Lewis Wright

Well travelled, well read, well... human. Former Software Developer. BSc(Hons)Geog. Interested in computing, geopolitics and Romans.

[Mrs Millicent: Whimsy mode ✝️♿ 🏳️‍🌈 @MillieCheesey]

I personally haven't called the fire brigade for 20 years either but I'm fairly certain its important to pay for it.

[CyberSif @CyberSif]

@emkenobi Robert Pattinson wouldn't have given Nolan that book if he wasn't in Tenet.
Pattinson wouldn't have been cast in Tenet if he wasn't already successful.
Pattinson might not have been successful without Twilight.
Twilight wouldn't exist without MCR.
MCR wouldn't exist without 9/11.

[Belinduh Pyne @belinduhpyne]

When your Mum asks you to go for a walk to see if your new school shoes fit…

[Jonathan Pie @JonathanPieNews]

I don’t care if you think Count Binface is funny or not, if he beats Nigel Farage in the Clacton-on-Sea by election it will be fucking hilarious.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

All-time classic sentence.

[Un Étrange En Terre Étrange @LoinDuTribu]

I hesitated to comment on Ann Widdecombe’s death because, for most of my life, she seemed less like a genuine political threat than a national eccentric: a crank with enough wit, media savvy and ballroom exposure to turn reactionary politics into a marketable personality.

Tory elders adored her precisely because she was a wingnut. The party establishment had enough residual sense to keep her away from its highest offices and never elevate her to the Lords. She could be wheeled out to harrumph about civilisation without being permitted to redesign it.

None of that remotely justifies her apparent murder.

She was found dead in her own home. Whatever the eventual facts, nobody should meet a violent end alone and frightened. You can’t really call that justice. It is not politics. It is barbarism.

But being appalled by her death does not require us to perform a posthumous lobotomy on her politics.

A Britain remade according to Anne Widdecombe’s wishes would have resembled a clerical-fascist state concealed beneath parliamentary procedure, Christian morality and the tasteful antimacassars of respectable Middle England.

She opposed abortion rights, LGBT equality and the human-rights protections restraining state power. She supported capital punishment, mass detention of asylum seekers and a criminal-justice system built around punishment, humiliation and fear.

She did not want to set human rights back by a few regrettable decades. She wanted to reverse the foundational principle that adults possess individual rights which do not depend upon Anne Widdecombe approving of their lives.

All the people now presenting her as some great trailblazer for women might take five bloody minutes to examine what she actually wanted women to be permitted to do with their bodies, relationships and futures.

She was not a misunderstood feminist revolutionary.

She was not a harmless old eccentric who occasionally became overexcited about Brussels.

She was a profoundly authoritarian moralist whose immense personal confidence convinced her that her religion, disgust and prejudices should become everybody else’s legal obligations.

The eccentricity was the camouflage. The politics underneath it were vicious.

She was essentially Aunt Lydia with a novelty television career, except without the redemption arc. A woman convinced that repression became compassion when administered briskly, in sensible shoes, for your own good.

Condemn her killing completely.

But spare me the canonisation.

Death deserves dignity. It does not confer innocence.

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

Game on, Nige.

[Will Hayward @WillHayCardiff]

Two MPs have been murdered in the last decade.

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

Good luck trying to convince people that the man with a bin on his head is the establishment and not the banker who owns five homes

[Oliver Gausden @DinomiteVGC]

For my non-UK friends who don't follow our politics:

- The leader of the far right party has called an election in his area as a publicity stunt to show he can win against "the establishment"

- He will be running exclusively against a man wearing a bin

- He might actually lose

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

River Roding in Parliament for the first time

Yesterday I took a guest of honour into the Houses of Parliament for a historical first visit. I was able to smuggle this guest in my bag, but it’s arguably more important than any politician who currently works there. This guest was the River Roding.

A bottle of Roding water was on the desk in front of me as I was given the chance by Ilford MP Jas Athwal to question Thames Water & the Environment Agency about illegal sewage dumping in the Roding for the first time ever.

The facts are damning. Throughout last year I went out on the Roding in a pair of waders with a bucket & ammonia tester & discovered dozens of completely illegal outfalls spewing over a billion lites a year of raw sewage straight into the Roding. In the last 30 years, Thames Water has effectively stolen £10’s of millions of bill payers money that should have been spent on infrastructure upgrades on the Roding, gave the money to shareholders, & then spent almost nothing on the river, safe in the knowledge that no one was likely to call out the tide of illegal sewage that resulted. Up til now, they weren’t wrong: the Environment Agency has not brought a single prosecution for illegal sewage dumping on the Roding since the Agency was founded, despite thousands of crimes being committed.

That cosy consensus had now ended. Before I questioned the EA & Thames Water, I made clear that I wasn’t there just on my own, or for the River Roding Trust, but representing the thousands of people who live the Roding & are determined that illegal sewage dumping will stop. I thought my asks to Thames Water were entirely reasonable in the circumstances: they must by the end of this year provide a detailed, costed plan of the specific physical steps they will take to end all illegal sewage dumps on the Roding by 2030. My ask to the EA was also reasonable: that they must prosecute all illegal sewage spills on the Roding to the full extent of the law, but that they could accept enforcement undertaking that the fines for each offence be spent on fixing the outfalls, rather than going to government.

I’m sorry to say that neither Thames Water or the Environment Agency was able to say yes to either of these fair & reasonable demands. It therefore appears that Thames Water’s plan is to keep saying good sounding words, but to keep dumping sewage in the Roding for decades. The EA’s plan is to let them do this.

The only thing standing between the Roding being killed with sewage pollution for decades to come is all of you. We don’t need ‘citizen scientists’ monitoring the decline of the river whilst justifying big river charity staff salaries to ‘engage’ people in a dying river. We need citizen investigators & campaigners: determined to find where the illegal sewage is coming from & then get it stopped by any (peaceful) means possible.

[Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar]

This worrying development takes place in a wider context of debanking for political reasons, against both the right & the left.

Banks have no right to interfere with legitimate journalistic activity. Lloyds must either disclose their rationale, or reinstate the account immediately.

[Gerry Samuels @GerrySamuels12]

Lots of Boomers seem to be remembering the summer of 1976 with rose tinted spectacles, & think that they ‘just got in with it’

Let’s have a look at what the newspapers of the day had to say in 1976….

🧵

[Milo Smith @mil000]

im gonna pass on installing your OS bro

[dart @poordart]

It's extra insane because there are only 2.4 million Albanians in total

Extremely impressive "fuck off kushner"

[Pallavi Devulapalli @doctorpallavi]

This is what aggravates people
‘Spend ten days and a thousand pounds making a river cleaner and an officer turns up within the week. Pump sewage into that same river for years and the chance of seeing a courtroom is close to zero.’

[April Danann - Nature Rebel Apothecary @DanannSpl4ces]

@SamaHoole Let the bee keeping associations know about the wool. We use it as winter insulation in our hives...we can work together on this.

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

@EnvAgency Imagining some poor person in the @EnvAgency comms department having to explain to their Chief Exec Phillip Duffy what a “ratio” is.

[VamosDundee 💙🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇲🇽 @VamosDundee]

Funny place to bring that flag. Just looks like they’re opposing the log flumes.