Stephen Wynne-Jones

‼️HE’S DONE IT AGAIN‼️ This time it’s an *individual* international medal!! 😍😍😍 Harry puts in a blistering swim in the 400 Free final at @thecgf Junior Commonwealth Games to win 🥉BRONZE🥉 So well deserved. Great job Harry ⭐️

My dear Stephen, How lovely to see you marking the sixtieth. One of the darkest days in our history, etched in the memory of the nation, a community of such strength. All true. And all of it happening to somebody else. Here is the part your tribute left in the drawer. The tribunal found the Coal Board wholly to blame and said the disaster "could and should have been prevented". The Coal Board then demanded £250,000 from the disaster fund to clear the tip that killed them. The fund, raised by public donation for the families, handed over £150,000. Your party's government applied the pressure, in secret. George Thomas objected, then folded, and leaned on the trustees until they folded too. The Charity Commission sat on its hands. Nobody was prosecuted. It took thirty years to give it back. In July 1997 Ron Davies, your party's first Welsh Secretary of that spell, returned the £150,000 without interest and without inflation, and conceded the demand should never have been made. So yes. Remembering is lovely. Your lot billed the bereaved for clearing the mine's own tip. Twenty three likes. Five retweets. And looking more like your father every year. Do carry on, pet.

Our MP @CalumMillerLD took part. Our MP @CalumMillerLD abstained… #Piddington #women #safety

🧵 The Conservatives' rejection of closer ties with Europe has cemented their position as a pointless anti-growth anti-business party. Our @LibDems plan to Get Britain Growing Again will turbo-charge our economy, starting with a new Growth and Defence Partnership with Europe.

Calum Miller has been Liberal Democrat MP for Bicester and Woodstock since 4 July 2024. He took 19,419 votes, 38.7 per cent, and a majority of 4,958. On 18 September 2024 he became the party’s foreign affairs spokesman. Before Parliament he sat on Oxfordshire County Council for Otmoor from 10 May 2021 until 1 May 2025 and served as cabinet member for finance until he stood down from that role in October 2023 to fight the seat. @CalumMillerLD 's public record on refugees is not vague. On 4 September 2015 he published an article arguing that British politicians had perverted the debate by making the migrant crisis about us: our GDP, our resources, our place in the league table. Families torn apart by war were knocking on the door, he wrote, and economics was worthless if it was not put in their service. On 7 November 2023, still a councillor, he voted for the motion that Oxfordshire should become a Council of Sanctuary. The text said the county was proud of its history of welcoming people seeking safety and that those people should be housed as neighbours and as part of our communities. In June 2024 the cabinet agreed to work towards formal Sanctuary status. In August 2025, after Nigel Farage spoke in Oxfordshire about mass deportations, Miller wrote that Farage had made no effort to understand the county. Oxfordshire’s real story, he said, was businesses thriving on home and overseas talent, services desperate for staff, and residents supporting refugees with compassion. His Commons votes sit with the Liberal Democrats: generally against a tighter asylum system. Then the government chose his patch. On 25 and 26 June 2026 the Home Office announced it was seeking planning permission at three former military sites, including MOD Bicester Site A, to house thousands of asylum seekers while hotels were closed. The Bicester plan was for about 1,250 to 1,256 single adult men. The site sits beside a village of 370 people. There is no pavement on the B-road. The nearest shop is two miles away. Bicester itself is five miles away. The land has never been used for accommodation. Warehouses are condemned and riddled with asbestos. A planning inspector rejected a smaller scheme for roughly half that number on the same site in 2003, after more than £30 million had already been spent. Miller was told in a ten-minute phone call on the Thursday afternoon before the announcement. He called the lack of consultation extraordinary. Within 72 hours his petition had 7,156 signatures. It later approached 10,000. He held public meetings, invited every party, tabled 39 written questions, spoke in two Commons debates, and met police, councils and local businesses. He said the site was inappropriate for residents and for the men who would be put there: isolated, nothing to do, no credible plan for services or cohesion. He said the government was simply moving people from one expensive, unsuitable place to another instead of clearing the backlog. Conservatives later pointed out that this sat poorly with his 2023 vote that people seeking safety should live as neighbours in communities. That is the factual spine. The rest is what it looks like when the sermon meets the postcode. in this case the #Piddington postcode. For a decade the line was moral and national. Do not make it about us. House them as neighbours. Oxfordshire welcomes refugees. Overseas talent keeps the county going. Farage deals in slogans; we deal in compassion. The moment Whitehall picked a remote depot next to a village of 370 people in his own constituency, the language flipped. Suddenly it was the wrong plan for the wrong site. Suddenly isolation, safeguarding, electricity, water, sewage, schools and football clubs all mattered. Suddenly 1,250 + fighting-age men with little money and little to do could not be “absorbed.” The neighbour he voted to welcome in 2023 became a planning objection in 2026. That is not principle. It is NIMBYism with a fake 'conscience''. The open-border adjacent left will sign Sanctuary motions, write pieces about knocking on the door, and lecture Reform about compassion for as long as the hotel, the barge or the barracks is in someone else’s town. The second it is their villages, their B-road with no pavement, their GP list and their primary school, they discover capacity, safety and “the people warehoused there.” Miller now says he supports decent treatment and transitional housing after a grant of status. He just does not want the large, basic, isolated site the government actually proposed on his doorstep. That is the oldest trick in local politics: yes to the policy, no to the site. Women who voted @LibDems or @UKLabour in 2024 were sold fairness, competence and a kinder system. What arrived was the same failed pipeline: slow decisions, hotels, then a scramble for remote male-only sites next to small communities. Concerns about streets after dark, cohesion, and the reality of large groups of young men from high-risk countries are not a moral failing. They are what you get when you treat numbers and source countries as an afterthought and local impact as someone else’s problem. Those women who voted in this abomination of leftist enablers and facilitators have a right to be angry at their own votes and a government and a leftist alliance that puts woke twaddle above the safety of its own citizens.. The politicians who preached welcome in the abstract and then fight the concrete proposal in their own constituencies do not get to call that anger unkind. They built the contradiction. They can live with the blame.

Lib Dems regain a majority on Oxfordshire County Council. This is huge

Why UK can’t afford Public Sector Defined Contribution Pensions National Debt £2.989 Tn + Unfunded PSDB liabilities, £1.4 Tn Annual Benefits £333 Bn Monthly increase in National Debt +£11Bn it is time for everyone to get the same workplace pension pls RT

Every life matters. One law. One standard. For everyone.  This is about justice, for Henry, for his family and for all our children. They deserve better.

Luke Charters, the 30-year-old York Outer lapdog who still smells of Bank of England photocopier toner, has managed to rack up more sleaze in 18 months than most MPs do in a lifetime. Fresh off the 2024 landslide, he hired his own £55k Labour donor as his taxpayer-funded office manager while his wife pockets another £34k as his secretary pure family-values cronyism. Then he voted to axe winter fuel payments for pensioners, kept the two-child benefit cap, and backed the PIP cuts that will hammer the disabled in his own patch. This is the same “proud dad” who lectures us about helping families while cheerfully signing up to Rachel Reeves’ welfare slaughterhouse. Yorkshire grit? More like London grift. But the real gut-rot is his cowardice on grooming gangs. When Parliament had the chance for a full statutory inquiry into the industrial-scale rape of working-class British girls, Charters either hid under his desk or voted against it records are murky, silence is deafening. He’ll rant for days about “Reform’s racist bile” and pose with rainbow lanyards, but when it comes to Pakistani grooming gangs and decades of Labour council cover-ups, suddenly he’s got nothing to say. Selective outrage is the poshest cologne this Oxford boy wears. So spare us the breakfast-club virtue signals, Luke. You’re not a Yorkshireman fighting for the little guy you’re a donor-bought, benefit-cutting, scandal-dodging party drone who sold whatever soul you had the moment you cashed those Labour Together cheques. By 2029 you’ll be back flogging fintech compliance packages to banks, wondering why the voters you betrayed never warmed to your smug little smirk. Enjoy the ride, lad it’s a short one, and the cliff edge is coming fast.

Here's an extract from my Mail column, 'Starmer is my 13th Prime Minister - and the first I've despised. He is a small man doing huge damage, and every day he remains in power is a worse day for Britain': dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic… I have worked with and written about politicians for over 35 years. And of all the prime ministers who’ve been in power during that time, I’ve admired a few, agreed with some, disliked others - and disagreed with many. But no matter what their party, as a rule I’ve thought these men and women deserved credit for going into politics - at heart a noble profession despite the opprobrium it attracts. And I have always respected the fact that they held the highest elected office in the land, from Harold Wilson (PM when I was born in 1964) onwards - even if Liz Truss pushed that respect to its limits. Sir Keir Starmer is – appropriately - my 13th prime minister. And for the first time in my life I do not merely disagree with the head of government - but actually despise him. Starmer has brought shame on himself and his government this week by recognising a Palestinian ‘state’ without first placing any preconditions on Hamas or indeed the Palestinians. The Prime Minister has not only rewarded terrorists for a massacre but capitulated to his party’s fear of sectarian Muslim politicians. If that was the only charge against him it would be damning enough. But it is merely the latest and most egregious proof that he is simply not fit to occupy the office of Prime Minister. Starmer is usually portrayed as a dull technocrat – a man trying his best but whose main problem is that he is temperamentally not up to the job. In truth, this is a profound miscalculation. The 63-year-old is not some ingénue but rather the most dangerous prime minister in living memory. After barely more than a year in office he has shown just how harmful he is. Look at the crazy arrangement to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, for no other reason than that his fellow lefty human rights lawyers think our use of the Diego Garcia miliary base is an example of modern colonialism. The issue with the Chagos Islands is telling - and not just because it is so dangerous for our security to hand over a site of vital strategic importance. ...Starmer’s defence of the deal has further exposed how he has taken the use of political lies to new depths. The PM still refuses to admit that it is costing us £35 billion – at least – to hand over the islands and then rent back Diego Garcia. He portrays himself as some sort of plain dealer but in reality his stock in trade is obfuscation, deception and – yes – deceit. Or take his handling of the recent Mandelson affair. It is surely inconceivable that Starmer’s explanation of what went wrong is entirely true: that all was fine with Lord Mandelson until new evidence of his revolting fondness for the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein suddenly emerged, hitherto unknown to the PM. And Starmer has consistently dissembled when it comes to our defence, too. In June he was busy trumpeting the rise in defence spending from 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent. But he then tried to disguise the fact that even this paltry increase would not happen until 2027, as if Britain could somehow pause the world’s conflicts for two years. Then at last week’s Chequers press conference with Donald Trump, Starmer beamed as the president said: ‘I want to congratulate the United Kingdom on making the vital commitment to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence at the Nato summit this year.’ That is indeed what he signed up to. But it is meaningless...because he has not even set out how to move to 3 per cent to begin with. All Starmer has said is that 3 per cent – the lowest possible sum needed to pay for the recommendations of the government’s own defence review - is an ‘ambition’. While the Prime Minister has been clear about the need to support and defend Ukraine, it would be more admirable if he was prepared to spend over the current derisory 2.3 per cent. But with spending not even reaching 2.5 per cent for another two years, his words are utterly cynical. His support for Ukraine amounts to nothing more than hot air – and he knows it. One of the many reasons he has no money to spend on defence, of course, is his pusillanimous retreat over welfare spending. In June, having told the then Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, to reduce the bill, he committed his third U-turn in one month following the winter fuel payments and grooming gangs inquiry fiascos, by reneging on the cuts. Starmer pulled the rug from under Kendall’s feet after economically illiterate Labour MPs exploded in fury over her proposals for a minuscule reduction to the £313billion welfare bill. Starmer may have a mighty parliamentary majority of 148 seats but he acts as if he is leading a minority government in thrall to the hard Left. (Little wonder that his personal ratings are floundering at -42 per cent, matching Rishi Sunak’s rating after the D-Day catastrophe.) It is a Westminster truism that Starmer has no political skills, which has led to such humiliating capitulations over welfare and grooming gangs. But it is less commented on that he is a coward. If Starmer had a backbone he would, like Thatcher or Blair before him, decide what he stood for and actually lead. Instead, he allows himself to be pushed around by backbenchers like the empty vessel he is. That was evident in one of his first acts in government. He talks proudly about how he ‘settled’ the junior doctors’ pay strikes. But a two-year-old child could have settled it as Starmer did – by caving in and handing over a 22 per cent pay rise without asking for anything serious in return. It was entirely predictable what would happen next – and it has. Those same doctors, having seen how easily Starmer gives in, are now striking for yet more money. And the rest of the public sector unions have learned from these retreats: Starmer folds under pressure. Two weeks ago, for example, the London Underground was halted for nearly a week by strikes from drivers who already earn a small fortune but can smell the stink of weakness that wafts around the prime minister. Starmer’s record is disastrous across the board. But in few other areas has he been so blatantly destructive as in education. The imposition of VAT on school fees has forced the closure of at least 54 independent schools, with more to come, an act of pure spite. Worse than that, however, is the unravelling of three decades of bipartisan reforms to state schools. Starmer is doing the bidding of the teaching unions, the most destructive force in education, and destroying many of the academy freedoms that were the foundation of the transformation in standards, pushing instead a return to failed centralisation and local authority control. Towering above all this, of course, is his disastrous economic legacy. As Lord Wolfson, CEO of high street store Next, put it last week, growth is being held back by ‘declining job opportunities, new regulation that erodes competitiveness, government spending commitments that are beyond its means, and a rising tax burden that undermines national productivity.’ Starmer and his incompetent Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, are presiding over a fiscal car crash. Inflation is now 3.8 per cent (nearly double the 2 per cent target) and borrowing is out of control and getting worse. The national debt rose by £18 billion in August alone. Debt interest is over £100 billion a year and exceeds spending on health, transport, defence and most other areas. Serious observers say we may be heading to a crisis requiring a 1976-style IMF bailout. The charge sheet against Starmer is not that he is simply the clueless prime minister of an awful government - though he certainly is. It is that he has not once come clean with the public about any of the crises he and his government have engineered and has no conception of how to lead. He is a small man who is doing huge damage, and every day he remains in Downing Street is a worse day for Britain.

Get obsessive about client service and focus on the ‘critical non-essentials’. The seemingly unimportant things that truly make a difference. How you greet your clients, the coffee you serve, your collateral and the Zoom/Teams meeting experience. Sweat the small stuff.

Introducing our fabulous 8 🌟 swimmers who qualified for the 2024 Olympic Trials (aka British Championships) The action gets underway on Tuesday at @AquaticsCentre in London. Heats and finals are live streamed & also @BBCSport iPlayer We’re so proud of you. Good luck guys ❤️

"That's a medal for 🇬🇧 that puts us on the map in marathon swimming" 👀 @hector_pardoe's surge to Men's 10km 🥉 was the headline as Britain's marathon swimmers secured three Olympic places in the space of 24 hours 💫🚅 britishswimming.org/news/lat…