Mark

The inconvenient truth of our times. 👇 "In the final analysis, these infringements generated negligible public health benefits while imposing a set of massive costs on society." #lockdown #CovidEnquiry

What was long suspected is now proven. Attorney General Hermer has been part of a group of ideologically-motivated, government-embedded, Human Rights lawyers that have acted in a vexatious and biased way to persecute British soldiers, not because they broke the law, but to serve some twisted anti-military, anti-British agenda. They, their greed (the made a lot of money doing it), and their crippling ideology, have deliberately misapplied the 1988 UK Human Rights Act to British military operations in ways that not only create a never-ending conveyor belt of Veteran persecutions but also fundamentally undermine Britain’s ability to wage war and thereby defend itself. For the love of Country, he must step down.

@louismosley @TaylorColumnist @_BoldPolitics @ZackPolanski You should sue.

@ZackPolanski - this is magnificent. Three things I can’t deny: 1. It is a video. 2. You are wearing a jacket. 3. Then you aren’t. 4. Then you are again. Unfortunately that’s where the accuracy ends. A few corrections for you: Peter Thiel is not our CEO. Alex Karp is — and has been for 20+ years. (A lifelong Democrat, for anyone keeping score.) We are not a “spyware company.” Spyware is malware. Malware is illegal. Calling a software company spyware is, technically, defamatory (don’t worry, we are not suing). We don’t build surveillance technology. We build software that helps organisations make sense of data they already hold. Not the same thing. There was no “private tour” of our HQ. There was a public photocall to which the media came. Hence, why there are so many pictures of the event. Our MOD contract is not “the biggest defence contract in UK history.” Ajax armoured vehicles = £5.5bn. Dreadnought submarines = £31bn. We’re grateful for the work, but let’s keep a sense of scale. We have no more access to NHS data than Microsoft has to the contents of your Word documents. I think you know this by now. We don’t have access to patient medical records. Same story. I agree that “nothing matters more than our health.” Which makes it worth reminding you of what Palantir’s software is actually doing in the NHS right now: ->110,000 additional operations ->15% fewer delayed hospital discharges ->7% more patients finding out within 28 days whether they have cancer Respect again for what you did with that jacket.

Time to take the fight to Palantir.

@MichaelLCrick @DavidVidecette Tweet aged well.

In two to three years time, when Starmer and his government are no doubt deeply unpopular, I hope we in the media will ask ourselves: "Why were we so supine during the long 2024 election; why didn't we hold Labour properly to account while we could, and ask more probing questions, and explore their records, rather than give them such an easy ride?".

There's an entire industry of lawyers and charities who are making a fortune by helping people break into our country, and cheat our immigration system. These lawyers are aiding criminal behaviour. They must be struck off and prosecuted. Kemi is absolutely right.

The UK, I am afraid to say, is in the midst of a full blown moral panic over new communications tech. This is like blaming TV, video games, or Socrates for “corrupting the youth.” This is an old movie, seen many times before, but this is getting absurd. The UK needs to get real

@tom_watson @DeborahMeaden If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. 🌉

He is many things but Keir Starmer is not a liar.

BREAKING NEWS: “Starmer denies knowing he was Prime Minister” Sir Kier Starmer has revealed that no one told him until last Tuesday he won the 2024 election and had become PM. He told Beth Rigby “I was totally kept in the dark by my officials. I’m really angry about it.”

@ConspiracyD101 @AllForProgress_ The suspects' description is the business of every law abiding citizens and we have a moral right to know. The police work for us and their job is supposed to be to protect us from criminals.

@AllForProgress_ That’s a lot of writing to say pretty much nothing. The suspects description is none of your business. The police do not owe it to you lot or anyone else other the victim and the family. You just want a reason to steal from Greggs and primary and pretend you give a shit.

On Saturday morning, a woman in her twenties was raped outside Epsom Methodist Church on Ashley Road. She had left a nightclub; she was followed by a group of men; the attack took place between two and four in the morning, in the heart of a market town in Surrey that most of the country thinks of, if it thinks of it at all, as somewhere you go to see the horses run. The residents of Epsom have asked Surrey Police reasonable questions. "Who are the suspects? What do they look like? Is there CCTV?" Surrey Police has declined to answer. They have said they do not have "sufficient information" to release descriptions. They have urged the public "not to speculate," because speculation "may lead to additional tensions within local communities." Translated from the institutional dialect, this means: we know what you are likely to conclude from the descriptions, and we would rather you didn't. On Tuesday evening, hundreds of residents gathered in the town centre to ask the question again. The police response was to deploy public order units, riot shields, and helmets against people standing on the pavement of their own high street demanding to know what the men who raped a woman six doors down from them actually look like. The local Lib Dem MP - who represents these people and the town - told the protesters to "take it elsewhere." "Take it elsewhere." This is the settled posture of the modern British state toward its own citizens. When a town asks for the most basic information about a violent sexual offence committed on its streets - information that, thirty years ago, would have been on the front of every regional paper within hours - it is met first with bureaucratic evasion, then with riot police, then with a sitting member of parliament telling them to do one. Epsom is not an unruly place. It is not a place with a history of disorder. It is a comfortable commuter town in Surrey whose residents have been told, in the space of seventy-two hours, that the police will not tell them who is hunting women on their streets, that asking about it constitutes a threat to community cohesion, and that if they persist in asking they will be treated as a public order problem. There is a specific and ugly contempt encoded in this response. It is the contempt of an administrative class that has decided the British public cannot be trusted with the truth about anything happening to it, and that the job of the state is no longer to solve the crime but to manage the reaction to it, forcibly. The people of Epsom have not misbehaved. They have done the thing that citizens of a serious country are supposed to do when something terrible happens where they live: they have turned up and asked questions. And the answer they have received, delivered in riot gear, is that their questions are the problem.

@AllForProgress_ @JuliaHB1 An establishment that despises, insults and repressed its people is a feature of dictatorships the world over...

Explain this to me. Why is it that a gathering of mostly white working-class men protesting about a rape is met by a line of menacing riot cops, and yet a gathering of primarily non-white youths running riot on a high street is given the kid-glove treatment? Following the events in Epsom last night, this query should be on everyone’s lips. ✍️ Brendan O’Neill Article | spectator.com/article/epsom-…

@tomhfh @K_Niemietz How the actual fuck is it possible that any politician gets away eihr measuring this any way other than per capita? 🤯

I think a huge part of the reason why no government has been able to enact difficult pro-growth reforms is that the average voter still believes we remain a rich country. You hear this in politicians’ rhetoric “the sixth richest country in the world”. We’re the sixth largest economy but now far from the richest. Per capita we’re tanking down the rankings. One of the reasons why Poland or China have been able to have growth miracles in recent years is they think like a developing country. They know they were poor and they have to build to get rich. We think we are rich and that we don’t have to build anything anymore, or that when we do, it has to be the most expensive possible version of what we build. Bat tunnels. Fish Discos. Kittiwake hotels. We think we’re rich so we can afford to chase some wealth creators away, afford to mandate public biodiversity net gain on every development in the country, and afford to ratchet up state pension spending five times faster than the rate of growth in the economy. We’re suffering from acute ‘rich country delusion’. It’s only once we realise we’re far poorer than we should be that we can start to fix this nonsense.

“Actually, I’m struggling to see the issue with Kurdish criminals operating in my town, what do you mean?”

Bogus websites, staged protests and pretend atheists: Inside the fake asylum industry bbc.in/4vC0zTU

This is horrible.

@lfg_uk @LondonNewLibs If I don't want NIMBYs in my back yard, what does that make me?

A group of NIMBYs have courageously grouped together to try and block the development of... ...a cancer hospital. The UK's cancer survival rates are up to 25 years behind other European countries. Is this acceptable?

@RupertLowe10 @RestoreBritain_ All common sense and reasonable. Disagreeing with this is the only extreme position.

The rapidly changing demographics of our country mean that the Muslim population of our country is set to grow and grow and grow - a process that will only get faster. This is the honest truth no other politician will dare to mention. Demands for political Islam will spread alongside that. We’re already seeing that process accelerate. The British people will be further expected to have our way of life changed, permanently, to tolerate those who would not show us the same respect. I don’t want that. Restore Britain does not want that. We have been quite clear that a Restore Britain Government would be far more muscular in our approach to Islam. This is a Christian country. Under a Restore Britain Government, it would stay that way. Halal slaughter would be banned, along with cousin marriage and the wearing of the burqa/niqab. Sharia courts outlawed, with any foreign nationals attempting to promote Islamism removed from our country. Mass dominating Islamic prayer in public spaces will not be tolerated. Islamic call to prayer blaring out across British towns will be banned. Unfettered immigration from Islamic countries will come to an end. Foreign nationals who cannot speak English, refuse to work, claim benefits, live in social housing, or hate Britain will also be deported. Under a Restore Britain Government, the British state would not bend over backwards to accommodate practices that would have been unwelcome in medieval England. The islamification of Britain will end. For making these demands, I have received numerous death threats. I want to be really clear - we will not be intimidated. Starmer panders to the Muslim vote, hoping the crocodile will eat him last. Farage has pathetically said if we ‘alienate’ Islam we ‘will lose’. The Tories had their chance, they accelerated the process. It’s all too weak, it’s all too late. And the hour is late. Because if we continue on our current trajectory, the size of the Muslim population will reach a point where they will no longer be asking. Just look at Lebanon. I will be hounded for stating these facts. And they are all facts. My response? Go to Tower Hamlets. Bradford. Rochdale. Leicester. Blackburn. Birmingham. Walk around. You could be living in an Islamic country. It’s not even multiculturalism. It’s one culture. Islam. And British people in those areas are expected to sit back and accept it, or leave. Colonisation is the right word. That is not an acceptable state of affairs. What has happened in those towns will happen elsewhere. It is simply a matter of time. We can all already see it developing. It is demographic reality. I’m 68. It will not impact me. I will be long gone. But my one objective with Restore Britain is to leave the country in a better state than the one my generation was gifted. I want my grandchildren, and your grandchildren, to grow up in a cohesive, prosperous and confident Christian country which treats women with respect. That will require decent British men and women to stand up for our way of life in a far more assertive manner than has so far happened. I am absolutely determined to offer the British people a democratic route out. There is finally a serious political party with the courage to do what needs to be done. Restore Britain. Join us.

Excellent thread, this. Something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about… The British state is run by people who have never been fired, never missed a number, never had a client scream at them, never stayed up until 3am working on a deal, or repricing a book because Tokyo opened badly. They have never experienced CONSEQUENCE. Ever. THAT is the single most important fact in British public life. The pipeline is so uniform and mediocre it scarcely needs describing: - School - PPE or adjacent - Civil Service fast stream or a Think Tank research role - Spell as local councillor to appear “grounded,” - Then a safe seat and a red box before 40 At no point has the market ever called them a moron. At no point has a P&L told them their idea was shit. The feedback loop that every private sector professional takes for granted simply does not exist in their world. This matters because policy is NOT an essay. It IS a trade. Every regulation has a cost, every tax has a behavioural response, every intervention has second and third order consequences. In markets, if you misread convexity you get carried out. In government, you get reshuffled to a different department. The incentive structure could not be more perfectly designed to retain the incompetent and repel the capable. Anyone with genuine commercial talent is earning multiples of a ministerial salary by their early thirties. So the applicant pool self selects for people for whom the title is the reward because they could never command that status where performance is measured. The think tank ecosystem makes it worse. IPPR, the Resolution Foundation, JRF and the rest function as ideological finishing schools and revolving doors. They produce people fluent in the language of policy who have never implemented anything. They can model a distributional impact assessment in their sleep but could not run a corner shop at profit. This is NOT intelligence. It is pattern matching within a closed system that never tests its own assumptions because everyone in it shares the same priors. The civil service compounds it further. The fast stream rewards generalism, rotating you through departments every 18 to 24 months to develop “breadth,” which in practice means you never develop depth. A Treasury official who helped design a tax policy in 2019 is working on transport by the time it starts distorting behaviour in 2022. Nobody owns the outcome. The private sector has one thing the state fundamentally lacks: a kill switch. Bad companies go bust. Bad traders get sacked. The state just absorbs failure, reclassifies it as “lessons learned,” and promotes the people responsible. The compound effect of thirty years of this is a permanent class institutionally incapable of delivering growth or even understanding why the private sector they depend on for revenue keeps shrinking under their stewardship. This is what we have, right now. You cannot fix this with better people inside the same system. The system selects against competence, insulates against feedback, and rewards survival over performance. Every parliament is just a fresh rotation of the same profile through the same machine expressing the same surprise when nothing improves. We need parallel institutions to be built by the guy or gal staying up til 3am repricing the book. The risk taker. The entrepreneur. Then we gradually phase the existing sclerotic failed structures out. That’s how we win. Make Britain Great Again 🇬🇧 💪

@lfg_uk 🤯

More than £68,000,000 has been spent to dual the A1. So, how are they getting along? Well, it hasn't even started. Even worse, it has been cancelled. Nothing was built. £68 million. Wasted. Is this good value for money?