TP

[Nayib Bukele @nayibbukele]

Even with crime rates already at razor thin levels, we’re still driving them even lower.

On track to become the safest country in the world.

[TP @aajprior]

@COYWhites_com Entirely on the manager that one. He got it all wrong

[City A.M. @CityAM]

Britain loses over half its billionaire wealth in two years https://t.co/qxVXG757Rr

[Liam Halligan @LiamHalligan]

"Andy Burnham's conference speech was detached from fiscal reality"

My weekly "Economic Agenda" column in today's @Telegraph

https://t.co/4ke3W0baWH

[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”

[Vini @vinii83]

New Order - Blue Monday

[Ian Leslie @mrianleslie]

Cambridge has abandoned its plan to investigate the hiring of Jason Arday. It will only investigate whether it offered him enough support.

[Rock'n Roll of All @rocknrollofall]

This was Led Zeppelin four months before Led Zeppelin existed.

[DepressedBergman @DannyDrinksWine]

Quentin Tarantino considers this scene to be the "Best moment in the History of Cinema" and he can't imagine any filmmaker ever topping it.

[Rock'n Roll of All @rocknrollofall]

As contagious as it is to watch Belushi, you just can't take your eyes off of Aykroyd.

The sheer amount of talent on that small stage is staggering.

The Blues Brothers performing 'Soul Man' live on SNL, in 1978.

48 years apart yet it is still incredibly impressive.

[Guitar Gods Unleashed @gguworld]

Keith Richards in the studio, amp on the floor, playing blues to himself between takes.

Count the strings on Sonny. Five. He took the low E off decades ago and never put it back.

[👉M-Û-R-Č-H👈 @TheEXECUTlONER_]

This song ‘Just Like Heaven’ was released by The Cure almost 40 years ago. 🤯

When we see all these older artists & bands, the first thing you notice is their voice has left them. They just don’t have it anymore.

Which makes Robert Smith’s voice that much more amazing. He sounds exactly the same playing to 40,000 people recently. 💯

What were you doing back in 1987 on October 5th, the day this song was released?

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

She Pledged Palestinian Freedom From A West Bank Pulpit. She Has Never Made That Pledge For Nigeria's Massacred Christians.

On Sunday morning Dame Sarah Mullally, the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, stood in a church in Birzeit in the occupied West Bank and told the congregation she would use her role to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve. It was a specific, named, actionable commitment. A promise from the senior Christian voice in Britain to one community in one conflict.

Search for an equivalent promise made to Nigeria's Christians and you will not find it.

In 2024 alone, over 4,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria, the majority by Islamist Fulani militia and Boko Haram affiliates. The Open Doors World Watch List, the most comprehensive annual survey of Christian persecution globally, documents severe persecution across more than 50 countries. Iraq's Christian population has collapsed from 1.5 million before 2003 to fewer than 250,000 today, one of the most complete destructions of an ancient Christian community in recorded history. The Coptic Christians of Egypt face sustained institutional discrimination and periodic massacres. Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing what some researchers describe as a slow motion genocide of Christian communities, conducted largely by Islamist groups, largely in silence.

Dame Sarah has not made a five day pilgrimage to stand with any of them. She has not stood at a pulpit in Kaduna or Cairo or Kirkuk and pledged to use her role to seek the freedom they deserve. The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, used his Christmas Day sermon at York Minster to say that Israel had committed genocidal acts. Neither Archbishop has used that language about the groups killing Christians in their thousands across Africa and the Middle East.

That asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects the ideological framework the Church of England has absorbed so completely that it can no longer see it operating. The same progressive institutional culture documented across British policing, the NHS, the BBC and the Ministry of Justice has captured the Church of England too. Its moral grammar has been rewritten. Suffering that fits the framework gets named, visited and pledged to. Suffering that does not fit the framework gets a footnote in an inaugural address that mentions Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo alongside Ukraine and Russia, carefully balancing the optics without committing to anything specific.

This matters because the Archbishop of Canterbury is not merely a religious figure. She is in law and in cultural memory the senior Christian voice in a nation whose institutions, laws, liberties and moral inheritance were built on Christian foundations. When that voice makes its most specific and most actionable commitment, it is not to the 4,000 Nigerian Christians killed last year. It is not to the last 250,000 Christians clinging on in Iraq. It is not to the Coptic families burying their dead in Egypt. It is to the community whose cause resonates most comfortably in the progressive institutional culture the Church now inhabits.

Justin Welby resigned over catastrophic safeguarding failures. Dame Sarah was installed while live safeguarding complaints against her remained unresolved. Abuse survivors called it a galling betrayal. The Church pressed ahead. The institution that could not pause a ceremony for its own survivors has found the moral clarity to make a specific political commitment from a West Bank pulpit within weeks of taking office.

The Church of England once stood for something that transcended politics. It spoke for the persecuted, the forgotten and the voiceless regardless of whether their cause was fashionable. It does not do that now. It speaks for those whose suffering fits the approved narrative and stays carefully silent about the rest.

Nigeria's Christians are still waiting. They will keep waiting.

[Il Genio @FritzGschweidl]

Glenn Hoddle vs West Germany 1985

playmaking masterclass

[The Mercian @TheMercianNews]

🚨JUST IN: Far left activist group "Stand Up to Racism" disrupted a vigil for murdered student Henry Nowak.

They proudly boast on social media that they screamed "fascist" at mourners as they laid flowers and attempted to hold a 3 minute silence in Southampton.

The face of pure evil. They are not conscious. They do not possess emotions like a well-adjusted human being. They don't belong in our society, and one day they won't be.

[GB Politics @GBPolitcs]

🚨NEW: Lindsay Hoyle has intervened to force the government to issue a statement on the Henry Nowak case

[Proper Memes 〓〓 @Proper_Memes]

@BurnsideWasTosh @ZackPolanski He doesn't understand the fundamentals of taxation.

[Manxpie @manxpie86]

"Tough one, I think I'd have to say... the best of the Bible"

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

To save me answering the same question, all politicians lie. Boris was an inveterate liar. But I have never seen a Prime Minister who has combined such extensive lying with such a broad and un-self-aware attempt to frame themself as a paragon of virtue, as Keir Starmer.

[The Sting @TheStingisBack]

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)
Inspector Clouseau's interrogation is Peter Sellers at the absolute peak of his comedic powers, a 5-minute masterclass in timing, physical comedy, and chaos. Every pause lands, every misstep escalates. Pure triumph, start to finish.