Christopher Smith

[Christopher Smith @C_JDS]

@molmutius Where from?

[David Turver @7Kiwi]

🚨The UK Government’s plug-in solar safety report is a shocker! They’re pushing plug-in panels hard for net zero, but the safety study by unqualified person has serious flaws that put homeowners at risk. Thread 🧵(1/11)

[Robert Colvile @rcolvile]

Finally got round to reading this by @cjsnowdon and it’s absolutely stellar, as expected https://t.co/Ob7Ijqh6Z2

[Sir Humphrey @pinstripedline]

The 15" guns outside of the Imperial War Museum in London are one of its most prized exhibits. They are a memorial to the 'big gun' ship. Yet the story of how they came to be there is little known but involves atomic weapons, the space race and lots of financial paperwork…

[Christopher Smith @C_JDS]

@sovietvisuals Doesn’t that say Kharkov?

[Nick Timothy MP @NJ_Timothy]

A King's Speech so tired, empty and illogical...

It has an Energy Independence Bill that stops us drilling our own oil and gas...

A Regulating for Growth Bill - a slogan up there with copulating for virginity and drinking for sobriety...

A Removal of Peerages Bill, aka Peter's Law...

A Civil Service Bill, aka Olly's Law...

A Northern Ireland Bill that will persecute our veterans...

A Conversion Bill that will persecute parents who talk kids out of going trans...

Votes for sixteen-year-olds, which they regret now the kids don't like Labour...

Digital ID cards that will be voluntary - any illegals likely to apply?

A Courts Modernisation Bill that brings back the attack on jury trials...

A Police Reform Bill that will abolish local forces...

A Social Housing Bill that bars the tenants from buying their home...

A Hillsborough Law they dropped once after promising contradictory things to families and to MI5...

A European Partnership Bill so they can ram through future give-aways without a vote...

And a Remediation Bill ... but no remediation for taxpayers, to whom Labour lied and shafted as soon as the election was done.

No welfare reform, no reduction in spending, no defence investment plan.

If Starmer thought that was enough to save his skin, he is sorely mistaken.

[Alan Smith @AlanJLSmith]

New guidance on Inheritance Tax on Pensions:

- Family members (beneficiaries) and personal representatives are jointly and severally liable for paying IHT from pension fund.

- They have 6 months to pay.

- Interest and late payment fees apply after that.

- Property held in pensions will often have to be sold to pay the IHT.

- The short timeline is likely to create ‘fire sale’ reduced valuations.

- Yet IHT is payable on the gross property value pre death/property sale.

- Pension providers, trustees, administrators, solicitors, personal representatives and family - all have to liaise and work through the admin - a logistical nightmare.

- In a tight window whilst the family is grieving.

- And then family beneficiaries pay income tax on income from the net fund - after deduction of inheritance tax. Double tax.

- All this to possibly raise £1.5 billion - or about 48 hours of annual NHS spending.

Thanks Rachel.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

My monologue from today’s The Times at One with Andrew Neil @TimesRadio

ROYAL NAVY RIP

While US destroyers duke it out with Iranian navy fast boats over the Strait of Hormuz, we learned yesterday that the Royal Navy’s HMS Iron Duke, a Type 23 frigate, was being withdrawn from active service, despite a recent £100m five-year refit, which suggests that was largely a waste of money. 

More important, it underlines the stark reality that we no longer have a functioning navy. 

That’s right. The country of Rule Britannia, which once had the most powerful navy in the world, capable of protecting an empire which covered a quarter of the globe, no longer has a navy worthy of the name.  

For the factual basis of what I’m about to say, I am indebted to Britsky, who posts important naval data on X and has become the reliable go-to source for information on our disappearing Navy. 

HMS Iron Duke joins another ageing Type 23, HMS Richmond, in retirement. Leaving the Royal Navy with just five frigates to monitor Russian submarine activity in the North Atlantic and other Russian activity in the Channel. 

Even that doesn’t reveal the full, desperate picture. Of the five frigates still supposedly available for service, one, HMS Kent, has been almost 750 days in refit and is not available for service. HMS Portland and HMS St Albans have also been laid up for some time. 

Only HMS Somerset is currently deployed and HMS Sutherland could be, pretty quickly. So the Royal Navy can call on the immediate services of only two of the five frigates we have, all dating from the 1990s. 

What about the more powerful Type 45 destroyers? Sad to relate the picture is even bleaker. There are only six. One, HMS Dragon, has been deployed to the East Mediterranean to protect Cyprus, though that took some time. 

Another, HMS Daring, has been in refit for 3,260 days and still not available for duty. HMS Defender has been out of action for over 1,000 days, HMS Diamond for just under 700 days. HMS Dauntless is in maintenance. Other than Dragon, out of our six destroyers, only HMS Duncan could be deployed quickly. 

What about our hugely expensive, powerful Astute class submarines? Better you don’t ask. We have only five — and only one, HMS Anson, is on active service somewhere in the Indian Ocean. 

The other four — Astute, Ambush, Artful and Audacious — have been laid up for a total of 4,000 days. That’s right 4,000 days. HMS Ambush alone has been inactive for 1,400 days. It’s currently laid up on the River Clyde. 

So the currently deployable, conventional Royal Navy, excluding the ancient, creaking subs carrying our nuclear deterrent, amounts to two frigates, two destroyers and one sub. That’s not a navy for a maritime nation. That’s a joke. 

Yes, we have two big aircraft carriers too. They also seem to spend a lot of time in maintenance, which is where they are at the moment. But both could currently be deployed pretty quickly, which is an improvement. But we don’t have the frigates or destroyers to form a carrier fleet. So they can only be used in concert with better equipped allies. 

We might be short of fighting ships. But we’re not short of admirals. We currently have around 30 rear admirals or above, which works out around four per deployable ship. That’s admirals. Not captains. 

None, of course, of this bloated top brass has been held accountable for the near disappearance of our naval power. Nor have any Tory politicians who for 14 years presided over our navy’s degradation. Nor is the current Labour government in any apparent hurry to put matters right.

Our airforce and army are in no great shapes either. But it is the state of our non-navy, an integral, vital part of our island history, which is the real national scandal. 

And, as is so often the case in modern Britain, nobody is held to account. Nobody forced to carry the can. Nobody making it their mission to put it right. And that is the real national disgrace.

[Christopher Smith @C_JDS]

Net Zero - Subsidies Galore https://t.co/WJ4uFyDLGE

[Mary Harrington @moveincircles]

Happy National Values Indistinguishable From Those Of Every Other Developed World Economic Zone Day

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Labour have looked at an oil shock, had a little think, and decided the correct response is to MAKE YOUR ELECTRICITY MORE EXPENSIVE.

As a form of protest.

Against oil.

Are you fucking hearing this!?

Britain. Island. Made. Of. Fucking. Coal. Floating on a bathtub of North Sea gas, ringed by one of the most developed offshore basins on the entire bloody planet that - in many instances we share with the Norwegians - and that we buy from the Norwegians at a sodding premium, and once upon a time we were the Ozempic of civil nuclear, the thing everyone in the world wanted a prescription for.

And the plan, the actual plan these window-licking noncery-merchant ass-hats have settled on, is to phase out the domestic stuff faster during an import price spike. That’s by definition NOT an energy policy, far from it, it’s more like a sort of febrile ransom note the hostage has written to himself, in crayon, with a little smiley face at the bottom.

“Some say we’ve gone too far, too fast. We disagree.” Oh do you. Do you really.

Well, dickheads, the National Grid disagrees with you disagreeing. So do the chemicals plants you’ve already turned into wildlife sanctuaries, the steelworks you’ve FedExed to Jiangsu, and every industrial electricity bill in this country which is now running at roughly four times the American rate, which, just so we’re clear, is the economic equivalent of trying to win Formula One on a fucking Boris bike.

And the big reveal, the headline policy, the thing they’ve stuck on a placard? Cover the brownfield sites, the literal tombstones of British industry, in solar panels. Bury the corpse. Plant a windmill on the grave. Put up a little QR code linking to the Guardian. Call it a recovery. Mind bending stupidity.

Meanwhile the capacity market is paying gas plants to stand around like substitute goalkeepers on a Sunday league bench, constraint payments are running into the billions because nobody can work out how to get Scottish wind down to a Surrey kettle, and every single pound of that gets smuggled onto the standing charge because these fuckwits haven’t got the minerals to put it on the unit rate where the public would actually clock it.

“It’s time to go further.” Further? Christ alive, you brainless shitheels have already landed us with the most expensive major economy in the G7 to run a factory in, your answer to an oil shock is to accelerate the thing that made you import-dependent, and you’re announcing it on a Tuesday afternoon like it’s a fucking bake sale. This isn’t net zero. This is net zero brain cells. This is the policy equivalent of setting fire to your house to own the arsonist.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

You terminal weapons-grade cretins, the structural kneecapping you deal out to the country on a daily basis is performance art levels retarded. It’s, genuinely, tantamount to sabotage. Our enemies couldn’t dream of such damage. Mike Tapp and Blue Labour are alright, but the rest of you can get all the way in the fucking sea. 🚮

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Excellent thread, this. Something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about…

The British state is run by people who have never been fired, never missed a number, never had a client scream at them, never stayed up until 3am working on a deal, or repricing a book because Tokyo opened badly.

They have never experienced CONSEQUENCE. Ever.

THAT is the single most important fact in British public life.

The pipeline is so uniform and mediocre it scarcely needs describing:

- School
- PPE or adjacent
- Civil Service fast stream or a Think Tank research role
- Spell as local councillor to appear “grounded,”
- Then a safe seat and a red box before 40

At no point has the market ever called them a moron.

At no point has a P&L told them their idea was shit.

The feedback loop that every private sector professional takes for granted simply does not exist in their world.

This matters because policy is NOT an essay. It IS a trade. Every regulation has a cost, every tax has a behavioural response, every intervention has second and third order consequences.

In markets, if you misread convexity you get carried out. In government, you get reshuffled to a different department.

The incentive structure could not be more perfectly designed to retain the incompetent and repel the capable.

Anyone with genuine commercial talent is earning multiples of a ministerial salary by their early thirties. So the applicant pool self selects for people for whom the title is the reward because they could never command that status where performance is measured.

The think tank ecosystem makes it worse.
IPPR, the Resolution Foundation, JRF and the rest function as ideological finishing schools and revolving doors. They produce people fluent in the language of policy who have never implemented anything. They can model a distributional impact assessment in their sleep but could not run a corner shop at profit.

This is NOT intelligence. It is pattern matching within a closed system that never tests its own assumptions because everyone in it shares the same priors.

The civil service compounds it further. The fast stream rewards generalism, rotating you through departments every 18 to 24 months to develop “breadth,” which in practice means you never develop depth.

A Treasury official who helped design a tax policy in 2019 is working on transport by the time it starts distorting behaviour in 2022. Nobody owns the outcome.

The private sector has one thing the state fundamentally lacks: a kill switch.

Bad companies go bust.

Bad traders get sacked.

The state just absorbs failure, reclassifies it as “lessons learned,” and promotes the people responsible.

The compound effect of thirty years of this is a permanent class institutionally incapable of delivering growth or even understanding why the private sector they depend on for revenue keeps shrinking under their stewardship. This is what we have, right now.

You cannot fix this with better people inside the same system. The system selects against competence, insulates against feedback, and rewards survival over performance.

Every parliament is just a fresh rotation of the same profile through the same machine expressing the same surprise when nothing improves.

We need parallel institutions to be built by the guy or gal staying up til 3am repricing the book. The risk taker. The entrepreneur.

Then we gradually phase the existing sclerotic failed structures out.

That’s how we win.

Make Britain Great Again 🇬🇧 💪

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

It is much, much worse than you think…

The UK added 11.1 million people and built 4.8 million homes (@GreatBritishTT article)

Broad money quadrupled from £700bn to £3.2tn while real GDP grew 55%.

Four pounds now do the job one used to do. That is the entire mechanism.

Your house didn’t get more valuable. Your pound got less valuable. The house just kept score.

Prime London down 25% from 2014. BTL yields below gilts.

Fertility at 1.44.

First-time buyer age up from 29 to 33.

Home ownership down from 71% to 63%.

Net income ratio between minimum wage and a top 5% salary: 3:1. The USSR never went below 5:1.

They sold the energy.

They sold the water.

They sold the housing stock.

They loaded the graduates with debt.

They crushed the savers.

They printed to cover the deficit.

They froze the tax bands.

They let the courts collapse.

They let a car leasing monopoly sit on £4bn in reserves.

They funded Persimmon’s CEO bonus with public money.

They taxed family farms at death.

They promised 300,000 homes a year and never once delivered.

Then they told you it was your fault for not saving harder.

Energy is the master input. Britain is an island made of coal surrounded by a sea full of gas and the political class won’t drill it.

Norway took the same geology, built a $1.7tn sovereign wealth fund, and is now courting OpenAI. We built consultancy reports.

The next industrial revolution will not happen here. Not because we lack the talent. Because thirty years of policy made the cost of powering anything too high for the industries of the future to justify locating in this country.

This is not just a housing crisis. It is a monetary crisis expressed through housing, compounded by energy failure, planning paralysis, institutional decay and three decades of fiscal incontinence.

Full piece:

https://t.co/zTHkMukXYY

[Christopher Smith @C_JDS]

The nonsense that is LCOE for renewables https://t.co/3gYb4jl6rE

[Andrew Orlowski @AndrewOrlowski]

Oh my

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Quite unbelievably (or is it??) the last reservoir built in Britain was completed in 1992. The population has since grown by ten million. Nobody built another one. Just so negligent and stupid.

The Victorians knocked these out by the dozen. The engineering is trivial, the cost is a couple of billion, which is a rounding error on the welfare budget. The planning system takes a decade to approve a hole in the ground.

The privatised water companies would rather pay dividends than pour concrete. And no government of either party thought to ask whether importing millions of people might require additional water supply.

The schemes now being fast tracked will not deliver a drop until the mid 2030s. Britain rations water in dry summers, on a wet island, because the last time it built a reservoir the Soviet Union still existed.

Pathetic.

[Ed Conway @EdConwaySky]

Good to see our salt story followed up here👇
The slow motion collapse (actually no longer slow motion) of Britain's chemicals industry is a BIG deal.
But NB it's not just salt.
Ammonia, sulphuric acid, ethanol, and a host of other foundational chemicals too. All going or gone

[Sophy Ridge @SophyRidgeSky]

Worth reading my exchange with Defence Secretary John Healey about whether Iran has the capability to strike London

SR: Israel has said Iran has missiles that could strike London. Is that true?

JH: We have no assessment of Iranian plans to strike London. We have a defence of Britain that isn't just about what we have for ourselves in and around Britain. Our defence of Britain is part of the layers of defence of NATO nations...

SR: I don't understand what that means, that you 'don't have an assessment'. Does that mean you don't have an assessment at all so we don't know? Or does that mean that your assessments don't suggest that?

JH: I understand the concerns that British people will have, but we have the resources and we have the alliances in place to be able to protect Britain. And we do that not just because we've got first class forces, but we have an alliance with 31 other NATO nations, and it's together that we defend NATO and British airspace, NATO and British homeland.

SR: Do we know if Iran has the capability to strike London?

JH: Look, what I'm saying, and trying to reassure people, is that we've got no assessment that Iran has any plans to attack, but we have the resources, we have the alliance in place to be able to defend Britain and we do that with allies, and we do that with NATO. And as far as Iran goes, they're demonstrating a capacity to hit across the Middle East. We see the same tactics and technologies that we see employed by Russia in Ukraine and this is the hidden hand of Putin in both conflicts. And I'm releasing today our latest defence intelligence assessment, which says that Russia was almost certainly providing training, sharing intelligence with Iran ahead of this conflict, including on types of drones, including on electronic warfare.

[Jardine Matheson Internationalist @emergenteffects]

This is entirely down to deliberate policy choices by the government. We have chosen to be a net importer of gas and leave resource extraction by the wayside.

The worst thing is those responsible for this disaster will claim it is evidence we need to do more of what they want. Yet we live in the world they created and it is a disaster.

[Andrew Montford @aDissentient]

Net Zero is unsustainable.