straen

The Tories imposed 14 years of austerity on Wales. Voting for Reform would put in power an even nastier replica.

How did Farage - who used to complain about being "skint" - find £225k to "invest" in a Bitcoin company? We now know: a £5m tax-free "gift" from a Thailand crypto king. Which raises huge questions about the methods Big Crypto is using to buy influence... times-comment.com/farage123

Ail drydar @KemiBadenoch ,pwy sa’n meddwl?

🚨 Major FT investigation out today: *Reform UK ran a council for a year. Things went badly * After winning Staffordshire County Council in May 2025 (49/62 seats), the reality has been chaotic. 🤯 Leadership meltdowns, racism scandals, soaring complaints & a tax rise instead of cuts. Think 🤔 before you vote before you drive Reform UK to run your council.

BREAKING: Man who used to march down the street singing hitler youth songs and go up to his jewish classmates and make the hissing sound of gas chambers realises he can use yesterday's antisemitic attack to score some cheap political points and talk about that two-tier far-right conspiracy bullshit. Classy.

@LazyLabourOut @IainDale Or Nigel’s £5 million gift

@IainDale Hope someone asks about Reform's links to Russia

Live from Cardiff at 7pm. If you have a question for our Welsh leaders debate, email it to me now with your phone number. Iain@lbc.co.uk

Farage received £5m from donor before he became MP bbc.in/49bQDqf

What's to celebrate? Harborne lives and pays his taxes in Thailand - his 'charity' involves a secret £5m (!) to Nigel Farage personally. This degree of personal bankrolling and enrichment is unprecedented in our democracy. A scandal hiding in plain sight thetimes.com/comment/column…

Something I hear a lot is that Wales gets a really good deal when it comes to funding in the UK. In some ways that is true. We get about £1.20 for every £1 spent on things like health in England. However, this is only part of the story. Though Wales gets more money per person on things like benefits etc, we are massively underfunded when it comes to Research and Development funding. Wales gets a fraction of UK Gov R&D funding compared to other parts of the UK. This is the sort of investment that actually improves prosperity and drives well paid jobs. Funding Wales gets for health is automatic whereas R&D is where the UK Government gets a choice on spending. Where they have a choice, they choose to shortchange Wales. If Wales was a sick person the current system keeps us on life support and stops us from dying while never allowing us to get better. Without changes to this funding formula, there is no way that whoever forms the next Welsh Government will be able to fix Wales’ problems. R&D funding should be more fairly distributed if this is to truly be a “United” Kingdom.

John Ystumllyn and the rose named after him. He was an 18th century Welsh gardener and is remembered with great affection in north Wales. History belongs to us all.

“Riddled with wrong assumptions”? Then name one. Mr Tice has identified zero errors in our reporting. Hasn’t even tried. Just vague whinging about how unfair it all is.

🚨 WATCH: Labour has released its banned party political broadcast containing quotes from Reform UK politicians

Pancreatic cancer has one of the most suppressive tumor microenvironments in oncology. But two pancreatic cancer results dropped today. Both matter. 1. BioNTech mRNA neoantigen vaccine: nearly all responders still alive at 6 years. 98% of induced T cells were de novo — the immune system learned to see a cancer it had always been blind to. 2. Daraxonrasib: 47% ORR, 92% disease control as first-line monotherapy. KRAS G12D, undruggable for 40 years, finally has a drug. Different mechanisms. Same disease. Both working. <13% of patients survive 5 years. That number is about to change. great day for science! 🔥

Our new report: Richard Tice signed accounts wrongly claiming £98,000 of tax exemptions A 🧵 with the evidence:

Whoever said this to @CamillaTominey is either mistaken or deliberately misleading a respected journalist to deter further scrutiny — we have see no legal complaint from Tice and stand by our reporting.

@Jedirev @MrTCHarris If a majority of a distinct part of a country no longer want to part of the whole,they surely have the right to decide not to part of it?Anything else is compulsion.

@MrTCHarris @straen wEither there's a right to self-determination or there isn't. But my point is agreeing that it certainly should be tied to the devolved legislature. (The weird thing is, that is now Reform's position - which I didn't expect to see. Same position that works for Alliance in NI.)

Yes, this is key: we need to be able to trust Starmer to put the nation's interests first and refuse another referendum. But this five-yearly pantomime of "Will there be an SNP majority? Will there be another referendum?" has got to stop. Until it does, devolved matters won't get a look in.

Nigel Farage took £585,000 from GB News. His MPs declared another £770,000. Four billionaires have spent £170 million building the media machine putting Reform in your living room every night. Today the Guardian exposed them and what they expect in return. This is a political project funded from the top. #ReformUK #NigelFarage #GBNews

Interesting quirk of Welsh national identity is that Romans are romanticised despite being conquerors just like Anglo-Saxons / Normans. Roman general Macsen remembered as father of the nation, dragon on the flag while three feathers on the rugby shirt problematic etc.