Darran

Low grade meme generator.
I don't own Bitcoin but my dog does.

[Darran @DStuck3y]

If a product or service is "free", you are the product.

[The Hacker News @TheHackersNews]

#TikTok has quietly revised its #privacy policy to allow it to automatically collect biometric information such as faceprints and voice prints from the content its users post on the platform.

Read details: https://t.co/hy4opM5gES

#datasecurity #infosec #cybersecurity

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

I have never taken part in a coup against any Leader of the Labour Party and I am not going to start now. 2/3

[Darran @DStuck3y]

Someone is going to have to run against him just to make it look like there's some kind of debate.

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Darren Jones is being lobbied by dozens of Labour MPs to launch a leadership bid to stop an Andy Burnham coronation

[@Tony_Diver]

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

I think this hashtag needs to be trending tonight, don’t you?

#GeneralElectionNow

[Darran @DStuck3y]

No incentives only punishment.

[Guido Fawkes @GuidoFawkes]

Burnham’s economic architect Miatta Fahnbulleh recommends, among other things:
•A wealth tax and yet another windfall tax on oil and gas.
•Mass nationalisation e.g. of land, transport, and energy.
•Extending national insurance to investment income.
•A cap on interest rates and charges on every form of consumer credit.
•Hiking capital gains tax to income tax levels.
•Hiking divided tax to income tax levels.
•Abolition of the upper earnings limit for national insurance.
•Huge expansion of the benefits system including a “minimum income guarantee” paid to everyone apart from the rich.
•Nationalisation of banks and creation of new “green” banks with taxpayer funds.
•Block on private banks lending to anyone with a “large amount of greenhouse gas emissions” and “penalisation of banks that provide too many carbon-intensive loans.“
•Forced sale of existing businesses to employees.
•A tripling of the stamp duty surcharge to 9% for multiple homeowners and an increase to 6% for non-residents.

[Tim Newman @whitesundesert]

Nothing will enrage a bureaucrat more than someone doing the job the bureaucrat was supposed to do.

[Darran @DStuck3y]

The split in the right will keep Labour in power

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 BREAKING: Andy Burnham has won the Makerfield by-election

🔴 LAB: 24,937 (+6,725) - 54.8%
➡️ REF: 15,696 (+2,893) - 34.5%
🟣 RES: 3,111 (NEW) - 6.8%
🔵 CON: 997 (-3,382) - 2.2%
🟢 GRN: 308 (-1,468) - 0.7%
🔶 LD: 163 (-2,572) - 0.4%

Changes w/ 2024
58.75% turnout

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 BREAKING: Andy Burnham has won the Makerfield by-election

🔴 LAB: 24,937 (+6,725) - 54.8%
➡️ REF: 15,696 (+2,893) - 34.5%
🟣 RES: 3,111 (NEW) - 6.8%
🔵 CON: 997 (-3,382) - 2.2%
🟢 GRN: 308 (-1,468) - 0.7%
🔶 LD: 163 (-2,572) - 0.4%

Changes w/ 2024
58.75% turnout

[Darran @DStuck3y]

It is no surprise that multiple countries enforce the same restrictions at the same time.

[Global Dissident @GlobalDiss]

🚨🇪🇺 EU wants INTERNET BY PASSPORT - and plans to block VPNs to enforce it.

“The new age verification system cannot be bypassed via VPN.”

Their plan is totalitarian surveillance! 1984 is coming!

[Darran @DStuck3y]

Trump got tricked into an endless war by those with their own agenda.

He wants out regardless.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

The US has circulated its version of the Memo of Understanding with Iran to G7 leaders in France. It’s as bad if not worse than expected.
— The moment it’s signed (Friday) sanctions on the export of Iran oil are lifted. So the regime can start replenishing its coffers immediately.
— The US commits to doing nothing to undermine or destabilise the Iranian regime (it started the war to remove it).
— The US specifically commits to ending its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz but Iran does not commit specifically to returning the Strait to toll/fee free transit exactly as before the war, with no Iranian control/regulation whatsoever .
— All sanctions against Iran will be dropped should phase two negotiations go well. And America will withdraw its forces from the region.
— The US ‘undertakes’ to work with Iran and Gulf allies to create a $300 billion reconstruction package for Iran. So America will now become a partner with the tyrants of Tehran, who Trump only recently wanted to overthrow, in rebuilding their economy.
— All matters related to Iran’s nuclear capabilities are kicked into the ‘final agreement’ in 60 days time (or longer if necessary).
— No mention of Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities or its financing of terrorist proxies.
And that’s just about it. When Trump insisted the war would only end with ‘unconditional surrender’ it never crossed my mind he meant his own.

[Darran @DStuck3y]

Anarcho tyranny

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

Good news! After decades of ignoring rampant environmental crime on the Roding, @EnvAgency has finally decided to act.

Bad news! It’s not against Thames Water for illegally dumping billions of litres of sewage in the Roding, or the waste criminals who have dumped thousands of tonnes of rubbish on its banks, but against myself & a small volunteer charity for… restoring a river without a permit!

Within a week of the magnificent work of River Roding Trust volunteers completing the arduous work of restoring 250 metres of the Aldersbrook this winter, EA investigators had been down to the site and rattled off a letter threatening us with prosecution for doing the work without a permit. This is despite the fact that the Trust have repeatedly asked the EA to do this vital work on the Aldersbrook themselves & they have refused. It is also despite the fact that they have not investigated the huge illegal sewage outlet on the Cranbrook a few hundred metres away, which illegally discharges 750,000,000 litres of raw sewage straight into the River Roding every year.

[Darran @DStuck3y]

One commentator stated this was to sow confusion and division, therefore making governance more difficult. Part of "Hybrid War".

Looking at the last 2 years the Govt is achieving that without Russian intervention.

[BBC News (World) @BBCWorld]

Russia was behind arson attacks targeting PM, BBC reveals https://t.co/gNgD9uSfQ5

[Poppy Coburn @kafkaswife]

I suppose it’s too much to ask the Conservative Party to actually bother to look at the academic consensus on teenage social media use and mental health outcomes, which has found NO EVIDENCE the two are connected.

Why bother with a silly little thing like the truth when such a golden opportunity to censor speech has presented itself?

[Darran @DStuck3y]

It's not the ban, it's the enforcement.

[Sai Ishaya @Sai_Ishaya_]

The people I don't get the most are the "kids will find a way" crowd 😅

Think about the things western society almost UNIVERSALLY agrees children shouldn't have: alcohol, cigarettes, & restricted physical substances.

We put age restrictions on them b/c we understand the devastating physical & developmental consequences.

Do teenagers still find workarounds? Absolutely.

But the fact that a 15-yr-old can sneak a drink doesn't mean we should abolish the legal drinking age. Even the most rebellious adults who accessed drugs early in life will fiercely protect their own kids from having open access to those same substances.

So why is the proposed social media ban facing such fierce backlash?

B/c the damage is silent.

You can't see an algorithm eroding a child's mind in a lab the way you can see a cigarette damaging their lungs.

Let's make the invisible harm visible(which is what I believe the campaigns leading up to this should've done a lot more).

Nearly 40% of children ages 8 to 12 are already using social media. Adolescents spending more than 3 hrs daily on these platforms face double the risk of mental health issues like anxiety & depression.

When asked about the impact on their body image, 46% of adolescents aged 13-17 said social media actively makes them feel worse.

For teenage girls using platforms like Instagram, about 1 in 3 reported feeling worse about their bodies due to the app.

As many as 72% of teens say they have been cyberbullied. Cyberbullying is more strongly correlated with suicide attempts than traditional face-to-face bullying.

These apps are altering brain structure during a highly vulnerable developmental window, affecting areas like the amygdala that manage emotional learning.

If a legal, physical product was doing this much quantifiable damage to an ENTIRE generation, we'd pull it from the shelves immediately. We need to stop pretending screens are safe just b/c there's no smoke.

[Darran @DStuck3y]

He'll then use a leadership contest in Labour to boost his profile even more and draw a line under the Starmer era.

Then we will have more of the same but with a northern accent and a sovereign debt crisis to follow.

[Darran @DStuck3y]

I've not been following the Makerfield by-election but I suspect Burnham will win, not by being a great candidate, but due to the opposition vote being split between Reform and Restore.

[Darran @DStuck3y]

In which case Burnham will be seen as a saviour and the opposition schism will be largely overlooked to push that narrative hard.

[Darran @DStuck3y]

Lewis not understanding economics.

[Lewis Goodall @lewis_goodall]

Musk as a trillionaire- anyone as a trillionaire- is a grotesque economic, moral and political problem. We cannot have individuals with that level of power, whatever they might have achieved.

[Labour Digital Rights Network @LabDRN]

While protecting young people from exploitation is a noble and vital goal, the PM is deliberately ignoring the terrifying reality of how his proposed policy would actually be enforced.

Companies like Apple and Google will effectively be forced to introduce state-mandated surveillance software (spyware) on every single phone, tablet and laptop in the UK.

Furthermore, because each device must know if the user is a child to block the content, this policy guarantees the roll-out of mandatory digital ID checks for the entire population, effectively killing internet privacy and online anonymity for us all.

We also must question the sudden sense of urgency and tough talk today.

Just last month, Jess Phillips resigned from the government over this exact issue, calling out Starmer for pursuing only "incremental change," and worrying more about upsetting tech bosses than protecting children.

Why the sudden pivot? It is hard to see this ultimatum as an act of genuine conviction. Instead, much like his rushed, unworkable social media ban, it looks like another desperate cynical attempt to shore up Starmer's political legacy before the looming by-election and leadership contest.

[Liam Halligan @LiamHalligan]

Labour risks being forced to seek emergency help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as Britain lurches toward a debt crisis, leading economists are now warning.

Former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff says, in a new interview, that there is “more than 50:50 chance” of a major UK debt crisis before the end of this decade.

He is joined by Sir Charlie Bean, a former senior official at both the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility, who says the need for an IMF bail-out is now a “material risk” for the British economy.

I not only firmly agree with Ken Rogoff and Sir Charlie Bean – but have been repeatedly issuing the very same warnings for a very long time.

Because the grave risk of a major fiscal meltdown has been apparent for at least the last two years – to anyone who combines serious knowledge of UK economics and politics and global debt markets with an open mind.

The UK's public finances were already fragile when Labour took office back in July 2024.

But this government's misguided, ideologically-driven statist policies have made a bad situation much worse, seriously increasing the danger of a deep fiscal crisis - which would cause a disastrous state funding shortfall and a very nasty inflation spike.

That would result in Downing Street being forced to follow the orders of unelected technocrats flown in from Washington and elsewhere.

It would be a very major national humiliation combined with a deep economic slump and an even more intense cost-of-living crisis – in which low-income households, as ever, would suffer the most.

Yet those of us that have shown the brains and courage to point out these inconvenient truths over recent months and years have long been dismissed and derided for our trouble - not only by ignorant politicians and approval-seeking journalists but also the overwhelming majority of "leading economists".

Ahead of the general election in mid-2024, with Labour on course to win, the conventional wisdom among the great sages of broadsheet journalism and the economics establishment was that "the adults would soon be back in charge" ... Labour would "get lucky with the economy" ... and "Britain would now enjoy an extended period of political and fiscal stability".

I thought that was total nonsense – not least as I was well aware Labour's plans irresponsibly to increase borrowing and spending would be met with deep scepticism by the global pensions funds, insurance companies and other institutional investors that lend governments serious money.

My weekly @Telegraph "Economic Agenda" column of 23rd June 2024, a fortnight ahead of the general election, was a total outlier. I recounted the disaster of 1976 – when Britain was forced to go "cap in hand" to the IMF for a bailout – and warned that "The Ghosts of the 1970s" would haunt Labour's (so-called) economic resurrection".

Six months later, after the October 2024 "Hallowen" budget in which Chancellor Rachel Reeves did indeed sharply hike borrowing and spending, I assessed the market reaction then doubled-down – warning more assertively in my column of 12th January 2025 that "The UK risks a return to 1976 unless Reeves changes course".

And then again on 20th July 2025, as Labour's policies raised the costs of doing business, translating into price pressures which pushed up government borrowing costs even more, I again cautioned that "Inflation risks are taking Britain to the debt-crisis cliff edge".

"It’s now screamingly obvious that Labour’s crude Keynesianism – “pump priming” the economy by upping state borrowing and spending – isn’t working," I wrote in that column last July.

"Worse than that, this Government’s actions are pushing Britain towards a budgetary crisis every bit as serious as that in 1976 – when the UK was forced to go “cap in hand” to the IMF for a bail-out".

It's been a lonely task issuing these warnings. I've been hounded in public debates, slagged off by senior civil servants and often dismissed by "leading economists" as "alarmist".

So what do these same "leading economists" now say to Rogoff (Harvard Professor, Former IMF Chief Economist) and Bean (LSE Professor and Former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England)?

The "economics establishment" – with very few honourable exceptions, the brilliant @jagjit_chadha among them – has been and remains extremely reluctant to point out the deeply unsustainable nature of this government's addiction to ever more borrowing.

The systemic fiscal dangers of evermore "tax and spend" – and the prospect of a serious spike in gilt yields and related fiscal meltdown – are now so real and present as to be completely undeniable.

Yet the UK government is about to shift even further to the left, pushing up borrowing and spending even more under a new leader, in a bid to appease the massed ranks of economic illiterates among Labour's Parliamentary party and activist base – making those dangers even more acute.

Yet, still, the silence among "public intellectual" economists is deafening.

I'm glad the likes of Ken Rogoff and Charlie Bean are now issuing clear warnings. So where is the rest of the "economics establishment" - those who purport to understand fiscal management and financial markets, and often funded by taxpayers' money?

Britain is now clearly in the crosshairs of a very serious danger. The government's creditors are increasingly fickle and based overseas – with no regulatory or cultural obligations to lend money to the UK government.

Those holding UK gilts are increasingly "speculative" rather than "strategic" long-term investors – looking for quick returns, financing their government bond purchases with "leverage" (money borrowed from elsewhere), which will quickly be withdrawn when senitment decisively shifts, causing a plunge in gilt prices and a sharp additional surge in government borrowing costs, setting up a vicious circle.

The UK government is very heavily indebted – and the global investors we rely on to bankroll a huge slice of our state spending are alarmed that of the £132bn the government borrowed last year, no less than £110bn was spent on debt interest – as I wrote in a column on 17th May 2026, "As Labour lurches further left, the markets are calling time".

Global investors are alarmed the UK has consistently had the highest inflation in the G7 (which pushes up borrowing costs) and has easily the highest share of index-linked debt (which magnifies the burden of inflation on the state's balance sheet).

And they are deeply, deeply alarmed that when Labour came to power in mid-2024, the Office for Budget Responsibility was forecasting additional state borrowing of £323bn by 2029, the scheduled end of this Parliament.

But Labour’s runaway spending and growth-crushing tax rises mean that the same five-year borrowing forecast is now £583bn – 80pc higher. And still, the trade unions, MPs and Labour activists who will choose Starmer’s successor now want even more.

It is not too late to pull the UK back from the fiscal brink, to avoid the extremely painful and deep, lingering damage of being forced to go to the IMF and perhaps other multi-lateral creditors for a bailout.

It is not too late to avoid the inflation surge, the currency crash, the shocking blow to consumer and business confidence alongside the sky-high interest rates that will seriously whack our economy – or the perhaps even deeper damage of yet more of the British electorate losing faith in the ability of our establishment to manage the country in a manner that avoids imposing serious hardship on so many hard-working people simply trying to make their way.

But our political and media class needs to start acknowledging the economic and financial truth – that the UK government is borrowing and spending too much, taxation is now so high that it's hammering growth and employment, and that trying to finally get the economy moving by "moving further left", borrowing and spending even more, will result in a fiscal collapse.

Smart, experienced, high-profile economists need to start speaking out – as Rogoff and Bean just have – raising the alarm in a bid to force the broader establishment to face reality. Before it's too late.

If you've read this far, you clearly think this analysis is worthwhile and important. So please like and share.

And for more, read my "Economic Agenda" column in The Sunday Telegraph each week – and subscribe to "When The Facts Change: Economics and Politics in a fast-moving world, with Liam Halligan"

[Darran @DStuck3y]

Do you think the dumbing down of debate is good for the UK?

[Ernest Funk @ThoughtOutlaw]

Do you think the British public understand fiscal rules or care @afneil ? The last election and @Keir_Starmer being PM hints at the answer.