Nick

👔🐻🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏳️‍🌈🛩🏡🚗🍸🕺

[Julian Jessop @julianHjessop]

I'm sure the @OBR_UK will be pleased with the attention that their dire but accurate warnings about the public finances are receiving today.

Unfortunately, they've been issuing these same warnings for years and STILL no government has taken them seriously enough... 🙄

[Alex Deane @ajcdeane]

Congratulations, Bridget Phillipson.

No doubt this is just “chattering” as you put it, but it’s what you wanted, so… bravo.

[David Betz @DavidBe31099196]

There are economies in the world which basically work: high income, sky-high social capital, world-class education, efficient services, low crime, high happiness, clean streets, functional everything. At least two of them, Hong Kong and Singapore, were British creations, back when we still had sane and competent politicians and bureaucrats instead of a captured civil service that ditched numeracy in the Treasury for diversity quotas.

That was the promise of Brexit: ditch the straitjacket, cut taxes, restore sovereignty, and become the Singapore of the Atlantic. Low tax, high trust, open but orderly, ambitious on the world stage. The so-called smart people sneered it was impossible, stupid, even dangerous. Instead they offered us Manchesterism.

WTF?

As if any sentient person on Earth wakes up thinking, “Yes, Manchester, that’s the glittering future I want for my children.” No one believes this. Not even the most committed Labourites in private. It’s garbage politics: the globalist endgame dressed up as progress, wheeling yet another mid-range, mid-competent, thoroughly biddable satrap onto the stage. It is genuinely humiliating. Brezhnev, for all his senility and stagnation, had more tangible accomplishments than Burnham.

Look at the record. Finances? Not healthy by any serious high-income standard. A £1 billion-plus budget now, yes, after central tweaks, but saddled with £1.6 billion in debt (up sharply), persistent gaps, heavy social care pressures, and reliance on reserves or central props.

Health? Life expectancy and healthy years lag the national average with grotesque deprivation gaps, higher preventable mortality, obesity, and services stretched to breaking.

Crime? Elevated violent and knife rates in known hotspots — Moss Side, Longsight, parts of Salford — creating patchwork safety: fine in the centre by day, avoid certain estates at night.

Youth? Rising NEETs and gang pipelines where opportunity died.

Native housing? Priced-out locals renting into middle age while home ownership slips away.

Happiness and life satisfaction? Dragged down by the lot of it, lower in the North West than in more cohesive places.

We invented better models once. Brexit was the chance to revive that competence and ambition. Instead, the “smart” people gave us Manchesterism: mid-tier outcomes, strained services, visible decay, and lectures on net zero while the basics creak.

It humiliates a nation that once exported order and prosperity. We could have been serious again. We still can if we reject this midwit self-fart sniffing managerialism and remember what we once built.

[Matthew Syed @matthewsyed]

Tories gave us 14 years of bigger government: more debt, taxes, spending, welfare, regulation and QE. Burnham thinks the cure is yet more government. It is like trying to cure socialism with a higher dose of the same disease. It can’t work 👇

https://t.co/oJ83Q1ALli

[Nick @mcmenemy_nick]

@chrisgolds @ByfordsofHolt Park ar Queen Anne drive by the Victoria Hotel, Holkham, and walk to the beach, along to Wells, and back. Blickling Hall is stunning. Also try The Gunton Arms and The Suffield Arms - in neighbouring villages. Visit Burnham Market.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

These thugs fractured the spine of Sgt Kate Evans, who spoke in court of the medical and emotional trauma she still lives with.
Prison is where they belong.
Unlike Zack Polanski, I want serious consequences for anyone who attacks police officers risking their lives to protect us.

[Nick @mcmenemy_nick]

@hjwakerley I adore mine. We’ve done 5 years and 60,000 miles together. Never missed a beat.

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

If you are of the view that millions of your fellow Britons are angry only because they have been “whipped up” by a few right-wing bogeymen, you truly do not understand your own country.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

This is an outrageous, disgraceful smear on John Healey — and an outright lie. There are a ton of ways to finance more for defence — starting with net zero — without taking a penny from schools or hospitals. Reeves should be ashamed of herself for allowing this nonsense. Suggests she’s really desperate.

[David Smith @dsmitheconomics]

Another Sunday Times piece from me: The new Danish government is cutting income tax, corporation tax and some VAT rates. How can it afford to do so when U.K. taxes are only going up?

If cheery Denmark can cut taxes, why can’t the UK?

https://t.co/613VZi5YFw

[Robert Colvile @rcolvile]

Absolutely bloody told you so

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Streeting and Burnham? They are promoting the same dreary socialist agenda that brought this country to its knees in the 1970s.

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions:

- welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap
- defence spending is too low
- the triple lock is unsustainable
- without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution
- we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea
- migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state
- any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement
- we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable
- Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly

Blair basically says all that.

The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind:

- judges and quangos have too much power, are unaccountable and without redressing the balance in favour of parliament it is very difficult to do anything big fast
- the bare minimum that needs to change in this regard is to reform judicial review and planning law so we can put building and economic growth ahead of newts and NIMBYs

None of that above really ought to be up for discussion. It is all common sense but not one of our politicians will publicly say all of it

Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement.

Over to Andy and Keir and Kemi and Nigel and Zack and all the others

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

Absolutely insane.

[Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn]

So the Labour leadership contest is moving into an arms race to tax the country’s entrepreneurs, risk takers and job creators ever higher. Just what low growth Britain needs right now.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

So things are so bad after fewer than two years of Labour that we now face wartime price controls and rationing?! Policies introduced then when we faced genuine shortages of essentials. Is that where we’re heading again? If so, Labour is heading for the knackers yard, never to return.

[Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist]

Lost for words. Never thought I’d see a British govt trying to set food prices. If there is one highly competitive sector it is food retailing.
Do we really want to live in a country where the state sets these prices?

https://t.co/yLqYOdfXNN

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Usual SNP lies. Scottish taxpayers don’t contribute a penny to HS2. Indeed Scotland gets more public money to spend via the Barnet consequential formula because HS2 is deemed an England-only spending project. Doh!

[Iain Dale 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 ⚒️ @IainDale]

This.