A UK family where both parents work full-time, pay full council tax, and earn enough to be 'doing alright' on paper, can't afford to take their kids to the Tower of London on a Saturday in 2026.
Two adult tickets and two child tickets at standard price comes to roughly £100. Add £40-£80 in train fares and £50-£70 for lunch — that's around £200 for a single Saturday at one tourist attraction in their own capital city.
A family on full Universal Credit, living in subsidised housing, paying no council tax, can take the same four people to the same Tower for £1 a ticket — £4 total — under the 'inclusive access' schemes most major UK attractions now run.
The working family pays the full £200 day out AND covers — through their taxes — the £196 discount the benefits family gets on the same trip.
Whatever the original intention of those schemes, this is the structure most UK working families are now living inside. Pay the full bill, then watch the people next door enjoy the day out you can't take your own kids to.
So Jenny Riddell-Carpenter @Jenny4SuffCoast Labour MP for Suffolk Coastal has made herself look a right idiot by saying pubs, warm beer and black labradors are not quintessentially English - they're the domain of the far right.
Here's Jenny in a quintessential English pub in her constituency with her black labrador. Is she now far right? Or just a soppy hypocrite?
I'll go for hypocrite, bearing in mind her interview with Wayne Bavin on BBC Radio Suffolk a couple of years ago when she said she'd put her constituents before party. Then, when elected, voted to remove pensioners' winter fuel payments. She also voted against the many farmers in her constituency by backing the Family Farms Tax.
Jenny is a hypocrite. She's also a champagne socialist, living in well to do Woodbridge, which is predominantly white, English and is representative of everything still quintessentially English. Or far right as she calls it.
And like all champagne socialists, she has a second home. In France. 🙄😬
Until last week, men over 50 were entitled to a free PSA prostate cancer check. But the government has now decided to withdraw that right. I cannot for the life of me work out what their reasoning might be.
Imagine watching people go to prison and KILL THEMSELVES, while knowing they were not guilty of anything!
BEYOND BELIEF, BEYOND COMPREHENSION, for anyone with a slither of humanity
Get her in court, take her (vast) money, bankrupt her, make her deliver mail on a fucking post bike
Why is Britain about to mandate the addition of a licensed medicine with the known side-effect of increasing miscarriages into the nation's flour? Folic acid is coming and the public are oblivious, says Dr Clare Craig.
https://t.co/CduDPLxZiU
Paula Vennells.
In her 7 year tenure as CEO of the Post Office she waltzed off with £5.1 Mn; around £2.2 Mn coming from performance related incentives and pension in lieu payments.
Yet postmasters/mistresses are still waiting for their compensation.
#Newsnight#PostOfficeScandal
Pakistan is a modern country. It has nuclear weapons, its own space programme and one of the world's largest militaries.
Yet Britain still sends it £133 million a year in foreign aid while defunding the Jodrell Bank telescope after more than 70 years of pioneering scientific research.
This is exactly the kind of investment Britain should be protecting. You don't build a stronger future by dismantling your own scientific infrastructure.
GOOD POINT👇👇👇
To all the Supermarkets and big commercial stores that operate 'Self Check-outs'....... You are heading towards almost exclusively self-checkout now. Yesterday I went shopping at one such store and the lady checking receipts at the exit was stopping everyone.
I didn't choose to participate in that nonsense, I had already filled my trolly, emptied my trolly and scanned the items, refilled my trolly and so I just skipped the exit line and left.
I heard her saying "Umm - Excuse me “ as I kept walking and raised the receipt above my head, leaving the store.
You can either trust me to do self-checkout, or you can put your cashiers back in place like it used to be.
• I'm not interested in proving that I did your job for you.
• If you want me to be a cashier with no training then that's your problem not mine.
• Keep employing young people and give them job opportunities.
YOU DON'T PAY ME TO SCAN MY OWN SHOPPING.
YOU DON’T GIVE ME STAFF DISCOUNT FOR WORKING FOR YOU.
Signed ......All of us
People we need to share this statement its basically about PROFIT to the stores AND putting People out of a JOB....!!!
🚨 JEREMY CLARKSON BLASTS ANDY BURNHAM FOR APPOINTING ANGELA EAGLE TO RUN THE COUNTRYSIDE.
Jeremy Clarkson has just hit the nail on the head regarding the absolute state of Labour's approach to British farming.
Growing food in Britain is becoming financially impossible.
Clarkson was forced to leave 200 acres of his own farm completely empty this year because planting wheat or barley guarantees a heavy loss!
And how does Andy Burnham respond to struggling British farmers? He appoints Angela Eagle as Environment Secretary! 🤡
A career politician who has never worked on a farm and has never run a business in her entire life.
As Clarkson rightly said, putting Angela Eagle in charge of the countryside is like putting Alan Carr in charge of the British Army!
Our Westminster elite are actively crushing British agriculture with Net Zero red tape, insane energy bills, and family farm taxes. They would rather import cheap foreign produce than protect the hardworking British families who keep this country fed.
How can a politician with zero real world farming or business experience dictate the future of our rural economy?
SHARE this everywhere to stand with British farmers! 🇬🇧🔥
This is worth more than the entire third world to me
We spend £2.8 million a year keeping it running
We spend over £1 Billion each year on benefits just for migrants
We spend £15 Billion on foreign aid
Cut them and keep our contribution to the stars
"Life expectancy has doubled since 1900. Modern food clearly works."
Marvellous. Airtight.
Picture your Victorian, dead at thirty-eight. What do you imagine finished him?
The butter on his bread?
The lard in his frying pan? The mutton off a hillside? The eggs from the yard, the milk carried in from a cow he could see out of the kitchen window?
Or was it cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, smallpox, a splinter that went septic, a birth in a room where nobody had washed, a mill accident, a pit collapse, a war, the workhouse, and a physician who treated all of the above by opening a vein?
Nobody added a decade to that man by swapping his dripping for sunflower oil.
We added it with sewers, soap, antibiotics, and the radical proposal that a surgeon might rinse his hands between the mortuary and the maternity ward.
Margarine contributed nothing to that. Margarine has spent the intervening century quietly working the other way.
The plumbing did the lifting. Build the plumber a statue.
@WriterHannahBT We have been using the Merlin app for quite a while and find it brilliant as were you. Throughly enjoyed your part in Clarksons Farm. Have you ever thought of taking a small party out to help them identify birds?