My eyes called?

And the two child benefit limit is abolished. An enormous victory for those who have campaigned tirelessly for eight long years through successive governments. This will lift at least 450,000 children out of poverty. Fewer kids will be hungry. No more women forced to disclose their rape.

Spare a thought for those hit hardest by the early leak of the OBR document: those of us who were about to have a quick bit of lunch at 12.

Incredibly sad and unbecoming when you have to briefly use microsoft edge for something and it asks to be made your default browser. Have a little self respect.

I know it’s set at Christmas, but funny to see Small Things Like These among the Festive Favourites! displays in bookshops.

Core argument of this seems to be that organisations supporting a wealth tax should instead be calling for policies that make structural change such as "changes to the labour laws to encourage union organisation". TUC named as one of the organisations and can safely say we do call for that!

A bit of delusional confidence that I have is that every time I receive a verification code I think to myself “could’ve guessed that”.

Today is disability pay gap day - the day that the average disabled employee stops getting paid for the year compared to non-disabled employees. Disabled employees earn, on average, £2.24 per hour less than non-disabled employees.

I was once accused of performatively reading a thesaurus on the train, but I was actually ostentatiously perusing it.

Often get annoyed by other walkers blocking the path etc., but think it’s silly to believe that someone breaking your idea of what good walking etiquette is justifies filming them without their consent and putting them online. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

New Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) out this morning. Pay growth over the past year highest among lowest earners (likely due to min wage rises) and highest earners (some big pay growth in finance industry this year). Median real pay growth at 1.3%.

2/2 Charlie Nunn's argument just doesn't hold water. Lloyds will announce their billions of pounds of Q3 profits tomorrow, not from 'investing in the real economy', but inflated by high interest rates. Windfall profits need a windfall tax. Email your MP 👇bit.ly/TaxTheBanksMPEmail

Very surprising that the guy who is being paid £5.6 million a year is against his employer's massive profits being taxed.

I know it's a bit much to describe lewisham shopping centre as iconic, but I do think it's fair to be sceptical of the regeneration when the development directly across the road promised a cinema it hasn't delivered and has been uninhabitable for six months. www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/2501508...

So far this year, the big four banks have made just under £1 billion profit every week. In 2023, the tories cut the bank surcharge (a tax on bank profits) from 8% to 3%. Returning the surcharge to 8% would raise £8bn over four years. Doubling it to 16%: £20bn. A 35% surcharge could deliver £50bn.

"Union membership" www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Good news on taxes on the wealthy. TUC polling shows widespread support across the political spectrum for a package of wealth taxes, whether thats equalising capital gains tax with income tax, a windfall tax on the banks and/or gambling companies, or a wealth tax on assets.

Once you have over a certain amount of characters in the book, you need to put one of those character lists at the start like Ferrante does. At least an index that tells you the first page they were mentioned. Pg. 300 reference to a character you briefly mentioned on pg. 21? You're killing me here.

Cafe near the office has celebrity quotes along the window and I feel like there’s a real vibe shift by the time you get to the third one.

Double whammy of this is how awful and aggressive council tax debt collection can be. If you miss one payment, you can quickly become liable for the full year's worth of council tax. Councils often use bailiffs to collect this debt, which then adds court costs and bailiff fees to the debt.

A reminder that we're only just out of a 16-year real pay crisis. Real average weekly pay (pay once you take inflation into account) only returned to it's 2008 level last year. Even now, we're only £9p/w above it. Real weekly pay would be £298 higher if it had grown at pre-crisis rates since 2008.

Asking people to pay for goods would kill the shoplifting industry ...

Seen this report referenced as evidence of a wealth exodus again this morning, this time in The Independent. Shocking that journalists continue to use them given that they're widely discredited.

Reading Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin

Guy in the pub watching, full volume, the Gary Neville hosted episode of Have I Got News For You from 2022.

… TUC commissioned polling found huge support for a package of taxes on wealth to invest in our local services, our NHS and more. Also huge support for a gambling levy, a windfall tax on banks, a 2% annual wealth tax, and for modernising our tax system to be more progressive.

Does it?

A bit intense for the side of a takeaway coffee cup.

This article a good summary of the rental market: it's all about a landlord being so scared of the changes they've sold 1 of their 9 flats, then about two-thirds in you finally hear from a renter who hopes the changes will stop her & her child being made homeless again. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Visited a place called Par last week and the local hairdressers was called Parsnip.

Wealth tax needed to help working people and avoid threat from Reform, says union chief

Food prices rising again, and not sure it's stated enough how steep the recent rises have been. Over past four years, food and drink prices have gone up by 38%. In contrast, in the four years before that, they went up by 4%. Really noticeable whenever you go to the shop.

Pacino, Gore, Yankovic. They all feel pain.

Absolutely love ref cam. Always wanted to watch football as if I’m playing a first person shooter game on the ps2.

All Points East yesterday has reminded me of my main cultural theory: every thirty something who was into music that has since been loosely defined as “landfill indie” has three bands that they will get weirdly defensive of if anyone refers to them as “landfill indie”.

Good to see more scrutiny of these numbers, but why weren't the journalists & newspapers using them for sensationalist headlines asking these questions before publishing? Also odd to pretend these are new doubts - The Londoner published the same concerns in early May. www.ft.com/content/28eb...

The outsourced company that runs one of our local council services has started doing a thing when you ring up where they put you on hold, tell you what number you are in the queue, wait until you're first in the queue, and then just cut off the call. A good comedy bit to be fair. Have to respect it.

Unsurprising to see City AM being against a wealth tax, but a bit surprising to see the editor using income tax stats to make a point about a wealth tax.

Thought this was a good, interesting article on the wealth ‘exodus’ and some of the dodgy data and reports around it. But odd to see this line on supporters of wealth taxes. Polling showing widespread support for wealth taxes across the political spectrum. www.theguardian.com/news/2025/ju...

New ONS data on health life expectancy a grim read. Not only is life expectancy, and healthy life expectancy, falling generally, but inequality getting worse. Life expectancy for men living in most deprived areas of England (72.6) is a decade lower than it is for men in least deprived areas (83).

But what about the essentials that families need to meet after paying for housing? Since the eve of the financial crisis, these have taken up a growing share of their budgets – particularly for those on the lowest incomes.

pleading with the supermarket staff to just let me have a little lie down in the big freezers.

Two, maybe three, seasons away from every sub having to go straight into a pitch-side recording of Stick to Football.

Solid thursday yesterday (ate a big sandwich, visited the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, went to see Lucy Dacus).

Another big article (this time in The Times) talking about Henley & Partners research without mentioning the legitimate questions about their methodology and data, so an excuse to share this article again.

Big Saturday night (finally googled how to pronounce the word “fugue”).

This is good to see: the Household Support Fund finally getting more than 6 or 12 months of funding at a time, with local authorities never knowing if it'll be scrapped or not.

New TUC polling shows public support for wealth taxes: • 6-in-10 think the wealthiest don't pay their fair share • Two-thirds (67%) believe there are too many loopholes to be exploited by the wealthy in the tax system • Same proportion (67%) support an annual wealth tax for estates above £10million

Ten years since Ivy Tripp-era Waxahatchee played in London with Girlpool supporting (the week after this album was released). Great gig, bumped into a lot of friends, but still remember it as the gig where I overheard someone say to their friend "why does everyone here have the same round glasses".

On this underfunding: an FOI sent by the TUC found that the government spent just £385m on the entire 18 months of the Test and Trace Support Payment Scheme. For context, this isn’t even half of what it spent on Eat Out To Help Out, which lasted just a month. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...