Martijn

Slightly more than a drunken idiot. I love to mock stupid people, make shocking first impressions, and lack the ability to keep a straight face in a photo!

[Bobbo Stark @bobbostark]

@RaminNasibov Command & Conquer: Red Alert

[Sunday Sport @thesundaysport]

If I were Starmer, I'd go to Makerfield to campaign for Burnham. Proper shit in the lad's Rice Krispies

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Oh god when will these morons stop? Leave people alone. We all know what this is and who the money it raises is for.

Allow me to educate you, Daniel:

The £2m threshold isn’t indexed. Frozen bands have been the Treasury’s favourite stealth lever since 2021, and there’s no reason this one escapes the same treatment. A decade of drift and £2m catches an ordinary family house in zones 2 and 3. Soaking the rich today, clobbering the upper-middle tomorrow.

Then there’s the asset-rich, cash-poor problem. Plenty of people bought in the 80s on teacher or civil service salaries and now sit on paper millions with pensioner incomes. The bill lands on cashflow they haven’t got. Telling them to downsize or remortgage to cover an annual charge on unrealised gains is a policy with forced sales baked in.

It also stacks. Stamp duty on the way in, council tax every year, CGT if it’s not your primary, IHT at the end. Each hits a different event so it’s not automatically incoherent, but piling a fifth recurring charge on the same illiquid brick is hard to defend on any efficiency basis.

Some owners will leave, but the genuinely internationally mobile wealthy sit well north of £2m. France ran almost exactly this experiment for thirty years. The (ISF) Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune was an annual wealth tax that caught a lot of high-value property. The behavioural response was the headline problem. Wealthy residents took the hint and left, mostly for Belgium, Switzerland and London, and they took their income tax, their VAT and their spending with them. By the time the Macron government scrapped it in 2017, the academic estimates suggested the tax had probably cost the French exchequer more than it raised once you accounted for everything that walked out the door. The exact number is argued over, some studies put the net loss higher than others, but the direction of travel isn’t really in dispute. France looked at the ledger and binned the tax. Because it was a shit idea.

That’s the real risk here. Not a guaranteed Laffer-curve disaster, but another shit policy that raises less than the press release claims because the people it targets have geo-arbitrage, offshore trusts, super mobile capital thanks to tech - as well as top drawer tax and wealth advisors.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What’s firmer still is the market freeze. Mirrlees and the IFS have spent years documenting how transaction taxes seize up mobility and carry hefty deadweight costs. Bolt a recurring surcharge on top of the existing stamp duty cliff and the band becomes a dead zone. Nobody trades in voluntarily, chains break, labour mobility takes a hit.

And the vehicle is incoherent. Council tax notionally pays for local services. Bins, street lights, social care, libraries. The family living in the £2.5m house don’t get its bins emptied more often than the flat down the road, and on most council-provided services is a lighter touch. Less social care, less means-tested support, more private provision of things the council would otherwise carry. So this isn’t council tax in any honest sense. It’s a wealth tax wearing a council tax lanyard, banked centrally and badged locally to dodge the cost of calling it what it is.

The precedent matters: any future government can now bolt a “surcharge” onto the council tax base and pretend it’s a local charge.

None of it builds a house. Britain’s affordability problem is a SUPPLY failure dressed up as a wealth problem.

A surcharge on existing stock doesn’t add a brick. It’s a gesture aimed at the politics of envy, standing in for planning reform successive governments have ducked because it’s hard and this is easy.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Boring tedious illiterate class-war slop as usual from Labour. None of them have a fucking clue what they’re doing. Bin.

[Prussian Blues Traveler @NWordBiden]

I’m willing to pay $6 a gallon

[Andrew Tate @Cobratate]

There is probably no bigger crime against humanity than the destruction of the United Kingdom.

England in the 90s, where I grew up, was actual paradise.

The pub gardens, the white people, oasis with fish and chips.

There were full bars and clubs 7 nights a week in every single town let alone city.

Always something to do. Even if you were poor, go out with a tenner and have the best time.

10,000 pound night today is 1% of what a 10-pound night was back then.

Neighborly people.

Safe streets. Even the council estates were safe.

You had to live it to understand it.

Everything’s been destroyed.

[RJ @rjNUFC]

On the other side of Sheffield he did this. Deserved a goal.

[Rob 🅼 @Im_RobM]

I won't forgot him scoring one of the funniest goals ever when VAR was was in it's early stages. Shelvey was thinking smarter than anyone on that pitch.

[Martijn @H_Bombaaa]

@AdamP1242 @LNER I suggest the Leopard

https://t.co/GUu4B30xUr

[Paddy Power @paddypower]

Newcastle had to start Karius in a cup final because Dubravka was cup tied, but Man City get to play Semenyo, despite him playing for Bournemouth in the Carabao this season.

Seems totally fair.

[90s WWE @90sWWE]

Oh hell yeah! 🍺

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

@Keir_Starmer Well this has gone down like a pint of tepid vomit.

Top work, 'Prime Minister'.

[The Native Hare @thenativehare]

@daveatherton I got ya @daveatherton

[Martijn @H_Bombaaa]

@CraigNE40 I think it's intentional, shirt is baggy too

[Martijn @H_Bombaaa]

@Angle__wix

[Raymundo @liquidsuitcase]

McDonald’s has had the same 5 things on the menu my whole life

If you need time to study the menu before you order I have to wonder if it’s even safe for you to be out driving on the roads

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

Starmer really is a properly crap Prime Minister.

[Jeremy Clarkson @JeremyClarkson]

We paid for Angela Rayner’s education. We paid her wages when she worked for the local council. We paid her wages when she became an MP. We even paid the settlement that enabled her to buy a house. Tax payers have funded every aspect of her entire life.

[Ricky Gervais @rickygervais]

Might host a music award next 😂

[giblets @furrygiblets]

Managed to shift two Directors of Football before Jamal Lewis 🤣

[Dan Salt @Danjsalt]

Nature will be healing when Page 3 comes back, cunts stop queuing in pubs and I'm seeing teenagers pissed on park benches again