Paul Spackman

It’s now everyone’s duty to vote Reform wherever Burnham stands. For the banter timeline, for the drama, whatever reason you like. The gods demand he is punished for his hubris.

So I sat thinking about it, and then, by coincidence, the same question came up on GB News: who is the best person to run against Andy Burnham? For me, the answer is simple: Maggie Oliver. She is the former police officer who put her head above the parapet and spoke out when others stayed silent. She challenged the institutions and individuals who, in the eyes of many campaigners and survivors, failed vulnerable children and sought to suppress the truth. Thousands of young girls were subjected to horrific abuse across areas including Rochdale and Oldham. Multiple independent inquiries and criminal convictions have established that serious institutional failings allowed that abuse to continue for years. I attended a public meeting in Oldham and listened to victims, survivors, campaigners, and local residents. They spoke with dignity and clarity about how badly they had been failed. Their testimony was powerful and deeply moving. That is why a contest between Maggie Oliver and Andy Burnham would be so significant. It would give voters a clear choice between someone who has built her reputation by challenging institutional failures and a politician whose record continues to face intense scrutiny from critics. Ultimately, the public will decide who they trust to deliver accountability and ensure that the mistakes of the past are never repeated. @MaggieOliverUK you have an Army here ready to campaign for you.

It’s quite an achievement to suffer a catastrophic kicking at the local elections and decide what the people really want is: * Rejoin the EU * Digital ID * Don’t mention immigration whatever happens Labour are dead and buried.

@higgyboson A tax dodger as PM. I never thought it possible.

I submitted my tax return to HMRC one day late. I was fined £100. And I didn't even owe them any tax! Angela Rayner tried to avoid paying £40,000 stamp duty for nearly a year and could have been fined £8,000 by the HMRC after she recently coughed up the money, (shortly after being gifted £50,000 from a refrigeration company for 'Office Expenses'). She wasn't fined a single penny. No fine. No penalty. No comeback whatsoever. Is it any wonder that us little folk are getting so pissed off with these freeloading, opportunistic, money grabbing, holier than thou, two faced charlatans?

Hi Gary, it’s always fun watching an economist discover a new tax they think will finally fix the damage caused by the previous ones. We already have the highest tax burden since WWII, public spending is near record highs, productivity is stagnant, housing is increasingly unaffordable and real living standards are falling. At some point, could you entertain the possibility that continuously expanding the state may be contributing to the problem rather than as evidence that it hasn’t expanded enough yet.

The Man Who Wants To Lead Labour Just Described Its Lost Voters As A Threat To The Nation. Wes Streeting resigned as Health Secretary this morning and launched his leadership bid with a letter that deserves to be read carefully. Not for what it says about the NHS. For what it says about how he intends to fight. Reform UK, Streeting writes, represents dangerous English nationalism and an existential threat to the future integrity of the United Kingdom. Reform won 27 percent of votes cast in local elections across England a week ago. Millions of working class people in Labour's former heartlands, people whose parents and grandparents voted Labour for generations, chose that party. Describing their choice as dangerous English nationalism is not a strategy for winning them back. It is the attitude that drove them away in the first place, restated with greater confidence the morning after the worst local election result in Labour history. The NHS claims in the letter require equal scrutiny. Streeting describes a fastest improvement in waiting times in history. The Nuffield Trust's deputy director of research told the Telegraph that the apparent progress owes more to administrative removals than genuine increases in patient care. The number of patients waiting over 12 hours for emergency admission in March 2026 was 141 times higher than before the pandemic. The waiting list remains above seven million. The letter presents stabilisation as transformation and expects nobody to check. Then there is Angela Rayner. HMRC has cleared her of wrongdoing over the stamp duty affair that ended her Cabinet career in September. The clearance itself is more complicated than her team is presenting. Tax Policy Associates, an independent expert body, states it cannot understand why HMRC decided not to charge a penalty. Both of Rayner's advisers explicitly told her to obtain specialist tax advice. She did not. Independent experts say a penalty of around 20 percent was the likely and legally correct outcome. HMRC reached a different conclusion without explaining why. A £50,000 donation to the Office of Angela Rayner Limited from Refrigeration House Limited arrived on 24 March 2026, declared on the parliamentary register and described as towards staffing costs. Weeks later Rayner paid the £40,000 stamp duty bill. Whether any connection exists between the donation and the payment cannot be asserted. The questions the timing raises are entirely legitimate and entirely unanswered. Over 100 Labour MPs have now called for Starmer to go. The threshold to trigger a leadership contest is 81. The numbers exist. What has been missing is a serious candidate willing to step forward and bear the consequences. Streeting has now stepped forward. Rayner is positioning. Burnham remains without a seat. The succession is underway. The candidates are the products of the same political culture that produced the Mandelson appointment, the three line whip, the undeclared Palantir meeting and the systematic accommodation of interests that do not align with Britain's. Streeting's letter describes Reform voters as nationalists. Rayner's clearance raises questions her supporters are not asking. Burnham's record on grooming gang accountability in Greater Manchester has never been satisfactorily addressed. None of them has identified the culture as the problem. None of them has proposed dismantling it. The country is being forced to accept the same arrangement with different names attached. The questions are already forming. They will not wait for the leadership contest to conclude. "Reform UK, Streeting writes, represents dangerous English nationalism and an existential threat to the future integrity of the United Kingdom."

@AngelaRayner, a few questions your statement does not answer. Tax Policy Associates, one of the most respected independent tax bodies in the country, states it cannot understand why HMRC decided not to charge a penalty. Both of your advisers explicitly told you to obtain specialist tax advice before completing the transaction. You did not obtain it. Independent experts say a penalty of approximately 20 percent was the likely and legally correct outcome under Schedule 24 of the Finance Act 2007. HMRC reached a different conclusion without explaining why. Do you believe HMRC reached the correct conclusion and if so can you explain why two independent expert bodies disagree? You state you had no personal financial interest in the trust set up for your son. The trust was funded in part by NHS compensation money awarded for your son's care. You sold your remaining stake in your Ashton constituency home to that trust for £162,500 in January 2025 and used those proceeds as a deposit on an £800,000 flat in Hove. How do you define no personal financial interest in that transaction? A £50,000 donation to the Office of Angela Rayner Limited from Refrigeration House Limited arrived on 24 March 2026, described as towards staffing costs and declared on the parliamentary register. Weeks later you paid the £40,000 stamp duty bill. Who owns Refrigeration House Limited, what is their connection to you, and was any part of that donation used directly or indirectly to meet the stamp duty liability? You say politicians should be held to high standards. The questions above are what high standards look like in practice. They deserve answers.

Remember the sequence. The Telegraph reveals Rayner removed herself from the deeds of the family house, designates a luxury seaside flat as her “main residence” and saves £40,000 in stamp duty while sitting in Cabinet demanding higher taxes on everyone else. Only once she’s caught does she “self‑refer” to HMRC and the ethics adviser, having already banked the benefit of the dodge. Now, months later, we’re told a quiet settlement of the missing tax, no fine and a conveniently timed green light just happens to arrive on the morning a leadership challenge is expected – and we’re meant to shout “vindicated” not “very cosy indeed”.

There is a scene in @HBO's Chernobyl that most viewers miss. A scientist presents evidence of the disaster to a Belarusian party official. The official dismisses her expertise, then boasts that he used to run a shoe factory. It is not central to the plot, but it explains everything. The Soviet Union was governed by a snowball of incompetence - decades of nepotism where ministries were handed to people with no relevant knowledge, provided they had the right party connections. Pedigree was political, not professional. I grew up there. My parents were subject matter experts who spent their careers battling apparatchiks enforcing decisions they did not understand. That is why I flinch when I hear the same logic here in Britain. @UKLabour politicians celebrate the "right background" - the poorer, the more deprived, the better. Council house to government, presented as triumph. Progress and resilience deserve recognition. But in these jubilations, merit vanishes. And celebrating ascent without competence is not progress. It is the embryo of disaster. Look at the Labour Party's front bench. Britain's central challenge is wealth creation - economic growth. Yet these are former charity workers, public sector lifers, people who have always been on the receiving end of funds rather than generating them. They have never had to create value others willingly pay for. So they look to regulators for growth ideas. It is farcical. It is only possible in a culture where navigating party structures replaces proven ability. A friend told me recently his wife had to close her coffee shop - high traffic, real revenue, still unprofitable due to taxes and business rates. In his frustration he said something raw: he no longer cares if folks running the government are toolmakers' sons or landed gentry. He wants competence. He found himself saying he would rather be ruled by Old Etonians. Not because Eton College guarantees talent. It does not. But sheer competence - knowing your subject - has become so scarce in British governance that the impulse is understandable. We are not the Soviet Union. We are nowhere near collapse. But on the left of our politics, the distance is shrinking faster than we admit.

The asset-rich middle is the designated payer, as usual. Not the top, who have trusts, BPR, agricultural relief, and lifetime gifting advice. Not the bottom, who have nothing to tax. The squeeze is - true to form - on the band roughly £500k to £2m of estate, which is now a terraced house in Wandsworth plus a DC pot. Threshold frozen at £325k since 2009. Houses doubled. That’s the tax rise. No vote, no debate, no despatch box. Inflation does the work. IHT take: £2.7bn then, £8.5bn now, £14bn by 2030. Share of estates paying: 2.7% to nearly 10%. Not because Britain got richer. Because the number stayed still. Pensions in scope from April 2027 sits on top. Threshold was calibrated for a world where pensions were outside the estate. Removing the exemption without uprating is a double tightening. Hence the £34k average extra bill. Same trick everywhere. Income tax bands frozen. Personal allowance taper. Dividend allowance gutted. Savings allowance. £40bn a year by 2028 per the IFS. Zero rate changes. Closing a loophole is just the cover story. The policy is a stealth wealth tax on the asset-rich middle, collected by inflation.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Expect more of these taxes as the state continues to spend spend spend.

Labour supporters see one decent GDP quarter and act like Reeves actually did come from accounts. That’s the level of economic illiteracy we’re dealing with. Meanwhile, life outside Narnia….the highest tax burden since WWII, businesses collapsing daily, borrowing exploding, productivity flatlining, energy costs crippling industry, and Britain deliberately shutting down domestic oil & gas to import foreign energy instead.

It is reality - the reality this country is enduring due to governments of all colours borrowing far too much, egged on by a political and media class that thinks the answer to every problem is "more government spending" So now, we are at the mercy of our creditors ... and we have no-one to blame but ourselves. Beyond the rabble-rousing words, what are you actually proposing, Richard? That we "abolish the bond markets"? Default on all our debts? How would that work? How would that help provide better living standards? Or enhance our democracy?

Here are 4 things that happened to the UK in the last 24 hours: 1. The Labour government confirmed it will remove the right to a jury trial. Cases will be tried by a judge alone. 2. The Labour gvt confirmed it will impose Digital ID despite it never being included in Labour's manifesto and nearly 3 million Brits signing a petition against it. 3. The Labour gvt confirmed we will "align" with the European Union, directly going against the 2016 democratic vote for Brexit & forcing the British people to pay billions for laws they'll never be able to influence. 4. The Labour gvt confirmed that while Islamist sympathisers & antisemites are free to march on the streets of our capital city, & while it welcomes former allies of al-Qaeda into Downing Street, it has banned conservative activists from joining a peaceful protest against mass immigration in London. Put all these things together and you get a sense - just a sense - of how hideously authoritarian and illiberal this Labour government really is.

@AngelaRayner @wallaceme Either you’re lying or you’re simply too cretinous to understand one of HMRC’s simpler rules or both Whichever it is, you’ve demonstrated you’re not fit to be let anywhere near government

I welcome HMRC’s conclusion, which has cleared me of any wrongdoing. I have been exonerated by HMRC of the accusation that I deliberately sought to avoid tax. When purchasing a home of my own with a mortgage, I did not own any other property and had no personal financial interest in the court-instructed trust set up to manage my son’s financial award. I was advised by experts that I should pay stamp duty at the standard rate. I set out to pay the correct amount of tax. I took reasonable care and acted in good faith, based on the expert advice I received, and HMRC has accepted this. I have always sought to act with integrity, and I believe politicians should be held to high standards - that is why I resigned from government and cooperated fully with HMRC.  I wanted to ensure that I paid every penny that I owed, and have done so. I am relieved that my family can now move on - and that I can get on with my job.

The reason Israel keeps doing well at Eurovision is not that the Israeli government is good at marketing. The Israeli government is, on most days, one of the worst-marketed states on earth. The reason Israel keeps doing well at Eurovision is that millions of people across Europe are watching the same news that other Europeans watch, reading the same op-eds, watching the same celebrities pose in keffiyehs, and have decided, quietly, that they disagree. open.substack.com/pub/henmazzig/…

@HasanEssam29636 There’s a simple lesson to learn; don’t start a war you can never win

One of the most terrifying images in history: a transformation from life to death. Gaza in 2023 and 2026!

@TomLondon6 There is no genocide Agree he’s not decent; lies constantly & his recognition of a Palestinian state was moronic

WHY do people keep saying Starmer is “decent”? He has supported and enabled a GENOCIDE

@King0243_PJC @zarahsultana You’re deluded Any native English speaker can read that for what it really is The Raisin delights in her support for nefarious causes & the Hopkins tweet is a p**s take Your delight in it merely confirms your cretinity

Watching Katie Hopkins forced to grovel on a digital leash for @zarahsultana is pure theatre. There is no greater joy than seeing a professional bully legally compelled to pin her own failure to the top of her profile for 24 hours. Keep that apology exactly where everyone can see it. #KatieHopkins #ZarahSultana

Ed Davey saying the quiet part out loud. He wants PR to happen just to stop Reform. He sees Reform as a threat to democracy after *checks notes* millions of people voted for Reform to win the local elections. A liberal’s motto is if you can’t beat them, change the system.