Nick Hurt 🇬🇧

Classical liberal. Lower taxes, cheaper energy, secure borders, ancient liberties, a smaller state that works.

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

A thread: The strong but limited state.
1/ I want a state that's strong and a state that's limited. People treat those as opposites. They aren't. A strong state catches criminals and controls the border. A limited one can't trample the innocent while doing it. A serious country needs both at once.

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

@JackWDart

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

@prieurdp It’s much safer

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

With all the heartbreak surrounding Henry Nowak's tragic murder, it's worth remembering Martin Luther King's words: People should be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. It's worth saying again, because it's still right, and still the only rule that treats everyone equally. Judge the individual. Never the category they're filed under.

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

@MartinSLewis Thats a very poor choice of options @MartinSLewis

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

The list of reversals tells its own story: the farm tax, winter fuel, welfare savings, even a planned income-tax rise, all announced then abandoned. A government that can't hold a position long enough to enact it isn't governing, it's reacting. You don't fix the public finances by U-turning at the first sign of noise.

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

Being pro-market means being pro-competition, which means being pro-customer. The test of any reform is simple: does it give people more choice and a better deal, or does it protect whoever's already big? Back the challenger and the small firm. That's where lower prices and better service actually come from.

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

We pay among the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, then wonder why manufacturers leave. Energy cost isn't a green issue or a right-wing one. It's whether we make things here at all. Cut the cost of power and you're not just easing bills, you're deciding whether Britain still builds.

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

The country that wins this century controls its borders AND competes hard for the world's best. Both. Decide who comes in, firmly, and roll out the welcome for the founders, scientists and grafters every rival wants to keep. Confidence, not just caution.

[Exonerated barrister Jon Holbrook @JonHolb]

SOS - belief discrim case

If you know Ricky Garrett of London Ambulance Service (Greenwich Team Manager in 2024) please ask him to contact me as there may be grounds to appeal his belief discrim claim, which Employment Appeal Trib has just overturned.
https://t.co/WF2Ubbe1ys

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

@MattChorley Misquoting their political enemies seems to be becoming quite the habit for @BBCNewsnight

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

Even by the standards of our criminal system, this is unbelievable

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

@PolitlcsUK @Sandra73372316 At least they have shown some honour, even if it is far too late. Charges for malfeasance / misconduct in public office should now follow.

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

Dr Kumar, please can you Follow me? I’d very much like to speak to you about Grace.
X

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

Even the IMF notes Britain’s deficit plan leans almost entirely on tax, not on restraint or growth. That’s the whole strategy in a sentence: take more, reform little, hope. You do not tax a stagnant economy into dynamism. You free it to grow, then the receipts follow.

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

The energy price cap goes up again from July, blamed on global gas prices. Fair on the cause. But we choose how exposed we are: how much of our own gas we use, how many levies we pile on bills, how we price power. We’ve maximised our exposure and then call the result bad luck.

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

Control and welcome, together. Decide who comes in, no illegal entry, no criminals, and compete hard for the world’s most talented and driven. A confident country does both. We keep being offered one or the other, as if a serious nation can’t manage to be firm and ambitious at the same time.

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

Trial by jury, judged by your peers and not by officials of the state, is one of the oldest checks on power we have. When you hear it should be trimmed because it’s slow or costly, be wary. “Expensive and slow” is exactly how ancient liberties get quietly bargained away. Fix the backlog, keep the principle.

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

Energy bills rising again bite hardest in rural Essex and Suffolk: older homes, more often off the gas grid, and the car a necessity rather than a luxury. National energy policy is felt most sharply in places like ours. Cheaper, reliable power isn’t an abstraction here. It’s the size of the monthly squeeze.

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

4/ That’s the quiet dishonesty of freezing thresholds. No minister votes for it, no rate is announced, but inflation does the taxing year after year, reaching further down the income scale every time. Index the thresholds. Tax in daylight, or not at all. (4/4)

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

Think it’s absurd to pay 40% tax if your on minimum wage? It’s closer than you think - A short 🧵: 1/ A frozen tax threshold doesn’t stay still. Inflation walks people into it. To see how absurd that gets, ask a simple question: if the higher-rate threshold stays frozen, when does a full-time worker on the minimum wage start paying 40% tax? (1/4)

[Nick Hurt 🇬🇧 @nickdhurt]

3/ At that pace, a full-time minimum-wage worker hits the “higher rate” around 2036. Even on slower wage growth, the early 2040s. A 40% band designed for the well-off, reaching the lowest legal wage there is. (3/4)