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More from @LizWebsterSBF

Liz Webster

@LizWebsterSBF

Mar 13

Let’s begin at the beginning @DavidGHFrost

Once upon a time Britain 🇬🇧 was not only energy secure, it was an energy exporter.

Coal powered the country and the discovery of N Sea oil and gas in 1970s gave Britain 🇬🇧 one of the largest new energy windfalls in the world.

🧨 Then came the political choices.

🧵 👇

In 1980s the coal industry was dismantled and the North Sea was opened up to private oil majors rather than managed as a national strategic asset.

Instead of treating North Sea oil as a national inheritance, Britain sold licences cheaply and used the revenues to fund day-to-day spending.

Meanwhile another North Sea country made a very different decision.

🇳🇴 Norway kept majority public ownership of its oil resources, created a sovereign wealth fund, and treated oil as a long-term national asset.

Today that fund is worth around $1.6 trillion.

Read 5 tweets

Liz Webster

@LizWebsterSBF

Jan 19

1. Britain over-invested in Trump (misled by Maurice Glasman’s Vance love-in)

No other European country went as far as the UK in courting Trump personally. That means:
🙈 More embarrassment now
🔥 More domestic backlash
🪤Less room to pivot

Starmer can’t plausibly claim principled distance 👉he visibly chased proximity.

🧵

2. The EU isn’t waiting for Britain

While Starmer talks about “resetting” relations with Europe, the EU is:
👉Focused on Mercosur
👉Managing its own Trump exposure
👉Not prioritising UK realignment

Britain is caught between blocs without leverage.

3. NATO has quietly changed

America’s message is no longer collective defence, it’s:

NATO is what the US says it is.

That leaves the UK awkwardly loyal to a system that no longer operates on mutual respect.

Read 6 tweets

Liz Webster

@LizWebsterSBF

Dec 18, 2025

⏰ A serious, unsettling piece and one of the most important FT columns of the year

Ganesh is able to analyse Trump and revise core liberal assumption about capitalism and democracy.

🧵 Here’s what he’s really saying, and why it matters so much for the UK and Europe.

1. The real reason Trump tilts toward Russia 🇷🇺

Ganesh dismisses the usual explanations:
•Christian nationalism? Too abstract for Trump.
•Peeling Russia away from China? Trump isn’t consistently anti-China.
•Geopolitics? Not his language.

Instead, Ganesh identifies something more basic and more dangerous:

Trump is a commercial animal.

He views the world through deals, upside, costs, returns.

From that mindset:
•Ukraine is a cost centre
•Russia is a future investment opportunity
•War is irrational noise that should be “fixed” by a deal

This explains why Trump instinctively pressures Ukraine rather than Russia:
Russia costs him nothing; Ukraine costs money.

2. Why business logic collapses in the face of ideology.

Ganesh argues that people shaped by business literally cannot process fanaticism. They assume:
•everyone is rational
•ideology is just cover
•extremists are bluffing
•everything is negotiable

That mindset works in markets.
It is catastrophic in geopolitics.

Putin’s Greater Russia. Xi’s civilisational mission. These are not bargaining positions, they are beliefs.

Trump and his envoy Witkoff don’t just underestimate them. They don’t believe they’re real.

That’s not cynicism. Ganesh calls it what it is: naivety.

Read 8 tweets

Liz Webster

@LizWebsterSBF

Dec 6, 2025

⭐ The American 🇺🇸 far-right isn’t angry at Europe because of migration or free speech.

They’re angry because Europe disproves their worldview.

🇪🇺 Europe is the proof that civilisation doesn’t need cruelty to survive.
Europe became the living proof that right-wing culture panic is nonsense.

Europe -especially EU - commits the cardinal sin in MAGA world:

👉 It shows you can have
🇪🇺welfare states
🇪🇺 public healthcare
🇪🇺workers’ rights
🇪🇺strong regulations
🇪🇺climate protections
🇪🇺secularism
and still have higher life expectancy, lower crime, fewer guns, better schools, and more stable societies.

This embarrasses the US Right.

It exposes the lie at the heart of MAGA ideology: that social democracy = decline.

So they must manufacture a myth of “civilisational collapse” to defend American exceptionalism.
🧵

Europe refused to become America’s cultural colony.

The FT piece is correct:
“Woke” is American and Europe mostly resists it.

But from the far-right US perspective, the real crime is this:

👉 Europe did not join their Kulturkampf.

Europe didn’t ban books, ban abortion, ban drag queens, or turn culture wars into national identity.

Europe said:
“Thanks, but we’re actually fine.”

MAGA takes this as betrayal.

Modern Europe proves that diversity doesn’t destroy nations.

The MAGA worldview depends on the belief that:

Migration = chaos
Diversity = decay
Muslims = civilisational doom.

If Europe remains stable, wealthy, and functional despite large Muslim populations, the entire MAGA narrative collapses.

So they invent a fantasy Europe that is:
•collapsing
•burning
•invaded
•dying

Propaganda every night on Fox News.

It’s not analysis 👉it’s psychological self-preservation.

Read 7 tweets

Liz Webster

@LizWebsterSBF

Nov 27, 2025

THIS IS *GARGANTUAN* 💥

One of the Chief Priests of Economists for Brexit has now publicly admitted:

🟥 Brexit made Britain poorer
🟥 Business investment collapsed
🟥 Productivity weakened
🟥 EU-facing firms cut jobs & spending
🟥 New trade barriers drag the economy down
🟥 Brexit deepened the fiscal crisis
🟥 There are no meaningful upsides
🟥 The damage is undeniable in the data

This is the economic equivalent of a senior Vatican priest admitting the Pope is wrong about God.

Even the architects of Brexit are confessing the truth 👉while Farage still lies.

🧵 full article next tweet

⭐ The pro-Brexit intellectual class is breaking ranks

He writes:

“We Brexiteers must acknowledge the costs.”

This is the first mass-market admission of guilt from one of the architects of the economic case for Leave.

This instantly:
•legitimises criticism of Brexit on the Right
•destroys the “it’s too soon to tell” excuse
•undermines the “we just need to do Brexit harder” argument
•contradicts Farage’s entire £1m Budget video campaign
•cracks the intellectual foundation of UK sovereign populism

⭐ He admits the economic damage is real, measurable, and Brexit-specific

He refers to:

📉 UK GDP 5–8% lower
📉 Business investment down 15%
📉 Firm-level productivity 3–4% weaker
📉 High-trade firms slashing capital spending
📉 Brexit acting as a “strong headwind” all decade

A Brexiteer economist just validated data they normally try to gaslight.

This destroys the “anti-Brexit propaganda” smear.

Read 8 tweets

Liz Webster

@LizWebsterSBF

Nov 20, 2025

📌 🧵 Why Britons Are Leaving — And Why It Matters More Than Ever

Every few months, another piece drops about Britons leaving the UK in record numbers.
Today’s Independent article is the clearest yet:

People aren’t leaving because they “hate Britain”.

They’re leaving because Britain has stopped working.

independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

What’s striking is how similar the stories are:

– No affordable housing
– NHS collapsing
– Underpaid, overmanaged professions
– High taxes but nothing to show for them
– Brexit bureaucracy
– Rising racism
– A political class that serves itself, not the public

This is a pattern, not coincidence.

And the harshest line?

People who left decades ago say they no longer recognise the country they used to love.

That’s the point:

You don’t need to be young, left-wing, or struggling to notice the rot.

It’s everywhere.

Read 9 tweets

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