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@londonHenryGB We should all just pack in our private sector jobs and work at the council

One of the worst value for money propositions in the UK. A national disgrace.

@Pinarello_Pete @RollingHedge Good on you, that’s amazing!

@RollingHedge I am. I pay over £9k a month in tax and NI.🤷‍♂️

This is accurate and it’s actually EVEN worse than Rob says. Sure, the top 3% in Britain starts at £103k. After income tax, NI, council tax, and VAT on everything you spend, real purchasing power is closer to £45k. Galling huh? You are in the top 3% of a G7 economy and you cannot buy a family home on one salary in the South East. How fucked is that? But here’s the part nobody talks about... Run the numbers on what a household of four actually needs to be a net contributor to the Treasury - meaning taxes paid exceeding the cost of services consumed - and the threshold is roughly £132k gross. That means the vast majority of the top 3% are still net recipients of state subsidy when you account for the full fiscal circuit. Britain doesn’t have a wealth problem as widely purported, what it does have is a denominator problem: GDP per capita has been flatlining for 15 years and the state has been masking it with debt, immigration-driven top-line growth, and the systematic erosion of what a middle-class income actually buys through bad policy formation and money printing. Are YOU a net taxpayer? @GreatBritishTT built the calculator. See where you sit: gbtt.info/net-taxpayer/i…

@LondonMoneyFS Yes but where? 9 Elms? Knightsbridge?

@ERBeaumont Central London

Took me a while but I think I’ve found the winner

@Keir_Starmer Did writing this make you feel better?

The ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz is deeply damaging. Getting global shipping moving is vital to ease cost of living pressures. The UK has convened more than 40 nations who share our aim to restore freedom of navigation. This week the UK and France will co-host a summit to advance work on a coordinated, independent, multinational plan to safeguard international shipping when the conflict ends.

@P0eMPieDinges @jopiethuismus Sounds like an idea invented by a horny teenage boy if I’m honest

@jopiethuismus Die maagden zijn de zgn hoeries. Zij zijn speciaal gemaakt door allah voor seks. Dat zijn geen mensen die op aarde geleefd hebben

Een 18-jarig Iraans meisje, Melika Azizi, wordt binnenkort in Iran opgehangen. Maar eerst gaat het regime haar verkrachten. Omdat ze nog maagd is. Want volgens hun zieke logica komt een maagd rechtstreeks in de hemel. Dus verkrachten ze haar eerst, zodat ze niet in het paradijs kan komen. Daarna pas de strop. En hier in Nederland lopen mensen rond die dit regime verdedigen en met de vlaggen van dit doodzieke regime zwaaien Dat zijn geen 'mensen met een andere mening'. Dat zijn beesten. Net zo schuldig als de beulen zelf. Mensen die dit regime steunen verdienen geen plek in onze samenleving. Het wordt tijd dat dit tuig opgepakt wordt en over de grens gedonderd wordt. Of denkt het kabinet nog serieus dat er met deze schijtzooi nog samen te leven valt?

@RollingHedge @peasant_trader That’s assuming they don’t have a plan2 student loan too. Running those numbers will make you want to cry

No? £60k household gross for a family of four takes home roughly £3,700/month after tax. These are the basics: Rent/mortgage: £1.5k to 2k Childcare: £2,000-2,500 Council tax: £200 Energy: £200 Food: £500-600 Transport: £300-400 Insurance/phone/broadband: £200 That’s £5k to £6k pcm before you’ve bought a pair of shoes or saved a penny. The basics cost more than the salary nets. That’s the point…. 👍🏼

Britain is the 6th largest economy in the world. Its people rank 30th. Real wages are still below 2008 levels. The median family needs ~£60k just to cover basics without state help. The median family earns £37k. The gap is £23k. That gap is not an accident. The government built the costs that created it, then pointed at GDP and told you everything was fine. “GDP measures the size of the machine. It says nothing about who benefits from it.” - Excellent quote and overall piece of work from the @GreatBritishTT team 👏 gbtt.info/gdp-delusion.h…

@minervas_muse Yep and it’s deeply depressing

The UK has a combination of being poor enough where salaries between 36k and 50k are treated like US 6 figure salaries... and a culture that is incredibly class conscious in a "Oh, so you think you're too good for a hostel, Mister Prime Minister?" kinda way.

Also, it is important to know that the UK middle class is not, economically, in the middle of the income distribution. It's their UMC The term was created to describe a class between the working class and the upper class, but upper class was originally defined as titled nobility

@javedhassan @tparsi @mb_ghalibaf @ryangrim @samirahmed14 @humza_jilani @citrinowicz @glcarlstrom @s_m_marandi @esaagar @samigodil Interesting take, let’s see how it plays out tomorrow

So, a couple of the boys have been texting me: “Why the hell would Trump drop the Hormuz blockade bomb on a Sunday? It’ll send oil screaming past $120, maybe $130 if the algos really panic. Makes zero sense if you actually want cheaper barrels.” But it makes perfect sense. Beautiful, even. See, Tokyo and Hong Kong are already humming by the time the East Coast is still nursing its coffee. Those futures pits—Dow, S&P, the whole equity complex, plus Brent and WTI on the screens—never really sleep. You’ve got fourteen, fifteen hours of runway before the New York bell. Plenty of time for the right hands to lean in: long the indices in Hong Kong, short the crude in Tokyo, riding the fear wave as the blockade tweet lights up every terminal from Singapore to Sydney. Then, right on cue, before the U.S. opens, comes the pivot. Something about “there’s regime change in Tehran,” “we can do business,” “Talks were Good,” the usual art-of-the-deal baloney. Markets whip around like they’ve been Tasered. Oil gives back the spike, stocks rip higher. The boys in Asia unwind clean, pocket the spread. A few hundred million, maybe more, conjured out of thin air on the back of one perfectly timed Sunday morning post. Not bad for a morning’s work. The Street’s been running these kinds of games for decades: information, timing, leverage. Just never quite so… presidential!!

@judeinlondon @Altymcaltalt3 Today the definition of rich seems to have become ‘you’re not desperately skint’ which is just ridiculous.

@W98AB £12k?! What amenities did this building have to demand such a high service charge?

Everytime I see a place like this, you immediately know its cheap because the service charge is outrageous. This one is £12k a yr!

@artifexius @GriftReport You are conflating comfortability with being ‘rich’. No one is disputing that £80k is a v comfortable salary. However, this salary will not put you in the bracket of the rich. It’s 2.5 X the minimum wage.

@ERBeaumont @GriftReport Anyone with income of £80k/year is in the top 5% salary/earnings. There are about 34M active workers in the UK. This means only 1.7M people have a salary of £80k (or more), out of 69M population. If they can't make £80k work for them, that's a skill issue.

Owen Jones gets absolutely destroyed by a caller when he tries to argue about benefits and taxing the rich. Absolute car crash (yet again)

@OfSymbols @pickwickpick @PhilWhomfield @GriftReport oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/eng…

@ERBeaumont @pickwickpick @PhilWhomfield @GriftReport Right but you’ve defined it yourself so that it makes sense retroactively to the point youre trying to make, so of course

@OfSymbols @pickwickpick @PhilWhomfield @GriftReport That’s not the definition of the middle class, which is what I previously referred to.

@ERBeaumont @pickwickpick @PhilWhomfield @GriftReport I consider it as more of a floating signifier than a phrase with actual intrinsic meaning, but if income is something to do with it, I’d assume it was around middle income, not at the higher end of income.

@OfSymbols @pickwickpick @PhilWhomfield @GriftReport Do you understand what the middle class is?

@ERBeaumont @pickwickpick @PhilWhomfield @GriftReport I mean, middle is usually like, not at the far end is it lad?

@pickwickpick @OfSymbols @PhilWhomfield @GriftReport To clarify, you believe that £80-100k puts you in the bracket of the elite rather than middle class? That’s fascinating.

@ERBeaumont @OfSymbols @PhilWhomfield @GriftReport It's not middle class considering it puts you in the top 3-5% of earners...

@MartFromEngland @GriftReport It’s very different, most noticeably our news outlets are constant doom and gloom. Ignore the noise. If you’re driven and ambitious, just stay focussed on achieving your goals and see what possibilities the world opens up for you 🙏

@ERBeaumont @GriftReport I've always been envious of that mentality, a small part of me has always felt I'd be more at home state-side. I haven't visited in a long time but I can't imagine it's more depressing than living here at the moment.

@MartFromEngland @GriftReport Yes it’s a shame. I go to the States pretty often for work & the outlook is so diff. In Austin / Miami, everyone there has purpose, they are building something, they are ambitious, both cities energised with people hungry for success and when they get close they are celebrated.

@ERBeaumont @GriftReport It's incredible how much people despise others if they're doing better than them. I'm nowhere near that but I certainly don't misinterpret that salary as being rich.

@MartFromEngland @GriftReport This discourse has been very eye opening.

@ERBeaumont @GriftReport Mental isn't it. £80k a year is a comfortable salary that people should strive towards not sneer at with contempt. The crabs-in-a-bucket mentality we have in the UK is draining.