Meryl Cook

[GINGERSKOL💜💛 @GlowSurfing]

Spot on!! 🎯😎😆

I can’t wait for the comments!!

Nicklas Nilsson explains the difference between right-wing and left-wing people in spot-on text on Facebook:

"If a right-wing person is gay, then he is, and he doesn't care what others think.
If a left-winger is gay, then he demands legal changes, protests against everything and everyone, and turns it into a political struggle.

If a right-winger is vegan, then he simply doesn't eat meat.
If a left-winger is vegan, then he wants to ban meat, halt food production, and protest outside farms and chicken farms.

If a right-winger doesn't like guns, then he just doesn't buy any.
If a left-winger doesn't like guns, then he tries to ban them, prevent everyone else from owning one, and hates those who do.

If a right-winger is worried about the climate, then he flies less, drives an electric car if it suits him, and sorts his waste.

If a left-winger is worried about the climate, then he wants to ban fossil fuel cars, air travel, and meat for everyone else, protest outside factories, and demand that the state forces the change.

If a right-winger wants to give his children a good education, then he moves to an area with good schools, or chooses a private school, or gets involved himself.
If a left-winger wants to give his children a good education, then he demands more tax money from everyone, equal results for all, a ban on charter schools, and protests against every inequality.

If a right-winger complains about his job or workplace.. he doesn't. He changes jobs or starts his own business.
If a left-winger complains about his job – then it's the boss, the company, or the colleagues who are at fault. He demands collective agreements, strikes, changes for the whole community, and protests against the company so that it suits him.

If a right-winger is dissatisfied with his housing or rent, then he moves, renovates, or buys something else.
If a left-winger is dissatisfied with his housing or rent, then he demands rent freezes, more subsidies, regulations for everyone, and protests against landlords and politicians.

If a right-winger fails with a business or an investment that goes wrong, then he gets up, dusts himself off, and tries again tomorrow.
If a left-winger runs out of money on the 24th, then he blames the rich for having too much and needing to contribute more, blames the lottery win that didn't come home last week, and mutters that he has such damn bad luck.

If a right-winger sees this – then he sends it to a few friends for a good laugh.
If a left-winger sees this – then he tries to argue against it, get it removed, and delete me from Facebook."

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

Labour has already tried Burnham’s dream. In February 1974, they promised an annual wealth tax spanning everything from houses and land to pensions and artwork.

Denis Healey went away, did the work – and concluded it was “impossible” to make such a tax raise meaningful sums once you counted the cost of hiring thousands of officials to value assets with no market price.

Officials warned of exactly what any serious economist would tell Burnham today: the policy risked an “exodus of UK capital” and “serious damage to the economy” as investors took their money – and jobs – elsewhere.

So Labour quietly dropped the plan.

Not because they became right‑wing, but because the numbers didn’t add up.

Burnham’s “new” wealth tax is nothing of the sort. It’s the same old wheeze: pretend you can soak “the rich” forever, ignore behavioural change, ignore capital flight, and hope nobody reads the history of why your own party scrapped this clown‑car policy 50 years ago.

[Dougie Brimson 🎬 🇬🇧 🇮🇱 @dougiebrimson]

It's incredible how so many people under 40 understand the pre-Thatcher years better than those of us who actually lived through them.

[Anthony Boutall @anthonyboutall]

The winter of discontent. The IMF bail out. The three day week. The sick man of Europe. Energy, heat, & light cut off from homes, schools, & hospitals.

As Andy Burnham confirmed today, Labour has one aim: to drag us back to the 1970s. 🥀

[Emma Trimble @Emma_A_Webb]

The World’s End in Finsbury Park… very good!

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

I was around in the 70s Labour brought the country up its knees

[Nigel Owens MBE @Nigelrefowens]

A view from last night. Cows loving the outdoors, plenty of trees for shade and helping the environment. This is a what most farms are like in the UK Mr Packham. You should come and visit sometime. Have a lovely weekend one and all. #MairwenHerefords

[Priti Patel MP @pritipatel]

Margaret Thatcher was an international stateswoman and a political giant who freed Britain from Labour’s economic tyranny of endless strikes, exchange controls, energy blackouts, and the Winter of Discontent.

She turned Britain around into a country to be proud of.

She brought down inflation, controlled public spending, encouraged entrepreneurship, and got people into work. She enabled millions of people to buy their own homes, increased social mobility, helped to end the Cold War, and secured the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands.

She had conviction, courage, and global stature.

Burnham is just another Labour class warrior, caretaking the same old Labour circus with people who spend all their time fighting each other while destroying the fabric of our great country because they have no plan to govern Britain.

https://t.co/dkx1ahhOH9

[The Grocer's Daughter @Thatcheritage]

"The Britain I want is a land where people are not ground down in the name of false equality to the point where a man is better off on the dole than at work."

― Margaret Thatcher (1979)

[John Redwood @johnredwood]

Mr Burnham criticises selling UK utilities to foreign states and companies. I agree. I helped Margaret Thatcher put in Golden shares to prevent this. It was the Labour government after 1997 that wrongly cancelled these protections to please the EU.

[Allen Omlas (anadrome) 🩵 3rd Gen Polish @bigpodski]

@Jenny_1884

[Martyn Thomas @gmartynthomas]

My letter in today's Times about Labour's policies relating to independent schools.
#VAT
#independentschools
@AllisonPearson
@HMC_Org
@LauraTrottMP
@the_isba

[Frau Hoppenstedt ⚡️ @loriotfehlt]

Mein Mann Walter ist ein sehr gutaussehender Mann. Ich möchte daher nicht, dass ihn andere Frauen sehen, auch nicht unsere Nachbarinnen vom Balkon aus.
So schützt er sich nun ganz in schwarz vor den lüsternen Blicken der anderen Frauen.
Es ist nur zu seinem und unserem Besten!

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Burnham says housing is wrecking the public finances. Correct. Watch him make it worse. Here is the arithmetic he managed to skip, line by line…

Build cost. Sticking up a three bed runs north of £220k (to £280k) before you buy a single square foot of land or book a penny of profit. That figure is set by things like bricklayers and the spot price of copper.

Sale price. Stack land, levies, finance and a margin that keeps the builder solvent on top, and your bog standard Bovis shitbox semi changes hands at £330k to £360k. Minimum.

Wages. Median full time pay is £39,300. Median household income lands at £36,700. Hold those two in your head, because everything below is measured against them.

Inflation. CPI is bullshit, inflation is not running at anything close to 2.8%. Treat that the way you would treat any figure a department gets to design its own basket to produce. Strip out the imported gadgets getting cheaper and the hedonic fiddle that pretends this year's phone counts as a pay rise, look only at what a family cannot dodge, rent, energy, food, childcare, council tax, insurance, and the real rate sits north of 6 or 7%. And I’m being nice. Pay rose against that by a rounding error. Sterling got debased. House prices in this range haven’t come down.

Groceries. Feeding a family of four runs roughly £8,000 a year (conservatively), and anyone who tells you it is done on £60 a week is either lying or living on tins of beans.

Energy. Price cap goes to £1,862 in July, and a family rattling around a three bed burns more than Ofgem's tidy typical household, so call it £2,000 gone before your new air con unit goes on / heating goes on in the winter.

Rent, after housing costs. A three bed outside London goes for about £1,450 a month, £17,400 a year, and every pound of it buys precisely nothing. Renters hand over a third of gross pay for the privilege of standing still. Again this is lowball. It’s closer to £1,600+ in Reading (a good proxy for non salubrious London commute).

Nursery. After the free hours a full time place in England is about £7,400 a year per child, so a family with two little ones still waves goodbye to the thick end of £15,000. Funded for 38 weeks only, with a taper that bites as you climb, and £13k to £16k a head in Scotland or Wales.

Deposit. 10% on a £350k home is £35k. Out in the real world the average first time buyer now stumps up £59,000 and does it at the age of 34, which tells you how long it takes to save that while renting.

Mortgage. Put ten per cent down and you carry a £315k loan. At a realistic high LTV rate of around 5.5% that is roughly £1,800 a month over thirty years, before service charge, insurance and council tax.

Now the part Burnham will not say from a podium in Manchester.

To service that loan on bog standard 4.5x lending you need a household pulling about £70k, or £57k if a lender stretches to 5.5x, with the deposit sitting in the bank on top. Barely a fifth of UK households clear even £65k gross. Fewer still clear the £70k this actually needs, and among the young it is thinner still.

Of the 25-35 yr old crowd this home is supposedly built for, ownership has fallen from more than half in the 1990s to roughly a quarter or a third today, and most who got there leaned on family money.
First time buyers bunch into the top two income brackets. From the bottom fifth, 4% manage it. Strip out the bank of mum and dad and the slice of that generation who could buy this house on their own earnings sits somewhere in the low teens.

None of which is useless. Building council homes and moving a waiting list is a decent day's work, and somebody stuck on it will sleep easier for it. Trouble is, not one brick of that lowers the open market for two people on normal wages, which is the very fire he stood up to put out.

He has in effect clocked the right problem and gone after it with a tool built for a different job. Because, like most of the Labour Party, he is totally illiterate.

Classic.

[Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope]

Here’s Makerfield MP Andy Burnham leaving by a side entrance moments after his speech today. I think it is appalling that he would not take questions from us journalists. He will be made Prime Minister of our country three weeks today. More coverage and analysis at @GBNEWS.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A horse is built to run. A donkey is built to stand and think about it. You have met Hector. This is the other half of his field.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about a parade horse. Hector stood through the King's Troop and the massed bands and a nation's worst day without shifting a hoof, and he will still, in a quiet Welsh field, levitate sideways at a pheasant coming out of a hedge. A carrier bag on the wind is, to a horse, a clear and present danger. The guns were a job, and the job had rules. The hedge has a pheasant in it and no rules at all, and so the flight animal underneath the seventeen years of training remains, on the matter of pheasants, entirely undefeated.

Nelson does not look up.

Nelson has never looked up. A donkey does not flee, it assesses, and it assessed the pheasant long ago and found it beneath comment. People call that stubbornness. It is an animal declining to spend adrenaline it sees no reason to spend.

And here is the domestic arrangement, which anyone who has kept the two together will know on sight. Nelson is a third of Hector's size and entirely in charge. He eats first. He picks the dry spot. He decides when they move. The black charger who carried the weight of the state stands by, with enormous patience, while a small grey donkey finishes the good hay.

The one thing that reliably undoes Hector is Nelson leaving the field. Five minutes, a foot trim, a vet down the lane, and the great composed horse comes apart at the gate, calling and calling, because a horse is herd to its bones and has decided that its herd is one unbothered donkey.

Nelson, for his part, despises rain. A desert animal washed up in Denbighshire, he stands in the shelter looking martyred while Hector grazes out in the wet, waterproof and serene.

Two opposite natures, each propping up the other exactly where it is weak. The horse who fears small things and the donkey who fears nothing at all. It works. It was always going to.

[Adam Gwiazda @delestoile]

🟥 Czy Henry Nowak mógł przeżyć?
Dr Krzysztof Magier @DrMagier , lekarz pediatra i były konsul honorowy RP w Cowes, przeanalizował nagrania z policyjnej kamery nasobnej pokazujące śmierć Henry'ego Nowaka.
Dr Magier jest lekarzem prowadzącym oddział intensywnej terapii dziecięcej, z doświadczeniem w szkoleniach z medycyny pola walki oraz po specjalistycznym kursie leczenia ciężkich urazów (w tym ran postrzałowych i kłutych).
Nie zgadza się z opinią patologa i sędziego, że Henry Nowak nie miał żadnych szans na przeżycie i ze skucie go w kajdanki nic w zasadzie nie zmieniło. Wręcz przeciwnie – istnieje duże prawdopodobieństwo, że to interwencja policji przyczyniła się do jego śmierci.
Przeanalizował on raport z sekcji, który wskazuje na uszkodzenie żyły podobojczykowej jako główne źródło krwawienia i tłumaczy, gdzie leży problem.
U zdrowej osoby krwawienie żylne odbywa się pod niskim ciśnieniem i często samoogranicza się dzięki powstającemu naturalnie skrzepowi, a samo zbliżenie krawędzi rany i ucisk otaczających tkanek domyka żyłę na tyle, że spowalnia albo nawet zatrzymuje krwawienie.
Z nagrania z policyjnej kamery nasobnej wynika, że gdy policja przybyła na miejsce (prawdopodobnie 5-10 minut po zranieniu), Henry był na tyle przytomny, że mówił dość głośno. Nie był zatem jeszcze w stanie terminalnym. Po wykręceniu rąk do tyłu i skuciu za plecami najprawdopodobniej doszło do rozciągnięcia żyły, rozerwania skrzepu i gwałtownego nasilenia krwawienia. W ciągu zaledwie ok. trzech minut stracił przytomność i zmarł.
Osoby z podejrzeniem urazów wewnętrznych nigdy nie powinny być gwałtownie przemieszczane ani szarpane – takie działanie może zniszczyć naturalny skrzep i doprowadzić do masywnego krwotoku wewnętrznego.
Zamiast natychmiastowego wezwania zespołu ratownictwa medycznego i przekazania pacjenta w ręce ratowników, policja go skuła. Gdyby na miejscu jako pierwsi pojawili się paramedycy, szanse Henry’ego na przeżycie byłyby znacznie większe. "50%" - pisze dr Magier.
Ratownicy mogliby szybko założyć kroplówkę, podać płyny zwiększające objętość krwi krążącej oraz kwas traneksamowy stabilizujący skrzep, a w razie potrzeby wykonać dekompresję igłową (wkłucie grubej i długiej igły w płuco), bo problemem nie był tyle brak funkcji płuca, ale ucisk zalanego krwią płuca na serce i śródpiersie, który blokuje krążenie.
Co gorsza, incydent miał miejsce zaledwie kilka minut jazdy samochodem (2–3 minuty karetką na sygnale) od Southampton University Hospital – regionalnego Major Trauma Centre dysponującego pełnym zapleczem specjalistów, procedur i sprzętu. "Jestem przekonany, że gdyby Henry dotarł tam żywy, lekarze nie pozwoliliby mu umrzeć" - pisze dr Magier.
Podsumowując: agresywna interwencja policji, zamiast ratować życie, doprowadziła do śmierci przez nieodpowiednie postępowanie z ciężko ranionym człowiekiem, mimo że najwyższej klasy opieka była w zasięgu kilku minut. "Obawiam się, że Sędzia i patolog byli zbyt łaskawi dla policji" - pisze dr Magier.

[Sandy Tregent @SandyofSuffolk]

Just to put things in perspective.

The average state pension in Spain is higher than in the UK.

The cost of living in Spain is 33% lower than in the UK.

Spain's equivalent to our council tax is about a tenth of what we pay in the UK. And they get daily bin collections.

Where's our money going?

[Sandy Tregent @SandyofSuffolk]

Just so you know.

Boomers didn't have fast food. Except fish and chips.

Boomers didn't have ready meals. Except Vesta beef curry. Look it up.

Boomers didn't have colour TVs, front loading washing machines, central heating or holidays abroad.

Boomers didn't have babymoons or baby showers nor did they go on stag or hen weekends.

Boomers didn't go to restaurants. Except on birthdays.

Boomers didn't have new clothes every year, every season. They made do and mended.

But Boomers had a fabulous time in the 1960s to 1980s because people were friendly, respectful, dignified and hardworking. Boomers also had law and order and a judiciary who punished ALL criminals.
Boomers were happy with their lot.

Yes. I'm a Boomer.

Just so you know.

[Maverik @PubMaverik]

When considering Andy Burnham as prime minister.. just remember his wife always seems to be perfectly placed to gain from any of his projects, firstly she was connected to the company that marketed all the failed clean air zone in Manchester, and now she sits on the board of Be.Ev,
The car electric charging company that is winning contracts all over Manchester..
Cronyism at its finest..