mark wears

@hopskipjumpy @Coneee @London_Centric Also look at how low City of London is, maybe it’s residential vs corporate addresses.

@Coneee @London_Centric How are Manchester and Leeds being counted geographicallly? Find it hard to believe Leeds produces double that of Manchester.

Great chart in @London_Centric Newham contributes almost as much income tax as Manchester? Islington more than Birmingham? Fascinating

@thealexbear What about a mk7 tsi ACT. They’re great cars if you can find one and only £20 VED

The hunt for the replacement for the L322 seems to be honing in on a mk5/6 Golf GTI...but still open minded. Any suggestions? Budget £6k, must be tidy, fun/interesting but practical, not a chore for a long trip. To sit next to a 5.0 Supercharged Range Rover sport.

@paullewismoney Not sure anyone won with 25% turnout. 75% thought they’re all as useless as each other.

Labour sees off Reform challenge in Manchester bit.ly/3Rta8oV it wasn’t even close at any stage

@Alexarmstrong Imagine if Trump started waving a bread bun around to make an analogy, the ‘gentle’ folk would be calling him an utter clown. After all Burnham’s skulduggery over the last couple of months, he still doesn’t seem to have grasped that he’s a prime minister.

This is getting exceptionally boring already.

@joncoupland Love a jumbuck, but it’s not a Felicia fun.

I have finally arrived in Southampton Now to find this Proton ...

@disclosetv Did they use echo location to find her?

NEW - Owen Anderson, 37, arrested on kidnapping and sexual assault charges after a girl taken outside a Chicago movie theater in 2022 at age 15 is found alive following four years in captivity — NBC

@LizWebsterSBF @campbellclaret History will also say there were three keys drivers of the Iraq war, Bush, Blair and Campbell.

🚨 @campbellclaret 👏 Well said! “History will say the three key drivers of Brexit were David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.” “Nigel Farage helped inflict the very thing that has weakened our economy, weakened our standing in the world and damaged our confidence. The fact some people now think he should be Prime Minister is a form of madness.”

@MarcherReborn This can’t be real; 770 cars to people with alcohol issues? The motobility scheme will only be reigned in when one of its cars is used in a terrorist attack!

We’re giving mobility cars to druggies and alcoholics. Dig deeper taxpayers

@AaronBastani TL:DR…. Some people in Belgium say that the wildfires in Spain are caused by it not raining in southern England.

It’s literally not rained for a month in southern England, and the Westminster press corps just spent weeks saying Ed Miliband is bad because he takes climate change seriously. We are almost certainly in the foothills of really significant changes to everyday life.

@paullewismoney I struggle to believe that labour scrapped a policy because a few on the right objected. Also, isn’t London majority Labour controlled including its Mayor?

Mad world pt 94: A plan to scrap 2 hated taxes - the deeply unfair council tax and the mobility stifling stamp duty - and replace them with a tax on land value that will leave 77% better off with protection for the 23% who’ll be worse off bit.ly/4wx8dyW is immediately hated by the London right wing elite and halted.

@joncoupland Roller boot/k11 micro

Name that car 🚗

@SarahLudford One way or another, migrants will always find a way to take advantage of the great things this country has to offer.

My excellent Polish builder has worked for me for several decades. His 17-year-old son is not following in his footsteps. Maybe because he has 4 A* at AS level & intends to go to Cambridge & become an astro-physicist. Speaks fluent Polish too. Migrants, eh? Who’d have ‘em?

@NoFarmsNoFoods Wasn’t this Theresa mays ‘dementia tax’ that labour demonstrated against!

Andy Burnham is reportedly exploring the idea of scrapping inheritance tax and introducing instead a uniform 10% tax on every estate left at death, with the revenue earmarked to create a National Care Service that would deliver free social care.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Thoughts on this?

@paullewismoney Are you saying that despite you doing it, working people now should be stopped?

The key is to stop it being so easy to avoid it - eg bunging £00,000s into a pension. Stop the ridiculous marginal rate relief. And never ever give warning of changes. Announce them in parliament for instant implementation. Action this day as Churchill said! Don’t give months for wealthy people to plan. Full disclosure follows: I bunged as much as I could into a pension to reduce my tax bill. Only stopped when law made me at 75. It shouldn’t have been allowed. I paid no NICS over 65. Ditto. Before 65 I only paid 2% marginal rate of NI. Madness! But don’t pretend that a 48% rate of tax has led to a drain of talent down to the North - well south of Scotland and much of England! And don’t believe one year’s figures to say Laffer was right. His curve can be frustrated easily.

@ListerLawrence Regarding point 1, one of Burnham’s 1st decisions was to scrap the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology! And although he’s kept an AI minister it’s gone down like a shit sandwich.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Andy Burnham and the challenges he’s facing. Then I got to thinking: if I had just been made PM how would I get the economy growing faster? This is what I came up with: 1. Ai - surely we have an opportunity to lead the world here. We should be building small nuclear power plants attached to data centres and create our own Ai platforms. The most obviously one is for Healthcare, since (unlike other countries) we’ve had a unified NHS for decades and hold more raw data on medical solutions than anyone else. Upload all that into Ai and with some clever giggery pokery we could have the World’s leading Ai diagnostic healthcare tool. 2. We aren’t a country of space or population, but only very recently we used to be the world leaders in Financial Services, now, we’re letting other countries take the lead because the FCA is a blocker to trade rather than enhancing it - Who would be in car finance at the moment for example? We need to supercharge Banking and Insurance and become world leaders again. It’s a long time since 2008 so I would ease some of the restrictions imposed from the financial crash and encourage more international trade from UK Bankers and Insurance firms to become the largest in the world again. 3. It’s clear that higher NIC costs and Ai implementation is reducing lots of jobs in Britain. However I don’t believe companies want to employ fewer people, they just have shareholders to answer to who want profits to grow (which means more tax anyway). Therefore I think we should have zero NIC on under 25 year olds to encourage companies to employ or take a chance on more of the young people that are unemployed. This will help young people get a foothold in a job and hopefully become invaluable to the company as they’re trained up. Would love to hear anyone else’s thoughts on how we could supercharge our economy?! Britain is small - but mighty! We just need to activate our potential!

@CutMyTaxUK Not just the Laffer effect, but also the Curley effect:

Burnham priorities: his social media team are offered higher salaries than the specialist in charge of making sure Russia doesn't hack our nukes.

> works for a pro asylum charity > complains when asylum seekers are put in your area

UK Civil Service salaries never cease to confuse me, you can either help manage the UK’s nuclear defence for £47k or you can make TikToks for Andy Burnham for £57k

@paullewismoney Where does the average figure of £5500 come from? Does that include property rv’s under £12k which are exempt?

So the average biz rates is £5500. Will this £20 a week - the price of a very small round of drinks - make a big difference?