A smith

@antonliubich Britain didn’t even have a capital gains tax until 1965, even in the 70’s it was lax and the courts didn’t give a toss about tax evasion, the golden age ended because Harold Wilson fucked it. Not because of hard working capitalists

Any conversation about taxes must begin with a conversation about government spending. Spending — not tax rates — is the true measure of the fiscal burden on an economy. Government expenditure as a share of GDP (IMF, 2025): China — 33% United States — 38% Russia — 39% United Kingdom — 44% Sweden — 49% By this measure, China and Russia are economically freer than most of the West. Now add context. The US carries roughly half of NATO’s entire defense bill. Russia is engaged in active hostilities. And still the burden on the US and Russian economies is lighter than Britain’s — in peacetime. You cannot discuss raising taxes before auditing the efficiency, usefulness, and justification of what is already being spent. Foreign aid, for example. Or programmes for penguins in Uganda. Only after spending is optimized — and society still considers something worth funding — does the second question arise: which taxes to introduce, which rates to change. That answer shapes incentives across the whole economy. Will the tax suppress investment or consumption? Will it push businesses to shut down or people to leave the country? What I have described is called sound tax policy. Proposing simply to raise taxes — on a group you conveniently don’t belong to — and agitating for it regardless of consequences is not tax policy. It is harmful activism.

@flump_76 @trevgoes4th @DanNeidle Blackjackpool?

@trevgoes4th @DanNeidle We can revive Blackpool by making Casinos illegal in the rest of the country, thus turning it into Las Vegas

I 100% agree on this from Max Tax @DanNeidle We need to let land values trend to zero in order to attract inward capital for renewal

@GuidoFawkes @garyseconomics I’ve been on the piss with Gary believe it or not, he didn’t buy a single pint whilst constantly reminding everyone that he’s a millionaire

‘The world’s best inequality economist’ @garyseconomics spotted at the Red Lion in Westminster. One step closer to Burnham’s ear

@peterrhague Does she understand that whiskey stones only cool a glass down because they’ve been kept in the freezer?

She says - twice - the London and the Southeast specifically will be allowed to have air conditioning instead of some passive system with rocks and chimneys. Apparently Norwich and Hull, almost as hot as London on this day, aren’t sufficiently important to be allowed the tech.

@captive_dreamer I wouldn’t trust a single one of them to park a car competently, who appoints these people?

Checking in on this "international criminal court"

@mr_james_c "Growth is less of a priority than making sure there's a habitable planet for our children and grandchildren."

"Growth is less of a priority than making sure there's a habitable planet for our children and grandchildren."

@tomhfh Probably a good time to start investing in some warships

Construction has begun on the Falkland Islands' first oilfield - Sea Lion. Over 300 million barrels of certified recoverable resources will be tapped in to in less than two years' time. By the 2030s, the Falklands could be generating more income from oil and gas than Britain. Peak tax revenue would be worth £80,000 a year for every individual man woman and child resident on the islands.

@andrew_lilico He’s not an economist, he sat at a high volume desk then got paid to sit in a corner doing fuck all in Japan for half a year but managed to keep his bonus because citi thought he’d off himself if they kept it, yet for some reason he’s on every screen in the country

An actual economist reasons as follows. If you introduce an exit tax, then foreigners will become less likely to invest in your country because they will not be able to withdraw their funds. So if your country has large inflows or throughflows of capital it's a damaging idea.+

@Dani4_Aye @KonstantinKisin No idea if it’s true or not but I’ve heard that families are told they’ll be held personally & criminally responsible for any unrest that would come from a “provocative” statement

@KonstantinKisin But what power do these officers have - that every family do what they are told to/say what they are told to?

I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that the families of the victims of horrific crime always express the same concern, word for word, every time. I'm sure it's got nothing to do with the "specially-trained" officers who support them.

@KonstantinKisin “So sorry for your loss, say don’t look back in anger or we’ll leak your browser history and kill your dog”

@admcollingwood I’ve completely given up on the UK now it’s just brown, poor and depressing. If you brought a lad who died on D-Day to modern London he’d think we lost the war

Well over 4 million people in Britain are claiming some form of unemployment benefits (last time I checked; might have changed since). Yet individual fastfood restaurants are bringing in scores of migrants to do basic jobs. There is no defence of the Yookay system of immigration

@Con_Tomlinson If you’re too retarded to understand that stabbing people is bad the surely that’s grounds for an even longer sentence not a shorter one? Or even better a flight home

So, deranged Afghan Dawood Safi breaks into Britain on a lorry, then gets given Indefinite Leave to Remain alongside thousands of others flown in from Kabul. He lies about his age, saying he's five years younger than he is, and about his father being killed by the Taliban. But when he stabs dog walker Wayne Broadhurst to death in broad daylight, while trying to stab another Muslim and his teenage son, the state accepts a manslaughter plea on grounds of "diminished responsibility." The government will import psychotic killers from countries with high levels of cousin marriage, opioid addiction, and lead poisoning, then gives them lighter sentences because they could never, ever be expected to live like us. They would behave no differently if they just wanted us all dead.

@CraigTribe2 @jackmrankin I hear we’re discussing demographic time bombs Craig!

@jackmrankin The economic illiteracy of right wing politicians who wilfully ignore the demographic time bomb of an ageing population and the diminishing working age population required to support future economic growth is astonishing.

No non-British citizen should be eligible for benefits. Not on a visa. Not on ILR. Never. And we should not grant British citizenship to anyone who is unlikely to be a net fiscal contributor. That should be a necessary condition for naturalisation, even if it is not sufficient.

@breadandposes @mrchuckbrown A tax policy that means building the next Amazon or SpaceX would bankrupt you sounds like a shit policy

@mrchuckbrown Exactly. They would be valued very different under a wealth taxed system?

If an asset netted £0 to its owner it wouldn't be worth £100m would it?

@DavidBe31099196 The EU is violent, but it’s a femininsed violence, done discreetly and with nuance through group shame, gossip and snook in with innocuous sounding legislation. The violence of past empires ie. A land invasion was more masculine through its overt nature and visual violence

As empires go, the EU is no Assyrian butcher, but it is still a smug, soul-crushing villain, petty, vindictive, and parasitic to its core. It struts like a resurrected Rome, draped in confected and artificial borrowed grandeur—epitomised by the fake, stylised bridges on the euro banknotes, as though Europe’s actual majestic bridges and cathedrals were somehow insufficient. Yet it commands none of Rome’s competence, none of its steel, and none of its results. It pales beside the British Empire’s raw dynamism. Its most unhinged critics call it a Fourth Reich, which is flattery. The truth is far more pathetic: it’s a decaying late-Soviet husk, stripped of ideology and left with nothing but managerial suffocation, self-dealing oligarchs, and an endless parade of unelected eurocrats fattening themselves at the public trough. Remember the idiotic prognostications just a few years ago? The EU was supposedly destined to rule the 21st century through the sheer majesty of its “regulatory soft power”, the “Brussels Effect” that would bend the world to its will. Delusional hubris. These secular clerics actually believe that regulation itself creates growth and innovation, as if smothering enterprise with paperwork, compliance costs, and risk aversion somehow magically summons dynamism. The bureaucrats who strangle every creative impulse then turn around expecting gratitude from the populations they’ve enfeebled. The results speak for themselves: universities sliding into second-rate mediocrity, industries turning third-rate under the weight of green dogma and Chinese overcapacity, and militaries that rank somewhere between third and fourth—paper tigers in a world that respects hard power, not directives on banana curvature. Don’t get me started on the idiocy of EU foreign policy, which as Collingwood points out, consists of turning friends into enemies, frontiers into raging forest fires. The rest of the world should not forget the last EU foreign affairs supremo (who actually was less bad than the current one, astonishingly) describing it as the “jungle” where nothing works as opposed to the “garden”, i.e., Europe, where everything’s hunky dory. These are not people of the “reality-based community”; they are cloistered mentalists tripping on their own posterior gasses. The EU Parliament in Brussels has draped itself in banners self-congratulating as the bastion of European democracy, when in truth there is almost no meaningful democratic legitimacy in how the EU is governed: power lies with the unelected Commission, the opaque Council horse-trading, and the permanent bureaucracy, not with any sovereign European people. Britain should count itself profoundly lucky to have escaped, even with the diminished, half-baked Brexit that our political class managed to “negotiate.” We shackled our national economy to a crashing zombie, submitted our laws to aliens who don’t much like us or our habits, and chained our regulations to minds hostile to the free-trading, global outlook that makes sense for an island nation. Our defence policy was (and is still, sadly) warped by the need to pretend we have a vital land frontier a thousand miles away, when our true strategic hinterland has always been the ocean. Escaping that slow-motion suicide, however imperfectly, remains one of the sanest, if incomplete, acts this country has taken. What about the EU that truly disgusts is the default malice: the pettiness, the preening bureaucratic narcissism, the casual sadism with which Brussels punishes any nation that deviates from its dogma. This is a quasi-aristocratic vampire squid—a flaccid imperium—latched onto a weakened civilization at a point of vulnerability, draining its blood, vitality, and future. This misbegotten monstrosity will not last. When it finally implodes under the weight of its own arrogance, corruption, and failure, Europe should breathe a sigh of relief and move on—scarcely bothering to mourn the corpse.

@SubversiveForce Bet they were gutted when they found out it was a miners gala and not a minors gala

Fantastic to see the immense Palestinian contribution to the mining community being recognised. Durham Miners’ Gala today.

@2ears2wheels I can’t afford a house because 15 million people have moved here since 1997 and HMRC steals £1500 a month from me in tax to pay for them all

Pages and pages of blue tick shite have been written since Wednesday when his doc came out. Gary can say more in one sentence, and it's far more effective:

@cjsnowdon Terrible posture too, always sits like a mong

He reminds me a lot of Jamie Oliver, crying in his own documentaries, talking bollocks with total confidence and having unlimited access to every media outlet for no obvious reason. Perhaps that’s why I find him so annoying.

@darkcobbett Bread and circuses. Shame our circuses are so shit though, at least the romans got to see gladiators fight. We just get 2010’s whimsical sarcasm and complete ignorance of the fact we’re barreling towards a currency collapse at near-terminal velocity

this is not funny not only is it not funny *in itself* but it is unbearably not funny in the face of a political class that has routinely allowed vicious murders to happen by their own neglect of their duties and this man with a bin on his head entirely conforms with that

I agree with the issue that hard working people are poor, but taxes at every turn which pay more benefits, that often act as a “top up” that allow firms to pay shit wages , is just a doom-loop that ends in an IMF bailout. If 10% of the welfare bill was spent encouraging some training and re-industrialisation we could turn every derelict seaside town into a mini shenzen province in 10 years

@godsaveourgdp @JaxRyan Agree on the spending especially direct and indirect government handouts to the wealthy. As for the “doesn’t want to work” that’s a load of crap. The problem is hard working people are poor. And that’s where social calm will be lost.

Did I watch the same documentary? I thought Gary did a good job drawing out the anti-wealth tax feelings of many wealthy people, who are either unable or unwilling to see the growing problems of wealth inequality in society. Those who can see it will campaign/ vote for change.🕊️