Duncan Anderson

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. - Winston Churchill

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The World Bank ranked every country on earth for practical solar potential.

Britain came second from bottom. Not second from bottom in Europe. On the planet. Out of everywhere they measured, the only place with worse conditions for a solar panel is Ireland. Norway is above us. Norway, where the sun clocks off entirely for part of the year, is a better bet than Lincolnshire.

The reasons are not a mystery. We sit at 53 degrees north, the same line as Edmonton, Alberta. The sun in December gets about as high as a first-floor window and then thinks better of it. And there's the cloud, which is not a detail, it is the national personality. A square metre of London gets 0.52 kilowatt hours of sunlight a day in December and 4.74 in July, so the panel does nine times less work in the month your heating is on than in the month it isn't. Across the whole of 2024, British solar ran at 9.5% of what it's rated at. The other 90.5% is a photograph of a power station.

Now the other column.

The ground we're bolting it to is Trent valley silt and Lincolnshire fen. Some of it took three hundred years to drain. It grows wheat at yields that most of the planet cannot get near, in a climate so reliably damp that grass grows here without anyone asking it to, which is the entire reason this island has cattle and cheese and a butcher.

So we are, measurably, one of the worst places on earth for sunlight and one of the best on earth for food.

And we've had a good long look at both of those numbers and gone with sunlight.

Somewhere in Namibia, which the same report ranked first, there is a patch of absolutely nothing, in full sun, wondering what it did wrong.

[Ben Graham @BenGrahamUK]

In 17 days, Cody Harper will stand before a judge, and his life could change forever.

I believe this case is incredibly unfair. If he is sent to prison, the entire justice system will come under public scrutiny like never before.

He was attacked by three men. In my view, while clearly disorientated, he struck out at a police officer.

The police then asked the public not to share these videos. But Cody's story need to be told.

To me, Cody Harper was the victim, not the criminal.

The country will be watching on 23rd July.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Gramsci's Dividend. Paid in Full.

@g_gosden, what this chart actually shows is the dividend of fifty years of institutional capture paying out in real time.

Reform leads among the least educated at 42 percent. Among the most educated it drops to 13 percent while Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats collectively dominate. The assumption embedded in the framing of this data, and in your post, is that this reflects the superiority of educated judgment. It does not. It reflects something far more revealing about what British education has become.

The most educated in Britain are the most likely to have passed through institutions that have spent decades teaching them what to think rather than how to think. Universities that no longer tolerate ideological diversity. Humanities departments captured by a worldview in which Western civilisation is the problem, national identity is suspect, borders are violence and anyone who questions the progressive consensus is not wrong but morally deficient. The products of those institutions are not more enlightened. They are more thoroughly processed.

Meanwhile the least educated, the people the progressive establishment consistently dismisses as unsophisticated, have reached their conclusions the hard way. Through lived experience of open borders, two tier policing, parallel communities, suppressed wages, overwhelmed public services and the systematic prioritisation of every interest except theirs. They did not need a university to tell them what they can see with their own eyes.

Gramsci called it the long march through the institutions. The deliberate capture of education, media, the civil service, the judiciary and the cultural establishment to shape the assumptions of the next generation before they ever enter a polling booth. This chart is what that march looks like when it reaches the ballot box. The most educated vote for the parties that educated them. The least educated vote for the parties that represent what they actually experience.

The left calls this a problem of education. It is actually a problem of indoctrination. And the difference matters enormously.

[Duncan Anderson @SimpsonDuncan]

@InvertTheWing 115 pending charges maybe?

[Duncan Anderson @SimpsonDuncan]

@clairebubblepop None of them are taxpayer funded. Not comparable.

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

Tax. We’ve all become so used to it, we forget how much we’re actually paying. It is relentless, even beyond death. And for what? If we had a semblance of functioning public services, I could maybe stomach it. But we don’t, so what are we actually paying all of this money for?

We are subject to Scandinavian levels of tax for third-world levels of competence - what a toilet deal.

Earn a salary. Income tax, a fifth gone before we’ve even started. National insurance, more on top of that. What for? A ‘world-class’ health service? The NHS? Ha. Good luck.

Even getting to work costs - taxes on buying a car, running a car, insuring a car. Vast amount of road tax. Is that being well spent? Unless you want potholes you can paddle in, the answer is no. A road network built for half the amount of cars. How’s that going? It takes twice as long to get anywhere. Fuel duty and tax on insurance - whack that on top too. Congestion charges, tolls, fines and more. It goes on and on and on.

Forget getting the train, that’ll cost twice as much and never runs on time - a season ticket into London costs thousands. Unaffordable. Yet the trains so often run empty? Maybe that system isn’t working…

VAT on anything that moves - getting taxed to buy products/services, from already taxed money.

Tax, tax, tax, tax, tax, tax. Then more tax.

Did you go to university? Your ‘loan’ isn’t loan, it’s a tax. Interest is so sharp, you’re just paying that off each month. Hundreds gone, to pay for a sociology degree a decade ago. Ouch. Why are we saddling our youngsters with so much debt, with so much interest on top of that? Madness.

Manage to put a few quid away to save? That gets taxed too - ISAs will be under attack in the budget. Profit made on successful investments, what happens? You guessed it. Tax.

Somehow you’ve scrabbled a deposit together for a property. Well done.

Paying half a million quid for a semi-detached? Not cheap. Stamp duty means you get slapped for thousands. Obviously first time buyer exemptions mean less and less as house prices soar.

You’re in the house. Great news. Or so you thought. Council tax. Going up seemingly by 5% every year. Thousands of pounds a year. For what? To collect the bins? Really? Don’t forget the extra costs to have your garden waste removed. Brilliant.

More insurance taxes, and of course VAT on any improvements you want to make. Bills soaring, with tax slapped onto every corner of it - green levies and the rest.

How depressing. Time for a pint.

Alcohol duty. Because of course. Why wouldn’t they throw extra tax on it? I’m not a smoker, but the same applies. Even holidays. Air passenger duty to put a few extra quid onto the price of a trip away. Just for good measure.

You’re limping on through. Maybe you decide that starting your own business is the way to go?

You get it up and running, starting to make a reasonable profit. Take a small salary - to pay for such luxuries as food and heating. As we know, that gets taxed.

Alongside the costs. National Insurance. Business rates. Fees and licences. It is endless.

What’s left after all that? A profit? Surely good news?

Bang. Corporation tax. A big slice gone. After that, we can enjoy a handsome profit. Right?

Nope. Dividend tax. With its brutal thresholds. What slivers you do take get taxed all over again when you want to actually buy something. Obviously.

And the final kick in teeth.

Inheritance tax.

After everything, somehow, you’ve managed to put a reasonable amount of money away. After all that tax, you’ve succeeded in building a financial legacy to pass to your children - your business, and your own savings.

Money you were taxed on the day you earned it, taxed when you saved it, taxed when you invested it, taxed to build your business. It gets taxed one final time. On both your personal savings, and also the value of your company.

Even after death, it continues.

What are we paying all this money for?

Are our schools world-class? Borders secure? Police visible? NHS efficient? Economy thriving? Roads operational?

No. No. No. No. No. No. NOTHING WORKS.

Britain has the highest tax burden in most of our lifetimes, yet the worst services many of us have ever seen. If everything worked perfectly, there could maybe be an argument for such suffocating levels of tax. But it doesn’t, and hasn’t for decades, so there isn’t.

When the taxpayers fail to fund this state monster of inefficiency and unaccountability, what do they do?

QE. Print money. Creating inflation, devaluing our earnings and our savings. Yet one more tax.

The people creating all of this, implementing all of this? £100k plus on the public sector, living in London. Comfortable salary, great pension, no job risk. Clueless about the real world.

Maybe, just maybe, the current approach isn’t working.

We need to urgently cut tax. Shrink government. Reward hard work.

You just can’t tax a nation into prosperity. It never has worked, and it never will work.

LEAVE OUR MONEY ALONE.

[Maurice Cousins @MDC12345678]

Interesting interview with @Ed_Miliband this morning on the BBC. Two observations.

First, he is wrong to claim Clean Power 2030 is an investment that will pay back in lower bills. He gets away with this because journalists are not starting from first principles. With energy systems, that means recognising that not all energy is equal - what matters is its density, reliability, and convertibility into useful work.

To be clear, CP30 isn’t a case of short-term pain for long-term gain. The higher costs we’re seeing today are not just one-off capital outlays. Why? Because low-density, weather-dependent energy requires more kit to do the same job: more land, more transmission, more storage, more balancing, more backup.

Compared to a dense and dispatchable system - like gas or nuclear - it’s a far less efficient way to produce usable energy. The grid must work much harder, and spend more, to keep the lights on. And with each additional step we add, we’re adding losses, and ending up with less usable energy - despite spending more. That’s the consequence of the new complexity.

That’s not a temporary investment curve. It’s thermodynamic and permanent. We will be getting less for more effort.

Second, it is amazing how he continues to falsely assert that gas is responsible for high electricity bills. The UK pays average wholesale gas prices - yet suffers the highest industrial electricity bills in the world.

As we heard this week from energy bosses, the real drivers are structural: policy costs, renewables subsidies, transmission expansion, and system-balancing overheads.

What a pity the BBC continues to allow Ministers to repeat this disinformation, despite clear evidence from DESNZ and the IEA.

[Duncan Anderson @SimpsonDuncan]

@AyoubKhanMP You are a disgrace

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

I won’t. Repost if you agree.

[Latimer Alder @latimeralder]

7 years ago, wholesale natural gas cost 74p per therm. And elecrtricity cost 13p per KWh

Today Natual gas costs 74p per therm. But electricity costs 25p per KWh

The gas price is the same. But the electricity price has doubled

==> It is NOT gas prices making electricity dear!

[Duncan Anderson @SimpsonDuncan]

@basilthegreat What "other countries"? China? Vietnam? No thanks to an authoritarian, socialist dystopia.

[Sophie Corcoran @sophielouisecc]

Sky have deleted this monologue about the UTK march yesterday

So let’s make sure we share it far and wide

[Duncan Anderson @SimpsonDuncan]

@jpxan71 But it was totally normal when an American criminal was the focus of global news for months while cities burned?

[Charlie Kirk @charliekirk11]

You can tell a lot about a person by how they react when someone dies.

[Duncan Anderson @SimpsonDuncan]

@spectator It's still behind the pay wall?

[Chloe Cole ⭐️ @ChloeCole]

I saw this video this morning on my feed and I think it so eloquently explains what Charlie Kirk was put on this earth to do.

“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence, that is when civil war happens”

[Duncan Anderson @SimpsonDuncan]

@TRobinsonNewEra Ignorant take. Shetland and Orkney are unique, productive parts of the UK. Why would you ruin that by turning either into a prison.

[Daniel Foubert 🇵🇱🇫🇷 @d_foubert]

Democracy has disappeared in Europe. We are ruled by an unelected, authoritarian technocracy.

You don’t choose who governs you. You choose who implements what Brussels already decided. Elections change nothing. Power belongs to commissions, courts, and councils no one voted for and no one can remove.

Laws come from people you've never heard of. Policies are made behind closed doors. When you protest, you're told it's for your own good. When you dissent, you're called dangerous. The state doesn’t argue anymore — it monitors.

This isn’t representation. It’s management.
Citizens became data. Nations became markets. Sovereignty became a technicality.
Europe hasn’t lost democracy by accident. It dismantled it — in the name of stability, integration, and progress. What replaced it is polite despotism, wrapped in blue flags and multilingual press releases.

You can still vote. Just not for anything that matters.

[Duncan Anderson @SimpsonDuncan]

@alexarmstrong Can't have people accessing content like this

https://t.co/zAXRT5WjDa

[Duncan Anderson @SimpsonDuncan]

@anon_opin Yes just what the country needs, more laws governing daily life. Get a grip.