Joe

👨‍💻

[Duncan Bannatyne @DuncanBannatyne]

Last week I decided to throw my support behind @AndyBurnhamGM for leadership of the Labour Party and on to PM.
But I cannot do that now that I find out he says Transwomen. IE men. Should be allowed to use the ladies toilets. I can never support anyone that does this.
Biological Women must have single sex spaces.

[Gordon Dimmack @GordonDimmack]

UK news: HS2 could cost up to £102.7bn and may not open until 2039 (BBC)

This is Chongqing railway station rebuild in China. It cost £16.5bn and took only around 3 1/2 years to complete.

Their high speed rail (350km/hr) cost just £5.9bn and took 6 years

[Sam Altman @sama]

being a dad is the thing that has most exceeded already-high-expectations in my whole life

[Football on TNT Sports @footballontnt]

Aston Villa will play their first European final in 44 years 🔥

The Villans will meet Freiburg in the Europa League final 🤝

📺 TNT Sports and HBO Max

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

I am challenging any death penalty opponent — there are millions of them, allegedly — to step up to the plate right now and explain why this guy should not be executed. His guilt is established beyond any doubt whatsoever. His crime is utterly savage and heinous. Tell us why he doesn’t deserve to die. Go ahead.

[BBC Sport @BBCSport]

It's a dream come true to be snooker's latest world champion 🌍🏆

But what does Wu Yize want to spend his prize money on? 💰🤔

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Size does matter

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

ANDREW NEIL: In Britain we get the politicians we deserve https://t.co/BYGVXG6mA2

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

Zohran Mamdani announces NYC is in a “budget crisis” after spending his entire campaign promising free stuff

[Manchester United @ManUtd]

29.04.2008 🚀

[UF @UtdFaithfuls]

This guy won 5 UCLs with Real Madrid but still loves us like this. 😭❤️

https://t.co/o1Zw4xIbJG

[Manchester United @ManUtd]

This is what it means ❤️

[United Pride @UtdPride]

🚨🎥Casemiro reveals how his son tells him the celebration he should do whenever he scores:

🗣"Everytime I leave the house, I ask him which celebration does he wants me to do. Then he came up with the 6-7😂"

[🎥@ManUtd]

[UtdTruthful @Utdtruthful]

🚨🗣️ @FabrizioRomano on Casemiro: “34 years old. Out of contract in June. Man of the Match. 9 (!) goals, in the most difficult league in the world, playing as a defensive midfielder at Manchester United.

“Decision to leave made in January. Giving up? Start thinking about next club? Save energies? Avoid injury for World Cup?
No way. Run. Score. Help your teammate. Pure leadership.

“Fight on every ball for 90 minutes, looking like he never won any trophy before... and guess what, he's won 5 Champions League, over 20 career trophies with club and country.

“And guess what again, there's not even a trophy to win. Just leaving Man United with a Champions League spot, playin' at best level possible, be top professional always, making sure this club and al the fans will remember you as an incredible player. The monster who won everything and was still there, running on every single ball and even scoring 9 (!) goals.

“One of the giants of our generation. Case-mito.

“Carlos Henrique José Francisco Venancio Casimiro. 🐐” ❤️👏🏼

[OptaJoe @OptaJoe]

1 - Casemiro tonight made 11 tackles, won 16 duels and made 9 clearances - he is the only player in the last 20 seasons to record all of those numbers in a single Premier League match. Everywhere.

[Joe @jfuller113]

Hahahaha 😅

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Rachel Reeves is considering banning landlords from raising rent on private homes for a year due to the Iran War

[@guardian]

[Dr. Jessica Taylor @DrJessTaylor]

Can we just take a second to really take this in? How on earth has it come to this? Where a man can performatively ‘admit’ to sex with a child on an international platform but then couch it as some form of reflection or responsible accountability exercise - whilst deliberately leaning on our terrible, useless, outdated sexual offences act and age of consent?

This man was 30 years old, and at the height of his fame - when he made an active choice to have sex with a child. I would use much stronger language here but he’s deliberately leaning on our consent laws, that a 16 year old child can technically consent to sex - meaning that he could technically have ‘consensual sex’ with a school age child.

His admission and his disgusting performative ‘progressive’ ‘reflection’ that he is ‘exploitative’ makes my effin skin crawl. If this is not a predator in full swing, I do not know what is.

This man is admitting to sex with children and no one is going to do a thing about it. Absolutely atrocious. Our laws need urgently updating to ensure no adult can ever have technically consensual sex with a child. No adult should ever want that; and no child should ever be exposed to it.

End.

[Channel 4 News @Channel4News]

Black children across England and Wales are almost eight times more likely to be strip-searched by police than their white peers according to a new report by the Children's Commissioner.

Nearly half of all searches resulted in no further action.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

That's because I wasn't interested in being used to boost the viewing figures of a pair of exceptionally arrogant men whose understanding of this issue drips with classism and misogyny, @campbellclaret. If you're genuinely interested in a debate I'm at a loss to understand why you're uninterested in interviewing @ForWomenScot, who secured the Supreme Court victory and are therefore THE leading voices on this issue. But perhaps your charming daughter has adequately represented the entire Campbell family's view, by describing them as 'ugly' women, with whom she wouldn't 'want to be in a room'?

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Excellent thread, this. Something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about…

The British state is run by people who have never been fired, never missed a number, never had a client scream at them, never stayed up until 3am working on a deal, or repricing a book because Tokyo opened badly.

They have never experienced CONSEQUENCE. Ever.

THAT is the single most important fact in British public life.

The pipeline is so uniform and mediocre it scarcely needs describing:

- School
- PPE or adjacent
- Civil Service fast stream or a Think Tank research role
- Spell as local councillor to appear “grounded,”
- Then a safe seat and a red box before 40

At no point has the market ever called them a moron.

At no point has a P&L told them their idea was shit.

The feedback loop that every private sector professional takes for granted simply does not exist in their world.

This matters because policy is NOT an essay. It IS a trade. Every regulation has a cost, every tax has a behavioural response, every intervention has second and third order consequences.

In markets, if you misread convexity you get carried out. In government, you get reshuffled to a different department.

The incentive structure could not be more perfectly designed to retain the incompetent and repel the capable.

Anyone with genuine commercial talent is earning multiples of a ministerial salary by their early thirties. So the applicant pool self selects for people for whom the title is the reward because they could never command that status where performance is measured.

The think tank ecosystem makes it worse.
IPPR, the Resolution Foundation, JRF and the rest function as ideological finishing schools and revolving doors. They produce people fluent in the language of policy who have never implemented anything. They can model a distributional impact assessment in their sleep but could not run a corner shop at profit.

This is NOT intelligence. It is pattern matching within a closed system that never tests its own assumptions because everyone in it shares the same priors.

The civil service compounds it further. The fast stream rewards generalism, rotating you through departments every 18 to 24 months to develop “breadth,” which in practice means you never develop depth.

A Treasury official who helped design a tax policy in 2019 is working on transport by the time it starts distorting behaviour in 2022. Nobody owns the outcome.

The private sector has one thing the state fundamentally lacks: a kill switch.

Bad companies go bust.

Bad traders get sacked.

The state just absorbs failure, reclassifies it as “lessons learned,” and promotes the people responsible.

The compound effect of thirty years of this is a permanent class institutionally incapable of delivering growth or even understanding why the private sector they depend on for revenue keeps shrinking under their stewardship. This is what we have, right now.

You cannot fix this with better people inside the same system. The system selects against competence, insulates against feedback, and rewards survival over performance.

Every parliament is just a fresh rotation of the same profile through the same machine expressing the same surprise when nothing improves.

We need parallel institutions to be built by the guy or gal staying up til 3am repricing the book. The risk taker. The entrepreneur.

Then we gradually phase the existing sclerotic failed structures out.

That’s how we win.

Make Britain Great Again 🇬🇧 💪