Author: 'Slaying Brexit Unicorns' (see link below). Tweets: Brexit, UK politics, and also fun geeky stuff. Expect facts and stats, sarcasm and gallows humour.
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Japan: 193 new covid cases yesterday.
UK: 93,045 new covid cases yesterday.
Japan has nearly twice the UK's population, and a higher population density.
Massive covid outbreaks aren't a given - they're a policy choice.
I've summarised the facts about Harry and Meghan below. There's frankly very little to say about them.
Despite this, The Express managed to publish over 100 articles about the couple over the last 72H, more than 90% negative. Some articles were brutally aggressive and insulting.
Things the BBC News website hasn't reported...
1. The UK's largest tomato producer (650m/year) said part of the supply issue is definitely down to Brexit.
2. The UK's largest turnip grower has given up on growing turnips. Can't get the staff, because of Brexit.
The Daily Mail's industrial levels of hate-mongering aimed at Meghan Markle barely slowed as the nation mourned.
Run your eye down these 15 headlines from the last 48 hours, then consider they only ran one negative piece about Prince Andrew...
It's a sickness. A deep sickness.
The Daily Mail published 65 articles about Harry and Meghan in the last 24H.
For a rag that constantly accuses them of being attention-seeking, it's giving them an unbelievable amount of attention.
By coincidence, it published 0 articles about Michelle Mone during that time.
Here's the truth about Brexit, the "punishment" some people claim the EU wants to inflict on us, the full horrific consequences of no deal, and the dangers lurking behind any deal we reach. Buckle in, it's pretty long. Better to be thorough than to leave anything out. 1/47
More people died of covid in the last 6 hours in the UK than have died since the beginning of the pandemic in New Zealand.
You can come up with a thousand excuses, from population to population density, and it will still show the UK in an abominably poor light.
British P&O workers sacked.
French P&O workers kept their jobs.
Dutch P&O workers kept their jobs.
Why? Different employment laws, probably. Certainly, the French have very strict rules on dismissals.
We had a chance to outlaw fire and rehire last year, but Tories vetoed law.
At approx. 58 billion euro (£50 billion) Spain's full high-speed rail network, all 2,464 miles of it, cost about the same to build as HS2 phase 1.
There's something very, very, very wrong with how we approach large engineering projects.
This is what industrial-scale hatemongering looks like.
All the stories below attacking Meghan (mainly) and Harry (quite a bit) appeared on the Express website within the last 24H.
44 bile-filled rants in just one day. That's a pace of 16,000 attacks a year.
As the dust settles on the Coronation, I've summarised the facts about Harry and Meghan. Frankly there's little to say.
Despite this, the Express published 136 overwhelmingly negative articles about the couple over a 4-day period. Many were brutally aggressive and insulting.
Q: How do you trick the population into believing that asylum seekers are becoming a bigger and bigger issue?
A: Stop processing asylum applications.
Cynical? That's exactly what the Tories did.
The % of asylum applications completed within 6 months fell from 80%+ to ~10%.
We're told there's no money to pay for anything, yet Priti Patel magicked £120,000,000 out of thin air to give to Rwanda without any oversight, and without Parliament having to approve it...
"The UK has stopped accepting visa applications from Ukrainians stuck in the country, meaning there is no safe and legal route for them to seek asylum in Britain unless they have British relatives."
Words are words. Deeds are deeds. Same old Tories.
It's been an utterly abominable 24 hours for Brexit news:
- The UK gave up on negotiations to extend our trade deal with Canada, leaving us worse off than when we were an EU member
- New incoming border checks will add £200 million a year to the cost of…
This is a genuine Leave campaign video from the 2016 referendum.
Notice how absolutely none of the claims it makes have since come true, and in fact they provide a useful shopping list of things that have been made worse by Brexit.
The news about Kate was released 16 hours ago.
Let's take a stroll through all the ways the Express have trolled Meghan and Harry since the announcement was made...
(Long tweet. Please expand. Thanks.)
REMINDER: The ONLY thing Harry and Meghan have done since Kate's bombshell…
Did the story about Boris Johnson's missing incriminating Whatsapp messages just die permanently?
There was a lot of heat and light about it, then Farage sucked a couple of weeks' worth of news cycle into the black hole of his banking woes, and... nothing.
EXACTLY 4 years ago today, the Express mocked the notion that roaming charges for UK travellers to the EU would return after Brexit.
Today, they're bleating that some tourists have clocked up over £1,000 in roaming fees.
Reality: Like a sledgehammer to the head.
THREAD
There's a lot of hate-farming fuss about flags and what some see as the perversion of the original Union Jack.
Much of the fake rage has emanated from the Tory party, which is ironic given how many times they've bastardised it for their own use.
It's been a tree...
1/
I’m proud of our national flag - can everyone leave it alone & keep it just as it is.
British Airways tried to change it many years ago - what a massive mistake that was just as it is now with our British Olympic Association trying to tamper with it.
The Prime Minister of Japan resigned in early October over criticism of his handling of the coronavirus crisis. During his year-long tenure, 16,305 people died.
In the same timeframe, 95,666 people died in the UK.
Japan has nearly twice the population of the UK.
The BBC can't afford to push the Gary Lineker domino for a number of reasons...
1) We know about BBC Chairman Richard Sharp's facilitation of an £800,000 loan to Boris Johnson.
2) They failed to rein in Laura Kuenssberg and Fiona Bruce's biases.
3) It really would be a domino.
It's amazing that the tabloids (and in particular the Daily Mail) have managed to fill an entire week's news cycle with things that Angela Rayner and Keir Starmer didn't do. At the same time, the dozens of real Tory scandals barely got a look in.
Imagine you have £1,000,000 in the bank, and then someone gives you £1.
That's not a £1,000,001 deal just because the amount you end up with is £1,000,001.
It's a £1 deal.
Same level of deceit being perpetrated here. £12 trillion is the combined GDP of all CPTPP members.
The coronavirus ran a bulldozer over the UK economy.
No deal Brexit in 76 days time will reverse a truck back and forth over it a few times until it stops twitching.
Never in the whole of history has any country done something so monumentally stupid *to itself*.
During WW2, countries switched to a wartime footing, producing 100,000s of tanks and planes.
Why couldn't they do a similar thing now, but for solar panels, wind turbines and other renewable energy components?
Make it a patriotic duty to eliminate the need for Russian oil.
Debunking WTO, and what "trading on WTO terms" really means...
As EU members, we participate in over 750 international treaties.
Many relate to trade, enabling us to trade freely with the EU, the EEA, and 40+ other countries. 1/26
Imagine if a referendum were held in which 52% of those who voted declared that the Earth was flat.
And that subsequently everyone in the UK was forced to behave as if the Earth was indeed flat, and all main parties said "Ok, flat it is. Evidence be damned."
That's Brexit.
Woke up with a wild idea racing through my mind: why don't we join the EU?!
Maybe it's nuts, maybe it's a lightbulb moment. Might at least be worth considering.
After all, as EU members, we could expect to enjoy...
1. Unfettered access to the largest trade block in the world
The Mail on Sunday has *2 double page splashes* deflecting blame for the coronavirus onto foreigners and stirring up xenophobia.
Target 1: the EU.
Target 2: China.
The reality is, Boris Johnson bungled this crisis very, very badly. He zigged when the rest of the world zagged.
This is what institutionalised bullying and racism looks like.
50 - yes, fifty - articles attacking Meghan Merkle were published on the Express website yesterday. That's *50* articles in *24* hours.
One headline in particular (highlighted below) deserves special attention.
This is remarkable. Priti Patel is accusing David Lammy of spreading misinformation, using as evidence a link to the official UK Gov webpage that proves him correct.
For Ukrainians in Ukraine without British connections, the normal complex UK visa application regime applies.
The EU made a big mistake around Article 16, but walked it back within hours.
The UK made a big mistake around Article 50, and we will still be paying for it for decades.
£1.6 billion for the barge contract.
40 migrants.
4 nights on board.
Works out at a tidy £10 million per person per night.
That's what you call a real Tory bargain.
Tory Tax Cuts
Year 1: increase taxes
Year 2: increase taxes
Year 3: increase taxes
Year 4: increase taxes
Election year: cut taxes, and make a massive song and dance about doing so
It's all a big con. Over the whole period, taxes are way WAY up.
Brilliant work by Jayne Secker holding the lying Suella Braverman to task.
I loved her breaking down the lie in detail, explaining that if you first take away 20,000 police then add 23,000 police, that's not 20,000 more police (the lie) but 3,000 more.
Here's how the future is going to play out.
(Long - please expand the tweet.)
1. The Tories will wreck everything at an ever increasing pace as the GE approaches, like irresponsible teenagers who know they're not going to be the ones cleaning up the morning after their wild…
Let's be brutally honest: I doubt *anyone* realised the full extent of everything EU membership offered us.
Here are 77 examples of what we lost, and what we might stand to gain if we were to join once more...
1. Full unfettered access to the largest trading bloc in the world.
People get obsessed about the £9 billion a year we pay the EU, as if we get nothing in return. But just because something can't be quantified in pounds and pence, doesn't mean it's worthless!
Our EU membership has given us...
- Longest unbroken period of peace in European history
Here's what I don't get.
All Labour has to do is say they'll shut down on their first day in office all new oil and gas projects that were greenlit between 1 August 2023 and the GE, and no firm will touch the available licences with a barge pole.
It's really that simple.
Grant Shapps had all 4 of his arses handed to him this morning.
Takeaways:
- UK Govt doesn't control oil and gas supply
- Extraction is by foreign firms
- They sell on world markets at world prices
- No impact on UK energy security
- Lies. Waffle. Lies. Waffle. Lies. Waffle.
Jayne Secker ripping Grant Shapps a new one this morning over those oil & gas license fibs 👏👏👏
How refreshing to see someone on sky News challenging government ministers on the lies they spout
I’ve put the best bits together👇
#ToryGaslighting
#Sunackered
THREAD: The Benefits of EU Membership
Let's remind ourselves of some of the things Brexit took from us when we left the EU. (Not an exhaustive list.)
1. No barriers to trade with the world's largest trading bloc. (Bristol, Berlin, Barcelona all equally accessible.)
A couple of steps towards cleaning up Parliament...
a) close all the bars (alcohol can still be purchased with meals in the restaurants, but should be itemised separately and can't be claimed on expenses - pay for your own ******* drinks!)
b) random drug testing and drug sweeps
Who negotiated the NI protocol?
Boris Johnson
Who agreed the NI protocol?
Boris Johnson
Who signed and ratified the NI protocol?
Boris Johnson
Who won a GE on the back of the NI protocol?
Boris Johnson
Who claims the NI protocol is not fit for purpose?
Boris Johnson
A Downing Street spokesperson was boasting again yesterday about our speedy vaccine rollout, claiming that it would have been a disaster under Labour because they would have kept us tied to the European Medicines Agency.
Meanwhile in the real world, away from the propaganda...
Meghan Markle has a sort of reverse Schrödinger's Cat effect on the rabid hate-monger segment of the British press.
They confect offence from both her presence and her absence, from both what she says and what she doesn't say, from both what she does and what she doesn't do.
Why can't the BBC do this every time? This is so, so good!
And it doesn't involve introducing bias or false equivalence. It's merely the application of reality to the discussion,
the equivalent of looking out of the window to check if it's raining or not.
"Renault and Aston Martin backer Geely to launch UK firm injecting £6bn and creating 19,000 jobs"
Gosh, doesn't that sound great? Tory MPs and the RW press have been feasting on the story.
Pity it's not true.
Let's take this step by step...
1/12
"Jacob Rees-Mogg warns Remainers deliberately undermining Brexit as they look to make UK a failure"
He should be sanctioned for economic crimes against Britain, and industrial strength gaslighting.
Here's what Keir Starmer should say (in more polished form):
"The Tories had 9 months to get Brexit done. Instead we have food shortages, crops rotting in fields, the highest energy prices in Europe, gaps on shelves and the hospitality sector on its knees. Brexit isn't working."
It looks like Boris Johnson may have travelled to Poland using the official UK Government jet. If that's the case, why can't he fill it with Ukrainian refugees on the way home?
"Jeremy Hunt offers Jaguar Land Rover £500m to keep factory in UK"
Brexit's going so well, Hunt's having to bung half a billion pounds at JLR to keep production in the UK.
That's half of all the money the government set aside for the entire industry.
David Davis claims Brexit is failing because we ended up with a "Remainers Brexit".
That's like a "vegan beef steak" or a "boiling ice cube".
Remainers didn't want Brexit. And they certainly didn't want to lose the SM, CU, FOM etc.
No, we have an idiot's Brexit.
Imagine sitting down with Gary Lineker to discuss his impartiality, yet having absolutely no issue with anything serial offenders Laura Kuenssberg or Fiona Bruce say.
Actually, you don't have to imagine it. Just switch on the BBC.
"Honours row grows after claim Charlotte Owen ‘worked as maternity cover’
The youngest life peer in UK history at the age of 29, the former assistant to Boris Johnson was covering maternity leave in his office"
This is getting absurb. Worse every day.
Leave won. Its prize: we left the EU.
But the truth is, we *all* lost. And we can't just "get over it".
Here are 91 examples of what Brexit took from us all... and what we could gain if we joined the EU again.
1. Full unfettered access to the largest trading bloc in the world.
ITV spells it out: unlike the EU and the US, UK GDP per head has fallen since 2019.
They endured Covid. So did we. They are impacted by Russia's war on Ukraine. So are we.
etc.
We're all suffering the same problems.
Except Brexit. That's just for us. As are the consequences.
The UK slipped into recession in 2023 but, when it comes to living standards, it’s not the size of the economy that matters, it’s the amount of growth per person.
And, as
@ITVJoel
reports, GDP per Head in the UK has been falling for almost two years.
Brexit is like spending £200 on £1 scratchcards, then bragging about the one that won £20 to everyone, never mentioning all the rest that went straight in the bin.
Live Tory Scandals
- Truss phone hacked (covered up by Johnson)
- Countless Suella Braverman issues
- Sunak snubs COP27 (Johnson going, unsolicited?)
- NI elections, again
- Holiday free school meals programme axed
- Overseas aid spent mainly in the UK
- Quatar gifts to MPs
1/2
Get to Know the Bibby Stockholm...
- 500+ single adult men crammed onto a barge with a capacity of 222 in normal use (e.g. as accommodation for oil workers)
Single rooms:
- 2 strangers, sharing an austere metal bunk bed
- TV (as mocking and useless as a paperweight: they've…
Does anyone have a definitive answer to this question:
What happens after the GE if Labour win? Do they get to see all the contracts that the Tories concealed from the public because of commercial sensitivity, e.g. for the Bibby Stockholm and other barges, or for PPE supply?
A little Friday musing...
I recently had the good fortune to be able to spend a couple of months in Tokyo (a place where I'd previously lived for 15 years).
People talk about Japan's stagnating economy. What few acknowledge (or maybe even realise?) is that it has stagnated at a…
Reminder: Harry came to the Coronation, but said nothing and did nothing. Meghan didn't, and said nothing and did nothing.
136 predominantly negative articles from May 4-7.
62 people contributed to this festival of hate.
Remember their names. Bullies detest the spotlight.
GB News headline: "British expats dealt major blow as France refuses to change 'Brexit punishment' rules"
Honest headline: "France applies exactly the same immigration rules to people from the UK as those applicable to people from other non-EU countries".
If the UK leaves the ECHR, then *people in the UK* lose all the protections listed below.
(Nobody else does, because no other country is leaving!)
It would be a massive act of self-harm, and a huge victory for a government bent on repression and fear.
Here's how the future is going to play out...
(Long - please expand the tweet.)
1. The Tories will wreck things at a faster and faster pace as we get nearer to the next general election.
(Implausible? You haven't been paying attention these last 13 years.)
Why would the…
Absolutely brutal takedown of Brexit. Good to see the BBC wading into the fray at last, now that the damage it's causing is too great to conceal.
(Arguably they should have been on message a *lot* sooner, but better late than never.)
THREAD: Under the new October average energy price cap, someone using both gas and electricity will pay over £300 a year just for the standing charge. That's before consuming a single unit of energy.
A case could be made for the government to step in and pay the SC.
1/5
#bbclaurak
: “The UK’s huge success of the vaccine program is maybe tangentially but probably linked to the fact that we had left the EU at that point”
First time Laura Kuenssberg is seen in weeks and she can’t but help defend Boris Johnson…
#newscast
This is a stunning clip.
Suella Braverman gets tied up like a pretzel trying to explain how an asylum seeker could apply for asylum from the UK despite (according to the Tories) not having any legal route to come to the UK in order to do so...
"The Co-op has pulled its planned Easter television advertising campaign, instead donating the airtime to the national food redistribution charity FareShare."
A brilliant gesture. The charity will benefit from £2.5 million worth of TV advertising. 👏
(h/t Guardian Live blog)
Jacob Rees-Mogg says he's going to church and watching the cricket today, after he was named in a Privileges Committee report as one of the Tory MPs who attacked those investigating Boris Johnson's partygate lies
If you're a Brexiter politician...
... and you have an EU passport...
... then you should shut up about Brexit forever.
Your "Get out of Jail Free card" that most ordinary people don't have disqualifies you from having an opinion.
Please RT if you agree.
Michael Heseltine will vote Lib Dem next week: "I cannot, with a clear conscience, vote for my party when it is myopically focused on forcing through the biggest act of economic self-harm ever undertaken by a democratic government."
What can you do about someone like Dan Wootton?
Calls for Meghan to be banned from attending the Coronation, then attacks her for... not attending the Coronation.
Foul waves of sewage spreading out from Whitby in an ironic buttocks formation...
If we were still in the EU, the UK would have had about a thousand lawsuits brought against it by now on the grounds that we are failing to adhere to minimum water quality standards.
Over the course of their reign of error, the Tories have grown the national debt from £1 trillion to £2.5 trillion.
In the same 13-year period, we have witnessed crumbling schools and hospitals, increasingly leaky water pipes and sewers, and other widespread structural failures.…
Congratulations to the EU. They secured a much better deal with NZ than the UK managed, because it won't put EU farmers at risk.
And NZ gets to join the massive Horizon Europe science collaboration, so there are winners all round.
Today we are signing the 🇪🇺🇳🇿 free trade agreement.
An ambitious, balanced agreement that reflects our shared net-zero goals.
We are already New Zealand's 3rd biggest trade partner.
Now we could increase trade between us by 30%
@chrishipkins