Edna_Dame

@lossnitzer @AlanJLSmith But what about the children's channels, does anyone actually watch them ?

Scrapping the TV licence will cut lots of cost like this: Letters, Call Centers, Web Sites, Cold callers, Court syste. Just scrap the licence make BBC 4 channels again BBC 1 (Information PBS), BBC 2 Education, BBC 3 Arts and BBC Parliament, 4 Radio - No Social media presence and funded by standard Taxation at capped costs. Make the BBC a PBS again.

How aggressive is this letter – sent to an elderly relative. Are the BBC getting desperate?

@JAHeale They could have called it Smiths and not run into issues

Doubt calling itself ‘TG Jones’ did much good either

@PaulEmbery Jobs which are essentially people facing will continue to be done by people. AI will help with some of the behind the scenes donkey work and make industries more efficient and effective. The public sector should seriously be considering these techniques but I expect big pushback

So demoralising. And with the growth of AI, things will become yet more challenging for young people like this.

@timtron2020 I noticed this mini series of documentaries on this case and wondered what narrative they were going to spin, the official Russia is Bad or be open minded and look at the evidence available. I guess I won't be watching...

Channel 4's Salisbury Poisonings programme claims the #Skripal suspects came "within yards" of his house according to CCTV images. In fact the closest they were seen on CCTV was about 300m from his house, captured on a petrol station's CCTV: which is to say, about 330 yards away.

@but_cyclists It appears she had plenty of space in front of her car and had no need to reverse. Granted she's driving in an Audi and different rules apply of course.

A cyclist - unfortunately dressed all in black with no high vis or lights - encounters a trained and licensed motorist.

@POTUS @elonmusk

So @ShabanaMahmood has now banned the following from entering the United Kingdom on the grounds that they “would not be conducive to the public good”. @EvaVlaar @ValentinaForUSA @JoeyMannarino @AdaLluch The common links? All right wing and all proposed speakers at the Unite The Kingdom rally on 16th May. Regardless of your political vista, this is chilling stuff and solely politically motivated to try to undermine @TRobinsonNewEra So much for “we’ve had free speech for a very long time and it will be around for a very long time”. What say you @POTUS ??? You can’t hate Labour enough.

@PatrickChristys Nothing to do with the EU this one, Germany doesn't routinely extradite it's citizens to foreign lands. Oddly Germans have fundamental rights protected by a constitution and law. Pity the UK doesn't. In any case he's a Patsy and there's no credible evidence.

‘Sorry, you voted to leave the European Union so we’re not going to let you prosecute a suspected child-murdering paedophile.’

@Lee060791260783 @LozzaFox Greens also attacking Labour, so it's hotting up nicely.

@DameBucket @LozzaFox Labour has lost rhe minority vote that's why they are now attacking the greens. Labour decided to sChase the far right vote and Farage and Rupert Lowe said No.

They never mention the problem. They never say. ISALM.

@higgyboson Paignton Zoo had peacocks, I was driving past one weekend morning and noticed one had escaped from its compound and was resting on the grass verge nearby. Maybe they go walkabout from time to time.

In 1987 we moved into a brand new house in a village with 400 residents in Devon. After our first night in our new home we awoke and looked out of the bedroom window to see a large peacock in the back garden. As we had 2 small children at the time we were concerned that the peacock might be a permanent visitor and a bit hostile. We went to the village shop to ask if anyone knew anything about the peacock. The owner and several residents told us they'd never heard about a peacock in the village. None of the parents whose kids went to the school had any knowledge about the peacock, no one in the village pub, (some of whom had lived in the village for 70+ years), had ever seen a peacock in the village either. No one even knew ANYONE who might own a peacock. Oddly, we never saw the peacock again. It appeared on our first morning in the house and then completely disappeared. We lived in the house for 14 years and to this day no one believes we saw that bird.

@YossiBenYakar Why's this man pretending to be doing a serious interview with low IQ people some of whom wear silly frocks?

Muslims in the UK are now openly calling for the imposition of Sharia Law including the Jizya tax on all non-Muslims. Yes, a special tax that non-Muslims must pay simply for not being Muslim. This is not some fringe interpretation. It is commanded directly in the Quran (9:29): “Fight those who do not believe in Allah... until they pay the jizya with willing submission.” How much longer will Britain pretend this ideology is compatible with Western democracy?

Great advice.

@CarolineLucas @TheGreenParty Caroline, what on earth happened to the Green Party? At one time it was a respectable environmentally focused pressure group that received favourable publicity and support. Now it's a magnet for all sorts of Marxists and Racists. Goldsmith and Porritt must be livid.

Statements that have now come to light from a handful of @TheGreenParty candidates are totally unacceptable & require immediate action. There’s no place for anti-semitism or any hate speech in the party. This is a society-wide problem & needs to be rooted out wherever it’s found

@A1an_M The shutters will eventually come down, it's been on the cards for some time, possibly it's being engineered to do so, as I really can't see even the low IQ Chancellor not realising the effects of suicidal policies. The bond markets giving up may be one brake but even the BoE may

Like most people I have a monthly household budget, in an attempt to ensure the money doesn't run out before the month does. There are some things on there that are non-negotiable. If I don't pay them I lose my house, my family doesn't eat or drink, I end up in jail. 🏠Mortgage payment. Council tax. Energy bills. Water bill. Food bills. Clothes. Then there are some items which are about preparing for a rainy day. Life would go on without them, but the future might be bleak. 💷Life insurance. Short term savings for emergencies. Pensions. Then there are some more discretionary items which we could live without, but life would be more unpleasant or difficult: 📺Internet. Mobile phone. TV streaming. Car maintenance / fuel. And finally, purely discretionary items. 🏖️Holidays. Presents. Meals out. Takeaways. Long-term savings. Add it all up, and make sure it comes to less than the household income. If not, some of the discretionary items have to go. When times are tough, the purely discretionary items go. When they get tougher, the somewhat discretionary items go. When they get tougher still, the saving for the future goes. When they continue to get tougher, even the "essentials" get scrutinised for savings. Tesco gets ditched for Aldi or Lidl. Zara or Next get ditched for Primark or charity shops. We're constantly told by "experts" that a country's budget can't be treated in this way. Why not? What are the essentials that a government must spend its money on, and what are the discretionary items? Seems to me that if we encourage the Chancellor to think more about the national budget in the way we all have to think about our household budget, we might be in a better place. Essentials, without which we'll lose our home, starve, or die: 1. Defending this country and its borders 2. Law and order 3. Food security 4. Energy security 5. Basic health service 6. Basic education Financial security 6. Interest payments on our debt 7. Balancing the budget / running a surplus 8. Reducing our debt 9. Reducing the cost of government 10. Saving for the future Discretionary spend 11. Everything else. Why don't we do this? With a household budget, household income is hard to change. Finding a new job is difficult, getting a promotion is difficult, pay rises are low. And political ideology doesn't play much of a part in household budgeting and if it does, falls into the "discretionary spend" bucket. But for the government, there is no essential limit on "income" (they think). They can raise taxes and borrow to infinity (they think) because the taxpayer has no choice. They can print money without penalty (they think). And they can spend money on all sorts of things which they think are a priority, for ideological or political (or corrupt) reasons, but are really not. This supposedly infinite ability to generate more income for themselves results in a total lack of spending discipline and complete inability to prioritise spending into "must haves" and "nice to haves". And we end up with a bloated and ever-growing State spending taxpayer money (or rather, borrowing the money of future, as yet unborn, taxpayers) on the wrong things. I fear that the only way this will change for us in the UK is when the bond markets decide they've had enough and refuse to buy any more government debt. Then we'll find ourselves in the countrywide equivalent of an Individual Voluntary Arrangement, and a new generation will experience actual austerity for the first time in their life. That moment may come sooner than we all think.

@thecarolemalone Can we deport Lipman to Israel as she seems to love the genocidal state so much? Perhaps Carole, you can join her.

Maureen Lipman is one of our most prized actresses.She’s also a woman of strong opinions but most relevantly she’s Jewish+because of that moronic, racist Palestinian activists in Scotland are trying to ban her from appearing in a play there.This evil has to stop. Jail them!!!

@AllForProgress_ Eventually there has to be a crunch point and it's surprising it's not already occured. It's obvious the two main parties will do nothing to solve this problem as they created it. When the time comes to clamp down, the screaming, shouting and whinging will be insufferable.

The Telegraph this weekend put a number on a quiet British scandal: 625,618 households now receive more in benefits than the average British worker takes home for a year of full-time work. £32,200 is the threshold. Across more than half a million households, on the welfare side of that line. 16,000 of those households, the same analysis says, take more than £60,000 a year, almost twice the average post-tax salary in this country. £155 billion is the running total of the welfare bill these payments come out of. By the end of the decade, projections show, it will dwarf Britain's entire defence budget. We can toss parables of indolence on the poverty line back and forth, but what this ultimately comes down to is incentives. Specific Cabinets have, in specific years, made specific decisions to expand eligibility, weaken assessments, and tolerate a structure in which working full-time on the median wage is a less rewarding proposition, in pure cash terms, than not working at all. Three Conservative governments and one Labour government did this, in slow steps, often in panic over a different problem - like judicial activism, demographic ageing, or some embarrassing headline about sanctions - and the cumulative result is a system that now explicitly fails the moral test that every welfare state in the world is built upon. Work must pay. Not working, except for those who are grappling with categorical incapacitation, must not pay. But in Britain, inn these never-ending years of hurt, it's Opposite Day every day. And the damage is not only the money. The damage is the message. The message that the relationship between effort and reward, the contract on which a productive society rests, has been suspended and inverted. The single mother working two jobs, the agency carer doing nights, the teaching assistant who tops up her hours with bar work, the young professional working doggedly and tirelessly trying to outpace the interest on the student loan debt they were obliged to incur: a vast number of value creators are, at the end of each month, looking at a payslip that is smaller in absolute terms than the entitlement of the household next door which generates none. They notice. So do their children. If we wish for Britain to progress, then the abiding regime in which £60,000 a year in welfare is paid to households that, by the system's own assessments, are notionally available for work, must end. We must rebuild the conditions of eligibility that decades of legal challenge have stripped out to produce this entitlements free-for-all. We must prosecute fraud properly, just as 25 years of Conservative and Labour governments have promised and never had the balls to do. We will treat the welfare state as what it was always meant to be: a safety net for the genuinely unable, paid for by the genuinely able, and not a reward for crafty systems-play. We must say what no one in Westminster has the nerve to say: that a country which pays £60,000 to do nothing and £32,200 to be a teacher has lost the plot, and that no nation has ever recovered from such a loss without first being honest about it.

@profsked No doubt another mis carriage of justice in the making that will end up costing the mug tax payers millions of pounds. Hopefully any Jury involved will see through the deception. We know who is responsible for the child's disappearance and he isn't German.

Met believes it has enough evidence to try Madeleine’s suspected killer in Britain. Fingers crossed.

@10DowningStreet @vonderleyen @Keir_Starmer This is very worrying and harrowing image to say the least. Fortunately you will be struck down from office very soon after the local election results are in on Friday. You can then have more time to spend with your family and all that.

When the UK and the European Union work together, we all reap the benefits. In these volatile times we need to go further and faster on economic, energy and defence security.

@billy_wrinkles @SoniaPoulton Yes that was a persistent media narrative and we had to send out our super duper metropolitan police and their apparently superior investigation powers to solve it, years later and millions spent and still nothing uncovered except a convenient German Patsy to hang the blame on.

@DameBucket @SoniaPoulton Making the British public believe the Portuguese police were incompetent and incapable was part of whatever game they were playing.

MADELEINE MCCANN ANNIVERSARY Madeleine McCann was reported missing 19 years ago today. She was three years old, almost four. The original Portuguese Police investigation believed she died in the holiday apartment and an abduction was staged. Kate and Gerry McCann were made 'suspects' but when the case was shelved so was their 'arguido' status. Neither they - or their holidaying friends - have ever been officially cleared of any involvement in Madeleine's disappearance. There have been recent police investigations in Portugal, Germany and the UK. Each force - with the complicity of a willing media - has tried to frame a German man who was an easy target because of how gross he is. British taxpayers have now spent in the region of £14million for a crime that did not happen in this country, and which cannot be justified given the unprecedented attention and funds for one child and one family. Elderly people and children gave money to a private fund to 'Find Madeleine' and that has been overseen by Kate and Gerry McCann - who infamously used some of it for their mortgage and for PR - and has £1million banked. I have followed this case from the beginning (been to the scene of crime twice, made two documentaries, doorstepped some of the names involved) and it is evident to me this is a cover up that includes Prime Ministers, the Home Office and the police. Yes, it's a serious accusation and I stand by it. Happy to be challenged in a court of law and will show 19 years of evidence. And, just to add, I have recently been harassed by police and CPS over this and I have reason to believe - and am pursuing - that my rights have been breached. As a journalist, I have refused to give up on this story because it is about so much more than a missing child, as sad as that event is. I'll be talking about Madeleine, 'Smith Man' and more on my 'Wake Up' livestream in the morning. Pics show: 1. Madeleine McCann 2. Kate & Gerry McCann, 12 May 2007, Madeleine's 4th birthday - 8 days after Madeleine was reported missing and the world was told she was taken by a predator.