Nick Simpson @NikkoSimmo

Dear Andy Burnham, the Oxford Internet Institute examined social media after the Brexit vote. Their conclusion was that Russian traffic made up around a one thousandth of just one percent of Brexit traffic. Thus, I suspect you're lying; so put up your evidence or shut up.

This is just not true. As soon as I became foreign secretary I asked the security services the same question and they replied that there was no evidence of any successful interference in the 2016 referendum, by Russia or any other power. Either the security services have changed their view - which would be very odd - or Burnham is lying about what he has been told. After all Starmer was in power for two years and had access to exactly the same information. theguardian.com/technology/202…

96% of businesses do not export to the EU. 92% of our economy is not related to the EU. 99% of people never used FoM. 50% of France is in flames. £35bn would be cost each year to rejoin. Don't let the Remoaners tell more fibs. #GrubbyBurnham #Brexit

There was a situation at my daughter’s school last week which left her in tears. I went in to the school the day after to let them know we were removing her with immediate effect. The head teacher tried to explain but I had no interest in her excuses or reasons. The school had a play and an open evening for next year’s new pupils, and my daughter’s class were asked to take the potential new pupils and their parents for a tour of the school and classes. My daughter is the most softly spoken, polite and friendly child you’d probably ever meet. She’s one of just 40 Jewish pupils at the school out of over a thousand children. My wife wanted her to go to a non Jewish school because she felt concerned about the security threats at Jewish schools, and I don’t have much say in the matter as I’m just the dad. Our youngest goes to a Jewish school and the security simply isn’t anywhere good enough. This would be both their last year at school in this country because we’d already made the decision to leave the country before their next school year. My oldest wears a tiny discreet Star of David pendant. It’s so inoffensive to anybody but allows her to express her Jewish faith in a small way. When it was her turn in line to greet the family she would show around, the family was a Muslim family. My daughter has no personal issue with anybody and is friendly with two Muslim girls in her class who aren’t bothered by her being Jewish. But this family clearly were. In front of everyone, the father refused to be shown around by “a Jew”. He apparently, according to several parents and a teacher, raised his voice at her, and demanded that another child show them around. Instead of the head teacher condemning his behavior and telling him to leave, she asked my daughter to step aside and asked another pupil to show them around. Nobody except other parents, non Jewish parents, came to my daughter to ask if she was even ok. She was in a flood of tears, frightened and confused. My wife got a phone call from another parent and insisted she would go fetch our daughter because she already knew what I would do had I gone there myself. But this is what we live in now. This is the new normal. For reasons of what will come next, I won’t name the school. But this is going to escalate, a lot.

"the Russians swung the Brexit vote" 🤦‍♂️ #GrubbyBurnham

The biggest interferences in the Brexit referendum were: 1. Project Fear, led by a Canadian Governor of the Bank of England and enthusiastic globalist, who'd prefer nations didn't exist. 2. A Remain campaign lavishly funded by the EU and several global donors. 3. A President of the US, Obama, who stated Britain wouldn't get a trade deal with the US if it left the EU. 4. A mainstream media overwhelmingly pro-Remain, including the BBC, ITV, C4 and Sky. All worked in favour of the Remain vote. Shall we *now* talk about Russian interference?

A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life. At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday." He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy. Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system. He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting. He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way." The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.

The UK government intends to spaff away £22 billion on carbon capture machines. A massive wealth transfer of taxpayers’ money to major corporations. Plant more trees instead - the most natural, cost effective, long lasting, beautiful carbon capture machine of them all. 🌳

🤡 Ok lets talk about foreign attempts to influence the Brexit vote (apart from Obama telling us we'd be at the "back of the queue" for a trade deal).... It's quite the list don't you think? ▪️ George Soros – Billionaire financier. Predicted sterling could fall by 15–20% or more, making British households poorer. ▪️ Bill Gates – Warned Britain would become significantly less attractive for business, investment and scientific research. ▪️WEF – published warnings that Brexit could cause profound recession, financial instability and falling investment. ▪️ François Hollande – French President. Warned of consequences for British trade & financial services. ▪️Hillary Clinton – US. Publicly backed Remain supporting Obama's position. ▪️ Angela Merkel – German Chancellor. Publicly backed remain. ▪️ Jean-Claude Juncker – European Commission President. Warned Britain not to leave. ▪️Justin Trudeau – Canadian Prime Minister. Warned that Britain would not get easy or automatic trade agreements after Brexit. ▪️ Donald Tusk – European Council President. Warned Brexit could have serious political and economic consequences. ▪️ Enda Kenny – Irish Prime Minister. Warned Brexit could threaten stability in Northern Ireland. ▪️ Shinzo Abe – Japanese Prime Minister. Warned Brexit could threaten Japanese investment and more than 100,000 British jobs. ▪️ Michael Bloomberg – American billionaire, former New York mayor. Supported Remain and warned of economic and employment consequences. ▪️ Li Ka-shing – Hong Kong billionaire. Warned Brexit would damage Britain. ▪️ Wang Jianlin – Chinese billionaire. Warned Brexit could affect Chinese investment in Britain. ▪️ Jamie Dimon – JPMorgan Chase CEO. Warned that thousands of British financial-services jobs could be at risk. ▪️ International Monetary Fund (IMF) – Christine Lagarde warned the economic consequences could range from "pretty bad to very, very bad". ▪️ Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – Predicted Brexit would leave British households thousands of pounds worse off annually. ▪️ G7 – Formally declared Brexit a serious risk to global economic growth. ▪️ G20 – Identified Britain's possible departure from the EU as a potential shock to the global economy. ▪️ European Commission – Warned Britain would lose existing privileges and face new trade barriers. ▪️ Bono and U2 – Irish musicians. Supported Britain remaining in the EU. ▪️ Liam Neeson – Irish actor. Encouraged eligible Irish voters in Britain to vote Remain. ▪️ Patti Smith – American singer. Supported a public appeal asking Britain to stay. ▪️ Jean-Michel Jarre – French musician. Supported an appeal opposing Brexit. ▪️ Lilian Thuram – French former footballer. Supported an appeal asking Britain to remain. The scale of attempted foreign interference in Brexit was extreme... And in the face of ALL of the opposition, in the face of all the threats to force us to comply... the majority voted Leave anyway 💣

My vote on Brexit was affected by disinformation. I voted Remain because I was told if Leave won there would be terrible consequences. The BoE Governor told me he would raise interest rates - he lowered them. The Chancellor said he'd have an emergency budget - he didn't. The Treasury said unemployment would go up - it went down. Goldman Sachs and others said they would pull out of Britain - they spent billions on new HQs The Chief Executive of the NHS Alliance said there would be an epidemic of super-gonorrhoea. As for foreign interference - The EU, the US and Irish Presidents etc etc all weighed in on the side of Remain.

Three bad harvests, input costs through the roof, SFI turned into a scramble, and bluetongue spreading. We’re still expected to produce cheap food and look after the landscape. Something has to give. Stand with farmers or watch more family businesses disappear. 🇬🇧

Protecting the heritage and the future of the British countryside is a hill I will die on. Not because I hate cities. I have spent 20 years of my 52 years on this planet living in cities. Not because I want the countryside frozen in a postcard. But because this beautiful green and pleasant land is the one thing Britain still has that money cannot easily fake and policy cannot easily replace. I come from a farming background. I see farming and the countryside for its true value. It is the hedgerow that has been laid for three hundred years. The country lane that still follows a Saxon boundary. The church tower rising over a field of hay. The dry-stone wall that someone stacked by hand decades ago and that still holds firm. The dawn chorus. The smell of wet earth after rain. The harvests that reap what has been sowed. The community spirit of the village pub. The footpath that belongs to everyone and to no one. This is not scenery. It is the country’s memory and heritage made visible. Blake called it a green and pleasant land. He was not writing a travel brochure. He was naming the thing we were supposed to keep while the mills rose. We kept enough of it that people still know what he meant. That is the inheritance. You do not get another one. Because once the farmland is gone, it’s gone forever. Never to return. We lose our green and pleasant land our own peril. A country can survive ugly architecture. It can survive bad fashion, bad governments, even bad decades. It cannot survive the slow conversion of its living rural landscape into a corporate development opportunity, a solar panel farm, a data centre or an energy industrial estate. We need homes. We need power. We need food. Those are not optional. What is optional is the government habit of treating the countryside as leftover space: the place you put the housing target; the place you put the solar farm on a real farm that feeds the nation when a warehouse roof or car park would show more common sense. The place called a “development” when governments have already decided the field is in the way and that somehow, food supply from farmland isn’t deemed to be a “development”. Once a village is ringed by a data centre, it is not a village. Once the best land is under glass and steel, it is not a farm. Once the view that made a place itself is gone, no planning approval can bring it back. Farmers are not extras in this picture. They are the reason the green and pleasant land of Britain still exists. A countryside without people who work it becomes either a theme park or a ruin. If we make it impossible to pass on a farm, impossible to grow food at a living return and easy to rent the same acres to a developer or an energy company, we should stop pretending we are “protecting nature.” We are just changing the land owner to a corporate asset stripper. This is my hill because the alternative is a Britain that still has a flag, a language and a history, but no longer has the thing those things were supposed to belong to. A nation that cannot recognise its own ground, soil, crops and trees has already started to forget who it is. I am not asking for nostalgia. I am asking for continuity. Build homes. Generate power. Feed people. But do it without flattening the last ordinary miracle we have: a small, crowded island that is still, in places, beautiful enough to break your heart. These places often live in the countryside. They should be protected. Working farmland is not in the way of the future. It is the reason the future is worth having.

WHILE THE WORLD ARGUES, AMERICA PUT A CITY-SIZED ROCKET IN ORBIT At 7:48 this morning, while the rest of the planet was still arguing about tariffs and elections and whose fault everything is, a rocket taller than the Statue of Liberty lifted off a beach in South Texas and did something no rocket that size has ever done. It went to orbit and stayed there. That's Starship, on its fourteenth try. Thirteen times before this it flew and fell short, sometimes spectacularly, and thirteen times a certain kind of commentator declared the whole thing a billionaire's fireworks show. This morning it had an engine quit on the way up. The old way of doing things, the way of committees and cautious men, would have been to abort and study it for a year. Instead, the ship relit an engine it wasn't supposed to need, pushed itself the rest of the way to 17,500 miles an hour, and opened its doors. Out came twenty-six satellites, each one the size of a 737 when it unfolds. The company's own spokesman said the payload was worth about twenty Falcon 9 launches of bandwidth. Twenty flights' worth of internet, delivered in one morning, from one ship, and then the ship came home and splashed down in the Pacific in time for lunch. Here's what I keep coming back to. Nobody made the country do this. No five-year plan, no ministry of rockets. A bunch of engineers on a Texas beach decided the future should arrive sooner, and it did, and the rest of us got to watch it on our phones. That's not something that happens everywhere. It happens here. Every empire in history was built by whoever controlled the high ground. For a few thousand years that meant the hill above the river. Then the sea. Then the air. This morning, in the time it takes to eat breakfast, we reminded the world where the high ground is now, and who's standing on it. Argue about the rest of it. That's fine. That's what a free country does. But somebody put a city-sized rocket in orbit today, and it wasn't them.

You could almost feel the Question Time attendees clutching their pearls. #bbcqt

It is depressingly apparent that to find reasonable commentators on global affairs today, you need to look outside of Europe. Below, former Singaporean Ambassador to the UN, Kishore Mahbubani, dispels the propagandistic narrative that @MishalHusain can't help but defend.

Extrait de l’intervention de Milei hier à l’ONU : « L’ONU a échoué à faire ce qu’elle était supposée faire et s’est mise à faire ce que personne ne lui avait demandé, et qu’elle n’aurait jamais dû faire. Elle a construit un Leviathan bureaucratique focalisé sur l’idée de décider comment doivent vivre les pays du monde et leurs citoyens. C’est un étrange mélange entre anarchie et tyrannie. Impuissance contre ceux qui enfreignent les règles les plus basiques, comme les dictatures sanglantes et les organisations terroristes. Et un contrôle et des obligations orwelliennes face aux démocraties libérales qui, elles, respectent les règles. Nous l’avons vu avec l’agenda du millénaire, l’agenda 2030, la régulation économique, les agendas sur le genre, l’extrémisme environnemental et l’immigration incontrôlée. Et à chaque fois qu’ils ont échoué, au lieu de demander des excuses et réviser leur modèle, ils ont doublé la mise. Comme on le voit déjà avec l’agenda 2045. Laquelle, je l’annonce, va échouer. Mais l’exemple le plus grave, qui devrait couvrir de honte cette organisation pour toujours, c’est la gestion de la pandémie. Durant la pandémie, des organisations dépendantes de cette maison (l’ONU) ont renié des preuves scientifiques et la souveraineté des nations. Elles ont promu dans le monde entier des politiques d’enfermement forcé qui ont détruit des emplois, ruiné l’éducation d’une génération d’enfants et ont couté la vie à des millions de personnes qui sont mortes seules, sans attention médicale basique. Quand certains disent que ce fut une erreur sanitaire, nous y voyons une expérience de contrôle social déguisé en expérience scientifique. (…) La terreur psychologique installée par l’État, qui a dit pendant des années aux citoyens du monde qu’il fallait avoir peur. Peur de son voisin, de l’air qu’on respirait, de sortir de sa maison. Cette peur n’était pas un effet secondaire mais l’outil choisi par les gouvernements. Le problème est que les urgences passent, la peur disparait, le temps s’écoule, mais les institutions et le pouvoir créés pour ces supposées urgences, restent. » Il n’est pas venu pour manier la langue de bois le Javier !

@afneil The irony here is that Saudi Arabia already has its own fleet of refueling jets and the distance between Saudi and the Houtis is only about 300 miles! Difficult to see what we are going to refuel exactly.

My son was casually threatened with a detention at school the other day if he "did that again" for innocently saying BC (dates before the birth of Christ in the historical record) instead of BCE (a shorthand of the modern historian and educator trendy term 'Before Common Era' that has been aggressively pushed in English state schools since around 2015/16). He did this because he used the summer holiday to read several long since oublished history books that were staples of secondary history education for a long time in order to be prepared for his first year at secondary school. He's Christian but we are not a zealously religious family. We're pretty relaxed and my son's mother is Buddhist by birth and upbringing in East Asia. He would be happy to use either interchangeably. But as he said, why can't he use a commonly recognised term in society if he chooses? I personally think changing BC/AD to BCE/CE is pointless and arguably quite offensive to Christians rather than being "inclusive", but it's not in of itself the end of the world to me. I don't care if people want to use it themselves. It's fine. It's their right to. I just don't like the attempt at mandatory imposition of it on others, especially in the educational sphere. It is the principle of being threatened with a sanction for using a term that has been widely used for millennia that frustrates me deeply. It is an abuse of power. It just shows what a madcap education system we live in. For now I am leaving it alone as it was a comment made in passing and nothing happened, but if they do try to discipline him if he does so again, I will be in touch with the school and the governing board about it. It's unacceptable. They tell you there is no indoctrination or compelled speech in education. They tell you there is no threat to freedom of speech and belief. But there absolutely is. @doveyymargeauxx @SBarrettBar

You don't know who James Purnell is. That's exactly how he likes it. While you were busy watching Burnham on the news, this man moved into No.10. No election. No vote. No mandate. He just walked in and sat down. Let me introduce you to the man who is now running your country. Start with the money. When Purnell was Work and Pensions Secretary he claimed £395 on parliamentary expenses, your money, for an accountant's advice on the sale of his own London flat. He told Parliament the flat was his second home and drew the second home allowance on it. When he sold it he used the main residence rule with HMRC so no capital gains tax was due. Same property. Two different answers depending on who was asking. He was not found to have broken the rules. He was not asked to repay. He was the minister in charge of making sure you did not claim too much. While he was Culture Secretary he got caught out by a hospital photo. He was late to the event. The other MPs had already left. The hospital photographed him on the same spot and merged him into the group shot. The trust said he consented. He denied agreeing to a fake. Later emails showed the hospital telling him they would “drop you into the photographs” and sending him the doctored picture. Jeremy Hunt, then shadow culture secretary, said his position was “completely untenable.” He kept the job. That same year he stood in front of the TV industry and told them to clean up after a wave of fakery scandals. Weeks later he was in a faked photo. The man lecturing Britain on media integrity was in a cut and paste job from a hospital car park. Back to welfare. Purnell proposed charging 26.8 percent annual interest on crisis loans to the unemployed and pensioners. Not loan sharks. The government. Targeting people who needed emergency money for a broken boiler. Gordon Brown had to kill it. His department also trialled “voice risk analysis” lie detector style tests on benefits claimants. The trials were dropped. Disability campaigners still name him as one of the ministers who helped turn poverty into a character test. Then in 2009 he stabbed Gordon Brown in the back. He timed his resignation letter to drop at maximum political damage, called publicly for Brown to “stand aside,” and walked out. Not for the country. Not for the voters. He calculated it was the right move for him. The man who called for his own Prime Minister to quit is now the unelected Chief of Staff to the next one. He writes the day. Burnham reads it. After Parliament he went to the BBC. No programme making experience. Former Labour cabinet minister handed a director role at BBC Radio worth around £300,000. Conservative MPs called it a mockery of impartiality. He spent seven years inside the BBC. Then he left. Then came Flint Global. He became CEO of one of Britain's most secretive lobbying firms. Known clients have included BP, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Jaguar Land Rover and water industry interests. Flint refuses to publish its full UK client list. After Labour won, the firm met government 38 times across breakfasts, lunches, dinners and roundtables. On the official lobbying register it declared almost none of that. He hosted Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds at a dinner with defence and industry executives. Reynolds logged a dinner with Flint. He did not log the companies in the room. Those firms have since taken large government contracts. This is not a rumour. It is in the documents. He resigned from Flint in June 2026 to take the No.10 job. Flint said he had recused himself and would have no ongoing financial interest. The appointment still walked a man who had just been selling access through the black door. This is the man running No.10. Not elected. Not accountable. Not in the shot. You were shouting at the dummy. Meet the hand.

No North Atlantic hurricanes have formed as of September 21st. That’s the first time for this to happen since 1914.

The Free Press @TheFP

4 weeks ago

It’s the quietest eastern hurricane season of the satellite era. So why aren’t we hearing more about it in the news? @LLBiggers weighs in.

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