Julian Constance

I wish it was all about rugby.

[Julian Constance @JGConstance]

@RugbyInsideLine The media created the villain, not the fans. We'd all be glad if the media stopped focusing on him so relentlessly but, they need to draw ears, eyeballs and clicks to stay relevant.

[Julian Constance @JGConstance]

@rugby_ap Media must have a villain to attract ears, eyeballs & clicks, whether it's Pollock or the "burgundy-chino'd gammon man of Twickenham" who hates Pollock so much they won't watch his TikTok's, which we must all be angry about. If media would shut-up about Pollock, we all would.

[Julian Constance @JGConstance]

@TelegraphRugby As ever, the media has to create a villain... most people dont care about his off-field antics nor brashness. If the media would shut-up about Pollock, we'd all celebrate it. So much else to focus on, particularly the rugby!

[Julian Constance @JGConstance]

@Brendennel 100% agree with you Brenden - it is mightily impressive. And I saw reports saying the coaches' 1/2 time message was to remember Australia last year, and how they felt after that match. Perhaps a blessing to rest Etzebeth and Kolisi longer - cotton-wool them now 'til ABs arrive?

[Thomas Sowell Daily @DailySowell]

“I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

— Thomas Sowell

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Well done to cricketing legend Sir Ian Botham who has launched a campaign against huge wind turbines wrecking some of the most beautiful landscapes in England.

[Kathryn Porter @KathrynPorter26]

"Parliament cannot keep outsourcing its thinking to unelected, unaccountable bodies. Especially when their numbers are wildly wrong."

This applies across the board

The government doesn't run the country. A large number of unelected quangos and arm's length bodies does

Plus the similarly unelected civil service which lost its political independence during the 2010s after CRAG was passed

It's vital that the government regains control. Even @UKLabour should want this... Having officials reluctant to tell the Prime Minister that the new ambassador to the US failed the security vetting became of CRAG is nuts

[Julian Constance @JGConstance]

@annaturley Incredible that even when you're publicly called out for lying, and the evidence to prove it is shown for all to see, you persist. Shameless.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Just to remind these same folk:
You’ve not lifted 1/2m kids out of poverty. You’ve just moved them over a bureaucratic line on a Whitehall spreadsheet.
Your ‘workers rights’ are destroying entry-level jobs, hitting young people disproportionately, where unemployment is now over 16%.
You have not transformed the NHS. It’s still the same old wheezing leviathan, just with a lot more dosh and still dismal productivity.
And you’ve nationalised steel and rail before. It was not the prelude to an economic or industrial miracle. Plus you will now have to include their demands for capital/subsidies among all the other priorities already crowding in on the public purse.
Other than that your reminder was useful. Thank you.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

22 YEARS LATER AND NOBODY HAS ANSWERED FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO DR DAVID KELLY

His name was Dr David Kelly. Most people have forgotten him. They shouldn't.

He was a quiet, mild-mannered scientist who spent his career inspecting weapons facilities around the world.

He knew more about Iraq's arsenal than almost anyone alive.

In 2003, Tony Blair's @InstituteGC government published a dossier claiming Saddam Hussein could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes. That claim was used to justify a war.

Kelly knew the intelligence behind it was being exaggerated. He said so, privately, to a @BBCNews journalist.

That one conversation destroyed his life.

The government found out he was the source. Instead of protecting a man who had served his country for decades, they quietly let his name reach the press. He was publicly identified, dragged before two parliamentary committees, and grilled by his own employer.

His wife said he came home a broken man.

On the afternoon of 17 July 2003, he left his house for a walk in the Oxfordshire countryside. He was 59 years old. He never came back.

His body was found the next morning in woodland. A knife beside him. A blister pack of painkillers nearby.

Here is where it gets worse.

Tony Blair personally intervened to replace the normal coroner's inquest with a private inquiry run by Lord Hutton.

The original inquest was suspended before it even properly began. It was never resumed. To this day,

Dr David Kelly is the only person in England and Wales in living memory to have died in unexplained circumstances without receiving a full coroner's inquest.

Lord Hutton concluded suicide. Case closed.

Except eight senior doctors and a former coroner wrote to @thetimes saying the verdict was medically unsafe.

The wound found on Kelly's wrist, a severed ulnar artery, would not cause fatal blood loss in a healthy person.

There were no fingerprints on the knife. The painkillers found were not in a quantity that experts considered lethal.

The government's response, delivered by Attorney General Dominic Grieve in 2011, was essentially: the Hutton Inquiry was good enough, stop asking questions.

Think about that. A man quietly raised concerns about the biggest political deception in modern British history, a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He was publicly exposed, professionally destroyed, and found dead days later and the government personally made sure there would never be a proper independent investigation into how he died.

Tony Blair went on to become a Middle East Peace Envoy. He has a knighthood.

Dr David Kelly got a private inquiry, a rushed verdict, and a sealed post-mortem report that was not released to the public for years.

Nobody was ever held accountable. Not for any of it.

This story should be on the front page every single year. Share it if you think it matters.

Sources: @BBCNews @guardian @thetimes @PrivateEyeNews

[Kathryn Porter @KathrynPorter26]

Seriously? How often did @UKLabour complain about "Tory Sleaze"

[Kate Hoey @CatharineHoey]

Heat pump tumble dryers being made mandatory as U.K. adopts EU rules. I push a vote to protest the way these statutory instrument regulations are slipped through

[Kathryn Porter @KathrynPorter26]

This.... Parliament is passing too much framework legislation that effectively allows ministers a blank cheque to introduce all sorts of things through secondary lw and statutory instruments without proper oversight

[Dr Luke Evans MP @drlukeevans]

Serious questions are being raised about NHS waiting list figures after a sharp rise in patients being removed from waiting lists without treatment.

In March alone, more than 350,000 patients were removed.

I asked Ministers, why?

A thread 🧵

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[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman: “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that’s the true tax.”

“If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or borrowing.”

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

The depressing 20-year legacy of An Inconvenient Truth

Exactly two decades ago today, Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" thrust climate change into the global spotlight. With dramatic imagery and dire warnings, it transformed a niche concern into a front-page crisis, influencing rich country leaders and elite jet-setters, and inspiring a generation of activists.

From my latest newsletter: https://t.co/8PmzChHQOl

Sign up: https://t.co/PIif2dDeWJ

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Climate policy prevented the IPCC’s high emissions scenario, say the media. It didn’t. The scenario was never possible as it predicted burning 5x more coal than is known to exist, even as natural gas was replacing it. The IPCC must be radically reformed or shut down.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

“Under a Labour government we would freeze energy bills. We wouldn’t allow them to go up.”

~ Keir Starmer

Yet another lie.

A typical energy bill will rise by £221 a year from July.

[Julian Constance @JGConstance]

@Ed_Miliband Wow, the responses to this thread make for dire reading for @UKLabour ... will it prompt you to be honest about why we're seeing rising energy costs, which is not to do with the war? We all know it, so I'm sure you'd get more respect for being honest.