Pinned Tweet
Having spent most of my adult life, for over fifty years, optimistically fighting and campaigning for a better world, I’ve come to the conclusion that the human race appears to be on an unstoppable course of self destruction, and it will destroy the planet in the process. 😟😒❤️
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
My controversial but accurate Left Wing opinion.
We shouldn't pay to renationalise anything, nor should we pay their debts.
They have stolen more than enough already.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Helen, Helen, Helen
Let me explain this to you in plain and exceedingly simple English.
Disabled kids are most likely to have been born with their disabilities or conditions (as I was). I know this might be shocking to you Helen, but we don't just stop being disabled at 18. Being born with a disability is usually a lifetime deal.
I tell you what, care to swap? You can have my cerebral palsy (and the benefits that you say come with it) and I'll take your fully functioning extremities and become an MP. Not a Tory one though, because I'm not a horrible bastard.
By the way, if you accept my offer, good luck trying to wipe your backside, put your own clothes on, wash any part of your body or doing any sort of cookery (since you won't be able to hold a knife properly) are, and one more thing, forget about rolling yourself over in bed at night, you'll have to get somebody to help you with that as well. But yeah, apart from that, a lifetime on benefits is really fucking easy isn't it?
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
I got thrown out of home in 1983 at the age of fifteen for opposing the Falklands Conflict, and refusing an apprenticeship with the military industrial complex.
My opinions haven't changed.
My kids aren't dying in a rich man's war.
Fight war, not wars.
🚨 NEWS: The head of the British Army has warned that the British public must prepare to make sacrifices to strengthen national defence as the threat of war increases.
General Sir Roly Walker told 700 soldiers at Catterick Garrison that political leaders would soon need to have a frank conversation with the public about the dangers facing Britain and the sacrifices required to prioritise national security.
His warning comes as new Ipsos polling reveals that 48% of Britons would refuse to take up arms for Britain under any circumstances, while 51% support increased defence spending.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Caroline Lucas has reacted angrily to Zack Polanski’s woeful campaign in Holborn and St Pancras and will not rule out asking him to step aside. I can’t say I blame her.
Polanski disgraced himself by more than tripling the Greens’ vote share from the last election, taking 33% in a Labour safe seat during Burnham’s honeymoon period. This was only the second best by-election performance in the Greens’ history. Every sensible person is suggesting that Polanski resign.
Among those sensible people is the former Green leader, who once nearly became prime minister by offering to form a coalition government made up exclusively of women and forgetting to suggest a single black or brown woman for her fantasy cabinet. Let’s be honest, who hasn’t forgot other races exist?
Caroline Lucas is the nation’s leading expert in not getting the Greens into power. I’m therefore honoured that she’s written this piece for her favourite establishment publication, Normal Island News:
It’s hugely disappointing to see Zack Polanski take 33% of the vote share in Holborn and St Pancras and turn the Greens into a serious electoral force.When I was Green leader, I had the good grace to only take 3.8% in that seat in 2017. Not many people know that I privately apologised to the Tories for exceeding expectations because 3.8% was far too high.
Our national vote share was just 1.6%. I accomplished this by making no serious attempt to engage with voters or make their lives better. Everyone who supported one of the other parties thought I was doing a brilliant job. Now, thanks to Zack, people who never liked the Greens are saying they wouldn’t vote for them.
In the past six months, we’ve seen Zack’s popularity go down among the people who would never vote Green—thanks to the type of media campaign that we only see when politicians threaten change.
This hate campaign is definitely Zack’s own fault. If he hadn’t threatened to change a system that’s not working for anyone but the rich, they wouldn’t be lying about him this way.
The Greens have a proud history of being a neoliberal party that pretends to be socialist. It’s supposed to mop up a few left votes so it looks like we have plurality, while making radical change seem unpopular. Unfortunately, Zack has convinced young people that change is possible because he is charismatic and genuinely cares.
Regrettably, the Green Party is no longer a safe space for Tories on bikes. One of my councillor friends was so upset by Polanski’s recent successes that he felt he no longer belongs in the party. Therefore he defected to the Conservatives—a party he was previously a member of until 2021.
Not only has Zack turned off the handful of Tories who pretend to care about the environment, he’s attracted voters who are supposed to be disenfranchised. As such I utterly reject him and everything he stands for.
Zack offered a serious challenge to a candidate that I never would’ve beaten in a million years. He’s pushing the government so far left that the Labour candidate even backed the nationalisation of Thames Water. There’s now a very real risk of sewage not being dumped on our beaches.
I much preferred the days when the Greens accomplished nothing and were rewarded with regular TV invites. Those invites have dried up for everyone but Greens like me, who are prepared to slag off their party leadership. It’s like the Corbyn years all over again!
Obviously, this is all connected to the fact that Zack criticises Israel. It’s highly illegal for the leader of a party in the UK to not support Israel. This is why myself and the rest of the establishment have expressed more anger at that “Zionism is racism” motion than we have at genocide.
Israel’s supporters have almost every other party to choose from and this is not enough. Israel’s opponents only have the Greens to vote for and this is one party too many.
Opponents of genocide don’t deserve representation any more than people who want affordable bills or a habitable planet. I don’t think I can forgive Zack for making the public think we are serious about any of these things. If the Greens’ poll ratings don’t collapse, I will have no choice but to demand his resignation.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
This is why that article about a family theoretically being able to get the equivalent of a salary of £70,000 on benefits when taxes are taken into account, was so damaging. Not only was it (mostly) bollocks, apart from a very small number of cases with large families with multiple profoundly disabled kids living in an extremely high rental area (London), but people have just taken the 70 grand figure and assumed that's what everybody gets. I knew this would happen when the info was first published, it just needs to more demonisation and prejudice against us as disabled people.
We didn't choose this for the money, I would much rather have four fully functioning limbs, be able to type at reasonable speed, and not have to rely on mam and dad to do the most basic of daily tasks for me. But alas, I was never given the option, none of us were.
If anybody tells you they would rather be disabled and on benefits, they speak from a position of not knowing what the thing may desire really entails, and the media just helps them spread their crap.
We are all exhausted by this bullshit now, just make it stop! Also, if you're not already, do follow @relish_hendy she's awesome.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Sadly Oli has become the Danny Thommo for generation hate the elderly. There will be real world consequences for some of the most vulnerable people in society. Very poor, very ill elderly people. The hateful rhetoric around the elderly is actually disgusting. And these lot think they are the kind people.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
I'm 64. I'm (obviously) not retired yet.
When I was at school, I was told I would be able to retire at 60. Then there was a court case that said that women and men should not be discriminated against, and should have the same retirement age.
The French (bless them) decided to bring the men's retirement age down to 60, in line with women's. In the UK they decided to put the women's retirement age up.
The reason we had an earlier retirement age was because it was recognised that women carry/carried the burden of homemaking and child-rearing on top of working. But hey ho. That is that.
I am what I recently discovered is called "Generation Jones" - a year or two short of Gen X, but definitely not "Boomer" either. I started work in 1979. In the 70s and 80s my basic income tax rate started at 33%, then went down to 30%, and by the time I moved to France in 87, was 27%. The 20% rate didn't come in til 2010.
All of you saying the Triple Lock should be smashed fail to take into account that we paid higher rates of income tax for many years. The majority of us most probably started working younger than the majority start now - far fewer of us went to Uni and worked from 16 or 18 (in my case, 17) "Gap year" was something out of Brideshead Revisited.
The UK has one of the lowests rate of state pension in the OECD countries. And you want to lower it even further by playing one generation off against another, while you STILL have endless money for bombs and wars in far off lands?
Get to fuck.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
A big win for disabled people! #assistedsuicide
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Where leading Disabled People’s Organisations stand on the assisted dying bill:
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Nobody in Britain was a fussy eater before about 1980, because the alternative to what was on the plate was going to bed hungry.
One dinner, cooked once, on the table at six. Liver on Tuesday, sliced thin into the bacon fat with onions. Kidneys in the gravy. Cold fat off Sunday's joint on bread. Milk with the skin on it, which nobody enjoyed, drunk anyway.
Nobody liked all of it. Liking it was never part of the arrangement.
That generation was not braver than us. They had no exit, and the exit turned out to be the whole problem.
The squeamishness is not random either. Meat that tastes of the animal. Milk that tastes of the animal. Fat that looks like fat. Every food a person is built to run on has picked up a reason to be avoided, while a nugget of paste and a carton of oats and rapeseed oil go down without a murmur. The objection was never to eating an animal. It was to being able to tell.
Then the second fear, and this one costs more. Somebody says they could not possibly eat the same thing every day, as though that were a medical fact rather than a preference they picked up around 1995.
Your mother put roughly the same dozen dinners on that table for forty years. So did hers. So did everybody, until a supermarket started stocking forty thousand lines and explained that variety was a nutritional principle rather than a way of selling more. Nobody in that house was deficient in anything, and the men in it were doing physical work into their sixties.
You do not need forty ingredients. A few good ones, over and over, is not a diet and it is not a phase. It is eating like a human being, and the only reason it sounds extreme is that almost everything else on the shelf was invented in the last hundred years and arrived with an advertising budget behind it.
Have the same lunch tomorrow that you had today. Meat, butter, eggs, cheese, milk. Then have it again on Tuesday.
You will feel better by Friday, and the only thing that ever objected was a habit somebody sold you.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
This is gonna be a bit of an all over the place post, while having the potential to be quite long, depending on what comes into my brain as it progresses. So I invite you, in the words of the great Sally Phillips in her role as Tilly in Miranda, to" bear with "
Right here we go
I've been thinking over the last few days about whether I should feel lucky in that I have a very obvious, permanent and profound physical disability that only those most severely lacking brain cells would even try to question. I mean it is perfectly obvious, I'm in my chair all the time, and if you were to see me out and about, I wouldn't be alone. This being the case, my needs shouldn't be in question, right?
But then I had another thought about the fact that most of the trolls I get on social media seem to latch on to the fact that I can right long posts, and therefore, based on that skill alone, I can work. They aren't bothered about the logistical challenges or The plethora of physical things that mam and dad have to do for me on a daily basis, they just think tweet = work.
In fact, they still don't care if I explain that even getting a suitable WFH job (if one existed) would require at least one of mam and dad to be at home with me during working hours in case I needed anything, whereas in my current situation, if they're going somewhere quite far away, I just go with them.
There was also the question of what sort of job I could realistically do. Call centre no: absolutely useless speaking on the phone to the point where I don't even. ring people like mam, dad, my brother or @sharron_honey if texting is an option. Admin/data entry, no, that also requires some level of phone usage, and Excel gives me a migraine. Also, I don't trust my. VRS enough to use it on things where typos would be a problem.
I am genuinely interested though what else is that?
So, not only does my visible disability not protect me from abuse, but I refuse to throw my friends with invisible disabilities under the bus anyway. If they are being attacked, which they are, I have a responsibility to defend them as I would myself, and so I've come to the conclusion that while having a physical disability is certainly easier to get people with the comprehension skills of one of Baldricks's turnips to understand, that it does not mean I am fortunate in any other respect. Some people still don't understand or even want to comprehend, what is blindingly obvious in front of them, and h has mentioned earlier, not everything is about me anyway, and I will always use whatever I can do fight for the rights of others at every possible time.
Finally, I just want to close by saying thank you to all your lovely people for the support you have given me over the last few days, I appreciate it so much, I really have the best community on the Internet. (And it's multi platform too, all of for some reason my brain just can't get on with blue sky.
We will keep fighting for each other, and in doing so, it is my heartfelt wish that one day, the time will come when we simply don't have to do it anymore, but we are not there yet.
With all my love and strength,.
Joe xx🩷🩷
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
There's a difference between an opinion I disagree with and a viewpoint that actually harms people. For example, somebody might say that they don't like Florence + the Machine, I happen to love them, but a person not liking them doesn't harm me.
In contrast, somebody saying that disabled people don't really deserve the support we get is deeply harmful because that rhetoric penetrate the space in which it was initially aired and spreads outside those confines. That can and has led to re instances of people being questioned or even attacked when going about their daily business, just because they had disabilities.
This is why I'm so angry with The framing of ableism as merely "opinions I don't like". As if we just sit there and take it.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Hi @andyburnham I spoke today to a friend whose father had Alzheimer’s. He told me that last year the council was paying around £900 a week for carers to visit four times a day, providing a combined total of about two hours of care per day.
That works out at approximately £64 per hour of delivered care to the agency.
While many care workers providing the actual visits are paid around £16 per hour.
For comparison, an experienced NHS Band 6 nurse earns around £20 per hour.
Why are taxpayers paying such high rates to private care providers when the frontline workers themselves receive a much smaller proportion of the cost?
Would a publicly provided model, with qualified nurses and care workers employed directly by the NHS or local authorities, provide better value and more consistent support, rather than relying on care agencies that often deliver short, offer fragmented visits, charge a fortune, and make extortionate profits?
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Dear Reform UK.
Please could you provide us [the political public], a copy of your acceptable free speech guidance? It may help in any future mix-ups.
For example:
Reform councillor said they'd melt down Nigerian people to fill potholes — fine.
Reform councillor shares a post calling for Natalie Fleet to be shot — fine.
Reform councillor says he can't wait for Starmer to be hanging from a lamppost — fine.
A man wearing a gallows humour T-shirt — not fine.
You see where we find ourselves? You allow vile and rancid comments under the guise of Reform Free Speech™, but when you see a T-shirt with the word Nigel on it, you lose your shit.
How do you even know it meant Farage? It could have been Havers or Mansell.
If you could email me your guide forthwith, I'd be much obliged.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Apparently, According to LBC, MPs are calling for a review into pip. The good news for them is, there is already one taking place and it's due to report in just a few months. You would think that they would know this, I wonder what else they don't know.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
All have now been privatised and there is 'no money'.
Because now it all goes to billionaires profits.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Nigel Farage just said the UK was better in the 1950's
In the 1950's the Government owned Gas, Oil, Rail, Power, Steel, Telecoms, Mail, Shipbuilding, Airports, Social Housing, Care Homes (Children and Adults), Schools, Hospitals...
And built 300,000 Council Houses a year.
Jeff Fowler #ToryScumOut #CorbynWasRight 🏳️⚧️ retweeted
The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.
The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.
Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.
If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.