L Swann 💙🌻

Wife, mother & metalmonger.

[Callum Lyon @CallumLyon]

How the fuck are single people on minimum wage in the UK expected to actually survive on their own?

The maths just doesn’t work anymore.
A full-time 37.5-hour week (because nowhere wants to pay you for breaks anymore) brings in around £1,700 a month after tax, National Insurance and pension.

Then you’ve got rent at the lower end of the market at roughly £800 if you’re lucky, £120 council tax, around £350 for utilities, and at least £70 a week just on food.

By the time the essentials are paid, you’re left with maybe £150 for the entire month and that’s before transport, emergencies, or anything unexpected.

Minimum wage doesn’t even come close to covering basic living costs anymore.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Why did Boris Johnson accept a £1m gift from the same billionaire who gave Farage £5m?

What did Nigel Farage AND Boris Johnson do for the biggest lump sums of cash ever given to British politicians?

So glad to see this trending. #HarborneReceipts

And follow @thenerve_news

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

NEW: Boris Johnson failed to declare to parliament a gift of private jet flights from the same cryptobillionaire, Christopher Harborne who gave £5m to Nigel Farage, leaked documents reveal.

New #HarborneReceipts investigation from @thenerve_news
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[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Fight against online-only TV is being lost. Terrestrial TV could end in 2034

You will need expensive broadband link, boost corporate profits.

Millions won't have TV because of poor signal.

Big brother will know what you watch.

Say NO. Write to your MP.
https://t.co/h1Q6iraaK7

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Really heartbreaking. 💔

[Tom Gordon MP @tomgordonLD]

£3 a trip, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year - that’s the unfair cost disabled people in North Yorkshire face just to get to work before 9am.

Disability bus passes shouldn’t have time restrictions on them. Agree with me and Andy Burnham? Sign the petition👇
https://t.co/XUvjcFSmKG

[ℹ️ Not The Torygraph 💚 #SaveOurNHS #ScrapNHSBill @TweetForTheMany]

The Royal Family crown estate earns over £1 Billion pounds a year from “leasing uk sea beds to wind farm operators”

Anyone else think that this is obscene?

[Robert HJ Marshall @roberthenryjohn]

#TheRoyalFamilyFunding
The Royal family have had their funding doubled, and they don't need any of it. . . .
While British pensioners struggle to get by on a state pension worth only 'half' the minimum wage. . . How does the Royal family sleep knowing that ??

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

So #BBCQT ran a special episode questioning why there isn’t a general election after Starmer resigned.

Meanwhile, there wasn’t one when May resigned, Johnson resigned, or when Truss resigned either.

But of course, there’s no bias at all - especially when the programme again invited Zia Yusuf, an unelected bureaucrat in Farage's Reform UK Party Limited

[Roger Gall @Shambles151]

Starmer's legacy:

Between Yvette Cooper imposing the Labour Govt's proscription & the end of April 2026, British police have arrested at least 3,070 peaceful individuals as terrorists - just for holding up placards.

Please RT this until this proscription is lifted.

Thank you.

[The Rt Hon Lady Matildamog @Jc62Matildamog]

Head of failing Royal Mail sees his pay rise from 2.1 million to 6.9 million. That’ll go unnoticed by most, but when train drivers get a pay rise people are up in arms. What a pathetic country this is.

[Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg]

Baroness Michelle Mone and husband made approximately £200 million personal profit from supplying defective medical gear to the NHS.

They were handed the contract with no competition or process despite having zero experience in the sector.

Nobody is in jail. They keep the cash.

[Martín Dandach @MartinDandach]

El capitán de la Selección de Irán, Mehdi Taremi, explotó contra la FIFA y la organización de Estados Unidos.

“Esta es una Copa del Mundo desastrosa. Como jugadores profesionales no podemos jugar una competición en estas condiciones, no está bien ni es justo. Si la FIFA piensa que esto es justo, tema de ellos, pero no lo es. ¿Quién debería solucionar este problema por nosotros? ¿La FIFA? ¿EE.UU.? ¡No sé! Díganme un nombre. El presidente de la FIFA, Gianni Infantino, vino a nuestro vestuario después del primer partido contra Nueva Zelanda y dijo que iba a resolver todos los problemas, pero en realidad, la FIFA no hizo nada. Respondiendo la pregunta de: "¿Sienten que los organizadores de la Copa del Mundo, incluidos la FIFA y los funcionarios estadounidenses, prefieren que Irán sea eliminado de la competencia?", digo: Tenemos que luchar contra absolutamente todo. No podemos quedarnos en el país, viajamos y nos sometemos a controles migratorios cada vez que queremos jugar, ahora no podemos quedarnos en Seattle y tenemos que volver a Tijuana. Han hecho todo lo posible para eliminarnos, entonces desde nuestra perspectiva, sí, creo que lo quieren así, nos quieren afuera”.

[Candice Holmes @hol40900]

You funded a £369m Palace revamp. They won't even live there.
Meanwhile, commuters on the Bakerloo line bake in 42°C heat but air-con trains need government funding .
Priorities? You swelter. They spend.

[Stew Peters @realstewpeters]

MIKE JOHNSON: “If we lose the midterms, the Dems will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body. They will go after the president's family, the cabinet, his donors, and friends.”

This is actually the best case I’ve heard for voting Democrat.

[Roger Gall @Shambles151]

"Labour Friends of Israel are a secretive pro-Zionist, pro genocidal party-within-a-party that refuses to publish a membership list or say where its funding comes from."

Please RT this until this organisation is proscribed & any form of support for it will result in arrests?

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

In 1975 the average of cost of children in care was £3,545 (£38,600 in today's money).

Then Margaret Thatcher privatised it.

Now 50,000 children are in Private Care at a cost of £384,017 each.

This blatant robbery provides terrible care and costs £20bn a year.

[Chris Wick @ChrisWickNews]

The speed of it should unsettle anyone paying attention.

Burnham doesn’t rise — he appears, almost overnight, as if placed rather than chosen. And just as quickly, Starmer folds… no resistance, no friction, no pause to question.

It doesn’t feel political. It feels scripted.

Like roles being filled, not power being earned. Like decisions already made somewhere far beyond public view.

Movements this fast don’t happen naturally. They’re executed.

And when leaders start moving in lockstep, without hesitation, without deviation… it stops looking like governance.

It starts looking like obedience.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Recent investigations by journalists show that Starmer was never going to be the kind of prime minister who could show moral courage or independence of spirit.

In fact, they reveal that Starmer was never in charge of his own party or government. According to his closest advisors, he has largely been a hologram leader.

In a memorable quote, one described Starmer to journalists in withering terms: “He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR” – a reference to the driverless Docklands Light Railway in London.

So if Starmer was never running the show, who was?

Investigative journalist Paul Holden’s recent book The Fraud disclosed that Starmer was the creature of a shadowy think tank called Labour Together, set up during Corbyn’s tenure as leader.

In secret, and in breach of electoral laws, it amassed a giant slush fund – some £800,000 – from wealthy benefactors, including more than half of the money from a prominent pro-Israel lobbyist, Sir Trevor Chinn.

Labour Together's early tasks included feeding the media endless smears associating Corbyn’s Labour party with antisemitism.

The aim was to replace him with a pliant novice who could be coached into telling party members what they wanted to hear but ignore their wishes once elected leader.

Starmer was Labour Together’s choice. He was an empty vessel through which hidden actors could exert their control over the party in the interests of wealthy donors.

Before the 2024 election, Labour Together would handpick and fund more than 100 candidates it parachuted into seats to bolster its grip on the party.

For much of this time, the think tank was led by Morgan McSweeney, who would go on to become Starmer’s chief of staff. McSweeney was himself a protege of Peter Mandelson, the key architect of Tony Blair’s Big Business-friendly New Labour.

McSweeney insisted, apparently against the advice of the security services, that Mandelson should be Starmer’s ambassador to the US.

That decision would seal first McSweeney’s fate and then Starmer’s as it emerged that both knew at the time of his appointment that Mandelson was a close friend of the serial sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.

It was yet another sleazy episode in Starmer’s short political career – and one, along with his complicity in the Gaza genocide, that pundits mostly preferred to gloss over this week in their assessments of his two-year tenure as prime minister.

Why? Because were the threads of the Labour Together scandal to unravel further, they would lead beyond the tawdry, crooked Starmer project to the role the establishment media played in destroying Corbyn and puffing up Starmer, all to eradicate the threat of a mildly socialist programme curtailing the privileges of the Epstein class.

This is an extract from my latest article Burnham must break with Starmer's dishonest politics. Find a link to the rest of the article in the reply post ⬇️

[Hamza Yusuf @Hamza_a96]

This Guardian article doesn’t once mention that he supported the Iraq War or that he is the former chair of Labour Friends of Israel.

Very interesting omissions.