Angie Sammons

Editor, writer, fixer. I live by the river.

[jodie c @jodcoll]

glad to see the BBC taking climate change very seriously by using daft jaunty music to accompany a news story on a local habitat completely drying up

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

There's a lot of people who seem to be really stupid

So let me make it clear

There is loads and loads of money. We can have pensions and benefits and healthcare and housing and everything everyone needs

But the billionaires and their puppets want to steal every single penny

[Kate Ironside @IronsideKate]

Journo students: Daily Mail names Widdecombe suspect with pic.
Legally, since 2018 Cliff Richard case vs BBC, suspects have right to privacy until charged.
You can debate this but that’s how things stand.
+ some social media posts reacting to Mail’s story breach Contempt law /1

[Ted Smith 🇪🇺 🇬🇧 @TedUrchin]

Farage will pull out of the Clacton by election.
The ignominy of being beaten by a bin, or even managing to beat a bin, will be too much for him to bear.
Conveniently, he will blame Ann Widdecombe’s death and explain that his own safety is now severely compromised.
Am I wrong?

[Angie Sammons @Twangeee]

@lewis_goodall Theresa May remains a nasty piece of work.

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and Greens: I demand you stand down in Clacton. I will be a unity candidate and pledge to build at least one affordable house.

Nigel Farage says he wants The People versus the Establishment. So be it.

Leave him to me.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I still CANNOT believe humans were gifted a planet full of trees, fruit, water, animals and sunshine and then they invented debt, capitalism and war.

[Angie Sammons @Twangeee]

@StevoMusicMan @AlexWensleydale @MIKEYWMS @NewWaveAndPunk Top tip: They should go to their 50th anniversary gig at the Philharmonic Hall on July 26.

[Angie Sammons @Twangeee]

@tastygizmo @TonyLaneNV What did she do? Threaten to shame it on TIkTok?

[Ian Prowse @IanProwse]

#Starmer #Burnham #Corbyn

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

22 YEARS LATER AND NOBODY HAS ANSWERED FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO DR DAVID KELLY

His name was Dr David Kelly. Most people have forgotten him. They shouldn't.

He was a quiet, mild-mannered scientist who spent his career inspecting weapons facilities around the world.

He knew more about Iraq's arsenal than almost anyone alive.

In 2003, Tony Blair's @InstituteGC government published a dossier claiming Saddam Hussein could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes. That claim was used to justify a war.

Kelly knew the intelligence behind it was being exaggerated. He said so, privately, to a @BBCNews journalist.

That one conversation destroyed his life.

The government found out he was the source. Instead of protecting a man who had served his country for decades, they quietly let his name reach the press. He was publicly identified, dragged before two parliamentary committees, and grilled by his own employer.

His wife said he came home a broken man.

On the afternoon of 17 July 2003, he left his house for a walk in the Oxfordshire countryside. He was 59 years old. He never came back.

His body was found the next morning in woodland. A knife beside him. A blister pack of painkillers nearby.

Here is where it gets worse.

Tony Blair personally intervened to replace the normal coroner's inquest with a private inquiry run by Lord Hutton.

The original inquest was suspended before it even properly began. It was never resumed. To this day,

Dr David Kelly is the only person in England and Wales in living memory to have died in unexplained circumstances without receiving a full coroner's inquest.

Lord Hutton concluded suicide. Case closed.

Except eight senior doctors and a former coroner wrote to @thetimes saying the verdict was medically unsafe.

The wound found on Kelly's wrist, a severed ulnar artery, would not cause fatal blood loss in a healthy person.

There were no fingerprints on the knife. The painkillers found were not in a quantity that experts considered lethal.

The government's response, delivered by Attorney General Dominic Grieve in 2011, was essentially: the Hutton Inquiry was good enough, stop asking questions.

Think about that. A man quietly raised concerns about the biggest political deception in modern British history, a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He was publicly exposed, professionally destroyed, and found dead days later and the government personally made sure there would never be a proper independent investigation into how he died.

Tony Blair went on to become a Middle East Peace Envoy. He has a knighthood.

Dr David Kelly got a private inquiry, a rushed verdict, and a sealed post-mortem report that was not released to the public for years.

Nobody was ever held accountable. Not for any of it.

This story should be on the front page every single year. Share it if you think it matters.

Sources: @BBCNews @guardian @thetimes @PrivateEyeNews

[JmRoyle #LFC #YNWA #BLM #RejoinEU @MyArrse]

10 years ago Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death in Birstall by a far right thug.
Do you remember the Farage \ Tommy Robinson riots that followed it,
No me neither.

R.I.P. Jo

[Angie Sammons @Twangeee]

@Ben_woodward9 @BladeoftheS

[Charlie @charliesbites]

@David__Osland @i_pinkwolfie Made a slight correction to your tweet. Hope you don’t mind 🙏🏼

[Capman #FBPE @Euro_toff]

@EdwardJDavey The liar must never become PM
For weeks he claimed the £5 million was for security, now he is under investigation he has changed his lie because if he had spent the money on security, he would have receipts to show the investigation

[Narinder Kaur @narindertweets]

Extraordinary allegations from @benhabib6 !!
Ben Habib alleges that Nigel Farage & Boris Johnson were paid £1m each by Christopher Harborne to essentially rig the election in favour of Johnson. He also claims the undeclared £5m "gift" Farage received in 2024 from Harborne was payment for Farage to take over as party leader of Reform UK and stand in Clacton.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

This country might be about to have its 6th Prime Minister in 7 years.

Why? Because they’ve all failed to take on a rigged economic system that enriches the few at the expense of us all.

People want a society where children don’t go hungry. That is really not too much to ask.

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding.

If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life.

That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.

Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival.
But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible?

Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there?

The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them.

Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact.

Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source.

This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes.

This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself.

I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state.

The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends.

The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act.

Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity.

Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them.

The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety.

That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.

[Boo @333too3]

I always preferred the English spelling of "diarrhea" which is
"diarrhoea" because it really looks like you've lost control of your vowels.

[Angie Sammons @Twangeee]

@JGMooreWriter They need to edit themselves. Also I am not being gaslit by people into believing the last one was "the best episode so far"