Pat Spall

Blues season ticket holder, Warwickshire CC

[Justice4the21 @Justice4the21]

. @jessphillips is the MP for mother of Maxine Hambleton (one of the 21) murdered in Bham Pub Bombings 1974. We wrote Jess an open letter that she still hasn't had the decency to respond to, but she found time to write this letter on behalf of other constituents 👇- BPB1974 remains England's longest unsolved mass murder of C20th! Hierarchy of Victims?

[Queen Bee @KingBobIIV]

1/ Today the Defence Secretary resigned because Starmer will not spend enough money on defence, which is quite something, because before we all start clapping like trained seals about tanks, missiles, Nato targets and which flag lapel pin everyone is wearing this week, there is a rather awkward question nobody in Westminster seems terribly keen to answer.

What exactly are we defending?

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

November 1971. Chiswick, West London.
Erin Pizzey is 32 years old. She is not a lawyer. Not a politician. Not a doctor.
She is a woman who talked Hounslow Council into lending her a cold, rundown building on Belmont Road — a former community hall — for almost nothing. Her original plan was modest. A warm room. A cup of tea. Somewhere for mothers with young children to simply get out of the house.
Then the door opened.
A woman stood in the entrance. She was covered, head to foot, in bruises. She was holding two small children. She was shaking.
She didn't want tea.
She needed somewhere to hide.
Erin let her in. She didn't turn her away. She didn't tell her to call the police.
Because Erin had already called the police. They told her the same thing they told every woman in Britain at the time: they could not enter a private home over a "domestic dispute." That was the law. The home was private. What happened inside it was a family matter.
When Erin contacted a female civil servant to report what she was seeing, the response was astonishing. The woman told her flatly: "There wasn't a problem of battered wives until you made one."
Erin put down the phone. Then she went back to her residents and made sure they were fed.
Within weeks, 40 mothers and children were sleeping in four tiny rooms. No funding. No staff. No legal authority.
She didn't stop.
By 1973, word had spread through quiet whisper networks — one woman telling another, "There is a place. Go to Chiswick. She won't turn you away." That same year, Erin hosted the first National Women's Aid Conference in the UK. Women from across Britain arrived, and they all recognized the same thing at once: what she had built needed to exist everywhere.
In 1974, the council set a maximum of 36 residents. At peak times, 150 women and children were living inside those walls — sleeping on floors, on chairs, in hallways. The building smelled of cooking, fear, and something else entirely: relief.
Erin was taken to court for overcrowding. She appealed all the way to the House of Lords.
She kept the doors open the entire time.
That same year, she wrote a book. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. It was the first published account of domestic violence in British history. It used real stories from real women inside the shelter. Overnight, a problem that had no official name was on front pages from London to New York.
The movement spread. Refuges opened across the UK. Then Australia. Then Canada. Then the United States. The pattern she created in four small rooms in West London — no blueprint, no permission, no funding — had been replicated in hundreds of shelters across the Western world.
MP Jack Ashley stood up in Parliament and said: "It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical."
She was ranked 14th in a poll of the 100 women who shook the world. She was awarded the Italian Peace Prize. She received a CBE. The charity she founded — Chiswick Women's Aid, which became Refuge — grew into the largest domestic violence charity in the United Kingdom, with over 460 employees and an annual income of more than £33 million.
Erin Pizzey passed away on October 4, 2025, aged 86.
She never stopped.
It all began with one woman, one borrowed building, and an absolute refusal to say no.
Forty women and children showed up with nowhere to go.
She made room.

Share this if you believe one ordinary person, refusing to look away, can build a shelter that holds the whole world.

Follow us Lost in Yesterday

[Pat Spall @bluebevan]

@SpeechUnion Is there a specific reason as to why these courts aren’t open?

[Pat Spall @bluebevan]

@WarwickshireCCC This is getting embarrassing now

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

I expected people to keep quiet during the trial. But, now that we have the conviction, why has no minister spoken out? Where are all the celebs who took the knee six years ago? Where is the wall-to-wall BBC coverage? Unlike the Floyd case, this one happened in Britain, ffs.

[David Wild @wildnoe]

@CPhilpOfficial An horrific attack.

How many stabbings, did you comment on when you were in Government?

How many times have you spoken up about a 51 year miscarriage of justice for the victims of the Birmingham Pub Bombings ?
@Justice4the21

All victims and their families deserve justice.

[Dogs On The Streets @dotslondon]

⚠️ URGENT FUNDRAISER APPEAL ⚠️
A mother. Her children. A little dog. And a life that needed saving.

We recently stepped in after witnessing severe domestic abuse involving a woman trapped in a deeply toxic and abusive relationship where alcohol had become part of the cycle of trauma and survival.

The perpetrator has since been arrested, and a Domestic Violence Protection Order is now in place.
But abuse doesn’t end when the police leave.

With no immediate support around her, this lady had turned to alcohol to cope with the pain, fear, and psychological damage she had been living through. We knew if immediate action wasn’t taken, this could end in tragedy.

So we acted.

We made the emergency decision to place her into a one-month rehabilitation programme where she is currently doing incredibly well. Her children are safe and cared for, and her beautiful little dog is safe with us too.
This was a cost of £9000 to us.

Now we are helping prepare her for release so she does NOT have to return to the environment that broke her.

This isn’t just about recovery from addiction.
This is about survival.
This is about giving a family and the beautiful dog their mum back.

If you can donate, no matter how small, or even simply SHARE this post, you could be helping save and rebuild a life.🧡

https://t.co/haFwZBygTn

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

HE KNEW THE DOSSIER WAS FAKE. WEEKS LATER HE WAS DEAD IN A FIELD

Dr David Kelly was Britain's foremost weapons inspector. He spent years inspecting Iraqi facilities, earned a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and knew more about Saddam's arsenal than almost anyone in government.

In 2002, Tony Blair's government published a dossier claiming Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes. Britain went to war on the back of it. No weapons were ever found.

Kelly knew the dossier was rubbish. He said so, quietly, to a @BBC journalist. That conversation ended his career, his privacy, and ultimately his life.

The MOD carefully allowed his name to leak to the press as the BBC's source. He was then hauled before parliamentary committees, stripped apart by his own employer, and thrown to a media frenzy he never asked for.

Two days after giving evidence to MPs, the 59-year-old was found dead in woodland near his Oxfordshire home.

Instead of a proper inquest, Tony Blair asked Lord Hutton to run a private inquiry. Hutton concluded suicide. The inquest was opened, then suspended, and never resumed.

Eight senior legal and medical figures, including a coroner, later wrote to @thetimes saying the verdict was unsafe. They argued the wound found on Kelly's wrist, a severed ulnar artery, would not have caused sufficient blood loss to kill a healthy person.

There were no fingerprints on the knife found beside his body, even though he was not wearing gloves.

In 2011, Attorney General Dominic Grieve rejected all calls for a new inquest. He said the Hutton Inquiry was "tantamount to an inquest" and that further investigation would be dismissed by judges with irritation.

A man challenged the government's justification for a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. He was publicly destroyed, died in mysterious circumstances, never got a proper inquest, and the people who sent him into that media storm faced no consequences whatsoever.

Tony Blair became a Middle East Peace Envoy the following year. You genuinely could not make it up.

Sources: @BBCNews, openDemocracy, Hansard, @thetimes | Hutton Report

[Sydney Jones @SydneyJones_]

🚨 PROTEST ANNOUNCEMENT

Today, a raid uncovered seven Afghan nationals taking part in a Norwich Rape Gang, abusing and trafficking multiple young teenage girls.

We must stand against it.

Join us on Wednesday 27th May, 4pm outside Norwich City Hall.

[Inevitable West @Inevitablewest]

He wasn't a career criminal. He was a Russel group university student.

State authorities assisted a foreigner in stabbing him to death.

This is 100x worse than George Floyd.

[Adam Stansfield foundation @as9foundation]

Under 90 minutes to make your bid? All money raised to @Jays_AIM Currently £300 with @Michael35028021

[Pat Spall @bluebevan]

@JamesCleverly @jfoster2019 And ……, ? 🤷‍♀️

[Missing Andrew Gosden @andrew_gosden]

Have you seen Daisy (14) missing from #StratforduponAvon area (#Warwickshire)? (has links to #Warwick and #LeamingtonSpa) Call Warwickshire police on 101 quoting 414 of 8 May) https://t.co/gEKsVCZ88P

[The Ricky Gervais Clips @gervaisclips]

"If you enjoy seeing an animal terrified or in pain, you are a cunt." - Ricky Gervais

[DERBY PAUL @DERBYPAUL3]

We got again tomorrow searching for #paulpike who's #missinginderby.
10am Derby County's Club Megastore.
Please share.
#bcfc.
Tia.

[Nat @NatJPeters]

If anyone has seen Paul either in Derby or Brum in the last 48 hours then please get in touch. Paul is my mate's younger brother, hasn't been seen since around an hour after FT of Saturday's game where he was last seen by Derby station. Please RT #bcfc #dcfc

[Bishop Ceirion H. Dewar FSHC @BishopDewar]

As a Bishop, I cannot stay silent. I have today drafted and sent an open letter to His Majesty King Charles III, the text of which reads as follows:

To:
His Majesty, Charles III,
King of the United Kingdom and the Realms,
Supreme Governor of the Church of England,
Bearer of the ancient title Defender of the Faith.

Your Majesty,

I write to you neither as a politician nor as a commentator, but as one of your loyal subjects who, as a bishop of Christ’s Church, cannot remain silent while the Christian foundations of this kingdom are steadily dismantled.

Sir, there are moments in the life of a nation when silence becomes a form of betrayal. If I refused to speak to Your Majesty now, this would be such a moment.

For more than a thousand years the Crown of this realm has stood in solemn covenant with the Christian faith.

The laws of this land were shaped by it.
The liberties of our people were nurtured by it.
The conscience of our civilisation was formed by it.

From the abbeys of medieval England to the parish churches of our villages, from the preaching of the Reformers to the missionary zeal that carried the Gospel to the ends of the earth, the Christian faith has not merely influenced Britain — it has defined her.

Yet today that inheritance is being quietly but deliberately eroded. Across the institutions of this nation there is a growing hostility toward the faith that built them.

Christian belief is mocked in the public square. Christian morality is dismissed as intolerance. Christian institutions are pressured to surrender doctrine in order to conform to the ideology of the age.

Within the very Church that bears the name of England, voices have arisen that appear more eager to mirror the spirit of the age than to proclaim the eternal truth of the Gospel.

Meanwhile, beyond the walls of our churches, powerful political movements openly speak of removing Christianity from its historic place within the life of this nation.

What would once have been whispered is now proclaimed openly: that Britain must become a post-Christian state.

It is in this context that I write to you, Your Majesty. For the British Crown does not stand apart from this crisis.

The Sovereign of this realm bears a title that is not merely historic but sacred in its origin and meaning: Defender of the Faith. Those words are not decorative. They are a charge.

They speak of a monarch whose duty is not merely to preside over the ceremonies of the Church, but to stand as a guardian of the Christian inheritance of the nation.

Yet many among your subjects now ask, with increasing anxiety: “Who will defend that inheritance today?”

They see a nation drifting from its foundations. And they ask whether the Crown will remain silent while that inheritance is dismantled.

Your Majesty, may I be so bold as to observe that your coronation oath was not a poetic formality. It was a solemn vow made before Almighty God to maintain and preserve the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law.

Those words bind the conscience of the sovereign. They remind the Crown that its authority is not merely constitutional but moral. The monarch is not merely a symbol of national continuity, but a custodian of the spiritual inheritance that shaped this realm.

History records moments when kings and emperors were confronted by the Church and reminded that their authority was accountable before God. In the fourth century Ambrose of Milan stood before the Emperor Theodosius I and reminded him that even the ruler of an empire must bow before the moral law of Christ.

That tradition of prophetic witness has never disappeared. Nor should it. For when rulers forget the foundations upon which their authority rests, the Church must speak — not with hostility, but with holy clarity.

And so, I write to say this, Your Majesty: The Christian character of this nation is under profound and accelerating assault.

If the Crown does not stand visibly and courageously in defence of that inheritance, history will record that the guardians of Britain’s institutions watched in silence as the foundations were removed.

The issue before us is not nostalgia. It is civilisation. Remove Christianity from the story of Britain and you do not create a neutral society — you create a moral vacuum. And history teaches us that moral vacuums are never left empty for long.

Your Majesty now stands at a crossroads that few monarchs in modern history have faced.

For the erosion of Britain’s Christian inheritance will not ultimately be judged by speeches made in Parliament or debates in the press. It will be judged by whether those entrusted with the guardianship of our ancient institutions chose to defend them — or merely preside over their quiet surrender.

You may preside over the quiet dissolution of Britain’s Christian identity. Or you may rise to the ancient responsibility entrusted to the Crown and speak with clarity about the faith that built this kingdom. The first path requires little courage. The second will require a great deal. But it is the path that history honours.

Your Majesty’s subjects are not asking for religious coercion. They are asking for leadership. They are asking that the sovereign who bears the title Defender of the Faith remember what that title means.

They are asking that the Crown hear the growing cry of anguish from Christians across this land who feel that the spiritual inheritance of their nation is being surrendered without resistance. And they are asking whether the Crown will stand with them.

For the faith that shaped Britain is not merely a cultural ornament. It is the wellspring from which our laws, our liberties, and our moral imagination have flowed. If it is cast aside, the nation will discover — too late — that it has severed itself from the very roots that sustained it.

Your Majesty, to many the Crown is a symbol of authority. But before God it is also a symbol of stewardship. And stewardship carries with it the duty to defend what has been entrusted.

May Almighty God grant Your Majesty the wisdom to discern this hour, and the courage to fulfil the sacred duty entrusted to the Crown.

Yours faithfully,

Bishop Ceirion H. Dewar FSHC
Missionary Bishop
Diocese of Providence
Confessing Anglican Church

@PhilHs10 @RevBrettMurphy @revwickland @BishopRobert1 @GBNews @TalkTV @danwootton @Jacob_Rees_Mogg @LozzaFox @BackBrexitBen @RupertLowe10 @KemiBadenoch @JohnCleese