EnglishEdward
Deity
No, and very nearly.
They can not even agree on the party name.
It is currently.
Your Party
It’s time to build a new kind of political party - one that belongs to you.
www.yourparty.uk
What is going on in the UK?
- Thread starter EnglishEdward
- Start date
No, and very nearly.
They can not even agree on the party name.
It is currently.
www.yourparty.uk
danjuno
Cole Phelps, Badge 1247
Defecting to the Greens should've been a no-brainer in an FPTP system.
The men who raised the flags
Nigel Farage says this summer’s movement was led by ‘ordinary people’ expressing their patriotism. That’s not what we found.
Plenty of people have been moved by the display of flags, and have reciprocated by hanging outside their homes and in their gardens. It’s obviously not the case that everyone involved in the Raise the Flags movement has a criminal history or holds extreme views. In Salford, we met a woman called Pauline who said she was concerned about “racists jumping on the bandwagon” but she broadly felt it was “fair enough” if people wanted to hang up patriotic flags. This seemed pretty sensible, and presumably close to the dominant public sentiment.
And yet, it is striking how many of the key players we have looked into — the people who have gone out of their way to put up hundreds of flags — seem anything but ordinary. In my experience, most people do not share overtly racist social media posts; they do not have criminal records for people smuggling or involvement in racist crimes. But time and again, our reporters — and others looking into this — have found key flag raisers with these kinds of CVs.
The Weoley Warriors, on the face of things, were the kind of ordinary patriots Farage describes: led by a 45-year-old electrician called Sean Doolan.
This is where it gets a bit confusing, though. While the Warriors appear to be ground zero in Birmingham, two other men soon surfaced claiming to be the original flaggers: businessmen Ryan Bridge and Elliot Stanley. The duo appeared on GB News in late September to tell the story of one of their flagging outings in the Stirchley neighbourhood.
Kate and Samuel started taking a closer look at Bridge and Stanley. The latter, it turned out, is the previous director of Sex Doll Official, a company selling customised sex dolls that Stanley ran with his wife and 17-year-old son (a short documentary about the company opens with the fantastic line: “it’s not every day you have a sex doll in your lounge with your 17-year-old”). The former, meanwhile, has also made headlines in the past: a story in the Mirror reports that Bridge was investigated by Spanish police for his role in a scam where a group of Brits allegedly made bogus compensation claims for food poisoning to hotels in Majorca.
Take Bootle, just north of Liverpool, where several dozen flags appeared at the end of September. I contacted Paul Walters, the leader of a loyalist flute band who claimed responsibility for many of the flags, and he told me his motivation was simple: “because I’m British no other reason”.
But a quick scroll of his social media accounts tells a familiar story: videos of people blackening their faces with charcoal, to which Walters comments: “only way you’re getting a new house these days”. He also shares conspiracy theories that the man who drove his car into a crowd of Liverpool fans at a parade in May was actually not white and British (the man charged with the offence is indeed white British).
What about in Scotland? At the end of August, a group of self-described “young dads” began heading out into north Glasgow and hanging Saltires on lampposts. They called themselves the Tartan Team and said the movement had nothing to do with immigration: rather they were protesting “politicians and councillors” who were presiding over a crumbling public realm and ever-worsening living conditions. Nevertheless, Saltire-raisers earned the approval of Tommy Robinson, who shared images of their work online.
On the face of things, it did seem this movement was of a different flavour to its English counterpart. That is, until the team at The Bell, Robbie Armstrong and Calum Grewar, started looking into Kieran Logan, the man who started the fundraiser to buy new flags. And on the evidence of his social media posts, Logan’s politics were pretty extreme.
He had replied to a video allegedly showing a fight between asylum seekers in Spain by saying “gas them all”. He also shared a video claiming “the answer for America lies… in Germany with a man named Adolf”.
Holmes recently draped a 100-foot-wide, £3000 Union Jack across a large, empty former council building that he owns in the area. Holmes’s enormous flag is a response to Chesterfield Council’s opposition to his previous flag, humbler in size at 30 feet long (which was unfortunately ripped to shreds by Storm Amy).
Holmes found the suggestion that he was in any way racist outrageous. The Tribune team in Sheffield sent Mollie Simpson along to meet him. Conducting an interview in the back of his Land Rover Defender (with a flagpole on the back of the vehicle), he made similar protestations about people who had accused him of racism and graffitied “Nazi” on the side of his building.
When we raised the fact that Holmes recently shared a Facebook post calling for “all mosques in the UK to be shut down” he responded initially with denial. “I don’t think I posted that. Did I?” he replied. Holmes quickly changed course, admitting that he may have. “I maybe did. I did. I maybe did a repost.”
Our story about Lee Twamley — the man who inspired our nationwide quest to track down the flaggers was picked up by the national press, including the Daily Mail, who printed his hilarious excuse for his criminality: that he was actually smuggling the Vietnamese migrants into the country to work as labourers on cannabis farms, so they wouldn’t be leeching off the state like the immigrants he was protesting. Twamley was even covered overseas, where the Dutch newspaper NRC kindly tried to translate his voicemails to me for their readers: “Yo is dit Jack the big, daft, fat fudging weird looking leftie ladies front bottom?”
Wherever we looked for the prominent flaggers and leaders of this movement, we found people smugglers and sex doll salesmen, people with dubious criminal pasts and people willing to put in a good word for Adolf Hitler. Farage told us the flag-raisers were just ordinary folk sticking it to the system. A few months worth of local journalism later, that now looks like a shaky claim.
Nigel Farage says this summer’s movement was led by ‘ordinary people’ expressing their patriotism. That’s not what we found.
Plenty of people have been moved by the display of flags, and have reciprocated by hanging outside their homes and in their gardens. It’s obviously not the case that everyone involved in the Raise the Flags movement has a criminal history or holds extreme views. In Salford, we met a woman called Pauline who said she was concerned about “racists jumping on the bandwagon” but she broadly felt it was “fair enough” if people wanted to hang up patriotic flags. This seemed pretty sensible, and presumably close to the dominant public sentiment.
And yet, it is striking how many of the key players we have looked into — the people who have gone out of their way to put up hundreds of flags — seem anything but ordinary. In my experience, most people do not share overtly racist social media posts; they do not have criminal records for people smuggling or involvement in racist crimes. But time and again, our reporters — and others looking into this — have found key flag raisers with these kinds of CVs.
The Weoley Warriors, on the face of things, were the kind of ordinary patriots Farage describes: led by a 45-year-old electrician called Sean Doolan.
This is where it gets a bit confusing, though. While the Warriors appear to be ground zero in Birmingham, two other men soon surfaced claiming to be the original flaggers: businessmen Ryan Bridge and Elliot Stanley. The duo appeared on GB News in late September to tell the story of one of their flagging outings in the Stirchley neighbourhood.
Kate and Samuel started taking a closer look at Bridge and Stanley. The latter, it turned out, is the previous director of Sex Doll Official, a company selling customised sex dolls that Stanley ran with his wife and 17-year-old son (a short documentary about the company opens with the fantastic line: “it’s not every day you have a sex doll in your lounge with your 17-year-old”). The former, meanwhile, has also made headlines in the past: a story in the Mirror reports that Bridge was investigated by Spanish police for his role in a scam where a group of Brits allegedly made bogus compensation claims for food poisoning to hotels in Majorca.
Take Bootle, just north of Liverpool, where several dozen flags appeared at the end of September. I contacted Paul Walters, the leader of a loyalist flute band who claimed responsibility for many of the flags, and he told me his motivation was simple: “because I’m British no other reason”.
But a quick scroll of his social media accounts tells a familiar story: videos of people blackening their faces with charcoal, to which Walters comments: “only way you’re getting a new house these days”. He also shares conspiracy theories that the man who drove his car into a crowd of Liverpool fans at a parade in May was actually not white and British (the man charged with the offence is indeed white British).
What about in Scotland? At the end of August, a group of self-described “young dads” began heading out into north Glasgow and hanging Saltires on lampposts. They called themselves the Tartan Team and said the movement had nothing to do with immigration: rather they were protesting “politicians and councillors” who were presiding over a crumbling public realm and ever-worsening living conditions. Nevertheless, Saltire-raisers earned the approval of Tommy Robinson, who shared images of their work online.
On the face of things, it did seem this movement was of a different flavour to its English counterpart. That is, until the team at The Bell, Robbie Armstrong and Calum Grewar, started looking into Kieran Logan, the man who started the fundraiser to buy new flags. And on the evidence of his social media posts, Logan’s politics were pretty extreme.
He had replied to a video allegedly showing a fight between asylum seekers in Spain by saying “gas them all”. He also shared a video claiming “the answer for America lies… in Germany with a man named Adolf”.
Holmes recently draped a 100-foot-wide, £3000 Union Jack across a large, empty former council building that he owns in the area. Holmes’s enormous flag is a response to Chesterfield Council’s opposition to his previous flag, humbler in size at 30 feet long (which was unfortunately ripped to shreds by Storm Amy).
Holmes found the suggestion that he was in any way racist outrageous. The Tribune team in Sheffield sent Mollie Simpson along to meet him. Conducting an interview in the back of his Land Rover Defender (with a flagpole on the back of the vehicle), he made similar protestations about people who had accused him of racism and graffitied “Nazi” on the side of his building.
When we raised the fact that Holmes recently shared a Facebook post calling for “all mosques in the UK to be shut down” he responded initially with denial. “I don’t think I posted that. Did I?” he replied. Holmes quickly changed course, admitting that he may have. “I maybe did. I did. I maybe did a repost.”
Our story about Lee Twamley — the man who inspired our nationwide quest to track down the flaggers was picked up by the national press, including the Daily Mail, who printed his hilarious excuse for his criminality: that he was actually smuggling the Vietnamese migrants into the country to work as labourers on cannabis farms, so they wouldn’t be leeching off the state like the immigrants he was protesting. Twamley was even covered overseas, where the Dutch newspaper NRC kindly tried to translate his voicemails to me for their readers: “Yo is dit Jack the big, daft, fat fudging weird looking leftie ladies front bottom?”
Wherever we looked for the prominent flaggers and leaders of this movement, we found people smugglers and sex doll salesmen, people with dubious criminal pasts and people willing to put in a good word for Adolf Hitler. Farage told us the flag-raisers were just ordinary folk sticking it to the system. A few months worth of local journalism later, that now looks like a shaky claim.
Cloud_Strife
Deity
Dead in the water, full of anti trans bigots unfortunately, because what the uk is really lacking is a political movement for people who hate trans people
Rachel Reeves considering pay-per-mile tax for electric vehicles in budget
EV drivers would face 3p-a-mile charge on top of other road taxes to offset falling revenue from petrol and diesel cars
The chancellor is expected to argue that the new levy would be fairer, as drivers of petrol or diesel cars currently pay on average £600 a year in fuel duty
A) This means they have to monitor everywhere you drive? Or are they going to put it on the tachometer, so you pay for every mile your car does even if abroad, and you have a very good reason to alter it?
B) The stated logic of fuel duty is because burning fossil fuels is bad, the same as cigs and booze. How is it "fairer" for electric cars to also pay this?
EV drivers would face 3p-a-mile charge on top of other road taxes to offset falling revenue from petrol and diesel cars
The chancellor is expected to argue that the new levy would be fairer, as drivers of petrol or diesel cars currently pay on average £600 a year in fuel duty
A) This means they have to monitor everywhere you drive? Or are they going to put it on the tachometer, so you pay for every mile your car does even if abroad, and you have a very good reason to alter it?
B) The stated logic of fuel duty is because burning fossil fuels is bad, the same as cigs and booze. How is it "fairer" for electric cars to also pay this?
Manfred Belheim
Moaner Lisa
- Joined
- Sep 11, 2009
- Messages
- 8,750
I'm sure the main purpose of fuel duty is raising revenue, so it makes sense they'd want to raise the same sort of revenue from the replacement.
EnglishEdward
Deity
Your car's milage is recorded at the annual MOT test.
Have you not worked out the way that the world is going?
Before too long, the regulations will insist that all new cars have an
active SIM to report where they are and how fast the car is going.
Consider who wants it:
(a) The car manufacturers want it for debugging and fine tuning.
(b) The insurance companies want it too so they can withdraw
cover from, or better still financially stiff, the less able drivers.
(c) The contract hire company wants it to support per mile charging.
(d) The police want it rather than relying on static speed cameras
(e) Lawyers wanting to sue you want it.
(f) As does the government.
Consider who does not want it
(a) Joe Public whose opinion will be of course ignored
And the monies will then be automatically deducted by the
company and by the DVLA from your bank account etc.
And once the majority of cars have it, they will almost certainly
retrospectively impose the requirement on preexisting cars.
Have you not worked out the way that the world is going?
Before too long, the regulations will insist that all new cars have an
active SIM to report where they are and how fast the car is going.
Consider who wants it:
(a) The car manufacturers want it for debugging and fine tuning.
(b) The insurance companies want it too so they can withdraw
cover from, or better still financially stiff, the less able drivers.
(c) The contract hire company wants it to support per mile charging.
(d) The police want it rather than relying on static speed cameras
(e) Lawyers wanting to sue you want it.
(f) As does the government.
Consider who does not want it
(a) Joe Public whose opinion will be of course ignored
And the monies will then be automatically deducted by the
company and by the DVLA from your bank account etc.
And once the majority of cars have it, they will almost certainly
retrospectively impose the requirement on preexisting cars.
True, but this will take many years. This says the average (I assume mean) age of a scrapped car is 16, and I think at the moment you can just take the SIM card out (I expect they will go eSIM soon to stop you). Even if they change the law today it will be a long time before most cars can be reliably monitored, and there will be a long time when older cars will be preferable which the car manufacturers will not like.
Klaus Hergersheimer
Emperor
One should also consider that electric vehicles tend to weigh more than their gasoline equivalents of a similar size. That actually means even further strain on the roads, ruining them that much more quickly. With the loss of excise taxes from gasoline sales, presumably the money for that road maintenance has to come from somewhere...
Now,
With the exception of reducing smog, this whole EV "push" is just people chasing their own tails. It is not some panacea. And it's only generating a wider degree of problems that only a new energy source would ever fix.
Now,
With the exception of reducing smog, this whole EV "push" is just people chasing their own tails. It is not some panacea. And it's only generating a wider degree of problems that only a new energy source would ever fix.
Senethro
Overlord
Therefore?
danjuno
Cole Phelps, Badge 1247
I don't think any new source of energy would change the fact that cars are bigger and heavier than any other form of personal transportation. Getting people off the roads to walk, cycle, or take mass transit is the only way to deal with those sorts of issues.
Totally. And the states main response to more electric bikes is to kill the kids who use them.
danjuno
Cole Phelps, Badge 1247
Yeah, what do they put in the water here in the anglosphere that makes people lose their minds at any form of transportation that isn't a 2-3 ton metal box?
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