Dino Bertolis

Good morning 6am Britain! 44.8% of GDP in public spending isn’t going to pay for itself so let’s get out there and SUBSIDISE Have a great week live players!

In the UK, banks don't charge monthly fees AND cash deposits are free. Why can't this be done in SA? For real, what are the structural reasons for the difference?

No way 😂 But seriously, how? @sportsshoes_com

My @Vitality_UK Health Insurance premium increased 326% in a year. No changes to circumstances, no change to health, no claims. That can't be right - surely?

@SebJohnsonUK Congrats 👏🏻 Been in it 4 years and outsourced payroll only 6 months ago. Would recommend.

Quit my job 8 months ago to build my own company. Ran payroll for myself for the first time last week. Surreal feeling

@Narchist236 @Mish_K_ Why did they refer to Iran's leader as "our beloved leader"? Asking from a place of curiosity.

IRGC mosque in Cape Town mourns their "beloved leader".

When it reaches a point where a tech giant has to publically call it out...you know it's bad.

2. The deficit this year will be £20 BILLION higher than expected in March. That's on top of all the extra borrowing Labour were already planning. In fact in their first 2 years they'll have borrowed about DOUBLE the amount that was planned at the last Conservative budget👇(2/6)

The UK has the biggest tax rate difference between top earners and average earners in the developed world, writes @jburnmurdoch ft.com/content/75ce2f…

Tide Bank has a really aggressive sales team for its credit products. I guess that's where the money is made in banking!

@EU_Commission I wonder what @compliantvc has to say about this.

We’re launching a bold plan to make high-speed rail the fastest, more sustainable way to travel across Europe by 2040. 🚆 It’s a concrete timeline to remove bottlenecks, unlock investment, and harmonise rail systems⬇️

Here's a handy IFS tax change analysis since 2010, distributed by household income decile. The state takes less tax from the bottom 90% of households compared to 2010. And takes a socking great lot more from the top 10%. We really, really have taxed high incomes, @bencsmoke.

Consider how stupid you think people must be to advertise this as a use case

@robprogressive I came out with 3 packs of beer, 10 packs of cigarettes, 4 x bottles of vodka, 3 x bottles of gin and sill managed to keep my £20

If you want to see inflation in action, walk into Tesco with £20. Then tell me in the comments what you managed to buy.

FT comments never miss

@BBCLondonNews Correction: Lack of housing**

Families are being priced out of living in London due to rising costs and a lack of social housing, the London Assembly has been told. bbc.in/4hgWUUB

@JohannBiermann1 Yep, same experience on my end. Integration with maps, Gmail, etc. gives it an edge in addition to the core AI. 6 months' ago it felt like a laggard, now definitely a leader.

I use LLMs like Grok, ChatGPT and Gemini almost daily for various tasks/searches/frameworks. Usually I prefer ChatGPT, but over the last 2 weeks I've found Gemini to be far superior. Anyone else having the same experience?

I sit in Parliament listening to these ministers, and it’s all just so depressing - the vast majority of them have never run a business, and it SHOWS. You would not believe how bad it is. They think ‘work’ means turning up to an office between 9 and 5, answering a few emails, and going home at the end of the day. Nice lunch break, few coffees away from the desk, probably a smoking break or several. It doesn’t - not for the millions of men and women who actually create the wealth that funds the state. Running a small business isn’t a job. It’s a way of life. It is life. It’s 24/7/365. It’s relentless. You are the accountant, HR department, compliance officer, cleaner, marketer, and customer service team - all in one. There’s no sick pay, no safety net, and no taxpayer-funded pension waiting for you. Holiday? Good luck. If you do manage to get away, it’s checking the phone all day, every day. Wife/husband obviously getting pissed off. We’ve all been there... It’s all on you. Every invoice chased, every tax deadline met, every bit of red tape navigated is on you. And if you make one mistake, one error, one small slip-up, the state comes after you - in a relentlessly efficient manner that is never afforded to us when we ask questions of it. Most MPs have no idea what that feels like. They just don’t. We’re going to see more of this in the budget I’m sure. More hurt. More pain. More tax. They don’t get it. They don’t understand that when a small business owner gets hit with another tax, it’s not absorbed by a ‘budget’ - it’s taken straight out of their family’s pocket. There is no ‘deficit’ in the business world - that’s called going bust. And they certainly don’t understand what real risk looks like. Politicians can vote through a policy on Monday and forget it by Tuesday - a small business owner lives with the consequences of that policy for years, decades. The MP monthly salary is safe. It always has been. In the public sector before, and in the public sector after - if not that, some charity/NGO funded entirely by the public sector. GET A REAL JOB. If MPs actually spent a week running a small firm - paying suppliers, tackling VAT, navigating health and safety law, sorting out HR issues, chasing clients for payment, trying to expand while staying compliant with everything from GDPR to local planning regulations - they’d legislate very differently. I can promise you that. They’d realise that most of Britain’s problems could be solved by the state doing less, not more. Cutting tax. Simplifying regulation. Slashing back the HRification of the country. Trusting people who actually produce things to get on with it. Instead, we have a political class that talks endlessly about ‘growth’ while brutally punishing the only people capable of delivering it - especially going after the family businesses/farms, which is a particularly spiteful policy decision. Small business owners are people who work harder than almost anyone in Parliament could imagine - and who are treated worse for it. Britain’s small businesses don’t succeed because of politicians, they survive in spite of them.

There’s an awful symmetry between ‘even if we cut the land costs to zero we couldn’t afford to build in London’ and ‘even if we cut the wholesale price of energy to zero bills might not fall’. Bad policies -> disastrous outcomes.