A Lawton @zander464

Russia is bombarding the U.K. information space with lies and misinformation. And Nigel wants it to carry on because it helps him. Like it helped them ten years again during the referendum. About time government took it seriously. Farage and his AfD pals in Germany have done enough for Russia already. His close pal Nathan Gill is paying a high price, wallowing in jail. Time for the rest of us to call it out.

Nigel Farage @Nigel_Farage

3 weeks ago

Instead of lowering your energy bills or cutting your taxes, Burnham has announced a National Centre for Information Defence. This is a Labour Ministry of Truth targeted directly at Reform. They know they can't win by fair means, so they're trying to destroy us by foul means.

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@RobertJenrick @reformparty_uk Your maths is wrong. If the price of something is £5.50 then the price before VAT is £4.58 If VAT were 10%, the price would be £5.04

Sack the politicians

evyn 🇱🇮🚒 @cinnavyn

a month ago

OH MY GOSH

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@afneil So 1/1000 homes didn't meet standard. That's not great..

It has taken Gatwick Airport almost 10 years to move a runway that it already owns 12 metres. It's part of a scheme to shift the existing standby northern strip 12 metres north so that 2 aircraft can use the airfield at once instead of 1. The land is Gatwick's. The tarmac is already down. The £2.2bn is private. Almost 10 years. On Tuesday the Court of Appeal threw out the last challenge. Lord Justice Holgate and Lord Justice Dove found the grounds unarguable, with no real prospect of success, which is judicial for get the eff-n-jeff out of my court. That failed appeal was itself the final stage of a process that began before the pandemic, before Brexit had been implemented, before 4 of the 7 prime ministers we have had in a decade had taken office. The project has moved at the rate of a metre and a half a year. A tortoise does a metre and a half in an afternoon and does not usually require senior counsel to do so. Heathrow Terminal 5 took 8 years to get planning permission. That delay was regarded as a national embarrassment so acute that Parliament built an entire new regime to prevent it happening again: the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects system, designed to produce a decision within 12 to 17 months. As you'd expect from a department with a name that'd make a penguin cringe, it hasn't worked. Gatwick has just taken 8 years under the system created to stop projects taking 8 years. The machinery designed to fix the problem reproduced the problem exactly, to the year, and nobody in Whitehall appears to have noticed or minded. 58% of decisions under that regime are now judicially reviewed. The success rate of those reviews is 3.9% for ordinary developments and 10.2% for significant ones. They add 1.4 years to a project on average and up to £121 million in costs on a major road scheme. Roughly 9 in 10 challenges fail, and they work anyway, because delay is the point and defeat costs the challenger almost nothing. An objection does not have to be right. It only has to be filed. We built a legal system in which anybody can impose years of delay and 8-figure costs on a national asset, lose, and walk away whistling. A peculiarly contemporary form of looting. Progress will end it inside the first year. Under our planning programme there is a binding statutory maximum of 12 months from acceptance of an application to the Secretary of State's decision on any nationally significant project, with no exceptions: 4 months for examination, 3 months for the minister, and deemed consent if the state misses its own deadline. Judicial review of planning decisions gets restricted to genuine points of law, with hard cost consequences for those who bring hopeless challenges and hard timetables for the courts that hear them. On the other side of those 8 years: 100,000 additional flights a year. Passenger capacity rising from 43 million to 80 million. 14,000 jobs across Sussex and Surrey. Every penny of it privately financed, requiring nothing from the Treasury but permission. All of it available in 2019. A country that cannot move a runway 12 metres in less than 8 years is not going to build the reservoirs, the reactors, the labs or the houses. Everything else we argue about downstream of this is conditional on fixing it. And we intend to fix it. If you would rather live in a country that can move 12 metres in under a decade, come and join us. It's time to get to work.

@AaronBastani The Starmer ministry really did have a marketing problem. They had good policy but didn't know how to sell it

Last night Argentina wore a shirt that celebrated Maradona’s cheating against England. Had VAR been in place in 1986 the Hand of God goal would never have been allowed. So it was very fitting that the TMO denied them the final try. Karma.

Argentina are the only team out of all 48 participants not to have a single VAR intervention against them, despite committing the most fouls in the tournament. Do you even realize how insane that is?

🚨 NEW: The Governor of the Falkland Islands has lit up his house in England colours ahead of tonight's match against Argentina

@SenSanders X zzz g

@Regenerate_SOT Are our local politicians even incentivised to think of big ideas like this?

@British_Airways @seeley_nigel @Ryanair don't have this issue

My monologue from today’s The Times at One with Andrew Neil @TimesRadio ROYAL NAVY RIP While US destroyers duke it out with Iranian navy fast boats over the Strait of Hormuz, we learned yesterday that the Royal Navy’s HMS Iron Duke, a Type 23 frigate, was being withdrawn from active service, despite a recent £100m five-year refit, which suggests that was largely a waste of money.  More important, it underlines the stark reality that we no longer have a functioning navy.  That’s right. The country of Rule Britannia, which once had the most powerful navy in the world, capable of protecting an empire which covered a quarter of the globe, no longer has a navy worthy of the name.   For the factual basis of what I’m about to say, I am indebted to Britsky, who posts important naval data on X and has become the reliable go-to source for information on our disappearing Navy.  HMS Iron Duke joins another ageing Type 23, HMS Richmond, in retirement. Leaving the Royal Navy with just five frigates to monitor Russian submarine activity in the North Atlantic and other Russian activity in the Channel.  Even that doesn’t reveal the full, desperate picture. Of the five frigates still supposedly available for service, one, HMS Kent, has been almost 750 days in refit and is not available for service. HMS Portland and HMS St Albans have also been laid up for some time.  Only HMS Somerset is currently deployed and HMS Sutherland could be, pretty quickly. So the Royal Navy can call on the immediate services of only two of the five frigates we have, all dating from the 1990s.  What about the more powerful Type 45 destroyers? Sad to relate the picture is even bleaker. There are only six. One, HMS Dragon, has been deployed to the East Mediterranean to protect Cyprus, though that took some time.  Another, HMS Daring, has been in refit for 3,260 days and still not available for duty. HMS Defender has been out of action for over 1,000 days, HMS Diamond for just under 700 days. HMS Dauntless is in maintenance. Other than Dragon, out of our six destroyers, only HMS Duncan could be deployed quickly.  What about our hugely expensive, powerful Astute class submarines? Better you don’t ask. We have only five — and only one, HMS Anson, is on active service somewhere in the Indian Ocean.  The other four — Astute, Ambush, Artful and Audacious — have been laid up for a total of 4,000 days. That’s right 4,000 days. HMS Ambush alone has been inactive for 1,400 days. It’s currently laid up on the River Clyde.  So the currently deployable, conventional Royal Navy, excluding the ancient, creaking subs carrying our nuclear deterrent, amounts to two frigates, two destroyers and one sub. That’s not a navy for a maritime nation. That’s a joke.  Yes, we have two big aircraft carriers too. They also seem to spend a lot of time in maintenance, which is where they are at the moment. But both could currently be deployed pretty quickly, which is an improvement. But we don’t have the frigates or destroyers to form a carrier fleet. So they can only be used in concert with better equipped allies.  We might be short of fighting ships. But we’re not short of admirals. We currently have around 30 rear admirals or above, which works out around four per deployable ship. That’s admirals. Not captains.  None, of course, of this bloated top brass has been held accountable for the near disappearance of our naval power. Nor have any Tory politicians who for 14 years presided over our navy’s degradation. Nor is the current Labour government in any apparent hurry to put matters right. Our airforce and army are in no great shapes either. But it is the state of our non-navy, an integral, vital part of our island history, which is the real national scandal.  And, as is so often the case in modern Britain, nobody is held to account. Nobody forced to carry the can. Nobody making it their mission to put it right. And that is the real national disgrace.

If you want a practical example of why this fund is bullshit, I have one from the River Roding. The Roding has billions of litres of sewage entering it illegally every year & the EA has refused to prosecute a single one. Separately, our volunteer River charity has been campaigning to restore the channel of the river through Ilford golf course & create a wetland. A large river charity (who will remain nameless) told us they could help us get funding for the restoration: great, we thought. They were awarded tens of thousands of pounds from the water company fine fund & instead of actually restoring the river, they spent it (without consulting us) on staff time & consultant costs to produce a *report* about restoring the river. This report will then sit on a shelf somewhere and meanwhile the sewage still illegally enters the river & the river channel is still not restored. Our volunteers were forced to give up their free time & rely on local donations (a fraction of the amount spent on the report) to begin the restoration work as best we could ourselves. The system is utterly broken and our rivers are paying the price.

Defra UK @DefraGovUK

6 months ago

Following tough action by the @EnvAgency, water companies have paid a record £8.5 million into projects to restore rivers, wildlife and habitats. This money will be reinvested directly where damage has occurred. Find out more: gov.uk/government/new…

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Here is my favourite Chagos receipt though. This is Reform MP, Andrew Rosindell, writing to POTUS Joe Biden 6 years ago proposing the UK hands to Chagos islands to Mauritius and rents them back on a 99-year lease.

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Ross @Rossco1103

6 months ago

@SamJRushworth @morton_wendy @Conservatives Haha Sam keeping the receipts, fair play. But both parties being as bad each other isn't a good thing.

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The UK shut a bioethanol plant thanks to chasing Trump’s trade deal. Now it’s reopening with £100m of taxpayer money bc war in Iran means imports aren’t reliable. CO₂ is a byproduct of ethanol production and is critical for: • Food packaging • Slaughterhouses • Fertiliser & supply chains This is the reality of Brexit trade policy: 👉 Shut domestic production 👉 Rely on imports 👉 Panic in a crisis 👉 Pay to rebuild what we destroyed Food security is national security. ft.com/content/802d03…

@ReemAmirIbrahim @albieamankona And how I can rehabilitate our local criminals? (for profit?)

@ReemAmirIbrahim @albieamankona Can you explain how I protect my village from flooding for profit?

@RobLMyers Not the same.