THFC | Rock/Metal/Punk | Snooker | Cricket | All sport, really | Art | Left wing | Atheist | Hedonist Also @skw2009.bsky.social
Joined June 2014
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Simon Webber retweeted
🚨 Braverman’s position on #bbcqt is so extraordinary: she internalises the racist premise that a person of Asian heritage cannot truly be English.
She is prepared to accept racial exclusion for herself, to do herself down and doff her cap to ethnic English nationalism, then uses her own self-exclusion to legitimise the exclusion of millions of others.
England is not a racial category. Black and Asian people born and raised here are no less English than anyone else.
This narrow English nationalism also treats England as the default nation of Britain, reducing Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to subordinate appendages.
The UK must be a partnership of equal nations, not a hierarchy with England at the top.
Simon Webber retweeted
On 7 June 1957, a bus doing 40 miles an hour in Datchet changed the life of a 17 year old boy who wanted nothing else in the world but to play Test cricket for England. Henry Blofeld was cycling to nets that morning. He never really got there, not in the way he had planned it in his head.
He spent 28 days in coma. 17 operations on his skull and face. A cheekbone gone flat, a jaw broken in more than one place. The same boy who had scored 104* at Lord's for Public Schools, who Middlesex were circling, who Arthur Mailey himself sent a telegram to, woke up as someone else entirely.
His cricket was finished. Blofeld tried anyway,Cambridge took him because his family had history there. He made a hundred against MCC at Lord's in 1959, which sounds romantic until you know he called himself the worst opening batsman for either university since the Boer War.
Eventually he stopped trying. That is when he became Blowers. He became a voice instead of a bat. And what a voice it turned out to be!
For 45 years he sat in that TMS box and refused to just call the cricket. He described the red buses passing The Oval. The cakes listeners sent in. The pigeons!
He forgot names, confused Monty Panesar with Monty Python, called Yasir Hamid Yasser Arafat and survived it all because he sounded like a lovely old posh uncle who had wandered in from another century. He said "my dear old thing" because he could not remember your name and made it sound like the warmest thing in the world.
But strip all that away and what is left is a boy who lost the one thing he was truly gifted at on a road in Datchet & then spent 60 years making sure nobody, himself inclyded, ever noticed the loss.
He would drive past that exact spot later with his wife Valeria and laugh about it, telling her she was lucky the driver was paying attention. It tells you about the man who decided long back that if the bus could not finish him off, the memory of it certainly never would.
He never played for England. But he gave lonely people, drivers, housewives, old and bored, the feeling that someone was keeping them company on a long summer afternoon. That was the real job.
Happy birthday Blowers! 87 years old now and somehow still remindind rest of us that a broken jam roll can turn into the sweetest innings of all, if you just keep talking through it.
Simon Webber retweeted
On the tube today I looked around and didn’t see a single white face.
I took my headphones off and didn’t hear a single English accent.
I opened my packet of crisps and didn’t taste a single English ingredient.
I felt around and didn’t touch a single English arse.
I smelled the air and there wasn’t even a hint of good old English Old Spice.
The train was pretty empty and this was in no way a big enough sample to draw any conclusions from but still…and it didn’t actually happen but the point still stands.
Simon Webber retweeted
Since its foundation in 1824 the bravery of Royal National Lifeboat Institution volunteers has saved more than 146,700 lives at sea.
Hundreds of those volunteers have died attempting to save others. They are the best of us.
Any person or organisation questioning their actions or loyalty to this country should be corrected and ostracised.
Anyone can drown, but no one should.
rnli.org/support-us
Simon Webber retweeted
Anti-migrant protesters target RNLI crews in Portsmouth. They hope to gain further public support by now going after Paddington and David Attenborough
Simon Webber retweeted
🚨 The Sunday Times business pages explain what its political pages chose to conceal: the bond sell-off is global.
It was driven by war, oil prices, inflation fears, interest-rate expectations and enormous borrowing by AI corporations, not Britain’s welfare bill.
Using a global shock to demand cuts to pensions and benefits is not market analysis. It is austerity advocacy dressed up as market instruction.
Yet when gilt yields rise, we are told the “markets” demand that British pensioners, disabled people and public services must pay.
Britain’s debt and refinancing costs are serious. But debt at roughly 94% of GDP does not automatically mean “IMF territory”. Britain issues sterling and most of its government debt is denominated in sterling. We have not suddenly run out of pounds.
Indiscriminate austerity would make matters worse. Cutting investment, suppressing growth and weakening tax receipts makes the debt-to-GDP ratio harder 👉not easier, to manage.
“We must impoverish the country because the country is becoming poorer” is not an economic strategy.
Borrowing to conceal failure is dangerous. Borrowing to strengthen energy security, food production, water, transport, housing and industry creates assets, expands productive capacity and reduces our exposure to future shocks.
And Britain cannot achieve credible growth while maintaining trade barriers with its nearest and largest market.
Rejoining the Single Market would support exports, investment and productivity. That is how we strengthen our capacity to manage debt, not by administering more gruel to an already weakened country.
Simon Webber retweeted
Thatcher sold the houses, sold the gas, sold the buses, crushed the pits, cashed North Sea oil like a scratchcard and told Sid he was a capitalist.Sid’s kids rent the old council house back at twice the price, fund a dividend with the standing charge, stand at a stop where the evening service died in 1986, and get patriotism lectures from men who think “British coal” means a mug, not a town she closed and never replaced.Property-owning democracy: one generation got the keys. The next got the landlord, the price cap and a rail replacement bus.She didn’t save the country. She liquidated it, paid herself in right-to-buy folklore, and left the invoice on the doormat. Tell Sid the warranty’s expired.
Simon Webber retweeted
For 37 years, privatised water companies have fleeced customers and poisoned our supply whilst extracting £88bn+ in dividends.
Privatisation is a scam. It is absurd that successive governments have allowed this farce to continue.
Put water into democratic public ownership, now.
Simon Webber retweeted
The University of Cambridge can boast 126 Nobel Prizes. That’s more than any other university in the world except Harvard, and it does it on an endowment that is one twentieth the endowment of Harvard. In the Nobel ranking, Cambridge beats MIT, Chicago, Columbia, Oxford, and Yale (in that order). Cambridge, the university of Newton, Hawking, Russell, Wittgenstein, Moore, Keynes, Crick, Sanger, Kendrew, Perutz, Rutherford, Chadwick, Turing, Maxwell, Brenner, the list goes on and on, Cambridge is beyond question one of the very greatest universities in the world. The list of immense distinction continues to the present day. It is tragic, and deeply unfair, that the reputation of this truly great university should suffer at the hands one unfortunate anomaly, the Department of Education.
Simon Webber retweeted
It's fair to say that @SadiqKhan is probably the single most maligned man in British politics, and I think we all know why. He is Muslim. The extraordinary level of hatred directed at him, including from people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, has nothing to do with his actual record and everything to do with the fact that attacking a Muslim mayor of London fits perfectly into their wider rhetoric. Khan has never attempted to push Islam on anyone. There is no Sharia law operating in London. The idea that London has somehow fallen under Islamic control is complete bullshit.
Meanwhile, his actual record is remarkably strong. ULEZ was an incredibly brave and often unpopular political decision, but it has dramatically reduced harmful air pollution and is improving the health of Londoners from babies to the elderly. Homicide and violent crimes have fallen significantly under this tenure. Council house building has reached levels not seen since the 1970s. The Elizabeth line opened under his administration and has transformed transport across London. None of this means London doesn’t have huge problems, particularly affordability, but pretending Khan has presided over some collapsing dystopia simply isn’t supported by reality.
One policy that particularly matters to me is universal free school meals for London’s state primary school children. I received free school meals myself, and they made a huge difference to my life. For periods of my childhood, it was probably the only decent meal I had each day. Today, 270,000 children benefit from knowing that at least five days a week they are going to get a proper meal.
Khan’s tenure hasn’t been flawless. No political tenure ever is. Things get better, things get worse and politicians should absolutely be criticised when they get things wrong. But the sheer hatred and vilification directed at this man bears absolutely no relationship to his actual record. He has taken years of abuse, including attacks from some of the most powerful people in the world, kept his resolve and carried on doing the job. He deserves far more credit than he gets.
Simon Webber retweeted
These people have no shame.
Nigel Farage — Fee paying — Dulwich College
Richard Tice — Fee paying — Uppingham School
Robert Jenrick — Fee paying — Wolverhampton Grammar School
Danny Kruger — Fee paying — Eton College
Suella Braverman — Fee paying — Heathfield School
Sarah Pochin — Fee paying — Haberdashers’ Monmouth School for Girls
Zia Yusuf — Fee paying — Hampton School
For too long Westminster has run on who you know and what school you went to.
That's how Britain got the rotten political class it has.
Reform is doing it differently.
Our Accelerator Programme is for brilliant, ambitious young people who want to build our future.
Come and join us!
Apply: reformparty.uk/accelerator
Simon Webber retweeted
Top tip: solve even the most complex of problems by simply adding "Problem solved" after any old bollocks.
Simon Webber retweeted
🇺🇸🇺🇸🧐🤔“AND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH…”
Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share.
This Australian’s response to Trump’s rant that “NATO does nothing for America” is absolutely devastating:
“Mate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight.
A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money.
A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive.
A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy.
A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages.
You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth.
More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea.
In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything.
They’re simply too poor to afford bail.
Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening.
Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s.
Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends.
Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years.
Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you.
And now a convicted criminal — found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another disaster.
And you call Greenland badly governed?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world.
Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment.
‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.’
When exactly was that, champ?
September 11?
Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU.
Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU.
Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years.
And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess.
You don’t care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown it a single ounce of sympathy.
So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan.
The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth.
And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?”
Simon Webber retweeted
Sunny uplands. Only 10 days to go.
As farmers sound the alarm about a growing food crisis, experts say that Britain’s food insecurity needs to be treated as a growing national emergency. The warnings are becoming impossible to ignore, writes disaster planner Lucy Easthope
Read more: independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho…
Simon Webber retweeted
Well done The Daily Mail! 👏
Burnham must be held to account for the failures of his regime so far.
His removal of VAT from electricity bills has already come far too late & could’ve been done yesterday.
If he hasn’t solved the cost of living crisis by Friday then he must go!
😡
Simon Webber retweeted
They convinced you that 20 days holiday a year is generous.
That working until you're 67 is normal.
That one full time job just isn't enough to actually live on.
They're making you slaves so they can have 3 castles, 8 yachts and a spaceship.
Simon Webber retweeted
These clowns claim they’re defending Henry Nowak and his family while viciously attacking his own sister for having a mixed-race child, calling her a mudshark race traitor.
You don’t defend a family by racially policing it like some inbred purity cult.
You hate the family.
You just hate brown people more.
Your “concern” is as fake as your non-racist LARP. Fucking idiots. The comment section is all you need to know about these people
Simon Webber retweeted
I find it kind of astonishing that people who were enraged about police officers being attacked at Manchester Airport went to Southampton last night to erm….attack police officers 🤔
