George Robertson

Greece has banned kosher and halal slaughter. The Hellenic Council of State, announced the ban deeming them “inhumane." The courts found that the religious preparation of animal products did not outweigh the suffering of those animals' welfare, The British government should do the same.

@graceelavery Fuck off Dave.

UNIVERSITY IN COURT OVER "TEA TOWEL" JOKE! STUDENT SUES ROYAL HOLLOWAY FOR TAKING SIDES IN GAZA ROW Brodie Mitchell, 20, has launched legal action against Royal Holloway, University of London after being suspended for "hate speech". His alleged offence: joking that a pro-Palestine activist's headscarf looked like a tea towel during a campus row over Gaza. Mitchell accuses the university of unlawful behaviour, unfair disciplinary measures and clear bias in the Israel-Gaza debate. The case could cost the university up to £734,000. This sadly has reinforced the belief that many universities are pro Palestine/Marxist

By shifting the cost of renewables subsidies on to general taxation. So not a saving at all.

@nicolasfulghum We've been subsidising wind since 1990. All this does is make energy more expensive BTW... you work for Ember, authors of the £300 off bills report Labour used to justify its promise.... How's that working out for you??

Jane, you are right to raise Thiel, and the public record on this is more troubling than most people realise. Thiel and Epstein corresponded regularly from 2014, met several times a year, and Epstein invested forty million dollars into Valar Ventures, a firm Thiel co-founded. The financial relationship between them was substantial and documented. What makes this directly relevant to the Starmer government is what followed. In 2018, Thiel's company Palantir hired Peter Mandelson's lobbying firm Global Counsel to facilitate its penetration of UK government contracts. Epstein's business associate was paying Epstein's close friend for access to the British state. That relationship did not end when Mandelson became ambassador. In February 2025, on Starmer's first visit to Washington as Prime Minister, his visit to Palantir headquarters came second only to the White House. That visit was organised by the British Embassy under Mandelson. It was Mandelson who introduced Starmer to Palantir's CEO Alex Karp at a meeting for which no notes were taken. Mandelson retained significant shareholdings in Global Counsel throughout. Ten months later the UK government awarded Palantir a Ministry of Defence contract worth hundreds of millions of pounds. You are not wrong to add Thiel to the list. The thread runs from Epstein to Thiel to Mandelson to Starmer to a defence contract with no paper trail. Every connection in that chain is documented. What remains unexplained is why nobody in government appears to have thought any of it worth examining. @KemiBadenoch "It was Mandelson who introduced Starmer to Palantir's CEO Alex Karp at a meeting for which no notes were taken. Mandelson retained significant shareholdings in Global Counsel throughout."

So Labour Together founder Morgan McSweeney’s phone - with all his legendary contacts and messages etc in it - was ‘stolen’? Its WhatsApp messages have gone to that ‘happy place’ in the sky where his close friend Peter Mandelson’s emails vanished to. This is how vetting works now

Criminally Negligent. Andrew Neil's Words. Britain's Reality. Andrew Neil does not use language carelessly. Writing in the Daily Mail this morning, he describes Britain as stuck in an energy emergency with an oil and gas policy bordering on the criminally negligent, delivered by a bunch of clueless inadequates at the tiller. He is not reaching for effect. He is delivering a verdict. And the evidence he marshals is unanswerable. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for the first time in history. Oil is heading toward two hundred dollars a barrel. Britain is facing the worst energy crisis since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The International Energy Agency has described the supply disruption as the largest in history. And the government overseeing this catastrophe has spent the past year doing everything in its power to ensure Britain would be maximally exposed when it arrived. It closed North Sea oil and gas production. It borrowed against already strained public finances. It built an economic strategy on OBR forecasts that the energy crisis has already rendered obsolete. And it put the man most responsible for Britain's energy vulnerability, Ed Miliband, in charge of the response. The Miliband contradiction has been hiding in plain sight for months. He stood at the despatch box during the energy debate last year and warned that Britain was a price taker not a price maker in international fossil fuel markets, leaving it exposed to their volatility. He was right. He was also the man who ensured that exposure would be as severe as possible by closing down the domestic production that could have cushioned the blow. The North Sea fields that could have been producing. The coal beds that remain untouched. The nuclear capacity that was decommissioned in pursuit of net zero targets that now look like a luxury policy designed for a world that no longer exists. Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences. The fiscal headroom she has been defending against every request for defence spending, every demand from the Treasury and every warning from military chiefs, is being wiped out not by defence costs alone but by the energy price shock her own government's choices made inevitable. Her foundations, as Neil puts it, are built on quicksand. The borrowing costs are rising at the fastest pace since the Liz Truss mini-budget. Foreign creditors are watching. The bond markets are watching. And the Chancellor is discovering that the numbers she has been citing as proof of fiscal responsibility were always dependent on a stable world that this government's foreign policy paralysis helped to destabilise. Neil makes one observation that connects the economic catastrophe to the political one with surgical precision. A stronger Prime Minister would have fired Miliband. He is right. The man who led the Cabinet revolt against supporting America, who blocked the use of Diego Garcia, who has spent a year dismantling Britain's energy independence and who stood at the despatch box admitting British households would pay the price, is still in his post. Still in the Cabinet. Still in the room. The reason Starmer has not fired him is the same reason he needed a drone on his own runway before he would act, the same reason he consulted his team on minesweepers and the same reason Britain is now a diminished, exposed and strategically paralysed country being described in its own press as a nation of clueless inadequates. He cannot afford to. The coalition that put him in power will not allow it. And so the inadequates remain at the tiller while Britain heads for the rocks. "Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. [...]. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences."

The Chagos Islands were attacked by Iran a few days ago, Starmer didn’t tell the Country. Now it’s exposed, he’s phoning others…… [to ask what to do?]

Labour has agreed to a one in, one out missile firing arrangement with the Iranian government.

@ChrisHelali @catmrow0 x.com/moderatemela/s…

For crying out loud. The head of human resources for Leeds city council wants to create a "safe space" for conversations between staff who might be upset by Nigel Farage's visit to the city next week. These people are truly nuts. Like probably demented. telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/…

This is obviously treasonous.

The nation is in meltdown, energy costs sky high & rocketing alongside the national debt, the cost of borrowing & unemployment. Our armed forces are a charade & we are reduced to irrelevance on the world stage. But apparently Angela Rayner is the answer. Lord give me strength.

In case your’e wondering, the UK-has: - no exo-atmospheric Anti-Ballistic Missile interceptor system - No layered missile defence architecture - No integrated national system protecting our cities or infrastructure. Our best system is the T45 Destroyer with the Astor/Viper. But it’s primarily a fleet protection asset. The fact is that we and Europe depend heavily on US detection, US interceptor missiles and platforms, and US command architecture. The harsh reality is that capabilities amongst European states, incl. the UK, are very limited and patchy indeed.

@JohnRentoul @DavidPBMaddox Jesus!

Reshuffle speculation from @DavidPBMaddox: Streeting and Reeves out; Rayner, Haigh and Powell back in independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

Fun fact: IRGC, the deadliest terrorist organization in the world, is still legal in Britain 🇬🇧. Everywhere else in Europe it is a designated terrorist organization.

I know a chap who could have done this for a couple of grand and even then he would have felt he was pushing his luck with the price.

Zoe Williams profile of Jenni Murray for the Guardian is extraordinay. Let's just not talk about the last decade, eh? That nasty business when she stood up for women's rights and was cancelled for it. theguardian.com/media/2026/mar…

This is why @NJ_Timothy is right.