Daniel S

@DavidVance What Becomes of The Brokenhearted - Joan Osborne, no question.

I’ll go first. “Good Year for the Roses” by Elvis Costello beats the George Jones original.

@SamaHoole @jfoster2019 My Mother lord bless her, cooked the liver until dry and chewy. Of course we never knew then how it was meant to taste. Always finished the plate, if you didn’t you would have to go hungry😉

Liver and onions was on the kitchen table of roughly every British household in the country, at least once a fortnight, from approximately 1850 to approximately 1985. A Tuesday meal. Whatever day the butcher had lamb's liver in, or pig's liver if you were further down the week, or ox liver if the household was stretching the budget. Your mother bought it that afternoon. Still warm, or nearly. Deep burgundy, slick and glossy on the butcher's paper. Half a pound. Tuppence. Change from a shilling. She sliced it quarter of an inch thick, dusted it in seasoned flour, and laid it in a pan where a pound of onions had been going soft in bacon fat for twenty minutes. Two minutes one side. Two minutes the other. The middle still faintly pink. Overcooked liver was a mortal sin in a British kitchen, spoken of by grandmothers with genuine sadness, the way a priest might discuss a lapsed parishioner. Pan juices deglazed with water and Worcestershire, poured over. Mashed potato. A pile of cabbage. A rasher of bacon laid across the top if it was a good week. The whole thing cost, in 1962, approximately 8p per serving. It delivered, in a single plate, the highest concentration of bioavailable vitamin A in any food on earth, more B12 than any supplement will ever contain, haem iron at absorption rates a plant source cannot match, copper, zinc, choline, folate, and selenium. Nobody called it a superfood. Nobody called anything a superfood. It was called Tuesday. Then, between 1985 and 2005, liver quietly disappeared. Mothers stopped buying it. The butcher stopped ordering it. The supermarket stopped stocking it. By 2010, most British adults under thirty had never knowingly eaten it. The word now carries a faint cultural embarrassment. A food your nan ate. Something to move past. Meanwhile, 20% of British women of childbearing age are anaemic. The NHS prescribes them ferrous sulphate tablets that cause nausea and take six months to address a deficiency one plate of liver a fortnight would correct in weeks. The women taking the tablets are, in many cases, the granddaughters of the women who ate the liver. The deficiency is cultural amnesia with a prescription attached. Your butcher still has lamb's liver in the counter. Ask him. He will be delighted. He might throw in the kidneys. Flour. Bacon fat. Onions. Four minutes total. Worcestershire. Mashed potato underneath. The grandmother is gone, but the dish remembers her, and so do you, whether you knew her or not. Eat it. Pass it on.

@annaroseridgway Go away.

Why is it so controversial to say that the government shouldn’t pay for pensioners to buy presents and go on holidays? If a family on UC spent some of it on holidays and presents all of these right-leaning boomers would be calling them scroungers or worse!!

@annaellis_net @miriam_cates 👏👏👏👏well researched, unlike some on here, there is so much false BS spouted on here regarding pensioners so called wealth.

Nice try. Let's start with the BSP shall we? The BSP is £9164.80 per year, it's the new State Pension (NSP) that's £12457.60 p.a. Women who don't get enough NI credits don't even get those amounts (carers, stay at home mums, disabled etc.) Two thirds of pensioners are on BSP atm. Then there's the reliance on the SP. That "majority" who have other incomes include many whose workplace pensions net them a cool £50-100 per month. Not exactly going to get them out of penury. But they will have to pay tax on that monthly pittance if it pushes them over the threshold. 9 million imminent retirees have private pensions that don't reach the BSP limit, btw. Not to mention the pensioners who have to find work as shelf-stackers or stock pickers to make ends meet. They're not wholly reliant on a SP either, so it's OK to demonise them? That's how it works? Those on the NSP won't get pension credits. Council tax support is a postcode lottery, is not guaranteed and is means tested. A pensioner couple on NSP may not get any reduction, e.g a couple in Warwickshire need a maximum income of £175 per week to get the full rebate. If both are on NSP? They get no help. Housing benefit is another postcode lottery and also dependent on whether the pensioner's on NSP or BSP. Free travel? Only on buses outside London. Winter fuel payments? Not guaranteed. Senior citizen discounts? Often less than family discounts and entirely in the gift of businesses, who could offer discounts to everybody if they wanted. 75% of pensioners are not millionaires. Not even close. You want to cut government spending. Good. The devolved governments cost £95 billion a year, we could stop that. Let Scotland fund its own free tuition & prescriptions. Give Wales the chance to fund its own UBI pilots. Quangos cost at least £3 billion a year, get rid of their funding. Drastically reduce the spending on government departments (Cabinet Office spends £1.4bn, HMRC spends £6.9bn, DEFRA spends £7.6bn) - got to be at least a £2bn saving across departments. NHS trusts account for £132bn government spending. Perhaps if they stopped rejecting the return of medical equipment and reduced medical malpractice payments, a mere £10bn could be saved? Public sector pension schemes get a £22bn top up annually. Stop that. Private schemes don't get that support. Environmental levies cost £15bn annually. Stop those. Renegotiate any older higher prices. All told, that would save the government £147bn. The pension bill is £163bn. Bit of a shortfall, but it might buy you some breathing space. But no, you'd rather tell granny to shove off, sell the home she's lived in all her life and form an orderly queue out of society. The fact that you'd rather bully the elderly than sort out other government over-spending speaks volumes.

Is the state pension really so 'meagre'? Let's take a look... The basic state pension is just £12,547 a year. But... Only around 15% of pensioners rely on the state pension alone. The vast majority have other income from private pensions etc., which is exactly how our system is designed to work (and why the UK has generous tax breaks for pension contributions). The small proportion of pensioners whose only source of income is the state pension are entitled to other benefits in addition, including pension credit, housing benefit and council tax support. A pensioner with no other income, no savings, no disabilities, no care responsibilities and rent of £800 per month is entitled to £401.55 a week in benefits including state pension, which is £20,881 a year. For comparison, a full time minimum wage worker has an after tax income of £21,364. Unlike a pensioner, a full time minimum wage worker is not entitled to free travel, free prescriptions, a winter fuel payment or senior citizens discounts. £21,000 a year is not a lot of money. But the very poorest pensioners have similar incomes to low-wage workers. Given the greater costs faced by those who are working, it's perhaps not surprising that working age adults are now more likely to live in poverty than pensioners. And at the other end of the scale, one in four pensioners are millionaires and still receive the basic state pension, paid for by current tax payers (including those on minimum wage). No one (definitely not me) is suggesting that the state pension should be reduced for the poorest pensioners. But pension spending now accounts for half of the UK's social security budget and, given the urgent need to cut government spending, we must consider reforms like means-testing and scrapping the triple lock.

@benjaminbutter @croucher_tiger You are talking bullshit, there are pensioners on exactly that with no help from the state, the average income overall for single pensioners is 14.5k.

@croucher_tiger Nobody is on £12,500 a year

Every serious person knows the triple lock is impossible to sustain and setting us on course for a nearly £200bn a year bill. And yet any suggestion of reality to the P&O cruise brigade unleashed entitled fury. Someone needs to stand up to these retirement communists.

@benjaminbutter You’re pretty sick.

@Timoldland @RowleyfileRRR We will rock you🤮🤮

What songs can you simply NOT listen to? They instantly make you skip the track or change station? For me there are only two. Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On Dexy’s Midnight Runners - Come on Eileen The 2nd particularly is so terrible and ingrained into my brain from attending a glut of 80s and 90s family weddings that I simply cannot allow it in my ears.

@lluis7bou Class

Así se ha ido Lamine Yamal del Metropolitano.

@JuliaHB1 @NBAFan23302408 People getting off on someone being called a certain word for disagreeing with a Government policy, and not offering any counter argument or evidence other than “they’re kids”. Hmm….

@NBAFan23302408 Right back at ya!

The breakfasts are not free. They are paid for by taxes - mostly on parents who feed their own kids. Most of these 10,000 children would have had a perfectly healthy breakfast at home without these clubs. This isn't about helping the poorest kids, it's the state taking over the basic job of parenting.

@NewsonTed The 12 billion figure is misleading, the OBR have estimated that the annual cost is 12billion higher NOW that it would have been had the TL not been introduced back in 2011. To scrap it now in favour of the lower 2.5% would only save around 2.5 billion.

🧵 Why the triple lock on pensions must be scrapped: The triple lock guarantees the state pension rises each year by whichever is highest: Inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5%. It sounds sensible, in reality, its a fiscal time bomb that no politician wants to defuse.

@NewsonTed Where are getting these figures from? The difference between 2.5% & 4.8% triple lock is estimated at 2.5 billion.

The triple lock was a good idea for an uncertain time: reversing previous pension decline. That job is done. Keeping it now costs £12 billion extra per year, crowds out other spending, and asks young workers to fund rising payments for a generation far wealthier than they are.

@stickthetip @PeterMckeever2 You are correct, it was Racing TV yesterday, my mistake and they are now showing the replay.

@RICTIC501 @PeterMckeever2 ”fact check” AT THE RACES would never have had replays of a race at Aintree.

The Gold Dancer situation is very sad But Paul Townend, the greatest jumps jockey of his generation with 150+ Grade 1 wins knowingly riding a badly injured horse out to the finish just to win? Not a chance

@comarocity Rip Gold Dancer

4/10🇬🇧エイントリー競馬場 マイルドウェイチェイス（NvGⅠ・5000） 終始雁行状態のRegent's Strollを突き放した Gold Dancer（騸7）に最終障害で大きな罠！！ を何とか粘って初のGⅠ勝利 ＃競馬　＃障害競走　＃海外競馬 x.com/RacingTV/statu…

@sportstalk_all Rip Gold Dancer, expect to hear more on this.

Final fence drama again at Aintree 220 Aintree 1. Gold Dancer 2. Regent’s Stroll 3. Salver Gold dancer blunders then carries on to win #aintree #grandnational

@brucemillington Not for me, he might be a great coach but find him irritating, I’ll take 4/5 “come on Rosy”

After months of extremely moderate golf commentary on Sky, the legendary Butch Harmon is on the mic. The world just got slightly better.

@clt4646 @drlukeevans State Pension isn’t Welfare, include it if you may but it’s a legal contract. Do keep up.

@RICTIC501 @drlukeevans Net zero has nothing to do with the welfare budget. Do try to keep up. You also will know the largest proportion of welfare is made up by state pensions.

Labour is now spending more on welfare than it is raising in Income Tax. In the 2025/26 financial year, the Treasury raised £331 billion in Income Tax. In the same year, the Government spent £333bn on welfare. As I and many others have pointed out, this is unsustainable. A 🧵

@G4rethM4tthew5 @drlukeevans State pension for those who have contributed for 35+ years is not a benefit, the government cannot legally reduce SP other than scrap triple lock (saving £2.5 billion pa) hardly a dent in the deficit.

@drlukeevans How much would you cut the largest benefits item by? That being state pensions at around half of that bill.

@bankofdad61 @drlukeevans That’s because the government cannot legally reduce state pensions other than scrap the triple lock with an annual saving of only £2.5 billion, and btw state pension isn’t welfare for those who contributed for 35 years plus.

@drlukeevans How much of the welfare budget is spent on pensions, guessing it’s a question you don’t want to answer, because over 50% is spent on pensions, and it’s part of the welfare budget.

@clt4646 @drlukeevans Scrapping the triple lock would have reduced the annual cost by 2.5 billion (basic 2.5% increase as opposed to triple lock 4.8%) hardly going to put a dent in the deficit. How about scrapping net zero £25 billion last year and rising with no proven global impact?

@drlukeevans Will the Tories stop the unsustainable triple lock on pensions? The largest proportion of welfare spending is pensions. Unless the conservatives also deal with the largest welfare bill sadly you will only scrape around the edges