Simon McCarthy

I know this little out of the way place that serves great Viking food ...

[David Frost @DavidGHFrost]

Very happy that Mark Carney sees the benefits of an independent trade policy.

Pity he couldn't be quite so clear while he was running the Bank of England and telling us Brexit was a terrible mistake.

[Basil the Great @BasilTheGreat]

🚨NEWS: Labour MP Bayo Alaba has been suspended after he tried to get out of paying back a Covid loan

A foreign Labour MP defrauding the British state

Who saw that coming?

[Simon McCarthy @simonjmccarthy1]

🎯

[Lukas Ekwueme @ekwufinance]

Japanese rates keep hitting new multi-decade highs almost on a daily basis.

At the same time, Japan’s new prime minister is pushing an unprecedented spending program to support the economy.

They can’t dump their massive UST holdings without crashing the US bond market.

And now their own borrowing costs are exploding higher with no signs of stopping.

It increasingly looks like Japan could be the first domino to fall...

[Simon McCarthy @simonjmccarthy1]

@TanyaSzendeffy Not the same building in terms of construction: the Victorian building is single skin i.e. without a cavity which makes a true Flemish bond possible.

[Simon McCarthy @simonjmccarthy1]

UK energy demand destruction ⬇️

[David Turver @7Kiwi]

The predictable result: energy consumption is collapsing. Total final energy use is down over 20% since its peak. Industrial energy consumption has almost halved. Electricity generation is down more than 26%. (10/13)

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

They are destroying a TV because it’s haram and it didn’t exist in Muhammad’s time, while filming it on their phones and posting it online.

Stupidity knows no bounds.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

IS THE POST OFFICE WAITING FOR BETTY BROWN TO DIE BEFORE IT PAYS UP??

Betty Brown ran the Annfield Plain Post Office in County Durham with her husband Oswall from 1985 to 2003. Good business. Nice customers. No problems.

Then Horizon arrived in 2000, built by Fujitsu @fujitsu_uk, and the till started lying.

First night it was £500 short.
Within weeks it was £1,500 to £1,600 a week, every week.

Betty and Oswall paid every shortfall out of their own pocket because the alternative was being branded a thief.

They handed over more than £50,000. Betty says the real figure was closer to £100,000.

That was their retirement money, poured into a hole created by software nobody at the @PostOffice bothered to question.

Betty was never prosecuted. Small mercy. Instead a manager decided she was too old for the job and needed replacing with someone who understood the technology.

She was pushed out in 2003.
Oswall died a year later.

Betty believes the stress helped kill him, and says his dying thoughts were about whether the Post Office had finally been in touch.

She spent the next two decades fighting for compensation while the people who built and defended a broken system kept their salaries, their bonuses and their pensions.

In 2025, aged 92, Betty finally settled her claim.
In 2026 she received an OBE from King Charles at Windsor Castle.

She used the moment to tell him that money does not equal justice, and asked him to pass that on to the Prime Minister.

She still had not received a single penny of her settlement by the time she collected the medal.

That is the British state's idea of closure. Ruin someone for over two decades then hand them a piece of metal before the cheque clears.

Betty says every subpostmaster caught up in the Horizon scandal deserves the same recognition she got.

She is right. None of them asked for a medal. They asked for their money and their names back.

SOURCES
@BBCNews @itvnews @ComputerWeekly @nickwallis @Karlfl

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

Absolutely appalled to read that @PatrickChristys and @CarverEmily were forced to flee their home after police warned of death threats from human traffickers.

He’s a fearless journalist and has done more to expose the people smuggling gangs in Calais than the entire government.

[Donna Louise @DonnaLouise1212]

The late @LiddleRod exposed the muslim gang mentality back in the 80's.

It didn’t start with the Batley teacher.

In the 1980s, Ray Honeyford, a headmaster in Bradford, had the audacity to say Muslim children in a British school should get a British education. Learn English. Not disappear for months to Pakistan. And yes the girls should learn to swim.
For that, he was hounded by a mob. Police lines outside his school.

Children forced to hold “Honeyford is a racist” signs. Threats to occupy the building. He was driven out of the job he loved. Career destroyed.

They called him a bigot. History called him right.
Multiculturalism wasn’t “enrichment.” It was the deliberate refusal to demand integration and the vicious punishment of anyone who did.

Same playbook, decades later: intimidate the teacher, silence the critic, protect the parallel society.

Honeyford warned them. They destroyed him for it. And now we live with the consequences.
Watch this.

Then tell me nothing has changed.

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Southern Water want to rob the River Test of 1/3 of its flows.

“Southern Water is arguing yet again that corporate greed and ineptitude should surpass the needs of the environment,”

Me in today’s @FT

https://t.co/TmdBGhotfT

[David Turver @7Kiwi]

For those who keep telling us that gas is a global market, how come UK gas prices are >6.5X US prices?
UK price of 130.69p/therm works out at £44.60/MWh. US Price of $2.68/mmbtu is £6.79/MWh.
UK and EU need to drill, baby drill to increase domestic supply.

[Sedd @SeddSezz]

This bastard Pat McFadden has committed an egregious act.

He has docked veterans’ benefits in a stealth raid on military pensions.

Former serviceman are being ordered to repay thousands of pounds because the Department for Work and Pensions classifies their military pension as “unearned income.”

It’s absolutely disgusting that migrants receive so many freebies when we can’t even see to the security of our own servicemen.

Why does Labour hate our armed forces?

[David Buik @truemagic68]

UK HOUSE BUILDERS YTD – PERSIMMON -18.57%, TAYLOR WIMPEY -27.44%, BARRATT REDROW -22.61%, VISTRY GROUP -54.22%, BERKELEY GROUP -10.99%, GALLIFORD TRY +13.46, CREST NICHOLSON -57.12%
Government's house building programme has not gone totally to plan?

[David Buik @truemagic68]

CITYAM - BP will sell its North Sea oil division after the government’s tax raid on domestic oil, in a move that will leave the British energy giant without any petrochemicals production in its home market for the first time in decades.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The BBC has had thirty eight years and £3.8 billion a year to explain British farming to the British public. The job was eventually done by an American shopping website, in eight episodes, fronted by the man the BBC itself dropped over a row about a steak.

Countryfile first went out on 24 July 1988, and its origin is the part nobody brings up. It replaced Farming, a programme that had spent thirty years making news for the people who actually did the work. The new show was deliberately widened to take in everybody who merely liked the countryside as well as those who lived off it. Widened meant softened. In 2009 it moved to Sunday evenings, where five to six million people still watch, and it has been settled ever since into an hour of scenery, a ramble, a calendar competition and the weather.

Then in June 2021 a company best known for selling doorbells put out a series about a man failing to farm a thousand acres, and within a week the British public understood the subsidy system.

Look at what an American retailer put on screen that thirty eight years of Sunday nights had not. A thousand acres, a full year of work, £144 profit. A crop drowning in the field with nobody coming to help. A farmer selling at a price he is not allowed to set. A council able to shut a restaurant standing on a man's own land. The accounts, open, with jokes over the top.

James Rebanks, who keeps sheep for a living rather than for a segment, reckoned Clarkson did more for farmers in one series than Countryfile had managed in thirty years. The NFU said the same thing in nicer words.

Now the funding, which is where it gets genuinely funny.

Countryfile is paid for by £180 a year, rising on 1 April, taken from every household in Britain that watches live television, on pain of prosecution. Twenty three million licences. Three point eight billion pounds. Guaranteed money, a captive audience, a national mandate and a prime Sunday slot.

Clarkson's Farm is paid for by people voluntarily pressing play, and it goes out in more than 240 countries.

The nation's farmers had one broadcaster legally funded by them, obliged to serve them, sitting on the biggest slot in British television. It gave them a weather forecast and a photography competition, and when a bloke with a Lamborghini tractor did the actual job for free, the same building's stars went on a sofa to complain about his opening credits.

The BBC had the money, the mandate, the Sunday night and thirty eight years.

It used them to film the view.

[Michael Warburton @For_Film_Fans]

If you want to know what sort of person DAVID NIVEN (who left us 43yrs ago today, aged 73) was, the largest wreath at his funeral was from the Porters at Heathrow Airport.

It read:

“To the finest gentleman who ever walked through these halls. He made a Porter feel like a King.”

[Simon McCarthy @simonjmccarthy1]

$NDX #NASDAQ #NASDAQ100

[*Walter Bloomberg @DeItaone]

NASDAQ NEARS CORRECTION AS AI FEARS GROW

The Nasdaq 100 fell 1.6% Tuesday, putting the index on the verge of a market correction after a 10% drop from its June peak.

Investors are increasingly worried that massive AI spending by Big Tech may not deliver strong returns.

Focus now shifts to earnings from Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, which could determine whether the tech selloff deepens or stabilizes.

[Simon McCarthy @simonjmccarthy1]

@mrofwallstreet In 2028 — which soup kitchen shall we meet you in?

[Simon McCarthy @simonjmccarthy1]

#BTC #Bitcoin $MSTR #MSTR

[Kurt S. Altrichter, CRPS® @kurtsaltrichter]

$MSTR is down 75% in a year and Wall Street still calls it a 170% buy.

Seventeen analysts hold a $275 target on a $100 stock, the biggest implied upside in the Nasdaq 100.

It is a leveraged bitcoin bet funded by preferred shares sold to retail. Bitcoin is down by half. Own $MSTR and you own that leverage with funding risk on top.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

UK data centers consume roughly 6.6 million liters of water every day, yet we are all threatened with a hosepipe ban.