@TheJoeChampuru@GBNEWS I delivered over £500m to my constituency in 4.5 years in the form of a road, a hospital and various pots of towns/community funding. Didn’t get me re-elected, mind!
@LucyTrims Excellent post. MPs are supposed to be there to legislate. We hardly had the time to scrutinise and amend properly. I hope there is a reset in the near future !
Well, Zia, I definitely consider myself unemployable, but you tend to be when you’ve built businesses from scratch and sold them - including one with 220 offices around the country employing 1000 people.
Here are some of the many others with interesting, relevant real-world backgrounds:
Business
Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs): Was chief operating officer and chief financial officer of Sky, the youngest finance director in the FTSE 100 at the time, selling shares worth around £17 million when Comcast bought the company.
Kemi Badenoch (North West Essex): Worked at McDonald’s at 16 after arriving from Nigeria with £100, then trained as a software engineer before moving into banking at Coutts, The Spectator and on to lead the party.
James Cartlidge (South Suffolk): Founded the shared ownership property portal Share to Buy and is now Shadow Defence Secretary.
Mel Stride (Central Devon): Founded Venture Marketing Group in 1987, a trade exhibitions, conferences and publishing company - is now Shadow Chancellor.
Chris Philp (Croydon South): Started at McKinsey before becoming a serial entrepreneur, founding wholesale distributor Blueheath and co-founding the property finance firm Pluto Capital.
Jeremy Hunt (Godalming and Ash): Co-founded the educational publisher Hotcourses after teaching English in Japan, selling it for a reported £14 million in 2017.
Military
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling): Served as an intelligence officer across Iraq and Afghanistan, earned an MBE and helped set up the National Security Council of Afghanistan.
Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne): A Scots Guards Colonel awarded the Military Cross after being shot and wounded saving lives during a coup in Sierra Leone, who later became a pensions business COO.
Medicine
Neil Shastri-Hurst (Solihull West and Shirley): Was a surgeon and a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps before retraining as a healthcare barrister, spanning medicine, military and law.
Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham): A consultant paediatrician who has continued doing NHS shifts alongside her work as Shadow Health Minister.
Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth): A former GP.
Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle): A medical doctor who grew up in social housing and is now Shadow Justice Minister.
Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge): Trained as a psychiatrist before politics and now serves as Shadow Science, Innovation and Technology Minister.
The list goes on.
The OBR forecast as Conservatives left office was for 2026 2% UK GDP growth, unemployment 4.2% and inflation 1.9% . After Labour’s tax rises they now forecast just 1.1% UK growth, unemployment up at 5.3% and inflation up at 2.3% for 2026.
"100% grass-fed" is mostly a US marketing term.
In Britain, cattle eat grass by default. The animal is a grazer. The hill it stands on is grass. The climate grows grass with no encouragement at all, for most of the year, in vast quantities, often into the lap of any farmer trying to grow something else.
Most British beef is finished on grass. A portion of conventionally raised cattle receive some grain or silage supplementation through winter, when the pasture goes dormant. The default model on these islands is overwhelmingly pastoral.
Then the American marketing department arrived.
Now the British consumer is anxiously paying a premium for British beef labelled "100% grass-fed" as if this were a hard-won ethical achievement, when it is broadly what nearly every upland farm in the country has been doing since the Romans landed.
The farmer is not the villain. The consumer is offering to pay more, and the farmer is, understandably, accepting.
The American marketing department, however, has successfully convinced an entire population that the default is the upgrade.
The cow is in the field.
The field is in Yorkshire.
The grass has been there since the last ice age.
You do not need a certification scheme for grass.
A leaked paper seen by
@IrishTimes has details of a plan by Europe’s largest economies to centralise oversight of financial markets at EU rather than national level, a proposed shift that would cause serious concern to Ireland and Luxembourg
https://t.co/za6rPRJLwi
@TimesRadio@StigAbell@KateEMcCann What other ‘way’ is there? You’re funding a regime killing our allies. You’re shutting down our oil and gas refineries as well as our oil and gas fields: your policies are a disaster. They may as well be written by Putin himself
The Kremlin will I am afraid be laughing today at the incompetence and stupidity of the Starmer government. This is a betrayal of Ukraine - and will do nothing to help British consumers
https://t.co/X0ZhKCnRAk
This bizarre Leftist tendency to anthropomorphise the markets, to treat them as if they had preferences and prejudices. The bond markets don’t care whether you are Left or Right. They don’t even care whether your spending is high or low. All they care about is whether it is in balance.
If you want to borrow money, creditors will assess whether they will get it back, and will ask a premium to lend to risky prospects. That premium means that Britain is now spending £110 billion a year on servicing past debt – more than on education, and twice as much as on defence.
British politics will reach a new reductio ad absurdum in the Makerfield by election:
Vote Labour to destroy the sitting Labour Prime Minister.
Support Labour PM Starmer but NOT voting Labour.
We are having a by-election not because there’s any demand or need in the national interest but entirely to suit the convenience of the byzantine politics of the ruling party and the political pygmies in whose interest it is run.
We are no longer a serious nation. No wonder the bond markets are squiffy.
Tory austerity is a myth. All Osborne did was cut annual borrowing (deficit) from £150bn in 2010 to £90bn by 2015.
We still spent £90bn more than we taxed. And this happened across Europe. It wasn't unique to the Tories and UK.
Some corrections:
You inherited 2% inflation. It doubled in 12 months after you became Chancellor. It is still 50% above the rate you inherited and 50% above target. It should fall to target 2% this summer. So two years to get back to where you started! What’s to boast about that?
Interest rates have been falling everywhere. UK cuts, which you don’t control, have been fewer and smaller because of your inflation record. We still have highest interest rate in G7. The Bank has made some cuts for the simple reason the economy is flat on its back. Well done.
Borrowing is slowly falling from a very high base. Almost six years after the pandemic-induced recession, we’re still borrowing around 4% GDP. And borrowing costs are the highest in the G7.
Retail sales are up in recent months. We’ll see how long that’s sustained. But the hospitality and construction industries are in crisis. Plus our massive services sector is stagnant.
UK fastest G7 economy? That’s simply a bare-faced lie. We grew by 0.1% in Q3 2025; and another 0.1% in Q4. End of.
It doesn't matter what fancy words they use to describe it, this is just another TAX.
...a tax on tourism and in fact all types of overnight stays, whether leisure, business or visiting friends & relatives.
Only Labour can believe the way to 'help' a sector is to tax it more!