Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦

Sort of semi-retired Farmer, kind of changing the world - doing what I think is right.

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@ajcdeane @MichelleDewbs But, doesn’t Scotland still have a hurty words law?

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@LordAshcroft He also vowed to be in power for 10 years amongst a lot of other things

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@timfarron @IndigoFast I seriously thought this was an answer to something else 🤣

[RS Archer @archer_rs]

Big panic inside Reform Party Ltd circles as leaks from their WhatsApp show their own polling in Clacton has Binface leading and increasing his majority over Farage.
Talk of needing to "reframe media focus to immigrants and the boats"

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

Anyone who says that this is demeaning politics or is undemocratic is completely missing the point. I have not felt more hope for British politics for years #hissyfitelection
It’s the very best way to show up that @reformparty_uk are not a serious governing party. #binface

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

I can neither confirm nor deny that Robert Jenrick has asked to defect to the Count Binface Party. I can confirm that the answer's no.

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@Peston Pretty sure it’s Burnham vs Farage first

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

It’s great to see the respective ministers and shadows chatting and laughing as they enter the chamber for Kings speech - that’s all

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@MrTCHarris It kinda show the stats for why there is always temptation for a new leader… in any party

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@StigAbell @TimesRadio why aren’t you a national DAB station- I rely on mobile phone to listen when driving which can be patchy. I miss bits of your excellent repartee and it always drops out at the important bit!!

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@TimesRadio @StigAbell I have recently changed mobile phone contract and it has reminded me that I still, after all these years cannot receive your amazing station on DAB in Cumbria. Why is this?

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@tomhfh Or Lucy Powell has tied him to it

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

During my leadership campaign, someone asked me to summarise my economic objectives in one sentence. I replied: “To deliver a high-growth, low-immigration economy.”

Right now, Britain has the opposite: a low-growth, high-immigration economy. It’s young people who are paying the price.

That’s why we’re launching our New Deal for Young People. We’re the only party that’s even thinking about them, because we understand that our economic and cultural problems are intertwined. You can’t solve one without the other.

Reform UK has tried to copy a lot of our immigration policy without doing the difficult thinking. They agree with us that deporting people who should not be here is a priority. But Conservatives know that alone does not turn Britain into a high-growth economy. It reduces public spending, it does not increase productivity – but our New Deal for Young People will.

The blame for our productivity problem can be laid at the feet of the Blairite settlement. For too long, politics has been run as if we’re still in the late 1990s.

Politicians hoping the world would stay the same: stable graduate jobs, stable career ladders, stable institutions, and a conveyor belt from school to university to a middle-class life. Blair pushed for 50 per cent of young people to go to university, and the Oxbridge-educated political class was too embarrassed to say no for fear of looking like hypocrites.

We didn’t get a nation of engineers and mathematicians. We hit the target by creating loads of useless courses. The result is obvious: young people loaded with debt and employers complaining about basic skills gaps. And while standards fell, parts of our university system started feeding the cultural rot.

You cannot build a high-growth economy on institutions that train young people to distrust reality and sneer at the society they are meant to inherit. Our New Deal for Young People is going to scrap the pointless courses, provide better offers and tackle the insidious debt trap. I started my degree in 1999, not long after tuition fees had been introduced.

I am horrified at what graduates today are dealing with, and this is one of the reasons millions of young people feel they’ve been stitched up. Plan 2 student loans, the system most people who started university from 2012 to 2023 are on, increasingly feel like a scam.

Under Plan 2, the interest on your loan is 3 per cent above inflation, so your loan can grow so fast that you can be paying the appropriate amount every month yet see the balance go up. It’s an infuriating situation – you’re paying money back, but every time you look at the outstanding amount, it’s rising. It just isn’t fair.

In 2012, when the policy came in, inflation and interest rates were low. It needs to be changed now, but the Labour Government is deliberately making money off the backs of graduates, and Rachel Reeves made it worse at her Budget by freezing the repayment thresholds, pulling more of a young person’s salary into repayments. That is not what student loans were designed for.

Our New Deal for Young People fixes that unfairness, backs work, and restores real choice. We scrap the extra 3 per cent and cap Plan 2 interest at RPI, so the balance stops racing upwards. Then comes the £5,000 First Job Bonus, so when a young person starts their first job the first £5,000 of National Insurance they would have paid goes into a personal savings pot for a first home deposit or future savings.

The third leg (my favourite) is the Apprenticeship Guarantee. It fixes the messy apprenticeship levy, providing fully funded training and college places for 100,000 extra 18 to 21-year-olds a year, so apprenticeships become a real alternative to university. This is where we need to deal with the snobbery against apprenticeships.

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@MrHarryCole

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@MaxWindCowie When the economy is thriving state funding is available

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@tomhfh *in Whitehall

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@PJTheEconomist Bearing down on inflation though

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@SophyRidgeSky Fiscal rules over manifesto promises

[Kevin Beaty 🇺🇦 @kevcow]

@KirstieMAllsopp @Oxfam It’s more like 14kg in uk