Hasbeen BBC, C5 and ITV reporter, now director of @baby_pendo making little trains, and, yes, hearing the drums since 1976. https://xitter.cf/t.co/DaK5cYiIRy
Cambridgeshire and London
Joined February 2009
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Ben Ando retweeted
Britain isn't broken 🇬🇧
Imagine if this had been achieved by a Reform UK government: Farage, Tice, Jenrick, Yusuf and the rest of them would be screaming these FACTS from the rooftops and they'd be extensively covered in every billionaire-funded news outlet:
✅ The UK economy GREW 0.7% between July and September, the fastest growth in two and a half years
✅ The services sector GREW 0.9% over the same three months
✅ The number of people crossing the Channel in small boats is DOWN 39% on last year so far
✅ The rolling 12-month total of small boat arrivals is at its LOWEST since late 2021
✅ The initial asylum backlog is at its LOWEST since 2019
✅ Asylum claims FELL 21% in the year to June
✅ The number of asylum seekers in hotels HALVED in a year
✅ Net migration FELL to 171,000 in 2025, down from a peak of 944,000
✅ The OBR expects net migration to fall to around 120,000 this year, the LOWEST outside the pandemic since 1997
✅ In England and Wales, violence is 79% BELOW its mid-1990s peak
✅ Homicides are DOWN on last year
✅ Knife crime is DOWN 6% on last year
✅ Firearms offences are DOWN 8%, to their LOWEST since 2015
Ben Ando retweeted
Now would be a good time to remind everyone of these Trump facts, because apparently some people still need the refresher.
Please meet the President of the United States:
Flew on Epstein’s plane at least seven times. Just friends, I guess.
Pleaded the Fifth more than 400 times in a single deposition. Nothing says “innocent” like refusing to answer a single question about your own business.
34 felony convictions. A record most people would call disqualifying. And 91 criminal charges.
Accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least 26 women. But sure, tell me again how he’s a great guy.
6 corporate bankruptcies. The self proclaimed greatest businessman alive somehow keeps running out of money.
5 draft deferments. Funny how the toughest guy in the room never actually showed up for duty.
4 criminal indictments. Not two. Not three. Four.
2 impeachments. A club of exactly one president.
2 of his own companies convicted of criminal tax fraud. Convicted. Not accused. Convicted.
1 fake university shut down. 1 fake charity shut down.
Even his charity was a grift.
Paid 25 million dollars to settle the Trump University fraud lawsuit because scamming people who believed in you costs money eventually.
Ordered to pay 5 million dollars in the first E Jean Carroll sexual abuse verdict, then hit with 83.3 million more in the second.
A jury said it twice so nobody could pretend it was a fluke.
Ordered to pay 2 million dollars for looting his own so called charity.
Stealing from a charity with his own name on it.
Found liable for business fraud and originally slapped with a penalty topping 450 million dollars, later thrown out on appeal while the fraud finding itself stuck to him anyway.
First president in modern history to increase the deficit every single year of a full term. Fiscal responsibility, apparently, was always just a talking point.
Kept the debt to GDP ratio above 100 percent for his entire first term.
Presided over the largest single day point drop in Dow Jones history at the time. So much for the guy who claimed to be a genius with money.
Set the record for the longest government shutdown in US history in his first term at 35 days, then couldn’t resist beating his own miserable record in his second term with a 43 day shutdown, followed by yet another shutdown just months later. Encore nobody asked for.
Added roughly 2.25 trillion dollars to the national debt in his first year back in office alone, pushing the debt past 39 trillion dollars.
Somebody remind me who the party of fiscal discipline is again.
Pushed through the largest defense budget increase since World War Two while the debt kept climbing anyway.
Purged more than 300,000 federal employees in his first year back.
Efficient, if your goal is chaos.
Pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6 Capitol rioters.
At least 40 of those pardoned rioters have already been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for new crimes since walking free. Shocking absolutely nobody.
His family’s crypto ventures, including a meme coin and World Liberty Financial, pulled in more than 1.4 billion dollars in disclosed earnings while he sat in the Oval Office.
Draining the swamp was apparently code for filling his own pockets.
Sent the National Guard into American cities at a cost of nearly 500 million taxpayer dollars in 2025 alone.
His own tariffs are projected to cost the average American household more than 2,500 dollars this year.
You’re paying for this. Not China. You.
No more foreign wars. Peace deal with Russia and Ukraine on Day One.
None of this is a conspiracy theory, a rumor, or something you saw in a group chat.
It is the actual, documented record, sitting in plain sight for anyone willing to look.
So the next time someone tells you to relax and give him a chance, ask them how many more indictments, judgments, and shutdown records he needs to rack up before that chance runs out.
Credit: Charles Curtis Rone
Ben Ando retweeted
Well after today’s announcement from the Bank of England, there is something very, very, very wrong in the system.
So … let me get this straight:
* British Gas made a profit of £1.3bn between January & June
* BP announced profits of £6.95 billion between April and June alone
* Shell has profited by £9.4bn in a year
The MEN at the top:
* John Pettigrew, boss of National Grid received £6.5m bonus on top of his salary
* Chris O’Shea, chief executive of British Gas owner Centrica was paid almost £2m last year in salary and benefits
* Centrica's non-executive directors were paid almost £1m
* Scottish Power's CEO Keith Anderson is on £1.15m.
* E.On boss Michael Lewis is on £1m
* EDF's Simone Rossi is also on £1m
* And their top execs enjoyed a share of £4.65m
* Peter Simpson of Anglian Water earned a £1.3m pay package
* Welsh Water bosses awarded themselves bonuses of over £930,000
* Severn Trent bosses awarded themselves bonuses of £5.56m
* Thames Water's Sarah Bentley, received a £727,000 bonus on top of her £2m annual salary
Meanwhile there are...
* People who haven't had breakfast and/or lunch TODAY, because they can't afford it.
* People using FoodBanks because food is becoming more of a luxury than a necessity.
* Children celebrating a birthday without presents.
* Parents worrying about new school uniforms - and some schools enforcing rules which are not cost-effective.
* People who can't get to work because they can't afford to put petrol in their cars/pay for public transport anymore.
* People who are working so much they're making themselves ill, and they STILL CAN'T AFFORD to pay their bills.
* People who have been given fines by these same energy/water companies because they couldn't afford to pay their bills in the first place - increasing their debt.
* Customers being told to do STAR JUMPS TO KEEP WARM for crying out loud!
* Hose pipe bans when gallons of water leak away everyday.
* Elderly people NOT DRINKING because they're worried about running out of water!!!
All this and energy prices are set to rise up to 75% in October...
THIS IS MADNESS!.. I'm all for supporting profits … I'm not for supporting greed at the cost of lives of others.
Something needs to change.
Why is customers' money being used to make life more comfortable for those who are making life more intolerable for the rest of us?
I actually don't understand how the energy companies are allowed to get away with this and why the government aren't stopping them instead of handing out money.....
Ben Ando retweeted
BREAKING: Donald Trump is reportedly furious with Zelenskyy because his Truth Social app is now "ruined" without all the Russian bots spamming endless AI videos of him as a superhero or Jesus, and his app now just shows real people complaining about how everything sucks.
Yes. I thought the way Sir Keir was jettisoned was a disgrace, but I’m loving what Burnham is doing.
Ben Ando retweeted
While the police and security services are working tirelessly here in Gloucestershire, to discover the source of this possible terror attack, Reform UK and the cult are resorting to their usual tactics.
Undermining the police.
Here's a little thought experiment for you on Monday morning.
Imagine Reform were in government when this happened. Imagine Farage as PM and Zia Yusuf as Home Secretary [stop laughing].
What would be their immediate response? Would Yusuf be hosting a CBRA meeting and then divulging EVERY detail to the public, as they're calling for today?
No, of course he wouldn't because it would severely hamper the investigation and the security services would immediately stop briefing them. They'd be frozen out of the loop.
When Farage and Tice post these calls that the public should know more, it shows how entirely unsuitable they are for any position of power.
These calls are nothing more than desperate attention seeking cries from failed populists.
Reform UK in a nutshell.
Ben Ando retweeted
Shut up 😂, you’ve had to rewrite Burnham’s words to manufacture the outrage. 🤡
He didn’t say Brexit caused migration. He said the loss of European cooperation after Brexit “hasn’t helped.”
And that part is simply factual: when the UK left the EU it also left Dublin III, which had provided a formal mechanism for transferring some asylum seekers back to other participating European states.
Italy, Spain and Greece having migration problems doesn’t rebut that point. They’re dealing with migration while still having EU cooperation mechanisms. Meanwhile Britain has had to construct new bilateral arrangements with France, including the current £662m three-year cooperation package.
So “Brexit reduced our ability to cooperate on returns” somehow becomes “BREXIT CAUSED THE INVASION!” because the actual argument isn’t nearly hysterical enough for the engagement farming.
Get back to closing those nurseries.
🛎️🔚
Ben Ando retweeted
We shouldn’t be afraid, as a nation, to agree across the left, right and centre, that the UK needs to further address immigration.
I don’t believe anyone should have an automatic right to come to Britain simply because they want to improve their life. In an ideal world, perhaps they would. But while we have British families struggling to put food on the table, people living below the poverty line and people without homes, I completely understand why immigration is such a contentious issue.
But here’s the part that those who hang almost everything on immigration conveniently ignore:
Migrants, whether legal migrants, illegal migrants or asylum seekers, ARE NOT the fundamental reason British-born people are struggling.
The far bigger issue is how wealth and resources are distributed.
Britain is an enormously wealthy country. Yet vast amounts of that wealth are concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of extraordinarily rich people.
And this is where the whole debate becomes almost absurd.
Take Sir Paul Marshall, the billionaire hedge-fund manager and co-owner of GB News. He has been estimated to be worth around £875 million, while the hedge fund he chairs has billions invested in fossil-fuel companies. He has enough personal wealth to feed over 140,000 British families for a year.
It doesn't take much common sense to explain why he is using GB News to convince ordinary British people that immigration is at the heart of what has gone wrong with their country, rather than wealth inequality.
Then look at Reform. Two crypto billionaires have just poured a combined £72 MILLION into the party. Reform pose as the solution to the immigration issue that they push down our throats 24/7, whilst their most substantive policies are focussed on reducing taxes on crypto and for the ultra-rich.
You could completely eliminate illegal immigration tomorrow and Britain would still have food banks. We would still have a housing crisis. People would still struggle with their energy bills. We would still have enormous wealth inequality.
None of the national conversation right now allows us to take any attention away from immigration - that is deliberate, and £100s of millions has been invested to ensure immigration is all we talk about.
If we continue down this road, sure, we might vote in a party like Reform, immigration might be eliminated, but nothing will be solved, and it will likely get a whole lot worse for working families.
Ben Ando retweeted
So let’s get this right Hegseth. You and your boss start a war against Iran without even informing never mind consulting your European allies, during which Iran seizes the Strait of Hormuz — which you’re now struggling to wrest back. And now you say it’s Europe’s fight rather than America’s.
No. You broke it. You fix it.
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Ben Ando retweeted
Peter Oborne, one of the wisest observers of UK politics, says 'Reform is not a political party, it's a business organisation funded by the super rich.' He's right.
Ben Ando retweeted
As each day passes it becomes more and more obvious Thatcher created immense damage to this country with her enabling of greed and privatisation. They are wrongs that need to be reversed if we're to have any kind of a future, and they need to be addressed sooner than later!
Ben Ando retweeted
Steve Reed on 25 March explaining that the £100k cap on donations "will therefore apply retrospectively, so it includes all donations from overseas electors received from today".
Yes, but how are people who never bother going to Parliament supposed to know that?
Ben Ando retweeted
Stop lying?
xitter.cf/barnes_barneso/status/…
Ben Ando retweeted
Zia, you are leaving out a rather important detail.
On 25 March the Government publicly told Parliament that the new overseas donation rules would apply retrospectively from that day.
Reform accepted these £72m donations nearly six months later.
That is very different from Labour suddenly changing the law after you received the money. Stop playing the victim, it is getting really boring.