I was struck by this sentence, written by Andrew Neil, calling for penalties for the unvaccinated:
"I'm not impressed by those who claim this is an egregious assault on our freedoms. Liberty is not the same as unbridled licence to do what you want, which is the road to anarchy."
Functional democracies have to find the right balance between on one hand, maximum freedom for individuals, & on the other, sensible measures to protect decent people from those who would cheat, lie, exploit, manipulate or use violence or intimidation to satisfy their desires.
Over recent decades, the Right has lurched toward 'free-market libertarianism', of the kind that reduces the influence of the state on economic matters, yet increases the repressive power of the state by abandoning rules, rights & regulations designed to protect citizens.
This lurch toward unbridled free-market capitalism, pushed by almost every grotesquely wealthy media baron, corporate CEO, right-wing Government & free-market think tank on earth brought us the catastrophic financial crash & is pushing the earth toward cataclysmic climate change.
As we can see in Britain, the Govt's cynical libertarian attitude, exploitation of good faith, & utter contempt for rules, regulations, human rights, codes of conduct & even truth itself, is resulting in division, anger, frustration & the breakdown of trust in democracy itself.
Imho, the Govt's cynical, exploitative & dangerously irresponsible lurch toward right-wing libertarian populism - of the kind broadly supported by Andrew Neil - is the REAL "egregious assault on our freedoms. Liberty is not the same as unbridled licence to do what you want".
"Freedom".
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I and countless others are sick to death of the billionaire-funded Reform UK propaganda machine, GB “News”, and their decontextualised ‘facts’ that would make Goebbels blush.
Let’s examine the claim that “one quarter of foreign sex offenders come from just five countries”.
Yes, the raw data comes from a genuine Ministry of Justice (MoJ) prison census, but the way it’s being weaponised is deeply misleading.
The statistic sounds explosive, and deliberately so: a factoid engineered to sound like a revelation of hidden danger.
The right-wing information pipeline: a cherry-picked fragment of official data stripped of context, laundered through an opaquely funded “think tank” that isn't a think tank, amplified by billionaire-funded media, and weaponised by opportunistic politicians for electoral gain.
In the September 2025 @SkyNews Immigration Debate, chaired by Trevor “Muslims are not like us” Phillips, Reform UK’s head of policy Zia Yusuf made a series of inaccurate and highly misleading claims about migration, and more recently, on @BBCNewsnight, about social housing.
These assertions are easily disproved with publicly available data, but often go largely unchallenged on air, despite being about some of the most sensitive and polarised issues in politics.
Yusuf started by claiming that UK net migration “last year” was “about a million.”
The BBC isn’t perfect — but it’s ours. As coordinated attacks on its independence intensify, I warn that if we don’t defend it now, we may lose more than a broadcaster — we may lose a cornerstone of British democracy...
As a long-time critic of the @BBC, let me spell it out: what we’re seeing right now isn’t organic outrage — it’s a sophisticated coordinated campaign by ideological enemies and commercial competitors to undermine the BBC’s independence and funding.
If you can’t see that, you’re being played — and that’s exactly the point.
Let’s start with Michael Prescott, author of the dodgy dossier leaked exclusively to The Telegraph, who is a PR man and former political editor at Murdoch’s Sunday Times.
Many of the crimes Goodwin cites are still under investigation, misreported, or involve UK citizens, not “illegal migrants.” The Huntingdon suspect is British-born — yet he cites it as evidence of “mass uncontrolled immigration.”
There is no factual link between the Huntingdon attack and migration.
In fact, once you control for age and sex, non-UK nationals are slightly LESS likely to be in prison than UK citizens — and for violence and robbery, non-citizens are under-represented. migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/comm…
Shameless opportunist Rupert Lowe is the most dangerous and most extreme MP in the UK.
His latest stunt is a letter to the PM that strongly implies the knife attack on a train was the product of “mass immigration” and “Islamic extremism”. It had *nothing* to do with either.
The incident was reported as NOT terror-related and the suspects BRITISH BORN at around 8:30 am: by @BBCNews 8:32; @Guardian 8:34; @SkyNews 8:36;
@ITVNews 8:38.
Lowe published his letter strongly implying it was 'Islamic extremists' on @X at 08:41. It quickly gathered 1M views.
Lowe is a modern day Oswald Mosley, shamelessly normalizating far-right discourse.
His letter is political malpractice: it mixes fear, plausible deniability, and ineffective proposals that would shred civil liberties and wreck lives, all while offering zero credible evidence.
A handful of selfish sociopathic billionaires and the populist politicians and media they fund have deliberately divided and radicalised millions of people across the world, solely to protect their wealth and power.
They claim to want to help “save children” while spreading distrust of experts, reputable journalism, climate science, and vaccines — which have saved over 100 million children since 1974.
By dividing the public, they protect their wealth and power.
Rather than justify how their wealth was earned, these elites cultivate scepticism of their critics and of expertise itself.
This deliberate erosion of trust shields their interests while undermining the science that saves lives and protects our planet.