Tinkerdust #FBPPR# @Tinkerdust2

Minimum wage in 2005 was £5.05 an hour. A Freddo cost 10p. One hour of work bought you 50 Freddos. In 2026, minimum wage is £12.71 and a Freddo is 39p. One hour of work now buys you just 32 Freddos. So despite minimum wage more than doubling, your Freddo buying power has fallen by 36%. If wages had actually kept pace with Freddo inflation, minimum wage would be £19.65 an hour today. Forget economists. Forget politicians. The Freddo has just delivered the most depressing cost of living graph you'll ever see.

The whole of Britain should be ashamed. . .

@Zhitnipalzhi Hello Dimitri, my name is carolyn from London, England and I’m reading this in English. This is such a beautiful thread, just amazing conversing with so many nationalities, I’m loving it! I would love to see Russia, it looks such a wonderful country.

@hunter_sbs @BenGrahamUK Absolutely we would!

🚨BREAKING: David Lammy announces that people under 17 caught carrying a knife will no longer be prosecuted 🇬🇧 They will instead be referred to youth justice services by police in attempt to make them ‘change course’ This is absolutely ridiculous, David Lammy is DANGEROUS ⚠️

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iPad left in a black cab tonight Journey was from Waterloo Station to Embankment Gardens. The passenger couldn’t get home to the countryside due to SWR disruption. A retweet would massively help get this iPad back to its owner. 🙏

@ElonMuskNews47 Yes please

@elonmusknews30 👋

@GraceGym_ Health

So I asked Grok, if I gave it £47Bn instead of giving it to Mauritius, what could we get to help rebuild Britain 200 new/upgraded hospitals 50,000 Nurses 20,000 Doctors 1000 new/upgraded schools 50,000 Teachers 500 new/upgraded police stations 20,000 police 200 New ambulance stations 2000 Ambulances 10,000 paramedics

@masternumber Thank you!!! X

@Maat_777777 🤗

Godfrey Bloom in the EU parliament several years ago, talking them through the working day of an Englishman. 💥💥

substack.com/@priscillaharv…

Spending too much on welfare? No, we're not.

* The Economics of benefits * This is the transcript of my video this morning, which challenges the whole idea most people have about the benefit of benefits. ------ If you ask the average politician about benefits, they will in some way or other imply that we are pouring money into a black hole and we've got to cut them, because that's the only way in which the government can balance its books, and apparently the government balancing its books is vital for economic growth. All of that is complete and utter nonsense. The actual reality is that making benefit payments in the UK is one of the best ways that we have available to us to stimulate growth in this country. If Labour only understood that, they would never have got themselves into the mess they did around personal independence payments. They would never have had to fall out with their own party. They would never have looked like the fools that they now do. But they were totally confused by neoliberal myths. So let's talk about the economics of benefits. Let's be clear. The benefits that are paid by the UK government do, almost entirely, go to poorer households, those who are in the bottom half of the income distribution overall. Yes, some of them do go to people who have reasonable incomes because they are in situations where they need those benefits to be paid to them. For example, people who do have personal independence payments, who can work, but who nonetheless need to be assisted with the extra costs that their disability creates. Nonetheless, though, however it is looked at, the vast majority of the benefit payments in the UK go to people on lower incomes. And if there's one thing that we know about people in the UK who are on lower incomes, it is that they have very few savings. Only 9% of UK wealth is owned by people in the bottom half of the income distribution. And as a consequence, what we know is that the vast majority of the money that they get month in, month out is spent by them and virtually straight away. But that doesn't mean to say that the money that we pay them in benefits is wasted. Far from it, in fact, because the reality is that the moment the people who receive these benefits get them, they begin to spend them and they become someone else's income. The benefits that a person receives immediately begin to support somebody's job, somebody's business, or somebody's services. And understanding this is absolutely vital, because if we understand that benefit payments immediately become the income of people who are working inside the economy, what we can see is that benefit payments don't just support those who need them, but they support our businesses as well. And what is more, they also support tax receipts because the moment that a person spends the money they receive by way of benefits, they'll do so with a business that will probably pay VAT as a consequence. It'll also pay corporation tax. And that business will then pay its staff, who will, as a result, pay income tax and national insurance. So the benefit payment gives rise to an almost immediate, significant tax flow back to the government. The money isn't lost. It's fueling government revenue. But this isn't a process that happens once, because of course, once the staff who are paid by the business who receives the income that the benefit recipient had, have their net pay at the end of the month, they'll go out and start spending it, because they, most likely, will still be in that group of people in the UK who save very little. So they too will now be boosting the UK economy as a consequence, in effect, of the benefit payments which were paid to the person who paid it to the business that employed them, that then provided them with the opportunity to spend, and so the cycle goes on. We do, in fact, create a virtuous cycle, which economists call the multiplier effect because this money goes round and round and round and round; okay, always in ever smaller amounts, because tax is paid on each and every cycle, but nonetheless, first of all, there's a boost, and a continuing boost to real incomes as a consequence of the benefits payment made to the first recipient, but secondly, tax is paid on every occasion when the money goes around in this cycle. And as a consequence, it could, if the cycle kept running, actually return to the government, all that it's spent by way of the benefits payment. Benefit payments aren't, therefore, money poured into a black hole. They're just a way of actually generating economic growth for vastly more people than the recipient in the first instance, and also a way of guaranteeing that the government will, as a consequence of that growth, which is created as a result of the benefits payment, get as much back in tax as they probably spent. Except, and here I have to add a caveat, except if the person who receives the money, which was originally generated as a consequence of the benefit payment to the first recipient who went on and spent it, if the person who receives that income then saves it. The person who saves the money they get as a result of the cycle that I've just described breaks the chain. They stop money going back into the economy. They stop the cycle from working. They stop there being new income for somebody else because they've kept the money for themselves. They've turned this live money, which is creating good things in the economy into dead money, which is precisely what savings are, they're money put aside and it's dead thereafter. Now, neoliberals don't describe things this way. They say that we should, if we want to grow the economy, let the wealthy get as wealthy as possible, and then their money will slowly trickle down into the economy and that this will, as a result, make everybody richer. There's absolutely no evidence to support this absurd claim, because if you are rich and you get some more income, which is what the neoliberals say we should ensure that the rich do get, you save it. And when you save your money, nothing trickles down. All you do is just turn it into yet more dead money. And that's what neoliberalism is all about. It's about capital accumulation for a few at cost to the many. But if we start injecting money instead into the economy with those who are amongst the poorest benefit recipients, what we can guarantee is that we get the maximum payback on that money because it will circulate many more times before the wealthy get their hands on it, put it aside, and break the cycle of growth, which it gives rise to. Far from wealth trickling down, the truth is that wealth in our economy floods upwards, and it is the accumulation of wealth by the wealthiest that actually prevents the reality that growth could be much larger than it is in the UK if only they didn't put money aside. Now, what does that mean? We need to stop the wealthy from hoarding is the actual truth of the matter. Far from money being wasted on making payments to those in receipt of benefits, as most of the wealthy would claim, where money is wasted in the UK economy is by letting the wealthy have it, who then don't want to use it. And that should be glaringly obvious. Leaving money with somebody who doesn't want to use it can never create new wealth because nobody's got it to spend. So as a consequence, what we need to do is, and let's be blunt about this, tax the wealthy more, redistribute to those on lower incomes, and as a consequence, that dead money, which the wealthy had, which we've now put back into circulation as a consequence of taxing them so that we can then manage the consequences of giving those on benefits more money to spend, that process will fuel growth. Giving money to the wealthy won't. Giving money to the poorest in our communities will. Benefits are the way to make our economy stronger. They're not about charity. They're not about feeding black holes. They are literally about how our economy is kept running. And it's the greed and ignorance of neoliberalism that has fueled the imaginations of politicians who actually believe all the nonsense that it has to say that is holding us back. We can beat the problem of low growth and a stagnant economy, but we can only do it by taxing the wealthy more and by providing more income to those who do not have enough because they will spend it, and that will fuel our economy, and employment, and growth, and investment. And what is more, and let's be clear about this, the government would even balance its books because the money would circulate for longer before it ended up in somebody's savings account, and as a result, government revenues as the proportion of GDP were rise, not because we increased tax rates, but simply because the money was allowed to circulate for longer. The economics of benefit payments are the reverse of what we are normally told, but that's always true in macroeconomics, because macroeconomics normally runs the other way round from microeconomics, which is the economics of the household. And far too many of our politicians believe that the economics of the household are what should be applied to the management of the state. They're not. If we only understood that if we feed money into the bottom of our economy, we get the maximum growth rate, but if we feed it into the top, we get the lowest possible growth rate, then we would have a better economy, a better society, and better off people. Why don't politicians want that? I wish I knew.

There’s a persistent myth that our government is somehow at the mercy of the financial markets and that it has to dance to their tune. This is most definitely doing the rounds this week, mainly as a result of Labour's mismanagement of its own party, and Rachel Reeves' subsequent very public tears. It’s a myth I have been challenging for years, so let me summarise why. 1. The government creates the money The UK government is the monopoly issuer of the pound. It spends all of that money into existence. Every pound of government spending creates a matching financial asset for someone else. It is only afterwards that the government issues bonds, not because it needs the money, but to provide a safe place for savers to deposit their funds when banks cannot provide this service. This point is critical. The government does not need the markets to ‘fund’ its spending. It is simply swapping one form of money (reserves) for another (gilts). Bizarrely, it pays interest to those to whom it provides this service. 2. Gilts are a choice, not a necessity The sale of government bonds, gilts in the UK, is presented as if the government is dependent on the markets to keep spending. This is nonsense. The government issues gilts largely because: It wants to drain reserves from the banking system to help the Bank of England hit its (currently too high) interest rate target. It wants to give pension funds and insurance companies a safe deposit facility to underpin their promises to those who use their services. It believes it must maintain an outdated and now unnecessary City-based financial architecture. None of this means it needs the markets to spend. If no one bought gilts, the government could continue to spend. In fact, as quantitative easing and now quantitative tightening prove, there is no relationship between bond issues and Bank of England market interventions and the capacity of the government to spend: the evidence is all there for anyone to see. 3. The central bank is always the buyer of last resort When financial markets are in turmoil, as happened in the mini-budget fiasco under Liz Truss,  the Bank of England steps in. Its role is to stabilise prices and yields. This is not optional. It is a fundamental part of having a sovereign currency and a central bank that acts as the lender of last resort. This means the financial markets are, in fact, dependent on the government and its central bank. Not the other way around. 4. Interest rates are a policy choice People say, “but the markets set interest rates, and so they can discipline the government.” Again, this misunderstands monetary operations. The Bank of England sets the base rate. It can cap or control longer-term rates by buying or selling bonds as it chooses. The so-called market rates are policy-contingent. When push comes to shove, the central bank can always enforce the interest rate it wants. 5. What markets really influence is ideology So why the obsession with ‘market confidence’? The reality is, politicians and economists often invoke markets to justify austerity. It is easier to say “the markets demand it” than to admit their own ideological choice, which would otherwise be unpalatable to the electorate. Financial markets do, in that case, play a political role, but they do not hold the government hostage. They operate within the monetary framework that the government and its central bank set. We could just as easily choose to run the economy with other priorities, but it does not suit neoliberal politicians to do so. That is because they view politics as the City does, at cost to us all. Summary I keep returning to this issue because it is so fundamental: the UK government is a currency creator, not a currency user. It is not like a household. It does not need to beg or borrow from the markets to spend. Financial markets are accommodated by the government, not the other way around. Understanding this changes everything. It means that economic policy decisions — on public services, investment, climate action, and inequality — are political choices, not technical constraints imposed by bond traders. That is why misinformation on this issue matters so much, and the fact that it is so widespread shows just how strong are the forces that wish to deny that democratic choices can still be made in the UK.

The same people cheering assisted suicide believe it's evil to deport people.