The Heartlands Tribune
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Working Class Independent left-wing news, views, and opinions. Formally, Labour Heartlands Please Donate https://t.co/tdPMBfVG2H
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It is a rare thing for the editor of the Daily Mirror, Kevin Maguire, to speak a truth that echoes the pages of The Heartlands Tribune. Yet on Good Morning Britain, even the mainstream media found itself forced to state the obvious. Discussing the government’s commitment and the order from Trump to ratchet up defence spending, targeting 3% to 3.5% of GDP by 2035, an extra £40 billion in today's money, Maguire laid bare the brutal trade-off: "If your choice is to spend a lot more on warfare, you're going to have less on welfare or council houses or health or education filling potholes, whatever you want." The case for the crown, fairly stated, argues that we live in a dangerous world requiring a massive commitment to deterrence. They tell us that without a militarised posture and total compliance with NATO spending targets, national security is compromised. Grant all of it. Assume the absolute worst-case scenario peddled by the hawks in Whitehall. The reality is that's a useful bogeyman for the bottomless pit. First, the threat itself is fundamentally mismanaged to justify the price tag. As Maguire noted, and as GCHQ and intelligence figures have conceded, Russia’s conventional military capability has been severely bled dry in Ukraine. It holds less capacity today as an invading force against NATO territory than at almost any point in recent history. Yet, every defence budget requires a bogeyman. Without a perpetual threat lurking on the horizon, the arms lobby cannot justify its subscription model. Second, where does the money actually go? Westminster treats the Ministry of Defence as a sacred cow, exempt from the fiscal discipline forced upon hospitals, schools, and local councils. Public finances are throwing billions into a black hole, and nothing functional comes out. Despite decades of record funding, our conventional armed forces remain notoriously under-equipped, plagued by procurement scandals and breathtaking wastage. Former ministers resign, parliamentary committees issue scathing reports on procurement failures, and yet the public is asked to throw good money after bad. The argument still leads straight back to austerity. If ministers keep their self-imposed fiscal rules, refuse to tax wealth properly and insist on meeting ever-higher NATO targets, the money has to come from somewhere. That means fewer homes, weaker councils, longer waits, deeper cuts and another raid on the working class. Real security is a council house, a GP appointment, more nurses, more doctors, a functioning school, decent social care and a wage that covers the bills. The real #welfare state now props up defence contractors, private arms firms and their shareholders. Everyone else gets austerity.
The Heartlands Tribune80,804 次观看 • 2 天前
Westminster has built a country where we spend more money on the planning paperwork for a single road than it costs other nations to build an entire mountain tunnel. This isn't a system accidentally strangled by red tape: it is a highly lucrative industry. A vast priesthood of consultants and lawyers is making a fortune they have no interest in the work being done. It is corruption by bureaucracy, and working-class communities are footing the bill for projects that never even see a spade in the ground. The absolute paralysis of modern Britain was laid bare in a recent parliamentary committee. A single witness gave them the truth with both barrels, exposing the administrative vampires sucking public money dry while the work goes undone. The details are an insult to every community waiting for homes, decent transport, and cheaper energy. Take the Lower Thames Crossing. The planning application alone has swallowed more than a quarter of a billion pounds. For that exact same amount, Norway actually constructed the world’s longest road tunnel. We spent it on paper, and we have not even turned a sod of earth. This is a permission state eating itself alive. Look at HS2, the most expensive railway line on earth. Part of the reason it cost so much is that we are spending £121 million on a specific "bat tunnel" to protect a few hundred bats living in a nearby wood, a wood the line does not even pass through. Look at Hinkley Point C, the most expensive nuclear power station in human history. For eight years, developers locked in a multi-million-pound wrangle with regulators over installing an underwater "fish disco", an acoustic deterrent to stop fish swimming into the pipes. 20 years ago, we built nuclear fleets at a fraction of the cost. Today, we sacrifice national infrastructure to the gods of endless compliance. The final absurdity is the plan to reopen just 3.3 miles of an existing railway line between Bristol and Portishead, a route already built but closed during the Beeching cuts. The planning application is 80,000 pages long. Over one thousand of those pages are about bats. We have created a system that trades in paper while the real economy rots. The working class pay the price for this institutional cowardice. They pay for it in soaring energy bills, missing homes, broken transport links, and a country that cannot build the future it keeps promising. Protecting the environment is vital, but drowning ourselves in paper is not environmentalism. A system that takes 80,000 pages to clear three miles of existing track is broken. It is not governance: it is managed decline with a clipboard. It's the bureaucratic vampires drinking the country's wealth...
The Heartlands Tribune204,909 次观看 • 16 天前
Remember when politicians understood that truth was not a media accessory, but a duty? Dennis Skinner did. In this clip, Emily Maitlis tries the usual Westminster sleight of hand, turning an untruth into a political line. Skinner stops her dead and calls it what it is: spin. No waffle. No handler-approved soundbite. No focus-grouped fog. Just a working-class traditional Labour MP telling a BBC presenter not to dress up an untruth and pass it off as news. That used to matter. Today, politics is drowning in slogans, scripts and manufactured sincerity. Ministers speak like bad actors in a poor production of democracy, repeating lines written by advisers who would not recognise truth if it kicked the camera over. Orwell had them nailed: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Skinner understood that. Truth is power. Lies are corruption. And a left that cannot tell the difference is no left at all... #DennisSkinner
The Heartlands Tribune310,197 次观看 • 1 个月前
Now even the mainstream media are starting to notice the machine. #AndyBurnham will walk into Number 10 on the 16th. The promised leadership challenge vanished. No contest. No mandate. No public vote. No scrutiny. Just a managed handover dressed up as democratic process. On Sky, Sophy Ridge and Wilfred Frost practically laughed in Labour MP Gordon McKee’s face as he tried to defend the indefensible. McKee reached for the weakest excuses: Burnham has done Reddit Q&As. Frost pointed out the obvious: Burnham chooses which questions he answers. Ridge added the part Labour would rather ignore: he can simply dodge the questions he does not like, including the ones the public actually want answered. That is not scrutiny. That is a handover. Ridge also highlighted that Burnham has barely done proper interviews at all. Press conferences are not enough, especially when journalists are not allowed to ask questions. Social media appearances are not enough when the candidate can filter the public. Hand-picked questions are not democratic accountability. They are stage management. This is not someone applying to run a residents’ committee. This is the man about to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. If Burnham should face proper interviews, hostile questions, live scrutiny, unscripted follow-ups and a public that is allowed to hear what he actually believes before he walks through the black door. The staggering part is not only that Burnham has avoided scrutiny. It is that Labour MPs are now tying themselves in knots trying to pretend avoidance is accountability. The machine has moved. The media are finally catching up. And the public will never get a say.
The Heartlands Tribune83,966 次观看 • 19 天前
British politics is now so far down the rabbit hole that Newsnight can put Count Binface on a politics panel and seriously discuss whether he might beat Nigel Farage in a by-election and become an MP. And the mad part is not that Count Binface is being asked the questions. The mad part is that, compared with much of Westminster, he sounds no less plausible. This is where the political class has dragged us: a country so exhausted by managed decline, broken promises, donor politics and manufactured leadership contests that the man with a bin on his head is treated as part joke, part protest vote, part constitutional possibility. Satire used to mock politics from the outside. Now it has been invited onto the panel because politics has become satire manifest.
The Heartlands Tribune83,469 次观看 • 20 天前
Diane Abbott, "I think the round of applause in the committee room just now was staged" "Just as all the endorsements of PM Keir Starmer were staged" "I can't see him lasting beyond the May election" Krishnan Guru-Murthy, "Why wait till May?" Diane Abbott, "Because they will be catastrophic, and they want him to stay to take responsibility" #StarmerMustResign
The Heartlands Tribune659,312 次观看 • 5 个月前
The internet has killed one of Westminster’s oldest tricks: say one thing today, deliver the opposite tomorrow, then deny the first promise was ever made. A time when "Today's news became tomorrow's chip paper", and nobody had to worry. Now, today’s video becomes evidence, shared a million times. This one didn't even reach the closing credits. Lucy Powell’s sales pitch for Andy Burnham lasted barely thirty seconds before collapsing under its own contradiction. First came the borrowed radicalism. Burnham, she said, wants to “radically rewrite” the political and economic model of the past forty years, a model that put private interests before ordinary people. Strong words. The sort designed to make working-class communities believe change is finally coming. Then Laura Kuenssberg applied the slightest pressure. Burnham has no mandate of his own and says he will broadly stick to Labour’s 2024 manifesto. How can he deliver dramatic change? Powell snapped straight back to the approved line: “He is going to stick to our manifesto.” There it is... You cannot radically rewrite forty years of failed economics while remaining chained to a manifesto written inside the so-called fiscal rules, market discipline and corporate Labour politics. One promise cancels out the other. Either Burnham intends to break with the economic model that hollowed out our industries, weakened public services and transferred wealth upwards, or he intends to preserve the manifesto built around it. He cannot ride both horses. It took 30 seconds to expose the contradiction... #AndyBurnham
The Heartlands Tribune24,320 次观看 • 10 天前
The Epstein files just dropped 2 hours of Steve Bannon footage, and it connects straight back to Downing Street. Jeffrey Epstein wasn't just friends with billionaires and royals. He was a card-carrying member of the Trilateral Commission, the same globalist outfit that counts Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson among its ranks. Founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller to spread neoliberal orthodoxy across three continents, this is the organisation that openly states democracy has "too much" public participation. They believe the powerful should decide, not workers, not voters. Epstein sat in those rooms. So did Mandelson, who rang him in jail to arrange banker meetings. So does Starmer, hand-picked from 650 MPs to join. Now Bannon's tapes reveal the extent of elite collusion, political fixers, media rehabilitation, private jets between them all. This isn't conspiracy. It's network mapping. From Rockefeller's vision to Starmer's cabinet, the same club, the same agenda, the same contempt for democratic accountability. Who runs Britain? Well, it's a big club and you're not in it... 👉 Read the full investigation including the Bannon video evidence: #EpsteinFiles #TrilateralCommission #Starmer #Mandelson #EliteCapture #UKPolitics
The Heartlands Tribune299,093 次观看 • 5 个月前
Starmer is gone. Good riddance, and close the door behind you. But what followed should trouble anyone who still cares about democracy. After Labour’s disastrous local elections, we were told there would be a leadership contest. Contenders began jockeying for position. Then Labour manufactured a by-election to parachute Andy Burnham into Westminster. Even then, we were told it was merely the route into a proper contest. Funny how the other contenders stood down the moment Burnham was elected. Now he walks into No 10 uncontested. No hustings. No public debate. No detailed plan for change. More than 400 Labour MPs sit in Parliament, yet the party had to bring in the Mayor of Manchester because none of them had the confidence or support to lead the country. That is an indictment in itself. Burnham keeps promising change, but change from what, and towards what? A politician cannot be held to promises he has never clearly made. This is a coronation without scrutiny. Why are we simply standing back and watching it happen? More than 400 Labour MPs, yet the party had to manufacture a by-election and bring in Andy Burnham. What does that say about the parliamentary Labour Party? #AndyBurnham
The Heartlands Tribune26,543 次观看 • 13 天前
Andy Burnham denies the coup, others say different... On Radio 4, Louise Haigh admitted MP's and Andy Burnham had been planning for this moment for at least a year, meeting allies and preparing a 100-day plan. The route only opened after the local elections, but the plotting was already well under way. Starmer had to go. Few will mourn his departure. But while working-class families count pennies at the supermarket till and dread the next energy bill, and scrape their way to payday, they were plotting and scheming while the energy giants, supermarkets, banks and defence contractors were making billions from the manufactured cost of living crises crushing everyone else. The fact is Westminster plotters found a year to organise who would inherit No. 10. yet, It still cannot find the urgency to stop the greatest transfer of wealth in modern Britain, from the working class to the oligarchy. Fixing Britain, apparently, needs another consultation.
The Heartlands Tribune15,470 次观看 • 12 天前
These people are clueless, including half the reporters asking the questions. They speak as if “credible economic policy” means one thing only: the financial markets must be served, reassured, stroked, fed and obeyed. Rachel Reeves says... Andy Burnham knows that the most successful Labour governments were those that combined radical change with “credible economic policies”. Fine. Let’s test that. The most successful Labour government in British history nationalised major industries, founded the NHS, built hundreds of thousands of council houses, expanded social security and shifted power towards working people. That was radical change. Not a press release. Not a Treasury-friendly slogan. Not managed decline with a red rosette. What have Reeves and Starmer done? They have bowed before the markets, boxed themselves inside Tory spending rules, protected wealth, punished the poor, and called it responsibility. This is the difference between Labour as a movement and Labour as a management consultancy. Tony Benn understood it. He did not worship market forces. He saw their victims: the homeless person in a cardboard box, the pensioner who could not manage, the sick person waiting for treatment while private insurance bought others a faster route. “When we look back at the 1980s, we see many victims of market forces. I do not share the general view that market forces are the basis of political liberty. Every time I see a homeless person living in a cardboard box in London, I see that person as a victim of market forces. Every time I see a pensioner who cannot manage, I know that he is a victim of market forces. The sick who are waiting for medical treatment that they could receive quicker through private insurance are victims of those same market forces.” – from Tony Benn’s 1990 speech in the House of Commons, ‘The Issue Is Thatcher’ That was a better class of politician. Because he understood the central question: does the economy serve the people, or are the people sacrificed to the economy? Reeves has answered that question. So has Starmer. And unless Burnham proves otherwise, he will simply inherit the same market-serving machine with a better northern accent.
The Heartlands Tribune17,963 次观看 • 17 天前
Jess Phillips was asked why, as the minister responsible for violence against women and girls, she voted against an amendment that would have excluded rapists, paedophiles and grooming-gang offenders from early release. Her answer? “Because there is a prisons crisis.” That tells you everything about the order of priorities. The prison system is full, so women and girls are expected to carry the risk. Victims who fought for years to be heard are now being told that some of the men who raped and abused them may leave prison earlier than expected. Recent reporting confirms that convicted grooming-gang offenders are already being released, while thousands of victims of serious sexual and violent crime have been warned that their attackers could benefit from the new rules. Meanwhile, the state always seems able to find a cell, a court date or a police visit for speech, protest and dissent. Apparently prison space is precious when the prisoner is a rapist. Less so when the accused has posted the wrong words online or stood against the destruction of Gaza. A government that cannot protect women from sexual predators has no business lecturing the public about safety. #JessPhillips
The Heartlands Tribune12,492 次观看 • 13 天前
THE WATER RIP-OFF IS NOT ADDING UP. Barry Gardiner MP has exposed the great trick at the heart of Labour’s position on water. Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds says bringing water back into public ownership would cost an “enormous amount of money”. But when challenged, her department’s own response admitted it has not assessed the cost of continuing with privatisation against the cost of public ownership. Read that again. The Government insists public ownership is too expensive, while refusing to do the maths needed to prove it. Water is a natural monopoly. People cannot shop around for a better pipe to their home. Yet billpayers are trapped in a system where their money must cover not only clean water, functioning infrastructure and sewage treatment, but the financial interests of private owners, creditors and shareholders. Public ownership is not some wild luxury. It is common sense. Remove the need to extract profit from an essential service and put billpayers’ money back into pipes, reservoirs, sewage works and lower bills. The question is no longer whether the privatised water model has failed. We can see and smell that failure in our rivers and on our beaches. The question is why a Labour Government is defending it without even calculating the public alternative. Come clean, Secretary of State. Publish the full comparison. Let the public see who this broken system is really serving. Labour Heartlands #LabourParty #PublicOwnership
The Heartlands Tribune44,540 次观看 • 2 个月前
“We have always been at war with Eastasia.” George Orwell wrote that line in his famous novel, 1984, to describe how governments rewrite history in real time. In the novel, yesterday’s ally becomes today’s enemy, and the past is simply edited to match the present. Newspapers are changed, records destroyed, and anything that contradicts the current narrative disappears into what Orwell called the memory hole. The point Orwell was making was simple but chilling. If you control the past, you control how people understand the present. And if you control the present, you control the future. Which brings us to #Ukraine. Here we are showing a video from 2014, when ITV News Europe Editor James Mates reported on a day of violence in the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. It is unlikely ITV will be replaying this report anytime soon, because it complicates the very simple story we are now told about Ukraine’s recent history. The war did not suddenly appear in 2022 out of nowhere. It began in 2014, after the overthrow of Ukraine’s government amid Western-backed unrest, with US politicians like John McCain on the ground supporting opposition forces. What followed was eight years of civil war in Eastern Ukraine. Shelling, civilian deaths, and refugees fleeing Donetsk, Luhansk, and Mariupol were reported by Western media at the time. This is not Russian propaganda. It is their footage. These are their reports. The truth is simple. The Ukrainian civil war ran for eight years. It ended on February 24th 2022, when Russia crossed the border and turned it into an international war. This is why old news reports matter. They are pieces of history that cannot easily be rewritten once people have seen them. Orwell understood this perfectly. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” So when certain parts of history quietly disappear from the conversation, when timelines suddenly begin at convenient political moments, it is always worth paying attention. Because the memory hole is not just a device in a novel. It is how propaganda works. Paul Knaggs , Labour Heartlands Old
The Heartlands Tribune70,403 次观看 • 3 个月前
“You’re making an extra £20 million a day while businesses go to the wall, and the government’s answer is to tell people to download an app to check petrol prices.” You couldn’t make it up. Labour’s James Murray replies tells you everything about modern government. #FuelPrices #IranWar
The Heartlands Tribune58,185 次观看 • 4 个月前
Here is a sum the Treasury never asks you to do. This year Britain spends £62.2 billion on defence. Within three years it will be £73.5 billion. At The Hague, every NATO government signed up to five per cent of GDP, demanded from a podium in Washington, agreed without a single parliamentary vote. Trump demanded it, Trump got it... And in the same breath, they tell the sick, the disabled and the young that the welfare state is unaffordable. Now Andy Burnham arrives with his plan. "Fair and lasting" welfare reform. An ally says he is "more welfare than warfare." Fine words. But Westminster has a long history of dressing up cuts as compassion. Support becomes conditionality. Help becomes surveillance. Reform becomes punishment. And the warning lights are already blinking. His own chief of staff has pushed for stripping bus passes and TV licences from pensioners. Taking PIP from the under-30s is called a "difficult sell." Not an outrage. A sell. Meanwhile the MOD sits on a £42.5 billion black hole and nobody sends an assessor round. Austerity, it turns out, is means-tested. It applies only to the poor. Welfare or warfare is not a slogan. It is an invoice, and somebody always pays it. For seventy years it has been us. So tell us. Do you trust #AndyBurnham's #welfare reform, or have we heard it all before?
The Heartlands Tribune13,336 次观看 • 21 天前
I had a grudging respect for #PlaidCymru. Their leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, always struck me as a serious, grounded figure, someone who looked like he understood the people he claimed to represent and wanted the best for his country. Then the rot set in... Identity politics crept through the door, and like it always does, it started replacing substance with performance. Now I look on and wonder what happened to the party I thought I recognised. Take Kayleigh Unitt, Plaid’s candidate in Flint–Wrexham for the 7 May elections. She says her disabilities prevent her from working a standard job: “I would love to work a 9-to-5, but my health just won't let me.” Yet somehow, those same limitations don’t stop her maintaining an active presence as a dancer on social media. That contradiction matters. Not because people with disabilities shouldn’t be represented, they absolutely should, but because this kind of optics risks undermining those who genuinely struggle and already have to fight to be taken seriously by an ever increasingly dismissive society. And here’s the deeper point: what does any of this have to do with the material concerns of the people of Flint and Wrexham? Jobs. Wages. Infrastructure. Public services. I wonder, what's her policy on fixing potholes? I despair!
The Heartlands Tribune44,086 次观看 • 3 个月前
The head of Ofgem, who earns an annual salary of over £300,000. gives some helpful tips on how people can reduce their bills. "Shop around, change your payment method and try to use less." The head of Ofgem says customers "may" be able to save around £140 a year by switching the way they pay for energy. Then comes the obvious question: what about the energy companies making enormous profits while households are being hammered? His response is telling. Ofgem caps the profits of the suppliers it regulates through the price cap, he says. But the really big profits are being made by the oil and gas companies extracting energy from the ground. And dealing with those profits? That, apparently, is for government and the tax system. So there we have it. The public are told to manage their direct debits and ration their energy use, while the companies making fortunes from a basic necessity, our country's own resources, are treated as a matter for somebody else. The system is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do: protect the market first and leave ordinary people to carry the cost. #energyefficiency #Ofgem
The Heartlands Tribune24,455 次观看 • 2 个月前
"You can buy your council house, so you’ll be a property owner, you may not be able to get a wage increase, but you can borrow’. And the borrowing was deliberately encouraged because people in debt are slaves to their employers.” -Tony Benn #morgages #CostOfLivingCrisis #Scam
The Heartlands Tribune63,550 次观看 • 3 年前
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