Mike Hayes

A life in urban planning, regeneration & development. Christian. Anglican. Architecture and arts follower. Evertonian. Personal tweets only. RNE.

[🇬🇧King 🇬🇧 @King0243_PJC]

🚨 SHOCKING — These are the exact same Reform activists who flood X every day screaming, lecturing, and telling everyone how Britain should be run…

Yet 24 hours after getting elected in Kirklees, they stand up in full council and admit:

“I don’t understand the Constitution…
I don’t understand standing orders…
I don’t understand what an amendment is.”

Then they whine it’s “not democratic” they might vote on things they don’t understand

This is the terrifying danger of populist rage politics: loud online warriors with ZERO clue how to actually govern.

Handing real power to people who don’t even know where to start is how countries collapse.
Watch this embarrassment 👇👇👇👇CC: @LesTrumpeter

[Paul Mason @paulmasonnews]

Oof. Life comes at you fast when you're the Reform group leader of Kirklees council

[Jamie Kay @TheRealJamieKay]

London 👏👏👏

[Mike Hayes @hayestweets]

@bikesontnt - sort out the sound on the Giro broadcast in the UK. Somewhere a microphone is open that should be closed!

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

This is the best piece on Starmer you will read today, perhaps this year

[Mike Hayes @hayestweets]

@mackin_john @keithjones84 Us too - on Ribble bus from Knowsley Road, Bootle.

[Cherry @Cherryopenmind]

I have read both letters, carefully and several times. As someone who loves this country and who is fighting to build something of my own here, I cannot help but notice the massive difference in character between these two men who, until yesterday, were leading our nation.

I am not writing this as a political analyst, but as a voter and a citizen who values people with character.

Wes's letter is full of 'I'.
I cut the waiting lists, I recruited the staff, I was successful.
Then, in the same breath, he attacks the team he was part of. If the situation was truly that bad, why did he not stay to fix it? Why did he not have the courage to stand for election and say: 'I have a better vision, elect me'?
Instead, he chose to walk away at the very moment we need stability most, feeding the media the drama they love so much. That is not protecting the party. It is protecting his own career.

On the other hand, Starmer’s response reminded me why I trusted him. He did not stoop to insults. He did not defend himself. He simply reminded Wes that those successes in the NHS were a collective effort.

Starmer showed what I admire most in the British, decency. Dignity. He remained the adult in the room, focused on us, the citizens, while Wes remained focused on his next job title.

Politics should be about us, about the people who pay their taxes and hope for a better future, not about who can best 'twist the knife' in a resignation letter.

Wes has shown his true face, and Starmer has shown that the stability of the country matters more than his personal ego.

That is what gives me hope that we will not allow chaos and populists to take the helm.

[Damian Low @DamianLow3]

Canada is beginning to show what modern centre-left governing may need to look like. Labour should notice.

1. Both countries inherited electorates exhausted by instability, cost-of-living pressure and declining trust. But the political responses are beginning to become very different.

2. Carney understands that competence alone is not enough. Stability reassures markets, but electorates also need to see visible change and a sense that government is materially improving national conditions.

3. That is why Canada is now pairing fiscal discipline with larger structural interventions on housing, industrial policy, infrastructure and economic resilience.

4. These policies are not being framed as technocratic adjustments. They are being presented as part of a broader national renewal agenda, the big narrative. Rebuilding capacity, increasing resilience and strengthening the middle class.

5. Labour risks falling into a different trap. After the chaos of the Conservative years, much of its political offer has understandably centred on stability, seriousness and restoring institutional competence.

6. But stability on its own has a shelf life politically. If voters do not feel tangible improvements in housing affordability, living standards, infrastructure and public services, competence can quickly start to feel like nothing is changing.

6. Canada’s experience matters because it shows the limits of managerial politics in an age of populism. Voters increasingly expect governments not just to manage systems better, but to reshape them visibly.

7. Carney also seems more willing to articulate trade-offs openly on economic sovereignty, supply chains and state intervention. That creates a clearer sense of direction, even where policies are contested.

8. Labour’s challenge is that caution may preserve market credibility while simultaneously creating political vulnerability. Anti-system parties thrive when mainstream governments appear careful but incapable of delivering transformational change.
This is the central dilemma for modern centre-left governments. Markets punish recklessness. Electorates punish drift.

That's the Canada lesson. After years of crisis politics, voters do want stability. But they also want to feel the country is moving somewhere.

[Will Hutton @williamnhutton]

This is a brilliant investigative piece on Farage, the dark millions behind him and the double standards of so much British journalism. Read and retweet! Nigel Farage pocketing £5m from a donor shows he’s unfit for power https://t.co/zHuVfDV8dh

[Sorcha Eastwood MP @SorchaEastwood]

I nearly don't want to say his name as he thrives on attention, violence, infamy and bullying. Way before 2016 my friends (all non-political) said Trump would win the Presidency. I was like, wtf why would you think that? They said because he was the guy off the Apprentice. He hired & fired. They didn't personally like him, but they saw how others thought that he got stuff done 1/

[Mike Hayes @hayestweets]

@_luke1878_ Agreed - amazing, wonderful, innovative building filled with great art and the light filtering through the multi-coloured lantern is stunning.

[Lou D🌹 🇬🇧 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇺🇦 @louderry]

British media have have normalised the bigotry and division of the far right for months. Today half a million good people turned out in London to stand against it.

Proud to be British today.

https://t.co/Pj2C5rE6gI

[Michael Lambert @GrandCamouflage]

This morning @CommonsEd chaired by @helenhayes_ have published their report on historic forced adoption. Their main conclusion and recommendation, among others, is for an “unqualified, formal apology” with the utmost urgency.
https://t.co/fzkvbvQpOI

[BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan]

trump gloating "I'm glad Mueller's dead" didn't make me forget his Pearl Harbor insult to Japan's PM.

That Pearl Harbor insult didn't make me forget his sending thousands more troops to a war of choice with Iran.

Iran War didn't make me forget the racist Obama apes video he posted.

The apes video didn't make me forget the Supreme Court slapping down his tariffs (and him calling them unpatriotic).

Tariffs didn't make me forget his divisive State of the Union lies & Dem-bashing.

SOTU didn't make me forget his push to 'nationalize' elections.

Nationalizing voting didn't make me forget threatening to seize Greenland by force.

And all of his cascading scandals, lurching from one to the next, haven't make me forget his million mentions in the Epstein files, or the fact that he might've started a freaking war trying to distract from them.

And I will NEVER forget that.

[Liverpool Vista @LiverpoolVista]

Goodnight folks. Caught the Liverpool waterfront looking like a neon dream. There is nothing quite like the waterfront when the sun goes down and the lights come on. The Three Graces looking absolutely spectacular. Is there a more iconic waterfront in the UK?

Which do you prefer: Liverpool in the daytime or Liverpool under the lights?👇

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Mike Hayes @hayestweets]

@csdriver @BBCr4today Totally agree. My reaction too. Why would anyone in public life want to subject themselves to being torn apart on the Today programme/BBC News for just doing their job to the best of their ability, in order to provide the BBC with a ‘gotcha’ moment!

[Mike Hayes @hayestweets]

@LiverpoolVista Correct on all points. My top building in the UK.

[Mike Hayes @hayestweets]

@SlapBatter @oldpicposter Me too. Went with my Dad and brother from Seaforth (we lived off Knowsley Road) to see the Lusitania on is side in the dock following a fire. Never forgotten!

[Backbench Business Committee @CommonsBBCom]

In Westminster Hall, MPs are holding a debate on World Book Day, put forward by @helenhayes_

📚Read the Commons Library debate pack: https://t.co/8fftdQaBwG

📺Watch on Parliament live: https://t.co/aaJfrfwS2r