LibertyIsResistance

“Liberty is not merely one particular value but the source and condition of most moral values.” — Friedrich Hayek

[LibertyIsResistance @PJacquerie]

@GHWTowler If 1) he is suspected of attempted murder & 2) is "unfit" to be interviewed, why has he not been sectioned & confined to a secure psychiatric unit?

[LibertyIsResistance @PJacquerie]

@JChimirie66677 @afneil In Scotland,tactical voting against a government is complicated by having two utterly shoddy governments in Westminster & Edinburgh to vote against. Horses for courses. In the English bye-election, the Tory vote was a derisory 2.2%.

[LibertyIsResistance @PJacquerie]

@danielmgmoylan @HeathrowAirport @UKHouseofLords @YouTube In the late 60s,before I left school, we were much animated by sites for the 3rd London Airport. Thurleigh was close enough to impact my home area. Now I am 73, retired after a stroke, & London Airport (Heathrow) remains unresolved & probably will remain so for ever.

[LibertyIsResistance @PJacquerie]

@GHWTowler Art 3.1 of the Treaty on European Union is explicit: "The Union shall establish an economic and monetary union whose currency is the euro." That is the law, an International Treaty. We rejoin, we join an organisation with a currency, the Euro.

[LibertyIsResistance @PJacquerie]

@BritainUnbound Art 3.4 of the Treaty on European Union - The Law - states: "The Union shall establish an economic and monetary union whose currency is the euro." Barnier, however, is not the law.

[Roman Sheremeta 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @rshereme]

Amazing Ukrainian ingenuity. This is the cheapest way to neutralize russian threats.

Ukrainian interceptor drones such as the Wild Hornets STING and SkyFall P1-SUN typically cost around $1,000–2,500 per unit, depending on the model and configuration.

Meanwhile, the russian Shahed-type drones cost around $20,000–$70,000 per unit, depending on the model and configuration.

The return on investment is 20 to 1.

[Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1]

Just checking: Labour has big moral issues with the Reform candidate's X posts about women. But they're perfectly fine with a man who pays prostitutes for blow jobs supporting their campaign?

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

When You Can't Beat Reform, Change The Rules. Labour Just Did.

There is a line in a democracy that, once crossed, changes everything. When those in power begin adjusting the rules of the game to determine its outcome, the game is no longer democracy. It is managed succession. That line was crossed again on Tuesday night.

Two days before the Makerfield by-election, Labour rushed a change to the mayoral voting system through the House of Lords. Regional mayors will now be elected using the supplementary vote system rather than first past the post. The change applies immediately. It will govern whoever replaces Andy Burnham as Mayor of Greater Manchester if he wins on Thursday and stands down.

The government's defence is that it is simply restoring the system used before Boris Johnson changed it in 2021. That argument requires the public to believe that a change Labour could have introduced at any point in two years of government became urgent on Tuesday evening, forty eight hours before the vote that triggers the election it is designed to affect.

Lord Hayward, a Conservative peer and experienced pollster, was precise in the Lords. There is no other justification for the haste, he said, other than that it solves the Labour Party's problems and prevents Reform winning a mayoralty. Not clumsy. Not rushed. Designed.

The mechanics explain why. Under first past the post, Reform could win the Greater Manchester mayoralty on a plurality of votes in a fragmented field, precisely as it won all eight council wards in May's local elections with around fifty percent of the vote. Under the supplementary vote system, voters express a first and second preference. Lib Dem and Green voters, given a second preference, will direct those votes to Labour overwhelmingly. The change does not affect Thursday's by-election. It affects the mayoral contest that follows it, constructing an anti-Reform coalition from the second preferences of smaller parties that Reform itself cannot access.

Lord Jackson identified the wider implication. This is potentially a strategy for a progressive alliance being rolled out ahead of a general election, he said, with the aim of locking out the Conservatives and Reform from power. Burnham's allies have already confirmed he would scrap first past the post nationally in favour of proportional representation. The supplementary vote is the local pilot for a national project. Pool second preferences, lock out the right, govern indefinitely on a minority of first preference votes.

This is not the first time. Earlier this year Labour delayed local elections after the Electoral Commission stated explicitly that the justification was not legitimate, that extending mandates damages public confidence and creates a conflict of interest by allowing those in power to decide how long they may remain there without consent. The Commission's objection was noted and ignored. Reform demolished Labour anyway.

Now the same instinct has been applied to a different mechanism. Not cancellation this time. Electoral system change, deployed with surgical precision forty eight hours before the vote that triggers the election it is designed to affect.

Governments confident in their mandate do not need to change the rules two days before the ballot. They face the electorate and take their chances. The timing of Tuesday night's Lords motion is not a coincidence. It is a confession.

The voters of Makerfield vote on Thursday. The question of who governs Greater Manchester after that, and under what rules, was settled in the Lords on Tuesday. Nobody voted for that.

"Burnham's allies have already confirmed he would scrap first past the post nationally in favour of proportional representation."

[LibertyIsResistance @PJacquerie]

@QcWynter My late wife had a mastectomy in round 1 of breast cancer. It is deeply distressing for a woman who is thus disfigured and for her partner who has to cope with her distress & lament her disfigurement. Voluntarily to undergo it & rejoice at it is simply vile, contemptible.

[Colin Wynter KC @QcWynter]

When I started posting on Twitter, I expressed scorn for those who posted from behind a pseudonym.
Then I strayed into the area of genderism, discovered "cancellations", "hi, there!" emails to employers & regulators & learnt why, for many, anonymity was essential.
It remains so.

[LibertyIsResistance @PJacquerie]

@QcWynter Probably not named for the cartoon "Hagar the Horrible", one is inclined to think.

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

Reform’s Zia Yusuf called it an “ambush” when two small‑boat migrants, one reading from a prepared statement about international law, were lined up to confront him on Question Time.

Now we know why it felt like a set‑up: because it was.

Those “audience members” were sourced, coached and accompanied by Imix, a campaign group whose explicit mission is to “build support for migration” through “media interventions”, “new narratives” and placing pro‑migration stories in national coverage.

Imix’s CEO, Jenni Regan, was not only in the audience but selected to ask a question herself, warning against reductions in migration – at the same time as overseeing the two asylum seekers’ participation.

This is not how a broadcaster obsessed with impartiality behaves; it’s how a political campaign behaves when it has gained access to a prime‑time slot and a captive, taxpayer‑funded platform.

The BBC claims it simply “approached local charities” to find people with “lived experience”, but Imix openly describes the night as a strategic win: a laboratory for their messaging, on your licence‑fee budget.

Of course Yusuf felt ambushed.

He walked into what he was told was a public forum and found himself in a professional comms exercise run by a lobby group whose whole purpose is to defeat the arguments he was invited there to make.

[LibertyIsResistance @PJacquerie]

@lara_e_brown And unaccountable Quangos. It's the "Not me, Guv!" method of governance.

[LibertyIsResistance @PJacquerie]

@CapelLofft I am old enough to recall "The World Tonight - Douglas Stewart reporting". I could not discern his voting habits & it was a measured, balanced programme. I gave up on the BBC years ago, tired of being made incandescent with rage by 6.00 AM with the lefty news & "Farming Today".

[LibertyIsResistance @PJacquerie]

@QcWynter The House of Commons is a very different place compared with when he was last there. We face very different national priorities. Yet in he will bustle, if elected, expecting everyone to swoon. Not sure they will.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Dartmoor's hill ponies have grazed those commons for longer than there has been a country called England. Fewer than a thousand are left, down from six thousand a generation ago. The United Nations listed them as endangered in 2023. So, naturally, the body charged with protecting nature has decided to get rid of nine in ten of the survivors.

There is a process, obviously.

Natural England's new grazing contracts now count the ponies in the same bucket as the cattle and sheep. A commoner with a fixed quota has a choice: keep a semi-wild pony worth nothing at market, or use the slot for a lamb he can sell. Guess which one survives the spreadsheet. The rest are gathered in the autumn drifts, and with nowhere to put thousands of unhandled moorland ponies, the next stop is the abattoir.

Natural England would like it noted that it has not ordered a cull. It has merely built a machine whose only output is a cull, switched it on, and handed the bolt gun to a farmer so the fingerprints land elsewhere. Very tidy.

And now the funny part. The pony is the best tool on the entire moor for eating Molinia, the coarse purple grass strangling Dartmoor into a brown monoculture. Cattle and sheep won't touch it. The ponies hoover it down and clear the ground for the orchids, the wildflowers and the insects behind them. Remove the ponies and the moor chokes into precisely the lifeless scrubland the contract was meant to prevent.

So the conservation strategy, in full: protect the habitat by deleting the animal that maintains the habitat. A masterclass.

Better still, Natural England's own Fursdon review looked at this exact question and told them, in plain English, not to lump ponies in with cattle and not to cut pony numbers. They read it, praised it, said they fully supported it, then did the precise opposite.

Four thousand years these animals have run Dartmoor with no committee and no contract. They could be gone within one, and the people who did it will write it up as a win for nature.

[Patrick Christys @PatrickChristys]

For me it’s the arrogance of the BBC to think the public wouldn’t notice they’d planted illegal immigrants in the audience and had them coached by an open border charity. It was blindingly obvious.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

So you’ve gone from 8%, no caveats, to a range of 2% to 8% — which is quite a range!!
My own view is that Brexit has had an economic cost, certainly in the short-run, though probably at the lower end of your range.
However even that judgement is muddied by the short-run being complicated by the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the absurd and costly pursuit, under Labour and the Tories, of net zero, which has given us the highest industrial energy costs in the world and hollowed out what was left of our heavy industries.
So it’s complicated.
But when politicians like you, Ed Davey and others baldly claimed Brexit is costing us £90bn a year (which is what 8% would mean), y’all need to be called out.

[Toby Young @toadmeister]

Small-boat migrants who appeared on a controversial episode of Question Time where Reform's Zia Yusuf was "ambushed" were placed there by campaigners at the invitation of the BBC. https://t.co/m8LieggqBy