Cllr Gene Maxwell

@RealStephenKerr @ScotTories I seem to recall you saying how great Liz Truss was too ?

@ScotTories are the party of business and we will get Scotland working. Economic growth must be the number one priority for the next Scottish Government. It is the only way we can get better jobs, higher wages and improve living standards. Vote Scottish Conservative on your PEACH ballot paper.

@RollingHedge @Dr_W_E_Bulmer @RokoMijic The Luftwaffe did a fair bit of that slum clearance…

Bread and dripping is doing a lot of work there. Real wages tripled between 1900 and 1939 on a state under 30% of GDP, which is what actually cleared the slums. The post-1945 settlement turned up to a rising tide and claimed it had brought the water. The men who fought weren’t bleeding for a 44% state share, they were bleeding for homes, security, and a country their grandchildren could afford. They got none of those. Hiding behind their sacrifice isn’t honouring it. The slums didn’t go anywhere, they got rebranded. HMOs are workhouses with WiFi. Food banks are soup kitchens with a logo. 16m working-age adults are economically inactive, which is a Victorian number in modern clothing. Singapore was built by men coming out of Japanese prison camps and runs on 15.5%, with better health, housing and security than we manage. Call it batshit if you want. But some of us are actually reading the receipts.

Just because so many on here commenting similar toss really don’t have a scooby what they’re talking about: A pastry-and-coffee-only independent in 2026 needs an average coffee price of around £4.20 and roughly 130 cups a day to pay the owner properly, but the market ceiling for a flat white in central London now sits at £4.00-4.20 for dairy and £4.60-4.70 with oat, meaning the price lever is exhausted, the operator cannot raise it further without losing the volume that makes the model work, and the only remaining variables are owner hours and closure, which is why anyone still selling flat whites at £3.80-4.00 is quietly subsidising their customers out of their own wages. The model is now viable in maybe 15-20% of the country by geography because a daily £4 coffee is a habit only the top 15-20% of earners can sustain, and that population lives almost entirely in central London, the Oxford-Cambridge-Bristol triangle, Edinburgh, and a handful of affluent commuter pockets, leaving the provincial independent to chase 40 regulars and a weekend treat-trade that has to carry four dead weekdays, on a cost base that has been Londonised by the national wage floor while the revenue base manifestly has not. All of which is downstream of the 2020-2022 M2 expansion that reset the UK price level across every input from beans to rents to wages, compounded by the deliberate policy choice to load the adjustment onto small employers through a 43% rise in the wage floor in five years, tighter employer NIC at a lower threshold, and tapered rates relief, meaning the coffee shop owner pays for the money printing twice, once in costs and again in the tax and wage structure built to redistribute its consequences. What the classic leftist position misses, when it claims “an inability to pay £12.71 an hour proves the business was never viable”, is that viability is not a fixed property of the business but a moving target the state itself controls, and the policy stack has deliberately moved it beyond reach for most of the country by loading non-wage costs onto small operators while pretending the wage is the only variable, in a system where wages are paid out of the marginal productivity of labour applied to capital in a given location, and a barista in Stoke cannot be paid London wages out of Stoke revenues without the owner working for nothing or the shop closing, both of which are routinely observed and dismissed as commercial failure rather than recognised as policy outcome. The fix - these same mouth breathing cretins would vehemently oppose on tribal grounds before substance - is the only one that actually works at the unit-economics level: cheaper energy via nuclear and North Sea gas to compress the input stack, planning liberalisation so commercial rent stops functioning as a rentier tax on every transaction, employer NIC reduced and its threshold restored, a personal allowance raised to £20k that would put roughly £1,500 a year into every minimum wage worker’s pocket without costing a single employer a penny and would do more for real take-home and discretionary spend than any further wage floor rise, and a lighter compliance regime for sub-£2m turnover businesses where fixed regulatory cost is most disproportionate to revenue, because the real project being defended is not raising worker incomes but expanding the regulatory and redistributive footprint of the state, and the wage floor is attractive precisely because it is coercive and visible rather than because it is the most efficient way to lift living standards, which is why the closure of the provincial independent sector is treated as collateral damage rather than recognised as the predictable consequence of the policy mix on offer, and why the coffee shop on the closing high street is functioning as the most reliable leading indicator of which towns the current settlement has decided shouldn’t have a discretionary economy at all.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​.. Duh…🙄 🤦🏻‍♂️

@RealStephenKerr I recall you were equally enthusiastic about Liz Truss. That went well.

Kemi is the rising star in UK politics and has the intellect and determination to effect the change so many weaker politicians have talked of. Use your peach vote for Russell and Kemi's Scottish Conservative team!

@pinstripedline And of those 11 ships, how many are actually seaworthy and how many tied up alongside in Portsmouth for years, unable to sail ? Years of neglect by Labour and Tory governments.

For the first time in many many decades, the Royal Navy has more destroyers (6) than frigates (5) in service. 13 frigates are on order, but unlikely to enter service for several more years.

@kathlee90362759 @RealStephenKerr That is a real LOL. Have you checked out any of the Reform Candidates - I'd not trust them to run a sweetie shop.

@RealStephenKerr Vote Reform only . Throw the old shower of the useless, out to grass.

This election is on a knife edge. Undecided pro-UK voters lending their Peach vote to the Scottish Conservatives would be the move that stopped an SNP majority. We can do this- together.

@Osinttechnical I suspect the US Navy knows that Iran just needs to get lucky once... Perhaps they've watched the Russian Navy being forced out of the Black sea by Ukraine....which does not have a navy.

The Trump-announced US mission to guide ships out of the Persian Gulf will not involve US Navy escorts -WSJ The US will instead instruct ships on safe avenues of passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and coordinate with shipping and insurance companies.

@STVNews Sorry didn’t notice the mistake in this last night. It was President Trump who made the call to @JohnSwinney, who happened to be on the election campaign trail in a garden centre when he took it!

@bayraktar_1love How would that work? What threat detection is onboard the Shahed to know it was being attacked?

Downed Russian Shahed drone with R-60 air-to-air missile, with a modified hull includes a built-in groove shaped for the R-60 missile, along with mounting points for a launch rail.

Exactly

@JimSpenceDundee @AnneMcGuire97 Really ?

The SNP press officer who came up with the bold idea to claim credit for Trump’s whisky deal will be picking up the P45 in the morning 😂

@ukgeorgina2 @KathrynSamsonC4

@KathrynSamsonC4 Swinney is a liar

Asked John Swinney about this tweet from Douglas Alexander 👀 “He has all the signs of a desperate, excited man who’s not enjoying the election campaign.” Ouch.

@NZblanc @KathrynSamsonC4 Ahem.

@KathrynSamsonC4 #DishonestJohn

@Miguel640283347 @KathrynSamsonC4 Really.

@KathrynSamsonC4 He should have said thank you to King Charles, not try & claim credit when he wasn’t even part of the conversation.

@McAllister1973 @rosscolquhoun This alone should be enough to stop anyone voting Labour.

Labour's election manifesto pledged to remove hereditary peers. They are now doing the opposite. Obviously.

An outrage.

@RpsAgainstTrump Straight forward threat of War Crimes. Why does not someone in the US have the guts to charge him?

Trump: We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL…if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!

@Free_to_leave @Dungarbhan Sadly not. The returning officer will probably accept a 1 as “expressing a preference” and ignore any other numbers.

@Dungarbhan If Labour voters mark a number instead of a cross, would that count as a spoiled vote? Oh dear, how sad.

The carpetbagger candidate, Labour’s Elizabeth Carr Ellis, proving she knows nothing about voting in Scotland. We don’t use ranked voting in Scottish Parliament Elections.

@JackS98060 @ScotNational Some Cafe.

@ScotNational The ever dwindling "independence movement" - could barely fill a corner cafe. It's not happening. What else do the SNP have to offer? Will they abolish council tax, like they promised to do 19 years ago? Fix our roads? Our NHS? Or is it all just "independence"?

Wes Streeting has been widely panned in the independence movement for his 'appalling' dismissal of calls for a second referendum. But could his obstinance point to a way forward? #Echobox=1776091134-1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">thenational.scot/news/26016688.…

Exclusive: Richard Tice’s company broke the law by failing to pay tens of thousands of pounds in tax on dividends that were paid to him and his offshore trust. He received at least £91,000 in excess payments as a result of the failure. thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…