Very sad to hear that Rod Liddle has died. Whether you agreed with him or not, it was impossible (at least if you had any interest at all in British politics) to ignore him. He was that rare thing: someone who expressed what he truly believed regardless of how many feathers it ruffled. Such people are in too short supply.
@RachelReevesMP@RupertLowe10@Nigel_Farage@Keir_Starmer@bbclaurak Rachel Reeves, I planned carefully for retirement.
A North Norfolk holiday-let barn was meant to provide income, pay tax, employ cleaners, use local trades and support a holiday letting business.
On an example £1,000 booking, after the £180 commission, £150 cleaning and laundry costs, £50 electricity, £40 water and £40 council tax, only £540 remains before maintenance and repairs. After 25% corporation tax, that falls to £405. If the remaining income is then taxed at 40%, the owner is left with just £243 from the original £1,000 booking.
Remember, this is before allowing for any maintenance, repairs, insurance or mortgage costs. And the electrical PAT testing last year was needed. Now that company will receive no further income.
It is becoming impossible for a small Limited company to earn money.
How coffee shops, pubs, guesthouses and other small businesses survive with staff, rent, tax, regulation, insurance and rising costs is beyond me.
Make small enterprise pointless and people stop doing it.
Then government gets no tax.
Cleaners get no work.
Agents get no commission.
Local trades lose jobs.
That is not growth.
Reading through Reddit threads in which leftists/progressives express their bewilderment/confusion/fury at working class English voters for casting their lot in with Reform, one of the things I'm starting to understand is this:
They simply do not understand how a government could help working-class people in any other way besides giving them benefits, handouts, and other free things.
Their entire mental architecture is premised upon the premises that
1. Working class people are poor
2. The only way for them to not be poor is for the state to give them free stuff
3. So left-wing parties need to promise them lots of free stuff
Then, when these working-class voters instead vote for right-of-centre parties who instead promise an economy in which they can build a career, start their own business, make a financial success of themselves and start a family, they're confused.
Because, again, in their mental architecture, what the working class are *supposed* to want is free benefits from the state.
But what they *actually* want is a fair shake at making their own way in the world, making money, getting on in life.
And the left simply doesn't understand that what these voters want from the state is an economy in which they can actually do this.
@RichardBentall If he has done wrong then he should face the consequences. Any person or organisation giving money to a politician, or a political party, is doing it for influence.
For months Bell insisted it was all perfectly benign: just a harmless “reserve power” buried in the Pension Schemes Bill, nothing for trustees or savers to worry about.
In reality, Clause 40 was a blank cheque for politicians to lean on pension funds and order them into pet projects – the very definition of moral hazard when you’re talking about decades of hard‑earned savings.
The House of Lords looked at that power, looked at the howls of alarm from across the pensions industry, and voted to rip it out of the bill entirely – 217 to 113 – explicitly stripping ministers of the ability to mandate where defined contribution schemes invest.
That is not a “technical tweak”; that is Parliament taking a sledgehammer to Bell’s core idea, and rightly so.
@JohnSlinger@UKLabour The latest figures from the ONS show that the UK unemployment rate fell to 4.9% in the three months to February 2026, down from 5.2% in the previous period. However, this rate is still significantly higher than the roughly 4.1% recorded when Labour took office in July 2024