Aidan Roberts

Let’s make Twitter chirpy

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

Funny how things change when it’s in their constituancy

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Oh for fuck’s sake give it a rest…

Brexit was FACTUALLY a de minimis footnote (I voted remain in 2016 so don’t even start…) when compared with a raft of the worst policy decisions imaginable since the end of WW2 across virtually all policy areas, by fuckwit politicians…

To name some of the biggest offenders:

- Most expensive energy in the developed world fuelling inflation across every good and service going - and net zero cultish insanity crippling our economy; we now make virgin steel only via emergency nationalisation in all but name - mainly because windmills and solar don’t produce the joules to produce concrete or steel, to build stuff

- Shuttering North Sea oil whilst buying the same stuff from the Norwegians who banked the oil: two trillion in the tank, three hundred grand a head, a quarter of the budget paid forever

- PFI. Blair and Brown fancied hospitals that didn’t trouble the books, so they put them on tick with loan sharks. £60b of buildings, £300b out the door, NHS still paying through the nose for a car park and a leaky roof.

- Tories borrowed the best part of £400bn at 0%, the cheapest money in three hundred years, and what have we got for it? Furlough, a fortune in PPE that didn’t work, and ~£20b handed to chancers with fake ltd co’s. Nothing built. Nothing that pays you back. The lot, gone. And here’s the one nobody says out loud… Money was free. Risk free. Rates at zero for the best part of a fucking decade. If a govt or their perm secs had any sense that was the moment to issue a 30y infra bond and build the grid, the reactors, the track, the housing, lock the cost in at basically nothing and let it pay for itself for two generations. Norway would’ve had it done by lunch. We didn’t issue a penny of it. Now the long end’s at 5.5 and the door’s now bolted shut. We had the cheapest money in history and spaffed it all.

- Capital markets that don’t work since Blair and Brown’s various legislative and regulatory changes, making pension fund allocations lower going into British companies, and making it harder and more costly to raise capital to grow and keep businesses here paying taxes and employing people - the collective cost of this to British households is conservatively estimated to be around £20trillion (per @andyroocraig’s figures) and countries that were literally communist within living memory are on track to overtake us this decade, on the IMF’s own numbers. Oh, and Mississippi HAS already overtaken us on GDP per capita basis (they are the butt of all poverty jokes in the US)

- Brown flogged 395 tonnes of gold, over half the national reserve, in 17 auctions between 1999 and 2002, at about $275 an ounce, near a twenty-year structural low. They call it “Brown’s Bottom” for a reason. Pocketed $3.5b but I t’d be worth around $52b today. So that socialist genius cleared the lot at the bottom of the market and torched the thick end of £40b in one decision (because he like many politicians since the 90s is a retard with no real world understanding)

- P90/P10 wage compression under social democracy is demonstrably worse than even the Soviets managed under Gosplan ffs

- Selling off and sweating various other national assets to fund our absurd debt borrowing pile that has mostly been spaffed up the wall on zero return or loss making initiatives / welfare socialism etc

- Series of the worst trade deals imaginable (pre and post Brexit)

- Too much of people’s money tied up in the resi property Ponzi scheme doing nothing (other than now: losing value in realtime)

- Planning laws that stop anyone building infrastructure on housing

I could go on…

Plus we have rising long yields now, which are (TL;DR) the price of having destroyed your own structural buyer base and then issuing into the gap while the central bank sells on top. Brexit doesn’t appear anywhere in that mechanism either.

So, this creepy obsession you have with Brexit is weird, lame and entirely worn out.

Bin.
🚮

[James Esses @JamesEsses]

🚨The government just voted down an attempt by the Conservative Party to cancel the puberty blockers trial.

Make no mistake about it, Labour are putting virtue signalling and ideology before the wellbeing of our most vulnerable children.

They bring shame upon our nation.

[Chief Nerd @TheChiefNerd]

STUCKEY: “Why should people have hope?”

VANCE: “Because Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He came down from heaven and is ultimately the author of history … If you actually believe that God himself became man and died to give grace to human beings, you just have to have hope.”

[Aidan Roberts @aidanroberts]

@RestIsPolitics I’d have liked Sir Keir to keep his word and fight. The debates would have forced thought through policy and given the public a chance to get to know Andy.

[Ramon Agusta @ramonagusta]

Never forget what Starmer (and Reeves) have done...

All the "red" represents tens of thousands of lives ruined, thousands of businesses closed, and more debt for our children.

And it was all so avoidable.

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

For Father’s Day, I’ll share this letter to Karl Marx from his dad

[Katie Lam @Katie_Lam_MP]

In just 8 years, China pumped out more carbon emissions than Britain has produced in 250 years.

Net zero is wrecking our industry, and driving up our energy bills, but it's having zero impact on global climate.

It's time to scrap Net Zero for good.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, Britain’s biggest trade union: “It is no secret that I disagree with Ed Miliband on almost every issue relating to a workers’ transition. Ed only seems to be interested in one side of the equation, rushing Britain to net zero with almost no thought for jobs, skills and national security.”
Couldn’t put it better myself.

[Aidan Roberts @aidanroberts]

I hope for a contest. We the public don’t know Andy, his political convictions or key policies. A contest is an opportunity to get some public backing. A transition will give Andy a starting approval barely above Keir’s.

[Andy Burnham @andyburnham]

Keir has given huge service to our country and I want to thank him for his leadership and dedication during such a challenging period.

His decision marks the beginning of a transition and it is important that this process is conducted in an orderly and responsible way. I will put myself forward as part of this process.

The country expects stability, seriousness and a continued focus on the issues that matter most and that is what it will get.

As we move forward, our priority must be to work together to get the country back to where we all want it to be. People want to see progress on economic growth, cost of living, public services, housing and opportunities for the next generation. Political change should never distract from the responsibility to improve people's lives.

The Labour movement has always been at its strongest when it looks forward with confidence and purpose. This is what we will do from here and we will make sure this transition is a positive process of renewal for our party and our country.

[Aidan Roberts @aidanroberts]

Good post. Still not convinced by the final line.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Hiking national insurance
The Family Farm Tax
Giving up on real welfare reform
Not funding our defence
Not drilling our own oil and gas
Appointing Peter Mandelson…then lying about what had happened

Britain is not ungovernable. Keir Starmer is a terrible Prime Minister. But the problem isn’t just Starmer.

Labour MPs only want higher taxes to hand out more benefits, as the Welfare Secretary has pointed out. These are Labour’s choices and their values, regardless of who is running the party.

We need to get Britain working again. We need the @Conservatives.

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

John Lennon wrote a beautiful song about socialism.

“Imagine no possessions” he told us.

He also:
– helped write his band’s anti-tax anthem, Taxman
– incorporated his IP holdings
– moved to a lower-tax country
– fiercely protected his royalties
- drove two Rolls Royce’s and had multiple luxury homes.
– made sure even the royalty cheques for Imagine were kept safe for his estate so his family would remain wealthy in perpetuity.

If he believed it, he’d have lived it. The trouble with socialism is that even the people who love the idea won’t run the experiment on themselves.

John Lennon writing Imagine while owning two Rolls Royce Phantoms and later having a law suit to protect his royalties tells you all you need to know about socialism in practice.

It doesn’t work outside of the imagination.

[James Esses @JamesEsses]

If you want to summarise just how messed up the United Kingdom is in a single sentence:

The UK government believes that 11 year olds are too young to watch YouTube but old enough to block their puberty and render themselves infertile.

[Claire Coutinho @ClaireCoutinho]

The Government have quietly announced that they will push ahead with their Puberty Blocker Trial.

Children as young as 11 will be given drugs that can lead to loss of fertility and bone density.

No child can consent to this. The trial must be stopped.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCdaily]

The word 'Conservative' is as bad (or almost as bad) as the word 'Progressive'. And it is bad for the same reason. It is bad because it introduces a test other than the test of right and wrong; of what we want or what we do not want.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

It is NOT ok to experiment on kids as young as 11 and make irreversible changes to their bodies.

We must protect children from dangerous ideology.

Conservatives will not just sit back and let this happen. I refuse to believe MPs, if given the chance, would let this continue. That is why we will force a vote, not just to pause this trial but to stop it completely.

[Mark Wallace @wallaceme]

North Sea oil and gas:

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Roger Scruton, the ancestor duty

[𝔉🅰𝒏 Karoline Leavitt @WHLeavitt]

🚨🇯🇵BREAKING

JAPAN'S NEW ANTI-ISLAM LAWS SEND SHOCKWAVES

Halal - BANNED✅
Mosques - BANNED✅
Call to prayer - BANNED✅
Burka - BANNED✅

This is basically saying Islam is not welcome here

Should we copy Japan?

A. Yes
B. No

[Documenting Saylor @saylordocs]

Milton Friedman on 4 ways to spend money:

1) Your money on yourself (you’re careful about both cost and quality)
2) Your money on others (you care about cost, less about quality)
3) Someone else’s money on yourself (you care about quality, not cost)
4) Someone else’s money on others (you care about neither)

The last one is how government spending works