Neil Osborne

[ZUBY: @ZubyMusic]

The way that millions of husband, fathers, and families have essentially been replaced by the government should be discussed more. I see it everywhere.

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

"Am I not a Man? And a Brother?" 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

The most famous image of the fight against slavery was made in a Staffordshire pottery.

Josiah Wedgwood was the most famous potter in England. Born in Burslem in 1730, he turned pottery into an industry: division of labour, costed processes, and a heat gauge for his kilns so good the Royal Society made him a Fellow in 1783.

Then he used all of it for something that mattered.

In 1787 he joined the new Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and commissioned a small jasperware medallion: a kneeling African man in chains, hands raised, and 5 words around the rim.

"Am I not a man and a brother?"

He paid for them himself. He never sold one. He gave away thousands, and shipped a batch across the Atlantic to Benjamin Franklin.

People wore them as brooches, hairpins, and snuff boxes. To wear it was to say, without a word, where you stood. It became the badge of the whole movement.

Arguably the first political logo in history. And every ribbon, wristband and awareness pin since traces back to a potter in Staffordshire who decided to use his kiln for something more than dinner plates.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He could have stuck to selling china to the rich. He chose to hand a movement its face instead.

This is the revival of British culture. Be part of it.

👉 https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf 👈

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧

Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Electroverse @Electroversenet]

Germany currently has about 26 gigawatt hours of battery storage. Most of it sits in home batteries with only 4.3 gigawatt hours actually serving the grid.

Building that storage already cost more than 10 billion euros and at national demand levels it only covers roughly 30 minutes of summer electricity usage.

The winter months bring what's known as "Dunkeflaute" - cold dark windless periods and higher energy usage.

To survive a 10-day winter lull (the minimum realistic requirement), Germany would need about 12,000 gigawatt hours of batteries, 470 times today's storage.

Such a system would weigh roughly 60 million tons and would be made from vast quantities of lithium, nickel, graphite, copper, aluminum and steel, all requiring intensive mining.

At current battery prices, the system would cost trillions of euros. And batteries last only 10 to 15 years, meaning the entire system would need constant replacement.

The conclusion is unavoidable...

Wind and solar require reliable backup power, renewables need oil, coal, gas and nuclear.

[Britain Unbound @BritainUnbound]

The headline takeaways from the Bloomberg Brexit analysis published today:

⚫️ The NBER 8% figure is garbage
⚫️ The Customs Union would add less GDP than the value of the UKs trade deals that it would lose
⚫️ The cost of membership in 2028 is higher than the expected GDP add

[Neil Osborne @NeilAOsborne]

@NoelleInMadrid I can't answer your questions, Noelle. I think it looks from the other side as if the son of a persistent enemy has uncovered illicit crypto payment mechanisms and publicised it to the authorities. I am guessing they see it as related to the father's campaign against them.

[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.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

The Mandy Files — 7
Perhaps a succinct précis of what ails this government, with Keir Starmer the heart of the problem:
Mandelson: ‘They [10 Downing Street] don’t work as a team, they are not led and none of them really know what Keir [Starmer] thinks or wants.
‘In fact most of them don’t think Keir knows what he wants.’
In these 33 words Mandelson sums up why this government , despite its landslide majority, has gone off the rails so quickly and so completely.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

If you agree with me, sign our petition👇https://t.co/Q5azQswf1v

[Neil Osborne @NeilAOsborne]

Whatever you think of the Conservatives, supporting the N Sea is common sense and will help economic growth with high paying jobs too, as well as more tax revenue. Win win.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Ed Miliband’s ideological shut-down of Scotland’s North Sea Oil & Gas Industry is going to hand Vladimir Putin £1 billion in oil revenue.

Our own oil is right there, under the North Sea. All we need to do is drill it.

Only the @Conservatives will get Britain drilling.

[ZUBY: @ZubyMusic]

A culture is in severe decline when condemning a sin is viewed as a greater sin than the sin itself.

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

85 years ago today, May 9, 1941, a 20-year-old British sub-lieutenant named David Balme rowed across the freezing North Atlantic, climbed down the ladder of a captured Nazi U-boat, and stepped into a scene out of a ghost story.

The lights were still on. Meals sat half-eaten on the tables. And bolted to a desk, still wired up and ready to encrypt the next signal to Berlin, was an Enigma machine.

The submarine was U-110. Her commander, Fritz-Julius Lemp, was the same officer who on the first day of the war had torpedoed the civilian liner SS Athenia, killing 117 passengers, children among them. He died in the water that morning beside the boat he had just abandoned, convinced his scuttling charges would send her to the bottom before the British could climb aboard. They didn't go off.

HMS Bulldog hooked the U-boat under tow, then deliberately let her sink the next day so Berlin would never know she had been boarded. The surviving German crew was shipped to a camp in Iceland and kept incommunicado for the rest of the war. The British sailors who saw it happen were sworn to silence. The Americans weren't told. Most of the Royal Navy wasn't told.

The Enigma machine, the codebooks, and the bigram tables for the Offizier cipher were rushed under guard to Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing's hut was waiting for exactly this. Within weeks they were reading the Atlantic U-boat traffic in near real time.

King George VI personally pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on Balme and called the boarding "perhaps the most thrilling episode of the war at sea."

The official British intelligence history estimates the codebreaking that followed shortened the Second World War by roughly two years and saved untold millions of lives. Churchill called the codebreakers "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled."

The entire operation, codenamed Primrose, stayed classified for 30 years.

In 2000, Hollywood released U-571, a film in which Americans capture the Enigma machine. Prime Minister Tony Blair called it "an affront to the memory of the British sailors who lost their lives in this action."

The truth is that the course of the war turned, in part, on a 20-year-old going down a ladder alone, into a still-warm submarine, on a Friday morning in the middle of the ocean.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

One of the many great days in our wonderful history. Which today’s young folk know nothing about. Watch and be proud. We liberated a great ally (still is) from the greatest evil.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Graham Linehan should never have been dragged through the courts in the first place.

The real scandal is a system that wastes time on litigious nonsense driven by professional activists while serious crime goes unpunished.

We need to kill cancel culture. Free speech cannot survive if the process becomes the punishment.

This is why I asked Toby Young to review the laws that are stifling free speech so the next Conservative government can put an end to this wasting of our resources.

[Simon Clarke @SirSimonClarke]

We have not even begun to make a serious attempt to explore the opportunities of independence.

Since Brexit, we have had a global pandemic and a European war, and we are now led by an (incompetent) socialist government with no interest whatever in making Brexit a success.

Ask the public whether they want the Euro, freedom of movement, huge net payments to Brussels, a return to the jurisdiction of the European Court etc etc and see how quickly the argument to rejoin is “there to be won”…

[Neil Osborne @NeilAOsborne]

@TgMacro You can take the Italian out of Italy, but you can never take Italy out of the Italian.

[Neil Osborne @NeilAOsborne]

And we are losing that many every 3 months from the N Sea oil and gas industry...

[Department for Energy Security and Net Zero @energygovuk]

We're backing British company @RollsRoyce to deliver our first SMRs – creating around 3,000 jobs at peak construction.

It will also drive investment to the UK industrial supply chain - supporting @GBNgovuk’s ambition that 70% of supply chain products are British built.

[Atlas Thugged @AtlasXThugged]

Lee Kuan Yew on the failure of the European welfare system:

[Tim Soret @timsoret]

As a European, I apologize to Americans for all the idiocy coming from our side.

You save your pilots no matter the cost.
You send humans to the moon.
You fight authoritarianism head-on.
It's truly inspiring.

We're on the wrong side of the moral equation.

[Tony Greer @TgMacro]

He was crucified, died on the cross for our sins, and buried in a tomb for three days. Let’s hear it for the comeback kid and the greatest story ever told.
Happy Easter, Good People.