JKen

[Liam Halligan @LiamHalligan]

“The fasten seat belts sign is on”.

This is a message I received early this morning from one of the UK’s most experienced, savvy and respected financial traders. Someone I have come to know and trust for the last 25 years.

10-year bond yields are now almost 4.5pc - up some 50 basis points over the last month.

30-year yields this morning went above 6pc - a 28-year high.

Yet the UK’s political and media class continues to focus on party posturing and folksy rhetoric, ignoring the slow-motion disaster that has been happening on the UK’s sovereign bond markets for at least the last 18 months - a disaster that will inevitably, unless we drastically change course, turn into a fully blown market meltdown.

At that point, the UK government won’t be able to borrow enough money to finance our already spiralling debt interest bill.

Britain’s financial management will be taken over by overseas technocrats - that will be the condition of additional borrowing, to maintain the basic functions of the state, as happened in Greece and Italy back in the early 2010s and here in Britain 50 years ago this year (when we were forced in 1976 to apply to the IMF for a bailout).

The austerity then imposed on Britain would make 2010-2019 feel like a picnic - far, far worse than it would be if we took serious action now to control our public finances.

Lower-income households would suffer most - and there would be serious damage done to the UK’s already rapidly-fraying social fabric ….

I have been warning about these looking fiscal dangers publicly, in my newspaper columns and elsewhere, since at least early 2024.

Doing so hasn’t been easy or fun. I have been dismissed and derided by numerous economists, “economists”, officials and policymakers - as well as lots of journalists.

I absolutely don’t want a disastrous 1976-style outcome - which is why I’ve taken the blows and issued the warnings.

The state is too big. Public spending is out of control. Our fiscal rules are a convenient nonsense - designed to kick the can of financial reality into the future. We need to get real … and take bold action to tame the growth of spending, push back a now totally over-bearing state and snap the British economy out of today’s high-tax-high-borrowing-low-growth doom loop - the result of myopic, counter-productive policy-making by successive governments for the last decade and more …

Other prominent economists who agree with me - ie who are financially-literate, can read a yield curve, have a passing interest in economic history and who understand the dangers of some 80pc of UK government borrowing going on debt interest as it currently is - need to chuck “career risk” in the bin, and start saying publicly what so many of them have, for quite a while now, only had the bottle to say to me in private …

Remember: “The fasten seat belts sign is on”

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

This is great journalism by @gabriel_pogrund and the Sunday Times. If it wasn’t for their work we wouldn’t even know about this appalling scandal.
I’ve been warning for some time that people are exploiting the system. Our laws, kindness and generosity are being used against us. It’s why we need to leave the ECHR -so we can deport those who arrive here illegally and strip British passports from naturalised citizens who commit these deeply serious offences.

[JKen @JKEN1978]

@naomirwolf You’re meant to be intelligent

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Oh, do fuck off. At a conservative estimate, Dolly Parton was 100,000x the person you are.

[JKen @JKEN1978]

@LegacySiu Suarez

[JKen @JKEN1978]

@Lfc_ola_ Mezut Osil

[JKen @JKEN1978]

Couldn’t agree more! This is the model for the future of the country. @Miss_Snuffy is a visionary and would be able to bring back discipline, as well as a sense of pride in the country. She’s clearly demonstrating this as she has a truly multicultural school. This is what politicians are talking about, but not achieving. She’s an inspiration!

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

This woman is extraordinary. I do not understand how government is not breaking her door down to get advice. What a strange world we live in that an education minister goes out of her way to do the opposite of what brings success.

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

Extracts from 11 Aug article in Spectator by Andrew Gilligan:

After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University.

We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday.

Ahmed is now responsible for postgraduate research in education at Britain’s top university, and for teaching undergraduate students, the future leaders of the profession, ‘how education shapes individuals and society.’

Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong.

During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’.

She attacks schools’ ‘attempts to integrate Muslim children’ as seeking to ‘produce new generations that reject Islam… if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.’

Worst of all, ‘religious tolerance is primarily pushed in religious education’, meaning that ‘Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like.’

Science is a problem too, because in the ‘teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam’. And in any subject, boys and girls may be asked to work together.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Mark Zuckerberg gets it right:

“The defining question of our age isn’t whether superintelligence will exist, but who will have access to it. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?”

Concentration of power is the biggest risk of AI. When a small number of labs (working hand-in-glove with the administrative state) decide who has access to which model capabilities, they inevitably shape what can be said, known, and built. That’s not “safety.” It’s control.

As Mark points out, the history of open source shows that broad access and transparency are usually the best path to actual security and resilience. Decentralization creates checks and balances on power. By contrast, centralized alternatives, like bureaucratic approval regimes and mandatory gatekeeping, typically produce regulatory capture and reinforce cartels.

Personal superintelligence in everyone’s hands, with competing models and real data sovereignty, is a far better check on a dystopian future than self-appointed guardians who claim to be “aligned” with all of humanity.

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

Before Windows95, before Oasis released Wonder Wall and before OJ Simpson faced trial, our new PM Andy Burnham had a job. He had a job as a journalist working for a little publishing company for 3 years.

This is the only job any of the new UK Government Cabinet has had.

Other than those three years, more than 30 years ago the entire cabinet has only ever worked in tax payer funded roles.

None of them have ever had to make a sale. None of them have been paid to pour a pint. None have felt a sick feeling about making payroll. None have been answerable to investors.

In the UK 50% of the jobs are small businesses and almost ALL of the jobs growth is small businesses. None of them has ever started, owned or run one. Wouldn’t it be nice if just one of them had some experience in making a small business profitably grow before having a crack at the 7th largest economy.

Imagine what it must feel like to KNOW that your wage is paid for by the tax-payer. Imagine the certainty and security working for a government that never fires anyone for anything. Imagine how it would feel knowing you could blow out a budget with no real consequences or you could completely screw up a project and nothing bad would happen. Imagine that level of insulation and comfort for decades.

I can’t. I’ve been in business for the last 25 years. If I don’t sell I don’t eat. If I screw up I face very real consequences very fast. Millions of small businesses are being asked to get out there and hire people and grow the economy by a team of people who’ve never had a proper job. Surely something isn’t right with that?

[JKen @JKEN1978]

@London_W4 I’m there most days and never been, I’ll give it a try soon!!

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧

Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed.

Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧

So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖

Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17.

They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too.

Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing.

In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave.

In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables.

In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves.

In 1807, Britain banned the trade.

Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time.

The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom.

From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓

In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans.

In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿

Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today.

That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧

So why haven't you heard any of this?

Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure.

The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account.

We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away.

This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name.

We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it.

If you can afford to support what we do: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Andy Burnham @andyburnham]

Like everyone, I want this vile criminal out of the country. Victims must come first.

I will ask the Home and Foreign Secretaries to review all possible options - and they should consider nothing is off the table.

https://t.co/u42MdjrX65

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

Bang on.

[Katie Miller @KatieMiller]

Imagine how much propaganda it took to convince women that this is oppressive.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

As a Japanese watching the UK right now, I have one simple question.

A Sudanese asylum seeker just tried to behead a local man in Belfast. The victim lost an eye.

This comes after years of grooming gangs raping thousands of British girls — gangs that police and councils deliberately ignored because they were afraid of being called racist.

In Japan, even one case like this would have triggered national outrage and immediate policy reversal.

But in Britain, the conversation is still about “not being far-right.”

British people, at what point does protecting your own children become more important than protecting your reputation?

We genuinely do not understand this.

[tetsuo @tetsuoai]

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.

Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.

And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor.

You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

[JKen @JKEN1978]

@Keir_Starmer @ukhomeoffice Enough.