Check out the latest
@MoneyBox
Live where we have a (surprisingly?) good time answering your tax/Budget questions with Kirsty Stone from
@PrivateOfficeHQ
& Elsa Littlewood from
@bdoaccountant
I also stop people in the rain to demand they do my tax quiz…
DPD courier at my door, speaking under his breath like a spy: “The parcel’s in the van. It says ‘drum-kit’ on the box. I wanted to warn you and not ruin Christmas.” Then he carried it round to my garage to hide it.
Hero. HERO.
I was just talking to a primary school teacher who is going into school early all this week to make 90 rounds of toast every day so that Year 6 have breakfast before their
#SATs
. Teachers are heroes.
Now I have a son in high school, I know that the brands the teens currently love best are Berghaus and North Face. I wanted to look like a teenage vampire, the current kids want to look like 40 year old hillwalkers.
Email from my boys’ school about World Book Day. Because of the cost of living “instead of coming to school in costume, we are having a ‘Get Comfy and Read’ day”. Home clothes and something comfy.
I love it! The MONEY the parents will save and the WASTE that will be avoided
Just held the door for a man because he was carrying a small child and he didn’t even acknowledge me and now I hate him with a fury I should probably save for war criminals
One thing I find very odd about the inheritance tax debate is this idea that it is ‘wrong to tax money twice’. That happens all the time in our system. I’ve just paid VAT on a chocolate bar that I bought with my taxed income.
I don’t understand why my energy account is £1200+ in credit and they are telling me I need to increase my monthly payment. And I understand more about energy bills than a lot of people.
DPD courier at my door, speaking under his breath like a spy: “The parcel’s in the van. It says ‘drum-kit’ on the box. I wanted to warn you and not ruin Christmas.” Then he carried it round to my garage to hide it.
Hero. HERO.
‘A child was “pretending to eat out of an empty lunchbox” because they did not qualify for free school meals and did not want their friends to know there was no food at home.’
I am on a Facebook group about surviving energy poverty where people share tips like ‘leave a bowl of water in the sun with a black bin liner on top and it will be warm enough to wash up in later’. Things are very desperate for a lot of people.
Very tired today of reading news reports detailing the names, roles and history of the men lost in the yacht accident only to add ‘and their wives and a daughter’ as if an afterthought.
I do think that the older generation’s ongoing belief that they worked hard to buy homes and younger people must be prioritising phones and other nonsense is behind the lack of attention. When we cover this, we always get emails about ‘I lived on beans, they should too’ etc
These remarkable graphs from
@jburnmurdoch
, who I spoke to at 8.43 on
@BBCr4today
, show monumental, sudden, devastating social changes, which have civilisational consequences
It is just astonishing how little attention the complete transformation of young adulthood gets
Ended up in a&e today with a (thankfully not actually seriously) ill child. Medical professional who looked after us isn’t just working on the bank holiday - it is her baby’s first birthday too.
And she gave my son an Easter egg ‘because the medicine is a bit yucky’.
#ThanksNHS
My 8 year old is crying because I told him he has to go to bed before kickoff tonight. Other parents - what are you doing? Shall we just have a nation of knackered kids tomo?
My house is full of 13 year old boys & they are playing hide and seek. I was drinking a cup of tea on my sofa when - about 7 minutes after I sat down - one erupted from underneath the beanbag next to me & screamed “I WIN, MEATBAGS” & I want to book into a hotel until September
The good news is that if I want to talk to a helpful human, I can just sit on hold for 2 hours because, once again, they are experiencing ‘higher than normal call volumes’
I’ve seen numerous people complaining that tonight’s big story is behind a paywall. Do you have ANY idea how expensive and time consuming a major investigation is? And how many lawyers and fact checkers are involved?
Listen to me, parents of Y6s. A lot of you will be looking round potential high schools in the next few weeks. Ask the right questions. It’s not about pastoral care or GCSE outcomes. You *need to know* if they supply the ingredients for food tech
Dear PRs, When you invite me to an event without specifying it is in London and just assume I live in London too, it just looks really out of touch and capital-centric. I am very proud to live in the north - and no, I don't mean north London.
If you’re interested, here is a File On 4 investigation I carried out in 2020 with
@meisel_anna
and
@Gailchampion3
into Doug Barrowman’s businesses and tax schemes
Next year I really must remember to take the whole of December off to concentrate on my three sons’ school events - so I have a hope of knowing exactly what nativity/home clothes/tombola prize/Christmas dinner day/Christmas jumper day/pantomime trip is happening every single day.
By the way, remember the other day when I asked if I might be genuinely immune to covid because I hadn’t caught it and you all said no? Well I have covid. So everyone was right.
“I don’t want to be told how to cook or what I should buy for 30p, or ways to keep warm, or the best tricks to save electricity. Why do they think they can be poor better than I can? I’ve done it for a lifetime.”
It’s genuinely baffling to me why private equity should have any role in the care we provide to our most vulnerable children. Of all the sectors that should not be about profit, this is surely an obvious one
Ofsted has published new data showing how children's homes have become a huge, money-spinning business. If you are squeamish about these things, look away now. 🧵
Remember, the most important thing is not all this political drama, it’s that inflation is at a 40-year high, energy bills are likely to hit £3k a year and the Lloyds boss says most customers only have £500 in savings.
Some news that is both personal and professional. I am so incredibly happy to have been made the new permanent
@Moneybox
Live presenter. Working with its new producer
@SarahRogersNews
and fantastic editor
@JessQuayle
, I am really excited about the programme's direction
There’s a tweet that’s gone viral about how the media didn’t cover the Post Office scandal - but it has been. Drama is a powerful tool for making people care but passionate journalists have been working at this for years
After watching
#BatesVsThePostOffice
I still can’t believe how many innocent people suffered at the hands of the Post office. I’ve been working with many of those people for over 3 years now Justice still has not been granted.
In my opinion, parents should get a statutory extra 2 days off when the kids go back to school so they can have a haircut, hoover the car, go to the gym and sit peacefully for FIVE DAMN MINUTES. We could call it 'feeling like a real human again leave' or 'FLARHAL'.
You need to build some savings for emergencies. Think of it as a ‘f***-off fund’, the money you need to escape a bad boss, a bad boyfriend or girlfriend, any bad situation.
On a train and honestly, why do so many people think it’s okay to play music out loud? I cannot begin to understand an adult who doesn’t think about other people even when they are sitting next to so many
I think it’s a BIT much for Oasis to warn touts against inflating ticket prices only for the selling website to hike prices for ‘in demand’ tix. They were always going to be in demand.
I am a few minutes behind the PM talking to
@BBCLeeds
. But please please be really clear - what Liz Truss said about ‘the maximum’ bill being £2,500 DOESN’T mean it’s an All You Can Heat buffet offer this winter. If you use more than an average home you WILL pay more.
This is not just to make sure all the children have eaten, it’s so they can go in early and relax before their tests. But it still makes the teachers heroes
I genuinely enjoy twitter. But y’day I tweeted a fairly simple argument (that investigative journalism is expensive and journalists cannot work for free) & I’ve had a pile on of different furious people, from supporters of the man accused to endless whataboutery. It’s not fun.
This, by
@neilhimself
almost 10 years ago, v relevant: “Round the world we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today”
Wow. Analysts Cornwall Insight predicts energy bills will rise to £4,266 in January for a typical household. You may as well ask some people to pay in unicorns, they won’t have it and can’t get it.
Sorry PRs, but genuinely the only way to guarantee I read a press release is to send a follow-up 20 minutes later that says: URGENT Do NOT use the previous press release 😂
Advice for scholars: next time you lecture on Kant and revolutions at “Downing” (
@DarwinCollege
) Cambridge, make sure your hair is neatly tied and that you’re not blonde. Or else your research impact will be on the
@spectator
libido section.
My supermarket is inviting me to review my recent purchase. “We’d love to hear what you thought of your purchase.” It was 20g of thyme. I haven’t bothered to have THOUGHTS about it.
My dog just did a proper running backwards and forwards, urgently barking, just like Lassie saying there are children trapped in the well. His ball was trapped under the sofa.
What’s a tiny, relatively unimportant modern innovation that has made an outsized improvement to your life?
Mine is audiobooks - I have so much less time to sit and read as an adult but I soak up books on the go instead.
I love that the tone police are now marching into my mentions to tell me that holding the door should be reward in itself/hate is a bad emotion/they’ve never rolled their eyes at anyone ever/he probably just learned his house was on fire 😂
6 years ago today I was breathless at having 20 seconds (literally 20 seconds!) on
@Moneybox
. Today I present the weekly Wednesday programme. Good to remember what a massive deal that was for me just a few years ago and what a privilege it is to be part of such a loved show.
I’m surprised at the number of people replying to this to object to *all* tax. I suppose in that universe we just have to live in armoured bunkers and never use roads or hospitals or schools or law enforcement or libraries or state pensions. I mean, it’s one perspective.
Only around 1 in every 25 estates pay inheritance tax. And yet somehow this is so little understood that millions of people who will come nowhere near the threshold believe it will affect their loved ones after their death.
I do a lot of interviews about the energy crisis where I am asked for tips and I always make the point that many people have already done all that stuff. This article really highlights to me the importance of not poorsplaining to people who have been doing it for years
A lot of people responding to this pointing out that we rarely hear the names of migrants who drown at sea. Which is absolutely a true point but doesn’t take away from the inherent misogyny in the current reporting, which is what I am presently drawing attention to.
I’m a
#HumanistBecause
my atheism describes what I *don’t* believe in, Humanism describes what I do believe in - respecting and connecting with others, science and reason, and belief that we can build a better society together
It's my middle son's birthday today, which means it's the anniversary of the greatest moment in my life. Not his birth - although that definitely ranks highly - but the day I had the PERFECT comment in the PERFECT moment.
Good to see
@DeborahMeaden
on the website today, pushing for businesses to go further and faster on climate change and highlighting consumer power to make that happen (you can hear more of her passion over 4 series of the Big
#GreenMoneyShow
btw!)