Phil

[James Boodt @JDBoodt]

@EflSimpsons

[Stefan Roberts @stefanroberts]

You’re saying No10 North will mean loads of civil servants spending millions of pounds and thousands of hours travelling up and down from Manchester just to take a video call?

[Daily Mail @DailyMail]

Revealed: Mandarin who runs No10 North lives in £2.2million townhouse in trendy Islington, commutes by train to Manchester and stays in luxury hotel with 23rd floor bar and a pool https://t.co/CLYkI8qEFO

[Richard Tice MP 🇬🇧 @TiceRichard]

Reform Council saves over £10 million after scrapping ‘net stupid zero’ target

Well done Newcastle-under-Lyme 🩵 https://t.co/hl8bUhaTG3

[CentreGoals. @centregoals]

🚨🚨| NEW: Marcus Rashford and Andre Onana's Manchester United salaries have 𝐑𝐈𝐒𝐄𝐍 𝟐𝟓% due to Champions League qualification clauses — despite playing 𝐙𝐄𝐑𝐎 minutes for the club.

[@TelegraphDucker]

[Lee Nallalingham @LNallalingham]

🚨 HMRC took £90.4 BILLION more from taxpayers last year.

That comes directly from the National Audit Office.

In just one year, HMRC collected 10.3% more tax - an extra £90.4 billion!

Thanks in part to frozen tax thresholds, 1.1 million more people were dragged into paying Income Tax.

So HMRC clearly has no problem taking more money from you.

What it does have, is a problem passing audit.

For the 24th year in a row, auditors were unable to give HMRC a completely clean audit because they found significant levels of fraud and error.

And now Andy Burnham is reportedly considering another £38 billion of tax rises.

How about before taking another penny from taxpayers…

…they stop the fraud and error and prove they can properly manage the record amounts we’re already paying?

[The Mercian @TheMercianNews]

🚨 BREAKING: New Health Secretary Yvette Cooper has taken almost half a million pounds from a donor linked to the NHS and private healthcare recruitment company.

Donor Peter Hearn has also been involved in the appointment of the lead for the failed NHS Test and Trace programme during the covid-19 pandemic.

[Kevin Edger @KEdge23]

Labour attacked supermarkets. They’ve hit back.

British Retail Consortium, which represents many big shops incl M&S, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, have said that Labour’s tax rises are to blame for higher prices.

Labour’s tax rises are also to blame for job losses.

[Boring Milner @BoringMilner]

Chelsea literally picked the most boring way to spend €2.41 BILLION.

[Donna Louise @DonnaLouise1212]

47-year-old Irish dad from Leinster drugged his own kids and their mates at a sleepover, then raped one of the girls in the woods during a game of hide and seek.

Jailed in Dublin for just 15½ years.

Not life.

Not the death penalty.

Fifteen and a half fucking years.

No wonder rapes are increasing at such a rapid rate. Disgraceful!

[Not Match of the Day @NOT_MOTD]

Can’t unsee this now 😭😭😭

[Adam @AdamJoseph]

Between 2011 & 2018, third party entities made twelve payments totalling approximately £47.5m. These were made with the knowledge & approval of Chelsea, using funds linked to Roman Abramovich.

For Eden Hazard, Kenedy, Ramires, David Luiz, André Schürrle & Nemanja Matić, the club paid £23.1m was paid to seven unregistered agents & associates using Abramovich's funds & never reported in their filings.

With Samuel Eto’o & Willian, both signed from Anzhi Makhachkala, a company made payments totalling €24m to two British Virgin Islands registered companies, the recipients were associated with Anzhi.

Total major trophies in the period: 14
- 3x Premier League
- 3x FA Cup
- 1x League Cup
- 2x UEFA Champions League
- 2x UEFA Europa League
- 1x UEFA Super Cup
- 1x FIFA Club World Cup

In the time these breaches occurred, Chelsea's yearly annual revenue was between £261m-£445m, winning between £700m-£800m in prize money. £10m is a pathetic 'punishment', it is a rounding error.

Clubs may as well cheat if this is the slap on the wrist.

[Who Is Gręgg🇿🇼? @greggmunikwa]

Probably the best thread of replies ever

[⚫️ ToonFan ⚪️ @ToonFan14]

Meanwhile, #NUFC and #AVFC have to sell their best players in order to avoid a points deduction……

[Basil the Great @BasilTheGreat]

🚨NEWS: The three females found dead in a small migrant boat are believed to have been murdered when crossing the channel, meaning their murderers are now in the UK

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

🚨#BREAKING: The Moroccan Muslims who have invaded the small Spanish city of Ceuta are now BREAKING INTO STORES by the HUNDREDS.

Police are completely overwhelmed.

Migrants can be seen running from one store to the next, grabbing items and running.

WHERE IS THE MILITARY?!!!!!

[Johnny Midnight ⚡️ @its_The_Dr]

British Humor! 🤣😂

[BBC Sport @BBCSport]

A £10m fine and a suspended two-window transfer ban for Chelsea ❌💰

[Football Tweet ⚽ @Footballtweet]

🇮🇹🗣️ UEFA Vice President Gabriele Gravina: “I have long denounced the political interference accepted by Infantino. Now we discover that they want to sell a stake in the organisation that holds the helm of football to the brother of the U.S. president’s son-in-law.”

“Does it look like the Super League? Very much so. The financial backers are the same, the idea is the same, but on a global scale. It’s even worse, though: football is being sold off. But football isn’t a private asset that you can sell to the highest bidder, how can you sell something that isn’t yours? Infantino didn’t invent it."

[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.