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The Royal Navy wants a drone wingman that works from a carrier with no catapult and no arrestor wires!!! Under Project Vanquish, the Navy plans to demonstrate a jet-powered, short takeoff and landing autonomous collaborative platform from a Queen Elizabeth-class carrier before the end of 2027. The Queen Elizabeth carriers launch with a ski jump and have no catapults or arrestor gear, so the drone has to work with the ship as it is 😓 Designing a jet-powered drone wingman quickly is one thing. Getting it to take off and recover from a carrier like this is quite another!
ALT This is an artists rendering, please don't think this is real 🙏
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On this important day, can we all take a moment to remember the serviceman with arguably the finest Wikipedia entry of all time?
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The EU Reset is treason.
For the many UK politicians @UKLabour and journalists @BBC who don't know anything about UK trade, here are the highlights:
1. The UK is now predominantly a service exporter. 57% of UK exports are services, which are not affected by EU 'red tape'.
2. UK goods exports have dropped from almost 70% of our total exports in 1997 to just 43% in 2025. This trend began long before Brexit and is tied to Net Zero mandates, high UK energy prices, and EV mandates.
3. Machinery and transport goods, such as cars and aircraft parts, are 42% of all UK goods exports. This is by far the UK's largest export sector, although it is also falling. It was 50% of UK exports in 2000. But if the UK joins the EU's CBAM, companies in this sector will see their imported material costs rise, making their exports even less competitive.
4. Chemicals are the UK's second-largest export sector. They account for 19% of UK goods exports, but this share is shrinking due to UK and EU energy costs and Net Zero regulations. These will increase if the UK joins the EU ETS.
5. Miscellaneous Manufactures account for 11% of UK goods exports. This is still the UK's third-largest export sector, even though it includes many goods the UK no longer makes because of our high Carbon taxes, which will increase if the UK signs up to the EU's even higher ETS on November 20th.
6. Fuels account for 9% of UK exports. This is still the UK's 4th largest goods export sector, even though the current and previous governments are/were trying to destroy it with bans on new exploration and ultra-high taxes.
7. Material Manufactures account for 8% of UK goods exports. This sector includes iron, steel, aluminium, ceramics, and glass manufacturing - industries that have gone, or are going, out of business in the UK because of high UK energy costs, which will rise if the UK joins the EU ETS.
8. These five sectors make up almost 90% of UK exports. The other 5 industry sectors are insignificant. But the government and our journalists think the UK is New Zealand and that the only goods we export are food and live animals to the EU. We don't! UK food and live animal exports to the EU were just 1.3% of the UK's total exports.
9. The government is about to sacrifice all of the export industries listed above to slightly reduce the IMPORT costs of a handful of Supermarkets, at least two of which are privately owned German companies.
These savings will not be passed on to UK shoppers because the government has also increased wages again, and supermarket energy costs will increase if we join the EU's ETS.
10. UK exports of food and live animals will not increase because we are paying farmers to not produce them, this has nothing to do with EU red tape. Instead we are paying farmers to plant trees and wildflowers or plaster their farmland with solar panels. (54% of UK electricity is coming from gas today, 12% from solar and 3% from wind.)
11. Write to your MP and tell him to #StoptheReset.
If you don't stop this, don't complain when all of our goods export industries have closed because of EU higher carbon taxes, EU higher carbon import tariffs, and the cost of complying with the EU's new packaging and process regulations.
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Capital investment is nearly always underfunded when it’s owned by the state. There are always more pressing, political demands on the public purse — like a pay rise for nurses instead of electrifying a line. That was the story of British Rail under Labour/Tory governments, of state-owned Network Rail — and it will be with so-called Great British Rail. Indeed the Transport dept budget is already being raided. So predictable. So obvious from history rail these past 70 years. But people never learn.
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UK workers are paying income tax on far more of their earnings because both Conservatives and Labour have kept tax-free thresholds frozen since 2021.
Meanwhile, welfare benefits have jumped by 30%.
How is it fair that non-workers are getting inflation-linked raises while workers get squeezed? 🇬🇧
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How about funding defence properly?
We remember those who gave their lives for our country.
Veterans, service personnel and their families deserve our support.
We are backing them with action: this government is protecting veterans' and forces' rail discounts in law.
thesun.co.uk/news/40956165/v…
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Nigel Farage posts a completely standard, dignified tribute honouring the young men who died for British democracy. A retired Air Marshal quote-tweets it with Farage’s head cropped off to lecture the public that the real lesson of the Cenotaph is "the dangers of populist politics" and the need for "European unity".
British soldiers didn't give their lives on the Western Front or in Normandy so retired officers could weaponise their graves to scold four million voters and run ideological PR for Brussels.
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It's no secret that the UK's welfare system is broken.
But did you know that 75% of constituencies in England receive more in welfare than their workers pay in income tax and National Insurance?
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Fair comment.
There was indeed a time when senior military commanders served a vital, unyielding constitutional function.
During the Second World War, Field Marshal Alan Brooke (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) famously spent half his waking hours standing up to Winston Churchill, bluntly killing off catastrophic strategic whims with hard arithmetic. In 1982, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin was indispensable to Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands: providing unvarnished, lethal military counsel, establishing the War Cabinet’s operational parameters, and telling Downing Street exactly what was required to win—not what the Treasury wanted to hear.
The creation of the unified Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) role in 1959—championed by Lord Mountbatten and solidified in the 1964 creation of the unified Ministry of Defence—had an initially defensible purpose: stopping the Admiralty, War Office, and Air Ministry from fighting tribal turf wars over procurement and duplicating budgets in the Cold War nuclear era.
What the role has degenerated into, however, is a corporate shock absorber for Whitehall.
The decisive death blow came with the 2011 Levene Reforms. Those reforms stripped the individual service chiefs—the First Sea Lord, the Chief of the General Staff, and the Chief of the Air Staff—of their constitutional direct access to the Prime Minister. Instead, power was concentrated entirely in MoD Main Building, split between the civilian Permanent Secretary and the CDS.
From that moment on, the CDS ceased to be a fighting commander and became a corporate executive in ceremonial dress:
• Managing decline instead of deterrence: Rather than resigning on principle when sovereign capabilities are butchered, successive Chiefs of the Defence Staff have functioned as the Treasury’s compliance officers—signing off on shrinking the Army to 72,000, retiring frigates with no replacements, and gutting ammunition stockpiles.
• The PR buffer: Their primary operational utility to Downing Street today is public relations. A politician cutting defence looks reckless; a four-star commander in gold braid sitting on a BBC sofa nodding along and calling for "efficiency and innovation" gives the cuts an institutional hall-mark.
• Bureaucratic capture: They are steeped in civil service managerialism, promoted through Whitehall committee rooms rather than operational combat command, resulting in a culture where producing another glossy "Strategic Review" takes precedence over maintaining physical artillery barrels.
We have created an administrative caste of peacetime generals who spend their tenures writing glossy Strategic Defence Reviews and absorbing political flak, while signing off on the hollowing out of our combat mass.
If our military leadership refuses to resign on principle over an unpatrolled seabed, a hollowed-out surface fleet, and a regular army cut to 72,000, then having a Chief of the Defence Staff is purely ornamental. Abolish the Whitehall boardroom, restore independent authority to the individual service heads, and stop sending four-star managers to run PR for state failure.
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Kings Cross A3 60063 Isinglass arrives at Kings Cross with an express in early 1961. Unknown photographer. – at Rolleston, England
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Powerful, damning stuff.
👇
There was indeed a time when senior military commanders served a vital, unyielding constitutional function.
During the Second World War, Field Marshal Alan Brooke (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) famously spent half his waking hours standing up to Winston Churchill, bluntly killing off catastrophic strategic whims with hard arithmetic. In 1982, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin was indispensable to Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands: providing unvarnished, lethal military counsel, establishing the War Cabinet’s operational parameters, and telling Downing Street exactly what was required to win—not what the Treasury wanted to hear.
The creation of the unified Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) role in 1959—championed by Lord Mountbatten and solidified in the 1964 creation of the unified Ministry of Defence—had an initially defensible purpose: stopping the Admiralty, War Office, and Air Ministry from fighting tribal turf wars over procurement and duplicating budgets in the Cold War nuclear era.
What the role has degenerated into, however, is a corporate shock absorber for Whitehall.
The decisive death blow came with the 2011 Levene Reforms. Those reforms stripped the individual service chiefs—the First Sea Lord, the Chief of the General Staff, and the Chief of the Air Staff—of their constitutional direct access to the Prime Minister. Instead, power was concentrated entirely in MoD Main Building, split between the civilian Permanent Secretary and the CDS.
From that moment on, the CDS ceased to be a fighting commander and became a corporate executive in ceremonial dress:
• Managing decline instead of deterrence: Rather than resigning on principle when sovereign capabilities are butchered, successive Chiefs of the Defence Staff have functioned as the Treasury’s compliance officers—signing off on shrinking the Army to 72,000, retiring frigates with no replacements, and gutting ammunition stockpiles.
• The PR buffer: Their primary operational utility to Downing Street today is public relations. A politician cutting defence looks reckless; a four-star commander in gold braid sitting on a BBC sofa nodding along and calling for "efficiency and innovation" gives the cuts an institutional hall-mark.
• Bureaucratic capture: They are steeped in civil service managerialism, promoted through Whitehall committee rooms rather than operational combat command, resulting in a culture where producing another glossy "Strategic Review" takes precedence over maintaining physical artillery barrels.
We have created an administrative caste of peacetime generals who spend their tenures writing glossy Strategic Defence Reviews and absorbing political flak, while signing off on the hollowing out of our combat mass.
If our military leadership refuses to resign on principle over an unpatrolled seabed, a hollowed-out surface fleet, and a regular army cut to 72,000, then having a Chief of the Defence Staff is purely ornamental. Abolish the Whitehall boardroom, restore independent authority to the individual service heads, and stop sending four-star managers to run PR for state failure.
Tall retweeted
In March 1942, a 22-year-old sat on the deck of a motor launch in the warm spring sunshine.
He was preparing to sail to occupied France for the raid on St Nazaire.
Or what has become known as ‘the Greatest Raid of All’.
He was Lance Sergeant Bill Gibson of No. 2 Commando.
He knew the mission to destroy this Nazi dry dock was likely a one-way trip.
He wrote a letter to his father, only to be delivered in the event he never came back.
"My dearest Dad, by the time you get this I shall be one of the many who have sacrificed their unimportant lives for what little ideals we may have - my own ideals I can thank you for."
He calmly explained the mission was "virtually suicide”, but the magnitude of the results would make it worthwhile:
putting the German raiders out of action for at least six months, protecting the ships bringing vital food across the Atlantic , and saving the lives of his fellow servicemen.
"The reason I am writing this at all, Dad, is just the thought that it might be a little better for you to get this rather than the dreaded telegram."
He reflects on the friendships he made in life, telling his father: "you've been the best pal I've ever had."
One can only be in awe of the character of a 22-year-old that went on:
"It seems ever so peculiar to be writing this letter. We've just finished our tea and the sunshine is streaming through the portholes.
We've been on deck sunbathing all day. With spring in the air and everything looking so beautiful we can only now appreciate how lovely everything is - almost like condemned criminals."
He asks his dad to write to his Irish girlfriend, Anne, and let her know what has happened.
He asks him not to worry or be too unhappy, and reminds him of the advice his father always gave him: to keep his chin up.
He lays out the reason for laying down his life:
"the generations to come might in some way remember us."
He closes:
"In a time like this I turn to you, Dad, and God - I hope there will be peace for everyone soon. Give my love to everyone - I'll remember you. Your loving son, Bill."
Neither Bill nor his friend Peter Harkness survived the night of 28 March.
Their launch, ML 268, was devastated by enemy fire before they could even get ashore.
However their mission, astonishingly, was a success.
Bill was 22 years old, with a girl he loved, a family he adored, and his whole life ahead of him.
He has no known grave; his name is on the Brookwood Memorial.
On Remembrance Sunday, the sheer scale of the devastation of the war can be overwhelming.
But Bill Gibson's letter illuminates the heart-wrenching reality of sacrifice: young men who loved life.
Painfully aware of the beauty of the world they were giving up.
Who went anyway for the sake of people they would never meet.
We are the generations to come that you wrote about, Bill.
We have benefited from what you did.
We remember you.
And the many others who made the ultimate sacrifice for us.
Lest we forget.
We will remember them.
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Nigel is an expert on World War One history too and does an extraordinary tour of those battlefields. True respect. @Nigel_Farage
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The military relationship is as close as he’s ever known it because Britain has reduced its own armed forces to a state of total, structural dependency on the Pentagon.
When our £3 billion flagship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, sailed on her maiden strike deployment to the Pacific, Britain could only muster eight of our own F-35Bs. We had to embark ten US Marine Corps jets and an American destroyer just so the flight deck didn't look empty on television.
Our sovereign nuclear deterrent draws its Trident missiles from a shared depot in Kings Bay, Georgia. Our army lacks the sovereign transport and logistics to sustain a single division in high-intensity combat without US tankers and American airlift.
Calling a client-state relationship close is Whitehall’s standard linguistic trick to disguise thirty years of catastrophic Treasury cheese-paring as strategic partnership. We haven't built an alliance of equals; we have built a military dependent on Washington for basic operational capability.
Meanwhile, Sky News uses Sunday airtime to air polling equating our security guarantor with hostile tyrannies, while military chiefs tour the studios managing our decline.
If this is what strategic strength looks like, Whitehall needs to buy a dictionary.
Chief of Defence Staff Sir Rich Knighton says the military relationship between the UK and the US is "as close as he's ever known it", despite a new survey finding 74 percent of people see the US as a serious threat to world peace.
trib.al/3vtWiUA
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602
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Are you talking to the people of Narnia and Utopia?
You are grossly neglecting and underfunding the defence of Britain and our interests.
Rank hypocrisy.
At this time of year, we come together to honour the courage and bravery of the Armed Forces and remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country.
I want to give my thanks to those who have served and are still serving today. I know you and your families make huge sacrifices to keep our country safe.
My job is to make sure that sacrifice is honoured, both through the way we treat our Armed Forces and our veterans, but also through the country we build for you and for your loved ones.
We will give our Armed Forces the funding and equipment you need to keep this country safe, as well as the good housing, training, and support you deserve. This is a world where once again it’s become necessary to stand up for our values and stand alongside our allies.
Our memories of those who went before us give us strength to know we will never be cowed in the face of threats or aggression. And together we will build a country we are proud to serve, and a future that remembers and honours those who fought for our freedoms.
A Britain worth fighting for.
Tall retweeted
For the many UK politicians @UKLabour and journalists @BBC who don't know anything about UK trade, here are the highlights:
1. The UK is now predominantly a service exporter. 57% of UK exports are services, which are not affected by EU 'red tape'.
2. UK goods exports have dropped from almost 70% of our total exports in 1997 to just 43% in 2025. This trend began long before Brexit and is tied to Net Zero mandates, high UK energy prices, and EV mandates.
3. Machinery and transport goods, such as cars and aircraft parts, are 42% of all UK goods exports. This is by far the UK's largest export sector, although it is also falling. It was 50% of UK exports in 2000. But if the UK joins the EU's CBAM, companies in this sector will see their imported material costs rise, making their exports even less competitive.
4. Chemicals are the UK's second-largest export sector. They account for 19% of UK goods exports, but this share is shrinking due to UK and EU energy costs and Net Zero regulations. These will increase if the UK joins the EU ETS.
5. Miscellaneous Manufactures account for 11% of UK goods exports. This is still the UK's third-largest export sector, even though it includes many goods the UK no longer makes because of our high Carbon taxes, which will increase if the UK signs up to the EU's even higher ETS on November 20th.
6. Fuels account for 9% of UK exports. This is still the UK's 4th largest goods export sector, even though the current and previous governments are/were trying to destroy it with bans on new exploration and ultra-high taxes.
7. Material Manufactures account for 8% of UK goods exports. This sector includes iron, steel, aluminium, ceramics, and glass manufacturing - industries that have gone, or are going, out of business in the UK because of high UK energy costs, which will rise if the UK joins the EU ETS.
8. These five sectors make up almost 90% of UK exports. The other 5 industry sectors are insignificant. But the government and our journalists think the UK is New Zealand and that the only goods we export are food and live animals to the EU. We don't! UK food and live animal exports to the EU were just 1.3% of the UK's total exports.
9. The government is about to sacrifice all of the export industries listed above to slightly reduce the IMPORT costs of a handful of Supermarkets, at least two of which are privately owned German companies.
These savings will not be passed on to UK shoppers because the government has also increased wages again, and supermarket energy costs will increase if we join the EU's ETS.
10. UK exports of food and live animals will not increase because we are paying farmers to not produce them, this has nothing to do with EU red tape. Instead we are paying farmers to plant trees and wildflowers or plaster their farmland with solar panels. (54% of UK electricity is coming from gas today, 12% from solar and 3% from wind.)
11. Write to your MP and tell him to #StoptheReset.
If you don't stop this, don't complain when all of our goods export industries have closed because of EU higher carbon taxes, EU higher carbon import tariffs, and the cost of complying with the EU's new packaging and process regulations.
Tall retweeted
Disinformation carries a penalty nowadays @SkyNews
Briton among six killed by 'far-right' gunman in Krakow rampage trib.al/WYstXTx
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At the going down of the sun and in the morning. We will remember them.
It was an honour to lay a wreath in Newark this morning.
