mademoiselle clio

Whichever way you look at it, and whatever transpires, Farage is corrupting British politics

Absolutely incredible work by Martin Rowson for @BylineTimes

@JackWDart But the story here is not whether Starmer's government is being fairly represented. You make great points about the relentless negativity, which is clearly unbalanced. It's the MONEY££ that pays for the negative press and protects Farage. All energy and spotlight on that please!

The media has convinced you that Keir Starmer is the worst Prime Minister in history. They're lying to you.

@archer_rs On the BBC, there is literally no mention of Ben Habib's accusations about Farage. A story with direct implications for UK democracy and how many votes Reform received at last week's election. Instead, wall to wall coverage on 'pressue' on Starmer. News = pressure.

The actions of the British media illustrate the urgent need for not only the full implementation of Leveson Two but also its extension to social media and digital news reporting. The British people should choose their leaders not a cabal of overseas media owners and the BBC.

This should be the most important story right now Labour MPs are just not very good are they

@supertanskiii Well said. I think it's great if Labour come under enormous pressure from this public vote, but we as country should also be looking at the other hugh Elephant in the room story, which is: does the fact that Reform are doing so well have to do with their dodgy funding?

Labour needs to change tack FAST. It’s made some catastrophic decisions which are definitely a factor in why support for fringe parties is surging. I’ve had my head in my hands repeatedly. Equally, I’ve never seen any other government face the removal of a PM since day one.

Unpopular opinion? I don’t think Starmer should go. 1. Emulating a revolving door of hapless have a go c*nts set by the Tories will help nobody. 2. The man made hysteria playing out isn’t just undignified but has fuck all to do with politics or what’s right for Britain.

This is indeed extraordinary. It's all very well cheering on Labour's evisceration - but shouldn't everyone be questioning why Reform are having so much success? - it's because of this MONEY! And the guy whistleblowing is a Brexiteer!!

If you missed picking up a copy at Kite Day yesterday, our Colouring Book is available to download from our Blog Page! Link here - streathamhilltheatre.org/fosht-colourin…

Putting herself in the history books 📚 Ceylon was the winner of the 1st ever Brit Saylor award for showing unwavering commitment, passion and pride in representing our football club. Congratulations Ceylon 🙌

He lives in Thailand. He goes by a Thai name. He holds 12% of Tether - a cryptocurrency that made $13bn last year. He has given Farage and Reform £22 million. He gave Farage £5m personally before he stood for parliament. After last night's historic results, this is the most important background read in British politics. Full story 👇

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.

What seems to be annoying Delo is this account of his conviction published by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/f…

Wow. I’ve just received a threatening letter from Ben Delo’s solicitors Addleshaw Goddard. They are claiming, among other things, that it is unlawful to publish information about Delo’s conviction for an anti-money laundering offence in the US. They also say I cannot publish their letter. An extract is below. Is Delo going to get his solicitors to threaten everyone who mentions his conviction? How is this not a SLAPP? @sra_solicitors @DanNeidle

This is a brilliant investigative piece on Farage, the dark millions behind him and the double standards of so much British journalism. Read and retweet! Nigel Farage pocketing £5m from a donor shows he’s unfit for power app.prospectmagazine.co.uk/story/73421/co…

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@SteelySeabirder An adventure! Brilliant! Can you show us a map of where you're going?

On my travels…

@BassTunedToRed Well done, Beez! You worked hard for it!

Some news. My freelance life is over. I'm going to be a Data Visuals Journalist in sport for The Guardian. Starting next month. From a hobby to a job to a national newspaper. It's been a journey. And it's only just starting.

@robbohuyton @SkySportsNews @spiritofshankly Very admirable. What an eloquent young man you are becoming!

📺 Spoke to @SkySportsNews re LFC ticket prices.

@mizgans But it's all about opinions. Hahahahahahahahahahaa! It's actually all about what someone saw on telly the other night and how much they enjoyed it - to which I say, fair enough - but that's no more meaningful than a meme on tiktok.

I mean at this pt this is a tournament-based performance award rather than rewarding someone who was consistently good throughout the season. Dembele has played 19 league games and we are almost in May. Lol