Economic justice campaigner. Professor of Accounting Practice, Sheffield University. Former chartered accountant. Political economist. Opinions all my own.
The Taxing Wealth Report 2024 shows that austerity is not needed in the UK. Instead, we can have decent public services employing appropriately paid people, and we can invest in our future. Download it here
I still don’t understand why the royal family did not ask people to donate money to charity instead of buying flowers. Food banks can do with all the help they can get right now.
My supplier of what they tell me is wholly renewable electricity told me it’s doubling its price to me today. But the price of producing renewable electricity has not changed right now. There is in that case no reason for this. The government is simply permitting profiteering.
Durham Police face a problem. They did not investigate the clear abuse by Dominic Cummings but now, to appease the Mail, they are re-investigating a closed case on Starmer. How is that? And who controls Durham Police? Is it The Mail?
Rishi Sunak does not thing we need a government enquiry into furlough fraud, PPE fraud or Covid loan fraud, but he does want a government enquiry into who leaked his tax affairs. How egotistical is that?
It took 20 police officers and an offensive law to remove one protestor from Whitehall. But not a single police officer saw an offensive Tory partying in Whitehall. Go figure.
It’s been reported that the Chancellor’s wife, Akshata Murthy, is not tax domiciled in the UK. This has been confirmed by a statement issued on her behalf. But I think the statement of facts issued by her is wrong. And I also suggest HMRC could challenge this claim. A thread….
Why is Israel at the Olympics when the ICJ has ruled it to be an apartheid state? South Africa was banned for that reason for more than two decades. What is the difference?
If you want to know who is paying for the Queen’s funeral it is the magic money tree that the Treasury can always shake when it needs a little more cash. They could also use it to tackle problems in the NHS, education, social care and so much else. They just choose not to….
Yesterday was bad. It was, in fact, very, very bad. If Johnson was a disaster, Truss has set out to be worse. I very much doubt that any prime minister has set out to create so many conflicts from the outset of their premiership in the way that Truss has. A thread….
Making sense of energy price rises is important. They’re going to be the cause of a lot of poverty in the UK, soon. So, I’ve been doing some analysis. What follow is a bit simplified, but not too much. What it reveals is that you’re about to be ripped off, massively. A thread….
Rishi Sunak has claimed that to pay a 10% pay rise to all public sector employees will cost each household in the UK £1,000. This is what I call CRAp - which stands for a ‘completely rubbish approximation’ to the truth. Let me explain…a thread…
A simple question.
Why did the BBC ever think it appropriate to report that the suspect in the Southport killings was born in Cardiff to parents from Rwanda?
If he'd been born in Surrey to parents from Yorkshire, I am certain that they would not have pointed that out.
Are
So, Rishi Sunak appoints as Home Secretary a woman who dreams of deporting victims of torture to Rwanda. Any hope that his government might be credible vanished the moment he did that.
Sajid Javid says we need to pay £20 for a GP appointment and £66 to go to A&E as a way to solve the NHS funding crisis. He’s wrong because there are so many better options in my new report on funding the NHS. A thread…..
The PPE scandal has produced not a single scalp.
Farage has his bank account closed and heads tumble.
As an indicator of how badly wrong this government’s assessment of risks might be, this says it all.
So, this afternoon the BBC gives in to fascists over Gary Lineker’s support for asylum seekers and on David Attenborough’s desire to highlight the impact of climate change. Fascism isn’t a threat. It is happening here and now, with the BBC enabling it.
The time’s come to admit the NHS in England has ceased to function as a proper emergency service. That’s not because of strikes: it’s why there are strikes. It’s failed because of deliberate neglect by a government that has always wanted to privatise it to end free care for all.
I spent yesterday writing about the technicalities of domicile as they might impact Rishi Sunak’s wife. But that’s because her tax decisions cast doubt on his suitability for office. Another thread, this time in the man himself ….
The European Court of Human Rights was created by Sir Winston Churchill to counter the risk of fascism re-emerging in Europe. Now most Tory leadership candidates want the UK to withdraw from it. Draw your own conclusions.
This idiot is our health secretary. She thinks 'junior doctors' are 'doctors in training'. The reality is that they are all hospital doctors who are not consultants - in other words, the majority of all doctors, and many of them have considerable experience. Is she being
Kwarteng may have no choice but reverse all his tax cuts before the weekend to stabilise the pound. If that happens I can’t see how he and Truss can survive into next week.
A week ago Johnson was still in the Tory leadership race. This weekend we know he cooperated with the Cabinet Secretary to suppress a massive security leak from Liz Truss’s phone so she could be elected PM. She, of course, knew too. Tory corruption is rampant. They have to go.
There is a story doing the news rounds this morning that Sunak has cost the government £11 billion by failing to manage government interest rates properly. But the real story is much worse than that. This is about banks winning at cost to us all, yet again...a thread to explain.
Why doesn’t inheritance tax have to be paid on the Queen’s private estate? Why should there be one rule for the monarch and another for everyone else? Shouldn’t a constitutional monarch be our equal before the law?
Detesting the Tories is not a sign of nastiness, as they are claiming. It’s the sentiment of a caring human being who cannot stand Tories loathing most people in this country.
Those close to the government appear to be realising that UK households have no chance of surviving the coming winter with fuel bills forecast to rise to £4,000 or more a year. But the plan they're looking at is dire. A thread....
I had decided that I would leave aside discussion of the monarchy and its role in our society until the Queen’s funeral had passed. But now that her death is being used by politicians to further their aims I have changed my mind. A thread….
We witnessed an attempted coup this week. A prime minister who has very obviously broken the law on many occasions and who holds the people of this country in contempt sought to stay in power aided and abetted by his party and the police. A thread….
The price of oil is falling steadily in world markets. It’s now under $100 a barrel. Have you noticed the impact of this on pump prices as yet? No, me neither.
Tories are arguing that wages must not rise as strongly as prices or we will get an inflationary spiral. But that’s ridiculous. All price increases add to the income of the companies charging them. What the Tories are saying is business should profit, not workers. A thread……
It would seem that there are a lot of very confused politicians in the UK who think inflation is caused by employees asking for pay rises when the inflation we’ve got has been caused by companies increasing their prices when their costs haven’t risen. Those companies are to blame
Steve Barclay is playing the ‘how can NHS staff live with the harm they’ll be causing by striking?’ card today. He forgets that those staff live daily with the risk government daily exposes them and their patients to because of ministers’ deliberate underfunding of the NHS.
Tories have a very odd view of the world. Labour must not oppose. Bishops must not talk about the teachings of Christ. The SNP must not mention independence. Lawyers must not uphold the law. And Tories can do whatever they like. Is that naive on their part, or deeply sinister?
If the price of something was £100 in 2021 and inflation was 10% in 2022 then the price went up to £110. If inflation is now about 7% that does not mean the price in 2023 is £107. It is £117.70 now. Listening to the media and politicians you would not know that.
There is a growing and numbing realisation of just how bad Sunak's budget really was. Worse, he’s even now saying that there is nothing he can do about poverty. This is a long thread to explain why he’s failing and what we can do about it if we want to change our politics.
The government has promised 7,000 HEPA filtration units to schools. There are 24,000 schools. Assume 14 classrooms on average. Two units are required per classroom. That is 672,000. So the government is meeting 1% of need. This policy works only as a measure of incompetence.
The government and the Bank of England are again calling today for wage restraint to beat inflation - as if the whole cost of beating inflation must fall on wage-earning households and not the companies and banks that are causing it or the wealthy who are gaining. A thread....
On Tuesday 100 Tory MPs who are in favour of taking away our right to protest will be voting against their own government for the right to not wear a mask. You cannot make political hypocrisy on this scale up.
The Queen’s been out twice since being unable to attend the opening of parliament last week. I can’t help but think she did not want to read out her government’s appalling legislative programme.
Yesterday I suggested that Sunak was likely to fail. The thread in question got read a lot. Perhaps that was because as the day went on it became increasingly apparent that Sunak’s failure almost inevitable. A thread…
I never thought I would live through a coup, but that’s what seems to be happening. What looks like a conspiracy between the government and police is perverting the course of justice, undermining parliament and leaving us all feeling that we are in a country out of control.
Since 1945 the Tories have been in office for 48 years. They repaid debt in just four of them. The total they repaid was just £7 billion in current prices, which is utterly insignificant. Tories simply do not repay debt. Why do they keep claiming they do and will?
I’ve read the morning papers and listened to the political commentary. And what gets me is that it seems almost no one appreciates that when between 25% and 50% of all people in the UK are not going to be able to pay their bills this winter what we’re facing is systems breakdown.
On Friday the wholesale price of domestic energy was nine times what it was a year ago. But the cost of production of energy hasn’t changed. The entire excess is due to profit taking that exploits shortages. Are we really just going to stand by and watch this exploitation happen?
I am struggling to get my head around this. The NHS is on a war footing. The military is being called in. But pubs are open, mask-wearing is not being enforced and NHS staff are still not getting decent PPE. You literally cannot make sense of incoherence of this sort.
Priti Patel told Marr that those with Covid are not as sick now as they were. That, with all respect to her, doesn’t offer much comfort to the 1,000 or so people who died from Covid last week. She has this horribly wrong.
The government is going to pay our commercial banks £136 billion of excess interest over the next five years on money the government gifted to them using the QE process. That’s £27bn a year that could be used in the NHS and education. This is outrageous. A thread….
Someone earning £1 million a year saves £42,500 in tax - way above the national average wage - thanks to Kwarteng cutting the top rate of tax. Staggering
I awoke in the night, panicking about Gaza.
For me (and I suspect millions of others) that was just a nightmare.
In Gaza is it an unimaginable reality.
No one can ignore what Hamas did on 7 October. It was unambiguously wrong.
But we cannot ignore what Israel is doing
How many people lived in fear in the summer of 1914, dreading what might happen? Come to that, what about 1939? People must have known that they were living on a precipice then, just as we are now. A disaster is about to happen, but there seems to be denial all around. A thread
This is telling. Labour has not won. The Tories lost and the SNP have lost, whilst Reform and the Greens have won, and the LibDems have been exceedingly organised. But Labour has not won hearts and minds. Not in the slightest.
I am so fed up with Tory MPs claiming that people seeking asylum in this country are doing so illegally. Everyone has a legal right to seek asylum in the UK.
Nigel Farage being massively beaten up by the Question Time audience is the best Friday night television I have watched for ages. They are destroying him, one after another, making him look like a complete idiot.
There is one very simple way to create growth in the UK. It is to redistribute money from those who do not need or spend significant parts of what they earn (the wealthy) and give it to those who will spend it more quickly, or even immediately (the poorest).
If your mortgage is £100,000 that Bank of England have just signalled they want to take at least £750 a year out of your annual income to punish you for inflation. How does that make you feel? And do you agree that inflation was all your fault in the first place?
When
@bbclaurak
starts her programme asking the question ‘can we afford to tackle the climate crisis?’ you realise that she really is not serious about finding answers.
It is a staggering fact that this government refuses to let unions use online ballots and yet the next PM may well be chosen by an online ballot of Tory members. That is total hypocrisy
I am so bored of hearing politicians saying that the country is being held to ransom by trade unions whose pay demands cannot be afforded when that is not true. A thread…..
The era of politics based on honour has gone. Johnson and Sunak have killed it. Now we need a written constitution to protect us from people like them ever abusing us again.
Jeremy Hunt is saying we cannot max out the national credit card this morning. This is total nonsense. There is no national credit card. Instead it’s the job of government to make the money we use. And since it can always make that money it can never max out on credit.
Hate brought out a few hundred. The love of people brought out hundreds of thousands. The contrast could not be greater.
What do you say now Rishi Sunak?
Quietly pleased for saying I was not happy to have to debate with a representative of the Institute of Economic Affairs live on air on the BBC at lunchtime and to question the opacity of their funding. Why should we put up with these people not telling us who pays them?
There is one very simple way to create growth in the UK. It is to redistribute money from those who do not need or spend significant parts of what they earn (the wealthy) and give it to those who will spend it more quickly, or even immediately (the poorest)
It’s estimated that we’ll paying £38 billion more for energy in the next year but the cost of producing that energy is hardly going to change. So the question is, who is profiting, and what is the government going to do about it, because this is nothing more than exploitation?
There has been much discussion about the likely failure of Thames Water in the last day or so. I’ve been looking at the accounts of England’s water companies for the last twenty years. My conclusion is that they are all environmentally insolvent. So, a thread…..
I love it that Kemi Badenoch likes talking about her (I suspect brief) time flipping burgers and forgets to mention her time at Coutts and The Spectator. Very selective memory in play.
I’ve a suggestion for the PM. Require that private landlords sell their properties to tenants who have been in occultation for more than 3 years at a 25% discount to market prices. If landlords don’t like it (and they won’t) he shouldn’t be asking Housing Associations to do it.
The Tories are plotting to instal Rishi Sunak as PM in place of Truss. He would be the fifth Tory PM in six years. When will they realise it is not who is leader that matters? It’s that they’re an incompetent party pursuing vile policies that makes them obnoxious to people.
Rishi Sunak has claimed tonight ‘he has a background in business’. He has a background in hedge funds. Professional gambling is not the same as business. The worrying thing is he does not understand the difference.
I was accused on
@lbc
this morning of being left-wing by someone I think a far-right Tory MP. I agreed. I am left of centre. The difference is he cares about a few people and I care about everyone. You decide which is better.
Sunak is going to force you into food and fuel poverty, make you stop spending on everything you enjoy and put your job at risk and all because he’s building up an election war chest to buy your vote with a tax cut next year. Don’t be conned by a Chancellor who does not care.
Give or take the odd pound or two the Bank of England admitted yesterday that Brexit is costing the UK about £1,650 million a week. That’s about £1,280 a year for everyone, babies included, in the UK. Some Brexit ‘bonus’, isn’t it? What could you do with that?