Richard Templeman

@pallyrand @lfg_uk If it costs £179m to rule something out, how many ideas can we afford to look at per year? I would wager that the decision makers only really looked at a fraction of the materials produced. The rest added no value to the decision making process but cost a fortune.

£179,000,000 was spent on the Stonehenge tunnel. So, where is it? Well, there is no tunnel. The only thing £179,000,000 produced was paperwork. That's it. Do you think this an acceptable use of taxpayers money?

@lfg_uk As with so many of these schemes - whether or not it should happen, it shouldn’t require that level of bureaucratic waste in order to reach a yes or no decision. It’s just madness.

@davidjdenton @thomsonchris @J4m35c4mpb3ll Funnily enough Christophe has blocked me from replying to this claptrap. He has colonised this thread!

@thomsonchris @RichardTemplem2 @J4m35c4mpb3ll Funnily enough it was a Scottish king who unified the kingdoms because Scotland's colonialism experiment didn't work and made you poor.

Every year an estimated £200bn in wealth is extracted from Scotland - we receive £50bn back and are told we have a deficit & to be grateful. Colonialism has to stop.

@thomsonchris @J4m35c4mpb3ll Picking up the claptrap below here. UK gov doesn’t own Scot ports so no control of their fate. Owners have no incentive to make them fail. Nothing to stop someone starting ScotAir. How is Eng stealing wind? G’mouth closed due to losing money (like many Eng refineries).

@thomsonchris @J4m35c4mpb3ll Please could you explain the mechanism by which this wealth is “plundered” ? You seem to imply that the Scottish economy is double the official size but the rest is magically hidden / stolen.

@leslieebond @J4m35c4mpb3ll They often seem to think that if something is sold to a person or business in England, then it’s stolen… Likewise if an English company buys a farm / factory in Scotland then everything it produces is also stolen… It’s a chronic, wilful delusion.

@J4m35c4mpb3ll The chart is pure fiction. Scotland’s tax revenue for 2024–25 was £91.4bn, not £200bn. Public spending was £117.6bn, leaving a £26.2bn deficit. That supposed “£50bn cut” is actually a record-high block grant from the UK. These are the facts.

@Aceofspades256 @KathrynPorter26 @ZackPolanski I would guess that the extra tax revenue will eclipse the bill savings, but that revenue could be recycled into supporting vulnerable households. We are still likely talking £bn and lower aggregate carbon emissions so I don’t see a sensible reason to say no.

@KathrynPorter26 @ZackPolanski I agree that this is greener than importing LNG. BUT please estimate the amount you think this will reduce bills by. It will be negligible.

A huge betrayal. Won't lower bills. Won't give us more energy security. Won't insulate from price shocks. And sends a clear message to the world that we are backing new oil and gas drilling.

@CRLibingstone @Malcolm_Offord @Conservatives I’m neither a reform supporter nor Scottish but he’s literally proposing to end certain destructive policies which are highly, negatively distortive to people’s lives. Scrapping the rubbish policies listed here would improve people’s lives and not cost the gov much (if anything).

@Malcolm_Offord @Malcolm_Offord you have nothing to offer but to offend in the Tory way @Conservatives and you’ll only decimate our communities up and down Scotland as you all are a part of elitist man

My ambition for Scotland is to restore the fundamental incentive to work, allowing people to earn higher incomes, and to build wealth for themselves, their families, and communities. That’s why we plan to cut Scottish income taxes below England's, making it the best place in the UK to live and work. But just as important is removing the complex cliff edges in the system, which are stifling all incentive to work and so are harming public services too. For example, someone looking after a loved one at home and receiving both the Carer Support Payment and Scottish Carer Supplement while doing a part-time job, if their wages rise above £10,608 per year will suddenly lose £5,100 in benefits withdrawn. Or take a police sergeant with children. If they or their partner earns above £60k, they start seeing their child benefit clawed back, and when working overtime end up keeping less than half of every extra pound they earn. Or take a doctor who still has a student maintenance loan to repay, who gets a raise above £100k. Suddenly, for every extra £1 they earn they get to take home less than 22p – before even taking into account their pension contributions. If they have a working partner and nursery-age children, then taking the raise actually makes them worse off by thousands of pounds, because tax-free childcare is suddenly withdrawn. With punishing cliff edges like these, is it any wonder that GP practices close their lists, experienced doctors retire early, dentists reduce NHS work, schools struggle to hire, and hospitals struggle to fill shifts, leaving wards understaffed and theatres empty despite long waiting lists? Fundamental to any workforce plan for fixing our public sector is getting the incentives right, and ensuring that workers have more money in their pockets at the end of a shift. Making sure that workers are rewarded is the most important lever we can pull to improve hiring, retention, and morale. Otherwise we’d be stuck with the same old story we've seen for years: throwing more funding at public sector raises, raising taxes to pay for it, and so taxing it back off those very same workers again while failing to fix the underlying problem. In the meantime, the private sector bears the burden, and faces many of the same productivity problems. A Reform government in Scotland will do everything it can with devolved powers to smooth away these damaging cliff edges as quickly as possible, so that earning an extra £1 always means keeping at least 50p of it. We will do everything we can to ensure that work always pays, and that you’re always rewarded for working an extra shift. For a Scotland that respects and rewards work, the only choice is Reform UK.

@danielmgmoylan @BWoodzy99 I don’t think it should be abolished or means tested (though it being taxable rightly, partially means tests). It should be linked only to inflation by default, with any extra increases being a political decision, not divine right. Over the long run that saves significant £.

@BWoodzy99 Well yes, that would save money. But it falls into my bracket of basically abolishing the state pension (for most). That’s neither equitable nor feasible.

I always want to know what these people would replace the Triple Lock with and why it would always be cheaper. Or do they just (at heart) want to scrap pensions?

@Sam_Dumitriu Piety. It is just piety! The Eurocentric belief that if we valiantly / unilaterally restrict production, the rest of the world will follow.

If it's true that "oil and gas prices are set on the global market" and "we're too small to affect the global price", then what is the climate case for restricting domestic fossil fuel production?

@drhingram Is it obligatory to dress like Galloway to be one of his candidates ?

Meet the candidate for Ward End in Birmingham 🤣🤣

@SharePickers @Littleboyblue75 @JohnRosier How long does the equipment last? If it pays for itself in 8 years then needs replacing in the 9th then that’s no good at all, but if it lasts 20 years then that’s far more compelling!

@Littleboyblue75 @JohnRosier No Contact Solar owned by EDL. Octopus would not attach cables to render for fear of damage, which is fair enough but Contact were excellent.

Two weeks ago we had solar panels and a battery fitted. We have just completed our first full week with the system. Our electric bill for the week commencing 10th March 2026 compared to the same week last year has dropped by 71% from £31.71 to £9.05. We also have not received our DNO cert yet which would allow us to sell back into the grid. On sunny days our battery has been full by 11:30am meaning we don’t yet benefit from the excess free energy being produced. We are now going to buy an electric car and fill it with free energy. If only all of the UK could do this, it would go along way to reducing the countries high energy costs. @octopusenergy @g__j

@TomLondon6 Which taxes for the rich did Thatcher / Lawson cut and what were the costs of those taxes?

When I was young, the UK and Norway both started drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea Thatcher WASTED the proceeds on privatisation and tax cuts for the rich Norway put it into a National Wealth Fund to help generations of Norwegians

@richkav1 @btharris93 The triple lock is also the problem. Guaranteeing that one group of society’s payouts rise faster than inflation and/or wages is literally guaranteed to eventually bankrupt the country. The only question is ‘at what point should it be scrapped?’

@btharris93 But that’s not mentioned in your post is it.

It’s depressing how easily many of the UK’s fiscal problems could be solved (by scrapping the triple lock and liberalising planning) but we simply choose not to because the pensioners would get mad.

@mikegalsworthy Which government spending would you have cut / which taxes would you have raised in order to be able to squirrel that money away? And then for extra marks, what would the economic consequences of those actions been?

I do think it’s Thatcher that you should be blaming… We could have had our own domestic oil and a £1 trillion fund by now.

@AnneLindsay7 @worstall @Timothy37619215 To pose the question another way, why should we not allow more North Sea extraction? - it lowers carbon emissions by not importing from Qatar - it generates significant tax revenues - it improves the UK’s trade balance Even if we believe zero cost savings, what is the downside?

@worstall @Timothy37619215 And we are stuck with the licences and cost of fuel on the open market. Your comment adds nothing.

How many times do all the advocates for more extraction of North Sea oil and gas have to be told it won’t make one iota of difference to 🇬🇧 supply and prices . WE DONT QWN IT!!! The multinationals do . It was all sold off by Thatcher ffs !!!

@carol_nasvytis @LoftusSteve @janrosenow China is building coal fired power stations. It also has a desert in which to build solar, the UK and Canada do not.

@LoftusSteve @janrosenow China see the point and they are vastly smarter than the US when it comes to strategic planning.

Spain's renewables build-out has structurally decoupled its electricity prices from gas markets. Gas now sets the price in only 15% of hours, compared to 90% in Italy. Countries that invested early in clean power are far less exposed to fossil fuel price shocks.

@pirateboy75 @LBC It’s a feature, not a bug

@LBC Not one single person will lose their job over this scandalous waste of money.

Stonehenge tunnel officially scrapped - after more than £179,000,000 spent on plan lbc.co.uk/article/stoneh…

@UniofOxford Thank you for identifying the potential household savings from maximal production. Please can you contrast this against the negatives of maximal production? I’m not aware of any such negatives, but your conclusion implies there are?

'Staying the course on clean energy would not only save households three times as much money but render the UK truly energy secure for generations to come.' Maximising North Sea production would reduce bills by just £16 to £82 per year, say researchers from the Oxford Smith School ⬇️ theconversation.com/would-more-nor…

@jruddy99 7.5bn barrels sold at $100 would directly (excluding employment taxes and second order effects) produce > £200bn in tax. Why is that a bad thing? You could use that money to fund all manner of renewable subsidies instead of adding them to bills.

If we drilled for every single one of those 7.5 billion barrels today, they would all be sold for $100 each - because that is the international market price. There is no guarantee a single drop would even reach the UK's petrol forecourts.