Karin

@DavidBowskill Not that I’m aware. Lemme check

reinforcing my already solid German 🇩🇪 identity by watching the women’s football team play Austria 🇦🇹 in the World Cup qualifiers. I’m predicting 2:1 for #Schland Last time it was 4:1. @karin_clare does the national team have a nickname? Austria are giving their all.

@DavidBowskill Looking at the match stats so far, Austria haven’t turned up ☹️

@karin_clare I predict 2:1 for Germany 🇩🇪 Austria 🇦🇹 is always good for a surprise though.

@karin_clare Prediction? A propos Nuremberg I‘ll get in touch about a short away break.

@DavidBowskill That’s true!!

@DavidBowskill @UKLabour @Keir_Starmer I don’t think that the King does anything that he doesn’t want to. It’s about the power structures behind the scenes imo

@UKLabour & @Keir_Starmer Please don’t use the King in this way. He has cancer 🙁

@iAmJoshHunt Churning tax payers’ money out of the system and in to people’s pockets. Not a bug, a feature.

The British government has wasted more money on failed projects than some countries spend building their entire infrastructure. After hearing about the cancellation of the Stonehenge Tunnel project, yet it still racking up £179 million in cost, I wanted to look at other projects and costs to see what the picture looks like this century. Every number here comes from official reports, the National Audit Office, parliamentary committees, and ministers' own admissions. Let me show you where your money has gone. HS2 was sold to the country as a £37.5 billion high speed rail network connecting London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. The first phase was supposed to open this year. In 2026. Here's where it actually is. After six years of construction and £46 billion spent, tunnels have been bored, earth has been moved, viaducts have been built. But there is no railway. Not a single metre of track. The legs to Manchester and Leeds have been cancelled entirely. What's left is a line from London to Birmingham with no confirmed opening date, no confirmed final cost, and estimates so unstable that Parliament's own Public Accounts Committee has warned the cash cost of Phase 1 alone could reach £80 billion. Some industry forecasts put it above £100 billion. The Transport Secretary stood in Parliament last year and called it "an appalling mess." She said billions had been wasted on scope changes, ineffective contracts, and bad management. Fraud allegations have since emerged in the supply chain. Three times the original price. A fraction of what was promised. And still years from completion. But HS2 is just one example. The NHS National Programme for IT was supposed to create a unified electronic health record for every patient in England. Launched in 2002 with a budget of £6 billion. Abandoned in 2011 with the Public Accounts Committee putting the expected cost at £12.4 billion. It delivered a fraction of its promised benefits. Only 13 out of 169 hospital trusts received the systems they were meant to get. Then one of the contractors sued the government and won a settlement of nearly half a billion pounds. On top. During Covid, the government threw billions out the door with almost no checks. The Covid Counter Fraud Commissioner's final report, published December 2025, found that fraud and error across pandemic support schemes cost taxpayers £10.9 billion. How much has been recovered? £1.8 billion. The Commissioner's words, not mine. The previous government "left the front door open to fraud." Bounce Back Loans were rolled out in under two weeks with no independent verification. PPE contracts were handed to companies with no track record. Defective gowns, masks, and visors weren't inspected for two years. By the time anyone checked, the money was gone. Universal Credit was supposed to simplify the benefits system. The original programme was budgeted at around £2 billion. The National Audit Office has flagged massive overruns repeatedly as the project ballooned in scope and complexity. Total costs have run many times higher than planned. Nobody was fired. The smart meter rollout was supposed to be finished by 2020. It wasn't. Costs have hit £13.5 billion. The programme has been dogged by meters losing functionality, missed deadlines, and a failure to deliver the energy savings that justified the whole thing in the first place. One many of you will be familiar with. The Post Office spent £600 million on a computer system called Horizon. It was fundamentally flawed. Its defects led to more than 900 wrongful convictions. Sub-postmasters lost their homes. Their businesses. Their families. At least 13 people took their own lives. Compensation has now reached £1.4 billion and is expected to hit £2 billion. Fujitsu, the company that built the system, has not paid a single penny toward that bill. It is still collecting government contracts. The Fire Control project. £469 million. Seven years. An attempt to modernise fire service control rooms. Scrapped. Nothing delivered. What a waste. The electronic tagging programme. Five years late. Tens of millions spent. Abandoned. They ended up buying off the shelf tags that could have been bought for a fraction of the price years earlier. The Garden Bridge. £53 million of public money. Not a single piece was built. You might ask what £53 million was spent on exactly. The Rwanda deportation scheme. £715 million. Four people went voluntarily. Not a single forced deportation was carried out. Then the whole thing was scrapped. Now here's the part that ties it all together. In 2019, the Prime Minister's own Implementation Unit looked at the government's £432 billion portfolio of major projects. Only 8% had proper plans to evaluate whether they were working. 64% of that spending, £276 billion, had no evaluation at all. None. The government was spending hundreds of billions of your money with no way of knowing if any of it was delivering. The National Audit Office has said there has been a "consistent pattern of underperformance" spanning 25 years. Twenty five years of reports saying the same thing. And nothing changes. Add it up. HS2 overruns. NHS IT written off. £10.9 billion in Covid fraud. Universal Credit ballooning. Smart meters over budget. Post Office compensation approaching £2 billion. Fire Control. Rwanda. Garden Bridge. Tagging. And those are just the ones that made the news. The total runs into the tens of billions. More than the entire annual education budget. Approaching what the government now spends on debt interest in a single year. And here's the scary part. This is only what we know about. The NAO has been clear the real picture is worse because most projects aren't properly evaluated in the first place. These are the failures too big to hide. Imagine the ones that aren't. This is the same government that says there's no money for public services. That raises your taxes every year and delivers less every year. That can't build a railway. Can't roll out a computer system. Can't buy protective equipment without losing billions to fraud. And every time it happens, the pattern is the same. The project fails. The minister moves on. The civil servant gets a knighthood. The contractor gets the next contract. And you pick up the bill. The UK doesn't have a funding problem. It has a competence problem. And until that changes, no amount of tax rises, borrowing, or spending reviews will make the slightest difference.

@DavidBowskill Aren’t these the things that Labour wanted to do before coming to power?

Sounds like socialism to me and I like it 🙂

News reports that women are still nowhere getting equality with men. Big shoutout to all the politicians who ever voted to equalise the pension age of women up to that of men, thus Robbin us of any compensation for that lifelong inequality.

@johnloeber This is where ‘you will own nothing and you will be happy’ gets us…

Many people are commenting that this will produce a capital flight and cause the most productive Dutch citizens to emigrate. This is true. However, the reality is much worse, far more perfidious. Virtually every Dutch citizen is going to be a criminal from here on. A specter of arbitrary enforcement will hang over each of their heads. Why? Two reasons. One -- the tax is both severe and hard to administer. Remember, without a sale, there's no financial trail. Lots of people are just going to chance it and not pay the tax. (They may even forget!) Second, people own so many different assets, and it's hard to mark those assets to the market without a sale actually occurring. If you own a painting that you once bought, is it still worth the same? The state says it's worth more, you say it's worth less. Who wins? This kind of policy is the worst kind, where it opens a door wide to abuse by arbitrary enforcement. Have an enemy? Start investigating them for unpaid unrealized capital gains taxes. You'll always find something, and then you can put them in prison. Dangerous tools.

@felixprehn Workbook

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@DavidBowskill Me too!

I agree with the President of Austria 🇦🇹

@theiaincameron We need to teach children and young people about risks and taking responsibility for themselves and each other.

I have come to the inescapable conclusion that most people commenting on rescues like this haven’t got the first clue what they’re talking about. “Bill them for the rescue” is by far the most common. Here are three reasons why this comment is idiotic. 1/4

@DominicFrisby Project fear

Christmas market in Frankfurt. So sad

@itsolelehmann Artisan

Is there a name for brands that only focus on highest quality? it's not really luxury but a different category instead of trying to impress/flex/show big names etc I want to start only buying things that have quality for life but everytime I look for highquality, I just find luxury douchebag wannabe brands is there a name for this?

@CiceroRevival @king_sol_omon @PeterSweden7 Not allowing dual/multi- nationality is a big hurdle. My son has never lived anywhere else and is fully integrated - except he does not hold nationality as he’d have to give up two others to do so

@king_sol_omon @PeterSweden7 That should worry Austrians even more, because it shows a lack of desire to become Austrian. If they won't even learn your language, there's no way they will ever accept your customs & traditions. What happens when they're the majority? Austria goes bye bye.

Over half of first grade students at school in Vienna cannot speak German. Over 50% of the population in Vienna has a foreign background.

@brunellaism Mushrooms have that effect on me too 🤣

I thought I was gonna die guys

@RupertLowe10 How do you feel about the millions who are living at home with their parents and have never worked, don’t claim benefits and think they’re not sponging, but of course expect to use the NHS and for the lights to stay on?

My five step plan to fix the welfare scam. Firstly, no access to benefits for foreigners. Full stop. Billions saved, every year. If a high skilled individual has vastly contributed for decades, they can become a British citizen through a FAR stricter application process. No benefits for anyone who arrived illegally, that goes without saying. They should all be turfed out, day one. Second, we must accept that a huge number of people are taking the piss. We absolutely must support those in genuine need, but that does not mean people can permanently live off the taxpayer due to mental health struggles. If we did this fairly, we could better support those with real need. A fair and compassionate approach. Third, a life on benefits for a healthy individual is NOT acceptable. If you can work, you must work. A few months to find a desired job is reasonable, but after that - if you want your benefit money, you will be put to work. Litter picking, street cleaning, care home work, gardening. Whatever. If it needs doing, you’re doing it. Sounds fair, right? If you refuse work, you get given it. Don’t like it? No benefit money. It’s simple. Fourth - reintroduce the two child cap. If you want more children, get a job. Hardworking parents shouldn’t have to subsidise indolence. Fifth, tax cuts. And lots of them. Raise the thresholds. Make it so that going back to work is financially rewarding. Obviously. Reward hard work, and people will do more of it. These aren’t complicated solutions. It will anger many who profit from the current system, but it needs to be said. I think it’s all just common sense, don’t you?

@dontdelay Why not simply raise the single person’s allowance for pensioners only to the total amount of the State Pension for the tax year?

Good point here One of many complications created by Reeves’ well meaning but ultimately flawed idea to exempt pensioners from income tax if their only income is state pension

@SilverGold_News In the absence of a circuit breaker,…

Did CME screens go blank to bail out a trader from delivering 400 Million Ounces of #Silver? thehindubusinessline.com/markets/gold/d…

@miriam_cates Don’t worry. Soon everyone will be on UBI and the problem will not exist. Young people are leaving because it’s more glamorous to live in a hovel in Oz or wherever than it is anywhere in the UK

Every suggestion of pension reform is met with "But I paid into it!", "I worked hard all my life!" and "I'm entitled!". Yet the alternative to reforming a system where the young working poor fund the asset-rich old is that all our most promising young people flee the country. No pensioner should go cold or hungry. But if we continue down this route of compulsory intergenerational transfer from young to old, enslaving our children to debt even after we’re long gone, then there really is no future for our country.