Devon based, gainfully employed.

Exmouth
Joined December 2008
Peter Mackness retweeted
Here we go again. Above inflation rise to the minimum wage which will cause even more pressure on businesses and feed into inflation. It will make life even less affordable for the lowest paid. Cue the usual "your business isn't viable if you cant afford to pay a living wage" posts from the terminally thick that would struggle to run a bath, never mind a business or employ people. Here, for anyone that can be bothered to educate themselves even in the slightest, is why the circa 50% rise in minimum wage in the last 6 years has made life less affordable and contributed to the cost of living crisis. Minimum wage employee 2020: Total cost to employer (wages + NI + pension): £18,460 Employee can make 18,460 widgets in a year. Cost per widget (ignoring any other cost or profit): £1 Take-home pay: £15,202 Widgets the employee can afford: 15,202 2027 min wage of of £13.20: Total cost to employer (wages + NI + pension): £29,436 Widgets made in a year (same productivity): 18,460 Cost per widget: £1.59 Take-home pay: £22,050 Widgets the employee can afford: 13,868 They’ve had a 45% increase in take-home pay but can afford 9% fewer widgets. This is why you are worse off. Now factor in other business costs, higher corporation tax, higher energy costs, higher risk from new legislation, maintaining pay differential, etc. etc. etc.. Yet the thick "yOuR bUsInEsS iSnT ViAbLe iF yOu cAnT aFfoRd AnOtHeR 50p" brigade are out in force championing this. Just increase the tax free allowance and reduce spending, for f***s sake. They are just driving businesses off a cliff in the UK.
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Peter Mackness retweeted
At the end of a private lane lined with vines, between Avignon and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
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Peter Mackness retweeted
A Chinese company uses civil unrest in France as an ad to promote the durability of its glass.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The video is news footage of French riots at an LV store filmed by journalist Clément Lanot of CLPRESS, not an ad by a Chinese company. Claims the glass is Chinese-made are unverified viral assertions. unwire.hk/2026/10/21/par… bloompakistan.com/chinese-blast-… shopenauer.com/en/news/louis-…
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Peter Mackness retweeted
UK new minimum wage: £27,456 per year. Higher-rate tax bracket: £50,270. 1.8x difference. In 1997 there was a 5x difference. Mind boggling.
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Peter Mackness retweeted
This year alone, more Christians have been killed by Muslims in Nigeria than Gazans in three years of war. Not a single Muslim or pro-Palestinian activist has protested like they do for Gaza. Weird.
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Peter Mackness retweeted
This is why the EU and Labour want to re-open free movement to the UK...
Migrants get a boat to the Canary Islands where they are helped by the Red Cross. They are then flown from Canary Islands to mainland Spain. They are then helped by the Red Cross (again) in getting to France. Free public transport across France to the migrant camps where they are looked after by all the NGOs until they eventually get on a boat to the UK. Its all very co-ordinated & well organised. Look at the boats the migrants use, they arent inflatable dinghies, ur not telling me they are destroyed after each journey. Spain and France are helping these men get to the UK with free flights & public transport 🤬🤬 @GBNEWS @PatrickChristys
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Peter Mackness retweeted
Tens of millions died in the Chinese Great Famine in Mao's Great Leap Forward.
'Leaving the European Union was the biggest act of economic self harm any country has ever committed' Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, told #BBCBreakfast Andy Burnham 'is spot on' about having an "honest discussion" ove the prospect of returning to free movement between the UK and European Union bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8e3…
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The high-status opinion used to be that migration was hugely beneficial across all metrics. Now it's minimising the negatives.
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Peter Mackness retweeted
This post goes some way to explaining the dire financial straits the UK is in... "Britain has almost run out of taxpayers, or at the very least, it’s slowly running out of people who pay enough taxes to plausibly finance the state." "...in 1998, about 43 per cent of British earners paid sufficient tax to cover the Government’s average per-capita spending. During Covid, that figure fell to an absolute low of circa 20 per cent, then by 2025 recovered modestly to 26.6 per cent." No wonder if fewer than 27% of people are net contributors to the state It's stats like this that make me want to leave. Big new project in the US in the next few months might be just the springboard I need @griffitha @LiamHalligan open.substack.com/pub/ieains…
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Peter Mackness retweeted
Unfortunately not, and this is the problem. The average pensioner receives substantially more in pensions, health and other benefits than they contributed in tax/NI during their working lives. (Difficult to calculate but some estimates put the average difference at around £200K). The reasons for this underfunding are 1. the ‘contributions’ were not saved - they have already been spent and 2. the level of contribution was calculated when life expectancy was 65 and people died after short illnesses, rather than spending 20 years or more receiving pensions and increasingly expensive healthcare. The fact that we can’t afford the current pension arrangements is not a moral issue; it’s a mathematical one.
Replying to @miriam_cates
Do you not think a pensioner has paid enough tax in their working lifetime
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Peter Mackness retweeted
Astounding Sunday Times investigation reveals new scandal in SNP’s Socialist Scotland: 800 NHS, central government, council and quango workers whose jobs no longer exist but remain on the public payroll because of the SNP’s ‘no public-sector redundancy’ policy. Estimated cost of paying people to do nothing: £27m a year. One NHS Highland worker has been receiving a full salary and benefits for 17 years despite not having a specific job. The health board refused to say what the worker had been doing for almost two decades and how much they had been paid. Likely cost to the taxpayer is expected to be far higher with several public bodies refusing to disclose salaries for hundreds of the workers awaiting redeployment.
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Peter Mackness retweeted
China consumed more coal in the last four years (2022–2025) than the entire world consumed throughout the 19th century.
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This car crash video where Carl Benjamin tried to explain simple stats and Narinder Kaur simply cannot comprehend the basics always makes me laugh 😂😂
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🚨The hundreds of billions flowing to Ukraine, while the latter’s children are conscripted to die in trenches. xitter.cf/elonmusk/status/211367…
What’s actually going on in Ukraine is that there is a massive incentive difference between the elites and the people. The former have grown very rich off the hundreds of billions flowing to Ukraine, while the latter’s children are conscripted to die in trenches.
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Peter Mackness retweeted
All the time we are told how the war in Ukraine is "unprovoked" But then i see this video from early 2014, were Ukrainian soldiers, fully supported by the CIA, are firing at homes in Eastern Ukraine, creating chaos in the region........
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Peter Mackness retweeted
Naturally, the wave of protests and disorder sweeping across Europe has now reached Greece. Extraordinary scenes in Athens, where police are deploying stun grenades to disperse crowds. From Paris to Milan, and now Athens, the scenes across Europe are deeply concerning. Europe is in crisis right now.
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Peter Mackness retweeted
Tonight, as I was leaving a restaurant on 14th Street in New York around 10 p.m., this Muslim woman took a prayer rug and a niqab out of the trunk of her car, put the niqab on, laid the prayer rug down, and started praying on the street. I grew up as a Muslim in the Islamic world, and let me tell you: this is absolutely part of an organized effort to flood the public square in the West with Islamic symbolism. First of all, there is no Islamic prayer at 10 p.m. Even if she missed the Isha prayer, which takes place earlier in the evening, she has until dawn to make it up. So why choose to pray on the street at 10 p.m.? Second, a Muslim woman who does not wear a niqab or hijab in her daily life would never normally have a niqab sitting in the trunk of her car. She is clearly not strict enough to wear it every day, so why would she suddenly be so strict about missing a prayer that she carries a niqab in her trunk specifically for this purpose? Third, in almost any Islamic country, you would never see a woman praying on the street at 10 p.m. This would be completely unacceptable. If she were genuinely worried about praying, she could simply wait until she got home, especially since a missed Isha prayer can be made up before dawn. I can tell you with full confidence that these scenes we keep seeing of Muslims praying in the streets of the West are intentional. They serve to assert dominance, normalize Islam in the public square, seize ground, and demand exceptional treatment that immediately turns into claimed rights. Bad-faith acts like this are signals of the same project that turned many cities in Europe into shitholes. Exceptional threats demand exceptional measures. Islam must be banned in the West because it is not a religion; it is a hostile political ideology. Until that happens, the West will continue losing ground to this ideology every single day.
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Replying to @CarolineLucas
Schrodingers gas field again: So big it "pours fuel on an overheating world" So small "It’s equivalent to just 2 months of UK gas demand" Do you not realise how ridiculous you are?
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Peter Mackness retweeted
Truth 🎯💯 - Ross Kemp @RossKemp did a very honest and important piece of journalism here. If this was better understood peace would occur sooner. And Britain would never have backed Ukraine in the way that we have. Millions of lives would have been saved. @kadmitriev @piersmorgan @JDVance @jaredkushner @SteveWitkoff
I'm old enough to remember Ukraine before February 2022. Before the great PR makeover. Before billions in British public money started flowing. Before the swastikas were quietly airbrushed out of the picture and yesterday's neo-Nazi problem became today's inconvenient history. Back in January 2015, Ross Kemp travelled to Ukraine for his Extreme World documentary series, investigating the rise of the far right and the Azov Battalion, including its neo-Nazi elements and symbolism. This was British mainstream television, not Russian propaganda. Funny how quickly history gets rewritten when the geopolitical interests change and the public chequebook comes out. Of course, Ukraine's corruption, extremist movements and internal divisions didn't magically disappear in February 2022. But suddenly, mentioning what British journalists had openly reported for years was enough to get you branded a Kremlin sympathiser. Well, here's Ross Kemp reporting from Ukraine in 2015, long before the political rebranding. No Russian bots. No Kremlin script. Just the history they would rather you didn't remember.
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Peter Mackness retweeted
In diesem Video zeigt ein intelligenter und gebildeter junger französischer Schüler, was er bis jetzt im Sportunterricht gelernt hat.
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