Tanning In The English Rain

George Best, Houdini. Small IS Beautiful (E.F. Schumacher)

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

Never forget what Palestinians did to the Bibas family.

An innocent family, with two young boys, brutally murdered.

I will personally remind the world every single day.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Multiple reports in right and left-wing media of Labour rifts over Ed Miliband going/not going to the Treasury. And Andy B isn’t even PM yet! So much for ending Labour’s “insidious briefing culture’. Team Burnham has been at the forefront of it.

[Andrew Snowden MP 🇬🇧 @A_J_Snowden]

This is a charade. A political pantomime from Burnham.

We @Conservatives had an opposition debate tomorrow to vote that parliament sit JUST ONE extra day to ask the new PM questions about his plans

Labour just cancelled the debate😡

Burnham is hiding from the press and now MPs

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Much will be said about Angela Rayner in the coming days, and rightly so. A former care worker with no health administration experience, tasked with overseeing an £18.7bn overhaul of social care, is a legitimate story. It deserves scrutiny, and it will get it.

But that scrutiny, however justified, is aimed at the wrong target if the goal is understanding who actually governs the country. Governments set policy. Whether that policy survives contact with the departments meant to deliver it is a separate question, and increasingly the answer depends on the permanent state, the officials who remain in post while ministers rotate through. Ministers like Rayner are not the ones actually running the country. They are the visible layer, replaced every reshuffle, while the people who administer, interpret and often quietly resist their policy stay exactly where they were.

That permanent layer is not a neutral machine simply executing whatever instruction it receives. Over three decades, the same progressive assumptions that reshaped universities, HR departments and NGOs, DEI training, unconscious bias frameworks, equity treated as more important than equality, have been absorbed into a civil service that recruits, trains and promotes from the same graduate pipeline as every other captured institution. Institutional capture and the permanent state are not two separate stories. They are one story told from two angles. Capture explains what the permanent state believes. The permanent state explains why what it believes matters more than who nominally sits above it.

Rayner's own department illustrates the second half of that story precisely. The health brief she may inherit is actually run day to day by Samantha Jones, DHSC's permanent secretary, the accounting officer legally responsible for how the budget is spent and the policy delivered. Jones was not elected. She was not selected by any minister accountable to a constituency. She moved directly from interim permanent secretary and chief operating officer at 10 Downing Street into running the department, appointed by the Cabinet Secretary "with the approval of the Prime Minister," entirely within Whitehall's own machinery. Nobody scrutinises that appointment, because no manifesto and no vote was ever attached to it.

The pattern holds wherever the permanent state meets an elected minister determined to act. At the Home Office in 2022, Sir Matthew Rycroft, the department's permanent secretary, objected in writing to the Rwanda deportation scheme on value for money grounds. Parliament had legislated it and an elected Home Secretary had announced it. Suella Braverman could only proceed by publicly overruling her own most senior official through a formal "ministerial direction," forced into open confrontation just to implement what her government had already decided. She won that particular fight. That she had to have it in public is the point.

Above Whitehall, the permanent state doesn't need to negotiate at all. On 14 June 2022, a deportation flight sat on the tarmac at Boscombe Down, passengers aboard, after Parliament had legislated and British courts, at every level, had already rejected every challenge against it. Hours before departure, a single duty judge at the European Court of Human Rights issued an interim order grounding the flight, no hearing, no published reasoning, no appeal available. One unelected official stopped what an elected Parliament, elected government and domestic courts had already cleared.

So yes, much will be said about whether Angela Rayner is qualified to run the NHS. She probably isn't, and neither were several of her predecessors. But the more revealing question is the one nobody asks about Samantha Jones, or Sir Matthew Rycroft, or the duty judge in Strasbourg: not whether they're qualified, but who put them there, and what happens to a policy that survives every election only to meet people nobody elected at all.

Angela Rayner and Samantha Jones

[Raja Miah @recusant_raja]

THE PRIME MINISTER's PAKISTANI RAPE GANGS PROBLEM

Andy Burnham is days from Downing Street. In that time he has not issued a single statement on Operation Hexagon, the operation that hunted the whistleblowers who tried to expose grooming gangs in Oldham and not the men who were gang raping little White girls.

This is not an oversight.

It is the same pattern Burnham has run since the beginning when he commissioned the Assurance Review that buried Oldham's cover up rather than expose it. He knows what silence buys him. It bought him three years of narrative control last time. It secures him a premiership now.

You will have seen it for yourself. Nobody in the press pack chasing his every word has asked him a single question about Operation Hexagon. Not the BBC. Not GB News. Not The Guardian or the Telegraph.

Before it became something they could no longer avoid, it was the same with the Pakistani Rape Gangs. In the end, they reported on it because they had to. Likewise, the same with the post office scandal. They reported on it because ordinary people would not go away. No matter what they did to them.

Want to force the Prime Minister Andy Burnham to testify before the National rape gang inquiry? Help keep the pressure up and sign up to Red Wall and the Rabble.

https://t.co/mZBZnScays

Every subscriber is a number they cannot erase. Every reader widens a circle they cannot control. A handful of supporters can be dismissed as noise. Thousands cannot. This is how the campaign survives. This is how we see it through to the end. This is how voices like ours stop being managed and start being feared.

Raja Miah MBE

[Dave @DaveKent101]

Andy Burn'em blaming Mrs Thatcher for de-nationalising companies in energy, water, oil etc which resulted in foreign ownership is completely disingenuous, and frankly dishonest or just plain ignorant.

What Burn'em WON'T tell you is that Mrs Thatcher ensured that her government retained what were known as 'Golden Shares' in these companies.
These allowed the government to stop foreign takeovers and to have a big say in how they operated.

Guess what though?🤔

The EU objected to these Golden Shares through their 'Free Movement of Capital' clause - Article 63 TFEU.
So John Major started to sell them off accordingly BUT the vast majority were sold off by TONY BLAIR and LABOUR.

So the finger for lack of government control in this area needs to be pointed at Tony Blair and Labour, NOT Margaret Thatcher.
So I am calling out Andy Burn'em as a liar.

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

The goal of my entire career as an historian was to ensure that citizens learned the lessons of history—including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it is adopted by a modern state. Yet today, as AI permeates social networks, anti-history is spreading like a cancer. The Holocaust is either denied or derided. I have to admit: I failed utterly.

[Adrian Yalland @AdrianYalland]

I am not sure what is worse - Burnham who wants to take us back to the 70’s, Farage who wants to take us back to the 50’s, or Polanski who wants to take us back to the Stone Age.

Only @KemiBadenoch has a plan that is credible, workable, and deliverable.

[Jo Marshall @JoFMarshall]

It was truly awful to see that not a single bishop turned up for the remembrance of Ann Widdecombe in the House of Lords this week.
A woman of deep, unwavering Roman Catholic faith, Ann centred her entire life and political career on her Christian beliefs, from her principled stands on life issues to her tireless advocacy for persecuted Christians. Her devotion to both Church and country was total and courageous.
Even if they disagreed with some of her views, the least the Lords Spiritual could have done was show basic respect for her lifelong dedication. Instead, their absence speaks volumes: too lost in woke values, lacking the courage to honour a woman of real conviction. A sad reflection on where parts of the establishment Church have drifted.
Rest in peace, Ann, you were a true servant of faith and principle. 🙏

[Donna-Louise @NoLongerTheFuzz]

1/
Andy Burnham just got crowned Labour leader today with zero contest – a guy who wasn’t even an MP two weeks ago, fresh from playing mayor in Manchester. Now he’s days from No 10 without a general election. The ultimate parachute job. This smug, jeans-and-t-shirt “man of the people” who spent years filming himself wandering around looking profound on X is about to run the country. Britain is absolutely fucked. 🧵

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

The UK government have just agreed to give Pakistan another £153,000,000. The government don’t actually have any money, so they’re giving away your money. It won’t go to the poor of Pakistan. It’ll go to the corrupt leaders there. As it always does. And the money comes from the hardworking, least wealthy people here. To put that enormous figure of £153,000,000 into context; the average basic rate taxpayer in the UK pays £2,700 per annum in tax. So 56,666 people in this country will be going to work all year just to give their money to Pakistan. Not one penny of their tax will go to schools, hospitals, roads or anything else in the UK. It will go straight to Pakistan. Imagine if those nearly 57,000 people got to keep their tax and spend it in this country instead. Imagine all that money being spent in pubs. Imagine the extra staff that would then be needed. The extra employment right here that it would create. But instead, it’s all going to Pakistan. Every single penny.

[Tanning In The English Rain @TanningRain]

@AllisonPearson Not weird .... Undemocratic and corrupt feel

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Souness is without doubt one of the best pundits in the business. It beggars belief that he was not used by the BBC or ITV during this tournament.

[Tanning In The English Rain @TanningRain]

@estebangt9093 @tunkuv Here's a concise, factual reply suitable for X:

Not quite. Argentina established a settlement in 1829, but Britain had claimed the Falklands in 1765 and never abandoned that claim. Luis Vernet wasn't removed by Britain in 1833—he'd already left after the 1831 USS Lexington raid.

[Tunku Varadarajan @tunkuv]

Argentines have many qualities--rhythm, a gift for cooking certain cuts of meat and baking pizza, an ability to play football (sometimes even without fouling their opponents)--but irony isn't one of them. So lost on them is the fact that they--a people descended from colonizers who liquidated the people who lived on the land they conquered, as well as from waves of European poor in search of a better life (Italians, Spaniards, Poles, Ukrainians, Serbs, Welshmen, and so forth)--are laying claim to the Falklands, islands they have never once possessed, inhabited by people who have no earthly wish to be Argentine, in the name of decolonisation. I can't think of a more twisted, absurd claim. At least Gibraltar--which is, and should always remain, British, for as long as its residents do not wish to be citizens of Spain--was once Spanish, until it was acquired lawfully by Britain. The only sovereignty the Falklands has ever known is British.

[Brigitte Gabriel @ACTBrigitte]

🚨Why is the father of a convicted ISIS terrorist from Australia waltzing into America and heading straight to the radical EPIC mosque pushing "EPIC City" in Texas?

This is exactly how parallel societies get built on our soil. Who is vetting these visas?

Our borders and immigration system are a national security disaster. America First means no more importing terror ties to plant Sharia strongholds.

Enough! @GregAbbott_TX @SecRubio @tedcruz @KenPaxtonTX

[Liza Rosen @LizaRosen0000]

Warning to Europe: CBN News Uncovers France’s Silent Islamization Crisis

Islam as a political ideology is incompatible with the West. It views Muslims as superior and non-Muslims as inferior. It strips women of rights and allows the forced marriage and sexual slavery of girls under 10, reducing them to male property with zero autonomy.

France is already being silently Islamized. The rest of Europe is on the same path.

Every Western nation has the right to protect its culture, identity, and values. The Western world must close its borders and halt all Islamic immigration. Do you agree? Yes or no?

[Peter Cardwell @petercardwell]

Beyond parody.

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 WATCH: Andy Burnham says he wasn’t involved in ousting Keir Starmer

[Ameer Kotecha @Ameer_Kotecha]

Farage: once again we are going to get a Chancellor who has never worked in private business

Our national debt is rising faster than any country in the world other than Botswana