This is straight up mental. Prosecuted for something he said in the privacy of his own car.
📣🚨 FSU VICTORY!
A Scottish FSU member was driving on the M80 with his four-year-old son after a day at an amusement park when another car cut him up, nearly causing a collision.
Under his breath, he muttered something racist. The windows were down, but the other driver wasn’t looking at him. The only witness was his young son in the back seat.
Convinced the dangerous driver had been drinking, our member contacted the police. They eventually stopped both cars and reviewed his dashcam footage.
A week later, the police contacted him to say that an offence had been committed — not by the dangerous driver, but by our member, for words he had muttered under his breath in the privacy of his own car.
He was prosecuted for allegedly causing alarm and distress, even though only he and his young son were in the car. It is extraordinary.
The Free Speech Union found him an excellent barrister, and he was acquitted by the Justice of the Peace within minutes.
This is the closest we have come to defending someone prosecuted for thought crime.
This is the extent of police overreach in speech and thought policing. They need to get their priorities straight.
Watch the Free Speech Union’s General Secretary, Lord Young, below 👇
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Richard retweeted
David Cameron, who led the Remain campaign is right here:
"I mean, our economic problems are we are overspending, over-borrowing, over-taxing, over-regulated, and far too much being spent on working age welfare. Those are a set of problems that have nothing to do with Brexit."
Richard retweeted
“Two doctors who helped overseas medical graduates “cheat” in exams designed to prove their safety to practise in the UK have been struck off”.
Qualified in Iran & Romania. We must start talking about the standard of foreign-trained doctors in the NHS.
bmj.com/content/395/bmj-2026…
Richard retweeted
AMD keeps its microarchitecture names simple: Zen 2, Zen 3, … Zen 6. Zen 6 is new and most of us still lack access.
Chips and Cheese measured what changed from Zen 5.
Zen 6 sustains 5.96 64-bit adds per cycle versus Zen 5’s 5.25 (same six ALUs). (Yes! Your processor can do that many additions per cycle!)
It also recovers faster from branch mispredictions: roughly 3–3.5 ns extra versus 3.5–4 ns on Zen 5. That's an important gain because lots of branchy code is limited by branch misprediction penalties.
Overall, Zen 6 processors today can match the best of the previous generation (Zen 5) running at high clocks with more cache. So we might get an realistic performance boost of about 20% with comparable chips.
Source: chipsandcheese.com/p/amds-ze…
Richard retweeted
Climate policies have consequences
EU households pay 1.9x US prices and 4x China
And Germany has the highest household electricity cost in the world
teapaw.org/BjornLomborg/status/21…
Climate policies have consequences
EU households pay 1.9x US prices and 4x China
And Germany has the highest household electricty cost in the world
iea.org/data-and-statistics/…
Great video as usual by Ed on inflation and where it might go next year.
📽️ The @bankofengland just raised interest rates. But why now? And will they do more?
Latest primer, including the best of the charts from the Bank's latest assessment on the UK economy👇
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Richard retweeted
The Resolution Foundation says the Bank of England’s forecast that inflation could hit 5% next year means real-terms pay packets will be £670 lower compared to previous forecasts
It says the £100 cost-of-living support announced at the budget is “pretty small by comparison”
Richard retweeted
“A nice guy doing his job, and he’s now paying a life sentence for it.”
It is now five years since a religious studies teacher in Batley was suspended from his job after offending some local Muslims.
His alleged offence? Showing his students a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad during a class discussion about the brutal massacre of journalists at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Fearing for his and his family’s safety, the teacher fled his home.
On this week’s episode of the FSU Podcast, @DavidRoseUK is joined by the teacher’s friend and local activist, Paul Holloran, who says his friend can now “never go home”.
Watch the full episode on the FSU YouTube channel 👇
Richard retweeted
I tweeted about the folly of burying cables underground and someone immediately organised a pylon.
Richard retweeted
That "staggering response" in full: Don't tighten settlement and benefits eligibility rules for recent migrants, say recent migrants.
Richard retweeted
🌊 The English Waters Megathread v2 🌊
It's been 3 years since my original thread and the prevailing narrative is still one of decline. I went through the latest numbers and put together this explainer video and thread to see what the new data shows.
youtube.com/watch?v=mRGeOUsb…
"OK, it is happening, but it's not that bad."
Our analysis suggests that Afghans are convicted of sex crimes in England and Wales at seven times the British rate. But the numbers need to be kept in perspective economist.com/britain/2026/1…
Richard retweeted
🚨OBR: "in nearly all the scenarios we produced, including with different assumptions for long-term policy, debt would move on to an unsustainable upward trajectory within the next couple of decades unless policy action was taken to prevent this"
Richard retweeted
🚨 NEW: John Healey is set to announce the following in his Budget later
- The gas standing charge will be scrapped to save £27 a year on a typical bill
- Green levies on energy bills will be scraped "for good"
- NHS prescription charges will be frozen at £9.90 for another year
- Poorer households on benefits will receive extra help with energy bills before January's sharp rises
- The VAT cut on electricity bills, which was due to expire in April, will be extended (though it's not clear if this will be announced in the Budget or separately)
- The Government will remove the link between gas and electricity prices, which currently inflates household bills, "in the long term"
- Banks will face higher taxes, with the surcharge on their profits potentially rising from 3% to 8%, making it the Budget’s biggest revenue raiser
- HMRC will be given powers to seize money from the bank accounts of people who fail to pay their tax
- The freeze on rail fares will reportedly not be extended beyond April
- Online retailers like Amazon, eBay and Temu will be made responsible for collecting unpaid VAT from sellers to fund a cut in business rates for high street shops
- The thresholds for income tax will be frozen again so another half a million people may be dragged into the higher rate
- January's planned increase in fuel duty will be cancelled
- Pensioners relying solely on the state pension will see their tax-free allowance rise to £13,036, in line with the pension increase, so they don't pay income tax
- Billions in long-term borrowing to invest in defence firms and raise the share of GDP spent on defence (without breaking fiscal rules, as the investments are expected to generate returns)
- The upcoming "Your First Home" scheme will be made more generous to provide greater support for middle-income earners
- The Budget will also assume the Rosebank oil field is approved, which will generate "significant tax revenues"
Richard retweeted
🌍 European countries that added the most migrants (2000–2024)
1. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: +7.1M
2. 🇪🇸 Spain: +6.8M
3. 🇩🇪 Germany: +6.4M
4. 🇹🇷 Türkiye: +5.8M
5. 🇮🇹 Italy: +4.4M
6. 🇫🇷 France: +3.0M
7. 🇦🇹 Austria: +1.4M
8. 🇳🇱 Netherlands: +1.4M
9. 🇨🇭 Switzerland: +1.3M
10. 🇧🇪 Belgium: +1.3M
11. 🇸🇪 Sweden: +1.3M
12. 🇵🇱 Poland: +917K
13. 🇮🇪 Ireland: +840K
14. 🇳🇴 Norway: +720K
15. 🇷🇴 Romania: +521K
16. 🇵🇹 Portugal: +476K
17. 🇩🇰 Denmark: +475K
18. 🇭🇺 Hungary: +393K
19. 🇨🇿 Czechia: +386K
20. 🇫🇮 Finland: +378K
Europe's migrant population grew by 40.8 million between 2000 and 2024, up 67%. The UK, Spain and Germany together account for almost half of that increase.
Source: UN DESA
Richard retweeted
Borrowing was £24.5 billion in September 2026, £1.8 billion higher than a year ago, as spending, including debt interest costs, grew faster than income. This was £1.9 billion above the OBR forecast.
ons.gov.uk/economy/governmen…
