Christine Robinson

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🟨🟥

[Christine Robinson @CrRobinson7]

@IAPonomarenko Inverness, Scotland. Nessie with Ukraine flag on a glorious March morning

[Ian L Richardson @ianrich15813274]

Leaving things seems to be the right's idea of solving problems. Leave the EU, well that's not worked. Leave the ECHR, that won't solve anything. All they have really left are their senses. Try joining with others to address the problems all nations face, it can work wonders.

[Ian L Richardson @ianrich15813274]

Hatred of the other is such a fruitless emotion, it can never be fully satiated. You see it etched into the features of some people, like Robinson & Tommo. It's a burden they carry throughout life. They won't listen of course, but if just once they could heed the wise words of the great Beatles song, All You Need is Love, they might just get out of their vicious circle.

[Christine Robinson @CrRobinson7]

😪

[UAVoyager🇺🇦 @CrimeanVoyager]

The Church of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist in Kramatorsk.

Bombed by russians yesterday.

[indy swim 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @indy_swim]

The 2014 ref wasn’t horribly divisive, it was a great debate on our country’s future

And while Scotland did say no, Susan fails to understand that the UK Scotland voted to remain part of doesn’t exist anymore. The SNP won the election on a manifesto commitment to have a new vote

[Torsten Bell @TorstenBell]

So much of the right these days just have a massive patriotism problem. This guy:
- is a tax exile (left long before this govt)
- hates his own country while complaining he doesn’t get big enough subsidies from it
- laments the hit to manufacturing driven by a Brexit he supported

[mike bird @mikebirdy]

Tesco has 20,000 employees on their basic £13ph
The majority of these claim income support.
That taxpayers money should be deducted from Tesco's annual pretax profit of £2.4 BILLION
We should NOT all be helping Tesco shareholders.
Same for ALL major low pay employers.
BURNHAM?

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

When 12 people were killed in Charlie Hebdo attacks, world leaders thronged to Paris for a solidarity march

But no world leader has organised a march to protest killing over 100,000 people—25,000+ children, 300+ journalists, 2000+ health workers, 405 UN staff—in Gaza and Lebanon

[Scotland’s Story @80_mcswan]

RT if you support

Scottish Independence 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿
Welsh Independence. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
United Ireland 🇮🇪

[Lesley Riddoch @LesleyRiddoch]

‘British loyalist though I may be, if I were a Scot I wd have no hesitation. Scotland wd have a tough transition to self-reliance, as did Ireland. But experience everywhere suggests small autonomous democracies fare well.’ Simon Jenkins on #CelticAlliance. https://t.co/CKZprNGxiS

[Pádraig Murchadhfinn @murchadhfinn]

“The truth is this: Burnham is an English politician who is unthinkingly committed to the union… He knows nothing about Ireland or Scotland and a little bit about Wales”
~Brian Feeney

The Irish News

☕️🥐

[The Real Indy 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @Humanistforindy]

US: Wyoming gets equal Senate power to California.
EU: Malta has the same veto as Germany on foreign policy.
UK: Devolved nations get no legal veto mechanism. England’s sheer population scale lets Westminster unilaterally override our consent every single time.

[Gordon Fielden @GordonFielden]

I completely reject the way the BBC has framed this argument, and particularly the suggestion that the triple lock is somehow becoming unsustainable because pensioners’ living standards have improved more quickly than those of working people. That is an extraordinarily narrow way of looking at what has actually happened.

There is a rather important part of this story that is being conveniently overlooked. Successive Conservative governments froze the personal tax allowance, and the present Labour Government has continued that policy. The consequence for pensioners is particularly stark. Their State Pension rises, as it should, yet the amount they are permitted to receive before paying income tax remains frozen. They are therefore being steadily dragged into the tax system through fiscal drag, with an increasing proportion of their pension becoming taxable.

Indeed, we are now reaching the absurd position where the full new State Pension itself is likely to exceed the personal tax allowance. The Government will increase the pension under the triple lock and then, because it refuses to raise the tax threshold, begin taking part of that increase back in taxation. If we are going to talk about a “ratchet effect”, perhaps that is the ratchet effect we ought to be discussing.

Nor are these payments some unexpected act of generosity bestowed upon pensioners by the state. These are people who have worked and paid National Insurance contributions throughout their lives on the understanding that, when they reached retirement, the State Pension would form part of their income. For millions of people, that was part of the social contract between the individual and the state.

We should also remember how that contract has already changed. When many of today’s pensioners began their working lives, the State Pension age was 65 for men and 60 for women. Those ages have since been increased. People have already been required to work longer and wait longer before receiving the pension towards which they spent decades contributing.

Against that background, to portray a State Pension of around £250 a week as evidence that pensioners are somehow becoming too prosperous is frankly absurd. Nobody could seriously describe that sum, from which people must meet the ordinary costs of living, as an extravagant retirement income.

The triple lock was introduced for a reason. The value of the British State Pension had been allowed to fall behind earnings over many years, while pensioner poverty became a serious national problem. It was designed to prevent that happening again and to ensure that pensioners shared, at least to some reasonable extent, in the rising prosperity of the country rather than being progressively left behind.

So the question should not be whether Britain can afford to honour the triple lock. The more pertinent question is why governments believe it acceptable to increase the State Pension while deliberately freezing the tax threshold until that pension itself becomes taxable.

After a lifetime of work and contributions, pensioners are not asking for charity. They are asking for the settlement they spent their working lives paying towards to be honoured. That distinction matters.

[The National @ScotNational]

LIVE: Historic scenes in Cardiff as the leaders of the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Fein come together to sign a deal calling for a democratic route to constitutional change in Scotland, Wales and the north of Ireland 🚨

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

Your regular reminder: If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.

[A Scot @AScot94175440]

Scotland has a population of less than six million people yet its resources generate enough electricity for twenty five million people every day which is transferred to England and then sold back to Scottish consumers who are then charged the highest prices in Europe to use their own energy.

[David Banks @DBanksy]

Worth sharing…

[STEVE MOSS 💙💚 Ⓥ☘️#Ireland. Stop #GazaGenocide @mr_stephen_moss]

There are very bad people, there are despicable people, there are utterly odious people and then there are those who chase, torture and kill sentient creatures for fun.
And the Establishment the law turns a blind eye to it.
Lobby your MP now to end this evil.
@andyburnham @gmb

[Indy Scot Extremist, independence supporter. @indyscot12]

No wonder the government in London didn't want to introduce zonal pricing for Scotland, they knew our prices would have been hardly anything compared to south England. From Octopus energy website👇👇

[Dale Vince @DaleVince]

Ridiculous sums of money don’t level the playing field - they distort it. It’s increasingly urgent that we get to grips with Political funding in Britain - our democracy is for sale to the highest bidder, Reform are a minor party with no track record (no positive one) and no real policies, stuffed full of bigots and failed Tories (and failed Tory bigots) - a handful of super rich fools are pushing them to a prominence they simply should not have. Our current system of funding is anti democratic - those with big money have more say than the simple vote we all have. I’m a donor and I’ve been calling for a ban on all donations for some time now. For just £50m a year, a packet of crisps from each Briton - we can make our politics squeaky clean and truly representative. A cap on donations would be a step in the right direction - the end game should be publicly funded politics.

https://t.co/8IjCEkT9hp