Dr Nic

Opinionated old fart despite trying to cogitate before opening mouth

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

In July 1959, the Conservative MP and erstwhile professor of Classics Enoch Powell made a blisteringly excoriating speech in the House of Commons to criticise the Conservative government after the Hola Massacre in Kenya. African lives, he said, were worth as much as European lives. Dennis Healey, a Labour MP who would later become one of the major figures in the postwar British politics, said that Powell's speech had "all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes." Think of that while watching the video below. This comparison, I think, sums up the intellectual and moral degeneration of the European political elite, which appears to have accelerated since the turn of the Century. Until we have a political elite with the intellectual horsepower, civilised mores and seriousmindedness to be far more conversant with Demosthenes, Thucydides and Atistotle than acting out in cringy social media videos, we are doomed to further decline.

[Andrew Doyle @andrewdoyle_com]

I don’t know which I despise more: the total failure to attempt an answer or the continual uptalk making every other sentence sound like a question.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Sophie Ridge is wonderful.

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

An important message about the end of democracy in Britain.

[June Slater @juneslater17]

Understanding the position of Reform UK
It's a very small team, unlike other parties.

They're under enormous pressure. Last month they got more emails than The Tory party.
The Tories have 157 staff, Labour have over 300.
Reform has less than 20 full time, some are volunteers .

They've had several
by-elections, costly and time consuming legal battles, including the very important one that challenged the government who attempted to cancel the council elections. Which would have stopped nearly 5 million people having the right to vote.
A major victory that
♦️no other political figure challenged♦️
Remember that‼️

The media are constantly on their back.

They've just had to stand 2 key figures down.

The topics of the emails vary, with 100ds of particular concerns. The volume means they have to prioritise.

They're vetting 10,000 council candidates for next year, as some of the seats they won are up again .

They're also vetting 3,000 applicants for Parliamentary seats as they don't know when there will be a general election.

Vetting is tough because the media look for dirt on every candidate. Social media content from applicants is very important as the media use it as an excuse to denigrate people.

What is of no consequence as a layman, suddenly becomes newsworthy as a candidate.

Sadly sometimes people lie over incidental things on application.
Hence people are stood down after the fact. It's not personal, it's just avoiding media scrutiny as best they can.

It not easy hence I try my best as a bystander to unravel what's actually happening.

I'm not paid, I volunteer my input, and to be fair it's appreciated .

No other political party or individual is under this much pressure.

I actually don't know any one involved in politics who works harder than Nigel Farage. That is something I respect.

I help without instruction because I truly believe this is our one and only possibility to change politics.
I'm not looking for perfection.

For nearly 30 years, Nigel has tried his best to be moderately rightwing, whilst simultaneously highlighting severe problems that other political figures have ignored.
He's savvy enough to know, bring overly too right wing will simply crush any hopes of becoming a government.

We simply cannot afford that!

30 years of being outcast by the establishment, a fringe player that has taken enormous ridicule and downright insults. The establishment is literally punishing him for what they see as an audacious attempt to change the system.

Politics is different to activism and commentary, people need to understand that.

Politics has way more boundaries and hurdles to jump.
Being taken seriously and appearing level headed is all important if you want to prepare for government.

Believe me it takes more than a few radical tweets and FB posts to challenge the system, all the other parties, the MSM and former colleagues who seem hell bent on damage.

For Nigel Farage even if he's fortunate enough to win a general election, the pressure will not only continue it will get far worse.
The radical left will go into overdrive. Number 10 is hostile territory, I actually appreciate his indefatigable courage.

I've explained all this to help you understand what it's like under this much pressure.
Thanks for understanding 🙏

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

The House of Lords will now debate whether democracy as we know it survives in Britain.

Burnham is crossing the rubicon with this proposed retroactive legislation to seize Reform's donations that were perfectly lawful when received.

Changing the law, after the fact, to try and bankrupt his main political opponent will be a fatal blow to the rule of law as we know it.

A fatal blow to the legitimacy of Parliament.

There will be no coming back.

All future governments will have no choice but to operate under this new paradigm.

These are the stakes.

Whatever your politics, speak up now or see the entire system we grew up in evaporate before our eyes.

[Michelle Dewberry @MichelleDewbs]

When directly asked “are you in favour of male teachers watching young girls getting changed for swimming”…

…The SCHOOLS STANDARDS MINISTER @Georgia_Gould responded by spluttering, stammering and um/er. She then whaffled unrelated nonsense about nursery children & nappies.

1) She claims not to know the full details of the story. Yet this was a story across much of the national press *that day*. It spans her remit, why isn’t she across her basic brief?

2) How can anyone, who answers anything other than an immediate *NO* to that question, be anywhere near school standards?

I despair at what this country is becoming and I don’t want moronic people like this, anywhere near my child’s education. Sadly, the sector is full of ‘em 🤦🏼‍♀️

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Britain Is Pricing Out Its Own Young While Opening The Door To Everyone Else

Pat McFadden flew to Rotterdam to find out why British youth cannot find work. He came home with a plan for youth hubs and a column blaming the death of the paper round. He did not need the flight. The answer was sitting in his own department's data: 27 young non-EU migrants hired in Britain for every one young British worker since 2020. Non-EU youth employment up 355 percent. The young British workforce grew by 0.3 percent over the same period. His own figures describe displacement. His own review, led by Alan Milburn, concluded there was no evidence immigration played any role. The same department wrote both documents. They cannot both be right.

Now Andy Burnham proposes to widen the door McFadden's department has just spent a review pretending does not exist. A youth mobility scheme with the EU could bring up to 100,000 young Europeans into Britain to work, study and live, with reciprocal rights for young Britons who, on current form, will be competing for jobs that do not exist at home either. Strip away the language of partnership and what remains is a bargaining chip, traded for access to an EU industrial scheme a "well-placed European source" would only call a vibe.

Alongside it sits a plan to cut tuition fees for EU students from £38,000 to £9,535, brought back from the dead after Sir Keir Starmer shelved it on his way out of Downing Street. The timing could not be worse chosen. The Student Loans Company has just admitted it has lost track of more than 370,000 graduates owing almost £13 billion, many of them EU nationals who took a British loan and left the country beyond reach of the taxman. Britain already cannot collect from the EU students it has funded. The proposed answer is to fund more of them, at a steeper discount, then hand the same cohort a formal route into the labour market once the degree is done.

Each piece of this, taken alone, might survive scrutiny. Taken together, they describe a government working against its own stated priority in three directions at once. Entry-level jobs were made more expensive by October's budget, through the employer National Insurance rise and a near twenty percent jump in the youth minimum wage. The government spends twenty-five times more paying young people to stay unemployed than it spends helping them into work. Youth unemployment stands at 16.2 percent. Nearly one million young Britons are not in education, employment or training. Against that backdrop, ministers are simultaneously discounting the entry price for foreign students and negotiating a treaty to bring more foreign workers in.

McFadden calls this an oversight of technology and habit. Burnham calls it a step-change in relations. Neither has explained why a government that cannot find jobs for its own school leavers is competing for the ones that remain against a subsidised, mobile, and untraceable cohort of its own making. The paper round did not disappear because of Deliveroo. It disappeared into a labour market Westminster has spent two years quietly stacking against the young people it was elected to serve. That is the real reset on offer this autumn. Not of Britain's relationship with Europe, but of who Britain's economy is actually run for.

"Andy Burnham is negotiating access to EU trade schemes at the cost of Britain's own youth labour market"

[Neil O'Brien @NeilDotObrien]

17) If you made it this far, thank you, and please do read the full piece - there is a lot more in there!

https://t.co/9MuER6f7Ec

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal.

If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist.

If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian.

If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.

[Graham Linehan @Glinner]

Oh my god at last! At last people who understand the issue are asking the right questions.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Zealot Discovers Pragmatism the Moment It Suits Him

Ed Miliband called new North Sea drilling "climate vandalism." He built a year in office on that conviction, closing licences, missing his own department's cost-benefit deadlines, and standing at the despatch box to warn that Britain's exposure to global fossil fuel prices was a danger to households. Now, with a possible move to Number 11 on the table, he is privately signalling he will approve production at the Jackdaw gas field. The vandalism argument has not changed. His career prospects have.

An industry source put the real motive plainly: Miliband sees approval as a way of showing willing to the City. Not to the 1.4 million households Jackdaw could heat this winter. Not to the union boss who warned his appointment as chancellor would strangle job creation. To the markets, whose confidence he now needs more than he needs his own principles to survive intact. Conviction, it turns out, was never the obstacle to drilling. Ambition was the only thing capable of overriding it.

Look at what has changed in the meantime, and what has not. Energy bills are 13 per cent higher than in April. Wealthy residents are drawing up exit plans over fears of a new CGT regime he may soon be responsible for setting. Britain still imports gas at a premium while sitting on fields it refuses to develop. None of that moved him while he held only the energy brief. What moved him was the prospect of a bigger one, and with it, a market reaction he could not afford to mishandle.

Even the manner of this conversion tells its own story. He cannot confirm the decision publicly until a consultation closes on 10 August, for fear of triggering a judicial review, the same legal machinery that campaigners used to strangle Jackdaw's original 2022 consent in the first place. So the U-turn arrives privately, filtered through unnamed sources, calibrated for maximum reassurance to investors and minimum political exposure to a Left flank that still believes he means what he has spent years saying. A minister discovering pragmatism only where nobody can hold him to it in public is not pragmatism. It is management.

The Aberdeen South by-election should have been the wake-up call. Voters handed the Tories victory on the back of exactly this argument, that domestic energy production matters more than distant targets. It made no visible difference to his convictions until his own ambitions entered the equation. That timing tells you everything you need to know.

None of this should be mistaken for a change of heart on net zero itself. Miliband has not renounced the target that has driven a year of closures, suppressed analysis and rising bills. He has simply found one exception, sized precisely to the moment his own career required it. The zealotry stays intact everywhere his ambition does not reach.

Andrew Neil called this government's energy policy bordering on criminally negligent. He might have added that the man responsible for it has just demonstrated exactly how negligence gets corrected, not by admitting the policy was wrong, but by discovering, at the moment it becomes personally useful, that it was.

Britain does not need a chancellor who abandons conviction under market pressure. It needs one who never mistook ideology for policy in the first place. Miliband has shown he is capable of neither, only of noticing, at exactly the right moment for himself, which one currently pays better.

"An industry source put the real motive plainly: Miliband sees approval as a way of showing willing to the City. Not to the 1.4 million households Jackdaw could heat this winter."

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The £4 Million That Arrived in the Only Week Nobody Was Watching

Darren Jones wants overseas money banned from British politics and donors made to prove their funds are clean. His own party's history makes the case for him, in a way he would rather not have made. Election law requires parties to declare large donations within a week once a campaign officially begins, so voters can see who is funding each side before they cast their vote. In May 2024, Labour received £4 million from the hedge fund Quadrature Capital, its largest donation ever, and it arrived just before that weekly rule switched on. A few days later, and the donation would have been public knowledge during the campaign itself, exactly when it might have shaped how people voted. Instead, it fell under the old quarterly system, so nobody found out until months after the election, when the result could no longer be changed and the money could no longer be questioned.

Quadrature calls this a values based donation, not a political one, insisting the firm remains non-partisan and apolitical. Its own portfolio tells a different story. The fund has held more than $170 million in fossil fuel companies including ConocoPhillips and Cenovus Energy, tens of millions in the arms manufacturers Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, and substantial stakes in Palantir, Blackstone and KKR. A later investigation found $121 million in holdings tied to firms supplying components for Israel's F-35 programme. That is not the portfolio of an organisation whose only concern is climate policy. It reads instead like a firm that hedges its politics the way it hedges everything else, then denies the hedge was ever placed.

What followed the donation deserves as much scrutiny as the donation itself. Rachel Kyte, who sits on the advisory board of the Quadrature Climate Foundation, was made the government's climate envoy soon after. Labour will insist the two facts are unconnected, and in the narrowest technical sense they might be. But a party that banks a record sum from a fund's founders, then hands a government role to a figure from that fund's own charitable board, is asking the public to swallow a coincidence it has done nothing to earn.

Set this beside the state of Labour's own finances and the picture sharpens. The party recorded a deficit of £3.76 million in 2024, its worst position in over a decade, while corporate donations rose sharply and Quadrature sat at the top of the list. A party in that condition has every reason to bank large sums quickly and ask few questions. Urgency and scrutiny rarely share a desk.

None of this proves wrongdoing in the legal sense. Quadrature is a lawful business and its donation was properly declared once the reporting window opened. But legality is a low bar for a party that now lectures the country on the corrosive effect of unaccountable money in politics. Jones cannot warn that foreign and opaque funding is warping British elections while his own party's history includes a Cayman linked hedge fund timing its largest ever gift to slip past the very disclosure rules built to catch it.

The electorate do not need a court finding to draw a conclusion here. They need only the week the money arrived, the industries it came from, and the appointment that followed soon after. Labour asks the country to see a coincidence. The country is entitled to see a pattern instead, and to ask why a party so quick to warn about influence was so slow to examine its own.

"Rachel Kyte, who sits on the advisory board of the Quadrature Climate Foundation, was made the government's climate envoy soon after."

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

I’ll keep saying it as it is:

I’m not going to take £15 billion off BRITISH pensioners while we are spending twice that amount on foreign nations and people who aren’t even British.

British. Pensioners. First. Always‼️

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

“Their instinct was to silence a democratically elected politician and censor her. Rather than being interested in what the truth was, they were more interested in silencing me.”

Shadow Energy Secretary and former Energy Secretary @ClaireCoutinho wrote an article in The Telegraph questioning the costings produced by the Department she once led. The Climate Change Committee — a public body — then lodged a complaint alleging that Claire’s article had breached the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) Editors’ Code.

Rather than engage with the substance of her arguments, they sought to silence her.

Claire fought back, but she is concerned that many others will keep their opinions to themselves when they should feel free to speak out.

Cancel culture is stifling debate on Net Zero and energy policy.

Watch the full episode with @DavidRoseUK and Claire Coutinho on our YouTube channel 👇

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

The BBC has issued an official explanation on why it has failed to cover our rape gang inquiry.

'Complex choices' are made for editorial and practical reasons.

These choices 'should not be taken as indicative of bias.'

Their words.

But the BBC were very quick to cover malicious complaints against our inquiry, in an attempt to smear our efforts? They were then forced to later apologise about how they covered the story.

So either the inquiry is worth reporting on, or it's not.

They can't pick and choose.

We're told 'complex choices' are made, meaning that efforts to uncover the industrial rape of young girls is not near the top of list.

Let's take a look at a few stories on the main BBC news page, right now...

'Osaka pays 'love and respect to Japan' in Wimbledon kimono'

'Why £15 durians are being sold at half price - or given away for free'

'We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40'

Are these stories more important than the rape gang inquiry?

I think not.

You cannot hate the BBC enough.

I expect no fair coverage from them, I've stopped expecting it.

But the BBC is funded by the British people.

Their continued suppression of our inquiry is a disgrace.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

A man (Samantha Tempest, here abbreviated to ST) is arguing in court that he belongs in a group for menopausal women. It is pointed out to him that menopause is the cessation of ovulation and that, being a man who never started, let alone ceased, ovulating he does not belong in such a group. He disagrees. He says he's had 'menopausal symptoms' like hot flushes and brain fog. This is like me claiming to have been in the army because I once shot an air rifle and quite like khaki.

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

“Whenever people refer to me as someone ‘who happens to be black,’ I wonder if they realize that both my parents were black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what the hell was going on.”

— Thomas Sowell

[Kellie-Jay Keen @ThePosieParker]

How anyone claims that this woman is on the side of women I’ll never know. She was meek and silent for years on men larping as women and the mutilating of children. But this exchange here is so disgusting that it makes her previous inaction and cowardice pale into insignificance.

Thankfully, I’ve never been a fan.

@UNSRVAW is like all at the UN, just a well paid member of a dangerous club that helps themselves and no one else.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

This is approximately a million times worse than Epstein. It’s not even remotely close. The scale. The nature of the crimes. The powerful institutions implicated. And yet something tells me that many of the Epstein obsessives will have nothing at all to say about this.