Reality Check

I don’t like what’s happening in politics today…….

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@life__pill 21. Your bones are always wet.

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@TrevorMore42887 @ZiaYusufUK If he was an unknown person seen on the streets of the UK, the reform party supporters would certainly want him and the likes of him, deported.

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@ZiaYusufUK Is there any truth to the rumours that @Nigel_Farage is set to step back from politics due to the £5m scandal and re-emerge a few months before the next scheduled general election?

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@Partisangirl 🫪

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@Nigel_Farage Thank you for your military service @Nigel_Farage

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@MoneySavingExp on the BG fixed exclusive Aug27 V4, are the figures for the gas at Daily Charge: 22.25p/day
Unit Rate: 6.18p/kWh only for DDebit? Or do those figures also apply to those that pay quarterly upon receipt of a bill? Is this only available via MSE App ? @MartinSLewis

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@BladeoftheS There is a difference, one had a toolmaker as a dad and we never heard the end of it...

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@DeborahMeaden Yeah, it is likely to happen but as long as Burnham can confirm that his dad wasn't a toolmaker as well and promises not to go on about what his dad did for a living, then it's all good....

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@ObserverUK @williamnhutton @AndyBurnhamGM On this Father's day, can you just confirm that your dad wasn't a toolmaker as well and if you become PM, can you promise not to go on about what your dad did for a living. Thanks 👍🏽

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@Neccccy How would you be able to tell who is Muslim and who isn't? Or would you just resort to getting rid of all coloured people, just to be on the safe side? 🤔

[Richard Murphy @RichardJMurphy]

52 Questions for Andy Burnham, if he wants to be Prime Minister.

If Andy Burnham is serious about becoming prime minister, then there are a series of questions he needs to answer before anyone can sensibly judge whether he offers a genuine alternative to the current government, or merely a different personality pursuing much the same agenda.

The questions need to go beyond personality, competence, or electability. They need to establish what he believes, what he would do, and how he understands the challenges the UK faces.

Here are 52 questions, including one final critical one, I would like him to answer.

The economy

1. What is the fundamental purpose of the UK economy?
2. Do you believe economic policy should prioritise GDP growth, or should it prioritise wellbeing, security and sustainability?
3. Do you believe the UK government is financially constrained in the same way as a household, business or local authority?
4. Do you accept that a government issuing its own currency can always meet obligations denominated in that currency?
5. What role do you think taxation plays in the economy: revenue raising, redistribution, inflation control, market shaping, or all of these?
6. What is your view on the current fiscal rules, and would you retain, reform or abolish them?
7. Would you continue paying interest on all commercial bank reserve balances held at the Bank of England?
8. What is your view on quantitative easing and quantitative tightening?
9. What would you do to improve productivity in the UK economy?
10. How would you reduce Britain’s dependence on rent extraction, financial speculation and asset price inflation?

Wealth, tax and inequality

11. Do you believe wealth inequality is now a greater problem than income inequality?
12. What specific measures would you introduce to tax wealth more effectively?
13. Should income from wealth be taxed at least as heavily as income from work?
14. How would you tackle tax avoidance by large companies and wealthy individuals?
15. What is your view on reforming inheritance tax?
16. How would you reduce regional inequality within the UK?

Housing

17. Do you think housing should primarily be a home or an investment asset?
18. What would you do to reduce house prices relative to earnings?
19. How many social homes would you build each year?
20. How would you finance a large-scale social housing programme?
21. What would you do to reform the private rented sector?
22. Would you support land value taxation, compulsory purchase reform, or other measures to tackle land speculation?

Climate and the environment

23. Do you believe economic growth can be fully reconciled with environmental sustainability?
24. What is your strategy for achieving net zero while maintaining public support?
25. How would you fund the transition to a low-carbon economy?
26. What role should public ownership play in energy generation, transmission and distribution?
27. How would you ensure that the costs of climate transition are borne fairly?
28. What policies would you adopt to restore biodiversity, waterways and ecosystems?

Public services and the state

29. What should be the balance between public provision and private provision in healthcare?
30. Would you reverse NHS privatisation measures introduced since 2012?
31. How would you tackle the social care crisis?
32. What reforms would you make to education?
33. How would you rebuild local government after fifteen years of austerity?
34. What powers and funding would you devolve to local and regional government, and are you open to independence if Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland wish for it?

Work, income and social security

35. What is your vision for the future of work?
36. Do you support stronger trade union rights and sectoral collective bargaining?
37. What is your view on a job guarantee programme?
38. How would you address economic insecurity among younger generations?
39. What reforms would you make to Universal Credit and social security more generally?

Debt, money and finance

40. Do you believe the national debt is a major problem facing the UK? Please explain your logic.
41. What do you understand government debt to be? Should government debt always be reduced, or can it sometimes be increased for good economic reasons?
42. How do you distinguish between productive public investment and current spending?
43. What role should government borrowing play in funding infrastructure, housing and climate transition?
44. Should the Bank of England’s mandate be reformed? Should it pay interest on central bank reserve accounts?
45. What reforms would you make to the banking system?

Britain and the world

46. What should Britain’s economic relationship with Europe be?
47. What industrial strategy would you pursue?
48. How would you respond to increasing geopolitical instability and trade fragmentation?
49. How do we resolve conflicts in the Middle East? What is the UK’s role in that?
50. What role should Britain play in tackling global inequality and climate change? 51. What is the future of our relationship with the USA and NATO? What are the defence consequences of that?

The biggest question

And perhaps the most important question of all:

52. What is your theory of society?

That question matters because every successful political project ultimately rests on an answer to that question:

- Neoliberalism begins with the individual.
- Conservatism begins with institutions.
- Reform begins with belonging and identity.
- The Greens begin with nature and climate.
- Labour traditionally began with solidarity, but that no longer seems to be the case.

Before Andy Burnham can ask people to support him, he needs to tell them where he begins and what his priorities are, because every policy choice that follows depends upon his answer to that question. Isn't that the least we should expect?

[Arshia Malik @arshiaunis]

As an Indian woman from Muslim heritage, I write this rebuttal with the clarity and directness that comes from living the reality @Ilhan only tweets about from afar. Ilhan Omar’s claim that India has reached the “eighth stage of genocide” against Muslims is not analysis. It is reckless, fact-free propaganda that insults every one of us who actually live here, work here, raise families here, and exercise our rights every single day.

If there were even the beginning of genocide, our population would not have exploded. In 1951, Muslims were about 9.8% of India. By 2011, we were 14.2%. Today we are estimated around 14.5–15%, heading toward 18% by 2050 according to Pew projections. From roughly 35 million in 1951 to over 200 million now. Absolute numbers have multiplied nearly six-fold while the country’s overall population grew far slower in percentage terms. Genocide does not produce the world’s largest Muslim-minority population that keeps growing faster than the national average for decades. It produces mass graves and fleeing refugees. We have neither.

We vote in every election in the world’s largest democracy. We contest seats, win them, become MPs, ministers, judges, IAS officers, doctors, engineers, and business leaders. Three Presidents of India have been Muslim. We serve in the armed forces and police. We own businesses, run hospitals, produce films, and dominate segments of entertainment and sports. This is not the signature of a community facing extermination.

We are thriving and prospering — with real data and real lives. Yes, like every large community, we have internal challenges — lower average literacy and educational enrollment in some metrics, pockets of poverty, and the need for better skilling. But the narrative of uniform victimhood is a lie told by people who have never walked through a Muslim-dominated area in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Lucknow, or Kerala and seen the middle class, the professionals, the entrepreneurs, and the young women studying medicine and engineering.

Prominent Indian Muslims — from business (Wipro’s Azim Premji built one of India’s largest companies), to cinema (generations of stars and directors), to sports, academia, and medicine — show what is possible when talent meets opportunity in a free society. Millions of ordinary Muslim families have moved from villages to cities, from informal work to formal jobs, from one generation of limited schooling to the next pursuing professional degrees. That is prosperity in motion, not persecution.

We enjoy specific rights and accommodations that Hindus as a group do not. This is the part Omar and her echo chamber never mention. Indian Muslims operate under a parallel personal law system for marriage, divorce, inheritance, and maintenance rooted in Sharia. Hindus do not.
After independence, Hindu personal law was comprehensively reformed and codified into a uniform framework (Hindu Marriage Act, Hindu Succession Act, etc.). Muslims retained the right to follow their own religious laws — including provisions for polygamy (up to four wives) and differential inheritance rules that the Hindu majority surrendered decades ago.

We also have constitutional minority protections under Articles 29 and 30 that allow us to establish and administer our own educational institutions with significant autonomy — rights the Hindu majority does not claim as a group because it is not classified as a minority. The Waqf Act gives Muslim institutions unique control over vast religious and charitable properties in a manner unparalleled for any other community.
In short: the Indian state has gone out of its way, through personal laws and minority safeguards, to preserve and accommodate Muslim religious and cultural identity in ways it has not extended equivalently to the Hindu majority. These are not “equal rights” in every narrow sense — they are deliberate accommodations that give us more space to live according to our traditions than the majority community receives under the same Constitution.

As a woman from Muslim heritage in India, I have the full protection of the Indian Constitution plus the framework of personal law. The criminalization of instant triple talaq in 2019 removed a specific vulnerability that existed under uncodified practice. I can study, work, vote, travel, criticize the government, wear what I choose (or not), and practice my faith openly — all while living in a country where my community’s population share has steadily risen for 75 years.

@Ilhan Omar’s “eighth stage of genocide” rhetoric is not solidarity. It is the lazy export of American culture-war talking points onto a country and a people she does not understand. It erases the agency of 200+ million Indian Muslims who are neither cowering nor waiting for rescue from Washington. It cheapens the word “genocide” while real atrocities happen elsewhere.
Stop peddling foreign fantasies about our lives. We are here. We are visible. We are voting. We are building. And we reject your narrative with the facts of our own existence. That is the view from inside — not from a podium in the United States.

[Comman Man @CommanMan777589]

A Bengali woman carrying a British merchant on her back…

📸 This photo was taken in 1903, at the height of British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent. This isn't just a picture…

it's a slap in the face to all those who sing the praises of "Western civilization." This is the true face of colonialism, which they still try to beautify in history books.

It's slavery and the humiliation of human beings, the crushing of human dignity, simply because they don't belong to the white race! And then they ask you about terrorism…

The history of Western colonialism is full of massacres, slavery, plunder, and starvation… But they reduce terrorism to oppressed peoples struggling for their dignity! 🩸

The effects of what British colonialism did in India—the killing, starvation, plunder, and contempt for humanity—are still evident today. Millions

were killed, wealth was stolen, and generations were displaced… all under the banner of a false "enlightenment"!

[Mayank Vora @aiwithmayank]

If Google locked your account tomorrow, you could lose your:

- Gmail
- Google Drive
- Photos
- YouTube
- Calendar
- Every "Sign in with Google" login

One account controls your entire internet life.

Here's the backup system nobody sets up until it's too late ↓

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@itamarbengvir Perhaps it is time that the @WhiteHouse and @JDVance take decisive action to muzzle this type of extremism. I can see how this type of rhetoric will lead to perpetual wars and be damaging to the USA.

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@itamarbengvir I wonder what @UKLabour and @10DowningStreet make of this extremist viewpoint and indeed whether they will call this type of rhetoric out or whether @Keir_Starmer will look the other way 🤔

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@BritishGasHelp
My gas tariff ends 31/07/26.
I cant get a new fix which will start on that date unless I call BG on the 31/07. If I get a fix now, it starts immediately meaning I lose 6 weeks of current tariff. Surely, I should be able to choose a tariff now to start on 31/07/26

[Reality Check @BigK___________]

@MartinSLewis My BG gas only tariff ends 31/07/26.
I cant get a new fix which will start on that date unless I call BG on the 31/07. If I get a fix now, it starts immediately meaning I lose 6 weeks of current tariff. Surely, I should be able to choose a tariff to start when my old one ends?

[Carole Hawkins @hawkins_carole]

The main announcement is that you will have a Single Palantir Record containing all of your medical notes, all your prescriptions, and your DNA sequence – all controlled by a politician, accessible and sold to whoever he sees fit. This wasn’t in the briefing Wes gave to make his plans sound good, but if the SPR regulations are unchanged, your GP opt out will be wiped away so he can sell your data.
When did they get the DNA sequence from everyone in the UK and how?

[Right over Left Everytime @RightSide_Uk]

🚨 MPs’ renting scandal just went nuclear — and the snout-in-the-trough champion of the week is none other than Labour’s own Deputy Leader, Lucy Powell.
It’s now been exposed that a whole string of MPs have been renting rooms and entire homes to each other at full taxpayer expense. Powell raked in over £30,000 last year alone by renting out a room to another MP. Taxpayer-funded second homes, taxpayer-funded rents flowing straight into fellow MPs’ pockets — a cosy little Westminster property scam that makes the old expenses scandal look like pocket change.
This is the same Labour Party that lectures working Brits about “fairness”, “austerity” and “paying your share” while their own elite treat Parliament like a private members’ club with an unlimited bar tab on your dime. While British families are crushed by sky-high rents, energy bills and taxes to fund this circus, Labour insiders are quietly lining their nests by renting to one another — all perfectly “within the rules,” of course. Because in two-tier Britain, the rules are written by the grifters for the grifters.
Lucy Powell isn’t some backbencher caught with her hand in the till. She’s the Deputy Leader. The second most senior figure in Starmer’s government. The same government that’s busy hiking your taxes, slashing services and telling you to tighten your belt while they play Monopoly with public money.
This isn’t a mistake.
This isn’t an oversight.
This is systemic corruption dressed up as “MP accommodation.”
The silent majority has had enough of these champagne socialists treating the British taxpayer like a bottomless ATM. We pay for their second homes, their rents, their expenses — while our own kids can’t get on the housing ladder and pensioners choose between heating and eating.
We demand:
✅ Immediate full public audit of every MP’s property dealings and expenses — names, amounts, everything.
✅ Resignations for anyone caught in this rental racket — starting with Lucy Powell.
✅ A complete overhaul of the MPs’ expenses system — no more second homes, no more self-dealing, no more pigs at the trough.
✅ Real consequences for the entitled elite who think the rules don’t apply to them.
Labour isn’t just failing Britain.
It’s looting it — one taxpayer-funded rental agreement at a time.
Starmer Out.
Powell Out.
The whole rotten Westminster cartel out.
The British people are watching. And this time we’re not forgetting.
🇬🇧 #MPSRentingScandal #LucyPowellExposed #TwoTierBritain #LabourGrift #RestoreBritain #PutBritainFirst #MPsExpenses #BritainIsBroken #EndTheCorruption