The Heartlands Tribune

22/08/2026

Andy Burnham...Saving the country, one bus route at a time...

22/08/2026

“THE NATIONAL DEBT” IS NOT A HOUSEHOLD CREDIT CARD.

Language can reveal the truth. It can also be used to bury it, and few political phrases conceal more than “the national debt”.

Economist Professor L. Randall Wray argues that, for a sovereign currency issuer, selling government bonds is not borrowing in the household sense. It exchanges one form of government liability currency or bank reserves for another that pays interest: bonds.

The quantity is still there. What changes is its form and who receives the interest.

That does not mean governments can spend without consequences. Inflation, available resources and the distribution of wealth all matter. But “Where will the money come from?” is often the wrong question.

The real questions are: What can the economy produce? What should government fund? And who benefits from the choices being made?

Wray explains what the phrase “government debt” so often hides

21/08/2026

It really doesn’t matter whether you belong to the Left Tribe or Right Tribe; we are at the point Ricky Gervais called 20 years ago.

What we really have to do is ask: What sort of society finds itself having to remind grown men not to r**e?

He got the judges right as well.

Forget the tribal excuses. A society reduced to explaining that r**e is wrong and then arguing over whether it was wrong to say so needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

What have we become, and how much further are we prepared to fall?

21/08/2026

When a government feels compelled to hand asylum seekers pamphlets explaining that r**e and child abuse are crimes, the public is entitled to ask one simple question: why?

Lucy Powell is asked repeatedly. She never answers.

Instead, we get the familiar fog of “robust processes”, “mitigations” and accelerated removals anything except an explanation of why the Home Office believes such a warning is necessary.

The contradiction is inescapable. If the pamphlet is necessary, the Government must explain the risk it is intended to address. If no such risk exists, why issue it at all?

Watch Powell search for an answer that simply isn’t there.

No matter where you stand on immigration, this is a dreadful look. A government that cannot explain why it issued a safeguarding warning cannot expect the public to believe it understands the risk, let alone trust it to keep them safe.

The government just reinforced every stereo type of migrants...

20/08/2026

UNISON has a women problem.

Three-quarters of its 1.3 million members are women, yet the union allowed a biological male to stand for a disabled women’s seat, breaking its own rulebook and trade union law.

Then came the Darlington nurses, women fighting for the basic right to change clothes without a biological male present. Their union did not defend them.

Now general secretary Andrea Egan is campaigning against the EHRC guidance and promising to change the law after the Supreme Court finally clarified that s*x in the Equality Act means biological s*x.

Trans people lost no legal protections. Women simply regained clarity over theirs.

A trade union exists to stand beside its members when power bears down on them. When ideology matters more than the women paying the subscriptions, something has gone badly wrong.

Read the full investigation:
https://heartlandstribune.com/the-ideological-capture-of-unison/

When UNISON allowed a biological male to stand for a seat reserved for disabled women, it broke trade union law and its own constitution. When seven nurses were harassed in their changing room, it looked the other way. Britain's largest union has not merely lost its way; it has actively turned on th...

20/08/2026

In government, austerity is always for the passengers at the back.

John Swinney has defended spending more than £45,000 of public money on business-class flights for himself and two senior aides during Scotland’s World Cup campaign.

Swinney and his private secretary cost the taxpayer £17,893 each. His special adviser’s ticket cost another £9,864.

Sports Minister Maree Todd and other officials managed to travel economy; her flight cost just £1,471.

The entire bill for ministers and officials, including flights, hotels, expenses and more than £15,000 in car hire, reached £98,442.

Yes, Swinney attended business and trade meetings as well as Scotland’s opening match. But Scottish Government policy normally restricts business-class travel to flights lasting ten hours or more. Boston is roughly seven hours away.

Justice Secretary Neil Gray says business class allowed them to “arrive fresh”.

How fortunate. Millions of working people arrive tired every morning and still have to do their jobs.

There is always an economy seat for the public and a business-class excuse for those spending its money.

The only saving grace is that Starmer and his entourage didn’t fly out to watch England. Had they gone, the Treasury would have needed to discover another black hole just to bury the bill in.

Read more... the receipts tell their own tale.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ceqe385qen2o

20/08/2026

One person’s consent cannot be used to cancel another person’s boundaries.

That was the point Jonah Orion Wheeler, then a 22-year-old Democratic state representative in New Hampshire, made when he broke with his own party in March 2025. As he spoke, colleagues walked out.

His answer was simple: women who want privacy, dignity and s*x-based spaces deserve to be heard too.

A year later, those words echo straight across the Atlantic. Britain’s Supreme Court has confirmed that “woman”, “man” and “s*x” in the Equality Act refer to biological s*x, and the EHRC’s new statutory Code now sets out how that applies in practice to single-s*x services, changing facilities, hospital wards, associations and sport.

The Code explicitly recognises women’s safety, privacy and dignity as legitimate reasons for maintaining single-s*x provision.

This was never simply left versus right, nor does recognising women’s boundaries require hostility towards trans people. Wheeler put the principle better than most: respect cannot mean demanding that one person surrender their privacy so another person can feel affirmed.

That is not hatred. It is where rights meet each other in the real world.

The culture war thrives by pretending common sense is extremism. Wheeler refused that trap. Britain should too.

19/08/2026

"Stealing and amassing wealth would not be enough for them; the poor man's applause, prayers, and tears were also needed." - Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

19/08/2026

Who are these people?

Saint Angela of Stockport...patron saint of housing and luxury flats.

Angela Rayner condemned MPs for taking second jobs, then pocketed tens of thousands of pounds from paid speaking engagements and declared that they somehow didn’t count.

We all know she would never accept that excuse from a political opponent. Why should we accept it from her?

But it's the audacity that's breathtaking. One of those lucrative engagements was with the property industry, where she was paid to speak about housing. Given her later difficulties over the correct payment of stamp duty, the irony could hardly be thicker.

Then we get a lesson on political doubletalk. It is all a game to them: change the label, dodge the principle and collect the cheque. Meanwhile, ordinary people pay the price for their failure to tackle the cost-of-living crisis.

They play with words. They fill their pockets, and we go on to suffer the consequences.

19/08/2026

“A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.” -Jack London