Reform councillor calling the RNLI volunteers people traffickers at Kent County Council. The sooner we vote them out the better. #Reform

In February the account in the screenshots below posted a chart to 400,000+ viewers with three claims: the government “quietly publishes the net fiscal contribution of different ethnic groups”; Whites are “the only group to make an overall fiscal contribution”; and Whites are “paying a big financial cost to create Multiracial Britain”. All three claims are misleading The NW Natur account posts mainly about the falling White British share of births, “non-European” migration and preserving the “historic European” character of the population. Its outlook is far-right ethno-nationalist, and this chart reflects that argument. The government publishes nothing quietly here, and it doesn’t publish these numbers at all. Two days later the account admitted @ONS presents this data as the effect of taxes and welfare on each group’s income, and that he had inverted it himself. The source is Table 23 of an ordinary ONS release, put out openly last September. When someone asked ONS for this exact figure in April, ONS said it would have to be specially created. It is also not an “overall fiscal contribution”. The data covers only the taxes and spending a household survey can assign to households, for one year. It comes from about 4,200 households across the whole UK. The Mixed and Other bars rest on a small share of them, and no margins of error are shown. Too many people find it hard to understand that ethnicity and immigration are different things. The Asian, Black and Mixed bars include millions of people born and raised in Britain. The White bar includes migrants from Europe, America and elsewhere. So the chart can’t tell you the cost of “creating” anything. “Benefits” here includes the #NHS and state schools. A young family with children in school counts as “receiving” thousands a year in education. That money is spent on the next generation of taxpayers. The account anticipates the age objection: the White group is older, and the figures include pensions and the NHS. Fair enough. Age pushes the numbers in both directions. But that’s exactly why the chart can’t tell you what ethnicity does. Each bar blends age, employment, pay and family size, and the groups differ on all of them. In the 2021 Census the median age was 43 for White people, 32 for Asian and Black people, and 19 for people of Mixed ethnicity. Unemployment among people identifying as African, Caribbean, White and Black African, and White and Black Caribbean was just over twice the national rate. Unemployment and low pay mean less tax, whoever you are. The chart takes those differences and labels them by race. And it’s a single-year snapshot. Most people take out more than they pay in at some stage of life, as children, as young parents and in retirement. One year shows where people are in life. It can’t show what they contribute over a lifetime. What the evidence actually shows: ONS’s own figures show that 53.3% of ALL people in the UK live in households that received more than they paid in a single year. Being a “net recipient” is the norm, whatever your ethnicity. Oxford’s Migration Observatory finds that a person’s age, job and earnings are the main factors that decide their fiscal contribution. It also reports that the Office for Budget Responsibility has generally found higher net migration REDUCES deficits and debt in the short to medium term, because migrants tend to be of working age. AND it finds that a migrant arriving at 25 and earning average wages makes a BIGGER lifetime contribution than a British-born worker on the same pay, because Britain didn’t pay for their childhood or schooling. Strip away the colours and the borrowed authority, and the chart shows that households with lower pay, less work and more children pay less tax in a given year. Big fucking deal. That’s a story about income, employment, and life stage. It does NOT show that one ethnic group pays for another, and it says nothing about recent immigration. But that doesn’t stop anonymous far-right accounts (like the one below based in Poland) posting it as though it means something about immigration, ethnicity, or “race”.

It isn’t proper for a national library to be charging for access to spaces that were paid for by the public: also London is overrun by loss making “flexible workspaces”. The BL consultation on its future barely mentions books or access to knowledge. Save @britishlibrary .

The vote for Brexit was advisory. The 2017 notification of withdrawal act also didn’t decide to leave the EU. The PM decided when she sent the letter of notification. The Supreme Court said Parliament had to authorise Article 50 because leaving would change domestic law and remove rights. Parliament passed a one-line Act empowering the PM to notify, but did that amount to the constitutionally valid decision to withdraw required by Article 50(1)? This is an unresolved question: without a valid decision, the withdrawal process should be contestable as unlawful.

Fascinating

timeshighereducation.com/new… This is how the theft and asset-stripping of The British Library (under the banner ‘privatisation’) begins. This must be stopped.

It appears that Donald Trump, alleged POTUS, doesn’t like the word LOSER. Please, whatever you do, try to avoid the totally unwarranted pejorative #LOSER Being attached in any way to this 34 times felon and rapist, just in case it was any some sort of administrative glitch.

Reflected Great White Egret. 😍 Taken yesterday at RSPB Ham Wall in Somerset. 😊🐦

Don't be an arse! Please keep your dogs on a lead when there is wildlife about. 👇

Poundland's private equity owners extracted £18.3m in 17 months, bought for £1. £8.6m interest, £3.8m store closure fees, £2.6m debt arrangement plus other fees. PE has £22.5m secured loan, will get paid first. HMRC owed £97m. Trade creditors owed £127m. news.sky.com/story/revealed-…

These sick pathetic far-right perverts filming and aggressively shouting at young woman are fucked in the head.

My review of this superb collection

We’ve ranked every UK university based on their Scrabble score. NOW UPDATED FOR 2026! ➡️ bantshire.github.io/blog-scr…

Please sign if you haven’t

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Three chilling slogans emblazoned on the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984, capturing one of the novel's most disturbing concepts. Doublethink. The ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept both as true. In Orwell's dystopia, doublethink was far more than simple hypocrisy. It was a fundamental tool of totalitarian control, conditioning people to accept contradictions without question, even when they defied the evidence of their own eyes. Fast forward to Britain in 2026... Just two weeks ago, @UKLabour approved drilling at the Jackdaw gas field. Now @Ed_Miliband tells the world that Britain's international climate leadership is backed by “strong action at home.” MORE FOSSIL FUEL DRILLING IS CLIMATE LEADERSHIP. Doublethink. When governments present policies that perpetuate a crisis as evidence of solving it, they ask the public to disregard the glaring contradiction between their words and actions. Orwell imagined the totalitarian world in 1984, but this isn't fiction. These are real decisions, with real consequences, unfolding before our eyes. And while we look to @reformparty_uk and the @Conservatives on the far right as the warning signs of authoritarianism, maybe we should pay closer attention to what's already being normalised in government today.

Of course he did. Palantir hired Tom Watson to schmooze his old pals. And he did. There is no world in which Palantir helps boost "the UK's tech sovereignty". We need to know exactly how @YvetteCooperMP made this decision, based on what evidence & what data?

Lest we forget. Men & Women from 26 Nations fought & died for our freedom. ALL of them deserve to be remembered. Pic of RAF pilots from the war - Sikh, Muslim and Hindu

RT @SalmaYaqoob: Urge the British Library not to close its reading rooms - which are currently free to the public - and turn them into pri…

Is this a great photo? NO! Am I happy though? YES! 😀 This is a female Hen Harrier, Only the 2nd I've seen in a couple of years. Seen this afternoon at a foggy and grey RSPB Ham Wall.🐦 I love sharing photos of the birds I see, whether they're great photos or not. 😊

Blue Wave Continuing...