Fran Russell

Exec Director at Waldorf UK. Lawyer, educationalist, long time advocate for human rights. Own views.

[Daniel Lambert @dlLambo]

This was done by Israel.

Jewish colonial supremacists armed to the teeth by the USA and Germany.

An evil beyond comprehension.

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

Given Trump-pardoned money laundering offenders now buying our politics …. This might be worth a look. If you don’t want Trump politics taking over ours make sure you fight the threat of Reform and Restore

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

Is Britain really complaining about immigration?

Here’s a list of countries we colonised:

Africa:

Botswana
Cameroon (partly British-administered)
Egypt (British occupation/protectorate)
Eswatini
Gambia
Ghana
Kenya
Lesotho
Malawi
Mauritius
Namibia (briefly under British administration via South Africa)
Nigeria
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Somalia (British Somaliland)
South Africa
South Sudan
Sudan
Tanzania (Tanganyika)
Uganda
Zambia
Zimbabwe

Asia & Middle East:

Bahrain
Bangladesh
Brunei (British protectorate)
Cyprus
India
Iraq
Israel/Palestine (British Mandate)
Jordan (British mandate/protectorate)
Kuwait
Malaysia
Maldives
Myanmar (Burma)
Oman (British influence/protectorate arrangements)
Pakistan
Qatar
Singapore
Sri Lanka
United Arab Emirates (the Trucial States)
Yemen (Aden and surrounding territories)

Americas & Caribbean:

Antigua and Barbuda
Bahamas
Barbados
Belize
Canada
Dominica
Grenada
Guyana
Jamaica
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Trinidad and Tobago
United States (the Thirteen Colonies)
parts of Honduras and Nicaragua (British-controlled areas/protectorates)

Europe & Mediterranean:

Ireland
Malta
Cyprus

Oceania & Pacific:

Australia
Fiji
Kiribati
Nauru (British-administered as part of a mandate)
New Zealand
Papua New Guinea (British-controlled parts)
Solomon Islands
Tonga (British protected state)
Tuvalu
Vanuatu (British-French condominium)

[Raphael Dogg @raphaeldogg]

This is not some wild lefty. This is Ann Pettifor, the economist who, pretty much uniquely, predicted the 2007-8 World crash.

[Leena-Palestine @Leena53022916]

*BRILLIANT*
The French made a short film about what could happen after all immigrants would follow the ‘_white, angry old man’s_’ advice to go back where they came from.*

[Richard Murphy @RichardJMurphy]

The FT view: make the vulnerable pay for failing neoliberalism https://t.co/GRgPDEFhpP Rarely is the message spelt out so clearly as the FT has today that the rich think the world should be run in their interests, and everyone else should pay the price.

[Fran Russell @FranRussell24]

The worst of Britain.

[Fran Russell @FranRussell24]

Very scary. Their ignorance of what it means to be a Christian only too palpable.

[The Rev. Anton Mittens 🌹👮🎓 @MittensOff]

What sort of scum storms a church to intimidate a vicar? James Henry Holmes, and other far-right frauditors do. It's no surprise that Holmes canvasses for Restore Britain.

[ruth mills🔶 @41below]

Feral home grown white boys. Not a word from St Nigel of #Reform because he can't blame immigrants. Absolutely lawless scumbags.

[Fran Russell @FranRussell24]

Fabulous!

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Policeman dances at the Notting Hill Carnival, demonstrating the best of community policing

[Fran Russell @FranRussell24]

This is deeply scary.

[Brexit Bin 🇪🇺🇬🇧🇩🇪🕊🇺🇦 #BrexitHasFailed @BrexitBin]

The white-supremacist Nathan Cofnas lied to the media about his job at Ghent University. But instead of double-checking it, the British media just took him at his word. ... Here are some excerpts from Ghent University's letter to suspend him for what amounts to academic fraud.

[Fran Russell @FranRussell24]

This is what integrity looks like.

[Nida @nidaj__]

Steven Methven from Novara is a good man. I hope every journalist that contributed an article to the public onslaught of Jason Arday is as unequivocal in their apology and thoughtful in their reflection as him.

[Fran Russell @FranRussell24]

We are so much the poorer without Alex Younger.

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🚨 Former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger delivered brutal Brexit truths last year:

“Putin would’ve been absolutely delighted by our decision [to leave the EU] and so would Xi.”

“We’ve made ourselves irrelevant.”

“France has effectively eclipsed us.”

“Brexit has marginalised us.”

Brexit wasn’t Britain taking back control. It was Britain voluntarily surrendering influence, while Putin and Xi watched with delight.

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

🇺🇸🇺🇸🧐🤔“AND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH…”

Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share.

This Australian’s response to Trump’s rant that “NATO does nothing for America” is absolutely devastating:

“Mate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight.

A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money.

A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive.

A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy.

A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages.

You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth.
More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea.

In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything.
They’re simply too poor to afford bail.

Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening.

Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s.

Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends.

Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years.

Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you.

And now a convicted criminal — found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another disaster.

And you call Greenland badly governed?

Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world.
Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment.

‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.’

When exactly was that, champ?
September 11?

Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU.

Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU.

Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years.

And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess.

You don’t care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown it a single ounce of sympathy.

So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan.

The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth.

And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?”

[alan rusbridger @arusbridger]

The guy who delightedly claimed to bring down Jason Arday, Nathan Cofnas, had his own work demolished as “unintelligible, wrong-headed …nonsensical” by nine more senior academics two years before Cambridge appointed him. He has argued that universities like Cambridge would have virtually zero Black professors if appointed solely on merit (which, funnily enough, is more or less what the supposedly ‘woke” Cambridge in fact has). He argues that Black people can only excel in sport and entertainment. A strangely under-covered aspect of this sad story https://t.co/rZ40w2dzvO

[One hard Truth @one_hardTruth]

A brain expert just said what no one wants to hear about screen learning.🤯

[Teachers Talk Radio @TTRadioOfficial]

“Teachers were being observed five or six times a day”

Former Athena teacher Robin Johnson claims SLT drop-ins were “relentless” and alleges staff who raised objections could find themselves being observed even more often.

He says the focus wasn’t primarily on the quality of teaching and learning, but on whether staff were following the trust’s systems consistently.

Robin says the pressure became so intense that, had he not found another job, he may have left teaching altogether.

Are frequent drop-ins useful for maintaining standards or can observation go too far? 👇

#teaching #teachers #education #teacherlife #teachertok #teachersoftiktok

[Fran Russell @FranRussell24]

Absolutely!!

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

French economist Thomas Piketty explains to Zack Polanski that how a local wealth tax should Include an exit tax, adding rich should pay their fair share in proportion:

"Let me make very clear that individual countries like Britain or France can very well have uh, uh, progressive wealth tax and billionaire on their own right away."

"They don't need to ask the permission of their neighbors or the United Nation, or they don't need to wait for world unanimity."

"The only thing they need to do when they do wealth tax on their own is to make clear that if you have made your wealth in, in Britain for many decades by benefiting from the public services in Britain, by the legal system of Britain, because creating wealth, accumulating wealth is always the outcome, uh, of a collective process where you use institution, the legal system, the education system, the health system, the transportation system, the road system."

"If you have benefited from this during many decades, you cannot simply walk away at age 50 or 60 or whatever and say, okay now, bye bye, I don't pay tax anymore."

"So the first, the only important thing you need to do when you set up a wealth tax, say in Britain, is to say even if you go away, you keep paying."

"The way the Americans do it, is by saying as long as you keep U.S. citizenship, you pay even if you're in Switzerland, wherever you want."

"I don't think this is the best way."

"I think a better way would be to make people pay in proportion to the years of, of residents that they have spent in the country."

"So if you have spent your first 50 years in Britain, you move at age 51, well that's fine, do that."

"But you know, you keep paying 50, 51st of the tax that you would have paid."

"So the fiscal cost for the treasury is quite limited."

"Yes, so that's the important point."

"And once you have said that, I think all the arguments about tax evasion sort of fall down almost immediately."

"Now people will tell you, oh, but you cannot do that."

"Of course you can."

"The problem is that we have put ourselves in a situation to think that the very specific treaties about capital flows, what we have come to call free capital flows that were set up in the 80s and 90s, are sort of law of nature."

"The idea that you have a sacralized right to benefit from the public services legal system in a country as much as you want, and then you push on a button and you can transfer your assets wherever you want and nobody can follow you and nobody can make you pay."

"And it's a sort of new sacralized right."

"But look, this is a uh, completely crazy system."

"This is a machinery to make normal people middle class and lower class people hate globalization."

"And if you tell people there's nothing you can change about this."

"There's nothing you can change about inequality, about economic policy."

"We see the only thing government can do is to control their border for, uh, migrants."

"And then of course, 20 years, 30 years later, the entire political conversation is about border control and identity."

"But that's because you close the discussion entirely about, uh, uh, economic and fiscal policy."

"So we have to reopen the discussion."

"And the first thing to do that is to question free capital flows in the sense that you don't have the freedom to escape taxation after you have benefited from the public services and public institution of a country during so long."

"So if you address this directly and make clear that you will keep paying in proportion to the number of years you have stayed in Britain, then um, um, I mean, you can also combine that with rules about the location of the assets themselves."

"As long as the assets are located in Britain, of course you can make people pay."

"But it's important to, to have also the number of years you've spent in the country so that even if you move your assets away, you keep paying and you don't have the choice otherwise your assets can be taken away from you if some of them are in Britain, if you return to Britain and you've not paid your tax, well, you will be subject to the sanction which anybody not paying your tax."

"So that's the first big thing, is that you don't need to have a world wealth tax."

"You can do a lot at the level of Britain."

"And we should not use this global wealth tax idea as an excuse not to do at, uh, the country level what national governments can do at their own level."

[Fran Russell @FranRussell24]

This makes sense.

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

After the Berlin Wall fell we got very overconfident.

We thought Russia would democratize.
We thought China would move toward democratic capitalism.

The Communist Party had other plans.

Three catastrophic decisions followed.

1. We let China into the WTO unchecked, which hollowed out our manufacturing centers.

2. We went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan with a tax cut, which was the first time in history we started a major war and cut taxes instead of raising them, which put us on a deficit trajectory we’ve never recovered from.

3. When the global financial crisis hit, we bailed out the banks and gave nothing to working and middle class people.

These decisions created the Tea Party, then Occupy Wall Street, and then those two got together, had a baby, and created MAGA.

Now we have anger-based populism from both directions, sharing the same economic desperation underneath very different costumes.

The current political leadership is not going to be the one that pulls us out of this.

They just don’t have the will for it.

[Fran Russell @FranRussell24]

@King0243_PJC Very funny and effective AND the reason Kemi Badenock is overlooking Joshua Bonehill’s-Paine’s horrendous facist and criminal record to give him the public platform of standing for the Conservative Party as a local counsellor in Somerset. Bad decision.