Bought two cars today for cash … my trusty RAV4 has given 10yrs of loyal service but time for a change. Walked out of a VW dealer this morning after they decided to have a team meeting in sales and kept me waiting - I gave them 20mins. Too old to put up with shit
If you ever want to know what Britain had lost over the decades that generation will never now replace it is the interview with Douglas bader … a legend and a true patriot Video from the Past [10] - Late Night with Douglas Bader (1965) https://t.co/FCOmlW5CYP via @YouTube
Reform's Robert Jenrick fast-tracked visas for Sudanese fighting-age men and then bragged about putting countless illegals in hotels across Britain.
Never forget, never forgive.
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.
@MadeInFareham@antmiddleton@RestoreBritain so he was one of the 274 climbers in one day queuing to summit Everest helping to make a mockery of mountaineering and thinks that allows him to claim the high ground.. I think not !
@starpukka1 no not yet... trying the old style of driving around garages talking cash deals with no part ex.
worked a treat last time although time consuming
spent hours this morning on autotrader looking for a car for my wife. It became a realchore was trying to filter out loads of 'Cinch' listed local cars which were not, infact local at all. Hated it and so I sold my shares as soon as I logged out. #auto
@MaxHacquoil and my perspective is that you either nail your colours firmly to a mast you wholly believe in, or, you sail on any ship promising change hoping it ends up somewhere better than last time. UK politics has had decades of that - it does not work anymore. cheers
@MaxHacquoil@ramonagusta Rubbish...Lowe is putting forward vastly different policies to reform and other parties and Farage is, and always has been openly hostile to him and restores' policies; as have the tories. Lowe is determined to stick to his priciples and those of this party and I agree with him.
@RollingHedge@GenGJenkinsRM It is renamed to permit a regimental history to be erased that is the sole reason for it. All part of the wider plan to reset the UK; same a bank notes, museums etc etc
HP Sauce: Parliament on the label, star of the full English, as British as it gets.
American-owned since 2005, and production shifted from its home in Birmingham to the Netherlands.
The English-made swap? Stokes brown sauce, made in Suffolk by a family firm. By all accounts, a cracker.
I've never seen trades like this reported as completed (not delayed) with such disparity on the pricing. I suspect a lot of retail would have got bounced out of the share in the process. #trig