Tim Middleton

So incredibly proud of my little boy's achievements. He's worked so hard with total dedication and his success is well deserved. Articulate, intelligent and passionate; he's got an exciting financial career ahead of him. Love him to bits 😀

@williamstafford God, it gets worse! She's a liar too! Good job she's not very popular though I did love her in Heartbeat with that Nick what's his name 😀

@TimMiddleton6 You have to tell lies on Call My Bluff. That’s acting

Watching Call My Bluff on BBC Four, and am reminded of the time when one of the panellists punched me on the arm at the RSC

@williamstafford She played herself! Not much acting required for that role! 🤔

@williamstafford Are you sure? Lots of theatre stuff on her Wikipedia page but nothing about appearing on Call my Bluff! 😮

@TimMiddleton6 Sinead Cuzack

Isabel Oakeshott moved to Dubai to avoid paying VAT on private school fees. Richard Tice avoided £600K in corporation tax. The Temu George and Mildred are a pair of brazen, unpatriotic ninnies. #Taxes #HMRC

@MikeyDT1979 @KarlTurnerMP @Keir_Starmer What, @KarlTurnerMP you didn't vote against it when you feel so strongly? I'm ashamed of you. You should be ashamed of yourself! Never heard of loyalty? Never heard of pragmatism?

@KarlTurnerMP @Keir_Starmer And so should you for abstaining in the vote

When the facts change! They haven’t though have they. And that’s what I have said time and again that I am ashamed that @Keir_Starmer has ever countenanced this utterly ludicrous policy. They should all be ashamed. Each and every one of them.

@SE22mum @terrybnd @WarrenAllison18 @natalieben I'm commenting on previous tweets including yours. If you're not sure what they're on about, I suggest you reread them. I think the English is pretty clear.

@TimMiddleton6 @terrybnd @WarrenAllison18 @natalieben Not sure what you're on about. Am chatting to Terry about something he and I have talked about before. But, you know, you do you.

#RightToRoam - there is so little nature on these depleted islands, we need access to all of it theguardian.com/environment/20…

@SE22mum @terrybnd @WarrenAllison18 @natalieben I don't think you need to be born/live in the countryside to know you shouldn't leave litter in the countryside. Just like you shouldn't leave litter in the town. You just have to be brought up properly by parents and taught to respect people and places.

@terrybnd @TimMiddleton6 @WarrenAllison18 @natalieben I agree abt things having got worse. You've seen my woe re. loo paper on Coniston Old Man. As you know, kids love learning about countryside. Mine learned to trailwalk when tiny. One's now a fab climber. Both know what you take up, you bring down. And, e.g. how to leave a gate :)

@terrybnd @WarrenAllison18 @natalieben As to your salient point. I think respect for the countryside comes from the same place as respect for any environment where we might find ourselves. Education tries to teach that. Everyone is entitled to enjoy the countryside. And everyone must do better to protect it.

Hence I said “a lot” not all 😉👍 Even so, how would you address this by the way? A doco I’ve been working on. Features local authorities, conservationists and more. My point as I’ve made in other tweets is one factor I blame is a continued decline in outdoors education in schools. There’s clearly a generational and societal shift I’ve witnessed over 15-20 years now.

@terrybnd @WarrenAllison18 @natalieben I don't think you should tarnish people who live in an 'urban environment'. There's a lot of naively in people regardless of where they live. If individual people cause a problem they should be held individually accountable.

@WarrenAllison18 @natalieben Regrettably I have to agree. There’s a lot of naivety out there especially in urban environments where folk have no understanding of the countryside and how to treat it with respect 😢

Jill came across a shoplifter in the village shop yesterday. She hid a huge muffin under her coat & then stuffed moist baps down her trousers. When challenged this deranged woman told Jill to frack off & called her a blob. Simple Sally chased her off with a mop & a blow torch. 😱

Richard Stupid Tice would like you to believe that the UAE urgently needed to hear what an irrelevant entitled gobshite had to say about Iran, rather than think he was just visiting his tax-dodging girlfriend in Dubai.

That YouGov poll has Reform at 4% with 18-24 year olds. The Young aren't falling for Farage

“For all we know, we could be in the middle of Keir Starmer’s finest hour”. Starmer’s critics say he is imperiling the UK’s special relationship with the US... But is it Donald Trump who's doing the damage? @jonsopel | @lewis_goodall

@seledka_vodka @MartinSLewis @KemiBadenoch Laura Trott? 🤣

Martin, thank you for a genuinely thoughtful response - and for taking the time mid-deadline. This is the kind of exchange that actually moves the conversation forward. I think the disagreement comes down to what the policy objective is. You frame it as "which plan has the most universal impact" - and on that measure, raising the threshold wins. More graduates pay less, across a wider range of incomes. I don't dispute the arithmetic. But a student loan is a loan. It was designed as one because the taxpayer could no longer sustain fully funding university education. That was the whole point of the 2012 reform. For graduates who never repay in full, the system already functions as a partial grant - a low earner who borrows 53k and repays 25k before the rest is written off has received 28k of taxpayer-funded education. That's, effectively, a subsidy. Raising the threshold inflates the grant. It reduces what graduates repay across the board, and the Treasury absorbs the difference - a bill ultimately carried by everyone, including many who never went to university at all. That is a legitimate choice, but let's be clear about what it is: it doesn't fix the loan but expands the grant. The injustice sits in a specific place. Graduates in the 50th to 85th percentile of earnings - teachers, engineers, mid-career NHS staff - are repaying 1.5 to 2.6 times what they borrowed because of compound interest. They are not wealthy. They are simply earning enough for the interest to snowball but not enough to escape it quickly. These are the people who rightly feel stitched up. @KemiBadenoch's interest cap targets exactly this. It brings the most overcharged graduates down from 2.6x to roughly 1.3x-1.5x of what they borrowed - closer to what a fair loan should look like. It does this without expanding the taxpayer subsidy for those who were never going to repay in full anyway. One policy corrects an imbalance. The other spreads costs wider. Both have a cost to the taxpayer - neither of us should pretend otherwise. But it's worth noting that @KemiBadenoch's broader package addresses the root cause too. The IFS found that 30% of graduates saw a negative financial return from their degree. These are precisely the graduates whose loans become taxpayer write-offs - and they were sold a promise that wasn't kept. Cutting low-value university places and redirecting the funding into apprenticeships doesn't just save the Treasury money - the £3.6bn saved is what funds the interest rate cap and then some. The money currently being wasted on loans that were never really loans is redirected to fix the pricing for graduates whose courses actually delivered value. That is a self-financing reform. Your threshold increase, by contrast, is a net addition to the public bill with no offsetting saving. What I find genuinely encouraging is that we are having this debate at all. For years, Plan 2 has been a slow-motion crisis that nobody in mainstream politics wanted to touch. The fact that @KemiBadenoch and @LauraTrottMP are putting serious proposals on the table, and that you are pressure-testing them publicly, is exactly how policy should be made. I hope your office does arrange a meeting with them and your conversation with Kemi, Laura and their teams is productive. I trust your teams combined have much more resources than I do. Getting this right matters to millions of people.

Martin - you say that @KemiBadenoch's proposal to cut Plan 2 student loan interest is "too late for most" - that because most graduates never clear their loans, reducing the interest rate won't change what they actually repay. I think you're right on the maths. But I think your alternative - raising the repayment threshold to £40,000 - solves the wrong problem. The graduates who never clear their loans are not the victims of this system. They're its beneficiaries. A low earner who borrows £53,000 and repays £25,000 over 30 years before the rest is written off has, effectively, received a £28,000 education grant from the taxpayer. That's not an injustice. That's literally a subsidy. You seem to want to give these graduates even more relief by raising the threshold, which amounts to a targeted tax cut for people who are already net recipients of public money. While it is a progressive cost-of-living relief measure, it has nothing to do with actually fixing student loans. The actual injustice sits with middle earners. A graduate on £45,000 who ends up repaying £132,000 on a £53,000 loan - that's where compound interest does real damage. These are teachers, engineers, mid-career NHS staff. Not rich. Just earning enough for the interest to snowball, but not enough to escape quickly. They repay two and a half times what they borrowed. That is the scam. Kemi's proposal targets exactly this group. Capping interest at RPI means these graduates clear their loans years earlier and save £40,000-£50,000 in lifetime repayments. On the other hand, your threshold increase proposal would redirect the same budget toward people who were never going to repay in full anyway. Basically, the choice is between fixing a genuine structural penalty on aspirational, middle-earning graduates, or handing a broader but shallower subsidy to people the system already treats generously. I think @KemiBadenoch has the better instinct here. The loans that "feel like a scam" are the ones where you pay back far more than you borrowed - not the ones where the taxpayer quietly absorbs the loss for you.

The govt's Student Loan Plan 2 repayment freeze in April 2027 must be reversed. It isn't moral. I'm concerned that my debate with Kemi Badenoch this morning distracts from the most immediate problem. In April 2027 Rachel Reeves will freeze the Plan 2 student loan threshold until 2030 which by then will increase graduate repayments by £300/yr more. This is effectively a unilateral negative breach of the student loan contract. Students were told the threshold would rise with average earnings. No commercial lender would be allowed to do this. The govt shouldn't do it either. Changing the terms of future students loans is a political decision - people may not like it but it is transparent. Negatively changing the terms of contracts already signed, and long in place, is a breach of natural justice.

@terrybnd @AdamMitcheson Good and bad to hear of the reopening of the pub. First visted in 1982 as a 17 year old on my first walking trip to the Lakes. The pub was magical and I returned often (last in 2015). Always held a special place in my heart and will visit this summer. I'll stay elsewhere!

@AdamMitcheson Me too! 🤯🤯 The owner doesn’t have a very good reputation sadly. Long story. But he’s clearly been canny 💵💵 The historic inn wasn’t listed which is astonishing. But we are where we are. As for the free car park? There’s ongoing talks about that. I can’t say more 😢

Peek inside the soon to reopen Kirkstone Pass Inn. Stu from Kirkby Lonsdale brewery sent me a video and I chose to have fun with it 👻🎥 It is one of Englands most haunted pubs ya know! 😉 #lakedistrict #pubs

@BumbleCricket And yet you never used the term Bowlsman! Always Bowler. So what's the problem with batter? Use whichever term you feel comfortable with but don't describe a female batter as a Batsman. Just a bit disrespectful if you do.

Funny thing … when I started commentating I used the term ‘batter’ . I was quietly and politely told that batter is for fish . Seems it’s gone full circle ! We are back to batter … Good Cod ! 😜

@lukejcr And which measure of inflation are you referring to Luke? The low one you base benefits on or the high one you scam students with? 🤔

This is utterly incredible. Are they having a total laugh? During their 14 years in office they: BUILT the current student finance system. TREBLED tuition fees. SCRAPPED maintenance grants. DESIGNED plan 2 loans leaving grads with sky-high interest. Now they think they’re the solution? GIVE OVER. Students don’t object to contributing. They object to being HAMMERED after a Tory mini-budget SPIRALLED inflation to 11%+, ratcheting up student loan debt in the process. All while Kemi sat round the cabinet table. The Chancellor Rachel Reeves is absolutely right that getting inflation down lowers student loan interest. Labour is doing exactly that. Even today we see inflation down to 3%. Labour has also brought back targeted maintenance grants, DESPITE the tough fiscal inheritance that the Tories created. Building on this work we should absolutely consider ways we can keep making student finance fairer for all. But let’s be clear: it was the Tories who both created and stitched together this Frankenstein’s monster of a system in the first place. We’ll take no lessons from the architects of this mess, at all.