Thomas Smith
131.1K posts
@SmudgeThomas
Norfolkman in exile in London. Expect Church, Trains, History, comment and pro-LGBT content. 🌈He/Him Gay; Christian; Opinionated
Navy barred from boarding Russian ships… Allegedly by Lord Hermer, our Attorney General The man who insisted we give away Chagos Islands If true, is he working for China or Russia? Or just against British interests telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/…
At one time they were stables and servants quarters for the larger properties at the front, Now these little buildings are houses for the very wealthy.
“NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” - President Donald J. Trump
"What we see far too often with Labour councils is they’re building luxury, unaffordable homes that no one is ever going to live in, while communities are knocked down in the name of regeneration." Green Party leader Zack Polanski on Labour’s record on the housing crisis.
Sunny afternoon out campaigning for @Jackson_Carlaw . Only a vote for Jackson Carlaw can stop the SNP on the 7th of May.
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage visits the winner of Reform UK's free energy bills prize draw
In 1972, 32% of Protestants were Baptists. It's 29% now. Methodists have dropped from 22% to 8%. Non-Denoms have risen from 3% to 30%.
The UK has a far flatter income distribution than the Communist Soviet Union. The UK take home minimum wage for working a full time job (40-hours) is now £22,555. At £100k salary, the take home is £68,558. That is a net income ratio of 3.04:1 We are now at the point where the wage compression and taxes in the UK means that the difference between minimum wage and a top 5% salary is a net income difference of only ~3x. In the USSR using the same comparison, this figure never fell below 5:1 It's actually even worse in reality because the person earning £100k in the UK often has student loans. Britain is nominally capitalist but functionally communist. China is nominally communist but functionally capitalist. Funny how that works.
A meeting between Cardinal Christophe Pierre and the Pentagon was described as a bitter lecture, during which a U.S. official invoked the Avignon Papacy, a 14th-century period when the French crown used military power to influence the papacy, as an implicit warning to the Church. Follow: @AFpost
Japan has the world’s best railway system. 28% of Japanese passenger-kilometers are by rail. Germany manages 6.4%, and the USA manages 0.25%. Just one Japanese company, JR East, carries more passengers than China’s entire railway system, and four times as many than Britain’s. What is the secret of its success? worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japa… Part of the answer is that Japanese railway companies don't just operate trains. They run hospitals, supermarkets, department stores, amusement parks, office complexes, and retirement homes around their railway stations. One of them co-built Tokyo Disneyland. Another owns a baseball team. A third created its own all-women musical theater in 1914, which is still running today. The logic is elegant: a railway increases the developable value of land around its stations, but normally that value accrues to landowners, not the railway operator. Japanese railway companies captured this value by owning and developing the land themselves. About half of the revenue of Japanese railway companies comes from ‘side businesses’ like these. Allowing railway operators to capture more of the value they created meant that more lines were profitable, making a far larger system financially viable. This may sound like a radically novel approach. But in fact, an exactly similar system existed in nineteenth-century America. The success of Japanese railways does not lie in some unreplicable feature of Japanese culture: it lies in good policy. If they learnt the right lessons from it, many countries could replicate Japan’s success. Read more (much more) in @Borners1's & @carto_graph's new piece for @WorksInProgMag Issue 23.
How the Green Party's 'reparations officer' is actually the descendent of one of history's largest slave traders. 1/4 It started in 1861 when the British West Africa Squadron in its war on slavery deposed the King of Lagos due to his role in transatlantic Slavery. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagos_Tre…
I’m an MP with a Plan 2 student loan myself, so I know exactly how millions feel about interest rates. Capping them at 6% is a clear signal: Labour is on the side of hardworking graduates and is tackling the cost of living head-on. 💪
I had a boomer unironically tell me to sell my $200 smartphone to save up for a mortgage today I told him you can't survive in modern society with a phone because of TOTP and banking apps and so on "In my day we just wrote a cheque!" 🤬🤬🤬
Norfolk:
picking fruit is a really long, laborious, and unpleasant job. it is also a sector which is chronically addicted to cheap, foreign labour because british people don't want to do it. this is exactly what automation is for. it also continues the trend that one by one, the case for low skilled immigrant labour is being eroded by automation. this will quickly have material impacts on policy decisions.
