Stu B
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stubalk67.bsky.social
Stu B
@stubalk67.bsky.social
330 followers 510 following 69 posts
Grumpy Old Man. Son, brother, husband and father. Politically disenfranchised. Loves cycling. Worried about the future
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Stu B
alasdairmackenzie.bsky.social
The Home Office’s absurd taxi bill results entirely from its insistence on forcing people to move round the country without choice or notice, & to live on the breadline so they can’t afford public transport. That Mahmood didn’t know about it till the BBC told her shows how appallingly the HO is run.
November 29, 2025 at 8:50 AM
Reposted by Stu B
stejormur.bsky.social
We really, really need a public information campaign to explain that one million pounds is actually not a large amount of money at all. £15.8 million, the total cost of all medical taxi journeys, is about one third of the cost of building one new Tesco Extra. www.building.co.uk/news/patton-...
November 29, 2025 at 9:18 AM
Reposted by Stu B
ironeconomist.bsky.social
www.theguardian.com/business/202...
November 29, 2025 at 8:14 AM
Reposted by Stu B
johnharris1969.bsky.social
... so much so that I suspended Labour MPs over it. Stop insulting everyone's intelligence man
November 27, 2025 at 5:22 PM
Reposted by Stu B
peterjukes.bsky.social
“Just three companies – DMG Media, News UK and Reach – control 90% of UK national newspaper circulation, a 20% increase in market concentration since 2014. Newsquest and National World – control 51% of the UK’s 882 local newspapers and local news websites”

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
‘Unelected power’ of ultra-rich is reshaping British politics, report claims
Equality Trust study shows how House of Lords appointments, big donations and media ownership affect political decisions
www.theguardian.com
November 27, 2025 at 5:32 PM
Reposted by Stu B
yanisvaroufakis.bsky.social
How Amazon, from its warehouses to the killing fields of Gaza to our public services, is becoming out technofeudal overlord. And how the Resistance is already beginning! www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
How Amazon turned our capitalist era of free markets into the age of technofeudalism | Yanis Varoufakis
Amazon Web Services owns the basic infrastructure for other businesses to operate online, turning even governments into its serfs, says the leader of MeRA25, Yanis Varoufakis
www.theguardian.com
November 27, 2025 at 6:19 PM
Reposted by Stu B
emathion.bsky.social
10 years have passed…

www.deutschlandfunk.de/toedliche-fl...
November 25, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Reposted by Stu B
anneapplebaum.bsky.social
the price of populism
anneapplebaum.bsky.social Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.bsky.social · 8d
"By 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%"

Read the Stanford report:
siepr.stanford.edu/publications...
The Economic Impact of Brexit
Other
siepr.stanford.edu
November 25, 2025 at 7:43 PM
Reposted by Stu B
carolecadwalla.bsky.social
I’m a past winner of the Orwell Prize & won partly because I exposed Vote Leave’s unlawful activities.

Michael Gove was its co-convener & refused to answer a single q. He’s now a judge of the prize & our world is truly one that Orwell would recognise

bylinetimes.com/2025/11/25/m...
Michael Gove Made Orwell Prize Judge Despite Record of Attacking Journalists and Dodging Scrutiny
Critics say "Orwell would have enjoyed the irony" of the former Conservative minister's appointment
bylinetimes.com
November 25, 2025 at 5:53 PM
Reposted by Stu B
premnsikka.bsky.social
Households face higher energy bills.

No end to profiteering - £30bn last yr.
£4.4bn bills arrears.
128000 a year, including 110,000.pensioners die in fuel poverty.

Must remove all subsidies from bills, pay via general taxation.

Exclude gas produced electricity from general Ofgem pricing formula.
Energy minister says 'there's no shortcut' to bringing down bills - as price cap rise announced
The average annual energy bill will rise by 0.2% in January, despite wholesale costs falling.
news.sky.com
November 22, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Reposted by Stu B
shipwreck75.bsky.social
Meta was aware that millions of adult strangers were contacting minors on its sites; that its products exacerbated mental health issues in teens; and that content related to eating disorders, suicide, and child sexual abuse was frequently detected, yet rarely removed.

time.com/7336204/meta...
7 Allegations Against Meta in Newly Unsealed Filings
Court filings allege Meta tolerated sex trafficking, hid harms to teens, and prioritized growth over user safety for years.
time.com
November 22, 2025 at 7:55 PM
Reposted by Stu B
zarahsultana.bsky.social
Six prisoners for Palestine are nearing their *fourth week* on hunger strike.

They are facing two years on remand without trial. They demand bail, a fair trial, an end to counter-terror powers used on protesters and the deproscription of Palestine Action
November 21, 2025 at 6:44 PM
Reposted by Stu B
darach.bsky.social
Record breaking prices for artwork sales do not, sadly, represent an investment in art and artists.

Investors are reducing their taxable profits before the end of the tax year with big one-off purchases while universities cut their humanities faculties and artists earn less than minimum wage.
news.rte.ie RTÉ News @news.rte.ie · 13d
A self-portrait by legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $54.66 million (€47.34m ) in New York yesterday, setting a new record for the price of a painting by a woman, the auction house Sotheby's said
Frida Kahlo painting auctions for $54.6m
A self-portrait by legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $54.66 million (€47.34m ) in New York yesterday, setting a new record for the price of a painting by a woman, the auction house Sotheby...
www.rte.ie
November 21, 2025 at 9:02 AM
Reposted by Stu B
scotnational.bsky.social
EXCLUSIVE: A leading polling company did not publicise data which showed that support for Scottish independence had increased by more than 6 per cent, The National can reveal
Leading pollsters failed to publicise Scottish independence 'surge'
www.thenational.scot
November 18, 2025 at 8:01 PM
Reposted by Stu B
mumsforlungs.bsky.social
NEW: Our DEFRA FOI reveals the budget for local councils to tackle #AirPollution has gone from £225 million a year to just £1.5 million in the last five years.

Cutting air pollution budgets by 99% at a time when children are still breathing illegal & toxic levels of dirty air is indefensible.
Funding for air pollution cut 99%, campaigners raise alarm
Mums for Lungs warned the cuts will significantly delay efforts to reduce emissions to levels recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO). New research from the parent campaign group shows fund...
airqualitynews.com
November 18, 2025 at 11:46 AM
Reposted by Stu B
tanjabueltmann.net
Tried to get this published but no luck, so might as well ‘publish’ it here so it’s not a complete waste!

➡️ Stripping rights from refugees today endangers us all tomorrow

#asylum #Mahmood #history #humanrights
Stripping rights from refugees today endangers us all tomorrow   When I was 13, I visited a Nazi concentration camp for the first time, confronting my country’s dark history always—and rightly—a bedrock in my growing up.    One image from that visit has stayed with me ever since: a display of prisoners’ personal possessions.    It revealed a world in which those imprisoned were stripped not only of their freedom but of the last tangible traces of their humanity. That systematic erasure was the most important precondition for murdering millions.   Now, as a historian, I know that history does not flow into the present in a straight line, and direct comparisons are rarely appropriate. They certainly are not here.   But history is the one compass humanity has. Too often we choose to ignore it.    The Home Secretary’s proposals for changes to the UK’s asylum system represent such a moment of failure.    Yet the most troubling aspect of Labour’s frantic efforts to appear tough on immigration is not even the historical echoes that taking refugees’ possessions invokes. It is that cost recovery is not the real purpose of the rationale behind it.    The true aim is to appeal to a particular audience—those who take satisfaction in seeing people seeking refuge deprived of what little they have. It is hard to imagine a more troubling approach to policymaking, and that becomes even clearer when we consider the Home Secretary’s proposals in context.   As of June 2025, there were 42.5 million refugees globally. Over 70% are hosted by low- and middle-income countries. The UK hosts 548,000 refugees; that is 0.78% of the UK population. Around 110,000 people are in receipt of asylum support; that is 0.15% of the UK population.   It is unconscionable that such a small and vulnerable population can be targeted with deliberate cruelty and weaponised for assumed political gain.   And that is all this will ever be. The core miscalculation is believing that adopting these positions will neutralise Reform.    Both historical knowledge and current research show the opposite. Mainstreaming extremist policies legitimises them further and aids only the original. Each step towards Reform’s territory simply gives Reform more power.   But our political discourse has been so degraded over the last decade that many no longer even recognise policies—or the language that frames them—as extreme.    That is how the Home Secretary can speak so casually of desperate people seeking sanctuary as recipients of a ‘golden ticket’ as though the context is Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory rather than countries torn apart by war and starved by famine. Speak of her ‘moral mission’ to withdraw support, alleging that ‘illegal migration is tearing our country apart.’ And warn of ‘dark forces stirring up anger,’ oblivious to her own role: from the use of blurry, dehumanising images of refugees to spread falsehoods about their impact on communities, to the equally false description of refugee movements as illegal migration.    I suggest the Home Secretary find a mirror if she is keen to understand who is helping turn anger into hate.   Because it is the mainstreaming of far-right talking points that the Home Secretary’s proposals represent that is really tearing our country apart.   For when a policy looks like the far right, speaks to the far right and is hailed by the far right as being far right, it is far right. There is a reason Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is jubilant and speaks of ‘the Overton window having been obliterated.’   This makes a mockery of the Prime Minister’s recent comments on the urgent need to tackle racism. But it also raises alarming questions about the impact this will have on communities around the country, many of which are already deeply divided.    The proposed policies will do nothing for these struggling communities, because their problems simply do not stem from people seeking sanctuary with us. In fact: for as long as politicians focus on immigrants and refugees as the cause of our problems, they will fail to deliver for the British people.   But it is important to grasp the impact of the Home Secretary’s proposals as they carry broader consequences for all of us. Suggestions for changes to how the European Convention on Human Rights is applied are particularly concerning. Requiring judges to prioritise ‘public safety’—falsely implying refugees pose a threat—would qualify human rights for a specific group.   And once one accepts that human rights can be qualified for one group, one creates tools that can be used against anyone.   So what these proposals really mean goes far beyond asylum policy. This is about the kind of country we will have in the future. If human rights are no longer universal, they become a means for exclusion and control.    That is why stripping rights from refugees today can only enable a system that endangers all our rights tomorrow.    And that is why our historical compass matters and why we have to use it now. Because that compass tells us without doubt that when first they come for one group that is never where it ends. 
November 18, 2025 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by Stu B
extinctionrebellion.uk
Monmouth floods: four severe flood warning, fear of “significant risk to life”, and 685 homes were without power which could not be turned back on because of the flood water.

#ClimateBreakdown #ActNow

Source: The Guardian
November 17, 2025 at 6:31 PM
Reposted by Stu B
philildo.bsky.social
Your regular reminder that Israel is only letting certain 'aid' into Gaza
R4 reporting that nothing incoming in the way of medicines, shelter, and not even nutritional food - just things to flood the street markets with unaffordable non-staple foodstuffs
All eyes on Gaza

#Israel is a pariah state
aaliyahxx.bsky.social Aaliyah 🇮🇪🇵🇸 ‼️SAVE GAZA‼️ @aaliyahxx.bsky.social · 18d
Torrential downpours have flooded displaced people's tents in Al-Mawasi, the largest displacement camp in the war-torn Gaza Strip.
November 16, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Reposted by Stu B
adambienkov.bsky.social
Shabana Mahmood on the BBC this morning talking about desperate people fleeing war and persecution as being given a "golden ticket" and "handouts" and saying she's got a "moral mission" to take them away from them

Indistinguishable from the rhetoric of Reform www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/shabana-ma...
Shabana Mahmood and the Politics of Extortion
Labour's strategy of telling its supporters to back Reform-style policies, or get a Reform Government, is the politics of the protection racket and it is not going to work
www.adambienkov.co.uk
November 16, 2025 at 9:25 AM
Reposted by Stu B
catiomiles.bsky.social
UK took in just 10 Palestinian children…
aljazeera.com Al Jazeera English @aljazeera.com · 17d
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says almost 4000 Palestinian children in Gaza still await evacuation to receive urgent medical care abroad, and his agency is working inside the enclave to rebuild health services amid the ceasefire.

🔴 LIVE updates: aje.io/int6w9
November 16, 2025 at 12:29 PM
Reposted by Stu B
premnsikka.bsky.social
Britain’s biggest housebuilder urges government to support first-time buyers.

Not a word about cutting profit margins, ever rising profits, gobbling previous stamp duty support, building substandard homes, builders secretly exchanging data to hike prices.
Britain’s biggest housebuilder urges government to support first-time buyers
Taylor Wimpey chief Jennie Daly calls for revival of help-to-buy equity loan scheme to revive property market
www.theguardian.com
November 16, 2025 at 8:31 AM
Reposted by Stu B
mcduff.bsky.social
They were doing this in the 2000s under Blair, with Blunkett and Straw. The current crop are all in post because they will not question the divine writ of 1997 and the true church of St Tony.
caponatacommie.bsky.social Rivoluzionario della melanzana @caponatacommie.bsky.social · 18d
Labour are doing all this evil shit in government not 'because they have to', but because they want to. This is the exact ideology of these people, don't be fooled otherwise.
November 16, 2025 at 8:32 AM
Reposted by Stu B
davidbsky1.bsky.social
Happy #SocialistSunday
November 16, 2025 at 8:17 AM
Reposted by Stu B
jkaconductor.bsky.social
‘The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what "works," but art opens up what is possible.’
tomdavidson92.bsky.social Tom Davidson @tomdavidson92.bsky.social · 18d
Pope Leo absolutely cooking
November 16, 2025 at 8:36 AM
Reposted by Stu B
13sarahmurphy.bsky.social
Dear Mahmood/Labour,

Once the strutting fascist, Yaxley Lennon, is taking credit for your policies, you must know you’ve completely lost your way. You need to get your head out of your arse and your account off X.

Yours
The real silent (fair-minded and ignored) majority of the UK
sundersays.bsky.social Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 18d
Tommy Robinson is claiming credit for the language/policy being used by the Labour government (about deporting people found to be refugees once their home country is deemed safe)
November 16, 2025 at 8:44 AM