AlexBeach 🇨🇦🇦🇺🇳🇿🇬🇧

@owenjonesjourno You people used the murder of Jo Cox to paint brexiteers as far right, including leftist brexiteers, and the Grenfell tragedy as a stick to thrash May even though it was the fault of a Labour council. Go away

It’s very obvious what Nigel Farage is doing with the murder of Ann Widdecombe. He wants to shut down scrutiny of himself and his fellow Reform politicians by claiming that holding any of them to account threatens their personal safety.

@owenjonesjourno Like Labour then?

Retweeted by Isabel Oakeshott. Very obvious that if Reform come to power, they will lock people up for criticising them.

@LBC @jfwduffield @TomSwarbrick1 People dissembling, saying employment levels are higher, probably true, but it’s also true that UNemployment is higher also. Every Labour government has left office with unemployment up. Employment is up with cheap, exploited migrant labor not indigenous Britons

‘Rachel Reeves will leave office with more people out of work than when she came in… is that a legacy to be proud of?’ @Tomswarbrick1 puts the latest unemployment figures to Labour’s Lucy Rigby.

@PaulEmbery You have that the wrong way round. The money that these people have is their property not the property of a state that graciously permits them to keep some of it. If you think that rates should be equalised then equalise them down not up

Holding the country to ransom.

@AlbaMurray22 @oli_tatty When I’m PM if you guys vote for a secessionist government you’ll get your independence at midnight the very next day. Deal?

@SandyShores100 @oli_tatty They are entitled to their opinions I didn’t say they werent. What they are not entitled to is to refuse Scotland a say. Would you be okay with London deciding that Newcastle isn’t allowed to decide what Newcastle wants?

One of my scottish mates isn't best pleased

@AlbaMurray22 @oli_tatty Maybe they believe that you and them are countrymen and therefore shouldn’t break up the country? You’re entitled to disagree as much as they’re entitled to believe it

@oli_tatty It’s quite simply really. If Scotland wasn’t an asset to Westminster and was in fact a liability like many of you suggest. Westminster wouldn’t have a problem with letting us have a referendum when the Scottish government asks for one.

@LordAshcroft Ceefax, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Claudia Winkleman’s fringe, conscription and unicycles I can actually get on board with

@edwinhayward No politician would ever support anything that wouldn’t allow them to harvest votes now. This is why council accommodation is always so under invested. Votes are in building not maintaining

Another variation: Government sets aside the £10K at birth not at age 18. That becomes £1.87 million by age 68 at an 8% average return. (The mistake 99.99% of investors make is not starting early enough for full compounding to kick in. A government doesn't have that problem.)

Crazy idea. Be gentle when explaining why it won't work. Government sets aside £10,000 when someone turns 18, invested in an ETF. 50 years later, at retirement age, that £10K is worth £460,000 at a long term average 8% return per year. Buys an annuity instead of state pension.

@NeworpK @GregHadfield @LloydsBank @TheCanaryUK Was “swallowed” by Lloyds 17 years ago. Alistair Darlings Treasury facilitated it

@GregHadfield @LloydsBank @TheCanaryUK Halifax are being swallowed by Lloyds. I feel an account closure/transfer elsewhere coming on in the not-to-distant future.

I’ll call again tomorrow. To reinforce my message: I will not do business with @LloydsBank because it has “de-banked” @TheCanaryUK for supporting Palestinians against the terror state of Israel.

@Williamgallus If they print whatever they like to close the gap between tax and spend, why can’t they just print all of what they spend and stop taxing my labor and savings for my old age? Maybe ask Weimar Germany how that turned out?

It's rare indeed that you find a detailed economic analysis in a Sunday newspaper. But when a "Bold new economic theory" gets this kind of coverage (double centre spread running to 4000 words), we can only describe it as an exceptional occurrence. 1/5

@CoininO @CEBKCEBKCEBK Paid for with development aid from the British Taxpayer

@CEBKCEBKCEBK There was no compassion... It was the quid pro quo for a British company winning the design and engineering contract for the Mangla Dam

Migration is inertial: under 0.2% of Pakistanis are Mirpuris, but almost 80% of UK Pakistanis are, because a bunch of Mirpuris were displaced in 1960 by one big dam construction project & were “compassionately” offered work visas by the UK to fill “labor shortages” in the industrial north, & then metastasized into malignant parasitic growths immediately notorious for sex crimes against minors. Luckily 80% of UK Mirpuris claim they’d like to return home permanently… Eg Bradford had 30 Pakistanis in 1944, 12,000 in 1964, 21,000 in 1970, & ~140,000 in 2021, & now ~75% of them are Mirpuris. You let a few in on work visas & tens of thousands more quickly follow by “compassionate” chain migration. Also worth noting that Bradford had extraordinarily full employment in the 1960s, when the government gave work visas to displaced Mirpuris, to fill jobs there weren’t spare workers for. But suddenly lots of those jobs went away (& excuses for work visas flipped on their head, from “whites are already too busy with other jobs” to “whites are still too lazy to work any jobs”), & eg by 1996 fully half of all Pakistani & Bangladeshi households in Bradford had zero adults in full-time work. They just collect benefits, commit frauds, produce dependents, perpetrate crimes, & hate whites.

@DavidGauke @stephenpollard @_PaulMonaghan @Prosper_UK_ The state pension is a stupid system. Live longer or have fewer children and there is less money going in. If we had a govt that paid £10k into a private pension every time a baby is born it would cost £6bn. But you guys want to harvest votes NOW, not in 67 years.

@_PaulMonaghan @Prosper_UK_ I’m afraid that is entirely wrong. The state pension is expenditure, it is welfare. It is not a return on investment, it is not a payment from the recipient’s pension fund.

The time is right to move on from the triple lock. It is uncertain, unpredictable and expensive. A smoothed earnings link would protect pensioners from inflation, make the system fairer, and free up more money for priorities like defence.

@DavidGauke @stephenpollard @_PaulMonaghan @Prosper_UK_ In that case, Dave, why is income from the state pension subject to tax (yes I know you need income from another source to have to actually pay tax)? Welfare is never taxable. It’s because you politicians raided the pot decades ago. If a private co did that they’d all be in jail

@KarakDesi @Benleo No-one has ever been able explain why an "oppressed" people, having won their liberty, then want to go move to the homeland of their "oppressor". Surely they would be ecstatic at the prospect of their homeland no longer governed by a couple hundred people from Britains elite?

@Benleo Ben, he hasn't said anything wrong about empire pillaging. Why do you think blacks and Asians came here? They had nothing left because of the empire taking it all and then being brought here upon invitation.

Me: certain nationalities in UK are more likely to commit sexual offences than Brits Leftist nutcase: “I’m gonna break your f*****g jaw.” ICE detention facility in New Jersey. I’m not surprised Charlie Kirk was murdered. These people are lunatics.

@anandMenon1 If I were the EU I would demand €, SM & CU BEFORE rejoining. Maximise the humiliation.

If I were the EU, I’d insist on euro membership, just to make sure it would be even harder to leave, were we disposed to try again.

@wh500w @JeremyVineOn5 EU would demand we adopt € before joining, and that we would have to meet the 60% debt and 3% deficit criteria within a fixed time limit in order to do so, maybe as short as 5 years. The resulting austerity would be carnage and you guys would get the blame.

@JeremyVineOn5 but it doesn't specify a time frame as such, also we in theory should have joined it from when the Maastricht treaty was signed but I presume we never met the criteria? In short they can't legally force you?

Would you swap the pound for the Euro in order to rejoin the EU? It's a condition demanded by an EU chief after Labour challengers Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham put a return to the bloc back on the agenda. Is scrapping sterling a price worth paying?

@omgsidewalks Cicely is about as old and rare I can think of Hortense Gretchen

@DespoticInroad The government also owned travel agents and betting shops. What social utility is provided by gambling? Every single nationalised corporation had to compete with “our NHS” for investment. 1/3 of BTs phone boxes were busted as a result of lack of maintenance.

V popular argument on the Right that our current problems are the result of ~statism/~socialism, & that the market-liberal reforms of the last ~half century were a mirage (contradicting Thatcher's own claim that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair/New Labour, because they ~continued much of her legacy). Here's a reminder of what the state used to do in the pre-Thatcherite era: 👉Own/run water, gas, electricity, railway companies as nationalised public monopolies (all sold off in '80s/'90s, often to foreign states, sovereign wealth, PE funds etc.) 👉Own/run municipal bus companies, coal mines, airlines, car factories, steelworks, telecommunications, shipbuilders & much else besides (all privatised in '80s/'90s, many mothballed entirely) 👉Build ~50-100k municipal homes/yr & impose rent controls on the PRS (social housebuilding, and ALL housebuilding, is now a tiny fraction of the post-war peak, millions of units have been privatised under R2B, rent controls were lifted in '88, & the Housing Benefit Bill exploded) 👉Impose strict controls on Forex & the export of capital abroad (controls lifted in 1979 & never re-imposed) 👉Have full employment as consensus policy aim & an attempt to control incomes & prices through Pay Boards/Price Commissions + corporatist relationship with trade unions (all abolished, with trade unions slowly emasculated, & with out-of-work/sickness & disability benefits bill exploding) 👉Impose punitive taxes (of 80/90%+) on high/"unearned" incomes 👉Spend ~5% of GDP on public capital investment/fixed capital formation (collapsing to ~1-2% in Thatcherite decade, where it has hovered around since) Britain's pre-Thatcherite political economy had levels of state involvement in PRODUCTION + NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT + the MANAGEMENT/DIRECTION of capital (not simply redistribution + regulation, as today), that are unimaginable nowadays. Many of the phenomena Ben describes below have little to do with anything approaching a social-democratic political economy – the "massive taxes" (relative to GDP) are largely a function of demographics, common across the developed world (even though our base rate/higher rate/additional rate are MUCH lower than they once were). The regulatory regime in water, energy etc. is a product of privatisation itself. And what we're seeing on stuff like the Renters'/Employment Rights Acts, energy subsidies, judicial rulings on pay via Equalities Act, minimum wage etc. is an attempt by legislators to perform a kind of post-hoc, bureaucratic, progressive distributional correction to the outcomes of a growth model still based on private ownership of core sectors, poor collective bargaining, low levels of public investment, outsourcing, PFI/PPP, globalisation/import dependency, financialisation, with the state desperately facilitating continued FDI etc. etc. rather than altering the growth model itself (which has been broken since 2008).

@jackprandelli UK Governments spend revenue very poorly. Rail, roads, ports, utilities didn’t get any investment when nationalised. When BT got privatised 1/3 of all pay phones didn’t work and had to be fixed at vast expense. Why? That money was spent on Ponzi scheme state pension & NHS

Norway and the UK drilled the same North Sea. 🇳🇴Norway got $2 trillion. 🇬🇧The UK got tax cuts. Same basin,Same era.... Completely different outcomes. Norway captured $30 per barrel in government revenue. The UK captured $11. That gap, compounded over 50 years of production, is the entire difference. Norway's model was simple: tax heavily (78% marginal rate), take direct equity stakes in fields via the SDFI, own part of Equinor, and put everything surplus into a fund invested abroad. The Government Pension Fund Global now holds over $2 trillion in assets. That's $390,000 per Norwegian citizen about 1.5% of all listed equities on earth. The fiscal rule: only spend the 3% annual real return. Never touch the principal. The UK started producing earlier, at lower prices, with a lower tax rate (40%) and no saving mechanism. North Sea revenues flowed straight into the general budget. Economists estimate the UK missed out on roughly £400 billion compared to a Norwegian style regime. The windfall largely financed tax cuts in the 1980s rather than a fund. Where things stand in 2026? Norway's petroleum sector will generate $63 bn in net cash flow this year alone feeding a fund already large enough to cover 10-15% of the national budget from returns alone. The UK is a net energy importer. Since 2021 it has paid countries like Norway more than £100 billion for gas. One country treated oil as a finite resource to convert into permanent financial wealth. The other treated it as income. image source:eia

@CliveWismayer Any attempt to rejoin & EU will demand Schengen, €, & FM BEFORE we join. All the rejoiners saying that we can cross our fingers behind our back and lie about committing to the € etc wouldn’t survive the 10-15 years to get in. EU will demand £bns in “compensation”

One of Leave’s greatest achievements was to throw away the UK’s privileged position on Schengen, the single currency & the rebate (the ‘opt-outs’). The EU will be hard to budge on these 3 in any application to rejoin. And polls have shown the current UK majority in favour of doing so disappears unless the opt-outs are reinstated. Brilliant!