David Funnell 🇬🇧

Old enough to know better. #veteran
Look after yourself, family and friends and generally be a good person.

[Keir Wrong Un @keirwrong]

The state wants you to source your news from approved organisations such as the BBC.

This BBC

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

Four years ago he called for a General Election when the Tories changed leader and he accused them of having no mandate.

Andy has no mandate for his No.10 and Treasury up North gimmicks.

[David Davis MP @DavidDavisMP]

This is a total disgrace.

It is absolutely not the role of the police to intimidate members of the public - especially while openly admitting no law has been broken.

An affront to free speech and a massive overstep of authority.

The public expects the police to focus on real crime, like stopping burglaries, not squandering taxpayer funded time and abusing their powers by actively undermining free speech.

https://t.co/gzBXywJy3m

[Dan Salt @Danjsalt]

I'm still stuck on this

I don't know the process but one assumes officers are assigned by seniors to do tasks

So who told them to go and do this?

I mean they should be sacked for being dumb at the minimum

[Dr Zoe Harcombe, PhD @zoeharcombe]

Ruthin school in north Wales has been open for 742 years.
It takes Labour just 2 years to destroy it.
You can’t hate these politicians enough😡😢

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Henry Nowak Died Handcuffed and Pleading He Could Not Breathe. His Killer Now Wants a Lighter Sentence.

"Unbearable." That was the word Mark Nowak used to describe the gap between how his son was treated and how his son's killer was treated. He said it the day Vickrum Digwa was sentenced. He may soon have cause to say it again.

Digwa is appealing both his conviction and his 21-year minimum term for the murder of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old stabbed to death in Southampton last December. The solicitor general, Ellie Reeves, had already referred that same sentence to the Court of Appeal as unduly lenient, arguing it was too soft. Digwa's answer to that referral is to ask for less time, not more accountability. No date has been set. No detail of his grounds has been made public. What is public is the plain fact of what he did next, and how the state responded to it.

After stabbing Henry, Digwa told police he was the victim of a racist attack. It was a lie. A judge later found Henry had said nothing racist at all. But in the minutes that mattered most, officers believed Digwa's claim over the wound bleeding in front of them. Body-worn footage showed police handcuffing Henry as he lay dying, ignoring his own words that he could not breathe, while first aid that might have saved him was not given.

That footage is now the subject of a formal misconduct investigation. The Independent Office for Police Conduct confirmed this week it is examining two officers for gross misconduct, including a specific failure to grasp that Henry needed urgent medical help, and a failure to act when he said he had been stabbed. One officer faces a separate finding for dismissing his account outright. Crucially, the watchdog is also asking whether race or religion shaped that decision-making. That question does not arise from nowhere. Hampshire's own Race Action Plan instructs officers to weigh racial dynamics as standard practice. If that policy taught officers to treat a claim of racism as the more urgent fact in the road that night, then what happened to Henry was not one team's failure on one bad shift. It was a system doing precisely what it had been trained to do, with a dying boy paying the price for it.

Keir Starmer said there were "serious questions" to answer. There still are, and they now run in two directions at once. One set of questions belongs to the officers under investigation, over why a lie about racism outweighed the plain fact of a stabbing. The other belongs to the Court of Appeal, over whether a killer whose own sentence was already flagged as too lenient should be handed any relief while that first set of questions remains unresolved.

None of this decides Digwa's appeal on its legal merits, which will turn on points of law rather than public anger. But the timing does the state no favours. Every week this appeal sits alongside a live misconduct probe into how police treated Digwa's victim, it becomes harder for any reduction in his sentence to look like justice rather than confirmation of the very pattern Mark Nowak already named. The solicitor general's referral signalled the system expected this sentence to rise, not fall. A quiet climbdown now would tell the country something it has already started to believe: that in modern Britain, the account of an attacker who claims racism can carry more weight than the account of a dying boy who cannot breathe.

"Digwa is appealing both his conviction and his 21-year minimum term for the murder of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old stabbed to death in Southampton last December."

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

Burnham is already looking spectacularly out of his depth.

[dan barker @danbarker]

What an unusual coup. You do a deal with a local MP where you get his job with the prospect he can then work for you, causing £5m in by elections. You then topple the Prime Minister, and decide - before you're even in charge - to move the country's seat of power to... your own back yard in a *£1 billion* campus you and two of your friends have 'been working' on 'for a long time'. And the friends you worked on that with? One of them was deputy to the guy you just toppled, with the full inside track, and the other you're currently trying to help into your old job.

[Keir Wrong Un @keirwrong]

Andy Burnham will save this nation, because Andy Burnham did a great job of being mayor for the city that Andy Burnham lived in. Andy Burnham buses.

Andy Burnham approves of this message about Andy Burnham

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

West Midlands Police Saw Nothing Wrong. The Public Saw the Footage.

West Midlands Police looked at the footage of a man being knocked to the ground, punched, and then arrested, and found nothing to trouble them. "We have no concerns over the officer's actions," the force said. "We are satisfied that they were reasonable and proportionate." That was their verdict before the public had properly seen it for themselves.

The footage shows a white man attacked by a group of black men in Birmingham on June 21. One shoves him to the ground. Another swings for him. As he tries to get back up, an officer pushes him against a wall. He swings back and catches her on the head. By then, the men who started it have already walked off. He alone was charged, with assaulting a police officer. He is due before Birmingham magistrates on July 23.

Only after the clip spread and the criticism grew loud did the force shift its position. On Friday, weeks after the event, West Midlands Police admitted an assault had taken place and said it was now trying to "identify those involved." Nothing in the footage changed between that first statement and this one. What changed was the volume of people watching it.

That reversal is the story here, more than the arrest itself. A force's first instinct was to defend its officer's judgement, not to ask whether an assault had occurred at all. It took public pressure, not internal review, to produce the admission that should have been the starting point.

This is not an isolated reflex. In Southampton, officers who arrived at the scene of Henry Nowak's stabbing handcuffed him as he lay dying, having accepted his attacker's claim that Henry had been racially abusive, while the wound in front of them went unattended. A judge later found Henry had said nothing racist at all. Hampshire's own Race Action Plan commits officers to weigh the racial dimension of an incident as a matter of policy. When forces are trained to treat a claim of racism as more urgent than the injury in front of them, this is the result: victims judged first by the identity of their attacker, not the harm they have suffered.

There is a second admission buried in West Midlands Police's own statement, easy to miss. Officers were "in the area" when the assault happened, the force says, but tied up arresting someone else. Present, yet unable to stop a man being knocked down and punched in the street. The same force found the resource to charge him within weeks once he struck out at an officer, while the men who put him on the ground in the first place remain unnamed a fortnight later.

Robert Jenrick, the Reform UK MP, has called the arrest "baffling" and demanded the force release the full footage. "The police have lost the benefit of the doubt in the eyes of many," he said. "They've had enough of two-tier policing." Whatever one thinks of the label, the sequence of events gives it weight. A force does not reach for "no concerns" and "reasonable and proportionate" by accident. That was a judgement, made and defended, before the facts were fully public.

None of this requires assuming bad faith on the part of the individual officer, who was, by the account given, pushed into a confrontation not of her making. The charge is institutional, not personal. It is a pattern of forces reaching first for the racial framing of an incident and only later, under pressure, for the facts of what actually happened.

Release the full footage, as Jenrick has asked. If it vindicates the force's original line, let it be shown plainly and the matter closed. If it does not, the public deserves to know why "no concerns" was ever the verdict, and why a young white man ended up in the dock while the men who put him on the ground did not.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

FAO all who support the UK puberty blockers trial:

'They ruined my life. They shaped and folded my body according to what they thought would look the best... You can't treat kids like that. We're not your art project.'

-- detransitioner Jonni Skinner

https://t.co/DlTYUfzi5H

[David Collier @mishtal]

A comedian (Deniz Göktaş) has just been arrested in Turkey accused of insulting Islam (blasphemy).

A NATO country.

Let me repeat that just to make sure I understood.

A NATO country has just arrested a comedian for insulting Islam.

Yep... understood.

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

I’m home now. Rick Rowe, the Green Party candidate has been given my personal information by the police. He let it slip tonight, when he deliberately came to the Chiswick pub that he sent the police to who acted on his orders (see my previous video). If I do not post on here in the morning, it means that the police have again acted on the orders of a Green Party candidate and have arrested me. I hope that I am able to post tomorrow morning, but seriously, please kick up a fuss with whoever you can if you don’t see a post from me by 9am British time. Really appreciate your support in these difficult times. Thank you.

[Joe Rich @joerichlaw]

Important to remember that Rochdale grooming gang leader Shabir Ahmed worked for many years as a Welfare Officer in Labour-run Oldham Council.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

.@SteveReedMP What you need to change are the laws currently preventing this monster from being deported.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

I haven’t seen any racism on my feed. I wonder why the X algorithm thinks Sadiq wants to see divisive bigotry?

[Net Zero Watch @NetZeroWatch]

A green energy think tank that Ed Miliband relied on to draw up policy is partly funded by overseas cash.

Ember, which inspired the pledge to lower bills by £300 by 2030, is funded by a number of overseas climate-focused donors including the European Climate Foundation and the Sequoia Climate Foundation.

[Ben Graham @BenGrahamUK]

Lisa Nandy had no problem using X when it helped Labour get elected. She's posted on here over 10'000 times in total since 2009.

Now she's in government, facing far greater scrutiny, she's suddenly decided the platform is the problem.

After being Community Noted multiple times and turning off replies to many of her posts in the last 12 months, walking away from X looks less like a principled stand and more like an attempt to avoid criticism.

If you're in public office, scrutiny comes with the job. Running away from it is spineless.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Thank you, Simon. The proceedings against the officers cannot be the last word, and there is a document that explains why. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary operates a Race Action Plan for 2024 to 2026, published on its own website and in force on the night Henry Nowak died. It commits the force to prioritising harm done to ethnic minority communities specifically, not to all communities equally. It commits to training officers in the historic grievances of particular groups, not in the equal treatment of every complainant who calls them to a scene. And it commits the force to explaining or eliminating any "disproportionality" in its own arrest figures, which is the term of art for arresting members of one community less often than the evidence would otherwise justify.

Read against that document, what happened on Belmont Road stops looking like an aberration and starts looking like an application. An officer trained to weigh disproportionality before weighing the knife in a man's hand has been given his instructions in advance. He handcuffs the boy bleeding out on the pavement and lets the other man go. He is following the plan.

This is why a misconduct panel confined to the individuals in the room will settle for far too little. It has no brief to examine the document that shaped their judgement before they ever arrived. It can find a delay, a badly worded statement, a failure of communication, and close the file. The Nottingham inquiry showed us this exact manoeuvre before. Named clinicians took the blame. The doctrine that trained them to treat a statistical disparity as more urgent than a clinical emergency was left standing, and went on to do the same thing elsewhere.

So the choice in front of the panel is not really about three officers. It is about whether Hampshire's Race Action Plan itself goes on the record as a cause, or whether it is quietly filed away as background while the men who followed it take the fall alone.

[David Atherton @daveatherton]

Twana Jamal made an estimated £4 million a year from people smuggling and served 5 years in a French 🇫🇷 prison.

He owns loads of vape type businesses in Britain 🇬🇧 and we are considering his application for asylum.