Steve Scrase

Politics, Military, Defence & Geopolitics. Putting Britain First. Stand with Reform UK.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

🧵 The Era of Access Journalism and Lazy Standards

The current standard of political reporting is nothing short of an embarrassment. Instead of deploying investigative units to tear into the Treasury's math, analyze the hidden tax burdens, or cross-reference the OBR forecasts against reality, modern media companies act as a free PR wing for the government. They dedicate hours of airtime to asking politicians how they "feel" about the budget, allowing them to read unchallenged from pre-approved briefing notes. This isn't journalism; it is state-sanctioned pacification. The establishment media is terrified of losing their insider access, so they offer the government a completely free pass. It is a lazy, laughable dereliction of duty that treats the electorate like infants who only need to be fed the headline, rather than citizens who deserve the truth.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

Notice there’s no link, no Substack source, and no date on this alleged quote. An unverified block of text posted by Lowe’s own party claiming Dominic Cummings surveyed twenty international bankers and David Cameron to vouch for him reads like desperate PR fan-fiction. Show the source or bin it.

[Restore Britain @RestoreBritain]

Dominic Cummings on Rupert Lowe.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

You're right. The Tories spent fourteen years gutting army headcounts, retiring frigates with no replacements ready, and treating Devonport like an afterthought. Now Labour steps in, hides behind endless strategic reviews, and kicks long-lead procurement into the long grass to balance the books. Thirty years of uniparty managed decline, leaving frontline crews to pay the price.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

We are watching the absolute degradation of British maritime power in real-time. Just days after outsourcing the defence of our own sovereign waters to the Danish Navy, one of our Vanguard-class submarines is dragging itself back to Faslane and perfectly captures a military running on fumes. The continuous at-sea deterrent is hanging by a thread. The establishment is parading this as routine operations, but the brutal reality is that the Ministry of Defence is flogging a fleet of museum-grade steel tubes lightyears past their expiration date because Westminster spent two decades asleep at the wheel.

Let’s look at the basic engineering reality. The Vanguard-class boats entered service in the 1990s with a strict, intended structural service life of exactly 25 years. We are now in late 2026. These hulls have spent three decades enduring the crush depth of the Atlantic, and the cost of keeping their aging Rolls-Royce PWR2 nuclear reactors operational and refueled is bleeding the naval budget dry. The transition to the Dreadnought-class replacement has become a £31 billion financial black hole. With over £3.3 billion of the contingency fund already accessed and an extra £5.9 billion injected just to keep construction at Barrow moving, we are burning astronomical sums of cash simply to cover for years of state procurement failure.

But the most catastrophic failure is the human toll. A Vanguard submarine is meant to operate a seamless four-boat rotation, sharing the burden across the fleet so no single crew is broken by the sea. Instead, because of maintenance backlogs and a crippled rotation schedule, crews of roughly 130 personnel are being sealed underwater for record-breaking, psychologically destructive deployments. You cannot bribe submariners out of severe mental health crises with a £43,000 base salary and a £3,200 monthly sea pay allowance. Working punishing six-hours-on, six-hours-off watches for half a year in an aging tin can destroys families and drives retention off a cliff. We don't have a resilient nuclear deterrent; we have a delayed procurement pipeline balanced entirely on the broken backs of exhausted sailors.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

🚨 British taxpayers poured £45.5 billion of public money into rescuing NatWest from collapse when its greedy board ran it into the wall. Seventeen years later, the public reward is boarded-up high street branches, customers trapped talking to useless automated chatbots, and 1,400 British staff thrown on the scrapheap to juice a £2.2 billion quarterly profit. We subsidised their reckless gambling, but when the machines arrive to replace the workforce, the boardroom keeps every penny of the dividend.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

Nothing strikes terror into the heart of the Kremlin quite like Ed Miliband delivering a stern, schoolmasterly lecture on multilateralism. The man who was defeated by a bacon sandwich is now giving homework to Sergei Lavrov, all while systematically dismantling our own North Sea oil and gas so we can buy energy back from hostile regimes at an eye-watering markup. Geopolitical genius at work.

[Ed Miliband @Ed_Miliband]

Today at the G20 Foreign Ministers meeting, I set out the UK’s commitment to multilateralism.

We will always stand up for Britain’s values and interests in the world.

In the plenary, I told the Russian Foreign Minister that he should have the courage to tell Putin that Russia will not win this war.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

It’s simple arithmetic, not salad.

Vanguard’s LOP(R) dragged on for nearly 8 years and cost half a billion pounds. When one out of your four boats is locked in a dockyard for the better part of a decade, 3BA is a spreadsheet fantasy and Vanguard/Vengeance end up pulling 200-day marathons to keep the deterrent afloat.

What part of that do you consider a success?

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

Those patches peeling off the hull are anechoic tiles. They’re specialised rubber/polyurethane coatings designed to absorb sonar pings and dampen engine noise so Russian hunter-killer subs can't track our deterrent.

Seawater naturally batters a hull, but when patrols stretch to 200 days because relief boats are backed up in Devonport refits, the tiles literally get ripped off. It’s an acoustic stealth issue, not an aesthetic one.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

Citing planned availability targets does not change the documented reality of extended maintenance cycles, dockyard delays, and strained operational tempos. The reasons for the backlog are well understood across the defense sector. Describing genuine concerns over fleet readiness as alarmist is precisely the institutional complacency that allowed the capability gap to widen in the first place.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

@Britinfloridaus @karentaylor2100 @ZiaYusufUK Bassetlaw was a Tory seat from 2019 to 2024, but don’t let basic facts interrupt your cope from the Sunshine State. The Tories didn’t even make the podium here. Reform is taking seats in working-class heartlands while the Conservative brand is in full cardiac arrest.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

If @ZiaYusufUK’s Question Time demolition of Campbell had aired just three hours before polls closed, Reform would’ve taken Dudley and the rest of them too. Masterclass performance on the panel, and the council results prove the momentum on the ground is very real.

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

🚨 Two more WINS for Reform!

One in Halton, one in Bassetlaw.

In these seats the Tories were *not even in the top 2 right wing parties*.

In large parts of the country, they have been electorally annihilated and will never come back.

Their betrayal will not be forgotten

Meanwhile, Reform is winning again!

We are the most resilient party because we are powered by the PEOPLE. 

Who will no longer accept being ignored and smeared.

Huge thanks to all our members, volunteers and candidates who work harder than anyone.

Love you all! ♥️🇬🇧

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

@AspalsLegal The uniparty loves the prestige of cutting the ribbon on a carrier, but refused to fund the jets, munitions, and sailors needed to actually fight with it. Total managed decline. 👍

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

There is nothing more terrifying to a British taxpayer, and nothing more amusing to the Kremlin, than a £3.2 billion aircraft carrier floating through a strategic maritime chokepoint without any actual aircraft.

We are watching Whitehall run a multi-billion-pound PR campaign on the back of a hollowed-out military. HMS Queen Elizabeth is an engineering marvel with a 4.5-acre flight deck designed to project sovereign power with up to 36 fifth-generation F-35B strike fighters. Yet it routinely sails past Gibraltar looking like the world’s most expensive cross-channel ferry.

The Ministry of Defence will endlessly spin this as "phased capabilities" or "helicopter-led tasking," but our adversaries know exactly what an empty deck means: the government is broke. The uniparty does not have the money, they do not have the jets, and they do not have the pilots.

Look at the brutal mathematics. Of the original 48 F-35Bs ordered in Tranche 1, Britain currently possesses around 34 active airframes. Once you subtract the jets permanently stationed in America for testing, those stripped down for heavy maintenance, and those tied up in land-based training, scraping together even 8 fast jets for a carrier strike group requires cannibalising the entire force. At roughly £90 million per airframe and astronomical hourly flight costs, both the Conservative and Labour governments quietly realised they cannot actually afford to arm the carriers they spent twenty years building.

Moscow and Beijing do not read MoD press releases about sightseeing with the Barbary Apes. They look at satellite imagery. They see a bankrupt political establishment attempting to mask a £17 billion procurement black hole by parading an unarmed 65,000-tonne target through the Mediterranean. It is managed decline on a maritime scale, and every hostile state on earth is watching.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

Writing an educational biography of Adolf Hitler and somehow forgetting to mention the Holocaust takes a very special type of modern media brain. It is not an administrative oversight. It is the natural endpoint of an entire industry that decided its primary purpose is no longer to inform the public, but to protect the public from experiencing negative emotions.

Look at the wider cultural landscape. We have sensitivity readers employed on comfortable salaries to scrub adjectives from classic literature in case a reader gets offended by a fictional character. We have streaming platforms slapping trauma warnings on episodes of classic British comedies as if viewers need a therapist on standby to survive a sitcom from the seventies. Museum curators are busy hiding historical artifacts or rewriting exhibit plaques to apologize for British history instead of simply displaying the facts.

There used to be a strict firewall between the personal neuroses of a media professional and their actual daily job. You left your activism at the door and delivered the news, the documentary, or the script. Today, the activism is the entire point of the job. The television production suites and editorial boards are packed with ideological graduates who view history not as a set of cold facts to be documented, but as a problematic narrative that needs to be heavily sanitized before it reaches the fragile eyes of the masses.

Omitting the darkest chapter of twentieth century history from a learning resource is exactly what happens when you hand national institutions over to people who prioritize ideological comfort over objective truth. They believe they are saving the world, but they are just erasing history because they lack the emotional maturity to look at it.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

Rupert Lowe: worth tens of millions, donates £4k of pocket change to greyhounds, and acts like he’s taken a vow of poverty. Imagine what that cash could do if it were invested into full-time staff to build an actual professional ground operation against Labour.

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

Latest MP salary donation sent - this time to help rehome retired racing greyhounds from Great Yarmouth. Nobody can accuse me of being in politics for the money.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

Campbell assumes everyone is as obsessed with vanity as he is. Some people just don't fancy getting ambushed by the very mob his politics spent twenty years enabling. Nice one Zia.

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

Alastair Campbell attacked me for having a “status symbol bodyguard” at Question Time.

I would give anything to be able to go back in time and give my friend and colleague Ann Widdecombe a bodyguard.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

Called it a week ago, and right on cue:
Senior Tory officials abuse government secrets to insider-trade £23,000 on election dates: buried at the bottom of the feed on a Friday night with a suspended sentence.

A young Reform councillor in Leicestershire gets into an administrative row with council bureaucrats: pushed straight to the top of the BBC homepage with a mugshot.

They aren't reporting the news; they’re running political suppression against an insurgent party.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

Slipped quietly onto the bottom of the Sky News feed on a Friday evening: former Tory Campaign Director Anthony Lee, his wife Laura, and an ex-party staffer handed suspended sentences after using insider knowledge on the election date to attempt to pocket £23,000+ through rigged bets.

Notice how the establishment apparatus handles real corruption. High-ranking Conservative officials abusing government secrets for personal financial gain get a soft-touch suspended sentence and a discreet, late-night media burial.

Meanwhile, look at the contrast with Reform UK. Mainstream media outlets deploy undercover operatives, obsessively hound minor local activists, and demand immediate police scrutiny or political execution over every minor comment made by Reform staff and members.

If a Reform candidate had abused insider state intelligence to clear £23k in a gambling scheme, it would be leading the 10 o'clock news for a month and driving national headlines. When the Tory establishment literally cheats the system, it gets brushed under the rug on a Friday night.

Two-tier justice. Two-tier media. Two-tier Britain.

@reformparty_uk @Conservatives @SkyNews

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

Alastair Campbell spent 2003 sexing up dossiers to turn Mesopotamia into rubble, and now he’s sipping Pinot Grigio with the Lib Dems while lecturing the proles on heat pumps and how much he hates democracy. Laila didn’t miss.

[Laila Cunningham @policylaila]

We don’t raise a glass with war criminals.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

Shabana Mahmood won’t meet Siobhan Whyte because she can’t look a grieving mother in the eye and defend why the man who murdered her daughter was ever allowed into this country in the first place.

Ministers can hide behind scripted soundbites and PR videos all day, but they run terrified the second they have to face the wreckage their open border actually leaves behind.

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

Why won’t you meet Siobhan Whyte, @ShabanaMahmood?

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

The Left understands coalition discipline and arithmetic; the fringe Right understands vanity projects and ego.
Splintering off into Restore isn't ideological purity—it’s handing Burnham another five years by default. If people actually want institutional change, consolidation behind Reform is the only viable vehicle on the ballot.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

@Tendar The US might view this as a one-off peace offering, but Ukraine’s real headache remains delivery timelines and burn rate. Authorisation is one thing; getting 500 interceptors on the launchers and keeping them supplied is another entirely.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

@NavyLookout @MichaelGDeveney I don't care how old they are, they're the best looking SSBNs on the planet.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

@ColinMucklow Thanks for the support Colin 👍.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

There is a distinct, unmistakable stench of the 1970s creeping back into British politics, carrying with it the ghosts of three-day weeks, industrial paralysis, and the complete collapse of the administrative state. When a nation’s governing apparatus publicly surrenders its monopoly on basic competence, the result isn't just policy failure; it is a sprawling, embarrassing pantomime across every department of state. We are no longer governed by serious operators; we are managed by a uniparty cartel that cannot even coordinate its own PR output.

​Take Andy Burnham’s Labour government, which currently views the national border as an administrative inconvenience to be outsourced to rural communities. While they aggressively manage the country's decline, the Ministry of Defence decided to launch a slick, self-congratulatory video on X about their new "Defence Offset Policy." Their grand attempt to project state authority and procurement competence was immediately derailed by one minor detail: the official Ministry of Defence account proudly tagged Wes Streeting—the Health Secretary—as the Secretary of State for Defence.

​You truly cannot write satire this good. A department commanding a £50 billion budget, supposedly entrusted with the geopolitical security of the realm, cannot successfully execute a social media post identifying its own boss. The state is not just failing; it has lost the basic capacity to function at an administrative level.

​But if Labour’s governance is a tragedy of basic incompetence, the Conservative opposition is a masterclass in pathological amnesia. Directly beneath the MoD’s digital car crash sits Chris Philp, suddenly discovering his outrage that the government is requisitioning Linton-on-Ouse to accommodate 1,500 unvetted male illegal immigrants next to family homes. Watching a Tory MP cry about the very policy of requisitioning military bases that his own government pioneered and maintained for over a decade is satire so thick you could choke on it. Philp sat in a government that meticulously engineered this exact border collapse, maintained a statistically negligible deportation rate, and handed Labour the blueprint for this exact dumping strategy. Now, completely out of power, he expects voters to forget his entire voting record so he can play the furious local resistance leader.

​The British public is entirely trapped between a Labour government whose departments don't know who their own ministers are, a Conservative opposition that pathologically lies about its own fourteen-year record, and splinter groups roleplaying Lord Kitchener from their laptops. You do not fix multi-decade institutional rot with hollow MoD press releases, hypocritical Tory quote-tweets, or eccentric fringe theatre. Fixing this requires cold arithmetic, ruthless administrative competence, and a total liquidation of the uniparty consensus. The establishment is offering nothing but managed surrender and digital incompetence. There is only one serious political movement left equipped to step into the room, tear up the excuses, and finally enforce order.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

@JohnMur24035538 @5PillocksUK No need to lie.

[Steve Scrase @StevenScrase]

The moment the video is released and completely debunks the narrative of a violent assault, the story instantly changes to "trust me, the real assault happened five seconds before the camera started rolling".

James McMurdock was standing right behind them and confirmed Caroline was the instigator picking a fight with Nigel. Elevating standard Commons congestion into "using physical force against a female MP" is desperate, manufactured victimhood from a party terrified of the truth on tape.

[Max Wilkinson MP @mpmwilko]

I was a witness to the incident between Farage and
@CarolineVoaden
(his pathetic excuse for not attending the budget yesterday).

For the avoidance of doubt and for the information of everyone making all sorts of silly statements: the incident happened BEFORE this footage.