Hermes

[Guido Fawkes @GuidoFawkes]

“I’m not going to go through a discussion, like, an exam, on the fiscal rules.”

[Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 @montie]

This is genuinely worrying.
I've gone on the record on a number of occasions to acknowledge @AndyBurnhamGM's real bipartisan strengths. I've admired him since we 'teamed up' (@ConHome and him) to unsuccessfully oppose the disastrous Lansley NhS reforms. He was more interested in principle than party then and I still see so much of that in him today.
But there is no money left! We have no operable military. The young need affordable housing and the private sector won't supply enough of it. We need radical welfare reform (which won't save money in the short-term). A higher tax burden will accelerate Rachel Reeves' brain drain. Sending billions to any other causes is completely unaffordable. Is Andy Burnham serious? I'm very concerned.

[Moving Home with Charlie @moving_charlie]

@ChrisGiles_ I hope this graph clears up any temporary confusion you have had between rising tax take somehow being a good thing, and falling jobs, which is a bad thing.

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

There’s a seismic shift happening in the gilt market that seems to be mostly going unnoticed. Everyone argues about how much Britain borrows, but the question of who lends rarely gets asked.

For most of the post-war period the gilt market had a captive domestic buyer. In recent decades that was overwhelmingly British defined benefit pension funds. They typically bought 30-year gilts and held them to maturity, because the rules said they had to. Which means the gilt market had a captive lender, quietly underwriting the entire post-war state.

The seismic shift we’re seeing… the captive lender is leaving.

DB pension schemes are closed and maturing. They are running off their gilts to pay pensioners, not buying more. They still own around 45% of the index-linked market, and that holding winds down over the next decade. On top of that, the BoE is selling too. Quantitative tightening, year after year, to unwind its balance sheet.

The replacement to British pension funds has arrived quietly. And most people have no idea about this shift.

Hedge funds now account for 63% of electronic gilt trading, which is up by a third since 2021. Pension funds and insurers have fallen from 45% to 26%. Overseas investors hold around 35% of the market, up from under 25% a decade ago. This isn’t central banks, it’s global bond funds. These are mobile, yield-hungry, gone-in-an-afternoon type entities. Not the long term holders we had in the pension funds.

The fast money doesn't own the majority of the stock yet. But it’s now dominating the trading, and the trading sets the price. This is a relatively new dynamic that will only continue to grow as pension funds see their holdings mature.

This is why long yields hit 1998 highs while inflation fell. The borrowing hasn’t changed. But the lender has.

And this is why it’s stiff drink time. The state needs to sell £246 billion of gilts this year, and every year for years, into exactly this market.

Every deficit argument in British politics assumed the lenders would be there, just like the dependency ratio assumed the workers would be there.

The whole system runs on lenders who no longer have to show up. And they expect a higher premium. Potentially a much higher premium.

[Goosey @Goosey30111568]

Regrets getting caught.

[VoxPopuli @vpopulimedia]

🇬🇧 Andy Burnham has spent £100 MILLION on a MASS-SURVEILANCE system throughout Manchester!

VPs @WillColeshill has spotted some of these number-plate recognition cameras across Makerfied.

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

I don’t support rioting from anyone but when BLM did it, Labour said that MPs should speak to the black community and listen to the concerns.

Following the scenes in Belfast, has any Labour MP mentioned speaking to white, working class communities to listen to their concerns?

[James Cartlidge MP 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 @jcartlidgemp]

It’s quite simple - if Labour publish the Defence Investment Plan when Parliament is not sitting, it will be a gross insult to our democracy and a shameful attempt to avoid scrutiny.

[Dr Luke Evans MP @drlukeevans]

Serious questions are being raised about NHS waiting list figures after a sharp rise in patients being removed from waiting lists without treatment.

In March alone, more than 350,000 patients were removed.

I asked Ministers, why?

A thread 🧵

1/12

[Sokol @PolemicalSokol]

@qirimlia Honey, to the victor belong the spoils. Crimea was never Ukrainian before 1954, nor Tatar before the 13th century.
You shouldn’t be talking about propaganda.
Sit down.

[Who is like God. @tetovoboy]

@GeraldoRivera The map show different story....but hey what floats your boat

[Brian @UncleButch2112]

@GeraldoRivera Your opinions have about as much value as a "journalist" as that vault you opened years back...

[Andrew Griffith MP @griffitha]

BREAKING: We have a youth unemployment crisis and Labour's new anti-jobs quango is on a jolly to Uzbekistan!

They’re focused on more rights for migrants and “promoting migration” while 1 in 6 young people here can’t find a job.

They’re letting Britain down.👇

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

BEFORE YOU BOARD YOUR NEXT FLIGHT READ THIS

A former airline captain named John Hoyte reached out to me recently. He spent nearly 30 years flying commercial aircraft, developed serious neurological damage, lost his career, and has been trying to get this story properly investigated ever since.

He sent me documents spanning two decades. The scale of what is in them is HUGE.

What he shared includes parliamentary records, a 320-page published report from the British pilots union, @BBC coverage, House of Lords testimony, and active litigation in multiple countries. This has been heard at the highest levels. It has largely been buried.

Most commercial jet aircraft use a system called bleed air. Instead of drawing fresh air from outside, the plane takes compressed air directly from the engines and pumps it into the cabin. That is the air you breathe for the entire flight.

When engine seals wear down, oil and hydraulic fluid can leak into that air supply. Those fluids contain organophosphates, the same compounds found in certain pesticides and nerve agents. Inhaling them can cause neurological damage, memory loss, and chronic fatigue. In documented cases, far worse.

This design has been in use since the 1950s. The health risk has been documented for just as long.

In 2005, @BALPApilots, the British pilots union, published a full conference report on this with the University of New South Wales. The following year, 27 BALPA pilots were tested by University College London. All 27 showed evidence of toxic poisoning and reduced cognitive function. Not some of them. All of them.

@BBCPanorama covered it in 2008. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee heard evidence on it in 2007 and 2008. In February 2007, 40 unrelated passengers on a single XL Airways flight were seriously injured by contaminated cabin air. Their cases went to court. Twenty of them won a US jurisdiction ruling in 2010.

A UK coroner recorded a death linked to this in 2015.

France has formally recognised aerotoxic syndrome as an occupational disease. In the US, a law professor is suing Boeing for $40 million after a single exposure left him permanently injured. Morgan & Morgan, America's largest personal injury firm, is now actively taking mass cases on behalf of passengers and crew.

John himself was one of those 27 pilots tested by UCL. He founded the Aerotoxic Association in 2007 at the Houses of Parliament to support other survivors. He has been fighting for this for nearly 20 years.

Almost every commercial jet aircraft except the Boeing 787 Dreamliner uses the bleed air system. The 787 uses a different design that avoids this problem entirely. That safer design has existed for years. That fact alone says everything.

BBC has not covered this story since 2020. The UK Civil Aviation Authority continues to say there is no positive evidence of a link. The Aerotoxic Association has been contacted by more than 2,500 people who believe they have been affected.

John is looking for mainstream investigative journalists who want to dig deep into this. He is an expert witness with decades of evidence and is willing to answer every question. He has a passenger injured on that 2007 flight, Samantha Sabatino, whose case is in the parliamentary record.

This is a genuine story of enormous public interest and it deserves proper investigation.

If you are a journalist or researcher and want to speak to John directly, his contact details are in the comments.

I will add media coverage links in the comments section.

Sources:
@AerotoxicAssoc (Aerotoxic Association)
@BALPApilots (British Airline Pilots Association) @forthepeople (Morgan & Morgan)
gcaqe org (Global Cabin Air Quality Executive)

@BBCPanorama covered it in 2008 with a full documentary titled Something in the Air.

@heraldtweets
@WSJ
@FlightGlobal
@TheCanaryUK
@the_ecologist

[Arron Banks @Arron_banks]

No one watches question time anymore ..

[Prof Michele Geraci, fmr Undersecretary of State @michele_geraci]

Sommario mio viaggio in Russia (il terzo in un anno)

1) Il governo italiano o non sa dell’immenso, immenso, goodwil di cui l’Italia gode qua e lo sta distruggendo inconsciamente. O lo sa, e lo sta distruggendo intenzionalmente

2) L’economia della Russia ha varie difficoltà, alcune strutturali (le geografia etc) ed altre contingenti ai postumi covid e a qualche sanzione che rende la vita più complessa ad alcuni cittadini

3) Ma non esiste nessuno, ripeto nessun, problema economico tale da portare la Russia al ritiro dall’Ucraina. E quindi, le sanzioni sono state un fallimento totale, come previsto,

4) Le sanzioni non le mette la “UE cattiva” ma il gruppo di capi di governo che le votano all’unanimità: quindi la responsabilità del fallimento delle sanzioni e delle conseguenze sulla nostra economia sono del governo #Meloni

5) la Russia resta aperta a riaprire i rapporti commerciali con quelle aziende europee italiane che hanno lasciato il paese senza aver lasciato troppo amaro in bocca. Ora parte la corsa dei topi che risalgono sulla nave.

6) la Russia è un paese bellissimo e ricco di arte e culture e tradizioni che consiglio a tutti di visitare sia la ovviamente splendida San Pietroburgo che tutte le regioni orientali, come ho fatto io nei miei tanti viaggi

7) l’Unione Europea è considerata una nullità assoluta nell’arena geopolitica e su questo mi trovo anche io d’accordo

8) la proposta della Russia per far terminare il conflitto in Ucraina e contenuta nel documento di Istanbul di quattro anni fa al netto di alcune variazioni territoriali e su questo la Russia non farà nessun passo indietro

9) l’Unione Europea e l’Italia resteranno col cerino in mano perché sono gestiti da incompetenti, nel caso migliore

vorrei enfatizzare il punto uno, perché è molto importante e non riesco forse a trasmetterne l’importanza: l’amicizia che il popolo russo hai nei confronti dell’Italia è un fenomeno intergenerazionale che risale agli anni dell’unione sovietica, anni 60 e 70, dalle auto Fiat ai nostri cantanti alla nostra cultura ..un legame che i nonni hanno trasmesso a molti dei giovani di oggi e che Meloni Tajani e Salvini stanno distruggendo

Sono stato chiaro ? Il nostro governo sta distruggendo il rapporto Russia e Italia

E se li votate ancora , la colpa è anche vostra

[James Cartlidge MP 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 @jcartlidgemp]

The Defence Investment Plan cannot be published when the House is not sitting.

My letter to John Healey👇

[Goosey @Goosey30111568]

What's happened to poor
Dan Hodges?

He appears to be suffering from a severe case of Reform Derangment Syndrome.

His personal quest to get Angry Burnham elected is making him take leave of his senses.
Get well soon Dan.

Maybe a weekend break in Clacton, will do you some good?

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Here’s the problem. The liberal political class wants us to treat atrocities like Belfast as single, random, isolated incidents. “Yes, it’s horrific, but don’t overreact,” they say. “Let the police do their job. Justice will be delivered. Let’s remain united,” and so on.

But the public can see that such incidents *aren’t* random or isolated. They are, in fact, all the consequence of massive state failure in the area of asylum and immigration. All roads lead back there.

That’s why people are angry.. They are sick of the platitudes that get trotted out after each fresh incident. They don’t want to hear them anymore. They know that the decisions of establishment politicians have brought us to this current pass, and they don’t trust those same politicians to fix things, especially when some of them refuse to even recognise that the public’s anger is justified.

There has been a huge vibe shift in recent years. Imagine - God forbid - there were another 7/7. Does anyone think the public response would be anything like as restrained as it was then? We are in really dangerous territory.

The public don’t want flowers and candles and “Don’t let them divide us.” They want someone who says, “I recognise that the state has failed abjectly. We have allowed far too many people to settle in the country without knowing who they truly are. It has disrupted your communities. Your anger is justified. And I will do everything in my power to put things right.”

Any politician unwilling to articulate that message, fully and sincerely, is effectively sanctioning more years of growing social disharmony and discord. Things cannot heal until those in power recognise the extent of the problem and what it will take to fix it. And, on both counts, most of them don’t.

That’s why the next few years are going to be very, very turbulent.

[Patrick Christys @PatrickChristys]

This is clearly wide open to abuse by the Labour government.