TheWhollyMadeOfCant

In the beginning was the word then a narcissist blubbed so it became
hate speech. Reposts may/may not indicate agreement. Some are just
funny, others a warning.

[Andrew Montford @aDissentient]

Letter in the Times...

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Sixteen Year Olds Get the Vote. They Do Not Get X.

Today Keir Starmer announced a ban on under-16s using ten social media platforms. TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch and Kick. Bluesky is not on the list. Neither is Discord.

This matters because of what we know about both platforms, and because of what Australia did about one of them. Bluesky has publicly acknowledged a "predictable uptick" in child sexual abuse material as its user base grew, serious enough that it partnered with the Internet Watch Foundation to deal with it. Discord was the subject of an NBC News investigation that found hundreds of active servers being used to groom and exploit children, a finding its own chief executive called "horrifying." The Australian government, the model Britain says it is following, agreed with that assessment of Bluesky. It was added to the restricted list there in November 2025, with the same minimum age of 16 that applies to the rest of the ban. The UK's preliminary list does not include it.

This is not a case of Britain simply replicating that approach. The policy has been described as "Australian-style" and "Australia-plus," going further on curfews and chatbot restrictions than the original. On the one platform with a documented child safety problem that the original restricted, Britain has chosen to diverge. That is not an oversight in a policy carefully benchmarked against another country's model. It is a choice.

X, meanwhile, made the list. The government itself uses X. So do the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats and Your Party. None of them are leaving the platform, yet figures from all four have called for tighter restrictions on it or for it to be banned outright. What changed is not who uses the platform but what gets said there and who says it. Footage of the Belfast stabbing first spread on X to millions of people within an hour of it happening. The government's record on immigration, asylum and policing is challenged there daily, by people it cannot easily silence. Bluesky, by contrast, has become known as a space where that kind of challenge is rare. The platforms are not being separated by risk to children. They are being separated by how comfortable the political class is with what gets said on each.

A government can claim this is coincidence once. The pattern across this entire policy says otherwise. Yesterday it emerged the announcement had been brought forward by weeks. Ian Russell, Molly Russell's own father, could identify no reason for that beyond the Makerfield by-election. Today it emerges the platform list does not track the evidence of harm, even when that evidence comes from the government's own template. Reem Ibrahim of the Reason Foundation has already asked the obvious question. Is this overt political censorship. Sources tell the Guardian the government may face judicial review over precisely this inconsistency.

Then there is the contradiction nobody in government has addressed. Starmer has discussed extending the vote to sixteen and seventeen year olds, on the basis that they are mature enough to weigh arguments and choose a government. The logic of this ban is that the same sixteen year olds cannot be trusted to read X without the state intervening on their behalf. A government that believes both of these things at once does not have a coherent theory of childhood. It has a theory of which platforms it would prefer young voters not to encounter before an election.

The timing was political. The platform list, sparing on its own template's terms the platform that most deserved scrutiny, is harder still to explain. This was never only about Molly Russell and child safety. It is about who gets to talk to whom, and when, in the run-up to an election this government is increasingly afraid of losing.

"Bluesky has publicly acknowledged a "predictable uptick" in child sexual abuse material as its user base grew"

[Simon Forrest @SimonForrest11]

People say we must change our national anthem - it's a dirge, negative or anti-english. Be suspicious of them. It's one of the great national anthems. They hate it because it is common - a 60s folk song, of the people, about our people, for our people. It is ours. It is us. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿💙

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Rubina Aminian was twenty-three years old. She was a student. She went to college, tried on jewellery, laughed into her phone, and believed her life was still ahead of her. On Thursday she joined a protest in Tehran after class. By the weekend she was dead, shot at close range in the back of the head and buried beside a roadside like discarded evidence. Shot in the back of the head is not crowd control. It is not panic. It is execution.

Rubina was not armed. She was not hiding. She was not a threat. She was a young Kurdish woman demanding the right to live freely in her own country. For that, the Islamic Republic killed her and then tried to erase her, refusing her family a funeral, surrounding their home with intelligence agents, forcing them to bury her quietly and without ceremony. This is how a regime tells its people that death does not end punishment.

Doctors describe hospitals flooded with bodies and shattered faces, protesters shot in the head and neck, bullets fired from rooftops, eyes destroyed by pellets, children among the dead. Parents are forced to identify their sons and daughters from screens showing bloodied faces while the internet is cut so the killing can proceed without witnesses. This is not loss of control. It is control stripped bare.

The order comes from the top. Ali Khamenei has handed repression to the men who exist for this purpose, trained to fire without hesitation and to disappear the evidence. When a state labels its own citizens "terrorists" and "offenders against God", it is not preparing dialogue. It is preparing mass death.

Outside Iran, something almost as chilling is happening. Silence. If Rubina had been killed by a Western-aligned government, her face would be everywhere. Her name would be spoken by politicians, celebrities, NGOs, and broadcasters. Marches would be organised. Statements would pour out. Moral certainty would arrive on schedule. Instead, she is barely mentioned.

The people who claim to speak for women say nothing. The activists who insist on believing victims are nowhere to be found. The institutions that lecture endlessly about justice retreat into caution and euphemism. Iran's internet blackout is matched by a moral blackout in the West. This silence is not ignorance. The facts are known, the images exist, doctors are testifying, parents are burying their children in secret. Silence, here, is a decision.

To speak plainly would require saying something uncomfortable: that an Islamic theocracy is murdering young women in the street, that this violence is ideological, not incidental, and that the people resisting it are not pawns of the West but among the bravest people in the Middle East today. Rubina Aminian did not die in a complex situation. She was killed because she stood against clerical rule, and that truth is what the silence is designed to smother.

She deserved a life. She deserved a future. She deserved a grave marked by love, not fear. The regime buried her by the roadside. The world buried her with indifference.

"Outside Iran, something almost as chilling is happening. Silence. If Rubina had been killed by a Western-aligned government, her face would be everywhere. Her name would be spoken by politicians, celebrities, NGOs, and broadcasters."

[Heidi Bachram @HeidiBachram]

The antizionists seemed genuinely surprised at the terrible reception they got from the Jewish community today. They think they’re the ones who fought the fascists at Cable Street but they’re actually the Black Shirts.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Navy That Could All Along. It Just Needed A By-Election.

On Sunday morning, Royal Marine Commandos and National Crime Agency officers boarded the Smyrtos, a Cameroon-flagged Russian oil tanker, in the English Channel. The operation took six hours, supported by Chinook, Merlin and Wildcat helicopters, an RAF P-8 Poseidon, and the warships HMS Sutherland and HMS Ledbury. Keir Starmer ordered it personally and called it "yet another blow to Russia." It was the first UK-led boarding of a Russian shadow fleet vessel in British waters.

The authority for this operation has existed since March. That month, Starmer agreed that British armed forces and law enforcement could stop, board and detain sanctioned shadow fleet vessels in accordance with international law. That is the legal framework. It has sat in place for eleven weeks.

In those eleven weeks, more than two hundred sanctioned tankers sailed through Britain's exclusive economic zone. Checked. Unchallenged. Three days ago, Britain's role in shadow fleet enforcement was still limited to supporting others, while France carried out its fourth such boarding, commandos rappelling onto a tanker four hundred nautical miles off Brittany.

Two weeks ago, a former Royal Marine MP told the Defence Secretary that France had again demonstrated seizing these vessels was "both legal and achievable," and that the gap between Britain's permissions and Britain's actions came down to the Attorney General's hesitation. Finland, Sweden, Estonia, France and the United States, he said, have no such hesitation.

In April, the explanation on offer was that the constraint was never legal capability. Lord Hermer's framework required an individual legal case for each boarding, and the government used that requirement to explain months of watching sanctioned vessels pass through British waters. A Russian frigate escorted tankers through twenty-one miles of Channel while Iran closed a strait of similar width with a single announcement. The Navy was ready. The law, we were told, was not.

The law was ready in March. What changed on Sunday was not the framework. It was the decision to use it.

Makerfield votes on Thursday. Reform holds every council ward in the constituency. A government that spent eleven weeks explaining why two hundred tankers could not be touched found, four days before a by-election it cannot afford to lose badly, that the first one could be.

This is not really a story about Russia, or about the Channel. It is the same story as Britain's asylum backlog. 87,450 people. A four percent removal rate. Years of unused levers. It is the same story as Hungary, which received 47 asylum applications in the same six months Britain received roughly 50,000, and as America, where border crossings fell from 1.6 million to under 240,000 within months of a government choosing to act. The tools existed throughout, in every case. The decision to use them was the only variable that was ever missing. On Sunday, for four days' worth of reasons, it stopped being missing.

"Agency officers boarded the Smyrtos, a Cameroon-flagged Russian oil tanker, in the English Channel. The operation took six hours, supported by Chinook, Merlin and Wildcat helicopters"

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Jobs Did Not Disappear. They Were Rented To People Who Cannot Legally Work.

729,000 people aged 16 to 24 were unemployed in Britain between January and March this year. The youth unemployment rate, 16.2 percent, is the highest since early 2015. For the first time since records began in 2000, it is now higher than the EU average. Almost one million young people are not in education, employment or training, the highest figure in more than a decade.

The explanation offered is economic headwinds. The cause is closer to home. Employer National Insurance contributions rose in April last year. The minimum wage rose with it. The sectors that have always absorbed young workers first, retail, hospitality, delivery, became the most expensive sectors to hire into. Job vacancies have fallen seven percent in a year, to their lowest level since April 2021. The pattern is simple. Raise the cost of hiring at the bottom of the market, and the bottom of the market stops hiring first.

But the jobs have not disappeared. Walk down any high street and the delivery riders are still there, in greater numbers than ever. What has changed is who is doing the work, and how.

At the Midland Hotel in Derby, a Grade II listed building housing around two hundred asylum seekers, a whistleblower described the daytime scene. The hotel is not busy, they said, because everyone is out at work. Delil, an Ethiopian asylum seeker staying there, put it plainly. "I work for Deliveroo like a lot of my friends. I want to work, that's why I came to the UK."

This was documented in December 2023. Researchers at Nottingham Trent and Heriot-Watt found migrant couriers earning between £900 and £1,500 a month. The mechanism is a rental market. An account holder with the right to work registers with Deliveroo, Uber Eats or Just Eat, then rents access to that verified identity to someone who does not have it, for £70 to £100 a week. At the time, hundreds of such accounts were available on Facebook Marketplace. In the first quarter of 2025, almost 750 civil penalty notices were issued to companies for immigration breaches, the highest since 2016.

The response came later. Deliveroo told MPs it had removed 105 riders since April 2024 for exactly this. In July 2025, the Home Office began sharing asylum hotel locations with the delivery firms, so they could flag accounts spending unusual time nearby. Asylum seekers are barred from working for their first twelve months. The data-sharing exists because, as Delil already said on the record, many already are.

Robert Jenrick called the substitutes system a driver of illegal immigration that put public safety at risk, because the companies were not carrying out proper checks. He was right, eighteen months before anyone with the power to fix it agreed, and the underlying arrangement, an entry-level job performed by someone the law says cannot hold it, accessed through an identity rented from someone who can, has not gone away. It has simply become harder to spot.

Put the two facts together. A record number of young Britons cannot get a foot on the first rung of the labour market, priced out by costs the government itself imposed. At the same time, the first-rung jobs are being done anyway, documented, named, on the record, by people the system says should not be working at all.

Nobody designed this as a system. Nobody has dismantled it either. Years after the Midland Hotel investigation, the high street looks exactly the same.

"Researchers at Nottingham Trent and Heriot-Watt found migrant couriers earning between £900 and £1,500 a month."

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

The Tartan Army are a credit to Scotland. Here they are in full voice singing ‘Loch Lomond’ in Boston Stadium last night for the World Cup match between Scotland and Haiti. Absolutely glorious.

[TheWhollyMadeOfCant @jolyanda_moron]

@Englishremnant The far-Left are fascist both
in attitude & organisation.
Accusing others of that which
they are guilty is mere deflection.
Their actions are inspired by a
loathing for other humans thinly
disguised by whichever garb
they pick from the fashionista
dressing-up box.

[The English Remnant @Englishremnant]

“In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse-racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention while ‘God Save the King’ was played than of stealing from the poor-box.”
— George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941)

Orwell was pointing out a type of person who sneers at their own country as if that makes them clever. Not because they’ve thought deeply about anything, but because they think mockery itself is a mark of superiority. The tone of it hasn’t changed. The same kind of people are still here. The same smirk. The same false performance of being “above” England.

You see it across media, universities, arts, politics - this little ritual of laughing at everything English: the history, the songs, the traditions, the parades, the accents, the villages, the old ways of doing things. As if scorn is the height of sophistication.

Meanwhile the ordinary Englishman hasn’t changed. He doesn’t make a spectacle of loyalty, but it’s there - in how he speaks about home, in how he looks after his own, in how he stands when something needs to be stood for. It’s quiet, steady, and real.

The divide Orwell talks about is still obvious:

There are those who feel duty and belonging.
And there are those who think they are above both.

The first group doesn’t need to explain itself. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Hungary Stopped It In Six Months. Britain's Government Chose Not To.

In May 2025, Keir Starmer stood in Downing Street and told the country, "The experiment is over." Six months earlier, he had already explained what it was. Of his predecessors, he said, "Policies were reformed deliberately to liberalise immigration. This happened by design, not accident." Both statements are true. The experiment was deliberate. But it is not over.

In the first six months of 2025, the same period Starmer declared it over, 47 people were permitted to lodge an asylum claim in Hungary, a country of 9.5 million. In the same period, Britain received roughly 50,000. Both countries answer to the same conventions and hold the same tools. The difference between 47 and 50,000 is not capacity. It is choice.

The United States made the same choice this year. Border Patrol apprehensions fell to their lowest level since 1970, down from 1.6 million in 2021 to under 240,000. Net migration to the United States turned negative for the first time in half a century. This was achieved within months of a government deciding to act. Britain's government has not made that decision.

This is not new. In 2013, Peter Mandelson admitted that in 2004, under a Labour government, "we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties for people." Andrew Neather, who wrote the 2000 speech opening Britain's borders, later said the policy was intended to "rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date." Six of eight references to that policy's social objectives were removed before publication.

More recently, Professor Alan Manning, former head of the government's own Migration Advisory Committee, admitted that mass migration was used to paper over economic failure. A substitute for reform. The trade-off was understood. The warnings were issued. The decision was taken anyway, by both parties, across three decades.

What is new is the second half of the choice. Having decided, repeatedly, to expand migration rather than confront the harder political work, the same state has built the machinery to manage the response.

The government's own project delivery guidance states that British equality, diversity and inclusion policy is governed by the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Prevent's training classifies "cultural nationalism," the belief that mass migration threatens Western culture, alongside extremist ideology, broad enough to capture the Prime Minister's own warning that Britain risks becoming "an island of strangers." A new definition of Islamophobia was opposed jointly by Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh leaders, by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and by the government's own former anti-extremism adviser, who warned extremists would use it to deflect scrutiny. It was announced regardless.

The pattern repeats in how dissent is handled. After the 2024 riots, people were jailed for social media posts within days, sentences in the same range as those who set buildings alight. This year, the Technology Secretary Liz Kendall announced new powers to remove "incendiary" content during "times of crisis," definitions set by ministers, the same day the government's own terror reviewer revealed his questions about migration's national security implications had gone unanswered. One question produced legislation within forty-eight hours. The other, silence.

None of this is incompetence. Incompetence does not produce a 47 person asylum total in Hungary and a fifty-year low in US border crossings within months of two governments deciding to act, while Britain, holding the same tools, produces neither.

Choosing not to close a border is one decision. Branding concern about that choice as extremism is another. The two are not separate. The second protects the first.

"In May 2025, Keir Starmer stood in Downing Street and told the country, "The experiment is over.""

[Alexandra @Alexandr4Denman]

I look forward to the storm coming Starmers direction from the Polish government now! Well deserved aswell

[Christian @InTheTrenchesUK]

Angela Eagle. 34 years of being wrong. 34 years of voting for every open-border policy, every EU power grab, every failed immigration scheme. She watched record boat arrivals on her watch and called it 'complexity.' She scrapped the Rwanda deterrent and replaced it with... nothing. She has never had an independent thought in 450 parliamentary votes. Not one rebellion. Not one principle she wouldn't sell for a promotion.

And now she's Security Minister. The woman who couldn't secure a border is securing the entire realm. The woman who never stood up to her party is standing up to terrorists. The woman who failed at every metric is measuring success for the rest of us.

This isn't government. This is jobs for the girls/boys who never questioned the boys/girls. 34 years of failure, rewarded with a Damehood and a promotion. Angela Eagle isn't a security expert. She's a careerist who secured the only thing that matters to her: her own advancement.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The BBC Has Ruled. Brexit Damaged The Economy. No Further Debate Required.

The BBC's editorial complaints unit has decided that the negative economic impact of Brexit is now a settled fact. Not a contested judgement. Not one side of a live debate. A fact, in the same category as man-made climate change, requiring no balancing view.

The ruling followed a Radio 4 Today programme segment featuring Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, alongside Liam Byrne and Sir John Gieve, both long-standing advocates of closer EU alignment. All three agreed Brexit had damaged growth. The presenter, Katya Adler, did not challenge the premise or introduce a dissenting voice. A complaint followed.

The ECU's response is the revealing part. It acknowledged the segment failed to "acknowledge the alternative case" for pursuing opportunities outside the EU rather than realignment with it. That part of the complaint was upheld. But the central complaint, that three pro-EU voices agreeing with each other on air is not balance, was dismissed. The reasoning given was that this reflected "the consensus among economists" and there was no "significant body of economic opinion" on the other side.

This is worth pausing on. The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist. The institution that is legally required to be impartial has ruled itself the arbiter of which questions are still open and which are closed, and Brexit has just been moved into the closed file.

The economics itself does not support the certainty on display. The headline figure driving much of this narrative, an 8 per cent hit to GDP since 2016, comes from an NBER paper built on a "synthetic control" model that constructs a hypothetical non-Brexit Britain from a basket of comparator countries. The largest weighting in that basket, over 60 per cent, is the United States, a country currently riding an AI investment boom and a separate fiscal stimulus. The model also weights Estonia and Greece more heavily than France or Germany. On a straightforward per capita basis against France and Germany, the actual comparators, Britain's performance since 2016 sits roughly in line with both. An 8 per cent gap simply isn't visible. This is a model producing a number that then gets reported as "the consensus," which the BBC then cites as the reason no alternative view is required.

That loop, model produces number, number becomes consensus, consensus becomes fact, fact requires no balance, is the mechanism. It does not require a conspiracy. It requires an institution that has decided which conclusions are respectable and which are not, and which then treats its own prior decision as evidence.

The same posture has been on display all week. A government department can decide its diversity targets are lawful without seeking legal advice to check. A police force can decide a book about dismantling "inner white supremacy" is leadership training. A broadcaster can decide an economic question is closed and that deciding so does not breach its own impartiality rules. In each case, the institution marks its own homework, and the mark is always a pass.

None of this requires Brexit to have been a triumph. Britain's economy has genuine problems, most of them unrelated to single market membership. But a state broadcaster, funded by compulsory licence fee under threat of prosecution, has now formally placed one of the most consequential political decisions in modern British history beyond the reach of its own impartiality obligations. Reform's Lee Anderson called it being "blinkered by groupthink." The more precise description is an institution that has stopped being able to tell the difference between its own assumptions and the facts.

"The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist."

[TheWhollyMadeOfCant @jolyanda_moron]

@OPlz @E7Drew @ediz1975 Priority should be given to the
most vulnerable road user i.e.
pedestrians. Vehicle drivers
accept that the flow of
traffic along a road may be
interrupted by the need to
enable pedestrians to cross
safely. Being part of a
continuous string of cyclists
is not a human right.

[TheWhollyMadeOfCant @jolyanda_moron]

@OPlz @E7Drew @ediz1975 Pedestrians should have priority.
A strange sense of entitlement
seems to pervade the Lycra-Nazi
classes especially in London (&
Cambridge). A car driver who
approached a pedestrian
crossing in a deliberately
intimidating way would be
condemned, bovver bikers
are no different.

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

If you are of the view that millions of your fellow Britons are angry only because they have been “whipped up” by a few right-wing bogeymen, you truly do not understand your own country.

[Christian @InTheTrenchesUK]

My dear Stephen,

How terribly delightful to see you once again waddling into the arena, that gloriously bald dome of yours catching the light like a freshly polished egg.

The son of Neil Kinnock, the man who turned Labour into an unelectable laughing stock, still desperately clinging to daddy's dusty legacy like a balding, entitled little limpet who never learned to stand on his own two feet.

You claim "we're delivering" 2.5 million dentist appointments. Bless your heart. You are not delivering anything. You are announcing. You are promising. You are counting chickens that will not hatch for a decade while your constituents pull their own teeth out with pliers today.

Dental school places? Future promises. The "biggest sustained increase since 2007"? Labour's own 2007 baseline, Stephen. How wonderfully convenient. The British Dental Association calls your numbers fantasy. Practices are closing. Dentists are leaving the NHS. Your "reforming dental contract" is a press release, not a policy. By the time your promised dentists graduate, there will be no NHS dentistry left to save.

But do carry on posting, pet. Eighty-five likes. Forty-five retweets. The nation is simply overwhelmed by your delivery.

[Darren of Plymouth @DarrenPlymouth]

“I never thought I’d live to see the day when the right wing would become the cool ones giving the middle finger to the establishment, and the left wing becoming the snivelling self-righteous twats, going around shaming everyone.”

- John Lydon, The Sex Pistols

[spiked @spikedonline]

Europe's populist right is not ‘fascist’. From Giorgia Meloni to Nigel Farage, they abide by democracy, have no grand imperial ambitions and are conservative rather than revolutionary. The 1930s analogies are crass and absurd, writes Joel Kotkin
https://t.co/28T6v8BRa9