Renegade-redhead soixante-sixard. Broadly Liberal but I like boundaries. Blog a bit.
Tavistock, Devon
Joined October 2010
- Tweets56.1K
- Following283
- Followers459
- Likes47
The Lentil retweeted
Important thread.
The Lentil retweeted
It is fair. Harsh, but fair. That's how borders and visas work. Countries can change their minds. It's not some sort of Make A Wish trip to Disneyland where a sob story earns ILR. Nobody is automatically owed anything. Especially when citizens have repeatedly voted against it.
Imagine giving 5 years of your life to a country, following every rule, paying taxes, building your career, leaving your family behind…
And just when you are 1 or 2 years away from the future you worked so hard for, the rules could change.
I am one of those Skilled Workers.
UK Government, is this fair?
We are human beings, not just visa numbers.
@ukhomeoffice @ShabanaMahmood
#SkilledWorkerVisa #ILR
The Lentil retweeted
Anyone hitting the reduced section to pick up a cheap dinner
Raadsel rond gehackte koelsystemen in supermarkten: 'Wie wint hier iets?' ift.tt/3FBUfV4
The Lentil retweeted
This confers on 'charities' a brokerage role in the immigration industry - a massively lucrative business. I hope the names of the sponsors will be publicly available and open to scrutiny, because this looks like it will be scam central as night follows day.
The Lentil retweeted
An incompetent state outsources one of its major responsibilities to 'charities'.
If the concept of 'charity' had not been distorted from 'doing good for others' into 'tax-reliefed activism' it would still be an awful idea.
But in our current environment, this is giving the kids the keys to the sweet shop - and then giving them a box of matches and some kerosene, just for good measure.
The Lentil retweeted
What’s crazy about this, aside from the inevitable abuse & disaster, is that it’s obviously a policy that’s grown out of charity land and passed through the civil service unopposed. Complete sector capture
The Lentil retweeted
One of the survival strategies of the regime is to outsource policy to NGOs.
In this case, they are outsourcing the importation of foreigners to the so-called “charity sector”.
This is one of the most brazen and dangerous moves yet and must be vigorously opposed.
The Lentil retweeted
4/The #ConversionBil deliberately puts the coercive powers of the state into the hands of children to use against parents who are trying, with no criminal intent, to protect their kids from harm.>
The Lentil retweeted
3/It's no oversight that the #ConversionBill has no parental carve-out, no reasonableness defence & no requirement that the perpetrator intends to act abusively or to cause harm. As @HJoyceGender says here, it doesn't distinguish between kids & adults>
xitter.gq/roseveniceallan/status…
“If my husband takes my phone away from me because he doesn’t want me contacting people, that’s coercive control. If I do that to my child, that maybe responsible parenting”
Well said @HJoyceGender! #BinTheBill
The Lentil retweeted
An enterprising opposition would UQ this astonishing breach of convention. Lewis says he's a journalist, but no journalist would blab about a pre-briefing hours before the budget is delivered. This man is regarded as some sort of saint, but he seems utterly unaccountable to anyone. Parliament should step in
CONFIRMED. Gas Standing Charges to be scrapped. I've just come out of a meeting with the Chancellor. The gas standing charge will be scrapped in 2027 (my guess, either for 1 Oct price cap or the 1 Jan 28 price cap). Having campaigned against the moral hazard of standing charges for years, I'm pleased.
It's currently £108 a year. That cost will be shifted onto unit rates. We don't know how much yet, but I suspect just under 1p per kwH.
The Chancellor also said he will be talking to Ofgem about how they get rid of the charge on electricity as well, but that is 'trickier' apparently and will take longer.
This is primarily about the price cap standing charges. There will still be an open market, so other firms can offer other forms of prices with or without the standing charge. My suspicion is that once it goes on the price cap, it will tend to be reduced on other tariffs as well.
As for those on fixes: if you get a fix now, the rate of your fix is fixed, so this should not affect it. You will pay what you pay and if it has standing charges they will continue (some asking if they should delay fixing because of this, no if a fix is right for you and will save you money, don't let this change that - this is about the structure of bills, as opposed to the actual costs on bills).
About 60% of people will pay less due to this, 40% more. My guesstimate is the dividing line will be somewhere around 12,500 kilowatt hours of gas (can't know until there is actual pricing). According to a study by Nesta, this switch would leave the majority of people in all income groups under £100,000 better off.
Of course, when this does come in, if we're still in the nightmare that we are right now, there will need to be support put in for vulnerable higher users, who will have to pay more. Though hopefully by then the mid-east will have calmed and energy prices lower.
---------------
That's all long term. The biggest issue in energy right now is that we're expecting a 27% rise in the price cap in January. I asked the Chancellor whether he will be intervening on that. He told me I'd have to wait for the budget, but reading between the lines, yes, there will be an announcement today.
Whether it's an increase in the Warm Home Discount, or whether it's council tax banned, or whether it's done via a payout for people in say council tax bands A-D as a proxy for household income as Rishi Sunak did who knows.
The Lentil retweeted
Here's the real story of this Budget, the can being kicked down the road. This Labour government is apparently planning spending cuts on most areas of public service spending of 2.6% per year between 2028-29 and 2031-32.
Pull the other one. It's got bells on.
The Lentil retweeted
Thing about the budget is the speech is exactly what the Government *wants* us to hear 🤔
The real work starts when the chancellor sits down. An army of SW1s most hardened wonks chipping away at the coalface of Comms; digging deep into the devil in the detail.
The Lentil retweeted
Completely pathetic. He throws about insinuations of racism from the pulpit of a church, gets challenged, comes up with a weasel response, then blocks. This says a lot about Alan Lester's character as a historian.
The Lentil retweeted
Much of this is because they have no actual vision of the nation's future, beyond an end of history secular humanist internationalism. I voted remain but I'm struck by how little the rejoin crowd seem to engage with geopolitical reality or what's going on in Europe
The Lentil retweeted
Burnham's camp did not like the joke about a Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynista walking into a bar, and the barman saying "What's it to be Andy?"
But it remains an accurate description of the man. He's all over the place.
Here - in my view - he's correct on his headline point. But if you don't agree, another principle will be along in a minute:
The Lentil retweeted
This is Fadi al-Halsa, a young Orthodox Christian (Rum Orthodox) dentist from Karak, Jordan who only just graduated from Alexandria University's dental school this year.
Instead of celebrating his bright future, Fadi's parents and two sisters are now laying him to rest. Fadi was martyred in the Karak Saint George Church terrorist attack in Jordan.
The Lentil retweeted
Transhumanism and transgenderism are related aspects of the religion of the tech bros, whatever precisely it should be called. It stresses alienation from humanity and from the physical world, and a desire to transcend both.
If this were a thousand years earlier, they’d be ascetic monks or similar - they also would not be allowed near money or power.
The blurring of the distinctions between male and female and man and machine are both simply the latest consequences of an anti-teleological philosophy of nature that has deceptively cloaked itself in the mantle of science since early modernity. More here: claremontreviewofbooks.com/g…
