@Helen_Whately One minute you're telling us London is too dangerous to visit/ or has been taken over by muslims/ and now you're moaning about the cost of bringing your kids for a day out.
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Martin Jones
712 posts
Taking your children for a day out in London to see the sights has become punishingly expensive.
But the real issue here is the relentless taxation of people who’re working - to fund ever higher benefits for those who’re not ⬇️
thetimes.com/article/d0c5e1…
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@jcartlidgemp Another Tory a couple of days late with his Easter message
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Today, Labour’s decision to reverse the two-child benefit cap kicks in, costing taxpayers billions. With war on two fronts, should the priority really be an even bigger welfare state? We would restore the two child benefit cap and spend the savings on our armed forces.
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@asentance Royal Mail still doing a pretty good job if you ask me. If I need to send a letter anywhere in the UK by tomorrow £1.80 isn't outrageous is it? Times change and business evolves.
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Price of 1st class stamp rises to £1.80 today, up nearly 6pc, double our inflation rate. More shocking, 1st class postal charge up 137pc since 2020 (76p-180p), nearly 5 TIMES the general rise in prices 2020-26 (29pc). “Regulated” prices are adding significantly to UK inflation.
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@MelJStride Mel is just a couple of days late with his Easter message.
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Labour’s decision to scrap the two-child benefit cap is a serious mistake and one the country cannot afford.
At a time when Britain faces a sustained cost-of-living challenge, families across the country are making difficult, often painful decisions to balance their budgets. They expect government to show the same discipline. Instead, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have chosen to increase welfare spending by billions, and to tax working people to pay for it.
Starmer and Reeves’ choice marks a significant shift in the principles that underpin our welfare system.
The two-child cap, introduced by Conservatives in 2017, reflected a straightforward and widely understood idea: that families should make choices based on what they can afford, and that the state should mirror that reality. It ensured the system remained fair, both to those who rely on support and to those who fund it through their taxes. Labour have now chosen to abandon that balance.
Under Labour’s plan, families on benefits can now receive thousands more for every extra child. For bigger households, that could mean well over £10,000 more a year, at a cost of around £3.5 billion each year.
That comes on top of already high levels of public spending and over £100 billion in debt interest – double the defence budget. Given the strain on the public finances and the fact taxes are rising to record highs to pay for this, such a commitment raises serious questions about sustainability. It also raises questions of fairness.
Working households do not receive more money when their family grows. They adapt. They plan. They make trade-offs. It is reasonable to expect that the welfare system reflects those same constraints, rather than insulating some from them at the expense of others.
This is not about withdrawing support from those in need. Britain already has a compassionate system that protects the most vulnerable. But compassion must be matched with responsibility. Without that balance, public confidence in the system begins to erode.
On top of that, we should all be concerned about how this decision was made.
Before the election, Keir Starmer made clear that the cap would remain. Its removal came about because Labour’s backbenchers have Starmer and Reeves over a barrel, following a slew of disastrous u-turns. A government driven more by internal politics than by a consistent economic strategy is dangerous.
Reform UK have taken every possible different position on the two child policy. Nigel Farage last year made a speech announcing he wanted to scrap the cap. His Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick voted alongside Labour to lift it just a few months ago. Then they said they only wanted to partially scrap it. And now they claim they would keep it. They may deny it, but Labour and Reform are pushing more welfare spending, with no consideration for the country’s finances.
The Conservative position is different.
We believe in a welfare system that is robust, targeted, and fair - one that supports those who need help while maintaining a clear link between responsibility and support. That is essential not only for fiscal sustainability, but for maintaining public trust.
Restoring the two-child cap would reaffirm an important principle: that support should be delivered in a way that is fair to all, and consistent with the realities faced by working families.
The country does not need competing promises of higher spending paid for by yet more taxes on working people. It needs honesty about the choices we face, and an understanding of what is fair.
Rachel Reeves@RachelReevesMP
Today we are lifting 450,000 children out of poverty with the end of the two-child limit. This Labour Government is achieving the biggest reduction in child poverty over a Parliament since records began. Change promised. Change delivered.
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@Edwina_Currie Did you pay for your ministerial car's petrol? No, thought not.
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She gets ferried around.. doesn’t pay for her petrol.. perhaps?
Neil O'Brien@NeilDotObrien
Reeves forecast oil price last week at $68 / barrel The actual oil price now is $103 But she is still planing to raise fuel duty by 5p Madness
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@DCBMEP For someone as stupid as you to question whether people have got appointments on merit is laughable.
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The govt’s proposed SPS agreement with the EU is as bad as expected: a complete betrayal of the Brexit vote and the subjugation of our laws to an EU that will legislate with no regard to our interests.
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They’ll add the Bible next
The Culturist@the_culturist_
The UK government flagged these books (among others) as potential signs of far-right extremism. List includes Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Hobbes' Leviathan, Milton's Paradise Lost. You may be an extremist if you've read these. What else would you add to the list?
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@_HenryBolton I'm not sure you understand English if this is your take.
'than at any time since the Cold War'
does not the time during which the cold war was taking place - ending in 1991 after which we cut spending drastically.
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The Prime Minister is, in effect, lying here. The UK is not spending more on defence “than at any time since the Cold War”.
Current UK defence spending is around 2.3–2.4% of GDP (2024–2025)
Cold War comparisons:
- 1990–91: about 3.2% of GDP
- 1980s: roughly 4–5% of GDP in many years
- 1950s: sometimes 7%+ of GDP
In cash terms (the number of £), we do spend more, but in real strategic terms (in value terms) Britain is spending barely half the share of national wealth on defence that we did during the late Cold War.
As a share of government spending we’re dramatically less.
As of the parlous state of our armed forces wasn’t enough his lying and attempts to mislead the nation demonstrate his appalling lack of integrity. He’s also, arrogantly, taking the public as fools.
/GBNEWS/status/2029567443350294886/video/1
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@MerrynSW Listed by Prevent strategy/Home Office under the last government if you read the story....details....
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Book club suggestions aplenty here.
The Culturist@the_culturist_
The UK government flagged these books (among others) as potential signs of far-right extremism. List includes Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Hobbes' Leviathan, Milton's Paradise Lost. You may be an extremist if you've read these. What else would you add to the list?
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@DPJHodges There is literally nothing that Dan isn't an expert on. Military Planning, Geopolitics, Marine Insurance, Asylum and Immigration, Energy Policy. The Benefits system. Taxation. There he is wasting his talent writing for a fascist rag.
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So, you know how Keir Starmer was boasting a couple of hours ago about how well prepared we were for this conflict. The MOD has just issued a procurement order for equipment that can protect RN vessels from drones.
ukdefencejournal.org.uk/royal-navy-see…
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This shield he's talking about. The Iranians - or their proxies - did actually hit Akrotiri, right? That photo of a big hole in the side of a hanger. We didn't all imagine it?
GB News@GBNEWS
'We will maintain this shield over British people in the region and our allies.' Sir Keir Starmer announces the UK will be deploying a number of military vehicles and aircraft to defend British bases against Iran drones. 📺 Freeview 236, Sky 512, Virgin 604
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@carlosbufe99 @DPJHodges Two air bases full of equipment to deal with stuff coming from the air. We can defend those. One drone from Lebanon and you've all lost your minds.
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@Jones2204Jones @DPJHodges We have 2 sovereign bases there which we should be able to defend and as part of the Treaty of Guarantee it is actually our responsibility to defend Cyprus.
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@DPJHodges I think she sent the Navy to get them back after they were invaded because she stopped defending them. Just detail though Dan.
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A key component of Margaret Thatcher's Falklands triumph was she did actually send the Royal Navy to defend them.
Simon Nixon@Simon_Nixon
Perhaps Iran will be Starmer's Falklands. Badenoch proving beyond any doubt that she is absolutely tone deaf, unpatriotic and out of her depth
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@MichelleDewbs @BillNeelyReport Thanks @MichelleDewbs for confirming you are employed at the right channel.
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Er - Are you inciting someone to burn down my (and hundreds of others) place of work @BillNeelyReport ?
🤔
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@Adrian_Hilton @Ameer_Kotecha So sad we've lost such a high-flyer. Ekaterinburg's loss I guess.
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Credit to @Ameer_Kotecha for writing so candidly about the paralysing effects of “civil service behaviours”, and for resigning rather than advancing the mentality. The question is why have successive Labour and Tory governments tolerated the dysfunction.
thetimes.com/article/aed812…
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@DCBMEP Thanks for letting me know you know nothing about how Lloyds of London operates.
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Starmer’s fumbling inaction is now threatening London as a world insurance centre via Lloyds. Very worrying.
John Ʌ Konrad V@johnkonrad
This is potentially the biggest Iran story nobody is talking about: the global insurance market may be heading toward a systemic crisis. Here’s why… Most people don’t realize London isn’t just a financial center it’s THE center of global insurance. Lloyd’s underwrites ~40% of the world’s marine cargo. Ship sinks, port gets bombed, canal gets blocked the bill lands in London. This is why the UK punches above its weight. Not the Royal Navy. Not diplomacy. Insurance. Control insurance, control trade. And London doesn’t just control the 90% of global trade that moves by sea. Lloyd’s and the London market are major insurers of almost everything skyscrapers, factories, ports, satellites, entire supply chains. You can’t participate in public markets or raise large amounts of capital without insurance. Now, the normal playbook for war risk is repricing, not cancellation. Canceling coverage entirely is a massive escalation in underwriting posture. It signals something beyond risk, it signals uncertainty so deep the underwriter can’t even price it. The question everyone should be asking: why? Why not just jack up premiums and make a fortune off the crisis like they did in the Black Sea off Ukraine? To answer that, you have to understand WHY London has maintained a stranglehold on global insurance while losing nearly submarket related to ships. The answer: better intelligence. It is no coincidence that MI6 headquarters sits directly across the Thames from the @IMOHQ, the world’s maritime regulator & a short distance from Lloyd’s itself. I have no proof of a direct pipeline, but it has long been speculated in the industry that intelligence flows from MI6 to Lloyd’s. Having the best intel in the world would be the single greatest competitive advantage any insurer could possess: the ability to price risk that competitors can only guess at. Here’s the problem: the majority of MI6’s intel doesn’t come from its own agents. It comes from Five Eyes the alliance comprising the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. And within 5Eyes, the dominant partner is obvious. The CIA, NSA, NRO, etc generate the lion’s share of intel. So if Lloyd’s pricing advantage flows from MI6, and MI6’s best intelligence flows from the US… what happens when that data pipeline gets throttled? All indications are that @Keir_Starmer was blindsided by the size and scope of the US/Israel strikes on Iran this weekend. That alone tells you something about the current state of transatlantic intelligence sharing. And we know there has been serious anger in Washington over the UK’s decision to sell Diego Garcia, home to America’s most strategically important base in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius. It is not a huge leap to conclude that the submarine cables linking Langley to London have gone dark, or at minimum have been significantly throttled. What this means for UK national security is a question for the Brits. But what it means for EVERY company globally that’s insured through the London market has massive implications for the entire financial system. Because most large insurers worldwide don’t do independent intelligence work. They index off Lloyd’s rates. If you’re insuring a skyscraper in Tokyo, a semiconductor fab in Taiwan, or a port in Argentina you get a Lloyd’s quote, then shop that price around. Other insurers see Lloyd’s number and assume the diligence was done. They price accordingly. This means if London is suddenly flying blind it’s not just Lloyd’s policyholders at risk. It’s the entire global reinsurance chain. The cancellation of war risk coverage on ships isn’t the crisis. It’s the canary. If this hypothesis is correct, we could be looking at a systemic repricing event across global insurance markets…. the kind of cascading uncertainty that defined 2008 and COVID. Watch Lloyd’s. Watch reinsurance spreads. What Five Eyes. That’s where this story, and possibly Wall Street, breaks. CC @BillAckman
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@DailyMail the Americans are a bunch of treasonous upstarts who rebelled against our king is what the Daily Mail meant to say
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DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Starmer has wrecked Britain's relationship with our oldest ally trib.al/JVl7ZeW
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