BilloTheWisp

Doesn't believe in fairy tales. Despises fear-mongering.
Pro nuclear & fracking. Despairs over RE fantasies.
Does the maths.
Politically middle of the road

[BilloTheWisp @billothewisp]

@mgshanks We use LESS electricity today both individually & as a country than we have for over 40 yrs. The grid's been reliable & adequate for all that time.
Until now.
We don't need a "bigger" "stronger" grid. We need reliable & on-demand generators like we had before this RE obsession.

[BilloTheWisp @billothewisp]

@Hepworthclare Lets face it.
"Stability" is hardly this governments strong point is it?

[BilloTheWisp @billothewisp]

@MDC12345678 He is heavily outnumbered. The zealots rule and own the Labour party. He stands no chance of turning it round.
His (and our) best option would be for him to leave. I doubt if he'd give the Tories or Reform a look so maybe he should look at the SDP or going independent.

[BilloTheWisp @billothewisp]

@7Kiwi I bet the knives are out for Carns & Healey today.
I expect there will be an (very) active spiteful & poisonous campaign to deselect them in the near future.
But where will they go?
I can't see them going to Reform or Tories.
Small party like SDP maybe?
Or independent?

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

We owe those who serve the UK the kit to do the job and the loyalty to stand by them when it's done. We are failing on both.

I’ve spent my whole time in government making that case. Number 10 will not listen, so I am resigning as Minister for the Armed Forces.

Letter to the PM below.🫡🫡🫡⬇️⬇️

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

This was the statement released by Police Scotland after the footage of the incident in Dundee went viral last year. It seems that everything was done to give the impression that the young girl was the aggressor and the migrant couple the victims. A court decided yesterday that it was the other way round. Blatant disinformation. Police Scotland owe everyone an explanation.

[Social Democratic Party @SDPhq]

Boris Johnson scrapped "British jobs first" rules in 2019.
Labour promised change but they kept Johnson's rules.

Now they're subsidising foreign hires on top of that.

You can't put working people first while fast-tracking everyone else.

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

Climate campaigners tell you green is cheap

It isn't

Global green transition cost is now $14+ trillion, rising with over $2 trillion/year (2% of global GDP)

105x our spending to avoid hunger

Still, CO₂ emissions set another record last year

https://t.co/9u6W6pJxtr

You can see all the references in my Twitter thread:
https://t.co/HfBtBL2mlK

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

The next war won't be won by armies, navies or air forces alone.

It'll be won by the country whose 19 year olds can code, whose factories can build drones in weeks not years, and whose grid stays on when someone tries to switch it off.

Industry. Society. Economy. That's the fight now.

We're not ready. And we're not being honest about what getting ready will cost.

[BilloTheWisp @billothewisp]

Coming hot on the heels of John Healey's bitter resignation do I detect in this post a potential schism developing in the Labour Party?
Not the usual one between the poisonous extreme left and ruling clique but between what has become known as Blue Labour and the zealots?

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

Britain spent a decade choosing to be smaller in the world.

Right now the rules on communications, energy and trade are being rewritten. By China. By Russia. By countries that take their own security seriously. We need to be at that table. That's a choice we must make.

Strong countries get cheap energy. Weak countries pay whatever the strong ones decide.

[David Galbraith @daveg]

Painfully dishonest degrowth piece. Here's a teardown.

1. The headline promises maths that isn't there.
"We've done the maths" but the piece contains no calculation. Just two borrowed statistics and a policy wishlist.
2. The 92% figure isn't a measurement, it's a definition.
"Excess" emissions means anything above an equal per-person share of the carbon budget going back to 1850. Define the rules that way and the North is guilty by construction. Pick a different baseline year or allocation rule and the number changes completely. It's a moral framework dressed up as arithmetic.
3. "Growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity" is the opposite of the global record.
Extreme poverty fell from roughly 38% of humanity in 1990 to under 9% before the pandemic, almost entirely through growth in China, India and East Asia. Not redistribution. Not aid. Growth. The claim is only half-true for median wages in some rich countries, and they quietly universalise it.
4. The headline contradicts the article's own sixth paragraph.
Headline: growth is doomed. Paragraph six: low-income countries still need growth. So growth works precisely where the poor actually live. That's not a doomed strategy, that's the most successful anti-poverty mechanism in history with a footnote.
5. The decoupling double standard.
This school insists GDP can never decouple from emissions (so growth must end), while claiming GDP has fully decoupled from wellbeing (so growth is pointless). Decoupling is impossible in one direction and total in the other, depending on which suits the argument. In reality 30-plus countries have cut emissions, including imported ones, while growing.
6. "Poverty is manufactured" is backwards.
Poverty is the default condition of our species for all of history. Wealth is what had to be manufactured. Inequality is policy-shaped, fine, but treating destitution as something governments created implies it vanishes once they stop, which no historical evidence supports.
7. "Endless expansion on a finite planet" conflates money with stuff.
GDP measures value, not tonnes. A therapy session, a software licence and a barrel of oil all count. Physical limits constrain material throughput, not value-added, and the two have been diverging for decades.
The two claims that hold up: the top 10% producing nearly half of emissions (solid Chancel/Piketty data) and the debt-servicing figure. Everything structural around them is rhetoric wearing a lab coat.
https://t.co/zEBANzOAlM

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

This year the Home Office moved to stop expert sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand coming to shear British sheep.

The people who keep the animals comfortable were declared surplus to requirements.

For over a decade, around 75 of the best shearers on earth have flown in each spring on a simple visa concession. In a few brutal weeks they take the wool off up to two million sheep.

A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes. Hundreds a day. Calm hands, no panic in the animal. It is a global trade and a young body's game, and Britain has never grown enough of its own.

The official line? Fourteen years to train Britons, so the door is closing.

Here is what that tidy sentence ignores. A sheep must be shorn every year or she overheats, cannot move properly, and gets eaten alive by flies and maggots. Shearing on time is welfare, plain and simple, written into law and into the animal's own skin.

So a government that lectures farmers without pause about welfare has quietly made the most basic welfare task harder to carry out. After the outcry they allowed one "final" year. Then the experts are gone for good.

A sector already losing money on every fleece, already burning wool it cannot sell, now told it cannot even get the people in to take the wool off.

You could be forgiven for thinking somebody wants the British sheep gone.

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

If you are of the view that millions of your fellow Britons are angry only because they have been “whipped up” by a few right-wing bogeymen, you truly do not understand your own country.

[BilloTheWisp @billothewisp]

@WilliamClouston Privatising water Co's is in essence privatising a monopoly. No competition. No free market. No real choice. The same water comes out of the same tap. People are not customers. They become a locked-in resource that is exploited by water companies to the fullest extent possible.

[BilloTheWisp @billothewisp]

@afneil You think he'll hand over to Vance?
But is Vance considered by MAGA hard-line enough?
If not who are possible Trump replacements?
On the other side: Who exactly in the Democrats is even capable of standing let alone winning?
They seem at the moment to be a complete shambles.

[Chris Newton @drchrisnewton]

Does anyone seriously think that someone who spent his earlier career seeking to prosecute soldiers, and who wanted a Prevention of Military Intervention Act, was ever going to be serious on defence?

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

This is an outrageous, disgraceful smear on John Healey — and an outright lie. There are a ton of ways to finance more for defence — starting with net zero — without taking a penny from schools or hospitals. Reeves should be ashamed of herself for allowing this nonsense. Suggests she’s really desperate.

[BilloTheWisp @billothewisp]

@ikeijeh @george_yarrow Kemi Badenoch may be the best (least worst?) leader the Tories have had in a long time. But they'll remain lost until there's been a highly public purge of the old guard who so badly failed us in the past.
They need an internal revolution.
I can't see it happening anytime soon

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

There is no point in being a defence minister for a country that has resolved not to defend itself.

[BilloTheWisp @billothewisp]

@Glinner I particularly liked the "under the camper-van" bit.