Andrew Clapham

#lufc

[Zac Goldsmith @ZacGoldsmith]

The authorities already knew a lot about the terrorist who killed and maimed Pride participants in Germany yesterday.

They knew that:
-he travelled to Lebanon to join the Islamic State in 2025.
-he was arrested and returned to Germany.
-he was held in pre-trial detention until May 2026.
-he was ordered to undergo a de-radicalisation programme.
-he was convicted in May 2026 of preparing a ‘serious act of subversive violence’, but given a suspended sentence rather than jail.
-he was known to police as a member of Islamist circles in Berlin.
-police received a recent tip-off that he had posted a photograph of himself posing with a weapon & searched his apartment.

Despite all this, he remained at liberty to attack innocent people.
Has there ever been a time in history when governments were so unwilling to protect their citizens?

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

I am having a drink this evening with a friend in a Chiswick pub. Two policemen have just come into the pub and asked me to step outside. I have stepped outside and they have threatened me because I tweeted about a councillor banning seating outside pubs in Chiswick. They admit on video (watch it!) that I did not break the law at all. They came to threaten me. To warn me off tweeting about councillors and the council. This is modern Britain. This is the police state. Please, please, please watch this video. It does involve me using very bad language, but this has got to be seen. Police coming out to threaten someone who hasn’t committed a crime. I’m fuming.

[Aaron Newbury @AJNewbury94]

I have to admit, Burnham's speech comes off as a bit naïve. To be blunt, it smacks of a man who's grown extremely used to not having much scrutiny and to being the centre of local power and attention for nearly a decade.

Him not taking questions at the end is just as telling. Burnham will effectively become Prime Minister by default: no contest inside his own party, no general election mandate for the changes he wants, and of course no scrutiny from the press.

His entire speech was, in effect, "why can't everyone be more like me" and yet it announced almost nothing. Nothing on cost, nothing on how any of it actually gets done. Just a collection of soundbites, and painfully political ones at that, with no substance behind them.

"A circuit-breaker." "Good growth in every postcode." All of it sounds lovely (let's do the good things and not the bad ones). Nobody's ever thought of that before!! But… how?

Being a Mayor is a fundamentally different job to being Prime Minister. A Mayor spends money, much of it handed to him by central government, and never has to weigh one department's misery against another's. The job he's warming himself up for is the one that has to make those trade-offs, and nothing today suggested he's reckoned with that.

He reaches, as these people always do, towards the idea of a country "lifted back up", homes built, places regenerated, industry revived, pride in place, etc etc. There are models for this. You can run massive public housing programmes, but historically they're delivered through expensive, highly centralised, government-run schemes. Singapore being the obvious example. What they are not delivered by is building a second centre of government.

What Burnham is really offering is top-down socialism with a smile. Devolution on steroids doesn't shrink the state, it bloats it. A "No.10 North" doesn't move power closer to people, it just builds more state, in a second place, at additional cost. It's more process, dressed up as a radical idea nobody's ever had before.

More and more, political speeches are just a hodge-podge of pleasant noise. We will do things, lots of things, good things. We'll make sure things you like have "social value", we'll make you proud of [insert thing to be proud of], we'll deliver [insert policy that sounds really nice].

But the problems this country faces are enormous. Law and order is eroding, and rebuilding it means serious money for police, courts and prisons. The state grows more expensive by the year while the workforce paying for it keeps shrinking. We have an energy crisis and a poverty crisis, conflicts multiplying abroad and armed forces begging for cash, and more than a million young people out of work - on top of housing nobody can afford, child poverty, and a generation that feels detached from the society around it.

You don't fix any of that with a slogan and a second postcode for the guy in charge.

Every Mayor thinks his city is the best, and Mayors, almost uniquely in British politics, are rarely questioned. Today we all saw what nearly a decade of that does to a man. And thanks to his refusal to so much as take a question, we've had no chance to hold a single one of his plans up to the light.

[Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith]

One of the major problems in the UK is middle-class leftists voting for policies that impact the working-classes, then censoring and demonising the working-classes when they dare to complain.

[Steve Davies @SteveDavies365]

🧵A way to understand the current state of UK politics.
1. As I explain in my recently published book, politics has realigned around a new fundamental issue. It is no longer economics (and class politics) but nationalism vs cosmopolitanism and identity. NB I do not welcome this.

[Andrew Clapham @claphamandrew1]

@JamesAllen27 @thecultraspod Twat.

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

Anti-mass migration tweet? 18 months in jail

Nigerian migrant r*pist? No jail

Welcome to the UK.

[Leeds United @LUFC]

👀 It happened again

[Graham Linehan @Glinner]

If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

As another man who once worked with me declares himself saddened by my beliefs on gender and sex, I thought it might be useful to compile a list for handy reference. Which of the following do you imagine makes actors and directors who aren’t involved with the HBO reboot of Harry Potter so miserable?

Is it my belief that women and girls should have their own public changing rooms and bathrooms?

That women should retain female-only rape crisis centres?

That men don’t belong in women’s sport?

That female prisoners shouldn’t be incarcerated with violent men and male sex offenders?

That women should remain a protected class in law, because they have sex-specific needs and issues?

That language should reflect reality rather than ideological jargon, especially in a medical context?

That women shouldn’t be harassed, persecuted or fired for refusing to pretend humans can change sex?

That women should not be threatened with violence and rape when they assert their rights?

That freedom of speech and belief are essential to a pluralistic democratic society?

That troubled minors, especially those who are gay, autistic and trauma-experienced, should be given mental health support instead of irreversible surgeries and drug treatments on non-existent evidence of benefit?

That gay people shouldn’t be pressured to include the opposite sex in their dating pools, nor should they be smeared as ‘genital fetishists’ when they don’t?

That cross-dressing heterosexual male fetishists aren’t actually oppressed, but having the time of their lives piggybacking off gender identity ideology?

That said ideology, and the privileged, blinkered fools pushing it because they suffer zero consequences themselves, have done more damage to the political left’s credibility than Trump and Farage could have achieved in a century?

Let me have your thoughts.

[Leeds United @LUFC]

We Are Leeds.

[Coinbase 🛡️ @coinbase]

If everything is fine, then don’t change anything at all.

But when the financial system isn’t working for so many people in the UK, it needs to be updated.

[Ricky Gervais @rickygervais]

Might host a music award next 😂

[Jean Hatchet @JeanHatchet]

You cowards @nationaltrust Condemn the deliberate crossing out of @jk_rowling name or stand with those erasing women - your choice.

Women - If you currently pay @nationaltrust pull your money out until they rectify this.

They are hosting embroidery celebrating women’s achievements - where the embroidered name of JK Rowling has been stitched over in trans colours.

[Prof. Gary Francione @garylfrancione]

Got a text from a colleague (poli. sci. prof): The exact/entire exchange:
him: WTF re: Rowling v. trans? Nutshell, pls.
me: JKR: live/look/love as u want but don't redefine wmn or take wmn's spaces/sports. Trans: JKR = bigot b/c men who ID as wmn are wmn.
him: ???
me: exactly.

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Few things are more dangerous in Britain today than a middle-class white liberal with a guilt complex and a degree.

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

Every so often I feel incensed with anger that the needs of these men have been so blatantly prioritised over the needs of women, especially when it's women who are far, far more vulnerable than them, and reading this story was one of those moments.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

In light of recent open letters from academia and the arts criticising the UK's Supreme Court ruling on sex-based rights, it's possibly worth remembering that nobody sane believes, or has ever believed, that humans can change sex, or that binary sex isn't a material fact. These letters do nothing but remind us of what we know only too well: that pretending to believe these things has become an elitist badge of virtue.

I often wonder whether the signatories of such letters have to quieten their consciences before publicly boosting a movement intent on removing women's and girls' rights, which bullies gay people who admit openly they don't want opposite sex partners, and campaigns for the continued sterilisation of vulnerable and troubled kids. Do they feel any qualms at all while chanting the foundational lie of their religion: Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men?

I have no idea. All I know for sure is that it's a complete waste of time telling a gender activist that their favourite slogan is self-contradictory nonsense, because the lie is the whole point. They're not repeating it because it's true - they know full well it's not true - but because they believe they can make it true, sort of, if they force everyone else to agree. The foundational lie functions as both catechism and crucifix: the set form of words that obviates the tedious necessity of coming up with your own explanation of why you're one of the Godly, and an exorcist's weapon which will defeat demonic facts and reason, and promote the advance of righteous pseudoscience and sophistry.

Some argue that signatories of these sorts of letters are motivated by fear: fear for their careers, of course, but also fear of their co-religionists, who include angry, narcissistic men who threaten and sometimes enact violence on non-believers; back-stabbing colleagues ever ready to report wrongthink; the online shamers and doxxers and rape threateners, and, of course, the influential zealots in the upper echelons of liberal professions (though we can quibble whether they're actually liberal at all, given the draconian authoritarianism that seems to have engulfed so many). Gender ideology could give medieval Catholicism a run for its money when it comes to punishing heretics, so isn't it common sense to keep your head down and recite your Hail Mulvaneys?

But before we start feeling too sorry for any cowed and fearful TWAWites who're TERFy on the sly, let's not forget what a high proportion of them have willingly snatched up pitchforks and torches to join the inquisitional purges. Call me lacking in proper womanly sympathy, but I find the harm they've enabled and in some cases directly championed or funded - the hounding and shaming of vulnerable women, the forced loss of livelihoods, the unregulated medical experiment on minors - tends to dry up my tears at source.

History is littered with the debris of irrational and harmful belief systems that once seemed unassailable. As Orwell said, 'Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.' Gender ideology may have embedded itself deeply into our institutions, where it's been imposed, top-down, on the supposedly unenlightened, but it is not invulnerable.

Court losses are starting to stack up. The condescension, overreach, entitlement and aggression of gender activists is eroding public support daily. Women are fighting back and winning significant victories. Sporting bodies have miraculously awoken from their slumber and remembered that males tend to be larger, stronger and faster than females. Parts of the medical establishment are questioning cutting healthy breasts off teenaged girls is really the best way to fix their mental health problems.

One seemingly harmless little white lie - Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men - uttered in most cases without any real thought at all, and a few short years later, people who think of themselves as supremely virtuous are typing 'yes, rapists' pronouns are absolutely the hill I'll die on,' rubbing shoulders with those who call for women to be hanged and decapitated for wanting all-female rape crisis centres, and furiously denying clear and mounting evidence of the greatest medical scandal in a century.

I wonder if they ever ask themselves how they got here, and I wonder whether any of them will ever feel shame.

[Ricky Gervais @rickygervais]

Hope you’re having the day you deserve.

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

Trans people have the same protections in law as other groups but men cannot opt into legal protections reserved for women however they identify, and that is how it should be. The end.