Former History Teacher and Head of Year/ Pub Quiz enthusiast/ Writing (attempting) a book about England & Portugal 🏴 🇵🇹
Joined May 2013
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Ry retweeted
Congratulations to councillor Ryan Witchell who has just won his first by-election campaign. Super proud. You ran a very good campaign. @RyanWitchell
@Conservatives
Ry retweeted
UK 30-year gilt yields have just smashed through 6%, hitting 6.065%. The 10-year is at 5.53%.
A month ago I said 6% was the "danger zone". Buckle up!
This is the bond market putting a price on Britain’s fiscal credibility. The real pain has only just begun.
Prices are high because of policy choices: carbon pricing on top of gas generation, network & subsidy costs loaded onto bills & planning delays. Prices are set by the marginal cost of gas in the wholesale market & that link exists whoever owns the wires
Burnham will say in his conference speech tomorrow: "We have a cost crisis. We all know it. The price of energy is crippling for businesses, and British billpayers pay some of the highest energy costs in Europe. We have an energy system where prices are dictated in markets miles away, while families and businesses here shoulder the costs. Once again, the British public has lost control.
"Within ten years, I want our energy costs to be in line with other nations in Europe. That means we must reform a broken energy market so it serves the public interest.
"I can announce today our plan for Great British Grid, a publicly owned company that will work with the private sector and network companies. It will increase competition to drive down costs and speed up delivery so businesses can connect faster and grow quicker. This is what more public control can do"
Ry retweeted
Our politicians are asleep at the wheel. This is what happens when you signal you will never make difficult decisions and instead simply take the easiest path you can every time.
Ry retweeted
The exact opposite of what Labour heavyweight, Denis Healey, said in 1969:
“Once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.”
🚨 BREAKING: Andy Burnham suggests he won't cut benefits to pay for defence spending
"National security cannot come at the expense of social security"
#PMQs
Ry retweeted
“Burnham is convincing MPs that a state spending 44% of GDP doesn’t spend enough, while convincing markets at 28-year-high interest rates that he wants to borrow to spend more on infrastructure, even though all the spending promises he has made are populist cost-of-living measures, such as cutting VAT or bus fares.”
My @CapX column on Burnham’s little room for manoeuvre on Taxes and Spending
Ry retweeted
Supermarkets are nothing short of a modern miracle.
A large Tesco Superstore carries around 40,000 product lines, sourced from over 20,000 British farmers and 70 countries, available year-round. A feat of logistics unimaginable just a few generations ago.
Yet in Britain today the supermarket is cast not as a marvel but as a villain, blamed for the very prices it has spent a century driving down.
A strong majority, 70 per cent, believe that supermarkets are making excessive profits. However, this conclusion has largely been driven by misinformation.
The public believes that supermarkets are making 32 pence for every £1 that shoppers spend. In reality, their margins are around just 3 pence per £1 spent, compared with the all-industry net margin benchmark of roughly 8.5 pence.
When you inform voters about the profits supermarkets make, public opinion shifts dramatically. The level of agreement that supermarkets are profiteering drops to 32 per cent, while disagreement rises to 44 per cent.
That represents a fall from +58 to -12 in net agreement that supermarkets are profiteering, an unusually large shift in public opinion from providing just a single piece of additional information.
My latest for @iealondon: economicaffairs.co.uk/p/the-…
Ry retweeted
Why are TVs getting cheaper, but energy is getting more expensive? Here's a hint: the government might just have something to do with it.
Ry retweeted
Our much-loved colleague Rod Liddle has died at the age of 66.
Rod presented every Saturday morning on Times Radio from January 2025, as well as being a columnist on The Sunday Times and The Sun.
He will be greatly missed.
Ry retweeted
Public debt growth since ~2002
🇬🇧 UK: +801%
🇺🇸 USA: +557%
🇫🇷 France: +285%
🇩🇪 Germany: +125%
🇨🇭 Switzerland: -37%
Ry retweeted
Imagine waking up tomorrow with £1,000,000 in your bank account...
Spoiler: You still wouldn’t be rich.
During COVID, the Bank of England created £450 billion out of thin air. But printing money doesn't create wealth, it just creates £40 coffees, £20M houses, and hands you the bill through inflation.
This is why inflation is really just taxation without legislation.
Ry retweeted
“Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.”
— Milton Friedman
So remarkable my energy bills keep going up
The UK's grid is doing something pretty remarkable today.
☀️ Solar: 31.5%
💨 Wind: 56.7%
🌱 Renewables: 88.5%
⛽ Gas: Just 11%
⚡ Power price: -£4.22/MWh
We're generating more electricity than we need, exporting the surplus, and wholesale prices have gone negative. Clean energy isn't just about cutting emissions - it's reshaping the economics of electricity.
I taught history in a MAT and the curriculum was intentionally designed to include Empire from 17th - 20th C in KS3. We also had the Arab conquests included in our Y8 curriculum
Happily, *all* students in Key Stage 3 in state schools have to study the British Empire, where a required theme is 'ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745–1901'. There are then optional modules at KS4 in this area, which many schools do.
People who (like ZP) attended fee-paying schools that do not follow this curriculum may have had different experiences, but state schools all teach this area. Alternatively, it's not uncommon for people to forget things they were taught at school and then didn't revisit afterwards in their lives or careers.
Ry retweeted
Lee Kuan Yew:
“Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."
Ry retweeted
The problem with left wing politics is they are completely out of ideas.
All their traditional progressive issues have been solved. Equal pay, equal rights, gay rights etc are all solved. Welfare and NHS funding is at record levels. Social housing is one of the highest in the OECD.
All they have is more of the same and solving problems that don't need solving.
At the same time they are completely incapable of addressing the real issues facing the country. Energy costs, planning regulation, migration, welfare reform, NHS reform etc.
Burnham isn't going to change a thing. It will be more of the same, just with a Northern accent.
