Rossye

Question Everything ? Born Free, Stay Free. Be kind 😍

[Bev Turner @beverleyturner]

Dear American friends...

This is our Prime Minister @Keir_Starmer who has been forced to stand down as he lost the faith of his own party and the public after 2 years.

He moves out this weekend and a new guy moves in ( 24, 900 people voted for him in a small town called Makerfield. We have 70m people in the uk).

All these people applauding Starmer wanted him out.

This shower of sh*te prefer performative theatre over honesty and authenticity.

Please send help!
We are scr*wed.
🇬🇧

[Michael A. Arouet @MichaelAArouet]

The UK and the US used to be similarly prosperous.

Not anymore. While the US thrives with free markets, innovation and progress, the UK has chosen bad left policies.

The new UK government plans to increase taxes even more, which will make a bad situation even worse. Good luck.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The World Bank ranked every country on earth for practical solar potential.

Britain came second from bottom. Not second from bottom in Europe. On the planet. Out of everywhere they measured, the only place with worse conditions for a solar panel is Ireland. Norway is above us. Norway, where the sun clocks off entirely for part of the year, is a better bet than Lincolnshire.

The reasons are not a mystery. We sit at 53 degrees north, the same line as Edmonton, Alberta. The sun in December gets about as high as a first-floor window and then thinks better of it. And there's the cloud, which is not a detail, it is the national personality. A square metre of London gets 0.52 kilowatt hours of sunlight a day in December and 4.74 in July, so the panel does nine times less work in the month your heating is on than in the month it isn't. Across the whole of 2024, British solar ran at 9.5% of what it's rated at. The other 90.5% is a photograph of a power station.

Now the other column.

The ground we're bolting it to is Trent valley silt and Lincolnshire fen. Some of it took three hundred years to drain. It grows wheat at yields that most of the planet cannot get near, in a climate so reliably damp that grass grows here without anyone asking it to, which is the entire reason this island has cattle and cheese and a butcher.

So we are, measurably, one of the worst places on earth for sunlight and one of the best on earth for food.

And we've had a good long look at both of those numbers and gone with sunlight.

Somewhere in Namibia, which the same report ranked first, there is a patch of absolutely nothing, in full sun, wondering what it did wrong.

[David Betz @DavidBe31099196]

Attorney General Hermer’s assertion that it is unquestionably better for Britain to be in the ECHR because it unites us with 45 other Council of Europe states in begs the question by assuming multilateral membership is inherently superior without proving net benefits to British sovereignty, borders, or democracy—relying on appeal to popularity in terms of elite ideals rather than evidence.

It borders moreover on tautological by treating group conformity as self-evident, which is why what he says amounts to weak and passé weak globalist hokum.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ We’ve had enough of it. Your arguments are not self-evident and a majority of people are sick to death of enforced conformity with policies of ‘superior’ people who’ve quite obviously demonstrated themselves not to actually be good in any moral sense or even competence. It’s stupid.

What’s really gross here, though, is the flippant and smarmy body language. For me, it just channels the pre-revolutionary French degenerate courtier Duc d’Orléans: a privileged princeling of the legal elite—bored, amoral, oozing superiority—utterly detached from the English attitudes and wishes of the taxpayers who fund his sinecure. The man just oozes intolerant, ignorant, unreflective self-regard and hauteur. Put him in a powdered wig and he’d blend seamlessly into the crowd of the John Malkovich film Dangerous Liaisons.

When it comes down to it Hermer speaks the language of the commons, ‘oops [shrug, whatcha-gonna-do-about-it-gurn]’, but scorns its common-sense instincts on sovereignty and borders. Of his own licence we know little, but given his best mate the PM… well, one supposes birds of a feather.

Hermer, Starmer, the whole government, actually nearly everyone in Westminster on either side needs urgent reminding: The people aren’t serfs. The governed classes deserve better than these deluded, ideologically distant, incompetent fools. We didn’t vote for this, it’s not better for us, and the country’s turning into a cauldron of discontent because these people just keep pressing on doing what they want in a way that can only be described as contemptuous.

[Dr S Maitra @MrMaitra]

Any prudent and farsighted British government should start resettling and remilitarising the overseas territories.

[Net Zero Watch @NetZeroWatch]

"Net zero is a fundamentally unconservative policy, a big-government statist capture of policy-making that has more in common with communism than with free markets and wealth creation." @DavidGHFrost

#CostOfNetZero

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

When it comes to tax in the UK, a lot of people are deluding themselves, thinking the government will just go after the wealthy to pay for the ballooning commitments they’ve made.

The truth is, the real target is the middle class. And the reason is simple. The middle class is the only viable option for the kind of revenue the government wants.

Start with who’s off the table. A third of British adults pay no income tax at all. The bottom half of earners take home about a quarter of the income in this country and pay roughly a tenth of the tax. There’s no pot of gold buried down there, and every party has spent years promising to protect “working people.” Squeezing them is politically radioactive and would raise next to nothing anyway.

The rich are off the table too, whatever the Channel 4 documentaries say. The top 1% already pay 28% of all income tax. Their money is capital, dividends and gains, so they’re mobile, and they’ve already started leaving. One widely quoted forecast has Britain losing half a million millionaires by 2028. Push the rate on these people much higher and you collect less, not more. Threatening them polls brilliantly, but relying on them for a tax bonanza is pure fantasy.

Which leaves the middle class, and the middle class can’t run. Most are on PAYE, taxed at source before the money touches their account. They can’t turn a salary into a capital gain. They can’t declare residency in Monaco, because the job, the kids’ school and the mortgage are all here. Their wealth is a house they can’t hide under the mattress and a pension they can’t reach. Numerous, visible and immobile. The perfect target, and in some ways the only one.

And here’s how it’s already being done. They won’t raise your headline rate of income tax, because they promised not to. But the threshold freeze, the one that sounds like a non-event on Budget day, is quietly hammering you, and it’s now been extended to 2031.

Took out a student loan since 2012? You’ve been paying the graduate tax in all but name. Hold investments outside an ISA? You’ve watched CGT climb to 24%, and it’s likely to be equalised with income tax next. Sent your kids to private school? That’s the VAT charge. Saving into a cash ISA? That shelter just shrank from £20,000 to £12,000. And from 2027, your pension gets pulled into inheritance tax, so the pot you spent a career building can be taxed again on the way out.

There’s more coming. Mansion taxes, higher CGT, property levies, dividends. Most of the taxes we’re told will hit the ultra wealthy will actually land on the middle class. And in most cases they’re not sat on fortunes, they’re sat on assets they spent a working life building.

What’s worse, the burden grows with every Budget, because of the compounding commitments this government keeps making, and that nearly every other party has pledged too.

So who pays for the past, present and future spending of the UK government? The middle class. And there’s not a thing they can do about it. Debt-trapped, stuck in place, with nowhere to turn, and the government knows it.

If any of this resonated, you’re likely in the taxation crosshairs. I wish you luck.

[Liz Kershaw @LizKershawDJ]

I was in Jersey last week. Their east coast is only 14 miles from France. 7 fewer than Calais to Dover.
And yet...I wondered...why don't they get dinghies full of young men coming across?
Because they intercept them, pick em up, lock em up, and return them to France...a safe country.
With the full backing of UK Border Force.
So why don't we do that?

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Aren’t you the minister for safeguarding women against violence?
And you have to apologise for what you tweeted after a fellow female politician was violently murdered?
Isn’t that a resigning matter?

[Michael A. Arouet @MichaelAArouet]

As socialists are not able to build anything, they always demand higher taxes.

Higher taxes throttle investment, innovation, progress, and make entrepreneurs emigrate, driving unemployment up.

Why are they not able to understand that? It’s basic economics, not rocket science.

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

Well over 4 million people in Britain are claiming some form of unemployment benefits (last time I checked; might have changed since). Yet individual fastfood restaurants are bringing in scores of migrants to do basic jobs. There is no defence of the Yookay system of immigration

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

The WEF is preparing to reorganise... Larry Fink, its current co chair, wants a smaller, MORE POWERFUL board and Christine Lagarde is reportedly considering taking the top job.

So the WEF could soon be run by a concentrated group of global finance and corporate technocrats

Larry Fink - BlackRock
Christine Lagarde - ECB
Julie Sweet - Accenture
Zhu Min - former IMF Deputy Managing Director
Jim Hagemann Snabe - Siemens
Orit Gadiesh - Bain & Company

A tiny group of central bankers, global financiers, consultants and Global corporate chiefs, wielding enormous influence over the policies governments and international institutions often adopt.

They are not elected and they are not accountable to the public. Yet they hold extraordinary power over how humanity and its future is shaped.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

1918: they sold radioactive water as a health tonic. It was radium, and it dissolved men's jaws.

1898: they sold heroin as a children's cough syrup. It was heroin.

1863: they sold cocaine wine as a daily pick-me-up. Popes and presidents put their names to it.

1946: they sold cigarettes on a doctor's recommendation. Whole campaigns ran on which brand physicians preferred.

1960s: they sold margarine as the heart-healthy fat. It was loaded with the trans fat that actually stops hearts.

Every one of these came with an expert's blessing and total confidence.

The people telling you today which fat to fear are the institutional descendants of the ones who put radium in your water and a doctor's face on a cigarette packet.

"The experts recommend it" has a body count going back a century.

[The Mercian @TheMercianNews]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Happy 1099th Birthday England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

On 12th July, 927AD, King Æthelstan secured control over the last Viking kingdom of Northumbria and united the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms under one ruler, becoming the first King of a united England.

Terrible day for Norway.

[David Betz @DavidBe31099196]

There is news to be smothered and UK media is on it.

[Peter St Onge, Ph.D. @profstonge]

In Britain, rapists are awarded lifetime immunity from deportation 🤯

[David Betz @DavidBe31099196]

As empires go, the EU is no Assyrian butcher, but it is still a smug, soul-crushing villain, petty, vindictive, and parasitic to its core. It struts like a resurrected Rome, draped in confected and artificial borrowed grandeur—epitomised by the fake, stylised bridges on the euro banknotes, as though Europe’s actual majestic bridges and cathedrals were somehow insufficient. Yet it commands none of Rome’s competence, none of its steel, and none of its results.

It pales beside the British Empire’s raw dynamism. Its most unhinged critics call it a Fourth Reich, which is flattery. The truth is far more pathetic: it’s a decaying late-Soviet husk, stripped of ideology and left with nothing but managerial suffocation, self-dealing oligarchs, and an endless parade of unelected eurocrats fattening themselves at the public trough.

Remember the idiotic prognostications just a few years ago?

The EU was supposedly destined to rule the 21st century through the sheer majesty of its “regulatory soft power”, the “Brussels Effect” that would bend the world to its will. Delusional hubris. These secular clerics actually believe that regulation itself creates growth and innovation, as if smothering enterprise with paperwork, compliance costs, and risk aversion somehow magically summons dynamism.

The bureaucrats who strangle every creative impulse then turn around expecting gratitude from the populations they’ve enfeebled. The results speak for themselves: universities sliding into second-rate mediocrity, industries turning third-rate under the weight of green dogma and Chinese overcapacity, and militaries that rank somewhere between third and fourth—paper tigers in a world that respects hard power, not directives on banana curvature.

Don’t get me started on the idiocy of EU foreign policy, which as Collingwood points out, consists of turning friends into enemies, frontiers into raging forest fires. The rest of the world should not forget the last EU foreign affairs supremo (who actually was less bad than the current one, astonishingly) describing it as the “jungle” where nothing works as opposed to the “garden”, i.e., Europe, where everything’s hunky dory. These are not people of the “reality-based community”; they are cloistered mentalists tripping on their own posterior gasses.

The EU Parliament in Brussels has draped itself in banners self-congratulating as the bastion of European democracy, when in truth there is almost no meaningful democratic legitimacy in how the EU is governed: power lies with the unelected Commission, the opaque Council horse-trading, and the permanent bureaucracy, not with any sovereign European people.

Britain should count itself profoundly lucky to have escaped, even with the diminished, half-baked Brexit that our political class managed to “negotiate.” We shackled our national economy to a crashing zombie, submitted our laws to aliens who don’t much like us or our habits, and chained our regulations to minds hostile to the free-trading, global outlook that makes sense for an island nation.

Our defence policy was (and is still, sadly) warped by the need to pretend we have a vital land frontier a thousand miles away, when our true strategic hinterland has always been the ocean. Escaping that slow-motion suicide, however imperfectly, remains one of the sanest, if incomplete, acts this country has taken.

What about the EU that truly disgusts is the default malice: the pettiness, the preening bureaucratic narcissism, the casual sadism with which Brussels punishes any nation that deviates from its dogma. This is a quasi-aristocratic vampire squid—a flaccid imperium—latched onto a weakened civilization at a point of vulnerability, draining its blood, vitality, and future.

This misbegotten monstrosity will not last. When it finally implodes under the weight of its own arrogance, corruption, and failure, Europe should breathe a sigh of relief and move on—scarcely bothering to mourn the corpse.

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

CHART OF THE DAY: The history of China's consumption of fossil fuels, from 1965 to 2025. Although as a share of total energy, fossil fuels has seen a decline, in absolute terms (in tonnes of coal, barrels of oil, and cubic meters of gas) demand set an all-time high last year.

[Peter St Onge, Ph.D. @profstonge]

This is how the Orwellians in Brussels announce their CBDC surveillance pantopticon.

No wonder they want to censor their voters.

[Peter St Onge, Ph.D. @profstonge]

Europe has 20% youth unemployment and they're mass-importing no-skill migrants.

It's a civil war, government against the people.