Kebabmon

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[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Delusional. It’s a £45 cut in the average annual household fuel bill. Offset by a £50 increase when the price cap is raised Oct 1st. So a net negative of £5. Nobody is going to move to EVs or heat pumps on that basis.

[John Redwood @johnredwood]

Mr Burnham criticises selling UK utilities to foreign states and companies. I agree. I helped Margaret Thatcher put in Golden shares to prevent this. It was the Labour government after 1997 that wrongly cancelled these protections to please the EU.

[Dave @DaveKent101]

Andy Burn'em blaming Mrs Thatcher for de-nationalising companies in energy, water, oil etc which resulted in foreign ownership is completely disingenuous, and frankly dishonest or just plain ignorant.

What Burn'em WON'T tell you is that Mrs Thatcher ensured that her government retained what were known as 'Golden Shares' in these companies.
These allowed the government to stop foreign takeovers and to have a big say in how they operated.

Guess what though?🤔

The EU objected to these Golden Shares through their 'Free Movement of Capital' clause - Article 63 TFEU.
So John Major started to sell them off accordingly BUT the vast majority were sold off by TONY BLAIR and LABOUR.

So the finger for lack of government control in this area needs to be pointed at Tony Blair and Labour, NOT Margaret Thatcher.
So I am calling out Andy Burn'em as a liar.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Grenfell, PPE, Post Office Scandal, Water Company Sewage dumping...

No such thing as rich criminals in the UK because the law is blind when the rich are breaking it.

[David Attenborough @fandom_david]

Every week, another wildfire.
Every month, another flood.
Every year, another “once-in-a-century” disaster.

At what point do we stop calling it coincidence…
and start calling it what it is?

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

We have to get Labour out

They are beyond hopeless - totally disconnected from the problems of this country, and simply hanging desperately onto their core voters

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Keir Starmer — ever a man of his word til the end.
In June 2023 he explicitly ruled out ever indulging in a resignation honours list (BBC Radio 4 Today).
Today he’s marked his resignation with 21 peerages, overwhelmingly public-sector/legal jobsworths. Barely a single wealth creator among them.
Classic line up of the New Establishment which has run the country under Labour and Tory governments for the past three decades and is now firmly in control. Largely (if not entirely) with the following characteristics:
*Career almost entirely in public sector, often taking salaries from several sinecures at once as they work up the greasy taxpayer-funded pole.
*Associated with various ‘right-on’ causes.
*Largely middle class, London chattering class, Oxbridge well represented (of course).
*Fashionable left but not too left. Good mainstream Labour links.
Thus is the antediluvian House of Lords perpetuated by the Left as well as the Right as a comfortable state-funded retirement home for the well-connected ‘good and great’ past their sell-by date — when it should simply be abolished.

[Fav ⛧ @Favwontmiss]

I don’t think humans need more technology. I think we need more forests. More trees. More birdsong. More clean air. More places where our nervous systems can finally relax. We’ve spent decades building faster machines. it’s time we start rebuilding the natural world that keeps us alive.

[Briefcase Michael @BriefcaseMike]

Corbyn has made a statement about Starmer's lie at #PMQs: "The prime minister today falsely claimed that Labour was found to be “institutionally antisemitic” under my leadership. There was no such finding, and Keir Starmer should have the decency to correct the record."

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

There’s a darker joke running through all of this.

Ed Miliband is mandating solar panels on the “vast majority” of new homes – but doesn’t have panels on his own £1.6m London house.

Neighbours confirm they’ve fitted solar in the same conservation area without needing special permission, taking advantage of the very incentives Miliband insists ordinary families should embrace.

Yet the man pushing mandatory rooftop solar nationwide declines to practice what he preaches, preferring to legislate for everyone else from a panel‑free semi.

Reform UK and even Conservative MPs have branded him the “king of hypocrisy”: no solar, no heat pump, but a growing list of eco‑requirements for everyone else.

This is the pattern: ministers waving net zero slogans from comfortable homes, while the policy costs land on young buyers in cramped developments where shaded roofs mean poor generation.

When Labour tells you rooftop solar is “common sense”, ask why the Energy Secretary decided that common sense doesn’t apply to his own property.

If panels are so essential, why are they compulsory for your new build – but optional for his £1.6m London semi?

Solar for thee, not for me. That’s not climate leadership. That’s moral posturing.

[David Baddiel @Baddiel]

Here’s @KuperSimon, @FT, unsuprisingly correct.

[David Baddiel @Baddiel]

Thank you to this poster, who may just have a tiny bit of insight into how to win at the highest level of sport.

[Guido Fawkes @GuidoFawkes]

Regicidal Labour MPs give Starmer a standing ovation and clap like seals as he leaves PMQs. Presumably we'll be doing this routine again in about 18 months or so. Maybe sooner.

[Liverpool FC @LFC]

The landmark Hillsborough Law legislation has now been passed by MPs in the House of Commons.

We would like to reaffirm our enormous admiration, respect and appreciation for all those who have campaigned for the introduction of the Hillsborough Law. The 97, their families and survivors are forever in our thoughts.

🔗 https://t.co/9sNTJ6nLMn

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

What is the rationale for a public service broadcaster like the BBC paying a DJ (Scott Mills) £750,000 a year to present the breakfast show on Radio 2 playing soft rock music which commercial radio already provides in abundance?

[Sunny Giron 🇨🇦🇬🇱 @sunny_giron]

We can live without data centres and billionaires but we can’t live without water

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

Stamp duty and council tax are terrible taxes. Land value tax could replace both - and Andy Burnham has backed it for 16 years.

Who wins? Who loses? What happens to house prices?

LVT could drive growth. But it isn’t easy. Our model shows its promise - and its problems.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Zealot Discovers Pragmatism the Moment It Suits Him

Ed Miliband called new North Sea drilling "climate vandalism." He built a year in office on that conviction, closing licences, missing his own department's cost-benefit deadlines, and standing at the despatch box to warn that Britain's exposure to global fossil fuel prices was a danger to households. Now, with a possible move to Number 11 on the table, he is privately signalling he will approve production at the Jackdaw gas field. The vandalism argument has not changed. His career prospects have.

An industry source put the real motive plainly: Miliband sees approval as a way of showing willing to the City. Not to the 1.4 million households Jackdaw could heat this winter. Not to the union boss who warned his appointment as chancellor would strangle job creation. To the markets, whose confidence he now needs more than he needs his own principles to survive intact. Conviction, it turns out, was never the obstacle to drilling. Ambition was the only thing capable of overriding it.

Look at what has changed in the meantime, and what has not. Energy bills are 13 per cent higher than in April. Wealthy residents are drawing up exit plans over fears of a new CGT regime he may soon be responsible for setting. Britain still imports gas at a premium while sitting on fields it refuses to develop. None of that moved him while he held only the energy brief. What moved him was the prospect of a bigger one, and with it, a market reaction he could not afford to mishandle.

Even the manner of this conversion tells its own story. He cannot confirm the decision publicly until a consultation closes on 10 August, for fear of triggering a judicial review, the same legal machinery that campaigners used to strangle Jackdaw's original 2022 consent in the first place. So the U-turn arrives privately, filtered through unnamed sources, calibrated for maximum reassurance to investors and minimum political exposure to a Left flank that still believes he means what he has spent years saying. A minister discovering pragmatism only where nobody can hold him to it in public is not pragmatism. It is management.

The Aberdeen South by-election should have been the wake-up call. Voters handed the Tories victory on the back of exactly this argument, that domestic energy production matters more than distant targets. It made no visible difference to his convictions until his own ambitions entered the equation. That timing tells you everything you need to know.

None of this should be mistaken for a change of heart on net zero itself. Miliband has not renounced the target that has driven a year of closures, suppressed analysis and rising bills. He has simply found one exception, sized precisely to the moment his own career required it. The zealotry stays intact everywhere his ambition does not reach.

Andrew Neil called this government's energy policy bordering on criminally negligent. He might have added that the man responsible for it has just demonstrated exactly how negligence gets corrected, not by admitting the policy was wrong, but by discovering, at the moment it becomes personally useful, that it was.

Britain does not need a chancellor who abandons conviction under market pressure. It needs one who never mistook ideology for policy in the first place. Miliband has shown he is capable of neither, only of noticing, at exactly the right moment for himself, which one currently pays better.

"An industry source put the real motive plainly: Miliband sees approval as a way of showing willing to the City. Not to the 1.4 million households Jackdaw could heat this winter."

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

Most people don’t follow every twist in Westminster, but the Olly Robbins case is simple: Labour’s Prime Minister sacked the top Foreign Office official in a panic over a scandal involving his own judgement, and that official is now asking a judge to rule that Starmer acted unlawfully.

If the courts agree, it means the man running the country broke basic standards of fairness to save his own skin when a controversial Labour insider, Peter Mandelson, blew up in his face.

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

The fact Keir Starmer and his team are openly briefing about his “last trip as prime minister” being a World Cup final in the US tells you everything about how they see high office.

No serious final mission, no reckoning with a broken state, no confronting the policy failures piling up at home – just a taxpayer‑funded farewell tour wrapped around football and photo‑ops.

While public services choke, the bond market still prices in long‑term structural weakness, and the UK’s global position continues to erode, Downing Street is choreographing a narrative where Starmer’s legacy is a selfie in a corporate box and a half‑remembered Falklands quote.

It’s the perfect metaphor for this Labour government: they inherited a fragile country, presided over drift, and chose spectacle over substance – then had the audacity to script their own “it’s all over” moment at the World Cup.