FCUM Co-Owner. Left-Wing. Anti-Labour, NOT because I'm on the same side as the Tories, but because THEY are.
South Yorkshire, England.
Joined January 2019
- Tweets23.3K
- Following504
- Followers345
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Red Yorkshire retweeted
The word “deficit”, when referring to government finances, is descriptively correct in accounting terms but rhetorically misleading, because in ordinary English it carries the sense of a shortage, inadequacy or failure. In this context, however, it simply describes a difference between government expenditure and receipts over an accounting period. It does not mean that the government itself is “short” of money.
Compare:
“The government ran a £100bn deficit.”
with:
“The government added £100bn of net sterling financial assets to the non-government sector.”
They describe the same accounting outcome, yet provoke completely different intuitions.
This is not to say that all government deficits produce good economic outcomes. A deficit may contribute to inflation; the composition of spending may be wasteful; or fiscal policy may produce an undesirable distribution of resources. Equally, a deficit may accompany price stability; the composition of spending may promote efficiency and productive capacity; or fiscal policy may produce a desirable distribution of resources.
None of these outcomes necessarily follows from the fact that the government’s accounting balance carries a minus sign. It depends on the economic circumstances, the level and composition of spending and taxation, and the productive limits of the economy.
A government “deficit”, then, identifies a residual accounting balance, not a deficiency in the government’s finances. The mistake is to import the ordinary-language meaning of deficiency into a national-accounting identity.
Red Yorkshire retweeted
Given the latest dialling-up of the “Russian hybrid war” nonsense — now we’re told Russia is making prank calls to create havoc across Europe — you might want to check out my extensive investigation debunking the whole narrative.
In it I show is that many of the most widely publicised cases of supposed Russian “hybrid warfare” — von der Leyen’s jammed plane, the Baltic cable cuts, the DHL crash in Vilnius, the Heathrow fire, the wave of drone sightings that swept Europe in the autumn of 2025, the Romanian TikTok campaign — turned out to be media-amplified speculation that collapsed under basic scrutiny. Yet almost every day, new claims are made — with little or no evidence ever provided.
Ultimately, serious scrutiny of the “Russian hybrid warfare” narrative can only lead to one disquieting conclusion. A “hybrid war” is indeed being waged against Europe — but it is being waged by the EU-NATO establishment itself, against its own population.
Europeans are being subjected to a sustained campaign of cognitive or psychological warfare aimed at conditioning them to believe that Europe is under attack from Russia, and that these hybrid attacks are a prelude to conventional hostilities — a claim for which, by and large, there is little or no proof. What the record points to, in fact, is a deliberate campaign of threat inflation in which governments, media outlets and defence-funded “think tanks” have colluded to instil a permanent sense of fear in the population, through relentless coverage of “incidents”, “attacks”, “sabotages” and “campaigns” that, in most cases, simply do not exist.
Read the article here: thomasfazi.com/p/the-russian…
“Russia wants to destroy the West.”
Matthew Syed of the Sunday Times warns we’re “tilting towards war” because of Russian hybrid warfare efforts in Europe.
#Newsnight
Red Yorkshire retweeted
Chair of the UK government’s Obesity Healthcare Goals programme was paid nearly £80,000 by GLP-1 drug firms bit.ly/4sJMGla. Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be. That’s how it is. Big Pharma always buys those with an influence.
Red Yorkshire retweeted
This is an extraordinary amount of economic confusion to pack into one graphic.
First, Britain does not need another 3.4 million taxpayers to provide the government with sterling. The British state is the sole issuer of sterling. It cannot involuntarily run out of its own currency in the way a household or a business can.
Second, debt interest is not money lost to the British economy. Every pound paid by the Government is a pound received by someone else. Government interest expenditure is income to the holders of government liabilities. The IEA is presenting one side of the accounting while conveniently ignoring the other.
Third, the recent increase in debt interest is substantially a consequence of higher interest rates and inflation indexation. The Bank of England as a matter of policy has increased the remuneration on reserves, consequently maturing government debt is being refinanced at higher yields. To describe all this as the inevitable price of excessive public spending is economically illiterate.
Finally, the comparison with the income tax liabilities of 18 million workers is designed to evoke the household-budget fallacy: the idea that government must first collect sufficient money from taxpayers before it can spend on public services.
It is a powerful political narrative, but a profoundly misleading description of how the monetary system operates.
If debt interest is genuinely your concern, discuss the interest-rate policies that determine much of its cost, who receives the payments, and their economic consequences.
But please stop pretending that Britain is running out of pounds.
Red Yorkshire retweeted
They’re undermining your rights under the cover of things you don’t like (or are afraid to defend). Russel Brand, extreme pornography, rape, child abuse, illegal immigration, “foreign agents”.
Whatever.
Those are means, eroding the right to privacy, right to a fair trial, presumption of innocence, and all other mechanisms designed to protect the individual from the state that have been in place so long now we take them for granted, and assume nothing can take them away.
But they are being taken away, and the people doing the taking are relying on your bias, shame or disgust to let them get away with it.
Red Yorkshire retweeted
Who in this “blue wave” is calling for the US to end the blockade and sanctions regime against Cuba? Who in this “blue wave” is demanding that oil be shipped and allowed into Cuba? Who in this “blue wave” is demanding the release of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores?
Red Yorkshire retweeted
Orwellian: Besides arrests without bail of female medic, ambulance driver & wife of tortured man, Security Service of Ukraine & police identified & investigate 130 protesters, who tried to free tortured men from secret prison of neo-Nazi led Azov corps. 1 female protester is already arrested.
"Police criminal analysts have determined that 27 of them actively participated in illegal activities, while another 24 behaved aggressively, incited society, and deliberately provoked conflicts with law enforcement officers and members of the National Guard of Ukraine. The actions of all active participants will be legally assessed as part of the investigations by the National Police, the Security Service of Ukraine, and the Prosecutor General's Office. This work is ongoing."
Red Yorkshire retweeted
LABOUR ADMITS WATER PRIVATISATION HAS FAILED. ITS SOLUTION? EIGHT MORE COMMITTEES.
You really couldn't make it up.
Our rivers are polluted, households are paying the bills, and the water companies continue to operate for private profit.
Now even Labour's Environment Secretary, Angela Eagle, admits the privatised water system has failed the public.
So what is the government's grand solution?
Eight regional water councils.
Can they fine water companies? Sack failing executives? Force investment into our crumbling infrastructure?
Angela Eagle was asked these very questions on Times Radio.
She couldn't name a single power they would have.
No published legal powers. No confirmed opening date. Not even a clear explanation of what these committees could actually compel a water company to do.
Meanwhile, the companies retain control.
We have spent 37 years watching a natural monopoly run for private profit while the public pays the price.
The problem isn't that ordinary people haven't been given enough opportunities to complain. It's that the people they're complaining to still hold all the power.
And here's what makes Labour's announcement particularly insulting: the government already has a legal mechanism to take control of a failing water company.
So why are we being offered another committee?
You don't put a sticking plaster on a burst sewage pipe and call it repaired.
Our latest Tribune investigation examines what Eagle couldn't explain, what Labour hasn't delivered, and what could actually be done.
Read: @angelaeagle 's Sewage Sticking Plaster.
👇
heartlandstribune.com/region…
# WaterNationalisation #PublicOwnership
Red Yorkshire retweeted
The women who discovered the Azov torture basement near Kiev — Tatiana Kireeva and medic Valentina Molodaya — have now been arrested for “obstructing the work of a military unit.”
The ambulance driver, Viktor Yen, has also been arrested on the same charge.
Red Yorkshire retweeted
Ah Ben! So glad to see you on my feed!
Can you explain what you mean about what you think Zeteo will/is becoming? Do you think Zeteo is antisemitic or insensitive to antisemitism?
As to your post, did you read the article?
To clarify: this is a Jewish journalist interviewing a Jewish attorney, author and academic, Kenneth Stern. Stern is a world-renowned expert on antisemitism. He is Director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, and was, FOR FIFTEEN YEARS, the director of antisemitism, hate studies and extremism for the American Jewish Committee.
He helped draft the Working Definition of antisemitism that became the IHRA Definition. He has repeatedly said it is not fit for purpose and that it has been used (amongst other things) to silence Jews critical of Israel. He is very clear, as someone who plainly cares deeply about antisemitism and is himself Zionist, that it should not be used in schools for this and other reasons.
What makes you think that these two Jewish people are part of some "campaign against changes" to protect Jewish children? Why don't you think it's actually because the IHRA Definition has been repeatedly and loudly opposed by academics, legal experts, civil society groups, and even the UN? Don't you think they might be motivated by genuine concerns about how the adoption of the IHRA Working Definition will undermine rather than help the fight against antisemitism?
On another matter entirely, your post has reminded me that I really need to do that thread about your working history as an advisor to David Lammy and John Healey, which is strangely not reflected on your LinkedIn or any professional bios I can find online - and which is ALSO a useful case study in why you should not trust Google's AI search results, so a learning moment all round!
Red Yorkshire retweeted
🚨 Eric Cantona on the United fan shouting at Omar Berrada and Jason Wilcox as they left the directors’ box:
🗣️ Cantona: “The fan was right to shout.
Security had to get involved. Of course they did.
Because that is what happens when the people who run the club forget who the club actually belongs to.
Berrada and Wilcox walk out of the directors’ box and a supporter has had enough. He says what he has been thinking for a long time. And suddenly it is a problem that needs security.
The problem is not the fan. The problem is the people who have been making the decisions that led to him shouting in the first place.
This club used to have standards. It used to have people who understood what it meant to wear the shirt. Who understood that the fans were not just customers. They were the reason the place existed.
Now the people upstairs make their choices. They spend the money. They pick the direction. And when it goes wrong, they walk past the anger like it has nothing to do with them.
That fan was not out of control. He was saying what a lot of people have been thinking. And he was saying it to the people who are supposed to be responsible for it.
You cannot keep taking the support and then act surprised when someone finally decides they have had enough. You cannot keep failing and then expect silence when you leave the ground.
The security staff did their job. But the people who needed to hear that message were the ones walking past it.
And until they start listening, there will be more fans who decide they have waited long enough.”
Red Yorkshire retweeted
Orwellian: Security Service of Ukraine arrested & charged female medic & two others, who uncovered illegal secret prison of neo-Nazi-led Azov corps & evacuated 4 tortured detainees for medical treatment. They face up to 8 years in prison for "obstructing lawful activities of Ukrainian Armed Forces" & "unauthorized dissemination of information regarding movement, displacement, or deployment of Ukrainian Armed Forces." Court denied bail to female medic and sanctioned her arrest.
Red Yorkshire retweeted
I go back, again and again, to Asa Winstanley’s book and his reference to the investigation by the Media Reform Coalition and Birkbeck, University of London that concluded that:
‘the Guardian’s coverage on the issue amounted to a “disinformation paradigm.” In an in-depth study of 259 newspaper articles and TV news segments on “Labour anti-Semitism” from 2018, researchers found 90 clear cut examples of misleading or entirely inaccurate reporting. They also found an overwhelming source imbalance, especially on television news, with those critical of Labour given “a virtually exclusive and unchallenged platform to air their views.”’ Page 262
In layman’s terms that “disinformation paradigm” was a continuing and consistent pack of lies in the Guardian.
It was the most sickening onslaught against a British mainstream political leader ever waged by the media establishment. Fuelled in part by a cadre of Labour/Blairite client journalists - at the Guardian and BBC especially.
@BBCNews @BBCNewsnight @itvnews @GMB @Channel4News @SkyNews @bbclaurak @jonsnowC4 @guardian @thetimes @dailytelegraph @PippaCrerar @Freedland @pollytoynbee @AsaWinstanley @BirkbeckUoL @mediareformUK
Red Yorkshire retweeted
No, that's just how money is created. When the Tory govt conjured up nearly half a trillion pounds out of thin air for Covid, the sky didn't fall in, did it? What govts actually need to focus on is the availability of real resources in the economy. That's what limits govt spending.
Red Yorkshire retweeted
Wow! Hiding in plain sight.
Ukraine is home to some of the world's largest known mineral resources.
These resources could play a vital role in the EU's digital and green transitions while also enhancing Europe's strategic autonomy and industrial resilience.
More ➡️ link.europa.eu/cp6hdM
ALT A landscape of terraced piles of rock and earth, with an orange excavator loading a lorry in an open-pit mine. The text on the visual reads 'Ukraine: a land rich in natural resources'.
Red Yorkshire retweeted
Thank God for capitalism. We can invade poor countries, steal their resources, poison their rivers, pay their workers $2 a day, and ship the profits back to billionaires who call themselves wealth creators.
Thank fuck I'm not living under communism.
Red Yorkshire retweeted
The woman who exposed a secret Azov detention facility in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka near Kyiv yesterday — where mobilized men and deserters were reportedly beaten and held against their will — has now been arrested.
And right on cue, the entire pro-government media machine and its army of bloggers have sprung into action.
Their target?
The woman who exposed it.
They're working overtime to paint her as a paid Kremlin agent and a provocateur.
Meanwhile, the questions that actually matter have conveniently vanished from the headlines.
Why were the men held inside that civilian building covered in bruises?
Why were they denied medical care?
Why did groups of violent thugs, mobilized by Azov, descend on protesters to the sound of the OUN march, attacking people indiscriminately — including journalists?
And why hasn't a single one of those attackers been arrested yet?
Instead, all the attention is now focused on the woman who brought to light a secret detention site where men's fundamental rights appear to have been violated.
How incredibly convenient.
This is the "beacon of freedom and democracy" that Brussels is backing and financing.
