When you look at the Maccabi Tel Aviv story and wonder how this could happen in a British city, one version of the answer is that it didn't.

About 14% of Birmingham's population straightforwardly does not identify as British. In the centre it's more like 35%. But that's too exculpatory. A better answer is that we now have large numbers of British citizens with little in common.

Birmingham is heavily segregated. In the areas around Villa Park, the population is roughly 70% Muslim. Cross over the road, and the share drops to 5-6%. These are communities living in parallel.

I'm getting some confused responses to this. That's ok, the benefits system is very opaque by design, and the extent of hidden subsidies in the UK makes it hard to find out what things actually cost.

So here's how a family earning £100k ends up worse off than one on welfare:

https://twitter.com/SAshworthHayes/status/1958518160669171790

The first thing to note is that the headline rates of Universal Credit are misleading. If you go to the main government page, it provides a list of payments based on circumstances and additional elements. And then there's a little caveat: you *could* get money for rent

The judges are running the county because Parliament surrendered control.

Take asylum. Would-be refugees are deliberately putting themselves at risk in sham "protests" outside embassies. As a result, a woman with eight failed claims was able to stay after joining a terror group Or we can look at welfare. The reason so many people can claim state-funded luxury cars for anxiety is a set of court rulings that expanded PIP to those experiencing 'psychological distress' - and then struck down Government attempts to correct this. These decisions cost billions

It's worth spelling out why they act like this.

Britain's establishment is aware that the migration policies it imposed have been an economic and social disaster. It also knows that it would be completely delegitimising to admit this.

https://twitter.com/SAshworthHayes/status/1951753533453135966

The worry about coming clean is twofold. First, they can't see a way to fix the mess, and people would demand that changes were undone. Admitting they've inflicted an irreversible negative doesn't seem like a recipe for harmony. Second, they wouldn't be calling the shots anymore.

Mass migration is directly suppressing the UK's birth rate by driving up house prices. The policy we've adopted to address demographic imbalances is making the problem worse, and it's far from the only government policy making it harder to raise children 🧵 If birth rates had been sustained at their 1972 levels - the last time the UK was at replacement level - there would be another 1.4 million children in Britain. Another 3.2 million adults.

It's as if Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool ceased to exist overnight.

The great immigration myth is that we need to import a million people a year or the economy falls apart.

Of the 955,000 visas issued last year, just 210,000 were for main work applicants, many of whom are temporary or unskilled workers . A brief thread:

https://twitter.com/SAshworthHayes/status/1919092806062129378

Take the health and social care visa. 27,000 were issued, primarily for care workers. This is driven by care being funded in large part by councils, and council budgets being cut, causing wages in homes to fall behind supermarkets. The visa is an attempt to avoid pay rises.

One of the reasons Labour is desperate not to talk about the grooming gangs is that it would involve confronting the scale of offending within communities.

It's likely that one in 16 Pakistani men who lived in Rotherham in 2011 has since been arrested for interview.
telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/1… This is hard to deal with for any party but particularly one which large numbers of votes from that group across constituencies. Isolated offenders can be dealt with. A project to arrest voters uncles, brothers, cousins, fathers is a hard sell when you can just do nothing.

Westminster has loaded councils with obligations to pay for school taxis, adult care, and temporary accommodation while cutting their funding.

In the process, it's hollowed out local democracy - these items devour most spending - and driven councils to the point of bankruptcy: One in ten (!) councils in England stayed afloat through "exceptional financial support" last year - borrowing money and selling assets. But this builds up costs for future years, with one council due to spend almost 20% of its 2030 budget servicing debts

The UK gave out 1.1 million visas in the year to September. This insanity has been driven by short-termism, shifting costs into the future through pensions and welfare in exchange for a short term sugar rush - and to avoid fixing things the government broke.

🧵 We can start with the care worker visa. This was essentially invented to get out of a jam: local authorities paid for care, local authorities had no money, the Treasury was presumably too busy funding migrant hotels and train driver pay rises to bail them out.

On current growth rates, Poland is set to be richer than Britain in 12 years time. Between Westminster and Whitehall, Britain's failure to grow can be explained in four words: it’s not allowed to.
spectator.co.uk/article/britai… Growth isn't everything, but it's an awful lot. And it's a real source of frustration that the people who want to be PM aren't laying out their plans to make Britain a wealthier country. No matter what you care about, it's easier with more money

The Just Stop Oil art protests are deeply selfish. We can have galleries that trust people to behave and give them uninhibited access, or we can have attention-seeking protesters ruin it for everyone else.
spectator.co.uk/article/the-re… It's so easy to take this for granted. Of course art gallerirs let you stand next to priceless works of art. Of course museums use polite signs to ask us not to touch exhibits. You don't notice how much trust is placed in you until someone breaks it and things have to change.

The thing is that from the Russian point of view they're working very well; if Putin doesn't have them it's pretty good odds NATO countries would be looking to intervene in Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/Aiannucci/status/1502931770102235140

Nuclear deterrence gets you, roughly, 'countries with the capability of destroying one another in thirty minutes work carefully to avoid direct conflict'. This is just as true when it deters us as when it deters our opponents. spectator.co.uk/article/in-def…