James Dutton

Long in the tooth C++ C# developer, Angular enthusiast, loving the Angular community, mediocre single dad of two, trail-running fanatic, all opinions my own

[James Dutton @jrdutton]

@KayBurley My first thought, how much of my tax contribution will be wasted on this virtue signalling exercise? And would he do it if he was paying for it, I’m willing to bet no 🤷‍♂️

[James Dutton @jrdutton]

@christopherhope @GBNEWS I doubt he has anything original, honest or workable to say. Perhaps we were spared another liturgy of untruths.

[James Dutton @jrdutton]

@JuliaHB1 I couldn’t bring myself to listen to yet another charlatan spouting lies. The hopeless optimism of the Labour back benches is nauseating. What a country. I fully expect to be robbed of more of my hard-earned savings to support the feckless.

[James Dutton @jrdutton]

@Fox_Claire @Madz_Grant As always, @Fox_Claire speaks common sense. We need more people like her

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

.@AndyBurnhamGM Keir Starmer gave huge service to the country?

He accepted more than £100,000 in gifts from a donor simultaneously given a Downing Street pass. He filmed a stay home pandemic message from a borrowed £18 million penthouse dressed to look like his own house. He removed winter fuel payments from 10 million pensioners without a manifesto commitment and reversed it a year later. He told Parliament full due process was followed on Mandelson while two aides resigned within 48 hours saying otherwise. He branded ordinary British people concerned about immigration as far right. He oversaw two-tier policing in which people were jailed for social media posts within days of the 2024 riots while other disorder was handled with conspicuous restraint. He legislated to silence online dissent while boosting the BBC algorithmically, the same BBC being sued for ten billion dollars for fabricating a world leader's words. His net approval collapsed to minus 66, the worst since records began. That is the service you are thanking him for.

Orderly and responsible transition?

Britain is about to install its sixth Prime Minister in seven years without a single vote from the general public. You yourself won 54.8 percent of the vote in one constituency on a message that amounted to get Starmer out. That is the mandate on which you now propose to lead a country of 67 million people. You described this as a positive process of renewal. The public will note that renewal, in this context, means one professional politician replacing another without anyone being asked.

Economic growth, cost of living, public services, housing, opportunities for the next generation?

You spent six years as Mayor of Greater Manchester spending £722,685 on migrant welfare programmes while one in 61 people in Manchester is homeless. You backed a policy that would have given migrants immediate access to the welfare state and dropped it the moment you needed Makerfield's votes. You want to equalise capital gains tax with income tax rates and restore the 50p top rate, policies that every serious economic analysis warns will reduce investment and growth at a moment when the tax burden is already at its highest since 1945. These are the solutions you are bringing to the issues that matter most.

Political change should never distract from the responsibility to improve people's lives?

Belfast burned while this government legislated for faster removal of social media posts about it. The asylum appeals backlog hit 87,450, roughly the population of Carlisle, while the removal rate sat at 4 percent. A generation of young British workers was priced out of entry-level jobs by cheaper imported labour while the government called the falling net migration figure progress. The country you propose to improve has been left more fractured, more indebted, more surveilled and more divided than at any point in recent memory, not by accident but by a government that chose to manage dissent rather than address its causes.

The Labour movement has always been at its strongest when it looks forward with confidence and purpose?

The country will be looking forward too. At the record you are about to inherit, the positions you have quietly buried, and the policies you will quietly resurrect once Makerfield is a distant memory. Confidence and purpose are easy to project from a press statement. They are considerably harder to sustain when the HMRC payroll data, the asylum statistics, the Belfast footage, the two-tier prosecution record and the gift register are all still on the public record.

The transition has begun. So has the scrutiny.

"The asylum appeals backlog hit 87,450, roughly the population of Carlisle, while the removal rate sat at 4 percent."

[James Dutton @jrdutton]

@Fox_Claire @chatswithem Claire speaks such common sense. Enjoyed listening to her on The Moral Maze and have followed her since. If only our politicians were so thoughtful and measured.

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions:

- welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap
- defence spending is too low
- the triple lock is unsustainable
- without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution
- we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea
- migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state
- any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement
- we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable
- Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly

Blair basically says all that.

The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind:

- judges and quangos have too much power, are unaccountable and without redressing the balance in favour of parliament it is very difficult to do anything big fast
- the bare minimum that needs to change in this regard is to reform judicial review and planning law so we can put building and economic growth ahead of newts and NIMBYs

None of that above really ought to be up for discussion. It is all common sense but not one of our politicians will publicly say all of it

Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement.

Over to Andy and Keir and Kemi and Nigel and Zack and all the others

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

.@MatthewStadlen, the figures tell a partial story. Here's the rest.

Net migration down 48 percent, measured from the highest artificially engineered peak in British history, driven by Conservative policy decisions in late 2023 and early 2024. Net migration at 171,000 is back to roughly where it was before the Boriswave. Non-EU net migration still stands at 350,000, roughly double pre-Brexit levels. Total arrivals in 2025 were 813,000. Nearly a million people in a single year.

Small boats down 41 percent year to date. Let's examine that claim. In the first half of 2025, small boat crossings were up 48 percent on the same period in 2024 and set a new record for the first six months of any year since records began in 2018. The comparison point you are using is the record-breaking surge of 2025. Measuring a fall from your own record high isn't an achievement. It's arithmetic. And as of this afternoon, 162 migrants have crossed the Channel today alone. A former chief border inspector is warning that many hundreds more will attempt the crossing in coming days as the heatwave makes conditions ideal. The summer surge has begun.

The cumulative picture tells the real story. Over 200,000 people have crossed the Channel illegally since 2018. Only around 7,500, roughly 4 percent, have been returned. Returns and deportations up 7 percent sounds impressive until you note that the removal rate remains catastrophically low. A 7 percent improvement on near zero is still near zero.

The official estimate of people living in Britain without authorisation is between 700,000 and 900,000, though a study commissioned by Thames Water and obtained by the Telegraph under freedom of information suggests the true figure may exceed one million nationally, with up to 585,000 in the capital alone. That's one in thirteen of London's population. The data underpinning that study dates from 2017, before the Channel crossing surge began in earnest. The real figure today is almost certainly considerably higher. None of them appear in any of your statistics.

And none of this addresses what is happening on the ground. Yesterday seven Afghan nationals appeared in Norwich charged with 40 offences including rape and human trafficking of teenage girls. On the same day seven men including an Iranian and a Syrian appeared in Bristol charged with over 40 offences against eleven teenage victims.

Numbers on a spreadsheet do not capture what is being dispersed into British communities. That's the story the statistics do not tell.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

.@MikeTappTweets, let's go through these one by one.

G7 growth. The UK led in one quarter of 2025 and was joint second lowest in another. One economist described it as winning a beauty contest amongst your seven ageing friends. The IMF has since downgraded UK growth for 2026 to 0.8 percent. Patchy is not the same as highest.

Six interest rate cuts, made by the independent Bank of England, not by Labour. Your own October budget spooked bond markets and put upward pressure on mortgage rates at precisely the moment families needed relief. The Bank held rates unchanged in April because inflation at 3.3 percent remains well above target.

Inflation down, from its peak, yes. Still 65 percent above the 2 percent target. Energy prices are rising again, driven by the Middle East conflict and Labour's obsession with Net Zero, which has closed domestic oil and gas production and left Britain importing energy from a war zone at prices British families cannot afford.

Net migration, the lowest since 2012 because of Conservative policies introduced by Sunak and Cleverly in late 2023 and early 2024. You inherited the mechanism and are claiming the credit.

Military investment, a pledge, not a delivery.

And none of it mentions 41,472 illegal Channel crossings last year, 200,000 cumulative since 2018, youth unemployment at 16.2 percent and rising with 729,000 young people out of work, employer National Insurance strangling small businesses, or a steel industry being nationalised at a cost of over £400 million with a further billion potentially owed to its Chinese former owner.

Lots done. Much of it by the Conservatives and the Bank of England. The rest of it cherry picked, rebranded and presented as Labour's own.

[James Dutton @jrdutton]

Demand local North Sea oil and gas extraction - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/WFNiKdeANk via @UKChange

[James Dutton @jrdutton]

@afneil I genuinely think they’ve started believing their own rhetoric

[James Dutton @jrdutton]

@PolitlcsUK After 18 months, the same recycled list of achievements: a few quid off bills, breakfast clubs hailed as progress, NHS lists barely shifting, costly net-zero policies, and employment reforms that may deter hiring. I’d say good riddance, but I’m certain the alternative’s worse.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

This is how democracy dies in Britain. Not in a blaze of force, but behind locked doors and half-drawn curtains, with police at the entrance and scorn in the room. People turn up on a cold night to demand the right to vote. They are smeared, ignored, and shut out. The vote is postponed. Control remains intact.

The chant was not violent. It was not obscene. It was not extremist. It was three words long: let us vote. That alone tells you how far things have slipped. In a functioning democracy, that demand ends the argument. In modern Britain, under the Labour Party, it is framed as intimidation.

This was not a mob confronting authority. It was authority recoiling from the public. Councillors debated behind glass while residents pressed placards to the windows. Officials talked of drawing the curtains. Security stood guard. The symbolism could not have been clearer if it had been scripted. The public outside. The state inside. And between them, fear.

Then came the slur. "Nazi." The modern Left's all-purpose weapon. When moral authority runs dry, it reaches for moral annihilation. Smear first, and you never have to listen. Once the voter is recast as an extremist, their rights become optional. Cancelling an election shifts from outrage to "responsible decision". Language clears the ground. Procedure finishes the job.

The excuse, as ever, is technocratic. Money. Restructuring. Efficiency. Transformation. The same dead words used whenever consent gets in the way of managerial ambition. £192,000, we are told, is too high a price for an election. Councils waste more than that on consultants and failed schemes without a flicker of shame. Elections cost money because freedom costs money.

Strip away the jargon and the truth is naked. Labour's majority was at risk. Reform was rising. Voters wanted to pass judgment. So judgment was delayed. Not abolished, they say. Just postponed. Just this once. Just until 2027. That is always how it begins. Democracy rarely dies in a coup. It is bled out by administrators who insist they are acting sensibly.

What happened in Redditch will not stay in Redditch. Once cancelling elections becomes an administrative option, the principle is gone. Local first. Then regional. Then, when pressure mounts nationally, the same arguments return. Too disruptive. Too expensive. Too destabilising. The vote becomes a nuisance rather than a duty.

Hovering over all of this is quiet approval from the top. Keir Starmer speaks of norms and decency while his party corrodes the oldest norm of all: consent. This is a government that trusts process more than people, planners more than voters. It prefers control to accountability.

This is not a warning about what might come. It is a description of what is already happening. When citizens ask to vote and are smeared, ignored, and shut out, democracy is no longer sickening. It is already on life support.

Restore the elections. Restore the verdict. Or stop pretending this is still government by consent. Because a state that flinches at let us vote has already decided the answer is no.

"Then came the slur. "Nazi." The modern Left's all-purpose weapon. When moral authority runs dry, it reaches for moral annihilation. Smear first, and you never have to listen."

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The scrapping of an Eton-backed free sixth form in Middlesbrough tells us more about Labour than any manifesto ever could. A project designed to educate the brightest children from one of the poorest parts of the country was not stopped because it failed, cost too much, or lacked need. It was stopped because it threatened to succeed. And success, when it cannot be controlled, is intolerable to this government.

This was not a fee-paying outpost or a vanity scheme. It was a free school, approved under the last government, partnered with a proven academy trust, aimed squarely at deprived pupils with high academic ability. The offer was simple: take children who show promise and give them an education equal to the best in the country. That should have been uncontroversial. Instead it triggered hostility, suspicion, and finally cancellation. Not because of what it would have done, but because of what it symbolised.

The real offence was a four-letter word: Eton College. That name short-circuited reason. Local Labour figures spoke of "elitism" while opposing a free school for poor children. Ministers talked about surplus places and SEND funding while quietly abandoning a project already designed to address a regional attainment gap that everyone admits exists. None of it holds up. The explanations came after the decision, not before it.

Look at the facts Labour prefers not to dwell on. The North East lags badly behind London on A-level results and university entry. That gap has widened, not narrowed. This school was explicitly designed to deal with the A-level drop-off that has trapped bright pupils in the region for years. Its location was central, its funding secure, its academic model tested. Scrapping it did nothing to help SEND pupils and nothing to raise standards elsewhere. It simply removed an option that would have worked.

What happened in Middlesbrough fits a pattern we have already seen. When schools succeed by insisting on discipline, knowledge, and high expectations, the response from Labour is not curiosity but suspicion. Not imitation but obstruction. Katharine Birbalsingh and Michaela showed what happens when deprived children are taken seriously. Instead of being celebrated, that success is treated as a problem to be managed. The lesson is the same here: excellence outside the approved model must be neutralised.

The Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, claims the money could be better spent elsewhere. That argument collapses on contact with reality. Identical Eton-Star colleges have been approved in other Labour-run areas. The money exists. The model is acceptable. What differed in Middlesbrough was not need, but politics. Local ideological resistance was indulged, and bright children paid the price.

This is the quiet cruelty of modern Labour education policy. It speaks endlessly about disadvantage while dismantling the very ladders that allow people to climb out of it. It treats aspiration as a threat and excellence as exclusion. It would rather keep everyone inside a failing system than allow some to rise beyond it, because rising exposes the lie that background is destiny.

We are told this is about fairness. It is not. Fairness would mean expanding opportunity wherever it appears. What Labour practices instead is levelling by denial. If not everyone can have something, no one should. If a school might allow working-class children to outperform expectations, it must be stopped in case it embarrasses the system.

Middlesbrough did not lose a school. It lost permission to excel. A message was sent to its brightest children: know your place. That is not compassion. It is control. And until Labour grasps the difference, it will keep dressing envy up as justice and calling restraint care. Ministers will feel nothing. Children will pay the price.

"Bridget Phillipson, claims the money could be better spent elsewhere. That argument collapses on contact with reality."

[James Dutton @jrdutton]

@robprogressive @mattwridley Thankfully, you may appeal to the Inland Revenue. We did, and they gave us a small Grant of Credit.

[James Dutton @jrdutton]

@robprogressive @mattwridley And, I’d completed and submitted the IHT forms myself, which had been agreed by the Inland Revenue. However, loan companies expect a solicitor to be involved. And, true to form, the solicitors we approached wanted £12k for this.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Keir Starmer revealed the truth when he said he was "delighted" to welcome Alaa Abd el-Fattah home. He was speaking for a political class that has forgotten what a country is for. Abd el-Fattah called British people "dogs and monkeys." He praised Bin Laden. He urged the killing of Zionists, "including civilians." He told Londoners to hunt police and burn Downing Street. This is not a border failure or a bureaucratic error. This is policy. This is the system working as designed.

How did he get citizenship? Because the ECHR forced Britain to dismantle its own safeguards. The "good character" test – the bare minimum barrier against importing hatred – was struck down, and Parliament folded. Now the Home Secretary shrugs. The courts shrug. The Government shrugs. "Nothing we can do," they say, as if sovereignty were a force of nature and not something they surrendered by choice.

This is the rot: citizenship without allegiance. The idea that nationality is a customer service right, not a duty. It's how we end up with ministers celebrating the arrival of a man who praised Bin Laden, while explaining to the public that removing him would be "unlawful." If that is true – if the law insists Britain must shelter the people who call for British blood – then the law is broken beyond repair and the Government has no excuse for leaving it that way.

This sits on top of a wider disease: the belief that Britain must grin and bear it. That imported hatred is just "the price of being open." That violence wrapped in a grievance is a cultural misunderstanding. That we owe patience to men who owe us nothing but contempt. It's how you end up with police policing tweets, not threats; ministers soothing fanatics, not defending citizens; and the public told that fear is the new normal.

There is a word for this: suicidal empathy. The belief that if Britain is kind enough, apologises enough, porous enough, then the people who hate it will soften. Instead, it produces the opposite. It tells extremists the boundaries have collapsed. It tells Jewish families the state will not protect them. It tells every ordinary citizen that loyalty is punished and contempt rewarded. It's the political class signalling to each other that courage is dangerous and caution is wise. It's how a nation dies in plain sight: by welcoming the people who would burn it, while punishing the people who want to save it.

The most chilling detail isn't Abd el-Fattah's tweets. It's the Prime Minister's reaction: pride. A "top priority." Relief and celebration. As if bringing home a man who wanted to kill Zionists was some moral achievement. As if British Jews didn't exist. As if the country had no memory of Manchester, Westminster, London Bridge, Birmingham, Bondi.

The ECHR forced the door open. Successive governments refused to close it. And now Starmer stands in the doorway, smiling, while the public is told not to notice the smoke.

A serious country would change the law, not hide behind it. It would scrap the ECHR shackles, restore the good-character test, rearm the Home Office with the power to strike off citizenship for those who spit on the nation that feeds them, and write into statute that allegiance is a condition, not an ornament. A serious country would revoke citizenship where allegiance is absent: no sanctuary for those who glorify terrorists, call for the murder of police, or deny the equal rights of fellow citizens. A serious country would defend its people with removals, bans, prosecutions, and a clear message that Britain is not a refuge for those who dream of burning it down. And it would say so out loud – without apology, without fear, without waiting for permission from foreign judges.

If the Prime Minister cannot say that, then he cannot govern. And if the law forbids it, then the law must go – not the nation.

"Abd el-Fattah called British people "dogs and monkeys." He praised Bin Laden. He urged the killing of Zionists, "including civilians.""

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

There's a sickness in Britain's public life: we have replaced judgment with performance. We have handed moral authority to the stage and let actors decide who belongs in this country. Olivia Colman, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Judi Dench, Brian Cox – a roll call of national treasures who lined up to read script lines and wept on cue for a man they barely understood. They weren't defending justice. They were auditioning for sainthood.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah called Britons "dogs and monkeys." He said he "fucking hates white people." He wrote that killing Zionists, "especially civilians," is heroic. He praised Bin Laden. He dreamed of our streets on fire. These weren't stray remarks. This was a worldview. A creed of racial contempt and revolutionary bloodlust. And Britain's cultural class didn't bother to look. They didn't want to look. Because the point was never him. The point was them – proving their virtue to each other like teenagers comparing scars.

Keir Starmer called Abd el-Fattah's return a "top priority." He said he was "delighted" when the man landed in Britain. Delighted – as if a racial arsonist was a trophy of moral progress. As if British Jews didn't exist. As if the names Westminster, London Bridge, Manchester and Birmingham had been whitewashed from the national memory. Starmer isn't conflicted. He is consistent. His politics is powered by applause from the international set, not the safety of his own citizens.

Celebrity pity replaced national judgment. Emotional theatre replaced due diligence. The Home Office didn't vet – or didn't want to. The civil service looked away. Westminster saw a cause, not a threat. In modern Britain the question is never "Is this man safe?" It's "Will supporting him make me look virtuous to the right crowd?" Conscience has been turned into a prop. The country has been turned into an audience, expected to clap on cue.

Name them. Olivia Colman, whose trembling voice lent saintly gravitas to a man who spat on her country. Emma Thompson, forever the moral matron of the luvvie class, too busy basking in applause to read the record. Stephen Fry, who will condemn intolerance at home but clasp the hand of a man who wanted Zionists dead. Mike Leigh. Mark Ruffalo. Emily Watson. Rebecca Hall. Joseph Fiennes. Harriet Walter. Sir Bill Nighy, beard grown for gravitas, telling the Prime Minister to "make the call" – and the Prime Minister did. They summoned a man who would happily see the country that knighted them burn.

This wasn't a mistake. It was a ritual. The ruling class performed virtue, the celebrities performed conscience, and Britain paid the bill. They needed him to fit a story: the "political prisoner," the "prisoner of conscience," the symbol of everything they think makes Britain look enlightened. They didn't check who he was because the truth would have broken the spell. Violence abroad is romantic in their eyes. Violence at home is a misunderstanding. Hatred is fine, as long as it is directed at the right targets.

The ECHR forced the door open. Successive governments refused to close it. Its architects still pretend it's the noble post-war shield it once was, even as foreign judges veto laws passed by the people who live with the fallout. A serious country would have walked the moment protecting its own became "unlawful." A serious country would say: glorify terror and you lose your passport; call for blood and you're gone. But Britain isn't serious. Britain is obedient – to treaties, to NGOs, to foreign approval, to the moral vanity of its own elite.

What we are watching is national self-harm dressed as progress. A country apologising for existing. A cultural class so besotted with its own virtue it can't tell a dissident from a fanatic. They think they are rescuing a hero. They are opening the gates. They think they are proving virtue. They are advertising weakness.

"The point was never him. The point was them – proving their virtue to each other like teenagers comparing scars"

[James Dutton @jrdutton]

@TrisOsborneMP Surely your time should be better spent serving your constituents, not obsessing over Reform. Let’s face it, you’ve only a few years left to do anything worthwhile, and Labour are not off to a good start. True to form, shafting those who work hard to pay for those who don’t