Helen Davenport

Keen observer of life, politics and economics. Mother, grandmother, wife, gardener and dog's best friend. Grateful to be a total nobody.

[Robin Redmile-Gordon @WhatNowDoc]

I have always admired @Miss_Snuffy but this is on a whole other level. Just when you think, where on earth have all the leaders gone, someone comes along who you’d just love to parachute into Downing Street.
Thank you dear lady, it’s comforting to know the flame of civilisation hasn’t been completely extinguished.
@elonmusk You should pay attention.

[Dr Philip Kiszely @KiszelyPhilip]

We’re at the stage now where beheadings are regrettable, but tweets are unforgivable.

[David Betz @DavidBe31099196]

It is pointless trying to understand the contemporary British media complex as ‘media’ in the conventional sense—journalism, reporting, or even opinion. The correct frame is propaganda: mood and sentiment management, with its sharpest tool today being crisis communications.

The dominant technique, visible daily if you still watch, is inversion—systematic reversal. It flips reality: victim into perpetrator, aggressor into defender, truth into falsehood, good into evil. It constructs Walter Lippmann’s ‘pseudo-environment’, an alternate reality in which the public is meant to dwell.

A key subtype is projection, or ‘accusation in a mirror’, neatly summarised by a Rwandan Hutu propagandist in a 1990s manual: impute to your enemies exactly what you and your own side are planning or doing.

When a genuine crisis erupts—such as the racially aggravated murder of Henry Nowak—the first imperative of the machine is to stall, dampen, and defeat the natural eruption of public outrage.

Call it ‘restoring calm’ if you like the euphemism. In practice, it means herding people back into anaesthetised normality so that inversion can resume.

Once the majority has been shamed, distracted, or bullied into silence, the remnant still angry can be ridiculed by the usual chorus—eye-rolling panellists on Have I Got News for You, columnists sneering at those ‘harping on’, and accusations of crypto-racism or worse.

Thus, the brutal stabbing of an unarmed 18-year-old student, the false cry of racism by his killer, and the police reportedly handcuffing the dying boy as he bled out on a Southampton street is repackaged as another ‘knife crime’ tragedy (note Shaban Mahmood’s flaccid parliamentary statement this afternoon)—preferably illustrated with a generic white face in the style of the BBC's so-called reality-based drama 'Adolescence' or the more recent but equally putridly manipulative 'The Capture'.

Real patterns (grooming gangs, crime disparities, two-tier policing) are airbrushed. This is projection at work: the actual sources of predation and institutional failure are recast, while legitimate grievance is pathologized.

The truth? The system enabled both the attack and the immediate inversion of its aftermath and that stands exposed to anyone with eyes and functioning brain by the video evidence. That’s the problem, your own 'lying eyes', that crisis communications has to handle before there can be a return to normal levels of public mood management can be restored.

This is precisely what Dan Hodges is performing when he labels people demanding we talk about the murder ‘scum’ for refusing to respect the family’s wish that their son’s death not be politicised. It is phase-one grunt work in the inversion protocol: shame the angry back into silence so the pseudo-environment can be restored.

Smart enough to know his role, malleable enough to perform it willingly—exactly as Noam Chomsky described the filtering process that keeps the right sort of voice prominent in the system.

The technique still works on some. But it is wearing thin. Every overplayed inversion, every *scummy* dismissal of raw public grief, prepares the ground for sharper identities and clearer grievances against the system itself. Normal people do not remain moderate forever when the machine insists their reality is the problem.

[Dan Salt @Danjsalt]

Led by morons

[Helen Davenport @Tridds]

@KimWhite612882 @NiallHarbison Thank you for your kind words.

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

John Edwards, an Independent councillor for Sandhurst, is being punished and silenced for telling the truth about an Afghan resettlement hotel scheme in Bracknell.

Last April, Bracknell Forest Council started to house 300 Afghans in a four-star hotel. The scheme provided on-site healthcare and “move-on” support to help Afghans resettle in private rented properties, with deposits and upfront rent paid for.

All of this information was already in the public domain. But the council didn’t appear to like John asking questions about the impact of the scheme on local services and residents. It subsequently launched a year-long investigation into him, costing taxpayers £15,000.

During the process, key evidence was withheld from him, his accusers were granted anonymity, and fellow councillors accused him of racism and xenophobia. It was claimed he had been reported to the police, and he was even compared to the murderer of the late MP Jo Cox.

After a year, the independent investigator cleared him of all charges. Instead of accepting the finding, the council returned with a new, narrower charge.

John is now accused of bringing his office into disrepute for telling the truth and exposing aspects and consequences of the Afghan resettlement scheme that the council didn’t want the public to know.

Throughout all of this, John has not been allowed to put forward a defence. He now faces a hearing where the same councillors who branded him a racist will decide his fate.

The council is using taxpayers’ money to fund its action against John — to silence a political opponent.

The Free Speech Union is proud to support John. He now needs your help, because if the council succeeds, it will create a blueprint for other councils to silence elected representatives and set a precedent whereby unelected officials decide which policies may be scrutinised and what information the public is allowed to hear.

If you can, please donate to his crowdfunder to help pay for his legal defence.

Watch John below and check out the latest FSU Podcast👇

[Department of State @StateDept]

While the United Kingdom faced unprecedented illegal boat crossings, UN agencies condemned plans for deportations.

UN officials lobbied aviation regulators to prevent the deportation of migrants – an appalling violation of the UK’s national sovereignty.

[Gray Connolly @GrayConnolly]

The UK’s political class (given their serial corruption and
failures over decades) should be thankful they are only losing elections - and not hanging from lampposts as they would be in much less polite if more exacting polities

[Barrister's Horse @BarristersHorse]

1. Encourage mass immigration of people whose cultural enemy are Jews.

2. Bemoan the fact that antisemitism is increasing exponentially.

3. Blame it on the far right & social media platforms.

[Cinema Tweets @CinemaTweets1]

Amadeus might as well have ended the music biopic genre. I don’t care how fictionalized this movie is- no biopic, hell, hardly any other film has ever made me feel the way Amadeus has made me feel. I don’t have the words- I don’t have the time- to describe this film’s importance.

[wretchardthecat @wretchardthecat]

This may seem like a small thing. A single insignificant step back. But it is not a small thing, but rather the veil of the Woke temple being rent from top to bottom.

[Robin Redmile-Gordon @WhatNowDoc]

@ukhomeoffice @MaizyDaizyZzzz This is a total pack of lies.
Toby Young, Lord Young, managed to get a motion through The Lords that forced you to have to change your policy. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the government who fought it tooth and nail.

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 Britain. 1943.

The war was being fought on every front.

But the coal mines were failing.

Without coal there was no steel. No ships. No weapons.

A hundred thousand miners had left for the front.

So Ernest Bevin announced a solution.

Every tenth man called up for military service would not go to war.

He would go underground.

The ballot was random. No exceptions. No appeals.

University students. Office workers. Farmers’ sons.

Forty-eight thousand of them.

They were called the Bevin Boys.

None of them had ever been in a mine.
The tunnels were four feet high. The coal had to be cut by hand. Six days a week. Ten hours a day.

Some were injured. Some were killed.
They received no campaign medals. No recognition whatsoever.

But they kept the steel mills running. The ships sailing. The weapons being made.
They kept Britain in the war.

When the war ended, most were not released for months. Some were refused their old jobs when they came back. For decades they were not eligible for veteran status.

It took until 1995 for them to receive formal recognition.

Forty-eight thousand young men who went down instead of going to war.

That is your history. And almost no one is telling you. 🇬🇧

Proud Of Us is funded entirely by our own community. No sponsors. No advertisers.

Help us keep our history alive. https://t.co/wN9S2gRmFj

Be Part Of Us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

[Gray Connolly @GrayConnolly]

The UK-USA alliance is at the bedrock of not just the Five Eyes but of NATO. It is hard to understand how the UK Starmer Govt has so mishandled the BIOT/Chagos & now Persian Gulf situations other than this is the worst UK Govt in generations & has no idea what it is doing.

[Rupert Myers @RupertMyers]

What a remarkably corrupt country we are in rapid danger of becoming. Well said @TrevorPTweets

[Friendless Churches @friendschurches]

In the late 19th century, this secluded and difficult to reach medieval church had fallen into a state of disrepair and the local bishop suggested that it be closed - left to be reclaimed by nature.

However, this quaint little church has endured against all the odds.

1/6

[Ike Ijeh @ikeijeh]

So it wasn't about "International law", it was about getting a dribble of applause from his dwindling Muslim voter base. When will Starmer get it through his head? Political Islam no longer needs Labour as it now has its own representation. Labour balkanised Britain for nothing.

[wretchardthecat @wretchardthecat]

The inability to use British bases will eventually be overcome by US operational adaptation, new technology, modified tactics just as unrep mitigated the need for a dense network of ports. But as these new methods are developed they may be jealously held back from Starmer's successors. When New Labour needs their backs scratched there will be no back-scratcher.

Starmer's defection (in game theory terms) will be met by Trumpian defection leaving both worse off until a new pattern of cooperation can be establised on the basis of new provisional trust on both sides.

[wretchardthecat @wretchardthecat]

"Breaking the ice" is a form of constraint relaxation. Once a person at a party takes a cocktail shrimp the rest follow. Very often people at a party are conscious of maintaining their dignity and jealous of their reputation.

But the Orange Man lost his dignity a long time ago and has long ago fallen below the level of Hitler. He has nothing to lose. So he takes the shrimp ... and the rest will have one too because they were thinking the same thing.