Stephen Gill

38 years in Probation, appalled to see it trashed. English, British and European. Likes history, walking, music, cooking, rugby, cricket. Hates Brexit.

[David Henig 🇺🇦 @DavidHenigUK]

UK messaging to Brussels about Made in Europe has been consistently terrible, whinge-threatening gaining precisely no friends even though there are many in the EU who want this to include allies, an argument that others may yet help with. https://t.co/aFb3IYdkQj

[UtterlyInteresting @UtterlyInterest]

Remembering J.R.R.Tolkien who passed away this day in 1973. In 1938, Nazis demanded to know if he was Jewish. He responded with a high-class burn.

Leave it to Tolkien to need 270 words to say "Go F*ck Yourself".

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🚨 BREAKING: The EU has confirmed a total suspension of Brazilian 🇧🇷 beef and other animal-product imports from tomorrow bc Brazil cannot demonstrate compliance with EU rules on antimicrobial growth promoters and critically important antibiotics.

✅ Northern Ireland will be protected by EU rules.

❌ Brexit Britain will not.

While the EU protects its consumers, antibiotics and farmers, the UK Government promotes Brazilian beef and tells British farmers that procurement will save them.

Procurement does not stop lower-standard imports entering supermarkets, processors, restaurants and public catering or prevent Britain becoming the dumping ground for meat rejected by our nearest market.

This is precisely why food and farming must be covered by dynamic alignment with the EU. Buy British slogans are no substitute for enforceable import standards.
@amcarmichaelMP

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🚨 Today’s Times business page tells you almost everything about Britain’s broken economic model.

At the top: lobbyists demand tax-free shopping for wealthy overseas visitors, supposedly delivering an £11.5 billion boost.

In the middle: a global bond sell-off, driven by Trump’s war, rising oil prices, inflation, quantitative tightening and vast AI borrowing, is repackaged as pressure on Britain to cut public spending.

At the bottom: more than $100 billion of takeover offers as further British companies prepare to pass into foreign ownership.

This is the model:

👉 Tax concessions for international wealth.

👉 Austerity and unaffordable borrowing for the public realm.

👉 British companies, infrastructure and productive assets sold abroad.

Buying an existing British company is not the same as investing in new British productive capacity. Ownership, profits, intellectual property and strategic decisions can all move overseas, while Britain retains the workers, liabilities and physical risks.

Brexit accelerated this fire sale by weakening growth, depressing valuations, devaluing sterling and erecting barriers around British businesses. Yet each overseas takeover is still celebrated as inward investment.

Global Britain was never about Britain conquering global markets.

It meant Britain itself being sold cheap to the globe.

[Edmund Barnett-Ward @Edmund_B_W]

Three and a half years of promises about wellbeing, learning and change since Ruth Perry died.

A headteacher undergoing cancer treatment asks for an inspection to be deferred.

Ofsted says no.

What exactly has been learned?

[Cllr John Morris @Plaistovian]

Imagine that just a few days after the news came out that scientists were left stunned by how well children's lungs have recovered from ULEZ, that someone is stupid enough to suggest watering it down.

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Complaints to UK energy ombudsman jump 16% to 46,532.

Smart meters, wrong/missing bills.

Regulator wants to replace consumer protection on binding bill accuracy, timeliness and meter readings, with a looser, outcomes-based approach.

Who protects people?
https://t.co/PQcTyeYFIa

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

A private project underwritten by up to £71 million of public money, while the taxpayer receives only a minority stake and rights to part of the concentrate, not control of the company or the value chain.

Britain still lacks the refinery needed to turn that concentrate into usable tungsten. Public money absorbs the risk; private shareholders retain control and capture the gains.

That is not industrial sovereignty @andyburnham 👉 it is corporate welfare dressed up as national security.

[dave lawrence 🐟🐟🐠 @dave43law]

Says man who has
- South African parents
- A Cambodian adopted sister
- a Leader who married an Irish woman, then a German who now has a French girlfriend
- was in a Party led by a Hindu whose parents were immigrants from East Africa of Indian heritage
- then a Party led by a Nigerian
- is colleagues with a woman whose parents were immigrants from Mauritius and Kenya
- and a man whose parents were immigrants from Sri Lanka

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🚨 Calling Nissan’s position a “recovery from Brexit” is like declaring that a patient on life support has recovered.

Sunderland produced 507,000 cars in 2016 and just 273,000 in 2025. It is operating at barely half capacity, has received £162 million in government support and may need China’s Chery to fill its production lines.

That is survival—not recovery.

Now its survival depends on:

👉persuading the EU to relax rules of origin;
👉gaining access to “made in EU” industrial support;
👉and possibly manufacturing cars for China’s partly state-owned Chery.

This post-Brexit sovereignty translates as a great British plant trapped outside its principal market and becoming dependent on Chinese business to use the capacity Brexit helped hollow out.

As pointed out in the article,
“Brexit keeps bringing up these uncertainties. The world is changing, and the EU responds to that, and that affects the UK.”

Britain now receives EU industrial policy as an external shock rather than helping to shape it.

Burnham weakening the electric-vehicle mandate may postpone difficult decisions, but it cannot resolve the fundamental problem. Sunderland needs inclusion in Europe’s automotive and battery ecosystem. Without a much deeper Single Market settlement, levelling up remains a subsidy for surviving the damage rather than a strategy for growth.
🔗 https://t.co/ctHsaN7PQ7

[GET A GRIP @docrussjackson]

Slippery Bob Jenrick's tweet is part of a coordinated same-day launch of Reform UK's "Election Integrity Bill". By far the most interesting thing about his tweet is what it leaves out.

The Commonwealth voting claim is accurate but completely stripped of context. As usual.

A qualifying Commonwealth citizen needs leave to enter or remain, has to meet residency rules, register by a deadline and show ID. NOBODY votes "immediately." The line "that will end" is an abolition pitch, not a fix to a loophole, since Reform's actual policy removes the right entirely rather than tightening eligibility.

It's also worth noting that Irish citizens have a separate, older voting arrangement not mentioned here, and the tweet names only India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, not the roughly 50 other Commonwealth countries this would also affect. Can't think why!😉

Family voting is already a criminal offence, but only where intent to influence can be proved (Ballot Secrecy Act 2023).

Reform's proposal is a real tightening: a flat ban on two people entering a booth together, removing the need to prove intent. The tweet presents this as closing a gap that current law only partly covers, which is closer to the truth than "already banned," but "prohibiting more than one person" is a stricter standard rather than enforcement of an existing one, which risks doing real collateral damage unless carefully drafted:

- It may clash with existing disability provisions. Disabled voters can currently be accompanied by a declared companion. A blanket ban either has to explicitly preserve that exemption or it undermines established accessibility rights.
- Enforcement falls on under-trained staff at the worst moment. Presiding officers are often short-term or volunteer, working the busiest part of the day. The current intent-based law already struggled with staff unsure when to intervene; a stricter rule raises the stakes without fixing that capacity problem.
- It risks uneven, discriminatory application. A rule meant to stop coercion could be enforced more readily against visibly different families or communities where accompanying relatives to vote is culturally normal and non-coercive, while identical behaviour elsewhere goes unchallenged.
- It could suppress turnout among people the current system quietly accommodates, elderly voters, people with less visible cognitive difficulties, non-fluent English speakers, who rely on informal help that doesn't meet a formal "disability" threshold.
- It replaces a calibrated test with a blunt one. The existing law distinguishes assistance from coercion by requiring intent to influence. A flat ban removes that distinction entirely, criminalising conduct that was previously lawful and often harmless.

The foreign language leaflets line is misleading by omission rather than falsehood.

There is no current ban, and Reform's own bill exempts languages "native to the British Isles," reportedly including Gaelic. The real target is languages like Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali, spoken by British citizens of South Asian heritage. Calling those "foreign" is doing the political work here.

The bill's other headline measure, letting polling station staff judge whether a voter has sufficient English or Welsh, isn't in Jenrick's tweet at all, and is arguably more contestable than anything it does mention.

"Captured by foreign conflicts and sectarian interests" remains pure assertion, and it's the rhetorical hinge that makes routine legal detail feel like an emergency.

But then again, almost everything Reform figures say or do is designed to provoke maximum division, outrage, and attention

[Stephen Gill @StephenGill55]

It’s called Fascism.

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🚨 Desperate Reform intends to waste parliamentary time creating more social division with an amendment designed to generate headlines.

They want polling-station officials to judge whether voters understand English or Welsh well enough for their vote to count.

Think about what that means.

Parliament determines who is legally entitled to vote. Reform wants to hand individual polling officials discretion to impose what amounts to an additional language test at the ballot box, creating enormous scope for inconsistency, discrimination and arbitrary disenfranchisement.

And what happens to elderly voters? Deaf or non-speaking people? Someone with a speech impediment, learning disability or communication difficulty? Or a perfectly lawful voter whose first language isn’t English?

Preventing electoral fraud or coercion is one thing. Giving an official the power to decide whether an eligible voter’s English is good enough for their ballot to count is something else entirely.

This is dangerous territory for a democracy.

[The_Grumbler 🏏 @The_Grumbler]

Excellent piece by George Dobell in The Cricketer mag on demutualisation, with particular reference to Yorks.

Can't say members, all over the country, aren't be warned of the dangers

[Alan Harrison 💙 @harrison_alan]

"Chancellor resigned as defence secretary in June over what he saw as inadequate ambition for military spending by Sir Keir Starmer’s government" 🤔 Resign?
Healey to shelve his own defence spending target of 3% of GDP by 2030 https://t.co/4eUiAVI4wV

[Jim Brown @jimbrownblog]

"Can't help but think that when the Ministry of Justice feel confident enough to anounce "A World First Crackdown" (going global, not national)...." 1/2

[Scot Ramsay @ScotRamsay]

Rightly so. Senior heads need to roll at that Academy Trust.

[Paul Lewis @paullewismoney]

Brexit. The gift that keeps on taking.

[Stephen Gill @StephenGill55]

This👇
Totally agree with John Curtice.

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

‼️ John Curtice punctures the central myth behind Labour’s Brexit strategy:

“The Labour Party could be much more pro-European than it has been, not to its disadvantage.”

Labour’s support remains overwhelmingly pro-EU. Its attempt to attract committed Leave voters has achieved very little because Reform now represents the majority of that electorate.

So why is Labour still administering Brexit according to Farage’s red lines? @andyburnham

It cannot out-Brexit Reform. It can only alienate its own voters while preserving the economic damage Reform helped create.

And while EU talks reportedly stall over student fees, Britain faces immediate shortages of construction workers, farm labour and food production.

@HFalconerMP promises “ambition within the red lines”. But the red lines are precisely what prevent the level of ambition Britain now needs.

Food security and construction cannot wait until 2029.

[David Henig 🇺🇦 @DavidHenigUK]

Interesting framing. Not possible for current UK-EU negotiations to "fix things in an amicable way that will add percentage points to our growth". That could only be done by the UK changing its red lines, which the government has ruled out. https://t.co/4oh53i4wk6

[Jim Brown @jimbrownblog]

Probation Has Leverage #probation #prison
https://t.co/9u07U5Zm3n