Jonathan Little

@soniasodha Actually your post neatly represents the problem. His sacking may or may not be 'legal'. The concern is with what is morally and ethically justfiable. Much of what now passes as legal (i.e. a process was followed) is unjustfiable and immoral.

His sacking might be unlawful. Or it might not be. That's why we have the employment tribunal. Strange to see politicians of the right thinking they can override the law and tell employers what they must and must not do.

Says a lot about the state of politics and politicians that so many of them are rushing to tell an employer what they "must" do in a situation where we clearly don't have the full story and the employer has a justifiable policy they don't like. thetimes.com/uk/crime/artic…

@HopeNotHate68 @rcolvile Actually everything we ration is inefficiently priced and poorly allocated. There are good reasons for regulation in some sectors but the state is the worst mechanism for achieving efficient allocation of anything.

@rcolvile We ration everything, via taxes, laws, regulations. We do so to allocate resources more efficiently in our economy as a whole allowing us to consume more stuff. Same rationale with planning. I got my info from Deloittes property index. And the problem is?

Sorry, Kevin, this is nonsense. Housing costs as a % of income have risen from 10% in 1957 to 30% or more. We are 6.5m homes behind European average. And the evidence from the many other countries with similar interest rates but higher housebuilding is pretty bloody clear.

@Miss_Snuffy @WilliamClouston Look, this is basically a demographic chart. 8pc of people my age got a degree after leaving school, now it’s circa 50p Also bearing in mind Clemenceau: “if a man isn’t socialist in his 20’s” etc., BTW I’ve got a Masters & I’m not voting Green, LibDems or Labour.

What is clear cut is that those with degrees have contempt for those without. Try getting a real job one day, build something, run something. Have some god damn respect. 😡

@LoftusSteve @David__Osland Well no. Actually we only tax 75%…that leaves a whole other 25% to play for…🤡

@David__Osland We already have a windfall tax of oil and gas you moron

The finance ministers of Austria, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain have called for windfall taxes on the big oil companies raking in superprofits from the energy crisis. Over to you, Ms Reeves.

No one serious is claiming that North Sea oil and gas is state-owned. That's a strawman. The actual argument is about what extracting it does for Britain - and the answer is straightforward. North Sea oil gets sold on the global market, yes. Around 80% of it bypasses our refineries entirely, partly because those refineries were built to process Libyan crude, not the light sweet crude the North Sea produces. Fine. But when oil companies extract that oil and turn a profit, the Exchequer taxes that profit. That tax revenue is real money that can subsidise bills during supply disruptions. That's our stake - and it's a legitimate one. Gas is even more direct. North Sea gas feeds straight into the UK pipeline network. Britain consumes between 65% and 85% of the gas it extracts domestically. It stabilises supply. It generates taxable profit. There is no coherent argument for leaving it in the ground. Now, climate. Britain produces less than 2% of global greenhouse emissions. Not a single major polluter on earth is adjusting their behaviour based on UK climate commitments. What actually happens when we strangle our own energy sector in pursuit of rapid decarbonisation is simple - we de-industrialise, we export jobs to China, and China builds EVs powered by coal. We get poorer. The climate is unaffected. Leaving recoverable North Sea reserves untouched doesn't save the planet. It just makes Britain weaker.

Fascinating letter in @Telegraph from Airey Neave’s family today. Perhaps this lead to what the Government must surely have been hoping to avoid, a case of unintended consequences? Let’s hope so. The government’s dreadful, vindictive, one-sided, terrorist rewarding, victim blaming and history-rewriting bill may actually come back to bite them if it allows, thorough the courts, for Neave’s killers and many other murderers like them to finally face justice. @williams_rje

@ejwwest @v_j_freeman It’s bad enough that you don’t bother to deal with the points raised but you reply in a patronising, demeaning way when doing so. She’s established her credibility- where’s yours? I’ve been involved in overseeing investment in large scale infrastructure projects - I’m with her.

@v_j_freeman This isn’t about how gas is extracted or physically moved, luv. It’s about who has the rights to sell it once it’s extracted. Unless the government proposes to commandeer the pipelines, ban exports, and set prices in the UK, it’s pretty irrelevant.

As someone with many years involvement in the physical movement of natural gas around Europe from field to end customer the ignorance in this post physically pains me.

@JMPSimor Hardly, she’s opining in an emphatic style about something she clearly doesn’t understand. Many of us are fed up with the level of ignorance on this topic.

A relentlessly rude, foolish and sexist individual - the fact that he ever had a tv show says a lot about tv…

@TheAthleticFC His views are entirely legitimate and reasonable free speech. Pep Guardiola has very controversial views for example…what of course is relevant is that those views don’t accord with a media establishment which is at best centre-right & mostly left-wing.

John Terry is Chelsea’s captain, leader, legend and an England great. But his recent liking of anti-immigration social media posts has been criticised by anti-racism groups and caused dismay at Chelsea, where he works as an academy mentor. It begs the question - can he ever have a major role in the sport he dominated as a player? ✍️ @DTathletic and @greggevans40 🔗 nytimes.com/athletic/71486…

@GavinBarwell Complete nonsense, the opposite is true but sadly like many of the lanyard class who could manage anything except more than a decade of national decline you’re unable to imagine anything different.

I guess Seb has to pretend he thinks this if he wants to be selected as a Conservative MP, but it's absurd. The world is *much* less conducive to a free trading, go it alone UK than it was in 2016 - which is why public opinion has shifted decisively in the opposite direction

@its_all_atoms @danielmgmoylan 4. Makes no sense at all. It many cases it’s frozen anyway.

@danielmgmoylan 1. Single lock: inflation. 2. No pension unless you have on 20 years of NI contributions (up from 10 now). 3. Time claiming unemployment benefit doesn’t count (unlike now). 4. No state pension when you’re not UK tax resident (move abroad if you like but we’re not subsidising it).

I always want to know what these people would replace the Triple Lock with and why it would always be cheaper. Or do they just (at heart) want to scrap pensions?

@TruthAsVirtue @gummibear737 Utter nonsense. The weapons inspectors only commented on what they saw but were refused access to large parts of areas they requested.

Terrible take. Iran actually signed the JCPOA with Obama back in 2015. They agreed not to weaponize their nuclear program and stuck to every single limit — IAEA inspectors confirmed they were fully compliant for years. Then Trump pulled the US out in 2018, slapped on heavy sanctions, and basically torched the only working diplomatic deal. Only after that did Iran start breaking the rules. Meanwhile Israel has had nukes for decades (nobody even knows exactly how many), never signed the NPT, and won't let inspectors in. If having nukes lets you hold everyone hostage and dare them to do something, Israel’s been playing that game forever. But suddenly when Iran gets close, it’s an existential crisis and they claim the moral high ground? Nuclear weapons are only good for one thing: deterrence. MAD means actually using them is suicide. That’s why every country that has them treats them like a shield, not a sword. The whole “death cult” line is just an excuse to ignore the massive double standard.

Iran was trying to use the North Korean model to get a nuke: create sufficient conventional deterrence so you won’t be challenged in acquiring one (it’s called the Seoul Hostage Problem). This has been explained over and over since day one. Everyone claiming shifting goalposts or no imminent threat has been lying. The reason North Korea was allowed to get nukes is because Seoul (and its 10 million inhabitants) is within artillery and rocket range of North Korea. During the 1994 nuclear crisis, the Clinton administration seriously considered airstrikes on North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor but backed off precisely because of the artillery threat to Seoul. Iran was trying to accomplish the same by stockpiling missiles and drones which would have had the same deterrent effect. The proof is what Iran has been doing in the past month: attacking all its neighbors in order to pressure the US to stop attacking it Beyond this, they were building medium-range ballistic missiles that could reach Paris and London, meaning all of Europe could be held hostage as they built a nuclear bomb. The reason Iran has not built a nuclear weapon until now is not because it couldn’t, but because it knew it would be attacked and denied this capability. So by allowing them to continue developing this conventional deterrence, you would be allowing Iran to get a nuclear weapon. And unlike North Korea, Iran is led by an eschatological death cult Reagan saw nuclear mutually assured destruction (MAD) as both morally bankrupt (because of the innocent-body-count problem) and dangerously fragile because it assumed flawless rationality between adversaries…this means it only takes one irrational actor to destroy the world. Working backwards from the conclusion that Iran’s Islamist regime must never have a nuclear weapon, it was necessary for the US to attack Iran to deny it the conventional capacity to hold the entire eastern hemisphere hostage. Every European leader knows this and behind the scenes praises the US for this action. But they are cowards, held hostage by their own internal Muslim populations, and so adopt these ridiculous public positions. This was never about Israel. And if your argument is that Iran should be allowed to get a nuclear weapon then you are a fool and a traitor to western civilization…you’re a useful idiot

@IndianManUnited @henrywinter It's limited by the club because of concerns about supervison etc., I'm not saying I agree that's the right number but each season the event is oversubscribed.

@henrywinter Only 40... what am I missing here? Wasn't Stamford Bridge open or that's what best could be achieve by Chelsea!! 🧐

@gummibear737 All true, every leader would have done it, or should have. Our intelligence services know it too. My only issue is that Trump is inconsistent in his follow-through.

This is the type of economic illiteracy & messed up thinking that’s rife these days. As if there’s only a finite amount of something and if someone has something it must be at someone else’s expense. Mad.

@VictoriaZeev @Starlink @AerLingus So what?

@Starlink @AerLingus Starlink on planes… while billions of people on the ground still can’t get reliable internet. Priorities.

Starlink is now onboard @AerLingus 🛰️❤️✈️

@LoftusSteve Exactly, our local council doesn’t even allow you to hire a van. It’s trade or private cars. Fly tipping is actually encouraged.

It costs £240 for a medium sized van to unload at a recycling centre. That's an average transit van size. If you turn up in a LWB Sprinter it's £350. In 2014 a LWB Sprinter fully loaded with house renovation waste cost me less than £80. Fly tipping is low risk, high reward.

@James_Saye @rorysutherland All true - I made an offer two years ago to a seller (who ironically is involved in a house selling software business) he turned it down in disgust - apparently I was not serious.. He’s still selling. Same sticker price, no offers. I’ve bought from someone who was more realistic.

@rorysutherland As someone who’s currently on the market I can tell you many sellers are completely delusional. Viewed some that have been on for 6-12 months and they won’t accept reasonable offers because they spent £50k on the kitchen extension 5 years ago and want their money back.

@bindelj Have also now had borderline illiterate legal email from Canada about RTing Bindel's tweets. I suspect they may be a little confused about UK Politicians having to adhere to threats about activity on X. Bless.