Mike

Note to all the pearl-clutching Tories out in force today… You don’t HAVE to send your kids to private school. We have universal education provision in this country. If you *choose* to do so, the rest of us shouldn’t pay for you to have a tax break for the privilege.

BREAKING: I've secured a parliamentary debate next week on banning all MPs' second jobs. Farage has pocketed over £1 MILLION from outside "work" since the General Election Being an MP is a full-time job. No MP should be out chasing lucrative second jobs. Let's end this racket!

🚨 NEW: The UK has announced that interest on cash in Stocks and Shares ISAs will be taxed at 22%

Well, Zia, I definitely consider myself unemployable, but you tend to be when you’ve built businesses from scratch and sold them - including one with 220 offices around the country employing 1000 people. Here are some of the many others with interesting, relevant real-world backgrounds: Business Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs): Was chief operating officer and chief financial officer of Sky, the youngest finance director in the FTSE 100 at the time, selling shares worth around £17 million when Comcast bought the company. Kemi Badenoch (North West Essex): Worked at McDonald’s at 16 after arriving from Nigeria with £100, then trained as a software engineer before moving into banking at Coutts, The Spectator and on to lead the party. James Cartlidge (South Suffolk): Founded the shared ownership property portal Share to Buy and is now Shadow Defence Secretary. Mel Stride (Central Devon): Founded Venture Marketing Group in 1987, a trade exhibitions, conferences and publishing company - is now Shadow Chancellor. Chris Philp (Croydon South): Started at McKinsey before becoming a serial entrepreneur, founding wholesale distributor Blueheath and co-founding the property finance firm Pluto Capital. Jeremy Hunt (Godalming and Ash): Co-founded the educational publisher Hotcourses after teaching English in Japan, selling it for a reported £14 million in 2017. Military Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling): Served as an intelligence officer across Iraq and Afghanistan, earned an MBE and helped set up the National Security Council of Afghanistan. Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne): A Scots Guards Colonel awarded the Military Cross after being shot and wounded saving lives during a coup in Sierra Leone, who later became a pensions business COO. Medicine Neil Shastri-Hurst (Solihull West and Shirley): Was a surgeon and a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps before retraining as a healthcare barrister, spanning medicine, military and law. Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham): A consultant paediatrician who has continued doing NHS shifts alongside her work as Shadow Health Minister. Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth): A former GP. Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle): A medical doctor who grew up in social housing and is now Shadow Justice Minister. Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge): Trained as a psychiatrist before politics and now serves as Shadow Science, Innovation and Technology Minister. The list goes on.

Your tax isn’t fair. So here’s what I would do about it. A wealth tax that works👇

You thought you ate with the tree analogy. But let’s get to the root... 😉 The problem is that your tallest tree isn’t some noble oak. It’s more like a greedy giant sequoia with roots like tentacles, that suck every last drop of water and nutrient out of the soil so the rest of the forrest is left starving. And blocking out all of the sunlight so all trees under it are barely surviving, let alone growing. I don’t want to own the tallest tree. I want to cultivate a healthy wood where all of the trees can thrive and where the saplings don’t have to choose between growing or eating. I want to grow the whole forest. Not just the one tree that’s shading everyone else to death. But since you mentioned it… just so you know, when one dominant tree monopolises resources or suppresses nearby plants and trees, foresters would typically thin that tree to improve the overall forest health and biodiversity… and they’d use a chainsaw. Not an axe. 😉