jonorgia

Just some dude in a poppadom bag..Plays some poker. Knows right from wrong. Peace not war. Old Hippy at heart.

[jonorgia @jonorgia]

@campbellclaret Fuck off. You should be in jail.

[Parody Nigel Farage @Parody_PM]

Thankyou JD Vance, we have so much to learn from America.

[Álvaro @Fiend_0]

Votar a la derecha siendo pobre

[Guz Khan 🥶 @GuzKhanOfficial]

Support @thecrimeanalyst and sign this petition! This country is far toooo lenient on sex offenders.

We need much more robust laws in place.

[LBC @LBC]

'It is inflammatory, it is extremist, it is divisive, it is everything the family didn't want.’

Former senior police officer Neil Basu tells James O'Brien that he believes Nigel Farage is using Henry Novak’s death to score ‘political points'.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

A few days ago, Ben Habib claimed that both Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson each received £1 million from a foreign-based crypto billionaire in November 2022

These alleged payments came years after the 2019 election, which Habib has linked to a deal where the Brexit Party stood down in key seats to help the Conservatives

Yet the media storm quickly moved on from Farage and the donations to Reform candidate Robert Kenyon and his offensive racist, misogynistic, and sexist social media posts

And not a peep about Boris Johnson receiving £1m in what is effectively foreign influence in the UK's democracy, the exact thing he said Brexit would stop

Why?

Is it normal for British politicians to receive £1m gifts from foreign based billionaires?

[John Roucker @Johnisnotjoker]

Has @Nigel_Farage personally sued Ben Habib yet?

Has @Nigel_Farage reported his "hacked" phone to the proper authorities yet?

Has @Nigel_Farage answered how his girlfriend afforded that house in Clacton yet?

Has @Nigel_Farage settled on a lie for that £5 million yet?

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Failure to vote for Israel at Eurovision is a sign of grave alarm and apparently warrants a Senate investigation in Australia.

Beyond parody at this point. They already eroded their free speech laws to protect Israel. Next: mandatory voting for Israel in song competitions.

[Simon @Simonblox]

Well that was one of the most insane thunderstorms I’ve ever seen in the UK..

Can’t quite believe this footage I’ve captured over Liverpool tonight ⚡️

[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.

[Trades Union Congress @The_TUC]

"I don't think this is a particularly unusual intervention from Tony Blair - and I just really reject what he says about that Workers' Rights Act."

- TUC Assistent General Secretary @KategoBell

[Alan Simpson 💙 @cityalan]

Extremely wealthy man says we really can’t afford pensions and welfare support for ordinary people.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

They did, it was called America

[Terry Hague @TezzaBelle88]

I’d be more concerned with a shirtless man near a school

[Wokerati Marty @WokeratiMarty]

Here’s Tony Blair sweating like a pig during a record-breaking May heatwave… while calling to scrap Net Zero policies.

Couldn’t make it up really.

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Parody Nigel Farage @Parody_PM]

Some notes on my work ethic:

-I last voted in Parliament on 18 March, so I haven’t done my job for ten weeks.
-I’ve never held any face-to-face constituency surgeries, despite apparently having £5 million to spend on security.
-I refuse to do interviews or face press scrutiny of any sort.
-when I was in the European Parliament I had the 4th worst attendance record out of 748 MEPs.
-although I did manage to turn up to vote AGAINST plans to tackle Russian misinformation.
-I was on the Fisheries Committee but I only turned up to ONE out of 42 meetings.
-but I will of course be taking my £73,000 EU pension.

Vote Reform, get lazy, grifting, self-serving sacks of shit.

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

Irish comedian Vittorio Angelone cooked Penny Mordaunt.

[Terry Hague @TezzaBelle88]

30° abroad: “let’s explore this town.”

30° in the UK: “I may not survive this Sainsbury’s trip.”