Ponderix

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

If Bernie's 5% annual wealth tax on billionaires had been enacted in 2012, Elon Musk would be worth less than $365 billion instead of the $1.2 trillion that he's worth today.

Elon would still be the wealthiest man alive & every family in America would have universal childcare.

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Working-class white people are burning down the homes of black working-class people, at the instigation of the world's only trillionaire. How has it come to this?

[Sky News @SkyNews]

New footage has emerged in the killing of seven-month-old Palestinian Sam Abu Haikal in the occupied West Bank.

The video appears to show the family's car slowing to a stop before an Israeli soldier opens fire.

Sky's @AdamParsons reports ⬇️

Latest: https://t.co/cjyZPzIyeA

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

Crazy that this is getting barely any coverage. This year’s European Press Prize was just awarded to an investigative report by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. It is entitled “What the Wounds Tell” and in it the journalists Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra document the cases of 114 children in Gaza under the age of 15 who were struck by a single bullet to the head or chest. Almost all of them died or were left severely disabled. They chose to document only the cases of boys and girls under the age of 15 (though often much younger: aged 3, 4 or 7) because these are children who can be immediately identified as such. “A single bullet in these parts of the body is a clear indication that these children were deliberately targeted“, the two journalists write.

This is the article: https://t.co/YkZrpqBWBQ

[Senator Chris Van Hollen @ChrisVanHollen]

Yesterday, the IDF seized 4 students from their homes in the West Bank, including 20-year-old American, Sama Safi.

The Israeli govt didn’t tell her family or the U.S. Embassy where or why she was being taken & is holding her without charges.

America must secure her release NOW.

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

@Nigel_Farage Are you getting desperate, lad?

Maybe keep your crypto millions for something else. 😂

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Sky News completely destroys the Zionist regime's primary excuse for bombing Lebanon. The reporter confirms there is absolutely zero evidence of military activity in the civilian homes Israel is obliterating.

Washington is funding pure state terrorism!

[Sunniva Rose @Sunniva_Rose]

Luxembourg’s @Xavier_Bettel: I must reiterate that Germany and Austria saying they have an eternal debt to Israel doesn’t excuse what’s happening today. Are we going to accept a 2nd Gaza? Do we want southern Lebanon to be a field of ruins and turn a blind eye? It’s not right.

[Thales @TupleJ]

@usembthehague It's called "Netherlands First". We don't want your greasy McDonalds fingers on our data.

[George Galloway @georgegalloway]

This is a German citizen a European Union citizen kidnapped in International waters and savagely beaten by Germany’s ally Israel.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

This post is from my Legislative Director, Raphael. He is the original author of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. He was offered twice his salary to leave my office and declined.

The staff of @RepRoKhanna and @RepMcGovern also made tremendous contributions to the legislation.

[Josh Housden @JoshHousden]

Here's my central estimate for how the 2024 UK General Election would've looked using Single Transferable Vote

Boundaries inspired by Denis Mollison (143 constituencies)

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

AIPAC spent $9 million to take out Rep. Thomas Massie.

Trump megadonors spent another $7 million.

It was the most ever spent on a House primary race—all because he defied Trump on Gaza and Epstein.

NO, billionaire super PACs should not buy our elections. One person, one vote.

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

These are international civilians, innocent of any crime, who have been illegally abducted in international waters by Israel. That’s what we’re looking at here.

[Radosław Sikorski 🇵🇱🇪🇺 @sikorskiradek]

You may not treat Polish citizens who have committed no crime in this way.
In the democratic world we do not abuse and gloat over people in custody.
We demand justice for our citizens and consequences for you.

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

The abominable treatment of civilians aboard the flotilla, including that which is documented in footage shared by Itamar Ben-Gvir, is unacceptable.

Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs has directed officials to summon the Israeli ambassador to demand assurances regarding the safety and security of Canadians involved.

Canada has already imposed strict sanctions on Mr. Ben-Gvir, including asset freezes and a travel ban, in response to his repeated incitement of violence. The protection of civilians and respect for human dignity must be upheld everywhere, at all times.

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

Israel has kidnapped the sister of the president of Ireland.

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

Critical take from Israel's Foreign Ministry on my column about sexual assaults of Palestinian men, women and children. You can read my piece here through a gift link: https://t.co/SL0oxguNmi

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding.

If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life.

That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.

Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival.
But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible?

Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there?

The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them.

Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact.

Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source.

This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes.

This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself.

I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state.

The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends.

The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act.

Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity.

Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them.

The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety.

That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.