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lesleyaw.bsky.social

@lesleyaw.bsky.social
172 followers 206 following 174 posts
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Nicola Kelly @nicolakellywrites.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I have spent weeks shadowing the RNLI and I can tell you, they do it out of nothing more than compassion. Wrote about the heroes I've met over the years in this free-to-read post. nicolakelly.substack.com/p/the-rnli-a...
nicolakelly.substack.com
The RNLI aren't traitors; they're heroes
I have spent weeks shadowing lifeboat crews. Here's what they do and what it's like.
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Dan Neidle @danneidle.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Nick Candy and Holly Valance. Britain’s most expensive house. A £265m sale. Usual consequence: £32m of stamp duty. But five small flats were included in the sale. By an extraordinary happy accident, that cut the tax by £18.5m. The curious sale of Nick Candy’s mansion A 🧵:
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
As former Labour minister Tom Watson joins Palantir, please read this devastating exposé by @petergeoghegan.bsky.social & @lucasamin.bsky.social of how the company, with Peter Mandelson's help, wormed its way into the UK government to sell its dire & dangerous products. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
lrb.co.uk
Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin · ‘This looks absolutely rubbish’: Palantir and the NHS
A decade ago Palantir was largely unknown in the UK. It now holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds...
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Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 14/09/2026
Your regular reminder: If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
If the police & security services didn't see this coming, it was a massive intelligence failure. If they did, but still gave the impression of being caught on the hop, it's something worse.
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Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Stop whatever you’re doing & watch this now! Reform’s magic money tree has been bust wide open. Huge kudos to undercover reporters Verbatim via @channel4news.bsky.social youtu.be/aXut3s90rUI?... huge
youtu.be
Undercover: Exposing Reform's secret donations plot
YouTube video by Channel 4 News
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🍂k a r e n🍂 @andthenisleep.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Why do 8 data centers in Gary, Indiana have power BUT MOST OF THE RESIDENTS HAVEN'T HAD POWER OR WATER IN DAYS.
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Adam Bienkov @adambienkov.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
I'd say "Something for nothing" culture is getting paid £100,000 a year of public money, plus expenses, for a job that you then fail to turn up to for months on end
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Ghislaine Hull @ghizzybear.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
“Reform will end ‘something for nothing’ Britain.” - Nigel Farage. He receives £98,599 a year as an MP, yet for more than three months this year he didn't cast a single parliamentary vote or make a single written contribution or speech in Parliament either. But yes, let’s shout at poor people
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Mark Hamill @markhamillofficial.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Siding with the enemy over one of our longtime allies. AGAIN. He is unquestionably an existential threat to our Democracy. #Impeach-Convict-REMOVE
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Victoria Derbyshire @vicderbyshire.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
This morning the website of Parliament’s standards commissioner has been updated to confirm that his investigation is no longer suspended
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Count Binface @countbinface.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the world's press: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEsa...
youtube.com
Count Binface meets the world's press
YouTube video by Count Binface
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
This is surely curtains for Farage's political career. I don't think there's any coming back from it. I hope not, at any rate. Looks like there could be a strong basis for a criminal case as well. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
theguardian.com
Revealed: George Cottrell transferred $2m to his mother days before her donations to Reform UK
Exclusive: Sources say Fiona Cottrell told bankers the transfers, received 24-72 hours before her donations to Reform, came from her son
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Simon Marks @simonmarksfsn.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
FT reporting that Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared, wants to lead this deal…which underscores yet again that the World Cup hydration breaks and half-time show were the thin end of a Trumpian wedge to dominate the business of the game. Grift everwhere you look. www.bbc.com/sport/footba...
bbc.com
World Cup: Uefa furious at reports Fifa plan to sell stakes in tournament
European football's governing body Uefa reacts furiously to proposals from Fifa to seek private investment in its competitions, including the World Cup.
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Fionna O’Leary @fascinatorfun.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Woah ‼️. SCOOP 🔥 “George Cottrell carried a fraudulent Swiss passport in the name of ‘Oscar Drewitt’ – the identity under which he was hired into a City corporate finance network by the future Reform UK treasurer, Mehrtash A’zami.“
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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
the pervert glasses company is not beating the allegations
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Northern & proud 👊 @gazlancs.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
😆😆
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Mrs. Betty Bowers @mrsbettybowers.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
The toxic influencer who has made "hyper-masculinity" his brand was arresting wearing Doris Day clam-digger slacks and a kicky purple blouse.
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Brant Reeves @bireeves95.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
He Should Be Fired Immediately and Investigated…..
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The Secret Barrister @barristersecret.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Just to recap: Calling Nigel Farage “an unflushable poo” = dehumanising hate speech. Calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire = guest of honour at party conference. Bless those non-racist free speech warriors.
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Farrukh @implausibleblog.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
"On August 6th, Farage is going to have to actively prove to voters that he's better than a garage bin" US news are now making fun of Nigel Farage vs Count Binface in Clacton
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Aelynn 🇨🇦 FanFest@Home @aelynn000.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
In positive news, was just reading about an island in Chile that installed open water solar panels and a bunch of tuna and salmon moved in underneath them because the vibrations of diesel energy had ceased. :) The world could be so good if people were just smarter everywhere.
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Bruce Little @brucedlittle.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
A contractor building Meta's data center flushed its "closed-loop" cooling system straight into Cheyenne's sewer. It carried a bacterium and knocked the city's water-reuse system offline for months. They sell these as sealed systems that barely touch the water. This one poisoned a city's.
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Sarah Murphy @13sarahmurphy.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
The current stack of charges against Farage and Reform. Just in case you’d lost count. Spoilt-brat richboy, Tice, calls it all “a politically motivated smear” rather than the frenziedly greedy and corrupt piss-taking that it is. “Reform and Farage have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing” (iPaper)
Charge sheet All the major claims against the Reform UK leader and his party

Nigel Farage’s finances are under increasing scrutiny as the Reform UK leader and his party face fresh allegations over donations and support.
The former UKIP leader is the subject of a parliamentary standards inquiry over £5m he received from Thai-based crypto billionaire and Reform backer Christopher Harborne.
He is also facing questions about financial support from convicted fraudster and crypto gambler George Cottrell, known as “Posh George”, who has funded Farage’s office and security staff.

Reform and Farage have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing through accepting donations.
Here, The i Paper takes a look at the key allegations they are now facing.
Criminal investigation into Reform donations

Headings and extracts:

1) Criminal investigation into Reform donations

The Metropolitan Police has been investigating £500,000 in donations from Cottrell’s mother to Reform for more than a year, The Times has reported.

2) £5m donation from crypto billionaire

Farage is being investigated by Parliament’s ethics watchdog for accepting a £5m undeclared gift from Christopher Harborne, Reform’s largest financial backer.

3) Money-laundering probe

A report in The Guardian suggested on Wednesday that bankers raised concerns to the National Crime Agency through suspicious activity reports (SARs) about at least four transactions involving senior Reform leaders.
These include the £5m gift to Farage and a £1m donation from Cottrell’s mother to Britain Means Business, described as a fundraising vehicle for Reform which deputy leader Richard Tice is a director of.4) Donations from fraudster ‘posh George’

Farage faces questions about undeclared support provided by his long-standing ally George Cottrell. He faces claims he failed to declare benefits, including staffing, security and housing,
According to The Sunday Times, Cottrell recruited and paid three staff to work on Farage’s social media before the general election.

5) Lobbying referral

A separate referral was made by Labour MP Phil Brickell over accusations that Farage “lobbied” Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey to drop plans for a state-run alternative to cryptocurrency, which could be costly to Harborne’s business interests.
But doubts remain as to whether a probe will be launched over the claims. Bailey has insisted that Farage’s lobbying on cryptocurrencies has had no effect on the Bank of England’s policies.
  
6) Jenrick donations investigated by police

Police have also opened an investigation into a political donation of nearly £40,000 to Robert Jenrick’s campaign to become Conservative Party leader in 2024 amid claims it ultimately came from a foreign source, The i Paper revealed this week.
It is illegal to accept political donations from foreign sources under UK electoral law. Scotland Yard did not state which individuals are under investigation.
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Count Binface @countbinface.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
What’s that, Dale? You want to give me an unconditional personal gift of £5million to do whatever I want with? Sure! I just need to fill out a form. If I didn’t declare it that would be silly.
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Count Binface @countbinface.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
On my way, Clacton.
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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
He's falling apart
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Sarah Murphy @13sarahmurphy.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Would Jenrick also like to explain how £5Mill Farage hawking gold bullion and grifting for crypto and fossil fuel billionaires while pledging to scrap the Equality Act, bin new employment rights and lower the minimum wage is not working for the super rich, against the interests of the rest of us?
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Adam Bienkov @adambienkov.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
The Conservatives are for "the super rich" says Robert Jenrick, whose own campaigns have been funded by a billionaire Israeli mining heir and a firm controlled by a sanctioned oligarch
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Oli Franklin-Wallis @olifranklinwallis.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Satire as a genre is dead
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Jane @localnotail.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
it's always the ones you most suspect
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BladeoftheSun @bladeofthes.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
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Sarah Owen MP @sarahowen.org.uk · 01/07/2026
Ben Cullen, a leading figure of the "Raise the Colours" campaign, will stand trial for three separate charges regarding a total of 78 indecent images of children. I have only seen this covered in local newspapers, so far. Grim as it is, it needs wider coverage www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/2624087...
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Sarah Murphy @13sarahmurphy.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
All credit to @zoegrunewald.bsky.social for summing it up so well. Important also to understand the corrupt malignancy at the heart of Farage’s politics…
Farage may have created Brexit, but in many ways, Brexit created him too.
The referendum was supposed to settle the defining question of his career. Instead, it provided the foundation for a new one. Farage successfully repositioned himself as Brexit's betrayed champion.
"Nigel Farage and Reform UK aren't creating something new but harvesting something old,"
Smith explains. "Just as the Leave campaign of 2016 did, they're making false promises and whipping up xenophobia, blaming the country's problems on others rather than being honest about the economic damage of Brexit, the dangerous man in the White House and their billionaire mates cream-skimming wealth from the public."Taken together, Reform's emerging programme speaks to the darker aftershocks of Brexit: fierce hostility to immigration, suspicion of liberal institutions and values, and a crueller, more divisive politics. The party has pledged to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act, and scrap the Equality Act, as well as introducing the mass detention and deportation of foreign nationals. What has been created in the last decade is not some settled post-Brexit order, but a looser, more volatile politics shaped by new money, shadowy alliances and a hostility to progressivism.
"Brexit was sold as a full stop but turned out to be a comma," says Smith. "The promise was that leaving the European Union would draw a line under a decade of political turmoil. Instead it created a new set of questions that Britain is still wrestling with today: what kind of relationship do we want with our nearest neighbours, what kind of country are we, and who does our politics actually work for?"
Those questions may remain unanswered, but Farage remains the man most willing to exploit the silence. He has trained the electorate to see betrayal everywhere they look, helped create the conditions for his voters' hardship and ensured they would never blame him for it.
And the parties and politicians around him have remained complicit, too afraid to name Brexit's failures and too blinkered to contend with its
damage.
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lesleyaw.bsky.social @lesleyaw.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Tech billionaires are getting richer while we pay the price for the real-world harm their platforms cause. The "neutral host" loophole lets them off the hook for pushing dangerous content. MPs are demanding emergency laws to make them pay. Add your name: you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/st...
you.38degrees.org.uk
Sign the urgent petition
Tech billionaires shouldn't get to hide behind a legal loophole while their algorithms push dangerous content for profit. MPs are demanding emergency laws to finally make them liable for the harm they...
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Peter Geoghegan @petergeoghegan.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
🔴 SCOOP: Farage doesn't seem to want to answer questions about his money. So I went looking - and found that the Reform leader's personal company is in breach of UK company law democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-n...
democracyforsale.substack.com
Revealed: Nigel Farage is breaking British company law
Farage’s personal company has almost £2m in cash but has not filed key documents
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Brexit Bin 🇪🇺 🇬🇧 🇩🇪 @brexitbin.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
This guy Cody Dahler nails the way MAGA and fascist billionaires are backing the British far-right. Well worth a listen! [SOUND ON 🔊]
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Lauren Dobson-Hughes @ldobsonhughes.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
These are the 30 women killed since 2020 in Northern Ireland, all by white men 21 killed in their homes by men they knew. The youngest 20, the oldest 82 21 were mothers, 4 were killed with their children in the home. Two were pregnant Nobody rioted over their murders www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
A picture of violence: The 30 women killed in more than four years
In at least 21 of the 30 deaths, the killers - or the suspects in their killings - were well-known to the women.
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Wolfgang Blau @wblau.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
Edward Luce in the Financial Times about Musk:
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Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
NEW: Why did Nigel Farage throw the 2019 ‘Brexit’ election for Boris Johnson? What does it have to do with Harborne’s £5m gift? And why is it tearing apart Britain’s far-right parties? A @thenerve.news investigation by me & @luciaoc.bsky.social (Link below) 1/ #TheHarborneReceipts
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Michael Spicer @michaelspicer.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
Nigel Farage Listens to the News
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Sarah Murphy @13sarahmurphy.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
When you have a complicit media not only refusing to call out the lies and threats of ugly racist populists, but actively amplifying those lies and threats, democracy doesn’t stand a chance. Shame on the BBC for being such a big part of the problem.
Yet for some reason the BBC has picked this week, as actual Neo-Nazis take to the streets in an attempt to ignite a race war, to get into a
"contentious debate" about whether a nonwhite person can ever be considered one of us.
Just as with the "two tier policing" claim, our national broadcaster is choosing to engage with ideas that until recently were the preserve of only a tiny fringe of far-right headcases.
That they are doing so now, as voters prepare to go to the polls in the most consequential by-election in recent history, is particularly alarming.The reason the radical right is given such oxygen, whilst the radical left is largely ignored, is that one side of that coin has the collective voices of the majority of the British press behind it, whilst the other side does not
This week the fruits of that pressure became obvious. An organisation that is supposed to remain completely above the political fray, has instead spent its week engaging almost solely with the ideas of the most radical right fringes of our society.
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Ed Wilson @eddwilson.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
Restore Britain has not received a penny in donations in Q1 2026. In fact, it hasn't reported any donations. Ever. Apparently. Is it working on membershp fees only, or sub-threshold donations, or the wealth of Rupert Lowe (which should be reported)? #R4Today
electoralcommission.org.uk
Political parties accept £24.7m in donations in Q1 2026
Political parties registered in the UK have reported accepting £24,716,802 in donations and public funds during the first quarter of 2026.
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Ellie Mae O'Hagan @elliemaeohagan.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
It's strange to me that Matt Goodwin seems to be on the BBC more than Hannah Spencer when he lost an election to her
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Peter Walker @peterwalker99.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Extremely good sketch by @mrjohncrace.bsky.social from yesterday's PMQs, particularly this bit. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
That just left Nige to make political capital out of a young man’s death. Everything is just material for Nige. He doesn’t give a shit about anyone or anything but himself. He is devoid of empathy, unable to see beyond his own vanity.

His imagined glories. King of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. “It’s now clear there is two-tier policing for different ethnic groups,” he began. Though he had no evidence to support this. Other than that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor would never have been arrested if he had been black. But Nige has never let the facts get in the way of his bigotry. And he has never needed his bigotry more than now.

Farage was not finished. There was anger spilling out on the streets of Southampton. Anger that he had done his best to stir up. He sounded disappointed that more people hadn’t been involved. He had asked for “pure cold rage”. But somehow the rage had not felt pure enough. Nor cold enough. Why couldn’t people even channel undiluted fury any more?

Starmer’s response was withering. He had the whole house, apart from the six Reform MPs, right behind him. He was disgusted with Farage’s comments. How dare he pretend to respect the wishes of Henry’s family. What he had done was unforgivable. The least anyone could do was keep quiet when asked. But Nige had, in a way, done us all a service. He had shown himself for who he really was. The whole country could now see through him.

It was as if we were watching the end of something. For 18 months, it has felt as if Reform is on an unstoppable roll. One triumph after another, as Labour and the Tories competed to be more useless than each other. But over the past six weeks, the shine has come off. They are the emperor with no clothes. Just another bunch of loudmouths with no answers. Just grievance.
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Marina Purkiss @marina-purkiss.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Just watch this… And for the love of God, please see Farage for what he is. His response to Sarah Everard Vs his response to Henry Nowak Jaw dropping.
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Marina Purkiss @marina-purkiss.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Just noting that when Sarah Everard was kidnapped and murdered by a police officer and a vigil held for her on Clapham Common, Farage urged people not to attack men or the police.
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The London Economic @thelondoneconomic.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Well this looks an awful lot like incitement doesn't it...
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Good Law Project @goodlawproject.org · 03/06/2026
🚨 BREAKING 🚨 MPs call for government to kick Palantir out of the NHS goodlawproject.org/mps-call-for-gov…
goodlawproject.org
MPs call for government to kick Palantir out of the NHS | Good Law Project
Cross-party committee identifies Palantir’s ‘clear mismatch with UK values’ and calls on ministers to bring the spy-tech firm’s data contract with the NHS to an end
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