@markhendy
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Interim CFO. Tax economics, PE finance, and motorsport and boats
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Joined November 2008
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Mark Hendy retweeted
Here's an idea - do something that makes a meaningful difference, rather than this vacuous nonsense.
Mark Hendy retweeted
True Story:
In December 1960, a twenty-three-year-old clerk named Armando Valladares sat at his desk at the Postal Savings Bank in Havana, Cuba.
The new communist regime had issued a directive requiring every government worker to place a small sign on their desk reading: "I am with Fidel."
Armando quietly refused. He stated that he was a Christian, he valued individual freedom, and he would not pledge fealty to a Marxist dictatorship.
Within days, political police raided his home, labeled him a counter-revolutionary, and threw him into a courtroom where a military tribunal handed him a thirty-year prison sentence.
The regime told him that release was simple. All he had to do was sign a single confession admitting his error, renouncing his faith, and declaring support for the socialist revolution. Sign the paper, and he could walk out to his family.
Armando looked his captors in the eye and refused.
The consequences were merciless. Guards shoved him into the infamous cells of Isla de Pinos and La Cabaña. They stripped him of his clothing, denied him medical treatment, and locked him in pitch-black solitary confinement boxes called tapadas. When he launched hunger strikes to protest the torture of fellow inmates, guards cut off his food and water entirely. Malnutrition caused severe peripheral neuropathy, paralyzing his legs and binding him to a wheelchair.
They broke his body, yet they could never touch his mind.
Sitting in total darkness, Armando began writing poetry. Lacking pens and paper, he used toothpicks, cigarette wrappers, and his own blood to write verses detailing the brutal realities of political prisoners.
Outside the prison walls, his young wife, Marta, dedicated her life to his cause. Visiting under heavy scrutiny, she quietly smuggled those bloodstained scraps of paper past armed guards, carrying his words to foreign embassies, publishers, and human rights organizations across the free world.
For twenty-two years, Armando endured beatings, starvation, and solitary confinement. Every few months, officials brought the same confession document to his cell, promising immediate freedom if he yielded his pen. For twenty-two years, he gave them the exact same answer: to sign away his conscience was a price far greater than death.
In 1982, mounting international pressure finally forced the Cuban government to release him. Armando arrived in the United States, gaunt and scarred, carrying the memories of two decades inside a socialist dungeon.
He published his memoir, Against All Hope, detailing the atrocities the world had chosen to ignore.
The book landed on the desk of President Ronald Reagan.
Reagan read the account with tears in his eyes and recognized something rare: an unyielding witness to the cost of human liberty. In 1987, Reagan bypassed the usual circle of career bureaucrats and made a stunning appointment. He named Armando Valladares the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
Months later, the man who had been starved in a Havana isolation cell rolled into the grand assembly halls of Geneva, Switzerland, carrying the diplomatic authority of the United States.
Taking his seat across from the very Cuban officials who had overseen his torture, Ambassador Valladares delivered devastating speeches exposing the secret labor camps, the political executions, and the brutality of the Castro regime. He successfully organized an international coalition that forced the United Nations to launch a formal inspection into Cuba’s human rights abuses, delivering a humiliating diplomatic defeat to the dictatorship.
Tyrants survive by convincing ordinary citizens that resistance is futile and compliance is safety. Armando Valladares proved that an entire totalitarian empire can be brought to its knees simply because one man refused to put a propaganda sign on his desk. Real sovereignty belongs to those who value their soul more than their comfort.
Mark Hendy retweeted
As a Muslim Arab, I am disgusted and heartbroken by what I saw across Western cities on October 7, 2026: people celebrating the October 7, 2023 massacre. Glorifying the murder, rape, and kidnapping of civilians is morally bankrupt, inhumane, and a disgrace to humanity. This wasn’t an ISIS or Al-Qaeda camp. This was in Western cities: people openly celebrating a massacre carried out by the filthy Muslim Brotherhood terrorists of Hamas against Jewish children, women, and civilians from all around the world in Israel. Utterly shameful.
How did we reach a point where this needs to be explained? An eight-month-old baby was kidnapped. Women were raped. Children were murdered. Families were slaughtered. Human beings were dragged from their homes.
No cause justifies this.
No country justifies this.
No grievance justifies this.
Nothing justifies raping a woman. Nothing justifies kidnapping a baby. Nothing justifies murdering innocent people.
And to see people in Western cities celebrating, glorifying, excusing, romanticising, or sanitising this horror in the name of “democracy” and “freedom of speech” is beyond disgusting.
It is morally bankrupt. Shameful. Depraved. Inhumane. Heartless. Indefensible.
What breaks my heart most is that we are even having this conversation.
When did rape require a political explanation?
When did kidnapping babies become something to celebrate?
When did massacring Jews become something people could cheer for in the streets and still pretend they were standing for humanity?
There is nothing progressive about celebrating barbarity. There is nothing courageous about glorifying terrorism. There is nothing democratic about cheering a massacre.
This is not humanity. This is a moral disgrace.
And the fact that anyone can celebrate such suffering should make every decent human being, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or otherwise, feel both heartbroken and furious.
Mark Hendy retweeted
This isn't crazy at all, it's just outside of most people's experience.
You just have to supply the relevant information, so people can understand.
Here, I'll do it myself.
(You should pay me more for this.)
Picture a jar. Not a special jar that I have to explain to you. Just an ordinary jar.
Put some gold in it. Just a little bit, ground to the consistency of fine sand.
Now some iron.
And some uranium. Don't worry, it's not very radioactive in this state. You can touch it with your hands. Just pour it in.
Now some tungsten. Surprisingly heavy, huh?
Some platinum.
Then just keep adding other heavy elements. Sticking to the useful ones. Should be pretty easy. They're all useful for something.
Jar about half full? Now pour in some really fine sand. Put a lid on it.
Now shake the jar for 4 billion years. Don't worry, it's just an imaginary jar, and an imaginary 4 billion years, you're not going to get bored or anything.
Now reach your fingers into the jar, and fish out a nugget of gold, or tungsten, or iron.
Oh, wait. You can't. It's all at the bottom. Under a thick layer of sand.
Can you picture it? Are you picturing it clearly? Close your eyes if it helps. Wait, no, open them again so you can read this.
That jar is Earth.
All the heavy stuff has sunk to the core. Where you can't get it.
Now smash the jar on the floor, and pick up the precious metals and the useful ones.... easy, right?
The smashed jar is asteroids.
Right now, your brain is saying "Oh, I see, he's talking about asteroid mining. He's saying we're going to go out and mine asteroids."
No.
I'm saying we already are.
When the Earth was molten, all the heavy stuff sunk to the core. We covered this. So how are we mining heavy stuff on Earth right now?
The answer is that we are mining asteroids.
We are mining asteroids that hit the Earth after it stopped being molten. So the stuff in them stayed on the surface. Pretty much every mine on Earth is an ancient asteroid strike.
Now think of all the asteroids in the solar system. Divide them into two categories.
The first category is the ones that have already hit Earth, sometime in the past.
The second category is the ones that haven't.
I'll save you the trouble of asking an AI. The first category is about .001%. The second is about 99.999%.
Everything you have, everything you own, everything you ever made, everything that your entire civilization is made out of, unless it's made of wood or entirely out of light elements.... it all comes from that .001%.
The 99.999% is out there in the rest of the solar system.
Now do you understand?
You, and I, and Elon Musk, and your sweet old granny, all of us, we grew up under conditions of grinding material poverty. We just don't see it that way because we have nothing else to compare it to.
We're used to it.
Are you starting to get the idea? Good, but we're not done yet. Now we're gonna talk about energy.
Here on Earth, we pull hydrocarbons out of the ground and burn them for energy. We could build fission reactors, but dumbass hippies made some movies, and now the retarded theater kids who run our government won't let us do that. They want us to go back to windmills, because they are retarded.
Windmills suck. Hell, even hydrocarbons suck. Fission is okayish, but the real energy source, the only one that matters in the long run, is hydrogen fusion.
On Earth, we can't really build fusion reactors that actually produce energy, despite the best efforts of engineers. That's not because the engineers are dumbasses like the theater kids. No, engineers are smart. They still can't do it because it's really really hard, unlike running a government.
Perhaps someday they'll succeed, but in the meantime, we're stuck burning hydrocarbons, until we hang all the theater kids and build fission plants instead.
But in space, there's a giant free fusion reactor waiting for us. In fact, we've been using it for millions of years. We call it the "sun".
In space, energy is free.
Oh, you have to invest in some solar panels, and they're only useful close to a star, but that's just nitpicky little details. Basic idea is that there's no power bill.
Build solar panels once, run 'em almost forever. On Earth, solar panels suck, and they're only useful for grid independence.
But in space, with nothing between you and the star but, well, space, then solar panels are awesome. And all the material and energy you need to build them is right there for the taking.
So, cheap material, free energy.
What else does a civilization need?
Computation? Well, guess what you can build a lot of with cheap material and free energy.
What this really all boils down to is that the only thing Earth has going for it is that it's a really nice place to build your house.
It's a crappy place to build a mine or factory.
The total value of everything off Earth — and I'm just talking about the solar system, not the rest of the universe — exceeds the total value of everything on the Earth by eleventy-billion percent.
In the future, most of us will continue to live on Earth, unless we really screw it up by not hanging all the theater kids. But all the mining, all the manufacturing, all the making the stuff, and all the making the stuff that makes the stuff, will happen in space.
And there will be a lot more of it.
All we have to do is get the tools we need from down here where we built them, to up there where we need them. So that we can build more tools out there, more and more and more of them, forever.
There's only one snag.
It's really hard to get things off Earth. We haven't really done much of it until very very recently.
SpaceX is the "very, very recently". SpaceX now owns about 80% of humanity's lift-to-space capacity, and no one else is even close.
That's 80% of the pipeline to infinite wealth. And first dibs on all the real estate out there, too.
In the old West, the railroads were money trees, because they didn't just own the transport, they owned the destination.
And there's about to be a frontier again, except this one's bigger, and it comes with a built-in second industrial revolution.
Make sense now?
Mark Hendy retweeted
My X account was hacked recently. I lost access and control for some weeks. Eventually X reinstated me but I lost all of my followers. Most are unknowingly following the old account. I am reassembling my followers here. Could I ask for this to be RT to inform the X community pse.
Mark Hendy retweeted
The Banks are worried. They've ramped up their campaign against a tax raid from "don't do it, you'll undermine SME lending" to "don't do it, banks will leave."
cityam.com/city-chiefs-warn-…
Mark Hendy retweeted
So he gets mitigation!
And wait for it, he has previous convictions!
I don’t want him to go to prison, it’s ridiculous.
However I do want a fair judiciary.
I don’t want a two tier judiciary and police force!!
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm87…
Mark Hendy retweeted
A British girl in 1960 left school able to roast a joint, render the dripping, make a suet crust and bone a fish. Her granddaughter was taught to design the box a pizza comes in.
It was called domestic science, and it was on the timetable from the 1870s. Once a week you carried your ingredients in on the bus in a wicker basket with a tea towel over the top. A woman in a white overall, who frightened everybody, taught you the lot.
- How to choose a cheap cut and make it tender
- How to make stock from the bones
- How to use up the cold joint on Monday
- How to feed a family of 5 for a week on a wage
The boys were next door doing woodwork, and went home to be fed by someone who had passed the course.
In 1990 the National Curriculum abolished it. Cooking was folded into a new subject called design and technology, alongside plastics and electronics. Pupils no longer cooked a meal. They "developed a food product". They surveyed their classmates on preferred toppings, drew the packaging, and wrote an evaluation.
Thousands of school kitchens were stripped out, since nobody needed an oven to draw a box.
That was 36 years ago. The first children through it are now the parents, standing in a supermarket with no idea what to do with a shoulder of lamb, and being told that their weight is a failure of willpower.
It was a decision. A country that had taught every girl to turn a carcass into a week of dinners chose to teach her children to be customers.
Mark Hendy retweeted
This week Ireland's Finance Minister delivered his annual budget. He...
* cut income tax
* cut capital gains tax
* cut fuel duty
* cut other excise duties
Just saying...
Mark Hendy retweeted
The marginal rate of tax on UK banks is 46.4pc, against just 27.9pc in New York. Yet Labour is toying with the idea of restoring the 8pc surcharge. Ministers speak the language of growth, but don't seem to understand the first thing about it. My column telegraph.co.uk/business/202…
Mark Hendy retweeted
.@andyburnham, the British public does not need a lecture about global events. We can see what is happening in the world. What we need is a Prime Minister prepared to explain why Britain has been left so dangerously exposed, and what his government intends to do about it. Instead, you offer us Google Maps.
Britain faces a serious energy crisis, households are watching their bills climb, businesses are struggling, and your answer is to tell motorists where they can find petrol a few pence cheaper. A price comparison feature may be useful, but it's not an energy policy. Dressing it up as meaningful government action insults the intelligence of those paying the bills.
You say global events are pushing up prices. Of course they are. But they do not explain every decision taken in Westminster over the past two decades, nor excuse the choices made by your party.
Britain sits on substantial oil and gas resources in the North Sea. Yet we have pursued policies that discourage domestic investment, create uncertainty and increase our dependence on international markets. We impose punitive taxes on producers while relying on their energy. We have allowed domestic capacity to decline without ensuring reliable, affordable alternatives are ready.
And then ministers express astonishment when international disruption sends prices soaring.
Ed Miliband has repeatedly reminded Parliament that Britain is a price taker in global fossil fuel markets. He is correct. But if your government understands that vulnerability, why pursue policies that discourage domestic production and leave us increasingly dependent on imports?
Nobody sensible claims another North Sea well would determine the world oil price. But domestic production matters for security of supply, jobs, tax revenues, investment and reducing dependence on foreign producers. Those benefits do not disappear because oil is traded internationally.
Energy security also requires adequate storage, dependable generating capacity, a functioning electricity grid, nuclear investment and an honest assessment of what the transition to renewables will cost. Energy is the foundation of a modern industrial economy, not merely another opportunity to announce a target.
Your government inherited serious failures from its predecessors. But Labour was elected to govern, not to spend its time explaining why everything is somebody else's fault.
Your party has made its own choices. It has defended restrictions on North Sea exploration, maintained a hostile investment environment for domestic oil and gas, and placed extraordinary faith in a rapid energy transition without adequately answering questions of affordability, reliability and security. Those are political decisions, Mr Burnham. They have consequences.
What makes your message particularly galling is the contrast between the scale of the problem and the triviality of the remedy. People are not worried because they cannot find the cheapest petrol station. They are worried because getting to work, heating their homes, running businesses and buying essentials keeps getting more expensive.
They were promised Labour's energy policies would bring bills down. They were told Britain would become an energy superpower. Yet when another severe price shock arrives, your answer is to shop around. A serious government would review barriers to domestic production, accelerate dependable energy infrastructure, address storage vulnerabilities and publish a credible plan to protect households and industry from prolonged disruption.
So yes, Mr Burnham, global events are driving prices higher. But Britain's vulnerability is not simply an act of God. It reflects years of political choices, including those your party continues to defend. The British people understand the difference between saving a few pence at the pump and securing the energy future of an entire nation. The question is whether their Prime Minister does.
I know people are worried about fuel prices. And I get it. You get to the pump, watch the numbers climb, and wonder why it's costing so much more than it used to.
The reality is that global events are pushing up costs, and families here at home are feeling the impact.
But I won't accept that there's nothing I can do to help.
That's why from today, you'll be able to see petrol and diesel prices on Google Maps, compare nearby stations and find the cheapest option before you fill up.
It's a small change, but if there's a practical way to help people keep more money in their pocket, I'll do it.
Mark Hendy retweeted
After 13 long months Greater Manchester Police have released the body cam footage of my arrest. For those of you new here 10 riot police were sent to my house in face shields complete with a battering ram to break the door down if I didn't open.
The crime? It was alleged that I walked into a migrant hotel and ate a bowl chicken pasta from the complimentary buffet that was being served to the asylum seekers. This warranted an early morning raid at my property and every electronic device in the house seized for 7 months along with numerous bail conditions.
I know have nearly 4 hours of body cam footage to go through from multiple officers which I will chop into a short video to show the absolute over-reach and incompetence from GMP. In the meantime here's a still of me being led out of my property. My lawyer estimates the whole police operation would have cost close to 30 thousand pounds and we are now deciding what the best course of action is going forward seen as the case seems now to be closed.
Mark Hendy retweeted
Both the PM and the Chancellor of the Exchequer are now telling us they launched a Google Maps service to help us find the cheapest petrol station.
This is their contribution to helping us with the extortionate fuel prices.
This has to be a fucking joke. I have been using an app, PetrolPrices, that does exactly that for nearly 8 years.
PetrolPrices was actually launched in 1999 as a website.
The problem, in my view, is not that this is a government of imbeciles.
The problem is that people across Britain are buying and falling for this utter shit (which is why there's an Andy Burnham bounce in the polls).
This is worrying because it shows you that the people of this country are themselves becoming as imbecilic as the government that represents them!
When fuel prices are high, finding the best deal matters.
That's why we've launched Fuel Finder in @googlemaps, helping you compare prices more easily and find your cheapest local option.
Mark Hendy retweeted
And every time the numbers climb, so does the tax. It costs so much because more than half goes to the government. Why can’t you be honest about that @andyburnham?
I know people are worried about fuel prices. And I get it. You get to the pump, watch the numbers climb, and wonder why it's costing so much more than it used to.
The reality is that global events are pushing up costs, and families here at home are feeling the impact.
But I won't accept that there's nothing I can do to help.
That's why from today, you'll be able to see petrol and diesel prices on Google Maps, compare nearby stations and find the cheapest option before you fill up.
It's a small change, but if there's a practical way to help people keep more money in their pocket, I'll do it.
Mark Hendy retweeted
Hey @UKLabour tonight I am sat in a pub on the North Yorkshire Moors. I have two labs, a bar full of gamekeepers, a log burner roaring and a great atmosphere. This is the England I know, have always known and want to preserve. And there are millions more like me.
