Peter Rudd retweeted
BBC #PoliticsLive "Here in Havering, more than 70% of people voted to leave the EU. Ten years on, how do they feel about Brexit?"
Gent in cap, "It's been a disaster economically, it's caused so much bad feeling and anger"
Lady with pink hair, "Brexit has not been carried forward as it should have done, Boris Johnson put a block on it. We leant him our votes and he betrayed us. I don't want to go back into the EU"
My view:
This exchange gets to the heart of Brexit: people were asked to vote for “Leave” without agreeing on what leaving would mean.
Some believed Britain could leave the EU’s political institutions while keeping close economic ties, including the single market.
Boris Johnson had previously backed staying in the single market and, during the campaign, talked about retaining access to it.
But Johnson didn’t block Brexit.
His government chose a version that took the UK out of both the single market and the customs union.
If you expected a different kind of Brexit, that can feel like betrayal.
That’s the consequence of selling one word as if it meant the same thing to everyone.
Peter Rudd retweeted
I need to understand why it is always the least well off that are targeted to bail out the UK.
We have billionaires dodging taxes, MPs claiming outrageous expenses and covid fraud that reads like a triple Power Ball rollover.
Why not target these disgraces.
Peter Rudd retweeted
#PoliticsLive "You were a remainer but you're in a vote leave borough, what are people in your constituency telling you?"
Danny Beales, "Common theme from businesses and constituents that we haven't got what we voted for, not feeling better off, public services didn't get the money they were promised, immigration went out of control under the Conservatives"
"People don't feel more sovereign, we are more buffeted around by global events now, and isolated in the world"
My view:
The most revealing line is: “We haven’t got what we voted for.”
Brexit was sold as more control, more money for public services and a better deal for Britain.
Yet people don’t feel better off, the promised public service dividend never arrived, and immigration rose sharply under the Conservatives.
You can blame Tory incompetence—and they deserve plenty of blame—but Brexit was their project.
Leaving the EU didn’t shield Britain from global events or give us more influence over them. It left us more isolated while the same problems carried on.
When voters say Brexit failed to deliver what they were promised, that isn’t an argument to double down.
It’s a reason to ask whether the promise was ever realistic. And, of course, to rejoin the EU.
Peter Rudd retweeted
Brexiter on BBC #PoliticsLive "I want us to have our own laws, govern ourselves, not be dictated to by an unelected European Parliament"
My view:
That claim sounds less like an informed account of how the EU worked and more like populist rhetoric repeated without checking the facts.
The European Parliament was directly elected by voters—including UK voters while Britain was a member.
Most EU laws were proposed by the Commission, then debated, amended and agreed by the elected Parliament and the Council of national government ministers.
The Commission could not simply dictate laws on its own.
British ministers sat in the Council and took part in those decisions; British MEPs represented voters in Parliament.
The UK could be outvoted in some areas, but that is shared decision-making—not rule by an unelected parliament.
And the Commission itself was accountable to elected institutions: Parliament had to approve the College of Commissioners.
You can argue that pooling sovereignty was a bad deal, or point to a specific EU law you opposed.
But “we were dictated to by an unelected European Parliament” is not a factual description of the process.
It replaces the real debate with a slogan.
And this explains the need for education and information so individuals such as this gentleman can make informed decisions based on accurate information, and not populist, divisive rhetoric.
Peter Rudd retweeted
A reminder that Suella was heavily involved in the £700 million Rwanda plan which resulted in 4 volunteers being deported, backed Liz Truss in the leadership battle and resigned as Home Secretary because of an accidental breach of the ministerial code then sacked during her second go.
Oops.
Peter Rudd retweeted
Given the corruption uncovered by the Covid Inquiry and now the names of the PPE facilitators tell me how these people walk freely amongst us. Enjoying the benefits they stole from tax payers. When will we put a stop to this?
Peter Rudd retweeted
Abdul El-Sayed, Do not believe people who say I'm for sharia law, I'm for shawarma law" - 😋👏
Then he makes a sensible call for multiculturalism,
"I want an America where everybody, no matter who the are, feels safe. Whether you're Jewish-American, Christian-American, or Muslim-American: that we all feel safe"
"You can point and try to divide us, but Michiganers are a lot bigger than that"
My view:
I'm fully behind shawarma law! 😋👏 If it means delicious food, generous portions and bringing people together around a table, sign me up!
But beyond the humour, Abdul El-Sayed makes a point that deserves to be heard.
The idea that Jewish, Christian and Muslim Americans should all feel equally safe, equally welcome and equally valued shouldn't be controversial. It should be the absolute minimum any decent society aspires to.
Multiculturalism isn't about everyone having to believe the same things, follow the same traditions or abandon their identities.
It's about recognising that people from different backgrounds, faiths and cultures can live alongside one another, contribute to their communities and share a common sense of belonging.
Nobody should have to hide their religion, apologise for their heritage or live in fear because of who they are.
And nobody's safety should come at the expense of somebody else's.
There's something wonderfully positive about responding to attempts to create suspicion and division with humour, warmth and an invitation to recognise our shared humanity.
We have far more in common than the things that separate us. Different religions, different cultures, different histories, but the same fundamental hopes: to live peacefully, raise our families, feel secure and be treated with dignity.
That's a message worth celebrating.
And if a plate of shawarma helps bring everyone together, all the better! 🤓
Peter Rudd retweeted
Wright's father left when he was just 18 months old. The man who later became his stepfather was a heavy drinker and gambler who mistreated both him and his mum.
“He was a nasty piece of work.”
Affection was also largely missing at home, and Wright grew up watching other children receive the love he desperately wanted.
“I was watching other people in households getting love, but I wasn’t getting anything.”
He struggled to understand how anyone could treat a child that way.
“And I could not understand, even with having nothing, how somebody could come in and treat a child like my stepdad treated me.”
That experience would shape one of the biggest decisions of his life.
In 1982, aged just 19, Wright began a relationship with Sharon, who already had a young son named Shaun.
Wright had no professional football contract, no steady job and very little money. But he knew he wanted to be there for the little boy.
“I was 19, didn’t have a job, and no means, but I took him on because it was the right thing to do.”
“I never thought twice about it.”
“He was a lovely kid.”
Wright was still chasing his football dream, facing rejection after rejection. He was also getting into trouble away from the pitch.
At one point, he spent two weeks in Chelmsford Prison over unpaid driving fines.
“So there I am, 19 years old, with a young son at home.”
“My life has never gotten lower than that.”
After his release, he decided to turn things around. He gave up chasing professional football for a while, learned bricklaying and plastering, and eventually found maintenance work at Tunnel Refineries in Greenwich.
He and Sharon also had another son, Bradley. Wright's priority was now providing for his family.
“I’m going to just work hard and try and help my boys.”
He was determined that his children would never grow up feeling the way he had.
“I didn’t want any of my kids to not be loved, like how I felt.”
And when it came to Shaun, he never saw him as anything less than his own son.
“When I started going out with his mum, I knew I wanted to treat him like my son.”
“He is my son.”
Football eventually gave Wright another opportunity when Crystal Palace offered him a trial in 1985. His career took off, leading him to Arsenal, where he became the club's record goalscorer, and to the England national team.
Meanwhile, Shaun was building his own football career. After being released by Nottingham Forest, he joined Manchester City and worked his way into the first team.
By November 2000, Shaun was playing Premier League football, with his dad watching proudly from the stands.
“I’m very proud of him.”
In March 2004, Shaun earned his first senior England call-up for a friendly against Sweden.
“As a dad I am so proud.”
“He’s done it all of his own back.”
Shaun went on to play for Chelsea, return to Manchester City and represent England at the 2010 World Cup, earning 36 international caps.
For Ian Wright, his son's success meant more than football. It was proof that the little boy he had chosen to raise had grown into a man he could be proud of.
“It chokes me when I think how he’s grown up and succeeded.” ❤️
Peter Rudd retweeted
What time is Chris Mason investigating why the BBC continue to give Reform and Farage disproportionate coverage despite them crashing down the polls?
Peter Rudd retweeted
BREAKING: SUPREME IRONY! Dr. Oz cluelessly warns about powerful mob bosses FRAUDULENTLY SIPHONING money — and somehow forgets who he works for.
You have to be amazed at how little self-awareness that Trump’s minions have as they parrot parcels of putrid propaganda protecting the policies of their puerile potentate.
Take Dr. Mehmet Cengiz Oz, the TV doctor who was appointed the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, working under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Unlike RFK Jr., Oz at least has a medical degree.
Since assuming his role overseeing Medicare and Medicaid, however, the man who promoted products from an accused dietary supplement pyramid scheme has spent more time helping the Trump administration push its politically motivated accusations of fraud in the public health care system than on actually helping Americans get the healthcare that they need and deserve.
Today, Dr. Oz traveled to St. Cloud, Minnesota to continue spreading accusations of fraud, likely in an attempt to bolster the electoral chances of Trump’s MAGA-endorsed candidates in the state where House and Senate seats, as well as the entire state government, are up for grabs this year.
Dr. Oz apparently thought that he was explaining the structure of the organized crime syndicates that he claims are behind the fraud plaguing Medicare and Medicaid when he dropped this statement while speaking at a press conference today:
“So think of the Godfather,” he proposed. “The Godfather, you've got all these street operators doing all kinds of illicit activities, but the Don, Don Corleone, he's actually taking the money at the top of the pyramid and siphoning it off. That's how the multinational criminal organizations get their money.”
It’s a fairly accurate description of how organized crime bosses skim cash from the illicit dealings of their underlings. The only problem is that it takes an extremely clueless individual to not make the direct connection between the financial structure that Dr. Oz describes and how Donald Trump is operating his own administration.
Given that the media is reporting today about how enraged Trump became when he discovered that the former fiancé of his own son was allegedly siphoning beaucoup bucks in a pay-for-play influence peddling scheme — and allegedly demanded that she donate that money to one of his political action committees — the mob boss reference was particularly ill-timed.
Perhaps it’s not the best idea to make comparisons to Don Corleone when your own boss is raking in billions from the fruit of his massive corruption.
Please like and share to thank Dr. Oz for reminding us — right before the midterms — just how corrupt the Trump administration actually is!
Peter Rudd retweeted
Hegseth on USS Lincoln reports: "Completely misrepresented."
Then the Navy put it in writing.
Sen. Gillibrand: "serious and deteriorating conditions for our service members.”
Impeach him:
actionnetwork.org/letters/te…
Peter Rudd retweeted
BREAKING: Pete Hegseth PUNISHES the poor sailor who jumped off a US Navy ship -- AND his family -- in a heartless show of cruelty and spite!
Nicholas McKelvey was just 19 years old when he reached the end of his rope aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
He had spent 255 grueling days at sea, working 12-hour shifts in punishing heat, often without enough food, while his wife struggled to raise their children back home.
He had missed the birth of his baby daughter. His mother-in-law was in treatment for cancer. And when he sought help for his deteriorating mental health, he says the Navy directed him to a chaplain instead of a mental health professional.
Then, one August morning, McKelvey ran across the flight deck and plunged 67 feet into the Arabian Sea.
A helicopter crew rescued him. But instead of treating his desperate act as a mental health emergency, the Navy accused him of FAKING his crisis to escape deployment.
And on Thursday, the Navy moved to discharge him under conditions that will cost him his G.I. Bill education benefits – the very benefits he and his wife had been counting on to build a better life for their children.
“They'd rather blame the victim,” his wife, Samantha Larry, told The NYT.
McKelvey and Larry have been together since middle school. They became parents as teenagers, dropped out of high school and married last year. He joined the Navy in 2024 in hopes of giving his family some sort of stable future.
What he found instead was life aboard an aircraft carrier whose deployment stretched to a near-record 322 days as the war with Iran dragged on. Food supplies dwindled. Contact with home became difficult. McKelvey told his wife he wasn't sure he could finish the deployment.
“I didn't want to be there anymore,” he told the Times. “If I was going to die because of it, then that's just how it is.”
McKelvey was not alone in his existential angst. According to the Navy's own report to Congress, there were EIGHT suicide attempts among sailors in the Lincoln strike group during the deployment.
The Navy maintains that McKelvey deliberately jumped overboard to get out of his duties. Its records note that he wore a flotation vest and jumped when the sea was relatively calm. But one officer acknowledged in a report that the deployment had been so difficult it was “unsurprising that we might have a jumper.”
Now McKelvey and his wife are preparing to return to Florida with their 3-year-old son and 8-month-old daughter. They're staying with relatives and in temporary rental housing while they figure out how to support their family.
“We're going to have to pull out student loans,” Larry said. “It is essentially setting us up for just putting us in debt.”
The Navy kept these sailors at sea for nearly 11 months, sent them into a war zone, worked them through punishing conditions and watched their mental health deteriorate. Eight suicide attempts in a single strike group should have set off every alarm in the Pentagon.
Even if every day of that deployment was militarily necessary, the sacrifices these sailors made deserve recognition, compassion and care.
Instead, when one 19-year-old father finally broke, the Navy accused him of faking it and took away the college benefits he had earned his family's hopes on.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth loves to preach his “warrior ethos,” but what kind of warrior culture treats a sailor's psychological collapse as a disciplinary problem rather than a human emergency?
McKelvey gave the Navy everything he had until he had nothing left to give. Now the institution he served is sending him home to his wife and two small children with fewer opportunities than he had when he enlisted.
If this is how America repays the sacrifices of its young service members, the Pentagon has a great deal more to worry about than its recruiting numbers.
Peter Rudd retweeted
Reporter: Ken Paxton has taken to calling you ‘Talafreako’
@JamesTalarico: If Ken Paxton is worried about freaks, he should stop giving Epstein-style sweetheart deals to pedophiles. This is the guy who just released Adam Hoffman from jail, an admitted child rapist, after one of Ken Paxton’s wealthy lawyer friends got involved in the case.
Ken Paxton even kept him off the sex offender registry. Adam Hoffman was supposed to serve 25 years to life, but instead he served less than a month. As of this week, he’s now back on our streets because of Ken Paxton’s corruption.
Ken Paxton is the most corrupt politician in America, and it is costing Texans, it’s endangering our children, and it must end. The Epstein class has no place in Texas.
Peter Rudd retweeted
"Yorkshire Water CEO Nicola Shaw to step down after four and a half years in charge."
In those 4 and a half years Nicola Shaw was paid over £3 million including £1.3 million which was paid via an offshore company.
Everybody say aww!
yorkshirepost.co.uk/business…
Peter Rudd retweeted
🇺🇸 Imagine if the American Civil War had ended with the United States permanently divided into two countries.
Two governments. Two economic systems. Two sets of rules. Two competing centres of power.
Would America ever have become the global superpower it became?
The history of the United States demonstrates something Europe urgently needs to understand 👉scale is power.
Britain produced Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Europe produced extraordinary science and innovation.
But America had something else: an enormous integrated market, deep pools of capital and the scale that allowed its companies to turn innovation into global commercial power.
Today the world is increasingly dominated by continental-scale powers: the USA, China and increasingly India.
Britain, France, Germany, Poland and the other European democracies are individually much smaller. But together we have the scale to compete.
Like antelope in the wilderness, survival doesn’t require every member of the herd to become the same animal. It requires understanding that there is strength in the herd.
Pooling sovereignty is how nations acquire power they could never possess alone.
Keep the nation.
Gain the power of the continent.
Brexit was like walking out of your home for good on a warm, sunny day with no coat, no food and no supplies because you assumed the weather would never change.
Then the storms came: Covid, Ukraine, Iran/Hormuz, climate extremes
A decade later, Britain has discovered what happens when a country strips away its resilience.
🔥 The IFS says the 2020s are on course to be the worst decade for household income growth since records began in 1950.
Typical working-age household incomes are forecast to FALL by another £1,050 by 2028-29.
Britain cannot rebate its way out of this.
🧵 1/2 👇
Peter Rudd retweeted
We are not blank cheques.
@andyburnham , these members of the public are calling on you to protect households during a cost of living crisis, by blocking the £2.4 billion Thames Water bailout.
Let Thames Water go bust and bring it into public hands.
Peter Rudd retweeted
Is John Healey's 3.9% increase in the minimum wage an unaffordable burden on business? With me in the studio to discuss this are a £99,000 a year Tory MP, a £200,000 a year rightwing journalist and a chief executive on the average FTSE-100 salary of £5.0m.
Peter Rudd retweeted
Lady in stripes, "What about the troubles inside our own country?"
"It was Nigel Farage who responded to misinformation about stabbings by saying that people should respond with cold hard rage"
"There were race riots in 2024, I had black and brown friends who were scared to leave the house"
"And there was a massive racial bias with Brexit pushing people to vote in certain ways"
Fiona Bruce, "And when it comes to freedom of movement with the EU would you welcome that?"
Lady in stripes, "I would welcome Freedom of Movement. I was only 16 when the vote happened"
"Many adults I spoke to voted for Brexit and then regretted it because they voted on it based on lies"
"There was also the Cambridge Analytica scandal"
"I'm firmly of the belief that the Brexit vote was not democratic and that we should have another referendum"
My view:
She is right to challenge the idea that Britain’s problems begin at its borders. The rhetoric used by politicians at home has consequences too.
When false claims about violence are amplified and people are urged to channel their anger, the damage does not stop when the headlines move on.
The 2024 riots left many people frightened in their own communities, including people who felt targeted because of their race.
Her argument about Brexit also deserves to be heard. A generation too young to vote has lived with the consequences, while many people who did vote later said they regretted it.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal raised further questions about how personal data was used in the campaign.
That alone does not prove the result was changed, but it deepened public concern about the way the debate was conducted.
If the case for Brexit still stands, let the public judge it again—with the consequences visible and the facts in front of them.
Peter Rudd retweeted
Almost 90% of England's water companies are still acting illegally, still dumping huge amounts of sewage into our environment.
“People are sick of excuses,” screams Dame Angela Eagle. We've heard it all before and yet nothing, nothing changes.
One interesting note "The UK is one of only two countries in the world where the provision of water is fully privatised. The other is Chile, where water privatisation was imposed in the 1980s by a military dictatorship." Hmm? 🤔
theguardian.com/business/202…