Is there any reason why council housing isn’t reassessed every five years?

When Notre-Dame burned in 2019, the world stopped. Today, Russia damages Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a monastery nearly 1,000 years old and older than Notre-Dame itself. A thousand years of history deserves the same attention, the same sympathy, and the same protection.

RT @LizaRosen0000: Iran’s Islamic regime tried to pressure Western countries to censor the film “The Stoning of Soraya M.” under the guise…

Truly repugnant scenes in the Commons Chamber as Dr Caroline Johnson explains dying adults and children are being refused life-saving drugs that are given free by drug firms as Rachel Reeves charges them VAT on their "perceived value" She then gets a gob full of abuse from the monster that is Karin Smyth MP, Minister of State (Labour)(obviously) **Viewer Discretion Advised**

There’s a seismic shift happening in the gilt market that seems to be mostly going unnoticed. Everyone argues about how much Britain borrows, but the question of who lends rarely gets asked. For most of the post-war period the gilt market had a captive domestic buyer. In recent decades that was overwhelmingly British defined benefit pension funds. They typically bought 30-year gilts and held them to maturity, because the rules said they had to. Which means the gilt market had a captive lender, quietly underwriting the entire post-war state. The seismic shift we’re seeing… the captive lender is leaving. DB pension schemes are closed and maturing. They are running off their gilts to pay pensioners, not buying more. They still own around 45% of the index-linked market, and that holding winds down over the next decade. On top of that, the BoE is selling too. Quantitative tightening, year after year, to unwind its balance sheet. The replacement to British pension funds has arrived quietly. And most people have no idea about this shift. Hedge funds now account for 63% of electronic gilt trading, which is up by a third since 2021. Pension funds and insurers have fallen from 45% to 26%. Overseas investors hold around 35% of the market, up from under 25% a decade ago. This isn’t central banks, it’s global bond funds. These are mobile, yield-hungry, gone-in-an-afternoon type entities. Not the long term holders we had in the pension funds. The fast money doesn't own the majority of the stock yet. But it’s now dominating the trading, and the trading sets the price. This is a relatively new dynamic that will only continue to grow as pension funds see their holdings mature. This is why long yields hit 1998 highs while inflation fell. The borrowing hasn’t changed. But the lender has. And this is why it’s stiff drink time. The state needs to sell £246 billion of gilts this year, and every year for years, into exactly this market. Every deficit argument in British politics assumed the lenders would be there, just like the dependency ratio assumed the workers would be there. The whole system runs on lenders who no longer have to show up. And they expect a higher premium. Potentially a much higher premium.

1/25 Scotland has a Crown Office problem. @COPFS prosecutes crime and investigates sudden, suspicious and unexplained deaths. The Lord Advocate also advises government. That is too much power behind too many closed doors.

No, sweetie. Donetsk was a city of a million roses when its own Ukrainian flag flew above it. Back then, it was also the fastest-growing and most rapidly prospering city in Ukraine -- home to what was the finest regional airport in Eastern Europe, one of the world's best football stadiums, a state-of-the-art railway terminal, and one of the cleanest, best-maintained cities in the region. Its elites were running Kyiv, and every time I visited Donetsk as a student, riding the famous trolleybus Route No. 2 through the city, I was amazed by how many new office buildings were appearing, how much money was flowing into the city, and how many international companies were opening their doors there. Fifteen years ago, to us kids from Donbas, Donetsk felt like the center of the universe because it had everything one could possibly dream of. It was a young city of universities and libraries, where the overwhelming majority of boys and girls from across Donbas went to study, including those from my own small hometown an hour away by bus. Names like Liverpool or Detroit Rock City may mean nothing to you, but our Ukrainian Donetsk was a city of great rock clubs and unforgettable concerts. We traveled there to see Western bands perform. We bought rock merchandise at the legendary Right House store near Krytyi Market. Scorpions, Rihanna, and Beyoncé performed at the famous Donbass Arena. Schoolchildren from across Donbas were bused in to watch Shakhtar Donetsk matches. The city even had a famous monument to The Beatles. It was a city where we sang songs on guitars in its beautifully maintained parks and along the Kalmius embankment before heading out to buy the famous "green Donetsk burgers." Our older friends moved there after graduation, formed rock bands, recorded full albums, and held wedding celebrations in the squares around Donbas Arena. We traveled there to visit the legendary Radio Market in search of films, music, and books. And then you arrived. And you turned the wealthiest, most prosperous Ukrainian city into a piece of shit. You deceived many of its people with sweet promises of Russian oil-fueled prosperity broadcast from television screens, but what you brought instead was war. You transformed a thriving city into a criminal wasteland ruled by ethnic gangs from Russia, into a kingdom of Stalinist terror straight out of the 1930s, complete with torture chambers in the infamous Izolyatsia prison camp. You turned the magnificent Donetsk Airport into lifeless gray rubble, while the vast stands of Donbas Arena have spent a second decade slowly being reclaimed by weeds instead of hosting Champions League finals and Metallica concerts. You swept away an entire generation of the city's men through your forced mobilization and threw them against Ukrainian machine guns until there were barely enough people left to keep basic municipal services running. Because of you, prosperous Donetsk became a withered desert without reliable water, because your war destroyed the canal system that carried water from the Siverskyi Donets River into Donbas. For years now, people have lived with chronic water shortages and have been reduced shitting into plastic bags forever. You dragged Donetsk back like seventy years in time. You turned it into a depressed backwater, devoid of hope and future. Even ten years ago, tens of thousands of people, the most active, the most talented, the most entrepreneurial, fled the city and found refuge in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. Many of them still remember our Donetsk with tears in their eyes, the Donetsk that existed before the arrival of the "Russian World." You transformed it into something that even my pro-Russian acquaintances are shocked to see when they return after years of occupation. It was you who trampled the million roses of our Ukrainian Donetsk into shit beneath the tracks of your tanks and the boots of your death troops, turning them into a foul swamp of death and despair. And that stain will forever remain on the conscience of fascist Russia, which brings nothing but destruction, decay, and death wherever it goes.

The scale of what the Telegraph has uncovered requires the country to stop and process it methodically. Between 2015 and 2021, more than £28 billion of British taxpayer money — through foreign aid payments and Covid emergency loans — was appropriated by terrorists, hostile foreign states and organised criminal networks. The money is described as “beyond reach.” Those who took it are “unpunished.” Russia received grants via state-linked companies. Islamic State received Covid loans. Chinese military-linked firms received research investment. And behind all of this sits a Cabinet Office report — the first government assessment ever to quantify this catastrophic leakage — that was deliberately suppressed to spare ministers embarrassment. Now consider the timeline. This covers six years spanning three Prime Ministers — Cameron, May, and Boris Johnson — and into the early Starmer era. It covers the 2015-2019 Conservative governments, the pandemic response, and the transition to Labour. Multiple Cabinets. Multiple Chancellors. Multiple foreign secretaries. All of them operating a foreign aid and emergency lending apparatus that — by the government’s own secret reckoning — channelled tens of billions to Britain’s worst enemies. None of the money recovered. None of the recipients punished. And the report — rather than triggering urgent cross-party accountability — was quietly buried. The public paid for this report. They paid for the £28 billion it documents. They were then deliberately denied the right to know either existed. If there is a cleaner definition of contempt for the electorate, it is hard to imagine.

How can a Secretary of State for Justice state unequivocally that he does not believe that people should be treated equally under the Law in a democracy and keep his job? Or remain as a barrister?

Keep going. Delighted to see your letters to Crown Office & Police Scotland were informed by independent legal advice from the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates. We need more transparency of decision-making in Scotland. If it takes legal action or a Westminster inquiry so be it.

Read this and imagine that you’re a British Jew interacting with a police officer who belongs to this organisation

Long overdue. Trust the UK will be a part of this.

Polite notice to schools still breaking the law by failing to provide single sex bathrooms: you will be sued and you will lose 👇

The Scottish Court of Session has just ruled that providing multi-user unisex toilets in a primary school amounted to indirect sex discrimination against female pupils. scotcourts.gov.uk/media/mv5d…

Let me categorically Debunk this utter rot. @sainsburys. I am a poultry Breeder. The hens that lay white eggs (Amberline/White Star) DO NOT have a lower carbon footprint. Yes they eat a bit less and produce roughly the same amount of eggs as the Brown egg layers (Bovan/Lowman/ISA Brown) but they live shorter lives, are prone to dying suddenly when startled, a flighty and nervous and because they live shorter productive lives (12 -18mnths) vs brown 18/24mnths (both commercial farmed), you have to incubate more which is increased (Electricity/gas costs) and their eggs are not the same quality. I breed and keep 20 different breeds, including: ISA Brown hens and White Stars. All my hens are 100% free range, Not a single barn kept bird, I have ISA browns that are 5yrs old and still laying beautiful Brown eggs, I have not seen a White star live beyond 3yrs and certainly none have laid eggs past 18-24mnths. White stars Lay themselves to death. They are slender birds and because they dont eat a lot, it drains their personal vitality to keep up laying the eggs you want to sell because of the nonsensical lie that they are "More Carbon Neutral" You want to know about eggs, come talk to someone like me, Don't rely on some hairbrained imagination of a buyer who's trying to squeeze the profit margin for a few extra pennies at our expense and to the poor hens detriment.

Had to stop watching, too distressing. The rest of the Digwa family belong in jail, the police concerned should be summarily fired.

The mask has finally slipped. Labour's own minister, Pat McFadden, has said it out loud: who can we tax to pay benefits to others? That's what many suspected from day one. Higher taxes. Less reward for work. The game is up. This government is finished.

We’re allowing a Jewish minority which has largely assimilated and won over 220 Nobel prizes (22% of all NP) to be driven away and replaced by a low-skill immigrant population that sees no need to assimilate and which has won just 6 NPs (13 if you count peace prizes). Madness.

Schiffe der Rusal-Fabrik in Irland steuern direkt St. Petersburg an, um Aluminiumoxid für Russlands Kriegsmaschinerie zu beliefern. Doch das ist noch nicht alles: Das 134 Meter lange Frachtschiff „Arne“ verließ am 1. Januar 2026 St. Petersburg und legte am 25. Januar am irischen Werk Aughinish Alumina an. Nach der Beladung bewegte sich das Schiff am 28. Januar vor der irischen Küste auf einer Tiefe von 90 Metern mit herabgelassenem Anker genau im Bereich des transatlantischen Datenkabels AEC-1 zwischen Irland und den USA. Zuvor kreuzte es das Kabel C-Lion zwischen Deutschland und Finnland, das genau in diesem Zeitraum Schäden aufwies. Am 22. Februar stellte die deutsche Polizei bei einer Kontrolle am Nord-Ostsee-Kanal fest, dass der linke Anker samt Kette fehlte. So wie das aussieht, nutzt das russische Unternehmen von Putins Oligarch Oleg Deripaska seine Schiffe auf der Route zwischen Irland und Russland nicht nur für den Rohstofftransport, sondern auch als perfekte Tarnung für verdeckte Sabotageoperationen gegen die globale Internet-Infrastruktur.

The Mandy Files — 2. May 2025 Another zinger from Cabinet Minister Pat McFadden to Mandelson: ‘Every meeting I have is “who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others”. They’re asking the wrong questions.’ Wow! Just wow!!