Jen4Scot retweeted
Hey Leo! Don't forget to tag me @LeoDiCaprio
Jen4Scot retweeted
Nothing highlights the fiscal failure of this government more starkly than the plight of Poundland. The chain's 600 stores and 12,000 workers sit on the verge of collapse, not because its customers have walked away - Poundland's sales grew by 6.7% in September - but because of this government's unaffordable tax rises, which makes it impossible to run a business that works on slim profit margins to keep its prices down for its customers. How ironic that a government preaching about helping the least well-off is forcing a company out of business that does just that.
Jen4Scot retweeted
"Kemi Badenoch delivered the most devastating response to a Budget of any Opposition leader I have ever heard"
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
Jen4Scot retweeted
If it wasn’t already known, after today, it’s clear to everyone that Kemi Badenoch is the prime minister we need.
Witty, strong, determined, principled, and has the vision needed for Britain. Her bold new policies will get Britain working again. She’s taking the Tories in the right direction.
Jen4Scot retweeted
🇬🇧 The OBR just dropped 200 pages on Healey's first Budget.
I read it so you don't have to.
Tax is at a record 37.9% of GDP by 2027-28, past the old high of 37.2%.
Then it climbs every single year to 38.6%.
Frozen thresholds are doing way too much to workers since they get a pay rise, hand more of it over.
1.8x the national minimum wage now classes you as a higher tax rate payer - what the fuck?
Borrowing @ £133bn this year. In March they said £115bn. Seven months later it's £18bn worse. And it's higher than March in every year of the forecast because neither the OBR nor treasury has a clue what they’re doing.
Debt interest at £39bn in 2019-20.
£109bn last year 😩
£160bn by 2031-32 😩😩£15bn of this year's bill is extra bc inflation's pushing up index linked gilts, and we know the uk has a structural inflation problem, partly due to the relationship between treasury and BoE.
Headroom is £14.5bn, down from £21.7bn at the last Budget.
Keep the fuel duty freeze going and it's £10.2bn.
The OBR gives Healey a 56% chance of hitting his OWN FUCKING rule.
Debt will peak at 97.3% of GDP, still 95.6% in 2031-32. Five years and it barely moves which is completely against his fiscal demands.
How it affects you?
Growth 1% next year with gdp per capita basically the same as it has been since 2019
Inflation 3.4% when March said 2%.
Zero real pay growth in 2027.
Living standards in 2030-31?
Just 2% above pre-pandemic.
But don't worry. You're getting a £100 council tax rebate.
Jesus Christ.
Jen4Scot retweeted
Heads up that in the last decade, the full-time equivalent salary on the minimum wage is up 77% from £15k to £26.5k
Meanwhile both the personal allowance and the 40% tax band threshold haven't moved in seven years
In 2016 someone earning minimum wage paid just £795 of tax a year; now they pay £2,773
Jen4Scot retweeted
Minimum wage is now £27,456. SNP additional tax on "high earners" starts at £29,527
Jen4Scot retweeted
This post goes some way to explaining the dire financial straits the UK is in...
"Britain has almost run out of taxpayers, or at the very least, it’s slowly running out of people who pay enough taxes to plausibly finance the state."
"...in 1998, about 43 per cent of British earners paid sufficient tax to cover the Government’s average per-capita spending. During Covid, that figure fell to an absolute low of circa 20 per cent, then by 2025 recovered modestly to 26.6 per cent."
No wonder if fewer than 27% of people are net contributors to the state
It's stats like this that make me want to leave. Big new project in the US in the next few months might be just the springboard I need
@griffitha @LiamHalligan
open.substack.com/pub/ieains…
Jen4Scot retweeted
This is absolutely true. It was a total rupture.
I remember sometime in my late teens or early twenties reading twentieth century literature, and realizing that there was something different about pre and post war writing—and then figuring out which war it was, before looking at the copyright.
Then 9/11 happened, and I realized it was another such event.
Covid will be bigger, but unlike 9/11, everyone wants to pretend it didn’t happen or wasn’t the cataclysm it was.
It was a cataclysm. We are onthe other side. And we don’t even know what chasm we crossed.
I swear SOMETHING broke in society since 2020 and nobody wants to talk about it.
And I’m not talking about masks, lockdowns, or COVID. I mean the FEELING of life.
Everything reopened. We went back to work. Restaurants filled up. Events came back. But somehow life still feels… different.
Years disappear faster. People feel more disconnected. Everything feels more expensive, stressful & rushed.
And somehow we’re all constantly exhausted. I can’t even explain exactly what we lost. I just know life before 2020 felt more ALIVE.
Tell me I’m not the only one who feels this.
Jen4Scot retweeted
I would like to give my informed consent to be putting back on display at Kelvingrove, I dont like it in this cupboard with the mops and buckets
@GlasgowCC
Jen4Scot retweeted
I think this girl is top class. And I’ve said it for a good good while.
The content of this is bang on. The delivery has huge gravitas. Lovely accent. She looks on top of her image.
And she’s got the edge you need. The put-down. @ttmygh @Raffadaisy @LucaMitchell200
Jen4Scot retweeted
The value of all residential mortgages in Scotland is approximately £84 billion.
So the Scottish banks are going to swiftly raise that enormous sum, then use it to turn £ contracts into S£ contracts, only to watch the S£ depreciate.
Worst business plan in history.
Jen4Scot retweeted
Thanks to UK prices the middle class has stopped buying anything
They have a new spending habit:
It’s called ‘don’t spend anything’
Want a new car? Clean the old one
Want a new house? Tidy the old one
They have a new going out habit
It’s called ‘Staying in’
The middle class didn’t get smarter with money, they have just become the new working class & can’t afford anything anymore
Jen4Scot retweeted
Tim Rideout is again pushing his plan as a pain-free solution to the SNP’s currency problem. So… watch how he deals with someone pointing out the obvious flaws. He has no answers. An independent Scotland would require its own currency, but that new currency would immediately…
Jen4Scot retweeted
A shock is coming. A big one. It will not be shocking to you or me, but it will shake the politicians to their core because they're operating on a certain presumption of state capacity they have always taken for granted.
For a long time, there's been a surprising amount of resilience in the system, so things have continued to function even when badly degraded. But a crunch time is coming. The national grid is looking ever more precarious. The armed forces are in a not-so-slow motion collapse. Inflation is rising, debt is rising, and the real economy is quietly imploding. Public morale is in the gutter.
But there's a reason our prat of a prime minister is tinkering around the edges, and it's because in his pollyanna world, all is well. He's oblivious. He looks at his parliamentary colleagues and believes that things can only get better, and are in good hands. Unlike Starmer, he does not speak of fixing the fundamentals because he has no concept of what the fundamentals even are, let alone how badly broken they are.
Starmer was unable to fix the foundations because doing so would have meant reversing every current operating assumption, which neither he nor his party were willing to do. Burnham, though, doesn't even think about what keeps the lights on, or what protects the nation. To him, it's all just one of those automatic certainties that just happens. I don't even get the impression he knows what government is for beyond being an all purpose welfare dispensary - to which all other concerns are subordinate.
This is the only explanation for his chirpy optimism. That's why the looming collapse will catch him completely by surprise. There are no market indicators or warning signals in Burnham's world. He thinks that going around being a nice guy is all that it takes to govern, and the nicer you are, the better things get. His world is not our world. There is no intellectual or technical depth to the man. What you see really is all you get.
I don't know what form the shock will take, or even when it arrives. I just see the national resilience sand timer running out fast. When that moment arrives Burnham will like Hitler, commanding panzer battalions that no longer exist into action.
Maybe it'll be civil unrest. Maybe it'll be the national grid falling over. Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe it'll be a complete financial collapse. All we know for certain is that such a national cataclysm will happen because the competence to prevent it no longer exists, and the politicians are not alert to the possibilities. There are no adults in the room. We're on our own.
Jen4Scot retweeted
🚨 Labour came to power warning of a £22bn black hole.
Since then they have:
❌ Put taxes up by around £70bn
❌ Borrowed another £310bn
And now, after taking more of your money AND borrowing hundreds of billions more…
…there is apparently another £35bn black hole.
At what point do we admit the problem isn’t that Government doesn’t have enough money?
It’s that Government cannot control its spending.
You cannot tax your way to growth.
You cannot borrow your way out of overspending.
And taxpayers cannot keep being handed the bill.
Enough.
Jen4Scot retweeted
Liz Truss was forced to resign when gilt yields reached 4.42%.
Under Andy Burnham they are now standing at 6.00%
Shouldn’t Andy Burnham resign or be calling a General election ?
