James Anderson

@warleechood High earners pay 54% income taxes when "employer" NI is included. I think that when anyone is paying more than half, then things have gone badly wrong.

@BenGrahamUK I think we all know in our hearts it will turn out to have a major flaw when it is finished too. Maybe trains don't fit through the tunnels, or tracks wrong size for wheels. Who knows what it will be, but please bookmark this tweet...

The UK built the world’s first modern railway network. Today HS2 is costing around £400,000 per day and still won’t be completed for another 10 years. At what point did Britain stop being able to build major infrastructure?

@robprogressive I fully agree. And also, at the other extreme, being roo rich seems to be bad for mental health, at least in some. I have in mind that some drive to succeed, and daily work routine is good for our mental health

No one wants to hear this but many 'mental health’ problems disappear when you have money No worrying about bills or living costs. No drowning in debt. Feeling stressed? Take some days off or go on holiday because you can afford to And if you do get really ill, you have money to fix that too. Why does no one want to acknowledge this?

@100kDiary Saving £6,000 a year does not make you a millionaire by retirement (Unless you work for 160 years)

The biggest wealth destroyer in the UK right now is PCP car finance. People on a £32k salary will happily lock themselves into a £500/month contract for a Mercedes they will never actually own, just to sit in gridlocked traffic on the M25 and try to impress people in the lane next to them. Then they get to the office and complain that taxes are too high and the government is holding the working class down. If you put that £500 a month into an S&P 500 ISA instead of a rented German car, you'd be a millionaire by retirement. Stop blaming the Prime Minister for your own terrible capital allocation. Your car isn't an asset. It's an anchor.

Blockading the Strait of Hormuz is potentially a war crime because it blockades essential energy and fertilizer supplies.

@Gabriel_Pogrund And HMRC is liable for tax over paid, dopey

Extraordinarily, Reform position today is Tice made an “admin error” — but it does not matter that his company didn’t pay £91k because he and his trust later paid unspecified sum of tax. The law makes no such allowance — the company was, and is, liable for any tax it didn’t pay.

@2147mill Example: you are 30 and plan to work to 70. Assume 20 years of retirement and you need £20,000 a year after state pension. Then you need to save £10,000 a year. And invest it wisely to cover inflation Damned difficult, but there it is

@2147mill 4% a year is inflation. So it's only £100,000 in today's money, or £4,000 a year of pension (4% rule) Instead, work out your expected length of retirement and how much you need a year in retirement. Divide that by your years left of working, and save that each year

£300/month into a SIPP at 30. £300 costs you £240 after 20% tax relief. Invested for 30 years at 7% avg. Final pot: ~£340,000 You put in £86,400. The rest is compound growth and free government money.

@Trav_Brown512 @WarMonitor3 Don't tell me the idiot Trump is now blockading the blockade

@JamesAndersonQ @WarMonitor3 No, the USA controls it now

Iran has made key demands today in negations with JD Vance and his team: -Control of the Strait of Hormuz. -Payment of war reparations. -Ceasefire across the region including in Lebanon.

@kifatlarge @ThisLeadenPall @TheAttagirls @CatherineHume10 Correct, my wording was indeed sloppy. But irrelevant. The same law covers assault by penetration and causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent

@JamesAndersonQ @ThisLeadenPall @TheAttagirls @CatherineHume10 Sexual offences act: (1) A person (A) commits an offence if— (a) he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with his penis, (b) B does not consent to the penetration, and (c) A does not reasonably believe that B consents.

There is no Woman of the Day today. Instead, I want to explain why I do what I do. No one really knows who first said, “History is written by the victors” but I’d bet you any odds it was a man. Think of your schooldays and count the number of times you learned about the roles played by women in shaping history, other than regnant Queens and perhaps Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale. Yet women lived, worked, networked, debated, campaigned, organised, invented things and built them too - but you’d never know this if your lessons, like mine, were confined to history books. For a practical example, just look around you. Fridge, washing machine, dishwasher, ironing board, home security system, call waiting system, car heater and windscreen wipers, even the very first computer algorithm: all invented by women. Are you surprised? Confined to the house, denied access to higher education, barred from engineering, denied entry to all branches of science and the professions for centuries, those bright analytical minds turned their attention to their immediate surroundings and saw what was needed to free them from domestic drudgery. In return, history ignored women’s achievements, glossed over them or consigned them to dusty footnotes. If all else failed, their work was credited to - or stolen by - men, the phenomenon known as the Matilda Effect, first identified by feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1870. In 1993, it was named for her by historian Margaret Rossiter who said, “It is important to note early that women’s historically subordinate ‘place’ in science was not a coincidence and was not due to any lack of merit on their part. It was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science.” Once you see it, you cannot unsee it - the Matilda Effect is everywhere - but now substitute ‘history’ for ‘science’. The proposition still stands. What I try to do is to pierce holes in that camouflage by writing about the almost-invisible women of history who overcame manmade barriers and changed the world. As a Second Wave feminist, I thought we’d won all the big battles, that it was just a matter of mopping up the resisters and dragging them into the 20th century. I did my bit to redress the balance in an overwhelmingly male environment, but how had I managed to miss the barefaced theft of our words, our spaces and services, our sports? How had we suddenly been reduced to a walking collection of body parts? It was a wake-up call. Once I saw, I couldn’t unsee the terrible damage being done to girls and young women who did not conform to the offensive sexist stereotypes being imposed on them by men who mimic women and their inane female cheerleaders. It made me fearful for non-conforming girls: tomboys. They need to see strong women as role models, women who don’t care about performing femininity, women who defy convention and do things their way. If you can see it, you can be it. So I went digging around in those dusty footnotes, found a little gold and started from there. I found thrilling tales of women who were inventive, resourceful and brave. Then I started sharing what I found more widely, tied to the calendar as Women of the Day. How do I find them? Often by pure chance. I go looking for one woman, spot a couple more names along the way - women whose stories really resonate with me - and file them away for the right time. Women’s history had been right under my nose the whole time. I just hadn’t realised that you needed to dig a little. The rather unexpected bonus was that in giving them a voice, I found mine. I am a conspicuously law-abiding woman, a former prison governor, and if you had told me when I retired that one day, I’d be standing outside a police station in protest at the hounding of gender critical women and singing “Go catch some rapists” to the tune of Guantanamera, I’d have advised you to seek immediate medical attention for the effects of the bump to your head. But here I am, telling women’s stories, and behind the scenes, pursuing a second career as a women’s rights activist. I won’t ever fall asleep at the wheel again. Tomorrow, I’m off to Cardiff with my Women of Wessex sisters, to protest about @bphillipsonmp’s inexplicable decision to delay laying the EHRC Code of Practice before Parliament — and make no mistake about it. It IS a decision; one that is causing real harm and damage to the rights of women and the protection of children. Some of you come for the occasional stories of women in history hiding in plain sight, but I hope you stay because you care about fairness and safety for women. For now, I leave you with this thought from the 1949 memoirs of Somerset suffragette Nelly Crocker (1872-1962): “Modern young women seem unaware of the price paid for their political and social emancipation, and modern historians have greatly ignored the struggle”.

@darrengrimes I think Trump has gone so off the scale bonkers that at some point our national interest becomes to distance ourselves from him

I see Labour has decided attacking the US President is their only way to win votes in May elections. Once again Labour prove that the only thing they care about is everything but the national interest. You can think Trump wrong whilst also recognising good UK-US relations matter.

@kifatlarge @ThisLeadenPall @TheAttagirls @CatherineHume10 Factually incorrect. Also, irrelevant. We are discussing whether a wife was the chattel of the husband in 1991, and the answer is no. Not evwn close

@JamesAndersonQ @ThisLeadenPall @TheAttagirls @CatherineHume10 A man can’t be raped by a woman wife or otherwise it wouldn’t fit the definition of the crime in law, it requires penetration by a penis……

@ThisLeadenPall @kifatlarge @TheAttagirls @CatherineHume10 Pre 1991 neither a man nor a woman could be convicted of raping a spouse but both could be convicted of indecent assault and ABH instead. None of this means a woman was the "chattel" of her husband, nor that the man was the chattel of his wife

@JamesAndersonQ @kifatlarge @TheAttagirls @CatherineHume10 Men could legally rape their wives until 1991. That makes their wives chattels.

@kifatlarge @TheAttagirls @CatherineHume10 I have no doubt there is some obscure technical sense it can be said, but in reality there was not one iota of truth in this in 1991

@JamesAndersonQ @TheAttagirls @CatherineHume10 It’s the technical underpinning for the old English law on marital rape (or the impossibility thereof), the property elements were altered earlier by statute but that was one of the last elements to go, in 1991

@TheAttagirls @CatherineHume10 Chattels until 1991? Sounds like BS to me

UK history has been recorded since before the Domesday Book. Men could be awarded university degrees in 1230. Cambridge finally capitulated and awarded degrees to women in 1948. Men first took seats in Parliament in 1265. Women had to wait till 1918. Men could vote in 1832. Women had to wait till 1918. Men were legally persons in their own right. Women were chattels (the property of fathers or husbands) until coverture was finally knocked on the head in 1991. That’s not a typo. 1991. It is true that one of us is certainly silly and historically illiterate. I leave it to serious historians to decide which…

You were culpable in the Post Office Scandal People died as a result Morally completely indefensible

@Davidpr52119342 @acfisken @DanNeidle I am impressed re contract. I have no doubt Rayner signed a waiver on all the blurb suggesting she get advice on this and that too. Just like you did on the platform. Lord knows I dislike Rayner. But the best we can say is she was hoist by her own high tax, big state petard

@JamesAndersonQ @acfisken @DanNeidle Yes

We certainly don’t know if additional tax paid by Mr Tice and his offshore trust made up for his company’s failure to pay tax. Where’s the evidence?

@Davidpr52119342 @acfisken @DanNeidle Employment contract?

@JamesAndersonQ @acfisken @DanNeidle Contract - yes. Platform, no, I signed the waiver confirming that I understood the risks. Ignorance isn’t a defence. You’re continuing to prove my point.

@Davidpr52119342 @acfisken @DanNeidle Last time you signed an employment contract, did you take the company's advice to hire a solicitor for legal advice first? What about when you bought some shares on a broker platform? Did you follow their advice to hire an independent financial adviser first?

@JamesAndersonQ @acfisken @DanNeidle You’re doing a wonderful job of providing that you are in fact exactly the type of person who would refuse to seek additional advice and then attempt to claim ignorance.

@Davidpr52119342 @acfisken @DanNeidle I repeat the question. On whose word do you have it that her solicitor told her to seek advice? And in what form was this advice to seek advice given? Rayner's resignation letter does not touch on these matters. I have no idea why you introduced it

@JamesAndersonQ @acfisken @DanNeidle Like I said…