Steve Davies #BackZack (@StephenWayneDa4) profile picture

Stronger within...Stronger together...Defeat barriers & intolerance. Green Party voter / member

West Midlands
Joined July 2016
Photo by Steve Davies #BackZack (@StephenWayneDa4)Photo by Steve Davies #BackZack (@StephenWayneDa4)Photo by Steve Davies #BackZack (@StephenWayneDa4)Photo by Steve Davies #BackZack (@StephenWayneDa4)Photo by Steve Davies #BackZack (@StephenWayneDa4)Photo by Steve Davies #BackZack (@StephenWayneDa4)Photo by Steve Davies #BackZack (@StephenWayneDa4)Photo by Steve Davies #BackZack (@StephenWayneDa4)Photo by Steve Davies #BackZack (@StephenWayneDa4)Photo by Steve Davies #BackZack (@StephenWayneDa4)
Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
Spot on from @MazzucatoM. We absolutely should, and must, be looking at wealth taxes. But redistribution alone isn't enough. We also need to address the extraordinary imbalance of power, breaking the stranglehold that concentrated wealth and big business have over our economy and politics. And fundamentally, we need to rethink how our economy works in the first place. Redistribution is be the bridge, but regeneration has to be the destination. An economy designed from the outset to distribute prosperity rather than concentrate wealth. One that creates genuine social value, restores our planet, and puts human wellbeing ahead of endless extraction. Not simply taxing the damage after it's done, but building an economy that works for people and planet in the first place.
I support Proposition 40. California’s billionaires should pay, and the state’s health system needs the money. But a one-time levy collected decades after the fact is a costly way to claim a return that could have been written into the contract at the start. Redistribution settles old accounts. Pre-distribution redesigns an economy from the outset. New in @TIME ➡️ buff.ly/KaA14s8 More in new book, The Common Good Economy ➡️ buff.ly/zfNmMU9
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
John Healey promised it would be a "continuity Labour government with a change of leader". His Budget has delivered exactly that.
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
🚨 THE ALARM BELLS ARE RINGING! So @andyburnham approved Jackdaw while insisting Labour remains committed to the green transition. The Budget announces cuts to energy bills through reduced levies and policy costs, presenting them as major savings. But already confirned energy price hikes in January will swallow those savings entirely, and then some. Your bills will still go UP! But buried in the Budget is something far more concerning. And @dantomlinsonmp, for some reason, has been stupid enough to highlight this. @UKLabour has announced that it will only award new contracts for renewable energy projects, such as wind and solar farms, if it's satisfied they'll reduce electricity bills. Sounds reasonable? But here's the problem. After years of underinvestment in Britain's electricity grid, the government is now introducing conditions that could delay or restrict the very renewable projects we desperately need to accelerate. Meanwhile, new fossil fuel projects continue to get the green light without having to demonstrate that they'll reduce household energy bills. And that's before we even consider the enormous long-term environmental, economic and human costs of continued fossil fuel dependence. Where in Labour's calculations are the costs of climate breakdown, environmental destruction and the devastating consequences for future generations? Because from the way these decisions are being presented, it's far from clear they're being given anything like the consideration they deserve. The government itself acknowledges that renewables are essential to escaping volatile gas prices, achieving energy security and tackling climate change. Yet its own policies seem designed to slow that transition. If Labour is genuinely committed to the green transition, why is it placing new conditions on renewable energy while continuing to approve fossil fuel expansion? And why do the enormous environmental, economic and human costs of climate breakdown appear to carry so little weight in these decisions? We should be accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels, not finding new reasons to delay it. @ZackPolanski @TheGreenParty #ClimateCrisis #Budget2026
This Budget is the start of a new energy pathway that the 10 Year Plan will build on. The priority is to bring energy costs down to help British business to compete, and British households to cope. And cheaper electricity will boost electrification, increasing our energy security and helping to decarbonise the whole economy. What does this mean? First, it means a focus on levies and policy costs on bills. The Conservatives added £100 to everyone's bill via levies in their last decade in power. Labour has cut £150 from bill costs already. But today, John Healey has drawn a line in the sand, with the announcement that we will add no new costs to energy bills, with a comprehensive cost control framework to follow at the spending review. The Chancellor is also junking plans, first set out by the Tories, to add on up to around £10 a year on bills to pay for hydrogen projects. Second, it means taking account of the interaction between the pace of grid build-out and the pace at which renewables are added to the grid. The NAO have said that investment in expanding the transmission network declined in real terms between 2016 and 2020, just when it was clear that more intermittent power meant we would need more capacity. It is now forecast to rise to over £10bn a year. But with growing constraint and distribution costs, it's right that the system costs of all new power are considered. That is why we will only procure clean power through AR8 (the next auction round) if we are confident it will lower bills. And we will reform the contract for difference by AR9 to support building the lowest cost system, fixing market distortions and siting assets in the right place. The evidence is clear, clean power is an essential part of the route to cheap power, and the overall approach of seeking to get ourselves off the gas-price rollercoaster to the right one. Gas is setting the electricity price less and less every year. If it wasn't for adding renewables to the grid in recent years then the current Iran price shock would have been worse for families and businesses. The Conservatives and Reform's ideological anti-renewables approach is the wrong one and fails in the face of evidence on how to protect bill payers from shocks and the need to make ourselves less reliant on foreign dictators. We'll take a pragmatic approach to get bills down. Getting electricity prices down, ensuring new clean power does not run ahead of the grid, is also the credible route to reaching our net zero goals. The decarbonisation that we want to enable in our homes, on our roads and in our businesses, is six times larger than that still to be achieved from getting to a clean grid. Unless we make electricity cheaper relative to other energy sources, we will struggle to increase adoption of EV and heat pumps.
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
Prediction... Burnham will call an early general election this week. He's a populist, and he knows the political opportunity in front of him. Reform are in retreat, the Tories haven't yet recovered, and the Greens are caught up in false accusations of antisemitism from Burnham and the Board of Deputies. But there's something much bigger at play here. Burnham is selling the promise of change while his government continues to defend so much of the political and economic establishment that desperately needs changing. Just look at the last week. Jackdaw approved, the antisemitism in schools report endorsed, and now a few encouraging words about Europe have people falling over themselves to praise him. It's political theatre, and it's working. But the longer he governs, the harder it becomes to maintain the impression that change is already here all we've heard so far is talk. So why not cash in on the honeymoon, and play the oldest trick in politics. Sell the promise of change, secure the power to deliver it, then spend the next five years explaining why meaningful change isn't possible.
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
I've been revisiting @UKLabour's 2024 manifesto, and some of the commitments are extraordinary given where we are today... - Defend the international rule of law. - Uphold international law in Gaza. - Recognise Palestinian statehood as an inalienable right. - Reject new oil and gas exploration because it worsens the climate crisis. These weren't demands from protesters. THEY WERE LABOUR'S OWN PROMISES! The government shouldn't need reminding what the principles are. It already wrote them down and commited to them! The question is why those principles become negotiable the moment defending them carries a political cost. @andyburnham @ZackPolanski
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
Vote Lula if you want Healthcare, Pensions, Wages and want a Brazilian to be President. Vote Bolsonaro if you hate all those things, love criminals and want Brazil to be Trump and Netanyahu's bitch/ #LulaNaPaulista #LulaEmCopacabana #ComLulaNaRua
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
If, by the end of this decade, we haven't stamped out this horrendous racism, weaponised as a fascist tactic to convince society that immigrants are the problem, rather than those exploiting division to entrench their own power, wealth and that of their donors, at the expense of ordinary people, our environment and society itself, then I genuinely fear we'll have passed the point of no return. And this isn't just about Trump or America. It's happening across Europe, and right here in the UK, where the same politics of fear, scapegoating and division are increasingly being normalised. The greatest danger isn't simply the racism itself. It's what that racism is being used to distract us from, and what those exploiting it are getting away with while we're distracted.
Trump: "Somalia -- 98% of the people here now from Somalia don't work. They don't have to work because they steal so much. They all have a Mercedes Benz. Low IQ and they live better than you do."
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
From two years ago.
Pro tip: nationalize Starlink before Putin does.
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Yes tax billionaires- but not because we need their money, but because we don’t want them to have it. O’Brien is plain wrong - the government fund and create markets - not taxes. Where do @TaxJusticeUK think tax payers get the money to pay taxes? #MMT
O'Brien is spot on here. The idea of the 'self-made' millionaire or billionaire is a fantasy. Success doesn't happen in a vacuum. Wealth is created collectively. When those who've gained the most stop paying back in, the foundations that made their success possible crumble.
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
End the tax breaks for big tech. Use the money for warmer homes!
It is time to cut tax breaks for big tech and use it to fund warmer homes. Here's our policy to lower energy bills, explained in 30 seconds.
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
🚨 PLEASE SHARE! I've written to both my children's schools following the Government's antisemitism review. I WILL NOT accept genocide being presented as a two-sided political debate, or Palestinian history and suffering being erased from their education. I've drafted a template which I'm sharing for other parents to use or adapt. Political impartiality must NEVER become historical dishonesty. Please use them. Challenge your schools. Demand answers. #GazaGenocide docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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The £3 trillion @griffitha refers to, is of course the net savings in the UK economy parked with the Treasury to earn £120 billion a year interest. When the MP talks of cutting the deficit, he doesn’t mean the £130 billion paid to banks, he means welfare.
🚨 Government borrowing of more than £3 trillion – the highest in history – and rising inflation show Labour has lost control of the economy. Healey’s Budget must take urgent action to tackle the deficit, reduce red tape and net zero costs that are driving up the cost of living.
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
If capitalism is so great, why do corporations need tax breaks, subsidies, exemptions, grants, bailouts, legal protections, and trade barriers to survive? And when ordinary people ask for help, why is it suddenly called socialism?
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“…like a shopkeeper cashing up at closing time and starting again at zero the following morning – except… the government doesn’t start the day with a cash float but with access to an approved line of credit from the Bank of England.” frapacioli.substack.com/p/wh…
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
Please retweet...
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
That's the way the money goes. Pop goes the weasel. Allow me to summarise what I've been saying in one post and explain what's going on here. We need a clean energy system, our water systems, schools and hospitals are struggling, roads are crumbling and we're facing serious welfare cuts. We're told that we can't use public investment - unless it's on the military, of course - to fix all this because it'll "cause inflation" and "increase borrowing costs". Two huge lies - in fact the principal cause of inflation is rising energy costs and currency-issuing governments with central banks don't need to borrow money from parasitic 'bond markets'. Debt trouble occurs when nations with weak currencies - such as Argentina - owe debts payable only in a foreign currency, i.e. $ US. We are not in that situation. Government bonds (called 'gilts' in the UK) are savings accounts giving big capital free money, nothing more - they don't fund our public spending. They're a relic from the age when the gold exchange system limited the money supply - this was abandoned between 1971 and 1978 when governments worldwide adopted fiat money systems. Just because bond traders jack up yields in the secondary market doesn't mean that governments need to increase yields in the primary auction. The problem is, as @JLMelenchon has just told the French, supine bought-off politicians and central bankers conforming to fiscal spending rules imposed on us by global money markets - the 'bond vigilantes'. We're told that we should limit public spending because governments are wasteful and don't allocate capital properly - in other words utilities, schools, hospitals, infrastructure maintenance and other goods and services we really need don't make huge profits. Private investors allocate capital more efficiently and ensure progress - huge lie #3. Look below - private investors are wasting $ trillions on a huge AI bubble that'll inevitably burst. Tulip mania revisited. The 'animal spirits' of greedy, excitable private investors never learn. But, to keep us in the dark, the investment elite - the wealthy corporations, banks and individuals who live off the free money we pay them as 'interest', 'yields' and 'returns' - won't let us see it burst. In the quite likely event that Western governments initially refuse to bail out the $4.2 trillion - yes, trillion - AI shortfall, there are contractual IPO (Initial Public Offering) mandates for compulsory 'public offerings' to fall back on. To cut a long story short, stupid pension, insurance fund, hedge fund, private equity and sovereign wealth fund managers, when they were told AI would be a bonanza, signed contracts to fund any bailout needed after 2030 and keep the AI shitshow on the road. We'll be paying for the system that steals our data, spies on us, give us the wrong answers to questions on ChatGPT, churns out cheat essays for students, ruins human creativity, and makes a mess of our NHS accounts etc. for the foreseeable future. In other words, the geniuses who look after our savings and pensions are contracted to flush them down the toilet. But there's more. These private investment grifters do this thing called 'leveraging' - in other words, they use your savings and insurance premiums as derisking collateral to borrow loads more investment money at cheap preferential rate from their pals in the commercial banks. When the bubble bursts and threatens commercial bank liquidity, the central banks, like they did in 2008, will issue loads of public money as QE (Quantitative Easing). Yes indeed, the same public money we're told causes inflation and inefficiency when spent on utilities, hospitals, schools etc. will be shoved in the commercial banks' reserve accounts. Then the bond market will jack up yields, the governments and central bankers will conform and we'll pay them more interest for doing absolutely nothing constructive. While all this is going on, China is still growing on the back of huge injections of public investment at 5% per annum with 1% inflation. This 300 year old loan-shark racket we call 'the market economy' in the West is finished. Melenchon is right.
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
I really tried to warn everybody. Five years ago, it was obvious Putin was going to invade Ukraine, and it was obvious who his allies were. But few wanted to believe it.
Bottom line: Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have allied with Putin and oil/gas interests to try to undermine the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, in a fascist bid to destroy the US and EU administrative states. Pick a side.
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
1) An emergency brake on rents - rising by the LOWEST of CPI inflation, wage growth, or 2%. 2) A commitment to protecting social security - not pitting people on benefits against spending on weapons. 3) A green energy revolution now - cutting bills for everyone, forever.
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Steve Davies #BackZack retweeted
In the run up to the Budget on 28 October the media will tell you which cuts “must” be made. Here’s the list they won’t read out. Corporate welfare. - The banks have already pocketed £6bn from the Tory surcharge cut. Labour still hasn’t reversed it. - The Treasury also pays the banks interest on their QE reserves at the Bank of England. IPPR puts that at £22bn a year. - Oil and gas firms get back tax they’ve already paid when they decommission rigs. HMRC’s own estimate: £24bn. That bank reserves payment alone is more than the entire police budget for England and Wales (£21bn), and over 80% of what councils in England spend on adult social care (£26.7bn). There’s always money. Now ask yourself why these numbers never make the media’s list of “tough choices”.
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