Born in Yorkshire to Irish & Welsh parents. Supports Ireland @ Rugby and Football. Interested music 🎶 , sports 🏉 politics & drama 🎭
Joined June 2018
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What an outrageous tweet! This is the tweet of someone unfit to sit in Parliament. A pointless talentless grifting nonentity! Absolutely clueless
Pity the French did not show the same resolve in defending their sovereignty in June 1940.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
About 90,000–100,000 French soldiers were killed during the Battle of France (May–June 1940), when Germany invaded. Around 92,000 is the figure most commonly cited.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of…
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
🔴 Later today Danny Kruger MP is giving a speech about Reform's preparation for government at Policy Exchange.
Policy Exchange won’t say who funds it. But we’ve found donations to its US fundraising arm jumped 74% last year
And that's not all.... 🧵
democracyforsale.substack.co…
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
One of the best discussions of modern media I’ve heard - well done @krishgm and @lewis_goodall . Wireless rather under mentioned but whatever ..
bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0033g…
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
For years Yaxley Lennon has intimidated and threatened journalists who tell the truth about him.
Listen to the impact of that on @MikeStuchbery_ 7 years ago.
And don’t talk to me about free speech. This is tyranny with life altering consequences
bylinetimes.com/2026/11/02/t…
John Fitzpatrick 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
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
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
John Fitzpatrick 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
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
NEW: Andy Burnham’s right about the speakerphone ban on buses and trains - but will anyone listen to him?!
My column for @thenerve_news 👇🏽:
“Mutual respect and empathy in shared public spaces – big or small – helps to oil the wheels of community cohesion”: @SangitaMyska on @andyburnham’s speakerphone ban
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
It’s my view - and I don’t feel the slightest pessimism about it. I’m deeply optimistic about Europe as a whole and as a team.
The morose framing is your own. I’ve never subscribed to this notion that being a member of the EU is some sort of victimhood. Especially for a hugely influential country like ours. For many countries, joining the EU was their liberation from tyranny- and now east to west we’re seeing over two dozen countries work together day in day out on shared issues - with their citizens and small business empowered by extra freedoms to work, trade, live across borders with ease.
As a scientist I’ve seen the shared European structures at their best - liberating scientists all over the continent (and world now) to work together… and pooling resource to support science at vast scale to crack problems that need scale.
Brexit was framed as a liberation from oppression. It has been anything but. In the vain search for a purist form of “liberty” from the straw man monster of our neighbourhood friends, we have ripped liberties and powers away from our own citizens and businesses- hemming them in and telling them to themselves find the benefits of blowing off our foot. That’s no freedom.
Look, I’m a scientist so I can’t begrudge experimentation. What I do object to is this new religion of reflexively slagging off everything European… and so a determination to do our own continent down in the vain hope that this will validate restrictions we imposed on ourselves. Without reassessing where we are. With the US, Russia & China in aggressive flux, I see huge opportunities for the UK and Europe and CANZUK all together as a team. A lot is going to happen over the next decade(s) and I want us with the right team (Europe & Commonwealth) at the juncture of it all. Despite all the dangers lurking in the world at this time, my view is fundamentally very, very optimistic of what we can be.
Believing Britain's future lies within the European Union is a hugely pessimistic view.
It's a view that says Britain can't hack it setting its own tariffs, regulating its own goods and services, setting its own taxes, controlling its own border, and eventually managing its own currency.
It's a miserable acceptance that Britain is defeated - and consequently must be subsumed into a larger political entity, under a higher political authority.
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
What an extraordinarily pessimistic view of Britain. Believing Britain’s future lies in Europe doesn’t mean believing Britain “can’t hack it”.
It means recognising that sovereignty isn’t measured by how many things you insist on doing alone.
France isn’t defeated. Germany isn’t defeated. The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Spain and Poland haven’t been “subsumed”. They are sovereign European democracies which have chosen to exercise some powers together because acting together can give nations more power over the world around them than acting alone.
And some of this argument is simply wrong. EU countries set their own income and corporation tax rates and decide how their revenues are spent.
Not every EU country uses the euro.
Yes, members share trade policy, tariffs and many regulations. But that’s the point of coordination to get better deals.
In return, businesses gain access to a huge Single Market without customs barriers between 27 countries.
Brexit Britain chose instead to erect a trade border between itself and that market and even created barriers to moving food within its own United Kingdom.
Now we’re negotiating to remove some of those barriers by aligning food standards with Europe again.
Britain is finally rediscovering geography.
And after Ukraine, Putin and the enormous geopolitical upheavals of recent years, I find the idea that European nations working together represents weakness particularly strange.
Europe was built because generations who had experienced what happened when European nations turned against one another understood the value of cooperation.
Britain doesn’t become smaller by sitting at the European table. It gets a chair.
My optimistic view of Britain is that we should be helping to shape Europe not standing outside it insisting that isolation is sovereignty. 🇬🇧🇪🇺
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
Spending time with Ciara Mageean was a delightful experience.
She was wonderfully mischievous. Eamonn Mallie.
‘Gee it’s great to be back!’ .. ‘Eamonn Mallie Face to Face with…’ returns to UTV with first guest in new series Ciara Mageean, 2024 European Athletics Championships gold medalist. Join Portaferry woman Ciara and me @utv Tuesday 22.45. @SuzyJourno @AlexKane221b
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
‘Gee it’s great to be back!’ .. ‘Eamonn Mallie Face to Face with…’ returns to UTV with first guest in new series Ciara Mageean, 2024 European Athletics Championships gold medalist. Join Portaferry woman Ciara and me @utv Tuesday 22.45. @SuzyJourno @AlexKane221b
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
I am advised UTV intends making Eamonn Mallie: Face to Face with Ciara Mageean available on ITVX. Thanks. Eamonn.
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
This will prompt more talk about the direction of the Telegraph under new owners, Axel Springer.
Comes after Allison Pearson also reportedly leaving. Expect a reaction on the right.
Axel Springer has already revealed cuts plan, including journalists - big changes now happening.
NEW: Nigel Farage's contract to write regularly for the Telegraph to END.
A dispute over the background. Sources suggest new owners were ending contract.
But Farage resigned Friday citing Tel's direction under new owners...
theguardian.com/politics/202…
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
How about you spending two minutes researching Miliband's parents and finding out that they were part of the anti-Stalinist left? Neither were ever members of the CPGB. Stalinist regimes would have shot them.
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
During my 51 yrs at the BBC the mandarins often changed their minds about axeing certain programmes they didn’t value. Hope it’s not too late to reprieve Radio 4’s You And Yours. In these parlous times for vulnerable consumers, a strong programme like this is invaluable.
John Fitzpatrick retweeted
Who actually cares at this stage?
Upper Bann MP Carla Lockhart has left the Democratic Unionist Party. bbc.in/4AtLxkL
