Exploring thoughts & ideas. Open to changing my mind - most of what I say isn’t a fixed view, but rather exploring and testing ideas.
Joined October 2019
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sky_trees retweeted
Sadly I could see where this was going back in August. Telegraph has gone full woke.
Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson is reportedly about to leave the newspaper amid significant job cuts to the newsroom theguardian.com/media/2026/o…
sky_trees retweeted
An interesting story in the Times which highlights the foolishness of giving HMRC the power to take money straight out of people's bank accounts.
Tax lawyer Simon Evans only found out that he apparently owed HM Revenue & Customs money when it was extracted from his bank account.
Last month he got a letter from HMRC to say it had taken £2,300 out of his account because it claimed he had unpaid tax. “There wasn’t a dispute, we’d never heard from HMRC nor had our accountant who has handled our taxes for many years,” Evans said.
“It turns out that HMRC had sent letters to an old address in London that we haven’t lived at in years,” he said. “This is despite the fact that all of our Companies House and tax returns are up to date with our correct address and our accountant’s address."
“If we owed this money we would of course have paid it. We wanted to know if there had been an administrative oversight, but over several calls no one at HMRC could tell us what we owed, or from what period it was owed. Our accountant is still trying to get to the bottom of it."
This is what happens when you give an incompetent public sector bureaucracy the power to take money out of people's bank accounts.
sky_trees retweeted
Andy Burnham has axed the worst parts of David Lammy’s justice reforms, which would have removed the right to trial by jury from those facing prison sentences of up to three years.
But don’t be fooled — more people will still be banged up for exercising their right to free speech under the Labour Government’s plans.
The Government is still planning to remove the right to elect trial by jury in the Crown Court for “either-way” offences. These include many speech-related crimes.
Despite there being no credible evidence for it, the Government continues to press ahead with slashing the right to trial by jury to reduce the Crown Court backlog.
Juries are not the problem. The problem is that countless courtrooms simply don’t sit on working days — many, as @soniasodha points out, because of leaky ceilings, asbestos and rat infestations.
Research by the Free Speech Union has shown that those accused of speech-related offences are almost twice as likely to be acquitted in a Crown Court with a jury as in a magistrates’ court without one.
Jury trials, as Burnham himself has said, are a “lynchpin of a fair society”. Dating back to Magna Carta, they are a bulwark of English liberty, protecting us from a repressive state.
The case of FSU member and Royal Marine veteran Jamie Michael shows exactly why they matter. He was reported to the police by a Labour Party staffer over a video criticising illegal immigration, then acquitted by a jury of his peers in just 17 minutes. Under the Government’s plans, Jamie would have had no right to elect a jury.
Last week, we delivered our Save Jury Trials petition, signed by 50,000 people, to Downing Street. Burnham must scrap these plans.
sky_trees retweeted
Barely half of all live births in England today are white British: 52.62%. This is the real demographic indicator, not total demographic share.
The UK is 75% white British, but it's the coming generations that really matter, and they're being born now.
The ONS has released new statistics on births by ethnicity for Q2 of 2026 in England today:
🇬🇧 White British = 52.62%
🇮🇳🇵🇰🇧🇩 Asian = 18.35%
🇪🇺🇺🇦 Other White = 9.75%
🇳🇬🇿🇼🇯🇲 Black = 7.75%
🌍 Mixed =7.53%
🇵🇸🇨🇳 Other = 2.68%
❔ Unstated = 1.31%
The White British share actually rose slightly vs Q1 2026, up from 52.06% to 52.62%.
sky_trees retweeted
He wins if the Right remains split & votes emotionally rather than tactically.
& Britain will basically be over. The ethnic & cultural transformation will be so complete, the tribalism so entrenched, the economy so battered, the constitution so wrecked, there’ll be no coming back
sky_trees retweeted
📵 A ‘social media ban’ isn't a policy for children's online safety - it's a national ID scheme by the back door.
Here are five things the government will not tell you about a social media ban ⤵️
sky_trees retweeted
We are being invaded by armed military-aged men. Burnham is complicit. The state welcomes these criminals before having them evenly distributed around Britain’s most impoverished areas, where they are free to roam. Unforgivable
ILLEGAL MIGRANT PULLS LARGE KNIFE ON SMUGGLER BOAT BOUND FOR BRITAIN!
Hardelot-Plage, France | 30 October 2026
Extraordinary footage I captured this morning on the French coast.
An illegal migrant attempting to board a smuggler’s boat heading for Britain became embroiled in a furious confrontation with a smuggler already on board.
What happened next was staggering.
The migrant pulled out a large knife, approximately 6 to 7 inches long, and appeared to prepare to stab the man on the boat.
But as he drew his arm back, he DROPPED THE KNIFE INTO THE WATER before he could strike.
And here’s the astonishing part.
Despite everything that had just happened, he subsequently managed to climb aboard the very same boat.
A man pulls a large knife, appears ready to stab someone, loses his weapon and then boards a boat bound for Britain.
All captured on camera.
Watch the footage. Draw your own conclusions.
This man is now most likely in the UK!
sky_trees retweeted
Australia tried a social media ban. It failed because of circumvention - people don't like being censored.
The UK's looming social media ban will also fail for the same reasons. The polls might say one thing, but revealed preferences show users don't want Ofcom's "protection."
Easy libertarian soundbite though this is, tearing down the social media ban and failing to offer an alternative is not only a shortsighted political move (parents overwhelmingly want action and parents are a constituency of millions); it also morally reprehensible.
If we were to tackle the hardware - smartphones rather than content - many of these issues fall away.
sky_trees retweeted
Incredibly worrying. Deeply authoritarian.
Govt should focus on improving its service rather than tracking fair criticism.
NOW — The Home Office has released the list of social media posts its Standards and Compliance Unit observed about Prevent in 2024.
The department disclosed:
• A post of mine criticising a local-council training module that directed staff to report anyone sharing “anti-immigration views” to counter-terrorism police.
• A post from @Con_Tomlinson criticising the Home Office’s RICU unit and the fact Prevent designated Douglas Murray a far-right extremist.
Dozens of other public posts and articles are listed raising the same position, “Prevent training focuses heavily on the far-right while downplaying Islamist extremism.”
This unit, known as “StaCU” - is collecting and logging criticism of Prevent’s training bias.
The original request for this material was refused under national-security and health-and-safety exemptions.
Disclosure only happened after the applicant went to the ICO.
sky_trees retweeted
The author.
‘Manosphere’ should be treated as public health issue: report ctvnews.ca/health/article/ma…
Gave serious thought today about how I might leave this country and live somewhere else - a state in the US that’s pro-freedom and more aligned with my politics and values. The UK just feels like one bad thing after another, as far as political decisions and policies go. I also entertain the fantasy of a number of like-minded Brits feeling the same and us setting up some kind of new community in the US somewhere - I basically consider Americans cousins, given the history of that country.
I am not a high value individual so moving to somewhere like the US is difficult. Maybe with lobbying things may be made easier for someone like me, if others with more influence feel similarly. But it was the most serious reflection on the subject I’ve yet had.
In a world where Hollywood is almost entirely captured, it’s a miracle this series got made before it was too late with Patrick Stewart’s passing. What a gift to Star Trek fans.
Crypto hasn’t fulfilled many of the promises its advocates has made. Not least, mass adoption. It’s just too fiddly and awkward for normal people to use.
However I can see AI integrating with it somehow, and the AI taking care of all the fiddly stuff. So there is still potential.
There's plenty of reasons why Bitcoin may not be a long term bet however the worst one is the idea that quantum computers will kill encryption
I mean think about that for a moment
If you really think this then you believe that the internet, any online account system, email, the entire financial services system and more are all basically going to die
If that's your belief then you should be prepping in a small cabin in the Scottish Highlands not worrying about a crypto currency
😂
In my view, Labour simply sees these people as new voters, and a means to replacing native Brits, whom they hate. They do not particularly care about crimes they may have committed or are likely to commit. Their hatred for native Brits overrides that.
BREAKING
Chaos in the Channel today. Hundreds of migrants crossing.
A lifeboat in Dungeness had 80 illegal migrants on board.
A man boarded a boat in Hardelot wielding a knife, screaming, "I will kill you." He will be in Britain soon.
Does @AndyBurnham care?
sky_trees retweeted
The Online Safety Act (2023) has far exceeded its purpose as a gentle instrument, to prevent child suicides, encouraged in part by online discussion.
Greiving parents' concerns were weaponised to create the swiss-army-knife of platform level censorship & regulation online in Britain; something no voter ever requested; it was foist upon them regardless.
Enacted by doting Tories, fine tuned in its readings by Hope Not Hate and other censorial activists in the charity sector, turbocharged in its enforcement by Labour.
Convicted pedophile and Hope Not Hate organiser Liron Velleman (pictured) was asked to give input on this bill's creation, and obliged by suggesting it should be geared toward targeting political activity on Britain's right. It could not be further from a safety oriented charter if it tried – see hansard, here: hansard.parliament.uk/common…
That America is having to provide conscientious objection to it, on our behalf, is embarrassing.
The OSA (2023) requires nothing less than full repeal.
“Three years after it became law, is the Online Safety Act delivering what Parliament intended?"
That’s the question the House of Lords will be asking itself next week, in a hearing where the Act’s architects will be offered the chance to ask for more powers - more censorship - to fix an Act that they themselves designed.
What Parliament intended was and is for the Act to have extraterritorial effect in the United States.
The Act’s designers were either blissfully unaware of or willfully blind to First Amendment doctrine as they drafted this law that was intended to regulate the United States.
I will watch this hearing. I have very low confidence that Parliament or its advisers will display the necessary self-awareness that the law's design is flawed, and that responsibility for those design flaws rests with them, and not with Americans who are lawfully invoking our Constitution in our defense.
Its designers all believed censorship was the answer when they drafted this monster. They still do.
They will ask for more aggressive censorship powers. Parliament should chart a different course on Internet regulations, and refuse that request.
Censorship will not make a better world. It never has.