Mark Cronfield

Actor (not so much now!), Dad, Dales.

Common ground. Common wealth

[The Heartlands Tribune @Labourheartland]

Westminster has built a country where we spend more money on the planning paperwork for a single road than it costs other nations to build an entire mountain tunnel.

This isn't a system accidentally strangled by red tape: it is a highly lucrative industry. A vast priesthood of consultants and lawyers is making a fortune they have no interest in the work being done.

It is corruption by bureaucracy, and working-class communities are footing the bill for projects that never even see a spade in the ground.

The absolute paralysis of modern Britain was laid bare in a recent parliamentary committee. A single witness gave them the truth with both barrels, exposing the administrative vampires sucking public money dry while the work goes undone. The details are an insult to every community waiting for homes, decent transport, and cheaper energy.

Take the Lower Thames Crossing. The planning application alone has swallowed more than a quarter of a billion pounds. For that exact same amount, Norway actually constructed the world’s longest road tunnel. We spent it on paper, and we have not even turned a sod of earth.

This is a permission state eating itself alive.

Look at HS2, the most expensive railway line on earth. Part of the reason it cost so much is that we are spending £121 million on a specific "bat tunnel" to protect a few hundred bats living in a nearby wood, a wood the line does not even pass through.

Look at Hinkley Point C, the most expensive nuclear power station in human history. For eight years, developers locked in a multi-million-pound wrangle with regulators over installing an underwater "fish disco", an acoustic deterrent to stop fish swimming into the pipes. 20 years ago, we built nuclear fleets at a fraction of the cost. Today, we sacrifice national infrastructure to the gods of endless compliance.

The final absurdity is the plan to reopen just 3.3 miles of an existing railway line between Bristol and Portishead, a route already built but closed during the Beeching cuts. The planning application is 80,000 pages long. Over one thousand of those pages are about bats.

We have created a system that trades in paper while the real economy rots. The working class pay the price for this institutional cowardice. They pay for it in soaring energy bills, missing homes, broken transport links, and a country that cannot build the future it keeps promising.

Protecting the environment is vital, but drowning ourselves in paper is not environmentalism. A system that takes 80,000 pages to clear three miles of existing track is broken. It is not governance: it is managed decline with a clipboard.

It's the bureaucratic vampires drinking the country's wealth...

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

People defend capitalism because they confuse it with commerce. They believe “capitalism” is when people start businesses and sell things.

If people understood that the thing they call capitalism and love so much is actually just commerce and that it’s not the same thing as capitalism, they would feel very different.

This is because a local baker selling bread, a mechanic fixing cars, or an artisan selling wares on a digital storefront is a sign of commerce in a market economy, which is simply a mechanism for exchanging goods and services based on supply and demand.

Needless to say, this has existed for thousands of years before capitalism was created.

As economic historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, commerce and capitalism are not only distinct; but historically, they have often operated at cross-purposes.

According to Braudel, ordinary commerce is competitive and transparent, while capitalism is anti-competitive and deliberately opaque, making it a zone of privilege held by a small elite who bend the rules in their favour.

Braudel further argues that commerce, or the market, is horizontal, transparent, and competitive and as old as civilization itself. It involves individuals or small groups trading goods, where barriers to entry are low, no single player dominates, and profit is a reward for fulfilling a specific need.

Capitalism, meanwhile, is a specific institutional arrangement that emerged relatively recently in human history, around the 16th to 17th centuries. It is NOT just people “trading stuff”. It is instead the legal and financial system where the means of production are privately owned, and the primary objective is the continuous, infinite accumulation of capital.

Because of this accumulation-obssessed nature of capitalism, when it scales up, it seeks to eliminate the free play of commerce to protect its investments. True market competition is risky for massive capital as it drives prices down and threatens profit margins.

Braudel contended that capitalism only begins where commerce ends. It is the zone of high finance and state collusion. Because it operates across vast distances such as the 17th-century spice trade, information takes months to travel, which creates a deliberate lack of transparency.

Braudel noted that the great capitalists of the early modern era in Madeira and Venice or the Dutch East India Company, never wanted to compete in a fair, transparent market because competition slices profit margins to the bone. Instead, they secured royal charters, exclusive trading rights, and naval protection. At the same time, the state granted them legal monopolies, effectively outlawing competition.

Therefore, capitalism naturally trends toward creating monopolies and securing state interventions like bailouts, subsidies, and regulatory capture to shield itself from the very market forces it claims to champion. In fact, the most important takeaway from Braudel’s analysis is that capitalism is NOT the natural evolution or the highest form of the free market, it is its dark shadow.

So, when our lizard overlords use “free market” and “capitalism” interchangeably, they’re deliberately hiding this distinction and using the moral legitimacy of the hard-working, transparent business owner to defend the structural privileges of the protected financial elite and its regulatory capture.

If ordinary people could comprehend these distinctions, many self-described “capitalists” would realise they are just pro-commerce, and actually anti-capitalist, because it would be clear that defending “capitalism” means defending the right of a small parasite class to bypass the market entirely.

[MW4Liberty @MW4Liberty]

We seal envelopes not because the letter contains a conspiracy, but because the contents belong exclusively to the sender and the receiver.

The "nothing to hide" argument is pure corporate/state propaganda. Privacy isn't about hiding a crime; it's about deciding who gets access to your life. It’s a boundary of power, not a shield for guilt.

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.

This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population.

Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”

— Albert Einstein

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

The UK plans to get rid of the Coastguard Service and turn it into volunteers only, to 'save money'.

This will cost lives, and we have afforded it for 204 years.

But now it is 'unaffordable'.

No it is billionaires who are unaffordable, tax them until there aren't any.

[Murray Rothbard @MurraySuggests]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.

The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.

Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.

If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[OldishBird @oldishbird1]

Count Binface is reminding us all what it really means to be British. An abiding love for a brilliant piss take that bursts the ego of the most highly inflated ego around. The sun is out, England are still in the World Cup and Farage has made himself look like a tool. 🤣🇬🇧⚽️☀️

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

From the archive

"What about university tuition fees, will you remain committed to scrapping them?"

"They're all pledges.. so the answer to these questions is yes."

"So university tuition fees being scrapped will be in a Starmer manifesto?"

"Yes. Thats why its a pledge"

[Mags Campaigner/Voice for Truth @SAVIA_NI]

@mikegalsworthy #VoteCountBinFace #Clacton

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

84-year old retired priest Sue Parfitt has been repeatedly arrested for breaking counter-terror law by holding signs to protest the proscription of Palestine Action. Today, she went further than ever before, vocally expressing support for the group, and encouraging the police arresting her to join her in that support. She was arrested under section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, a criminal offence that carries a sentence of up to 14-years. She told Novara Media why she’ll continue to break the law.

[troovus @troovus]

As Starmer's premiership draws to a close, let's appreciate what he & his team have achieved

Taking Labour from a big majority handed to them on a plate, to a nasty, right wing, authoritarian, soulless rump of a party in thrall to corporate lobbyists, almost universally despised

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Severn Trent Water company doubles CEO reward plan to £3.1m.

Reward for what?
400m litres of water a day lost to leaks.
Sewage dumped into rivers for 200000 hrs
Customers fleeced
No new reservoir since 1989
£12bn paid in dividends

Must nationalise water.
https://t.co/yKVAg17tGp

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

In 1970 the UK and Norway were roughly equal, almost no debt, and owned all their Public Services.

Now the UK owns nothing and has £3tn of debt.

While Norway still owns everything and has the equivalent of £10tn.

That's how privatisation 'works'.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Finland the happiest country on the planet, bans for profit schools, taxes billionaires, houses the homeless.

Time to do the same.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

SHE NAMED 270 ABUSERS. THE COUNCIL GAVE HER A DIVERSITY COURSE INSTEAD

In 2001 a Home Office researcher called Adele Weir mapped a child abuse network in Rotherham. She found at least 270 victims and named the men running it. The Hussain family was on that list.

Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police had the names, the cars, the addresses. Their response was to tell Weir to never mention Asian men again and book her onto a two day ethnicity and diversity course.

A few months later her files vanished from a locked office.

Computer records were altered too. Nobody was ever charged for that either.

It took until 2016 for Arshid Hussain to get 35 years and Qurban Ali to get 10.

Fifteen years after Weir handed the council the names on a plate.

The Jay Report in 2014 confirmed 1400 children were abused in Rotherham.

The Casey Report in 2015 called the council not fit for purpose and pointed straight at a culture that put political correctness above child protection.

This keeps happening because the playbook never changes. Raise the alarm and you get managed. Stay quiet and you get promoted.

Weir did her job. The people whose actual job was protecting children sent her to a workshop.

Sources: @thetimes @BBCNews @yorkshirepost

[Wide Awake Media @wideawake_media]

Neil Oliver maintains that the technocratic agenda to construct a "digital cage"—comprised of digital ID and CBDCs—is ultimately doomed to failure "without the cooperation of the people".

"Despite what the technocrats would like us to think... all of it will fail."

"Because the trust is gone. And you cannot force governance on millions or billions of people. It just won't work."

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

Professor Clara Mattei just gave a masterclass on the coercion of capitalism:

“Capitalism has been imposed upon us by a tiny elite since the beginning. Liberal democracy is really only a superficial facade. When people rise up against the capitalist system liberals and fascists are best friends to implement austerity.”

She wasn’t done teaching! She also points out capitalism itself isn’t natural and that it took control of the world using violence by excluding people from the land. Prior to capitalism forcing itself onto the world indigenous cultures used a much different method to organize their societies:

“If you look at all the indigenous cultures it was based on circular, horizontal organization through councils. It was about caring for the commons and caring for nature rather than extracting.”

Professor Mattei just gave the world a much needed wake up call with this interview and outlined the need for humanity to look to its indigenous roots for how to chart a sustainable path forward!

[Elaine Molyneux @molyneux_elaine]

Clara Mattei: capitalism is not natural - it’s enforced https://t.co/yi13qDZ4ZN via @YouTube
Brilliant woman. Very interesting interview with @krishgm from Channel 4

[The Heartlands Tribune @Labourheartland]

"You can buy your council house, so you’ll be a property owner, you may not be able to get a wage increase, but you can borrow’. And the borrowing was deliberately encouraged because people in debt are slaves to their employers.” -Tony Benn #morgages #CostOfLivingCrisis #Scam