WeWuzRobbedRef CharlieF

Late period Osborne: interest rates at zero and 50-80bn of headroom: and his priority was “don’t invest”.

Osborne deserves a lot more condemnation, for not just doing austerity but doing it so cackhandedly:

1. Not borrowing to invest when borrowing costs were at essentially zero

2. Cutting spending by salami slicing every part of the public sector with no real analysis of where could take it

Ofwat letting water firms charge twice to tackle sewage, court to hear River Action bringing legal action against water regulator over who should foot bill for firms’ past failures to invest

Ofwat letting England water firms charge twice to tackle sewage, court to hear

Companies billed people for sewage disposal, used cash to pay dividends and exec bonuses, dumped sewage in rivers.

Now charging again to fund promised investment, not raising capital from shareholders. Customers fleeced

We in the UK will work out far too late that this is a bad thing.

King Charles strips Andrew of prince title and ejects him from mansion Royal subject to ‘censures deemed necessary’ in sharp change of tone by Buckingham Palace

This is the Royal equivalent of the amputation of a gangrenous limb to stop the rest of The Firm getting infected.

An act of self-preservation.

If it was integrity, then they'd have booted Andrew out years ago.

They didn't.

www.ft.com/content/a7d6...

Coventry South needs a by-election soon Zarah Sultana has no mandate for disarming the people of Britain and betraying Ukraine

"To say 'Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class' is an insulting, facile distraction from the fact that Sultana refuses to support the Ukrainian people’s fight for existence."

Proper cold fury and moral clarity from @paulmason.bsky.social on Sultana.

open.substack.com/pub/htsf/p/c...

‘When others pray’

My new Arsenal piece 🖊️

Please share if you don’t mind 🎈

gunnerstown.com/arsenal/2025/1…

Farage: epic grifter

We must act now: without a written constitution, Reform UK will have carte blanche to toxify our nation | Goerge Monbiot It means breaking with hundreds of years of tradition, but it can’t wait. As hard-right figures spread division and laud autocrats, a fail-safe is vital, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

The Spectator and others have chosen (deliberately I suspect) to interpret this article as a desire to stop a future Reform UK government from legislating. My purpose is to stop *any* government crushing our fundamental rights. It’s just more urgent now. 🧵 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Magnifico 👏

After Moscow, Ukrainian OSINT analysts have now identified the type and exact location of the air defense systems deployed near Putin’s Valdai residence:

🔵 — Pantsir-S1
🔴 — S-400

Labour’s plan to move the goalposts by increasing the ILR qualifying period from 5 to 10 years for legal migrants already on the path could potentially affect over a million people, cripple industries and the NHS and destroy trust in the immigration system. They should absolutely rethink their plan.

Stop International Trade of Whale Sharks, Oceanic Whitetip Sharks, and Manta and Devil Rays Add your name today to support greater regulations and protections for vulnerable sharks and rays.

Please sign and share if you can.

Stop International Trade of Whale Sharks, Oceanic Whitetip Sharks, and Manta and Devil Rays

only.one/act/cites-20...

Thank you to @mrjamesob.bsky.social for having me on, one of the v few people in the UK press to follow this story during what is now a decade of media apathy &/or complicity

Where to begin with this - everything about it is wrong

Retired Army Sgt. Brian Wofford spoke to me this morning at the Oklahoma City #NoKings protest. Didn’t expect him to be carrying his DD214 so I asked some warmup questions like when he got out and whether his injury was service-related.

He paused while describing the car bomb in Iraq to say this:

"I hear very few people are gonna be there" -Donald Trump, 10/15/25

Left: Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of War, "Your diversity is not in your strength, your strength is in your unity of purpose, your oath to the constitution"

Right: President Trump publishes an AI video of him wearing a king's crown, flying a US fighter jet, dropping poo on the American people

2025: Claire Coutinho criticises net zero

2023: Claire Coutinho praises net zero

These are their values, and for the right price, they have other values too

CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1965: 20-1

CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1990: 75-1

CEO-to-worker pay ratio today: 280-to-1

Trickle-down economics was always a sham.

Nothing has ever trickled down.

There's always a tweet.

World’s landscapes may soon be ‘devoid of wild animals’, says nature photographer Margot Raggett, whose latest compilation shows animals scrubbed from natural habitats, calls for rethink on UK accelerated housebuilding

So many species are being eliminated by the greed of some humans that we have entered an era of extinction that resembles the death of the dinosaurs. We are part of nature and every loss diminishes us

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Life of Juliana de la Floude

Every day is a school day in Winchester. This woman deserves a wikipedia page at least.

The media seems to forget
to mention that when Tel Aviv Maccabi fans went to Amsterdam, there were reports they chanted “we will f**k the arabs” and ““There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left.” They also pulled down Palestinian flags. They were met with attacks from locals.

I can see why Reform would oppose measures to prevent money laundering. Maybe banks should check money going *into* bank accounts - particularly when it's Russian money going into Reform politicians' bank accounts...

‘Frightened to get out of their cars’: Britain’s toxic race debates threaten overseas care workers Staff are being advised to travel in mixed groups and carry panic alarms as incidents of intimidation spread

‘Frightened to get out of their cars’: Britain’s toxic race debates threaten overseas care workers

NEW: The British politician, his Russian intelligence handler & a Kremlin plot against the US & Ukraine.

My new piece about Nathan Gill and Nigel Farage for @thenerve_news in which we ask:

Why, even now, is no-one asking questions?

t.co/BUTtpK9C4S

"Nathan Gill isn’t some postscript to a minor episode of recent British history. He’s a key to understanding the scale and sophistication of the threat against us, a network of pro-Russian actors that stretches not only across the Atlantic but Europe too."

@carolecadwalla.bsky.social

The plastic inside us: how microplastics may be reshaping our bodies and minds The particles are in our blood, brains and guts – and scientists are only beginning to learn what they do Microplastics have been found almost everywhere: in blood, placentas, lungs – even the human brain. One study estimated our cerebral organs alone may contain 5g of the stuff, or roughly a teaspoon. If true, plastic isn’t just wrapped around our food or woven into our clothes: it is lodged deep inside us. Now, researchers suspect these particles may also be meddling with our gut microbes. When Dr Christian Pacher-Deutsch at the University of Graz in Austria exposed gut bacteria from five healthy volunteers to five common microplastics, the bacterial populations shifted – along with the chemicals they produced. Some of these changes mirrored patterns linked to depression and colorectal cancer. Continue reading...

The plastic inside us: how microplastics may be reshaping our bodies and minds