Cath Roff MBE

Project Director: Social Care Transformation, Former Director of Adults & Health at Leeds City Council, Feminist, #Big Spurs fan. #walking #outdoors

[Nadeem Ahmed @Muqadaam]

“When is the British government going to impose sanctions on Israel for its endless violations of international law?”

Retweet if you agree with Corbyn

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Now enforce sanctions if they continue to ignore international law & continue empire building

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Pep Guardiola is much more than just an unbelievable manager.

He spoke up for the people of Palestine, Sudan and Congo while others looked away.

Pep used his platform to defend our shared humanity. That will never be forgotten. Thank you, Pep.

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

Imagine if a candidate of any other party was found to have deleted an account with so many disgustingly offensive posts. I suspect we will hear very little of this as the Double Standards Squad continue to ply their trade to the benefit of the 5 million pound man

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

This week, the ICC requested an arrest warrant against Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

In response, he ordered the forcible evacuation and demolition of Khan al-Ahmar in the occupied West Bank.

This is ethnic cleansing. When will our government end its complicity?

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

If the subject of the £5m donation scandal was a member of the Cabinet, a senior SNP, Plaid or Green politician, he or she would be getting doorstepped an monstered everywhere they went. The double standards are sickening

[Pedro Sánchez @sanchezcastejon]

Hay una pandemia que nadie quiere frenar: la del egoísmo. Y esa, también se contagia.

El mayor riesgo para la salud global ya no es la falta de ciencia, sino la falta de conciencia. Por eso, cuando otros recortan, España duplica su ayuda.

Porque ninguna sociedad merece llamarse civilizada si abandona a los suyos. Cuidar de quien no puede cuidarse no es caridad. Es lo que nos hace humanos.

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Congratulations to Mayor Mamdani. He inherited a huge budget deficit, brought it down to zero, and still invested in childcare, housing and city infrastructure.

When municipal governments stand with working families, not billionaires, there is nothing they cannot accomplish.

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding.

If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life.

That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.

Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival.
But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible?

Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there?

The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them.

Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact.

Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source.

This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes.

This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself.

I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state.

The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends.

The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act.

Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity.

Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them.

The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety.

That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

A lesson on social democracy that is not from a lying billionaire.

[Palestine Solidarity Campaign @PSCupdates]

Everyone to London. Let's march. 🇵🇸

Nakba 78
For Palestine
Against the far right

Saturday 16 May, midday, Exhibition Rd, SW7 2DB

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel has wiped out 39 villages in South Lebanon and destroyed 40,000 homes.

39 centuries-old historic villages entirely erased from the map. In just 60 days.

This is ethnic cleansing.

This is terrorism.

And not a peep from the complicit “international community”, of course.

[Naila Ayad🇵🇸 @Naila_Ayad]

They are killed for telling the truth about Palestine.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Natasha Devon, "I hear this accusation all the time, that anti racism groups don't do enough to include Jewish people"

"I just want to try and pour some clarity on that if I can"

"When the appalling stabbing happened, Keir Starmer called a COBR meeting. He brought together some leading thinkers to ask what more could be done to tackle antisemitism. The Met police called for more funding to protect Jewish communities. The media gave it pretty much its undiverted attention for days"

"That is the correct response"

"That response did not happen when a Muslim woman was targeted by a hit and run"

"When a Sikh woman was sexually assaulted by a racist who thought she was Muslim"

"Or when 50 mosques were targeted between Juen and October 2025"

"We don't see the same response"

"Antiracism campaigners are looking at where they are needed"

"When these appalling attacks happen to the Jewish communities we have the correct response"

"When it happens to other communities: women, LGBT, black people, Muslims, not the same urgency is applied"

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

And not a word on the front pages, and pretty much a news blackout on the broadcast media. We are getting into Reverse Pravda mode when it comes to the wrongdoing of @reformparty_uk … anyone would think the media was biased to the right !!!

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Israel’s murder of journalists continues. The details of what happened to Amal Khalil are horrific. The Red Cross tried to rescue her but were themselves fired on.

How is Israel allowed such total impunity? Why is the international press not in uproar?

[Amnesty UK @AmnestyUK]

This is a moment of extreme danger for civilians in Iran and the wider region.

For President Trump to threaten that 'a whole civilisation will die tonight' echoes genocidal language.

The UK government must urgently end military support to the US that could enable crimes under international law, including war crimes.

Amnesty International is unequivocal: threatening to systematically destroy civilian infrastructure is a threat to commit war crimes.

Attacking power plants essential to the survival of tens of millions of civilians would be unlawful.

The UK must act now.

Read on: https://t.co/eksGRKBiYi

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Meryl Streep: “The SAVE America Act, if that passes, all the married women that have changed their names are going have to go to the registrar and prove that they are who they are. Otherwise, when you get to the voting booth in November, you might be disqualified because your name on your birth certificate doesn't match the name on the voting rolls. This is such a pain in the neck, but do it because otherwise you’ll be turned away and I think women need to be heard”

[Palestine Solidarity Campaign @PSCupdates]

Hundreds on the streets of London now to protest Israel passing a racist, illegal law imposing the death penalty exclusively for Palestinian prisoners 🇵🇸

Our government must take concrete action to oppose this discriminatory law and impose sanctions, including a full arms embargo, on Israel.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

The most important Oscar speech tonight wasn’t about film.

The director of “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” just said this from the stage:

“You lose your country through countless small acts of complicity. When we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets. When oligarchs take over the media and control how we produce and consume it. We all face a moral choice. But even a nobody is more powerful than you think.”

He was talking about Russia.

The audience knew he was talking about America too.
Elon Musk owns the platform you’re reading this on.

David Ellison is buying CNN — Pete Hegseth said it will be “far better” when he does.

The DOGE deposition videos were removed from YouTube.

The Epstein files are sealed.
The Pentagon won’t release a casualty count.
Countless small acts of complicity.

That’s how you lose it.
A nobody is more powerful than you think.

Never stop connecting the dots.