Mark Broughton

Defence, Aerospace, Terrorism, and Security News; founder of Marontech; keen sailor; actively involved with the Order of St John and St John Ambulance

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@SSAFA_NI is super proud to have been the chosen charity at this year’s Belfast International Tattoo, thanks to everyone who supported and those who have given so generously

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@belfastcity_air Please register me for flight updates on flight BA1396 on 2026/09/03 13:35 GMT+01:00 RSRC:101

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

Stop the permission of the Chinese Embassy in London https://t.co/3lo4c5ynYq via @UKChange

[FeelGoodThoughts @feelgoodtale]

In September of 2005, on the first day of school, Martha Cothren, a History teacher at RobinsonHigh School in Little Rock, did something not to be forgotten. On the first day of school, with the permission of the school superintendent, the principal and the building supervisor, she removed all of the desks in her classroom. When the first period kids entered the room they discovered that there were no desks.

'Ms. Cothren, where are our desks?'

She replied, 'You can't have a desk until you tell me how you earn the right to sit at a desk.'

They thought, 'Well, maybe it's our grades.' 'No,' she said.

'Maybe it's our behavior.' She told them, 'No, it's not even your behavior.'

And so, they came and went, the first period, second period, third period. Still no desks in the classroom. Kids called their parents to tell them what was happening and by early afternoon television news crews had started gathering at the school to report about this crazy teacher who had taken all the desks out of her room.

The final period of the day came and as the puzzled students found seats on the floor of the desk-less classroom. Martha Cothren said, 'Throughout the day no one has been able to tell me just what he or she has done to earn the right to sit at the desks that are ordinarily found in this classroom. Now I am going to tell you.'

At this point, Martha Cothren went over to the door of her classroom and opened it. Twenty-seven (27) U.S. Veterans, all in uniform, walked into that classroom, each one carrying a school desk. The Vets began placing the school desks in rows, and then they would walk over and stand alongside the wall. By the time the last soldier had set the final desk in place those kids started to understand, perhaps for the first time in their lives, just how the right to sit at those desks had been earned.

Martha said, 'You didn't earn the right to sit at these desks. These heroes did it for you. They placed the desks here for you. They went halfway around the world, giving up their education and interrupting their careers and families so you could have the freedom you have. Now, it's up to you to sit in them. It is your responsibility to learn, to be good students, to be good citizens. They paid the price so that you could have the freedom to get an education. Don't ever forget it.'

By the way, this is a true story. And this teacher was awarded the Veterans of Foreign Wars Teacher of the Year for the State of Arkansas in 2006. She is the daughter of a WWII POW.

Do you think this email is worth passing along so others won't forget either, that the freedoms we have in this great country were earned by our U.S. Veterans?... I did.

Let us always remember the men and women of our military and the rights they have won for us.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

There is a mill on the Dove at Rocester in Staffordshire, an eighteenth-century Arkwright mill from the years when this country was inventing the factory as we know it. It spun cotton for two hundred years and then following its decommission it stood empty and waited to be turned into apartments.

In 2010 it opened as a school. Anthony Bamford turned Arkwright's mill into an engineering academy for fourteen to nineteen year olds, a £20 million conversion, with Toyota and Bosch and Fujitsu putting their own engineers into the classrooms. It is now the most oversubscribed school in the county.

Ask yourself why a digger company had to build a school.

It had to build a school because the British state, presented with the plainest industrial problem in the country, produced the Apprenticeship Levy. Since it came in, apprenticeship starts have fallen 31 per cent. Starts in small businesses have fallen 49 per cent. Level 2 starts, the ones that take a sixteen-year-old with nothing and make him employable, have fallen 72 per cent. Employer spending on training is down 36 per cent a head in real terms since 2005, forty-two per cent of manufacturing vacancies go unfilled because the qualified people do not exist, and the shortage costs us somewhere between thirty and thirty-nine billion pounds a year in output that simply never happens.

So Bamford stopped waiting and made his own.

This month the engineers that mill helped produce are taking a car to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. It is called the Hydromax, it is ten metres long, and it runs on two hydrogen internal combustion engines that JCB designed and built itself, sixteen hundred horsepower between them. Andy Green is driving. That is a lovely piece of symmetry, because Green set the diesel land speed record twenty years ago this month, in a JCB, at 350.092 miles per hour. Same firm, same driver, back on the same salt.

The hydrogen combustion record stands at 187 miles per hour. Hydromax has already done 208 in testing on British ground. They are going for something past 350.

Of course, our national conversation about engines has been conducted for a decade by people who have never made one. Whitehall decided that the combustion engine was finished and that the future would arrive procured from China. A family firm in Staffordshire declined the memo and rejected the underpinning philosophy, then spent its own money for years to build a hydrogen engine that eleven European licensing authorities have now certified for sale, and is about to drive it across a salt flat faster than anything of its kind has ever moved.

The state's only contribution to this superb endeavour was a levy that cut apprenticeships by a third.

Progress will abolish the Apprenticeship Levy outright and put the Skill Capital Levy in its place, hypothecated entirely to training, three quarters of it locked to Levels 2 and 3 where the actual work of the country is done, with a £5k tax credit for any employer who takes a worker beyond the statutory minimum. We will let young people start earning nationally recognised Hallmarks at fifteen, so that a kid can walk out at eighteen with three of them locked and loaded and ready to go, no debt, and a trade that pays.

Imagine a hundred Rocesters. Imagine every decent-sized town with a firm that serious and a school that good sitting in the middle of it, and a generation coming out at eighteen who can build things that move. Germany does this. Switzerland does this. We did it ourselves within living memory, and there is not one law of physics standing between us and doing it again; doing it even better than it has ever been done before!

Anthony Bamford had to do it alone because nobody in Whitehall was ever going to help him. We mean to change this country so that the next man like him doesn't have to.

Good luck at Bonneville.

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@nickdebois Perhaps he should go by shanks pony, the greenest of them all. As a green zealot how on earth will he even begin to do his job? What a p***take of an appointment, just to keep him on side not the country safe and respected.

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@PeterTCross @TheUCS473 Is this exercise going to be a Tewt, tactical exercise without troops? There aren’t enough regular or reserve to have any effect.

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@Telegraph Membership of the Chinese Communist Party coming home to roost, just like allowing them to build their new embassy or should that be spy centre and jail.

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@johnnnyknowall For tweeting this type of comment others have found themselves in front of the judiciary, will she? It is comments like hers that put politicians at risk.

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@nicholadrummond @thinkdefence It is worth considering as the 110th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme is commemorated that if the British Army of today had been involved there would be nobody fit to fight, a really sobering thought.

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@Telegraph Starmer and Reeves may have been desperate but the next lot will make everyone poorer and the country a complete basket case with the only people to gain is the IMF and the international money markets charging exorbitant interest rates.

[Gabriele Molinelli @Gabriel64869839]

With this one, i believe we have seen in public/in photos/videos 7 of the 8 "P" pre-series CHALLENGER 3s.

I have some reservations on one as the image quality made it tough to be sure about the registration.

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@stay_remain @PeterTCross @Bishopstonedit Peter you are right about loyalty, Starmer has no real understanding of it, his behaviour would not even encourage me to follow out of curiosity. Conservatives may have been a mess but this lot are horrendous and IMHO a real threat to the country in every aspect.

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@JohnHealey_MP At last a Labour Minister with integrity well done @JohnHealey_MP Now will the Chiefs do the same thing and show their integrity, maybe the only way Starmer and Reeves will wake up to the threat. Easy way to find money get rid of Miliband and his department

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@LOS_Fisher At last someone taking responsibility for the shambles in government on defence

[Lucy Fisher @LOS_Fisher]

BREAKING: John Healey resigns

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@haynesdeborah They need to justify the shortfall in the DIP so refresh SDSR to meet the DIP always a good way not to run a strategy. When is someone really senior going to resign in disgust?

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

British defence companies locked out of £100bn Nato ‘bomb bank’ https://t.co/dAE6uAHYlr there is only one place for “two face” and the “poison fool” HM Tower of London and charged with treason

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

@RWJThomas @DefenceHQ Very well considered piece at the same time really concerning for industry and defence in general. Politicians need to wake up and realise without strong defence security will drop and the economy sing rapidly.

[Mark Broughton @markbroughton53]

What is the British military actually for? Excellent piece should be required reading for all. Thanks https://t.co/zeGXlSAgox