Things I support: cost-benefit analysis of public health interventions; understanding risk; accepting trade-offs; taking vaccines. Willing to change my mind.
Joined May 2013
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The inconvenient truth of our times. 👇
"In the final analysis, these infringements generated negligible public health benefits while imposing a set of massive costs on society."
#lockdown #CovidEnquiry
⚠️ Study charts how measures designed to save hundreds of thousands of lives may actually have done more harm than good telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06…
Mark retweeted
The Ministry of Justice let a convicted ISIS terrorist loose on our streets.
It took a journalist contacting them for him to be recalled to prison.
Now they say he can’t be deported because he might face mistreatment.
I don’t care about his treatment.
He must be deported.
Mark retweeted
StatsForLefties is a well run account. Professional graphics, very regular content, high engagement.
It should be reason enough to strip the out of work benefits from the person who runs it.
She is obviously talented and very clearly isn’t incapable of employment.
Mind blowing 🤯
This is incredible.
An Algerian Hamas supporter who became an illegal overstayer in Britain, lied to immigration officers about it, and went to prison for it, is now in a senior role at the BBC.
Because the Tories and Labour failed to deport him.
Hicham Yezza has a long record of supporting Islamist violence.
He was arrested in 2008 for possessing an al-Qaeda terrorist training manual.
He came to Britain on a visa that expired in 2003. He stayed anyway. When immigration officers caught up with him, he told them his passport with the visa stamp had been stolen. They found it in his flat.
A jury convicted him of deception. He was jailed for nine months.
Then he won his appeal against deportation, and was later handed British citizenship.
Now he’s the Principal Data Scientist in the BBC’s “Responsible AI” division, helping to decide how AI shapes what BBC News tells you.
Before that he worked at BBC Monitoring, briefing BBC journalists on the Middle East.
Can you guess what kind of briefings he gave them?
He should never have been allowed to stay. Under Reform, people like him never will be.
Under Operation Restoring Justice, we will detain and deport anyone who broke into our country.
Our borders will mean something again.
Mark retweeted
The sanctity of contracts in England played a huge role in its pre-eminence and helped underpin a high-trust society. Eroding that principle will lead people to retreat to dealing with only those they know and trust, where agreements can be enforced through informal sanctions.
Mark retweeted
Incentives and outcomes strike again.
FT decided to dig in to the biggest drag on growth this country has. We have a new record of a 72% marginal tax rate.
If you are evenly remotely above average, it increasingly feels like Britain is not the place for you.
I know many people caught in this. You either need household income closer to £500k or someone to stop working for this to make any sense. Yet again, the middle gets punished for doing the thing that the economy and country functions on (working, having a family).
I try to be optimistic here but I don’t see this being fixed. It’s too small of an issue to be a vote winner and high-risk for any politician who’s trying to appeal to the average earner in third world Britain.
Britain’s £100,000 tax trap ft.trib.al/PozWvDe
Mark retweeted
- Literal convicted ISIS terrorist
- served 4+ years in prison in Germany for terrorist activities
- ECHR Art 3 blocks his removal to Iraq
- subsequently enters Britain illegally by small boat in December 2025
- arrested days later
- sentenced to two years in prison in July 2026
- released from prison last week
- made a fresh application to remain in Britain, delaying Home Office extradition attempts
- still a literal ISIS terrorist
Whatever you think of Cummings, he's right about this. Sheer madness. 👇
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.
This is very bad. If you think we have a housing crisis, you ain't seen nothing yet. 👇
Mark retweeted
It is an extraordinary failure that the BBC has the resources to do genuine public interest journalism that is much less viable commercially (from foreign correspondents to long-form local reporting) but instead we get relentless lowest common denominator nonsense
GTA 6: Can you cheat on someone with a video game character? bbc.in/4egQBjw
Mark retweeted
A reminder that this person - a contender for the worst MP of all time - was brought into parliament by the Labour Party.
Mark retweeted
When people say "I used to swim in the sea all the time when I was a kid. Now my kids can't" they really have no clue.
Chances are they swam in sewage 10 to 100x more concentrated.
Danny Dyer thinks the water around the Isle of Sheppey is "a disgrace" and "very dangerous". Is it dirtier than when he was a kid? No.
In 1991, 55% of English bathing waters would pass today's standards. In 2025: 95%. Leysdown's E. coli is down ~96%.
tidalwaiv.co.uk/blog/danny-d…
Mark retweeted
If you're going to attempt to persuade citizens to fight for their nation, you must first ensure that you have established among them a shared national story and the highest levels of social solidarity, trust and cohesion. If you've spent several decades eroding those things, you'll find you're left with a citizenry which feels it has little to fight for. That's basically the difference between Britain in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Mark retweeted
Billions of pounds lost on a single project because we can’t connect it to the grid for half a decade and have destroyed our capacity to generate reliable electricity.
Exclusive: Microsoft cancels UK data centre deal with Nscale. Comes just as Nscale hopes to pull off a $35 billion IPO telegraph.co.uk/business/202…
Worrying
This from @CitySamuel was the column I wanted to write this week, until she went and wrote it. Fascinating and alarming thetimes.com/comment/columni…
Mark retweeted
The Wall Street Journal is again telling our political elites to wake up to what has gone wrong in this country. So was Jensen Huang yesterday.
Americans I speak to are more pained than our own ministers about seeing the likes of Oxford defiled. They wish it to still be the city of dreaming spires they imagine.
It should not be impossible to build a nice-looking bridge. It should not cost more to build this pitiful piece of infrastructure than it cost to build the Titanic.
We must wake up
wsj.com/world/uk/a-ludicrous…
Mark retweeted
I wish to yet again point out that the South Koreans manage to build a nuclear power plant every FIVE years at 20% of the cost of Hinkley C.
Nuclear power is cheap, WE alone make it expensive
We pay more than £200 million to this organisation to make our lives worse.
They have blocked homes, kite festivals, put millions onto the cost of our infrastructure, and found loopholes in laws to block new homes & make life even harder for young people.
We are talking about "Natural" England.
They are completely unelected and completely unaccountable
We’ve prepared some of their most rational moments for you to enjoy.
1️⃣ Made Hinkley Point C even more expensive by forcing a £700 MILLION "fish disco". This will save... one salmon... every decade.
➡️ If we don't have secure energy, Britain is at risk of blackouts.
2️⃣ Blocked a kite festival for charity because some grass might need to be mowed. The event had to be shut down after more than 30 years.
➡️ The only other government organisation to ban kite flying… The Taliban.
3️⃣ Shut down a paintballing centre because of "ground compaction". In other words, people walked on the land.
➡️ This was so despicable that Natural England deemed it acceptable to take this family-run business to court. The owners have spent more than £50,000 on their legal defence.
4️⃣ Designated part of the M25 as an "area of outstanding natural beauty".
➡️ Natural England has the power to designate land as an area of outstanding natural beauty. They’ve chosen the M25. Maybe the yellow emergency area looks stunning in summer.
5️⃣ Found loopholes to laws passed by our democratically elected government.
➡️ New planning rules mean that houses within 500 metres of a train station are more likely to be approved. So Natural England is designating areas just outside train stations as of "outstanding" natural beauty. No homes can be built here.
6️⃣ Blocked 27,000 jobs at a London theme park to protect… spiders.
➡️ Plans included what would have been the largest indoor water park in Europe.
We could continue.
Natural England is a very odd organisation, but one thing is clear. We do not need to deal with this. The Government can and must ABOLISH them. It has gone on for too long.
NO more Natural England.
Now, we need your help. Write to your local MP and tell them to ABOLISH NATURAL ENGLAND ⬇️
Mark retweeted
"The UK is so docile that one erratic poster using a pseudonym can set the whole national conversation for years" ...
Our very own Max Tempers gets a shout out @maxtempers as well asthe sorry state of the UK. The Yanks are laughing at us.
TGIF: The New School of American Diplomacy open.substack.com/pub/bariwe…
Mark retweeted
Does this Government have no shame?
The whole process of drafting and implementing the official definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” stinks.
First, Angela Rayner appointed five people to the Working Group tasked with drafting the definition. All had previously expressed support for the need for a definition, and all had troubling links to Islamist organisations.
Second, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said it had deleted all responses to the Working Group’s consultation. That appeared to contradict the Government’s own data policy and has only fuelled speculation that Islamist extremists may have had an opportunity to influence the process.
Third, the Ministry has now admitted that it did not delete the responses after all: they still exist on the department’s data system.
What on earth is going on? It is time for Angela Rayner to come clean with the British public.
