Lesley MacHinery

Scottish, British 🇬🇧- not ‘Other British’. #SNPOut

[Help2Rehome Edinburgh, Stirling and Perth @H2REdinburgh]

Not many shares for this lad, can you help?

[Alan Smith @AlanJLSmith]

In the 24 months since Labour came to power, we've seen;

• Employer National Insurance increased from 13.8% to 15%.
• The employer NI threshold cut from £9,100 to £5,000.
• Income Tax and National Insurance thresholds frozen until 2031.
• Capital Gains Tax increased from 10% and 20% to 18% and 24%.
• Business Asset Disposal Relief increased from 10% to 14%, then 18%.
• Investors’ Relief increased and its lifetime allowance cut from £10 million to £1 million.
• Carried interest taxation increased and moved towards the Income Tax regime.
• Dividend tax rates increased by two percentage points.
• Savings-income tax rates increased by two percentage points.
• Property-income tax rates increased by two percentage points.
• Most unused pension funds brought into the Inheritance Tax net.
• Agricultural Property Relief restricted.
• Business Property Relief restricted.
• Inheritance Tax thresholds frozen for longer.
• The non-dom regime replaced with a more extensive residence-based system.
• VAT imposed on private school fees.
• Business-rates relief removed from private schools.
• Stamp Duty increased on second homes and buy-to-let properties.
• The Furnished Holiday Lettings tax regime abolished.
• Pension salary-sacrifice benefits capped at £2,000 before National Insurance applies.
• The Cash ISA allowance cut to £12,000 for most under-65s.
• A 22% charge introduced on interest from cash held inside non-cash ISAs.
• Restrictions introduced on transfers and cash-like holdings within ISAs.
• The Energy Profits Levy increased and extended.
• Investment allowances for oil and gas producers reduced.
• A new Vaping Products Duty introduced.
• Tobacco duties increased above inflation.
• Vehicle Excise Duty increased for many new cars.
• Electric vehicles brought into the Vehicle Excise Duty system.
• A new mileage tax announced for electric and plug-in hybrid cars.
• Air Passenger Duty increased.
• Climate Change Levy rates increased.
• Plastic Packaging Tax increased.
• A new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism introduced.
• Making Tax Digital extended to more landlords and self-employed people.

Together they represent one of the biggest transfers of wealth from households and businesses to the Treasury in decades - with no noticeable improvement in public services.

Whether you're a business owner employing staff, a parent paying school fees, a farmer planning succession, an entrepreneur building wealth or simply someone trying to save for retirement...

You keep less of what you earn.
You keep less of what you invest.
You leave less to your family.

Death by a thousand cuts is becoming tax policy.

[Alex Burghart @alexburghart]

When the Severe Alert system was established in 2024 it was made clear that:

“There will be a very high threshold for its use based on strict criteria centred on an immediate risk to life.”

Tonight’s use at a national level clearly doesn’t hit that threshold and opens the door to future misuse of the system.

Labour needs to publish who signed off the decision to use the alert and the criteria that they were using.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

The utopia that lied. Here's the truth...

@prageru

[Lesley MacHinery @LesleyMac]

@TitaniaMcGrath @andrewdoyle_com @spectator Rod would have had a good chuckle at that

[James Dreyfus @DreyfusJames]

Had the pleasure of briefly meeting him a few years ago.
He was a powerhouse. Had a wonderfully dry sense of humour.
Loved his articles & writing…

RIP Rod Liddle

[Freddie Sayers @freddiesayers]

Everyone at the Spectator is devastated by the news that our beloved columnist and friend Rod has died. We knew that he had been unwell for some time but had been hoping for a recovery and return to the writing which Spectator readers loved and looked forward to every week.

His voice, of course, is irreplaceable: a combination of bravery, originality, fearlessness and laugh-out-loud wit that we will miss deeply in the weeks and years to come.

Tributes are already pouring in from contributors and friends, and we will be running many of them in the coming days. He was much loved and will be profoundly missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family. RIP.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I’ve just seen a post from yet another man who thinks my position has shifted since I wrote my 2020 essay about gender identity ideology and the consequent clash of rights https://t.co/pasxBD1Hzl

For the avoidance of doubt, I stand by every word I wrote then. For instance: ‘woman isn’t a costume.’ If it surprises you that I say men don’t become women by wearing make up and dresses, you didn’t understand the essay. I’ve been crystal clear all along that I believe people are free to live and present themselves as the opposite sex if that’s what feels comfortable and authentic TO THEM. This appears to have been interpreted (most often, tellingly, by men) as ‘and it naturally follows that I, as a woman, will validate a man’s belief that he is now, to all intents and purposes, the same sex as me, and I will use only the speech he deems appropriate and will be very careful to protect his sensitive ego, no matter the cost to myself in pretending to believe a falsehood, or the loss of my own rights due to this pretence.’

Dress as you like within normal bounds of situational decency, wear lipstick, sequins and a beard if you want, call yourself whatever you like, have sex with any consenting adult you please: I wish you health, happiness and safety. What you don’t get is the power to compel my speech and belief.

When I call a man a man, I am speaking verifiable truth. It is essential to be able to accurately name sex when discussing fair sport, facilities and services for women and girls and the right of gay people not to be demonised for their same-sex attraction. In years to come, a lot of useful idiots are going to awake to the fact that they’ve been complicit in enormous harm done to women, girls, gay people who stood against the insanity, and some extremely vulnerable young people. I don’t doubt we’ll hear a lot of, ‘I thought I was just being kind.’ Such individuals, especially those in positions of power, should be asked why they never had anything to say about the loud, public, widespread unkindness directed against those who refused to adopt their fashionable, elitist beliefs, eg, the detransitioners being bullied and vilified by former ‘allies’, the whistleblowers who tried to stop an unregulated experiment on troubled children, the women who lost their careers and livelihoods by standing up for all women’s rights.

Some people appear to believe it a worse crime for a woman to call a man a man than for trans activists to call loudly and publicly for the assault and assassination of all women who refuse to bend the knee. I have never wished violence or any other kind of harm on a trans-identified person, but, like many other people who’ve defended women’s and girls’ rights over the past few years, I have received thousands of threats of death, rape and torture. The wilful blindness of those who bleat ‘both sides’ will rightly be judged harshly in times to come.

TL;DR Trans women aren’t women, and if that hurts your feelings, be grateful you live in a society where you are just as free to espouse gender ideology as I am to speak the truth. As Orwell said: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

Daily Telegraph covers the proximal origin scandal well:

The messages that show Covid scientists secretly suspected a lab leak
Authors of influential Nature Medicine paper privately admitted ‘we can’t rule it out’
Sarah Knapton Science Editor. Eric Williams News Reporter
Published 24 July 2026 6:00am BST
1600

Scientists who were instrumental in shutting down the Covid lab-leak theory admitted in private “we can’t rule it out”, newly released messages show.

In March 2020, a group of influential virologists published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine arguing that an animal spillover event probably caused the pandemic.

The article, known as “The Proximal Origin of Covid”, concluded “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” and was hugely persuasive in stifling debate globally.

But messages obtained and published by US senator Rand Paul show that behind the scenes the scientists voiced concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out experiments on coronaviruses at insufficient biosecurity levels.

The virus emerged eight miles from WIV laboratories and was seemingly pre-adapted to infect humans.

Three months after the paper was published, one of the authors, Prof Kristian Andersen, of the Scripps Institute, California, wrote on Slack, the communication platform: “At the end of the day, we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other – and especially given some of the recent evidence, we also can’t rule out that somebody actually put it in there.

“That’s obviously not to say that somebody ‘did’ but we can’t rule it out. Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way’, but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage.”

In the Nature Medicine paper, the authors had argued that bat coronavirus manipulation was carried out across the world, so it was unfair to point the finger at WIV, but Prof Andersen privately admitted that was not the case.

“That isn’t true, it has exclusively been going at WIV,” he wrote, adding that he believed both a natural and a lab-origin scenario were “equally probable”.

He also warned that the paper had claimed manipulation of viruses was hard, and that the virus could not emerge through cell evolution experiments. But he said both those arguments had been proven untrue.

Prof Andersen said that a lab leak was 30 per cent likely while co-author Prof Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney put the probability at between 10 and 20 per cent.

Viscount Ridley, the author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, said: “These messages confirm that the Proximal Origins authors continued to believe a lab leak was possible.

“So why did they not correct or retract the paper that misled the world?”

The messages also reveal that authors were aware that Dr Shi – the lead bat virus scientist at WIV – was herself worried that Covid had been caused by a lab accident.

In September 2021, it emerged that before the pandemic Dr Shi had applied for a grant to insert a furin cleavage site (FCS) into bat coronaviruses – the very addition that made Covid-19 so infectious to humans.

Although the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency dismissed the grant because it was too dangerous, Slack messages showed that scientists feared the work had gone ahead anyway.

Prof Andrew Rambaut of Edinburgh University wrote that “it isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff”, adding, “We just need to re-convince ourself it is coincidence.”

Prof Holmes added that it was “striking” that a bat-derived coronavirus with a furin cleavage site turned up in a city with a lab “proposing to muck around” with FCSs in bat coronaviruses.

WIV planned the bat research in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance, founded by British zoologist Peter Daszak and the American virologist Dr Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina.

Prof Rambaut told his co-authors they would need to talk about the “Baric/Daszak s---show” and come up with a strategy “so we don’t get associated with these f---ers”.

He also warned colleagues to “stay off email” or “carefully curate some emails” in case of Freedom of Information requests.

Although the virologists claimed publicly that most scientists agreed on a natural origin for the pandemic, privately they admitted this was not the case.

Prof Andersen said he had been “pretty surprised” to learn that “most scientists I talk to believe there is a likely connection to the lab”.

Prof Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, who has called for a lab leak scenario to be fully investigated, said: “The claim repeated literally thousands of times by journalists that most scientists favour a natural origin of Covid and oppose a lab origin of Covid always was a lie.

“And almost always was a deliberate lie.”

The scientists were also dismissive about journalists, politicians, commentators and other experts who supported a lab leak theory, calling them “idiots” “tw--s” “clueless” “deranged” and “morons”, making up disparaging nicknames for experts.

Senator Paul said: “Behind closed doors, the scientists who authored the Proximal Origin paper privately questioned their own conclusions.

“Publicly, however, they shamed, attacked, and censored those who raised legitimate questions – all in the name of damage control.

“We deserve accountability for every effort to keep the public in the dark.”

The Telegraph has approached the scientists for comments.

[Help2Rehome Scotland @H2RScotland]

We’ve not had any enquiries for Maisie, can you please share to help her on her way?

We're supporting the owner/family of Maisie.
Maisie's owner is moving into a hospice due to illness and Maisie is looking for a home.
She is 14 years old.
Maisie would be best in a quiet home with no other pets or children.
She is chipped and spayed.
Maisie is healthy with no medical problems.
She would like a garden to lie in as she enjoys the sunshine.
We think Maisie would make a great companion for someone who is on their own or a couple with a quiet home.
Maisie uses a litter tray and likes her treats.
She sleeps in her own bed or on the sofa.
Maisie is happy to be left alone. She has a carry box and eats Gourmet Mon Petit, Fresh n Fine, Gourmet Perle sachets and does like the cat lick sticks.

For more information or if you can offer Maisie a quiet home please email [email protected]

[Lesley MacHinery @LesleyMac]

@JamesMelville Don’t be fooled!

[Lesley MacHinery @LesleyMac]

@JamesMelville

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

There’s a tacit conspiracy to never discuss this.

The Tories don’t want to admit they presided over redistribution from high earners to low earners.

And Labour doesn’t want to credit the Tories with it.

Right? Wrong? You decide. But it happened.

[S★ @xxyllinn]

I don’t want to "download the app" to pay for parking. I don’t want to "create an account" to see a menu. I don’t want to "provide feedback" on a 30-second interaction. I just want to exist in the physical world without a digital leash.

[Social Democratic Party @SDPhq]

William Clouston (@WilliamClouston), SDP, is standing to give the people of Clacton full and fair debate. 👇

@UKLabour won't serve Clacton.
@Conservatives won't serve Clacton.
@LibDems won't serve Clacton.
@TheGreenParty won't serve Clacton.
We will.

[Claire Fox @Fox_Claire]

Brave speech by @DavidDavisMP using parliamentary privilege to raise all those inconvenient truths & qus that need answering, around Sturgeon & SNP scandal. And glad to hear a robust defense of Alex Salmond's reputation, which one always suspected was attacked for dodgy reasons

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

Claire says something extremely important here.

I thought his comments about Ann were appalling. Now I see him for exactly who he is. And that is the power of free speech.

Vile speech should be exposed, condemned and challenged by other speech and argument. But unless it crosses a clear legal threshold into a genuine threat or incitement, it should never end in arrest.

The post caused outrage. Good. Outrage allows society to judge and reject ideas and ideology. Suppressing it doesn’t destroy it, it just gets driven underground, where resentment festers becoming infinitely more dangerous.

And more, how would we ever know anyone’s true nature, if only approved groupthink is allowed? Surely that, in the end, is where the real danger lies?

[Tony Dowson @TonyDowson5]

"Please don't politicise Anne Widdecome'a death — although I will use it to tighten the Online Safety Act ratchet even more"

[Lesley MacHinery @LesleyMac]

@afneil Students from England and overseas are also accepted with pitiful grades. Money over merit!

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Beyond pathetic. Indeed. But don’t expect a reply. She’ll be too busy burnishing her Norwegian accent.