Noel Lock

Founded the Greenfuel Company in 2003. Campaigning to reduce air pollution from road transport through the greater application of cleaner burning fuels.

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

The first test of @andyburnham is the Chagos deal. Almost everyone – including, in private, almost every Labour MP – is against it, and with reason.
It would mean raising taxes here to fund tax cuts in Mauritius, a country that never had sovereignty over the archipelago; abandoning the world’s most pristine marine reserve to a country with a terrible record on biodiversity; inviting unfriendly powers to establish a presence on neighbouring atolls; straining our alliance with the US; and betraying the truly wronged party, the exiled Chagossians, who do not want to be governed by Mauritius.
It is hard to imagine any government pushing ahead so determinedly except one dominated by Keir Starmer, Lord Hermer and the human rights lawyers.
Will Burnham do the correct and popular thing? Or will he side with the most anti-British elements of the Doughty Street/Matrix Chambers clique?

[Noel Lock @NoelLock2]

@MarxdeMorais Sounds like EU Strasbourg/Brussels gravy train - a gaping grasping greed machine for the Starmer/Harmer misery grifters.

[Noel Lock @NoelLock2]

@DanielJHannan We bought our teenage daughter her first car yesterday. 15 years ago I likened the then ministers to my toddler daughter ‘driving’ her plastic toy. In her mind she was steering and controlling but in reality her feet were peddling & the controls weren’t actually connected

[Noel Lock @NoelLock2]

@ChiOnwurah Probably a reason why UK the only country in world that taxes education. The wonderful school my daughter went to now closed. This costs the tax payer more than the tax raised (£0)

[Noel Lock @NoelLock2]

@DanNeidle Drive anywhere around the country and you will see closed pubs - how much are they generating for the exchequer? How is that impacting unemployment, suppliers, the economy. Maybe Laffer Curve actually something to consider?

[Noel Lock @NoelLock2]

@DanNeidle @softleftlabour Pubs are closing because everything this govt has done is against them. A vital sector for teen first jobs - no wonder youth unemployment is a scandal. Decay by design is not a virtuous circle. Less economy, less tax, repeat.

[Noel Lock @NoelLock2]

@Ed_Miliband Labour isn’t working

[Noel Lock @NoelLock2]

@DanNeidle More focus needs to put on tapering CGT. If you own an asset for only a few seconds - 100%CGT. If you own it for 10 years - 0%.

[Fergus Mason #BurnhamOut 🇬🇧🇮🇱🇺🇦 @FergusMason25]

This is a lie. Gas in Britain currently costs 124.46p per therm. In the USA it currently costs 25p per therm.

Electricity prices are not "set by global gas rates" because THERE ARE NO GLOBAL GAS RATES. Labour are just lying to you because they think you're too stupid to check it yourself.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

After 18 months of “standing up to Putin” the Labour govt quietly issued a licence allowing imports of Russian oil refined in third countries.

Yesterday Labour MPs voted AGAINST UK oil and gas licences.

We are now importing from Russia instead of drilling in the North Sea.

Insane.

[Noel Lock @NoelLock2]

@anon_opin The country urgently needs to reduce government spending. Paying salaries to people who are prepared to go to work will be a higher priority than paying those that are not.

[John Donoghue @JohnDonoghue64]

Perhaps the most British headline ever…

[Daniel Franke @dfranke]

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection.

You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum.

You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom.

You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine.

You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two.

You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

[Rupert Myers @RupertMyers]

What a letter

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Pattern That Demands an Answer. Is Starmer Compromised?

There is a threshold in political commentary beyond which responsible analysis must go, even when the conclusion is uncomfortable. The question that this series of events now compels is not one any serious observer raises lightly. But the evidence, assembled piece by piece over months, makes it impossible to avoid.

Is Keir Starmer compromised?

That question deserves to be asked precisely rather than loosely. It does not assert that Starmer is an agent of a foreign power. It asks something narrower and more troubling. Whether the consistent pattern of decisions made by this Prime Minister on matters relating to China and Russia is compatible with the actions of a leader whose primary loyalty is to British national security.

Consider what that pattern contains. Starmer attempted to surrender the Chagos Islands, handing Beijing strategic proximity to Diego Garcia that successive governments had refused to concede, before the deal collapsed under the weight of its own strategic incoherence. He allowed a China spy trial to collapse because his government refused to describe China as a national security threat in court, even as MI5 publicly declared it one. He approved the largest Chinese embassy in Europe, with a concealed underground chamber built within a metre of the fibre-optic cables carrying the City's financial data. He oversaw the Royal Navy's withdrawal from Indo-Pacific training at the precise moment China's navy became the largest on earth. He moved to relax accounting standards for Chinese companies listing in London, weakening City oversight for a state his own intelligence services treat as a strategic rival.

Each decision was defended with the language of pragmatism and balance. Each delivered a strategic benefit to Beijing.

Now add the Mandelson dimension. A man whose Chinese state enterprise connections alarmed American senators sufficiently to refer a dossier to the FBI. A man targeted by Russian intelligence for decades. A man who failed his developed vetting on grounds centring on his links to Russia and China. That man was placed in Washington with Strap Three clearance, giving him access to information that could endanger intelligence sources if leaked. The Prime Minister who placed him there had read a due diligence report flagging those exact concerns. Senior Whitehall sources say he was warned about the major risks and waved them away.

The cumulative weight of these decisions defies innocent explanation through incompetence alone. A Prime Minister can make one catastrophic misjudgment about China. He cannot make six sequential decisions, each advancing Beijing's interests and retreating from Britain's, and ask the country to attribute it all to poor judgment.

Two explanations exist. The first is that Starmer governs according to an ideological framework that genuinely regards Chinese engagement as opportunity rather than threat. The second is that something else is driving those decisions. Something that operates through networks, relationships and private arrangements that never fully surface in the public record.

No commentator can answer that question definitively. Only a full independent inquiry, with access to intelligence material and the classified record of every decision documented here, can do that. What commentary can do is assemble the visible evidence and ask whether it is consistent with the leadership of a country that intends to defend itself. It is not. And the country deserves to know why.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

@EdwardJDavey, with respect, that analysis is back to front and the facts don't support it.

Trump did not ask for Mandelson. He asked for Dame Karen Pierce to stay. She was already in post, already trusted by the incoming administration, already known to Trump personally, and his team had made clear they wanted continuity. A senior Trump campaign adviser described her as professionally universally respected and lamented her removal. Trump himself has since said the Mandelson appointment was a mistake.

Starmer did not replace Pierce to flatter Trump. He replaced her despite Trump's preference. The decision to install Mandelson was driven entirely from the British side, by people around Starmer who wanted that specific figure in that specific post for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained.

So the question is not why Starmer tried to appease Trump. The question is why he overruled Trump's own preference, removed a diplomat the Americans trusted, and installed a man the security services had said should not be cleared, in the face of warnings about Russia and China connections that were sitting in his own due diligence report.

That is not appeasement of Trump. That is something else entirely. And it is the question nobody in Parliament has yet succeeded in getting Starmer to answer.

"Trump did not ask for Mandelson. He asked for Dame Karen Pierce to stay."

[Noel Lock @NoelLock2]

@ShippersUnbound McFadden reasonably reverts to rationale at time to appoint Mandelson & I think that needs to be forensically explored. Why were Chagos & Mandelson the first decisions, the top priority? Is there a link from Sands to Starmer & Chinese money?

[Noel Lock @NoelLock2]

@afneil ‘Can the Prime Minister assure the House that a full audit of all documents that Mandelson had access to whilst UK Ambassador to the USA will be undertaken so that we can understand the scale of national security risk that the PM is responsible for?’

[Noel Lock @NoelLock2]

@BethRigby Getting harder to defend the indefensible. As soon as Mandleson an issue No10 team would have sought out the vulnerabilities. This would have happened months ago. Plausible deniability is bunkum. Stammer’s appeal was his experience of forensic examination. He lied, he must go.

[Higgy @higgyboson]

"Hello Emily, what's this ".

"Well Miss Phillipson, despite me only being six years old I decided to do a deep dive into the Morgan McSweeney stolen phone fiasco".

"OK Emily, we'll leave it there".

"Anyway, I was VERY suspicious right from the start because Mr Starmer, You, Mr Reed and all the other people who came on the telly and were asked about it all gave different dates for when it went missing and......".

"Stop Emily, that's enough".

"....and these dates varied by nearly a year, which is mental. And then you all gave differing accounts of what actually happened on the date you individually claimed to be the day of the theft. From my perspective as a mere six year old child this all seemed to be a bit whiffy, like when my puppy does a poo on the carpet, so I....".

"THATS ENOUGH ".

"....so I dug a bit deeper. Mr McSweeney gave what can only be considered to be scant details of the alleged theft when he reported it to the Police. It seems he didn't even know the location of the incident despite actually being there at the time. Now, I may only be in year 2 but I'd certainly know where I was if someone came up to me in the street and stole my ice cream so....".

"Emily... bloody SHUT UP".

"....so I've absolutely no idea how he didn't know where he was when his phone was snatched out of his hand. And then we move on to the "lost data". Now, Miss Phillipson as you know.....".

"Now listen here you little shit, I've heard enough of this bollocks. Can someone take her away please"?

"I'll continue. As you know Miss Phillipson, if someone takes your phone and won't give it back, or if it's damaged or stolen you can get a new one. It happened to my Daddy at work. He dropped his phone off some scaffolding and it wouldn't work. So THE NEXT DAY he got a new one and carried on as normal. He even had all the messages on it from my Mummy telling him she thought Mr Starmer was a twat, Lammy is thick as mince, Reeves couldn't run a burger van and you couldn't be trusted as far as anyone could throw you. It was all still there".

(Miss Phillipson walks off).

"But Miss Phillipson, I haven't mentioned how I believe this could all jeopardise your digital ID ambitions".

"Piss off Emily, I'm not interested".

"Can you or Mr Starmer tell us why we should put absolutely everything about ourselves onto our mobile phone for our "convenience" if all the data completely disappears when someone steals the phone, just like it did with Mr McSweeneys phone? Don't you think that's a bit silly"?

(Miss Phillipson has left the playground).