redfeathers

'Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed..' L.Cohen

[Nikki da Costa @nmdacosta]

It’s very simple now. No more passing the buck. A vote at second reading is a vote for this particular bill and the Parliament Act Plan. Every MP voting for it is signing up to forcing this particular bill into law no matter what.

[Metropolitan Police @metpoliceuk]

We are policing a protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice following the appeal on the proscription of Palestine Action.

Updates will be posted on this thread.

[Janet Murray @jan_murray]

Thanks to everyone who has emailed or messaged me about Lush and other organisations using imagery associated with mastectomy scars in campaigns and promotional material.

It's clear the Chelmsford display is not an isolated example. Nor, it seems, is Chelmsford City Council the only local authority promoting such imagery for Pride Month.

I've also heard from a number of people who either work for Lush or know people who do.

If you've come across similar examples, I'd be interested to see them. Anything you send will be treated in confidence unless agreed otherwise.

[email protected]

[Dan Hitchens @ddhitchens]

Re-upping this. Will a Labour government find itself presiding over the dismantling of the hospice movement?

[Nikki da Costa @nmdacosta]

Kit Malthouse, hardcore supporter of the Bill, just told @SebastianEPayne @TimesRadio that MP supporters of the Bill must NOT amend the Bill.

Every amendment, no matter how vital, will be rejected by Lauren Edwards MP.

[Toby Young @toadmeister]

A museum has renamed itself after Left-wing activists mistakenly thought the 'SS' in its old name – 'SS Great Britain' – referred to 'Slave Ship'. Rather than tell them the truth, it pandered to their ignorance. https://t.co/Q6qApFiAS8

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

🚨 Serco - the government contractor that runs large parts of Britian's immigration and justice operation - has taken the extraordinary position of saying it would oppose Reform's plan to deport illegal migrants from Britain.

Having read the Telegraph's report making this claim, I have written to Serco's CEO asking him to urgently clarify their position.

Serco is the firm the Home Office uses to deposit unvetted men from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq into British housing estates without the knowledge nor consent of local residents.

Serco is the firm that launches huge bids for rental homes, outbidding local residents by such a vast amount that lifelong residents - including veterans - have been served eviction notices by landlords. All to house illegal migrants.

Serco has expressed no moral concern about any of this.

Yet they apparently take exception to our plan to actually uphold immigration law and remove those who break it.

Moreover, if the Telegraph's reporting is correct, a company so enmeshed in the British state it even runs recruitment for British Armed Forces, says it will take a hostile position to a duly elected Reform government.

If the Telegraph’s reporting is correct, the only reasonable interpretation of Serco’s position is that it now believes itself to be an alternative power base to the duly elected government of the United Kingdom, and is willing to act contrary to the interests of the British electorate.

If this were true, a Reform government would be left with no choice but to view Serco as a threat to national security. 

I have given Serco until 6pm to clarify their position.

Should they fail to do so, we will take the following steps to decouple the British Government from Serco:

1) On forming a Government, we will initiate an accelerated review of all Government contracting with Serco with the aim of removing Serco as a public contractor within our first Parliamentary term.

2) Where Serco has breached contracts or break clauses are available, we will terminate those contracts and continue to exercise break clauses as they come due. 

My full letter below 👇

[SonofLiberty357 @SonofLiberty357]

@Polymarket

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 BREAKING: The Court of Appeal has ruled the decision to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was lawful

[Michael Thompson @ThompsonMinor]

@lucianaberger @redfeathers It's like Brexit

If you don't like the outcome you keep trying to get the decision overturned

I am in two minds over Assisted Dying but having been thrown out by the Houses of Parliament I believe it should not be allowed back in this term

[Philip Murray @philipmurraylaw]

Already something very fishy about Lauren Edwards’ assisted suicide Bill. Edwards says she doesn’t think the Bill should be enacted through the Parliament Acts, yet is insisting exactly the same Bill be passed by the Commons as last time, refusing even to incorporate Lord Falconer’s 70+ amendments from the last session.

There can only be one reason for this: the Parliament Acts require the same Bill to be passed by the Commons in two sessions. I’ve no doubt that Edwards will continue to present her Bill simply as an opportunity for the Commons to ask the Lords to “finish the job”, but the idea that the Bill won’t end up on the statute book if the Commons passes it again is, frankly, disingenuous.

[Jack Montgomery @JackBMontgomery]

@PolitlcsUK "Adults can still access social media through age checks like facial recognition, digital IDs, passports and credit cards" — So eliminating the right to anonymity/privacy online is the true objective, got it 👍🏻

[Prof Katherine Sleeman @kesleeman]

Depressing thread on the numerous inaccuracies in Lauren Edwards’s statement.

The statement reads as though it was written by DiD, which it probably was.

Feels like we’ve outsourced the job of legislating - on this most grave of subjects - to a single issue campaign group.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

"Makerfield votes on Thursday. Reform holds every council ward in the constituency. A government that spent eleven weeks explaining why two hundred tankers could not be touched found, four days before a by-election it cannot afford to lose, that the first one could be."

[The Spectator @spectator]

One uncomfortable consequence of political longevity is seeing the facts prove some of one's most confident forecasts wrong.

As the trade secretary overseeing Britain's entry into the single market in 1992, I claimed it would wonderfully boost our exports. As I outline in my new paper for Policy Exchange, I was proved wrong. Over our 28-year membership, British goods exports to the EU grew less than 1 per cent a year, while our exports to the 111 countries with which we had no trade deal grew four times as much – by 87 per cent.

Yet the present Business and Trade Secretary, Peter Kyle, is apparently ignorant of this disappointing experience. He has justified the government's proposed 'reset' of relations with the EU by claiming that ‘the single market is where the magic happens’.

✍️ Peter Lilley

Article | https://t.co/W5QEHs0Qv2

[Toby Young @toadmeister]

Universities are receiving millions in taxpayers' money for research about asylum seekers stuffed with jargon like "postcolonial sexual identity" and "diasporic queers". Charlotte Gill has found 10 hair-raising examples. https://t.co/zOD2eMQ2cZ

[Rebecca Paul MP @Rebecca_SPaul]

This 👇 I was on the commons bill committee. We tried so hard to improve the bill. They rejected almost all of the much needed safeguards we suggested. They even voted down our amendment to not bring it up with children!!!

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Jobs Did Not Disappear. They Were Rented To People Who Cannot Legally Work.

729,000 people aged 16 to 24 were unemployed in Britain between January and March this year. The youth unemployment rate, 16.2 percent, is the highest since early 2015. For the first time since records began in 2000, it is now higher than the EU average. Almost one million young people are not in education, employment or training, the highest figure in more than a decade.

The explanation offered is economic headwinds. The cause is closer to home. Employer National Insurance contributions rose in April last year. The minimum wage rose with it. The sectors that have always absorbed young workers first, retail, hospitality, delivery, became the most expensive sectors to hire into. Job vacancies have fallen seven percent in a year, to their lowest level since April 2021. The pattern is simple. Raise the cost of hiring at the bottom of the market, and the bottom of the market stops hiring first.

But the jobs have not disappeared. Walk down any high street and the delivery riders are still there, in greater numbers than ever. What has changed is who is doing the work, and how.

At the Midland Hotel in Derby, a Grade II listed building housing around two hundred asylum seekers, a whistleblower described the daytime scene. The hotel is not busy, they said, because everyone is out at work. Delil, an Ethiopian asylum seeker staying there, put it plainly. "I work for Deliveroo like a lot of my friends. I want to work, that's why I came to the UK."

This was documented in December 2023. Researchers at Nottingham Trent and Heriot-Watt found migrant couriers earning between £900 and £1,500 a month. The mechanism is a rental market. An account holder with the right to work registers with Deliveroo, Uber Eats or Just Eat, then rents access to that verified identity to someone who does not have it, for £70 to £100 a week. At the time, hundreds of such accounts were available on Facebook Marketplace. In the first quarter of 2025, almost 750 civil penalty notices were issued to companies for immigration breaches, the highest since 2016.

The response came later. Deliveroo told MPs it had removed 105 riders since April 2024 for exactly this. In July 2025, the Home Office began sharing asylum hotel locations with the delivery firms, so they could flag accounts spending unusual time nearby. Asylum seekers are barred from working for their first twelve months. The data-sharing exists because, as Delil already said on the record, many already are.

Robert Jenrick called the substitutes system a driver of illegal immigration that put public safety at risk, because the companies were not carrying out proper checks. He was right, eighteen months before anyone with the power to fix it agreed, and the underlying arrangement, an entry-level job performed by someone the law says cannot hold it, accessed through an identity rented from someone who can, has not gone away. It has simply become harder to spot.

Put the two facts together. A record number of young Britons cannot get a foot on the first rung of the labour market, priced out by costs the government itself imposed. At the same time, the first-rung jobs are being done anyway, documented, named, on the record, by people the system says should not be working at all.

Nobody designed this as a system. Nobody has dismantled it either. Years after the Midland Hotel investigation, the high street looks exactly the same.

"Researchers at Nottingham Trent and Heriot-Watt found migrant couriers earning between £900 and £1,500 a month."

[Jesse Norman @Jesse_Norman]

Letter from members of the Lords from palliative care, psychiatry and law, on the #AssistedDyingBill. >> "the Bill ... failed because too many of its supporters were unwilling to engage with the complexities of developing a law that is genuinely safe, equitable and compassionate." This is true.

[Danny Kruger @danny__kruger]

Appalling that the Bill’s new sponsor could be so misinformed about the legislation she has signed up to lead through Parliament. And shame on the campaigners who drafted these untruths for her.