𝐏𝐚𝐮𝐥

[Bobbie @bo66ie29]

This beautiful remastered footage was captured by an off duty policeman on 8th May 1945 after Churchill officially declared Victory in Europe. Flags are strung between terraces during the street celebrations in Gateshead. 🇬🇧 #VEDay

[𝐏𝐚𝐮𝐥 @paulorwill]

I never thought I'd agree with Diane, but she's spot on here.

[Diane Abbott @HackneyAbbott]

There is a myth, very widely held in Labour, that we achieved an huge popular victory in 2024 under Starmer.
In fact we won 9.7 million votes, over 3 million fewer than in 2017 and half a million less than the 'disastrous' 2019 poll.
We won because the Tories imploded in 2024.

[The English Oak Project @TheKentAcorn]

The very normal sight of a Giant Sequoia slowly swaying in the wind in a British churchyard

There are estimated to be half a million Giant Redwood in Britain, and nearly all are about 170 years old

[𝐏𝐚𝐮𝐥 @paulorwill]

Everyone should listen to this from 1945 https://t.co/Q4nLB9pyFk

[Rob Rinder @RobbieRinder]

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. My grandfather arrived here as a refugee, a Holocaust survivor and helped build the life and the democracy I stand in. Now denial grows. Antisemitism shapeshifts into “debate,” into “what about,” into language that makes hatred feel normal. He was saved by a country that chose courage. What kind of country will we choose to be? The responsibility to remember and to speak up is now ours @HMD_UK #bridginggenerations

[Auschwitz Memorial @AuschwitzMuseum]

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers.

This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.

Auschwitz took time.

[H.E.T. @HolocaustUK]

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, marking over 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We remember the 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. As survivors grow fewer and antisemitism rises, today is more vital than ever.

[Rabbi Poupko @RabbiPoupko]

When the terrorists came to the home of 83-year-old Shlomo Ron in Kibbutz Nachal Oz, they found him waiting for them, on a couch near the window.

An 83-year-old man with a cup of coffee in his hands. He wasn't armed; he was just waiting.

Hamas barbarians shot dead the man they thought was a lonely old man at point-blank range, murdered him, and moved on to the next house.

That was why he sat that way.

Inside the house's safe room were Shlomo's beloved wife, Chana, his daughter, and his grandson.

Shlomo left the safe room so Hamas thinks he was the only one in the house and saved the lives of his wife, daughter, and grandson. He succeeded. Yesterday, his wife Chana passed away.

May their memories be a blessing.

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

Some basics about Chagos for BBC reporters, Sky anchors and others coming new to the debate.
1. The Chagos Islands lie half-way between Africa and Indonesia, and host a key Anglo-American military base on the main island, Diego Garcia
2. France ceded the archipelago to Britain in 1814 separately from Mauritius; the islands were always a distinct territory, though, lacking suitable facilities, their administration was sited in Mauritius
3. To put the issue beyond doubt, Mauritius permanently renounced any claim to the islands in 1965 in return for a cash payment from Britain
4. It eagerly trousered the money, its first post-independence PM, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, explaining that he had been glad to sell any theoretical right to “territory of which very few people knew, which is very far from here, and which we had never visited”
5. Mauritius is indeed 1337 miles from the islands, and began to press its claim again only when it grew closer to China in the early 2000s
6. The barrister it hired was Philippe Sands, a co-founder of Matrix Chambers and a close friend of Keir Starmer’s, who has always been cagey about what conversations they have had about Chagos
7. Far from providing a mandate for the deal, the Labour manifesto explicitly promised the opposite (see graphic)
8. Starmer justifies the surrender by pointing to a non-binding resolution by a UN court, which included a Russian and a Chinese judge, and whose jurisdiction had been expressly denied in disputes between Commonwealth or former Commonwealth states
9. In November, a different UN body issued another non-binding resolution, this one ordering the transfer to be halted, but Labour did not change direction
10. The party may have a guilty conscience, for it was Harold Wilson’s government that removed the 1800-odd inhabitants from the islands after 1968 to make room for the base
11. Chagossians, who now number around 10,000, do not see themselves as Mauritians and overwhelmingly oppose the transfer
12. British and American generals have expressed reservations about the deal, warning that a future Mauritian government might lease adjoining islands to unfriendly powers
13. The base has proved its strategic value many times, lying as it does lies within reach of four of the seven global choke points that funnel maritime traffic: the Bab-el-Mandeb, the Straits of Hormuz, the Malacca Straits and the Cape of Good Hope
14. Mauritius has no navy and admits it cannot protect the territory
15. At the same time, it wants commercial fishing in the matchless marine conservation zone around the islands
16. A Freedom of Information Request shows that the payments to Mauritius will total £34 billion
17. Mauritius says that this money will wipe out its national debt and still allow tax cuts
18. Opponents of the Bill want Chagossians themselves to decide the issue in a referendum
19. If the deal falls, Britain will be under a moral obligation to allow Chagossians to settle the outer atolls (see video in next post)
20. Providing for a permanent settlement will cost (on the government’s figures) one sixth or (on the actual figures) around one fiftieth as much as Labour wants to hand to Mauritius
21. The transfer cannot go ahead without both parliamentary ratification and the formal approval of the US, neither of which has been secured

[𝐏𝐚𝐮𝐥 @paulorwill]

This is amazing for weather obsessives. It seems Wales really is wet.

[Arthur Juliani @awjuliani]

I'm trying to figure out where to live next, and one big consideration is the climate. So naturally I made a tool that represents monthly average temperatures for cities as 3D rings so they can be compared more easily. Check it out: https://t.co/MqPb0ufLYY

[Dov Forman @DovForman]

This year, Holocaust Memorial Day, on the 27 of January, will pass quietly in hundreds of British schools.

Not because the Holocaust is no longer relevant, and not because it is no longer important, but because too many educators now fear the reaction it might provoke, from parents in their communities and even from colleagues in their own staff rooms. According to new figures released by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has more than halved since October 7.

That fact alone should trouble us deeply. It is a stain on this country.

Holocaust Memorial Day exists to remember the six million Jewish men, women and children who were systematically murdered for no reason other than that they were born Jewish. It is not a political gesture. It is not a commentary on today’s conflicts. It is an act of human memory, and a moral one at that. When we begin to treat remembrance as something that must be justified, balanced or quietly avoided, we reveal how fragile our commitment to it has become.

My great-grandmother, Lily Ebert, survived Auschwitz. For decades of her life, she devoted herself to speaking to people all over the world about what she had witnessed and endured in what she called “hell on earth.” She answered their questions, listened to their fears, and tried to explain, with remarkable strength and gentleness, how ordinary societies slide into extraordinary evil. When she said “never forget,” she did not mean “unless it becomes uncomfortable.”

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers and death camps. It began with words. With lies. With the spread of conspiracy theories. With the slow normalisation of hatred. With the othering of Jewish people. With people deciding that certain lives mattered less than others. And, crucially, with silence, with decent people looking away because it felt easier than speaking up.

This is precisely why Holocaust education matters. It teaches young people where prejudice leads when left unchallenged, how democracies corrode from within, and what happens when lies become louder than truth. My great-grandmother always believed that education was the solution, that knowledge could be a shield against hatred.

But what happens when education itself becomes the problem?

What we are seeing now is that the sharp rise in antisemitism is not happening despite decades of Holocaust education, but in part because so much of it was never truly believed in to begin with. For too many academic institutions and teachers, Holocaust remembrance and education about anti-Jewish racism became a tick-box exercise, something done because it had to be done, not because it was understood, valued or defended. It was procedural, not principled. Now, when that education becomes inconvenient, when it carries social cost, when it risks controversy, when those teachers have an excuse and a reason not to teach it, it is quietly dropped. And that tells us everything.

At a time when antisemitism is at its highest level in decades, and becoming increasingly violent, we should be strengthening Holocaust education, not retreating from it.

Too many teachers are being forced into silence by pressure from their communities and from colleagues. They are being told they must “balance” Holocaust remembrance with unrelated political narratives, as though the murder of six million Jews requires qualification, as though Jewish suffering must now come with footnotes.

Soon, there will be no survivors left. No living witnesses. Only last week, we lost Harry Olmer, a Holocaust survivor who endured multiple Nazi forced-labour and concentration camps. He was a personal hero of mine. I travelled to Poland with him in 2023 and heard his story first-hand. Soon, there will be no one left who can say, simply, “I was there.”

When that moment comes, all that will remain is what we chose to teach.

If we allow Holocaust education to wither now, at precisely the moment antisemitism is rising, distortion is spreading, and Jewish students increasingly report feeling unsafe, then we are not just failing the past. We are betraying the future. Because history does not repeat itself. People do.

And when we abandon the responsibility to teach our children the past with truth and integrity, we abandon the future too. If we teach children that history can be set aside when it becomes uncomfortable, we teach them something far more dangerous than any lesson about the past, we teach them that moral clarity is negotiable.

That is a lesson no school should ever impart.

[Robert Jenrick @RobertJenrick]

We Britons are “dogs and monkeys” apparently. The police are “not human” and should be “killed”. The City of London and Downing Street should be burned down. Zionists (aka Jews) should be killed, including using drones to target their weddings. The Holocaust didn’t happen. White people are “a blight on the earth” and there needs to be a genocide to wipe them out.

This is a mere fraction of the vitriol that has spewed from the mouth of one Alaa Abd el-Fattah. He’s clearly a man who hates Britain, is an anti-white racist, a rabid anti-Semite, preacher of hate generally and quite obviously, someone we wouldn’t want to ever step foot in our country.

Indeed if we were unlucky enough to be visited by this vile man, presumably he would be arrested at the airport like the unfortunate comedian Graham Linehan, or locked up for 15 months like Lucy Connolly.

You will forgive my surprise then when the country was given a belated late Christmas gift from the Prime Minister in the news that he now lives amongst us. What’s more, we are to be “delighted”. Rejoice! The nodding dogs of the Cabinet – Lammy, Cooper et cetera – took to X to express their excitement that he was now being inflicted upon the poor inhabitants of this country.

It was, in their minds, a diplomatic coup. Think Nixon in China.

The Prime Minister has claimed he did not know about el-Fattah’s views, but he had hardly concealed them. They were so well known in fact that he had a notable European peace prize rescinded in 2015 because of his anti-Semitic diatribes.

The parable of Mr el-Fattah is, however, bigger than Starmer. It tells you everything you need to know about our broken British state.

Firstly, he should not have been a British citizen at all. It shames me that the last government agreed to grant him a passport, the logic of which is hard to comprehend.

Presumably the geniuses at the Foreign Office thought that giving him citizenship would put pressure upon the Egyptians to release him from captivity and it might have eventually done so.

But be under no illusions, el-Fattah had only the most tenuous link to this country.

He was born, raised, educated and worked in Egypt. His mother briefly lived in Britain and a loophole enabled a path to a passport. It reinforces the case I’ve made for years that we need a long path to indefinite leave to remain and citizenship. No shortcuts. British citizenship should be a great prize, to be earned, not tossed around like confetti.

Secondly, whatever el-Fattah might have done in the Arab Spring, it was clearly no business of Britain to bring him to our country as he didn’t share our values.

How could it possibly be a “top priority” of British foreign policy or even of our bilateral relationship with Egypt. When I went to Cairo in the autumn of 2023 to seek the support of the Egyptians to take back their foreign criminals and illegal migrants, I was told that our embassy was under massive pressure and would not be able to devote much resource to it.

The October 7 atrocity had shaken the kaleidoscope and there was a flurry of diplomatic activity between our respective countries, understandably. It says a lot about the rot in the Foreign Office that they considered securing this man’s release more important, or even anywhere approaching the importance, of, say, stopping the boats.

When I travelled as a minister in my quest to stop illegal migration I was constantly shocked – though there were exceptions, like our superb ambassadors in Albania and Italy – at how little our diplomats were focused on the actual priorities of the British people.

Their own social media was a smorgasbord of trite interventions into fashionable causes like hoisting the rainbow flag above the embassy. Illegal migration was far too dirty and parochial an issue for much of the diplomatic elite.

And thirdly, our political classes seem bewitched by the fleeting applause of celebrity backed campaigns. There is a sickening video in which TV and film stars queue up to extol the virtues of el-Fattah and demand Starmer intervenes. Would they like to defend his views now, perhaps to some British Jews?

The BBC were quick to report the news that a “human rights campaigner” had been released, but remarkably slow to reveal the true nature of the man. It didn’t fit their narrative.

Of course, like with the surrender of the Chagos Islands, there were human rights lawyers like Starmer’s good friend, Philippe Sands KC involved.

The political and media class are possessed of a suicidal empathy in which they put the appearance of compassion above actually keeping our own people safe. It’s what the US vice president has spoken of, when he says Europe is in danger of committing “civilisational suicide”.

So Starmer says he will fight to “eradicate anti-Semitism” after the Bondi Beach terror attack, but then ships an actual anti-Semite into the country.

With hypocrisy of this order it’s no wonder his sidekick David Lammy was booed by the Jewish community in Manchester in October. This doublespeak is one of the reasons so many have total disdain for the ruling class and want to upend its cosy, failing club altogether.

What to do now? El-Fattah has already taken to X and reposted a message criticising Starmer. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

The Prime Minister should start by withdrawing his welcome and unalloyed praise for El Fattah. I would go further. Admit that this has been a massive failure of the British state from start to finish. This man’s citizenship should be revoked and he should be deported. That would send a signal that Britain is not prepared to be a joke country any longer.

[Robbie Moore MP @_RobbieMoore]

I spoke up for farmers in Parliament yesterday. 

Labour Ministers sat there laughing - all whilst farmers watched on from the public gallery.

This is the level of disrespect our farmers have come to expect 👇

[𝐏𝐚𝐮𝐥 @paulorwill]

@BennettArron you've gained me.

[𝐏𝐚𝐮𝐥 @paulorwill]

@ldgower2 @bo66ie29 It is still there - Glasshouse, Gloucs

[No Farmers, No Food @NoFarmsNoFoods]

More and more farmers and local farm shops are using social media to sell their food. Fair play to them, because it’s bloody hard out there with supermarkets who pay them pittance for their food and a government who punishes them.

[𝐏𝐚𝐮𝐥 @paulorwill]

@Tim_Richmond_ But isn't it JLR and the Land Rover bit is doing rather well?

[Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1]

Very irritated with all the commentators tonight saying what a nice guy Tim Davie is and how he "wanted" to reform the BBC.

But he didn't, did he? He did absolutely NOTHING to tackle the BBC's blatant anti-semitism, or their obsession with trans or their unscientific climate hysteria, or their Trump and Brexit derangement syndromes, or their insanely out of touch pro-mass immigration stance or their absurdly obvious left wing bias.

He didn't sack anyone who deliberately misled the public about Trump's Jan 6 speech, or the Glastonbury Bob Vylan debacle, or anyone responsible for other clear breaches of the BBC code of conduct.

It really isn't hard for the BBC to simply report the news as fact, giving airtime to different viewpoints. They make a deliberate choice every single day to NOT do that. And yet we are all forced by law to pay their wages.

Far more heads must roll than just Tim Davie and Deborah Furness. The BBC needs a full clear out.

[𝐏𝐚𝐮𝐥 @paulorwill]

@AllisonPearson @ShabanaMahmood I thought by now Keir would 'smashed the gangs'.

[𝐏𝐚𝐮𝐥 @paulorwill]

@Artemisfornow The only shock is that they think it's a 'shock'.