Bertha Mason

If the BBC folk had half a brain, they'd look at the empty seats and work out that they've put their money on a broken nag. How tragic is the fall of the once mighty BBC?

After the Budget, millions will use online tax calculators. But there's a privacy catch: we tested the seven most popular, and every one sends your income to a server. Here's what MoneySavingExpert sends:

We’ve never learned this lesson in the UK. We still have to listen to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of a bunch of racists and fascists.

Attacks on trans people were never about protecting women, as they claimed. It was always about enforcing far right ideas about gender and sex on everyone.

Currently wondering what message the UK govt thought it was sending by dressing up the Minister for Net Zero in a literal Shell logo.

In one day, two politicians - Bolsonaro in Brazil and Vucic in Serbia - with ties to Trump have lost surprise elections thanks to high turnout. The rise of the international far-right is not inevitable.

On the same day, huge crowds are welcoming Machado back to Venezuela. Her return was blocked for months by the US-backed regime. Pressure from below finally made it impossible for Trump and Rodriguez to keep her out

“Digital crimes must be dealt with like real-life crimes.” 💯

Naomi has polling evidence, I have trade policy evidence that Made in Europe means the UK being further squeezed out of manufacturing supply chains, and that talking about Freedom of Movement is a response to that.

All those right-wingers who bleat on about 'sovereignty' are amazingly quiet when private equity monetises our NHS, our care homes and clinics, when US PE and Canadian pension companies profit from our water, when they buy up our homes, when UK energy and transport profits go to foreign companies.

The shift away from the US continues. Ten countries have now signed on for Macron’s Forward Deterrence initiative, including the UK, Germany and Poland, WSJ reports. Under the plan, France would station nuclear-capable fighter jets across Europe as trust in the US erodes.

Vučić out in Serbia; Lula in, in Brazil. Most importantly, the US tech giants, with their millions spent on meddling in other countries' democracies, are starting to lose and wasting their money. Here's hoping the US mid-terms go the same way.

Speaking as a pensioner, I find the student protests, be it Serbia, India, France, Belgium or Albania really heartening. My generation has left such a dreadful legacy for them...overpriced housing, expensive education, climate change, pollution, debt...good for them for fighting back.

A new era for Oxford Street starts now.

London's clean air has been Sadiq Khan's greatest achievement. It takes real political balls to stick with something that was so widely unpopular in the early days. Lives saved, people healthier, better and faster public transport.

Bolsonaro-friendly mayors appear to be sabotaging public transport on Election Day. Buses aren’t running in Lula-friendly areas, flights and ferries mysteriously canceled. Traffic lights have gone out and people’s power cut in Salvador, indigenous people’s travel restricted

🔴 REVEALED: Palantir led closed-door review of how MoD buys software The review was presented to defence minister Luke Pollard by Palantir UK boss Louis Mosley in Feb and has mostly been implemented None of this was made public New investigation🧵 democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-p...

This is a confession to treason. Elon Musk, a private individual and not an elected official, hijacked U.S. national defence policy to harm partner Ukraine and help enemy Russia. www.cbc.ca/news/world/u...

Fascinating Jeremy, now tell us about the time you cut national insurance twice as an electoral game despite knowing we couldn't afford it.

At some point, we'll wake up to the fact that this is really bad news but, for now, the government will push this as a good thing.

Police attack LDH observers. LDH is the French equivalent of Human Rights Watch.

French police protecting fascist militants.

As Burnham decides whether to end Palantir’s £330m NHS contract, the questions about its access have never been more vital Read the full investigation, and the documents: democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-p... Democracy for Sale is reader-funded. If you value this work, please subscribe 😊

"Imagine if, for once, Labour decided to tell the truth about immigration. Our economy needs it. The NHS needs it. And making foreign workers’ lives more miserable – as the home secretary plans to do – will undermine integration." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The wonderful Richard Dadd exhibition at the Royal Academy finishes tomorrow. Escape the rain and get to it if you can. Truly superbly curated and beautifully lit. A feast for the soul.

"The Home Office has identified a new problem with migrant care workers. The people presented as a burden on Britain because they earn too little have become so indispensable that they must be prevented from finding a better or higher-paid job." ukandeu.ac.uk/unaffordable...

My grandma had a outside toilet in her house. Most of the (cheap!) rooms/flats I rented as a student to my early 20s didn't have central heating. Paraffin heaters were the pits. I travelled through Europe and across to Goa with a hard framed suitcase that didn't have wheels and weighed a ton.

🚨🚨This could be a turning point. Amid #Starlink crisis, #Finnish tech giants #ICEYE and #Nokia signed a letter of intent with #Ukraine's Defense Ministry yesterday formalizing a partnership aimed at developing Ukraine's own #satellitecommunicationssystem. kyivindependent.com/amid-starlin...

Again, it’s important to understand that the transgender terror did not arise organically from the public. It was imposed from above, by the world’s most hateful and poisonous media class.

They told you to fix it with a paper straw while 100 companies are responsible for 71% of all industrial emissions. It's not you. It's them.

If the GRU had this information from hacking Kushner's phone, what else do they have about the Trump circle? Is it any surprise that Trump is siding with Putin? The family is corrupt and compromised.

Dalia Gebrial's passionate advocacy for the invaluable contribution made this country by care workers and other immigrants was so good to hear. I'm sick of this downgrading of people who we invite here, who we need here, and then we tell them, we don't know if you deserve to be here. #politicslive

Nice to have some good news. I'll be praying for his victims.

Reminds me of the great footnote from John Julius Norwich in his History of Venice

My son very kindly sent me a link to the Wikipedia page for this gentleman, Preserved Fish. “There were at least ten other Fish family members with the Quaker given name Preserved, whose lineages are often confused.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preserv...

The court judgment quoted one student: "The College would not associate itself with an astronomer who believed that the sun orbited the earth, or a medic who believed scrofula could be cured by the king. The claim black people are only fit to be sports stars and entertainers has no more validity.”

Andrew lloyd Weber everyone

President's falling for it was collected in a file sent directly to the Kremlin. Inside Putin's "Doppelgänger" operation, based on leaked correspondence between the PA and Russia's Agency for Social Design. The White House has been penetrated by Russian agents as never before in US history.

Leaks from Putin's office have revealed an extensive influence operation targeting JD Vance, which achieved everything it set out to achieve. Read all about how JD Vance and others fell for a lie about Volodymyr Zelensky concocted by agents of Russia's Presidential Administration. And how the Vice

The Experiment on C4 was terrifying. It was shocking how many people could watch disabled people having their basic rights taken away from them, be forced to do menial tasks for pin money, be treated like criminals & encouraged towards sterilisation & euthanasia, & think of it as 'nice' for them.

Ooh...at last Meta gets a fine that might actually sting at bit. Shame it wasn't the full $219bn. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Why has #C4News made their poor reporter stand outside in the bitter dark wind and wuthering of Cumbria to introduce a report on the water company plans around Windermere, when she could as easily say what she is saying in a warm studio?

Net migration was 171,000 for 2025 but visas were falling sharply & have kept doing so. Expect it to fall below 75,000 for July 2025 - June 2026 in November data, then zero for 2026 (announced May 2027) James has had vg modeling and predictions: his prediction is 50k bsky.app/profile/jame...

I see debt as a percentage of GDP has gone *down* to 94%. So it's not 'forever rising' as some would have us believe.

Crap that this has happened, but the new council was right to pull up the developer on the lack of social housing. 98 out of 1,744 homes is not going to get anywhere near the 50% social housing new build target for the borough. www.standard.co.uk/news/london/...

Sigh. Last line of this story "As a proportion of the economy, debt was ​lower than a year earlier, the ONS said."