Lee-Ann 🇺🇦 #istandwithukraine

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[Lee-Ann 🇺🇦 #istandwithukraine @EcoLeeAnn]

I've not used X for a while now. I miss my connections and supporting others. Many reasons why but media independence is important to me. I want #twitter back but will that ever happen? I'm over on @bluesky now if anyone wants to catch up with me on there- [email protected]

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Oh yes, did I mention that @thameswater want to pay their shareholders £2,000,000,000 over the next few years?

What, nobody told you? 🤔

https://t.co/ZyPVsOTmIe

[MattStaniek @MattStaniek]

The 24th week of the Strike Against Sewage is about to begin. We will be here for 24-hours from 10am until 10am tomorrow morning – demanding an end to sh*t in Windermere.

Please join us at any point over the next 24-hours. Our special guest Steve Coogan will be here at 1pm this afternoon, so come down to UU’s Disinformation Centre to say hello.

Plus, if you’re in the Lake District today, keep your eyes peeled for our Save Windermere van which will be driving around all day, making sure everyone knows the dirty truth about United Utilities operations in this National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Snap a pic and tag us on socials for the chance to win a Save Windermere tee.

To be the first to know about our future events, sign up at

https://t.co/Z8svuQkFOO

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Alan Bates is considering Privately Prosecuting the Bosses of the Post Office for Corporate Manslaughter.

RT If you support him, it is the only way there will be justice.

[Mark Seddon @MarkSeddon1962]

How the hell did we 'become involved in this conflict'? Why hasn't Parliament been consulted? And why are we supporting a country being accused of genocide? Netanyahu has long wanted to drag the US into war with Iran. But why us too? https://t.co/BGnXzUn2Rq

[Dr Paul Dorfman @dorfman_p]

The market has fled nuclear - which can only be built with vast public subsidy.

#nuclear #climate #climatefinance
https://t.co/P0xp1kz3me

[Caroline Lucas @CarolineLucas]

Over 600 UK legal experts have now written to remind the UK Government of its obligations under international law to act to prevent genocide. Merely demanding explanations from Israel doesn't cut it. Weapons sales must stop now. https://t.co/rjRAtW1J0A

[Greenpeace UK @GreenpeaceUK]

🚨BREAKING: Shell who made over £20 BILLION in profit last year is expecting the TAXPAYER to fork out HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of pounds to dismantle some of its dirtiest oil rigs in the North Sea.

Why on earth should ordinary people be made to foot the bill for SHELL's toxic waste?

[Jonathan Pie @JonathanPieNews]

You have until 16th April to register to vote in time for the Local elections on May 2nd.
Do it NOW!!!

https://t.co/SnsVyQ6RqP

[Armando Iannucci @Aiannucci]

I hope this expensive and restrictive legislation is looked at again, but meantime, if you don’t have the right ID, here’s the link to get what you need to vote in May and at the General Election. https://t.co/byZgSMaNLa

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"As South West Water defends a court action from a Devon swimmer, it also claims it has no legal duty to keep waters clean."

Yep you read that right. @SouthWestWater claim they have no obligation whatsoever to keep the sea clean. You swim in their sh*t it's your fault.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

The US can see exactly what is wrong with the UK.

Why can't we?

[Greenpeace UK @GreenpeaceUK]

🚨BREAKING: The UK has REJECTED new EU rules which would FORCE cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies to PAY for their river pollution.

Why is the UK government allowing polluters to get away SCOT-FREE?

[Lee-Ann 🇺🇦 #istandwithukraine @EcoLeeAnn]

All the gruesome details you ever needed to know about SEZs and Freeports - oh and buy @europeanpowell a coffee,he deserves it! https://t.co/s0eC5JpcnR

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

People asking me for my notes from the Inverness Public Meeting today, I probably said a few extra things, but in any case, here they are👇🏻
Inverness notes on SEZs and Freeports March 2024
Zone fever has arrived in the UK
What are Freeports and SEZs (Special Economic Zones)?
Regular ports deal mostly in freight transshipment. Freight comes into a port area, is stored then processed, before being re-exported.
UK Freeports are privately owned tax havens whereas EU ports are publicly owned.

A Special Economic Zone is a designated region that can house a Freeport, airport, towns, entire cities, and rural areas under a ‘privately governed authority’.
So, think of an SEZ as a room within a room, a state within a state, or even a party within a party.
The UK post-Brexit is now like a Russian doll.
That’s what Special Economic Zones are.

The government claims that UK Freeports and SEZs are zones of prosperity, creating 1000s and 1000s of jobs, are green and environmentally friendly, but that is just to make them sound palatable to the public. They are in fact none of those things.

Take for example the claim that Freeports are facilitating offshore energy schemes. Those schemes were never dependent on Freeport status, they already existed anyway. Similar energy schemes are going on in ports in the EU that don’t require Freeport status.

Private vs Public.
Scottish Ports were privatised in the 1990s by Thatcher but had to comply with EU laws and regulations.
Fast forward to today, where Brexit Britain has turbocharged deregulation.
UK Freeports are run by a stand-alone corporations with a future scope and incentive to expand into the surrounding SEZ territory.

What is the ideology behind Freeports and SEZs?
The current ideology embraced by Sunak, Truss, Mogg, Badenoch hails from the US and fuses libertarianism with anarcho-capitalism, their goal is to abolish the centralised state and replace it with countless small states all totally privatised. This has its roots in empire-building and British colonialism. The East India Company in 1600, Hong Kong and Singapore in the mid-1800s, the Brits installed dozens of Freeports in those regions, bringing their own laws, and courts with them, this was known as ‘China’s century of humiliation’. In the 80s Thatcher’s aim was to turn the UK into 1 big tax haven and SEZ, but she came up against the EU.
The current Tories have taken that baton of ‘exit’ from Thatcher and several prominent economists and progressive right-wing radicals like Ayn(‘Ine’) Rand, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Antony Fisher. Freeports, SEZs and charter cities have long been the ideal templates to isolate away or ‘exit’ from Big Govt by establishing areas of a country as zones of exception to the host country.
Rishi Sunak studied at Stanford University, his mentor was Prof. Paul Romer who lectured on a return to colonialism via SEZs and charter cities.

What differentiates UK Freeports and SEZs from those in the EU?
UK Freeports and SEZs are being optimized for the deregulated private sector whereas Freeports and SEZs in the EU are publicly owned and strictly regulated to prevent corporations making astronomical profits, extracting resources, and not contributing anything back to local communities.
In Jan 2024 a UK Govt report on REUL(Retained EU Law) was published it stated ‘EU ports are publicly owned and are therefore unsuitable for the UK economy. The report stated that +600 pieces of EU/UK law were revoked across 3 main areas, employment, food safety, and the environment, thousands more are for the chop by 2026. The report went on to say that EU ports were publicly owned and incompatible with the UK economy. Sunak’s Freeports will be tax havens, Jeremy Hunt has declared Freeports and SEZs as tax-exempt for 10 years.

What do Freeports and SEZs have to do with Brexit?
SEZs and Freeports are all about ‘exit strategies’ .
Britain + Exit = Brexit.
Sunak’s 12 Freeports and 74 SEZs are currently carving out extraterritorial spaces the length and breadth of the UK. This is to perforate holes in the fabric of the nation, to lay waste to councils and public services, the more holes you cut out the more the zones will overlap and eventually privatise the UK. Thatcher tried out SEZs in the 1980s, the reason they failed is because the UK was in the EU and had to abide by EU regulations on State Aid. By reducing Big Govt you reconfigure its powers by reallocating them to privately run smaller states, this is known as ‘accumulation through dispossession’. Libertarian exit implements decision-making such as (zoning, exit, land grabbing, taxation, and as Mogg said ‘restructuring sovereignty and the state). Mogg’s father’s book The Sovereign Individual is all about thriving from the engineered collapse of the Welfare State. The dangers that come with deregulated Freeports are money laundering, private banking, stolen art, human trafficking, drugs and arms trade, tax evasion, and onshoring wealth. Today the most lucrative line of business is between corporations and Govt’s, many r/w think tanks have successfully stripped our politicians of any semblance of public representation.

Why are there so many Freeports and SEZs being set up across England, Scotland, and Wales?
In Scotland, there are currently 2 Freeports and 18 SEZs.
So we have The Inverness and Cromarty Firth Green Freeport, and the Firth of Forth Green Freeport, both are not yet operational. These are not just ports, they are SEZs, that are both 45km in diameter, and cover vast areas of towns, cities, and land.
Creative Clyde - Glasgow – creative industries
Prestwick - South Ayrshire – aerospace
West Lothian - Broxburn – food and drink manufacturing
West Lothian - Eliburn - Livingston – food and drink manufacturing
Dundee Port - Dundee
Dundee Claverhouse - Dundee
Leith Port - Edinburgh
Nigg - Highland
Hatston - Orkney
Scrabster - Highland
Arnish - Western Isles
Lyness - Orkney
Life Sciences Enterprise Area
Irvine - North Ayrshire
Forres Enterprise Park - Highland
BioQuarter - Edinburgh
Inverness Campus - Highland
BioCampus - Midlothian
BioCity - North Lanarkshire
The Govt wants to do away with centralized powers by handing them over to private small states run under corporate governance to further super-concentrate wealth accumulation. Big Govt is being hollowed out by both Cons and Labour to facilitate the transfer of powers to those running the zones. Tax exemption is the cherry on top within these privately protected jurisdictions.
Brexit thrives on deregulating laws that used to protect people from malign corporate interests compounded by stealth incursions into the public sector. Once companies have got their tax breaks and extracted whatever resources they can, they will pack up and move to the next available zone. Know that any clean-up bills for pollution in the SEZs will be passed on to taxpayers, just like the water companies have been doing since the UK left the EU.

Do UK Freeports and SEZs sabotage rejoining the EU?
Brexit means the UK has defaulted to WTO rules, which changes how State Aid public money in the EU is distributed. Under WTO rules State Aid can now be given to companies of the Govt’s choosing, this preferential treatment is expressly forbidden in the EU because it distorts markets creating an unlevel playing field. Each Freeport gets £25m x 12 is £300m, Teesside Freeport has received +£500m so far. Each SEZ gets £80m x 74 is £5.92bn. This is not enough money for long-term sustainability, this is subsidizing corporations for boom-and-bust, it is corporate welfare. Scores of councils are going bankrupt, this is by design, corporations in league with the duopoly will absorb all public services and ultimately privatise the UK. In 2023 Michael Gove included a section in his Levelling Up Bill on Compulsory Purchase Orders that apply to:
business owners and occupiers
agricultural owners and occupiers
residential owners and occupiers
Just wait for this to kick in when Sunak's 12 Freeports and 74 SEZs are installed. The duopoly plans to break up the nation into patchworks of corporate sovereignties, subdividing the land for corporate rule.
Scotland must become independent and undo the Westminster stranglehold. A corporate coup hatched by a cross-party alliance all sit on Freeports consortia in England, Scotland and Wales, they comprise MPs, councillors, mayors, Baronesses, and Lords (eg Lord Smith of Kelvin whose company Otter Ports is the parent company of Forth Ports and is registered in the Cayman Islands) Scottish land, and Scottish sovereignty is being turned into a commodity for venture capitalists to extract your resources without contributing anything back to communities.
Going to end with a quote from George Orwell’s 1984 “You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves”
@HunterNorrie @coletteisp @grazzar09 @SalvoFreeports @SSalyers2 @TartantuesdayI @susanchubb @blowhound

[ACHUB PENRHOS / SAVE PENRHOS NATURE RESERVE 🍃💚🍃 @PenrhosSave]

Let this be turned on its head.
I am one of the 3 admin who are fighting our local council namely Ynys Mon County Council and the developer Land & Lakes Ltd who want to destroy a nature reserve in Holyhead namely Penrhos Nature reserve/Coastal park. This is an SSSI, AONB area with red squirrels, bats and ancient woodland. It will be destroyed if this planning to make a holiday village with 500 lodges etc goes ahead. It was also thought to be gifted to the community in 1971 by RTZ Anglesey Aluminium. We have been successful in heading to a judicial review after taking it to the High Court of Justice, Cardiff. It seems that NRW and the local planning department really do not care about our forests SSSI etc. They should be protected yet they have agreed for 27 acres plus of ancient woodland to be felled. At the same time, the Welsh government is pushing farmers to plant trees on agricultural land. These would take hundreds of years to get to the benefits of Penrhos. It's just sheer madness. For more information please
Search Achub Parc Arfordirol Penrhos Caergybi/Save Penrhos Coastal Park Holyhead. @NFUWales @1GarethWynJones

Gadewch i hyn gael ei droi ar ei ben.
Dwi’n un o’r 3 gweinyddwr sy’n brwydro yn erbyn ein cyngor lleol sef Cyngor Sir Ynys Môn a’r datblygwr Land & Lakes Ltd sydd am ddinistrio gwarchodfa natur yng Nghaergybi sef Gwarchodfa Natur/Parc Arfordirol Penrhos. Mae hwn yn ardal SSSI, AONB gyda gwiwerod coch, ystlumod a choetir hynafol. Bydd yn cael ei ddinistrio os aiff y cynllun hwn i wneud pentref gwyliau gyda 500 o gabanau ac ati yn ei flaen. Credwyd hefyd ei fod yn rhodd i'r gymuned yn 1971 gan RTZ Anglesey Aluminium. Rydym wedi bod yn llwyddiannus wrth fynd i adolygiad barnwrol ar ôl mynd ag ef i’r Caerdydd. Mae'n ymddangos nad yw CNC a'r adran gynllunio leol yn poeni am ein coedwigoedd SSSI ac ati. Ar yr un pryd, mae Llywodraeth Cymru yn gwthio ffermwyr i blannu coed ar dir amaethyddol. Byddai'r rhain yn cymryd cannoedd o flynyddoedd i ddod i fuddion Penrhos. Dydi o ddim yn gwneud synnwyr. Am fwy o wybodaeth chwiliwch am
Achub Parc Arfordirol Penrhos Caergybi/Save Penrhos Coastal Park Holyhead. 📸Sharon Jones

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"Rivers are "dying in front of our eyes" as a result of sewage discharges".

If we cannot conserve the most precious rivers on the planet like the Test, Itchen and Kennet all chalk streams then what hope do you think there is for the Trent, Ouse or Seven?

https://t.co/ifAIgcNMaq

[Mike Hudema @MikeHudema]

Newly discovered docs dating back to the 1970's reveal that Shell has known about the harm caused by oil & gas for decades.These files aid the massive climate lawsuits targeting Shell: https://t.co/FzoAJw2N3f

Hold the companies causing this crisis responsible. #ActOnClimate

[watershed_investigations @WATERSHED_i]

Elsie Sunderland, Professor of Environmental Chemistry at Harvard, on how our society's 'just flush it away' approach to chemical waste is harming our health, our rivers & our oceans. New podcast 👇

https://t.co/3lOpy1NKa5

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

The US is the only developed country with entirely privatised healthcare.

It has the lowest life expectancy, the highest levels of infant and premature adult death (before 50), and its healthcare costs 3.5x as much as anyone else’s (per person).

This is what Privatisation means

[Global Player @GlobalPlayer]

“The worst thing about the ‘hustle a bit harder & you’ll make it’ is it makes it your fault.”@garyseconomics quit his dream job as Citibank's most profitable trader to campaign on the issue of wealth inequality. He joins @MrJamesOB on ‘Full Disclosure’ to talk to about obsessions with money & how it's destroying the things that matter. Listen to the episode now: https://t.co/I5VVlnRg0l