Percy

Husband, father of 4, RTs are not necessarily endorsements ...they may just interest me👍

[James Dreyfus @DreyfusJames]

Mr. Davies,

For a brief, fleeting 10-15 years, WE ALMOST HAD IT. The years between 1998-2012, roughly, we were very close, when no one really gave a damn either way. I remember it distinctly. An enormous shift in attitude’s & acceptance had occurred, after the horrors of being gay in the 80’s to the early-mid 90’s.

I was NOT alone in feeling this, even amongst the upper echelons of the ‘Gay Mafia’ I used to hang around with said the same.

The original aim was EQUALITY & we were, more or less, there.

Then along came identity politics, gender ideology & Que*r Theory, which screwed everything up.

Stonewall’s CEO, Ruth Hunt, said in 2014/15, & I quote, that their shift in focus was “known to be controversial, that it would be difficult, that people would LOSE by that & that herself & the staff thought THAT WAS A PRICE WORTH PAYING.” In other words, they KNEW this would receive pushback, yet were unwilling to listen or engage with those of us who had serious concerns.

A subsequent Stonewall CEO, Nancy Kelley, called lesbians “sexual racists” for not including men in their dating pool.

Michael Cashman called for those who had questions, predominantly women, about this shift to be “defecated upon” & there was “no debate” to be had.

And NOW look where we are.

Look around at the utter mess we’re in.

If you’re going to “look at yourself as an idiot”, at least be aware of WHY you might feel that way & what part you, yourself, played in it.

You cannot cheerlead & encourage an ideology that has caused so much destruction & damage, & then pretend to be flummoxed as to the reasons WHY everything has got so much worse.

Just so we’re clear…

[Cat @catdeans]

This is awful. The last ever Denby Pottery going to the kiln. Why is there not uproar? Where’s the government in this?? We all have Denby in our homes, in family heirlooms, as our history and now it’s closing through lack of support, such a sad sad day. #SaveDenby @denbypottery

[Percy @Percy3945]

Check this out! https://t.co/PKfoSfkTzr

[Dominic Cummings @Dominic2306]

Davey supported all the mad bullshit over BLM, convicted criminal George Floyd, ‘structural racism’ and all the maddest bullshit from the maddest parts of California’s communist loony bin.
He supported all the changes to police and every other institution which have made us an international joke.
He supported the Boriswave and the importing of thousands of sex criminals.
He supported the continued coverup of the grooming Gangs which is why he wants to ban X and impose censorship.
Davey Starmer etc need censorship so they can continue importing millions from Africa and the worst parts of South Asia.
Until we retire them they will continue wrecking the country

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I knew what I was getting into when I entered this debate and compared to what others have suffered, I've got off lightly. Even so, it continues to astound that Kemi Badenoch remains the only UK political leader offering unequivocal solidarity to women defending their rights.

[Percy @Percy3945]

@patrickkmaguire @lewis_goodall I like it!🫡

[Percy @Percy3945]

No Lists.
#NewXAndroidFeedback

[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.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

If Europe does two things, it will -- at least for a while -- be the most militarily powerful entity on Earth:

1. Learns drone warfare from Ukraine

2. Completely indigenizes the drone supply chain and ramps up manufacturing capacity

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

A whistleblower has revealed this month that civil servants across multiple Whitehall departments have been gaming the flexitime system to award themselves up to fifty extra days of paid holiday a year

That's about 2.5 months of full-time work lifted off the public payroll without record, on top of the CS-norm 26 days of annual leave, the eight public holidays, the contractual sick days, and of course the parental allowances that are already part of the standard package.

The methods and techniques by which this fraud has been accomplished are worth dwelling on, because the detail tells you something about the institution.

The first technique is the laptop-open-on-the-kitchen-table move. Here, the civil servant clocks off for all intents and purposes at 5pm but leaves a work laptop on, accumulating "active hours" from a home Wi-Fi connection, registering the evening as labour without performing any of it.

The second trick is the commuting-time-as-paid-hours wheeze, in which the round trip from Surbiton to Whitehall - coffee-and-podcast - is logged as part of the working day.

The third con, which the whistleblower reported as the most brazen of them all, is the straightforward falsification of office attendance against the three-days-a-week-on-site rule that this government, having promised the public a return of civil servants to civil-service buildings, has manifestly failed to enforce. The falsifications, in some cases, have been running for years.

Sit, for a moment, with the kind of person who does this and the kind of institution that permits it.

The person doing it is, in the main, a desk-bound senior official on between £55,000-130,000 a year, with access to a clocking system that runs on trust, who has decided, with the active connivance of his line manager and the silent assent of his department, that the appropriate response to that public trust is to defraud it.

And it's not even ambitious or spectacular. At least with a major fraud, you have a level of vision and nerve you have to admire even as you despise the motivating corruption. No, here, it's done through a series of small, deniable engineered manoeuvres that together transfer large sums of public money into undeserving pockets.

No honour among thieves, but some thieves are even less honourable than others.

The institution that permits it is the British Civil Service, an organisation whose senior cadre has spent the last decade in a state of escalating public-facing self-pity about its working conditions while the country it is paid to run has visibly fallen apart underneath it.

These are the same people who inherited the mandate of Brexit and, because the idea ran against the Metropolitan class bromides by which they orient their lives, hashed it up on purpose to punish the electorate whom they are duty-bound to serve.

And it's the same civil service that could not, in the end, manage a single COVID procurement contract without losing about £30 billion out of the back of the warehouse.

In light of this general disposition, a flexitime fraud is its small, daily, individual expression.

And the cost is not abstract. The Civil Service pay bill runs to roughly £15 billion a year. Headcount has grown by approximately a hundred and fifty thousand since 2016, with the deepest expansion in the policy and "leadership non-teacher" desk grades, the exact cohort the whistleblower says is gaming hardest.

Every 50-day phantom holiday, on a senior salary, is around £20k of public money paid for nothing. The country has been told for years, under successive governments, that there is no fiscal room for the things the country actually wants, like policing, prosecutions, courts that sit, borders, doctors, dentists, because the public finances are too tight.

Bollocks are they. You've got a whole parallel economy of piss-artist leave-taking running in Whitehall, and there'll be plenty more cash coming in to keep its subsidy even given this whistleblower's report. I don't for a second believe that no one senior saw it or knew about it, just as I don't believe that the rampant inequities in our police departments go unnoticed by whole legions of bystanders.

But the bystanders are not arsed.

That's why I say "Hooray for the whistleblower." Their life is going to be hell. They will be hugely unpopular. They will be described as bitter, disloyal, mentally ill, motivated by personal grievance, and unrepresentative of the dedicated public servants who go above and beyond.

That is what these institutions always say when one of their own breaks ranks. It is what they said to Maggie Oliver about Rotherham, to Alan Bates about Horizon, to the survivors of the Letby ward, the Cumberlege report, and the Sussex maternity unit. The smothering of internal dissent is now part of what the British civil service does for a living. The actual public service is something it has subcontracted to itself, badly, in stolen office hours, from the kitchen table.

I was the Civil Service comprehensively remade in this country, the only way such things are ever made, which is by changing the people and all the incentives under which they operate.

These people have been on the public payroll for fifteen years and have produced nothing for which the public can be grateful.

It's time to find out where the hours went, and dispense with those who are wasting them, along with our money.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Nice to hear from you, Andy. Thanks for the by election. We live for such things.
I’m in no doubt life is tough for lots of folk in Makerfield. But it’s hardly a poster child for urban squalor/deprivation.
Thatcher left power in 1990. She was followed by seven years of unThatcher Major and 13 years of Labour government, of which you were a part. So it’s quite a stretch to blame her for any continuing woes. Unless we blame Labour for failing to put anything right.
On the other hand the houses you were walking past were bought by the tenants under Thatcher’s right to buy scheme, which has given them some pride in place and some wealth they once could only have dreamt of accumulating.
I assume your pledge to ‘renationalise housing’ does not include taking these homes back into public ownership ... even if that would constitute a proper, radical reversal of the Thatcherism you’re (some what bizarrely) campaigning against.

[Martina Navratilova @Martina]

Bingo

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

This is the best piece on Starmer you will read today, perhaps this year

[James Hogg @JamesAHogg2]

John Eric Bartholomew, AKA Eric Morecambe, was born 100 years ago today.

Few people in history have made as many people laugh as Eric, and as someone whose life was dedicated to that purpose, I am sure it is an accolade he would have been incredibly proud of.

For me, Eric’s brilliance lay not just in the laughter he created, but in the anticipation of the laughter to come. That gift was omnipresent, following him like a comedic halo. To see him was to smile instinctively, followed quickly by genuine laughter. His friend Tommy Cooper possessed that same rare quality, and I have many treasured memories of watching them both when I was young.

Thanks to social media, Eric’s work continues to be enjoyed by millions worldwide every day, and appreciation for his immense talent only grows. Long may that continue.

Here he is, with Ernie and Mr Preview, creating some 22 karat TV comedy gold.

God bless Eric Morecambe x

[Martina Navratilova @Martina]

The Labour Party has lost its mind

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

'As far as I’m concerned, women are women who are born women, but women are also women who are trans women' -- Harriet Harman, 2002

You cannot defend what you're afraid to define. 2/2

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Bravo, @Keir_Starmer, for getting in an Adviser on Women and Girls who thinks the definition of women and girls includes men and boys. That'll definitely win back people who believe Labour's a party for smug, lanyard-wearing, luxury-belief-espousing cultural elitists. 1/2

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

The CEO of South East Water has resigned. Now it's time for Ofwat to revoke the company's operating licence.

[James Armstrong @PoliticoTeacher]

I have a BA and an MA in Politics, I've taught it for more than a decade & I'm obsessively interested in it.

After almost two years of Labour government, I have absolutely no idea what their pitch to the electorate is.

[Percy @Percy3945]

@DrHelenFry The Avro Lancaster.