Ricardo 48

@truemagic68 The Establishment never acted on Brexit other than to stall its implementation and continue with all the rules regulations and ECHR etc. THE UK GOT BRINO INSTEAD Which has been the real disaster,together with our wonderful Uniparty govts these last 10 years.

Bank of England Governor, Andrew Bailey quoted in Telegraph today - "A decade of Brexit has been bad for the economy!" Really? What about Covid, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and a massive energy crisis? Surely they must have played more than a spear-carrying role?

@LizWebsterSBF The country needs a general election before it goes bust under this govt of PPE clowns. Starmer like Gordon Brown is bequeathed a legacy of utter failure but he knows he will be richly rewarded in future with high profile international positions and huge monetary rewards.

‼️ Reports of Starmer’s anger - threatening to resign his own seat to create chaos for a Burnham suggests a mix of arrogance (refusing to accept the writing on the wall) and vindictiveness (wanting to damage the party or successor rather than facilitate a smooth transition). It’s not the behaviour of someone putting country or party first at a moment of crisis. It risks making the exit even messier and further damaging Labour’s reputation. The country needs a clean, orderly transition. @AndyBurnhamGM has the mandate from Makerfield to deliver real change. No more drama. Time to move forward for the country.

@AllForProgress_ In other words Andy Pandy is a Communist Manchester has a budget deficit of £ 1.6 billion FYI. Manchester is also one of the UKs proud capital cities that has covered up the revolting criminal Pakistani rape /murder gangs under Andys not so watchful eye. Just saying!

The government got a nice warm lie to tell us this week. GDP per head edged up, and I anticipate you will be hearing about it from ministers, from the Treasury, from every commentator who has a stake in the prevailing status quo. Of course, I don't generally need to tell you that it's bollocks. It will already have dissolved on-contact with the circumstances of your lives. If you need further proof of its meaninglessness, hold it against the rest of the week's figures. Consumer confidence is at its lowest since 2023. Youth unemployment has hit 16.2%, the worst in over a decade. Hundreds of thousands of payrolled jobs have gone since Labour took office. And the rent, the weekly shop and the standing charge are taking more money out of your pocket every week, wholly indifferent to the one statistic Downing Street wants to talk about. There's an insult buried in it. The message that travels with that lonely good number is always the same: things are improving, and if you cannot feel the improvement, that's your fault. You're too negative. You have caught the national gloom. You need, as every minister puts it eventually, to talk the country up. It's gaslighting raised to the level of statecraft, telling a man that the figure at the bottom of his own bank statement is a failure of attitude. Naturally, the public is correct; it is their curse and burden that they cannot be but correct. They know to the last pound what they can no longer afford, and are sick of being talked around the shortfall. And none of it is weather. The cost of living in Britain is a policy with authors, not a misfortune that befell us - the taxes loaded onto employers and passed straight to the till, the levies stacked on every energy bill, the regulation that lifts the price of a weekly shop. Someone chose this, decision by decision. It can be chosen differently. Which brings me to the man now odds-on to take charge of it. Andy Burnham won his seat on Thursday and is the bookmakers' favourite to be in Downing Street by the autumn, and the whole pitch of a Burnham government is feeling. Where Starmer is cold, Burnham is sort of warm, if in a still fundamentally untrustworthy sort of way. Where Starmer lectures, Burnham 'listens'. Yet I myself was rooting for Burnham's efforts to be frustrated. Why? Because as bad as Starmer is, Burnham is even worse. Worse, first, because his actual economics is more of the very thing that built the squeeze. The 'soft-left' programme Burnham embodies means more spending the country cannot fund, more borrowing the markets will price in, more tax to chase it, more of the regulatory weight that sits on every business and lands on every receipt. He would add to that burden, not lift it. So do not be consoled by the change of face that is coming. The country needs a Prime Minister who stops inflicting the pain, not one who feels it more sincerely; one who tears the engineered costs back out of the bills and lets people keep what they earn. A decent bedside manner feeds nobody. A man who understands exactly how hard your life has become and means to carry on making it harder is not your friend, however kindly he says it. The public worked that out long ago. They can tell the difference between being helped and being held still while the injection is administered.

@GuidoFawkes UK £3 trillion debt Not a penny of it ever paid back Just rolled over with an ever increasing debt interest cost Politicians promise the world to a childlike electorate and deliver all round poverty instead. BECAUSE they have run out of spending other people's money!

One of the advisers Team Burnham brought on to reassure the bond markets, Jim O’Neill, calls for more borrowing on Sky News: “I think you just need to be bolder about borrowing to invest. A lot of people right now, given Britain's history for 30 years or more, think any kind of borrowing just means wasted money. But if you borrow for things that have really positive multiplier effects.”

@InTheTrenchesUK Communists always burn everything to the ground It's their specialist project

THE DOSSIER #16: Ed Miliband – The Catastrophe Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (since July 2024) | One of the most senior figures in Keir Starmer's Cabinet | Responsible for the government's green energy and net zero policies. Born 1969. London. The son of Ralph Miliband. The Marxist academic who hated Britain. The father who taught you to despise the nation that gave him refuge. You learned well, Ed. You learned to loathe. Oxford PPE. First Class. Then LSE. Then Harvard. The elite's conveyor belt. The establishment's perfect student. You have never worked outside politics. Not one day. Not one hour. Affiliations: Former Chair of the Young Fabians. Launched your leadership bid at the Fabian Society. Unite the Union delivered you the crown. TUC Congress regular. Your wife was Vice President of the TUC. The union block vote that stole the leadership from your own brother. The backroom fix. The puppet with many strings. Researcher for Harriet Harman. Special adviser to Gordon Brown. MP for Doncaster North 2005. A safe seat in a leave-voting town. You ignored them. You ignored everything they wanted. You stabbed your own brother. David Miliband. The better man. The elected man. You used union votes to steal the leadership in 2010. The Fabian Society platform. The Unite barons delivered you. "Red Ed." The puppet. You led Labour for five years. Five years of opposition. Five years of the bacon sandwich. The 2014 photograph. The open mouth. The staring eyes. The moment the nation saw you for what you are. A man who cannot eat a sandwich. A man who cannot lead. You promised to control immigration. You put it on a mug. "Controls on immigration." Then you campaigned for free movement. Then you campaigned for Remain. Then you demanded a second referendum. The mug was a lie. Everything was a lie. The Ed Stone. 2015. You carved your pledges into stone. Eight feet tall. The hubris. The vanity. The ridicule. You lost the election. You lost Scotland. You lost the working class. You lost to David Cameron. You resigned in disgrace. You returned as Shadow Business Secretary. Then Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. The climate zealot. The net zero fanatic. You want to ban oil and gas. You want to ban petrol cars. You want to ban gas boilers. You want to freeze pensioners to save the planet. You took £30,000 from a green energy firm. You took hospitality from climate lobbyists. You took flights to COP summits. You preached sacrifice while you flew. You preached net zero while you emitted. The hypocrisy is total. You are the man who cannot eat a sandwich. You are the man who cannot win an election. You are the man who cannot keep a promise. You are the man who cannot lead. Your career is over. Your credibility is ash. Your energy secretary post is a corpse that has not yet fallen. Congratulations. You are The Dossier. Your betrayal of Britain is complete.

@HonestHalo Sadly we're a broken country with a political Establishment that makes Venezuela look stable. We have to crash and burn as everything is out of control,particularly spending on vanity projects,net zero and immigration. There is no way that this can continue as UK is bankrupt

Britain voted for a profound break from decades of division not a perpetual leadership merry go round. The mandate given to Keir Starmer and Labour Party was a promise of steady, long-term national renewal. Yielding to internal fractures or coordinated pressure campaigns only serves those who wish to see the UK destabilized. True strength means standing firm, uniting the party, and delivering the stable Labour government the British people trusted to lead.

@JChimirie66677 @MattHarperUK @FlapZappa Communists always the same kind of stupid. Govt by overgrown children for people who behave like children. All the parties call for change,but nothing ever changes. A pantomime of unending farce and utter chaos to the detriment of the nation.

That logic is exactly the trap that delivers landslides like Makerfield, and it's worth examining closely because it gets the strategic picture badly wrong. Voting Burnham in to remove Starmer assumes Burnham is the lesser evil. He is not. Starmer is a managerial centrist constrained by his own caution, his fiscal rules, and a party he doesn't fully control. Burnham is a committed figure of the soft left with a record of expansive public spending commitments, a stated desire to scrap fiscal discipline in favour of a land tax and looser borrowing, and allies who have confirmed he would scrap first past the post for proportional representation specifically to lock in a permanent progressive coalition. He's not a moderate alternative to Starmer. He's what the left of the Labour Party gets when it finally gets the leader it actually wanted. The voters who backed Burnham to be rid of Starmer have not removed a problem. They have upgraded it. A Burnham government would be more ideologically committed, more comfortable with state intervention, more aligned with the public sector unions, and considerably harder to dislodge given the institutional changes his allies are already planning. Getting rid of Starmer was never the strategic prize. It was the bait. The real prize, for those who designed this succession, was replacing a cautious, electorally damaged centrist with a true believer who has a twenty point mandate and a plan to change the voting system before anyone can challenge him again.

The Right Lost Big In Makerfield And Won Big In Aberdeen. The Difference Is Discipline. Andy Burnham won Makerfield with 54.8% of the vote and a 9,231 majority. Reform finished 20 points behind. Every poll in the run up to Thursday had this as a close contest. Survation had Burnham at 43 and Kenyon at 40. The actual result was not close. It was a landslide. The temptation is to explain this away with the vote split argument that has anchored analysis of this seat for weeks. Restore took 7%, almost double what senior Reform figures predicted on the night, taking real votes from Kenyon in a seat the right needed. That fracture is real and Farage himself called the result disappointing, urging Restore voters to think again. One in 15 Makerfield voters backed a party that did not exist a year ago. That is not a footnote. It is the central fact a divided right now has to reckon with. But 20 points is too large a margin to be explained by a 7 point third party alone. Something else moved. The most plausible explanation is the one the smaller parties' vote share points toward. A consolidation of left of centre support behind Labour, motivated less by enthusiasm for Burnham than by a determination to keep Reform out, would explain a meaningful share of a swing this size. The same instinct that delivers tactical voting at general elections, where Green and Lib Dem voters routinely back Labour in marginal seats to stop the right, appears to have operated here at scale. Burnham's own personal standing is also a genuine factor. Farage compared him to Boris Johnson's personal popularity as London mayor, a fair comparison. The same night told a very different story in Scotland. In Aberdeen South, contested simultaneously, the Conservatives gained the seat from the SNP with 49.5% of the vote, a 25.1 point swing. Reform finished a distant third on 8.6%. Labour collapsed to 5.4%. Where Makerfield saw the left consolidate around Labour, Aberdeen South saw the right consolidate almost entirely around the Conservatives. The contrast is instructive. Aberdeen South suggests consolidation on the right is achievable when one party is clearly the dominant challenger and the contest is framed around a question, in this case the Union, that unites right of centre voters more naturally than immigration policy currently does. Makerfield suggests that where Reform and Restore are both viable options, the right of centre vote splits exactly as the arithmetic always predicted it would, while the left, faced with the same choice between Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens, consolidates instinctively around whichever party can win. What should worry the right is not which seat is more representative. It is that both outcomes point toward the same underlying truth. A divided right loses even where it should win. A unified right, as Aberdeen South shows, can still deliver landslide victories against a collapsing SNP and an even more collapsed Labour. The difference between the two results is not the public mood. It is discipline. Burnham now returns to Westminster with a comfortable majority and a clear path toward a leadership challenge. Starmer has confirmed he will not walk away and will stand if a contest is triggered. The mayoral by-election to replace Burnham will now be fought under the supplementary vote system rushed through the Lords two days before this result, a system designed to allow exactly the kind of left consolidation that may have just delivered this landslide. Restore took 7% in Makerfield and will not disappear. Aberdeen South proves the right can still win decisively when it is not competing against itself. The question facing Farage, Badenoch and Lowe is not whether the public wants change. Aberdeen South answers that emphatically. The question is whether they can stop handing seats like Makerfield to a party the country has already rejected. "The Right Lost Big In Makerfield And Won Big In Aberdeen."

@toadmeister The defence of the realm should be shouldered by both the public and private sectors as per the US Net Zero,our laughable defence incapability, and illegal immigration proves that you can't trust govt to get anything right no matter how much money you throw at them

After defence secretary John Healey quit over the under-resourcing of the Armed Forces, Paul Homewood has a simple solution: scrap Net Zero, then Britain can easily meet its military obligations and needs. dailysceptic.org/2026/06/17/scr…

@mrdanwalker The BBC is the Communist equivalent of Pravda. Lies are truth!

I’ve had lots of messages from very worried former colleagues at the BBC. The corporation’s news operation is respected around the world but for many, this latest announcement about major cuts and job losses feels like the ‘managed decline’ of a trusted institution and a huge hit to morale. The direction of travel is one of reasons why, whenever I get asked if I miss the BBC, I say that I miss the people and I miss working with my friends. I do not miss the mess.

@afneil The west should leave Iran alone. It's a huge energy rich country with 90 million people supported by Russia & China.Its a BRICS member and has lost all trust in the Great Satan.If Israel wants to slug it out with Iran forever & a day let them go to it There can only be 1 winner

JD Vance peddling the line that the deal will work because Iran has the chance, even minded, to become a ‘normal country’. You’d think after 47 years America would have learned this won’t happen as long as the country is in the grip of hardline Islamist generals/mullahs — which, after Trump’s failed war, it still is, in fact, more so than ever.

@KemiBadenoch Compare and contrast the genius of American tech and corporate success with that of the UK/EU. OR ASIA for that matter. THe last thing we need is a govt led economic revolution,the latter has proved its incompetence time after time

@KemiBadenoch Over the last two decades our financial institutions have been rescued by the taxpayer on at least two occasions &that includes the BOE.Easy money ever increasing national debt by crazy govt spending does nothing to inspire the investor confidence that is so necessary 4 growth.

Over the last two decades, our financial institutions have been hollowed out. More and more regulations has been piled on with the best of intentions, but it’s killing our competitiveness. Our growth has stagnated due to red tape and unnecessary bureaucracy. And we are all paying the price with higher costs and worse public services. We need an economic revolution, so today I will lay out the Conservatives first steps to unleash our economic powerhouse and get Britain working again.

@KathrynPorter26 @JamesMelville @AllisonPearson @Ed_Miliband @ClaireCoutinho The milli legacy is the deliberate economic destruction of the UK economy on the instructions of the UN Sustainable 2030 Agenda and the WEF which by way of its billionaires is the paymaster to almost every useless MP in the House of Traitors. That's how it works Winston!

@JamesMelville @AllisonPearson What he's doing to the entire UK economy is vandalism The Miliband legacy will be economic destruction. He's not saving the world he's creating an economic wasteland and will be remembered as one of the most dangerous people ever to hold high office @Ed_Miliband @ClaireCoutinho

What Ed Miliband has done to the local economy in Aberdeen is absolutely disgraceful. He has choked off the oil and gas economy because of his net zero claptrap. Absolutely shameful.

@afneil Great win for Iran. Israel will have to pursue its own odious policies in the Middle East on its own in future. US has now found out its own limits as a superpower. China and Russia will continue with BRICS as they can't trust the west. EU/UK are collapsin irrelevant nonentities

President Trump has signed his ‘treaty’ with Iran in, of all places, Versailles. Which is fitting since Versailles 2.0 likely to be as disastrous as Versailles 1.0. The deal allows for an immediate resumption of Iranian oil exports, worth $60 billion a year to the tyrants of Tehran. That’ll buy a lot of new missiles, arms for terrorist proxies and equipment to enrich uranium, as Trump’s attention wanders far from the Gulf. Already this week, several oil-laden Iranian tankers have steamed out of port and across the U.S. naval blockade line, an early indication of the rush of anticipated exports.

@SamCKx So why ask for a passport ? Who do I trust with that request? This is Communist state surveillance as per 1984. Giving this kind of information to the vicious Starmer govt is the abandonment of all our freedoms. British people will leave thisrotting country in droves cos of this

The biggest lie being spread about age verification is that it’s some backdoor for the government to see everything you do online. That’s simply not how modern age verification works. I’ve worked with KYC, AML and age verification systems for years. In nearly all cases, the age check acts as a gatekeeper. It confirms you’re old enough to access a service, then keeps that information ring-fenced within a secure, encrypted system. The website gets a “yes” or “no” answer. It doesn’t suddenly hand the government a list of every site you visit or every video you watch. The entire point of modern verification technology is to prove eligibility while sharing as little personal information as possible. In many systems, even the verification provider itself has extremely limited access to user data. People are entitled to debate whether age verification laws are a good idea. But the claim that verifying your age for a website automatically creates a government surveillance database of your browsing history is misinformation from people who either don’t understand the technology or are deliberately trying to create outrage. Argue the policy if you want. Just argue the reality, not the conspiracy theories.

@TrisOsborneMP CPLIES

Second month in a row with inflation coming in lower than expected - with the fall last month sustained. The right wing war in the Middle East has pushed up some prices but overall inflation in the UK has fallen this year while it has risen in other peer economies.

@BigBrotherWatch Governments throughout the world are pursuing IDs and social media controls.Thats what comes naturally to Communists ,they love surveillance states and all its controlling features.

📱There's no such thing as a social media ban for under-16s It means we will ALL face a “papers, please” demand to get online. Holding platforms to account and giving parents the tools they need are the answer for child safety - not government-issued bans and digital ID checks for all.

@johnadgrady Another policy failure in the making by the dumbest government this country has ever had.

This UK Government is taking bold action to keep kids safe and happy by banning social media for under 16s. The Government’s action will give children their childhoods back and protect them from online features that bring the most harm.

@JChimirie66677 @SJXT1 @ppainsworth Zthis govt and the entire left wing Establishment. It should be remembered that Communist govts always collapse in total ruin,loathed by its people.

That's a fair point and the Thatcher analogy is a good one. She came to power having watched Heath's government collapse under the weight of exactly the compromises she refused to make, and that experience shaped both her diagnosis and her resolve. Failure observed closely enough does harden the lesson in a way that theoretical commitment doesn't. The question is whether the failure has been properly internalised or merely repackaged. Thatcher didn't just observe the Barber Boom, she drew the correct conclusions from it and held them under sustained pressure for years. The test for any politician claiming the same journey isn't the diagnosis they offer in opposition. It's whether they hold the line when the permanent state, the Lords, the media and their own backbenches push back simultaneously, as they always do, and always will. Experience is an advantage. But only if the lesson learned is the right one, and only if the resolve to act on it survives contact with power. That's the part nobody can know until it's tested.

An Iraqi Too Westernised to Deport. A Nigerian Too Possessed. An Albanian Not Extreme Enough. This Is the System Philp Wants to Dismantle. Chris Philp announced something this week that deserves more attention than it has received. Leave the ECHR. Repeal the Human Rights Act. Abolish the immigration tribunal system entirely. Replace it with Home Office decisions subject to a quick internal appeal. The only remaining route to court would be judicial review on a single ground, that the government had acted outside its legal powers. Philp estimates this would remove 98 percent of immigration cases from the courts. Judge the policy on its own terms, because the cases Philp cites are real and devastating. An Iraqi drug dealer avoided deportation because a judge ruled he had become too Westernised to safely return. A Nigerian armed robber assessed as presenting a high risk of serious harm to the public won his appeal because mental healthcare in Nigeria was deemed inadequate and he might be considered possessed there. An Albanian burglar with 50 convictions was allowed to stay because a judge decided his offending was not very extreme. These are not edge cases. 93 percent of small boat arrivals whose claims are decided are permitted to stay. Only 12,000 failed asylum seekers were removed last year against 80,000 rejected applications. Twenty thousand foreign criminals who should be deported by law remain in Britain. Philp's diagnosis is correct. The problem is not that Parliament has failed to legislate. It is that whatever Parliament legislates, ECHR jurisprudence and a tribunal system staffed in part by judges with documented backgrounds in open-borders advocacy will find a way to reach the same outcome. Shabana Mahmood's reforms, restricting Article 8 to immediate family, a 28 week appeal limit, a single appeals body, operate entirely within that framework. Philp's point, that Labour is tinkering, is hard to dispute when the tinkering leaves intact the legal architecture that produced the Iraqi, the Nigerian and the Albanian rulings in the first place. Reform's own proposals go further in one respect, an outright bar on asylum claims for anyone arriving illegally. On the core mechanism, removing the courts from the centre of immigration policy and returning the decision to elected ministers, the two parties are not describing different destinations. They are describing the same destination by routes that converge. Which is why the silence around this announcement is worth examining. A policy this radical, more radical in its institutional implications than anything Labour has proposed, has been almost entirely absorbed into the noise of Belfast, Makerfield and the social media ban. The government's response, that this is far too late and that Labour has already announced a system addressing this, is not really a rebuttal of the policy. It is a rebuttal of the messenger, and it works because it's not wrong about the messenger. The Conservatives had 14 years and the Boriswave happened on their watch, with Philp himself serving as a minister inside that government. That history is real and it matters. But it doesn't make the policy wrong, and the people most likely to privately agree with it, Reform voters who have spent years insisting the Conservatives are part of the problem, are the least able to say so without seeming to concede the argument that got them to Reform in the first place. That's not a comment on the policy. It's a comment on how thoroughly trust has collapsed, to the point where the right answer and the credible messenger for it currently belong to different parties, and voters are left choosing between the two rather than getting both. Philp is right about the courts. Whether anyone believes him is now a separate question from whether he's correct.

@JChimirie66677 @SJXT1 @ppainsworth The apparatus of the Communist surveillance state of GBR will have to be dismantled by the revolt of the people & a leader who is in tune with them.Farage could be the man as he speaks for the white working man & middle class,all of whom know that they are actively hated by