Martin Jones

Where do we go from here?

[Martin Jones @MartinLeeJones]

Bloated World Cup from 32 to 48 teams. Is it any wonder stadiums will be half empty for many of the qualifying matches with rip off prices. Hopefully a lesson to FIFA on greed. Roll on knockout phase.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Breaking. John Healey Resigns. Starmer Told NATO Russia Could Attack By 2030. His Own Defence Secretary Says The Funding Does Not Match The Threat.

John Healey is not a rebel. He is not a troublemaker. He is one of Starmer's most loyal and trusted allies. A man who spent four years in opposition preparing for the job of Defence Secretary. He has resigned this morning because Rachel Reeves refused to fund the defence of this country adequately at the most dangerous moment in Europe since the Second World War.

His resignation letter says the Treasury has been unwilling to commit the resources the nation needs. The Defence Investment Plan falls well short of what is required. It rises to just 2.68 percent of GDP in 2030. He says that without a plan that meets the moment he is being forced to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our forces, increase the risk to personnel on operations and could make the country less safe. He had no other option but to resign.

Starmer told NATO last week that Russia could attack by 2030. That is not a political statement. That is the British government's own intelligence assessment shared with our allies. Healey has resigned because the money allocated does not match the threat his own Prime Minister publicly named to our NATO partners just seven days ago.

Rachel Reeves has chosen the fiscal rules over the defence of the realm. Starmer has allowed her to. And the man responsible for our armed forces has concluded he cannot in good conscience continue.

In the most dangerous security environment since the Cold War a Labour government has just lost its Defence Secretary over money. That is not a governing party. That is a liability.

[Martin Jones @MartinLeeJones]

@TruthFairy131 Nose ringed lunatics

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Belfast Tonight. Britain Tomorrow. The Trajectory Is Set.

On Monday night a man was pinned to a residential street in north Belfast and stabbed repeatedly in the face and neck. Members of the public intervened. One used a hurling stick. By Tuesday night three houses and a Middle Eastern supermarket were burning. Infants were carried from neighbouring properties. A police vehicle was set alight. Politicians called for calm.

Remember this night. Not because it is exceptional. Because it is not.
This is where the road leads. Not in twenty years. Now. Belfast has experienced serious immigration-related disorder for three consecutive years. The same cycle every time. Attack. Outrage. Disorder. Calls for calm. Nothing. The next incident. What is playing out in Belfast is not a malfunction. It is the destination. A state that cannot name the cause manages the consequence instead, and calls it governance.

Now project forward. Not with imagination. With arithmetic. Over 200,000 people have arrived by small boat since 2018. The majority are unvetted young men from countries with no cultural alignment with the host society. They are housed in communities without consent. Dispersed without warning. The removal rate is four percent. The government knows the other ninety-six percent are staying. It has decided to manage that fact rather than reverse it. Every year the number grows. Every year the concentration deepens. Every year the friction increases.

In ten years those concentrations will not be streets. They will be districts. In twenty years they will be cities within cities, governed by parallel authority, answering to parallel loyalties. We have watched this happen in France. The banlieues were built accommodation by accommodation, retreat by retreat, until the French state no longer entered them except in force. Britain is on the same road, travelling faster.

The trigger events will multiply. One policing incident. One foreign conflict landing on a British street. One court case, one arrest, one viral video. Any spark will do because the kindling has been laid by policy and left to dry by neglect. The riots will not be contained to one city for one night. They will spread, as they spread in France, as they spread across England last summer, because the grievance is not local. It is national. And the anger on both sides will harden with every cycle.

Public order will not hold at current trajectory. The police already negotiate where they once enforced. Investigations are quietly dropped. Reports go unfiled. The state keeps the peace by lowering the bar for what constitutes peace. That bar will keep falling because the alternative requires confronting what the political class has spent thirty years refusing to confront.

The political system will bend to the new demography. It already has. Candidates selected on foreign conflicts. Councils controlled by sectarian bloc voting. Representatives answering to communal leaderships rather than constituents. That process will accelerate as the demographic weight shifts.

And somewhere in this trajectory a trigger event will occur that cannot be managed. A mass casualty attack. A riot that becomes an insurrection. A video so barbaric it breaks the remaining political consensus around managed silence. After that the response will be less controlled, less proportionate and less reversible than anything a government could have delivered by acting fifteen years earlier when the choice still existed.

Britain is not sleepwalking into this. The eyes are wide open. The trajectory is known. The choices being made are deliberate. Every week that passes without a closed border, a functioning removal system and an honest political reckoning is a week in which the future described above becomes more certain and less avoidable.

Belfast on Monday night is not a warning. The warnings came years ago and were ignored. Belfast on Monday night is the bill beginning to arrive.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

The idea that a government populated by ministers who, combined, have close to zero proper business experience, dribbling out small dollops of cash to companies they favour will play any role in finding ‘the UK’s first trillion-dollar firm’ really is one for the ages. If it ever happens it will be despite the government, not because of it. They really have no clue.

[Martin Jones @MartinLeeJones]

@grimshub Too many rules killing everything.

[Martin Jones @MartinLeeJones]

@ChezBruce About five years ago - another DEI initiative.

[Martin Jones @MartinLeeJones]

@Madz_Grant But the matches are played in the evening so there will be no pavement pint in the sunshine. They loaded the wrong software.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Worth watching. Proper, measured, thoughtful response.

[Martin Jones @MartinLeeJones]

@BygoneChelsea Sang all the way home that day!👍

[Martin Jones @MartinLeeJones]

@alexmassie @K_Niemietz Is there concrete all around or is it just in my head.

[Martin Jones @MartinLeeJones]

A £10 pint: What is really driving prices in the UK hospitality sector? https://t.co/s8vuC9o6zo

[Martin Jones @MartinLeeJones]

@PolitlcsUK Except the games are at night.

[Martin Jones @MartinLeeJones]

The State hasn’t got the wit or the money to do what it’s meant to do let alone become a fund manager.

[Cut My Tax @CutMyTaxUK]

Peter Kyle, who has never had a proper job in the private sector but who spent some years as an aid worker in NGOs, is going to be in charge of supposedly 'aggressive' investments in British private firms.

Billions of pounds will be used to take bigger stakes in private companies, resulting in UK taxpayers owning far more of privately owned businesses than has previously been the case, @thetimes reports.

What could possibly go wrong?

[Will Kingston @WillKingston]

I’m stunned. The Sunday Times is reporting Hampshire police wanted to portray Henry Nowak as the aggressor in an official statement three days after his death, but changed their wording following outrage from his family.

I’ll be covering this shocking and contemptible revelation from the hosting chair on The Late Show Live. @GBNEWS 12am.

[Nick Timothy MP @NJ_Timothy]

The Left wants to shut down the argument after Henry Nowak’s murder.

Because the ideology embraced by public authorities has been exposed.

And there is nothing more racist than left-wing “anti-racist” ideology.

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

JD Vance is closer to the British people than Keir Starmer.

Starmer has never understood this country. Which is why he’s already on the way out.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

'If you want to know what sort of man Sir Keir Starmer is, consider these two clues'

'First, note how slow he was to make any public comment about the murder of Henry Nowak. And second, note how quick he was to condemn his political opponents for speaking up about it.'

Read Michael Deacon's full column 👇
https://t.co/rU5639b8pV

[Paul Hayward @_PaulHayward]

Found this gathering of ex-England captains at Lord's yesterday quite moving.
One thought: same job but very different characters.
There's no such thing as a captain archetype....

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

A lot of people feel uncomfortable about saying this publicly but there is simply no denying it.

We have to speak honestly about this issue: equalities legislation, which was ostensibly about making sure there were no second class citizens created a racial hierarchy of citizenship where people are treated differently because of the colour of their skin.

Some of us have been pointing this out for a long time. I believe the evidence for this claim is now incontrovertible, no matter how uncomfortable the subject may be for some people.

Equalities legislation must be amended or scrapped and replaced with something that restores the principle of equality before the law. Indeed, you'd think equality before the law would be the very central principle of any law on equality.

This must become a minimum basic commitment for any party that seeks to form the next Government. Any party that fails to make this commitment has failed in its basic duty of understanding the catastrophic damage that has been done to race relations in this country by a decade of woke insanity.