Martin Southwood

Artist, imaginist, writer, consultant, nature lover. Radical #socialist

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

Quite proud of this:
'Peak's Pond, Guildford Castle'
Acrylics on canvas, 60 x 60 cm
#acrylicpainting #artistsontwitter #artwork

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

@Shrink_at_Large https://t.co/hf5M8TLnrc

[MikeD @mjdaly57]

Helen Whately has been the Conservative MP for Faversham and Mid Kent since 2015. She is currently the Shadow Secretary of State for Work & Pensions. Her previous ministerial roles include having been Social Care Minister during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Helen was educated privately at Woldingham and Westminster schools and went on to Oxford University.

Helen has accepted the following donations and freebies:

£10,000 from Edward Sells of the Policy Exchange think tank. Helen’s aggressive targeting of people who are unwell and disabled should be viewed in the context of her close links to the Policy Exchange (PX). This donation was made in February 2026.

PX is a prominent Conservative think tank (very much the equivalent of Labour Together). It was formed in 2002 by among others Michael Gove. Like Labour Together, it hasn’t been fully transparent with its funding. PX has been described as ‘strong supporters of the austerity agenda’ and ‘one of the least transparent think tanks in the UK.’

£5,000 from the hedge fund manager and tax avoider Lord Baron Stanley Fink (January 2026).

£5,000 from the hedge fund executive Lord Baron Michael Farmer. (March 2026)

£2,450 from Richard Chesson.

£488.50 from @GoogleUK for accommodation and hospitality at an AI event.

£7,500 from the Chief Executive of Schroders Global Richard Oldfield.

£452 in hospitality from the Evremond Estate Ltd to attend an event at the Domaine Everemond Winery. 🍷

£2,000 from the Turkish restaurant owner Sedat Zorba.

£346 from the Policy Exchange to pay for a return taxi journey from the 2023 Conservative Party Conference. 🚕

£2,000 from Charles Villiers.

£553 from @leedscastleuk in accommodation and hospitality. 🏰

£2,000 from Lady Sasha Swire.

£7,500 from Abdul-Majid Jafer.

£3,187 from the Saudi Arabia government for a trip. ✈️ 🇸🇦

£3,717 from the Saudi Arabia government for a trip. ✈️ 🇸🇦

£3,050 from the Bahrain government for a trip. ✈️ 🇧🇭

£1,396 from the Turkey government for a trip. ✈️ 🇹🇷

Helen has been in the spotlight over her expenses claims. She was found to have been claiming £3,250 a month (£39,000 annually) on expenses to rent a London property when her family home in Faversham was less than 50 miles away from Westminster.

Helen’s rental expenses claims rose by 70% at the same time that she bought a £1.5 million farmhouse in her constituency.

With her basic £93,904 salary, expenses, donations and all the perks that come with the job, Helen has certainly enjoyed the good life in her eleven years as an MP. 🥂

@Conservatives @Helen_Whately @GrowUp_Farms @BBCNews @Channel4News @MichelleDewbs @itvnews @Peston @DWP

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

@SammyBaxter6 @OborneTweets I think you were the one in the parallel universe. Corbyn turned Labour into the biggest party in Europe. Even with all the animus of the state ranged against him, he came within a hair's breadth of victory.

[Wokerati Marty @WokeratiMarty]

From Jeremy Corbyn’s new interview with Katie Halper:

I’ve never heard Jeremy say this before.

“There were lots of very wealthy people who had loaned the party money under Tony Blair, and the day I became leader they all asked for it back immediately.”

Badge of honour.👍

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

@Shrink_at_Large She is an awful person, pandering to kneejerk reactionaries.
Anyone who has applied for a PIP knows how hard it is.

[Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg]

You get longer jail time in England for destroying killer drones destined for a Genocide, than you get for kidnap and rape.

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

@dieworkwear @Rohan_Choksi 🤣🤣🤣

[Gyll King Post Skip Diplomacy @GyllKing]

Burnham’s advisors - a Tory Lord & former Goldman Sachs banker, a Bank of England economist who worked with Gove on his fictional “Levelling Up” & the former OBR head who earned more each month than the annual state pension - are advising him
to end the pension triple lock.

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

A stunning reminder of why we cannot give up on our rivers yesterday, as I stumbled across an adult eel on the Roding for the first time, lounging in the shallows in the shade of a council tower block & within earshot of the North Circular.

This now rare & magical sight used to be common, until eel populations crashed on the Roding in the 1980’s & have not recovered. Seeking to understand & reverse this population crash should surely be a key role for the governments environmental regulator, but as usual they have done nothing to improve water quality or remove barriers to eel migration. Worse, they are actively blocking my efforts to help the eel population recover.

Ordinarily, baby eels (elvers) for restocking are expensive to buy. However, I managed to secure a kind donation of elvers from fishermen on the River Severn (where the elvers often get stuck behind barriers on the river). I applied for my @EnvAgency restocking permit like a good boy & all they had to do to help recover eel populations on the Roding was to say yes. Perhaps predictably, my application was rejected, because there was no positive evidence that reintroducing eels to the Roding would be a good thing. Perhaps most annoyingly, my application to restock eels on the Roding was rejected because reintroducing them would interfere with the EA’s monitoring of their continued decline.

I asked what would happen if I went ahead & released the elvers anyway & was told that the EA would fine me up to £50,000. Yet another example of the malevolent uselessness of the EA: obsessed with procedure, but will do absolutely sod all to actually reverse the decline in our rivers.

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

@ILAMIR3 @caitoz No they're not.

[Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg]

Yes. They also destroyed all the records of interactions with Sweden in the Assange case.

We had to get from Sweden the evidence that Sweden wished to drop the sexual assault charges as unfounded, but the CPS under Starmer insisted they did not.

All internal CPS records destroyed.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

* Judge Jeremy Johnson had to rig two jury trials before he secured a criminal conviction for damage against four activists who targeted an Israeli drone factory in the UK.

* Johnson did not tell the jury he was going to sentence the four as terrorists – the first time such an "upgrade" has happened in British history.

* This week he's referred their defence barrister for contempt of court proceedings for a second time – again a British legal history first – even though the Court of Appeal rejected his previous application.

But hey, the government, police and courts' treatment of Palestine Action – the first direct action group ever to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation in British history – has been completely normal.

A link to my new article, The Plot Against Palestine Action, can be found in the reply post ⬇️

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Meet James Purnell. Andy Burnham's chief of staff.

He supported Iraq invasion; ex chair of Labour Friends of Israel; said that Winter Fuel Allowance and free bus passes should not be sacred; supported PFI, lie-detector tests for benefit claimants.

Next?
https://t.co/8Cnj0hIu62

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

@afneil Listen to the climate change denier who still thinks he is in control.

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

This is why we can't have nice things. Is it wilful blindness? A cognitive bypass? An emotional disconnect?

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

The UK is increasing the Pension age to 68.

Poland has lowered theirs to 60.

Their pension is higher as well.

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

@TedUrchin This. Bloody this.
https://t.co/gRddL6kPiL

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Keir Starmer was not merely a disappointment. He is a mendacious figure of ethical decrepitude, a man who won the Labour Party leadership based on promises that he jettisoned five seconds after winning - a Labour leader who dared banish from the Labour Party not only his predecessor but also remarkable human beings like director Ken Loach - the gentleman who has taken the historic Labour Party and transformed it into a vessel for the very oligarchy it was elected to restrain.

Consider the litany of Starmer’s moral and logical failures. He promised a 'different Britain', yet his actions were a masterclass in Tory-lite politics—using the same maxed-out credit card analogies that once served the austerity brigades to justify his own failure of vision. He promised a human rights lawyer’s approach but he embraced a racist-lite version of Farage.

On Europe, Starmer promised Brexiteers that Brexit is Brexit yet stood before those who yearn to rejoin the European Union, winked at them to make them feel that Britain would gradually reconnect, even rejoin, with the EU while offering nothing of substance. This is not leadership; it is a fraud.

And then there's the manner in which Starmer and his government rushed to offer Israel unequivocal support in pursuing its genocide in Gaza, sacrificing precious political and civil liberties in the UK by imprisoning grandmothers, priests and peaceful activists who dared support Palestine Action, an organisation that Starmer and his minions proscribed as terrorists for practising the usual activist tactics of trespassing to spray paint military planes that had demonstrably aided in the genocide. To add insult to injury, Starmer performed the diplomatic pantomime of recognising a Palestinian state, in a manner that ensured it would never happen.

But above all else, this is a government that has learned nothing from the post-2008 era. Starmer and his Chancellor are playing the same tired austerity game while enabling and empowering the Finance Curse perpetrated by the City of London, throwing in forgood measure cuts in international aid to fund a military spending trickle under the guise of a "Strategic Defence Review" . It is the same old doctrine: austerity for the masses, socialism for the financiers and the arms dealers.

History will remember Mr Starmer as a man without conviction, a Prime Minister who offers not a shred of honesty, but merely the cruel illusion of change. He is ethically decrepit because he had chosen, consciously, to abandon principle for power. And for that, history will indict him. Good riddance, I say.

https://t.co/sGfebPkDXR

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

@WokeratiMarty @BSEYoga @jeremycorbyn Strange, I thought Starmer was such a 'decent' and 'principled' chap 🤣

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

@ReturnOfDadbo @Ofcom If you think there was nothing wrong with Starmer, I regret to inform you that you have been manipulated, and belong to the cohort you despise.
Either that, or you're a liar.

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

Dear @EnvAgency.

In February this year, after 4 years of asking you to look after the Aldersbrook, I led a team of volunteers to do your job for you & clean out tonnes of silt & leaves, as well as hundreds of bags of rubbish. Through the effort of community volunteers & donations, & at zero cost to the taxpayer, we turned a forgotten silted up ditch back into a river again.

Last nights intense rain storm showed why our actions are the very definition of “strengthening water resilience”. A huge amount of rain fell in a short time, but the restored section of the Aldersbrook has been able to hold 100’s of thousands of litres more water, stopping this water running into the Roding, & thereby *reducing* local flood risk. The first photograph below is of the Aldersbrook after the rains this morning- a big contrast to the area before we did the work.

Perhaps more importantly, this water, instead of running straight off into the Roding & hence the sea is now being held in the Aldersbrook & gradually released so it can be used by nature. It is feeding marshes, trees & wildlife, topping up groundwater & helping to reduce our flood/drought cycle. If you want to strengthen water resilience, we need thousands more projects like the Aldersbrook around the country.

So the question I ask you, Environment Agency, is why you are threatening me with two years imprisonment, rather than offering to meet & discuss how we can work together to restore the Roding & its tributaries, which could become a blueprint for you cooperating with local river guardians nationwide?

[Martin Southwood @paintandashes]

A pretty good start 👍

[Admirim @admirim]

The demands of the anti-corruption protests in Albania. 🇦🇱