Steve Tanner 🇬🇧

Western Australian exiled in the Chatham suburbs. Wishes to time travel and fly on a VC-10. Oh, the glory of it! @SDPhq member but really tired of politics now.

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_ME5]

@Peter88902568 Purity test: Fail

Deport: Immediately

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_ME5]

@FUDdaily My dad grew up in the '30s and '40s in Headington, Oxford. Back then, he could tell if someone was from Wheatley or Witney, Abingdon or Bicester, just by the accent.

We had diversity then. What we have now is just a tragedy in the making.

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_ME5]

@Artemisfornow I have a black cat called Alfie. He's a greedy and lazy sonofabitch, just like a Lab, and he's my best buddy.

Alfie and I approve of this pub's actions.

#FuckLabour

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_ME5]

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

I had serious doubts as to whether the SDP could find anyone even half as good as @WilliamClouston but then I recall the @SDPhq does tend to attract some pretty serious people. Clouston was/is good at presenting the philosophy and the arguments, but Eleanor evidently has a realistic plan, and the industry experience to put it into action. It's the same brand of quiet competence I've come to expect.

I happen to think that it's a bit late in the day for party politics, and think it's time for more robust street action, but small parties like the SDP can still serve a function - as agenda driving quasi-think tanks, and a means to channel middle England's disaffection into meaningful representation (especially on a local level).

The SDP is more likely to achieve that than the vacuous slopulist parties of the right who tend to attract cranks. All they do is make noise and spend more time fighting each other. I sort of regard the SDP as what the Lib Dems should be, and in a parallel universe would be were they not rudderless, thick, and unprincipled.

If at the other end of this political turmoil, the SDP becomes the replacement third party of Westminster politics then it's to everyone's benefit. Eleanor looks like she's up to it. She is very obviously the right fit for the party and I'll be interested to see how it develops. Unless the party can do as good as Clouston or better, there is no further point in it. Eleanor has some big shoes to fill.

[Hush-Kit Aviation News, History & Satire @Hush_Kit]

New US Navy F/A-XX fighter revealed

[Eleanor (Ellie) Rofe @eleanorrofe]

Today, I'm announcing that I'm standing for the leadership of the SDP.

I've said for years that we need people from outside politics to step up, because the political class that put us down here is not going to lift us back up.

If I'm perfectly honest, I always meant "people other than me".

But William Clouston was the first politician who inspired me to join a party. And he's now inspired me to wade into the fray myself.

What he built is unique: a party that puts reality, honesty and the national interest front and centre. My job as leader would be to turn his substance into scale, and reach the millions of Brits who aren't served in the slightest by the current slew of parties.

Watch the video to see my ambition for the party - and our country.

[Liam Halligan @LiamHalligan]

“The fasten seat belts sign is on”.

This is a message I received early this morning from one of the UK’s most experienced, savvy and respected financial traders. Someone I have come to know and trust for the last 25 years.

10-year bond yields are now almost 4.5pc - up some 50 basis points over the last month.

30-year yields this morning went above 6pc - a 28-year high.

Yet the UK’s political and media class continues to focus on party posturing and folksy rhetoric, ignoring the slow-motion disaster that has been happening on the UK’s sovereign bond markets for at least the last 18 months - a disaster that will inevitably, unless we drastically change course, turn into a fully blown market meltdown.

At that point, the UK government won’t be able to borrow enough money to finance our already spiralling debt interest bill.

Britain’s financial management will be taken over by overseas technocrats - that will be the condition of additional borrowing, to maintain the basic functions of the state, as happened in Greece and Italy back in the early 2010s and here in Britain 50 years ago this year (when we were forced in 1976 to apply to the IMF for a bailout).

The austerity then imposed on Britain would make 2010-2019 feel like a picnic - far, far worse than it would be if we took serious action now to control our public finances.

Lower-income households would suffer most - and there would be serious damage done to the UK’s already rapidly-fraying social fabric ….

I have been warning about these looking fiscal dangers publicly, in my newspaper columns and elsewhere, since at least early 2024.

Doing so hasn’t been easy or fun. I have been dismissed and derided by numerous economists, “economists”, officials and policymakers - as well as lots of journalists.

I absolutely don’t want a disastrous 1976-style outcome - which is why I’ve taken the blows and issued the warnings.

The state is too big. Public spending is out of control. Our fiscal rules are a convenient nonsense - designed to kick the can of financial reality into the future. We need to get real … and take bold action to tame the growth of spending, push back a now totally over-bearing state and snap the British economy out of today’s high-tax-high-borrowing-low-growth doom loop - the result of myopic, counter-productive policy-making by successive governments for the last decade and more …

Other prominent economists who agree with me - ie who are financially-literate, can read a yield curve, have a passing interest in economic history and who understand the dangers of some 80pc of UK government borrowing going on debt interest as it currently is - need to chuck “career risk” in the bin, and start saying publicly what so many of them have, for quite a while now, only had the bottle to say to me in private …

Remember: “The fasten seat belts sign is on”

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Yes. Expensive doesn’t mean good in sort of the same way expensive housing doesn’t mean we are rich. We are not a rich country in any way that matters. We delude ourselves into thinking we are 6th globally and somehow a superpower, when in reality we have lower GDP per capita (the only measure that really matters to ordinary folk) than Mississippi. We are closer to on par with Lithuania, which was recently communist. We are nominally capitalist and functionally communist. China is the opposite. The state now is a subscription you cannot cancel and cannot use. The social contract is broken. The political elite are morons. The civil service is inept or actively hostile to the national interest. The Bank of England is incompetent. We have the most expensive energy in the developed world which is upstream of the vast inflation across virtually all goods and services one could consider buying. CPI is a lie, a fugazi. Real inflation is around 6-7%. Our capital markets are atrophied to the point where we incubate great companies and take all the risk, then let them leave at the point where they become successful because we can’t competitively raise capital for them and insist they have a one legged gay black transvesite on the board for diversity. The impact of this is all that tax and all those jobs go overseas. The conservative cost of that since Blair is about £20 Tr to the economy. We have successive PM’s who don’t know anything. We now have a PM who doesn’t understand what the bond market is, having borrowed so much our debt to gdp is now nearly 100% and most of that was spaffed up the wall on zero return items - why we are in hock to it, and why we pay a moron premium. Just to add to his collection - he now also thinks you can offer young people 2.5% mortgages to prop up house builders in a market that is nominally repricing downward by 10-20% in the near term in which instance all those homes would be in negative equity virtually instantly. The marginal buyer of our debt is now a mercurial hedge fund manager, our judiciary is ideologically captured by progressive wet liberals at best and hostile Marxists at worst. Justice is applied very unequally and this is transparently the case, and the law always sides with the minority group or labour client demographic at the expense of the law abiding tax paying majority. We let a network of organised Islamic criminals and nonces rape women and children all over the country and the state is complicit in the cover up even in some local cases partakes in the action. This unhinged Blank slatism from the progressive left asserts that the Sudanese and Eritreans arriving here offer identical GDP impact to Norwegians and Americans. Drop an Afghan in Tilfords now viral barley mow pub, offer him warm brown ale, a Labrador puppy and some elocution lessons (a far right fantasy now) and next week he’ll be turning out at mid off for the vets cricket team, opining on the weather and saying “we should go for a beer” to his new found friends - but never following up. He’s just like us. No. Sorry. It’s all fantasy. Insane fantasy. Nothing means anything anymore. And to top it all off AI has completed our voyage into the endless meaninglessness of the Baudrillardian simulacrum, whilst gearing up to make every white collar rules based process driven job there is redundant forever as this Baumol’s cost disease diasterclass heads into an Engel’s pause right when it needs to welfaremaxx the hardest. When a smaller number of taxpayers props up an increasingly growing number of state largesse recipients and can no longer do so - either cos they have left the country already for a more favourable tax jurisdiction- or cos their job doesn’t exist anymore - then you have Betzian civil war à la Lebanon. Or full Balkanisation. Take away the UC opium and watch the patient convulse and foam at the mouth and become violent.

Other than that, it’s great.

And if we ever meet -- I’ll tell you what I *really* think.

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

Most of the time, you can count on me for relatively dispassionate analysis, but there are days where I come very close to losing my shit completely - and this is one of them. I am heartily sick of being lectured by scumbag MPs with single digit IQs, and I am sick of their fecklessness and abject stupidity, to the point of white hot rage - where if they were in the same room, I imagine I would quite happily rip their fucking faces off like a blood-crazed chimpanzee in heat.

I would not, of course, actually do it - because prison is quite an effective deterrent, but that's the only thing stopping me. It certainly isn't respect for their position in society or the institution of Parliament. I just have to suck it up and take a deep, calming breath, and remind myself that today's utterances from whomever are just part of the daily ritual punishment beating we all have to endure.

I accept that in a democracy the state has the monopoly on violence and we live by the rule of law, and these people, scumbags though they are, are still elected by the good peoples of this nation. It is not my place to remove them, much though I would like to.

What blows my brain, however, is that in the meantime, I am meant to passively accept a government dumping rapey third-worlders in my community, knowing that if I complain too loudly I can expect a knock on the door form the plod, who apparently don't have anything better to do, even though there are machete wielding African primates rampaging through the towns as I speak.

There is a litany of daily insults we are all supposed to absorb without complaint, and remain as calm as Hindu cows on the instruction of our masters. They who routinely promise that someday they might, if they feel so inclined, do something about it - even though we know as well as they do that they're not going to lift a sodding finger.

We're meant to wait until election time when we may trot along to the polling station and pointlessly register our disapproval. Never let it be said that the British are impatient and intolerant.

What our politicians do not seem to register, though, is that our patience is finite, and the social contract is fading into oblivion before our very eyes. If they are incapable of taking the hint of masked protestors congregating for a stroll along the sea front (the political equivalent of a big neon sign), then that takes us to a point where certain individuals (without the same self-restraint and fear of prison that I have) will take matters into their own hands. There will be few people left willing to condemn it.

The British electorate are like an old, tired dog chained to a fence post, unable to escape the casual abuse of its master. While you can keep kicking it, it is only a matter of time before it bites back. When it does, I will enjoy the catharsis, because whatever is visited upon them will be richly deserved if they keep this up.

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_ME5]

@Hush_Kit Stab in the dark here: Me 410

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_ME5]

@Hush_Kit FW 190?

[Dan Salt @Danjsalt]

Party that rammed millions of migrants into the country after lying about reducing migration is now worried about the forces it has unleashed

Still no apology though

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

I get a surprising amount of shit from the nationalist right for supporting Israel. Personally I don't see how you can be a nationalist and not support Israel. As a precursor to being a nationalist, you have to fundamentally believe in the concept of nation states - which are the greatest civilising technology of all time. A system by which peoples can protect their own way of life, according to their own rules, and guarantee their own future.

But nation states are not the default for humanity. They are a relatively new innovation, and much of the conflict we have seen over the last hundred years or so have been border disputes - because the one thing a nation state needs is secure and coherent borders. Borders are essential because the are the demarcation line where ideas begin and end.

When you have that, the nation is the source of political authority, and its peoples are the legitimate owners of their homelands.

Germany in 1800 was not a country. It was a mess of kingdoms, duchies, and free cities inside the dying Holy Roman Empire. It only became a state through a popular consensus that Germans are a linguistic and cultural community that should act as one.

The 19th century then industrialises the idea. Railroads, newspapers, conscription, and especially public schools teach a standardised language and a shared past. Benedict Anderson called nations “imagined communities”: you will never meet most of your compatriots, but print and schools make you feel like you belong to the same story.

The same idea proliferated to the Middle East after the collapse of empires following WW1. From that process, several states were established, and one of which had to be a Jewish state, and Israel was the logical place to put it.

It's never been written in stone that a nation necessarily has to be ethnically homogenous or even of the same faith. It certainly helps, but there are examples of multi-ethnic nations that function under a constitution.

That could have been Israel had the Arab states not decided that that Jewish ambitions of statehood were intolerable. It resulted in several attacks with the intention of again driving the Jews out of their place of origin. And so they organised, built the institutions of a state, defined borders, and built a formidable army to expressly guarantee the survival of their own people. And that nation thrived, despite numerous attempts to delegitimise and destroy it. It is an accomplishment worth defending.

Here it should be noted that nation states are not granted or recognised. They are built from the ground up. For a state to be recognised as such, it must meet the criteria of the Montevideo Convention. The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states. Arabs haven't built anything that satisfies any of these criteria in the disputed territories. Their political priority has always been the eradication of Jews, and have been willing to kill themselves and their own people to do it. They are owed nothing.

As far as "Palestinians" are concerned, there has never been a nation of Palestine. There was the British Mandate of Palestine, more than half of which is now Jordan - whose treatment of Palestinian Arabs is as bad as anyone elses in the region. Not least Egypt.

That Palestinian Arabs have been displaced by the process of nationalisation, it is hardly unique. Jews were expelled from several Arab countries over the preceding decades, and then there's the creation of Pakistan, which has comparable stories to tell. As such, the fixation on the Jewish state tells its own story.

My support for Israel is not out of any special fondness for Jews. There is a lot about their culture that is admirable and amazing. But like any other, there is much that is also grotesque. But that's the beauty of nation states. They can be who they choose to be within their own borders. We also have the right and we must do the same. If we do not uphold the validity of nation states as an idea, and celebrate the practice of it, then we have no hope of ensuring our own future.

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_ME5]

@realhansard I work from home these days so am pretty much a house-husband, and I find 20-30 minutes cleaning the kitchen (by hand) each lunchtime a nice break from my routine. Therapeutic in a way. Dishwasher: no; but I'd love a tumble dryer if only we had room!

[Ross Baglin @ross_baglin]

- Capital is deployable savings
- Deployable saving is key to creating investment and jobs
- People with capital tend to be clever in pretty basic ways
- One of them is moving or staying offshore so you don’t get your grubby mitts on it to buy votes from your client groups.
- So this tax raises little, costs the economy more than it saves and only punishes ordinary middle class people, not the wealthy.

…. By the way, if you have three children, they inherit ~£170k tax free each, not £500k. Because you tax the estate not the beneficiary.

Thanks for asking.

[Ross Baglin @ross_baglin]

Mysteries of our time : (a) The fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 ; (b) the Amber Room looted by the Nazis from St Petersburg and never recovered intact ; (c) the existence or otherwise of dark energy ; (d) what a Liberal Democrat is for.

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_ME5]

"Our job as politicians is to improve people's lives, not take them away."

Never a truer word written.

[Adam Williams SDP/YSD @WilliamsAdamUK]

I am pleased to see that MPs have defeated the bill for assisted dying.

It is now our moral duty to tackle palliative care head on, and give the most vulnerable people in our society true dignity in their final days.

Our job as politicians is to improve people's lives, not take them away

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

I first met Charlie Kirk more than ten years ago. At that time, he was very young, and possessed an evangelical naivety that was relatively foreign to a Canadian.

He was truly and somewhat amusingly shocked, for example, at the pervasive smell of marijuana on the streets of Toronto.

It was obvious, however—despite that sheltered mien—that Charlie was someone deeply and singularly committed to a unique mission, and that he would be driven to learn everything necessary to its success.

I met him in person another dozen times after that, and was asked to speak at a number of Turning Point events.

I enjoyed the events. It was a very good thing to see thousands of enthusiastic young people trying to make things better in their somehow endearing conservative American way.

It was also fascinating to watch Charlie develop in sophistication over the years. The bravery he showed in presenting a truly conservative viewpoint on university campuses was part of that development, as was the ferocious skill he developed at debating contentious issues, under trying conditions, for years.

My wife, Tammy, and I met his lovely wife Erika with him on several private dinners. They made a truly admirable and mutually respectful couple. We had plans to make such meetings a regular occurrence—but life, and death, got in the way.

I was not informed about Charlie's murder for several months after it occurred, in consequence of my recent illness. It came as a terrible shock.

It is also truly awful to see what a spectacle has been made of his demise by pathological actors across the political spectrum.

He was a solid, decent, hard-working, truthful, brave person.

We are all—right and left alike—lesser without him.

On the right: because he was an example and a leader.

On the left: because he would willingly talk across the aisle, and in good faith.

There will come a day—and too soon, I am afraid—when even those who vilify his memory will long for the days when people such as Charlie existed, and made such civilized talk a priority.

I had the privilege to sit down with Charlie and talk with him about his life and the world not so many months before that was no longer possible: https://t.co/1b3U5MxGB1

RIP Mr. Kirk. I write that in true sorrow.

[Henry Bolton OBE 🇬🇧 @_HenryBolton]

I completely oppose outsourcing such a strategically vital defence capability to a civilian, commercial business.