Tony

Believer in free speech, small government, a low tax economy and encouraging aspiration. All views my own

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Burnham Promised Change. His National Security Adviser Has China Connections And An Unconfirmed Vetting Status.

Andy Burnham has not yet entered Downing Street. He has already made his most important national security decision. He has chosen to keep Jonathan Powell.

Powell was planning to leave in the autumn and return to Inter Mediate, the private consultancy he founded in 2011. An ally told the Observer that a sense of duty convinced him to stay. That formulation deserves scrutiny. Duty to whom. And to what.

Powell is the first political appointee ever to hold the National Security Adviser role. Parliament's joint committee on national security strategy was blocked from questioning him, unlike any previous holder of the post. Every parliamentary question about his vetting arrangements has been blocked using language identical to that deployed to obstruct questions about Mandelson. He conducted two secret visits to Beijing in six months. He maintains relationships through Inter Mediate with officials linked to China's intelligence apparatus, including the former head of PLA intelligence and the Secretary General of the CPAFFC, described by the US Congress as the public face of China's United Front Work Department. His vetting arrangements have never been publicly confirmed. None of that has changed. All of it will now continue under Burnham.

The Chagos deal Powell negotiated would have handed Beijing strategic proximity to Diego Garcia, the joint UK-US military base in the Indian Ocean, at a cost of up to £35 billion to the British taxpayer. It was postponed only after Donald Trump raised concerns about the security implications. Powell began working on it before his NSA appointment, in a personal capacity, through Inter Mediate. The constitutional lines between his private consultancy work and his government role have never been clearly drawn. Parliament was blocked from asking him about it.

Burnham says he wants to focus on domestic issues and spend less time abroad than Starmer. The man he has chosen to manage Britain's relationships with a dangerous world is the man whose undisclosed China connections triggered the most serious national security questions of the Starmer era. The man who ran a secret backchannel to a proscribed terrorist organisation. The man whose departure would have returned him to a private consultancy with documented PLA-connected relationships.

The fresh start narrative has a familiar cast. Powell stays as National Security Adviser, his China connections undisclosed and his vetting status unconfirmed. James Purnell arrives as chief of staff, a man who left Parliament in 2010, spent years in senior positions at the BBC and then worked at Flint, one of London's most influential corporate lobbying and political strategy firms, before joining Burnham's inner circle. Burnham himself entered Parliament under Blair in 2001. The fresh start is three New Labour figures, a corporate lobbyist and a set of unanswered national security questions.

This sits alongside a pattern documented across multiple pieces. Public money lent without adequate due diligence to a developer whose luxury towers were marketed to Chinese investors in Hong Kong. A bilingual confidential letter praising China's Covid response sent to the Mayor of Tianjin. A formal twinning relationship with Tianjin providing institutional cover for Chinese financial engagement. A Court of Appeal hearing on £140 million of those loans with judgment reserved. A wife on the board of a company holding a public contract with the transport authority her husband chaired. And now a National Security Adviser retained despite documented China connections that have never been subjected to the transparency the Mandelson affair demanded of everyone else.

Burnham enters Downing Street in three weeks. Powell goes with him. The questions that were never answered under Starmer deserve answers before the door of Number Ten closes behind them.

[Tony @KingsBishop2]

@Teehmah Having just watched your performance on Nana’s show this afternoon I would be interested to know what qualifies you as a political commentator? As far as I can see you have never held a significant position in industry or government. You have lots of opinions but that’s all they are, opinions! They are worth no more than mine or any other member of the public.
However well done for finding a way to monetise them - maybe you will reflect in later years on what positive contribution you have made to humanity. @GBNEWS

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

This past week, on a test bed in Britain, a Rolls-Royce jet engine ran at full take-off power on pure hydrogen, putting out water vapour instead of carbon.

Nobody on Earth had managed it before. It is the sort of thing that ought to stop the country in its tracks, and it will be forgotten by the weekend.

Leave aside the recent paroxysms of renewed net-zero insanity from Derelict Ed and the pervasive atmosphere of offended envy that greets much homegrown achievement nowadays in Britain. This engineering is a wonder, and it's British to the bone.

We gave the world the jet engine in the first place - Frank Whittle, a Coventry man and an RAF officer, patented it in 1930 while the Air Ministry assured him it was a curiosity. Rolls-Royce is today one of perhaps three firms anywhere that can build a large aero engine at the outer edge of the possible, and it has just done what most of the industry swore was twenty years away.

As usual, you marvel at how little the people who govern us had to do with it. The engineers in Derby are world-class; the stewardship above them is third-rate. They pulled off a global first while paying the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world to keep the power on over the bench - a weight no German, American or Gulf rival has to carry. We produce frontier brilliance on the shop floor and fritter it away at the despatch box, and we have done for two generations.

That is the maddening shape of modern Britain: brilliance from below, sub- (or, indeed, ultra-) mediocrity from above. The people here who actually make things are still among the best in the world; the state that is meant to back them treats a firm like Rolls-Royce as a photocall today and a takeover target tomorrow, and prices its energy as though it would prefer the next plant were built in Texas.

Progress starts from the other end. Give these people what every rival government gives its champions and we beg ours to do without: the cheap, abundant power their competitors already enjoy, a supply chain built around them, and a state that guards a national asset rather than auctioning it. The hard part of a British revival - the talent, the nerve, the engineering - is already done, and was done again this week, by people who deserve a far better country than the one currently sitting above them.

We just taught an engine to breathe fire and exhale water. The least we owe the men and women who managed it is a government and a state as brilliant as they are.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Fair point Steve. Scarman followed the Brixton riots of 1981. Macpherson followed the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the Metropolitan Police's catastrophic handling of it. Neither was a response to mass peaceful protest.

But look at what those reports actually produced. Scarman introduced the concept of institutional racism into British policing. Macpherson embedded it. Both recommendations were implemented, expanded and built upon over the following decades until they produced the training frameworks, the Race Action Plans and the College of Policing practice bank that conditioned the officers who handcuffed Henry Nowak.

The riots that preceded Scarman didn't produce the change. The report did. And the report was hijacked by the progressive institutional infrastructure that spent the next forty years embedding that ideology deeper into every institution it could reach. The result is the Britain we are living in now.

The lesson of Scarman and Macpherson isn't that violence produces change. It's that institutions capture whatever change violence triggers and uses it to advance their own agenda. Southampton last night produced exactly that. The cameras moved. The questions about Henry Nowak disappeared. And Starmer changed the subject without breaking a sweat.

My position stands. Violent protest is not the answer. The answer is building institutions that produce different reports with different conclusions. It's slower. It's harder. But it's the only thing that lasts.

[Tony @KingsBishop2]

All lives matter! The question that needs to be answered is why did the police believe Digwa’s over Henry when they first arrived on the scene? They did not even undo Henry’s coat to check when he said he had been stabbed and couldn’t breathe. Only the officers involved know but if their actions were down to unrecognised bias as a result of their training even they will not be aware. Justice is blindfolded for a reason, will the investigation establish the truth or will it be a face saving exercise. Let hope that something meaningful comes out of this terrible tragedy. Politicians should focus on the facts and stop trying to spin this for their own ends. Sincere condolences to the Novak family. @gbnews #IOPC

[Tony @KingsBishop2]

@DHSCgovuk The removal of the Council of Governors from foundation trusts is designed to avoid accountability to the community and strengthen the control of the bureaucrats running healthcare. It removes a vital piece of governance and was slipped out in the 10 year plan with no publicity. It should be resisted strongly by patients groups.

[Tony @KingsBishop2]

Rebecca had better get more votes than Burnham or you will condemn the country to another 3 years of Socialism.
We need a general election to give the electorate a chance to kick out this incompetent, divisive government before the country is destroyed.
Running a candidate is a cynical move designed to get you more media exposure and nothing else. The right needs unite to beat the socialists and stop the infighting. The country is sick of it.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Defence of the Realm vs The Defence of the Majority

George Robertson has been a Labour man for sixty years. He served as Tony Blair's Defence Secretary. He ran NATO. When Keir Starmer needed someone to write his Strategic Defence Review, he turned to Robertson. That is the context in which Robertson's words this week must be understood.

Britain's national security, he said, is "in peril." The Treasury is committing "vandalism." The government is gripped by "corrosive complacency." His co-author, General Sir Richard Barrons, was equally precise: the British Army can currently "seize a small market town on a good day."

That verdict comes from the men Starmer himself commissioned. But Robertson said something else, something quieter, that explains everything. The reason Starmer will not act, he told the Guardian, is that everybody is "worried about votes." Left and right. Reactions. The political situation. He said it almost as an aside. It should have been the headline.

The Defence Investment Plan was due last October. It has still not appeared. The military faces a funding gap of £28 billion over four years. Defence chiefs are meeting this week to discuss cuts of £3.5 billion. The Treasury, it is widely reported in Whitehall, is simply refusing to release money. Meanwhile the welfare budget runs at five times what Britain spends on defence.

Robertson's remedy is direct: the welfare budget must be reduced to fund the armed forces. Within hours, Diane Abbott was on cue. Cutting welfare to spend on armaments, she said, was "appalling." Labour would lose votes to the Greens. That was the authentic voice of the constraint Robertson was describing.

Starmer cannot cut welfare. A backbench rebellion of over a hundred Labour MPs killed his welfare reform bill last year. He cannot borrow more without alarming markets. He cannot raise taxes without another political crisis. So the system deadlocks. The review sits on a shelf. The investment plan drifts toward June, then perhaps beyond. And the men who wrote the review go public.

Those who follow my work will know I have written at length about Starmer's paralysis on Iran. The inability to act decisively in the Gulf, the refusal to name what is actually driving his hesitation. The answer, in both cases, is the same. Starmer leads a coalition held together by Muslim communities whose votes he cannot afford to lose and whose instincts run directly against any muscular projection of British power abroad. That constraint does not stop at the water's edge. The same electoral arithmetic is now preventing him funding the armed forces. It is not a coincidence. It is a governing philosophy. When survival of the parliamentary party conflicts with the national interest, the parliamentary party wins. Every time.

The government's response to Robertson was to say Britain's armed forces are "among the best in the world" and that Starmer is "determined" the investment plan will be fit for purpose. Determined. Not funded. Not scheduled. Determined.

General Barrons put the timeline plainly. At the current pace, Britain needs ten years to reach genuine war readiness. British intelligence, alongside allied assessments, gives Russia three to five years before it tests European resolve directly. That is the gap. That is what "corrosive complacency" means in operational terms.

Lord Hutton, another former Labour Defence Secretary, has called this the defining moment of Starmer's premiership. He is right, though not in the way he intends. The defining moment has already passed. Starmer has chosen. Faced with a direct conflict between what the defence of this country requires and what his backbenchers will tolerate, he has chosen the backbenchers.

Robertson said he believes his country is in danger. He said he had to speak out even though it would be uncomfortable. A sixty-year Labour loyalist broke with his own government because he concluded the alternative was worse. And he was right.

[Tony @KingsBishop2]

@Keir_Starmer have you forgotten that you represent us, the taxpayers that are being treated as ‘cash cows’ and expected to fund your socialist experiment which is destroying communities and creating division in the country.
You are all amateurs and have no experience of running complex organisations which need to generate profit to survive. The sooner you are kicked out at the next election the better for the country.
When you talk about the best interests of the country you mean the best interests of yourself and your cohorts.
We need a complete overhaul of the political system starting with the sacking of all career politicians.
You should remember only 25% of the electorate voted Labour at the last GE, you have no popular mandate for your policies.
We are not fools and we see through your propaganda, you are the worse Prime Minister in living memory and if you had an ounce of integrity you would have called a general election and let the electorate have a say before you go against the referendum and drag us back into the EU.

[Revd Canon Fr Phil Harris† 🇬🇧🇮🇱🇺🇸 @PhilHs10]

@Keir_Starmer, you will not answer a question, will you? Then you spout this nonsense.

The Adhān is not just a call to prayer; it’s a declaration of spiritual authority over the space where it is proclaimed. In Islamic tradition, the public recitation of the Adhān signals that the area is under Islamic rule. It’s a proclamation of God’s greatness and the call to submit to His will as revealed in Islam.

From a theological and cultural perspective, this act is seen as a form of spiritual marking or staking a claim. It’s about establishing an Islamic presence and inviting the community to align under that spiritual authority.

This makes the Adhān not just a call to individual devotion but a public declaration of faith that can be seen as transforming the environment into a place of Islamic worship and identity.

Understanding this dynamic is crucial, especially when considering interfaith interactions or the impact of such public religious expressions in diverse communities.

Let me remind you of the words, Prime Minister:

“Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest
Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest

I bear witness that there is no god but Allah
I bear witness that there is no god but Allah

I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah
I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah

Come to prayer, come to prayer

Come to success, come to success

Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest

There is no god but Allah”

Islam gives NO SPACE for other faiths. This is the beginning of the subjugation, and the mayor knows exactly what he is doing.

[Tony @KingsBishop2]

#PMQs The NHS is not delivering value for money in the opinion of those of us who actually have to pay for it. It is the taxpayer, not the state just hard working people!

[Tony @KingsBishop2]

Great analysis which shows the deviousness of this government and its plans to subjugate the British people.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Manifesto Was the Alibi

The Labour manifesto of 2024 was explicit. Britain would not rejoin the customs union. It would not rejoin the single market. There would be no return to freedom of movement. Voters were told this clearly, repeatedly, and in writing. They voted accordingly. That was the promise.

Eighteen months later, Cabinet ministers are publicly calling for exactly that. David Lammy has pointed to the benefits of customs union arrangements. Wes Streeting has called for a deeper trading relationship with the EU. Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, has said it would be crazy not to engage with the prospect of a customs union. These are not backbenchers freelancing. These are senior ministers, at the Cabinet table, arguing openly for the reversal of a commitment their party stood on at a general election. Ask yourself what that tells you about how seriously the commitment was made.

Downing Street's response is instructive. Sources close to Keir Starmer did not say the ministers were wrong about the destination. They said they had not thought it through. The objection was tactical: move too fast, trigger freedom of movement, and the politics become unmanageable. The direction of travel was not disputed. Only the pace.

That is the admission. Buried in a briefing designed to look like a rebuke is a concession: the government accepts the logic of deeper integration. It simply wants to manage the sequencing before the public understands what is being decided. This is not a debate about Europe. It's a question about whether the people who voted in 2024 were told the truth.

The agrifood deal now being finalised illustrates the method. Ministers present it as a modest technical arrangement, a matter of reducing friction for exporters. What it actually involves is Britain operating under EU law, enforced by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice, with British taxpayers funding the privilege and British ministers having no vote on the rules they are required to follow. That is not alignment. It's accession by another name. And if you doubt that the same logic will be applied sector by sector until the architecture is complete, consider that no one in government has yet explained where it stops.

The economics do not justify it. Independent analysis from the Growth Commission and the Prosperity Institute reaches the same conclusion: rejoining costs more than it returns. The case being made in Cabinet, that integration means growth, is not supported by the modelling. It's an article of faith presented as an economic argument, and the public is being asked to pay for it without being told so.

And the damage extends further still. Rejoining the customs union would require Britain to abandon its trade deal with India, exit the CPTPP, and unwind agreements with Australia and New Zealand. Those arrangements took years to negotiate and represent the most tangible gains from leaving. They would be surrendered not for a gain but for a loss, in exchange for re-entering a regulatory framework in which Britain has no seat, no vote, and no means of redress. That is the deal. It should be stated plainly, because the government will not state it at all.

The Downing Street briefing made one thing plain. The complaint against Lammy, Kyle and Streeting was not that they were wrong. It was that they were saying openly what the government is doing quietly. The objection was to the candour, not the content. The manifesto said one thing. The negotiations are producing another. That is not a government managing a difficult policy. It's a government that made a promise it never intended to keep, and is now hoping the public will not notice until it's too late to matter.

"David Lammy has pointed to the benefits of customs union arrangements. Wes Streeting has called for a deeper trading relationship with the EU"

[Tony @KingsBishop2]

@Keir_Starmer Too little, too late and an insult to British History. We are a laughing stock in the world because of you and your imbecile policies. Do something positive, back our oldest ally and grow a pair before it is too late

[Tony @KingsBishop2]

You are a disgrace and have shamed us in the eyes of the world. You should call a general election and get a mandate for your actions if you can. I am ashamed to be British and be led by such a shambolic and cowardly government. Many of my overseas friends are incredulous at the stance you are taking cannot believe that Britain has become so weak.
You only received 25% of the vote, you have no popular mandate and should hang your head in shame, the sooner you resign the better. @POTUS

[Dr Peter Caddick-Adams #StandwithUkraine @militaryhistori]

@Keir_Starmer The Prime Minister has addressed the nation. Possibly not his fault, his intonation lacked passion and fizz. However, I've never heard words closer to Neville Chamberlain's of 1938-39 before. Flat, inadequate. Other-worldly. The voice of a distinguished lawyer, but not a leader.

[Baroness Foster DBE #FreeIran🦁❤️ @jfoster2019]

Of course you are 🙄

You and this @UKLabour Government are ..

everything that is wrong with this country 🇬🇧..

Spineless, weak, kowtowing Government to Islamists across this country 🇬🇧

and the terror and devastation this barbaric Regime has caused

to its own people and those across Middle East…

and other countries..

#FreeIran🦁❤️

[Tony @KingsBishop2]

Nigel does not keep his word to the ‘little people’ Tony Mack is still waiting to be reimbursed for the money he spent promoting Reform when he was the Parliamentary Candidate for Tendring, if a man does not keep his word can he be trusted? Rupert Lowe looks trustworthy and withstood the Reform attack and maintained his credibility.

[Tony @KingsBishop2]

@OfficeofABC Does the Archbishop Elect realise that the church will lose far more than £100million if she continues to support slavery reparations.
Congregations will not continue to donate 10% of their income to the church if the money is not being used to support the ministry in this country. Any decision of this magnitude should be the subject of a vote of the parishes and not decided by the Church Commissioners under pressure from the ‘House of Bishops’
Many parishes are declining and desperately need more funding. It is a sad state of affairs when a Bishop’s secretary is paid more than a minster. It is time for a radical overhaul of the structure to bring it back in line with the teachings of Christ and kerb the power of the Bishops who have no grounding in the Gospels and are a made creation.
@churchofengland