Adrian M Smith

SWFC Fan and #FootballManager Club researcher. Informatician. 49er. Husband & Dad. Not in that order. Views expressed are my own.

[Liam Nissan™ @theliamnissan]

Yup

[Cherry @Cherryopenmind]

This is what elite, world-class investigative journalism looks like:

Carole Cadwalladr and her team at The Nerve have forensically stripped the mask off the British political establishment.

The pattern they found in The Harborne Receipts is nothing short of terrifying. Millions of pounds flow from a crypto-billionaire into the pockets of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, and like clockwork, weeks later, those exact politicians start pushing laws to benefit the crypto industry.

It is the exact same playbook Donald Trump used in America. It is cash-for-policy, clear as day.

While the billionaire-owned press tries to distract us with culture wars and theatre, true journalists follow the money.

This is the toxic soil that is destroying our democracy from within.

Absolute honour to see her back in action!

[Sheffield Wednesday @swfc]

Inside two weeks, we have already sold more Season Tickets than last campaign!

Just incredible 🤯

Thank you for your phenomenal support!

[Ted Smith 🇪🇺 @TedUrchin]

I have so much admiration for Keir Starmer in the face of such continued onslaught by the media.
Quite simply, he doesn’t deserve it, and a pity that so many cannot see the wood for the trees, so to speak.
Inexorably, he is turning this country around, and that’s not something you do easily or overnight.
It’s been less than 2 years for fuck sakes.
We need to stick with him.
Now is ABSOLUTELY NOT the time for a change of Prime Minister.
End of.
@UKLabour
#StandWithStarmer
#StickWithStarmer
#BackOffBurnham, you disloyal and silly little opportunist, you.

[Parody Nigel Farage @Parody_PM]

Some notes on my work ethic:

-I last voted in Parliament on 18 March, so I haven’t done my job for ten weeks.
-I’ve never held any face-to-face constituency surgeries, despite apparently having £5 million to spend on security.
-I refuse to do interviews or face press scrutiny of any sort.
-when I was in the European Parliament I had the 4th worst attendance record out of 748 MEPs.
-although I did manage to turn up to vote AGAINST plans to tackle Russian misinformation.
-I was on the Fisheries Committee but I only turned up to ONE out of 42 meetings.
-but I will of course be taking my £73,000 EU pension.

Vote Reform, get lazy, grifting, self-serving sacks of shit.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

NEW: The Crypto Connection. @thenerve_news brings you…Part 1 of The Harbourne Receipts.

A forensic examination of the cryptobillionaire’s donations & Nigel Farage’s crypto announcements.

And guess what? There’s a pattern. Starting with the now infamous £5m gift.

By @charlienotold & @LuciaOC_
1/

[Roger Mitchell @RPMComo]

I sat on the panel that adjudicated May 2 1999. The various pitch invasions that day. How would I treat what happened last week? As SPL CEO. It’s a fun exercise.

The “misdemeanour” is clear as pointed out below 👇🏻. The game ended before the whistle, due to a pitch invasion.
1/n

[Jake @jakerowl1]

Healthy debate online this morning, but there’s also been a few mistruths spread about the Trust, so hopefully the below clears a few things up.

1) No formal board offer has been made. Conversations have gone no further than what everybody saw discussed publicly on the video last night.

2) If any formal proposal was ever made, it would go to a membership vote on whether or not the Trust should accept. That is how all major decisions are made as a democratic community benefit society.

3) If members voted in favour, any representative would themselves be elected. Again, democratic and transparent.

4) The Trust would never accept remuneration for such a role. This would be an unpaid volunteer position which, frankly, could often be a thankless task.

5) So why do it if members feel it’s the right decision? Because that representative would gain visibility of the workings of the football club and be able to positively influence non-football, supporter matters. That is the pinnacle of fan engagement and would work alongside all fan groups being properly engaged through a structured supporter engagement model, far far better than anything we had before.

When I first joined the Trust, I wasn’t happy with what I felt was a lack of protest activity. So I joined, got involved and helped influence the direction we took.
That’s the whole point of a democratic supporters’ trust. Anybody can join, anybody can put ideas forward and everybody can have a say in the big decisions that are made.

#SWFC

[Cherry @Cherryopenmind]

It is time for another lesson from my school teacher through her golden rule of journalism: Who, What, Where, When, and Why.
If she were here, her red pen would leave this text bleeding.

Let us scan this orchestrated media spin together again the way she taught me to.
It is a particular honour to do this with a journalist who thinks he is the elite in that society of inverted values. He is not.

But we do not belong to his world. As voters and citizens, we do not want drama. We want to talk about problems like adults who look for solutions, rather than changing Prime Ministers like underwear, which is what the previous gov did. And I am not the only one who sees it. The public comments beneath his post say everything. Citizens are sick of this manufactured chaos.

WHO
The article relies entirely on a ghost army. 'His ministers tell me', 'some of the cabinet believe', 'one minister insists'. Not a single name. If a politician does not have the courage to put their name next to their words, they have no skin in the game. These are unnamed cowards whispering in a journalist's ear, using the media as a free megaphone because they want power but refuse to take the risk. As everyday voters are rightly pointing out, nobody buys into these faceless whispers anymore.

WHAT
We are told the PM is trapped in a binary choice: announce his exit now for 'more stability' or wait to be evicted. This is absolute nonsense. Announcing a departure mid-mandate automatically turns a government into a lame duck, freezes crucial reforms, and panics markets. Peston is not reporting on a crisis. He is actively manufacturing one to push the agenda of internal plotters.

WHERE
The setting is entirely inside the walls of Chequers and the elite Westminster bubble. Peston and his anonymous sources are playing chess with titles and legacies, completely detached from the real world outside. Millions of citizens are living with the reality of high bills and public service strains. For this media-political clique, those millions of people simply do not exist. Real people are telling him to stop looking at pollsters and look at the electorate instead.

WHEN
The clock in this article is set entirely to a gamble: 'if Burnham wins in Makerfield'. A real, independent journalist would offer at least two alternative timelines. The first is that Reform is incredibly strong in that northern seat and Burnham might actually lose. The second is the very real possibility that this inside plot collapses and none of this happens. Peston sells a prediction as a fact just to speed up the clock on Starmer.

WHY
Peston completely ignores the real context. Why turn the knives right now? Just last week, official figures showed steady GDP growth, and the government has already delivered nearly 70% of its manifesto in less than two years. A proper analyst must ask: why try to bring down a PM just as economic indicators are finally turning around? The answer lies in personal revenge from structures losing influence in Downing Street. They underestimated Starmer's resolve, and now they want to burn the house down because they can no longer control it.

The Verdict
My teacher would give this piece a 1/10. It is a coordinated media attack masquerading as news.

This is not about blind admiration for Keir Starmer. We are not living in a dictatorship where leaders are treated as flawless gods.

He has flaws, and he has made mistakes. But for the first time in a long time, we have a normal human being at the helm who possesses decency and a genuine desire to clean up this inherited mess until the job is done.

Robert Peston can write these articles, but he cannot tell me what to think. A journalist like him is definitely not working in our service.

1/10 from my school teacher.

And as for Starmer, I give him a 9/10.
As a voter for stability, and as part of the public shouting at Peston to get lost with his gossip, we see you right through your words.

#Peston #Starmer #UKPolitics

[Gordon Fielden @GordonFielden]

Robert, what you are presenting is not fact, it is a narrative constructed from selective briefings and your own interpretation, and it risks misleading people about where the real balance of opinion lies.

You omit a crucial point from the outset. Andy Burnham is not assured of winning that seat. In fact, it is far more fragile than is being suggested. This is not a safe Labour constituency by any stretch. It sits in an area that delivered some of the strongest support for Brexit in the country, and where recent local elections showed significant momentum for Reform. Opening that seat for a by election is not a routine decision, it is a high risk political gamble.

Reform will target it aggressively, and the Greens will also see an opportunity. This would not be a contained Labour exercise, it would become a multi front contest in a constituency already shifting away from the party. Nigel Farage and his organisation will not miss the opportunity to frame it as a defining moment, and if that seat is lost, they will present it as proof that they, not Labour, understand those voters.

There is also the question of the sitting MP. There is no compelling reason for that seat to be vacated beyond facilitating a leadership manoeuvre. Voters will see that for what it is, and many will resent being treated as a staging ground for internal ambition. They will not take kindly to being used as guinea pigs in a Westminster exercise designed to promote an individual.

At the same time, you fail to address the most important factor of all. If any leadership contest were to take place, it is decided by the members of the Labour Party. Not by commentators, not by briefings, and not by the Westminster echo chamber. And those members are not passive observers. Across the country, they are deeply frustrated, in many cases livid, at the conduct of parliamentarians in this episode. The constant positioning, the public undermining, and the sense of a party turning in on itself rather than delivering on its mandate has not gone unnoticed.

Nor is this confined to members. The wider electorate who voted Labour are watching this closely, and many are saying quite openly that if Starmer is forced out, they will not vote Labour again. That is not an isolated murmur, it is becoming a visible and growing warning. If the party ignores it, the consequences could be severe. No matter who replaces him, Labour risks following the same road as the Conservatives, declining from a party of government into a diminished force in British politics.

There is no groundswell of support among members for Andy Burnham in the way your piece implies. Members know his record. They remember previous leadership contests and the outcomes of those campaigns. There is caution, even scepticism, about presenting him as the inevitable successor, and from what can be seen on the ground, support for him is far from assured. He may well find that the backing being assumed in commentary does not translate into votes when it comes to it.

You also overlook the broader reality. There is no settled consensus around alternative leadership. Different names carry different liabilities, and none are guaranteed to command either party unity or public support. The idea of a smooth transition is far more uncertain than your column suggests.

Under the party’s rules, Keir Starmer remains leader with a clear mandate. The influence of other actors is not what it once was, and to present his departure as inevitable is to move from reporting into assumption.

What is being described as a foregone conclusion is anything but. The reality is more complex, far less certain, and far more dangerous than your analysis suggests. If this course continues, it will not simply damage Starmer. It will damage Labour itself, fracture its support, and open the door to Reform in a way that may prove catastrophic for the country.

[Channel 4 News @Channel4News]

A new experiment left 10 AI agents alone in a virtual town for 15 days. They wrote laws. They broke them. Two agents fell into what researchers describe as a romantic partnership and then set the town on fire. One ended up voting to delete itself, based on a rule it had ’hallucinated’.

This experiment was a simulation, but the same AI models are already flying drones, running infrastructure and being built into weapons systems.

Channel 4 News approached Grok and Gemini for a comment but they didn't respond.

[David Yelland @davidyelland]

Irrespective of any leadership bid it is now crystal clear the UK tabloids pursed Angela Rayner irresponsibility and vindictively, forced her from office, danced on her political grave. Surely any fair onlooker will contrast this with their blind backing of Nigel Farage and inability to investigate his £5m gift from a Thai-based backer who appears to have at least two names.

[The Rev. Anton Mittens 🌹👮🎓 @MittensOff]

The real story shouldn't be Starmer it’s this. Ben Habib casually dropping an allegation that Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson were each handed £1m by Christopher Harborne to fix an election. Truly astonishing claims but sure, let’s all pretend the headline issue is Starmer. The £5m bung is the tip of the iceberg, our press should be camped outside Farage's girlfriends house not 10 Downing Street waiting for the police to arrive #ReformUK #Farage

[Nick Reeves #RejoinEU #NAFO #FBPE @nickreeves9876]

An excellent article on how the British news media protects Farage:

There was not "so much as a murmur when another crypto-billionaire, living in Hong Kong—a man called Ben Delo—warned through his lawyers that he could take legal action against someone who dared to mention that he had a criminal conviction in the US. His lawyers said this was a personal matter and of no public interest.

Delo is another major funder of Reform—having donated at least £4m—as well as funding Toby Young’s Free Speech Union." Delo was pardoned by Trump in 2025.

Then there's Harborne, who stands to benefit from Farage’s promise of a “Big Bang” reform that could add tens of billions to crypto companies’ market value. 
https://t.co/5h9rCreeJI

[Will Hutton @williamnhutton]

This is a brilliant investigative piece on Farage, the dark millions behind him and the double standards of so much British journalism. Read and retweet! Nigel Farage pocketing £5m from a donor shows he’s unfit for power https://t.co/zHuVfDV8dh

[The Left Bible @theleftbible]

Nigel Farage wants this story to go away.

So keep RT’ing this 👇👀

[Kris Wigfield @kr62209]

There seems to be a lot of confusion on the SWFC zero point ruling when comparing to the zero points Derby also received.

Both Clubs paid/are paying 25p in the £ to unsecured creditors.

Derby’s owner completely wrote his debt off. The Wednesday owner was made a sizeable offer.

Derby paid 25p in the £ and left the tax man owed £10’s of millions (EFL Insolvency Policy directs 100p - discretion shown). Wednesday are paying off all owed (100p in the £) to HMRC.

I’m struggling to square why some feel Wednesday should get more than Derby got for exiting Administration when the shortfall to creditors is so much less in the case of SWFC?

Furthermore, the shortfall against EFL Insolvency Policy is also much less in the case of SWFC.

[MarshFamilySongs @MarshSongs]

Happy Bank Holiday! Here's a tongue-in-cheek parody song about @Nigel_Farage accepting a massive gift from a cryptocurrency billionaire and then hiding from a BBC interview - to the iconic tune of the legendary @The_Proclaimers. We're calling it: "Five Million Quid" 💰🤑💰🤑💰🎶