Sam TM

[Kevin Blake @kevinblake2011]

After seeing this remarkable image, I went searching. Turns out it was Cloghran Stud Farm and those mares were there to be covered by Blandford. While the farm has almost been totally absorbed by Dublin Airport, the distinctive building in the background (covering shed?) is still standing and sits just over 100m away from the main road out of Dublin Airport. @DublinAirport now own the farm. Hopefully they preserve the history.

[Sam TM @KautoStar2007]

@gamray Shakshuka?

[Sam TM @KautoStar2007]

@KeejayOV3 @RPWeekender 🎯

[William Kedjanyi @KeejayOV3]

3/3 on this week’s by-elections - don’t miss out and get buying future @RPWeekender editions!

[Gary Kelly @maxcouch]

Nail on the head from Lydia. When I think of Royal Ascot I think of the Gold Cup. It's the big one. The feature. The historic one. The great stayers. Levmoss, Sagaro, Le Moss, Ardross, Yeats, Stradivarius, Kyprios and now Scandinavia.

[James @jamesaknight]

Cracking day of sport ahead at Royal Ascot and a great advert for British racing. You'd like the government to take the hint really - this is a great industry that the country should be proud of - it's time to stop pulling the rug from underneath it.

[Sam TM @KautoStar2007]

@ScobieCjnr @Stephenh61 Horse Trader?

[Pinza @Pinza_UK]

Ryan Moore is famous wherever he rides, whether in Asia, Australia, Europe or America. His achievement has been marked today by an MBE. Yet he has been airbrushed out of BBC's exhaustive Honours List article. Another sad example of @BBCSport's bigoted prejudice against Racing.

[Sam TM @KautoStar2007]

@tayz2017 What does RP say bout Chuck d?

[Sam TM @KautoStar2007]

@Chezp1985 @tayz2017 Pffffft bluffer

[Sam TM @KautoStar2007]

@tayz2017 when are Ascot day 1 decs?

[Sam TM @KautoStar2007]

@tayz2017 Anything on Puerto Rico mate?

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

There's a pattern in the ONS's monthly jobs data that I find very telling. Everyone reads the headline payroll number, but the real story is sitting in the two lines underneath. And it's the same two lines, almost every single month.

Here are the numbers that I find particularly striking… retail, on the year, down 65,000 in January, then 49,000, then 57,000, then 76,000 in April. Health and social work, on the year, up 39,000, then 42,000, then 41,000, then 24,000. That's from HMRC's real-time payroll records, published by the ONS every month. And in almost every single release, the largest fall in the country is retail, and the largest rise is care.

And the backdrop is deteriorating fast. The latest ONS estimate puts payrolls down 210,000 on the year, with 100,000 lost in April alone. Unemployment has just hit 5%. The pubs and restaurants are shedding workers faster than any sector in Britain.

Which means the market economy, the shops, the pubs, the factories, the offices, is shrinking at scale, whilst the overwhelmingly taxpayer-funded care economy is, month after month, the biggest hirer in the country.

We're not really creating jobs anymore… we're converting them. Shopkeepers, factory workers and waiting staff into carers, month after month, on a production line.

Now, I know what some will say… this is the NICs rise and the minimum wage increases hitting retail and hospitality. And that's partly true. But tax rises explain the speed we’re seeing now, not the direction. The direction was set decades ago, in the maternity wards, during the baby boom. An ageing country demands more care. I've written countless times about the empty classrooms and the dependency ratio. This is the same story, arriving in the jobs data, exactly on schedule.

The trouble we have here is what each conversion costs. Every swap from private sector to care hits the Treasury twice. A job that paid tax disappears, and a job that tax pays for replaces it. Revenue down and spending up, in one transaction. Run that swap tens of thousands of times a year and you start to understand the fiscal hole this country faces far better.

And this isn't a blip that will unwind. The Resolution Foundation expects public sector employment to rise from 16% to over 18% of all jobs by 2030.

Every economy eventually gets reorganised around its demographics. We're just still pretending the country can be run the way it was run yesterday.

[Harry Findlay @TheDogHarry]

https://t.co/SKyInkFl6u

[Sam TM @KautoStar2007]

@Mikedq Any early thoughts on Wimbledon Mike?

[Nick Goff @nickgoff79]

Betting as a source of fun, or as a semi-serious vocation, is being destroyed in front of our eyes but they want to police work sweepstakes. It’s got to be a wind up?

[Sam TM @KautoStar2007]

@ashsh When are first entry stages for the Diane mate?

[Sam TM @KautoStar2007]

@seeley_nigel @PaulJonesRacing Cheers mate

[Sam TM @KautoStar2007]

@helynsar Shout 👍🏻