Here is my new paper for the Great British Business Council on the importance of oil, gas and coal to the UK economy. The UK’s industrial decline is not inevitable, but the result of decades of deliberate policy choices that have undermined domestic energy production and driven manufacturing offshore. Lowering UK employment and tax revenues, while increasing the UK trade deficit. The paper also includes a plan to reverse this. gbbc.uk/uk-deindustrialisati…

More than half a million balsa trees are illegally logged in the Amazon each year, largely driven by the demand for wind turbine blades. As plantation supply runs short, logging has moved into protected rainforest and indigenous territories. Roads are cut into intact jungle, habitats are fragmented, and local ecosystems are disrupted. Balsa is lightweight and essential for turbine construction. Demand has surged due to the West's environmental push, but the supply chain is largely untracked at source. The result is an ignored cost: so-called "green" energy, cut down and shipped.

You can see the exact moment when the Lib Dem realises his case for rejoining the EU customs union has been comprehensively demolished by @afneil #bbcqt

Why are they so desperate to make the 🏝️Chagos deal, at any cost? Who benefits from the deal? Mauritius gets £billions from the UK leasing Diego Garcia. Mauritius hopes to earn far more by mining the mineral resources on the seabed of the France-sized Chagos marine zone. The British lawyers 👨‍⚖️ who worked on Project Chagos got £millions and could make many £millions more if the deal goes through. 🇨🇳China, 🇮🇳India, and others could benefit massively from fishing the currently protected marine zone, and mining the rare earth elements REEs and minerals thought to be worth trillions on the Chagos Archipelago's seabed. China and India will significantly increase their military and commercial leverage in a region vital to Western Security. The deal is being sold as securing the strategically important joint UK/US 🪖military base on Diego Garcia. The deal does🚨NOT secure the base. It does the opposite. The deal operationally hobbles the base, and increases the dangers to the British and American military personnel, and the civilians who work there, and in the wider Central Indian Ocean region. Diego Garcia's remoteness made it easy to defend in the past. This deal leaves the base horribly vulnerable to the growing threats posed by the new longer-range missiles, and more sophisticated and lethal drones. When Keir Starmer, Lord Hermer and Vijay Rangarajan, the Director General at the FCDO negotiated the deal, it was fully understood that the outer islands of the Chagos Archipelago were by far the best locations to deploy early warning, and air-defense systems, to protect the main base from missile and drone attacks. Yet, inexplicitly and recklessly they decided to only lease Diego Garcia. And¥ Burnham, the droves of civil servants in both Number 10s, and all the Labour MPs know the rotten and deceptive Chagos deal increases the dangers to the lives of the British service personnel, and our NATO allies personnel, in the strategically important Central Indian Ocean region. To double down and keep pushing the deal with that knowledge is utterly shameful. Mauritius will control the France-sized airspace above the Chagos Archipelago if the deal goes through. In April this year, Mauritius denied the Taiwanese president's plane permission to fly in its airspace enroute to Africa at China's request. Mauritius being a signatory of the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty, together with several clauses in the Chagos deal, significantly limit and impact military operations on Diego Garcia. Then there's the bewildering betrayal of the Chagossian people who overwhelmingly wish their homeland to remain British. Is self-determination for the Chagossians the hidden threat to who owns the rights to the potentially vast mineral wealth in the Chagos Archipelago's seabed the reason for the desperation to make the deal with Mauritius? Have promises been made to certain countries or to other 🕵️entities with great power that can't be broken without the most serious of☠️consequences? Why are they so desperate to make the Chagos deal, at any cost, and who benefits?

There’s definitely something we don’t know about going on with this 👇🏼…. Make it make sense

I am absolutely fed up about the Chagos Betrayal. It is time that the @NCA_UK investigate this.

Do yourself a favour & read One News Australia. It has nailed the hypocrisy of @AlboMP & his pontification to an almost empty room at the UN

UK direct Brexit fiscal savings from avoided EU budget contributions total £525Bn net present value, discounted to January 26, built entirely on official Treasury and Commission data. Briefings for Britain, 03/07/2

Andrew Neil’s Brexit reality check on BBC Question Time. In a nutshell: Rejoiners are ignoring the huge political wind of change sweeping Europe and the UK v Germany/ France/ Italy growth rates make a nonsense of their Mickey Mouse economic arguments too. #bbcqt

Andrew Neil gives the Rejoin EU fantasists a dose of reality they rarely get on Question Time. The argument is still being conducted as though Britain left the Europe of 2016 and can simply climb back aboard the same train. Neil’s point is devastatingly simple: that Europe no longer exists. The political balance has shifted, its biggest economies are struggling, and rejoining the single market or customs union comes with obligations and costs that are too often waved away by those selling Brexit reversal as free money. He also reminds Remainers of something they prefer to forget. There were serious economic arguments for staying in the EU in 2016, but the official campaign squandered them with a relentlessly negative campaign and then spent years raging at the electorate for delivering the wrong answer. You cannot rerun 2016 in 2026 and pretend nothing changed. The #EU is rapidly becoming a goose step away from 1933... #Rejoin #Brexit

Dame Emma Thompson is President of a charity that received £1,194,240 from taxpayers between 2021-25 It campaigns for asylum seekers

“He’s a Prince fan, ‘cos he is still dancing like it’s 1999.” Lord Glasman, Brexiteer and founder of Blue Labour, rejects Sir Tony Blair’s call to revisit the UK’s relations with the EU, and tells #Newsnight “what we have to do is strengthen our sovereignty… and take the opportunities that Brexit has opened up.”

🔥 How to destroy farming UK… ▪️Government encourages farmers to take land out of production and manage it for nature. Meaning they lose profit from crops. ▪️Then government cuts some of the promised payments, caps agreements and opens a £253 MILLION SFI funding pot. ▪️12,200 farmers apply but it was gone in 5 hours 48 minutes, leaving thousands of farmers unable to plug the profit gab, with many close to bankruptcy. Which is so handy for the global corporates looking for more land and the renewable energy companies isn’t it? What an utterly ridiculous way to run British farming. Unless that’s the plan 🔥

Today the PM of Mauritius confirmed to his Cabinet that Andy Burnham reaffirmed Labour's commitment to surrender the Chagos Islands and pay Mauritius billions to do so. He also confirmed that the National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell - a man who operates in secret and with no public accountability - is meeting him shortly. We need Labour to come clean on what these negotiations will cover, if Labour will be paying Mauritius while President Trump objects, and what their plan is. The best thing to do is tear up the surrender treaty, but white flag waving Burnham won't do this.

Labour MP and UK Business and Trade Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, on BBC Question Time last night: "The deal we had [with the EU] has gone. We're never gonna get what we had before with our own currency and being outside Schengen" So Labour admit that rejoin is not possible.

🚨 Your tax money funds $11 BILLION in welfare benefits for citizens of OTHER COUNTRIES! A family can make $100,000 a year in benefits, paid for by hard working Californians earning less! Enough is Enough. I will shut down this scam and use the savings to cut your taxes: $150k Tax Free. Bombshell report from @christopherrufo below 👇

Asylum support is too low, says the Helen Bamber Foundation, which received £1,194,240 from taxpayers between 2021-25. I have calculated over £312 million in taxpayer funding towards 44 asylum and migration charities, and haven’t even added this one in yet.

The pro-EU mainstream press in the UK have yet again demonstrated today why they cannot be trusted. Their headlines: "Blair says UK should rejoin EU" What was actually said: "The UK shouldn't rejoin the EU as it is, and should only consider it if the EU changes significantly"

$3.20 in Detroit. $3.25 in Houston. $5.68 back in California — and we actually have the oil. The Sacramento machine (Becerra included) taxes and regulates working families into the ground while other states without our reserves pay half. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH ☀️👊

Just an update to highlight that since @UKLabour came to power, 6 and a half divisions worth of fighting age men have completed amphibious operations against our coast. That's more divisions than were in the Allied assault wave on D-Day.

A Muslim man in a balaclava holding & throwing a brick during 2024 riots… SUSPENDED SENTENCE A white man, threw a plastic bottle & swore at police during a recent protest… TWO YEARS IN PRISON Two Tier Britain 🇬🇧