Joram Spoor

Gastroenterology doctor in training. Tweets are personal opinion, not representing medical advice.

[David Collier @mishtal]

A question:
More than 30 Christians have just been murdered in Nigeria by Islamist gangs. Yesterday, a mass burial was held.

Eleven of the victims were Christian children - butchered with machetes.

So why doesn't @BBCNews (or the rest ofUK media) want to tell you about it?

[Bowine Michel MD PhD @BowineMichel]

Nieuw Amerikaans datacenter in Amsterdam verbruikt veel meer drinkwater dan de bedoeling is, 1.100.000.000 liter per jaar.
Overmacht, zegt de bouwer. Anders past het niet

Of u allemaal wil stoppen met douchen.

https://t.co/9Uw9tyzE4b

[Rob Roos 🇳🇱 @Rob_Roos]

GroenLinks (@GL_PvdA) noemt het intrekken van vergunningen van vijf pluimveehouders in Brabant “het enige juiste”.

Kan GL uitleggen waarom?

Niet vanuit het dogma “stikstof is altijd het probleem”, maar vanuit het beginsel van rechtszekerheid:

🔹 Vergunningen zijn afgegeven door de bevoegde instanties.
🔹 Ze zijn onherroepelijk geworden na de bezwaar- en beroepstermijn.
🔹 De bedrijven houden zich aan de voorschriften en afspraken.

Waarom is het dan plotseling “het enige juiste” om die rechtsgeldige vergunningen in te trekken?

Rechtszekerheid is een kernbeginsel van de rechtsstaat. Zonder dat is geen enkele ondernemer, bouwer of particulier nog zeker van zijn positie, ook niet als hij zich keurig aan de regels houdt.

Graag concrete argumenten en feiten. Geen morele slogans.

[Joram Spoor @J0ramS]

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

🚨📉THE SLOW DEATH OF BRITAIN:

We have shit water companies so we buy bottled water.

We have rubbish police so we hire private security.

We have terrible healthcare so we pay private hospitals instead.

Airbnbs in Cornwall pay council tax but get no rubbish collection, so they pay Biffa on top.

An awful lot of firemen are now volunteers.

NHS dentists don’t really work anymore, so you go private or you pull it out yourself.

Our roads are littered with potholes nobody fills. Your privately funded tyres and suspension are the collateral.

You are forced under threat of criminal prosecution to fund the BBC, and it’s so bad you pay for streaming to get news or entertainment anyway.

Your bins are collected fortnightly, so you drive to the tip. The tip now requires a booking, a permit and proof you live in the county.

Garden waste is a separate annual subscription. On top of the council tax that used to cover it.

Your GP surgery is an 8am phone lottery, so you pay £40 to an app to speak to a doctor in a different time zone.

CAMHS has a two year waiting list, so parents remortgage for private assessments.

Your child’s SEN provision is a legal entitlement, so you hire a solicitor to sue the council for it. The council spends more fighting you than the support would have cost.

Physio is a forty week wait. Your back does not have forty weeks.

Schools teach in portable cabins bolted to the playground because the actual building is held up by aerated concrete and hope.
Half of them are technically insolvent.

Parents fund the reading books, the glue sticks, the photocopier, the roof and increasingly the teachers wages - all via a PTA raffle and local fundraisers.

The state offers “free” childcare hours that don’t cover the nursery’s costs, so the nursery bills you a “top up fee” for the free thing.

Shoplifting under £200 is functionally legal, so Tesco hires guards - who crucially don’t even try to stop it - and you pay for them in the price of the milk.

999 takes an hour, so you buy the Ring doorbell, gather the evidence, file the report and get a crime number for the insurance you also pay for.

Court backlogs run to years, so anyone with money settles privately and everyone else gets nothing.

Legal aid is gone. Represent yourself.

Passport and DVLA backlogs are chronic, so the state sells you a fast track service to escape the queue the state created.

The trains are late whoever owns them, so you drive on the roads with the potholes.
Public toilets are shut, so you buy a coffee you don’t want.

The library is staffed by pensioners working for free.

Street lights are switched off at midnight to save money in a country with a burglary charge rate near zero.

You pay National Insurance for fifty years and they move the pension age.

You pay the adult social care precept every year and then sell your mother’s house to pay for adult social care.

Leaseholders pay for a “waking watch” because the state signed off the cladding and then billed the residents to fix it.

Social housing sits on the most valuable land in Britain, allocated by need rather than proximity to work, 48% of zone 1 social housing is occupied by foreigners mostly welfare dependent - while the nurses, teachers and other workers who keep zone 1 running commute ninety minutes each way from Kent because we stopped building anything in 1979.

Every one of these is a service you have already bought. The receipt is your payslip.

The tax burden is heading for its highest sustained level since the 1940s. The service level is the worst in living memory.

You are not overtaxed or underserved. You are actually BOTH, simultaneously, and the gap between the two is where your standard of living went.

The state has become a subscription you cannot cancel and cannot use.

[Joram Spoor @J0ramS]

@Mikethejourney1 Yeah it’s about 0.8%

[Joram Spoor @J0ramS]

@Mikethejourney1 Put mine in Wealthify at the highest risk level (because it will even out over 18 years). They’re up 40% in two years!

[Your Accountant @TJiMTS]

Andy Burnham, in two weeks of being PM, has perfectly illustrated the main problem in UK public finances.

Week 1: there's a cost of living crisis, so to help you we've taken £45 a year off your electricity bill and capped bus fares at £2.

Week 2: we don't have enough money to fund everything we want to do, so we're taking £630 a year out of your salary.

Same government, same month.

Credit where it's due first - taking VAT off electricity from October is real money, so is the £2 bus cap in January if you're on a bus twice a day. Immediate cost of living relief is genuinely needed by most people.

But I'm not sure how someone who couldn't manage without that £45 a year of relief is supposed to now manage with £630 a year less in their pocket?

The £630 is a 1.8% levy on income to fund a National Care Service costed at £18bn a year. On a £35,000 salary it's £630, on £50,000 it's £900.

It's charged as a percentage of your income.
It's collected out of your income.
It is not, apparently, income tax, because they're going to call it a levy.

It also only applies to taxpayers over 34... So you turn 35 and take a pay cut, at the exact age most people are stretched on a mortgage with childcare costing more than the mortgage.

But the UKs ACTUALLY problem? Spending is too high. And it's too high in ways that are fixable if anyone was willing to challenge the status quo rather than buy more votes with handouts.

This is where £1,383bn goes this year:

Health, £269.6bn
Pensions, £236.3bn
Welfare, £204.0bn
Education, £126.7bn
Debt interest, £104.6bn
Defence, £75.2bn
Everything else, £367.1bn

Health, £269.6bn: We need mandatory health insurance as an employment benefit and a hybrid model. Everyone hears "insurance" and pictures America, someone bleeding out over a copay, as if no other model exists on earth.

The Netherlands has mandatory private health insurance. Insurers are legally required to accept everyone. They cannot charge you more for being chronically ill. A risk equalisation pool moves money towards the insurers covering the sickest people. It's consistently ranked top three in Europe.

Welfare, £204.0bn: Income tax raises £330bn. So almost 2 of every 3 pounds of Income Tax taken from every working person in this country is spoken for by the welfare bill.

Welfare should be for people who cannot work. Disability, genuine incapacity, the people it was built to protect. It has drifted into a general income top-up, and the number that proves it is 4.2 million working age people now claiming at least one health related benefit, up a million since 2019.

Change how we determine eligibility, fix a lot of spending issues immediately.

Pensions, £236.3bn: The state pension is a Ponzi scheme, and I mean that technically rather than as an insult. There is no fund - the ONS says so plainly. Your National Insurance is not being put aside and invested for your State Pension, It just pays the payouts for last year's pensioners. Yours depends entirely on there being enough workers behind you.

Which, btw, there won't be. The ratio of pensioners to workers goes from 27% to 48% by 2050 (and these estimates are before we've seen the proper impact of AI/automation on jobs.

Australia already fixed this: 12% of earnings into a private fund with your name on it, mandatory, employer paid. It's your money, it compounds, it doesn't need a bigger generation behind you to work.

We could mandate the same tomorrow and let the state pension run down over the next 40 years, eventually saving £236bn a year.

You can't levy your way out of these problems. A 1.8% charge on everyone over 34 raises £18bn. It doesn't even cover the interest on our existing debt.

And in the meantime... If we're going to borrow anyway, why is none of it buying anything?

Norway found oil in 1969 and put the money in a fund... That fund is now worth $2.049 trillion. It holds a stake in roughly 1.5% of every listed company on the planet.

We found oil in the same decade and spent it.

The UK's National Wealth Fund is capitalised at £27.8bn. Norway's is about 73 times bigger.

So where is our position in AI, in data centres, in grid scale renewables, in batteries, in electric vehicles, in any of the things the next fifty years actually runs on? We borrow £133bn a year and almost none of it buys an asset.

Fix government spending immediately, increase government income over time (without milking people for every penny of 'levy' you can find), and quality of life will genuinely improve as people have more money in their pockets.

The UK has a spending problem, not a tax problem.

[Joram Spoor @J0ramS]

Scandalous

[Armand Girbes @ArmandGirbes]

Alle alarmbellen zouden moeten afgaan, want dit duidt eenvoudigweg op een einde aan de rechtstaat. Net als een overheid die zich herhaald niet aan de wet houdt.

[Joram Spoor @J0ramS]

In Italy they have bpa free receipts ! @paulsaladinomd

[Don Ceder @DonCeder]

Je ontvlucht geloofsvervolging om vervolgens in een Nederlands azc opnieuw vanwege je geloof te worden bedreigd. Onacceptabel.

In de Telegraaf roep ik de minister op tot actie tegen deze misstanden en de daders.

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

When it comes to tax in the UK, a lot of people are deluding themselves, thinking the government will just go after the wealthy to pay for the ballooning commitments they’ve made.

The truth is, the real target is the middle class. And the reason is simple. The middle class is the only viable option for the kind of revenue the government wants.

Start with who’s off the table. A third of British adults pay no income tax at all. The bottom half of earners take home about a quarter of the income in this country and pay roughly a tenth of the tax. There’s no pot of gold buried down there, and every party has spent years promising to protect “working people.” Squeezing them is politically radioactive and would raise next to nothing anyway.

The rich are off the table too, whatever the Channel 4 documentaries say. The top 1% already pay 28% of all income tax. Their money is capital, dividends and gains, so they’re mobile, and they’ve already started leaving. One widely quoted forecast has Britain losing half a million millionaires by 2028. Push the rate on these people much higher and you collect less, not more. Threatening them polls brilliantly, but relying on them for a tax bonanza is pure fantasy.

Which leaves the middle class, and the middle class can’t run. Most are on PAYE, taxed at source before the money touches their account. They can’t turn a salary into a capital gain. They can’t declare residency in Monaco, because the job, the kids’ school and the mortgage are all here. Their wealth is a house they can’t hide under the mattress and a pension they can’t reach. Numerous, visible and immobile. The perfect target, and in some ways the only one.

And here’s how it’s already being done. They won’t raise your headline rate of income tax, because they promised not to. But the threshold freeze, the one that sounds like a non-event on Budget day, is quietly hammering you, and it’s now been extended to 2031.

Took out a student loan since 2012? You’ve been paying the graduate tax in all but name. Hold investments outside an ISA? You’ve watched CGT climb to 24%, and it’s likely to be equalised with income tax next. Sent your kids to private school? That’s the VAT charge. Saving into a cash ISA? That shelter just shrank from £20,000 to £12,000. And from 2027, your pension gets pulled into inheritance tax, so the pot you spent a career building can be taxed again on the way out.

There’s more coming. Mansion taxes, higher CGT, property levies, dividends. Most of the taxes we’re told will hit the ultra wealthy will actually land on the middle class. And in most cases they’re not sat on fortunes, they’re sat on assets they spent a working life building.

What’s worse, the burden grows with every Budget, because of the compounding commitments this government keeps making, and that nearly every other party has pledged too.

So who pays for the past, present and future spending of the UK government? The middle class. And there’s not a thing they can do about it. Debt-trapped, stuck in place, with nowhere to turn, and the government knows it.

If any of this resonated, you’re likely in the taxation crosshairs. I wish you luck.

[Conor McGregor @TheNotoriousMMA]

I believe in one God,
the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.

God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
consubstantial with the Father;
through Him all things were made.

For us men and for our salvation
He came down from heaven,

and by the Holy Spirit
was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.

For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
He suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.

He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead,
and His kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the Giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.

I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

I confess one Baptism
for the forgiveness of sins,

and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come.

Amen. 🙏🏼

[Joram Spoor @J0ramS]

- The post incorrectly applies a general 6-year timeline for new gas fields to Jackdaw, which has drilled wells, hooked-up infrastructure, and is ready for production by October 1 if approved soon after final checks.
- Jackdaw was discovered in 2005, approved in 2022, but required updated environmental impact assessments following a 2025 court ruling on climate considerations for burning the gas.
- The boss’s warning highlights the UK’s limited 8-day gas storage and energy security risks this winter; no evidence is presented for the backhander allegation involving ReformUK.

[Sheila of the Most High @sheilatebra]

Did you know Jacob was buried with Leah, not Rachel? Not the woman he loved. Not the one he cried for. Not the one he labored fourteen years to have. Leah. In Genesis 49:29–31, when Jacob was about to die, he gave a clear instruction: “Bury me… in the cave… where Abraham and Sarah are… Isaac and Rebekah… and there I buried Leah.” Pause. Rachel was his passion. Leah was his alignment. Rachel was the love story. Leah was the covenant story. Rachel had his emotions.
Leah carried the promise. Rachel was buried on the roadside (Genesis 35:19). Leah was laid in the ancestral grave of covenant the lineage of God’s dealings. And here is the mystery: Leah was the rejected one. The one Jacob didn’t choose. The one he endured, not desired. But heaven chose her. From Leah came Judah. From Judah came Jesus Christ. Let that settle in your spirit The woman rejected by a man became central to God’s redemptive plan. This is where many people miss it:
 We are all trying to be “Rachel”seen, desired, celebrated. But God builds legacy through “Leah seasons”And that is the gospel pattern: God does not build His purposes on human preference. He builds on grace and election. So if you feel overlooked… if you feel like second choice…

if life has not chosen you first— hear this clearly: God’s choice overrides man’s rejection... if you’re in your Leah season you are being written into something bigger.
Amen

[Joram Spoor @J0ramS]

@CConcern He needs to get his job back if he was acquitted!

[Basil the Great @BasilTheGreat]

🚨BREAKING: UK GOVERNMENT TO TAKE CONTROL OF YOUTUBE ALGORITHM

This is pure authoritarianism

Keir Starmer's/Andy Burnham's Government is set to control the YouTube algorithm by LAW stipulating that they must push "APPROVED CONTENT" to UK Citizens

And independent voices who criticise the government will be pushed to the back of the queue making it harder for people to find

YouTube has acknowledged this is happening

This must be stopped

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Swiss farmers planted flowers between their crops and watched pest damage drop by over half. The UK is now running the same trial across 15 farms. The reason this works is embarrassingly simple.

A Swiss study on winter wheat found that fields with wildflower strips had 40 to 53% fewer leaf beetle pests than fields without. Crop damage dropped 61%.

The mechanism is simple. Wildflowers feed hoverflies, lacewings, parasitic wasps, ladybugs, and ground beetles. Those insects eat the aphids, beetle larvae, and caterpillars that farmers would otherwise spray for. A few meters of wildflowers hosts an unpaid pest control crew that would jump at the chance to whoop some aphid ass.

In apple orchards where no insecticides had been used for five years, plots with wildflower alleyways had 9.2% damaged fruit. Control plots without flowers had 32.5%.

The UK is now running a five-year trial across 15 farms placing 6-meter flower strips through the middle of fields, not just at the edges, because the beneficial insects can't reach the center of a large field otherwise.

This works the same way in a backyard vegetable garden as it does on a commercial farm. Plant native flowering species near your tomatoes, beans, and squash. The pests still show up, but the predators show up too.

Study doi: 20151369

[Dr Clare Craig @ClareCraigPath]

The folic acid plan is a supranational plan.

It is a recommendation from the WHO.

But look at the basis for their "strong recommendation".

It is not safe.
It must be stopped.

Sign petition in next tweet.