Tony Blair’s stamp duty dodge and other shady deals As many as 35 current and former world leaders feature in the explosive leak. They include former British prime minister Tony Blair. Together with his wife Cherie, the ex-Labour Party leader was able to avoid paying stamp duty on an $8.9 million (£6.5m) London office the power couple acquired in 2017. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/oth...cvid=514dbd87b29144faa2512680b68c7031#image=3
Buggery bollocks brexit. Germany enters gas crisis as Russian supply plummets "From now on, gas is a scarce resource. Prices are already high and we have to brace ourselves for more increases." "It's the failures of the past decade that have put us in these problems," "We must now take precautions to be prepared for winter," "All energy supply companies affected in the supply chain (have) the right to adjust their gas prices at an appropriate level to their customers," says paragraph 24 of the law. This means that the gas bill for consumers could rise considerably. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/cars/news...cvid=e852eb86b16f402d98779ac61e72a5e2#image=2
Poorer white pupils let down and neglected - MPs Committee chairman Robert Halfon said it was a "major social injustice" that so little had been done to address this gap in attainment - and accused the government of "muddled thinking" in suggesting it could be explained by poverty. "If you think it's about poverty, then it doesn't explain why most other ethnic groups do much better," he said. Poorer white pupils are falling behind "every step of the way", he warned, and with almost a million young people being affected, it could not be "swept under the carpet". At GCSE, in 2019, 18% of white British pupils on free meals achieved grade 5 in English and maths, compared with 23% for the average for pupils on free meals For university entry, 16% of white British pupils on free meals get places, compared with 59% of black African pupils on free meals, 59% of Bangladeshi pupils on free meals and 32% of black Caribbean pupils on free meals. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-57558746
Why does no one speak up for poor white boys? They are now the lowest-achieving group in Britain First, a few facts. If you broaden the definition of non-white Britons to encompass all ethnic minorities, including British Asians, they’re significantly more likely to go to university than white Britons, according to an Institute of Fiscal Studies report published last year. That report found that Chinese pupils in the lowest socio-economic quintile are 10 per cent more likely to go to university than white British pupils in the highest quintile. The weakest performers are not black pupils, but white Britons in the lowest quintile. They’re 10 per cent less likely to participate in higher education than any other ethnic group. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-does-no-one-speak-up-for-poor-white-boys- yup, I know it's not recent.
No doubt too long for here, and difficult to summarise but I'll try below I found the full article an interesting read. Vivek Ramaswamy: 'Woke capitalism is a cultural cancer' Ramaswamy’s argument – made through shocking examples and tight, hefty analysis – is that in their embrace of woke “religion” and the pursuit of trendy social agendas over simple shareholder satisfaction, business titans are increasingly dictating not just which goods and services rise to the top, but which social and political ideas do too. Ramaswamy had watched with unease as the Government bailed out banks in 2008, and then as those banks, instructed to repay the taxpayer, actually ended up using “a sizeable chunk of the £11 billion earmarked for ‘consumer relief’” paying vast sums to “nonprofits picked from a list created by the federal government… a lot of them were liberal favourites [that] use their funds for liberal priorities like voter registration and lobbying state, local, and federal government”. He shows in his book how some of these companies, such as Airbnb, Disney, Marriott and Apple, snuggle up to dictatorships such as China and Saudi Arabia all while trying to indemnify themselves with virtue through the woke racket. To Ramaswamy, it’s a “scam”, plain and simple. “It’s easier to post a black square on your Instagram account [as users did to support the Black Lives Matter movement] than it is to condemn human rights abuses committed against, say, Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang province. But “the thing that pushed me over the edge” was the reaction to an article he wrote in The Wall Street Journal, published a week after the Jan 6 2021 Capitol Hill riots, “that reflected some of my views as a citizen and legal scholar”. It argued that Silicon Valley technology companies “co-opted” by Congress to “do through the back door what the government cannot directly accomplish under the constitution” should be treated as state actors. As such, they violated the first amendment in banning certain forms of speech. “That caused three advisers to my company to resign within 48 hours of that piece being published, and to me that was my final wake-up call to make a choice, and so I made that choice.” He couldn’t speak out on issues he now felt were urgent while also doing right by his company. It was a case for his own argument: business and pleasure may mix; business and public politics do not. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertain...pc=U531&cvid=829879a429ac4b63a2bcf071ee45e066
