Martin Stevens

Community Councillor for Penperlenni

[Barrister's Horse @BarristersHorse]

We all thought pretty much the same when the superinjunction was lifted and it emerged you lot had made arrangements for over 30,000 Afghans to come to the UK.

[Charlotte Gill @CharlotteCGill]

Refugee Action: Behind the scenes of £16 MILLION taxpayer-funded charity (2021-25)

I thought people might find it interesting to look through some accounts together!

https://t.co/BlZXMkR8pA

[Barrister's Horse @BarristersHorse]

The political left get what they want: vacuous virtue signalling.

The political right get what they want: highlighting two tier justice and the unfairness of it all.

Us? Well our views clearly mean nothing. I'm deeply saddened that a country once considered one of the most liberal and welcoming has been reduced to this by politicians of all stripes taking the pee in regard to those tolerant values. Polite discourse requesting restraint on immigration has led nowhere and promises of immigration control have been broken spectacularly for over two decades.

It's now race to the bottom stuff, with a stagnating economy and rising unemployment, there's no bandwidth left to accommodate more and more migrants. Distributing them to the shires will engage an otherwise sleeping cohort of people, not ordinarily known for protesting.

Those old enough will recall the Poll Tax Riots and how it was intrinsic to the downfall of a tin eared government, too long in power to properly sense the mood of the nation. We're at that point again: the political class are talking to themselves, unwilling and probably unable to address the things that really matter to people. I can no longer bear to listen to them, hence my presence on X has diminished because I often can't bring myself to engage in the bs.

We slide steadily into more frequent, mass civil disobedience, and 'they' fiddle whilst Rome burns.

[Christian @InTheTrenchesUK]

Andy Burnham's "Ministry of Truth" isn't coming. It's already here.

That footage you saw? The father climbs aboard while his own child floats helpless in the water, nearly drowning, abandoned for French lifeguards to rescue. Burnham's ministry would classify this as "harmful misinformation." Not because it's false. Because it happened.

They watched it go viral and their response wasn't "stop this happening." It was "stop them seeing it."

X is one of the last places in the UK you'll see this. The mainstream media won't touch it. If you're reading this, screenshot it, save it, share it elsewhere. Get it out before they bury it.

The timing tells the story. First the footage leaks. The narrative slips. People start asking who we're actually ferrying in. Reports from The Telegraph, GB News, Daily Mail, Express and LBC confirm five terrorist organizations have infiltrated the UK via small boats: Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, IRGC Unit 700 and Hamas. The Telegraph and LBC specifically report IRGC Unit 700 using Channel smuggling networks to position operatives in London. GB News and the Express document Hamas-linked militants arriving by boat. Multiple outlets confirm Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab affiliates among the crossings. Thousands more pour in undocumented and unvetted.

Then, conveniently, a Labour mayor proposes state-licensed journalism and approved opinions.

This isn't coincidence. It's causality.

They need the Ministry of Truth because the truth is escaping. One camera did more damage to their immigration narrative than a thousand debates. Now they need machinery to ensure the next video gets buried before it breathes.

Burnham said the quiet part out loud. The problem isn't the boats. It isn't fathers leaving their children to drown. It's you noticing.

They're not building a Ministry of Truth to protect you from lies. They're building it to protect themselves from reality.

[Annunziata Rees-Mogg @zatzi]

This is utterly terrifying. 👇

No wonder the bond markets are spooked.

This video brings home quite how massive our problems are - and how out of their depth Labour are.

[Tina London @UK_Women_UTD]

@RupertLowe10 Its a central government project. Reform are against it Rupert. They put out a video against it and telling us all the details yesterday & said they were committed to stopping it & will go down the legal route if necessary! Why are you misleading people?

[Martin Stevens @Mogg1]

No, this claim is not correct. It appears to be fabricated clickbait.
England did beat Norway 2-1 2026 FIFA World Cup quarter-final on 11 July . Post-match coverage focused on Jude Bellingham’s two goals and the respectful handshake/embrace between Harry Kane and Erling Haaland.

[Caymen @Caymen_lee]

The Whole Country Reacted https://t.co/j8Wef8Os3o

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

When You Can't Beat Reform, Change The Rules. Labour Just Did.

There is a line in a democracy that, once crossed, changes everything. When those in power begin adjusting the rules of the game to determine its outcome, the game is no longer democracy. It is managed succession. That line was crossed again on Tuesday night.

Two days before the Makerfield by-election, Labour rushed a change to the mayoral voting system through the House of Lords. Regional mayors will now be elected using the supplementary vote system rather than first past the post. The change applies immediately. It will govern whoever replaces Andy Burnham as Mayor of Greater Manchester if he wins on Thursday and stands down.

The government's defence is that it is simply restoring the system used before Boris Johnson changed it in 2021. That argument requires the public to believe that a change Labour could have introduced at any point in two years of government became urgent on Tuesday evening, forty eight hours before the vote that triggers the election it is designed to affect.

Lord Hayward, a Conservative peer and experienced pollster, was precise in the Lords. There is no other justification for the haste, he said, other than that it solves the Labour Party's problems and prevents Reform winning a mayoralty. Not clumsy. Not rushed. Designed.

The mechanics explain why. Under first past the post, Reform could win the Greater Manchester mayoralty on a plurality of votes in a fragmented field, precisely as it won all eight council wards in May's local elections with around fifty percent of the vote. Under the supplementary vote system, voters express a first and second preference. Lib Dem and Green voters, given a second preference, will direct those votes to Labour overwhelmingly. The change does not affect Thursday's by-election. It affects the mayoral contest that follows it, constructing an anti-Reform coalition from the second preferences of smaller parties that Reform itself cannot access.

Lord Jackson identified the wider implication. This is potentially a strategy for a progressive alliance being rolled out ahead of a general election, he said, with the aim of locking out the Conservatives and Reform from power. Burnham's allies have already confirmed he would scrap first past the post nationally in favour of proportional representation. The supplementary vote is the local pilot for a national project. Pool second preferences, lock out the right, govern indefinitely on a minority of first preference votes.

This is not the first time. Earlier this year Labour delayed local elections after the Electoral Commission stated explicitly that the justification was not legitimate, that extending mandates damages public confidence and creates a conflict of interest by allowing those in power to decide how long they may remain there without consent. The Commission's objection was noted and ignored. Reform demolished Labour anyway.

Now the same instinct has been applied to a different mechanism. Not cancellation this time. Electoral system change, deployed with surgical precision forty eight hours before the vote that triggers the election it is designed to affect.

Governments confident in their mandate do not need to change the rules two days before the ballot. They face the electorate and take their chances. The timing of Tuesday night's Lords motion is not a coincidence. It is a confession.

The voters of Makerfield vote on Thursday. The question of who governs Greater Manchester after that, and under what rules, was settled in the Lords on Tuesday. Nobody voted for that.

"Burnham's allies have already confirmed he would scrap first past the post nationally in favour of proportional representation."

[Martin Stevens @Mogg1]

Electric underfloor not a wet system

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

On the day America celebrated the IPO of its biggest space company, Britain found out its government is banning underfloor heating.

The decline of our country is not inevitable, it is the choice of the rotten political class.

[Reform UK Wales @RUKWales]

🚨 BREAKING NEWS:

Welsh Conservatives have just voted with Plaid Cymru to not publish full costings for their flagship childcare policy.

Vote Tory get Plaid.

[The English Remnant @Englishremnant]

An American Soldier in WWII:

"Those Brits are a strange old race. They show affection by abusing each other, will think nothing of casually stopping in the middle of a firefight for a 'brewup' and eat food that I wouldn't give to a dying dog. But fuck me, I would rather have one British squaddie on side than an entire battalion of Spetznaz! Why? Because the British are the only people in this world who when the chips are down and it seems like there is no hope left, instead of getting sentimental or hysterical, will strap on their pack, charge their rifle, light up a smoke, and calmly and wryly grin, 'Well, are we going then you wanker?" 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧

[Liam Halligan @LiamHalligan]

Labour risks being forced to seek emergency help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as Britain lurches toward a debt crisis, leading economists are now warning.

Former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff says, in a new interview, that there is “more than 50:50 chance” of a major UK debt crisis before the end of this decade.

He is joined by Sir Charlie Bean, a former senior official at both the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility, who says the need for an IMF bail-out is now a “material risk” for the British economy.

I not only firmly agree with Ken Rogoff and Sir Charlie Bean – but have been repeatedly issuing the very same warnings for a very long time.

Because the grave risk of a major fiscal meltdown has been apparent for at least the last two years – to anyone who combines serious knowledge of UK economics and politics and global debt markets with an open mind.

The UK's public finances were already fragile when Labour took office back in July 2024.

But this government's misguided, ideologically-driven statist policies have made a bad situation much worse, seriously increasing the danger of a deep fiscal crisis - which would cause a disastrous state funding shortfall and a very nasty inflation spike.

That would result in Downing Street being forced to follow the orders of unelected technocrats flown in from Washington and elsewhere.

It would be a very major national humiliation combined with a deep economic slump and an even more intense cost-of-living crisis – in which low-income households, as ever, would suffer the most.

Yet those of us that have shown the brains and courage to point out these inconvenient truths over recent months and years have long been dismissed and derided for our trouble - not only by ignorant politicians and approval-seeking journalists but also the overwhelming majority of "leading economists".

Ahead of the general election in mid-2024, with Labour on course to win, the conventional wisdom among the great sages of broadsheet journalism and the economics establishment was that "the adults would soon be back in charge" ... Labour would "get lucky with the economy" ... and "Britain would now enjoy an extended period of political and fiscal stability".

I thought that was total nonsense – not least as I was well aware Labour's plans irresponsibly to increase borrowing and spending would be met with deep scepticism by the global pensions funds, insurance companies and other institutional investors that lend governments serious money.

My weekly @Telegraph "Economic Agenda" column of 23rd June 2024, a fortnight ahead of the general election, was a total outlier. I recounted the disaster of 1976 – when Britain was forced to go "cap in hand" to the IMF for a bailout – and warned that "The Ghosts of the 1970s" would haunt Labour's (so-called) economic resurrection".

Six months later, after the October 2024 "Hallowen" budget in which Chancellor Rachel Reeves did indeed sharply hike borrowing and spending, I assessed the market reaction then doubled-down – warning more assertively in my column of 12th January 2025 that "The UK risks a return to 1976 unless Reeves changes course".

And then again on 20th July 2025, as Labour's policies raised the costs of doing business, translating into price pressures which pushed up government borrowing costs even more, I again cautioned that "Inflation risks are taking Britain to the debt-crisis cliff edge".

"It’s now screamingly obvious that Labour’s crude Keynesianism – “pump priming” the economy by upping state borrowing and spending – isn’t working," I wrote in that column last July.

"Worse than that, this Government’s actions are pushing Britain towards a budgetary crisis every bit as serious as that in 1976 – when the UK was forced to go “cap in hand” to the IMF for a bail-out".

It's been a lonely task issuing these warnings. I've been hounded in public debates, slagged off by senior civil servants and often dismissed by "leading economists" as "alarmist".

So what do these same "leading economists" now say to Rogoff (Harvard Professor, Former IMF Chief Economist) and Bean (LSE Professor and Former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England)?

The "economics establishment" – with very few honourable exceptions, the brilliant @jagjit_chadha among them – has been and remains extremely reluctant to point out the deeply unsustainable nature of this government's addiction to ever more borrowing.

The systemic fiscal dangers of evermore "tax and spend" – and the prospect of a serious spike in gilt yields and related fiscal meltdown – are now so real and present as to be completely undeniable.

Yet the UK government is about to shift even further to the left, pushing up borrowing and spending even more under a new leader, in a bid to appease the massed ranks of economic illiterates among Labour's Parliamentary party and activist base – making those dangers even more acute.

Yet, still, the silence among "public intellectual" economists is deafening.

I'm glad the likes of Ken Rogoff and Charlie Bean are now issuing clear warnings. So where is the rest of the "economics establishment" - those who purport to understand fiscal management and financial markets, and often funded by taxpayers' money?

Britain is now clearly in the crosshairs of a very serious danger. The government's creditors are increasingly fickle and based overseas – with no regulatory or cultural obligations to lend money to the UK government.

Those holding UK gilts are increasingly "speculative" rather than "strategic" long-term investors – looking for quick returns, financing their government bond purchases with "leverage" (money borrowed from elsewhere), which will quickly be withdrawn when senitment decisively shifts, causing a plunge in gilt prices and a sharp additional surge in government borrowing costs, setting up a vicious circle.

The UK government is very heavily indebted – and the global investors we rely on to bankroll a huge slice of our state spending are alarmed that of the £132bn the government borrowed last year, no less than £110bn was spent on debt interest – as I wrote in a column on 17th May 2026, "As Labour lurches further left, the markets are calling time".

Global investors are alarmed the UK has consistently had the highest inflation in the G7 (which pushes up borrowing costs) and has easily the highest share of index-linked debt (which magnifies the burden of inflation on the state's balance sheet).

And they are deeply, deeply alarmed that when Labour came to power in mid-2024, the Office for Budget Responsibility was forecasting additional state borrowing of £323bn by 2029, the scheduled end of this Parliament.

But Labour’s runaway spending and growth-crushing tax rises mean that the same five-year borrowing forecast is now £583bn – 80pc higher. And still, the trade unions, MPs and Labour activists who will choose Starmer’s successor now want even more.

It is not too late to pull the UK back from the fiscal brink, to avoid the extremely painful and deep, lingering damage of being forced to go to the IMF and perhaps other multi-lateral creditors for a bailout.

It is not too late to avoid the inflation surge, the currency crash, the shocking blow to consumer and business confidence alongside the sky-high interest rates that will seriously whack our economy – or the perhaps even deeper damage of yet more of the British electorate losing faith in the ability of our establishment to manage the country in a manner that avoids imposing serious hardship on so many hard-working people simply trying to make their way.

But our political and media class needs to start acknowledging the economic and financial truth – that the UK government is borrowing and spending too much, taxation is now so high that it's hammering growth and employment, and that trying to finally get the economy moving by "moving further left", borrowing and spending even more, will result in a fiscal collapse.

Smart, experienced, high-profile economists need to start speaking out – as Rogoff and Bean just have – raising the alarm in a bid to force the broader establishment to face reality. Before it's too late.

If you've read this far, you clearly think this analysis is worthwhile and important. So please like and share.

And for more, read my "Economic Agenda" column in The Sunday Telegraph each week – and subscribe to "When The Facts Change: Economics and Politics in a fast-moving world, with Liam Halligan"

[Nigel Farage @Nigel_Farage]

I am addressing the nation on the shocking case of Henry Nowak’s murder. White lives matter too. https://t.co/x9ggxb4V20

[Peter Bleksley @PeterBleksley]

Please wake up Makerfield, and read this…

[Martin Stevens @Mogg1]

@GigaBeers Wrap it in Denso tape

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

The current state of the Royal Navy:
2 aircraft carriers — neither operational.
6 Type 45 destroyers (our most powerful warships) — one operational (in Cyprus).
7 Type 23 frigates (less powerful, much older) — three operational
5 Astute class nuke-powered subs — one operational (in Arabian Sea?).
Surely those responsible for this appalling state of unreadiness (a national embarrassment if ever there was one)— political, civilian and military — should be fired/charged.
Their incompetence has effectively left us without a navy.
Quite an achievement for an ancient island nation.

[Martin Stevens @Mogg1]

@rebecca_ryder21 I was told that the blood we supplied by the transfusion company sells it to us for double they sell it to Belgium. Came of a good source

[Martin Stevens @Mogg1]

@TaylorMadeGolf @McIlroyRory @TommyFleetwood1 Love Tommy fleetwoods putter

[Martin Stevens @Mogg1]

@LauraJ4SWEast I will take a little time thinking of my Dad who always had a little walk on Armistice day thinking about the Canadian he saw in a body bag . Since Dad has passed every year I think of him also . We will remember them .

[Martin Stevens @Mogg1]

@RupertLowe10 When are you going to answer a question