Architect, trade unionist
NW Europe
Joined January 2009
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intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
Exactly. Leave a customs union means you resurrect customs borders. The UK did so with 28 others. Leave a single market of regulations means you resurrect regulatory borders. The UK did so with 31 others. Thus adding both of these to those the UK already has with *all* the world's countries...
Customs & regulatory borders between different customs & different regulated territories are the hardest of "frictions" & barriers to trade & growth.
All Brexits were thus always going to fuck over & shrink the UK economy
For goodness sake, stop the claptrap !
It wasn't the "botched Brexit deal" which "put up frictions and barriers" - it was Brexit itself !
It's like leaving a gym, then complaining you've "botched" no longer being a member because you can't use the apparatus !
@EmmaforWycombe
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
💔 Brexit broke my heart, it still makes me cry 😭 often.
I have felt incredibly sad and at times frightened about Brexit impact.
For me, Europe was never principally about GDP, trade deals or regulations. Europe is about peace; countries that spent centuries fighting one another deciding that their futures were safer intertwined.
And it is about protecting our shared European culture, our democracy and our security.
And so many of the things I feared in 2016 have since happened. War has returned to Europe. Putin’s killing machine continues its assault on Ukraine. And Trump’s America has itself gone to war with Iran while its relationship with Europe is fractious.
Do we continue looking across the Atlantic and hoping America will always guarantee our security and defend our interests? Or do we recognise the simple reality of our geography?
We are European. Europe isn’t perfect, nothing is. But European unity was never based upon the proposition that European countries would be perfect, it was built upon the knowledge of what can happen when Europe is divided.
The lesson of Suez wasn’t that Britain needed America more. Britain, France and our European neighbours need each other.
Britain’s future and Europe’s future are inseparable. 🇬🇧🇪🇺
🇬🇧 🇫🇷 Did Britain learn the wrong lesson from Suez?
Seventy years ago, the Suez crisis brutally exposed the reality that Britain 🇬🇧 and France 🇫🇷 could no longer act as great powers alone.
But Britain and France drew very different lessons from the humiliation.
Britain turned towards America and France turned towards Europe.
🇩🇪 German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told the French PM:
“France and England will never be powers comparable to the US and the Soviet Union. Nor will Germany. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world; that is to unite to make Europe.”
And then came the devastating observation: “England is not ripe for it.”
Seventy years later, that question has returned. Meanwhile Trump has transformed the transatlantic relationship and Putin’s war has transformed European security.
Ukraine 🇺🇦 has demonstrated why Europe needs the ability to defend itself and Brexit has left Britain outside the European institutions where many of the decisions affecting our own continent are made.
@andyburnham now wants Britain to have a new conversation about Europe and it cannot just be about trade.
It is about security, defence, economic resilience and whether Britain has more influence acting with its European neighbours or perpetually trying to be America’s junior partner.
Perhaps the lesson of Suez wasn’t that Britain needed America more and in fact it was that Britain, France and their European neighbours needed each other.
Seventy years later, it really is time to exorcise the ghost of Suez. Britain’s future and Europe’s future are inseparable. 🇬🇧🇪🇺
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
One of the most poignant images from All Saints’ Day in London.
At the Polish Air Force Memorial in Northolt, 8-year-old Antek joins hundreds of Poles in paying tribute to the Polish airmen who sacrificed their lives ‘for your freedom and ours’. Their bravery and sacrifice will never be forgotten!
The commemoration was organised by Polskie Dywizjony Lotnicze, and British Poles was the media patron of the event.
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
Today is All Souls' Day, or Lá na Marbh, but long before the church made the 2nd of November a Catholic holiday the Gaelic world marked Samhain, when the veil between the living and the dead was thin. Christianity did its thing and 1st became All Saints, the 2nd became All Souls, and the old Pagan and very human instinct to honour and welcome the deceased found a home in the parish.
In traditional Irish households, fires were banked and left burning so the returning souls could warm themselves. Chairs were left by the hearth. Some families, like me own, set out food and a bowl of water to quench the visiting ancestors and left the door on the latch. It's a beautiful and poignant way to feel them close to you, especially ones you've lost that year. These were your own people, home for one night.
The whole of November became the month of the Holy Souls. Families handed names to the priest for the "dead list" and heard them read out at Mass, a litany of grandparents, infants, and neighbours lost to famine, fever, and more often than not British related violence.
In Dublin, when Daniel O'Connell opened Glasnevin in 1832, it was a Catholic cemetery where Catholics could finally bury their dead with their own rites after Emancipation. Every November since in cemeteries across the country, people who mightnt visit normally have walked those paths with flowers and the odd bottle or can, tending graves.
For anyone who's suffered bereavement, especially this year as our own family painfully has, my heart sincerely goes out to you. May you feel their arms around you today. May the memory of their lives bring you comfort, and may the knowledge that they carry on in Paradise awaiting a reunion bring you some peace in this imperfect world. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a n-anamacha.
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
Not sure which European states have Patriots, but any that can be sent to Ukraine should be sent. Now. Not years from now.
Overnight alone, our energy infrastructure came under Russian attack in four regions: Dnipro, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, and Khmelnytskyi. Substations, transformers, and power lines that supply electricity to our people’s homes were targeted. Repair crews are working everywhere. As of now, hundreds of thousands of families remain without power.
Massive Russian attacks on Ukraine’s other critical infrastructure are also continuing unabated. This past week Russia has launched 1,940 attack drones, more than 1,580 guided aerial bombs, and 44 missiles of various types against Ukraine, including 36 ballistic missiles. The intensity of the strikes is extremely high, and the Russians are trying to take maximum advantage of the shortage of ballistic missile interceptors.
Every day, we communicate our need for Patriot missiles to America, Europe, and other partners who can help. And this month, the United States and European countries made new decisions on additional packages for Ukraine. But these deliveries cannot take years. Russia is destroying infrastructure and killing our people right now, and it is betting on ballistic missiles this winter. Accordingly, decisions on air defense must also be implemented now. I thank everyone who supports the defense of Ukrainian skies.
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
🇬🇧 🇫🇷 Did Britain learn the wrong lesson from Suez?
Seventy years ago, the Suez crisis brutally exposed the reality that Britain 🇬🇧 and France 🇫🇷 could no longer act as great powers alone.
But Britain and France drew very different lessons from the humiliation.
Britain turned towards America and France turned towards Europe.
🇩🇪 German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told the French PM:
“France and England will never be powers comparable to the US and the Soviet Union. Nor will Germany. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world; that is to unite to make Europe.”
And then came the devastating observation: “England is not ripe for it.”
Seventy years later, that question has returned. Meanwhile Trump has transformed the transatlantic relationship and Putin’s war has transformed European security.
Ukraine 🇺🇦 has demonstrated why Europe needs the ability to defend itself and Brexit has left Britain outside the European institutions where many of the decisions affecting our own continent are made.
@andyburnham now wants Britain to have a new conversation about Europe and it cannot just be about trade.
It is about security, defence, economic resilience and whether Britain has more influence acting with its European neighbours or perpetually trying to be America’s junior partner.
Perhaps the lesson of Suez wasn’t that Britain needed America more and in fact it was that Britain, France and their European neighbours needed each other.
Seventy years later, it really is time to exorcise the ghost of Suez. Britain’s future and Europe’s future are inseparable. 🇬🇧🇪🇺
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
Brexiter on BBC #PoliticsLive "I want us to have our own laws, govern ourselves, not be dictated to by an unelected European Parliament"
My view:
That claim sounds less like an informed account of how the EU worked and more like populist rhetoric repeated without checking the facts.
The European Parliament was directly elected by voters—including UK voters while Britain was a member.
Most EU laws were proposed by the Commission, then debated, amended and agreed by the elected Parliament and the Council of national government ministers.
The Commission could not simply dictate laws on its own.
British ministers sat in the Council and took part in those decisions; British MEPs represented voters in Parliament.
The UK could be outvoted in some areas, but that is shared decision-making—not rule by an unelected parliament.
And the Commission itself was accountable to elected institutions: Parliament had to approve the College of Commissioners.
You can argue that pooling sovereignty was a bad deal, or point to a specific EU law you opposed.
But “we were dictated to by an unelected European Parliament” is not a factual description of the process.
It replaces the real debate with a slogan.
And this explains the need for education and information so individuals such as this gentleman can make informed decisions based on accurate information, and not populist, divisive rhetoric.
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
The Age of AI will necessitate the introduction of a universal basic income in all countries. Bring on the UBI!
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
Look at all the crap being said about Poland and the EU. There isn’t a coup. There is a constitutional dispute that started with PiS trying, and succeeding, to stack the court years ago. Look at who is saying it. Mad MAGA loons, Russian politicians, corrupt PiS liars.
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
Will Coleshill is mixed race. His original name was CongoRay Salamat.
If this person thinks black men are 'third world savages' that doesn't bode well at all.
Myself & @WillColeshill have just been attacked by third world savage Congolese migrants in Paris.
It started because we were documenting the demographic replacement in France.
They went to attack our female friend and we stepped in to defend her.
This is why we need Remigration
📽️: @LukeWSchmidt
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
Today, on All Saints’ Day, hundreds of Poles in the UK gathered to light more than 1,000 candles at the Polish Air Force Memorial in Northolt, west London, honouring our heroes.
The commemorative event “Light a Candle for Polish Airmen” honoured the Polish airmen who fought and died defending British skies during WWII. Over 18,000 Polish personnel served in RAF squadrons, more than 2,000 lost their lives.
The commemoration was organised by Polskie Dywizjony Lotnicze, and British Poles was the media patron of the event.
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
FYI - It's a great charity & this donation isn't some sort of poke in the eye. Action for Children supports all children, including refugees. Thank you.
From their website:
Just donated what I would have won for my chosen charity @actnforchildren ❤️ ❤️ amazing cause 😘🙏🏽
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
Ryan Bridge has been detained and placed under house arrest in Somalia. His mate Billy Allison from Raise the Colours is on trial for murder. Ay Audits and his mates are banged up in France. Tommy Robinson has been found guilty. Joey Barton and Danny Tommo are on remand. James English is on bail awaiting sentencing, and Russell Brand is on trial.
What a year for the far right.
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
It's that time of year when we remind everyone that Halloween celebrations originated in Ireland in the festival of Samhain 👻🎃
It dates back over 2,000 years & marked the end of summer & the beginning of winter
ow.ly/xCJi51029Vz
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
Man travels overseas to advocate for remigration & complains about 'foreign savages' chasing him out.
Chouette
Today, I could have died at the hands of masked foreign savages.
One foreigner recognised me and shouted ‘FASCISTE’, and hundreds of masked thugs chased me down as they were being kettled by the French police.
God willing, I outran them and escaped.
This will be the norm in Britain if we don’t get a grip on migration.
Footage coming soon.
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
Purging books, given the experience of the British Library when their system was hacked, is desperately shortsighted.
Stop the Library Purge and Safeguard UNH's 300,000 books - Sign the Petition! c.org/KVcNpcxvx6 via @UKChange
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
Wow. In all of his 21 years, he's never known anything like it.
He could try reading some books.
What I witnessed in Paris today was of a different order entirely.
England is next. London is next. France stands only a few years ahead of us in the scale of migrant uprisings now consuming our major cities.
Bricks hurled through the windows of the innocent. Streets thick with the stench of tear gas. Blood on the pavement. Savage migrants spitting, abusing, and smashing their way through our capital.
We are watching the fall of Europe, our great and beautiful continent, our ancestral homeland.
As white Europeans become a minority, these foreigners will kill us, attack us, and abuse us more and more. We are already being outnumbered.
We need remigration. Now.
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
The year is 1746. You live in the Highlands, weeks after Culloden. The redcoats burn your house and drive the cattle of the glen down to Fort Augustus, 2,000 at a time, where dealers up from Yorkshire buy them by the lump. You walk to the camp to beg for one cow back for the children and are turned away at the gate. The old die of hunger on the bare hillside while the Duke of Cumberland holds horse races on the flat ground below.
The year is 1847. You live in Ireland, a country that lived off its cattle until conquest handed the herds to the landlords and left you an acre of potatoes. The potatoes have rotted black in the ground. The ships leaving for England are loaded to the rails with cattle, pigs and butter, and your neighbours are found dead in the ditches with their mouths stained green from eating grass. A million die. The man running relief from the Treasury, Charles Trevelyan, writes that the famine will bring about a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation. He is knighted for his work.
The year is 1905. You are Herero, in what is now Namibia, a people whose whole life is cattle. The German general has ordered every Herero shot, with or without cattle, and the rest driven into the desert to die of thirst. In the camp at Swakopmund the women are made to boil the heads of the dead and scrape them clean with shards of glass, for shipping to universities in Germany. Four Herero in five die. The survivors are forbidden by law to own a cow.
The year is 1932. You are Kazakh. The Party has taken your herds and sent them to feed Moscow and Leningrad, and the bodies along the roads are stacked like firewood. You pull a sled across the steppe with your dead child on it, and if you run for China the border guards shoot you. Four Kazakhs in ten die, and the ones left become a minority in their own country.
The year is 2026. You milk cows in County Cork, where the cattle sailed for England while your great-great-grandparents chewed grass in the ditch, and your own government has modelled culling nearly 200,000 dairy cows to meet a climate target.
Take a people's animals and hunger does the rest. The redcoats knew it. The Treasury knew it. The general and the Party knew it.
Ireland learned it in a ditch with grass in its mouth, and is now drawing up the list itself.
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
🇵🇱🇪🇺 Poland’s Constitutional Crisis: Before You Believe The Coup Narrative, Understand Who Changed The Rules
I’m seeing people around the world sharing dramatic accusations about a coup in Poland. Most of them have absolutely no idea how this crisis started.
So here’s what you need to understand.
Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal is supposed to protect the Constitution. Think of it as a court that decides whether the government and parliament are acting within constitutional limits. It is not supposed to be an instrument of whichever political party happens to hold power.
The trouble began in 2015, during a dispute over judicial appointments. The outgoing government made controversial appointments, but after PiS came to power, it rejected appointments that the Tribunal subsequently ruled were lawful and installed its own judges. The conflict expanded into years of battles over judicial independence, court appointments, and the rule of law.
In 2023, Polish voters elected a new parliamentary majority, bringing Donald Tusk’s coalition into government. But changing the government did not automatically undo the institutional changes made under PiS.
That’s the part people need to understand.
Imagine a political party losing an election but leaving behind appointees who can obstruct the new government’s attempts to restore institutions. Now imagine the resulting confrontation being presented to the world as proof that the new government is overthrowing democracy.
This is why the history matters.
In 2026, President Karol Nawrocki refused to swear in several judges elected by parliament. Constitutional Tribunal president Bogdan Święczkowski also refused to allow newly elected judges to take up their duties.
On October 30, Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska announced the suspension of Święczkowski and his deputy. The court’s rival leadership rejected her authority. Nawrocki returned to Warsaw, PiS politicians accused Tusk of staging a coup, protesters gathered, and police were deployed.
But an accusation of a coup is not proof of a coup.
Tusk’s government argues that it is restoring constitutional order after years of unlawful interference with the judiciary. Nawrocki and PiS argue that the suspension itself violates constitutional order. The legality of these actions must be determined through the law, not by whichever politician shouts the loudest.
And here’s the bigger question.
When politicians claim to defend law and order, do they mean laws that apply equally to everyone, including themselves? Or do they mean protecting their own people and their own control over institutions?
That’s the contradiction at the heart of this crisis.
I grew up in communist Poland. I remember what political control over institutions looked like. That’s why I take the independence of courts seriously, regardless of which party is in government.
Poland doesn’t belong to PiS. It doesn’t belong to Tusk. It doesn’t belong to Nawrocki. It belongs to its people!
It belongs to the Polish people.
And before anyone outside Poland shares another sensational post about a supposed coup, they should understand the decade of political and constitutional conflict that brought the country to this point.
Law and order must mean the rule of law, not the rule of whichever party claims to own it.
intermax #FBPE #FPHD #RejoinEU 💙 #FBPPR retweeted
🚨Poland crisis explainer.
Poland is in the middle of a political crisis over its constitutional court, called the Constitutional Tribunal. This court decides whether laws are allowed under Poland’s constitution, so whoever controls it has a great deal of power.
Between 2015 and 2023, Poland was run by a right-wing party called Law and Justice (PiS). During that time, PiS reshaped the court, including by putting its own judges into three seats that had already been filled by the previous parliament.
In December 2025, the European Union’s top court ruled that those appointments, and the way the court’s president was later chosen, broke the rules, and that as a result the tribunal does not count as an independent and impartial court under EU law. It also found the tribunal had broken EU law by rejecting the authority of European court rulings. The EU had already imposed heavy financial penalties on Poland over other parts of PiS’s changes to the justice system.
In 2023, PiS lost power to a coalition led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, which runs from the left to the centre right. Tusk’s government promised to restore the court’s independence, but it hit a wall. Poland’s president, Karol Nawrocki, is an ally of PiS, and he has blocked the government’s attempts to change the law.
Parliament elected eight new judges this year. Polish law provides for new judges to take an oath in the president’s presence, and Nawrocki has done this for three of them but refused the other five. Those five took their oaths in parliament instead, arguing that the president’s refusal could not stop them taking office.
The head of the court, Bogdan Święczkowski, a former PiS government minister, refused to let them work. He did so even after the European Court of Human Rights, in May, told Poland that four of them must be allowed to take up their posts.
In October, the Venice Commission, a respected European advisory body on constitutions, called on Nawrocki to swear in all the judges immediately, and said they could take office without him if he refused unlawfully. Nawrocki’s side pointed out that its opinion is advisory and not legally binding.
Both sides had been using the institutions they control against each other for months. In May, the tribunal itself ruled that the president does not have to swear in judges chosen by parliament. In September, prosecutors charged two of the tribunal’s administrative staff, the head of its chancellery and the head of its security service, with offences including abuse of power for obstructing the new judges, which both deny. On Friday 30 October, the standoff boiled over.
Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, one of the judges elected by the current parliament, announced she was taking temporary charge of the court and ordered a one-month break in the duties of Święczkowski and his deputy. Police surrounded the court as protesters opposing the suspension gathered outside, with some cutting through the fence and throwing objects at officers. The president cut short a foreign trip and flew home.
The government says it is repairing a court that PiS had taken over. PiS and its allies call it a coup. Even some long-standing critics of PiS, including the respected legal scholar Marcin Matczak, say there was no proper legal basis for the suspension. So the government has strong backing from European bodies on how the court was captured in the first place, while the way it acted on Friday is much harder to defend.
There are echoes of this in the United States, though the two situations are not the same. In both countries, the top courts have become prizes that the main parties fight to control.
In America, Republicans refused to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016, then rushed through Donald Trump’s nominee in 2020, while some Democrats have since talked about adding extra judges to the court.
There have also been arguments in both countries about governments and court decisions. In Poland, Tusk’s government ignores the tribunal’s rulings because it says the court is illegitimate. In America, a federal judge, James Boasberg, ordered the Trump administration in 2025 to halt deportation flights to El Salvador, then found there was probable cause that it had wilfully disregarded his order. The administration denied breaking the order and challenged the finding in the appeals courts.
The systems also differ: American Supreme Court judges are chosen by the president and approved by the Senate, while Polish tribunal judges are elected by parliament.
The comparison is useful less as an exact match than as a warning about what happens when politicians start treating courts as tools of power.
The crisis has already been taken up by politicians abroad, mostly on the right. In Britain, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage posted: ‘Arrests and a raid on the constitutional court - all to defend the undemocratic EU.’ Former prime minister Liz Truss called it a ‘shocking assault on democracy in Poland’.
Elsewhere in Europe, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders posted ‘Tusk acts like a Nazi’, and Balázs Orbán, formerly political director to Hungary’s ex-prime minister Viktor Orbán, described ‘an attempted JUDICIAL COUP’.
The arrests Farage mentioned were of three protesters detained after breaching the court’s fence, and none of these posts mentioned how PiS had reshaped the court or the European rulings against it.
By contrast, the US ambassador to Poland, Tom Rose, noted that the two sides gave sharply different accounts, and urged restraint from everyone involved.
So who is right?
The difficulty is that having a good reason and having the legal authority are not always the same thing. A government can have a strong case that a court has been captured without every step it takes to fix it being lawful.
A useful test is to ask of each action: would I accept this if my political opponents did it? Taking over courts, ignoring their rulings and getting around the constitution are hard to justify on that test, whichever side does them.
Imho, the real question in Poland, which matters for every democracy, including ours, is what a government should do when a court has been captured by one party and every legal route to fix it is blocked.
Some see Friday’s action as necessary repair. Others fear it simply swaps one side’s control for the other’s, and sets an example the next government could follow.