Robert Capper @capper42004

I do believe the UK State is persecuting citizens who dare to dissent. Those who challenge the prevailing narrative are arrested, publicly vilified and silenced. Their treatment is a warning to anyone else who dares to do the same. The process is the punishment. Metered out by the witch hunters and then the authorities. In a “you will all comply” type of way. This is not the way of a functioning democracy. It is how tired civilisations die. And it begins with the state demanding total control.

@JChimirie66677 Excellent post as always Jim. Quick as well.

Brilliant Badenoch, Four Pence Off Gherkins and a Chancellor Left Exposed John Healey stood up today promising "breathing space now, fresh hope for the future." When Kemi Badenoch rose to respond, she dismantled the claim with a single line: this is a budget for getting by, not for getting on. In eleven words, she exposed what fifty minutes of Treasury rhetoric had tried to obscure. A government managing decline and calling it relief. Badenoch's sharpest moment was also her simplest. Healey had announced £100 energy payments, an extension of the electricity VAT cut, and business rates relief, dressed as a serious response to household pressure. Badenoch's verdict: "Instead, we got 4p off gherkins." The line lands because it exposes the absurdity. A country facing diesel at £2 a litre and gas storage at a third full heading into winter was offered a rounding error and told to be grateful. Badenoch did not need to shout to make the gap visible. She simply held the promise next to the policy and let the distance speak. She was equally precise on the fiscal claims underneath the theatre. Healey insisted his Budget met the government's own fiscal rules and left £15 billion of headroom by 2029/30, the same confident arithmetic his predecessor Reeves offered before her own numbers moved against her. Badenoch was unimpressed, and rightly so. Headroom quoted four years out, in a Budget delivered against a backdrop of £14 billion in additional forecast debt interest this year alone, is not a cushion. It is a hope dressed up as a forecast, and Badenoch's refusal to accept it at face value was the correct instinct from an opposition that has watched this exact promise fail once already under this government. Her challenge on enterprise was the one Healey will find hardest to answer honestly. He pointed to new money through the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank, business rates changes, and tax incentives for company founders, and called it a plan to unleash British enterprise. Badenoch's response cut straight through the announcement to the arithmetic underneath it: none of it touches the underlying costs already crushing employers. A tax incentive for founders means little to a business still absorbing last year's National Insurance rise, this year's minimum wage increase, and a wholesale energy bill that has doubled since the Iran crisis began. You cannot unleash enterprise with one hand while taxing its costs with the other, and Badenoch was the only person in the chamber prepared to say so plainly. Badenoch also went after breathing space itself as a concept, asking how much room Britain genuinely has left when borrowing costs, debt interest and the overall tax burden are all moving in the same direction at once. It is the right question, because breathing space implies slack somewhere in the system, and nothing in Healey's own figures suggests any exists. A Chancellor claiming headroom while debt interest rises by £14 billion in a single year is not managing a surplus of room. He is managing its absence, and hoping nobody checks the working. What made the performance outstanding was its discipline. Badenoch did not need to invent a crisis or raise her voice to find one. Sharp, witty, and relentlessly on point, she read Healey's own numbers back to him and let the contradiction do the damage itself. A government promising fresh hope, offering 4p off gherkins, and calling £15 billion of headroom security rather than wishful thinking has handed the opposition leader everything she needs to make the case against it. Badenoch made that case, and made it look easy.

@copdoc1 Yes absolutely. Welcome to the distopian world that is the uk.

@christopherhope @GBNEWS That's net migration. How many low I.Q. people will actually turn up expecting to be looked after.

@JavierBlas No shit sherlock.

I was a criminal intelligence analyst for a decade, then a consultant in that kind of thing. I've never seen crime data portrayed like this, for good reason. Logarithmic scales are used to compress exponential differences (bacteria multiplying, stock markets doubling year on year, differences between towns and cities). In the Economist's case, a log scale would make sense if there was a reason for Afghan men to commit more of these crimes (if each Afghan had a hundred cocks, or was actually ten men inside one suit). But there isn't. The log scale just obscures the vastly higher rates of offending by these imported Labour voters. The casual reader will skim over it and assume it's a linear scale. The one advantage is that it makes proportional differences below/close to the baseline easier to see. But it obfuscates the truth.

sonny @SonnyTLoughran

2 days ago

Baffling that people are calling my excellent data colleagues woke for producing this. It's not our fault you don't understand log scales! These are obviously disturbing stats. Worth also reading the full piece for some perspective...

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Shocking neglect and abuse of retired Lt Col Stephen Maguire DCM SAS, a natural born leader of men who spent 40 years in service to his country, and his son's long fight for justice. Please share Ben's post widely: "My father, Retired Lt Col Stephen Maguire DCM SAS, is a man who spent nearly 40 years in dedicated service to this country, serving from 1970 until 2009. He is a natural leader, a decorated soldier, to those who served with him. However, he has been completely abandoned and betrayed by the very system he gave everything to. I am fighting for justice for my father. This struggle is a mirror of my own life; my own journey marked by the negligence of MPs, charities, and veteran services which led me to the absolute rock bottom of homelessness as a veteran myself. I know exactly what it is like to be discarded by the people who promised to provide support. After years of fighting, we finally have a pathway toward the right care, but the damage is already done. The sheer scale of the failings along the way has crippled a man who likely only suffered from PTSD. What should have been a manageable recovery became a total collapse because of institutional incompetence. This isn't a failure of one person or one office it is a systemic rot. For too long, the UK government, regardless of which side of the fence they sit on, has played a political game with the lives of our veterans. Whether it is Labour or the Conservatives, the result is the same: service men are treated as assets when they are useful and as liabilities the moment they are broken. We are told our sacrifices are "remembered," but the reality is that once the uniform comes off, the care vanishes. We sought help for my dad, worried about PTSD and dementia resulting from his service. Through the SAS Association and Veterans’ Aid, he was referred to various healthcare facilities. Instead of professional care, he found negligence from these referrals. In the last few years alone, he has been through multiple institutions that have failed him. We've dealt with incorrect diagnoses, doctors who tried to push him out of their care because he was "too difficult," and the removal of life-saving medication that led to him being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He was sedated and left to decline without specialist care. His PTSD was completely ignored, and his medical history was dismissed. In one instance, he was admitted to the hospital due to low sodium caused by the excessive use of anti-psychotic medication. The most infuriating part is the silence from the top. MPs have explicitly ignored this situation and failed to act for a Lt Col in 22 SAS. The "Military Covenant" is nothing more than a piece of paper used for photo opportunities while men like my father are left to rot. The system has failed. The NHS has failed. Veteran charities have failed. From the MOD passing the buck to the medical incompetence of the facilities, my father has been abandoned like thousands of others. I am posting this because we need accountability. It is not enough to simply "help" now; there must be justice for the way he was treated. My father spent four decades looking after his men and serving at the highest level for the United Kingdom; it is a national disgrace that the government failed to look after him and many like him. Do not listen to the rhetoric the government continues to push. As this is an example of what happens after 40 years of dedicated service. Please share this. We need the people in power to answer for this. We need leaders who actually lead, not politicians who just talk." facebook.com/story.php?stor… bobshepherdauthor.com/2023/11/15/ex-…

@JamesMelville Absolutely fucking brilliant! How does your friend know where I keep my laptop? It's Bebington not Ellesmere Port btw.

A great rant from a friend: “I don't know who's running the British newspapers at the moment, but I reckon somebody's accidentally given the editorial jobs to a bunch of fucking doomsday preppers. Have you seen the absolute state of the news lately? World War Three. Nuclear Armageddon. Russian cyberattacks. Chinese hackers. Emergency survival kits. How to prepare for the end of civilisation. Every bloody newspaper seems to be running the same story. You'd think Vladimir Putin had been spotted at Dover services with a tank and a packed lunch. And apparently, the most important thing we can do to prepare for all this is go shopping. Seriously. We're being advised to stockpile food, water, torches, batteries and enough toilet roll to survive the collapse of Western civilisation. Do they genuinely believe we're all going to read these articles, leap off the sofa and charge down to Asda like there's a fucking trolley dash on? I reckon somebody's looked at the Christmas retail figures and thought, "How can we get these bastards to spend another two hundred quid?" "Tell them the Russians are coming." "Brilliant. We'll shift those seventeen pallets of corned beef we've had sitting in the warehouse since Easter." And what exactly am I supposed to do with all these emergency supplies if there's a nuclear attack? Imagine it. You're sitting in your living room, minding your own business, when suddenly there's an enormous flash outside. The windows explode. The roof comes off. There's a nuclear shockwave tearing through the city, flattening everything in its path. And there you are, crawling across the kitchen floor, desperately trying to get the fucking tin opener out of the drawer. "QUICK! SOMEBODY GET THE BEANS!" What fucking difference are beans going to make? You're about to be vaporised at several thousand degrees. I don't think the nutritional benefits of baked beans are going to be particularly relevant. But the politicians are the funniest part of all this. Angela Rayner was asked what she'd be stockpiling. Sauvignon Blanc and mascara. Sauvignon Blanc and fucking mascara! I love that. The world's coming to an end, millions could die, civilisation might collapse, but Angela's making sure she's got a decent bottle of white and her eyelashes done. Then Andy Burnham comes along telling people not to stockpile alcohol because they need to keep a clear head. Well, thank Christ we've got that sorted. One politician's preparing for the apocalypse like she's going to an all-inclusive resort in Tenerife, and another's telling everybody to drink responsibly. And apparently Andy's emergency supplies include Twiglets. Fucking Twiglets. I mean, at what point did the national security discussion turn into everybody comparing what they've brought to a children's birthday party? We're supposedly facing the possibility of World War Three, and our political leaders are having a conversation that wouldn't sound out of place in the middle aisle of Aldi. And then there's the cyberattack warnings. Apparently, Russia or China could launch a massive cyberattack and bring down our communications, electricity supplies and essential services. Right. And what am I supposed to do about that? Unplug the kettle? Put the laptop in a biscuit tin? I can just imagine some highly trained Russian cyberwarfare specialist sitting in Moscow, surrounded by millions of pounds' worth of sophisticated computer equipment. "Comrade, we have penetrated the British national infrastructure." "Excellent. Shut down their electricity." "We cannot, sir." "Why not?" "Some bastard in Ellesmere Port has wrapped his Virgin Media router in fucking Bacofoil." It's a good job Churchill isn't around to witness this. "We shall fight them on the beaches. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender." "Unless we've run out of Pot Noodles, in which case we're absolutely fucked." What a fucking pantomime.”

A doctor rapes a patient. The victim reports it. THE DOCTOR ADMITS IT. He tells a hospital committee that it was a "one off" and he will not do it again. THE MANAGEMENT SAYS THAT IS OK. And allow him to carry on working. THE POLICE TAKE NO ACTION. The hospital concerned is the BLACKPOOL VICTORIA HOSPITAL. The same hospital where a 75 year old patient was raped to death and no one was ever convicted for it. Are women worth nothing to the NHS? bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@Con_Tomlinson Good man. Stick at it. It's all worth it.

A message to the North East, a region that means so very much to me, but it matters to each of you with these new almighty mayors too. This is Kim McGuinness. The Labour Mayor who sat in a room with the Prime Minister and a table full of elected mayors last week and complained that your councils were getting in her way. Her words: "They could stop me from doing it. And I don't think that's right, either on this or other things." This was never just about a tourist tax. It's about who gets to decide what happens in your town. I'm a County Durham lad. My grandad, and generations of my family before him, went down the pits here. My mam and dad met working in the factories of Stanley. I was brought up to believe that power belongs as close as possible to the people it affects. In your street. In your village. With the councillors you can stop in Tesco and give a piece of your mind. So let me walk you through what's happened. In 2024, Kim McGuinness stood for mayor promising a £1 a night charge on hotel rooms. A quid. A "small charge," she called it. Now she wants a levy of up to 5% on every booking. On a £150 hotel room, that's £7.50 a night. Every hotel, B&B, guest house and holiday let in the region. That isn't the small charge she put in her manifesto. It's a massive escalation she never asked you about. Then something happened she didn't plan for. You voted. After she was elected, the people of Durham, Sunderland, Gateshead and South Tyneside put Reform in charge of their councils. Those are mandates every bit as real as hers, and more recent. In September, the four of us wrote to her asking her to rule this tax out. Northumberland's Conservatives oppose it too. That's five of the seven council leaders on her own cabinet, from two different parties. So what was the first thing she did? She didn't come back to us. She didn't try to change our minds. She went straight to the Prime Minister, in front of mayors from across the country, and asked for the power to overrule the councils you elected. Let's be clear about what that means. Devolution was supposed to take power out of Westminster and hand it back to communities. What Kim McGuinness wants is to take power out of Westminster and park it on one desk in Newcastle. Hers. That isn't devolution. It's centralisation with a regional postcode. It reduces your local councils to powerless chambers with a car park. She was asked to pick between the councils you elect to serve your community and more power for herself. She picked herself. And she told the PM it wasn't just about this. "Other things," she said. So ask yourself what comes next. If your council can't stop her taxing visitors, can it stop a thousand homes going up on the edge of your village? A solar farm across good farmland? Turbines on your skyline? She wants the answer to be no. Follow the money too. In that same meeting, which project did she talk up? Newcastle. She didn't name a single Durham town. Durham's guest houses collect it. Tyneside spends it. Her reply to me in the Chronicle was 200 words on why her tax is wonderful. There wasn't a single word denying she'd asked the Prime Minister to overrule the leaders you elected. Not one. I don't think that's right. I don't think any of you voted for that. And I'm not going to sit quietly whilst it happens either.

@boot15_vu @EmilyThornberry Couldn't have put it better myself.

Shabana Mahmood: “white men that wave the England flag are bad people”.

Labour. You have all the power. Every department, every budget, every lever. So stop hiding behind a press release and answer one question. Your own numbers. 135,580 British households crammed into temporary accommodation, a record. Over 9,000 of our own sleeping rough every month, a record, the fourth year running. Ours in hostels and doorways. Our veterans on the pavement. Our kids in B&Bs. Now the other column. 93,000 people in Home Office accommodation, all of it on our tab. 73,000 of them dumped into HMOs and flats on your street. 16,000 still in hotels. 205,000 have crossed the Channel since 2018 and only 5 per cent have been sent back. Foreign criminals on our streets at a record 21,294. Theirs in hotels. Ours in doorways. So answer it. Why not send them back. They come over a terrorist highway, now run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Rubber boats, smuggler gangs, and a year later nobody knows who they are or where they went. Because they will tell you it is complicated. ECHR. Judicial review. Human rights lawyers. Appeals. The backlog. Pull factors. A returns deal with France. A taskforce. A review. A consultation. A pilot. A bill that takes four years and fixes nothing. They call the Rwanda plan a gimmick and the barges a gimmick, then use every excuse the Tories ever used. Take all that away and half your government is out of a job. Which would also be a good thing. The thing is simple. Homeless solved. Illegals solved. And our own are still on the pavement. You promised to end rough sleeping "once and for all". You called it a moral mission. You have all the power. So do it. Or admit it out loud. You are not for the British. You never were. You are for everyone but.

Labour Future @LabourfutureUK

2 days ago

Ending Rough sleeping is the patriotic and progressive thing to do. No Brit should be comfortable knowing our fellow countrymen and women are sleeping on the streets. It is a moral mission to end rough sleeping and by God are we going to end it. This is Labour.

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In August 2023, an 18-year-old Polish student was out in Munich. After a night of drinking, he ended up alone and helpless on the platform of Max-Weber-Platz station after the last train had left. A 20-year-old Afghan asylum seeker got off that train, watched him for a while, and saw that he couldn't fight back. For about half an hour, he groped him, undressed him and raped him. Then he stole his phone and walked off. Security cameras recorded it all. Police tracked him down through the stolen phone. The court found him guilty. Then it gave him four years under juvenile law, because the judge said he hadn't yet "gone through certain stages of maturity." Poland was so outraged that it summoned the German ambassador and blamed Berlin's asylum policy. Credit Basic optimism

Oh dear … here’s Precious Andy explaining in 2016 that the free movement of people has destroyed jobs in the UK… He’ll say anything for power. But you must know that by now. It’s just a race to the bottom hey Andy?

Why were Jonathan Powell, Peter Mandelson and Lord Hermer appointed without vetting? The answer is that Chagos was a deal Starmer couldn't refuse to make. Here's a timeline of the key stages of the Chagos treachery. In 1982, after it became known that the Chagos seabed may contain vast mineral wealth, Mauritius set up a select committee to examine the matter. However, sea-mining technology was in its infancy, and it was too expensive to be commercially viable at that time. In 2003, as underwater mining technologies advanced and the value of minerals and rare earth elements soared, mining the Chagos seabed became an exciting possibility again; Mauritius appointed the eminent international barrister Sir Ian Brownlie as advisor for the Chagos Archipelago. A former member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Brownlie was a good friend of Sir Satcam Boolell, a former Labour deputy prime minister of Mauritius, and High Commissioner in London. In 2009, Brownlie led the first Mauritius delegation to the Foreign Office in London seeking a Chagos deal. Among the delegation was Sir Satcam Boolell's son Satyajit, who became Mauritius Director of Public Prosecutions the same year. In 2010, after Brownlie died in a motor accident in Egypt, Sir Keir Starmer’s “great mate”, Philippe Sands, a leading human-rights lawyer who has publicly boasted of humiliating the UK in international courts, took over as counsel to Mauritius for Chagos. In 2013, Satyajit Boolell invited Keir Starmer, whom he had become friendly with during Starmer's time as the UK's DPP, to a legal conference at the 5-star Balaclava resort in Mauritius. During the trip, Starmer discussed the future of the Chagos Archipelago with then Mauritius prime minister Navin Ramgoolam. After Starmer’s 2013 visit, Ramgoolam wrote that he and Starmer were aligned over Chagos. In 2015, Ramgoolam was arrested on money-laundering charges when large sums of cash in foreign currencies, suitcases full of brand-new luxury watches, and blank British visas were found in his home. Also in 2015, Starmer was elected to the British Parliament. In 2019, Philippe Sands, after a campaign of lobbying the UN, obtained an International Court of Justice ruling (advisory opinion only, and non-binding) that the Chagos islands should be given to Mauritius. Sands used the ICJ ruling as leverage in the following years in his efforts to persuade the Conservative government to give Chagos to Mauritius. In 2020, Starmer became leader of the Labour Party. In 2021, Sands received Mauritius' top honour, The Most Distinguished Order of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean. In 2022, Sands made an unauthorized entry into the Chagos Archipelago for a flag-raising ceremony. Sands tweets at the time, “It’s morning on Chagos, where the flag of Mauritius flies." In 2023, Sands became a Mauritius citizen, but retains his British and French citizenships. 🧧In November 2023, David Cameron replaced James Cleverly as Foreign Secretary and, with the support of other senior Tories, stopped a Chagos deal saying, it’s not in the national interest, as reported in Hansard. In July 2024, Starmer became UK Prime Minister and just ten weeks after entering Downing Street, he agreed a deal with Mauritius, despite there having been no mention of Chagos during the election campaign, and the Labour manifesto pledging to protect the BOT. in November of 2024, Ramgoolam was elected Mauritius prime minister again after a snap general election, and took over from the incumbent PM, Pravind Jugnauth, to lead the Chagos negotiations with the UK. In December 2024, after 14 years in the role, Philippe Sands steps down as Mauritius counsel for Chagos. In January 2025, Attorney General Lord Hermer recused himself from signing off on the Chagos deal, and declined to say why. In February 2025, Jugnauth was arrested on money-laundering charges after large sums of cash in foreign currencies and suitcases full of brand-new luxury watches were found in his home. In May 2025, twelve years after discussing the future of Chagos in Mauritius, Starmer and Ramgoolam sat down in London to sign the treaty that transfers the archipelago's sovereignty to Mauritius. The Fall Out. The Chagos deal does🟥NOT secure the joint UK/US military base on Diego Garcia. The deal operationally hobbles the base, and increases the dangers to the British and American military personnel, and the civilians who work there, and in the wider Central Indian Ocean region. Diego Garcia's remoteness made it easy to defend in the past. This deal leaves the base horribly vulnerable to the growing threats posed by the new longer-range missiles, and more sophisticated and lethal drones. When Keir Starmer, Lord Hermer and Vijay Rangarajan, the Director General at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, made the deal it was fully understood that the outer islands of the Chagos Archipelago were by far the best locations to deploy early warning, and air-defense systems, to protect the main base from missile and drone attacks. Yet they still decided to lease only Diego Garcia. Andy Burnham, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, and Defense Minister Wes Streeting, know the deal increases the dangers to the lives of British service personnel, and our NATO allies personnel, in the strategically important Central Indian Ocean region. To double down and push the deal with that knowledge is a shameful act of betrayal. While the deal leaves Diego Garcia vulnerable to attack, it also renders the base itself ineffective and operationally hobbled. Mauritius is a signatory of the Pelindaba African Weapon-Free Zone Treaty which bans all nuclear weapons from treaty members' territory. Pelindaba gives each of the more the 40 countries who have signed it the right to inspect the facilities on Diego Garcia if they suspect nuclear arms are being stored there. The UK's nuclear-armed Trident submarines will no longer be able to enter Chagos waters, or visit Diego Garcia which is the only island in the region which has suitable anchorage and facilities for maintenance and restocking provisions, etc. The US's nuclear-armed submarines, ships, and planes will also be banned from Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago's waters. Mauritius gets complete sovereignty over everything, including control of the airspace above the Chagos Archipelago, which at 250,000 square miles is the same size as France. The implications of controlling such a vast area of airspace in a strategically vital region are huge. Mauritius has shown it will ban planes entering its current airspace when China asks. The Chagos Deal does not ‘secure the base’. It methodically destroys every element required for operations. The text and annexes state it will: ❌Constrain future Ops and use of the base ❌Prevent the placing of sensors and other maritime installations ❌Require us to sight our foes on defence planning ❌Mean we’re unable to use our preferred contractors ❌See us lose of control over electromagnetic spectrum.

@DonnaLouise1212 As the saying goes- import the third world become the third world.