Graham NT 🇬🇧 @GrahamT_FC

Official figures out this morning report that last month, the UK government borrowed £24.5 billion. But the fineprint shows that almost £11 billion of that extra borrowing went on debt interest payments. That's more than £400 per household on debt service costs, in September alone. So far during this financial year, from April to September, the government's debt interest payments amount to £61 billion. Now, this number will barely feature in UK newspapers and across our airwaves. It may be mentioned in passing in out-of-the-way business sections, or on the odd business bulletin. But this huge debt interest bill won't register with the vast majority of our political and media class, or impact the national debate. Let me explain why that's so wrong and so dangerous ... £61 billion is a massive amount of money. It's equivalent to the UK's entire annual defence budget – the money we're paying, increasingly to foreign creditors, simply to service our national debt for six months, not to pay any of it back. £61 billion is equivalent to the money you'd raise over a year from adding a whopping 7 pence to the basic rate of income tax. For £61 billion, you could build around 40 large, state-of-the-art hospitals, or employ more than 100 thousand extra nurses for ten years. £61 billion would pay for free-at-the-point of use social care for everyone who needs it in the UK, for an entire year – three times over. Again, this is the debt interest bill on Britain's spiralling national debt – now more than 3 trillion pounds – over the last six months alone. The UK's public finances are close to meltdown – yet so many MPs and journalists continue blithely to view ever more public spending and borrowing as the answer to every problem. Those who highlight the dangers post by our hugely precarious national accounts are dismissed as cranks, ideologues or worse. But basic arithmetic has no ideology. And there is nothing "progressive" or "kind" or "right-on" about driving the UK ever closer to the fiscal cliff edge, provoking a crisis that will make the "austerity" years of the 2010s feel like a picnic, a crisis in which poorer households will suffer the most. Yes, Britain's national debt is lower than that of France. But because our borrowing has been rising so sharply, and because we're so prone to inflation, our debt service costs are much higher. The UK is spending a disgraceful 3.6pc of GDP on public debt interest, while France spends less than 2.5pc. Endless airtime and column inches are devoted to spurious conversations about a billion or two of additional "fiscal headroom" we may or may not have in three years' time. And, of course, any "extra headroom" is immediately pledged in new spending – which means yet more borrowing. These conversations are a waste of time – and, in fact, are deeply counterproductive. Three-year fiscal forecasts, even one- and two-year forecasts, routinely turn out to be askew by tens of billions of pounds. I'm not saying we don't need fiscal rules - we do, but we need more immediate rules, which actually bite, acting as a meaningful constraint on out-of-control borrowing and spending. Instead, political and media sages present the nation with spuriously precise discussions about fictional fiscal outcomes way into the future – using rules which are deliberately designed to kick arithmetic realities into the long grass .... An increasingly expensive, over-bearing, out of control state is not the answer to Britain problems. But unless we change course, it will certainly be our downfall. Please like/share if you think what I'm saying is important – and if fiscal realities should feature more prominently in our national debate. And for more sharp, plain-speaking economic analysis subscribe to: "When The Facts Change - economic and politics in a fast-moving world, with Liam Halligan"

@Cyrisha__ @visegrad24 Cyrisha = Russian bot

Fund the Jodrell Bank Observatory's largest telescope - Sign the Petition! c.org/PHq2JSF5Qb via @UKChange

@MarkVipond @KemiBadenoch Decent Conservatives are appalled by Farage’s treatment at the hands of the Uniparty and much of the media. Kemi should be calling it out and defending our British values. Instead she perpetuates insinuation of wrong-doing and does not condemn The Times. “Hissy fit” indeed! Anger

One must admire the tenacity of Miss Phillipson. Raised in Tyne and Wear between a disused railway and a flattened chemical plant, she has evidently decided that her childhood hardships constitute a permanent shield against arithmetic. How quaint. Miss Phillipson promised 6,500 teachers, funded by her spiteful little VAT raid on private schools. She has delivered, by her own creative accounting, 4,654. One might almost congratulate her, were one not possessed of a calculator and the ability to read footnotes. The 4,654 includes further education lecturers and special school staff. The actual increase in secondary teachers? Nine hundred and seventy-eight. Not 6,500. Not close. She has not moved goalposts; she has relocated the entire pitch to another sport. Meanwhile, the National Education Union reports that zero percent of her profession considers her work "very good." Seventy-four percent consider it poor. One imagines even the flattened chemical plant of her youth achieved higher approval ratings. The private school VAT has displaced thousands of children, damaged the sector, and produced precisely the opposite of her stated intent. But then, one does not become Education Secretary to educate. One becomes Education Secretary to settle scores dressed as social justice. Miss Phillipson did not escape poverty to improve schools. She escaped to become precisely the sort of politician who uses her past as immunity from scrutiny while dismantling the ladders she climbed. VERDICT: Statistical fraud in working-class costume. A revolutionary who destroys the ladder, then charges admission to view the wreckage.

Bridget Phillipson @bphillipsonMP

4 months ago

Despite what you've heard this week, we're delivering on our manifesto with over 4,600 teachers recruited into where we need them most – secondaries, special schools and colleges. That's alongside more teachers in training, more rejoining and more staying in our schools.

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End Of Term Report: Bridget Phillipson. Grade: F. Must Do Better Is No Longer Sufficient. As children across England sit their exams this week, some of them are doing so in schools they did not choose, having been displaced from schools their families stretched to afford, by a policy that promised 6,500 new teachers and cannot confirm a single one was hired. That is Bridget Phillipson's record. Here is the full assessment. Private school VAT. The government promised the levy would displace around 14,000 pupils into the state sector and fund 6,500 new teachers. The original internal estimate was 3,000 pupils. The actual figure is over 43,000, three times the revised estimate and fourteen times the original one. Over 100 private schools have closed, including schools that explicitly named the VAT policy as the cause of their collapse. Fees have risen on average 14 percent, substantially above Treasury forecasts, hitting middle income families hardest, the people Labour claimed it was protecting. Smaller, more affordable independent schools have been destroyed. The country's most prestigious and expensive institutions have barely noticed. On the 6,500 new teachers: when asked in Parliament how many had actually been recruited using the VAT revenue, a government minister declined to answer. The question was put directly and left unanswered. The government does not know, or will not say, how many teachers its flagship policy created. What is known is that more teachers have left the profession than joined it in the last recorded period. The state sector is absorbing tens of thousands of additional pupils while the teaching workforce shrinks. Kemi Badenoch called Phillipson a spiteful class warrior. The evidence supports the description. The policy was not designed around evidence. The government's own estimate was out by a factor of fourteen. It was designed around ideology, the belief that private education is an offence against equality and that taxing it is its own reward regardless of consequences. The consequences landed not on Eton but on families who stretched to afford smaller schools that no longer exist. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that sex under the Equality Act means biological sex. That was one year ago. The Equality and Human Rights Commission drafted its code of practice. Phillipson received it and sat on it. Baroness Falkner, who oversaw the drafting, said publicly that the guidance is ready and that the delay is political. The charge has gone unanswered. The minister holds the title Secretary of State for Women and Equalities while withholding the legal protections the law requires her to implement. Schools are being nudged toward identity-based decision-making in areas that demand caution, maturity and parental involvement. Teachers are placed in an impossible position, told to affirm identity claims before maturity, before medical certainty, often before parents are informed. The Cass Review explicitly warned against premature affirmation. The guidance ignores that warning. When things go wrong it will not be ministers who face the consequences. It will be teachers. The Eton-backed free sixth form in Middlesbrough, a free school for deprived pupils in one of England's poorest areas, was cancelled not because it failed but because it threatened to succeed in a way the government could not control. The curriculum is being diluted. The EBacc is under pressure. Knowledge is being replaced with flexibility, which means lower academic floors for the children least able to absorb that cost. While children sit their exams, the record speaks. Over 43,000 pupils displaced. Over 100 schools closed. Zero confirmed new teachers from a policy that promised 6,500. Legal guidance withheld. Safeguarding inverted. Excellence cancelled. Not fit for purpose. Should not be allowed to continue in post. End Of Term Report: Bridget Phillipson. Grade: F. Must Do Better Is No Longer Sufficient.

@implausibleblog Phillipson grew up in poverty, on a council estate, raised by a single mother, on free school meals, and worked her way up to Cabinet. Why did she become a spiteful class warrior?

@ramonagusta This is nonsense. Factor of 100 error. Decimal point misplaced. Divide by 100 to gat the actuality.

@harrow_council Absolutely disgraceful behaviour that actually gives us a good insight as to the culture at @harrow_council that they so brazenly said these things and were so certain the police would back them up. This is much deeper than just these two idiots.

@julianHjessop CPI inflation is actually 2.93%. April 2026 vs the corrected April 2025 index. Problem is, ONS never uses its corrections retrospectively.

There is a very simple reason the Morrisons story is politically dangerous for Labour. It collapses the entire moral story they tell about themselves. Labour wants voters to believe that every tax rise, every employment cost, every regulation and every intervention is really just “standing up for working people”. Then a major supermarket says it is closing around 100 convenience stores, putting hundreds of jobs at risk, and says government policy choices have made returning those stores to profitability even harder. So who exactly is being protected here? The worker whose job is now at risk? The pensioner who loses the local shop? The family that now has less competition nearby? The high street with another shuttered unit? The customer already paying more for food? This is the problem with performative economics. It sounds noble in a speech. It polls well in a focus group. It gives ministers a line to use on television. But businesses do not operate in speeches. They operate in margins. If a shop loses money, it closes. If staff become too expensive relative to revenue, hours get cut. If compliance costs rise, expansion slows. If government keeps treating employers like an endless cash machine, employers eventually protect themselves. And then Labour acts shocked. The phrase from Morrisons should haunt ministers: “Government policy choices.” Not bad weather. Not bad luck. Not vibes. Choices. A choice to make employment more expensive. A choice to raise the cost base. A choice to squeeze the same retailers you then demand must lower prices. Labour cannot keep pretending there is no connection between the policies it announces and the consequences that follow. The bill always arrives. This time it is arriving in the form of 100 shop closures.

@CCHQPress @reformparty_uk @Makerfield_RFK Hey CCHQ, that is an unworthy smear.

@SBarrettBar Toast lasts longer than bread. And the smell hangs about.

Thoughts on St George's Day comment.press/stgeorgesday

So apart from trying to give away the Chagos islands. Recognising Palestine. 13 ministerial resignations. Showing full confidence in Morgan McSweeney, Peter Mandelson, Sue Gray and Lord Ali. Blaming the far right for an island of strangers. 16 Policy U turns and rising. Having no operable warships. Not smashing the gangs. Approving a huge Chinese embassy in London. Spending 23 seconds laying a wreath in Southport only to rush back to a drinks party. Raising income tax. Raising inheritance tax. Raising national insurance. Raising capital gains tax. Raising council tax. Raising value added tax. Raising mansion tax. Increasing welfare spending and the minimum wage whilst freezing tax allowances. Scrapping jury trials. The only boat he has stopped is HMS dragon from crossing the channel. What has Starmer really achieved apart from breakfast clubs and the decay of our country?

Speech, Migration, Nation: NCF Beaconsfield Spring Conference - 25th April Our Locals Spring Conference brings together a stellar line-up of speakers from brilliant organizations Tickets: eventbrite.co.uk/e/ncf-beaconsf… With: @AlpMehm of @MigrationWatch @janmacvarish of Free @SpeechUnion @TimScottUK of @tfa4freedom @Sargon_of_Akkad of @lotuseaters_com @david_oldbolt of @InstituteDanube Cornelia Van Der Poll of @RestoreTrustNT and our very own Dr. @KiszelyPhilip

This.

I’ve been called racist and islamophobic hundreds of times today for outlining Restore Britain’s policy on banning halal slaughter, the burqa, sharia law, cousin marriage and plenty more. I want to be really clear about our party’s official response. We do not give a shit.

Retweet if you support him.

You ban North Sea drilling. You ban fracking. You tax customers at the pump. You hit producers with retrospective taxes. And now you have the nerve to turn around and blame rising costs on the fuel companies.

Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer

7 months ago

If fuel companies try to rip off customers, my government will step in. @RachelReevesMP and @Ed_Miliband are bringing the bosses of the fuel companies in today, to make sure that customers aren’t losing out because of the conflict in the Middle East.

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