Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧

Solo Christo 🙏 | Work in tech 👨🏻‍💻 | Gin lover 🍸| Dog lover 🦮

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

@AvantiWestCoast I’m in carriage E on the 10.49 service to Glasgow (currently at Crewe). There is no air conditioning in this carriage and it’s incredibly hot especially with it being so busy. No sign of any guard/staff to ask for them to do something.

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

I maintain that speakerphone on mobile phones was a terrible invention- it just seems to encourage twattish behaviour from all the usual suspects

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

Why do TfL get away with such daily incompetence?

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

@ColeFusionHQ @HCH_Hill The sense of entitlement from these people is incredible

[Benedict Spence @BenedictSpence]

Jason Arday’s story depicts an awful cycle of left wing behaviour. A man is favoured because he ticks victimhood boxes. He does wrong, and it is ignored because he’s their man. He is finally revealed, and they drop him.

Now he is dead, he has become a useful victim again.

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

Academic standards don’t matter apparently:

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

Just 350 people live in the little English village of Piddington. It has a church and a village hall.

Labour wants to put 1,250 single adult male illegal migrants at a former military site near this village

This is a twisted socialist version of “fair and equitable”.

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

Britain increasingly faces this problem too:

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

Lee Kuan Yew explained this…

"In multicultural societies you don't vote in accordance with economic or social interests. You vote in accordance with your race and religion."

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

how many of these illegal degenerates will end up here in Britain?

[Patrick Christys @PatrickChristys]

We simply cannot go on like this.

[Engineering Dad 🔧🌍🇯🇪 @eng_dad]

Not a single engineer or scientist, entrepreneur or business leader amongst them. These people have never made or contributed anything of any value to the UK. Labour is an utterly unserious party. A motlier collection of unqualified people you would be hard pressed to find.

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

@EmRoman74 If Carlsberg made bellends...

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

@Keir_Starmer Utterly delusional.

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

We are so appallingly badly governed. The civil service is just a nest of self loathing vipers who will gladly see Britain get the raw end of every deal made. Is there any other Western country with an 'elite' quite so determined to ruin their own country?

[Katie Lam @Katie_Lam_MP]

The Government's trade deal with India will mean that it's cheaper to hire an Indian worker than a British one.

And amazingly, they've just made it even worse.

Most other countries are perfectly happy to strike trade deals without forcing us to undercut our own workforce. We should have expected India to do the same.

Instead, under the terms of our Free Trade Agreement with India, Indian companies will be able to transfer their workers to this country more easily.

Once they're here, those workers will be able to avoid National Insurance payments for up to five years. The same is true for employers. Previously, that exemption applied for three years - which was already bad enough.

Instead, both employee and employer will pay into the Indian social security system instead.

This National Insurance exemption will make it much cheaper to hire Indian workers, in fields like IT and engineering, than to hire domestic talent.

Let's imagine a British IT firm, set to hire a computer programmer for £60,000 a year. To hire them, an employer needs to spend £60,000 a year on their salary, plus £8,250 on Employer National Insurance. That's a total of £68,250.

An Indian competitor with an office in London, meanwhile, can save money by transferring Indian workers to the UK, even if they pay the same headline salary.

They’d still spend £60,000 on the salary - but instead of paying National Insurance, they pay into the Indian Employee Provident Fund instead. Mandatory contributions to the fund are capped at 15,000 rupees a month, or about £120.

That means that, across a year, an employer only pays £1,470 into the social security system - for a total of £61,470.

So under this Government's deal, it would be at least 10 percent cheaper to hire an Indian worker over a British one for this job. This is absurd.

Over five years, it would be nearly £34,000 cheaper for an Indian firm to bring over an Indian worker to London than to hire locally.

The reason for this absurd arrangement is that the India deal includes a Double Contribution Convention. DCCs make it easier for international companies to transfer their workforce. They're designed to stop highly-skilled workers from paying into two different social security systems.

We already have Double Contribution Conventions with other countries. However, these other countries tend to be either:

(1) roughly as developed as the UK - in the case of countries like Canada or Japan, or
(2) very small - in the case of countries like Jamaica.

India is by far the poorest country on the list, and by far the largest. The net result of this deal will be more Indian workers in fields like IT and engineering, undercutting British workers.

Given the relative markets in the UK and in India, we shouldn't expect this to automatically be a like-for-like swap in terms of talent.

We've seen this happen in the US already, with Indian consultancies leasing their workers to American companies, who are then able to pay an Indian worker far less than they'd need to pay an American.

The result has been a massive expansion in the number of lower-cost Indian workers, at the expense of American workers.

We should not be allowing other countries to dictate the terms of our migration system, in exchange for some trade benefits at the margins. If India wants to trade, then we should trade. Migration shouldn't even come into the equation.

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

There is never any sense of urgency on the Piccadilly line - let’s just trundle along as if we were in subsaharan Africa

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

An excellent summary of Burnham and his ilk:

[Aaron Newbury @AJNewbury94]

I have to admit, Burnham's speech comes off as a bit naïve. To be blunt, it smacks of a man who's grown extremely used to not having much scrutiny and to being the centre of local power and attention for nearly a decade.

Him not taking questions at the end is just as telling. Burnham will effectively become Prime Minister by default: no contest inside his own party, no general election mandate for the changes he wants, and of course no scrutiny from the press.

His entire speech was, in effect, "why can't everyone be more like me" and yet it announced almost nothing. Nothing on cost, nothing on how any of it actually gets done. Just a collection of soundbites, and painfully political ones at that, with no substance behind them.

"A circuit-breaker." "Good growth in every postcode." All of it sounds lovely (let's do the good things and not the bad ones). Nobody's ever thought of that before!! But… how?

Being a Mayor is a fundamentally different job to being Prime Minister. A Mayor spends money, much of it handed to him by central government, and never has to weigh one department's misery against another's. The job he's warming himself up for is the one that has to make those trade-offs, and nothing today suggested he's reckoned with that.

He reaches, as these people always do, towards the idea of a country "lifted back up", homes built, places regenerated, industry revived, pride in place, etc etc. There are models for this. You can run massive public housing programmes, but historically they're delivered through expensive, highly centralised, government-run schemes. Singapore being the obvious example. What they are not delivered by is building a second centre of government.

What Burnham is really offering is top-down socialism with a smile. Devolution on steroids doesn't shrink the state, it bloats it. A "No.10 North" doesn't move power closer to people, it just builds more state, in a second place, at additional cost. It's more process, dressed up as a radical idea nobody's ever had before.

More and more, political speeches are just a hodge-podge of pleasant noise. We will do things, lots of things, good things. We'll make sure things you like have "social value", we'll make you proud of [insert thing to be proud of], we'll deliver [insert policy that sounds really nice].

But the problems this country faces are enormous. Law and order is eroding, and rebuilding it means serious money for police, courts and prisons. The state grows more expensive by the year while the workforce paying for it keeps shrinking. We have an energy crisis and a poverty crisis, conflicts multiplying abroad and armed forces begging for cash, and more than a million young people out of work - on top of housing nobody can afford, child poverty, and a generation that feels detached from the society around it.

You don't fix any of that with a slogan and a second postcode for the guy in charge.

Every Mayor thinks his city is the best, and Mayors, almost uniquely in British politics, are rarely questioned. Today we all saw what nearly a decade of that does to a man. And thanks to his refusal to so much as take a question, we've had no chance to hold a single one of his plans up to the light.

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

Honestly, the amateurism of LuL staff especially when making announcements is so embarrassing in a city like London

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

Do the signallers at Earls Court Tube station have any idea what they’re doing? Doesn’t look like it

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

@ukhomeoffice No one voted for this you traitorous sons of bitches. The whole Home Office needs cleansed of you self-hating ghouls.

[Willow 👨🏻‍💻🍸🇬🇧 @willowbehere]

Some diversity enrichment in my local neighbourhood today. Name one good thing to have ever come out of Somalia - I’ll wait.

[Metropolitan Police @metpoliceuk]

We’re investigating a serious collision that took place in Ealing Broadway earlier. Five people were injured after being struck by a car.

The driver has been arrested.

If you saw anything or have footage of the incident, please contact us on 101 giving the reference 4607/27JUN.

[William Clouston SDP @WilliamClouston]

Only a fool would think this good for the country or likely to stop the boats. But then again, we are governed by fools…