@Dave_Murrie

Applied sports scientist, lecturer & coach... skier, athlete, traveller, photographer.

Wales
Joined January 2014
David Wynn Murrie retweeted
BROKEN BRITAIN? LET ME EXPLAIN WHO IS BREAKING US People keep asking why the UK feels broken — why public services collapse, why councils go bankrupt, why families drown in rent, the NHS is on its knees. Here’s the truth nobody in Westminster will say out loud: Britain isn’t Poor. It’s Being Drained. Drained by a tax system designed to protect wealth, punish workers, and let global investors treat our country like a vending machine. The UK’s £3 trillion debt isn’t an accident — it’s a transfer of wealth. Every year, over £100 billion goes straight to bondholders in interest payments, money that should be fixing GP appointments, repairing schools, supporting disabled people, building social housing, funding mental health care, keeping youth services alive, and stopping councils from collapsing. Instead, it’s siphoned upward to pension funds, banks, sovereign wealth funds, and global investors. The poor pay tax, the government pays interest, the wealthy collect the money — that’s the pipeline. And here’s the kicker: the poor can’t escape it. They can’t move, can’t hide income, can’t shift profits to Luxembourg, can’t hire accountants to “optimise” tax, can’t buy property through offshore trusts. They pay PAYE, NI, VAT, council tax — every unavoidable tax that hits the bottom hardest. Meanwhile the wealthy live in a world where tax is optional, debt is profitable, and the system bends around them. If everyone paid fair tax, the UK would transform every single year. HMRC’s own numbers show £30–40 billion is lost annually through avoidance, evasion, loopholes, and “creative accounting”. If that money actually arrived, NHS waiting lists would fall, councils would stop collapsing, social care would stabilise, schools wouldn’t be begging parents for glue sticks, homelessness programmes would get funded, public transport would improve, debt would stop spiralling, and interest payments would shrink. Every year gets better -- Every family feels the difference. Every public service breathes again. But it doesn’t happen, because the people who benefit from the gaps are the ones with access to power. The system is biased because capital is mobile and people are not. If you tax workers, they stay. If you tax wealth, it can leave. So governments squeeze the immobile group — ordinary people — and tiptoe around the mobile group — global capital. No threats, no conspiracies, just structural leverage. And nowhere is this clearer than London property. London isn’t a housing market anymore — it’s a global asset class. Investment giants like BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield and Sovereign Wealth Funds buy entire blocks, entire developments, entire neighbourhoods, often through offshore companies, trusts, shell entities, and complex ownership chains. And here’s the part that should make people furious: many of these structures legally minimise UK tax to almost nothing. Global investors avoid UK tax in ways that are all legal and all outrageous: buying the company that owns the building instead of the building itself to avoid stamp duty; holding property through Jersey, Luxembourg or Cayman entities to shift profits offshore; loading UK subsidiaries with “internal debt” so profits vanish as interest payments; using REIT structures so rental income becomes tax‑free; exploiting double‑tax treaties so gains are taxed at ultra‑low rates abroad; using nominee directors to hide beneficial ownership. The average person pays tax on their wages. These guys buy a skyscraper and pay less tax than a nurse. And politicians won’t touch it — ever. Because the same investment firms fund political events, hire ex‑ministers, lobby aggressively, threaten “capital flight”, own media influence, promise “growth”, offer “partnerships”, and bankroll think tanks. No MP wants to be the one who “scared off investment”. So the loopholes stay open, the tax system stays soft, and public services stay starved. Meanwhile ordinary families pay the price: rising rents, collapsing councils, NHS delays, school shortages, social care crises, unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, higher taxes, shrinking services. Not because Britain is poor, but because Britain is bled dry by a system designed to protect wealth at the expense of everyone else. The injustice is simple: the people who benefit most from Britain contribute least to Britain, and the people who rely on Britain the most are punished the hardest. This isn’t left or right. It’s structural. It’s systemic. It’s deliberate. The UK tax system was built for a world where capital moved slowly, companies stayed put, landlords were local, wealth was visible, and ownership was simple. None of that is true anymore, but the rules never changed. If people understood this, they’d be furious — not at each other, not at the poor, not at the working class, but at the architecture that funnels wealth upward, protects global investors, and leaves public services to rot. Britain isn’t broken. It’s being broken. And until people see the system for what it is, nothing will change — because no politician will ever go against the donors, lobbyists, and financial interests who benefit from keeping things exactly as they are.
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
Sir Jim Ratcliffe and why he needs to S.T.F.U part 2
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
Yesterday they were promoting the line that the Triple Lock was ‘unaffordable’, today they’re pushing the line that ‘war may be coming’. As I said earlier this week ‘news’ today is not about simply reporting what happens in a factual, objective way, it’s about promoting and pushing agendas. In other words, propaganda in place of news.
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
This needs to be done as a matter of urgency. There’s no room for far-right thugs in British society.
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
Not a word from Farage and Co about this councillor
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
“These anti-migrant vigilante groups claim that their intention is to protect women and children. This is manifestly false”: why we need to act now against far-right disorder By @hopenothate’s @lowles_nick
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
🚨🇬🇧 There was nothing spontaneous about Dover. Kent Police said there was. What actually happened: Tommy Robinson's right-hand man spent weeks recruiting men across the country, staged hundreds of them overnight in a Kent village 18 miles from the port, and moved them in at 5.30am in vans. Daniel Thomas - Danny Tommo - hid none of it. In August he held a national recruitment day in a Warwickshire field and told the men there they would be part of the biggest pushback since the Second World War. Three days before Dover he posted a video saying "something is about to go down and men from all round the country will be involved in it." He named an earlier operation after the D-Day landings. The French banned the rally and banned him from the country. You didn't need intelligence sources. You needed an internet connection. The Guardian reports today that police were told the night before. Hundreds of men had taken over Preston-next-Wingham, population 920, parking on junctions, in the primary school, in the butcher's car park. Someone overheard them in the local pub and passed it to counter-terrorism officers. Hope not Hate said they showed little or no interest. Roger Gale, the local MP, called 999 on Saturday morning and had 50 number plates photographed. Kent Police called it spontaneous. No arrests. In 2021, Insulate Britain blocked the approaches to the same port. Same roads. Same force. Kent Police arrested 39 people. Extinction Rebellion tried it in 2019 and were arrested as well. The offence hasn't changed. The men committing it have. And the traffic is the least of it. Thomas told Dan Wootton the aim was "taking control of this country." During the 2024 riots, he posted a video telling British men that every city had to go up. He recruits nationally and promises vetting - "quality over quantity" - and Searchlight found a convicted animal abuser and men from the Southampton disorder in the first intake. He was himself jailed for two years in 2016 after pleading guilty to attempting to kidnap a man at knifepoint. He masks them, buses them in, and points them at police lines while officers handle boat arrivals. In Portsmouth on Sunday, he livestreamed a call for supporters to get down to Eastney and stop migrants being moved. Officers were injured, even though Tommo had to retreat, tail between his legs, because of low attendance after threatening to mobilise a thousand men. A private force, masked, recruited nationally, organised to obstruct the police. He has been saying so out loud since June. Kent Police looked at all that and called it spontaneous. When are we going to start taking this far-right threat seriously?
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
🚨 Today’s Times business page tells you almost everything about Britain’s broken economic model. At the top: lobbyists demand tax-free shopping for wealthy overseas visitors, supposedly delivering an £11.5 billion boost. In the middle: a global bond sell-off, driven by Trump’s war, rising oil prices, inflation, quantitative tightening and vast AI borrowing, is repackaged as pressure on Britain to cut public spending. At the bottom: more than $100 billion of takeover offers as further British companies prepare to pass into foreign ownership. This is the model: 👉 Tax concessions for international wealth. 👉 Austerity and unaffordable borrowing for the public realm. 👉 British companies, infrastructure and productive assets sold abroad. Buying an existing British company is not the same as investing in new British productive capacity. Ownership, profits, intellectual property and strategic decisions can all move overseas, while Britain retains the workers, liabilities and physical risks. Brexit accelerated this fire sale by weakening growth, depressing valuations, devaluing sterling and erecting barriers around British businesses. Yet each overseas takeover is still celebrated as inward investment. Global Britain was never about Britain conquering global markets. It meant Britain itself being sold cheap to the globe.
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Reform UK Councillors Gone: Update
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
Well, well, well… X has apparently decided THIS particular post is the one that needs to be hidden from people. Of all the profanity, insults, Trump-induced psychosis and political shitposting I’ve unleashed on this platform, THIS is where they draw the line? Adorable. 😂😂😂
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
They told you the problem was immigrants and wokery. The real problem is the landlords, the energy bosses, the water companies and the offshore rich who own this country and the politicians who protect them. While your rent rises, your bills explode and the NHS waits get longer, Farage’s Reform and the Tories keep the utilities private and the landlords winning. Democratic socialism is not radical. It is common sense. Public power over energy, housing and the essentials. For the many. Not the few. This account exists to help organise that fight. No more gaslighting. No more fake patriotism. The future belongs to the majority who actually live and work here. Follow if you’re done being shafted.
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
Nigel Farage just said the UK was better in the 1950's In the 1950's the Government owned Gas, Oil, Rail, Power, Steel, Telecoms, Mail, Shipbuilding, Airports, Social Housing, Care Homes (Children and Adults), Schools, Hospitals... And built 300,000 Council Houses a year.
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
People defend capitalism because they confuse it with commerce. They believe “capitalism” is when people start businesses and sell things. If people understood that the thing they call capitalism and love so much is actually just commerce and that it’s not the same thing as capitalism, they would feel very different. This is because a local baker selling bread, a mechanic fixing cars, or an artisan selling wares on a digital storefront is a sign of commerce in a market economy, which is simply a mechanism for exchanging goods and services based on supply and demand. Needless to say, this has existed for thousands of years before capitalism was created. As economic historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, commerce and capitalism are not only distinct; but historically, they have often operated at cross-purposes. According to Braudel, ordinary commerce is competitive and transparent, while capitalism is anti-competitive and deliberately opaque, making it a zone of privilege held by a small elite who bend the rules in their favour. Braudel further argues that commerce, or the market, is horizontal, transparent, and competitive and as old as civilization itself. It involves individuals or small groups trading goods, where barriers to entry are low, no single player dominates, and profit is a reward for fulfilling a specific need. Capitalism, meanwhile, is a specific institutional arrangement that emerged relatively recently in human history, around the 16th to 17th centuries. It is NOT just people “trading stuff”. It is instead the legal and financial system where the means of production are privately owned, and the primary objective is the continuous, infinite accumulation of capital. Because of this accumulation-obssessed nature of capitalism, when it scales up, it seeks to eliminate the free play of commerce to protect its investments. True market competition is risky for massive capital as it drives prices down and threatens profit margins. Braudel contended that capitalism only begins where commerce ends. It is the zone of high finance and state collusion. Because it operates across vast distances such as the 17th-century spice trade, information takes months to travel, which creates a deliberate lack of transparency. Braudel noted that the great capitalists of the early modern era in Madeira and Venice or the Dutch East India Company, never wanted to compete in a fair, transparent market because competition slices profit margins to the bone. Instead, they secured royal charters, exclusive trading rights, and naval protection. At the same time, the state granted them legal monopolies, effectively outlawing competition. Therefore, capitalism naturally trends toward creating monopolies and securing state interventions like bailouts, subsidies, and regulatory capture to shield itself from the very market forces it claims to champion. In fact, the most important takeaway from Braudel’s analysis is that capitalism is NOT the natural evolution or the highest form of the free market, it is its dark shadow. So, when our lizard overlords use “free market” and “capitalism” interchangeably, they’re deliberately hiding this distinction and using the moral legitimacy of the hard-working, transparent business owner to defend the structural privileges of the protected financial elite and its regulatory capture. If ordinary people could comprehend these distinctions, many self-described “capitalists” would realise they are just pro-commerce, and actually anti-capitalist, because it would be clear that defending “capitalism” means defending the right of a small parasite class to bypass the market entirely.
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
Trump told you he’d run America like a business. He is. It’s called asset stripping. You go in, sell the profitable pieces, gut the workforce, load it with debt, & walk away rich while everyone else holds the bag. Venture capitalist politics.
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Wrong, it was The Tories. Between 2017 and 2020, The Tories sold off 17 UK schools to China. Two UK private schools close after takeover by Chinese owner. Durham High School and Ruthin School - which opened in 1284 - will close imminently. independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho…
Ruthin school in north Wales has been open for 742 years. It takes Labour just 2 years to destroy it. You can’t hate these politicians enough😡😢
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#Independent, Express, Telegraph, Mail, Sun, BBC, GBNews, Farage, Johnson, Reform Restore
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
İtalya Başbakanı Meloni: "İsrail'i kırmızı çizgiyi aşmakla suçluyorum, Filistinli sivillerin katliamını kınıyorum ve İtalya'nın İsrail'e karşı Avrupa yaptırımlarını destekleyeceğini açıklıyorum."
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David Wynn Murrie retweeted
Good context here on the riots in Belfast
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