Ste Firth

Oh

[John Redwood @johnredwood]

The government says our energy prices are dictated by a world market oil and gas price. So why is our energy around 4 times the price of US and 3 times China?

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

This past week, on a test bed in Britain, a Rolls-Royce jet engine ran at full take-off power on pure hydrogen, putting out water vapour instead of carbon.

Nobody on Earth had managed it before. It is the sort of thing that ought to stop the country in its tracks, and it will be forgotten by the weekend.

Leave aside the recent paroxysms of renewed net-zero insanity from Derelict Ed and the pervasive atmosphere of offended envy that greets much homegrown achievement nowadays in Britain. This engineering is a wonder, and it's British to the bone.

We gave the world the jet engine in the first place - Frank Whittle, a Coventry man and an RAF officer, patented it in 1930 while the Air Ministry assured him it was a curiosity. Rolls-Royce is today one of perhaps three firms anywhere that can build a large aero engine at the outer edge of the possible, and it has just done what most of the industry swore was twenty years away.

As usual, you marvel at how little the people who govern us had to do with it. The engineers in Derby are world-class; the stewardship above them is third-rate. They pulled off a global first while paying the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world to keep the power on over the bench - a weight no German, American or Gulf rival has to carry. We produce frontier brilliance on the shop floor and fritter it away at the despatch box, and we have done for two generations.

That is the maddening shape of modern Britain: brilliance from below, sub- (or, indeed, ultra-) mediocrity from above. The people here who actually make things are still among the best in the world; the state that is meant to back them treats a firm like Rolls-Royce as a photocall today and a takeover target tomorrow, and prices its energy as though it would prefer the next plant were built in Texas.

Progress starts from the other end. Give these people what every rival government gives its champions and we beg ours to do without: the cheap, abundant power their competitors already enjoy, a supply chain built around them, and a state that guards a national asset rather than auctioning it. The hard part of a British revival - the talent, the nerve, the engineering - is already done, and was done again this week, by people who deserve a far better country than the one currently sitting above them.

We just taught an engine to breathe fire and exhale water. The least we owe the men and women who managed it is a government and a state as brilliant as they are.

[Katie Lam @Katie_Lam_MP]

Rachel Reeves has put taxes *up*, and ended up actually raising *less* money.

How has she managed that?!

It turns out that when you punish people for taking risks, hiring people, or working hard, they're less likely to do those things. Who could have guessed?

[Smirkley @Smirkley]

“The more customers who walk into a restaurant, the more tables you need, especially when you already have a table shortage.”

Leftists:

[Chris Bowden @ItsChrisBowden]

They knew it would do this. They do not care.

Anything that harks of English tradition they want to delete.

They don't want you to have things to aspire to. Indeed they don't want you to aspire, or to excel. They want cattle they can feed into their Fabian fantasy.

[LB✌🏽 @Londonblue_2]

For a club supposedly distorting football through spending, it’s remarkable that only four City players appear on this list.

The perception of City’s spending has become far more popular than the reality.

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

The man is genuinely mentally ill. He has just made it illegal for Britain to take part in the automation revolution. Genuinely.

Absolute raving lunatic. The most dangerous man in Britain.

Great repeal act can’t come fast enough. First 100 days of new govt requires mass Afuera’ing of virtually everything enshrined in law since 1997.

@MCRReiners can help with this.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

"It's very important not to politicise a personal tragedy."

[Octavian 🇪🇺 @posta_octavian]

Yes, without Britain, there would be no steam engine, steam trains, telephones, parliamentarism, modern constitutionalism, English as the lingua france, penicillin, end of the slave trade, ATMs, logarithms, Shakespeare, the theory of evolution and so much more.

In 1000 years, once we have gotten over neurotic jealously and third worlidsm, people will look at Britain with more admiration than we look at Ancient Greece today. It is quite evidently the greatest nation the world has ever seen. It's not even particularly close.

[Peter McCormack 🏴‍☠️🇬🇧🇮🇪 @PeterMcCormack]

Everyone who bent a knee for a crackhead in Minneapolis is telling you to be quiet about a teenager getting murdered in Southampton.

[AlfredRex @alfred_rex1]

@HantsPolice One of your officers has been receiving death threats?

I don't think he has, mate.

[The New York Times @nytimes]

From @TheAthleticFC: If referee calls had been correct, the Premier League title race would have entered the final match round with Manchester City two points clear of Arsenal, according to our analysis of key match decisions. https://t.co/FSWGZMMBRL

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

The Mandy Files — 2. May 2025
Another zinger from Cabinet Minister Pat McFadden to Mandelson:
‘Every meeting I have is “who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others”. They’re asking the wrong questions.’
Wow! Just wow!!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

💯

[Simo @ijsimo25]

We made it illegal to employ a 22 year old with no prior experience full time for less than £25k and we wonder why there are no jobs for them

[Alex Fasulo @alex_fasulo]

If this was about “saving the climate,” they’d put the panels over every big box store, failing mall, brownfield, parking lot, and parking garage in the world.

It’s never been about the environment.

Commercial solar is a Trojan horse for the largest wealth transfer of our lifetimes.

Generational farmland is transitioning to multinational foreign corporations.

That was always the plan.

[Paul Cox @PaulCoxComedy]

Had Southampton punched a female police officer in the face in front of airport CCTV cameras, instead of spying, they’d still be in the play-off final.

[Jonathan Smith @Fiat__Justitia]

In the United Kingdom, we’ve managed to achieve communism for 95% of the population.

If you have kids, unless you earn more than £80,000 gross, you have the same quality of life as those on benefits.

And the government managed it without a revolution.

Incredible really.

[redpillbot @redpillb0t]

The most dangerous thing happening in the world today is Western governments turning against their own citizens. Nothing else comes close.