Evan Owen-Powell

Surveyor

[Evan Owen-Powell @eowenpowell]

Most important part of being a surveyor? You've got to stay.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................relaxed.

[Kevin Pietersen🦏 @KP24]

Some dude from Manchester who I’d never even heard of until recently, is today the UK’s new PM.

Anyone else lost a little on this?

[Capel Lofft @CapelLofft]

Future historians are going to be puzzled about how Britain, in the face of terminal decline - economy decaying, infrastructure crumbling - had a political & media class who spent its time on talking bins and trivial nonsense, all while utterly ignoring the impending crisis

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

On Saturday, after nearly a century, the long-wave transmitter at Droitwich fell silent, and the two old masts at Westerglen and Burghead with it. Most people won't have noticed. But something left the country on Saturday worth marking before it slips out of memory as well as off the air: the Shipping Forecast, in the form millions have grown up with, one of the primi among British institutions, read out on long wave to the fishing fleets and the insomniacs and anyone else still awake at the rim of the day.

If you've ever heard it, you know the odd power of the thing. "Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty" - a litany of sea areas most listeners will never lay eyes on, in a cadence that hasn't altered in generations, read with the calm of a voice that assumes you are out there somewhere in the dark and means to see you home. It carried far more than the weather. It was among the last things the whole of Britain still heard at the same hour: the same words, the same rhythm, meaning the same thing to a trawlerman off Rockall and a sleepless accountant in Surrey. A aesthetic paradigm of our culture; supreme utility and sublime superfluity. A country that now shares almost nothing in common still shared that.

And there's a stranger fact again, one that lifts the whole business clear of nostalgia. By long-standing account, the Royal Navy's nuclear-missile submarines, hidden somewhere beneath the Atlantic with the nation's last deterrent aboard, used Radio 4 on long wave as one of their signs of life from home. If the broadcasts kept coming, Britain was still there. If they ever stopped, and stayed stopped, the commander was to open the sealed letter the Prime Minister had written out by hand, and learn what his country wished of him in a world that no longer contained it. The same mild signal that told a fisherman the wind in Dogger was, by that account, a pulse the end of the world would have been measured against.

It is fitting, and bleak, that a broadcaster which has spent years forgetting who it was ever for should choose this, of all things, to switch off. The BBC never seems short of money for the things it wants to do. It decided the cost of the old signal was no longer worth bearing, and silenced the one transmission that asked nothing of anybody and reassured everybody. The fishermen, the old, the sleepless, the men under the sea - none of them were an audience it cared to keep.

The forecast itself survives in other forms, on other frequencies; this is not the end of it. But the signal that carried it for a hundred years, and the idea it quietly stood for - that a nation is a thing held together by small shared rituals, faithfully kept, that ask nothing and bind everyone - that has fallen silent, and it fell without a fight. We let these things go one at a time, each too small to defend on its own, until we glance up and find there is nothing left that we all still do together.

How many more will we let go?

How many more will you let go?

[John Stepek @John_Stepek]

More devolution is a great idea. Such is the surfeit of political talent in this country, we need to create more jobs to accommodate them all, can't let all that ability go to waste

[Professor John Hearn @jbhearn]

What a surprise for the Bank of England, the BBC and all those economists who believe in the myth of cost push inflation!
Inflation stays at 2.8%.
Time to listen to the monetarists.

[spankybackpack @spankybackpack]

CEEFAX banned for under-34s after 6:54 PM

[Evan Owen-Powell @eowenpowell]

I now own 0.0000000013% of SpaceX 😅

[Evan Owen-Powell @eowenpowell]

@Pibydd Cymru am byth!

[Charlie @btc_charlie]

In 2 years interest rates in the UK will be 10%.

Good luck have fun.

[John Stepek @John_Stepek]

Had a minor lightbulb moment: this is the desired outcome. Subsidising demand and constraining supply is ideologically consistent with a fundamentally anti-growth worldview. You ban supply, then use redistribution as a backdoor rationing tool. The pie shrinks. Job done.

[Evan Owen-Powell @eowenpowell]

A blog on the Straight of Hormuz closure, and the looming crisis (with quite a good Dire Straights-pun-related title, if I say so myself) https://t.co/KDsgdHmZIo

[Evan Owen-Powell @eowenpowell]

@echetus @pengabdirakyat Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck is exceptionally good

[Zynx @ZynxBTC]

The UK has a far flatter income distribution than the Communist Soviet Union.

The UK take home minimum wage for working a full time job (40-hours) is now £22,555.

At £100k salary, the take home is £68,558.

That is a net income ratio of 3.04:1

We are now at the point where the wage compression and taxes in the UK means that the difference between minimum wage and a top 5% salary is a net income difference of only ~3x.

In the USSR using the same comparison, this figure never fell below 5:1

It's actually even worse in reality because the person earning £100k in the UK often has student loans.

Britain is nominally capitalist but functionally communist. China is nominally communist but functionally capitalist.

Funny how that works.

[Evan Owen-Powell @eowenpowell]

We edge closer to people working out that things aren't getting more costly, as such - it's just that the value of the £ is deteriorating at a faster and faster rate...

[Essex Patriot @Essex_Patriot]

Honestly at this point UK prices are just made up:

How is a return train to London £170? How is a "cheap" weekend away in England suddenly £600 when I could fly abroad for that.

How did £700 rent turn into £1500 for the same house?

Why does my car insurance rise every year on the same car with no claims? And since when did two bags of shopping come to nearly £100? We're finished. Absolutely done. 🇬🇧

[Evan Owen-Powell @eowenpowell]

Fig. 1

[MONETARY MAYHEM @MONETARY_MAYHEM]

Gold $5,575
Silver $120

[BowTiedMara @BowTiedMara]

Red zones: complicado

[Kevin Framp @BigKev67]

This is why English cricket is fucked.
2026 schedule. 8 rounds of 4 day cricket April to mid June. Dodgy weather. Green pitches.
Then 2 months of nothing in the height of summer.
Then 6 rounds from late August through September. Season finishes a week short of October!
Bonkers.

[Evan Owen-Powell @eowenpowell]

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

[Matt Gubba @MattGubba]

Ten years ago, a small business owner taking a £100k dividend could pay as little as £2,500 in personal tax if structured efficiently under the old dividend tax system.

Today in 2025, they’re paying £21,250.

Next year, under Labour’s new budget, they’ll pay over £23,000.

And that’s after the company has already paid 25% corporation tax on the profits used to fund that dividend.

In a decade, we’ve gone from a manageable tax bill to one where the state takes nearly a quarter of the dividend on top of corporation tax before the owner sees a penny.

That’s a nearly 800% increase in personal tax on the same £100k.

All for the crime of running a business in Britain.

- This is why entrepreneurship is dying here.
- This is why people aren’t scaling.
- This is why founders are taking their companies and jobs abroad.

If you want growth, stop treating business owners like a bottomless ATM.

Britain needs entrepreneurs, not policies that punish them for succeeding.