RakerStrikes

@MarkSmaller @Madz_Grant @bphillipsonMP It has benefited no one.

@RakerStrikes @Madz_Grant @bphillipsonMP Who taxed education for the few for the benefit of the many....

The Gestapo marched hundreds of thousands of innocent people to their deaths. I've ended private schools' tax breaks to invest in state schools. No responsible leader makes vile comparisons like this. Kemi Badenoch is not fit to be Prime Minister.

The British Medical Association just voted to stop following the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The decision is supposedly about free speech, even though the IHRA definition DOES NOT prohibit criticizing Israel. All it does is point out that criticism of Israel can be antisemitic. In fact, most antisemitism today disguises itself as anti-Israel rhetoric, while still spreading old antisemitic ideas. Without clarifying this feature of antisemitism today, an antisemitism definition is virtually irrelevant. At a time when Jewish doctors are leaving the UK because of widespread antisemitism, the NHS needs to be raising standards, not throwing them out the window.

Sickening. Just sickening. Monstrous.

Bridget Phillipson: "waah, how dare you call me spiteful" Also Bridget Phillipson: "fuck you, children in blazers" x.com/bphillipsonMP/…

What you did was cruel & vindictive. For what? Most private schools opened up their facilities to local, often rural, often lacking, communities. Those have gone along with all the jobs lost & the friends of those turfed out of their schools because normal families could no longer afford the increased fees.

@bphillipsonMP @christopherhope You are making a mess of your brief. Putting a tax on education FFS

Kemi lost her head at PMQs - and afterwards too. It's not the first time. She's compared me to a Gestapo officer. I wonder what it is about a working class woman driving record investment in state schools by ending private schools' tax breaks that the Tories hate so much.

Has Brexit improved your life?

Burnham’s economic architect Miatta Fahnbulleh recommends, among other things: •A wealth tax and yet another windfall tax on oil and gas. •Mass nationalisation e.g. of land, transport, and energy. •Extending national insurance to investment income. •A cap on interest rates and charges on every form of consumer credit. •Hiking capital gains tax to income tax levels. •Hiking divided tax to income tax levels. •Abolition of the upper earnings limit for national insurance. •Huge expansion of the benefits system including a “minimum income guarantee” paid to everyone apart from the rich. •Nationalisation of banks and creation of new “green” banks with taxpayer funds. •Block on private banks lending to anyone with a “large amount of greenhouse gas emissions” and “penalisation of banks that provide too many carbon-intensive loans.“ •Forced sale of existing businesses to employees. •A tripling of the stamp duty surcharge to 9% for multiple homeowners and an increase to 6% for non-residents.

Starmer lied about his intentions, lacked a mandate for what he did, and was never scrutinised until he was elected. Are we really about to go through the same thing again?

Gary Lineker will be a pundit for @itvfootball during the World Cup. If he'd offended Muslims or Black people, we'd never see his face on TV again; but it was only Jews, so he gets a free pass. thesun.co.uk/sport/39474492…

🚨 The depravity. Lewis Bates and Mark Wilson — the Hartlepool sex beasts who abducted a 13-year-old schoolgirl, took her to a remote track and took turns raping her — have been released. These monsters enticed the girl into a car, drove her to an isolated spot, and subjected her to a half-hour nightmare. They left her bleeding profusely, barely able to walk. She was physically sick when she got home and had to be taken to hospital. Sam Hunter helped lure her in and got a lighter sentence. 15 years for gang-raping a child. And now they’re back on the streets. How many more victims before these monsters are kept locked up for good? Our girls are not safe while the system keeps letting animals like this out early. Name them. Shame them. Never forget what they did.

Australians probably think this means they’re winning

@drhingram Not as talented as the fat one?

Andy Burnham is the Gary Barlow of politics

I get why he’s striking this tone, but it sounds like a bloke whose wife is carrying on with the Pilates instructor and he’s the last to know.

@Madz_Grant @bphillipsonMP A Secretary of State for Education who taxed education. That will be her legacy.

@bphillipsonMP It’s cute that you expect sympathy over some hurty words when your actions have disrupted numerous children’s educations, made thousands of teachers and staff redundant and caused longstanding institutions to close - while achieving none of your stated aims for state schools

I was a teenage girl who had my healthy breasts removed, and so were all the other “boys” you’re talking about. feelings in a child’s brain to not make normal development a medical condition. female children cannot have gynecomastia.

Today a group of Muslims prayed next to the Ministry of Defence, facing the Iraq and Afghanistan memorial. As I have said before, choosing to pray in this way in public is a political act. It is a social statement and, yes, it is an act of domination. Anybody who understands Islamism understands that the domination of public spaces is part of the modus operandi. It is done so Islamists can show who is in charge - and to show other Muslims and the wider public that the authorities will bend to their will. There is quite obviously no need to pray here. The decision to do so is symbolic and pointed. It is not welcome. We have freedom of religion in this country, which is why there are mosques. But we are not a Muslim country and this is not welcome. It should be stopped.

‘No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or banished or in any way molested, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and the law of the land’. Happy Magna Carta Day edwest.co.uk/p/the-glory-of…

The BBC Has Ruled. Brexit Damaged The Economy. No Further Debate Required. The BBC's editorial complaints unit has decided that the negative economic impact of Brexit is now a settled fact. Not a contested judgement. Not one side of a live debate. A fact, in the same category as man-made climate change, requiring no balancing view. The ruling followed a Radio 4 Today programme segment featuring Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, alongside Liam Byrne and Sir John Gieve, both long-standing advocates of closer EU alignment. All three agreed Brexit had damaged growth. The presenter, Katya Adler, did not challenge the premise or introduce a dissenting voice. A complaint followed. The ECU's response is the revealing part. It acknowledged the segment failed to "acknowledge the alternative case" for pursuing opportunities outside the EU rather than realignment with it. That part of the complaint was upheld. But the central complaint, that three pro-EU voices agreeing with each other on air is not balance, was dismissed. The reasoning given was that this reflected "the consensus among economists" and there was no "significant body of economic opinion" on the other side. This is worth pausing on. The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist. The institution that is legally required to be impartial has ruled itself the arbiter of which questions are still open and which are closed, and Brexit has just been moved into the closed file. The economics itself does not support the certainty on display. The headline figure driving much of this narrative, an 8 per cent hit to GDP since 2016, comes from an NBER paper built on a "synthetic control" model that constructs a hypothetical non-Brexit Britain from a basket of comparator countries. The largest weighting in that basket, over 60 per cent, is the United States, a country currently riding an AI investment boom and a separate fiscal stimulus. The model also weights Estonia and Greece more heavily than France or Germany. On a straightforward per capita basis against France and Germany, the actual comparators, Britain's performance since 2016 sits roughly in line with both. An 8 per cent gap simply isn't visible. This is a model producing a number that then gets reported as "the consensus," which the BBC then cites as the reason no alternative view is required. That loop, model produces number, number becomes consensus, consensus becomes fact, fact requires no balance, is the mechanism. It does not require a conspiracy. It requires an institution that has decided which conclusions are respectable and which are not, and which then treats its own prior decision as evidence. The same posture has been on display all week. A government department can decide its diversity targets are lawful without seeking legal advice to check. A police force can decide a book about dismantling "inner white supremacy" is leadership training. A broadcaster can decide an economic question is closed and that deciding so does not breach its own impartiality rules. In each case, the institution marks its own homework, and the mark is always a pass. None of this requires Brexit to have been a triumph. Britain's economy has genuine problems, most of them unrelated to single market membership. But a state broadcaster, funded by compulsory licence fee under threat of prosecution, has now formally placed one of the most consequential political decisions in modern British history beyond the reach of its own impartiality obligations. Reform's Lee Anderson called it being "blinkered by groupthink." The more precise description is an institution that has stopped being able to tell the difference between its own assumptions and the facts. "The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist."

@PaulEmbery It happened also at Queen Caroline’s funeral in 1821

Mass public hysteria at the death of Diana. I’d never seen anything like it.