Emma Warman

Fortunate to have: 1 wife, 2 daughters, 2 dogs & 1 forgotten cat. City worker, former Conservative parliamentary candidate & borough cllr. Status: exhausted.

[Emma Warman @EmmaWarman]

I don’t like Blair and I think his government laid the foundations for some of the problems we face today, although perhaps this wasn’t so obvious at the time (being charitable). Nevertheless I listened to his interview this morning and found it hard to disagree with any of it.

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions:

- welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap
- defence spending is too low
- the triple lock is unsustainable
- without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution
- we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea
- migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state
- any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement
- we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable
- Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly

Blair basically says all that.

The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind:

- judges and quangos have too much power, are unaccountable and without redressing the balance in favour of parliament it is very difficult to do anything big fast
- the bare minimum that needs to change in this regard is to reform judicial review and planning law so we can put building and economic growth ahead of newts and NIMBYs

None of that above really ought to be up for discussion. It is all common sense but not one of our politicians will publicly say all of it

Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement.

Over to Andy and Keir and Kemi and Nigel and Zack and all the others

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

You might have heard of Maggie Oliver.

She's a former Greater Manchester detective who, in 2012, was ordered to abandon her investigation into the systematic rape of children in Rochdale, and decided she would rather resign her warrant card rather than do so.

Maggie, as that would imply, is one of the good ones. I constantly ask how our police can consider themselves worthy of the badge if they are not willing to return the badge rather than commit injustice in its name. Maggie did just that; she was asked to cover for criminals, so she told the shirts to stuff themselves and handed back her commission.

She won a small but consequential victory in the High Court on Friday. Mr Justice Kimblin granted her foundation a full judicial review of whether the British state has actually done anything about the recommendations it accepted, in 2022, at the end of a seven-year inquiry into the institutional cover-up of decades of child sexual abuse.

Maggie Oliver is one woman. She has no political party behind her and no standing in Whitehall. She has no peerage, no chambers, no billionaire foundation footing her bills.

She was ordered, by senior officers, to drop her investigation into a network of men who were raping children in industrial quantities in her city, because of the demographics to which those men belong made the whole thing a bit awkward.

Fourteen years on, she has done what nobody else in this country has been able to. She has hauled the British state into open court to answer for the choice it made, over four years and under two governments, to hold a seven-year, £200 million inquiry into the institutional cover-up of child abuse and implement, deliberately, none of that inquiry's recommendations.

The Home Office accepted those recommendations in 2022. So did the Department for Education, the police inspectorates and the Crown Prosecution Service. And then nothing happened. The recommendations sat. The departments restructured. Ministers rotated.

The girls and women who had given evidence aged. More such operations continued around the country, while the men who had run the previous set of them either walked free, left the country, or drew their own pensions.

The state, in the manner of every institution Tony Blair ever built, had decided that the writing of the report was the action, and the doing of the report could be handed off to history.

That is what Maggie Oliver has now forced into court. And the political class knows what that means. The Home Secretary has not commented. The Prime Minister has not commented. The candidates jockeying through the post-Starmer Labour succession have, at the time of writing, failed even to speak her name, as though they know that, if they do, lightning will flash in the sky and they'll be turned into a pillar of Tesco's-own-brand dishwasher salt.

They are silent because they recognise, accurately, that the answers a judicial review will produce - to the question of why their inquiry's findings were treated as ornamental - will, should, must end the careers of every official who was supposed to act on them and did not. That councillors and councils, mayors, indeed entire political parties, will be caught under ultraviolet light and shown for their guilt.

It's time a government did what the British state has spent twenty years declining to do. Take on institutional failure.

Name the institutions that failed, in public, on the record. Name the officers and officials who covered it up, and the officers and officials who pressed for the cover-up too. Prosecute them under the standards that any other employee of a public organisation defrauding the public would expect to face.

The recommendations the inquiry produced must be implemented in full, alongside whatever further measures a second look at the evidence then demands.

There will not be another inquiry into the inquiries. There will be the verdicts.

Maggie Oliver is one of the bravest people in Britain. She has earned, by her own resignation and by fourteen years and a foundation and a court case carried on her back, the right to expect from a future British government the simple thing that ought to have happened in 2014, in 2016, in 2018, in 2022 and in every other year of this national disgrace.

She has not yet been given it; we have not yet been given it. But it will be given, and soon.

[Eylon Levy @EylonALevy]

Pretty sick of the countries that are boycotting Eurovision because the Jews are competing. Before you say “don’t conflate!”, these are countries that expelled their Jews (Spain), or refused to welcome Holocaust refugees (Ireland), or where most Jews were genocided (Netherlands). Europe liquidated its Jewish population in living memory and the survivors built new lives in Israel. Now these entitled, hateful broadcasters are boycotting the show in solidarity with the territorist armies that tried to kill those survivors. It’s so fucked up.

[Vodka & Seledka 🇬🇧 @seledka_vodka]

There is a scene in @HBO's Chernobyl that most viewers miss. A scientist presents evidence of the disaster to a Belarusian party official. The official dismisses her expertise, then boasts that he used to run a shoe factory.

It is not central to the plot, but it explains everything. The Soviet Union was governed by a snowball of incompetence - decades of nepotism where ministries were handed to people with no relevant knowledge, provided they had the right party connections. Pedigree was political, not professional.

I grew up there. My parents were subject matter experts who spent their careers battling apparatchiks enforcing decisions they did not understand. That is why I flinch when I hear the same logic here in Britain.

@UKLabour politicians celebrate the "right background" - the poorer, the more deprived, the better. Council house to government, presented as triumph. Progress and resilience deserve recognition. But in these jubilations, merit vanishes. And celebrating ascent without competence is not progress. It is the embryo of disaster.

Look at the Labour Party's front bench. Britain's central challenge is wealth creation - economic growth. Yet these are former charity workers, public sector lifers, people who have always been on the receiving end of funds rather than generating them. They have never had to create value others willingly pay for. So they look to regulators for growth ideas. It is farcical. It is only possible in a culture where navigating party structures replaces proven ability.

A friend told me recently his wife had to close her coffee shop - high traffic, real revenue, still unprofitable due to taxes and business rates. In his frustration he said something raw: he no longer cares if folks running the government are toolmakers' sons or landed gentry. He wants competence. He found himself saying he would rather be ruled by Old Etonians.

Not because Eton College guarantees talent. It does not. But sheer competence - knowing your subject - has become so scarce in British governance that the impulse is understandable.

We are not the Soviet Union. We are nowhere near collapse. But on the left of our politics, the distance is shrinking faster than we admit.

[Emma Warman @EmmaWarman]

@RuthDavidsonPC @RobertSyms Happy days! I remember your fundraising efforts at LGBTory Fringe that year. In this case, is it possible for someone else to move the writ sooner, rather than follow Starmer’s preferred timetable?

[Emma Warman @EmmaWarman]

Hearing lots of “politics is a team sport” comments on the radio at the moment. No it’s not; it’s people’s lives, standard of living and futures. Until our political class start acting like it matters and not treating politics like sport we will continue to have useless govts

[Emma Warman @EmmaWarman]

Wow! Congratulations @paulswaddle

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: The Tories have won control of Westminster council from Labour

🔵 CON: 29 (+9)
🔴 LAB: 22 (-9)

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Graham Linehan should never have been dragged through the courts in the first place.

The real scandal is a system that wastes time on litigious nonsense driven by professional activists while serious crime goes unpunished.

We need to kill cancel culture. Free speech cannot survive if the process becomes the punishment.

This is why I asked Toby Young to review the laws that are stifling free speech so the next Conservative government can put an end to this wasting of our resources.

[Lee Hurst @LeeHurstComic]

If Israel didn’t exist, all the people who say they only hate IT would find another way to express their hatred of Jews.
It’s just an excuse.

[Emma Warman @EmmaWarman]

Absolutely! The constant hate matches have led to a situation where extremist language has been normalised on our streets and our Jewish friends and neighbours are being targeted again and again whilst the government stands by. This has to stop.

[Darren Johnson @DarrenJohnson66]

Shouting the phrase 'Globalise the Intifada' in public or carrying it around on a placard should be treated as an illegal act anywhere in the UK under incitement to terrorism legislation.

[Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1]

If you're shocked by today's stabbing terror attack on British Jews, you must have been living under a rock for the past few years.

Not a single one of the men who drove through North London in 2021 shouting “F*** the Jews, f*** their daughters, f*** their mothers, rape their daughters and free Palestine" were prosecuted. Not one.

So why is anyone surprised when British Jews are stabbed in broad daylight a few years later? The message went out loud and clear that anti-semitism was allowed on our streets. You reap what you sow.
https://t.co/G9457et3Av

[Heidi Bachram @HeidiBachram]

Jews were just stabbed in London and this morning a Green Party candidate is telling ppl on the doorstep that Israel shouldn’t exist. Is Philip Notley representing your party policy of annihilating the only Jewish State @TheGreenParty?

[Joy Morrissey MP @joymorrissey]

PMQs: another afternoon of the PM telling us what he didn’t know and wasn’t responsible for. All this from a man who has made a career out of standing on the moral high ground. Damning so many others for the disgraceful behaviour he is now demonstrating.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

At least now little girls who dream of Olympic medals will know that biological males can't cheat their way onto their podium...or punch them relentlessly in the face and get a medal for it.

Credit to Sharron Davies and Martina Navratilova, who spoke up despite attacks from those who should've known better.

They spoke up when it was easier to stay quiet and paid the price in lost income and support.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

I stand with our allies in the US and Israel as they take on the threat of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its vile regime. The same regime that carries out attacks on the UK and on our citizens, that seeks to build nuclear weapons that would threaten our country and that brutally repressed pro-democracy protests only months ago and murdered thousands of its own people.

Under my leadership, the Conservative Party will always put our national security first and work with our allies to make the world a safer place.

[Tom Harris 🇬🇧 @MrTCHarris]

Actual adults in this country look at Israel, with its free press, independent judiciary, equal rights for all (including Arabs) and democratic elections. Then they look at the Iranian regime and they see a government run by clerics under a barbaric, medieval code, the execution, rape and torture of women and the execution of gays for being gay. And they decide: "Yup, I'm on the side of the Ayatollahs."

[LGB International @lgbinternationl]

If lesbians cannot meet without men, there is no right to be a lesbian.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Good.
We know that these drugs are actually a form of conversion therapy on gay kids told they were born the wrong sex.

As I have said many times:
NO CHILD IS BORN IN THE WRONG BODY❗️
Under my leadership, Conservatives will do everything to protect childhood.
Let’s focus on giving children and young people a positive body image instead of drugging them into oblivion and leading them down the path of irreversible biological changes.

No child can consent to such treatments. So it is right that this unethical trial is paused. It should be stopped completely.

Thank you to @StuartAndrew, @RosieDuffield1 and all the cross-party parliamentarians who signed my letter calling for this.

[Barry Wall @HeadWarriorTWM]

Important case in Australia
Lesbians can't gather without gusset fumblers.

[Eldur - The Icelandic Gay Guy @justgayice]

I wonder how many times Olivia has been gay bashed, kicked, spat on, punched for being a gay man.

WTF is wrong with these people?

We are truly living in the Dumb Ages.