Sheila

Proud to be Scottish and part of the United Kingdom.

[sandieshoes 🇬🇧 @sandieshoes]

Look what’s lurking on page 118 of the Budget document…

Once again, the government has delegated one of our most politically salient questions to an unaccountable body of experts …
👇

“For all the Budget’s uneventfulness, there was buried in the small print something more pernicious and revealing of this government’s priorities.

Tucked away on page 118 of the Budget document, the Treasury announced that, from next spring, employers will be allowed to recruit certain foreign workers on lower salaries than the current rules permit.

That is to say, the government is making it easier for businesses to rely on immigration rather than recruiting and training Brits.

Let us not forget we have a million Neets.
While Alan Milburn beavers away on his long-awaited report into the youth employment crisis and the government pays lip service to its commitment to tackling it, Burnham and Healey have decided to make it easier to hire from abroad.

What is the purpose of spending billions educating our young people who are then unable to secure jobs?

Or then spending billions more supporting them as dependents on the state?

It should be a truth too obvious to state that a government’s first responsibility is to its own citizens and ensuring they have a reasonable chance of getting a job, but then such sentiments can no longer be taken for granted.

And it is not just this one concession.

Elsewhere in the Budget are plans to give some migrant workers longer to find another job if their employment ends, as well as expanding visas for foreign graduates and allowing more international students to remain in Britain after finishing their degrees.

Where did this change to salary thresholds come from?

Tellingly, it was recommended by the ‘Migration Advisory Committee’, an influential body headed by a handful of academics but which most people aren’t even aware exists.

Once again, the government has delegated one of our most politically salient questions to an unaccountable body of experts.

But ultimately the buck stops with ministers.
The Migration Advisory Committee’s members are appointed by the home secretary, and its recommendations are not binding.

This is a familiar Whitehall trick: turning a political choice into an administrative inevitability.

For a government which claims to want to ‘Get Britain Working’, making it easier to recruit workers from abroad while almost a million young Brits remain languishing without work is an odd way of going about it.

And even more tragic is what it suggests: that Labour appears to have so little faith in the people that it governs”
Spectator.

[Andrew Bowie MP @AndrewBowie_MP]

🤔 The removal of standing charges on gas bills…sounds good doesn’t it?

💁‍♂️ On the face of it, yes, in general bills might be lower - but here’s the catch…

🤨 If you are a ‘higher consumer’ (meaning someone that uses gas for heating, cooking, hot water etc) then your energy bill is about to go UP. That’s cause they are putting the fixed daily cost on to the Unit Rate.

🥶Next week in large parts of the UK, the temperature is going to get close to freezing. Because of these changes, if you live there and heat your home with gas and want to turn on the central heating…Labour just made your life much more difficult and far more expensive.

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

The Courts and Tribunals Bill goes before peers in the House of Lords today, and the Prime Minister is expected to face a rebellion from Labour peers.

Good.

This Government, like Sir Keir Starmer’s, is pressing ahead with plans to curtail our right to a jury trial.

It is a sinister, authoritarian assault on our criminal justice system and English liberty — particularly on free speech.

FSU research has shown that people charged with speech offences are almost twice as likely to be found not guilty in a Crown Court with a jury than in a magistrates’ court without one. Put simply, more people could be banged up for exercising their right to free speech.

[Darren Grimes @darrengrimes]

Oh dear, Andy. More faces than Big Ben Burnham skewered by his own Home Secretary.

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Labour manifesto, 2024. Couldn't have been clearer.

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

@AngelaRayner, did you allow Islamist extremists to influence the drafting of the “anti-Muslim hostility” definition?

It’s a simple yes-or-no question.

If not, why did your department claim that it had deleted all responses to the Working Group’s consultation, only to say — after the Free Speech Union threatened legal action — that the responses were still held on its data system?

And why does your department still refuse to disclose who responded to the consultation?

While we’re at it: if, as your Permanent Secretary confirmed in a letter to @NJ_Timothy, ministers had no involvement in this decision, who is running your department?

The public deserves to know the truth.

[John Pow @Johnpow1]

It is not often that you see the Forth like this.

[Steven Barrett @SBarrettBar]

They let Henry Nowak bleed out on the floor.

This type of blind support for failing institutions is how we got in this mess - pretending we don't have huge problems

Just won't work.

[Andrew Bowie MP @AndrewBowie_MP]

🚨Sneaked out by OFGEM this morning, a warning for the first time EVER they cannot guarantee that demand will be met on a peak day in winter.

Let’s be clear what that means. They cannot guarantee that homes will be warm, lights come on or industry function on a peak day this winter.

And why? Because of an accelerated decline in domestic gas supply from the North Sea.

So what is the solution? For British bill payers to pay more, to IMPORT more from Europe (specifically Belgium) to keep the lights on in Britain.

Britain. A country with vast supplies of gas, untapped, deliberately due to Labour policy now going cap in hand to Europe and paying vast sums to import foreign gas.

It is utterly outrageous. You couldn’t make it up.

https://t.co/saKKnc8gOq

[David Davis MP @DavidDavisMP]

In 1987, at Loughgall, the SAS stopped eight murderous IRA killers.

The actions of the SAS that day no doubt saved innocent lives. Yet now, decades after the event, our brave veterans face relentless legal persecution.

Here's what really happened on that day in 1987👇🏻

[Stephen Kerr MSP @RealStephenKerr]

Jackdaw approved.

But two hours later…

Where is John Swinney’s welcome? Where is his enthusiasm for Scotland’s North Sea workers and businesses?

His indifference is staggering. These are Scottish jobs, Scottish skills and Scottish livelihoods. If he cannot bring himself to welcome good news for them, what exactly is he standing up for?

“Stronger for Scotland.”

Aye. That’ll be right. 😏

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

You won't stop the carnage we see in France by passing a few immigration reforms -- as British politicians are now suggesting.

Tighten immigration, sure. But the problem we face is much bigger than this.

What we are witnessing is a highly-coordinated, deeply ideological and concerted war on not just France but the West more broadly.

At the heart of it is a 'Red-Green' alliance of left-wing extremists, Islamists, and the Palestinian movement that has now morphed into a revolutionary movement.

It wants nothing less than the destruction, dismantling, or 'deconstruction' of Western civilisation.

And it is benefitting from a wider circle of 'tacit support' within our own Western institutions -- our schools, universities, media, publishing, and more.

These activists are now exploiting a West that has become dangerously divided, deluded, & demoralised.

While the West has certainly eroded itself and emboldened its enemies through mass immigration and broken borders, it has also taken a sledgehammer to its own foundations by teaching its own young people to hate who they are -- to hate their own history, culture, identity, and inheritance.

Scruton called this Oikophobia. Furedi called it the war against our past. In France, Philippe de Villiers calls it 'Memoricide'. The stripping away of any sense of who we are. It is cultural vandalism against ourselves.

China, Russia, Islamic states, they are all laughing at us.

We have cut our own young people off from the West's distinctive and proud history by either telling them our nations are racist and embarrassing or bombarding them with historically illiterate documentaries and Netflix shows that present the West as evil.

Unsurprisingly, they now feel little attachment or loyalty to their own nations while many young people today, put simply, don't even know who they are.

With no strong sense of national identity, and no real understanding of where they are from or what their ancestors built, they have become completely disoriented, bobbing around on a sea of globalism and phone-induced narcissism.

The young French destroy their country because they feel no loyalty to their country.

Somebody said to me recently the West resembles a bouquet of flowers on the mantlepiece -- it is still beautiful but if you look closely it's roots have been cut off and it is now slowly dying in the vase.

In the first instance, France is suffering the effects of all this, looking on at a generation that clearly hate its own nation or at least feel no attachment to it.

But this deeper malaise is now visible in pretty much every Western state today, having been encouraged by a political class that decided it was a good idea to redefine Western nations as empty vessels that are merely here to show empathy towards everybody else.

Immigration reforms might help but what we are facing now is actually much bigger than any of that.

As Scruton, Furedi, Caldwall, Phillips, Murray, Lasch and others have been warning us for many many years, there is a war against the West and before it even really begins we are already helping our enemies by cutting off our own legs.

Today it is France, tomorrow it will be everywhere.

[Iain Duncan Smith MP Chingford & Woodford Green @MPIainDS]

The IRA were terrorists, not soldiers. Their campaign of murder and bombing was not a war of equals, and no amount of historical revisionism will ever make it so. Labour’s Northern Ireland Troubles Bill risks allowing the IRA to rewrite history while British veterans face the prospect of being dragged through investigations decades after serving their country.

Where is the accountability for the IRA? Where are the answers from the Irish Government about those who fled across the border, the support they received and the supply of weapons?

I served in the British Army. My friend, Captain Robert Nairac, was murdered by the IRA. His body has never been recovered. His family still deserves to know what happened to him and where he lies.

The IRA cannot be allowed to portray its campaign of terror as justified by the Good Friday Agreement. Peace does not retrospectively legitimise murder. There is no moral equivalence between terrorists and those who served to uphold the law.

This Bill is a betrayal of our veterans and of families still waiting for the truth.

[Steven Barrett @SBarrettBar]

Yesterday, I tweeted about how ridiculous the media are for trying to smear Reform when a senior Labour figure is on trial for alleged rape

And what's funny is, most people thought I meant a different guy

Because there isn't just 1 Labour guy on trial for alleged rape.

[Colin Brazier @ColinBrazierTV]

It is simply extraordinary that taxpayer-funded civil servants are being sent to work for months for ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC.
It is utterly inconceivable that public sector employees would be sent to work at GB News or Talk TV.
https://t.co/fal0Tms30D

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Every single sentence in your post is untrue.
Labour’s 2002 ‘deal’ had very little long-term impact on migrants trying to sneak into the UK by lorry/container/vehicles. It simply moved from Sangette to other routes.
Between 2014-2019 55,000 came in that way — an underestimate since many came in undetected and disappeared into society. Unlike boat people, nearly all of whom are counted.
So it’s an obvious nonsense to say people weren’t being sent back because nobody was arriving. Tens of thousands were arriving.
They switched to small boats when major advances in technology, perimeter defence of lorry/container parks and detection made lorries etc too risky to take.
That’s why, from 2018 onwards, the small boat numbers grew fast.
Nothing to do with EU, Brexit, Dublin rules, fairy dust etc. Why do you peddle such falsehoods?

[James Price @jamespriceglos]

Every Islamist, and every unassimilated barbarian on the streets of Europe is an enemy of western civilisation, and must be treated accordingly.

That means decades of imprisonment with no parole, or deportation if possible.

Pour encourager les autres, to borrow a phrase.

[🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇬🇧Iain_L 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @Iain_L]

£30m? To fight against division and hatred? From the man who leads the party who’s stated aim is to divide a country? Perhaps John could look at his own supporters rather than labelling everyone who disagrees with him far-right.

[James Price @jamespriceglos]

“Was killed”.

You’re a coward, Prime Minister.

It was more than that, wasn’t it?

Sir David Amess was murdered by an evil Islamist Jihadist.

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

Reform UK should be held to high standards. I don't think anybody is disputing that. But watching the latest Channel 4/ITV investigations I did wonder:

Where is the year-long undercover investigation into the grooming gangs and the Labour-held councils and police officers who enabled them for years?

Where's the year-long investigation into the mosques, Islamic charities and educational foundations that are suspected of supporting Islamism in this country?

Where's the prime-time investigation into the pro-Palestine or pro-Hamas activists who have been marching through our streets for years?

Where's the investigation into the civil service and why supposedly impartial government units are now becoming so openly political?

Where's the undercover sting operation into the Green party, Stand Up To Racism, Hope Not Hate, and other far-left groups -- including their links to the Labour Party and funding from British taxpayers?

Where's the detailed uncover work on the global multinationals that are ruthlessly exploiting British workers, the corrupt regimes exploiting foreign aid from the British people, or the organised foreign national networks exploiting Britain's welfare state?

None of this is to downplay the investigation into Reform UK. Personally, I think all this makes the party stronger over the longer-term. The party should and no doubt will improve its internal policies as a result.

It is also now crystal clear to everybody in this country what is going on. Establishment interest groups are trying to dismantle the party.

But I still ask: if the media and journalists are going to do this kind of deep undercover work then shouldn't they be doing it to everybody?

Because right now it looks like they are only interested in discrediting the one political party that wants to overturn the broken status-quo.