Garstonk F

@CallumLyon Give yourself a day off mate, please.

£30,000 a year sounds like decent money... until you actually break it down. Monthly salary before anything comes off: £2,500. Then reality kicks in: Tax: £286 National Insurance: £198 Student loan: £20 Pension: £100 What actually lands in your bank? Around £1,896. Now the bills: Rent (somewhere half decent): £1,200 Council tax, utilities & internet: £420 Getting to work (fuel or train): £250 That's roughly £1,870 gone before you've even bought food. You're left with around £26 to last the rest of the month. Food, clothes, emergencies, birthdays, a social life... everything comes out of that. And people still wonder why so many are living payday to payday. This isn't sustainable. Something has to change.

@globaltravails @MerrynSW Eh? It's the worst in my experience.

@MerrynSW Security at EDI is amongst the best and most efficient of any airport in Europe, despite the lots of walking they make you do. Conversely International Arrivals is the worst of any airport in Europe. It's quite the dichotomy there.

If I were running Edinburgh Airport security I too would hide my satisfaction monitoring machine behind a screen.

@davidfkey @MerrynSW How long did it take, on average, to get through?

@MerrynSW You wouldn’t get the job. Edinburgh Airport security is excellent, based on my recent experiences this year. What is rubbish is the arrivals procedure.

@MichaelCunlif17 @MerrynSW Really? How long on average did you spend in security?

@MerrynSW Personal experience as a fairly regular commuter is really good at Edinburgh. I normally am through security 30 mins from leaving home in central Edinburgh.

@liamjdbutler @afneil What renewables jobs?

@Garstonk @afneil Vs how many by retraining for renewables for how much longer?

Ok. So answer this. Should we be drilling for new fields? Simple yes or no.

@ian4downton Which Argos are you talking about?

What a disastrous deal it was a acquiring Argos. The whole appeal of Argos was ordering and quick collection - not parking up in a busy Sainsburys and battling to/from the back of a dimly lit store with large items. news.sky.com/story/sainsbur…

@AlberttheSnail @afneil Nice one Albert Hindsight.

@afneil Your party gave oil away Unlike the Norwegians, who didn't

Your party backed a supertax on oil companies in the North Sea. Your party opposed new licenses in the North Sea. Why are you surprised BP has decided to pack it in? Nauseating hypocrisy to affect to be now concerned about jobs and communities.

@dalkeithfiddler @afneil Says a (clearly) deranged idiot.

@afneil Fuck you Andy .. and your relentless gammon tinged pish and bullshit! This is all reserved under the power of the UK Government and the windfall tax was a Tory tax! Go fuck yerself you deranged idiot !

@liamjdbutler @afneil Thousands (>5000) for at least a decade.

@Garstonk @afneil How many jobs and for how long?

@ThinkLicence @aldensbutchers I was aware of that.

@Garstonk @aldensbutchers That is not what it says.

Morning @aldensbutchers , I would have DM privately but you don’t allow that, and I can’t be bothered to upload to YouTube, and email you. You are not heavy X users so might not see this, but it is worth a try. Please ask your driver(s) to obey DO NOT OVERTAKE CYCLISTS signs.

@liamjdbutler @afneil Jobs? Expertise?

@afneil Seems extremely costly and pointless in the long term and can't reduce energy bills by anything worthwhile. Politically popular though so pick your medicine.

@baxterparp @afneil That's great but what would the policy be in independent Scotland?

@afneil Why not ask someone who can actually authorise drilling new fields?

@Pyrmha @afneil Easy, yes.

@afneil . Difficult Question: Should we be producing more fossil fuels in the middle of a Climate Catastrophe? . Ooh. Ooh. Difficult one, Andrew .

@Innealadair Well said Martin. SNP is very much in the 'drill baby drill' camp and always has been.

Andrew Neil trying his best to make the BP sale the fault of the SNP when offshore oil and gas licensing, exploration and production has always been entirely reserved to and controlled by Westminster.

@Boshanko @afneil I agree, but people still vote for them.

@Garstonk @afneil I'm afraid that boat's sailed. And it should've taken your leaders with it as you've been sold down the river.

Nauseating hypocrisy. You and your party’s green mongering over the years have driven BP and others away. You gave virtue signalling priority over jobs, families, communities. And now you express concern for them. Pass the sick bag. Scotland is truly run by a kakistocracy. But Scots only have themselves to blame. They keep electing self-serving numpties.

@donmcgowan He's as much a specialist as you.

Ah yes, that famous migration specialist, Harry Redknapp. 🤦‍♂️ Did they run out of racist old white men to talk to? Did Charlie Mullins finally melt?

@Boshanko @afneil SNP are the only option for those looking for independence.

@afneil I find it difficult to believe that some Scottish people are actually backing Swinney. What is it they can't see?

@rachelstockkk @EssexPR metro.co.uk/2017/07/01/ref…

@EssexPR Your really struggling with Reform's dip in the polls!! Add on the drop in small boats and we can see why you've ramped up the rhetoric. Not working though, is it.

Care 4 Calais had a problem with their lefty women shagging the migrants… I’d suggest that this happens all over Europe with these women charity workers.

@TJiMTS TL;DR

Andy Burnham, in two weeks of being PM, has perfectly illustrated the main problem in UK public finances. Week 1: there's a cost of living crisis, so to help you we've taken £45 a year off your electricity bill and capped bus fares at £2. Week 2: we don't have enough money to fund everything we want to do, so we're taking £630 a year out of your salary. Same government, same month. Credit where it's due first - taking VAT off electricity from October is real money, so is the £2 bus cap in January if you're on a bus twice a day. Immediate cost of living relief is genuinely needed by most people. But I'm not sure how someone who couldn't manage without that £45 a year of relief is supposed to now manage with £630 a year less in their pocket? The £630 is a 1.8% levy on income to fund a National Care Service costed at £18bn a year. On a £35,000 salary it's £630, on £50,000 it's £900. It's charged as a percentage of your income. It's collected out of your income. It is not, apparently, income tax, because they're going to call it a levy. It also only applies to taxpayers over 34... So you turn 35 and take a pay cut, at the exact age most people are stretched on a mortgage with childcare costing more than the mortgage. But the UKs ACTUALLY problem? Spending is too high. And it's too high in ways that are fixable if anyone was willing to challenge the status quo rather than buy more votes with handouts. This is where £1,383bn goes this year: Health, £269.6bn Pensions, £236.3bn Welfare, £204.0bn Education, £126.7bn Debt interest, £104.6bn Defence, £75.2bn Everything else, £367.1bn Health, £269.6bn: We need mandatory health insurance as an employment benefit and a hybrid model. Everyone hears "insurance" and pictures America, someone bleeding out over a copay, as if no other model exists on earth. The Netherlands has mandatory private health insurance. Insurers are legally required to accept everyone. They cannot charge you more for being chronically ill. A risk equalisation pool moves money towards the insurers covering the sickest people. It's consistently ranked top three in Europe. Welfare, £204.0bn: Income tax raises £330bn. So almost 2 of every 3 pounds of Income Tax taken from every working person in this country is spoken for by the welfare bill. Welfare should be for people who cannot work. Disability, genuine incapacity, the people it was built to protect. It has drifted into a general income top-up, and the number that proves it is 4.2 million working age people now claiming at least one health related benefit, up a million since 2019. Change how we determine eligibility, fix a lot of spending issues immediately. Pensions, £236.3bn: The state pension is a Ponzi scheme, and I mean that technically rather than as an insult. There is no fund - the ONS says so plainly. Your National Insurance is not being put aside and invested for your State Pension, It just pays the payouts for last year's pensioners. Yours depends entirely on there being enough workers behind you. Which, btw, there won't be. The ratio of pensioners to workers goes from 27% to 48% by 2050 (and these estimates are before we've seen the proper impact of AI/automation on jobs. Australia already fixed this: 12% of earnings into a private fund with your name on it, mandatory, employer paid. It's your money, it compounds, it doesn't need a bigger generation behind you to work. We could mandate the same tomorrow and let the state pension run down over the next 40 years, eventually saving £236bn a year. You can't levy your way out of these problems. A 1.8% charge on everyone over 34 raises £18bn. It doesn't even cover the interest on our existing debt. And in the meantime... If we're going to borrow anyway, why is none of it buying anything? Norway found oil in 1969 and put the money in a fund... That fund is now worth $2.049 trillion. It holds a stake in roughly 1.5% of every listed company on the planet. We found oil in the same decade and spent it. The UK's National Wealth Fund is capitalised at £27.8bn. Norway's is about 73 times bigger. So where is our position in AI, in data centres, in grid scale renewables, in batteries, in electric vehicles, in any of the things the next fifty years actually runs on? We borrow £133bn a year and almost none of it buys an asset. Fix government spending immediately, increase government income over time (without milking people for every penny of 'levy' you can find), and quality of life will genuinely improve as people have more money in their pockets. The UK has a spending problem, not a tax problem.