property expert, business owner and rugby supporter ( Go Warriors). Forever Joe Jackson / 10cc. RIP Dr John. Proud to be 🇬🇧

glasgow, scotland
Joined June 2014
Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
We are compelled by law to fund the BBC if we watch live television or use BBC iPlayer. In return, the absolute minimum we should expect is independence from government. Instead, serving civil servants were embedded inside BBC News and BBC Verify, working on small boats, migration and Covid. That is a disgrace. Publish everything. Investigate it properly. No excuses.
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Read this powerful article by @thetimes , and reflect on what has been shared.. This is not just “persecution by (extremely clumsy) process” imposed upon active-duty SAS operators fighting to detain vicious ISIS thugs in an active war zone, but also an example of performative self-immolation initiated by the most senior UK Special Forces officer at the time (G Jenkins) as self-serving exercise in what HE calls ‘transparency’…… So, if someone, anyone (quite possibly an enemy) within an active war zone says the SAS killed an unarmed man, then the so-called ‘senior leaders’ (some, as in this case, with near-zero combat experience) within the Whitehall-based ‘UK system’ desperate to demonstrate something that they call ‘transparency’ (or whatever else floats the MOD’s boat), will automatically launch an aggressive RMP operation to detain the SAS men involved…. Not on the basis of any hard evidence (there is no crime scene, no bodies, no bullets etc), but purely on distant, uncorroborated hearsay and remote, delayed analysis of operational reports; all supported by desk-bound, chinless leaders that seemingly care more about how they will (personally) look in an MOD promotion board than trying to properly understand the circumstances faced by the SAS men and defend them accordingly. What a gift this utterly pathetic weakness, low threshold investigative process and twisted self-defeating system gives to our many enemies….and what an awful message it sends to those that still volunteer to fight on our all of our behalves….
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
Our country is fucked. SAS soldiers hunting down ISIS in Syria get accused of murder and hounded for 5 years only to be found innocent meanwhile an actual ISIS terrorist who took part in genocide against the Yazidi’s is filmed shopping in the U.K a free man.
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My friend Sheila McHarg is fundraising for Beatson Cancer Charity. Check out their @JustGiving page and please donate if you can. Thank you! #JustGiving justgiving.com/page/beatsnbi…
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
The BBC has been accused of using its Bitesize website to push open borders, Net Zero and woke ideology on children as young as 11, teaching them that more immigration is great and anyone who disagrees is likely a bigot. dailysceptic.org/2026/10/18/…
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
Sandy Easdale, who owns McGill's buses alongside his brother James, said Swinney "appears to have transformed into the next Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe”, dictators who bankrupted their countries. Swinney & the SNP are a danger to Scottish businesses & us. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmge…
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
Whitehall Inside the BBC: Who Really Shapes the News? For years the BBC has insisted that its journalism is independent of government. Now we learn that serving civil servants have been working inside its newsroom, helping shape coverage of politically sensitive issues in Britain. Migration, crime, elections, Covid and public spending. A woman seconded from the Welsh government during the pandemic acknowledged that her advice had led to BBC news lines being changed and new stories being told. That raises the question: how far should serving government officials be involved in shaping the editorial output of a broadcaster whose independence from the state is supposed to be sacrosanct? Another secondee drafted material on migration and crime statistics. Officials from Defra and other departments helped prepare coverage of Budgets and government figures. These are subjects on which Whitehall has its own institutional interests, preferred explanations and its reputation to protect. Yet civil servants were helping the national broadcaster decide how the numbers should be understood and presented to millions of viewers. The recruitment advert for the 2027 intake sought candidates able to influence decision-making. That wording alone does not prove political interference, but it makes the BBC's blanket assurances deserving of scrutiny. Government statisticians have described helping journalists select figures, develop explanations and shape reports. Some have been credited under BBC News or BBC Verify bylines without their civil service positions being sufficiently clear. The public was entitled to know who was contributing to these stories. Instead, the BBC has promised to amend bylines only after The Telegraph began asking questions. The financial arrangement deepens the concern. The secondees remain on salaries paid by their government departments while working inside the BBC. Taxpayers therefore fund officials who help produce coverage of policies, statistics and controversies involving the institutions employing them. Nobody needs to allege secret instructions from ministers to recognise the conflict this creates. The permanent state is capable of shaping public debate through shared assumptions, professional habits and institutional loyalties. When those responsible for producing official figures also help shape how the national broadcaster explains them, the separation between government and journalism becomes dangerously blurred. Professor Carl Heneghan, director of Oxford University's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, has questioned whether officials with competing interests can remain impartial. His concern goes to the heart of the matter. A civil servant may act conscientiously, correct genuine errors and still approach a controversy through the assumptions of the institution in which their career has been formed. The BBC argues that statistical expertise improves accuracy and that its journalists retain final editorial control. That defence deserves examination, not automatic acceptance. Who checked the secondees' contributions? Who decided which interpretations were challenged? And how often did advice from Whitehall change the story that reached the public? Thirty-nine civil servants have passed through this scheme in eight years. The BBC now promises greater disclosure while maintaining that editorial independence was never compromised. But independence requires more than an assurance from the institution whose conduct is being questioned. It requires visible safeguards, honest attribution and scrutiny of how stories are produced. As ministers consider extending compulsory BBC funding to streaming households, the public discovers that serving officials have been helping shape its news. The corporation asks Britain to trust its independence. It must now explain why serving officials from Whitehall were helping shape its journalism, and why the public was not clearly told who they were.
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
Imagine jumping from a helicopter behind enemy lines at night to capture an ISIS cell leader, not knowing if you'll come home. Then imagine coming home to a double murder investigation. In July 2022, five SAS soldiers came under fire in a pitch-black field in Syria. The two people in front of them refused calls to surrender, and the soldiers believed their lives were in danger. They fired. An internal review cleared them on self-defence grounds. Days after a BBC Panorama on the SAS, the Director of Special Forces overturned that review and referred them to the military police. The soldiers were arrested at secret bases in Syria and Iraq, and their homes were raided. Detectives asked for a sleeping baby to be moved so they could search under its cot. Forty-eight hours after their police interviews, the same men were sent back to jump out of helicopters into enemy territory, with life sentences hanging over them. Their legal support was one sheet of A4 listing legal aid solicitors, plus no more than £500. After nearly three years of limbo they were told there would be no charges, but the case could be reopened at any time. They have never been formally cleared. All five have now left the Army. They've been through broken relationships, drinking, and in one case an attempted suicide. The SAS is losing more experienced soldiers than ever, and the Defence Secretary has refused to meet them. This is outrageous. They aren't asking to be above the law. They're asking for a fair process. Our soldiers deserve protection from lawfare, not to be treated like criminals by the state they serve. #SAS #Lawfare #StandWithOurSoldiers
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
Delighted to see BBC Bitesize used by every UK state school has been busted for making kids play a game called Increasing Immigration. They are rewarded for choosing 'open borders' and granting an amnesty to illegal migrants. You wonder why kids grow up brainwashed. That's why labour want to fuck about with the BBC licence fee. Pupils are also encouraged to campaign for controversial Net Zero policies. Has the penny dropped yet luv?
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
😡 The BBC is supposed to be an independent, impartial broadcaster, separate from the Government. Yet now we’re learning that 39 civil servants have been seconded into BBC newsrooms over the past eight years.. helping write and fact check stories about immigration, small boats, crime, Covid and government budgets. Some of that work appeared under BBC News and BBC Verify without readers knowing government employees had contributed. 🤦🏻‍♀️ See the problem here? The BBC is supposed to scrutinise the Government.. not have government employees helping produce the very news reports we’re relying on to hold it accountable. And suddenly, the Government talking about extending the BBC licence fee to people who don’t even watch the BBC is making a lot more sense now, isn’t it? 🤦🏻‍♀️ And we’re expected to trust the BBC’s impartiality while being legally required to fund it through the licence fee? 🤔
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
🔥 Er … the BBC appears to be trying to brainwash our children. Now, this should come as no surprise, because the BBC is a fully signed up member of the UN’s propaganda arm tasked with ensuring the narrative is prominently platformed. Using the Bitesize website, the BBC teaches children about immigration, Net Zero and globalisation. And look what happens when children make the WRONG political choices. If children choose to deport migrants, they lose points. But if they choose open borders they gain 3 points for the economy and 2 for public health. If they decide open borders are too radical, they get ZERO points. BBC Bitesize tells pupils that believing migrants take jobs from local people likely arises from prejudice! Children are encouraged to petition local government over Net Zero, told they may need to fly less and eat less meat, and introduced to the wonderful promise of a borderless world. The BBC appears to see its role as underpinning ‘correct’ thought and that legitimate contested political questions are settled science and only the global view wins the game! And we are forced to pay for it🔥.
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Howard Lutnick delayed going to work so he could walk his young son Kyle to his first day of kindergarten. That short delay changed everything. When the plane struck the North Tower, Lutnick was not at his desk on the 101st floor. Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees that day, the largest single loss of life suffered by any organization on 9/11. Among them were Lutnick’s younger brother Gary and his closest friend Douglas Gardner. In a matter of hours the company lost roughly two-thirds of its workforce. As he grieved with the families, Lutnick made a commitment. Cantor Fitzgerald pledged 25 percent of the firm’s profits over the next five years to the families of the victims and continued their healthcare coverage for ten years. Altogether the company distributed more than $180 million. He also promised that every child who lost a parent at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 11 would have the chance to join the firm once they were old enough. By 2016, 57 of those children had become employees. Cantor Fitzgerald continues to remember its colleagues through its annual Charity Day, when the company donates 100 percent of its global revenues to charitable causes. Lutnick survived that morning because he had taken time to be there for his son. In the years that followed, he used his position to help hundreds of families who had lost someone they loved.
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
No matter where he goes, this ambassador understands what makes us tick. I wish our own government loved our culture and history as much as he does.
Yma o hyd👍 Tiny Rebel!!😄
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
Watch Liberal Democrat MP Calum Miller promise Piddington residents that he would stand with them to stop migrants being housed at the MOD site. When the vote took place - he was absent. MP’s promises mean little. His constituents deserve better. Shameful & deceitful.
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
Nandy ponders “netflix tax” to fund the BBC. This getting ridiculous. The BBC licence fee is an anachronism in the modern, multi-channel era and will have to go. But how typical of Labour to think that yet another tax is the answer. 🙄 telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
Today marks the 5th anniversary of the darkest of days. My dad lifted his eyes to heaven and I am left down here to fight for him. I will never stop until I get answers. Please keep us in your prayers. #justiceforsirdavid
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
Fife Council has restricted how people can object to planning applications after it received more than 14,000 responses to a proposed AI data centre on the site of a 1000-year-old castle near the village of Auchtertool.
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
The left-wing extremist who is accused of murdering my colleague Ann Widdecombe and targeting my friend Nigel Farage "held an extreme left-wing mindset". Now ask yourself: Where is the big national debate about left-wing extremism? Where are the BBC documentaries and podcasts about left-wing extremism? Where are the calls to warn children in schools and universities about left-wing extremism? Where are the government 'counter-terror units' stating that if you read, say, Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci then you are "on a pathway to terror"? Where are the think-tanks producing major research reports on left-wing extremism and its followers? Where are the multi-million pound research grants going to academics who investigate left-wing terror? If it was far-right we all know what would happen. Wall to wall blanket coverage, analysis, and debate. Does anybody else notice the silence?
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Brilliant read 👇👇👇
My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket. After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders. Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry. Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector. Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system. But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away. At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets. Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it. No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%. Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are. What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything. There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us. So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next. Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong. You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now. Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians. I come from your future. Don't make it yours.
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Graham Figes #AbolishHolyrood retweeted
Backbone went missing. Remember which parties are not standing up for the rights of British citizens, for British tax payers to come first. Especially those suggesting they want to reduce violence against women then enable the exact opposite. Fluffy Words are simply platitudes
Piddington’s own MP just sat on his hands. 🫤 Calum Miller spent months calling the MoD Bicester plan for 1,256 men “the wrong site,” “totally inappropriate,” and bad for his constituents. Then when Parliament voted to condemn it, he (and every other Lib Dem) abstained. The women of Piddington were in the gallery. Conservatives and Reform voted against the camp. Their local MP did nothing. Talks a good game. Disappears when it counts.
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