Thomas Smith
131.1K posts
Thomas Smith
@SmudgeThomas
Norfolkman in exile in London. Expect Church, Trains, History, comment and pro-LGBT content. 🌈He/Him Gay; Christian; Opinionated
London, England شامل ہوئے Şubat 2011
2.4K فالونگ1.8K فالوورز
Why does the party I’d never vote for get all the twinks? 😭
Joshua MacLeod@JoshMacLd
Sunny afternoon out campaigning for @Jackson_Carlaw . Only a vote for Jackson Carlaw can stop the SNP on the 7th of May.
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Thomas Smith ری ٹویٹ کیا
Representation of the People Act 1983, “treating” is considered a corrupt practice. The pre-election period for local authorities will start from the publication of a notice of election, this will be no later than Monday 30 March. This might be considered “treating”.
Politics UK@PolitlcsUK
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage visits the winner of Reform UK's free energy bills prize draw
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Thomas Smith ری ٹویٹ کیا
Thomas Smith ری ٹویٹ کیا
30% of Protestants now attending churches where the average pastor has never gone to a seminary explains why such bizarre heresies are arising in American churches right now
Ryan Burge 📊@ryanburge
In 1972, 32% of Protestants were Baptists. It's 29% now. Methodists have dropped from 22% to 8%. Non-Denoms have risen from 3% to 30%.
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Thomas Smith ری ٹویٹ کیا
Seems remarkable but it's true: in terms of P90/P10 ratio, wage compression in the UK is similar to the USSR at its most compressed.
Soviet min wage also peaked at ~60% median income, while we've just hit 66%.
Social democracy has achieved greater egalitarianism than communism.
Zynx@ZynxBTC
The UK has a far flatter income distribution than the Communist Soviet Union. The UK take home minimum wage for working a full time job (40-hours) is now £22,555. At £100k salary, the take home is £68,558. That is a net income ratio of 3.04:1 We are now at the point where the wage compression and taxes in the UK means that the difference between minimum wage and a top 5% salary is a net income difference of only ~3x. In the USSR using the same comparison, this figure never fell below 5:1 It's actually even worse in reality because the person earning £100k in the UK often has student loans. Britain is nominally capitalist but functionally communist. China is nominally communist but functionally capitalist. Funny how that works.
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Thomas Smith ری ٹویٹ کیا
Palestine Action activists sued: “I smashed up these guys’ business, and I can’t believe that they want me to pay for the damage!” theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/a…
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That's actually insane
AF Post@AFpost
A meeting between Cardinal Christophe Pierre and the Pentagon was described as a bitter lecture, during which a U.S. official invoked the Avignon Papacy, a 14th-century period when the French crown used military power to influence the papacy, as an implicit warning to the Church. Follow: @AFpost
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Thomas Smith ری ٹویٹ کیا
Thomas Smith ری ٹویٹ کیا
This, btw, is exactly how Britain’s ‘Big Four’ private railways used to operate before nationalisation. They owned ships, had their own truck divisions.
Once re-privatised, they only privatised the rolling stock franchises. The railway itself is still state owned under Network Rail.
Samuel Hughes@SCP_Hughes
Japan has the world’s best railway system. 28% of Japanese passenger-kilometers are by rail. Germany manages 6.4%, and the USA manages 0.25%. Just one Japanese company, JR East, carries more passengers than China’s entire railway system, and four times as many than Britain’s. What is the secret of its success? worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japa… Part of the answer is that Japanese railway companies don't just operate trains. They run hospitals, supermarkets, department stores, amusement parks, office complexes, and retirement homes around their railway stations. One of them co-built Tokyo Disneyland. Another owns a baseball team. A third created its own all-women musical theater in 1914, which is still running today. The logic is elegant: a railway increases the developable value of land around its stations, but normally that value accrues to landowners, not the railway operator. Japanese railway companies captured this value by owning and developing the land themselves. About half of the revenue of Japanese railway companies comes from ‘side businesses’ like these. Allowing railway operators to capture more of the value they created meant that more lines were profitable, making a far larger system financially viable. This may sound like a radically novel approach. But in fact, an exactly similar system existed in nineteenth-century America. The success of Japanese railways does not lie in some unreplicable feature of Japanese culture: it lies in good policy. If they learnt the right lessons from it, many countries could replicate Japan’s success. Read more (much more) in @Borners1's & @carto_graph's new piece for @WorksInProgMag Issue 23.
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Thomas Smith ری ٹویٹ کیا
April 8th 1983: A year after the Falklands War, families representing over 500 missing Argentine servicemen travel to the UK to demand their release from "Secret Detention Camps on Ascension". Of course, we don't have them. Those families returned in 1987 with the same demand.
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This is hilarious.
The Green Party’s ‘reparations officers’ is descended from a slave trader and CRITICISED the UK abolishing slavery in Nigeria because it was her family that lost out.
Christopher Howarth@CJCHowarth
How the Green Party's 'reparations officer' is actually the descendent of one of history's largest slave traders. 1/4 It started in 1861 when the British West Africa Squadron in its war on slavery deposed the King of Lagos due to his role in transatlantic Slavery. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagos_Tre…
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(Actually helping would involve stopping people paying more than double the amount they borrowed)
Luke Charters MP@lukejcr
I’m an MP with a Plan 2 student loan myself, so I know exactly how millions feel about interest rates. Capping them at 6% is a clear signal: Labour is on the side of hardworking graduates and is tackling the cost of living head-on. 💪
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The problem is, policymakers are more likely to listen to the boomers than the workers.
Roko 🐉@RokoMijic
I had a boomer unironically tell me to sell my $200 smartphone to save up for a mortgage today I told him you can't survive in modern society with a phone because of TOTP and banking apps and so on "In my day we just wrote a cheque!" 🤬🤬🤬
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It will be a hard sell to some that this isn't just the Borough council in Lynn annexing a bigger portion of the county.
Jack Shaw@JackTShaw
Norfolk:
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It's also work that really should not need human labour nowadays. Agriculture deserve the tech attention and investment. Not The latest california fads.
Loïc@Fremond_
picking fruit is a really long, laborious, and unpleasant job. it is also a sector which is chronically addicted to cheap, foreign labour because british people don't want to do it. this is exactly what automation is for. it also continues the trend that one by one, the case for low skilled immigrant labour is being eroded by automation. this will quickly have material impacts on policy decisions.
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This really is an ever-green poster.
GB Politics@GBPolitcs
🚨NEW: The UK has more young NEETS (those not in education, employment or training) now than during the pandemic
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Over 5 million families are skipping meals.
jrf.org.uk/cost-of-living…
Also if you're really going to pretend you had it worse, open your housekeeping books for your 30th year to public inspection.
Daryl Jones@BritishCur42756
@SmudgeThomas The data doesn't reflect that. Also a streaming service is literally a luxury service, it isn't an essential item. The problem you all have is you've been conditioned to be consumers. x.com/BritishCur4275…
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Holidays and luxury goods are wildly out of reach for a lot of young people. If you think a streaming service is a luxury you clearly thought Blockbuster was pricier than the Ritz.
Daryl Jones@BritishCur42756
@lukerobertblack @tigerax Stop buying expensive things, going on holiday and luxury goods for a year or two.
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Thomas Smith ری ٹویٹ کیا
When Israel handed over control of Bethlehem to the PLO, it was 60% Christian. Today, it is 15%.
Humza Yousaf@HumzaYousaf
Just a hunch, but instead of an Easter message, perhaps Christians would prefer you stopped killing them, stopped bombing their Churches, stopped preventing their clergy and congregations from attending their Holy Sites and stopped illegally occupying the birth place of Christ?
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