Tony Cowards

Sony Award winning writer, stand up and Ipswich fan living in Northumberland.
Expect a mixture of jokes and pictures of painted WW2 models.

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

The trouble with getting a job in bomb disposal nowadays is that it’s all about ticking boxes.

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

If you want any pot holes filled in tell your local council that they are sinkholes caused by immigrants trying to tunnel into the country.

Viola! Instantly smooth roads.

[Tom Jamieson @jamiesont]

Keir Starmer has been a disappointment, but anyone calling him 'Britain's Worst Ever Prime Minister' in a world where Liz Truss & Boris Johnson exist must have been kicked in the head by a horse

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

Got given this after my grandad died.

As far as I’m aware he was only ever in Chevy trucks during the war (he was a navy wireless operator who got seconded to the Commandos clearing the Scheldt) but, I guess, these were standard issue to all vehicles?

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

@TheUCS473 Surely with the prevalence of drones and artillery, small arms are increasingly irrelevant.

Any reasonably reliable rifle that can fire when needed would be fine. Seems like we’re worrying about a capability which is not a high priority (as usual).

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

I used to have a job carrying those "End of the World" sandwich boards but I got fed up with working the nigh shift.

[Very Brexit Problems @VeryBrexitProbs]

MAGA thinks Europe can't defend itself without America. Here's what they don't know.

1. France and Britain have 515 nuclear warheads and 8 nuclear missile submarines.

2. European defence spending hit €481 billion this year. That's more than Russia and China spend combined. The EU's ReArm Europe plan is mobilising another €800 billion.

3. European countries have over 1.7 million active troops. Russia has 1.3 million.

4. EU and UK air forces fly over 1,400 combat aircraft. Their navies have five aircraft carriers, over 60 submarines, more than 120 frigates and destroyers.

5. Europe has over 6,000 artillery pieces and that's before the biggest rearmament wave since the Cold War. Poland alone is adding 212 new howitzers.

6. The British SAS invented modern special forces. The US copied them to build Delta Force. From France's Foreign Legion to Poland's GROM, Europe's elite units are among the deadliest on earth.

7. Europe already has joint military commands ready to fight. The UK leads a 10-nation rapid reaction force across Northern Europe and the Arctic. Finland alone can mobilise 900,000 trained reservists all prepared to fight in arctic conditions.

8. Europe has its own satellite navigation (Galileo), its own defence programme (75 active projects) and is building its own rapid deployment force.

The "helpless Europe" story was never about defence.
It was about keeping Europe dependent and buying American weapons, relying on American intelligence, following American foreign policy.

Thanks to Trump, that now ends.

[Anon Opin. @anon_opin]

I should have known this country was fucked when Marcus Rashford asked the government to make sure poor kids didn't go without food during the pandemic and the media acted like it was some insane radical idea.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Right then.
Let me explain something very slowly, because it appears some basic logic has gone missing somewhere over the Atlantic.

No serious nation in the history of warfare has spent fourteen months insulting its allies, threatening to annex their territory, siding with their common enemy, and then knocked on their door expecting them to come running to rescue a catastrophe of its own making. That is not how alliances work. That is not how anything works.

You abused the UK. You threatened Canada. You tried to grab Greenland. You called the EU an adversary. You praised Putin, the one man every serious NATO ally has spent decades preparing to fight. You hosted Kremlin officials in the Capitol. You undermined European elections. You abandoned Ukraine. You imposed tariffs on your closest partners. You did all of this loudly, proudly, and on camera.
And now you are surprised that nobody is returning your calls.

Here is a question worth sitting with. Why do you think that is? Is it possible, just possible, that when you treat your allies like enemies for over a year while cuddling up to their actual enemy, those allies might update their opinion of you? Is that concept too complicated? Does that require more working memory than is currently available?

You did not plan this war with your allies. You did not consult them. You did not build a coalition. You started a conflict, watched it go sideways, and then got on your knees asking for help from people you spent fourteen months calling weak, corrupt and irrelevant.

NATO is not what it was. Not because Europe changed. Because Washington made crystal clear which side it is on. And it is not ours.

You want European boots on the ground? Start by explaining why America is more aligned with Moscow than with Brussels. Take your time. We will wait.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

@militaryhistori @SkyNews There is an arrow pointing to the correct place but it’s very hard to see due to them using, pretty much, the same colour as the sea.

[SophieSpring97 @SophieP25397]

Remember in 2023 when right-wingers lost their minds because #Lineker mixed sport and politics? Now they’re celebrating #Ipswich Town hosting #Farage with lunch, six personalised shirts and a dressing-room shoot. Now Sport and politics mix just fine when it’s their guy

[Arthur Smith @ArfurSmith]

I sailed through my driving test, which is why I failed it 😔

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

@Mark4choice I hope so but even if it’s just in the short term, in a crucial period in a promotion chasing season, it’s turned us into a punchline

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

The sad thing is that Ipswich Town have been regarded as a “nice” club that fans of other clubs, apart from that lot up the road, have had a lot of fondness for.

We’re the club of Sir Alf, Sir Bobby and now Kieran McKenna.

That’s all been thrown away.

We’re now a meme.

[Sam @SamCKx]

I can no longer hold my tongue seeing the utter lies being spread about Britain, our history of migration, and how this country was built into what it is today. For those so deeply buried in fake news, manufactured outrage and billionaire‑funded propaganda, I’m going to lay out the truth – and exactly why you’re being fed all this poison.

Britain was never a sealed white island. From Roman times there were African soldiers stationed on Hadrian’s Wall and living in British towns, people from across the empire walking these roads nearly 2,000 years ago. Through the Middle Ages and Tudor England you still find Black people in the records – sailors, craftsmen, servants, musicians – even Black musicians at the royal court and Africans being baptised, marrying and being buried in English parishes like anyone else. This isn’t some modern experiment; it’s older than half the castles people visit on their bank‑holiday tours.

As Britain went out into the world, the world came here. Sailors and traders from India, Yemen and beyond were arriving in British ports from the 1600s. Some of those men were practising a new faith to most Britons at the time, praying quietly in boarding houses near the docks while they worked brutal shifts in the engine rooms of British ships. Over the centuries, more people from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia passed through and settled, bringing their languages, foods and beliefs into port cities that were far more mixed than today’s nostalgia merchants like to admit.

After two world wars, the truth is simple: this country asked the Commonwealth to come and rebuild it. People from the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia didn’t sneak in; they were recruited. They came to drive buses and trains, staff the NHS, work in mills and foundries, clean offices, run corner shops, open takeaways and small businesses, and yes, build prayer spaces and community centres alongside churches and temples in the neighbourhoods everyone now pretends were always “traditional” and “unchanged”. They did the work that kept Britain going while being told to go home, refused housing, and treated as permanent outsiders.

And what have they been paid back with? Scandals where people who’ve lived, worked and paid taxes here for decades get told they don’t belong. Policies designed to make life so hostile that some give up and leave. A media that uses their names, accents, clothes or places of worship as props in endless scare stories. The message is always the same: you might toil for this country, but you will never fully be of it.

So when you hear that “Britain was white until recently” or that the country has been “overrun”, understand that you don’t arrive at that belief by accident. You get there because your history has been deliberately ripped out and replaced with a comforting myth: that “real” Britain is white, homogenous, and constantly under siege from people who look, speak or pray differently.

Now look at when this myth has been turned up to max volume. Wages frozen. Housing a sick joke. Energy and food prices out of control. Public services hacked to pieces. At the same time, the number of people hoarding unimaginable wealth at the top has exploded. Funny, isn’t it, how every front page is about boats and “swarms” and “our culture”, and almost never about the landlords, hedge funds, private equity and offshore trusts quietly buying up your city and your future.

That’s because this isn’t just prejudice; it’s a strategy. If you’re sitting on a mountain of wealth, the last thing you want is ordinary people – of every colour and background – realising they have the same problems and the same enemy. Much safer if the factory worker is furious at the new family down the road. Much safer if the person who can’t see a doctor blames the nurse with an accent instead of the minister who cut the funding. Much safer if a man who can’t afford his rent spends his rage on the woman in a headscarf at the bus stop instead of the billionaire who owns half his city.

Racist rhetoric, religious dog‑whistling, all of it, exists to break solidarity. It turns neighbours into enemies and stops people seeing that Black, brown and white working‑class communities have far more in common with each other than any of them will ever have with the people flying in on private jets. It keeps you so busy policing skin colour, passports and prayer mats that you never get round to asking why your kids can’t afford a home, why your parents can’t get a hospital bed, why you’re working harder and standing still.

The real story of Britain is this: a crossroads, not a fortress. Africans on Hadrian’s Wall. Black people in Tudor courts and city streets. Sailors, traders and workers from South Asia, the Middle East and beyond in the ports. Caribbean, African and Asian workers rebuilding the country after the war, staffing surgeries and hospitals, driving cabs, running shops, cooking food, teaching kids. Today’s multi‑ethnic, multi‑faith working class is not a glitch; it is Britain. It built this place and it keeps it running.

If you’re genuinely angry about what’s happening to this country, good. You should be. But aim it where it belongs. Britain was never pure, never untouched, never “theirs” to take back. The people ruining your standard of living are not the ones risking their lives to get here, or the ones whose names you struggle to pronounce. They’re the ones buying politicians, owning media outlets, writing the story of this country so you never learn your own – and never realise who is standing beside you.

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

Getting some lovely responses on here and some banter that I’m happy to engage with but the “block” button is also getting a bit of a hammering. 😂

My favourite was getting abuse about my name (shhh… don’t tell anyone but it’s a stage name) from someone called Gerald Bogherd.

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

@WarkThisWay @CallMeStat It’s the “left” that get upset about Eggs which clearly still have the word “Easter” on them is it? The “left” who think the RNLI, the National Trust and anything that’s vaguely nice and caring is “woke”? It wasn’t “lefties” who virtue signalled by walking out of Parliament today

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

@CallMeStat I’m seeing quite a few bots though. Have a look at some of the accounts and see how many posts they have, then check what they reply to.

A lot of friends of Putin.

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

@GARP1967 It’s a pseudonym Mr Bogherd 😂

[Tony Cowards @TonyCowards]

@KateDerborn @Stuart_Watson @BlueAction1878 Hi “Kate”, one post and some replies supporting anything anti “woke”, whatever that means.

This screams bot to me. Say “hi” to Vlad.

[Nick Ames @NickAmes82]

Politics and football don’t mix? Tell that to Ipswich’s players, who are not happy about Farage’s visit. What a mess, and many tough questions still to answer: https://t.co/4vM4y5JArC #ITFC