Drovers

@UxbEconomist07 Mostly brought about by Scots for whom the Empire presented massive opportunity.

‘They walk among us!’ 👀🤪🤦‍♂️ #Brexit

@lancelachlan Those things you mention have only arrived with a Labour Government. Wonder why?

Only 34% of the public are now opposed to rejoining the EU. The Brexit fantasy is collapsing under the weight of reality - lost trade, higher costs, staff shortages and lower growth. People were sold slogans. Now they’re paying the bill. 66% say they would prefer to rejoin 🇪🇺

@SaveOurDemocr13 @KonstantinKisin 😁😁

@Drovers12 @KonstantinKisin Is dishonest cynicism a lifelong affliction for you?

What if the west isn't the villain they told you it was? We’ve spent years accepting accusations about racism, intolerance, and slavery without challenging the bigger historical reality: The societies most condemned today are also the ones that led the world in ending slavery, expanding rights, and building the most tolerant nations on earth. That’s the conversation nobody wants to have.

@FinanceTiger @HLInvest @CMCInvestUK 95% investment trusts. But massive climb. Must have been a big outflow i would imagine

@Drovers12 @HLInvest @CMCInvestUK Especially if you hold funds.

📈 Investors often debate which platform is best, but in my experience, none ticks every box. My wife and I use @HLInvest for SIPPs & ISAs, and @CMCInvestUK as well as IG for trading outside wrappers. CMC's App is really sleek. I’d love better features on HL (like clearer gains tracking, iPad App, more stock selections etc.), but I stick with it for one key reason this week’s @IChronicle sums up perfectly 👇 💡 Customer Service and Drawdown! For many people, their pension will be the largest asset they own outside of a property, if not the largest outright! If you value being able to speak with someone about any issues that may arise with your pot, it's worth taking Customer Service and the reputation of a platform into consideration!

@OliverCooper US stuggling with the admin.

While it makes for a good headline, this is a terrible policy for several reasons. 1. It would create a 'cliff edge' at £75,000, which means many people going from earning £75k to £76k would get hit by a tax bill that's bigger than their raise. This will hugely deter people from earning more. 2. It would be exceptionally easy to game to facilitate tax avoidance. Nothing would stop unscrupulous employers and and employees agreeing that the regular pay is very low, but an hour of overtime is paid (say) 100x ordinary wages. All of a sudden, the whole wage is tax-free. 3. It would be unfair between professions where hours are contracted and those it's not. The professional services sector, for example, rarely pays overtime. This would incentivise those professions to move to clock-punching: forcing professions to change their culture to suit government. 4. By targeting hours, it gives a tax break to work that takes longer. But we should be incentivising higher wages through higher productivity, not lower wages on longer hours. 5. Self-employed people and people who work multiple jobs wouldn't benefit from this. For absolutely no reason whatsoever. Just cut taxes generally. Don't dream up schemes that make our tax system even more complicated and even more distortionary just to get a quick headline.

@GBNEWS What plan?

‘The plan is working!’ Keir Starmer defends record in power as PM vows to ‘keep pushing forward’ gbnews.com/politics/keir-…

@charles_forsyth @ShepherdWales 💯

@ShepherdWales I think Sunak was lying about voting Brexit

Boris was doing just that with the NI Protocol Bill but the ousted him and then Sunak binned it. Barely months later he produced the Windsor Framework and pushed it through Parliament without a full vote - they only voted on a part about packages and the backstop element. It was a travesty. Sunak has a lot to answer for and gets off Scott free.

@danielmgmoylan @Fox_Claire Obsession . Like Greta’s eco grenades!

Someone in government needs to get a grip. RAF to spend £1bn switching to sustainable jet fuel telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/…

@cultfree54 @GilesUdy Agree

Late to this piece in the Mail by the author of the important and revealing book, Labour and the Gulags, the historian @GilesUdy He describes how a party with no interest in the economic prudence necessary for a country to survive and prosper, is instead going all-out to alter the character of Britain in the most profound manner. He ends with this warning: ' Under the 'people's party', Britain is becoming so repressive that any former subject of the Soviet Union or its satellite states would recognise the hallmarks of them here today. Every time Keir Starmer is given a chance to rein in his 'Keir Stalin' instincts, however, he instead doubles down. Month by month, things worsen. Only a majority government composed of either the Tories or Reform UK – and I have reservations about both – or a coalition of the two can reverse our decline into a very British totalitarianism. If they fail, we are all sunk'. dailymail.com/debate/article…

@StuartMaggs It is a straight attack on ownership. When should they stop increasing it. Stamp duty is bad enough. Early Marxism.

A good tax system takes its slice out of the transaction when there's cash available to pay it. A poor tax system imposes a "dry" tax charge, where there is no cash available to pay it. Most of the UK's taxes - income tax, VAT, NICs, CGT, etc - work on this basis most of the time. An annual wealth tax or land value tax will trigger headlines complaining that elderly people are being forced to sell the homes they've lived in for 50+ years to pay exorbitant wealth taxes. That's fine if you're prepared for it politically. I see absolutely no groundwork being done for it.

@SaveOurDemocr13 @KonstantinKisin I am better informed! Thank you. So ‘Loved I not Virginia more’ was to keep slavery? The Lincoln household must have been pretty conflicted I imagine with her father owning slaves.

It is a simple matter of historical facts. The single-issue Republican party won the white house in 1860 as well as the senate and was steadily pressuring the democrats on the slavery issue. Dems saw the writing on the wall and decided to "secede" (not an option under the constitution). The sole reason for secession was to protect their right to own slaves, which were viewed as essential to their economic survival. The attack on ft. sumter was a foolish attempt to force the issue, confronting the Lincoln administration to abandon the effort to end slavery (on the basis of the myth of the southern states being a separate sovereign nation). "States rights" was a ploy, a patently unconstitutional gamble in the democrats' desperate attempt to retain the right to enslave other human beings.

@SaveOurDemocr13 @KonstantinKisin Perhaps you could explain where I am wrong.

@Drovers12 @KonstantinKisin The old "states rights" motivation for the war is complete nonsense.

@SaveOurDemocr13 @KonstantinKisin Uk abolished it on planations in 1830s nothing to do with the Civil War which started about independence of States from a federal Washington

The single most determined and effective country in eliminating slavery was the United States. European nations began almost immediately into buy caps from African slave traders and shipped them to America to sell them to European colonists. It wasn't until the United States fought the most vicious and violent war in its history (more men slaughtered than in World War II, World War II, the Korean War and about half of Vietnam) that we were able to eliminate the European institution of slavery. So yes, America inherited slavery from the Europeans, an institution that had been completely integrated into society and the economy, but was willing to sacrifice the blood of its sons and brothers to end it.

@Edwina_Currie Who bought and paid for the rolling stock?

You’ve just changed the livery. A paint job. How superficial is that..? The public are not fooled, so don’t treat us as idiots. 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👀👀👀😡😡😡🤬🤬🤬🚂🚂🚂

@tjbate2000 @FlowerdewBob Same about the railways. Fanfare about state ownership until they have to compete for capital against vote catching welfare increases. No prizes for guessing who goes to the back of the queue.

@FlowerdewBob Socialist always ignore delapidation. Where will the money for repairs and renovation come from? Visit a few countries with lots of social housing. What do you notice about the buildings?

if landlords were abolished there's still be the same number of homes, just they'd be owned by someone not expecting to make a huge profit annually as rent, plus capital appreciation

@robertsturt @Streakyblue1951 @RachelReevesMP @RupertLowe10 @Nigel_Farage @Keir_Starmer @bbclaurak But that stupid female who ran for deputy leader of the Labour party and lost claims that growth comes from nurses and deliveroo drivers. Where do they come from.

@RachelReevesMP @RupertLowe10 @Nigel_Farage @Keir_Starmer @bbclaurak Rachel Reeves, I planned carefully for retirement. A North Norfolk holiday-let barn was meant to provide income, pay tax, employ cleaners, use local trades and support a holiday letting business. On an example £1,000 booking, after the £180 commission, £150 cleaning and laundry costs, £50 electricity, £40 water and £40 council tax, only £540 remains before maintenance and repairs. After 25% corporation tax, that falls to £405. If the remaining income is then taxed at 40%, the owner is left with just £243 from the original £1,000 booking. Remember, this is before allowing for any maintenance, repairs, insurance or mortgage costs. And the electrical PAT testing last year was needed. Now that company will receive no further income. It is becoming impossible for a small Limited company to earn money. How coffee shops, pubs, guesthouses and other small businesses survive with staff, rent, tax, regulation, insurance and rising costs is beyond me. Make small enterprise pointless and people stop doing it. Then government gets no tax. Cleaners get no work. Agents get no commission. Local trades lose jobs. That is not growth.

Been at the cookie jar again haven’t they.

@ostschlampe @julianHjessop Reports are that I cannot but will try my accountant again. Thanks Holland vs UK is there a tax agreement as with US.

@Drovers12 @julianHjessop You can deduct the withholding tax from UK taxes

ICYMI, some EU fans are now comparing the UK's post-Brexit performance against the Netherlands, and you can see why they would want to based on the chart below. But the Netherlands is not a good benchmark, for many reasons. In particular: 1⃣ the UK economy was hit much harder by Covid, with more long-term scarring 2⃣ Dutch energy prices (especially the cost of industrial electricity) are relatively low 3⃣ Dutch government debt is much lower (about 44% of GDP), creating more fiscal space 4⃣ the Netherlands benefits from the "Rotterdam effect", which the UK could never replicate 5⃣ Dutch GDP statistics are distorted by the activities of multinationals (not to the same extent as Ireland, but for similar reasons) 6⃣ the Netherlands has a more competitive tax system, especially for corporate dividends and expats 7⃣ the Dutch have kept minimum wages at a sensible level and avoided a large increase in labour market regulation, which has helped to keep unemployment low... I could go on but life is, of course, much simpler if you just blame everything on Brexit... 😉

@sandieshoes @GraceRo95193774 Marxist dogma. Property is theft

Good article. It doesn’t matter which Labour Prime Minister is in Downing Street. “The state of play is even bleaker than it was during the 1970s, when a class-war obsessed Labour Party dedicated itself to taxing the rich until the pips squeaked (as the then socialist Chancellor Denis Healey didn’t quite put it), levied confiscatory rates on high incomes, targeted “speculators” and sent the country into the arms of the IMF as a result.  This time around, it’s not just the very wealthy that are in Labour’s sights, but almost anybody with assets or who wants to improve their prospects in life. When it comes to taxation, it matters little which Labour apparatchik becomes our next PM: all will be even worse than the already terrible status quo.  Rachel Reeves is our worst Chancellor in 45 years, but her successor will be even more damaging.  Every bad idea in tax policy is now mainstream on the Left, especially as candidates to replace Sir Keir Starmer emphasise their supposed fiscal probity and commit to raising more money through taxation, not merely borrowing more of it, to placate the gilt markets.  Investors may at first like this newfound embrace of low budget deficits, but they need to remember that the alternative – effectively confiscating assets from their rightful owners – is something no capitalist society can survive unscathed.  Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband, somebody else: they will all increase capital gains tax and probably also inheritance tax.  All candidates will double down on the looming scandal that is the mansion tax, an idea that Miliband helped pioneer.  They all believe that the problem is that the stock of wealth – housing, equities, savings – is insufficiently taxed, and that income from capital (what Marxists call unearned income) is under-taxed compared with income from “work” (or rather, labour, as managing capital also requires work).  Many Labour MPs, in their hearts, believe that the ISA shield against CGT is too generous.  At some point, they will also turn against pension tax relief for the middle classes (high earners have already lost almost all of their tax relief), though we are not there yet.  Burnham repeated his call for a land value tax on Friday, a disastrous idea that – in practice, if not under the unrealistic theoretical construct pushed by economists – would turn into a proto-communist tool to expropriate housing wealth en masse. The Left, wrongly, now almost all believe that the rate at which capital gains tax should be levied must be equaled with that of income tax. This is wrong, for several reasons.  It is possible to construct scenarios under which the state grabs 90 per cent of the value of an income stream.  When will the tax madness end?  There was respite during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, as the Tories (starting in 1979) slashed marginal tax rates and New Labour (as it then was) famously explained that it was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they paid their taxes” (as Peter Mandelson put it in 1998).  In reality, Labour soon succumbed to the politics of spite, taxing pensions and house purchases much more harshly, though it also cut nominal CGT rates. Fast-forward to 2026, and Gordon Brown’s stealth taxes now feel almost benign compared to the horrors that lie ahead of us.  A PM Burnham would be a disaster for taxpayers – but then again, so would any other Labour prime minister” Alistair Heath.