Sad to hear the head of the submarine service repeat the tired old crap about them being considered “un-English” when the man who allegedly said it was actually responsible for building the bloody things.

Every single privatised industry that was once publicly owned greatly improved under privatisation. The hankering for public ownership as some form of remedy to the countries ills is pure fantasy.

I hand it to PM Burnham. He's sold his bill of goods to the media hook, line & sinker. That takes some doing! I've been left behind. I thought we were living in a real financial crisis & the Government seems to be saying - "After you, Marmaduke; not my problem!" Manyana, Manyana!

I must have missed the part of Burnham’s speech where he explained how he was going to grow the economy and pay down the country’s crippling debt. Why are people so easily pleased? Energy price cap goes up 24% in January. People are going to be broke and poor. Hope Again?

Reform & the Tories *say* how terribly high spending is & how urgent nay desperate it is that spending be cut, but then when spending cuts are announced they're suddenly all "Not like that!" Everyone's cuts plans barely scratch the surface. We need all of them & much much more.

I don't think they actually want to do that. Every single warship, every single AFV, every single jet the Armed Forces are getting / have in the pipeline were ordered by the Tories. Labour so far have ordered a few drones (CORVUS is half the number of WATCHKEEPERs it replaces), the BOXER RCH155s, the New Medium Helicopter and balanced it all with heavy cuts, including going this entire Parliament with 0 new fast jet orders; withdrawal for the SHADOW R1 fleet in the coming months; cancelling BOXER Batch 2 and multiple naval project (Type 32, Type 83, MRSS with reduction from 6 to 4 hulls which also happen to be smaller; 2nd MROSS hull); CHINOOK reductions (although intended to be in theory "temporary") and the Army's whole WILDCAT fleet withdrawn from next year. It's really not a pretty picture if you actually know what you are talking about. Wes, as a matter of fact, does not.

good article from @TomSharpe134 on the Russian threat to NATO's subsea cables in the North Atlantic. uk.news.yahoo.com/putin-may-…

Far from our considering paying reparations, we should, as this good article suggests, remind the World how good they had it when the @RoyalNavy made global SLOCS essentially free. We assumed geography was history — now it’s choking us thetimes.com/article/f349444…

Good point from Greg. And it wasn’t for lack of invites.

Why do the FCO and its outriders act as if an advisory ICJ opinion, which placed no legal obligation on the UK and didn’t award sovereignty of the Chagos to Mauritius, is binding? policyexchange.org.uk/wp-con…

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said: “I have never seen killing and destruction like Gaza in all my years as Secretary-General.” According to even the most critical reports, Guterres, 70,000 people were killed in the war in Gaza, a large proportion of them Hamas terrorists. During your years as Secretary-General: more than 600,000 people were massacred or starved to death in Ethiopia. 377,000 died in Yemen — that figure appears in reports issued by your own organization. 150,000 were killed in Sudan and 12 million were displaced. Hundreds of thousands have been buried in Ukraine. You didn’t see it? They died before your eyes. You simply looked the other way, because the Jews couldn’t be blamed.

The rest of the G20 should boycott anything attended by this war criminal. Responsible for over 1m deaths in Ukraine.

New: Lawfare “persecutions” have led to the biggest exodus from the SAS in its history and pushed it to the point of existential crisis - two prominent veterans tell The General and The Journalist podcast thetimes.com/uk/defence/arti…

Two of the biggest wastes of political energy in recent history are this nonsense Chagos bill and the Assisted Suicide bill. Both a huge waste of time and money, and neither were things the public asked for. Which about sums up British politics.

Its that time of year (every year) to talk about this image which does the rounds on Linkedin about once a week. What is it ? Well the image itself, is something which is inferred was drawn by the statistician Abraham Wald. But in fact its something someone drew at some point in MS Paint or something, to talk about "survivor bias". THE INTERNET wrote of this image and Walds work: "The US military’s conclusion was simple: the wings and tail are obviously vulnerable to receiving bullets. We need to increase armour to these areas. Wald stepped in. His conclusion was surprising: don’t armour the wings and tail. Armour the engine." The trouble, is this is all basically nonsense. Wald published his early work in 1943, the conclusions after 100 pages of equiations, are not exactly staggeringly profound: =========================== "This analysis of the hypothetical data would lead to the conclusion that the plane is most vulnerable to a hit on the engine area if the type of bullet is not specified, and is most vulnerable to a hit by a 20-mm cannon shell if the part hit is not specified. The greatest probability of being destroyed is .534, and occurs when a plane is hit by a 20-mm cannon shell on the engine area. The next most vulnerable event is a hit by a 7.9-mm machine gun bullet on the cockpit. These, and other conclusions that can be made from the table of vulnerabilities derived by the method of analysis of part VIII, can be used as guides for locating protective armor and can be used to make a prediction of the estimated loss of a future mission." =============================== Aircraft are extremely weight sensetive, and by 1943, all aircraft designers the world over already knew perfectly well which part of an aircraft to armour. They put armour on the pilots cabin and the engine systems. You cant put any where else as then the plane becomes so heavy its useless and so slow its probability of being shot down skyrockets as its performance goes down. All Allied aircraft followed this doctrine from early on in WW2. There was never an attempt by aircraft constructors to put armor all over tails, and wingtips. USAAF aircraft were also about as heavily armoured as they could be, this is (along with defensive armament) the main reason why a B-17 has so much less bombload capability than a British Lancaster, the British believed that fewer bombers meant the best tactical results and so the Lancaster had a lot less armour and armament than a B-17. This was offset by its massive bombcarrying capability. So what WAS Abraham Walds work ? What it really comes down to is the first major attempt to define a statistical probability based estimate of the proportions of a batch of aircraft on a mission which would be likely to be shot down, based on data gathered experimentally. Although Wald did state (see quote above) that it could also guide armor placement, this aspect of his work was already perfectly obvious to anyone who made aeroplanes and was already in effect being followed to the letter. So yes, Abraham Wald was a clever statistician, whose work is likely important piece of early matematical history to anyone studying the topic at University today, but NO - none of this resulted in aircraft manufacturers in WW2 changing the position of any armour plate, because everything of critical value which could be armoured, already was.

CITYAM - Nationalise Thames Water and block private rescue deal, MPs tell Burnham - Gentlemen of the lower House, there must be many of you, with some financial savvy must know - My comment - WE CANNOT AFFORD TO NATIONALISE WATER IN OUR CURRENT FINANCIAL PLIGHT!

This whole argument has been debunked by the brilliant @jburnmurdoch: the UK tax wedge is the largest in the world. Whilst Switzerland raises 2% of GDP in the form of taxes on wealth, the UK raises 3.7% of GDP. This 1% proposal would take the UK to more than twice the level of Switzerland. Fiscal arbitrage on assets is a thing.

Why has a company that only has net assets of £62,733 donated £150,000 to @AngelaRayner between December 2025 and March 2026? The company has no employees, and one director Paul Edward Jordon. It stinks.

Paul Nowak has “confirmed that [he has] not engaged in any party political activity in the last five years” before joining the Bank of England’s Court of Directors. In other news, here's Paul Nowak's identical twin brother, also called Paul, writing for Labour List... 🤔 labourlist.org/2026/07/howin…

A Labour peer and former minister has started waging war on the number of government amendments to bills approved "on the nod". Lord Rooker has twice in a fortnight demanded a list of amendments to legislation without any debate or vote in the Commons. He did it earlier this month on the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, and again last night on the Representation of the People Bill. On the latter, he pointed out "15 new clauses and six schedules occupying 72 columns of Commons Hansard were approved on the nod — no debate, no speech, no vote". Rooker sums up what he says is a growing issue with a lack of scrutiny by the Commons: "We cannot identify in the Bill the part that we are not revising but scrutinising for the first time because nobody else has scrutinised it. "We are being taken for Charlies, as it were, because we get the blame later on... "More bills are being pushed through, and we are now ending up with unscrutinised legislation, and that is not good legislation."