Alex Neil

Former Member of the Scottish Parliament (1999-2021).

[Alex Neil @AlexNeilSNP]

Outrageous salary given the sacrifice the key people in RNLI make in saving lives

[The State of Britain @stateofbritain1]

The RNLI's chief executive: a £217,302 package. Some of its volunteers are likely owed the minimum wage, its own 2025 accounts say. Its auditor qualified those accounts because the charity couldn't put a figure on the bill.
👉 Follow us for what's really happening in this country

[Alex Neil @AlexNeilSNP]

Burnham is acting like the Prime Minister of and for and only for Manchester

[YES Brechin @BrechinYes2]

Burnham tells us there is a new AI development centre on its way just after the budget. Guess where it's being situated? Of course in his North. Manchester. He gives the go ahead for the Jackdaw Gas Field. Guess where the revenues go? London. In Scotland? When will we ever learn.

[Alex Neil @AlexNeilSNP]

Excellent initiative

[terry for indy @TerrySaurus14]

Good to see this happening in Alex Salmond memory. Please share. “Who are the Awards for?
The Awards will be aimed at young people who can demonstrate potential, commitment and a genuine desire to progress, https://t.co/vSweIW3xAg #ScottishIndependence

[Alex Neil @AlexNeilSNP]

This is utter rubbish

[Neil Findlay @Neilsocialist]

What can you say about this?

[ScotNews @indyscotnews]

Speech by @AlexNeilSNP at #SSRGConference2026
https://t.co/tETSTzVhxR

[ScotNews @indyscotnews]

@bigandymccoll @AlexNeilSNP Andy, this link starts with Alex:
https://t.co/tETSTzVPnp

[andrew mccoll @bigandymccoll]

FF tae @AlexNeilSNP at 1h23 here fae the recent SSRG Conference. Inspirational. Christ we need the next generation speaking like this, then we'll win the very next day. https://t.co/sUNKHlcyA4

[Alex Neil @AlexNeilSNP]

Andy Burnham has to put a stop to this nonsense

[Martin Lewis @MartinSLewis]

Important News: @Ofgem’s just launched a ‘consultation’ about switching on the Market Stabilisation Charge as soon as November. It doesn’t sound a big deal, but it could be, it ain’t good for consumers and I don't want it to slip under the radar.

In a nutshell, it means if wholesale energy prices drop sharply, the cheap fixes and switcher’s deals offered will be a lot more expensive, in order to protect energy firms’ profits.

That’s because any firm taking on a new customer, including on a cheap fix or other specialist tariff, will have to pay compensation to that customer’s old supplier, if they switch. It's basically a form of switching penalty.

While technically this is a consultation, it’s one of those where Ofgem has made up its mind, but is required to consult - it will almost certainly happen. Below is my ‘first look’ explainer on this...
------------------------
How it works (simplified to make it easy to understand):

Ofgem decided to put this power back into suppliers’ licences in May, so it could switch it on quickly if needed, and now it is trying to do just that.

It means if wholesale prices drop more than 10% below the level built into the Price Cap (and remember the January Price Cap is currently predicted to be 25% higher than now), and someone switches supplier from that or any tariff, the new firm must pay the old one 85% of the drop in wholesale rates beyond that 10%.

So very roughly, say the wholesale energy in the Price Cap costs £1,000 (a made-up number, to keep it simple. This is about proportions, not exact amounts):

- If prices drop to £900, there’s no Market Stabilisation Charge.\
- If prices drop to £800, you get the first £100 drop, but 85% of the next £100 (£85) goes to your old supplier.

So almost certainly the new firm will make you pay the difference, meaning the tariff will be up to £85 more than it would otherwise have been (other factors could affect the amount, but this is a rough illustration)

In other words, the new supplier can’t pass a chunk of the saving from lower wholesale rates on to you, because it has to hand much of it to your old supplier.

Why Ofgem says it’s doing this

Its argument is that the Price Cap requires suppliers buy energy in advance. If wholesale rates fall sharply and people leave in large numbers, those suppliers would be left out of pocket, and it doesn’t want suppliers who did the right thing by buying energy in advance to be penalised.

My View

I don’t like it. This is a ‘Market Stabilisation Charge’ but the supplier market is pretty stable, and I doubt we are at the domino risk of suppliers going bust in the way they did in the early twenties. A good few energy firms have made large profits since then, and protecting them over winter by effectively dampening competition because it’s ‘not their fault’ feels raw.

After all we don’t take their profits off them when they make them ‘through no fault’. Until now, my hope had been that at some point the Middle East situation would de-escalate, wholesale rates would drop. While it would take months for that to feed into the Price Cap, other cheaper tariffs would be available to switch to. That would still happen, but the savings could be no-where near as good as otherwise.
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As noted, these are my provisional thoughts and this has only just come out. I will need to do more looking/thinking.

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: Billionaire Sir Richard Branson unleashes a SCORCHING attack on Trump and his disgusting cozying up to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

This is EXACTLY the kind of thing that gets under Trump's skin...

"I thought I’d never have to say this in my lifetime, but this is 2026, and sadly nothing is what it used to be," Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, wrote on LinkedIn. "The Trump administration has become an appeaser to autocrats and dictators, putting their personal whims before the best interests of the American people and those of the free world. What is it about Putin that President Trump fawns over?"

"How will America’s allies ever be able to trust this administration again when they are now turning against them at a time of war and suffering?" he asked.

Trump has repeatedly betrayed our Ukrainian allies in recent days. First, he announced a stunning deal with Putin to allow millions of barrels of diesel into the global markets, a move that will directly pump money into the Russian war machine. Then, he began a concerted smear campaign against President Zelenskyy and said that Putin is easier to deal with.

The backstabbing escalated when Washington failed to provide its usual early warning to Kyiv of an incoming Russian ballistic missile attack. Now, it appears that the White House ordered a temporary disruption of Starshield, a military version of Elon Musk's Starlink that the Ukrainian armed forces rely upon.

"The slowdown of Starlink/Starshield and the inexplicable lack of advance warning of Russian missile launches have already caused Ukrainian civilians to die unnecessarily," wrote Branson. "How much worse can it get?"

"If one thing is clear it’s that European leaders must overcome the initial shock about Trump’s recent actions and step up to the plate. It’s as much about Europe’s freedom as it is about Ukraine’s sovereignty. Both are worth fighting for," he continued. "All options should be on the table now, from the transfer of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine to the delivery of advanced weapons systems such as Germany’s Taurus."

"Why oh why is this happening? We cannot let the free world be dismantled before our very eyes," Branson concluded.

We couldn't agree more. Trump is an enemy to Ukraine, an enemy to democracy, and an enemy to the American people. When Democrats retake power, we have our work cut out for us. Every last trace of this monstrous man's legacy must be erased.

Please ❤️ and share if you think that Trump is Putin's puppet!

[Alex Neil @AlexNeilSNP]

Best wishes to your Dad and all your family Marie at this difficult time. The Scottish Government really needs to get the NHS sorted ASAP

[Dr Marie M S Macklin CBE @MarieMacklin]

Thank You All For Your Kindness.
My dad is still in a corridor at Crosshouse Hospital @NHSaaa
since 11 am. They have no beds and continue to do tests.
I have now just read all your messages ❤️
I send my condolences and Love ❤️ to those who have lost a loved one or experienced what my family are going through.
Reading the feeds below fills me with mixed emotions including upset, angry and sympathy for you all.
I will always fight for my mum and dad as do my sister and brother.
God help the elderly who have no one.
The failure is not the front line caring staff but the bureaucrats driving failed @scotgov policies with incompetent Government leadership at Cabinet and Ministerial level.

[Alex Neil @AlexNeilSNP]

This is totally unacceptable

[Dr Marie M S Macklin CBE @MarieMacklin]

Breaking News
NHS Scotland
This is my dad an 88 year old @JohnSwinney @ScotGovFM
My brother called an
ambulance 2 am it arrived 7 am and he has been in ambulance in Crosshouse Hospital car park since
8.15am.
He is terminally ill.

This is your Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

He has worked since he was a 15 year old.
He is a proud military man, bricklayer, businessman and is a huge supporter of charities.

Like many other pensioners he has been failed.

I never post personal family business but today this has been the final straw for me and my family.

Should he not make it ... well I have my solicitors ready.

[Christina Hendry @ChristinaH3ndry]

Two years and missed every single day.

Missed at family celebrations.
Missed for his wisdom & guidance.
Missed as someone to turn to no matter what.

Two very difficult years for our family, making the grief even harder to carry.

Forever missed. Never forgotten. Uncle Alex 💙

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Lucas Sanders 👊🏽🔥🇺🇸 @LucasSa56947288]

RETWEET if you support Rep. Ilhan Omar.

[Piotr Ostrach @PiotrOstrach]

Daj lajka i udostępnij post jeśli stajesz w solidarności z prezydentem Zełenskim i Ukraincami ✊

[PROTECT KAMALA HARRIS ✊️ @DisavooWTrump2]

RETWEET if you stand with President Zelensky against Donald Trump!

[Nick Reeves #RejoinEU #NAFO #FBPE @nickreeves9876]

Trump says Zelensky should be replaced. Please repost if you believe that Trump must be replaced as soon as possible.

[Protect Kamala Harris ✊ @DisavowTrump20]

RETWEET if you stand with President Zelensky against Donald Trump!

[Damaan, AKA 'Philly's Finest!' @Damaan4u33]

Donald Trump absolutely hates these pictures. He wants them to disappear from the Internet. If you want to make Trump happy please don't repost them!

Y'all know what to do! ✍️

[Alex Neil @AlexNeilSNP]

Burnham will live to regret this crazy decision

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Burnham to pass law scrapping pension triple lock before next election.

Risks handing advantage to opposition parties who will argue the opposite.

Will alienate some senior voters.

Risks Labour backbench rebellion.

Numerous ways of funding triple lock.
https://t.co/9lRXsvVQD8