Extraneus_in_a_insolitus_terra

Isabel, there's quite an assumption buried in that question. A couple on average wages in 1975 raised children, paid a mortgage, ran a car, kept the heating on and put food on the table. The idea that they had surplus income to accumulate significant savings across fifty years while doing all of that assumes a level of financial comfort that the majority of working people never had. Savings require disposable income. Disposable income requires wages that outpace the cost of living. For most of the people we are discussing that was never the reality. You have also just described a choice to be cash poor as though poverty is a lifestyle preference. The vast majority of people in this country do not end their working lives with substantial liquid savings because they spent those working lives doing what working lives require. Paying bills. Raising families. Contributing to a society that is now debating whether they deserve to keep their homes. And who taught an entire generation of young people that asset accumulation is a choice rather than a privilege, that cash poverty is a personal failing rather than a structural condition and that the solution to a lifetime of contribution is to liquidate the only thing it produced? The universities and institutions that shaped the worldview now being applied to the people who built them.

Khan wants the state to ban social media posts about crime in London. That should terrify anyone who believes in free speech.

🚨 Reform UK is standing candidates in more wards than any other party in the upcoming May 7 elections. Just as we fielded more candidates than any other party last year - a history making event. Few appreciate just what @Nigel_Farage has built in the blink of an eye. Huge congratulations and thanks to our candidates, wonderful branch officers and amazing team who made this happen Bring on May 7, let’s put the uniparty out of business! 🇬🇧

These protesters are absolutely vile. I honestly don’t understand why they choose to live in Britain…possibly because of the benefits.

Almost two thirds of voters want Starmer out. Can’t stand him. Including almost 50% who voted Labour. Most want a General election NOW! We can’t limp on with this zombie government. telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/…

How so. Spain closed its embassy and relocated. He's just helping them relocate.

Jacob's loyalty is heartbreaking I think the world of him intellectually and admire his deep personal honour But I can also name the utter shits in his party that simply will not ever let our country be fixed. The good people in the Tories, and in Labour, need to join Reform

The Vatican could give to the poor, I mean I've visited the Vatican and there is a lot of room for the poor.

You are a fucking dangerous lying evil man who has destroyed the capital city where I have lived for over two decades. There is no "outrage economy" or "disinformation" from me. The Islamist takeover is real. I HAVE BEEN MUGGED TWICE. MY FAMILY MEMBERS HAVE BEEN MUGGED MULTIPLE TIMES. MY NEIGHBOURS HAVE HAD THEIR HOMES INVADED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT AND THE POLICE DO NOTHING. MY FRIENDS ARE TOO SCARED TO WALK THE STREETS. Try and censor us all you want, but you will never shut down the truth.

Shame on the men who sit back and watch, Their towns be defended by the few, He asks a valid question here; “What would you do if it was you?”

99.9% of voters on May 7th will have the chance to vote for Reform. This is another phenomenal achievement for our party. Vote Reform. Get Starmer Out.

Dear @PahlaviReza Know that decent British people are deeply ashamed of our country's Prime Minister. Please do not imagine he represents us. He is about as much use as a cock-flavoured lollipop. And believe me, he KNOWS what one of those tastes like. x.com/PahlaviReza/st…

The Navy That Cannot. The Lawyer Who Will Not. Two weeks ago Keir Starmer stood at a multinational summit in Helsinki and promised Britain would go after Putin's shadow fleet, closing the Channel to sanctioned vessels and starving his war machine of dirty profits. Since that promise was made, dozens of sanctioned Russian tankers have passed through British waters. Britain has seized none of them. The Royal Navy has followed behind and issued statements. The explanation is now on the record. Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, has advised that each boarding operation requires an individual legal case to be made before it can proceed. Every interdiction must be justified separately under international maritime law. The Navy is ready. The law is not. So Putin's ships sail through and Britain watches. Lewis Page, a former Royal Navy officer writing in the Telegraph, has identified the sharpest comparison available. The English Channel is 21 miles wide at its narrowest point. The Strait of Hormuz is 21 to 30 miles wide. Britain announced the Channel was closed to sanctioned vessels. Iran announced the Strait of Hormuz was closed. The difference in outcomes requires no elaboration. Iran has shore-launched drones, missile stockpiles and the will to use them. Britain has a legal framework, a defence investment plan that missed its deadline and, according to Page, just three warships currently capable of firing anti-ship missiles. A Russian frigate armed with cruise missiles and surface-to-air systems escorted sanctioned tankers through those 21 miles without a single British vessel prepared to intercept. The pattern running through this entire period is now visible in its complete form. Hermer blocked Diego Garcia. Hermer's advice constrained the response to Iran. Hermer's framework is now the reason Putin can sail armed frigates through British waters while the Navy follows at a respectful distance. An unelected Attorney General, accountable to no voter, is the single most consequential figure in British national security. The Prime Minister who appointed him has outsourced every hard decision to a legal opinion and called the result principled leadership. Boris Johnson, whose many failings are a matter of public record, called the government's response pathetic and demanded to know why Britain was not boarding sanction-busting ships fuelling the slaughter of innocent Ukrainians. The former Prime Minister whose judgment Starmer spent years forensically prosecuting has arrived at a clearer understanding of what the moment requires than the man currently in Downing Street. History will find that irony amusing, if not particularly reassuring. John Healey said on Thursday that Russia's decision to escort the tankers with a warship showed Britain had successfully diverted Putin's resources away from Ukraine. A Russian frigate diverted from Ukraine to escort oil tankers through the English Channel past the white cliffs of Dover while Britain follows behind in a support vessel staffed by civilians. If that is the definition of success, the bar has been set at a height that even this government should be embarrassed to celebrate. Starmer promised sovereignty would always be defended. Putin sent a warship to test that promise in Britain's own waters. The answer came back in the form of a Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker trailing at a distance. Britain's adversaries have now had their answer to every question they needed answered. In the Gulf, in the Channel, in Helsinki and in Riyadh. The promises are made. The legal advice arrives. The ships sail through. "Hermer blocked Diego Garcia. Hermer's advice constrained the response to Iran. Hermer's framework is now the reason Putin can sail armed frigates through British waters while the Navy follows at a respectful distance."

Isabel, let's take this point by point because some of it deserves a serious answer and some of it really doesn't. You have compared people who paid National Insurance for forty years, based on official government communications, HMRC letters and statutory projections, to people who knowingly buy stolen goods. That is not an economic argument. It is an insult. And it tells us more about the emotional register driving this piece than the analytical one you are claiming. On the pay as you go structure. Yes, the state pension was always a transfer payment rather than a funded scheme. But the state did not present it that way. That is the crux of it. For decades successive governments communicated it in explicitly contributory terms, through HMRC letters, qualifying year statements, projected pension figures and official publications. You cannot design a system around contributory language, collect money on that basis for seventy years, and then tell the people who believed the official communications that their understanding was naive. The fraud, if we are using that kind of language, was committed by the state against the contributor, not by the contributor against the taxpayer. The counterparty argument is philosophically interesting but collapses under its own logic. If the following generation could not consent to the arrangement, neither could the generation that paid into it. They were presented with a system, told the rules, paid accordingly for decades and had precisely zero ability to redesign it. Holding them morally responsible for structural decisions made before most of them entered the workforce while simultaneously denying them the contractual expectation those decisions created is not consistency. It is having it both ways. On the income chart. Real incomes rose across the period shown. They also absorbed rising mortgage costs, the collapse of defined benefit private sector schemes, the shift from single to dual income households as economic necessity rather than lifestyle choice and the gradual withdrawal of state services that previous generations received as standard. One variable on a chart does not capture that complexity and you know it. The boomer as political architect argument is the weakest in the piece. The generation you are describing did not vote as a coordinated bloc to enrich themselves at their successors expense. That is a retrospective narrative that mistakes demographic weight for deliberate conspiracy. By the same logic every generation is culpable for every policy enacted during their voting lifetime regardless of whether they supported it. The Australian model is worth discussing. Ring fenced contributory funds, genuine accumulation, transparent obligations. Good. But that conversation requires treating the people who played by the existing rules as victims of a system they did not design rather than as its beneficiaries. The blood sweat and tears you are calling for will not come from people who have just been compared to receivers of stolen goods. You want Churchillian realism. Churchill understood that you do not inspire sacrifice by insulting the people you are asking to make it.

Scotland has a housing emergency. The supply of private rental accommodation is lower than it was ten years ago, rents are sky-high, and young people are being forced to sacrifice flexibility and to take on mortgages with high interest rates because the only sure way to find the home they want is to buy instead. The SNP have piled regulation after regulation onto the private rental sector, raising the costs and risks of providing long-term lets, creating a perverse incentive for landlords to pivot to short-term letting, and incentivising build-to-rent developers to concentrate on building less risky short-term accommodation like hotels and student flats. Scotland’s towns and cities are gradually turning into staging posts for a succession of transient visitors, rather than cohesive neighbourhoods for people to put down roots. And the SNP today pledged to make it worse, by giving private renters first refusal for a period of time “at a fair market rate” when their landlord wants to sell up. It makes for a nice soundbite to say you’ll give renters more of a chance to stay in the place they’re living. But John Swinney has once again failed to think through the incentives. By allowing renters to purchase the property at a fixed price before there’s a closing auction to determine the property’s market value, he would force landlords to sell for less than the property is actually worth. Landlords will leave the sector in droves ahead of the change, tenants will be turfed out, the rental supply will fall, rents will rise still higher, and the housing emergency will get even worse. Homelessness, already well beyond crisis levels, will increase even further. To bring down rents, we must get the incentives right to boost supply. Reform will not only build more social housing and allow more private housing to be built, but we will repeal the SNP’s damaging regulations for all new tenancies, while keeping the terms of existing tenancies unchanged. Reform will unleash the private rental sector to make homes both plentiful and more affordable for the Scots who need them most.

I would say the Crown Prince of Iran @PahlaviReza has more of a right to comment on Iran than a far-left agitator in the UK who nobody likes.

There’s only one choice for change on May the 7th 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Both Votes ➡️ Reform

7 square miles of solar panels all shipped from China with micro cracks with potential of leak of toxic chemicals into soil…Prime farmland ruined…That is our destiny if we do not stop this desecration.

I moved out of London last year. It wasn't because of "disinformation" on social media. It was because I saw London become a third world shithole full of sketchy deliveroo bongolians. I want my kids to be able to go to the park on their own without being harassed/filmed/assaulted by some government-sponsored janjaweed tuberculosis squad. Sadiq has done this to London to bring in people who vote for him, creating an electoral dictatorship. Like any dictator, he now wants to suppress any dissent. This is the left's blueprint for the whole country. The "disinformation" is Sadiq pretending that London is fine.

Has anyone ever seen an in-depth interview with Rupert Lowe since he set up Restore???