Afternoon music
Broken Britain
“‘You’d be ashamed to bring someone here’: The struggling billionaire-owned high street that shows Reform’s road to No 10“
[Guardian headline]
“Six miles north of Darlington, this industrial wasteland was chosen by William Beveridge for his pioneering new town in the late 1940s. Beveridge, the architect of the welfare state, personally oversaw its creation on the site of a former explosives shed used for experiments in the war.
It would, he said, be a town of “hopes and dreams” and a “paradise for housewives”, which would be centred on a high street he named Beveridge Way.
Nearly 80 years later, this single shopping precinct helps tell a different story.
Of the 45 shops on Beveridge Way today, 23 are empty – a vacancy rate nearly four times the national average. Those that are left include a Ladbrokes, Greggs, four charity shops, four discount stores and a pawnbroker.
The banks are long gone – the closest now a 90-minute round trip to Darlington by bus – and the faded signs record an exodus of household names: Wilko, Select, Peacocks...
But one peculiar aspect is that its town centre is wholly owned by a London-based multibillionaire who is wealthier than Richard Branson.
Benzion Freshwater, 77, may be the biggest property tycoon most Britons have never heard of.
The London-based multibillionaire heads one of the UK’s richest families, worth £2.6bn, according to the latest Sunday Times rich list. His empire includes prime property in New York, Florida and London, including the capital’s Grade II-listed Africa House.
Since 1990, his company, Daejan Holdings, has also owned the entirety of Newton Aycliffe town centre.
What attracted this global property empire to a remote corner of County Durham? And why have they stayed on despite decades of decline and growing local anger? The Freshwater family have scarcely ever been pictured in public, let alone spoken to the media.“
[Guardian]
The Guardian managed to write and publish that whole long, intensively-researched report (I have reposted only a small part of the whole) without once expressly mentioning the fact that the secretive family that own the entire town centre of Newton Aycliffe are Jews:
“Benzion Shalom Eliezer Freshwater (born 1948) is a British billionaire property investor of Haredi Jewish descent, known for his leadership within the Freshwater Group and its main company, Daejan Holdings. He is one of the UK’s largest private landlords…In 2007 it was reported that he held 279 directorships…In 2026, a Guardian article highlighted Freshwater’s and Daejan’s name, depicting them as “absentee landlords” responsible for the high level of vacant shops in the town of Newton Aycliffe, fueling political discontentment and the rise of the Reform party…In the Sunday Times Rich List Freshwater’s fortune rose from £1 billion in 2009 to £1.6 billion in 2016,[4][7] with his net worth estimated at £2.6 billion according to the 2025 edition.”
[Wikipedia]
Jewish Reform UK group
“Reform UK has announced the launch next month of the Reform Jewish Alliance, (RJA) with both leader Nigel Farage and deputy leader Richard Tice scheduled to speak at the opening event…Jewish News also understands that a separate Reform Friends of Israel (RFI) group will soon be announced.
It is understood that Jason Pearlman, former advisor to Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, could be appointed as director of the group in what would be seen as a major coup.“
[Jewish News]
Regular readers of the blog will know that I have been predicting for quite a long time that Reform UK, the “populist” upsurge party, has been morphing into a System party. Look at recent events: System party ex-Conservative Party “retreads” joining Reform, Farage and especially Tice going all-out to speak in favour of the Jews and Israel; and now this.
Reform UK has one use— to destroy the old System parties. The downside of that, as predicted, is that Reform UK itself becomes a System party —perhaps the only one of any size, looking a few years down the line, and even more (((occupied))) than Con and Lab.
However, Reform has opened the door through which a social-national movement can march.
Tweets seen
The Church of England committed suicide many years ago. Now it is led by some woke/joke-priestess.
The UK needs a real chistka, starting at Westminster and in the msm…
Our animal friends.
For once I agree, up to a point, with both the Daily Mail and Dan Hodges, though it may be that Reform and Farage taking in the Con MP “retreads” will actually win over many former kneejerk Conservative Party voters to Farage and Reform, albeit at the same time alienating people desperately seeking an alternative, a more radical alternative.
Say what you like about Matt Goodwin —and naturally I despise his doormatting for Israel and the Jewish lobby— but it has to be admitted that he is the standout by-election candidate at Gorton and Denton. Someone of rare energy and decisiveness. If he does not win, it will not be because he has failed to try. At present, he is the favourite in the polling, and also with the bookmakers.
I myself dislike Goodwin’s pro-Israel, pro-Jewish lobby views (whether genuine or, shall we say, self-interested); I disagree with his apparent wish to dismantle what is left of the social security/”welfare” system, and to introduce an Americanized agenda even more than has already been the case; I disagree with several of his proposed solutions to “broken Britain”. However, he at least recognizes that the UK is sliding to dystopia, and needs to stop that slide.
Late tweets seen
14 words…
System scribbler Dan Hodges calls that opinion poll “madness” because —like many in the Westminster Bubble— he has not quite understood the depth of deep discontent and, yes, anger which now pervades much of Britain.
The Westminster Bubblers live in, as it might be, Blackheath or Hampstead, or Kensington and Chelsea, or now-gentrified Fulham, or wherever is quite affluent, have incomes in the hundreds of thousands (in many cases), family money too (in many cases), and have never known insecurity or poverty, or even much serious inconvenience (in most cases).
Dan Hodges and the rest thus fail to see, even now, that huge numbers of British people have just “had it” with the System parties and their ranks of careerist, moneygrubbing and treacherous clowns. Hodges etc think of Reform as a bunch of clowns, but have they really stepped back to look objectively at the utter clowns of Labour, Conservative Party, or the LibDems (such as hugely-smug LibDem clown-in-chief Ed Davey)?
Yes, Reform struggles to get beyond 35%, and is now in the modest 24%-30% zone, but that is because people are not voting for Reform, they are voting against “the others”, and against everything this country has become over the past 40 years; and against what the country is fast becoming.
That opinion poll translates to a Commons with about 376 Reform UK MPs (very solid majority), 67 Greens (very weak official Opposition), 57 LibDems, 45 SNP, 42 Lab, and 26 Cons.
Incidentally, on those figures, both Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer would lose their seats.
NWO/ZOG puppets. Useless and treacherous.
Why are the Iranians waiting to be attacked. They could do as the Israelis have often done, mutatis mutandis, and launch a massive pre-emptive attack on Israel, using everything they have. Dimona, Ben-Gurion Airport, central Tel Aviv, and nearby wealthy suburbs and towns such as Ra’anana.
Channel 12 is an Israeli TV station.
[“Iran Showed Underwater Missile Tunnels and Threatened the Security of the Strait of Hormuz
Amid growing tensions with the US, Iran officially showed a network of underwater missile tunnels, stating that in the event of an attack, the Strait of Hormuz would cease to be safe. On state television, the IRGC showed footage of the commander of the Navy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Alireza Tangsiri, inside underwater facilities, where cruise missiles with a declared range of over 1,000 km and “intelligent” guidance systems are located.
According to Tangsiri, the infrastructure was created specifically to counter American ships in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, and Iranian forces are ready to respond to threats “at any level and in any geography”. The Iranian side claims that it has full control over the Strait of Hormuz in the air, on the surface and underwater – a key route through which about 20% of the world’s oil supplies pass.
The political deputy commander of the IRGC Navy, Mohammad Akbarzadeh, stressed that Iran is not seeking war, but is fully prepared for it, including the ability to track ships in real time. He also warned that regional states would be considered hostile if their territory was used to strike Iran. In parallel, Iranian media showed footage of the US aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and elements of simulated guidance, demonstrating Tehran’s readiness for a tough and prompt response.“]
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 