Richard Bishop

Software development and testing, Scouting, Sailing, Cycling, Walking etc.

[Al Murray 🇺🇦 @almurray]

A year to decide not to do the thing you were never going to do

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

Look at the sequence.
1) Cabinet Office guidance after Covid: use WhatsApp ‘with care’, don’t hide key decisions, and make sure an intelligible record of your time in office exists.
2) The Information Commissioner warns ministers that failing to keep or deliberately destroying WhatsApp records of government business may attract criminal sanctions.
3) Parliament demands the Mandelson communications; 1,500 documents are released – and the one thing missing is the PM’s auto‑deleted chats with the man in question.

Of course the Conservatives should support an ethics probe.

The question isn’t whether Starmer found a technical loophole; it’s whether he has deliberately engineered a system to keep the most compromising conversations off the official record.

[Ramon Agusta @ramonagusta]

800% worse than they forecast... and it has cost jobs, ruined families and *raised no net tax revenue*.

Halt the policy immediately.

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

Downing Street now admits Starmer has disappearing messages turned on while conducting government business with Peter Mandelson – and, surprise, not a single WhatsApp between them appears in the 1,500 documents Parliament forced him to release.

The Cabinet Office guidance is crystal clear: if you use private apps like WhatsApp, significant information and decisions must be recorded and retained and disappearing functions must not undermine transparency.

That is exactly what appears to have happened here.

The Tories are absolutely right to demand an ethics investigation – if the Prime Minister can auto‑delete politically sensitive chats with his own fixer, then “ministerial standards” are a sick joke.

[Rod Bishop @rodbishop15]

The #OBR public sector lefty clowns have just revealed that their borrowing figures are understated by £65bn!!!!!
WOW!!!!
They also overestimated growth from 1.4% to 2%.
This is disastrous.
#RachelReeves tax rises have crushed the economy and now we are in a bigger hole than ever.
#Starmer looks blank and mumbles breakfast clubs.

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

Keir Starmer: “there is no such thing as two-tier policing”.

Police chiefs today: “we will review controversial guidance advising officers to treat ethnic minorities differently”.

The absurdity of modern Britain.

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

Look at who is using disappearing messages: not some junior aide, but Starmer, Reeves, Lammy – the core political brain of this Labour project.

If they were confident their dealings with Mandelson and other power‑brokers would look defensible in five years’ time, they’d want those messages preserved as proof; instead they’ve set the system to wipe the tape before any future inquiry, court case or humble address can catch up.

When politicians deliberately choose technology that guarantees there is no paper trail, the only rational assumption is that they never intend to be fully accountable for the decisions being cooked up in those chats.

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

How to manufacture a crisis:

A WHO commission wants to declare climate change a “global health emergency.”

Their big evidence? Rising heat deaths in Europe.

But once you adjust for an ageing society, the “crisis” essentially disappears.

Even more dishonestly, the report conceals that cold deaths have declined by approximately 250 times as much as heat deaths have risen.

https://t.co/8T5c9Hmesh

[Ben Pile @clim8resistance]

This has been a limitation of all estimates of the "green economy" since the 2000s.

I pointed it out in 2009 that DECC had hired a private market research firm, but it included waste management and the manufacture & retail of "doors and windows", which are counted as "green" because they are subject to green legislation.

DECC and the company refused to let me see the full taxonomy of the database, but I eventually obtained it under FOI in 2013, along with emails about them discussing how to obstruct it and bitching about me.

Then it became a competence of the ONS and other agencies, which produce a number of estimates.

But what's the point of attempting to measure the "green economy" when we know that it's only growing because legislation requires subsidies and grants to be given to the sector -- its growth is parasitic? The entire enterprise is daft.

[Paul Brand @PaulBrandITV]

Can we all just recognise that there is only one reason why politicians use disappearing messages (and many, many of them do) and it is not to 'save storage space' on their phones as they keep claiming in interviews.

[Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 @jurgen_nauditt]

Europa, dümmer als die Polizei erlaubt.

Russische Frachter wie die „Arne“ pendeln munter zwischen St. Petersburg und Irland, versorgen die Waffenfabriken – und „zufällig“ lassen sie Anker genau über transatlantischen Datenkabeln schleifen.
Europa registriert, notiert, eskotiert und macht weiter Business as usual.

Fazit: Dieses Europa ist nicht nur naiv, es ist selbstmörderisch.

[Richard Bishop @Richardbishop]

@theresa_may This is nonsense. Look into the figures.
Burning trees in Drax is not net zero. Counting waste recycling and nuclear power (both of which happened before Net zero) is not a net gain in employment. These jobs existed beforehand.

[Cut My Tax @CutMyTaxUK]

Nicola Sturgeon is probably about £5,900 better off because of her move to lower-tax England. If we take into account her Scottish Parliament resettlement grant of about £74,506, her £75,000 book advance, her company dividends & the fees she gets from media appearances then she's almost certainly an additional rate taxpayer.

England applies the additional rate of 45% above £125,140, whereas Scotland applies 48% above that amount & Scotland also has higher rates on income between £29,527 & £125,140.

Nicola no doubt needs the extra money now she has to pay for her own hairdryers & coffee machines. However those who stay in Scotland still must pay the higher amounts of tax she forced on them.

[RGill @robggill]

Kalibr subsonic cruise missiles are 60% aluminum; 40% of the structural weight of drones is alum; 20% of Ballistic missiles such as Iskanders is aluminum. These missiles can not be constructed without aluminum and aluminum coming from the Shannon Estuary.

[Claire Coutinho @ClaireCoutinho]

I’m starting to worry that the Labour Energy team can’t read.

This is not a report about jobs that only exist because of Net Zero.

A sizeable chunk of the jobs included are ‘waste and recycling’ and nuclear power. To state the obvious, we had those before Net Zero.

They aren’t explicit, but they appear to also include burning trees at Drax, which nobody thinks is green but which our Net Zero legislation forces us to do.

It also includes water monitoring and soil restoration - again, nothing to do with Net Zero.

It includes jobs which are not strictly a result of Net Zero, but ‘are not in conflict with it’ - for example, solar panels on roofs, or engineering consultancies. But again, there is no evidence that these jobs would not exist regardless. China, the world’s largest polluter, and the US, which doesn’t have a net zero target, have an abundance of clean tech jobs.

The problem is not clean tech, it is legislation which forces you to pick decarbonisation *when it does not work for the economy or living standards*.

If industries are paid through extremely expensive subsidies on everyone’s energy bills, of course they will be raising private capital - it’s a rent seekers’ paradise - but is that positive for the economy overall?

This is almost as bad as their ‘independent evidence’ that Clean Power 2030 would cut bills, which also turned out to be pure garbage.

For all of those repeating the Labour lines, please at least do the basics of reading the report.

[Richard Bishop @Richardbishop]

So he's confirmed that he's breaking the Ministerial code. If he hasn't taken screenshots or arranged for notes to be made.

[Jason Groves @JasonGroves1]

NEW: No 10 finally confirms that Keir Starmer uses *disappearing messages* function - meaning that countless exchanges with Mandelson may have been lost

[Annunziata Rees-Mogg @zatzi]

Funny how we have to keep bank statements and the like for 7 years but government by WhatsApp can vanish after 7 days….

One rule for them….

[Darren Grimes @darrengrimes]

Labour Government says a police officer has been forced to relocate after being mistakenly identified as one of the arresting officers in the Henry Nowak arrest.

That is obviously bad.

However, the Batley Grammar School teacher is STILL in hiding today and Labour has NEVER addressed that. Why?

[𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ @NiohBerg]

Here's what happened today:

• Israel and Hezbollah have their own war, geographically separated from the Iran war (Hezbollah started it)

• The IRGC superglues its own ceasefire to Lebanon, despite Lebanon being a sovereign country 1000 miles away

• IRGC loudly declares "we refuse to negotiate unless our proxy terrorist group is left alone in Beirut"

• Within hours, Trump is on the phone forcing Netanyahu to back down. And apparently on the phone with Hezbollah also. And talks resume.

At some point this stops looking like 3D chess and starts looking like the US allowing the IRGC to pressure threaten them.

The right strategy here would have been to tell the islamic regime "No, Lebanon has no part in this negotiation, and you don't get to set terms and conditions. Either accept this or the war restarts", and allow Israel to do what it planned.

I'm glad some of you can trust the plan completely and have 100% faith in Trump, but I struggle deeply to see what the bigger plan for doing this is.

[👣ℙ𝕖𝕕𝕣𝕠'𝕤 𝕄𝕦𝕤𝕥𝕒𝕔𝕙𝕖🇺🇲 @OfAthenry]

Someone's ancestors did this 7 days a week, 800 years ago, just for them to be born in the 21st century with a boring name like "Mike Cooper".