Golf, football, whatever

Yeah, you might notice a passing interest in politics, world events, CFC (yes, I was there even when we were sh1t) and knob jokes

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

It just gets worse.

144 out of the 532 Crown courtrooms across England and Wales are sitting empty today. That’s a staggering 27 per cent.

Rather than doing the hard yards of governing and getting the courts to actually sit, David Lammy claimed that the only way to bring down the backlog of cases in the Crown Court was to slash our ancient right to a jury trial.

FSU research has shown that those charged with speech-related offences are almost twice as likely to be acquitted in a Crown Court with a jury as they are in a magistrates’ court without one.

Put simply, if Lammy’s reforms go ahead, more people will be banged up for simply exercising their right to free speech.

At the Free Speech Union, we know just how important jury trials are. Royal Marine veteran Jamie Michael was arrested at work after posting a 12-minute video on Facebook in the wake of the heinous Southport murders in which he criticised mass migration. He had been reported to the police by a Labour Party staffer.

A jury found him not guilty in just 17 minutes.

When Parliament returns next week, Andy Burnham must axe David Lammy’s sinister reforms and save jury trials.

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@WeAre_TheShed Been saying this for ages, who gaf about spurs? Won fuck all and we’ve won it all. Stop singing it!

[Electroverse @Electroversenet]

The UK Met Office has again been caught publishing temperatures from weather stations that don't exist.

An FOI revealed Lowestoft closed in 2010, yet the Met Office kept issuing official temperatures for it.

The office said they were using "well-correlated" neighboring stations, but the FOI revealed that this was a lie.

The numbers were actually coming from a model that was inventing data from 'phantom' neighboring stations.

When exposed, they quietly deleted years of readings for Lowestoft, as well as a number of other stations, and added a disclaimer saying their data is "for general interest only."

FOIs also show over one third of Met Office stations never existed, and that real high-quality sites like Colwood are ignored.

Also, more than 80% of the network is low-grade class 4 or 5, by WMO standards giving 2-5C uncertainty.

This is the foundation of the UK's climate record – closed stations, imaginary stations and synthetic temperatures. The Met Office isn't credible.

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

This month’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham @andyburnham has just announced he’s increasing foreign aid to 0.7% of GDP, which is £21 billion per year. Let me put that in context for you. The average amount of income tax paid per year by basic rate taxpayers in the UK is £2,700. So that means that nearly 8 million taxpayers in the UK are working all year ONLY to give their wages to foreign governments. There are 30 million basic rate taxpayers in the UK, so one in four people that you see working in restaurants or pubs, nurses, cleaners and many more are paying all of their tax to foreign countries. Countries like Pakistan that can afford nuclear weapons, to India that can afford a space programme, to China that can afford to buy the world, to Somalia that doesn’t have a government, only warlords. Etc etc etc etc etc. One in eight British basic rate taxpayers are paying all of their money not to schools in this country. Not for hospitals in this country, nor to fix the roads, nor anything whatsoever in Britain. Every penny goes abroad. Eight million people here giving their hard earned money to the British government who then give every penny away. Every single penny. So, if you’ve ever wondered why things aren’t improving in this country and wonder what happens to the money you’ve made from your toil and your sleepless nights of wondering how you’ll pay the next bill, that’s what happens to it. 8 million of you are working for foreign governments. Think about that.

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@Lord_Sugar Oops

[Stephen Pollard @stephenpollard]

Here's my @JewishChron column, 'Why Labour’s attacks on Israel are really about winning back the Muslim vote'

https://t.co/eEbVmbnCUY

On Wednesday night the Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, did what British foreign secretaries have done continually since Labour took office in July 2024. Miliband issued a statement condemning Israel.

We need not detain ourselves for long with the specifics of Miliband’s tirade, since this latest – as with all previous ones on Israel under this Labour government – is not about the words it comprises. FYI, it attacks the launch of tenders for the E1 settlement project as “unacceptable and destructive”.

As it happens, I disagree with the settlements, although the E1 project is relatively innocuous. It is a small strip of land connecting the Israeli capital with Ma'ale Adumim, a town of 40,000 people. The idea this destroys the two state solution, as Miliband asserts, is away with the fairies. It doesn’t bisect the West Bank and it would never be part of a Palestinian state.

But Miliband’s words are not the point. There is only one reason why Miliband has made such statements, as did his predecessors Yvette Cooper and David Lammy, treating Israel not as the ally it has been to the UK for decades but as an enemy to be brought to heel. That reason can be found in the results in four constituencies in the last general election – Leicester South, Blackburn, Birmingham Perry Barr and Dewsbury and Batley – in which so-called “Gaza independent” MPs won, and the fact that Labour’s vote fell by over 14 per cent from 2019 in constituencies where the Muslim population was above 15 per cent.

To put it bluntly, Labour is scared witless about its prospects of holding on to the Muslim vote at the next election. Thirty-seven constituencies have a Muslim population of over 20 per cent, and in another 73 seats the Muslim population is between 10 and 20 per cent. No wonder Labour is scared. From day one of the Starmer government, Labour’s Middle East policy was determined by one thing: seeking to stem the tide of deserting Muslim voters. Everything it does with regard to Israel should be seen in that context.

That is why Miliband is lambasting the Israeli government over a housing project on the periphery of Jerusalem, to prepare the way for – as he put it in his statement – “a comprehensive set of measures to respond to Israeli government policies”. Have a guess what those might be…it doesn’t exactly require Nostradamus, does it? This is all about finding excuses to sanction Israel, in the hope that this will appease sectarian Muslim voters.

The housing project is merely the excuse. Any other could have done. If Benjamin Netanyahu had passed the cold virus on to a non-Israeli by sneezing then Miliband would have used that: “It is an outrageous abuse of governmental norms, of the Vienna Convention and of the prospects of peace that the Israeli prime minister has so recklessly – some would say wilfully – chosen to spread the cold virus beyond internationally accepted Israeli borders. The British government cannot and will not stand back and see this continue blah…blah…blah.”

The irony is that Labour’s plan to win back Muslim support will be as effective as its attacks on Israel: useless. Those votes are gone – finito, vamoose, scarpered. They are as over as British influence on Israel. That vanished in July 2024 when Labour restored UK funding to Unrwa, the UN agency which employed some of the October 7 terrorists, when it dropped opposition to the ICJ arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, and when it recognised a non-existent Palestinian state without making a single demand on any Palestinian leaders, effectively rewarding Hamas for its strategy of mass-murder.

Does Miliband – or the PM, Andy Burnham – think Israel even gives a damn about their using Israel to appease British Muslim voters? Have neither of them noticed that Israel hasn’t even bothered to send an ambassador here for over a year? Do they not realise that Britain needs Israel far more than the other way round?

Leave aside the trade balance (the UK exported £3.2bn worth of products to Israel, while Israel sold £2.5bn worth of goods and services to the UK). Leave aside that 1.7m people work for UK firms exporting goods to Israel. Leave aside even that one in eight of the drugs dispensed by the NHS comes from Israeli companies. Focus only on intelligence and the military.

ust last week Yossi Cohen, the former Mossad chief, revealed that an MI5 director-general had told him, “Yossi, you deserve the Oscar for what you did here. You have disrupted a huge quantity of terror activity inside the UK. Thank you very much for doing it”. The Israelis had, Cohen said, “saved many, many lives on British soil”. And British soldiers would have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan without Israeli defence equipment.

Perhaps Burnham and Miliband think the model to follow is Ireland, which has also gone out of its way to demonise and boycott Israel – to the extent that its new jet is unable to land in fog or rough weather because in 2024 Micheal Martin, the then-defence minister and now Irish PM, ordered the removal of an Israeli-made navigation system which would have required a deal with Elbit Systems, an Israeli defence firm. Maybe Burnham and Miliband will think it is a good idea to ensure that RAF can’t get its planes off the ground, because they depend on Israeli technology. And, by the way, Israel is the UK’s second largest defence supplier – and doesn’t buy British weapons. This is one way traffic.

If Miliband and Burnham were serious about peace, they would knuckle down and try to restore relationships with the Israelis and tackle some of the obstacles on the Palestinian side, such as the PA’s ongoing "pay for slay” programme, whereby the families of terrorists are rewarded financially.

But none of this about the peace they claim to want – which they go out of their way to undermine by attacking Israel. This is about seeking to save their political skins by shouting at the Israelis as colonial masters would lord it over supplicants. It would be amusing if the stakes for Israelis – and, yes Palestinians – weren’t so important.

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@soccertorey @THRAZpilicueta Anelka Dechamps Leboef Giroud

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

😬sorry #Marcher , I actually think it’s quite original and “out there”. But then I did have 3 of the last XJ’s (one brand new which eventually they accepted back as not fit for purpose!), and I loved the shape and the car. Electronics were shit but 3.0 diesel really shifted and interior was very “Jaaaagg”. Underrated. But maybe this will go the same way.
Don’t get all the advertising bollox and hope they drop all that.

[Eden Hazard @hazardeden10]

Football is back and so am I, but will they recognise me? 👀

BTW what is your discount @JohnTerry26 ? 😜

Let’s go @ChelseaFC 💙

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@Ed_Miliband Every single response is negative. Who tf even voted for you?

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@visitnorthyork … before transferring straight to ICU

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@ClarksonsFarm1 Hello Metro, thank you for your opinion…

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@JohnCleese You are an ex John Cleese, you are no more… 🦜

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@ClarksonsFarm1 C 3 4

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

It has taken Gatwick Airport almost 10 years to move a runway that it already owns 12 metres.

It's part of a scheme to shift the existing standby northern strip 12 metres north so that 2 aircraft can use the airfield at once instead of 1. The land is Gatwick's. The tarmac is already down. The £2.2bn is private.

Almost 10 years.

On Tuesday the Court of Appeal threw out the last challenge. Lord Justice Holgate and Lord Justice Dove found the grounds unarguable, with no real prospect of success, which is judicial for get the eff-n-jeff out of my court. That failed appeal was itself the final stage of a process that began before the pandemic, before Brexit had been implemented, before 4 of the 7 prime ministers we have had in a decade had taken office.

The project has moved at the rate of a metre and a half a year. A tortoise does a metre and a half in an afternoon and does not usually require senior counsel to do so.

Heathrow Terminal 5 took 8 years to get planning permission. That delay was regarded as a national embarrassment so acute that Parliament built an entire new regime to prevent it happening again: the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects system, designed to produce a decision within 12 to 17 months.

As you'd expect from a department with a name that'd make a penguin cringe, it hasn't worked. Gatwick has just taken 8 years under the system created to stop projects taking 8 years. The machinery designed to fix the problem reproduced the problem exactly, to the year, and nobody in Whitehall appears to have noticed or minded.

58% of decisions under that regime are now judicially reviewed. The success rate of those reviews is 3.9% for ordinary developments and 10.2% for significant ones. They add 1.4 years to a project on average and up to £121 million in costs on a major road scheme.

Roughly 9 in 10 challenges fail, and they work anyway, because delay is the point and defeat costs the challenger almost nothing. An objection does not have to be right. It only has to be filed.

We built a legal system in which anybody can impose years of delay and 8-figure costs on a national asset, lose, and walk away whistling. A peculiarly contemporary form of looting.

Progress will end it inside the first year. Under our planning programme there is a binding statutory maximum of 12 months from acceptance of an application to the Secretary of State's decision on any nationally significant project, with no exceptions: 4 months for examination, 3 months for the minister, and deemed consent if the state misses its own deadline. Judicial review of planning decisions gets restricted to genuine points of law, with hard cost consequences for those who bring hopeless challenges and hard timetables for the courts that hear them.

On the other side of those 8 years: 100,000 additional flights a year. Passenger capacity rising from 43 million to 80 million. 14,000 jobs across Sussex and Surrey. Every penny of it privately financed, requiring nothing from the Treasury but permission.

All of it available in 2019.

A country that cannot move a runway 12 metres in less than 8 years is not going to build the reservoirs, the reactors, the labs or the houses. Everything else we argue about downstream of this is conditional on fixing it.

And we intend to fix it. If you would rather live in a country that can move 12 metres in under a decade, come and join us. It's time to get to work.

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@linadreaamy 223 same sequence as earlier x 2 + 1

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@waitmaya 31

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@LinkedInHelp I’m getting multiple identical messages suggesting a particular contact. Around 10 per day. Help please.

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@DeLindavGiezen @BoyGeorge Surely this sort of discriminatory story should be published by the Guardian?

[Golf, football, whatever @RambleOn1905]

@sharrond62 @Fox_Claire One of the most sensible and articulate people in public life. The senior politician we never had, Our loss is USA’s gain.