You Engage @YouEngage

Bureaucracy elevates the incompetent into positions of power, granting them authority they could never earn through merit or respect.

Same Paralysis, New Prime Minister Andy Burnham was asked a simple question on Wednesday. Would he commit to spending 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030. He would not. Instead he offered a different date, 2035, and a different justification: "those commitments relate to the Parliament after this one." Read that sentence twice. The Prime Minister has just told the country, in his own words, that the promise he is willing to make is one he may never be required to keep. This matters because of who Burnham is and how he got here. He replaced Sir Keir Starmer after a defence funding crisis that toppled his predecessor. John Healey resigned as defence secretary warning the Treasury's refusal to fund the forces properly could make Britain "less safe." Pamela Nash quit alongside him. Al Carns, a veteran decorated with the DSO, OBE and Military Cross, resigned as veterans minister rather than pretend the investment plan was adequate. The Chief of the Defence Staff wrote directly to Downing Street. Lord Robertson, the man Starmer himself commissioned to write the Strategic Defence Review, called the Treasury's approach "vandalism." Britain, he said, was under attack on multiple fronts and unable to respond. Burnham arrived promising to be different. Today he showed he isn't. The arithmetic explains why. Wes Streeting, who inherited the Ministry of Defence when Burnham moved into No 10, has not identified where the £15bn Starmer added to the budget before leaving office is coming from, nor the roughly £2.3bn a year the Office for Budget Responsibility says is needed simply to hit the existing 3 per cent target on schedule. Burnham has now closed off the obvious routes to finding it. War bonds, the borrowing mechanism Healey himself once floated, have been ruled out. Income tax, National Insurance, VAT and corporation tax are protected by manifesto pledge, restated by Burnham the same day officials were quietly testing a new social care levy that manages to avoid all four by name alone. That leaves welfare. Burnham told journalists the country was "paying for failure" by leaving too many people in their twenties on benefits, and that changing this would "open up the way" to funding defence. It is worth remembering what happened the last time Labour tried this. A backbench rebellion of more than a hundred MPs killed Starmer's welfare reform bill outright. Diane Abbott called a similar trade-off, cutting welfare to pay for social care, "appalling," hours before Burnham floated the same mechanism for defence. He is proposing to fund the armed forces using the one lever his own party has already shown it will not pull. This is structural paralysis, not personal failure, and it has outlasted the man it was first blamed on. The coalition that returned Labour to power contains MPs who will not accept welfare cuts, a Treasury that will not accept borrowing, and a manifesto that forecloses the tax rises that might otherwise pay the bill. Change the man at the top and the constraint remains exactly where it was. Streeting has staked his career on the outcome. He has promised to resign if Burnham fails to find an extra £4.7bn at the autumn Budget, calling it "a matter of principle." That Budget is now the test. Either the money appears, from somewhere Burnham has not yet named, or Britain's defence secretary becomes the fourth resignation this saga has produced in under a year. Robertson warned that the country is under attack and cannot respond. On the evidence of Wednesday, that warning still stands, only the name in Downing Street has changed. "Streeting has staked his career on the outcome. He has promised to resign if Burnham fails to find an extra £4.7bn at the autumn Budget, calling it "a matter of principle.""

I like Sarah, but this is the kind of myopia that's plagued the middle class since the 2000s. I had family and friends in the trades when Blair chose to give the accession countries unlimited access to Britain in 2004. Their livelihoods were rapidly impacted. The middle classes - who had always hated the 'white van man' trades anyway - crowed and crowed about how shit you must be if someone could come from another country and beat you in the market. But they refused to even begin to look at what was happening. Groups of men living in cramped housing for a year or two - so they could undercut Brits, because their goal was to rapidly save cash to go and create a life in their much cheaper homeland. British men and women were not playing on the same field. And they were mocked as their businesses and futures were harmed. This excellent Polish builder has stayed here and made a success of things. Lovely for him. Lovely for Sarah, who got a cheaper servant class. And it sounds like he's good for society in general. But he was part of a wave of immigration that was really shit for lots of Brits - most of whom have since been called 'far right' for daring to notice the asymmetry of immigration impact. More than 20 years on, and the wilfully blind dogma has only grown worse. Now this post ignores the very obvious social, economic and cultural impacts of even greater influxes of people from more alien and violent cultures. I honestly don't know what we do when people refuse to see the picture in the round. Do we have to wait for a civil war before they'll acknowledge issues?

Sarah Ludford 🇬🇧 🇮🇪🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @SarahLudford

2 days ago

My excellent Polish builder has worked for me for several decades. His 17-year-old son is not following in his footsteps. Maybe because he has 4 A* at AS level & intends to go to Cambridge & become an astro-physicist. Speaks fluent Polish too. Migrants, eh? Who’d have ‘em?

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"It is outrageous that this woman has been given bail. The Irish judge that made the decision was wrong - bail should not have been granted. The judiciary is independent, but the role they play has major impacts. They are not beyond legitimate concerns and criticisms being raised. Dissident republicanism is a real threat to Northern Ireland - the cross-border aspect of this requires the Irish Government to step up and work with us. The intent of these organisations and those involved in them is grotesque - those involved no matter if male, female, young or old need to be taken on and the full weight of the criminal justice system thrown at them. Dissident republican terrorism MUST be taken seriously" Emma Little-Pengelly MLA

@MatthewStadlen Avoids the question why they are needed. Ignores the impact on their home communities as long as we're alright jack. Tries to legitimise immigration rather than tackle it. Easy stuff from the PR Consultant.

@JamesMelville But just like Starmer he thinks you can spend your way to happier times - deluded 🤡

@JeremyClarkson It seems the EU systems implementation has failed in various locations. Not sure what that has to do with Brexit except proving that Brussels Big Brother interventions never end, or start, well.

@traceyb78 @andyburnham If the economy doesn't get moving these trained youngsters will end up on benefits. The economy has to get energised not stagnated by red tape & punitive ideological policies

@KEdge23 Talking about issues that need resolving without any explanation as to how. Dress sense is woeful & his social media activities are an embarrassment. 1 out of 10 🤷

If he wants to spend these amounts taxes will have to rise across the board & u turn on manifesto pledges Lab were elected on He has to take that to the electorate, anything else is political deception

Burnham is a 6 year old in a toy store. Any radical proposals to change the social care will require billions. The defence shortfall is billions. Asylum costs continue in the billions Revised skills training will cost millions Nationalisation of water will cost billions.....

Somewhat Surprising: How Article 8 Keeps Foreign Criminals In Britain Mohammed Sury Dabo has 19 convictions for 34 offences. He has dealt heroin and cocaine for an organised crime gang, carried knives, committed burglary and robbery. Analysis of his phone suggested more than a thousand drug transactions in a single month. He arrived in Britain in 2007 claiming asylum, his claim failed, and he has lived here unlawfully since 2011. The Court of Appeal has now ruled he cannot be deported. Lady Justice Andrews did not pretend the result was comfortable. She called the tribunal's finding, that Dabo's private life in Britain was so established that removing him would breach his human rights, "on the face of it, somewhat surprising." She then upheld it anyway. That sentence is worth sitting with. A senior judge looked at nineteen convictions and a county lines drugs operation and said the outcome struck her as surprising, before ruling that the law required it regardless. Dabo is not a one-off. The Commons Library records around 61,000 successful ECHR appeals at the first-tier immigration tribunal between 2015 and 2024. Parliament tried to close this gap. Legislation passed in 2014 was designed specifically to raise the bar for Article 8 claims in criminal deportation cases. Nineteen convictions later, the bar did not hold. Other cases fill in what "somewhat surprising" looks like in practice. Klevis Disha, an Albanian who entered Britain illegally under a false name as a fifteen year old in 2001, was jailed in 2017 after being found with roughly £250,000 in proceeds of crime and later stripped of citizenship obtained through deception. He avoided deportation partly because his son struggled with the texture of foreign chicken nuggets. An unnamed Pakistani man, granted anonymity by the immigration court itself, was convicted of attempting to cause children under 16 to engage in sexual activity after grooming decoy victims online. He escaped removal on the grounds it would be "unduly harsh" on his two toddlers, a ruling the Home Office called contrary to the evidence and plainly wrong on appeal. None of these required a sympathetic judge bending the rules. Each followed the same Article 8 balancing exercise that kept Dabo in Britain, applied correctly, producing outcomes that Lady Justice Andrews herself found startling. This is where Lord Sumption's argument stops being abstract. He has described the European Court of Human Rights as a tribunal that abandoned the text its signatories agreed to, replacing it with a doctrine that lets Strasbourg invent rights no drafter intended. Britain's domestic courts then inherit that expanded doctrine, whether or not a single Strasbourg judgment named Dabo, or Disha, or Swansea's county lines drugs. Article 8 was written to protect family life from arbitrary state interference. It has become a mechanism through which a man with thirty four offences persuades three courts that removing him would be disproportionate. The tribunal weighed Dabo's education, periods of employment, social services support and an on-off relationship with a girlfriend he does not live with. Weighed against that: a public drug supply operation feeding addiction across Swansea. The tribunal found the first side heavier. The Court of Appeal, visibly uneasy, agreed it was entitled to. Sumption's proposed remedy, leaving the convention and re-enacting it as domestic statute, interpreted only by British courts, would not abolish family life protections. It would return them to Parliament and British judges, not a Strasbourg doctrine engineered to expand without limit. Nobody voted for a system in which a Court of Appeal judge finds a result surprising and rules for it anyway. The 61,000 cases behind Dabo's are the evidence that this is not one tribunal's error. It is the settled operation of the law as it now stands. Lord Sumption: architect of the case against Article 8's reach.

@jeremycorbyn Are you doing anything for landlords who don't get paid 🤔

Y'all kept telling me to read it. So I read it. Two hundred and nineteen pages of the Rape Gang Inquiry report, start to finish, at my kitchen table. My God. The debauchery and the cowardice. I have read a lot of ugly documents. This one is different, because the ugliness is not the surprise. The cowardice is. Somebody in every single one of these towns knew, wrote it down, filed it, and went home to dinner. Here is what is in it. Britain did not get this report from its government. It got it from twenty thousand people who passed the hat. Chaired by Rupert Lowe MP. Panel included Esther McVey, Nick Timothy and Carla Lockhart. Run day to day by Sammy Woodhouse, who survived Rotherham before she investigated it. That detail is the whole story. The state that spent forty years refusing to look was never going to fund the looking. What the Inquiry documented is not a series of local tragedies. It is one national pattern repeated town after town. Organised networks that moved girls between cities, supplied them with drugs and alcohol, filmed the abuse for blackmail, and passed children between multiple adult men. Confirmed in at least 149 local authority districts. That is close to 40% of every district in the United Kingdom. The method was identical everywhere. Befriend a girl at eleven. Cigarettes, vodka, attention, the feeling of being treated like an adult. Collect her by taxi from the school gates or the care home. Take her to a flat, a takeaway, a hotel. Then the group. The earliest case the Inquiry traced sits in the British Newspaper Archive, four Bradford men charged with raping a fifteen year old girl from Middlesbrough, back in 1955. Seventy years of receipts. On scale, the report is careful, so I will be too. The 250,000 figure everyone quotes came from Lord Pearson in the House of Lords in May of 2019. It was an extrapolation from Rotherham and Telford, not a headcount. Pearson called it an underestimate. The Casey Audit of June 2025 said the true scale cannot be quantified, because the data was never properly collected and in places was suppressed on purpose. Both things are true at once. Nobody knows the number because nobody was allowed to count. That was the design. On the perpetrators, the Inquiry cites court records showing 87% of those convicted in group based cases carried distinctively Muslim names, and an Oxford imam, Dr Taj Hargey, putting the real proportion nearer 95%. Those are cited estimates, not a census. Baroness Casey reached the politer version of the same finding and the country still called it far right to say out loud. Then the institutions. Police who closed cases without opening them. Social workers who treated protective parents as the threat and the traffickers as a lifestyle choice. An NHS that treated the infections in a thirteen year old and sent her home the same night. Schools that excluded the victim and left the perpetrator his access. Licensing boards that renewed the taxi permits that made the whole thing run. Every door a child could have walked through was locked from the inside. Here is the part that should end careers. The government finally announced its own inquiry in December of 2025 under Baroness Longfield. Its terms of reference were finalised in March of 2026, drawn so tightly that it cannot examine the national scale, cannot examine the perpetrator profile, and cannot examine the political calculation that protected them for decades. It is permitted to examine local operational failures. It is engineered to find nothing. A rape survivor and a backbench MP did what the British state would not do in forty years. They passed the hat and did it themselves. Three posts in this thread. This one was the summary. The next one is the detail, and it is worse. 🦋

@Ross_Greer @hzomlot Think you mean the Greens, the SNP & the terrorist sympathisers who vote for you clowns. Not in Scotlands name at all & never will be 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇬🇧

You gave them your money. You believed they were saving British lives. You were lied to. Tonight 6PM: The documents that prove the RNLI is a state-run border operation taking orders from HM Coastguard, funded by civil service payroll, and coordinated with 160 international NGOs to facilitate mass migration across the Channel. The "volunteers" are paid. The "charity" is state-tasked. The "rescue" is transport. I have the MOU. I have the financial records. I have the names. Thread 1/4 drops 6PM. You deserve the truth.

@andyburnham Who was it that started telling them education, education, education 🤔

Lucy Connolly only had a few thousand followers. And isn't a party leader. Zack Polanski has hundreds of thousands of followers. And is a party leader. Lucy got 31 months. Reform recently had a senior member murdered. Given context, Polanski's offence is far, far worse.

Burnhams aim to move youngsters away from Blairs university obsession is a step in the right direction. However without a flourishing economy trained electricians, plumbers & brickies etc., will all be unemployed.

This clown needs to stop pretending he speaks for all of Scotland. He doesn't. He speaks only for himself and his corrupt party.