36. Founder, #ClarkesLatin. Author, CL & #Variatio. Writer & publisher. Written for Spectator, TES & Indie. Musician & comedian. Cat dad. Gay. Ex-Tory.
Hampshire, UK
Joined July 2015
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Ed Clarke retweeted
I posted a picture of my parent's village where the residents have managed to keep it free of road markings. I use it as a visual example of how overladen we are with bureaucracy that makes people's lives worse, in the name of making it better. It's very hard to argue against any regulation supposedly based on safety or performance that are used as a universal trump card to create an arms race of rules and our built environment is now full of them. ht @Alright_dot for the render with signage. Original on the right.
Ed Clarke retweeted
We have a cultural issue in Britain, where wealth is basically a sin. This is what feeds the politics envy.
I really don't see how we get out of the doom loop.
Unusual take on scripture from @haugejostein, who beheld him the beam in one man’s eye and wondered why no-one was interested in the motes.
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Ed Clarke retweeted
In the developing country of the UK, withdrawing £2.5k of your own money for a holiday is such a comically, laughably large amount of money that the curtain twitchers in the bank fraud teams just assume you’re money laundering and if you don’t itemise everything you intend to spend that money on, they might just decide not to give you it. Your own money.
Ed Clarke retweeted
There is a real problem with Mary Whitehouse bans like this.
1. Deeply tender people who have never watched pornography assume it's all sadistic and twisted, and that only absolute sickos would watch it.
2. These people moralise loudly in Parliament. They think evil men are into BDSM when it's actually more often women who are.
3. Parliamentarians who actually have watched pornography (76% of men, 53% of women) do not say what they think lest they become known as 'the porn mp'.
4. A majority of adults go without representation.
5. Bog standard face sitting or mild hand to throat stuff is banned through misunderstanding, moralising, and embarassment.
But this is all academic. Since the porn laws came in, no one watches pornography from UK IP addresses anymore, so these further restrictions are meaningless.
nitter.cf/i/trending/21154209133…
Ed Clarke retweeted
💖 Actress Marina Sirtis Posts Heartbreaking Tribute to Sir Patrick Stewart! 💔
Posting on Instagram, she said: "He's gone. My friend. My Captain. Me fellow football fan"
Sirtis and Stewart worked alongside each other across #StarTrek: The Next Generation, 4 movies and returned for #StarTrekPicard 🖖
Ed Clarke retweeted
The two families with small children I know best face a constant struggle.
Both sets of parents work flat out, full time, to pay the bills and make sure the kids don’t feel poor.
They pull in good money which would guarantee a nice life in most countries.
Not in broken Britain where hard work is penalised and idleness rewarded.
“The Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank says this will be the worst decade for household incomes since the Second World War. Are we capable of drawing a line from the individually popular spending increases to this dire fact?”
dailymail.com/debate/article…
Already reserved for someone else’s stag do.
Man who picked up dead deer off A66 to take home and eat was told he was breaking law ift.tt/xf9YQ3o
Ed Clarke retweeted
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and as a young man in the 1990s and that lived experience leaves me convinced that Britain was a better society back then.
Of course there were real problems - recessions, industrial strikes, deindustrialisation and inequalities that should never be romanticised. Yet alongside them ran a stronger sense of community, greater everyday freedoms and a deeper spirit of national and local pride, stoicism and resilience. People looked out for one another more readily, lived with more basic contentment and faced difficulties with a toughness that now feels less commonplace.
Those qualities were not perfect, and they were not universal. But they shaped ordinary life in Britain in ways that feel diminished today.
This is not nostalgia for its own sake. I’ve lived through the diametric difference between these eras. Britain now lacks a core spirit that it used to take pride in. So where did it all go wrong?
Ed Clarke retweeted
You can't hate them enough
The hidden tax measure in the Budget is huge for people paying tax under self-assessment - sole traders, partners, landlords, retired investors.
For 6th April 2028-29, you currently pay 50% of your income tax late in the tax year in question (in January 2029), 50% just after the year end (in July 2029) with any make-up payment in January 2030.
Under the new proposals you will pay your tax perhaps monthly or quarterly (TBC) from April 2029 onwards. A rough analysis suggests the impact is to draw about 50% of your tax bill forward, a huge cashflow boost to HMRC and a significant funding issue for the self-employed.
The Treasury recognises this, and expects to raise £1.3bn of additional tax in 29/30 as a result of this change.
The cashflow impact of the accelerated charge will send some businesses to the wall.
Does that mean playing the famous Monty Python song about this particular activity now constitutes some kind of illegal incitement…?
youtu.be/Dax_tnZRExc?is=o0rh…
Ed Clarke retweeted
Someone earning £150,000 pays over 7x the income tax as someone on £50,000. Compared to someone on £30,000, it is 15x.
We have essentially created a system reliant on a very small number of individuals being bled white and keeping a far smaller proportion of what they earn.
I earn £100 grand a year.
I have a detached house. 2 cars and my wife is a full time home maker.
I can just about afford this. I probably couldn’t afford the house I own if I was buying for the first time today.
My salary puts me in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
Top 5% to have a similar standard of living to Homer Simpson.
That is a disgrace.
We have a flatter salary distribution than Soviet Russia and the highest taxes and borrowing costs we’ve seen in generations.
Success is almost impossible because our tax system means hard work makes you a stressed out tax cow, not wealthy and certainly not free.
We need something radical.
Less state.
More family.
Less handouts.
More reward for risk.
Instead. Tomorrow, Labour will offer another batch of policies which will send one message to aspirational Brits: why bother.
Ed Clarke retweeted
I earn £100 grand a year.
I have a detached house. 2 cars and my wife is a full time home maker.
I can just about afford this. I probably couldn’t afford the house I own if I was buying for the first time today.
My salary puts me in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
Top 5% to have a similar standard of living to Homer Simpson.
That is a disgrace.
We have a flatter salary distribution than Soviet Russia and the highest taxes and borrowing costs we’ve seen in generations.
Success is almost impossible because our tax system means hard work makes you a stressed out tax cow, not wealthy and certainly not free.
We need something radical.
Less state.
More family.
Less handouts.
More reward for risk.
Instead. Tomorrow, Labour will offer another batch of policies which will send one message to aspirational Brits: why bother.
I read a piece in the FT this week about the price of being middle class in Britain now and it said a couple earning £436,000 combined take home £216,000. That’s a crazy amount of tax, and it doesn't include VAT on purchases, council tax, stamp duty or other taxes (I think does include pension contributions). I can’t stop thinking about it.
I was incredibly blessed to have a Head of Music at prep school who let me loose on the department, conducting orchestras and composing carols (and in fact, arranged my first professional accompanying gig for Kentish Opera when I was thirteen!). It is no exaggeration to say she was one of the most important figures in making me who I am today; and now that she is forging her own path in private tuition I recommend her services as singing teacher and vocal trainer, both gladly and wholeheartedly.
y-sing.com/
Ed Clarke retweeted
I don’t have £2 million in assets, and I don’t earn £200k a year. I’m quite short on both counts. So the HMRC wealth audit doesn’t impact me. Yet.
But it signals a clear intention. A lack of respect for the individual. What is yours is only yours until the government decides they want it to fund further welfare expansion.
Property rights only exist in this country as long as your holdings are meagre enough to escape the fiscal Eye of Sauron. They will come for it all.
For all that our politicians wang on about “soft power” etc., they are seemingly quite oblivious to the damage done to our reputation on the international stage by the draconian and outrageous curtailments to free speech they insist on perpetrating. We’re a laughing stock.
Ed Clarke retweeted
That's funny because at my last strategy meeting with my accountant, they informed me I must use HMRC-recognised Making Tax Digital compatible software, creating an oligopoly for firms like Xero.
I must now also report my company's income every three months rather than once a year, as well as a final report at year end.
So I now have to pay for a Xero subscription.
And pay my accountant more for the increased submissions.
And fuck about with reconciling every three months, rather than once a year.
For HMRC to end up with the same amount of income from me as before.
Fuck off.
Just fuck off.
Fuck off all the way back to Yorkshire, then fuck off some more.
