The last remaining person on Twitter not being followed by John Cena.
Joined January 2011
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Andrew Cotter is rapidly becoming the BBC's new Barry Davies. They can basically drop him in to commentate on absolutely anything and he knocks it out of the park.
Swansea Snapper retweeted
Sublimely disguised pass by Fulton to take out five Blackburn defenders in this sequence.
Swansea Snapper retweeted
What bothers me so much about this, even more than the immediate, ruinous impact on the rental sector, is what it does to civil society. If you design a system that encourages people to take the piss, people who’d never otherwise have thought to do so will also have to start doing so or risk feeling like mugs. You already see this in the benefits system, where even genuine claimants are encouraged to lie and exaggerate.
And this habit, once formed, doesn’t just limit itself to interactions with faceless institutions. It spills over into all dealings in the public sphere, and an underlying level of suspicion builds up between strangers. Forebodes a very bleak future as people revert to informal institutions and additional costs are layered into every transaction as “fair play” can no longer be relied on.
Swansea Snapper retweeted
as someone who works in the software industry in britain, i can't believe there are contracts and estimates like this.
it seems getting these government contracts is incredibly lucrative in the uk, because the amounts are absolutely insane. £1.7bn to £4.4bn for hmrc's customer system? pre ai that's a crazy number. post ai it's still crazy.
for a fraction of the cost you could hire britain's top 50 engineers and pay them £300k a year. over 15 years that's £225m. it would cost less and be way better than what will come out of this.
put the rest into an ai lab and you'd have one of the best funded in europe. but no, it's an hmrc crm system lol.
I also continue to be impressed by Eustaquio. Constantly talking. Almost always where he needs to be. Serious football intelligence.
Swansea Snapper retweeted
You think you’ve met some tough sailors?
Let me introduce you to one of the most badass sailors ever Commander Bill King, Royal Navy.
This absolute BADASS survived SIX YEARS of submarine warfare during WWII. No significant breaks. As other submarine captains were getting slaughtered by Germans, he kept returning to even the odds.
The he decided the best way to recover from the experience was to sail ALONE around the world in a 42-foot sailboat.
And somehow, that’s not even the craziest part of his story.
King was born in 1910. His father was killed fighting in WWI. At just 12 years old, he entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.
By the outbreak of WWII, he was commanding British submarines.
Think about what that meant.
No nuclear propulsion. No modern sonar. No satellite intelligence. No helicopter rescue waiting overhead.
Just diesel engines, batteries, torpedoes, and a steel pressure hull separating you from a horrible death.
He fought through the Battle of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean campaigns before taking command of HMS Telemachus in the Pacific.
In July 1944, King hunted down and sank the Japanese submarine I-166 in the Strait of Malacca.
He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order TWICE, along with the Distinguished Service Cross.
He was reportedly the ONLY British submarine commander to remain in submarine command from the beginning of WWII to its end.
SIX YEARS.
Imagine the accumulated stress of six years hunting enemy warships while knowing that one depth charge could send you and your entire crew to the bottom.
The war ended, but it never really left him.
King later admitted that the experience had reduced him to a nervous wreck.
So what did he do?
He bought a ruined castle in Ireland, took up farming, and eventually decided he needed to get away from EVERYTHING.
In 1968, at the age of 58, he entered the inaugural Sunday Times Golden Globe Race.
The mission?
Race 9 other competitors to be the first to sail alone, nonstop, around the entire planet.
He built the 42-foot junk-rigged schooner named Galway Blazer II.
No GPS. No Starlink. No weather routing. No EPIRB.
Just celestial navigation, seamanship, and a lifetime of experience surviving in places where mistakes get people killed.
He sailed south into the Atlantic.
Then the Southern Ocean came looking for him.
A monstrous storm capsized his boat, destroying his masts.
King survived, rigged emergency sails, and eventually made it to South Africa.
Race over.
Worse? He lost the race to a young Merchant Navy officer.
You laugh but the other Royal Navy commander whose boat sunk in that race, was so embarrassed by being shamed by other naval officers that he hung himself.
Most men would have called it quits.
Not Bill King.
He tried again.
And again.
On a subsequent attempt, something enormous, possibly a shark or whale, slammed into his boat off Australia, punching a hole in the hull.
He spent DAYS making emergency repairs at sea.
Again, he survived.
Finally, in 1973, at the age of 62, SIXTY TWO, he completed his solo circumnavigation.
He had survived two world wars’ worth of family tragedy, six years of submarine combat, a dismasting, a capsizing, and a terrifying collision at sea.
And he was STILL sailing.
In 1975, the Cruising Club of America awarded him its prestigious Blue Water Medal.
But there’s one more part of his story I find extraordinary.
Decades after King sank the Japanese submarine I-166, the son of one of the Japanese sailors killed aboard that submarine visited him in Ireland.
Instead of hatred, the two families developed a friendship.
They planted trees together as symbols of peace.
Think about that.
A submarine commander who had spent years trying to kill the enemy ultimately found friendship with the family of a man he’d killed in battle.
Bill King lived to be 102 YEARS OLD. He simply refused to die.
Fair winds Commander 🫡
Swansea Snapper retweeted
Here comes the “if you can’t afford to pay your workers, your business model isn’t viable” brigade.
Please listen, any economy only exists because of private enterprise.
Without business owners there wouldn’t be the NHS, there wouldn’t be benefits, there wouldn’t be transport infrastructure.
You should thank them for taking the risks of starting a business.
In terms of the business model being viable, something is viable then government swoop in, increase taxes, increase regulation, increase costs.
Government need to be less involved, not more involved.
Let the markets determine prices, wages and viability.
I suggest you thank your employer next time you get a pay check. Rather than moan, it’s significantly harder running a business than working in one.
Swansea Snapper retweeted
Average profit for limited companies in the UK is £70,000.
If it’s going to cost half of that to employ someone full time what do you think will happen?
A) the owner will forgo half of their profit to employ someone.
B) they’ll struggle on, not employ anyone and therefore not grow.
Most people are employed by SMEs, if you make employing people more expensive there’s less employment.
Yet another reminder: if you can't afford to pay your staff enough to live on you don't have a viable business. #budget26
Swansea Snapper retweeted
It astounds me how little some people understand inflation and what causes it.
Take my last point about the minimum wage. Why not £100 an hour? Why not £1,000? We'd all be rich then, wouldn't we? Marvellous.
Except, of course, we wouldn't. Raising wages by law doesn't magically conjure wealth out of thin air. When wages rise faster than productivity, the money must be found somewhere. Businesses can swallow the cost, raise prices, cut jobs or simply close their doors. And when those price rises spread throughout the economy, inflation eats away at the purchasing power of the very wages that have increased.
It's a closed loop. Businesses must earn the money to pay their workers, and that money ultimately comes from customers. You cannot simply legislate prosperity into existence.
And let me tell you an uncomfortable truth: the real minimum wage is zero.
Swansea Snapper retweeted
Highest taxes on record in the country’s history and nothing works, public services are broken, the economy is stagnant at best, society is fractured and more tax is apparently the solution.
***The 2026 Budget - what to expect***
FISCAL HEADROOM
* John Healey is expected to lower the fiscal headroom from £23bn to around £15bn after economic hit caused by Iran war
* Ministers fear fresh military strikes by the US against Iran in wake of mid-terms will render OBR forecasts obsolete within days - worse is to come
ENERGY BILLS
*Healey will extend the warm homes discount for families on benefits, giving them another £100 off their energy bills
* But households not on benefits will bear the full brunt of the rise in January, when bills are due to go up by 27% to an average of £2,192
* Gas standing charges will be scrapped next year, saving £27 on a typical bill although those with larger homes who use more energy will pay more
* Healey will announce long-term plans to move more green levies off energy bills in a bid to reduce them 'for good
* He's also expected to announce long-term plans to remove the link between gas prices and electricity prices
FUEL DUTY
* The fuel duty freeze - which was due to end in January - will be extended to help with soaring prices at the pumps
BANKING TAX
* The biggest 'revenue raiser' in the Budget. Healey has been lobbied to restore the 8% surcharge on corporation tax, which would raise £2bn
ONLINE RETAILER TAX
* Online retail giants like Amazon, eBay and Temu will be made responsible for collecting tax from retailers selling on their platforms
FAMILY BUSINESSES
* Thousands of high-street shops, cafes, pubs and hairdressers will no longer have to pay business rates. Move funded with online retailer tax
MINIMUM WAGE
* The living wage, paid by older workers, and the national minimum wage, paid by those aged 18 to 21, will increase by 3.9%. Healey has chosen to stop the huge rises in the minimum wage amid concerns it was pricing young people out of work
PENSIONERS
* Healey will announce plans to shield 1million pensioners from paying income tax
* The state pension is due to rise by 3.9%, taking 1million people with low incomes above the income tax threshold
* Healey will introduce a new tax allowance for low-income pensioners
* He has also decided not to reduce the tax-free pensino lump sum
DEFENCE SPENDING
* Healey's immediate priority is filling £4.7bn hole in the defence investment plan. Cuts expected to departmental budgets elsewhere
* He is also expected to announce additional borrowing to fund government investment vehicles, which will then be used to fund defence
* But he WILL NOT set out a timeline for hitting the 3% defence spending target. That will come in the spending review next year
HELP TO BUY
* A revived Help to Buy scheme called Your First Home
* It will offer first time buyers a 20% equity loan to help them buy a new-build home, with a minimum deposit of just 2.5%
* The earnings cap will be set at £140,000 in London and £110,000 outside London
RECORD TAX LEVELS
* The OBR is expected to once again say that the tax burden will rise to another post-war record
* It's being driven by fiscal drag. Half a million people will be dragged into paying the higher rate
* The freeze - which is pencilled in for more than a decade - is effectively the single biggest tax rise in history
OBR forecasts
* They will highlight the huge uncertainty caused by the war in Iran. Ministers think it could make the OBR forecasts obsolete within weeks
* The tax revenues underpinning the Budget assume that Rosebank will be given the go-ahead, despite Cabinet splits on the issue
WHAT ISN'T IN IT
* Healey has rejected calls from colleagues to increase Capital Gains Tax amid concerns that doing so would damage growth and end up reducing tax revenues
* Major welfare reform will wait until after the Milburn review, which is coming after the Budget. It will require significant upfront investment in employment support
* Defence spending - the big decision has been deferred until the spending review, expected in Autumn 2027
Swansea Snapper retweeted
£11 billion in one month. Just on debt interest.
Your taxes paid that bill.
Tomorrow’s Budget will ask for more.
They will tell you it is the billionaires. It is the corporations.
They will not tell you money supply went from £980 billion in 2000 to £3.2 trillion today.
No surplus in that time.
CPI is 3.5%. Real wages are up half a percent.
You are poorer because of government incompetence and monetary debasement.
End of story.
Swansea Snapper retweeted
Just shy of £23,000 pounds separating those on the minimum wage and those now in the higher tax bracket. This is completely unsustainable, the squeeze on middle earners and the pressure this places on employers is nothing short of a scandal.
Swansea Snapper retweeted
A man who would've been proud to see this moment...
🙌 Harry gave a mention to the late Kenny Jackett in his Ballon d'Or acceptance speech last night.
I used to have a boss who they could have based Pauline on, and she knew it.
Would often come onto the floor first thing with a "Good morning Jobseekers!"
Think she even used to do Restart.
Swansea Snapper retweeted
When you say minimum wage should be frozen people make it out like you want people to be worse off. AI decimating British employment, people are being laid off in their thousands. The government needs to make it cheaper to employ people, not more expansive. This is lunacy.
Swansea Snapper retweeted
Young people deserve a fair wage but it is unacceptable to increase costs on businesses without making employing people more affordable.
We need cheaper energy, less tax on business, and an NI cut for younger workers. This is just going to make the NEET problem worse.
Swansea Snapper retweeted
The pre-pandemic rate was £8.21/hour; £13.20/hour represents a more than 60% increase in five years.
People keep saying businesses who can't pay it shouldn't employ people.
So they're not.
EXCLUSIVE
John Healey will announce plans to increase the minimum wage by nearly 4 per cent but slow the rise for young people after warnings that they are being priced out of jobs
The Times has been told that the national living wage, which applies to those aged 21 and over, is expected to rise from £12.71 to around £13.20 — an increase of 3.9 per cent
However, Healey has decided not to repeat the big rises of the past two budgets in the national minimum wage, which applies to those aged 18 to 21
It will rise broadly in line with the rate for older workers - from £10.85 to around £11.27, an increase of 3.9 per cent
It effectively spells the end of Labour’s manifesto pledge to bring the “discriminatory” minimum wage for young people into line with the living wage for older workers in this parliament
The minimum wage increased by 26 per cent between 2025 and 2026, leading to stark warnings from employers that it risked impeding efforts to get 1 million “Neets” - young people not in education, employment or training - into work.
Healey alluded to the approach in an interview with The Times last week, in which he spoke of the importance of the “trade-off between the level of the minimum wage and the employment rate”
thetimes.com/article/c9142a2…
