Steph Morgan QPM

The government's war against the self-employed is intensifying with brutal new proposals to force them to pay tax monthly in advance. The crunch year will be 2029, when they will have to pay double the amount of tax in one year. “The Government’s proposed changes to how self-assessment operates are completely unworkable as they stand and will cause enormous cash flow problems for many thousands of self-employed people,” warned the Federation of Small Businesses “Under the new proposals, in 2029 the self-employed will have to pay around two years’ worth of tax in one go.” The plan is clearly to give Labour a one-off cash boost in an election year. 1/2

75% of constituencies in England and Wales spend more on welfare than their workers pay in income tax and National Insurance. London and the South East are the only regions that are net contributors; the North East is the most welfare-dependent region in England. Explore the ASI's new Welfare Sustainability Tracker at buff.ly/ltyWwQH

🚨 BREAKING: Labour has suspended David Walliams as a party member after the allegations he preyed on young women and girls

Today is the day. David vs Goliath. Today we go to the High Court for our landmark judicial review against the Government. We have been shocked at the arguments being advanced by the Home Secretary in defence of its failure to implement key recommendations made by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). These arguments include, that The Maggie Oliver Foundation does not have standing to bring this challenge on behalf of children, that the Government is under no obligation to implement child protection measures, and that the public at large cannot rely upon promises made by the Prime Minister and Ministers that are made in Parliament. The Government's legal defence raises fundamental questions about public trust, accountability and whether promises made to survivors following public inquiries mean anything at all. At the centre of the judicial review are 20 key recommendations issued by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) proposed to better protect children across the UK from sexual abuse. These include properly collecting data relating to child abusers and victims of abuse and exploitation, ending the use of pain-inducing restraint techniques on children in custody and regulation of staff in children’s homes. We are concerned that more effort and public money appears to be going into defending a challenge designed to ensure these critical improvements in child protection are made than into implementing them. The simplest example of this is this – if the Government had implemented the first recommendation of the IICSA, there would have been no need for a further three-year, £65 million public Inquiry (The Statutory Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs). WHO IS ALLOWED TO ASK THE QUESTION? The Secretary of State is a challenging whether The Maggie Oliver Foundation and our founder and Chair, @MaggieOliverUK , have standing to bring the case at all. This raises a deeply troubling question. If organisations representing survivors and working every day with the consequences of child sexual abuse are not entitled to ask why promised child protection measures have not been implemented, who is? The Government is trying to exclude from the debate the very people closest to the consequences of these failures. For years survivors have been told to come forward. Speak up. Tell the truth. Many have done so at enormous personal cost, but now the Government says they, and those who represent them, cannot object to failures to protect children. Their voices must be silenced. This challenge was never about politics. Governments of all stripes have let down children. It is astonishing that the Government's first argument in this judicial review is that victims can have no voice. If organisations representing survivors, and survivors themselves, cannot ask why promised child protection measures have not been implemented, who can? IF GOVERNMENT DOESN'T HAVE TO ACT, WHAT IS THE POINT? A central plank to the Government's defence is that ministers are under no legal obligation to implement recommendations made by public inquiries. If that is right, why spend hundreds of millions of pounds on public inquiries if Government is just going to ignore what they find? We genuinely struggle to understand how anyone can think that is acceptable. Millions are spent, years of hearings are had, victims pour out their hearts, findings and recommendations are made, promises are made by Government and then broke – but when someone has the temerity to ask why those promises haven't been kept, the Government's response is we never had to keep our promises. If that is right, the Government must be open about it, and explain to the public why they hold expensive public inquiries at all. IICSA took seven years, heard from more than 7,000 survivors, cost more than £200 million and made twenty recommendations intended to protect children. But the Government now says, we have no obligation to fulfil its promises to implement recommendations to protect children. CAN POLITICIANS DENY THEIR PROMISES MATTER? We are also challenging the Government's position regarding promises made by the Prime Minister and ministers following publication of IICSA's recommendations. Repeated assurances that action would be taken have been made by senior politicians across successive governments. The Government's defence includes arguments relating to parliamentary privilege. In effect the Government say that The Foundation cannot rely upon ministerial promises made in Parliament, and that such promises cannot give rise to expectations about future action. If the public cannot rely on promises made in Parliament, what can they rely on? Survivors and the public hear ministers make promises. They hear repeated assurances that lessons have been learned and change will follow. They build their expectations around those promises. Many survivors have spent years believing ministers when they said action was coming. To now be told that those promises cannot be relied upon is not just a legal argument, it is a fundamental betrayal of the trust survivors (and children across the UK) were asked to place in the process. Trust works both ways. Survivors are asked to trust public inquiries with the most painful experiences of their lives. Governments should not then be able to argue that survivors cannot rely on the promises they receive in return. WHILE GOVERNMENT ARGUES, CHILDREN ARE STILL BEING ABUSED Government figures show that approximately 2 million children have been sexually abused since IICSA published its recommendations in October 2022. That astonishing number must not be lost amidst legal arguments and the Government’s technical defences. This case is about the protection of all British children. What shocks us most is how much ingenuity and effort has gone into finding reasons not to act. Imagine if half of the same energy had been invested in implementing child protection measures. Imagine if the resources currently being spent defending this case had instead been spent protecting children. How many children might already be safer? While well paid Government lawyers argue, children are still being sexually abused. That is the reality we cannot lose sight of. This case was never about clever legal arguments. It is about whether promises made to children and survivors mean anything at all. The Maggie Oliver Foundation will not be silent on that question.

🚨 BREAKING: Russell Brand has been jailed for 10 years and 6 months over rape and sexual assault

The internet is 99% garbage. But if you know where to look, it’s an absolute goldmine. Here are 50 legendary websites that feel illegal to know and will save you thousands of hours👇 1. zoom.earth — Watch the world via live satellite imagery 2. flightradar24.com — See every plane currently in the sky 3. marinetraffic.com — Track all ships at sea in real time 4. windy.com — Live map of winds and storms 5. lightningmaps.org — Watch lightning strikes hitting Earth in real time 6. earthquake.usgs.gov — Live list of recent earthquakes 7. submarinecablemap.com — Ocean cables carrying the internet 8. globalforestwatch.org — Watch forests disappear from space 9. worldometers.info — The world's statistics, second by second 10. internetlivestats.com — Current number of tweets and searches being posted 11. thetruesize.com — Compare the true sizes of countries 12. oldmapsonline.org — Maps from centuries ago 13. davidrumsey.com — Archive of 150,000 historical maps 14. openstreetmap.org — World map drawn by volunteers 15. window-swap.com — Look out the window of a random person around the world 16. virtualvacation.us — Virtual walks through cities 17. mapcrunch.com — Teleport to a random spot on Earth 18. atlasobscura.com — Catalog of the world's strangest places 19. neal.fun — Interactive knowledge experiences 20. htwins.net/scale2 — Scale journey from atom to universe 21. eyes.nasa.gov — Explore the solar system in 3D 22. stellarium-web.org — Real sky map in your browser 23. apod.nasa.gov — NASA's astronomy picture of the day 24. images.nasa.gov — NASA's entire visual archive, free 25. pudding.cool — Visual articles told through data 26. ourworldindata.org — The state of the world with real data 27. gapminder.org — What we mistakenly think we know about the world 28. informationisbeautiful.net — Visualizing complex data 29. data.worldbank.org — World Bank's open data 30. data.tuik.gov.tr — Turkey's official statistics database 31. archive.org — Archive of millions of books, films, and software 32. gutenberg.org — 70,000 free books whose copyrights have expired 33. openlibrary.org — Record of every book in the world 34. loc.gov — U.S. Library of Congress digital archive 35. europeana.eu — Europe's cultural heritage archive 36. dp.la — America's digital library collection 37. artsandculture.google.com — Tour museums from home 38. rijksmuseum.nl — Download artworks in high resolution 39. wikiart.org — Archive of 250,000 artworks 40. publicdomainreview.org — Forgotten visual treasures of history 41. openculture.com — Free archive of culture and education 42. metmuseum.org — Met Museum's open collection 43. musicmap.info — Family tree of music genres 44. radiooooo.com — Pick a country and decade to listen to that era 45. listen.hatnote.com — Turn Wikipedia edits into audio 46. wikipedia.org — Random knowledge well 47. timeanddate.com — Time, sunrises, and sky events 48. sciencedaily.com — Live stream of science news 49. arxiv.org — Free preprints of scientific papers 50. observablehq.com — Visualize data with live code Save this. You’ll definitely need some of these later. 🔖 Follow @Zenith_coder for more useful websites, AI tools & tech resources.

Proposals have been floated today for the merger of England & Wales’s 43 police forces into just 8-10 mega forces I oppose enforced mergers to create just 8 or 10 mega police forces, replacing the 43 current forces which are mainly based on historic counties. Each mega force will cover around 7 million people and merge around 5 existing forces into one Mega forces will be distant from local communities, resources will get taken away from rural areas and towns into large cities, the transition will cause huge disruption to crime fighting and there is no evidence larger forces are more efficient or more effective - the Met itself is the biggest force in the country by far yet has one of the lowest clear up rates, despite the highest funding per capita

🚨Labour’s Bill Would Let Energy Firms Dig Into Your Tax Records and House Value So They Can Charge You Extra to Subsidise Others Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh introduced the Energy Independence Bill last week that would hand energy companies access to eight government databases, including your HMRC tax and income records, child benefit, property value and pensions. This is a major expansion beyond the limited fuel-poverty data they already get. Official assessments openly plan “progressivity”: discounts for some households paid for by extra levies on those judged better off. Nothing happens until the bill passes and ministers create a scheme through further legislation. Her department calls it targeting support. The unmistakable purpose is giving private firms the power to inspect your private finances and raise your bill to subsidise everyone else. This is not support. It is a deliberate decision to treat your private tax records and property value as legitimate tools for deciding who gets charged more, then hand that power to private energy companies. Once the machinery exists, Labour will expand it. The only real question is how far they intend to go.

A one-way ticket to the past. Nationalised rail services are poorer than when they were private. This is what happens when Labour politicians try to run things.