Jon S

UK households paid extra £13961 on bills since 2021 amid soaring inflation Has your net income risen by the same? Income tax personal allowance frozen since 2021. Poorest 20% pay higher proportion of income in direct/indirect taxes than the richest 20%. Hitting the less well-off is normalized.

Company behind Scotland’s biggest data centre proposal is owned by the treasurer of the UK Conservative party via British Virgin Islands. It could receive £23m public subsidy. BVI facilitates opacity and tax avoidance. Successive UK govts have defended the use of tax havens by wealthy elites.

Hats off to the Eye (as ever), for flagging the Conservative hypocrisy over our conference ban

Seems the Tories have found their magic money tree again to fund their bungs to the wealthy. We await the press taking them to task over their maths….not.

@octopus.energy We await an octopus engineer to EV charge circuit modified by one of your engineers on 23/9/2026. After his visit our Ohme charger failed & requires replacing. It is a legal requirement of anyone working on domestic electrics to sign off and test any modifications to the circuit.

I am now retired from the UoB where I researched and taught for 34 yrs. A strange feeling.

Reform-linked thinktank ‘to call for big tax cuts for the rich’; accompanied by deregulation of the City, weaken the authority of the courts. That would be the return on donations by the super-rich. Cost borne by the old, sick, disabled, unfortunate; cuts to public services.

NEW EPISODE: The Big Bung Theory! Reform U.K. is awash with cash so we talk all things spending rules, changes to donation law, and what it all means for our democracy. 🍏 podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/q... 🎧 open.spotify.com/episode/34B3...

Remember: There is nothing natural or inevitable about extreme inequality; it’s the result of an economic system that values wealth and power over human dignity and justice. It doesn't have to be this way.

Do you want to hazard a guess at what this “jaw-dropping” list of freebies included? What luxuries asylum seekers might be being given “for free” in Thetford? Xboxes? Plasma TVs? iPhones? Ferraris? Let's take a look👀 🧵 1/22

“This film is where the beginning of Nolan’s career meets the apex. A 'Memento' for The Ages, in which our hero keeps recovering fragments of lost memories, sharing his confusion with the audience, as he discovers that his role in the epic may not be as heroic as he - or we - first thought.”

Privatisation of water & energy has failed its customers & the country. The fact that these parasites can walk away passing on their debt to customers tells you all you need to know about the Tories who created the mess and the greed of the companies. Insufficient safeguards and clauses. Appalling.

🟡 MAGAZINE: A Letter to the Old Country on America’s 250th Birthday: We’re a Mess, But Still Worth Fighting For The United States is a country that has always faced itself eventually – for Republican campaigner Rick Wilson, it’s what keeps him going in the dark… Read the full story below.

Heatwaves are killing thousands in this country. Fossil fuels are an economic dead end. Approving new oil and gas drilling would be environmentally disastrous and economically illiterate.

In summary: He's panicked accountability is coming 11/3/26.

Really weird, I could have sworn Trump made a big point about how foreign countries meddling in politics/elections was a terrible thing just 24 hours ago….

We think 2026 has been unusually hot. #climate

“We need to talk about how ludicrous it is to speak of defence in terms of % of GDP. If the UK economy were to massively expand, you wouldn’t suddenly need billions more to protect it. And if it shrank, you couldn’t defend it for less. The expression of a budget as a % of GDP is utterly arbitrary.”

Channel 4 News: “Police have asked the public not to speculate. However, Nigel Farage has done just that, which is why we will not be showing his words.”

UK inflation is not distributed equally ft.trib.al/P2B3IHA | opinion

An important paper about protecting science from political interference. Europe needs to defend its science against the kind of attacks unfurling in the US. By Martin McKee, Christina Pagel & Tiago Correia in the European Journal of Public Health: academic.oup.com/eurpub/artic...

A reminder that Brazil banned Twitter for failing to stop the spreading of disinformation. There is nothing stopping the British government from doing the same.

Never trust a Tory (or Reform for that matter): www.birminghamdispatch.co.uk/labours-doom...

It's hard to convey just how monstrous the privatisation of children's care homes has become. Highly vulnerable children have been turned into cash machines, with devastating impacts on their wellbeing. Please sit down before reading this week's column. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Foreign money funding Reform UK. Another 7m from two overseas British crypto billionaires - £4m from Hong Kong-based billionaire, £3m from Thailand. Tax exiles shaping UK politics. Modern equivalent of representation without taxation. What have they been promised? Must ban political donations.

The right in this country have totally lost it, a complete and utter collapse of any kind of cordon sanitaire with the far right in favour of gutter racism. It's been slow, but the grinding move from "anti-white racism is real" from far right agitprop to Times leader is complete.

I’m a climate scientist. Let me fix this headline. “Nearly a century ago, scientists showed that burning fossil fuels warms the planet. Today, we know human emissions account for over 100% of the warming. Yet dark money and disinformation still work to keep Americans addicted to fossil fuels.”

👇👇

134 years ago this cartoon was drawn, and in 134 years the problem has only gotten worse.

1. Number of stories about Trump buying and selling hundreds of millions of dollars in stocks in the first three months of 2026: CBS: 0 CNN: 0 Fox News: 0 NPR: 0 PBS: 0 Politico: 0 Semafor: 0 Business Insider: 0

The bond market is being treated by the media as if it has a veto over any Labour move to the left. The media are, then, complicit in the whole conspiracy to make sure democracy cannot deliver what people want and need so that the wealthy might gain. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

This is an extraordinary allegation, and the guy making it (Ben Habib) has openly goaded Farage and Harborne to sue him if it's not true.

The 0.29% Panic: Brexit, Small Boats and Britain’s Manufactured Crisis

All together now! ... "But Nige did take five million quid, and Nige would take five million more!" 💥💥💥 #RefUKkers

NEW ANALYSIS: What's going on in Spain? Spain's wholesale electricity price in early 2026: €44/MWh. Italy: €127. Germany: €96. UK: €103. Wind+solar now deliver 44% of generation. Gas sets the price in just 9% of hours, down from 55% in 2022. Full analysis: janrosenow.substack.com/p/spain-just...

Morning, Sunderland. Meet one of your new councillors. "In now deleted posts, Gibbins ranted on social media that he ‘carnt [sic] believe amount of Nigerians in town’ and they ‘should melt them all down and fill in the pot holes’." What happened to Reform's " metro.co.uk/2026/05/09/r...

🗳️ Sunday School: Worst Past The Post 🐸 If you’ve had enough of media treating this week as a coronation of Farage as PM then @pimlicat.bsky.social & @sturdyalex.bsky.social’s is the election analysis you’ve been waiting for. 🎧 open.spotify.com/episode/37TE... 🍏 podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/q...

This, from @adambienkov.bsky.social in @bylinetimes.bsky.social, completely nails so much of what's gone wrong for Labour. Just add in too many examples of terrible policy misjudgements, and you get Thursday's debacle. All despite them doing so many good things, and Starmer being a decent man.

Well a predictably depressing outcome. As Curtis says, the Brexit brigade are doubling down on their folly. Looks like we’ll be following the US into the pit in the coming years.

The Environment Agency failed to prosecute any water company for a serious pollution incident occurring in the last five years, choosing a divisive alternative punishment instead, writes Alex Thomson. ✉️Read our latest newsletter:

Just heard self-centred hypocrite Nigel Farage on BBC News say that no British politician has been physically attacked more than him. An insult to the memory of Jo Cox and David Amess, both murdered.