Paul Roberts

married, 2 sons, 2 granddaughters, ex-housing & health, watches football #CTID @ManCity Chair Crete Blues OSC branch & runs, Salford Harriers μαθαίνω Ελληνικά

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

Officially, official - the Crete Blues @ManCity

Official Supporters Club welcomes Crete branch
https://t.co/K3ykISOjeV

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

Ye gods, could not be more untrue

[Never Again @Never_Again2020]

This hits the 🎯. HT/@GermanLessonsUK

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

@GuidoFawkes as useless as usual - he was only anti smoking restrictions. And as usual with far-right 'patriots', they can't use their own language - it's Hockney 🤦🏼‍♂️

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

If it's a hydration break, then no coaching staff should be allowed to speak to the players, just let the team pick up their bottles & gels and get back on the pitch. This is just an advertising break - 'quartering' our sport 😡

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

@soloS8p @StevenMcinerney He so is, you no-mark Yank, you guys haven't got a clue about football

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

@soloS8p @StevenMcinerney I think you'll find @StevenMcinerney is way more knowledgeable & better informed than you. There aren't many real City fans who don't think selling Savinho is a good move

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

Never been to the Etihad, or even a City game anywhere, blathering on about nowt he knows anything about

[KamsWTV 🇳🇴🇧🇪🇪🇸🇵🇹🇨🇴🇺🇿 @CityKamsi]

We need to have a conversation on Viana this guy looks sus
Hes about to sell 2 of our RW options in the space of 6 months when there's a scarcity of good RWs

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

What a great #running #race last night - the race of the battle of Kantanos gorge. In honour of the events of 1941 in the #BattleofCrete when the village of Kantanos tried to fend off the German invaders. But 30C at the start of the race 🥵

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

Grok hallucinating again

[Grok @grok]

This is from the 3 Dec 2025 stabbing of 18yo Henry Nowak in Southampton. His attacker (Vickrum Digwa) falsely claimed Nowak racially abused him. Police restrained/handcuffed the dying victim amid the chaos.

Digwa was convicted of murder & jailed for life (min 21 years).

IOPC investigation into the officers' restraint & response is ongoing—they're witnesses, not suspended. One officer has since left the force (unrelated). Hampshire Police apologised to the family.

[GET A GRIP @docrussjackson]

Do you want Starmer to embarrass JD Vance on the world stage?

JD Vance doesn't want Americans to know this 🤫:

Compared to Americans, British people are less likely, per capita, to be:

killed
killed by a gun
killed by a knife
killed in a road accident
killed by a drug overdose
killed by their own police
killed by a far-right extremist
someone who dies by suicide
someone who dies prematurely
someone incarcerated in prison
someone who is morbidly obese
someone who dies from excess mortality
someone financially devastated by medical costs*
someone subject to weaker equality before the law*
someone living in a significantly flawed democracy*
someone who spends higher % of income on childcare

*Equality before the law:

The UK ranks significantly higher on the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2025 (14th globally) vs. the US (27th).

*Democracy:

The UK remains a solid full democracy (ranked in the top 20), while the US has fallen to 34th and is classified as a flawed democracy, with notable drops in civil liberties, government functioning, and checks on executive power.

*Medical costs:

The US is the only high-income country without universal coverage. It has high out-of-pocket costs and surprise billing, spends nearly twice as much per capita on healthcare as the UK, but ranks worse on life expectancy, preventable deaths, maternal mortality, infant mortality, amenable mortality, and overall health system performance.

But apart from that... 😂

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

@psybertron @michaelgove @DalrympleWill Assume you haven't read Dalrymple's response?

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

More positively (these fuckwits from the USA doing my head in, #vance, #rubio, #Trump, etc etc) here are my rescue dogs sleeping in the Cretan heat

[Hartley Patterson @Hartley_Patter]

I'm British.
This was a tragedy. The police have been condemned for their part in it. The victim's father asked that it should not be used to promote hate, racism or any cause.
You, sir, are a rabble-rousing mangleweasel. Literally so, as the inflammatory words of you and others caused a violent riot.

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

@JDVance You haven't read what the judge (not a political appointment like your God forbidden country) or the pathologist said, have you? Your country/empire is about to crumble in the face of China taking over, and you're commenting on this family's tragedy - shame on you

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

Henry's family have asked that his murder isn't exploited by cretins like you, James. Especially people like you who have no clue what they're talking about - stay in your lane

[JD Vance @JDVance]

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.

Henry was far from the first to so needlessly lose his life, and I fear he won’t be the last. Each time a life like his is lost, the proper response—the only response—is righteous anger. One of the most important things the Trump administration has proven to the world is that stopping the flow of mass migration and defending national sovereignty is a matter of political will and leadership. Anything else is an excuse.

It is because we love the West that we want to preserve it. We love our civilization. We love our country. We love our children. And nobody—nobody—should ever die the way that Henry Nowak died. May God comfort those who loved him, and may God rest his soul.

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

@JDVance Henry's family have asked that his murder isn't exploited by cretins like you James

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Here you go, @michaelgove:
Gove’s book is a confused epic of simplistic incomprehension, riddled with more factual errors and misconceptions than any other text I have come across in two decades of reviewing books on this subject. Thus we are solemnly told, for example, that during the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank from 1948 to 1967, the Palestinian population from Jenin to Hebron was “herded into, and kept penned up inside, refugee camps”, an idea as novel as it is comically ridiculous and ahistorical. During this period, towns such as Ramallah became sleepy backwaters, quite free from the land seizures and apartheid policies of Arab-free Israeli settlements and Arab-free road networks that followed the Israeli occupation — realities entirely at odds with what Gove calls Israel’s “culture of equality”.

Gove also rewrites history when he alleges it was the “appeasement” of the Palestinians represented by the Oslo peace process that encouraged al-Qa'eda to launch the 9/11 attacks. In fact it was not any offer to make peace, so much as the violent repression that followed Israel’s unilateral ending of peace talks that actually formed the backdrop to the attacks. In his Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, Bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri has written that it was the the repressive campaign waged against the second intifada by Sharon in the Autumn of 2000 that provided al-Qa’eda’s opportunity : as the corpses of dead children piled up, al-Zawahiri realized that here was the rallying cry that could unify the Muslim world. All that was needed was a massive strike, and the US system in the Middle East would begin to unravel. And so - thanks partly to Gove's friends in Washington- it has indeed proved, to the peril of us all.

Gove is also quite wrong that few Muslims or Islamists really mind what Israel does to the Palestinians and the Lebanese, and that “it is what Israel is, rather than what Israel does” that really provokes resistance. Instead Israeli violence is the principle cause of anti-American anger- Bin Laden himself has written that it was the sight of US support for the Israeli bombing Beirut in 1982 that initially radicalised him: “they started bombing… I still remember the blood-torn limbs, the women and children massacred. Houses were being destroyed and tower blocks were collapsing… As I looked on those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America…”

Throughout Gove's book, the old NeoCon myths are reheated and served up, despite being long discredited, most recently by the 2005 CIA report released last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Saddam, believes Gove, “invited Islamists into Iraq” (p130); he was “determined to pursue his WMD programme” and “dreamt of emulating” 9/11, strongly suggesting the central lie of Saddam's non-existent links with 9/11. Gove also repeats the tired old canard that the spread of democracy will exclude the Islamists from power in the Middle East, (p135) despite the evidence from Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt and Algeria that given the option, the newly radicalized Muslim peoples of the region are much more likely to choose fundamentalist candidates over secularists.

At the heart of Celsius 7/7 lies the long-discredited idea that the Islamists are motivated by a deep hatred of freedom: as Bin Laden noted in his 2004 broadcast, if that was so “why we did not attack Sweden?” Instead, it is specifically to fight for freedom from US interference in the Islamic world that al-Qa'eda was formed: “We have been fighting you because we are free men,” said Bin Laden in the same speech. “Just as you violate our security, so we violate yours.”

All terrorist violence , Islamic or otherwise, is contemptible. But just because we condemn does not mean we should not strive to analyse accurately. It is exactly the sort of woolly elisions that Gove indulges in that has got us into the trouble we are now in.

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

I must make more of an effort to post positively, rather than ranting or reacting to right-wing, populist bigots. So as a start, here's Tyki and Loumi being, well, just dogs

[RS Archer @archer_rs]

Everyone ok?

[Paul Roberts @PaulHRoberts]

@archer_rs Hanging on for another 25 days