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Something from me on Friday's @UKSupremeCourt Uber judgment strongerinnos.medium.com/the-uber-supre… ... @JolyonMaugham
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Michael O'Connor
21.8K posts
Michael O'Connor
@StrongerInNos
DMs open. Views entirely personal. Longer stuff on Medium.
Katılım Ekim 2013
99 Takip Edilen1.6K Takipçiler
@FraserNelson In 2019 over 3 million families were claiming Tax Credits which have now been wholly replaced by UC 🤷♂️
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Universal Credit was intended to speed the journey from welfare to work. LCWRA, the UC sickness benefit, is doing the reverse - with profound consequences.
I hope this forms a big part of the RF's report. Failing to recognise this daily calamity is the new British disease.
Resolution Foundation@resfoundation
April 2026 will mark a true milestone for the UK benefits system: the end of the thirteen-year rollout of Universal Credit that has brought together all means-tested working-age benefits. This moment is an opportunity to consider how the system can be improved ⤵️ buff.ly/TjrE4OW
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@StrongerInNos @highfivedave @chrislittlewoo8 @sandrasparrow2 Council tax band G in Cornwall £475 a month
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Can someone tell me what I’m actually paying for?
My latest council tax bill has arrived. £330 a month.
For what?
We still have to pay extra just to have the garden waste collected.
The roads are knackered, the drains are blocked, and every time it rains the streets flood.
The local town is now devoid of shops because business rates and parking charges have made it almost impossible to trade and expensive for people to visit.
So where is the money going?
Councils spend tax revenue on vanity projects like cycle lanes that might see a bike once a decade and disability parking bays that sit empty most of the time.
Meanwhile the services we actually rely on continue to decline.
We are expected to pay more and more for less and less.
And at the same time we all see public money being spent on people who entered this country illegally and have never contributed.
So I’ll ask again.
What exactly are we paying for?
The whole system is broken.
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If ‘you’ were a UK resident, for stamp duty to have been 15% of the property value then it would have to be a second (or subsequent) home costing £5m. If you had the income to afford a £5m second home, then your Council Tax is unlikely to be more than a very teeny percentage of your income and nothing like 10%
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Why do you have to pay 10% of what you earn on Council Tax for your house…
When you already paid 15% stamp duty to buy the house…
From money you paid 45% tax on in the first place
That’s 3 f*cling taxes just to LIVE.
Why do you have to pay 20% tax on a new car
And then up to £5,490 road tax
And then 59% fuel duty and 20% VAT which is £41.46 out for a £70 tank in tax
That’s 3 f*cking taxes just to DRIVE
AND there’s STILL POTHOLES f*cking everywhere
Beyond a joke
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@highfivedave @chrislittlewoo8 @sandrasparrow2 Tell me you live in one of the most expensive properties in the country without telling me you live in one of the most expensive. At £484 monthly it’s at least Band H and maybe Band I so around the top 1% of houses in Wales (top 0.3% if Band I).
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@chrislittlewoo8 @sandrasparrow2 Just had mine . £424 per month. Double in Wales to £848 per month if holiday home. God help though to those young families with mortgages. The rates have become like another mortgage . Where the F - - - is the money going????
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@GoodByeXNow @paullewismoney @robprogressive @PhilipJMilton In Hackney, LHA is £700 a week for a four-bedder. So near £3k a month. Childcare near enough £1,800 even with present limit. Standard elements for single parent and two kids (3rd presently excluded) another £1,000. That’s near enough £6k before any disability or other addition.
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@StrongerInNos @paullewismoney @robprogressive @PhilipJMilton Housing support is tied to Local Housing Allowance (LHA), which is based on the 30th percentile of local rents, not market rents.
Even the LCWRA element after April 2026 is £429.08/month at the higher rate, or £217.26/month at the lower rate.
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@paullewismoney @robprogressive @PhilipJMilton Easy enough if large family in high rent area and max childcare. Obv no benefit cap if someone’s working (many people seem not to realise it only applies to workless households). Once the 2-child limit goes and also on childcare then £10k should be quite possible.
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@robprogressive @PhilipJMilton Show your arithmetic Rob. It’s nonsense.
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@policy_uk The one that surprised me a while back was when I tried to find out via FOI what proportion of the UK population had been to prison (for purposes of comparing with USA). Detailed point-in-time statistics for prison population are regularly published but they don’t help.
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To my astonishment the UK Govt has no breakdown by type of court case heard by the courts…I was told when I asked ‘to submit FOI requests to each individual court’. There are 150 Magistrates’ Courts in England and Wales !
Ameer Kotecha@Ameer_Kotecha
Agreed. Overall my experience in government was that there were much better stats (not to mention easier to access and much more intuitively presented) in the press than in official documentation
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@DanNeidle That’s not actually so. In-house legal advisers who are barristers don’t need a certificate. You need to be authorised only if (essentially) you tout for legal business as a barrister or on the basis that you are a barrister.
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BSB guidance is clear that someone who isn't authorised to practice can't call themselves a "barrister":
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Today's mystery: the Bar Standards Board tells me that Setu Kamal, the barrister who lost a £8m libel claim against me, is no longer authorised to practice.
Why? When? The BSB won't say.
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@alexanderrX_ As with a number of other apparently marvellous things, its profitability and sustainability derive from its original developers going bust so the true cost of the development doesn’t have to be recouped.
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canary wharf is privately owned. clean streets, private security, things get fixed when they break. people complained about walking around the water so a bridge went up in months. try that anywhere else in the uk and you’re looking at years of planning. now they’re opening a 50m floating lido this summer. this is what execution looks like without government.
Alexander@alexanderrX_
canary wharf is a massive opportunity for the london AI startup scene. just open one canada square and hand out 500k VC cheques to teams of 10x engineers. lots of empty space to let people build
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@SueJonesSays Tbf judges decided today alone that the ‘Kneecap’ prosecution was unlawful, stopped the outrageous attempts of a key tax-avoidance barrister to prevent @DanNeidle exposing him, and roundly criticised the Prisons Service and Serco over unlawful detention.
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Tory funding cuts - which started in 2010. The MoJ took a huge cut to its £9bn budget. Tories shut courts, by 2022, 8 crown court centres & more than 160 magistrates courts were gone, according to ministerial answers to parliamentary questions. Justice system on point of collapse
Robert Jenrick@RobertJenrick
Tonight Labour voted to scrap jury trials. They’re trashing ancient rights rather than getting the courts sitting round the clock. It’s shameful.
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A tax barrister sued me personally for £8m for libel after we linked him to a tax avoidance scheme.
Today the High Court struck out the claim, granted summary judgment, and ruled it was a SLAPP. The judgment is highly critical.
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@SohrabAhmari @tunkuv Disagree, it’s not even the most beautiful run in London itself. Prefer Hyde park/Westminster.
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This is the most beautiful urban run in the world. Sorry, Central Park doesn’t come close.
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@ChrisGiles_ The majority who have been largely unaffected by fiscal drag in the past three years might well find it unalarming. Those who have been might well not.
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@StrongerInNos That's sort of true, but don't you find the statement "another tax rise similar to the past three years and we stabilise debt" more interesting than "we're doomed"
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This is just the most incredible chart...
if the UK government implements current policies on taxes and benefits, public debt is stable (contrary to what the OBR always mistakenly tells us)
My column as.ft.com/r/960c9f32-880…
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@LNallalingham Mean size of population of these countries is just over 5m. There are nearly three times that many state pensioners in the UK. What’s your point?
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🇬🇧 UK is forecast to spend £333 billion on welfare this year.
For context, that is more than the entire economic output of many countries:
🇷🇴 Romania: ~£275bn
🇨🇿 Czechia: ~£260bn
🇵🇹 Portugal: ~£230bn
🇬🇷 Greece: ~£190bn
🇳🇿 New Zealand: ~£185bn
🇭🇺 Hungary: ~£165bn
🇺🇦 Ukraine: ~£140bn
🇸🇰 Slovakia: ~£103bn
🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ~£87bn
🇱🇺 Luxembourg: ~£67bn
🇭🇷 Croatia: ~£65bn
🇷🇸 Serbia: ~£59bn
🇸🇮 Slovenia: ~£59bn
🇺🇾 Uruguay: ~£57bn
🇱🇹 Lithuania: ~£57bn
🇵🇦 Panama: ~£65bn
🇱🇻 Latvia: ~£36bn
🇧🇭 Bahrain: ~£35bn
🇪🇪 Estonia: ~£32bn
🇨🇾 Cyprus: ~£26bn
🇮🇸 Iceland: ~£24bn
🇧🇦 Bosnia & Herzegovina: ~£21bn
🇦🇱 Albania: ~£20bn
🇲🇹 Malta: ~£17bn
🇲🇩 Moldova: ~£13bn
🇲🇰 North Macedonia: ~£12bn
🇽🇰 Kosovo: ~£9bn
🇲🇪 Montenegro: ~£6bn
🇲🇨 Monaco: ~£6bn
🇱🇮 Liechtenstein: ~£5bn
🇦🇩 Andorra: ~£2bn
🇸🇲 San Marino: ~£1.6bn
53% of the UK population now takes more out of the system than they pay in.
At some point we have to be honest.
This simply isn’t sustainable.
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@JohnRentoul Not due to any material diminution in numbers arriving, but instead to a significant increase in UK nationals leaving.
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OBR forecast for average net immigration cut from 295k to 235k a year assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69a6d7b6…
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@paullewismoney @thebordercairn Honestly, Paul! For a small business whose inputs are largely own labour and with non-business customers it’s a no-brainer. Plumber on a £200 job needing a £20 part gets £180 for his work. VAT-registered he gets £150 (paying £33.33 output tax and recovering £3.33 input tax)
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@thebordercairn What is it then? A lack of ambition to grow?
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Jeez. It’s not about being able to calculate the VAT. For goodness sake.
Paul Lewis@paullewismoney
If you ever wondered what cutting your nose off to spite your face means, it is this bit.ly/4rFjPxa cutting the turnover of your small business to avoid registering for VAT, which anyone with a spreadsheet can sort out in half a day every three months
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@paullewismoney Hmm. But who are the people selling at a loss - people who bought to let or people who bought to occupy? And shared ownership can’t be an unalloyed bad - I know two late-20s who are now owner-occupiers of houses having started in shared-ownership flats.
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Indeed. And there isn't a ladder and shared ownership is even worse.
Norma Cohen@NormaCohen3
Here’s the verdict from a money expert; purchasing a leasehold flat is NOT a first leg on ‘the property ladder’. Legally, you are nothing more than a tenant.
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@JamesHarrisNow @lmharpin That isn’t the point at all. Tho hard to see how the manifesto would have scared off anyone - the position on the Middle East being an entirely anodyne expression of a position shared with almost every country in the world.
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@StrongerInNos @lmharpin And formed a government afterwards, right?
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Labour source:
“There are far more seats like Runcorn than Gorton.
“2019 showed what happened when Labour wrapped itself in the Palestinian flag and the country rightly thought we were insane.”
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@elonmusk Artificial Intelligence isn’t artificial? Or Artificial Intelligence isn’t intelligent?
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