John Foley

🇬🇧London 🇮🇪Kerry 🇪🇺Europe (🇷🇴son 🇫🇮wife 🇷🇸grandkids) 🎓PPE 🤔reason 🇺🇦free 😇kind 🇼 Wikipedian 🔶LibDem ⚖️barrister 🚴🏽‍♂️cyclist ♛chess 🫖tea

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

Psychology explains why nearly all intelligent people change their minds in front of others more often than the rest of us are willing to — and the reason isn't that they care less about being right, it's that they've stopped needing to look right. https://t.co/6JEo19VQtM

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Finnish libraries have evolved far beyond traditional book lending, becoming vibrant community hubs that offer a wide range of practical services.

Many public libraries across Finland now lend sewing machines, 3D printers, and other tools to the public at no cost. Helsinki’s iconic Central Library Oodi, for example, provides access to over 100,000 books alongside sewing machines, recording studios, and digital fabrication equipment.

These services are fully funded by municipalities and protected by law, ensuring everyone, regardless of income, can use them. The initiative reflects Finland’s strong values of equality and sustainability. By lending sewing machines, libraries encourage people to repair their clothes instead of throwing them away, helping to reduce waste and promote a circular economy.

This innovative model highlights how Finnish libraries are redefining themselves as modern centers of community support, creativity, and lifelong learning.

[Jack Prandelli @jackprandelli]

Norway and the UK drilled the same North Sea.

🇳🇴Norway got $2 trillion.
🇬🇧The UK got tax cuts.

Same basin,Same era.... Completely different outcomes.

Norway captured $30 per barrel in government revenue. The UK captured $11.

That gap, compounded over 50 years of production, is the entire difference.

Norway's model was simple: tax heavily (78% marginal rate), take direct equity stakes in fields via the SDFI, own part of Equinor, and put everything surplus into a fund invested abroad.

The Government Pension Fund Global now holds over $2 trillion in assets.
That's $390,000 per Norwegian citizen about 1.5% of all listed equities on earth.

The fiscal rule: only spend the 3% annual real return. Never touch the principal.

The UK started producing earlier, at lower prices, with a lower tax rate (40%) and no saving mechanism.

North Sea revenues flowed straight into the general budget.

Economists estimate the UK missed out on roughly £400 billion compared to a Norwegian style regime.

The windfall largely financed tax cuts in the 1980s rather than a fund.

Where things stand in 2026?

Norway's petroleum sector will generate $63 bn in net cash flow this year alone feeding a fund already large enough to cover 10-15% of the national budget from returns alone.

The UK is a net energy importer.
Since 2021 it has paid countries like Norway more than £100 billion for gas.

One country treated oil as a finite resource to convert into permanent financial wealth.

The other treated it as income.

image source:eia

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

@athenaeumbc I am of the final generation in which it was obligatory to pass papers in Latin and a foreign language in order to study PPE.

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

@MartynBowler @SorchaEastwood @SoggyMoggy50 Higher taxes for the rich? Nah. How about investing in HMRC and dismantling tax evasion structures.

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

What nonsense is this @O2AcademyBrix? One ticket per person does not mean one ticket per device. What about people who don't have devices?

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

@TicketmasterCS sold me two tickets for @O2AcademyBrix and afterwards say I need a separate device for each ticket. This is a change to the agreed contract between us. I don't accept this condition. You should have made this clear when you sold the tickets.

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

@TicketmasterCS My wife does not have a smart phone.

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

@TicketmasterCS I bought two tickets from you for @O2AcademyBrix which are on my phone but now get a message insisting one ticket per device. What's going on? There is no second device.

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

Philosopher Gilbert Ryle popularised two useful concepts: the "ghost in the machine" and the "category mistake". https://t.co/wi1titWp1D

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

https://t.co/WU1w6hyRAE

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

🚲 LCC's campaign Streets for Cycling is calling on local election candidates to make cycling in your borough safe everywhere and fun for everyone! 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
🧑‍💻 Email & ask your candidates to pledge to build a safe local cycle network today https://t.co/xXu1R1eoba

[Paha Kiisu 🍽️ @halbkass]

So let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about the second class russians in Estonia and Latvia. A narrative rotated in russian propaganda apparatus for decades. Let’s also look what is actually behind it. 🧵 1/

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

This one will require a stiff drink.

In the early 1990s, the government came up with a clever idea. Instead of borrowing money cheaply to build hospitals, schools, and roads, it would get the private sector to build them and then pay the private sector back over 25 to 30 years. The Private Finance Initiative. PFI.

The attraction was obvious. You got a shiny new hospital today. The bill didn't show up on the government's books. The cost was deferred into the future. Politicians got ribbon-cutting ceremonies without the awkward conversation about borrowing.

It was, in effect, the nation's credit card. Buy now, pay later. Except the interest rate was extraordinary.

The total capital value of everything built under PFI was around £50 billion. As of March 2024, there were 665 PFI contracts still running across the UK, with roughly £136 billion in remaining payments stretching out to the early 2050s. These are payments public bodies are contractually locked into. Hospitals, schools, councils, government departments. Paying for buildings that in many cases were constructed twenty or thirty years ago.

And the terms are extraordinary.

PFI contracts were structured so the private sector would not just build the facility but manage its services. Cleaning. Maintenance. Catering. Portering. These services are bundled into long-term contracts with built-in inflation increases that the public sector cannot renegotiate, cannot exit without paying massive penalties, and often cannot even fully scrutinise because of commercial confidentiality clauses.

In one case raised in Parliament, a hospital was charged £333 to change a lightbulb. That isn't an urban myth. It was cited in Hansard.

The NHS has been hit hardest.

According to parliamentary analysis, the capital cost of NHS PFI projects was around £13 billion. The total repayments are estimated at around £80 billion. And the peak of NHS PFI annual repayments isn't even here yet. It arrives in 2029. The bills are still going up.

In 2020-21, NHS trusts paid £457 million purely in interest charges on PFI contracts. Not services. Not maintenance. Interest. In the last five years, NHS trusts have handed over more than £1.8 billion in PFI interest alone. We Own It calculates that money would have covered the starting salaries of over 50,000 new doctors.

One NHS trust, Essex Partnership, has reportedly paid back 27 times what was originally borrowed. Some hospitals are spending more on PFI repayments than on medicines for patients. And remember, these repayments come out of the same NHS budget that's supposed to fund patient care, staff, and equipment.

Scotland got it just as badly. Audit Scotland reported that Scottish taxpayers will pay a cumulative £40 billion for PFI assets worth just £9 billion. North Ayrshire Council will have paid £440 million by 2038 for four schools that cost £83 million to build.

Now here's what makes this worse.

Many of these contracts are starting to expire. The buildings are being handed back to the public sector. And the NAO has warned of significant risks around the handback process, including cases where public bodies were dissatisfied with the condition of assets being returned to them. Decades of payments. And some of these buildings may come back needing significant further investment.

So what actually happened?

The government could have borrowed money at significantly lower rates to build these hospitals and schools itself. Sovereign borrowing has always been cheaper than private finance. Instead, it paid the private sector to borrow at a premium and passed the inflated cost on to the taxpayer. The private sector took the profit. The taxpayer took the risk. The buildings are now ageing. The debts are still being paid. And the services that were supposed to benefit are being squeezed partly because so much of their budget is locked into contractual obligations they cannot escape.

PFI wasn't investment. It was an accounting trick. A way for governments to build things without the borrowing showing up in the national debt figures. It made politicians look fiscally responsible while loading future generations with obligations they had no say in and no ability to renegotiate.

Both parties did this. The Conservatives created PFI in 1992. Labour massively expanded it after 1997. More than 700 projects were signed. The coalition eventually wound it down. The current government scrapped the latest version. But the contracts remain. The payments continue. And the damage is already done.

This is what it looks like when a country chooses to buy its infrastructure on hire purchase instead of investing properly. You lock in above-market rates for decades. You lose control of the assets. You tie the hands of future governments. And when the bill keeps coming due, you're told there's no money for doctors, teachers, or social care.

There was always money. It just went somewhere else.

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

I just donated to this important cause! Together, we can make a difference. Will you join me? https://t.co/HiKmjBTLFg

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Dear MAGA America. Dear Orbán Hungary.

I have been thinking about this for a while now, and I have come to the conclusion that something has gone genuinely, historically, almost impressively wrong.

America produced jazz, the national park system, the Marshall Plan, and the men who froze at the Bulge and bled on Omaha Beach. Those men built an alliance on a simple idea. That free nations stick together and that autocrats are best confronted early rather than photographed with enthusiastically.

And then one family drove the whole thing into a wall at speed and walked away from the wreckage whistling.

Look around. Look carefully at what is actually happening.

There is a man in Washington building triumphal arches and gold statues of himself while announcing, in his own words, that he intends to take Canada, Greenland, Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, and the oil of Iran. He said these things out loud, repeatedly. There is a man in Moscow rewriting borders by force. And there is a man in Budapest facilitating both of them from inside the Western alliance, with Donald Trump Jr. flying in to offer his personal congratulations.

The last time the world looked like this it was 1938. The truly unsettling thing about 1938 was not that it felt alarming. It felt like politics. Strongmen being strongmen, reasonable people making accommodations, everyone hoping it would sort itself out.
It did not sort itself out.

Germany has been replaced by the United States. The man with the triumphal arches is in Washington now, on a crusade for oil and territory, pulling the energy of the Middle East into the kind of confrontation that has a very poor historical record of ending tidily. And the checks and balances that were supposed to prevent all of this turned out, at the crucial moment, to be a paper tiger that looked at its shoes.

Every Canadian, every European, every person who has stood in a Normandy cemetery knows exactly what this feels like. We are all in the same boat. And the boat is taking on water.

Now, Hungary. The real one.
Budapest is one of those cities where civilisation genuinely tried and largely succeeded. Hungary is European in every meaningful sense, geographically, historically, culturally, always pointing in one direction. West. It rose up against Soviet tanks in 1956 with magnificent stubbornness because the alternative was simply unacceptable.

And yet Orbán Hungary is walking it back toward a 1956 moment. Dismantling courts, silencing press, rerouting the country away from the West and toward Moscow. Methodically. Quietly. Legally. Orbán Hungary is not a country. It is a project, lucrative for those running it and considerably less so for everyone else.
Hungary belongs in the West. In 2026. Not in Orbán Hungary’s 1938.
There is a choice coming. The rest of us will be watching with considerable affection for the real Hungary, which managed it once before under considerably worse conditions.
I have every confidence it can manage it again.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Stay connected,
Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

[Very Brexit Problems @VeryBrexitProbs]

MAGA calls Europe freeloaders. Here’s what they’re not telling you.

​1. Ramstein Air Base, the most important US military hub outside America, is built on German land provided rent-free, with Germany contributing hundreds of millions to its upkeep. The US couldn’t replace it anywhere in the world.

2. Every US military operation in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia flows through Ramstein. Lose it and US power projection in the Eastern Hemisphere is crippled.

3. The UK provides and maintains RAF Lakenheath used almost entirely by the US Air Force. Italy provides Aviano. Greece provides Souda Bay. Turkey provides Incirlik. European land. European infrastructure. American operations.

4. The US Sixth Fleet depends entirely on European ports for fuel and supplies. Souda Bay, Naples, 11 Greek ports. Without them the Sixth Fleet cannot operate in the Mediterranean or project power into the Middle East.

5. The majority of NATO’s intelligence and surveillance capacity is hosted on European soil and fed directly to the CIA, NSA and Pentagon.

6. Early warning radar at Fylingdales, UK. Missile tracking in Greenland. Norwegian monitoring stations near Russia. All dependent on European goodwill.

7. It would cost America MORE to bring the troops home than keep them here. European hosts subsidise roughly a third of all basing costs.

8. Europe is America’s largest arms customer. Stop buying American and part of their defence industry goes bankrupt.

9. The bases aren’t charity. They’re America using European soil, European money and European goodwill to project power across the world.

10. We’re not the freeloaders.

[John Foley @FoleyJohnP]

I got tickets! The Big Push - O2 Academy Brixton - Fri · 8 May 2026 · 07:00 pm - Who's in?
https://t.co/Azb3diETJs

[Joan Larroumec @larroumecj]

In case anybody missed it, France is actively preparing for a post Pax Americana world.

In the last 6 months:
∙ Aircraft carrier “France Libre”: 80,000-ton nuclear carrier, largest warship ever built in Europe announced, €10-12 billion
∙ Nuclear arsenal expansion: first warhead increase in 30+ years, stockpile size now classified, forward-basing on allied territory authorized
∙ European nuclear umbrella: “forward deterrence” doctrine with 8 partners (Germany, UK, Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Denmark)
∙ UK-France nuclear pact: joint strategy consultations, joint submarine patrols, joint R&D since July 2025
∙ 140 Rafale sold to India: 26 Rafale Marine ($7.5B, April 2025) + 114 Rafale for air force ($39B, cleared January 2026), largest Indian arms deal ever
∙ World’s 2nd largest arms exporter: 9.8% global share (SIPRI, March 2026), up 21%, replacing Russia
∙ Gold repatriation: 129 tonnes sold at the NY Fed, repurchased in Paris, entire 2,437-tonne reserve now in France, €12.8B profit
∙ €36B defense spending increase: budget to reach €64B by 2027, two years ahead of schedule
∙ Strait of Hormuz: leading EU escort mission, 19 of 23 major warships deployed to Mediterranean/Gulf. On April 3, a French-owned CMA CGM vessel became the first Western European ship to transit the strait since Iran closed it
∙ New SSBN “L’Invincible”: next-generation nuclear ballistic missile submarine announced
∙ JEWEL program: sovereign European space-based missile early warning system
∙ ELSA initiative: Franco-British-German long-range conventional strike missile program
∙ SAMP/T NG air defense: next-gen surface-to-air system, Denmark and Ukraine already buyers
∙ 14 EPR2 nuclear reactors planned: largest nuclear construction program in Western Europe
∙ Africa strategy reset: new Africa-France Summit in Nairobi, post-withdrawal from Sahel
∙ 2025 National Strategic Review: new strategic objective on scientific and technological sovereignty (AI, quantum, nuclear propulsion)

Ready to lead Europe into a path of independence.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Vive la France, vive l’Europe

[Ruud Hendriks @RPJ_Hendriks]

@Microinteracti1 @KurtSchlichter �� ‘The Illusion of American Omnipotence’ (D.W. Brogan, 1952): “America’s unshakable faith in its ability to shape the world to its liking, indifferent to what others might want and supremely confident that its plan is the right one.”
https://t.co/1Z0rrdhI9q