Stuart Wicks

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Britain is not just badly governed. It is captured.

We pay taxes into a government machine that no longer treats us as its purpose. It treats us as its raw material and objects to punish and control. Public money is gathered from wages, from rents that swallow half a paycheck, from energy bills that punish people for staying warm, from motorists who need to use their vehicle to get to work or deliver goods - and then it is piped towards the corporations who hoover up all the national assets.

A politician is supposed to be a public servant. Too many now behave like account managers for someone else’s balance sheet. Lobbyists write the briefings. Donors buy the access. Contracts follow the friendships. Then the same faces appear on the evening news and talk about “hard choices,” despite the fact that we pay them to feather their own nests.

What we are watching is not serious government. It is a parlour game played by shysters who have never had to live inside the consequences. They treat the country like a game show: TikTok videos, empty announcements, slogans, crisis after crisis caused by them, another inquiry, another reset. Meanwhile a cost of living crisis is not an abstract phrase. It is a cash strapped parent standing in a supermarket doing the arithmetic of hard choices. It is the heating left off during winter. It is a town centre with more shutters than shopfronts. That is the real Britain. Westminster often looks like it has never visited it.

What hollowed Britain out was not a single event. It was deindustrialisation in the 1980s and the decades of neglect that followed. Works sold, pits closed, yards turned into tumbleweed, factories destroyed. Destruction, then a government press release about competitiveness.

Go to South Wales, Central Belt of Scotland, North East and the North West of England. The pattern is the same. It’s now happening in rural areas. They were the productivity engine rooms of the country. Wages that held a high street up, pubs that held communities together by social gatherings, a reason for young people to stay, a community dignity that did not have to be explained. When the industry went, the purpose went with it. After that came the long afterlife - low-paid work if you can get it, benefits if you cannot, forgotten areas that were only remembered by governments to house thousands of illegal migrants in them and a political class that discovered these communities mainly at election time, if at all, to offer yet more false promises. I have walked those streets. You can feel the missing heart.

We became a country that imports what it used to make and exports what it used to keep. An importing economy is not a lifestyle choice. It shows up in the balance of payments, in fragile supply chains, and in the deficit no spreadsheet captures - the collapse of community spirit.

We reap what we sow. The seeds were planted forty years ago. Nobody bothered to replant.

Now the rotten harvest is this: crumbling services, taxes extracted from the squeezed middle and the working poor, emergency contracts that smell of mates’ rates, torrents of public money towards favoured corporate missions, foreign commitments announced with moral sanctimony while the waiting list at home grows another month and a politics of cultivated fear used to keep a restless public in its place. The worst return on tax investment in modern British life. A gigantic transfer dressed up as necessity. Follow the money. Greed at the top. Extraction underneath.

Britain lacks real public servants in government. It has performers. Until government is forced back into the service of the public that pays for it - and until the old industrial nation is treated as a country to be rebuilt, not a museum of managed decline - the rot will keep travelling inward. The forgotten old industrial towns and communities already know this. They have long been living in the future that the rest of the country is only now beginning to fear.

[TheSecretScout @TheSecretScout_]

Every kid who loves football, should be shown this.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

A great idea on Crail beach.

The Crail Beach Toy Library is a wonderful community-run sharing box at the harbor beach in Crail, Fife, where families can freely borrow and return buckets, spades, and seaside toys.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

They are playing us.
The news cycle is no longer a window onto the world. It is a hall of mirrors. Fact and fiction have been ground together until the difference is almost impossible to feel.

Official truth is often a product. Actual truth is treated as a contaminant. In the age of rolling headlines and social media, the bamboozle is not an accident. It is the design.

The modern world has become a simulacrum: a copy so complete that reality itself starts to look like the counterfeit. People then argue not about what happened, but about the story they were trained to defend through confirmation bias and tribalism.

A ruling class has greed with an appetite that never fills: power, control, money. They will take all three and call the theft a public service and the need for higher taxation. Its favourite costume is virtue. Its favourite performance is “it’s for your safety” protection.

Millions of people are being continually gaslighted into thinking that the people concentrating wealth and authority are the only adults in the room, the only ones who care, the only ones who can keep them safe.

They are not your friends.
What we watched through the Covid lockdowns, wars, Net Zero, digital ID and a dozen other nefarious policies was not simple incompetence. It was a theatre of moral prestige. Politicians, legacy media, corporations, billionaire owners and unelected technocrats learned the same trick: speak like saints while acting like landlords to the entire planet. The point was never only policy. The point was compliance. Believe the virtue, accept the leash.

That leash is tightening around property, work, digitalisation, movement, high streets, free speech, farms, healthcare, education, land, businesses, homes, savings, travel and the last scraps of independence are being regulated, priced, shamed or transferred until they can be owned by someone else. They want to own everything at our own cost of living and freedom. At the same time, life is being fenced in by data: first the vaccine passport, then the advance of digital ID and central bank digital currencies.

This is not “safety.” It is a massive asset grab dressed as safety and convenience - the largest attempted enclosure of ordinary life and wealth transfer in history.

Anyone who has the courage to ask critical questions is smeared. They are falsely branded.

Question the Covid response?
“Covidiot.”

Question the wars?
“Putin apologist.”
“Antisemite.”

Question Net Zero?
“Climate denier.”

Question illegal migration?
“Far-right.”
“Racist.”

These are not arguments. They are smear tropes. Gutter politics exists to make inquiry feel dirty, so that opposing debate is shut down or marginalised. Silence is surrender.

A government, a technocrat or an institution that pushes medical coercion, the shrinking of civil liberties and the upward transfer of wealth while the public drowns in a cost-of-living crisis is not protecting you. It is asset stripping you. Modern day feudalism cloaked with virtue.

Do not mistake their virtue-con halo for a conscience. Fake virtue is the oldest instrument in the authoritarian manual. It turns obedience into a moral duty and dissent into a character flaw.

When authoritarianism comes, it will not introduce itself as tyranny. It will arrive smiling in an expensive suit flown in by a private jet, speaking of kindness and asking that you stop asking inconvenient questions.

[Vulture trades 🦅 Private @optiontrades_]

Ronaldinho came on for his debut in Serie C since he came out of retirement and scored two goals😂😂

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Sunshine → hosepipe ban
Rain → flash flooding

British weather management infrastructure is so monumentally shite that every drop of rain and every ray of sun gets frantically blamed on “climate change” rather than the far more awkward truth: we’ve spent decades refusing to build reservoirs, clear road drains, or plan for the weather that Britain has always had.

Absolute farce.

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

Westminster has built a country where we spend more money on the planning paperwork for a single road than it costs other nations to build an entire mountain tunnel.

This isn't a system accidentally strangled by red tape: it is a highly lucrative industry. A vast priesthood of consultants and lawyers is making a fortune they have no interest in the work being done.

It is corruption by bureaucracy, and working-class communities are footing the bill for projects that never even see a spade in the ground.

The absolute paralysis of modern Britain was laid bare in a recent parliamentary committee. A single witness gave them the truth with both barrels, exposing the administrative vampires sucking public money dry while the work goes undone. The details are an insult to every community waiting for homes, decent transport, and cheaper energy.

Take the Lower Thames Crossing. The planning application alone has swallowed more than a quarter of a billion pounds. For that exact same amount, Norway actually constructed the world’s longest road tunnel. We spent it on paper, and we have not even turned a sod of earth.

This is a permission state eating itself alive.

Look at HS2, the most expensive railway line on earth. Part of the reason it cost so much is that we are spending £121 million on a specific "bat tunnel" to protect a few hundred bats living in a nearby wood, a wood the line does not even pass through.

Look at Hinkley Point C, the most expensive nuclear power station in human history. For eight years, developers locked in a multi-million-pound wrangle with regulators over installing an underwater "fish disco", an acoustic deterrent to stop fish swimming into the pipes. 20 years ago, we built nuclear fleets at a fraction of the cost. Today, we sacrifice national infrastructure to the gods of endless compliance.

The final absurdity is the plan to reopen just 3.3 miles of an existing railway line between Bristol and Portishead, a route already built but closed during the Beeching cuts. The planning application is 80,000 pages long. Over one thousand of those pages are about bats.

We have created a system that trades in paper while the real economy rots. The working class pay the price for this institutional cowardice. They pay for it in soaring energy bills, missing homes, broken transport links, and a country that cannot build the future it keeps promising.

Protecting the environment is vital, but drowning ourselves in paper is not environmentalism. A system that takes 80,000 pages to clear three miles of existing track is broken. It is not governance: it is managed decline with a clipboard.

It's the bureaucratic vampires drinking the country's wealth...

[Dan @CfcDan_01]

🚨Zlatan Ibrahimovic on VAR after Croatia’s last-minute equaliser vs Portugal was ruled out:*

This referees are doing everything possible for Ronaldo to win the world cup but they will say Messi is the FIFA boy , This ball was never an Offside because the ball didn't touch the Croatia player , This is pure daylight robbery.

"The referee and VAR have just erased what should have been one of the greatest moments of this World Cup.”

"Let’s be clear: if you’re going to cancel a goal in the 90th minute, the evidence has to be beyond doubt. I’ve watched the incident multiple times, from every angle, and I still don’t see anything conclusive enough to overturn it.”

"If you’re in that VAR room for minutes, pausing, zooming, drawing lines to a shoulder, a boot, a heel… it’s not clear and obvious. And if it’s not clear, the goal must stand. That’s the whole point of VAR.”

"The referee has allowed technology to become the main character. But fans don’t fill stadiums or stay up late to watch a screen. They come for football — for drama, for emotion, for moments you remember forever.”

"Croatia showed real fight. They dug in, they scored late, they thought they’d earned a dramatic equaliser to keep their dream alive. Then one decision ripped it away, and that decision will be argued about for years.”

"This is why confidence in VAR is collapsing. It’s no longer fixing obvious mistakes. It’s hunting millimeters that nobody in the stadium can see with their own eyes. That’s not what football is supposed to be.”

"I feel for those Croatian players more than anything. You celebrate, you believe your World Cup is back on, and then it’s gone in seconds. For me, the referee on the pitch and VAR in the booth both got it wrong.

[Alan @A1an_M]

So...

We're not allowed to buy air conditioners for our houses to cool them in hot summer weather, because we don't have enough electricity to power them, because the solar panels and wind turbines we installed to stop the planet getting hot in summer, don't work when it's hot and windless in summer, so we'd need to burn gas, oil and coal instead to power the AC to cool our houses, but we blew up the oil, gas and coal power stations to stop the planet getting hot in summer, but it's still hot in summer.

But it's still ok to install heat pumps in winter, heat pumps which are also air conditioners and use the same amount of electricity or more, but we still won't have enough electricity to power them on cold, dark, windless winter evenings, because solar panels and wind turbines don't work then either, and we blew up the gas, oil and coal fired power stations because they were making the planet too hot in winter as well as summer.

Have I missed anything?

🙄🤡🌍

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

The ban on social media for children under 16 is an idea that has merits. But the way it is being done is simply a way to force everyone, including adults, to identify themselves online, creating the most powerful surveillance and censorship architecture in human history.

[Vladimír Coufal @Coufi5]

I will be FOREVER blowing bubbles, till I fade and die 🫶🏼⚒️
Now it hurts but I am 💯 percent sure first game of new season fans will be here again, London stadium will be full cheering for Claret and Blue army.
COYI

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

4 billion years of human evolution unfold in minutes

[🎞️ thebrainmaze]

[West Ham United @WestHam]

Every one of Tomáš Souček's 39 @premierleague goals ⚽️

[Arnold Schwarzenegger @Schwarzenegger]

Every piece of advice that works for fitness works for life.

-Reps are the only way to improve
-Don’t fear failure
-Just do a little more every week (progressive resistance)
-Learn to be comfortable with discomfort

I could go on all day!

[Danny Baker @prodnose]

It's not a contender.
This is it.
Trust me, I know about Own Goals & Gaffes.
#InOffHisArse

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Amid laughter and hugs, they took him to fulfill a dream: to see the sea.

His friends accompanied him to the shore, where happiness was reflected on his face and the waves seemed to celebrate with him.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A real coach.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become king. The palace becomes a circus.

#Budget2025

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Food prices ⬆️
Council tax ⬆️
Energy bills ⬆️
Water bills ⬆️
National debt ⬆️
Unemployment ⬆️
Employers national insurance ⬆️
Business closures ⬆️

The Labour government aren’t ’fixing the foundations’. They are blowing the bloody doors off the economy.