Advice To The Bus Conductor in Chief

 

Without effective national security, you won't have social security!

Moronic Powell Posts Moronic Tweet

 

The Education Secretary’s latest tweet is pure sloganeering dressed up as wisdom.

Lucy Powell, the UK Education Secretary, posted the other day: “I think education should be about what you can do, and not what you can’t do.” It was tied to her Observer piece pushing reforms that soften the focus on exams, expand practical elements in GCSEs, and shift away from what she and allies call a “one-size-fits-all straitjacket” or “exam factory.”

It sounds warm and inclusive. It is also utterly moronic as a guiding principle for education policy.

Education has always been about both. You cannot meaningfully expand what someone can do without rigorously identifying, confronting, and closing the gaps in what they cannot do yet. Reading, writing, arithmetic, scientific knowledge, historical understanding, and the ability to construct a coherent argument are not optional extras or elitist impositions. They are the foundations that make genuine agency possible. Pretending otherwise is how you get systems that celebrate “potential” while leaving large numbers of children unable to access proper further study, skilled work, or independent adult life.

The soft framing,“what you can do, not what you can’t”, is a classic progressive rhetorical move. It reframes high standards and honest assessment as negativity or exclusion. In practice it risks lowering the bar so that fewer people feel like failures, rather than equipping more people to clear a high bar. Countries and systems that actually deliver strong outcomes for broad groups of pupils do not pretend knowledge and skills are in conflict, or that rigorous testing is the enemy of talent. They insist on mastery of core knowledge and practical application. England’s relative strength in international comparisons did not appear by accident; it came from a sustained (if imperfect) push toward knowledge-rich curricula and higher expectations after years of drift.

Powell’s version risks the opposite: diluting academic content in the name of “relevance,” “belonging,” and “pathways for all,” while talking up vocational routes as if they magically solve the problem of weak foundational skills. Vocational and technical education is valuable. It is not a substitute for literacy, numeracy, and disciplined thinking. Students who leave school without those basics are not liberated by “what they can do”; they are constrained by what they still cannot.

A serious education secretary would say: we will relentlessly raise what every child can do by refusing to lower expectations about what they must master. That means honest diagnosis of weaknesses, high-quality teaching of the knowledge that unlocks everything else, and assessments that measure real competence rather than participation. Feel-good tweets that treat standards as the problem are not bold vision. They are an abdication of the hard part of the job.

Children do not need more slogans about potential. They need adults in charge who understand that the point of school is to close the gap between what is and what could be—through knowledge, practice, and accountability, not by redefining success downward.

The Army’s New Training Regime: Staring Sternly at Russia While Polishing the Barracks Floor

 

In a bold display of strategic genius, the British Army has been ordered to pause “non-essential” training exercises to save a bit of cash. Live-fire drills, tank manoeuvres with Challenger 2s, exercises involving Apache helicopters—all the messy, noisy stuff that actually prepares soldiers for fighting—can largely wait. Units not immediately heading overseas or on standby get to sit tight. The pause is expected to last most of the year. Priority, we’re told, goes to the truly essential: lessons from Ukraine on drones and modernisation. Everything else is a “nice to have.”

This arrives at roughly the same moment the government continues to warn about the threat from Russia. The Kremlin has issued its usual dark mutterings about British targets. Defence chiefs have long flagged the need for readiness against a peer adversary. Yet the response is to mothball large-scale collective training for the Army’s main fighting formations so the books balance a little better this financial year. One source called it “absolutely devastating.” Former senior officers have used stronger language: short-sighted, scandalous, a national dereliction.

Picture the scene. Somewhere in Whitehall a spreadsheet is looking healthier by a reported £30 million or so. Meanwhile, the Iron Division—the unit you’d actually want if things got serious with Moscow—practises the ancient martial art of remaining in camp. Soldiers can still do individual skills, desktop exercises, and selected modernisation work. Just not the expensive business of operating together at scale with live ammunition and heavy metal. Nothing says “we are taking the Russian threat seriously” quite like cancelling the war games.

The official line is prioritisation and efficiency. Training informed by Ukraine continues. Deploying units keep training. The rest can wait until the money situation improves. It is the administrative equivalent of telling the fire brigade that, due to budgetary pressures, they should only practise with the hose when a building is already on fire. In the meantime, polish the engines and read the manual again.

This is not abstract. Armies that do not train collectively lose the ability to fight collectively. Crews get rusty. Commanders stop rehearsing the hard, chaotic parts. Muscle memory fades. When the government simultaneously talks up the threat and trims the preparation, the gap between rhetoric and reality becomes the real story. Russia does not pause its exercises because fuel or ammunition is pricey this quarter. It does not rebrand large-scale training as optional extras.

The political context makes it richer. The government is inching defence spending upward but faces relentless pressure to go further and faster toward 3 per cent. Past rows over the Defence Investment Plan, resignations, and warnings from the Chief of the Defence Staff about dialling back activity if day-to-day funding stays tight all form the backdrop. Cutting training now is the predictable result of treating readiness as a residual after other priorities have been met.

One can almost admire the consistency. If the threat is real, the training should be non-negotiable. If the training is negotiable, perhaps the threat rhetoric should be dialled down to match. Doing both at once—warning of danger while quietly parking the tanks—invites exactly the ridicule it is receiving. Soldiers did not join up to sit in camp for six or seven months practising frugality. Taxpayers did not fund an army so it could discover innovative ways to avoid using the training areas.

In the end, the decision is a masterclass in short-term accounting dressed up as prioritisation. Save the money this year. Hope the threat remains theoretical. And if it does not, explain later that the exercises were only “nice to have.” History is littered with armies that discovered, too late, that readiness is not a luxury item you can switch on when the invoice arrives. Britain appears determined to test the theory again, one cancelled live-fire exercise at a time.

Healey U Turns on Defence Spending

 

 

Healey has u turned on his 3% defence spending pledge (made when he resigned as Defence Secretary under Starmer).

It is clear that resignation was done to bring down Starmer, in exchange for being given the role of Chancellor.

Healey's spineless u turn whilst certainly not benefitting the country, may also not benefit him. There is a possibility that Burnham calls a general election before the Budget. In the event Labour win, Burnham will sack Healey and put Miliband in the role. 

Little shitweasel! 

Home Orifice Wankers Fear The English Flag

 

It seems that staff at the Home Orifice are afraid of the English flag.

Such is their fear, that the wankers running the Home Orifice have offered them 11 different mental health support services to help them cope with their fears.

Useless, pathetic wankers!

Brash, Cretinous Moron!

 

Labour backbencher Jonathan Brash has deleted an X post which read:

“Public sector workers use their income to pay FOR the private sector. The state is one of the biggest procurers of the private sector. It wouldn’t exist without tax payers. People creating the divide between public and private genuinely don’t understand how an economy works.”

We are governed by retards! 

On The Buses With Burnham

 

Andy Burnham: The Bus King of Toytown Who Can’t See Past the Yellow Paint

Andy Burnham has spent years treating Britain’s buses as if they were the answer to every national crisis. As Mayor of Greater Manchester he turned the Bee Network into a personal brand, complete with bright yellow liveries, worker-bee logos, and endless photo opportunities standing next to shiny new vehicles. Now, having somehow ascended to higher office, the fixation continues unabated. £2 fare caps, 24/7 free travel for disabled pass holders, more franchising, more “blueprint for Britain” rhetoric. Buses, buses, and more buses.

Meanwhile he has discovered TikTok. Vertical videos, influencer collabs, casual chats into a phone, meme-friendly clips of the Prime Minister in the driver’s seat announcing the next stop is cheaper fares. It is politics as content creation: low-stakes, shareable, and carefully curated to look like a man of the people who “gets it.” The effect is less statesman and more mayor of Toytown, endlessly polishing the model railway while the real country burns.

This is not harmless localism. It is a form of political displacement activity. The issues that actually determine whether Britain remains a high-trust, prosperous, coherent country receive far less of Burnham’s visible energy.

Illegal migration continues to place heavy pressure on housing, public services, and social cohesion. Small-boat arrivals, asylum backlogs, and the downstream costs of failed integration do not disappear because a bus fare has been capped at £2. Yet the public messaging from Burnham has often been muted, managerial, or focused on dispersal rather than deterrence and control.

The costs of Net Zero policies remain largely unexamined in the same breathless tones reserved for bus franchising. Household energy bills, industrial competitiveness, and the reliability of the grid are treated as secondary concerns while the political class congratulates itself on climate targets. Approving or rejecting new oil and gas licences is a serious trade-off between security of supply, jobs, and emissions. It deserves more than the occasional side-note in a transport-heavy agenda.

Rising crime, particularly knife crime and the erosion of street safety in many towns and cities, does not yield to better bus routes. Bond markets are not calmed by yellow buses. Unemployment and the stubbornly high number of people outside the labour force will not be solved by cheaper single fares. Inflation and the cost-of-living pressures that genuinely hurt working households require harder choices on tax, spending, regulation, and energy policy than another round of transport gimmicks.

None of this is to say public transport is irrelevant. Reliable, affordable buses matter for people who rely on them. Greater Manchester’s experiment produced measurable increases in patronage and satisfaction for some users. Expanding successful local models can be legitimate. The problem is proportion and priority. Burnham’s political identity has become so tightly bound to the Bee Network that it crowds out the larger, harder, less photogenic questions.

A serious national leader would treat buses as one tool among many, not the centrepiece of a governing philosophy. Instead we get the spectacle of a politician who appears most comfortable when the cameras are rolling on a yellow double-decker or a vertical video. The country faces structural challenges that cannot be solved by franchising schedules and TikTok algorithms. Continuing to prioritise the former while largely performing the latter is not pragmatic northern pragmatism. It is avoidance dressed up as delivery.

Britain does not need a mayor of Toytown with a national platform. It needs adults willing to confront the awkward, expensive, and politically difficult realities that actually determine the country’s trajectory. So far, the buses keep rolling and the hard issues keep waiting.