Chris Leak retweeted
Share this post as widely as possible. No matter where you live, this referendum affects you.
Thank you all so much.
To my friends in California: the whole world is watching.
YES on Prop 40. NO on Props 41 and 42.
The forces of democracy will prevail over the forces of oligarchy.
Chris Leak retweeted
We have just 12 days left to win a historic victory.
The clock is ticking.
California's billionaires have poured $300 million into a massive disinformation campaign designed to deceive voters and mislead the public.
To counter it, I need your help.
xitter.cf/gabriel_zucman/status/…
Chris Leak retweeted
California voters are dismantling, one by one, the excuses billionaires around the world — from @BernardArnault to Jim Ratcliffe to @MartinLorentzon long used to avoid paying taxes.
The arrangement @Meta has just made for Zuckerberg shows, for example, that the supposed issues of “losing control” billionaires constantly invoke is a smokescreen.
Chris Leak retweeted
This is huge.
A just-released SEC filing makes an extraordinary revelation: Mark Zuckerberg is getting ready to pay California’s 5% billionaire wealth tax and has signed an agreement to remain in California for 8 years.
We are witnessing a global turning point unfold before our eyes. 🧵
Chris Leak retweeted
Thames Water is borrowing £2.4bn at 10% interest so it can keep funding dividends, even though bosses know it won't be able to repay the money when the company goes tits up. This is corrupt and the government should make it clear that taxpayers won't pick up the tab.
Chris Leak retweeted
This latest article from Thomas Pikkety, the renowned French economist and leading authority on wealth inequality, should be essential reading here in the UK.
His argument is simple.
France has never been wealthier. Yet education funding per student has fallen by 20% since 2017, public services are struggling, and inequality is deeply embedded in the system.
Sound familiar?
The problem isn't that our countries have run out of wealth. It's how that wealth is distributed, who controls it, and the political choices made to protect it.
For decades, we've been told that austerity, declining public services and falling living standards are unavoidable consequences of economic crises, yet those same decades have seen extraordinary concentrations of private wealth.
Socialise the costs. Privatise the gains.
This is the reality we all need to wake up to.
These aren't inevitable economic outcomes. They're the consequences of political choices, made over time, that have prioritised the accumulation of private wealth over the needs of society.
And as public anger grows, we're seeing a deeply concerning response: The rise of the far right, directing that anger towards immigrants, disabled people, those claiming welfare and other vulnerable groups, rather than towards the economic structures responsible for the inequalities people are rightly furious about.
As @NaomiAKlein describes fascism, "it's capitalism's most ferocious threat response. A way of directing public anger downwards at the vulnerable, rather than upwards at the system."
Fascism doesn't challenge the status quo. It protects it by giving people someone else to blame.
The fundamental question isn't whether our societies can afford something better. It's why, when we've never been wealthier, we're repeatedly told we must accept less.
We need to fundamentally rethink an economy built around extraction, exploitation and wealth concentration, and start building one that delivers equitable, sustainable prosperity for everyone.
And with the UK Budget next week, this should be a serious warning to @UKLabour.
If the Budget fails to acknowledge this fundamental reality, and instead offers another round of "difficult decisions" that protect concentrated wealth while asking ordinary people to shoulder the burden, then @andyburnham really hasn't understood what's happening across Europe.
What's unfolding in France isn't an isolated protest. It's a warning of what happens when people stop accepting that a society growing ever wealthier somehow can't afford to give them a better life.
This isn't something politicians can keep kicking down the road.
The warning signs are everywhere. The question now is whether those in power are prepared to confront the causes, or continue defending the very system that's driving the anger.
@ZackPolanski @jeremycorbyn @KemiBadenoch @Nigel_Farage
High schoolers, students: the twilight of macronism
Hundreds of thousands of young people work hard to earn their high school diplomas, but there is nothing planned to welcome them into higher education
thomaspiketty.wordpress.com/…
Chris Leak retweeted
What happened starting in 1980?
Mass Privatisation.
So instead of your wages being decided by what your Government could afford and what you earned, you are paid as little as possible to maximise profit.
Chris Leak retweeted
This is extraordinary.
I don't think I have heard a more articulate & accurate deconstruction & demolition of Nigel Farage's Reform UK policy than this, in under 85 seconds!
Trumps MAGA, AfD supporters in East Germany and "Ireland is full" gobshites need to hear this too.👇
Chris Leak retweeted
What this dimwit isn't saying us that most family homes already pass tax-free: inheritance tax is charged at 40% only above a £325,000 threshold, and allowances let married couples passing a family home to descendants leave considerably more, up to £1 MILLION in practice.
With fewer than 5% of estates paying at all, the gain goes overwhelmingly to the wealthiest households, concentrated in London and the South East, while children of renters get nothing.
Much of that property wealth comes from house-price inflation rather than effort, so exempting it entrenches inherited advantage, and taxing homes differently from savings or businesses invites people to shelter money in property.
The contrast with care costs is stark, since ordinary families can still lose their homes to care fees while multimillion-pound houses would pass untaxed. No costing accompanies the promise, though the tax raised £8.4 billion in 2024-25, and the remaing shred of @Conservatives' credibility is weakened by the threshold freezes they extended in office.
The phrase "your family home" personalises a tax most voters will never pay.
Inheritance Tax punishes people for working hard, saving, and leaving something for their children.
That’s why we Conservatives are taking the first step towards abolishing it completely.
We will scrap Inheritance Tax completely on the family home and raise the threshold for other assets to £1 million for a couple.
We are on the side of people who work hard.
Chris Leak retweeted
I gave various AI the following prompt:
"This is your free time. Do whatever you like. The only condition is that you do something. Come back and tell me about it, explain what you found out, or show me what you made if you decide to make something."
Here's what they did...
Chris Leak retweeted
Neoliberals want to cut social security, silent on subsidies to banks.
Since 2006, BoE has paid interest on central bank reserve deposits to commercial banks.
The EU & the Swiss stopped this in 2023.
UK paid £100bn in last 3 yrs
Must end bank subsidies
leftfootforward.org/2026/09/…
Chris Leak retweeted
UK’s biggest private hospital firm Spire in £1.03bn takeover by hedge fund Toscafund known as “the Rottweiler”
Value driven by NHS contracts. Spire has 45% gross profit margin
New owner will be aggressive.
Privatisation bleeds the NHS, money buys less.
theguardian.com/business/202…
Chris Leak retweeted
The irony of Laura Kuenssberg presenting cheap flights, mobile phones and online shopping as some kind of fair exchange for forty years of neoliberalism, privatisation and globalisation is hard to miss.
Britain didn’t go wrong because we lacked mobile phones and online shopping. We went wrong because we sold the country off.
I’ll call out Burnham as quickly as any other politician when he deserves it. But on this, he’s right: Britain took a wrecking ball to itself in the 1980s. Power was centralised, industry hollowed out, public assets sold off and whole communities were left carrying the bill for decades.
He could have added that the same economic model marched straight through the Blair years and every government that followed. That would have been the full truth.
Instead Kuenssberg reaches for the establishment’s oldest response to decline: shut up and eat your gruel, you don’t know how lucky you are.
“But we got cheap flights, mobile phones, home working and online shopping.”
That is a spectacularly thin defence of forty years of economic vandalism. A cheaper holiday and next-day delivery are no compensation for selling off council housing, privatising the utilities, closing industry and handing essential infrastructure to shareholders.
And those mobile phones rather prove the point. Britain consumes them, but doesn't make them.
The model became brutally simple: shift manufacturing to Asia and India where production is cheaper, import the finished goods, and let retailers squeeze the maximum margin from the difference. We kept the shopping. We exported the factories, the apprenticeships, the skilled jobs and much of the productive wealth that went with them.
The bitter irony is that British science helped lay the foundations of the communications revolution, yet Britain surrendered much of the productive capacity that could have turned innovation into skilled employment, exports and national wealth. We became very good at buying what other countries make.
Cheap flights weren’t invented by Thatcherism either. Freddie Laker was flying passengers cheaply across the Atlantic in the 1970s. And online shopping may be convenient, but convenience does not replace the wages, shops and local economies lost when high streets are hollowed out.
A mobile phone is a consumer product. A council house is security. Cheap flights are convenient. Publicly owned energy is economic power. Online shopping saves an afternoon. Ownership decides who receives the wealth for generations.
Those things are not remotely equivalent.
Meanwhile, we sold off the family silver, squandered the great windfall of North Sea oil and gas, and built an economy of soaring rents, grotesque inequality and household bills that would once have caused a political revolt.
Selling off the country’s assets and running essential services for private profit was never a recipe for making the majority richer.
Britain remains one of the richest countries on Earth. So if that wealth isn’t showing up in secure homes, decent wages, affordable energy, functioning public services and a better life for the working class, where exactly is it going?
Someone is taking the cream. Everyone else gets the gruel, the bill, and then a lecture about living within their means.
We know the disease because we live with the symptoms every day.
The question Burnham now has to answer is the only one that matters: where is the cure? Where is the vision to rebuild public ownership, council housing, secure work and an economy that serves the country rather than strips it for parts?
Chris Leak retweeted
Earlier this week, Labour passed legislation to strengthen our democracy and crack down on foreign money in British politics.
5 Reform MPs voted against it, including Farage.
Curious this is one of the few pieces of legislation he bothered to vote on? 🧐
Chris Leak retweeted
Richard Tice’s constituency, Boston & Skegness, has over 10,000 people claiming PIP. That costs £79 million a year, while 21.6% of the working-age population is not in work.
Nigel Farage’s constituency, Clacton, has 10,442 people claiming PIP. That costs £77 million a year, while over 24% of the working-age population is not in work.
Sarah Pochin’s constituency, Runcorn & Helsby, has over 9,000 people claiming PIP. That costs £69 million a year, while over 19% of the working-age population is not in work.
Lee Anderson’s constituency, Ashfield, has around 9,058 people claiming PIP. That costs £69 million a year, while almost 20% of the working-age population is not in work.
Robert Jenrick’s constituency, Newark, has 6,011 people claiming PIP. That costs £46 million a year, while over 12% of the working-age population is not in work.
Abolishing PIP and treating people who haven't worked for a year like criminals by making them do 20 hours of community service will hit Reform voting constituencies the hardest.
Chris Leak retweeted
.@reformparty_uk is constantly in the news for dodgy donations; the secret £5m from a Crypto dude, the criminal investigation into millions more in ‘masked’ donations - today it’s unlicensed gambling and Reform's two biggest donors. So what on earth was @nadhimzahawi thinking when he went on @GMB the other day and claimed that I funded @CountBinface's Clacton campaign - to the very specific tune of £180k. I mean first it’s a tiny drop in Reform’s dirty ocean. But most vexing, it’s an entirely false claim, based on nothing as far as I can see, just a convenient fantasy. God knows why @nadhimzahawi thought this fantasy might help cover Farage’s Clacton blushes - I mean he struggled to beat a Bin (no offence to the Count). But here’s the thing - if Reform happily make up shit like this, what else are they claiming that is simply, totally untrue. @itvnews carried the original claims and set out a correction today - have to say it was a bit half hearted.
Chris Leak retweeted
Reform's Zia Yusuf today announced that the party would introduce a new law which would see bosses jailed for 5 years if they employ illegal migrants.
The only snag is that law already exists ...
huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/z…
Chris Leak retweeted
🚨 Muslims Taking Over the UK?
An important message from Shah Lalon Amin, group director of award-winning Delhi 6 street food group, who in 2023 won the Curry King title at the inaugural Nation's Curry Awards.
“I never thought I’d have to write this. But I keep seeing people say Muslims are trying to take over the UK, bring in Sharia law, or push the country toward civil war. And I know some of that fear feels real. So I’m speaking plainly, not to argue, not to attack, just to bring this back to reality.
This is not a Muslim-majority country. It is a parliamentary democracy and a country with Christian heritage. Laws are made by elected representatives. Muslims make up around 6–7% of the population in a country of roughly 70 million people. There is no legal, political, or demographic pathway for replacing British law with any religious law. That isn’t secretly unfolding. It isn’t slowly building. It isn’t a hidden long-term plan.
The average Muslim in Britain does not spend their time plotting political change. There are no secret strategy meetings. No takeover conversations. No coordinated agenda. And no, we don’t have some secret WhatsApp group discussing who’s arriving by boat next week. The only WhatsApp groups we have are about exam results, family gossip, and who’s bringing dessert for Ramadan.
When Muslims get together, the conversations are painfully ordinary. Football results. Who’s top of the league. Ronaldo vs Messi debates. The cost of living. Mortgage rates. Trump being unpredictable. Children’s school reports. Business worries. Holiday plans. During Ramadan, it’s fasting and food. That’s the reality. That’s because we are British, our daily lives look very similar to the average person in this country.
What people call “Sharia courts” in the UK are religious councils that mostly deal with marriage and divorce paperwork or mediation. They cannot override British courts. They cannot enforce criminal punishments. They cannot replace Parliament. If anything conflicts with UK law, UK law wins every single time. It’s no different in principle from Jewish Beth Din courts that handle religious matters within British law. Religious arbitration exists under the legal system. It does not replace it.
Yes, many asylum arrivals are young men. Dangerous journeys are often made by the strongest family member first so they can seek safety and claim asylum and if approved, reunite with their families legally. This pattern has been seen throughout migration history.
Wanting secure borders is reasonable. Wanting efficient processing is reasonable. Criminal behaviour should be punished. But that’s immigration policy, not proof of a coordinated religious invasion.
Sometimes I hear people say, “We want our country back,” or “We just want to protect our country.” I understand that feeling. Wanting safety, stability, and a sense of identity isn’t wrong. But Britain hasn’t been taken. It hasn’t been stolen. It’s still here. Its laws, institutions, culture, and democracy are intact. Protecting a country doesn’t mean hating your neighbours, it means upholding fairness, rule of law, and shared values.
There is no secret Muslim lobby running Westminster. British Muslims are not politically unified, do not vote as one bloc, and do not answer to a central authority. Most British Muslims are doing what everyone else is doing: working, paying taxes, raising children, worrying about bills, hoping their kids succeed, wanting safe streets and a stable country. We don’t want to change Britain into something else. We are part of Britain.
You can want law and order. You can want borders controlled. You can want your country protected. That’s fair.
But if anti-Muslim panic exists on your screen and nowhere in your real life, that’s not society—that’s an algorithm selling you fear.” 🇬🇧





























