Jan Hamilton💚🤍💜

Independence for Scotland, SCND. No DMs.

[Ron Wilson 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇺🇦 @TartanSeer]

Scottish Oil, Gas and Electricity has - and is - keeping the English/Brit State afloat. Subservience means our democratic votes are ignored, traduced and laughed at. When the hell is @JohnSwinney @theSNP going to take the initiative and take 'em on?

[Richard Burgon MP @RichardBurgon]

BREAKING: I've secured a parliamentary debate next week on banning all MPs' second jobs.

Farage has pocketed over £1 MILLION from outside "work" since the General Election

Being an MP is a full-time job. No MP should be out chasing lucrative second jobs.

Let's end this racket!

[LustraSkye @LustraSkye]

‼️SCOTLAND IS NOT FOR SALE”

Scotland is being asked to host a wave of hyperscale AI data centres, freeports, special economic zones and offshore wind infrastructure all at the same time, all under planning frameworks that were never designed for this scale, and all without an updated national energy strategy since 2017.

Communities facing these applications have no statutory right of appeal, no mandatory environmental impact assessment, and no enforceable definition of what ‘green’ actually means in planning law.

The Scottish Government is processing each application as if it exists in isolation, while the cumulative demand on Scotland’s land, water, grid and communities is anything but isolated.

This isn’t a planning problem. It’s a governance failure.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Your cruelty-free wardrobe is mostly crude oil. Here is the label, translated.

Vegan leather: polyurethane. Plastic from oil.

Vegan wool: acrylic. Plastic from oil.

Vegan fur: modacrylic. Plastic from oil.

Vegan silk: polyester. Plastic from oil.

Vegan down: polyester fill. Plastic from oil.

Plant leather: plant fibres glued with polyurethane. Mostly plastic from oil.

Every one of them sheds microplastic, outlives you in landfill, and began life in a refinery. The animal product each one replaced grew back, wore for decades, and rotted down when it was finished.

They did not hand you a kinder material. They handed you the oil industry wearing a leaf badge.

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Andy Burnham advisers back scrapping pension triple lock.

Full state pension, received by 35% of pensioners, is less than 50% of the minimum wage.

2m pensioners live in poverty. 100,000 die in fuel poverty.

Millions can't save enough for future pensions
https://t.co/yHng3w9oZs

[🇬🇧King 🇬🇧 @King0243_PJC]

Farage on #BBCBreakfast: “If Andy Burnham becomes PM we need a General Election, no mandate!”

Sally Nugent: “Do your MPs who defected from the Tories have a mandate?”

Watch the chancer’s face as his own logic gets rammed straight back down his throat. Pure gold.

This is the exact line every interviewer should use on him from now on.😂😂😂

RT if Sally Nugent deserves a medal 👇👇👇👇

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

HMRC failed to collect £59.2bn (tax gap) in taxes last year, £6.4bn increase.

Small businesses accounted for 62% of the tax gap.

£500bn+ not collected since 2010.

Offshore tax gap data not released.

Silence on taxes avoided through profit shifting.
https://t.co/tM6mupVLpK

[Jan Hamilton💚🤍💜 @JanHamilton15]

@andywightman @TheGlasgowBible Fantastic! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

400,000 UK children supported by baby banks, up 11%.

4.5m children living in poverty.

Low incomes, rising cost of energy, water, housing, essentials drive poverty.

Tories and Reform pledged to reimpose the two-child benefit cap.

What future?
https://t.co/WUL0celyNW

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Govts handing NHS to private equity (PE).

Eyecare contracts handed to PE backed firms, profit margins of 32% to 43% from NHS work.

Profiteering means less available for NHS services.

NHS capacity not expanded, permanent dependence on private providers.
https://t.co/I0XaUBp0QC

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Keir Starmer was not merely a disappointment. He is a mendacious figure of ethical decrepitude, a man who won the Labour Party leadership based on promises that he jettisoned five seconds after winning - a Labour leader who dared banish from the Labour Party not only his predecessor but also remarkable human beings like director Ken Loach - the gentleman who has taken the historic Labour Party and transformed it into a vessel for the very oligarchy it was elected to restrain.

Consider the litany of Starmer’s moral and logical failures. He promised a 'different Britain', yet his actions were a masterclass in Tory-lite politics—using the same maxed-out credit card analogies that once served the austerity brigades to justify his own failure of vision. He promised a human rights lawyer’s approach but he embraced a racist-lite version of Farage.

On Europe, Starmer promised Brexiteers that Brexit is Brexit yet stood before those who yearn to rejoin the European Union, winked at them to make them feel that Britain would gradually reconnect, even rejoin, with the EU while offering nothing of substance. This is not leadership; it is a fraud.

And then there's the manner in which Starmer and his government rushed to offer Israel unequivocal support in pursuing its genocide in Gaza, sacrificing precious political and civil liberties in the UK by imprisoning grandmothers, priests and peaceful activists who dared support Palestine Action, an organisation that Starmer and his minions proscribed as terrorists for practising the usual activist tactics of trespassing to spray paint military planes that had demonstrably aided in the genocide. To add insult to injury, Starmer performed the diplomatic pantomime of recognising a Palestinian state, in a manner that ensured it would never happen.

But above all else, this is a government that has learned nothing from the post-2008 era. Starmer and his Chancellor are playing the same tired austerity game while enabling and empowering the Finance Curse perpetrated by the City of London, throwing in forgood measure cuts in international aid to fund a military spending trickle under the guise of a "Strategic Defence Review" . It is the same old doctrine: austerity for the masses, socialism for the financiers and the arms dealers.

History will remember Mr Starmer as a man without conviction, a Prime Minister who offers not a shred of honesty, but merely the cruel illusion of change. He is ethically decrepit because he had chosen, consciously, to abandon principle for power. And for that, history will indict him. Good riddance, I say.

https://t.co/sGfebPkDXR

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Private equity has devoured UK town centres.

It controls airports, seaports, hospitals, care homes, football teams, housing, GP surgeries, vets, dentistry, pubs, restaurants, energy, water and more.

Everything financialised.

What future for the UK?
https://t.co/I0XaUBp0QC

[LustraSkye @LustraSkye]

On the planning side: Ivan McKee, who declined APRS and ERCS’s moratorium request in January, has since been promoted to a newly created Cabinet Secretary for Public Service Reform role.

Hannah Mary Goodlad now holds planning instead also new, also with nothing on record.

Two ministers now hold the two halves of the brief that matters most here economic development and planning
and neither has said a word publicly about data centres yet.

Whatever position the Scottish Government takes on Auchtertool and the wider pipeline from here is genuinely still unwritten.

[Rushi @rushicrypto]

The one question I’ve never seen an AI bro answer successfully:

If AI is so groundbreaking and brilliant, why can’t it design a way to run without giant data centers, massive amounts of electricity, and enormous quantities of water?

It can’t even solve its own resource problem.

Why do you expect it to solve ours?

[Richard Murphy @RichardJMurphy]

52 Questions for Andy Burnham, if he wants to be Prime Minister.

If Andy Burnham is serious about becoming prime minister, then there are a series of questions he needs to answer before anyone can sensibly judge whether he offers a genuine alternative to the current government, or merely a different personality pursuing much the same agenda.

The questions need to go beyond personality, competence, or electability. They need to establish what he believes, what he would do, and how he understands the challenges the UK faces.

Here are 52 questions, including one final critical one, I would like him to answer.

The economy

1. What is the fundamental purpose of the UK economy?
2. Do you believe economic policy should prioritise GDP growth, or should it prioritise wellbeing, security and sustainability?
3. Do you believe the UK government is financially constrained in the same way as a household, business or local authority?
4. Do you accept that a government issuing its own currency can always meet obligations denominated in that currency?
5. What role do you think taxation plays in the economy: revenue raising, redistribution, inflation control, market shaping, or all of these?
6. What is your view on the current fiscal rules, and would you retain, reform or abolish them?
7. Would you continue paying interest on all commercial bank reserve balances held at the Bank of England?
8. What is your view on quantitative easing and quantitative tightening?
9. What would you do to improve productivity in the UK economy?
10. How would you reduce Britain’s dependence on rent extraction, financial speculation and asset price inflation?

Wealth, tax and inequality

11. Do you believe wealth inequality is now a greater problem than income inequality?
12. What specific measures would you introduce to tax wealth more effectively?
13. Should income from wealth be taxed at least as heavily as income from work?
14. How would you tackle tax avoidance by large companies and wealthy individuals?
15. What is your view on reforming inheritance tax?
16. How would you reduce regional inequality within the UK?

Housing

17. Do you think housing should primarily be a home or an investment asset?
18. What would you do to reduce house prices relative to earnings?
19. How many social homes would you build each year?
20. How would you finance a large-scale social housing programme?
21. What would you do to reform the private rented sector?
22. Would you support land value taxation, compulsory purchase reform, or other measures to tackle land speculation?

Climate and the environment

23. Do you believe economic growth can be fully reconciled with environmental sustainability?
24. What is your strategy for achieving net zero while maintaining public support?
25. How would you fund the transition to a low-carbon economy?
26. What role should public ownership play in energy generation, transmission and distribution?
27. How would you ensure that the costs of climate transition are borne fairly?
28. What policies would you adopt to restore biodiversity, waterways and ecosystems?

Public services and the state

29. What should be the balance between public provision and private provision in healthcare?
30. Would you reverse NHS privatisation measures introduced since 2012?
31. How would you tackle the social care crisis?
32. What reforms would you make to education?
33. How would you rebuild local government after fifteen years of austerity?
34. What powers and funding would you devolve to local and regional government, and are you open to independence if Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland wish for it?

Work, income and social security

35. What is your vision for the future of work?
36. Do you support stronger trade union rights and sectoral collective bargaining?
37. What is your view on a job guarantee programme?
38. How would you address economic insecurity among younger generations?
39. What reforms would you make to Universal Credit and social security more generally?

Debt, money and finance

40. Do you believe the national debt is a major problem facing the UK? Please explain your logic.
41. What do you understand government debt to be? Should government debt always be reduced, or can it sometimes be increased for good economic reasons?
42. How do you distinguish between productive public investment and current spending?
43. What role should government borrowing play in funding infrastructure, housing and climate transition?
44. Should the Bank of England’s mandate be reformed? Should it pay interest on central bank reserve accounts?
45. What reforms would you make to the banking system?

Britain and the world

46. What should Britain’s economic relationship with Europe be?
47. What industrial strategy would you pursue?
48. How would you respond to increasing geopolitical instability and trade fragmentation?
49. How do we resolve conflicts in the Middle East? What is the UK’s role in that?
50. What role should Britain play in tackling global inequality and climate change? 51. What is the future of our relationship with the USA and NATO? What are the defence consequences of that?

The biggest question

And perhaps the most important question of all:

52. What is your theory of society?

That question matters because every successful political project ultimately rests on an answer to that question:

- Neoliberalism begins with the individual.
- Conservatism begins with institutions.
- Reform begins with belonging and identity.
- The Greens begin with nature and climate.
- Labour traditionally began with solidarity, but that no longer seems to be the case.

Before Andy Burnham can ask people to support him, he needs to tell them where he begins and what his priorities are, because every policy choice that follows depends upon his answer to that question. Isn't that the least we should expect?

[C Roberts(tweets from a colonised Scotland) @CRobertsonUK]

The British Govt - digital id resoundingly rejected, voted against by MPs on the public pushback.

Same British Govt - lets reframe it as protecting the weans online, everyone has to have a digital id, no vote in parliament, job done.

USA companies - air punch.

[LustraSkye @LustraSkye]

AND THERE’S A PRICE TAG ON STEERING THEM HERE

Priority grid access through AI Growth Zones requires available power, so DSIT is offering targeted energy pricing discounts specifically to steer operators toward places like Scotland where capacity exists.

Scotland’s renewable surplus is being treated as a subsidy mechanism for an industry that isn’t based here.

4/

[LustraSkye @LustraSkye]

@Ross_Greer @DavidHTorrance
@APRScotland

More than 80% of the UK’s data centre capacity sits in and around London, and West London is now reaching saturation point on land and grid capacity.

DSIT’s own AI Growth Zones policy document says Scotland’s wind power “often exceeds transmission capacity” meaning, in the UK government’s own framing, locating data centres here lets operators tap that surplus and lower the UK’s overall electricity costs.

Priority grid access requires available power, so DSIT is offering targeted energy discounts to steer operators toward places like Scotland.

This month OpenAI put its planned UK “Stargate” server farm on hold, citing energy costs and the regulatory environment in a country with electricity prices already roughly four times those in the US.

‼️Scotland’s data centre pipeline isn’t organic growth.

It’s the stated consequence of London’s saturation and a UK policy designed to redirect that pressure north in the government’s own words.

Source: https://t.co/kuNHRqFIt6