Fieldy 🎺

Half Man, Half Soprano Cornet, Half Harmonica. Ebiker. Brass Bands.

Privileged to play with great musicians in the UK and around the world

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

@tonymc39 Yup, the Greens, Tories and LimpDems were nowhere to be seen

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

“Suicidal empathy is using your own people’s money to give a council flat in Barnet to a Hamas chief, a house in Shepherd’s Bush to a terrorist preacher, a flat in Slough to the family of an ISIS leader, & a flat to an al-Qaeda preacher”
https://t.co/sc50ruGsuu

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

I’ve never claimed it’s been good for the economy. Though it’s possible to argue that modest short-term costs could be worth it for long-term gain. We’ll see.
When Labour came to power with a massive majority Brexit, for good or ill, was done and dusted. Yet under your lot we still have political instability — and it’s nothing to do with Brexit and everything to do with the internal dynamics and divisions of your party.

[Julian Jessop @julianHjessop]

I assume the claim of £90 billion a year in lost tax revenues is based on the NBER's upper estimate of an 8% hit to UK GDP.

Which nobody - including the authors of the NBER paper - actually believes... 🤔

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

Spot on👇

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Here’s the problem. The liberal political class wants us to treat atrocities like Belfast as single, random, isolated incidents. “Yes, it’s horrific, but don’t overreact,” they say. “Let the police do their job. Justice will be delivered. Let’s remain united,” and so on.

But the public can see that such incidents *aren’t* random or isolated. They are, in fact, all the consequence of massive state failure in the area of asylum and immigration. All roads lead back there.

That’s why people are angry.. They are sick of the platitudes that get trotted out after each fresh incident. They don’t want to hear them anymore. They know that the decisions of establishment politicians have brought us to this current pass, and they don’t trust those same politicians to fix things, especially when some of them refuse to even recognise that the public’s anger is justified.

There has been a huge vibe shift in recent years. Imagine - God forbid - there were another 7/7. Does anyone think the public response would be anything like as restrained as it was then? We are in really dangerous territory.

The public don’t want flowers and candles and “Don’t let them divide us.” They want someone who says, “I recognise that the state has failed abjectly. We have allowed far too many people to settle in the country without knowing who they truly are. It has disrupted your communities. Your anger is justified. And I will do everything in my power to put things right.”

Any politician unwilling to articulate that message, fully and sincerely, is effectively sanctioning more years of growing social disharmony and discord. Things cannot heal until those in power recognise the extent of the problem and what it will take to fix it. And, on both counts, most of them don’t.

That’s why the next few years are going to be very, very turbulent.

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

👇👇👇

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Let’s nail this state lie once and for all. The government is NOT increasing defence spending by £270 billion during this parliament. It is a ludicrous claim.
Yet one Keir Starmer made to Parliament’s Liaison Committee in March: Labour, he said, will “spend £270 billion MORE (my emphasis) than we would otherwise have done on defence” in this Parliament.
Starmer has always been weak on facts and figures but even by his standards this is a massive porkie.
This is the truth: £270 billion is the total cumulative projected defence spending for the four financial years from 2025/26 up to and including 2028/29 lumped together.
It is NOT even the cumulative increase in defence spending during these years.
Nobody (except perhaps Gordon Brown) speaks about public spending in this way, unless the intention is massively to mislead.
By 28/29 defence spending is projected to be £13 billion a year more than at the start of the period. So not exactly £270 billion. But I guess if you’re going to lie you might as well make it a whopper.

[Tony McDonough @tonymc39]

Dinosaurs weren’t ‘left behind’. They were obliterated. Freudian slip?

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

Brilliant! 🤣🤣🤣🤣👇

[James Dreyfus @DreyfusJames]

Like an old, defective fax machine, juddering out crumpled sheets of paper, smeared with unintelligible ink stains, that just won’t stop, even though you unplugged the fucking thing hours ago…

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

😋😋😋

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Liver and onions was on the kitchen table of roughly every British household in the country, at least once a fortnight, from approximately 1850 to approximately 1985.

A Tuesday meal. Whatever day the butcher had lamb's liver in, or pig's liver if you were further down the week, or ox liver if the household was stretching the budget.

Your mother bought it that afternoon. Still warm, or nearly. Deep burgundy, slick and glossy on the butcher's paper. Half a pound. Tuppence. Change from a shilling.

She sliced it quarter of an inch thick, dusted it in seasoned flour, and laid it in a pan where a pound of onions had been going soft in bacon fat for twenty minutes. Two minutes one side. Two minutes the other. The middle still faintly pink. Overcooked liver was a mortal sin in a British kitchen, spoken of by grandmothers with genuine sadness, the way a priest might discuss a lapsed parishioner.

Pan juices deglazed with water and Worcestershire, poured over. Mashed potato. A pile of cabbage. A rasher of bacon laid across the top if it was a good week.

The whole thing cost, in 1962, approximately 8p per serving. It delivered, in a single plate, the highest concentration of bioavailable vitamin A in any food on earth, more B12 than any supplement will ever contain, haem iron at absorption rates a plant source cannot match, copper, zinc, choline, folate, and selenium.

Nobody called it a superfood. Nobody called anything a superfood. It was called Tuesday.

Then, between 1985 and 2005, liver quietly disappeared. Mothers stopped buying it. The butcher stopped ordering it. The supermarket stopped stocking it. By 2010, most British adults under thirty had never knowingly eaten it.

The word now carries a faint cultural embarrassment. A food your nan ate. Something to move past.

Meanwhile, 20% of British women of childbearing age are anaemic. The NHS prescribes them ferrous sulphate tablets that cause nausea and take six months to address a deficiency one plate of liver a fortnight would correct in weeks.

The women taking the tablets are, in many cases, the granddaughters of the women who ate the liver.

The deficiency is cultural amnesia with a prescription attached.

Your butcher still has lamb's liver in the counter. Ask him. He will be delighted. He might throw in the kidneys.

Flour. Bacon fat. Onions. Four minutes total. Worcestershire. Mashed potato underneath.

The grandmother is gone, but the dish remembers her, and so do you, whether you knew her or not.

Eat it. Pass it on.

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

@tonymc39 The guy's an utter crank. He's pedalling conspiracy theory nonsense about a major NHS supplier here. Unbelievable.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

We now have the Government response:
Neither the PM nor 10 Downing Street nor the Cabinet Office knew the Foreign Office had decided to ignore the fact Mandelson had failed his security vetting.
Call it the ‘know-nothing’ government.
But it leaves a major question unanswered: why would the FO take it on itself to make such a huge judgement call — and not inform/consult Downing Street?
What was in it for the FO? It hadn’t even necessarily wanted Mandy, unlike Starmer and the 10 Downing Street operation.
Doesn’t add up.

[Briefings For Britain @Briefings_Brit]

The 'Brexit trade collapse' is a myth. UK post-Brexit trade with the EU is up 18% on 2015. Services exports grew 54%. The UK is £12bn a year better off. Here's the data: https://t.co/KuhlbuVtOM #Brexit

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

👏👏👏

[Gully Foyle #UKTrade @TerraOrBust]

BOOM

The bill to sign over ownership of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius has been dropped by the Labour government, after the US Administration withdrew their support.

Yet another U-turn thank god, but what an appalling government we have.

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

This is unsustainable 🤦👇

[Adam Brooks AKA EssexPR 🇬🇧 @EssexPR]

🚨 FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY

A UK Government’s welfare bill now exceeds the government’s income tax revenue.

Income Tax revenue - £331 BILLION

Benefits & welfare - £333 BILLION

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

🤣

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Some might call this a cunning move 😉

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

This is madness

[Robert Midgley @RobertMidgley07]

For the first time ever, the true cost of the Chagos Islands Deal is now in legal writing

UK taxpayers would pay at least £50bn to give away the Chagos Islands and rent back our own territory of Diego Garcia

Not Starmer's £3bn
Not £36bn
Not £46bn

But £50bn+

Let that sink in

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

🤔

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

This is what happens when one of the following goes to no. 10:

An Israeli official. = Mass protests.

President Trump. = Mass protests.

Syrian President Ahmed al‑Sharaa, a man who led Al-Qaeda, anti-Christian pogroms and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. = No protests.

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

@skotticus Is there pish that takes away the shouting?

[Fieldy 🎺 @ParpNHarp]

That Sam Ryder version of Gethsemane is a right mess