say tax us more and tax us now.

85% of Reform UK voters think London is unsafe. 63% of people who actually live here say it is safe. That gap was created deliberately. The dystopia is a lie. #London #ReformUK #Farage #Politics

What will it take for the government to step in and defend households and the environment? Thames Water is insolvent and in breach of its licence conditions since July 2024. The shareholders have walked away. Why should a handful of US hedge funds be allowed to rip off 16 million Thames Water customers while flouting the law? @EmmaforWycombe @Ofwat morningstaronline.co.uk/article/thames…

Reform supporters bewildered with facts

‘I never knew of racist Clacton canvasser, Andrew Parker, the racist candidates Edward Oakenfull or Robert Lomas. I never knew ex-Reform Wales leader and Russian spy Nathan Gill, and I’ve never met the Russian Ambassador.’ Narrator: he knew them all.

In response to Simon Dudley's (@reformparty_uk) recent comments on Grenfell:

This is just sickeningly insensitive. Not an ounce of decency, compassion or respect for the 72 lives lost and wider community. But this isn’t a slip-up or a stumble. This is Reform showing us exactly who they are.

A year ago today, my Private Members’ Water Bill was debated in Parliament. I set out plainly why public ownership is the only way to fix our broken water system. Because privatisation is an outrage. It is an outrage that companies like BlackRock have siphoned off billions from our water system while our rivers have become open sewers. That infrastructure built with public money is crumbling. That entire towns are left without water for days. That people are getting sick - some even dying - from water regulators told us was safe. It is an affront to every value that we claim to stand for as a nation to have let our most precious and fundamental resource become a vehicle for profit extraction. The founding principle of the NHS still holds: some things should be run for need, not profit. Water is one of them. Public ownership delivers cleaner, fairer and cheaper water. That is not just me saying that, it’s the experts. We have the solution; what we’re missing is political will. My Bill didn’t pass. But with the support of tens of thousands of you, we’ve built on it. It’s going to take everything we’ve got to kick the profiteers out of our water. Show your support here: actionnetwork.org/forms/water-be…

NEW: Will Google's AI hype man kill the BBC? I've written about Matt Brittin because the coverage of his time at Google is shockingly naive. The BBC's next DG made his career as a yes man at a rapacious AI monopoly that preys on news journalism in order to destroy it. 1/

This shouldn’t be controversial: water should be publicly owned. I’ve spent years fighting for that in Parliament. Now thanks to the support of tens of thousands of you, we’re gaining ground. Profiteers have their billions. We have each other. Join us: actionnetwork.org/forms/we-can-d…

The most important thing about this amazing Paris transformation is how fast it happened —how fast people on bikes “appeared” —once streets were transformed. You can’t write this off as “#Paris was always this way,” because it wasn’t. It took leadership.

Your fridge runs 24 hours a day. Solar panels only work while the sun’s out. That mismatch is the entire reason this plant exists, and the fix is just hot salt. The Dunhuang plant in China’s Gobi Desert uses 12,000 mirrors aimed at a single tower about as tall as an 80-story building. All that focused sunlight heats a mix of salts (the same stuff in fertilizer) to 565°C, hot enough to glow red. That liquid salt gets pumped into giant insulated tanks. The tanks are so well insulated they only lose about 1°C per day. When the city needs electricity at 2am, the hot salt boils water into steam, the steam spins a turbine, and you get power. Same basic process as a coal plant. Just no coal. Here’s what makes this different from regular solar: the storage lasts 11 hours. Sun goes down, plant keeps running all night. The big batteries that cities plug into their power grids right now? Those typically hold about 4 hours of electricity. Building batteries that last 11 hours is possible, but the cost balloons fast. A German energy storage study found that storing energy in hot salt costs roughly 33x less than storing it in the lithium-ion batteries we use today. China has built 27 of these plants so far, enough to power roughly a million homes. They doubled that number in 2025 alone. Another 3,000 megawatts (enough for about 2 million more homes) are under construction right now, with 4,000 more in the planning stage. Beijing wants 15,000 megawatts by 2030. The US tried this same technology once. Ivanpah, out in the Mojave Desert. Cost $2.2 billion. But they skipped the storage part entirely, so it could only make power while the sun was shining. It needed natural gas every morning just to start up. It’s now slated to shut down in 2026, thirteen years early, because regular solar panels got so cheap they made the whole project obsolete. China took the same idea, added the one part America left out, and is now building dozens of them. One more thing worth knowing. The salt is made from basic industrial chemicals. No lithium mining. No cobalt. No rare earth metals. And it lasts 30 years of daily use before the tanks need work.