Steve Stanley 💙

Loves family life, golf and technology especially most things Apple. Oh, and a very proud Bluenose and Warwickshire Bears fan. KRO #bcfc #youBears

[Rosie Duffield MP @RosieDuffield1]

Farewell to what for most has been 2 years of broken promises, weakness, let downs, scandal, chaos, greed, chronyism.
But for many of us, 6 years of a spiteful, closed, technocratic, top down, entitled managerial regime which fostered resentment, resulted in workplace stress, ignored political knowledge, talent and achievement in favour of nepotism. Mandelson, glasses, inept, badly-fumbled u-turns, empty politics rejected by voters.
Not legacy, not greatness, not leadership.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Arrest. The Kitchen. The Questions Angela Rayner Must Now Answer.

Five people were arrested on Thursday morning on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud. The allegation is that fake independent candidates were entered on the ballot for St Peter's ward in Tameside to split votes for opposition parties and deliver the seat to Labour. Greater Manchester Police confirmed the arrests and said they were working closely with the Electoral Commission.

The arithmetic is not complicated. The Labour candidate won by 177 votes. The two alleged fake candidates received 291 votes between them. St Peter's was the only ward in Tameside to return a Labour councillor on May 7. Reform won the remaining 18. Without those alleged fake candidates on the ballot, the ward in all probability falls and Tameside returns no Labour councillors at all.

St Peter's ward sits in the heart of Angela Rayner's Ashton-under-Lyne constituency. Rayner denies any involvement or awareness of the alleged plot. That denial is on the record and must be the starting point. She has not been arrested. She has not been charged. No evidence has been presented publicly that connects her personally to any decision.

What has been reported, by the Manchester Mill and subsequently by the Telegraph, is that Philip Wilson-Marks, the former vice-chairman of the Ashton-under-Lyne Community Labour Party, has alleged he was approached twice about the fake candidate tactic. One of those approaches, he claims, took place in Rayner's kitchen.

Rayner says the allegations have nothing to do with her and any suggestion of involvement or awareness is baseless. That statement must stand until evidence establishes otherwise. But the location claim is documented, attributed and on the public record. It cannot simply be set aside because it is inconvenient.

There is also the matter of a leaked 2024 recording in which Rayner pleaded with Muslim voters in her constituency, acknowledging she could not have held her seat in 2019 without their support and promising Labour would do everything in its power on Gaza. St Peter's ward, where the alleged fraud occurred, has a significant Muslim population. The Labour candidate who allegedly benefited is Atta ul-Rasool, the former vice-chairman of the Ashton-under-Lyne Labour branch. The connection between Rayner's documented bloc vote cultivation and the ward where five people have now been arrested for alleged electoral fraud is not an allegation. It is a question the evidence requires to be asked.

Rayner has been cleared by HMRC of wrongdoing over her stamp duty affairs in circumstances that independent tax experts describe as difficult to understand. A company incorporated fourteen months ago with £1 of capital, controlled by a former member of her staff according to Companies House records, donated £150,000 to her political office. Those questions have not been answered.

Rayner is not responsible for the actions of every person associated with her local party. But the culture that allegedly produced those decisions is the culture of the political operation in her backyard. A party that has spent months accusing Reform of threatening democratic norms has five people under arrest for alleged conspiracy to defraud a local election in its own heartland.

The questions are specific. When did she become aware of allegations about fake candidates. Whether anyone discussed the tactic with her or in her presence. What she intends to do about the culture that produced these arrests. Rayner resigned from government in the name of integrity. Integrity means answering those questions. The kitchen allegation is on the public record. The questions will not go away by themselves.

"The Labour candidate who allegedly benefited is Atta ul-Rasool, the former vice-chairman of the Ashton-under-Lyne Labour branch."

[Steve Stanley 💙 @stanleysp]

@dalemoon90 Probably because it wasn’t a foul!

[Steve Stanley 💙 @stanleysp]

@chris_skudder Rubbish!

[BruceUnfiltered @BruceUnfiltered]

So let me get this straight.
Nigel Farage is being dragged in front of what many people will quite rightly see as an establishment kangaroo court.

Instead of hiding behind lawyers, committees and Westminster procedure, he calls a by the book, legitimate by-election in Clacton and says: fine, let the people decide. And somehow that is a circus. A farce. A vanity project.

But when Labour manufactured a by-election less than a month ago, got one of their own candidates to stand down, parachuted in their preferred man, and effectively cleared the path for their next Prime Minister, that was apparently democracy working exactly as intended.

Funny how that works, isn’t it?
When the establishment does it, it’s strategy.
When Farage does it, it’s chaos.

When Labour moves people around like chess pieces, it’s legitimate, and all above board, the whole bandwagon jumps onboard.

When voters in Clacton are handed the final say, suddenly everyone starts clutching their pearls about the “cost to the taxpayer”, Even though Reform are funding it, but the establishment wants you to pay for one they "think" is coming later down the line.

Honestly, some people need to wake up.

[Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico]

The fact Boris & now Farage were put through virtue trials by committees to decide if they were worthy to be MPs but Starmer was protected from the same process despite manifestly having done much worse goes to feed the sense these committees are just anti-democratic stitch-ups.

[The Mercian @TheMercianNews]

🚨NEW: KC Anu Mohindru has been allowed to continue being a barrister despite falsely claiming that he studied medicine at Oxford University and for claiming that he was a qualified doctor.

He also claimed that he had played cricket for the Bar, for Lashings Cricket Club and for MCC, and that he was a cricketing blue having represented Oxford in a varsity match against Cambridge.

A tribunal disbarred him for telling his 23 Essex Street interviewers a “reckless, foolish and completely unnecessary lie” about studying at Oxford, and because he “doubled down" on his CV.

On appeal at the High Court, Mr Justice Johnson overturned  Mohindru's expulsion, stating that it "would be wrong to impose the ultimate sanction merely because dishonesty is present".

[jim maxwell @jimmaxcricket]

The wrong man has gone: Stokes quits while Key and McCullum survive for now
Sad day for the game. Such appalling management on and off field https://t.co/SuuSxvDqNZ

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

We are in a very dark place. The football World Cup is on & this council has spent tax payers money going to court to make it illegal to fly Our flag on Our streets.

[David Frost @DavidGHFrost]

A powerful piece, well worth reading in full. 👇

[Planesanity @planesanity]

The Concorde taking off from JFK in 1980

[leilani dowding 🌸🚜 ☮️ @LeilaniDowding]

This is just 1 police force! Look at the amount of our tax money going on ridiculous jobs

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Multiculturalism Built The Training That Killed Henry Nowak. Nobody Is Investigating That.

The Home Secretary stood at the despatch box today and said there must be no two tier policing in Britain. The police have a sacred duty to act without fear or favour. Everyone is equal before the law.

Shabana Mahmood said this the day after the body cam footage of Henry Nowak's final minutes was released. A boy who told officers nine times he could not breathe and had been stabbed. An officer who replied I don't think you have, mate. A killer who was never handcuffed and was taken to choose his food while his victim died in the street. A government whose spokesman said, while that footage existed, that there is no such thing as two tier policing.

That statement lasted hours before political pressure made it untenable. It was withdrawn. Not because the government had examined the evidence. It was withdrawn because the evidence had become impossible to ignore. The Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle had to order the government to make a statement to MPs. A government that requires a Speaker's instruction to respond to one of the most disturbing pieces of body cam footage in British policing history does not take two tier policing seriously. It manages it.

Mahmood warned that anyone using this tragedy to stoke division should be rejected. But the division was not created by those naming it. It was created by decades of multicultural policy, progressive institutional capture and DEI training frameworks that systematically prioritised community cohesion over equal treatment under the law. Rotherham. Rochdale. Oldham. The Batley teacher still in hiding five years later. The Bradford hate crime scrutiny panel chairman sacked for naming the elephant in the room. And now Henry Nowak. The same cause. Different victims. Different towns. The same silence from the same institutions until silence became politically impossible.

The training that conditioned those officers to treat a racism accusation as more urgent than a dying boy's pleas was not an accident. It was built by the Police Race Action Plan, the National Police Chiefs Council's institutional racism declarations, the College of Policing's redesigned disciplinary framework and fifty years of DEI ideology embedded across policing, education, the civil service, HR departments, universities and every institution that shapes how Britain's public servants think and act. Gramsci theorised it. Dutschke operationalised it. Mahmood is now standing at the despatch box condemning its most visible consequence while her government continues to fund and embed its causes.

Kemi Badenoch said something that has been absent from mainstream British political discourse for thirty years. That Britain should be a multi-racial country not a multicultural country. One shared culture. One shared set of values. One law applied equally to everyone regardless of which community they belong to or which accusation they make. That distinction is the most important observation produced by any politician in response to Henry's death. Multiculturalism as a policy framework assumes that multiple incompatible value systems can coexist indefinitely in the same civic space without consequence. Henry's death is one of the most documented consequences of that assumption failing.

The powder keg that has been building for decades across Britain's towns and cities was not created by those asking the questions that Mahmood calls divisive. It was created by the political class that spent fifty years refusing to ask them. The IOPC will investigate the officers. Nobody is investigating the ideology that produced them. That is the conversation Mahmood is determined to prevent. It is the only conversation that matters.

"The powder keg that has been building for decades [...] was not created by those asking the questions that Mahmood calls divisive. It was created by the political class that spent fifty years refusing to ask them."

[Henry Bolton OBE 🇬🇧 @_HenryBolton]

I’m so sick of this government that I can’t put it into words.

It is no wonder that increasing numbers of people believe there is a deliberate agenda to dismantle and displace the way of life of the British nation as handed down to us as our heritage by our forefathers.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A farmer dies in April 2026.

His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847.

The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle.

On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify.

In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable.

The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft.

The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let.

A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up.

The Treasury collects £140,000.

The land never produces British food again.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Mandelson Affair Has Disappeared. Ask Yourself Why.

Three weeks ago the Mandelson affair was the most dangerous story in British politics. The files were building toward further release. Ian Collard's written evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee was outstanding. The privileges committee referral remained live. The pattern of decisions accommodating Beijing's interests, Chagos, the spy trial collapse, the largest Chinese embassy in Europe, the Indo-Pacific withdrawal, was accumulating in the public record. Starmer looked like a man running out of road.

Then in the space of seventy two hours everything changed. Josh Simons resigned his seat. Andy Burnham announced his candidacy. Wes Streeting resigned as Health Secretary. Angela Rayner was cleared by HMRC. And every front page in Britain was consumed by the Labour succession drama. The Mandelson story has not appeared on a front page since.

Starmer does not look like a man fighting for survival. He looks like a man whose shoulders have been relieved of a weight.

Consider the Simons dimension carefully. Simons commissioned Operation Cannon, a 48 page dossier produced by APCO Worldwide that falsely linked Sunday Times journalists to Russian intelligence. A version was sent to GCHQ. He resigned from government on 1 March 2026, cleared of breaching the Ministerial Code but acknowledging he had become a distraction. He then resigned his seat on 14 May 2026, specifically to provide a path for Burnham. This is the first time in over sixty years a by-election has been triggered to provide a seat for a figure not in Parliament. A man with that record resigns his seat with convenient timing and the political class calls it a selfless act.

Consider the Burnham dimension. His mayoralty was already ending. He announced he would not seek re-election in 2028. Westminster was always the only path left for his career. Standing for Makerfield is not a sacrifice. The risk calculation has been entirely misrepresented. And his candidacy was approved by the NEC without any other names being put forward, bypassing the local party vote entirely. The same NEC that blocked him for Gorton and Denton in February cleared his path without resistance in May. The machine that controls candidate selection moved smoothly and without friction.

Consider what Burnham's mayoralty actually produced in Greater Manchester. 108 Labour councillors lost their seats in the region in the May local elections alone. Reform won 24 of 25 seats in Wigan, 18 of 19 in Tameside, 13 of 21 in Salford. The Manchester Mill described the scale of the collapse as unfathomable. This happened on Burnham's watch. His personal popularity has been used to paper over a regional collapse that is structural, severe and entirely compatible with the grooming gang cover-up allegation Maggie Oliver has placed on the public record.

Whether this sequence of events represents coordination or coincidence cannot be established from the visible record. What can be established is this. The people who benefit most from the Mandelson story disappearing are the same people who have engineered the circumstances that made it disappear. Starmer is freed from immediate threat. Simons rehabilitates his reputation through a selfless gesture. Burnham gets the Westminster return his career requires. And the files, the testimony, the China pattern, the vetting questions, the missing formal record, all of it waits quietly while the political class argues about a by-election in Wigan.

The Mandelson affair has not been resolved. The questions have not been answered. The files have not been fully released. They have simply been buried. And the people who buried them are already planning the next act.

"Starmer does not look like a man fighting for survival. He looks like a man whose shoulders have been relieved of a weight."

[Bears @WarwickshireCCC]

A true Bears legend

🐻 #YouBears