This year I have been preoccupied with my 17yr old disabled son, who unexpectedly died of a chest infection on 7/9/23. This is devasting and it will take me some time to process.
Jack's last happy picture from the 26th Aug 2023. He loved flirting and was a massive personality.
Based on the Teesside Freeport Scandal, which saw Sunak's flagship Brexit project gobble up £560 million of taxpayers money, there are 11 more freeports to consider, including the 3 Freeports US Blackrock has 80% stakes in, Harwich, Felixstowe, and Thamesport.
How is the public to know if the £25 million seed capital is also not going to be increased to similar levels that occurred at Teeside?
This is an absolutely critical question about transparency and accountability.
Based on the Teesside precedent, there are several concerning factors that make it difficult for the public to know what's actually happening:
The Transparency Problem
The UK Government's June 2025 "UK Freeports Programme Report" appeared more than eighteen months after investigative journalism began exposing systematic problems at Teesside, meaning the omissions were deliberate choices, not innocent oversights.
The government report presented Teesside as a success story while omitting the £560 million in actual public spending, suggesting a systematic pattern of obscuring true costs.
Why the Public Can't Know
No standardised reporting: There's no apparent requirement for freeports to publicly disclose total public expenditure beyond initial seed capital
Multiple funding streams: Public money flows through various channels - seed capital, tax breaks, business rates relief, infrastructure loans, government grants - making it nearly impossible to track total subsidies
Private partnerships: With BlackRock holding 80% stakes in 3 UK Freeports, Harwich, Felixstowe, and Thamesport, profit and cost structures remain commercially confidential.
Post-facto discovery: The Teesside £560 million figure only emerged through investigative journalism, not government transparency
The Structural Risk Given that:
Teesside model: £25m claimed → £560m actual (22x multiplier)
12 freeports total in England
BlackRock's commercial interests in maximising returns on their 80% stakes
If even half the freeports follow Teesside's pattern, we're potentially looking at billions more in public subsidies beyond what's officially stated, with profits flowing to private equity while taxpayers bear the risk.
The public has no reliable mechanism to know until investigative journalists or auditors uncover the reality years later, by which point the money is spent and the 25-year contracts entrench opacity.
https://t.co/sO34TfzN1v
In an article in the FT yesterday, its long-term columnist, Martin Wolf, suggested we must sacrifice both people and planet to growth to supposedly save democracy. Almost everything he wrote was wrong. It's time to move on from the ideas of neoliberal dinosaurs dedicated to destruction to a politics of care. https://t.co/5unEy74qOH
Here’s why Digital ID must not be rolled out in the UK and US.
It’s the single most important piece of infrastructure that Silicon Valley and the corporations associated with them need, we must not comply.
Larry Fink CEO of Blackrock and now acting chairman of the WEF, he’s saying everything will be on the same universal ledger or database, and everything on that will have a unique identifier/number.
The tokenizing of everything includes green spaces or as Larry Fink calls them ‘natures assets’ as a new additions to their financial portfolio. These will be put on a blockchain and surveilled by drones.
The Tony Blair Institute is calling for a National Data Library, it means Blair’s previously ditched Digital ID has been resurrected in line with extreme corporate pressure from the entire AI industry, Palantir, Google, Meta, Facebook, etc, and Keir Starmer’s AI Growth Zones launched in January 2025 are a key deregulated facet.
Keir Starmer is point blank lying to the public when he says Digital ID will not track the lives of Brits, this statement is the polar opposite of what Silicon Valley wants, there is no way that Starmer is pushing Digital ID for benign reasons.
https://t.co/DVv96ifvbD
The US and UK both refused to sign up for the EU’s AI Safety Summit in Paris earlier this year, JD Vance calling the EU’s proposals “woke regulation”.
Watch @_whitneywebb talk about Starmer, TBI, and the corporate push for Digital ID
https://t.co/GI25862Nu7
Restore Britain has uncovered that the British Government has been spending our money quietly building Digital ID infrastructure, not just in Britain, but in foreign nations for a number of years.
Official documents start to tell us the story.
@Lewis_Brackpool has the details.
There is no mandate for Digital ID- don’t let them convince you otherwise.
The public does not want it.
It won’t be long until they announce that MP’s and officials don’t need Digital ID, due to “security risks”.
It’s purely about control, nothing else.
@ChrisWebbMP@Keir_Starmer Wow. You can’t even personally word your own message
A clone of others in your party
Being told what to say and when to say it
Utterly pathetic and embarrassing
#WoefulWebb
@ChrisWebbMP@Keir_Starmer Passionate about condoning GENOCIDE waged by
his🇮🇱Friends
Decent men DON’T condone SLAUGHTERING innocent🇵🇸civilians
&
Defending IDF💀DEATH💀SQUADS executing starving Gazans at food aid stations
Or
Criminalise decent human beings who DARE protest
against🇬🇧COMPLICITY in🇮🇱WAR CRIMES
@ChrisWebbMP@Keir_Starmer BS from lots of Lab MP's today smacks of organised desperation. I will never vote for Starmer. A lying authoritarian who supported genocide in Gaza, has shut free speech and protest down. And now he wants to rerun 1984 on steroids, sold with lies & if you got nothing to hide BS!
@KarlTurnerMP@Keir_Starmer We hoped that getting rid of the Tories would reduce the lies & deceit coming out of No 10. Instead, we have another liar who thinks they have a right to impose authoritarian control on the population. You can stick your Online Control Act & Digital ID! Starmer is a Tory!
@KarlTurnerMP@Keir_Starmer I see why Starmer and McSweeney expunged the left, the tradition of Labour MPs criticising their leader publicly no longer exists. What's happening now is a sycophantic brown-nosing that is overtly Trumpian.
It is quite sickening.
Investigative journalist Whitney Webb: The WEF is pushing "for every person's access to the internet to be tied to a digital ID".
"People aren't necessarily going to consent to that unless they are made to believe that anonymity and privacy online are dangerous."
"So how exactly can you convince people that that needs to happen? Well, you have some sort of event where anonymous hackers do something online that causes major disruption globally
"That is the end of human liberty in the West."
Ex-investment banker Catherine Austin Fitts: Digital ID—once connected to AI and CBDCs—enables authorities to monitor and control every aspect of human behaviour.
"If I can track you closely—where you're going and what you're doing—and I can get you on programmable money, which can be turned on and off, then I can start to use AI and surveillance systems and algorithms to basically manage and control your behaviour."
"So if I want you living in a 15-minute city, your money won't work beyond the 15 minutes unless you do what I say."
"So what we're talking about... is building a system that will allow you to be [surveilled] and tracked and turn your money on and off, or incentivise you or penalise you in a variety of ways with your money, that can be integrated with your behaviour."
"When you integrate [AI] with a digital ID and programmable money, then you're talking about complete control.
@UKLabour You know what you can do with your digital ID control freak ideas? You have no mandate to dump the authoritarian crap that your dark corporate donors dreamt up in order to make money and control the population. How many times has centralised data been misused or hacked? F OFF!!!