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It’s obvious, once it’s explained clearly - the State (whichever party) is the problem that needs solving:
On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.
And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.
I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.
A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.
Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.
At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.
At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.
Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.
At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.
B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.
When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.
In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.
The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.
C. Suffering demands a culprit.
A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.
But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.
And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?
D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.
Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.
Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?
No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.
E. One lens, a thousand causes.
And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.
F. The perfect inversion.
Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.
It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.
G. The ballot box confirms it.
In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.
In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.
H. The way out.
These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.
The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.
That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.
Simon Thomas retweeted
In the UK civil service is larger now than ever before. It’s almost impossible to be sacked with employees being 12 times more likely to die on the job.
They take more sick days and have some unbelievable perks : 🧵
Simon Thomas retweeted
The no. 2 on this year's Sunday Times Rich List, David Reuben, has moved to Monaco. He and his brother have a combined wealth of some £28 billion
There is no income tax, capital gains tax or inheritance tax in Monaco.
In addition to paying huge quantities of tax into the British Exchequer the Reubens have given large amounts to educational, health, child welfare and other charitable causes. In 2019, they gave £80m to Oxford University to establish Reuben College, its first new college in more than 30 years.
The top 0.1% of income taxpayers contribute more than the bottom 50%. It's a major problem that a significant chunk of Britain's tax base is walking out the door. It will result in everyone else having to pay more tax.
Simon Thomas retweeted
A floor plan tells you where a room is.
Photos tell you what it looks like.
Explorer joins the two.
Tap any room on the plan and see the photos for that space.
Try it here:
alphre.io/explore/c5f03c42ab…
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Property media has improved enormously. The listing hasn’t changed much.
So we built Explorer.
Tap through rooms, watch the property video and explore the area with Area IQ — all in one link.
See a live example:
alphre.io/explore/c5f03c42ab…
Bring your listings to life.
Simon Thomas retweeted
This Parliament has taxed more than any other on record and we've still got just under three years to go.
An informative graph from The Spectator.
And Labour and its think-tank allies are still droning on about yet further tax hikes.
Simon Thomas retweeted
There was a girl in Rotherham. Twelve when the first man raped her. Fourteen when social services pulled her from school and called it "consensual." She was doused in petrol and told to burn if she talked.
She was one of 1,400.
Between 1997 and 2013, while the Alexis Jay Report later confirmed industrial-scale child sexual exploitation in Rotherham Metropolitan Borough, John Healey sat in Parliament representing that same borough. Twenty-nine years. Three constituencies. Same streets. Same schools. Same suffering.
In September 2012, The Times broke the story nationally and demanded an inquiry. Healey opposed it. His own website preserves the excuse: "I had an open mind but was not convinced this would help the abused girls."
Not convinced. While the men kept raping and the state kept not looking, Healey wanted more time. Two years later, the number was still 1,400.
Then came the money.
In 2014, UKIP MEP Jane Collins stood in Doncaster and accused Healey and two other Labour MPs of knowing about the abuse and doing nothing. They sued her for libel. In February 2017, Mr Justice Warby ruled in their favour. Collins was ordered to pay £54,000 to each MP. Healey pocketed fifty-four thousand pounds from a woman who accused him of failing those girls.
Total damages: £162,000. Total costs: over £670,000 billed to UKIP.
He did not hand it back. He did not donate it to survivors. He kept it.
Now look at the donors.
While positioning for Defence Secretary, Healey accepted £40,000 from two individuals, Nigel Grinyer and Barbara Follett, whose addresses the Register of Members' Financial Interests lists simply as "private." £40,000 in shadowy cheques while he prepared to accuse Nigel Farage of "secret donations."
Then the tax.
November 2025. Defence Secretary Healey failed to pay council tax on his London second home. An "administrative error," his office claimed. Sources confirmed he intended to claim the £1,469 back through parliamentary expenses. The man setting the national budget planned to bill you for his own oversight while his party stripped nine million pensioners of Winter Fuel Payments.
Then the charity.
Kin Kids. A Rotherham support group for kinship carers. Healey publicly backed it, pushed for its charitable status, attached his name to it. Its founder, Vicki MacGregor, was later convicted of child sexual abuse offences. Healey vouched for a paedophile's charity in the same borough where 1,400 children were raped on his watch.
Then the regicide.
June 2026. Healey resigns as Defence Secretary with a public letter damning Starmer as "unable" and the Treasury "unwilling" to defend the nation. Six weeks later, Starmer is gone. Andy Burnham is Prime Minister. Burnham makes Healey Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The knife goes in. The chair is warm.
Now the legacy.
The Child Trust Fund: Healey's brainchild. Promised as a gift to every British child. Today it sits as £1.6 billion of children's own money gathering dust in forgotten accounts, while fund managers extract £100 million annually in fees. A scheme that became an annuity for the City.
Housing: As Minister for Housing, Healey declared that more people renting rather than owning was "a good thing." The man now drafting the national budget opposes the concept of working families owning their homes.
The ledger:
∘ 1,400 confirmed victims during his tenure.
∘ "Not convinced" an inquiry would help them.
∘ £54,000 from a UKIP MEP for being called out.
∘ £40,000 from private donors while demanding Farage's transparency.
∘ £1,469 in unpaid tax, billed to you.
∘ £1.6 billion of children's money left to rot.
∘ One paedophile's charity, vouched for.
∘ One coup. One promotion. One Chancellorship.
St Peter's School, York. Founded 627 AD. Christ's College, Cambridge. Fabian Society. TUC campaigns. Twenty-nine years on the taxpayer. Zero days in a real job. Zero days answering to anyone outside the machine.
That girl in Rotherham? She's thirty-seven now. She lives with it every day.
John Healey lives in Downing Street. He signs your cheques. He decides how much of your money you keep.
Every signature from the man who was "not convinced" an inquiry into her rape would help her.
That's your Chancellor.
People who need to be replaced by AI … the absolute halfwit who built the @O2 website
Simon Thomas retweeted
There is a hint of delicious irony to all this.
China currently manufactures 80% of the world’s solar panels, 75–80% of all batteries, 60–65% of wind turbine parts and 55% of global crude steel.
This staggering modern-day success story represents the largest, quietest transfer of industrial might and power in human history.
China's manufacturing grunt is more than the next 15 countries combined—larger than the US, EU and Japan together. To power this industrial onslaught, China commissions around six state-of-the-art coal plants a month (50–80 GW a year).
It operates over 1,200 coal plants totaling 1,271 GW—more than half the world’s total capacity. Its coal mining fleet is four times larger than second-place India.
As a result, China’s share of global manufacturing grew from 6% to 30% since 2000. Meanwhile, America’s plunged like a lead balloon from 25% to around 12%, and Europe’s collapsed from 25% to around 14%.
How? China uses abundant, reliable coal power, refuses to bind itself to net-zero, and has leadership that treats factories and steel mills as critical assets—unlike the West.
In geopolitical terms, this should be a lightning rod across the decaying West. But the job on the West is just about done, and the Western green transition is now almost entirely dependent on hardware manufactured by China.
This rise to dizzy heights was only made possible by using the same demonised dense fossil fuel energy that has already sent the Western world spiralling into a brackish, foul-tasting, latter-day mediaeval backwater.
It should be the biggest, loudest, and most outrageous news story in the Western world—but it hardly rates a mention.
Simon Thomas retweeted
Andy Burnham, in two weeks of being PM, has perfectly illustrated the main problem in UK public finances.
Week 1: there's a cost of living crisis, so to help you we've taken £45 a year off your electricity bill and capped bus fares at £2.
Week 2: we don't have enough money to fund everything we want to do, so we're taking £630 a year out of your salary.
Same government, same month.
Credit where it's due first - taking VAT off electricity from October is real money, so is the £2 bus cap in January if you're on a bus twice a day. Immediate cost of living relief is genuinely needed by most people.
But I'm not sure how someone who couldn't manage without that £45 a year of relief is supposed to now manage with £630 a year less in their pocket?
The £630 is a 1.8% levy on income to fund a National Care Service costed at £18bn a year. On a £35,000 salary it's £630, on £50,000 it's £900.
It's charged as a percentage of your income.
It's collected out of your income.
It is not, apparently, income tax, because they're going to call it a levy.
It also only applies to taxpayers over 34... So you turn 35 and take a pay cut, at the exact age most people are stretched on a mortgage with childcare costing more than the mortgage.
But the UKs ACTUALLY problem? Spending is too high. And it's too high in ways that are fixable if anyone was willing to challenge the status quo rather than buy more votes with handouts.
This is where £1,383bn goes this year:
Health, £269.6bn
Pensions, £236.3bn
Welfare, £204.0bn
Education, £126.7bn
Debt interest, £104.6bn
Defence, £75.2bn
Everything else, £367.1bn
Health, £269.6bn: We need mandatory health insurance as an employment benefit and a hybrid model. Everyone hears "insurance" and pictures America, someone bleeding out over a copay, as if no other model exists on earth.
The Netherlands has mandatory private health insurance. Insurers are legally required to accept everyone. They cannot charge you more for being chronically ill. A risk equalisation pool moves money towards the insurers covering the sickest people. It's consistently ranked top three in Europe.
Welfare, £204.0bn: Income tax raises £330bn. So almost 2 of every 3 pounds of Income Tax taken from every working person in this country is spoken for by the welfare bill.
Welfare should be for people who cannot work. Disability, genuine incapacity, the people it was built to protect. It has drifted into a general income top-up, and the number that proves it is 4.2 million working age people now claiming at least one health related benefit, up a million since 2019.
Change how we determine eligibility, fix a lot of spending issues immediately.
Pensions, £236.3bn: The state pension is a Ponzi scheme, and I mean that technically rather than as an insult. There is no fund - the ONS says so plainly. Your National Insurance is not being put aside and invested for your State Pension, It just pays the payouts for last year's pensioners. Yours depends entirely on there being enough workers behind you.
Which, btw, there won't be. The ratio of pensioners to workers goes from 27% to 48% by 2050 (and these estimates are before we've seen the proper impact of AI/automation on jobs.
Australia already fixed this: 12% of earnings into a private fund with your name on it, mandatory, employer paid. It's your money, it compounds, it doesn't need a bigger generation behind you to work.
We could mandate the same tomorrow and let the state pension run down over the next 40 years, eventually saving £236bn a year.
You can't levy your way out of these problems. A 1.8% charge on everyone over 34 raises £18bn. It doesn't even cover the interest on our existing debt.
And in the meantime... If we're going to borrow anyway, why is none of it buying anything?
Norway found oil in 1969 and put the money in a fund... That fund is now worth $2.049 trillion. It holds a stake in roughly 1.5% of every listed company on the planet.
We found oil in the same decade and spent it.
The UK's National Wealth Fund is capitalised at £27.8bn. Norway's is about 73 times bigger.
So where is our position in AI, in data centres, in grid scale renewables, in batteries, in electric vehicles, in any of the things the next fifty years actually runs on? We borrow £133bn a year and almost none of it buys an asset.
Fix government spending immediately, increase government income over time (without milking people for every penny of 'levy' you can find), and quality of life will genuinely improve as people have more money in their pockets.
The UK has a spending problem, not a tax problem.
Simon Thomas retweeted
Andy Burnham increased the debt of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority by 28.8% (£300m) during his tenure in office, leaving it with the highest debt of any combined authority in England.
If he expands this track record to the whole of the UK, that would mean an equivalent national debt increase of about £860 billion, taking UK debt towards £3.85 trillion.
The debt-to-GDP ratio would rise from 95.1% to 122.5% & at an average interest cost of 5% we'd pay an additional £43bn in interest costs each year.
High spending Andy could be a very expensive choice for Britain.
Simon Thomas retweeted
'A Britain that dumped GDP-destroying climate policies, put prosperity first, slashed its energy costs and started to put on a point or two of extra GDP growth would be an example to be emulated.'
briefingsforbritain.co.uk/br…
Simon Thomas retweeted
Robert Farle hat gerade live im Bundestag die Klima-Religion mit einem Taschenrechner hingerichtet.♥️👏
78 % Stickstoff.
21 % Sauerstoff.
0,04 % CO₂.
Davon produziert die Natur selbst 96 %.
Von den restlichen 4 % menschgemachtem CO₂ kommt Deutschland auf lächerliche 1,76 %.
Hochgerechnet ergibt das einen deutschen Einfluss auf den weltweiten CO₂-Gehalt von 0,000028 %.
0,000028 %!!!!
Und für diese Zahl soll Deutschland weiter seine Industrie zerstören, seine Strompreise explodieren lassen, seine Arbeitsplätze ins Ausland treiben und den Wohlstand der arbeitenden Bevölkerung opfern?
Die Regierung, die Grünen, die Medien und alle, die diesem Wahnsinn immer noch applaudieren, tun so, als würde ohne die deutsche Energiewende die Welt untergehen.
Während China und Indien jeden Monat neue Kohlekraftwerke hochziehen.
Während der Rest der Welt einfach weitermacht.
Und wir? Wir zahlen. Wir frieren. Wir verlieren unsere Fabriken.
Farle hat nur eine Frage gestellt:
„Wie blöd halten Sie eigentlich die Menschen?“
Die ehrliche Antwort lautet: Offensichtlich so blöd, dass sie immer noch glauben, Deutschland könne das Weltklima retten, während der Rest der Welt das Gegenteil an den Tag legt😂
Das ist kein Klimaschutz mehr.
Das ist ideologischer Selbstmord auf Kosten der eigenen Bevölkerung.
#KlimaSchwindel #EnergiewendeFail #Deindustrialisierung #RobertFarle #CO2Lüge #KlimaHysterie #WohlstandVernichten #GrünePolitik #Bundestag #RealTalk #DeutschlandVerliert
Simon Thomas retweeted
The Manchester Model. What It Actually Looks Like Up Close.
Andy Burnham is asking the country to trust him with Downing Street on the strength of what he calls the Manchester Model. Eight years of integrated public services and progressive governance that he says Britain should adopt nationally. Before the country decides, it should know what that model actually produced.
Start with the money.
£578 million in public money was lent by Burnham's Greater Manchester Combined Authority to a single developer, Daren Whitaker of Renaker. A tribunal found that GMCA failed to obtain a statement of assets and liabilities from Whitaker before lending, exposing taxpayers to a risk the tribunal described as potentially wiping out the public funds. A meeting between a senior GMCA officer and Whitaker at which loan terms appear to have been agreed produced no minutes or notes. Court papers allege Renaker presented high profit figures to the GMCA when seeking loans and low profit figures to Manchester City Council when seeking exemption from affordable homes requirements. The Court of Appeal is considering judgment on whether the loans were lawful.
Out of 11,000 homes built with that public money, 503 are classed as affordable. Less than five percent. Whitaker's personal fortune grew from £140 million to £698 million during Burnham's mayoralty. The luxury towers were marketed to Chinese buy to let investors through Hong Kong estate agents. Hundreds of flats have been sold to Asian investors according to Telegraph analysis of Companies House filings.
Now the transparency.
In April 2026 the Information Commissioner issued a practice recommendation to the GMCA for failing to publish Freedom of Information compliance statistics. Greater Manchester Police, under Burnham's authority as Police and Crime Commissioner, was separately issued with an ICO enforcement notice for 850 overdue FOI requests, more than 800 over six months old. The oldest had been waiting two and a half years.
Now the transport flagship.
The Bee Network has absorbed a £30 council tax precept increase in two years to subsidise its operation. The £115 million Clean Air Zone was scrapped after £211 million in public funds was received and only £22.5 million returned. Burnham's own transport commissioner acknowledged the network remains twenty two years behind London. The board of Be.EV, the company holding the Bee Network's public EV charging contract, includes Burnham's wife, who joined the company six years into his mayoralty and was appointed to the board as his Westminster ambitions became increasingly visible.
Now the promises.
Burnham pledged to end rough sleeping by 2020. Rough sleeping rose. Today 18,000 people across Greater Manchester have no permanent address. He promised Platt Bridge a flood solution by 2018. The area flooded in 2015, 2021 and on New Year's Day 2025. The projected solution is now 2028. When asked on Question Time why he would not apologise, he said it was before his time. He became Mayor in 2017. The promise was made in 2018.
Now the politics.
Labour's candidate to replace Burnham as Mayor is Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council, the body that accepted Renaker's low profit figures and granted the affordable homes exemption. The mayoral by-election on 30 July will be fought under the supplementary vote system rushed through the Lords two days before Burnham's Makerfield victory, designed to consolidate left of centre second preferences and lock out Reform.
108 Labour councillors lost their seats in Greater Manchester in May's local elections. The region Burnham governed for eight years delivered the most devastating local election result in Labour's history.
This is the Manchester Model. These are its documented facts. The country is being asked to implement it nationally. It should read the small print first.
Bev Craig. Labour's candidate to replace Burnham. Leader of the council that granted Renaker's affordable homes exemption.
Simon Thomas retweeted
Whether you are from the left or the right, watch this. @LiamHalligan is brilliant and entirely right.
If you are not for a massive slashing of the state, you should be nowhere near politics because you are for the economic destruction of our country.
"The 6th biggest economy in the world is run by infantile fantasists with no understanding of financial markets.... There's nothing progressive about driving the economy of a cliff"📉⛰️
@LiamHalligan @ #BattleFest 2025 "From steel to railways: can the state revitalise British industry?"👨🏭🚆
👇
Which political party is awake to this in the UK? If we wait until the next elections we’re going to be so far behind that we’ll never catch up. What do you think @RestoreBritain_
Simon Thomas retweeted
Spend £50 on petrol & £27.16 (54.3%) is taken by Rachel Reeves & the remaining £22.84 is the underlying fuel/retail cost before tax
After Labour's 8p per litre tax increase by next April, £28.39 (56.8%) will go to tax & £21.61 to the underlying fuel/retail cost.
Fuel in Britain is mainly a tax payment. If Labour is serious about reducing the cost of fuel, they need to cut tax on fuel. A lot.
