A crucial but less discussed element of the immigration story is exactly when and precisely why legal visas exploded in number. The below table (from the OBR) tells all. It was just after Brexit, and because Boris Johnson’s government brought in a new points based system (1/3)

Allow me to address the elephant in the room: The decades-long outsourcing of domestic manufacturing to China was not an insidious Chinese conspiracy for dominance but the greedy strategy of the American ruling class to explode its profit margins by exploiting global inequality.

Jeff Bezos has once again caved to Donald Trump and will not list the increased prices caused by Trump’s tariffs on Amazon. RETWEET if you think @JeffBezos is a coward!

Donald Trump's first 100 days have been characterized by the most flagrant corruption imaginable. Today, I want to talk about 10 of the absolute worst examples. (Thread 🧵)

Hundreds of Israelis walking in Tel Aviv tonight with photos of children killed in Gaza demanding to stop the attacks now.

This is what a rigged economy looks like: In the 1970s, CEOs made 27 times more than the average worker. In the 1980s, CEOs made 48 times more than the average worker. This decade, CEOs are making 354 times more than the average worker. That has got to change.

Did he honestly say this? What an ignorant, evil ****. The fact that he is in a position of power is yet another sad indictment of the current administration.

theguardian.com/commentisfre… Every word of this.

There is no Cost of Living Crisis. Supermarkets have permanently quadrupled their profits. Energy Companies have permanently x10ed their profits. It is a Cost of Greed Crisis and it needs to be reversed.

🤣🤣🤣🤣

This is - according to @metpoliceuk - an entirely false claim. Worth asking who benefits from inventing and spreading news designed to instil fear, and destabilise and divide British communities….and why @x does not act to take this down

we’re reaching corruption levels which will be used as examples in social studies classes for centuries to come

Private children’s home providers, owned by hedge funds, are bankrupting councils by charging thousands per week, per child - Farage voted against capping their profits. This man simply can’t be trusted.

Disappearing people without any due process is fascism — full stop. I’m sick to my stomach and we all should be.

Hi @Tesco my da had cancer treatment this week and my maw needed a few days off work to care for him. her manager told her to take this as unpaid leave. Can I ask, is this company policy? Can you also confirm that your CEO received over £9M in pay last year? Thank you♥️

We just learned that the world’s most powerful person, Donald Trump, has a boss: the bond market. He may not have acknowledged this to himself, yet, but the global financial tumult he caused - and has temporarily eased - has locked him in a fiscal prison. Because, as I have been saying for 24 hours, he came perilously close yesterday to having caused such an extreme fall in the price of US government debt that it would have become prohibitively expensive for his administration to fund a large deficit - more than 6% of GDP - and also to refinance the almost $8 trillion of government debt that matures in the coming year (almost a third of America’s sovereign debt). The point is he is totally in hock to the good will of bonds investors. And when he announced his reckless roster of massive tariffs eight days ago he alienated them, because they feared he would tank the economy such that tax revenues would plummet and the deficit would balloon. So they sold US government bonds, Treasuries, and the yield on the bonds - the de facto interest rate - soared. Which is why Trump blinked, and put on hold the more extreme tariffs, except for the 140% on China, for 90 days. You might think the worst part of this is the uncertainty he has created for businesses and investors for the next 90 days. Since no one in their right minds would make a major US investment till the final tariff determinations are made. But the cancerous uncertainty is not the worst of it. The worst of it is he has shredded any respect that overseas governments and investors might have had for America’s economic and fiscal competence. Shades - you might say - of how Truss and Kwarteng’s unwise unfunded tax cuts undermined the perceived fiscal competence of the UK. But unlike Truss and Kwarteng, there is pretty much no mechanism for removing Trump. All of which means that bond and stock markets will remain fragile and volatile - fearful that Trump will regain his mojo and engage in some other fiscal extravagance. He has also handed a loaded gun to his perceived enemy, China, and his supposed ally Japan. This matters in both cases, because he is engaged in the mother of all trade wars with China - and Japan wants a trade deal with him that would see it escape mega tariffs. The loaded guns they have are their massive loans to the US government. Japan owns more than a trillion dollars of US Treasuries and China not much less. If they were to sell those bonds, or even if they chose not to refinance maturing bonds, that could be a disaster for Trump. Because it could cause another potentially crippling spike in bond yields. Here is the measure of Trump’s debacle. He may well have trashed America’s single most important financial competitive advantage, namely that investors have traditionally bought the dollar and US Treasuries at a time of economic and political uncertainty. No more - because he personally has become the world’s source of economic uncertainty snd anxiety. So, as I say he, is now in a fiscal prison. And if bond investors, including Japan and China, see him imposing tariffs or cutting taxes in ways they don’t like, they learned yesterday they have the means and power to stop him.

For the record, I strongly suspect Trump’s underlying plan is to create hyperinflation which will lead to civil insurrection, giving him the excuse to impose martial law and suspend the democratic process. Initially the mid terms then the presidency.