John Charnock retweeted
Pray, what did you expect was going to happen...?
🚨NEW: All train services that were nationalised by the Labour government have seen their performance plummet
It comes alongside ticket prices to use the services remaining the exact same
[@thetimes]
John Charnock retweeted
This is a straight forward lie Wes. You know what i said was both Labour and Conservatives hollowed out defence. Be man enough to admit it. Lies dont hide your own record. The last government to spend 3% of GDP ( without all your treasury tricks) was a Conservative one. MOD now spends 2.2% GDP and you are cutting day to day spending this year and next. many veterans, like me who served under a Labour government never forget the Snatch Landrover scandal. If you want to be taken seriously as a Defence Secretary stop playing child like politics. Earn your respect by sticking up for the armed forces, fighting the Treasury for real funding not spin and be honest about Labours part in hollowing out. At the moment your fake claims on 2.7% GDP coupled with under funding day to day spending are a perfect example of hollowing out. @haynesdeborah @larisamlbrown
John Charnock retweeted
🌺 REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY | 8 NOVEMBER
Join the Aylesbury Rugby family as we come together to remember.
🕐 13:00 Arrival
🌺 13:20 Service
🍛 14:15 Free Curry Buffet
📍 Ostler's Field, Weston Turville
All welcome.
We will remember them.
#LestWeForget #AylesburyRugby
John Charnock retweeted
In 1830 HMS PRIMROSE captured Spanish Slaver Velos Passagera rescuing 555 Africans destined for slavery. PRIMROSE was part of the Royal Navy's West Africa Sqn tasked with anti-slavery duties.
Between 1808-60 the RN intercepted 1,600 slave ships, freeing over 150,000 Africans
John Charnock retweeted
The #RoyalNavy seriously lacks resources to counter rising #threats, as shown by our thorough #Defence Committee #HighNorth report.
That’s why we’re right and have been warning consistently not to kick the can down the road, but urgently #InvestNow!
theguardian.com/politics/202…
John Charnock retweeted
If one removes the nuclear estate, pensions, and intelligence services, then I believe it's about 1.6% of GDP goes on *actual* defence.
What is the UK's actual *military* spending this year?
I know the NATO report puts general British defense spending in 2026 at 2.6% GDP but unless I am mistaken, that includes a number of spending categories that don't actually relate to funding the British military.
It seems to include (a) civilian intelligence services, (b) security adjacent infrastructure investments and (c) Ukraine aid.
All 3 of those categories are obviously very important. No serious person questions this. But they're not substitutes for robust spending on *hard power* (eg frigates, destroyers, attack subs, fighter jets, helicopters, cruise missiles, air defense missiles, tanks, artillery, ASW aircraft, troops, drones, etc).
So if 2.6% is the number for this very expansive definition, what is the actual spending on the literal British military? Something around 2.2% ?
John Charnock retweeted
🚨NEW: A UK bank chief executive, reacting to John Healey's decision to raise the bank's profit surcharge said:
"Taxing the engines of growth to reduce VAT on gherkins is end-of-Rome level of stupidity"
[@FT]
John Charnock retweeted
Budget Day - war footing latest:
Having resigned as Defence Secretary over the lack of defence spending, @JohnHealey_MP who is now Chancellor is obviously going to announce a huge increase in the MoD budget ... oh hang on...
John Charnock retweeted
There is nothing socialist about a system of free movement that is used by multi-nationals to undermine wages. WATCH my Brexit speech today.
John Charnock retweeted
Customer: "No veal, thanks. I know what happens to the calves."
Butcher: "So do I. Which bit do you know?"
Customer: "Crates. Taken off the mother, kept in the dark, can't turn round."
Butcher: "Banned here in 1990. This one had straw, a shed, and other calves to annoy for eight months. Rose veal, we call it. Pink, not white."
Customer: "It's still a baby cow."
Butcher: "It's a dairy bull calf. Where do you think they went before people bought veal?"
Customer: "Reared for beef?"
Butcher: "A Holstein bull doesn't make beef worth the feed. For years the answer was a bolt in the head at a day old. Tens of thousands a year, in this country, shot in the pen because nobody would eat them. The industry only promised to stop that a couple of years ago."
Customer: "That's horrific."
Butcher: "That's the price of a latte. Every pint of milk needs a cow in calf every year, and half the calves are boys."
Customer: "So eating the veal..."
Butcher: "Gives him eight months in a shed instead of eight minutes. The customer who won't touch veal and buys a flat white has made a choice. She just didn't get told what it was."
Customer: "I'll take a kilo."
Butcher: "Good. And the next person who tells you veal is cruel, ask them what they take in their coffee."
John Charnock retweeted
This government is taking preparations for war so seriously that the MoD is being forced to make £3.5Bn of in-year ‘efficiency savings’ during 2026-27.
"we needed to make some savings to bring them into line and balance the books. I have taken decisions to stop doing some things this year” says Streeting.
UK must be ready for war in 1000 days says Streeting trib.al/Tzf9Jil
John Charnock retweeted
Astounding Sunday Times investigation reveals new scandal in SNP’s Socialist Scotland:
800 NHS, central government, council and quango workers whose jobs no longer exist but remain on the public payroll because of the SNP’s ‘no public-sector redundancy’ policy.
Estimated cost of paying people to do nothing: £27m a year.
One NHS Highland worker has been receiving a full salary and benefits for 17 years despite not having a specific job.
The health board refused to say what the worker had been doing for almost two decades and how much they had been paid.
Likely cost to the taxpayer is expected to be far higher with several public bodies refusing to disclose salaries for hundreds of the workers awaiting redeployment.
John Charnock retweeted
🏉 COLTS TEAM NEWS 🩷🖤
Your squad for Sunday’s friendly away to Chinnor is confirmed!
🆚 Chinnor U18 Colts
📅 Sunday 25 October
⏰ 1 pm KO
📍 Kingsey Road, Thame, OX9 3JL
Get behind the lads! 👏
#AylesburyRugby #COYA
John Charnock retweeted
What makes the British Army unuseable on modern battlefields is the lack of Ground Based Air Defence, the shortage of artillery, the shortage of counter-battery sensors, the paucity of combat and combat service supports for its brigades, the disappearance of direct fire weight in infantry units as IFVs disappear, the uncertainty of the future of gap crossing capability in the direct fire zone (TYRO Close Support, people, why aren't we hearing anything on that), the fact that most of the Army effectively is made of "foot regiments" and so on and on and on, in more or less this order.
The lack of a dedicate BOXER recovery variant is very close to the bottom of the list.
Obsessing over that is looking not even at the finger, but at a dent on the nail, while the finger is pointing at the Moon plummeting down from the sky.
John Charnock retweeted
🏉 Weekend rugby 💗🖤
Sat 24 Oct:
🏠 Men I v Marlow — 3 pm
🚗 Men II at Didcot II — 3 pm
❌ Men III at Abingdon II — POSTPONED
Sun 25 Oct:
🚗 Colts at Chinnor U18 Colts — 1 pm, friendly
Get behind the lads! 👏
#AylesburyRugby
John Charnock retweeted
Reminder: just yesterday we learned that:
A) a former ISIS guard for a beheading squad came to yookay illegally on a boat, obviously because of the ECHR/HRA he can't be jailed or deported, living freely;
B) SAS guys sent on missions to deal with ISIS beheaders were then arrested for MURDER for dealing with them; they were lied to by the military police; they have been told they can never be clear of the charges (because the ECHR/HRA means any time some lawyer like Jolyon or Hermer wants to team up with nutters on a ECHR case, the government will be forced to investigate again and remember Hermer's friend *invented* war crimes to bring cases against British soldiers, but obviously wasn't jailed, triples all round in the Inner Temple).
So we're importing the jihadis at scale while prosecuting for murder SAS we rely on to defend us from the jihadis - and if you don't like this you're fascist and it's a reason to ban X in yookay.
No you will not see Kemi-kasi campaign on these issues because the Tories agreed with Labour for 25 years that this combination is 'defending civilisation'. The Tories imported many of the jihadis now in the news, and the Tories approved all the worst officials and lawyers in SW1 bringing the lawfare cases, including against those who were given medals by the Queen for stopping IRA terrorist attacks - they now have to beg for cash for lawyers in their 70s/80s.
And because Reform is a bin fire which can't maintain focus on anything for 2 minutes -- like Kemi-kasi -- you probably won't see anything sustained from them either.
John Charnock retweeted
When we are made to rejoin the EU, we will probably end up paying for these 😀
Latest analysis article:
France and Germany offer to build submarines for Argentina
navylookout.com/france-and-g…
John Charnock retweeted
Introduction: Boxer as Symptom of a Deeper Problem
Views my own, comments and corrections welcome.
1/25 The British Army’s Boxer programme is not simply another delayed armoured vehicle project. It is the clearest contemporary illustration of a service that has spent more than three decades searching for a coherent role after the end of the Cold War and has repeatedly failed to hold a single vision long enough for equipment to match doctrine. What began in the late 1990s as a collaborative multinational effort has, as of this month (October 2026), produced a contracted fleet of 623 vehicles whose planned specialist variants have been cancelled and whose second tranche has been abandoned.
The platform that was once expected to form the spine of the Army’s mechanised infantry and to contribute to NATO’s two-division commitment now occupies a narrower supporting role while the Army continues to operate an ageing tracked inventory whose principal replacements remain late, incomplete or subject to residual safety concerns.
This is not primarily a political story. It is an Army story.
John Charnock retweeted
⏰The head of the @BritishArmy has just delivered a massive wake-up call to his troops - and the whole of the UK - about the gathering storm.
Please read or watch ⬇️
General Sir Roly Walker tells his soldiers: "You didn’t know this but our nation is going to need you.
"Very soon the political leaders of this country will start to have a frank conversation with the citizens of this country about just what is going on and where the risk lies.
"They are going to try and explain to our citizens that our citizens have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritise defence and security.
"And then they are going to ask those citizens, to whom we are not necessarily at the front of their mind, that they too need to play a part in the defence and security of this country.
"They need to understand what we do for them.
"They need to consent to allow us to do that, which means sacrifices by them.
"And ultimately we are going to need them to back us, to back you to do the one thing that you do that noody else gets to do and that is to take the fight to the enemy."
🇬🇧 Are Britons ready for the sacrifices needed to strengthen national security?
Speaking to soldiers in Catterick Garrison the head of the British Army warns Britons must face a “frank conversation” about the sacrifices needed for defence and security🔗forcesnews.com/services/army…