Software Engineer in Telecoms #MakeBrexitWork
Haslington, England
Joined February 2015
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Ray Nixon retweeted
Part of me thinks that it is perfectly reasonable for segments of the coalition that the Telegraph represents to want more immigration. An influx of cheap labour holds down wages. Large numbers of people from different cultures breaks down the social cohesion needed for a welfare state, a single payer healthcare system, and for workers to unite against the power of capital. Old fashioned socialists like @georgegalloway understand this perfectly well, and will find themselves entirely unsurprised to find the newspaper of the wealthy advocating for such a policy.
I guess these days the liberal progressive side of the Labour coalition has completely swept aside the old patriotic left, with only some vestiges -- sidelined in the party as comprehensively as the human intestine as sidelined the appendix -- like @PaulEmbery and @blue_labour. It means of course that the instinct to break down British culture and the ties that bind takes precedence over everything else, including the bargaining position of the poorest in the labour force.
It would be great, though, if there was at least one paper that could be a voice of social conservatism -- of the left or the right, or preferrably both. A place with many more Peter Hitchenses and John Grays than Polly Toynbees and Boris Johnsons. Given social conservatism of one strip or another covers about 50% of the population, you'd have thought there'd be some escape from the full spectrum liberalism of the newspapers.
Ray Nixon retweeted
Read all of this. It is more important than you think. Wayne Dixon is a councillor in Leeds. He doesn't get involved in foreign policy issues. No standing with Ukraine or Palestine or Israel or wherever. He doesn't even get involved much in national issues. He just focusses, laser like, on doing small things that make the lives of his local constituents better. Cleaning up footpaths covered in wet leaves. Harassing the local authorities until they fix potholes. Cleaning up graffiti. Trimming hedges so they look neat and tidy. Liaising with the police to deal with antisocial behaviour. Ensuing that the local schools have enough places for every local who wants to send their kids there. Getting bus stops put in the right place when roads are re-laid or new roads are built. Making sure that green spaces where kids play football are not flogged off. Ensuring that important community groups and support networks are helped as much as they can be.
It is hyper local politics. It is the work that only somebody with high energy and who knows the local area can do. If we had 20,000 Wayne Dixons, the cumulative transformation in the entire country would be shocking over ten years. Any sports fan knows that marginal gains have huge cumulative effects when achieved consistently over a period of time (see the Chicago Bulls and Team Sky). Same with countries. 150,000 little, easy, cheap things over 10 years and you have almost a new country. This is achievable right now, with no changes in legislation or 'new elite'.
More politics should be about exactly this: putting right the 20 streets closest to where you live and making the lives of people who live there better. Remember: there are black and white pictures of a young Lee Kwan Yew sweeping the streets of Singapore. That's where he started his politics. Of course we need to get the big things right -- and Britain is facing at least three existential problems that only central government can address. Yet simultaneously, we also need this.
Ray Nixon retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: Starmer left trapped inside No. 10 for several hours after no one told him he needs to open the door to leave.
"It's staggering. No one told me the operating procedure for the front door. Unforgivable. I've lost confidence in my team and they will have to resign".
Ray Nixon retweeted
It’s not just the blatant lying. It’s the sheer arrogance of Labour - who hate Britain and take the public for fools.
The backlash will come…
Ray Nixon retweeted
IMPORTANT: PMQs Wed 4 Feb
Starmer asked 'did the security vetting he received mention Mandelson's relationship with Epstein'
Starmer answers: 'yes it did'
So Starmer had seen the DV vetting
So how can he have been unaware that Mandelson had failed that DV?
#receipts
Ray Nixon retweeted
If we learned anything from the failure of Brexit it should be that the obstacle to change isn't existing treaties, regulations, or laws, but political will
(we haven't learned anything from the failure of Brexit)
Ray Nixon retweeted
The government just admitted Ed Miliband’s net zero agenda has achieved precisely nothing.
Same fossil fuel dependency as day one.
He’s destroyed our energy bills, blocked British drilling and picked fights with anyone who disagrees — all for zero measurable outcome.
This is what zealotry looks like when it collides with reality.
Ray Nixon retweeted
Rory Sutherland made a quietly devastating observation about one of the biggest societal shifts of the last 50 years.
He said the move to the double-income household started as an option but quickly became an obligation. The big winners? Governments (twice as many people to tax) and property owners (now two salaries were needed to buy a house). The big loser? The family itself, which lost roughly 35 hours of discretionary leisure time per week — with no real increase in living standards, because the extra money was largely soaked up by higher house prices and taxes.
It’s a classic example of how something that begins as liberation can quietly turn into a new form of constraint.
Longitudinal studies on happiness and time use (including data from the American Time Use Survey and OECD reports) show that the sharp rise in dual-earner households correlated with stagnant or declining leisure time for families, while subjective well-being metrics for parents have not risen in line with the additional income — supporting the idea that much of the gain was captured by housing costs and taxation rather than improved quality of life.
It’s a reminder to look carefully at changes that society presents as inevitable progress.
What do you think — has the double-income model delivered more freedom or more pressure for most families?
Ray Nixon retweeted
So the minimum wage just went up and the government is very proud of itself.
Here is what they are not telling you.
Your wage goes up. Your tax goes up. Your National Insurance goes up. HMRC takes its cut before you see a penny of that £1,500.
Now your employer is paying more for every single person on their books. They are not absorbing that. Nobody absorbs that. So prices go up.
The coffee you buy on the way to work costs more. The lunch you grab costs more. The haircut costs more. All of it costs more because the people serving you are now on higher wages too, and their employers did exactly the same thing.
So you got a pay rise, and everything got more expensive at the same time. Almost like it cancelled out.
If they actually wanted workers to keep more money they would cut their tax. That's it. That's the whole idea.
But that would mean the government collecting less. So instead they raise the minimum wage, taking a cut on the way in and benefit from the price rises on the way out through VAT, and call it a historic day for working people.
Ray Nixon retweeted
Good to see our salt story followed up here👇
The slow motion collapse (actually no longer slow motion) of Britain's chemicals industry is a BIG deal.
But NB it's not just salt.
Ammonia, sulphuric acid, ethanol, and a host of other foundational chemicals too. All going or gone
The factory that produces half of Britain’s salt could soon be killed by Net Zero. For the first time in history, England is set to be a net importer of the world’s most important mineral. This will be catastrophic for UK manufacturing, says Ruari McCallion
buff.ly/M8o8O6P
Ray Nixon retweeted
"A society that has secured abundant energy, industrial production, and physical safety creates the conditions in which political attention can migrate upward into questions of identity, moral positioning, and self-actualization." 1/6
Ray Nixon retweeted
1. The price cap is not a response to the war in Iran. It existed anyway (based on incorrect analysis by the CMA)
2. If you cared about the cost of living you would...
(i) lift the drilling ban and cancel the EPL.
And create incentives for opening new fields ASAP
(ii) call for gas companies and suppliers to import on long term fixed price contracts rather than doing everything on a just in time basis
(iii) cancel the RO, AR7 and future renewables auctions until prices are under control
(iv) abolish carbon taxes... They serve no purpose and just make energy expensive and industry uncompetitive
(v) cut the fuel duty... Half the pump price of petrol is tax. It's greedy profiteering by the government
But you won't because you actually care more about your net zero ideology than the cost of living or anything else
Ray Nixon retweeted
Criminally Negligent. Andrew Neil's Words. Britain's Reality.
Andrew Neil does not use language carelessly. Writing in the Daily Mail this morning, he describes Britain as stuck in an energy emergency with an oil and gas policy bordering on the criminally negligent, delivered by a bunch of clueless inadequates at the tiller. He is not reaching for effect. He is delivering a verdict. And the evidence he marshals is unanswerable.
The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for the first time in history. Oil is heading toward two hundred dollars a barrel. Britain is facing the worst energy crisis since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The International Energy Agency has described the supply disruption as the largest in history. And the government overseeing this catastrophe has spent the past year doing everything in its power to ensure Britain would be maximally exposed when it arrived. It closed North Sea oil and gas production. It borrowed against already strained public finances. It built an economic strategy on OBR forecasts that the energy crisis has already rendered obsolete. And it put the man most responsible for Britain's energy vulnerability, Ed Miliband, in charge of the response.
The Miliband contradiction has been hiding in plain sight for months. He stood at the despatch box during the energy debate last year and warned that Britain was a price taker not a price maker in international fossil fuel markets, leaving it exposed to their volatility. He was right. He was also the man who ensured that exposure would be as severe as possible by closing down the domestic production that could have cushioned the blow. The North Sea fields that could have been producing. The coal beds that remain untouched. The nuclear capacity that was decommissioned in pursuit of net zero targets that now look like a luxury policy designed for a world that no longer exists. Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison.
Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences. The fiscal headroom she has been defending against every request for defence spending, every demand from the Treasury and every warning from military chiefs, is being wiped out not by defence costs alone but by the energy price shock her own government's choices made inevitable. Her foundations, as Neil puts it, are built on quicksand. The borrowing costs are rising at the fastest pace since the Liz Truss mini-budget. Foreign creditors are watching. The bond markets are watching. And the Chancellor is discovering that the numbers she has been citing as proof of fiscal responsibility were always dependent on a stable world that this government's foreign policy paralysis helped to destabilise.
Neil makes one observation that connects the economic catastrophe to the political one with surgical precision. A stronger Prime Minister would have fired Miliband. He is right. The man who led the Cabinet revolt against supporting America, who blocked the use of Diego Garcia, who has spent a year dismantling Britain's energy independence and who stood at the despatch box admitting British households would pay the price, is still in his post. Still in the Cabinet. Still in the room. The reason Starmer has not fired him is the same reason he needed a drone on his own runway before he would act, the same reason he consulted his team on minesweepers and the same reason Britain is now a diminished, exposed and strategically paralysed country being described in its own press as a nation of clueless inadequates. He cannot afford to. The coalition that put him in power will not allow it. And so the inadequates remain at the tiller while Britain heads for the rocks.
"Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. [...]. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences."
Ray Nixon retweeted
I don’t share all of this gentleman’s opinions, but there is no doubt he thinks more seriously and practically about policy and state capability than almost anyone else writing about Uk politics. This is a good read.
Ray Nixon retweeted
My personal view on an important matter.
On the 18th of March the House of Lords rejected the amendments tabled to remove or meaningfully limit Clause 208 of the Crime and Policing Bill, a clause which decriminalises, without restriction, a woman ending her own pregnancy at any stage up to and including full term.
Abortion is a matter of considerable moral complexity on which reasonable people hold differing views. It has long been held to be a matter of individual conscience by both myself and the Social Democratic Party (SDP). However, this clause was not in any party's manifesto. It was not debated during a general election campaign. Rather, it was inserted into the sprawling Crime and Policing Bill and given just 46 minutes of debate in the House of Commons.
Abortion pills may now be obtained over the internet, without prescription or medical oversight. A full-term viable pregnancy may be ended at home with no legal consequence. Further, it could be argued that this law leaves vulnerable women more exposed, not less. It reduces vestiges of the legal framework by which coercion towards abortion would have been identified and prosecuted. It also opens the door to sex-selective abortion - which some societies practice at scale throughout the world - with no mechanism remaining to challenge it. This reckless legislative change has been passed without public consent, without adequate scrutiny, and - critically - without regard for the viable human lives it leaves entirely unprotected.
My personal position is clear: I regard this as an appalling and distressing decision by the Lords. To decriminalise abortion at any point in pregnancy crosses a line which, hitherto, I had considered to be well beyond the majority view of any reasonable British parliamentary body. Sadly, I was wrong. It’s an extreme decision which some argue puts into question our claim to be a civilised society. Were I in government I would push for the restoration of the legal protections for viable human life that this clause removes.
Ray Nixon retweeted
Check out the ten-year gilt yield this morning - after the UK's likely next Prime Minister tried to lecture international investors about the intricacies of fiscal policy and the UK's national accounts.
A subject about which she clearly knows absolutely nothing.
Nice one @AngelaRayner !!!
Markets now demanding 4.9% per annum to lend money to the British government. In Morocco, it's 3.4%.
And get this. In February 2026, the UK government a massive £14.3 billion - according to figures released this morning.
No less than £13 billion of that money borrowed last month went on interest payments on existing debt.
Think about that for one second - it's utterly insane. The UK's national accounts are now akin to a Ponzi scheme.
And yet still, lunatic MPs and potential Prime Ministers call for ever more borrowing and spending - "because it's the right thing to do"
Labour's chronic economic illiteracy and internal party-political posturing is driving the UK economy off a cliff ...
⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️
This story below reveals the true extent of Angela Rayner's cluelessness when it comes to economics, the public finances and financial markets.
I say that not with glee - but deep alarm and regret.
If this is really how the probable next Prime Minister of the UK thinks - betting markets put a more than 50% chance on leadership coup by June - then the ousting of Starmer/Reeves by Rayner (or Miliband) is likely to spark an instant spike in gilt yields, from their already elevated levels.
Just the fact that Rayner has said what she has below will put yet more upward pressure on the market-driven borrowing costs – whatever the Bank of England says is these days mere mood – that drive the interest rates faced by firms and households.
I have nothing against more social housing – on the contrary, the arguments in favour of building more are at the heart of my book "Home Truths", along with policy mechanisms that could get that done.
But if you think that, in the current environment, hard-nosed international creditors do - or even should - give a monkey's about the "social benefits" of subsidised housing then you are utterly and dangerously deluded.
Again, I say this in sorrow, not glee. I knew plenty of smart people at the top of successive Blair governments. The architects of New Labour – at least the Blairites – always made sure there were financially literate and market-savvy people in the room when big decisions were made.
That was important back then - when the national debt Britain had to service was 35pc of GDP. Now – with the same metric pushing 100pc of GDP and Britain paying more than Morocco to borrow money – it is absolutely vital.
It seems that there is no-one – NO-ONE AT ALL – near the top of today's Labour government who has the first clue about the realities of public accounts and global finance.
These are – once again – NOT tribal or party-political points, but statements of cold fact ....
Ray Nixon retweeted
🚨And there you have it.
Sly News are finally GETTING IT!
If Labour actually cared about reducing carbon emissions and making us less dependent on imports from Qatar they would do *MORE* drilling in the North Sea.
@Ed_Miliband's entire Net Zero argument DESTROYED in 2 minutes
