It would be hilarious if he called a general election and lost his seat because the deceived Makerfield voters took their revenge!

Andy Burnham will require loyalty from ministers if he pushes ahead with plans for a return to free movement and rejoining EU amid cabinet splits The prime minister is expected to include his Brexit plan in Labour's manifesto, meaning ministers will have to back the plans even if they have concerns One senior government source said the issue was likely to be the subject of a motion at the next Labour conference, which meant the party was more likely to support rejoining the EU Ministers will also be bound by collective responsibility once the options for closer alignment with the EU have been announced on November 20, meaning that they cannot publicly express a view thetimes.com/uk/politics/art…

From tomorrow Oxford Street is going to be car-free, bus free and it is set to be pedestrianisation only. The stretch between Orchard Street, near Selfridges, and Great Portland Street, just east of Oxford Circus, will be closed to vehicles. Buses, taxis, private hire vehicles, bicycles, scooters and pedicabs will all be diverted.

… The reality is UK total (goods & services) exports to EU in 2025 were: · ⬆️ 18.9% on 2015 (pre-referendum) · ⬆️ 3.8% on 2019 (before leaving EU) · ⬆️3.2% on last year. All in real terms (source: ONS trade statistics) …

Yes, the monarchy was deeply implicated in the slave trade. But not the British monarchy. The biggest African slavers were not pirates or bandits. They were kings. In the 1750s, King Tegbesu of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, was reported to be making £250,000 a year from selling slaves. That astronomical sum, equivalent to perhaps £45 million today, was vastly more than any British aristocrat While Tegbesu was trafficking human beings, the future George III, who had recently become Prince of Wales, was becoming a convinced abolitionist. He wrote a monograph arguing that “slavery is equaly [sic] repugnant to the Civil Law as to the Law of Nature”. He went on, as King, to sign the abolition of the slave trade into law in 1807. That act prompted incredulous rage among West African chiefs. In the 1840s, King Ghezo of Dahomey, played by John Boyega in the 2022 film, The Woman King, fiercely resisted such pressure. “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth,” he complained. Contrast his attitude with that of his British fellow-monarchs. Although Victoria, as Queen, was expected to refrain from expressing political opinions, her husband was under less constraint. Albert made his very first speech as Prince Consort to the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa. His words are a reminder of how determined Britain was to ensure that ending the Atlantic slave trade did not simply push the commerce eastwards. “I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings (at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe) have not as yet led to any satisfactory conclusion. But I sincerely trust that this great country will not relax in its efforts until it has finally, and for ever, put an end to a state of things so repugnant.” The difference between the British Crown and contemporary African monarchies can be glimpsed in the story of Aina, a young Yoruba girl owned by King Ghezo of Dahomey. In 1850, a naval captain called Frederick Forbes came to Dahomey to try to convince Ghezo to stop selling slaves. He was unsuccessful but, during his visit, he was offered Aina as a gift. Forbes knew that such slaves were generally destined for human sacrifice, so he accepted the child, naming her Sara Forbes Bonetta. When Sara arrived in Britain, Queen Victoria became her godmother, paid for her education and arranged for her to marry a wealthy Yoruba businessman. Are the British really the baddies here? Critics talk of telling our nation’s story “warts and all”; but they rarely get around to the “and all”. The “and all” surely includes the vast sums devoted to stamping out slavery, calculated by Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape as 1.8 per cent annually of GDP between 1808 and 1867, the most expensive moral foreign policy in human history. Even if there were a case for reparations in principle (which there is not) that sum alone – not counting the billions given in aid – would surely have covered any debt. What we are seeing is not a debate about history, but an argument about contemporary politics. Critics want to convince us that Britain became rich through exploitation rather than, as was actually the case, through private property, free contracts and independent courts. The easiest way to demonstrate the negative correlation between capitalism and slavery is to look at the places where human bondage is most prevalent today – in order, North Korea, Eritrea, Burundi, the Central African Republic and Mauritania. If William III owning shares in the Royal African Company bothers you more than the continuing abomination of slavery in those places, you need to ask yourself some hard questions about your motives.

🚨 IN FULL - HMRC letter to wealthy Britons : "I hope we can build an open and productive working relationship" 🤡

HMRC has quietly sent hundreds of letters to wealthy people asking them to reveal what they own. Not what they earn or what tax they've paid, but what they own. Here's what's going on. A unit called the Wealthy Team covers anyone with "incomes of £200,000 or more, or assets equal to or above £2m in any of the last three years". That's about 850,000 people. The letters ask for a meeting to discuss "sources of wealth", "future intentions", trusts, companies, family arrangements and even "significant life events" you expect in the coming years. It is presented as voluntary, but there's a nudge: "We may still need to carry out compliance checks on your tax returns. However, speaking with you first may help avoid this." Until now, inspectors have usually only asked about income and earnings. Experts call this a "sea change". One lawyer asked the obvious question: "does HMRC have a right to know what someone owns and not simply that they have paid the right amount of tax?" A tax adviser said: "No other G20 country asks for this level of detail from its taxpayers about what they own." So what is it for? Advisers suspect it is groundwork for an exit tax, a charge on your wealth for leaving the country. As one put it: "Building that knowledge could indeed be part of moving towards an exit tax." You don't have to be a billionaire to see the problem.

Most Western democracies have been hacked. Not with code. With institutional architecture. Let me show you how it works, using the most advanced example: the European Union. First, how it works. Once every five years, you vote for a European Parliament that cannot even initiate legislation. The body that proposes laws is the Commission: 27 commissioners nobody elected, appointed after backroom bargaining between heads of state. Bills are then negotiated between the Commission, Parliament and Council in "trilogues", closed-door meetings where the real decisions get made. A law that will apply to 450 million people goes through corridors that 99.9% of them will never see. Now look at who's in those corridors. Brussels has become the lobbying capital of the world: nearly 18,000 organizations on the transparency register, tens of thousands of lobbyists, more than 50 for every single MEP. And that's just the declared part. Add the revolving door: a former MEP only has to wait six months before becoming a lobbyist to the EU himself. The real problem is distance. A national MP who votes for a law that ruins the farmers in his district runs into them at the market on Saturday. In Brussels, the decision-maker never meets the people who live with his decisions. But he meets lobbyists every day: at lunch, at cocktails, at conferences. So the system doesn't optimize for the wellbeing of the people. It optimizes for the interests of whoever is in the room. You don't even need corruption for that, incentives are enough. Although sometimes, as Qatargate showed, there's corruption too. The result: the system has a structural incentive to accept things the people would never vote for. Take Mercosur. Twenty-five years of negotiations. France votes against it in the Council in January 2026 and gets outvoted. To keep national parliaments from blocking it, the Commission splits the deal into two texts, including a trade agreement that only needs a vote in Brussels. The European Parliament itself writes, in black and white, that this split circumvents the right of national parliaments, and refers the deal to the EU Court of Justice. The Commission's response: it has been applying the agreement provisionally since May 1, 2026, without waiting for the Court's opinion. Farmers were protesting outside Parliament. They lost anyway. And remember the one time the people were actually asked about Europe directly: in 2005, France and the Netherlands rejected the European Constitution. The text came back two years later as the Lisbon Treaty, ratified by parliaments. No more referendums. But the worst of it is immigration. In 2015, relocation quotas were imposed by qualified majority on countries that had voted against them. Since June 12, 2026, the Pact on Migration and Asylum applies across the entire Union, with its "mandatory solidarity" mechanism: you take people in, or you pay. Not a single European people has ever been consulted directly on this, even though it's the issue that is transforming our societies most profoundly. And this is where we have to talk about the most sophisticated piece of the machine: George Soros. Soros understood before anyone else that you don't need to win elections if you shape the ecosystem around the people who make decisions. His network, the Open Society Foundations, describes itself as the largest private funder of advocacy groups in the world. In Brussels, it runs its own lobbying arm aimed at EU institutions, the Open Society European Policy Institute. Here's what we know from internal documents leaked in 2016: a document titled "Reliable allies in the European Parliament" listed more than 200 MEPs. Strategy papers described building "inside-track groups" to caucus "internal allies" who could advance their goals in their daily work. Training sessions were organized for MEPs on how to counter so-called populist parties. The mechanism is brutally elegant. Think tanks produce the "expertise". NGOs produce the "demand from civil society". Legal NGOs litigate in the courts. Funded media outlets produce the narrative. The Brussels decision-maker, cut off from the population, hears the same message from every direction and ends up believing that this is what people want. And the craziest part: the institutions fund the loop themselves. Between 2021 and 2023, the EU paid around €7.4 billion to NGOs, and the European Court of Auditors found the use of that money insufficiently transparent. It even came out that the Commission had funded NGOs to lobby MEPs in favor of its own Green Deal legislation. The institution pays "civil society" to ask it to do what it already wanted to do. All of this is legal. That's exactly what makes it a hack and not a crime. The system works exactly as designed, except nobody designed it for the people anymore. The patch is simple to state and hard to impose: bring decisions back closer to the people who bear them, hold referendums on issues that change a civilization, create a mandatory register for every influence actor, NGOs included, with their funding sources, and shut the revolving door. Until that happens, European democracy will remain what it has become: a user interface sitting on top of a system that runs for someone else.

Wow! The temptation for the PM to call an early general election is growing 👇