Steve Jary

Can someone explain the impact on the economy of increasing the minimum wage and then extracting more income tax from those on the minimum wage by freezing thresholds? I’m struggling to understand.

Looking forward to Rachel Reeves surprising us and confounding her own PR by unveiling a historic, reforming budget. A wholesale restructuring of the tax system, shifting the burden from earned income to wealth and rentier income - encouraging investment in productive assets and a Just Transition.

Why is the sugar tax change coming in in 2028? Makes no sense at all. ‘Change’ needs to come at pace if this government is to get a second term. I detect a lobbyist.

Don’t want to come across all cynical, but… Two questions:
1. How come this has happened just a few days after it became national news?
2. How did just one man (and a van?) manage to fly-tip so much commercial waste?

I’m not sure… But, I have to admit that many of your political hunches I have disagreed with over the years have turned out to be right. Hope this doesn’t break that streak!

Reith lecture edited by BBC removing a legitimate point about Trump ‘on legal advice’ in the face of an, as yet non-existent, defamation action by Trump. Wonder what Lord Reith would have thought about that!

Michael Crick pointing out to Nick on #r4today that everyone (BBC included) have ignored the Farage story for over a decade. He broke the story, of course, before the Brexit vote. Nick now trying to downplay what Crick is saying.

My attendance record in the European Parliament was the 4th worst out of 751 MEPs, yet I managed to turn up to vote AGAINST plans to tackle Russian misinformation.
Thankfully this is of no interest to the media.

Breaking! Farage launches new policy platform: Make Racism Affectionate

Y’know, believing there’s a kind of racism that isn’t hurtful or insulting is itself quite revealing.

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

I’ve only ever racially abused people in a non-hurtful way, insists Nigel Farage After more than twenty people who were at school with Nigel Farage have come forward to describe the racist abuse he engaged in during his time at school, Farage has insisted he only did the ‘…

NEWS! I've only ever racially abused people in a non-hurtful way, insists Nigel Farage newsthump.com/2025/11/25/i...

Petition: Call a public inquiry into Russian influence on UK politics & democracy We are concerned about reported efforts from Russia to influence democracy in the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere. We believe we must establish the depth and breadth of possible Russian influence campaig...

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74...

“Playground banter” says Farage. I doubt that very much. Dulwich College probably has a quadrangle, not a playground.

At least they’re running it in full this morning. The BBC TV News last night edited out the most damning bits.

How come #r4today is so late to the Farage story? Forced to cover it by the ITV interview?

Frightening that our most senior civil servant could go ever think of going on the record as thinking this. ‘Ex’ or not.

Can you post the extract they just played in BBC New at 10? Shockingly tame. Makes the Trump edit look very modest! They didn’t show the telling bits at all.

Brutal

Zia Yusuf - We need to talk about Zack Polanski

Funny they'd want to do that while not talking about NATHAN GILL at all.

Sellers of illegal vapes to be put in prison. To be announced in the budget, according to #r4today. What on Earth has that got to do with the budget?

Just tried ChatGPT for stats for 2025. It couldn’t find anything, so I asked it to do its own scrape. It couldn’t find machine readable transcripts of the programme.

I’d love to see a count of the snippets extracted from the papers every morning on #r4today Just to see whether my impression that the Mail, gets top spot, closely followed by the Telegraph and the Times, with the i and the Guardian trailing behind, is accurate. Somebody must have done this, surely?

If there was any doubt, GB News clearly the Reform/Farage propaganda channel on @bbcnewsnight.bsky.social

An additional 2% employee contribution increases the pension to £10,000. An employee contribution of 10% means £77,500 lump sum and pension of £15,500. Of course, the state pension will be paid from age 68 (or perhaps even later by then).

When will the means test kick in?

It all depends where the threshold is set. But a full-time 25yo on min wage who has been auto-enrolled into a pension and is making contributions at 3% (employer contributions 5%) can expect at 65 a lump sum of £38700 and a pension of £7780 [source: NEST]. 1/2

Exactly!

Just as a matter of interest, allowing political parties to receive donations in crypto is one way for Russian and pro-Russian donations to be disguised.

Is treason still a capital offence?

Sky News taking over from the BBC as national broadcaster?