Matthew Bramble

Every thing I see, and hear, and feel, in this great reservoir of folly, knavery, and sophistication, contributes to inhance the value of a country life.

[Matthew Bramble @MBrambleEsq]

https://t.co/bRKPfLrUGE

[Adjacent Possible @Sage_Opinion]

I think it's safe to say the universe exists. It was created when something went bang (expanded) 13.8 billion years ago. That something was produced by another something that existed outside the time & space of our universe. Science can't explain what that other something is...

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

After the Second World War, anthropologists found islanders in the Pacific building airstrips out of nothing. They had watched American servicemen clear runways, put on headphones and wave paddles, and watched the cargo planes come down out of the sky with riches in their holds. So when the Americans left, the islanders built their own runways of packed earth, their own control towers of bamboo, headphones carved from wood, and waited for the planes to come. They had copied everything about the miracle except the part that made it work.

We call it a cargo cult, and this week the British state built one out of the Royal Navy.

The Defence Investment Plan cancels the Type 83, the destroyer that was meant to replace our ageing handful of Type 45s and give the fleet a serious air and missile defence for the 2030s. In its place we are promised six "Common Combat Vessels": smaller, cheaper ships that will serve as motherships for swarms of drones, on the surface, in the air and under the water. Drones are the cargo these planners have watched descend from the sky elsewhere. So they have started building the runway, and they are waiting.

Drones are a real revolution in the places where the expensive, vulnerable thing is the human being - the pilot in the cockpit, the man walking the minefield. Take the person out and the whole arithmetic changes. But a destroyer is expensive because of its radar, its missiles, and the magazine of vertical-launch cells that fire them; the crew is close to the cheapest thing aboard. Swap the ship for a budget mothership and a cloud of drones, and you have saved your money in the one place there was never much to save, while throwing away the very thing the ship existed to carry: a deep magazine of high-end interceptors, and a radar strong enough to see the threat coming. It is innovation aimed with perfect precision at the spot where it does the most damage.

And the timing is the part that ought to make a serious person despair. We are doing this in the same year a real missile war has been running in the Middle East, and the clearest lesson of that war is that air and missile defence is now the capability everything else depends on - and that the scarce resource in it is magazine depth. Israel, with some of the finest air defence on Earth, has been burning through its interceptors faster than the factories can replace them; the Americans' stocks are badly drawn down; and the people who know will tell you it takes years, not months, to build more.

Our own Type 45s already carry one of the smallest magazines afloat - 48 launch cells, against 96 on an American destroyer and 112 on a Chinese one. The Type 83 was our chance to fix that. We have cancelled it. You cannot play this game with cheap drones; magazine depth and high-end interceptors are the one thing a drone swarm cannot give you, and it is the thing we have picked this exact moment to stop building.

We have McNamarred ourselves again - can't afford the real ship in annual budgeting terms, so the real ship was dressed up as obsolete, and a fashionable word, autonomy, was wheeled in to make the retreat sound like a leap forward. At the end of it Britain, an island that once ruled the sea, will not have a proper navy. It will have a flotilla of motherships and a slide deck full of drone designations - the bamboo control tower of a country that remembers greatness as a set of costless gestures.

[Kosher @koshercockney]

It is utterly UNFORGIVABLE what politicians have done and are STILL doing to the UK.

[John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre]

The UK Treasury quietly scrapped its numeracy test because basic math was a "hurdle" for minority candidates.

Let that sink in.

The people in charge of the nation’s money, debt, taxes, and economic policy decided that competence in numbers was problematic.

This isn’t diversity.

This is institutional self-sabotage.

[Adrian Hilton @Adrian_Hilton]

The Government has a simple majority of 156 and a working majority of 165. It can do precisely as it wishes. It could indeed deport Shabir Ahmed, but chooses not to. @BBCNews ought to know this, and inform people of this, even if it means interrogating those quote marks.

[Kosher @koshercockney]

The UK went from “Stop the Boats”

To “Smash the Gangs”

To finally “Let them all in and give them brand new Houses that hardworking UK Citizens can’t even afford”

[Matthew Bramble @MBrambleEsq]

@Englishremnant My family traces back to before the Norman conquest - my 5 yr old son reads Beowulf and dresses up as an Anglo-Saxon warrior - and we walked the fields of Agincourt last month. But my wife is Chinese - so do you consider my son English?

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Well who wudda thunk it?! The Starmer-Reeves defence spending plan assumes £10 billion in defence ‘efficiencies’/savings — and leaves Andy Burnham to find a further £5 billion for defence in the next Budget for the figures to add up. Starmer-Reeves — shysters til the very end.

[Joe Rich @joerichlaw]

How did Southampton Police manage to charge disabled veteran Matt Styler with violent disorder and assault police? How did they procure a decision to proceed with the prosecution? The thugs grabbed Styler, pulled him over, then smashed him ‘Russian style’ with their riot shields.

[Ben Graham @BenGrahamUK]

When five people were injured in Edinburgh on 19 June, Keir Starmer responded the very next day:

“No one should face violence on our streets.”

He also said the suspect “appears to be motivated by anti Muslim hatred.”

Fast forward a week.

Five pedestrians are run over by Timir Ahmed Mohamed, who has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.

Where is the Prime Minister now?

What was the motivation behind this alleged attempted murder of 5 people?

It's these obvious double standards in public messaging that have fuelled division over the last two years.

People notice when some incidents get an immediate response while others are met with silence.

[Jenny Holland @SemperFemina21]

3/3 So I studied up on the EU, and voted Brexit. The next day, a morbidly obese woman at work cried hysterically. A former friend wrote me hate mail. I was called an idiot at a cocktail party. It was the beginning of the end of my old life, and the start of my new one. Happy anniversary my fellow apostates!

[Matthew Bramble @MBrambleEsq]

@ukhomeoffice Of all the things that will never happen, this is right up there.

[Matthew Bramble @MBrambleEsq]

@finlayjmc @WendyWhittakerL @FraserNelson You don't even understand the basics - all Tory MPs have always been required to sign-up to the manifesto of the day; they've all too often paid lip service to this and voted however they wanted anyway. And no MP can't be "legally bound" to vote a certain way.

[Matthew Bramble @MBrambleEsq]

@ShabanaMahmood You're trying to import future Labour voters.

[Nigel Farage MP @Nigel_Farage]

34,000 asylum seekers who came to Britain in the last year will cost taxpayers £5 billion over their lifetime.

Britain is being bankrupted by illegal migration. Only Reform will stop it.

[WasAcop @WasAcop]

🚨 Critical questions on police conduct in Southampton:

A military veteran involved in the Henry Nowak protests was charged with assaulting a police officer.

He has now been found NOT GUILTY.
Footage from the protest shows officers using significant physical force during his detention — including multiple officers engaging him with shields and batons while he was on the ground.

If the court has ruled he did not assault police, serious questions remain about the level of force used against him and why no officers appear to be facing consequences.

Veterans and protesters deserve fair treatment and proper accountability when force is used.

This case highlights ongoing concerns about how these protests were handled.

#Southampton #PoliceAccountability #JusticeForVeterans

[Optimist Prime @trevgoes4th]

That is why you are all so rich now

https://t.co/AtYfJqjzRz

[Nigel Farage MP @Nigel_Farage]

Has Shabana Mahmood lost her mind?

This week, she is set to announce a ‘Homes for Ukraine’-style migrant scheme for conflicts all around the world.

For context, that scheme took in over 200,000 Ukrainians.

This must not stand.

What nations do Labour have in mind?

Sudan. You know who is Sudanese? Deng Majek, the illegal migrant who murdered Rhiannon Whyte - stabbing her 23 times with a screwdriver.

And Mohamed Harun, a refugee who raped a woman and told the judge sentencing him “fuck England”. In fact, over a third of Sudanese criminals in prison here have committed sex offences.

Mahmood also wants to prioritise Eritrea.

We’ve had rapists and attempted murderers from Eritrea these past few years. Eritreans here are more than 20 times more likely to account for sexual offence convictions than British citizens.

No doubt Labour will open the floodgates to thousands of Palestinians too.

Labour say they’ll cap the number of people in the scheme at the tens of thousands. But, over time, they’ll all bring in their extended families. The ‘chain migration’ will be catastrophic.

It's all modelled on a Canadian scheme that's let 400,000 migrants in, and nearly 100,000 in the last five years alone. In fact, the Canadian Government have paused their scheme because it’s so unpopular.

Labour have no mandate whatsoever for this. If Burnham wants one, he must call a general election.

The British people have made it abundantly clear: we don’t want anymore migration like this.

When it comes to so-called ‘asylum seekers’ from nations very different to our own, we are long past full.

A Reform government will reverse this ridiculous scheme.

Or, better yet, the whole thing should be cancelled now.

[Matthew Bramble @MBrambleEsq]

@JohnFoster12 @Karen1732 @CrewkerneMan This is why I'm never voting Tory again. Just blind to the magnitude of their cluster fuck-ups.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

A peak life advice from Brian Armstrong:

“Action produces information. If you're unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it's the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing. Sounds simple on the surface - the hard part is making it part of your every day working process.”

[Matthew Bramble @MBrambleEsq]

@sebserlo @Steven_Swinford No it doesn't; you're conflating the rules for donating to individuals and organisations.