Serving the communities of The Hodder Valley. Not part of the Tesco family
Hodder Valley
Joined January 2020
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Slaidburn Central Stores and Post Office retweeted
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
Slaidburn Central Stores and Post Office retweeted
For the Westminster bubble, Campbell getting challenged on BBC Question Time is treated like political pantomime and studio theatre.
For those who lived through the consequences of the 2003 invasion, there is nothing entertaining about it.
One hundred and seventy-nine British service personnel came home from Iraq in flag-draped coffins. Thousands more returned with shattered limbs, catastrophic brain injuries, and minds destroyed by blast trauma.
While New Labour spin doctors were massaged in Downing Street corridors and redrafted intelligence dossiers to manufacture a pretext for war, young British soldiers were sent into meat grinders like the siege of CIMIC House in Al-Amarah and the streets of Basra—patrolling in lightly armoured "Snatch" Land Rovers that ministers knew were death traps against shaped IEDs.
From the desert wastes of Iraq to the legendary brotherhood of the SAS—where British and Commonwealth operators like New Zealanders in 22 SAS fought and bled shoulder to shoulder, from the harrowing evasion of Bravo Two Zero to black-ops counter-terror raids in Baghdad—our soldiers fulfilled their oath with unmatched courage. They fought for the man on their left and the man on their right. They did not die for corporate reconstruction contracts, Downing Street vanity, or Blairite messianism.
For over twenty years, Alastair Campbell has enjoyed lucrative book deals, fawning media platforms, and podcast respectability lecturing the country on "integrity in public life".
Calling him to account on live television isn’t a political stunt. It is the absolute bare minimum owed to 179 dead British troops, their grieving families, and the generational destruction unleashed in our name.
@ZiaYusufUK said to his face what millions of veterans and citizens have wanted said for two decades. #bbcqt
Slaidburn Central Stores and Post Office retweeted
Update:
In the 27 months since Labour came to power, we've seen;
• Employer National Insurance increased from 13.8% to 15%.
• The employer NI threshold cut from £9,100 to £5,000.
• The freeze on Income Tax and National Insurance thresholds extended to 2031.
• Capital Gains Tax increased from 10% and 20% to 18% and 24%.
• Business Asset Disposal Relief increased from 10% to 14%, then 18% – and now its lifetime limit halved to £500,000.
• Investors’ Relief raised to 18% and its lifetime limit cut from £10 million to £1 million.
• CGT relief on sales to Employee Ownership Trusts halved.
• Carried interest taxation increased and moved into the Income Tax regime.
• Dividend tax rates increased by two percentage points.
• Savings-income tax rates increased by four percentage points.
• Property-income tax rates increased by four percentage points.
• VCT income tax relief cut from 30% to 20%.
• Most unused pension funds brought into the Inheritance Tax net.
• Agricultural and Business Property Relief capped.
• Inheritance Tax thresholds frozen until 2031.
• The non-dom regime replaced with a tougher residence-based system.
• VAT imposed on private school fees.
• Business-rates relief removed from private schools.
• The Stamp Duty surcharge on second homes and buy-to-let raised from 3% to 5%.
• The Furnished Holiday Lettings regime abolished.
• A new annual surcharge on homes worth £2 million or more.
• Pension salary-sacrifice NI relief capped at £2,000 a year.
• The bank surcharge doubled.
• Capital allowances for plant and machinery cut twice.
• Online gaming duty almost doubled.
• The Energy Profits Levy increased and extended, and its investment allowance scrapped.
• Vaping Products Duty brought in and tobacco duties increased above inflation.
• Vehicle Excise Duty increased for many new cars, with electric vehicles brought in.
• A pay-per-mile tax on electric and plug-in hybrid cars legislated for 2028.
• Air Passenger Duty increased.
• Making Tax Digital extended to more landlords and self-employed people.
Together they represent one of the biggest transfers of wealth from households and businesses to the Treasury in decades – with little to show for it in public services.
Whether you're a business owner employing staff, a parent paying school fees, a farmer planning succession, an entrepreneur building wealth or simply someone trying to save for your family’s future...
- You keep less of what you earn.
- You keep less of what you invest.
- You leave less for your family.
Death by a thousand cuts.
Spot on 👏.
Please be aware we don’t stock gherkins 😁
🚨 BREAKING: A UK bank chief executive has said of Healey's budget:
"Taxing the engines of growth to reduce VAT on gherkins is end-of-Rome level of stupidity"
ft.com/content/80acb561-34e2…
Slaidburn Central Stores and Post Office retweeted
Tax his land, Tax his bed,
Tax the table, At which he's fed.
Tax his tractor, Tax his mule,
Teach him taxes are the rule.
Tax his work, Tax his pay,
He works for peanuts anyway!
Tax his cow, Tax his goat, Tax his pants, Tax his coat.
Tax his ties, Tax his shirt, Tax his work, Tax his dirt.
Tax his tobacco, Tax his drink, Tax him if he Tries to think.
Tax his cigars, Tax his beers, If he cries Tax his tears.
Tax his car, Tax his gas, Find any way To tax his ass!
Tax him all he has, then let him know
That you won't be done Till he has no dough.
When he screams and when he hollers;
Then tax him more, take all his dollars
Then tax his coffin, Tax his grave,
Tax the sod in Which he's laid...
Put these words Upon his tomb:
‘Taxes drove me to my doom...'
When he's gone, Do not relax,
It's time to apply Inheritance Tax!
#BudgetDay
Slaidburn Central Stores and Post Office retweeted
A Budget that amounts to pissing into a westerly gale - tinkering around the edges while the British economy burns, with a treasury packed full of economic arsonists.
It is an insult to every taxpayer, every struggling business and every family being bled dry by this rotten economic system. Nothing will change - we continue our uninterrupted plunge into the abyss.
The country is drowning in debt. I don’t know how else to say this…
We are BANKRUPT. We cannot afford any of this. Nothing.
A crushing tax burden remains, small businesses are strangled and as employers we’re punished for creating jobs. For what? To fund millions of scroungers who can’t be arsed to work like the rest of us? Foreigners who turn up and expect housing, benefits, healthcare? When our tax goes up, THAT is what we are funding.
Debt is now THREE TRILLION. We can thank lockdown for a large part of that. But please think about it. Three trillion. The scale is just unimaginable. Yet we get another Chancellor fiddling with the numbers while the country goes up in flames. Billions and billions and billions get added every month. It is GROWING. I don’t know how else to say this.
The people governing us seem absolutely incapable of understanding one basic principle.
Wealth is created by businesses and workers. NOT by politicians spending somebody else's money to win votes. NOT by the state. NOT by the public sector. I detest it.
The British people, working mums and dads, are expected to work longer and harder to fund this corrupt charade - all while giant multinationals shift vast profits out of our country on the back of their work and bloated corporates extract outrageous contract profits from the taxpayer thanks to criminal public sector mismanagement.
I challenge Healey or Burnham. Go and start a business. A cafe, a contractor, a small shop. Try being a sole contractor on the tools. Experience these taxes, the regulation, the stress. Have their families rely on sporadic invoices. Watch their earnings get siphoned off by a corrupt state. Let’s see how they get on.
The system does not need reforming, or conserving - it needs smashing up. We need to rip apart, limb from limb, the failed assumptions that have governed British economic policy for decades.
Cut the waste. Shrink the state. Slash the tax burden. Back small British businesses. Reward work. Restore the incentive to invest, build, employ and succeed. Get millions of healthy Brits OFF benefits. Give people a reason to work. BE UNPOPULAR. If healthy scroungers hate me for taking their benefits off them, good. Get used to it.
It’s all that, on a scale never seen before, or the country will collapse further into a third world hellhole - only this time we’ll get the hyperinflation and total economic catastrophe in addition to the migrants.
I refuse to leave a broken, bankrupt nation to my children and grandchildren.
Restore Britain is offering a route out.
It will be painful, more than anyone realises.
But it is the only way.
Slaidburn Central Stores and Post Office retweeted
‘John Healey, if you’re listening, where’s my breathing space?’
Business owner Paul Bowen has criticised the Chancellor’s promise to give ‘breathing space’ through measures in his Budget.
#budget #businesses #costofliving
Slaidburn Central Stores and Post Office retweeted
The Cost of Britain 🇬🇧
Here is the single MADDEST number in today’s Budget - and the Chancellor didn’t mention it once in his speech 👀
From April, the National Living Wage rises to £13.21 an hour.
For a full-time 40-hour week, that is £27,477 a year.
That’s GREAT right?? 🤔
At the same time, today’s Budget leaves the 40% Higher Rate tax threshold FROZEN at £50,270 right through until April 2031.
Do the maths on that:
In Britain today, earning just 1.8x the minimum wage now classes you as a Higher Rate taxpayer.
When the 40% tax band was created, it was meant for the top 3.5% of earners - bank directors and senior executives.
Today, a skilled tradesperson, experienced nurse, police sergeant or salaried worker earning 1.8x the legal minimum wage hands over:
❌ 42p of every extra pound to HMRC (40% Income Tax + 2% NI)
❌ 51p of every extra pound if they have a student loan
That single threshold freeze is quietly pulling an extra £34 billion a year out of working people’s pay packets - without the government ever having to announce a headline tax rise.
Pushing minimum wage up from the bottom
Whilst freezing the 40% tax trap at the top
How can earning 1.8x minimum wage possibly be classed as a “higher earner” in 2026?
Slaidburn Central Stores and Post Office retweeted
It's that time of the year again folks... 😍
#Parkin #ClaytonParkBakery
Slaidburn Central Stores and Post Office retweeted
Full Tour de France route revealed: is it coming to a road near you? ift.tt/Af6CnqI
Slaidburn Central Stores and Post Office retweeted
Cheers @Morrighani for highlighting how Carlsberg-Britvic have destroyed our much loved British brewing heritage.🍻👍👏🤬
Slaidburn Central Stores and Post Office retweeted
Customer: "Why's beef so dear? The chicken's a third of the price for the same weight."
Butcher: "How old's the chicken?"
Customer: "No idea."
Butcher: "About six weeks. Hatched, fed, gone. Never saw a season."
Customer: "And the bullock?"
Butcher: "That one was two summers out on the hill before he came to me. Thirty months, give or take."
Customer: "So I'm paying for..."
Butcher: "Time. Two years of grass, rain, a farmer getting up in the dark and a field doing what fields do. The chicken's six weeks in a shed on a bag of soya."
Customer: "Put like that, the chicken's the expensive one."
Butcher: "Per week of life, it's the dearest thing in the shop. You're just not paying for its life. You're paying for the shed."
Customer: "The beef still costs more at the till."
Butcher: "Everything that takes two years costs more than everything that takes six weeks. Whisky. Cheese. Oak. Nobody stands in a distillery asking why the vodka's cheaper."
Customer: "I'll have the beef."
Butcher: "He'd have wanted that. He put the work in."
Buy from a local Butcher. 100 percent quality 👍
Cheap processed slop from the supermarkets
#shoplocal
Lidl has put peas in the beef and written High Protein on the front.
The pea is hidden in a little black box, in a font you need a suspicious nature to read.
It isn't a pea. It's the beige powder left after yellow split peas are milled and soaked in alkali. Vegan shakes are made from it. It tastes of a wet cupboard and it costs a fraction of mince.
It's short of methionine. Beef isn't. So the 37g on the front is a bigger number doing a smaller job.
The cow spent 2 years turning plants into beef. Lidl has put the plants back in.
They took the fat out too. The flavour, the vitamins and the fullness left before the pea arrived. Food removed, crop added, and the word for that is High.
Nobody in a gym has ever read past High.
The reason isn't hidden. Lidl promised a quarter of its protein would be plant based by 2030. The meat-free aisle went grey. So the peas are going into the beef, where the customers are.
In Holland the same mince is already 40% pea. Britain hasn't been told its number.
Tesco printed Meat & Veg on the box in 2019. Dead in a year. Lidl moved the veg to the back.
Buy the ugly 20% mince with one ingredient. The animal already ate the peas.
