Tired of political hypocrisy. Pro-environment, but not the hijack by Net Zero zealots. Pro business, pro farmers. Hoping common sense prevails. 🇬🇧 UK.
United Kingdom
Joined June 2020
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Various @UKLabour MPs have been on TV lately claiming VAT coming off electricity bills is 20% saving. Can someone please explain basic maths to them? VAT is added at 20% - removing it from the total is 16.67% ; 100 x 1.2 = 120 ; 20/120=0.167
This week in Lanyard Land 🙄 :
• @UKLabour MP: country pubs & black labs = ‘far right’
• @TheGreenParty dep leader: No clue about Birmingham in local radio interview
• @LibDems councillor: thinks builders can carry cement mixers on bikes
• @SeneddWales: Bans the word blanket
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
If black labradors are far-right, are the yellow ones far-left? Or is it the cat people who are on the left? And what does that make people who have parakeets?
I don't understand the British.
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
Welcome to FindABrit 🇬🇧
FindABrit has one simple mission: to make British businesses easier to find and easier to support.
Britain is full of brilliant independent shops, tradespeople, farmers, makers, manufacturers, family businesses and entrepreneurs, and I want to make it easier for people who genuinely want to support them to actually find them.
For now, every business listing on FindABrit is completely free, and it'll stay that way until I believe the site is providing businesses with genuine value. That might take two weeks or it might take two years. I'm not going to charge a British business simply for having its name sitting on a website nobody visits. I have to earn the right to charge first.
When I can genuinely justify charging, FindABrit will cost just £4.99 a month. Some of the better-known business directories can charge £20, £30 or more every month, and I don't want FindABrit to become another one of them. There'll be no expensive tiers, hidden extras or sneaky price rises once I've got you through the door.
That £4.99 will help cover the hosting, development, maintenance and promotion needed to keep growing the site and, most importantly, put British businesses in front of more people who actually want to support them. Until I can deliver that, my job is to build something worth paying for.
There's one other part of FindABrit that's particularly important to me. From the very beginning, I'll be awarding selected lifetime complimentary memberships to great British businesses and individuals doing exceptional things for their communities.
That could be supporting local causes, raising money for charity, volunteering, helping veterans, preserving British skills and traditions, supporting other local businesses or simply going above and beyond for the people around them. If I award you one, it's yours for life. If FindABrit becomes a paid service, you'll never have to worry about paying a subscription to remain listed.
I'll find some of these people myself, but I'll also welcome nominations. So if you know a British business or individual doing something genuinely worthwhile for their community, tell me about them.
Not everything worthwhile needs to be monetised. Sometimes the people doing good things for Britain and their communities deserve a little backing themselves.
Buy British. Support British. Back British. 🇬🇧
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
Andy Burnham is the political equivalent of that supply teacher who bounds into the classroom flashing a matey grin, drops a couple of half-decent gags and attempts a bit of street slang he clearly rehearsed in the car park. For the first lesson, the class is charmed; he seems human, approachable, almost one of the lads.
Then the novelty quickly evaporates. The jokes start landing like wet socks, the “down with the kids” act begins to look faintly desperate, and it becomes painfully obvious he has neither the quiet authority nor the steel to keep order. The classroom eventually descends into chaos: paper aeroplanes in flight, someone has set the register book on fire, and half of the class is climbing out the window heading for the chip shop.
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
Over 1,300 British farms have joined a new app in about twelve weeks. It is called Only Farmers, it was named deliberately after OnlyFans, and the parallel runs deeper than the joke intends.
Both are platforms where the producer sells direct access to themselves, because the people who used to pay them stopped paying enough to live on.
Lisa Hogan built it with her son Wolfe Bentinck, after five years of farmers coming into the Diddly Squat shop to thank her for the programme and then tell her their own version of it. Her words: this is for smaller farmers who do not have a marketing budget or Amazon.
Look at what is being sold.
Farm stays. Vineyard tours. Cheese-making. Beekeeping. Weddings. Lambing days. Clarkson's own summary this week was that you could walk an alpaca or milk a cow.
Every item on that list is something a farmer does anyway. Unpaid, at four in the morning, in February, as part of a job that a government review found loses money on nearly a third of British farms.
The novelty version pays. The work does not.
A family will hand over real money to stand in a shed for two hours and watch a ewe give birth. That same lamb, reared for months and sold through the proper chain, goes at a price the farmer is not allowed to set.
The second half of the app is grimmer still, because it also runs farmer-to-farmer equipment rental. Farms hiring kit to each other, because too few can justify owning their own.
None of which is a criticism of Hogan. She has built something useful, after listening at a till for five years. Book the alpaca. The money goes where it should.
But 1,300 signups in twelve weeks is not enthusiasm for an app. It is 1,300 farms reaching the same conclusion in the same season, which is that the dependable money is in the experience rather than the food.
We have arrived at a country where a farm earns more reliably from charging strangers to watch it farm.
Nobody thought that was worth remarking on.
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
60k+ people don’t just independently decide to invade a country in a 24 hour period. This was clearly coordinated. We have to accept the probability that illegal migration has become a warfare tactic.
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
Before Windows95, before Oasis released Wonder Wall and before OJ Simpson faced trial, our new PM Andy Burnham had a job. He had a job as a journalist working for a little publishing company for 3 years.
This is the only job any of the new UK Government Cabinet has had.
Other than those three years, more than 30 years ago the entire cabinet has only ever worked in tax payer funded roles.
None of them have ever had to make a sale. None of them have been paid to pour a pint. None have felt a sick feeling about making payroll. None have been answerable to investors.
In the UK 50% of the jobs are small businesses and almost ALL of the jobs growth is small businesses. None of them has ever started, owned or run one. Wouldn’t it be nice if just one of them had some experience in making a small business profitably grow before having a crack at the 7th largest economy.
Imagine what it must feel like to KNOW that your wage is paid for by the tax-payer. Imagine the certainty and security working for a government that never fires anyone for anything. Imagine how it would feel knowing you could blow out a budget with no real consequences or you could completely screw up a project and nothing bad would happen. Imagine that level of insulation and comfort for decades.
I can’t. I’ve been in business for the last 25 years. If I don’t sell I don’t eat. If I screw up I face very real consequences very fast. Millions of small businesses are being asked to get out there and hire people and grow the economy by a team of people who’ve never had a proper job. Surely something isn’t right with that?
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
1/ As someone who has been in a few murder trials let me just try to explain why the police always ask people not to speculate, (with the caveat that I understand everyone is justifiably angry, saddened and horrified).
Murder investigations and trials are very fragile things.
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
To all the vile, vile excuses for humanity who have been rejoicing at the death of Ann Widdecombe and are now considering how to backtrack:
Don't bother deleting.
Don't bother apologising.
We all saw it.
When people show you who they are, believe them.
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
The Left seems to think it’s perfectly acceptable for opponents to be murdered. Gloating over the bludgeoning to death of a 78-year-old woman? Yes, that’s all right too.
This is the same Left that infests the institutions and dominates education.
If you wonder why the culture is sliding into psychopathy, well, now you know.
Sickening
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
I see the #BeKind people are being especially kind today...
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
The celebration of Ann Widdecombe’s tragic death by sections of the left won’t diminish what she stood for. If anything, it exposes a striking hypocrisy: those who most loudly preach kindness and tolerance are often the quickest to celebrate the death of someone they opposed politically.
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
We’ve seen the “be kind” brigade hoping that Trump was assassinated. We’ve seen them celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Now we see them saying vile remarks about Ann Widdecombe, who was likely murdered.
They preach about decency but would happily celebrate your death.
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
I’d never celebrate someone dying, unless they were a paedophile or child killer, serial rapist etc.
The comments on here about Ann Widdecombe show how disgusting some are on the left.
VILE
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
We tax cigarettes to reduce smoking.
We tax alcohol to reduce drinking.
We tax fuel to reduce driving.
What do you think happens when you tax employing people and running a business?
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
Every week I get the same comment. "Why is your farm shop meat so much more expensive than the supermarket?"
It's a fair question. But it's the wrong question.
The real question is — how is the supermarket so cheap? And when you understand the four mechanisms they use to get to that price, you'll realise you've already been paying the full cost. It just doesn't show up on your receipt.
HartleyGoesOn retweeted
So many socialists are stuck in 1839 Dickens era Britain.
“Wealthy people exploit others to make money”
“People get rich at the expense of the downtrodden”
“If one person is rich it’s because 100 people were made poor”
In an entrepreneurial, digital, modern economy there is no zero sum game. Wealth is created. Trade is mutually beneficial.
If someone is rich from business it’s because they added value at scale.
Some of the richest people I know …
- Developed software that ensures an entire industry can easily follow regulations. Thousands of businesses happily paying a subscription, saving money and running smoothly.
- Runs a massive conference each year with a 2-3 year waiting list. Has a portfolio of consulting and software investments that scaled up off the back of it.
- Built banking software that dramatically improved services in the developing world. Allowed millions of people to have safe and secure financial services.
- Raised money and bought a failing business that was on the verge of collapse, turned it around and saved all the jobs and customer relationships.
- Buys run down buildings that are unliveable, restores them into luxury apartments and shops.
After the creation of the Limited Liability Companies act in 1855, the nature of business changed. It’s more inclusive - anyone can start with an idea, raise money, use their stock as a currency and scale up.
After we moved into an era of services and digital products, even the nature of business is collaborative and value adding.
Businesses create growth, opportunity, jobs and wealth by adding value at scale. Are there exceptions that highlight bad behaviour - sure. Would society be better off with more successful businesses - of course.