Thank you Monty (and Ned) not not only for the gardening tips, but for the peace, the calm, the ambience. A window into a kinder, gentler world. Fridays won't be the same.
#GardenersWorld
Mrs Rocksson retweeted
BREAKING: after Healey’s Budget today, MoD spending will be £1bn per year lower than in the Defence Investment Plan he resigned over👇
Big row potentially brewing on defence…
Tories alleging that Healey - the man of principle who quit over DIP - might actually be *cutting* defence spending
In the next two financial years, the budget for the MOD will be £1bn a year less than Rachel Reeves planned when the DIP was published in June.
The total departmental spending can be calculated from the Budget Red Book pages 145-147. When compared to the DIP settlement, the Tories claim it shows that Labour are cutting £1bn a year from the MOD budget for the next two years.
Why? It appears that they are forecast to spend less than expected on pensions. Rather than the MOD being allowed to reuse this Resource Department Expenditure Limit, the Treasury has kept it
Cartlidge: “This is a complete dereliction of duty from the Chancellor”
Mrs Rocksson retweeted
🚨Sneaked out by OFGEM this morning, a warning for the first time EVER they cannot guarantee that demand will be met on a peak day in winter.
Let’s be clear what that means. They cannot guarantee that homes will be warm, lights come on or industry function on a peak day this winter.
And why? Because of an accelerated decline in domestic gas supply from the North Sea.
So what is the solution? For British bill payers to pay more, to IMPORT more from Europe (specifically Belgium) to keep the lights on in Britain.
Britain. A country with vast supplies of gas, untapped, deliberately due to Labour policy now going cap in hand to Europe and paying vast sums to import foreign gas.
It is utterly outrageous. You couldn’t make it up.
ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/f…
I've tried, I've really tried, I still love watching the dancers (go Graeme 🕺) but, aside of Emma who's an absolute 👑 it's almost unwatchable with this presenting set up.
#Strictly
Mrs Rocksson retweeted
Important News: @Ofgem’s just launched a ‘consultation’ about switching on the Market Stabilisation Charge as soon as November. It doesn’t sound a big deal, but it could be, it ain’t good for consumers and I don't want it to slip under the radar.
In a nutshell, it means if wholesale energy prices drop sharply, the cheap fixes and switcher’s deals offered will be a lot more expensive, in order to protect energy firms’ profits.
That’s because any firm taking on a new customer, including on a cheap fix or other specialist tariff, will have to pay compensation to that customer’s old supplier, if they switch. It's basically a form of switching penalty.
While technically this is a consultation, it’s one of those where Ofgem has made up its mind, but is required to consult - it will almost certainly happen. Below is my ‘first look’ explainer on this...
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How it works (simplified to make it easy to understand):
Ofgem decided to put this power back into suppliers’ licences in May, so it could switch it on quickly if needed, and now it is trying to do just that.
It means if wholesale prices drop more than 10% below the level built into the Price Cap (and remember the January Price Cap is currently predicted to be 25% higher than now), and someone switches supplier from that or any tariff, the new firm must pay the old one 85% of the drop in wholesale rates beyond that 10%.
So very roughly, say the wholesale energy in the Price Cap costs £1,000 (a made-up number, to keep it simple. This is about proportions, not exact amounts):
- If prices drop to £900, there’s no Market Stabilisation Charge.\
- If prices drop to £800, you get the first £100 drop, but 85% of the next £100 (£85) goes to your old supplier.
So almost certainly the new firm will make you pay the difference, meaning the tariff will be up to £85 more than it would otherwise have been (other factors could affect the amount, but this is a rough illustration)
In other words, the new supplier can’t pass a chunk of the saving from lower wholesale rates on to you, because it has to hand much of it to your old supplier.
Why Ofgem says it’s doing this
Its argument is that the Price Cap requires suppliers buy energy in advance. If wholesale rates fall sharply and people leave in large numbers, those suppliers would be left out of pocket, and it doesn’t want suppliers who did the right thing by buying energy in advance to be penalised.
My View
I don’t like it. This is a ‘Market Stabilisation Charge’ but the supplier market is pretty stable, and I doubt we are at the domino risk of suppliers going bust in the way they did in the early twenties. A good few energy firms have made large profits since then, and protecting them over winter by effectively dampening competition because it’s ‘not their fault’ feels raw.
After all we don’t take their profits off them when they make them ‘through no fault’. Until now, my hope had been that at some point the Middle East situation would de-escalate, wholesale rates would drop. While it would take months for that to feed into the Price Cap, other cheaper tariffs would be available to switch to. That would still happen, but the savings could be no-where near as good as otherwise.
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As noted, these are my provisional thoughts and this has only just come out. I will need to do more looking/thinking.
Mrs Rocksson retweeted
To those saying that we don’t “pay in” to a state pension, and that it is a benefit, why is there an online government State Pension forecast based on…what you’ve paid in?
On top of which, if you haven’t paid in enough, you can top it up before retirement to increase what you receive in your state pension.
Payments in = Pension. Fact.
The gaslighting by the Left is getting tedious now.
gov.uk/check-state-pension
I think they've got Josh doing the main "presenting" and got Emma supporting to see if he's any better. He's not. Shouting across Anton judging 😬
#Strictly
Mrs Rocksson retweeted
Torn between just wanting to laugh about @Jenny4SuffCoast and make jokes about black labs & beer, and being absolutely furious about this attack on a whole way of life, her bigotry is off the charts.
Last week incessant cackling, this week competing with Motsi for shouting. Josh, mate, chill out. It's too much.
#Strictly
One of the reasons few people know about oesophageal cancer and its risk factors is because dumbed down words are used. Please use the medical term (actually educate your audience, your main purpose for existing) and not "food pipe". My father died of this cancer. Words matter.
Mrs Rocksson retweeted
Not everything has to be looked at through the lens of discrimination.
Conservatives managed to choose our first woman leader 51 years ago. Meanwhile Labour are celebrating Andy Burnham as their first female Prime Minister.
Claire has been promoted because she is excellent and Conservatives believe in meritocracy.
If Harriet is worried about discrimination, there is plenty in her own party to keep her busy.
Boris Johnson promoted me to the Treasury while I was on maternity leave in 2020. Nobody did a podcast episode on it because we didn’t think it was remarkable. He just knew I could do the job.
Women do not need patronising theories to explain their success. That is the point.
Time was, @ClaireCoutinho, that women had to conceal pregnancy, fearing the sack. We fought against maternity discrimination so that women could be promoted on merit not sacked for pregnancy. I’m glad you’ve escaped mat discrimination. But it’s still a problem. How about siding with us to banish it? @ThenScrewed
Mrs Rocksson retweeted
The last overseas shearers Britain intends to let in are on the fells right now, working out the final weeks of their leave.
The door shut on 30 June. No vote, no debate, no announcement, just a date passing quietly in a summer when everyone was looking elsewhere. Those still working the Borders this week are here on leave that expires on 1 October, and when they fly out that is the end of it.
Understand what is walking out.
Six New Zealanders spent three months in one Northumberland valley last year and sheared nearly 90,000 sheep. Fifteen thousand head each, across farms from the Scottish Borders down to County Durham. They have been coming into Coquetdale for over thirty years. Since 2011 a concession has let up to 75 of them in each spring, and between them they take the wool off one and a half to two million British sheep in a window a few weeks long.
The Home Office rejected the application on 2 February. Twenty-six days of farmers writing to their MPs got it reinstated on 10 March for one final year, with a line about the sector having had fourteen years to train British workers and now being expected to transition to domestic labour.
Here is what that sentence is standing on. British Wool trains over 800 people a year, most of those courses are basic level, and most of the people on them are sheep farmers learning to do their own flock. Training was never the bottleneck. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes, calm hands, no panic in the animal, hundreds a day for weeks on end, and reaching that standard takes years of conditioning and a place in a global trade that follows the season around the planet.
Fourteen million breeding ewes. A few weeks to do them all. A sheep left in fleece gets eaten alive by maggots, so the job is not optional and the date is not negotiable.
Next spring those farms make phone calls that nobody answers.
Seventy-five shearers, once a year, and a government that could not find room for them.
Mrs Rocksson retweeted
Yes, Jeremy Clarkson bought his farm partly for the inheritance tax break. He has said so himself. Now sit with what that admission actually proves.
The line gets thrown at him constantly. He told the Sunday Times in 2021 that avoiding inheritance tax was the critical thing in buying the land. Cornered by the BBC in 2024, he shrugged that the tax relief comes with the benefit, and said people like him will simply put the farm in a trust, live seven years, and pay nothing regardless.
The critics think that quote is their trump card. It is the opposite. It is a confession to the exact thing the show is about.
Because ask the obvious question. Why was farmland, for decades, one of the best ways for a wealthy man to shelter his money from the taxman?
It was not sentiment. It was deliberate policy. Farmland was exempted from inheritance tax for one reason: a family farm is worth millions on paper and earns almost nothing in cash, so taxing it at death would force the family to sell the land just to pay the bill. The exemption existed to stop farms being broken up every single generation. It was the one thing keeping the family farm in the family.
So a rich man sheltering his fortune in farmland is not exploiting a loophole. He is standing inside the proof that farming does not pay. Nobody parks money in an asset that earns a real return and escapes tax at the same time, because no such asset exists. You get the return or you get the shelter. Farmland offered the shelter precisely because it never offered the return.
That is the whole argument of the show in one line. A thousand acres made £144. A fortune to buy, a pittance to work.
Then in October 2024 the government scrapped the relief on farms over a million pounds, and the mask slipped. The same politicians who spent years calling it a rich man's perk suddenly needed you to believe those same farms were poor family concerns that would barely be touched. They cannot have it both ways. Either farmland is a shelter for the wealthy, or it is the threadbare livelihood of families who will have to sell fields to pay a death bill. It was always the second. The relief existed because it was the second.
And none of this dents the message.
He has since said the tax line was a joke, that he really bought the place to shoot, and only led with inheritance tax because admitting to pheasants sounded worse. Untangle it how you like. It changes nothing, because in the same breath he confirmed the relief was real and that he would use a trust to sidestep the new charge. The man is rich. He had mixed motives. Pheasants, money, a television show, all of it, admitted with a grin.
It does not matter, because the numbers on the screen are real. The £144 is real. The drowned crop is real. The council that shut the restaurant is real. The subsidy that vanished overnight is real. A messenger's motives do not change a message you can verify with your own eyes over four series.
They want you to throw out the evidence because you dislike the witness.
The witness bought a farm for a tax break that existed because farms do not make money. He could not have proven the point better if he had tried.
Mrs Rocksson retweeted
The qualities that made Starmer an effective lawyer & DPP; intellect, caution & detachment are not the same qualities that inspire a country. Today’s resignation is a reminder that you cannot build a political identity around not being the other lot. Eventually people need a positive vision: what Britain is for, what we do better than anyone else & where we’re going. Voters need not just to hear your argument but to feel that you understand them.
Mrs Rocksson retweeted
Overnight the Government has sneaked out an announcement that they have lifted sanctions on Russian diesel and aviation fuel if processed in a third country.
They’re also now permitting Liquified National Gas to come to the UK direct from Russia.
Incredible that for all their rhetoric about the war in Ukraine Labour is now allowing Russia to benefit from oil revenue, undoing sanctions that go all the way back to the invasion of Crimea in 2014.
I never had them pegged as Putin appeasers.
This Government is a disgrace.
Mrs Rocksson retweeted
After 18 months of “standing up to Putin” the Labour govt quietly issued a licence allowing imports of Russian oil refined in third countries.
Yesterday Labour MPs voted AGAINST UK oil and gas licences.
We are now importing from Russia instead of drilling in the North Sea.
Insane.
BREAKING: UK waives some Russian oil sanctions, allowing imports of diesel and jet fuel processed in third countries from Russian crude
(most likely supply chain: imports of Indian refined products produced by processing Russian crude).
gov.uk/government/publicatio…
