Robert Blandford

IT Programme Manager. Proud father to 3 beautiful younger ones 23, 21 and 17.

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@Mike_Fabricant Looks beautiful!

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@Iromg Is it each, or between them ?

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@BenedictSpence It’s so tragic. How bad can our government get !

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@JuliaHB1 I think that applies to half the country unfortunately

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@LeoKearse Well said !

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@London_W4 @happy_foxxy Well handled Alastair.

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@AnnabelDenham1 Well said!

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@jaxoncoder @MdRimon488484 213

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@premium It doesn’t work with Apple pay! I’ve tried credit and debit card and changed the default card in Apple pay and it just doesn’t go through

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@robertwlk Cracker ! Where’ve you been ?

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@London_W4 Wasn’t he in George & Mildred ?

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@London_W4 @GBNEWS You did good, came across very well !

[Ranty Man @RanTeeThree]

Keir Starmer has only allowed one of these people into Britain. He invited them to Number 10. Can you guess who it is?

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@DefenceHQ @16AirAssltBCT Excellent !

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🇬🇧 Most British schoolchildren are taught about Magna Carta.

They are taught it was sealed in twelve fifteen at Runnymede.

They are taught it is the foundation of English liberty.

They are taught it is one of the most important documents in human history.

They are not taught what came next.

They are not taught about the eighty years between twelve fifteen and twelve ninety-five when ordinary Englishmen forced three successive kings to write down, for the first time in any kingdom in medieval Europe, what English law was, what English liberty was, and how an English king must govern.

They are not taught about the Charter of the Forest, which restored the right to graze, gather firewood, and live on common land, and which remained in force for seven hundred and fifty-four years.

They are not taught about the Provisions of Oxford in twelve fifty-eight, often called England's first written constitution, which placed the king under a council of fifteen and required Parliament to meet three times a year.

They are not taught about the Provisions of Westminster in twelve fifty-nine, which subjected the barons themselves to the same law they had forced upon the king.

They are not taught about Simon de Montfort, an earl born in France who died for England, who summoned the first Parliament in English history to include ordinary commoners alongside the great lords.

They are not taught about the Statute of Marlborough in twelve sixty-seven, which is the oldest piece of statute law in the United Kingdom still in force today. ⚖️

Seven hundred and fifty-nine years old.

If you've ever taken a debt to court in England, you've used it. 🏠 If you've ever rented a home, you've been protected by it. 👑 If a creditor can't lawfully drag your possessions into the street to settle what you owe, that's because of a law signed seven hundred and fifty-nine years ago.

They are not taught about the Model Parliament of twelve ninety-five, summoned by Edward the First, which became the shape of every English Parliament since.

Eighty years. Three successive kings. The first written constitution in any kingdom in medieval Europe.
It was not given to them. It was not handed down from God or king or Pope.

✍️ It was written. By Englishmen. For England.

🇬🇧 The British write their own history. They always have.

This one needed more than a thread. The full story is in our video, watch it below 👇

Help us remember who we are. Help us remember every British achievement. 👇🙏

👉 https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf 👈

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧

Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Robert Blandford @BlandfordRob]

@kelvmackenzie And Walton

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

Yesterday's edition of the Financial Times carried a lengthy interview with Lord Hermer KC, the present Attorney General of the United Kingdom.

If you haven't seen it: oh, boy.

The interview was part of the FT's fluffy "Lunch With" feature, a sympathetic profile format whose previous subjects have included most of the 'grown ups in the room' of the British establishment over the last 40 years. The Hermer instalment was, by the FT's own pitch, an opportunity for the Attorney General to "open up about the Keir Starmer people don't see," and to explain the merits of the Chagos deal.

The piece appeared. The comments section opened. And in those comments, you could see a country on the precipice of major change.

The Financial Times's readership is not, to put it as politely as the situation will allow, known for its raucous lower-class anger. It is the readership of senior partners at City firms, central bankers, retired civil servants, retired ambassadors, and the broader metropolitan managerial caste of Britain at the fatter end. It is, on almost every available political question, the most reliably establishment-tarian readership of any newspaper in the United Kingdom.

The comments, before they were closed, were so brutal that readers were openly asking for the article to be withdrawn and threatening to cancel their subscriptions in numbers the FT had not seen before. When the FT readership turns on a Labour Attorney General, the Labour Attorney General has a problem.

If you were wondering what caused such an outbreak of fury from the terribly polite class, here's a summary of the last three decades of Lord Hermer's career.

Lord Hermer, before he became Attorney General, made his name and his living as a human-rights barrister whose principal practice, for a meaningful slice of the relevant period, was the prosecution of civil claims against the British state.

Suing his own country. He got particular mileage out of pursuing claims against the British armed forces, on behalf of foreign nationals alleging mistreatment by British servicemen and women in the field.

The most notorious of these matters is the Al-Sweady litigation. Lord Hermer was lead counsel for eight Iraqi claimants who alleged that British soldiers had murdered, mutilated, and tortured Iraqi prisoners after the Battle of Danny Boy in May 2004. The claims occupied the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Military Police, and a public inquiry for the better part of a decade. The inquiry, at its conclusion, found the claims to be "wholly without foundation," and the result of "deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hostility."

On 22 April this year, the Daily Telegraph published more than 25,000 pages of contemporaneous emails and legal documents from Lord Hermer's chambers' handling of the Al-Sweady litigation. Among the documents was an internal communication in his own writing, advising on how to "get the big story out there" and noting the need for "wriggle room if the killings did not in fact happen."

Today's edition of the same paper carries further documents from the same info dump showing Hermer privately criticising serving British soldiers, in correspondence with his legal team, while praising publicly the Iraqi lawyers whose own clients the inquiry had found to be lying.

Hermer has, rightfully, been formally referred Lord Hermer to the Bar Standards Board for serious professional misconduct. Lord Glasman, a Labour peer who knows him personally, has called him "an arrogant...fool." Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister, has said directly that Hermer "aided false war crimes claims against British troops."

(Fancy losing a moral high-ground to Boris Johnson...)

This is the Attorney General. He is the chief legal officer of the Crown. The man whose entire constitutional function is to ensure that the legal interests of the British state are properly defended in the highest forums is a man who, before assuming the post, made his career attacking the British state on behalf of liars, liars whose lies were specifically calibrated to destroy the reputations of British servicemen and women.

There is a word for this kind of legal practice when it is done at scale and in a particular direction. The word is "lawfare." The deployment of judicial mechanisms as a substitute for politics by other means.

The systematic use of human-rights frameworks, judicial review, and aggressive litigation to constrain the actions of one's own state, to attack one's own armed forces, and to advance a worldview that the elected institutions of one's country have repeatedly declined to advance through the ballot box.

It is, at its outer edge, a form of treason that wears a wig. And Hermer, who practices it, is an enemy of our state.

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

Never forget, Britain is a country that banned Kanye West from entering but allowed a murderer from Egypt to arrive by small boat and gang rape a British girl.

The establishment must be smashed.

[Reasoned Liberal @tuckedupp]

David Blunkett "We just didn't understand that [the Islamists] were not just anti-Western, but on a different plane altogether, and this is still not widely understood in the UK. We can be as nice as pie to them, but that's not the issue. They are on a mission that has taken them outside anything we can say, a mission to destroy completely our way of life. Because [British authorities] think it's just a few extremists, they are continuing to track the threat of big, spectacular attacks, looking, for example, at transfers of materials for bombs, whereas what they should be looking at is what's going on inside people's heads."

And we still don’t fully grasp what we’re dealing with.