Nick Platts

CEO of the publisher Schofield & Sims. The views expressed are my own etc

[The English Remnant @Englishremnant]

“In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse-racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention while ‘God Save the King’ was played than of stealing from the poor-box.”
— George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941)

Orwell was pointing out a type of person who sneers at their own country as if that makes them clever. Not because they’ve thought deeply about anything, but because they think mockery itself is a mark of superiority. The tone of it hasn’t changed. The same kind of people are still here. The same smirk. The same false performance of being “above” England.

You see it across media, universities, arts, politics - this little ritual of laughing at everything English: the history, the songs, the traditions, the parades, the accents, the villages, the old ways of doing things. As if scorn is the height of sophistication.

Meanwhile the ordinary Englishman hasn’t changed. He doesn’t make a spectacle of loyalty, but it’s there - in how he speaks about home, in how he looks after his own, in how he stands when something needs to be stood for. It’s quiet, steady, and real.

The divide Orwell talks about is still obvious:

There are those who feel duty and belonging.
And there are those who think they are above both.

The first group doesn’t need to explain itself. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

[Chris Parry @DrChrisParry]

Rudyard Kipling articulated precisely what the problem with 'The Stranger' is for normal British people. @hilarybennmp would do well to take note:

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control—
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

[Ross Baglin @ross_baglin]

One of the greatest ever moments on QT, and a reminder of what a serious country run by adults would sound like.

[Suella Braverman @SuellaBraverman]

Oh Claire. Come off it.

All of this DEI stuff grew under the Tory government.

As Home Secretary I was the first to challenge two tier policing. Where were you in that fight? Where was Kemi? Nowhere. Silent. Your mate Rishi sacked me for blowing the whistle on police failure.

And if you want to talk about tackling Islamophobia, I repeat, where were you and Kemi when I was trying to stop the Grooming Gangs in 2023? Kemi was instead criticising me in public - before she said I was having a nervous breakdown, of course. And Tory MPs accused me of Islamophobia. And what about how @LeeAndersonMP_ was disgracefully treated by the Tories?

The point is this: when you were in power and had the opportunity to stop some of these tragedies, you did nothing whatsoever. In fact, it was Tory MPs who made it worse.

Talk in opposition is easy. Action in government is hard. And the Tories utterly failed the British people.

It’s why I left and am so pleased to be in @reformparty_uk - the only party that speaks for the British people.

[Arron Banks @Arron_banks]

The Conservative Party implemented all the DEI legislation and woke bullshit. Kemi was the equality minister. Case closed.

[Kate Hoey @CatharineHoey]

Who do BBC reporters always refer to Reform as a right wing party but never the Greens or even the Lib Dem’s or Labour as a Left wing party ?

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

Keir Starmer: “there is no such thing as two-tier policing”.

Police chiefs today: “we will review controversial guidance advising officers to treat ethnic minorities differently”.

The absurdity of modern Britain.

[Jack Montgomery @JackBMontgomery]

@AllisonPearson Just scrap the College of Policing, the Police Constable Degree Apprenticeship infested with woke ideology, hiring criminology graduates, and so on, and return to the pre-Blair system of military-style residential training and learning on the job under a Tutor Constable.

[David C Bannerman @DCBMEP]

Party stalwart John Strafford on candidate selection: Julian Ellacott continues with the disastrous selection process we have had for the last 25 years whereby a small group of people unelected, unaccountable to the ordinary members of the Party determine who can be a Conservative parliamentary Candidate.

Go back to pre 1998 when the ordinary Party members decided who they wanted as their MP. The results then were high quality.

Once again the ordinary members are being treated with contempt and you wonder why membership is collapsing.! Soon the Conservative Party will cease to exist as a membership organisation and inevitably the parliamentary party will go into decline?

https://t.co/ogr8aIOlsw

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

A reminder that, under our soil, we have 1.5 billion barrels of oil, 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 300 years' supply of coal.

https://t.co/8dXQcd78or

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[john sturgis @sturgios]

Kingsley Amis’s more true-to-life parody of Victorian sentimentality

[Julian Jessop @julianHjessop]

Would be nice to think that what finally did for Starmer was his belief that the solution to any problem is "more Europe"... 🤷‍♂️

[Matt Le Tissier ✝️ @mattletiss7]

Standing room only on the train to London this morning, a spare seat became available right by where I was stood, I asked the only lady I could see if she wanted it and she refused so I looked round to see if an elderly person would like it and it suddenly dawned on me I was the oldest one here 😂😂😂😂😂

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

As Starmer warns about 'very dangerous opponents', the Sky News rolling right hand panel produces a picture of Angela Rayner

[Lee Anderson MP @LeeAndersonMP_]

Why did Labour & the Tories try and cancel the local elections.

For the hard of understanding 👇

VOTES CAST IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND AND WALES

RFM - 3,825,559
LAB - 2,854,352
CON - 2,669,816
GRN - 2,319,190
LDM - 2,075,538

[Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 @montie]

That was a waste of an interview of @TiceRichard by @bbclaurak. Questions that were asked before the election and being repeated now about eg the donation to Nigel didn't concern voters who gave us nearly 1,500 gains. The BBC needs to move on.

[Madeline Grant @Madz_Grant]

V tiresome framing, as if biological reality and its obvious relevance to public spaces, female sports, the privacy and dignity of women, is somehow trivial

Actually, if politicians lie or equivocate on this basic point, you can safely assume they'll do it with everything else

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCdaily]

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

[Living Freedom @LivingFreedomUK]

University of Sussex case: law defeated by culture in battle for free speech 🗣️🥊

This acts as a timely reminder for why Living Freedom is so important: it’s not enough to ask government to intervene when free speech is violated. As Stock herself writes: ‘It is the moral crazes rippling periodically through universities that constitute the biggest threat to freedom of expression there.’ We must build a culture in which free speech is actively championed, especially among young people, so that environments shaped by caution, complaint and self-censorship give way to ones grounded in confidence, openness and genuine intellectual freedom.

https://t.co/4fe2OWrnQZ