Pete Digger retweeted
Chaotic lobby briefing eventually clarifies that just because Andy Burnham said he would hold a referendum before reviving free movement with the EU, that does not mean he will
Pete Digger retweeted
🚨I'm recruiting an Evidence & Research Lead to join my team at the Royal Osteoporosis Society. Help shape our research programme, work with academics and turn evidence into better outcomes for people with osteoporosis.
4 days/week | Remote
careers.theros.org.uk/job/b4…
Pete Digger retweeted
I don’t have £2 million in assets, and I don’t earn £200k a year. I’m quite short on both counts. So the HMRC wealth audit doesn’t impact me. Yet.
But it signals a clear intention. A lack of respect for the individual. What is yours is only yours until the government decides they want it to fund further welfare expansion.
Property rights only exist in this country as long as your holdings are meagre enough to escape the fiscal Eye of Sauron. They will come for it all.
Pete Digger retweeted
Another one. High taxes are costing the UK economy…
Former Goldman Sachs boss flees Britain over rising tax burden just days before the Budget
lbc.co.uk/article/goldman-sa…
Pete Digger retweeted
For the avoidance of doubt (since some have been asking), the 800 on the Scottish public payroll without proper jobs does NOT include the 129 MSPs in Holyrood 🤣🤣🤣
Astounding Sunday Times investigation reveals new scandal in SNP’s Socialist Scotland:
800 NHS, central government, council and quango workers whose jobs no longer exist but remain on the public payroll because of the SNP’s ‘no public-sector redundancy’ policy.
Estimated cost of paying people to do nothing: £27m a year.
One NHS Highland worker has been receiving a full salary and benefits for 17 years despite not having a specific job.
The health board refused to say what the worker had been doing for almost two decades and how much they had been paid.
Likely cost to the taxpayer is expected to be far higher with several public bodies refusing to disclose salaries for hundreds of the workers awaiting redeployment.
Pete Digger retweeted
It's like they actually want everyone to leave. ...The HMRC letter asking rich people to reveal what they own
thetimes.com/article/1d92cd6…
Pete Digger retweeted
I’ve written many times about how the soft left on Labour’s backbenches are ‘economic illiterates’. This is proof positive. Beyond redemption in its misunderstanding of markets, supply, demand, taxes.
Nope, that’s not how taxes and price works. The price is determined by demand and supply.
Companies charge the highest price they can given demand. A tax levied on *profits* does not affect a company’s cost ie supply.
Taxes on *windfall* profits (like oil and gas) are the most efficient kind of tax there is.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Corporate profit taxes do not directly shift marginal costs but empirical studies show partial pass-through into higher consumer prices. Windfall taxes on oil and gas have deterred investment and production in practice despite theoretical efficiency on rents.
dadun.unav.edu/server/api/cor…
ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps…
taxfoundation.org/blog/big-oil-p…
scottishfinancialreview.com/2025/09/03/win…
thetimes.co.uk/article/1d92c… This is truly mad surely. State hands out benefits without checking people actually entitled to them but will interrogate people creating wealth. Pat McFadden’s observations become official policy.
Pete Digger retweeted
Just been told about the fascinating appearance of breakfast show star Mike Graham at the wedding reception of Richard Tice and his bride Isabel Oakshott.
Mike arrived late at The Shard at London Bridge and, according to fellow guests, was already over-refreshed.
On Tice beginning his speech Mike fell into a slumber. Tice does have that effect but not normally at the beginning of the oration.
Reform’s No.2 finished on a rousing note and this woke Mike up who then decided the guests should hear his glowing views on Tice and his bride.
So, he grabs the microphone and begins to speak in what some felt was a version of Latin. Very hard to decipher.
David Bull, Reform’s former chairman, thought Mike was lowering the tone of the event - how this was possible with a roomful of politicians, journalists and Rebekah Brooks is hard to divine- and tries to grab the microphone.
Mike fights him off, so in the middle of the room a wrestling match is now going on with Farage telling colleagues ; “Mike’s out of control.”
Difficult for Farage to be too censorious as on occasions he has been in the grip of the grape .
Anyway, a now irritable Mike beats off Mr Bull for the microphone but the effect of his exertions means he’s lost his thread and he lays down the mike.
On reverting to his chair Mike is accosted by another guest displeased by the Latin oration and another bout of physical unpleasantness breaks out.
Then it’s time to leave and for Mike, a matter of hours later, to prepare himself for his enormously successful breakfast show on UK Live.
How he does it all is quite beyond me.
Pete Digger retweeted
I feel for Danny Kruger. He's a decent guy and when he defected to Reform he had no idea it would end up engaging in this type of racial politics - or that that he'd end up in interviews like this.
But Tim's right: in a party full of moments, this is a moment.
🚨 COMING UP: Reform UK's Danny Kruger REFUSES to condemn high-profile Reformer's 'disgusting slur' towards Kemi Badenoch...
You won't want to miss this...
🎧 Tune in from 4:30pm with @CamillaTominey and @timothy_stanley through the link in our bio
Pete Digger retweeted
It’s kind of Liz to thank us but she very much managed it on her own
Traitorous Gove, Cartlidge and Stride toppled me, claims Liz Truss
telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
thetimes.co.uk/article/9b12c… The economy is Burnham’s ‘blind spot’. Not at all worrying
Pete Digger retweeted
As his upcoming budget will show, the chancellor is out of his depth economist.com/britain/2026/1…
Pete Digger retweeted
“Next year he actually has to find the money that doesn’t exist.”
“There are things the Government can do that aren’t just about tax.”
Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the 2019 Conservative manifesto and Paul Nowak, TUC General Secretary, discuss the challenge facing Andy Burnham’s government, ahead of next week’s Budget
#Newsnight
Pete Digger retweeted
The UK government has, since April, spent no less than £61 billion - that’s £61,000,000,000 - on debt interest payments.
That’s equivalent to our entire annual defence budget - on just half a year’s worth of debt service costs, not paying back a penny of our national debt.
For £61bn you could build 40 state-of-the-art hospitals.
Or employ 100,000 nurses for a decade
Or fund free-at-the-point-of-use social care, across the entire UK, for three years.
Watch this short “When The Facts Change” video for more on the UK’s soaring debt interest bill - the biggest national scandal our mainstream media continues to ignore.
Pete Digger retweeted
EXCLUSIVE:
Andy Burnham must “take the knife” to public spending in the budget or risk a Liz Truss-style crisis that will “crater” the economy and the government’s popularity, an ally of the prime minister has warned
Andy Haldane, a former chief economist at the Bank of England, said he feared the government would deliver a “mañana budget” that deferred the difficult decisions on public spending and “doesn’t speak to the urgency of now”
In an interview with The Times, he said that Britain was “close to being taxed out and maxed out in terms of borrowing”. He spoke of concerns that the government was failing to grasp how “precarious” the fiscal position was
He said that the government needs to cut the size of the state and reduce taxes if it were to “unleash the animal spirits and generate growth”
Haldane warned Burnham that he cannot “vibe-code” his way to growth, and raised concerns about the gap between the government’s rhetoric and the reality. He said that the government was effectively deferring the “day of reckoning”
He also said that the decision to increase taxes on banks could show that the government lacked the courage to cut public spending. He said the move was “penny wise, pound foolish” and sent a broader economic message that if businesses make profits “the taxman cometh”
Haldane said that while Burnham had the potential to be a “great prime minister” who could serve two terms, the economy was his “blind spot”. He said that the fiscal situation facing Britain was “precarious”
“The penny has not yet fully dropped, including in Downing Street,” he said. “You see that in us having the highest borrowing costs in the G7, despite not having the highest debts and deficits.
“It’s the old Hemingway [Ernest Hemingway, the author] thing, isn’t it? How do you go bankrupt? First slowly, then very quickly. The biggest risk to Andy not transforming Britain, to not serving two terms, to not being seen in the history books as a great prime minister, is not political risk.
“It’s not those who sit behind him. It’s probably not even those who sit opposite him in Westminster. Keir [Starmer] lost the dressing room. Andy’s biggest risk is that he loses the dealing room. And then that’s an even more painful way to go, as Liz Truss would tell you.”
Andy Haldane: PM risks Truss-style crisis if he dodges tough choices
thetimes.com/article/9b12c00…
Pete Digger retweeted
No, you cannot just "tax the rich". Good illustration by @_HannahRitchie hannahritchie.substack.com/p…
