14/09/2026
🇬🇧 MONDAY MADNESS 🇬🇧
Just another week of mayhem in the UK… let’s dive in 👇
💷 INHERITANCE TAX: YES MORE BLOODY TAX
Reform has ruled out abolishing inheritance tax. Rupert Lowe has made Restore Britain’s position pretty clear:
Restore will abolish it. In full. For everyone.
You work. You earn. You pay tax.
You buy a house. You pay tax.
You invest. You pay tax.
You build a business or a farm. You pay tax.
Then you die… and the taxman can come back for another slice.
Your life’s work should be yours to pass on to your family, not another opportunity for the state to take a cut.
Inheritance tax is one of the most unpopular taxes in Britain, so why are Reform really supporting it?
What do you think? Should you be able to pass on what you’ve spent a lifetime building to those you’ve built it for, without the Government taking another bite?
📜 WE’RE CERTAIN THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR NEXT STORY…
Reform has just received a record-breaking £72 million from two crypto billionaires. £36m each from Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne. It’s the biggest political donation haul in British history.
The donations are legal under the rules currently in force, but Reform is already under police investigation over separate allegations concerning political donations and foreign funding. Reform denies wrongdoing.
If you need £72 million to win an election, aren’t alarm bells ringing that your party and policies aren’t strong enough?
🗞️ NEXT STORY…
Meanwhile, the Government is pushing changes to political donations through the Representation of the People Bill, including a £100,000 annual cap on donations from certain overseas electors and a ban on crypto donations. And the interesting bit…
The Government intends the changes to apply retrospectively from 25 March 2026.
Angela Rayner has said the proposed rules could potentially catch Reform’s £72m donations.
Nothing to do with our story above…just a coincidence?
We’ll let you decide. 🤔
🏛️ ANGELA RAYNER: DOUBLE FEATURE! LOCAL GOVERNMENT… AGAIN
Remember the great local government reorganisation?
Well… it’s been reorganised. 😂
The Government has now withdrawn four proposed reorganisations and paused reviews of 16 more areas after receiving updated legal advice.
And guess what?
Lancashire is one of them.
The Government says the plans need to be reviewed to make sure the process is “robust” and lawful.
Which raises a fairly obvious question:
How did we get this far before checking that?
And if all these changes were supposed to save money and make councils work better, how much has already been spent getting us to this point?
Anyone?
🚨 PROTESTS, POLICING & DOUBLE STANDARDS?
After last weekend’s Portsmouth protests, police returned to the city this weekend as face covering restrictions were enforced.
A 76-year-old man was arrested at Saturday’s anti-immigration protest in Portsmouth for concealing his identity.
What makes this unique?
He was wearing a burqa.
Now, to be clear, wearing a burqa isn’t illegal. The arrest came because police had imposed temporary powers restricting face coverings at the protest, and police said those powers applied equally to everyone.
Portsmouth has around 10,000 Muslim residents, 1 in 20 residents identifies as Muslim.
And there were three arrests on Saturday, but ONLY one was for concealing identity under the new face-covering powers.
So question…
If a Muslim woman wearing a niqab or burqa had been attending the protest, would the same rules have been applied to her?
The police say so, do you believe them?
He’s due in court next month, let’s see how that plays out.
🏫 DARTFORD GRAMMAR: A VERY DIFFERENT SCHOOL DEMOGRAPHIC
A statistic that stopped us in our tracks. At Dartford Grammar School for Girls, the proportion of pupils recorded as White British has fallen to just 7% in a decade.
Across grammar schools in England, the White British proportion has fallen from 66% to 44% over the same period. The debate around grammar schools, tutoring, admissions and who gets access is clearly a complicated one.
But when the numbers change this dramatically, surely it’s worth asking how? And perhaps more importantly is the current system giving every child an equal chance of getting through the door?
🍺🍷 GOOD YEAR FOR WINE… NOT SO MUCH FOR B**R
Some good news for the w**e drinkers.
English vineyards are expecting an exceptional 2026 vintage after a warm, dry growing season. 🍷
Unfortunately for the b**r drinkers, barley isn’t having quite such a good time. Barley yields are reportedly around 19% below the five-year average, putting pressure on supplies of brewing quality grain. 🍺
No more cauliflower cheese?! Cauliflower is apparently struggling too. 🥦
The extreme heat and lack of rain have hit British brassicas hard, with growers warning of shortages and more imports being needed.
So there we have it.
W**e: thriving.
B**r: struggling.
British farmers? Still being squeezed from every direction.
With extreme weather hitting crops, rising costs and changes to inheritance tax putting further pressure on family farms, isn’t it time we stopped taking British farming for granted and started asking what we’re actually doing to support the people who feed us.
Food security shouldn’t be an afterthought. 🇬🇧
📊 POLL CHECK: RUPERT IS OUTPOLLING ZACK
More in Common asked voters whether they thought party leaders were doing a good/bad job.
Zack Polanski:
Good score 15%
Bad score 43%
And now Zack is officially standing in Keir Starmer’s old Holborn & St Pancras seat, with the by-election taking place on 8 October. He obviously fancies his chances or he wouldn’t be standing… let’s hope common sense prevails.
💷 BRITAIN’S BORROWING BILL JUST GOT MORE EXPENSIVE
Britain sold £4.25 billion of 30-year government debt last week at a yield of more than 5.8% - the highest comparable rate since 1998.
Britain has borrowed around £130 billion over the last 12 months.
To put that into perspective, if £130bn were borrowed at 5.8%, that’s roughly £7.5 billion a year in interest.
Now, that’s an illustration rather than the Government’s actual interest bill, our borrowing is made up of different bonds at different rates.
But £7.5 billion is an enormous amount of money. That’s roughly the entire estimated cost of the proposed £7.5bn White Horse reservoir in Oxfordshire. It’s also around the scale of a year’s NHS capital investment.
Imagine what £7.5bn could do for hospitals, schools, roads, water infrastructure or other projects Britain desperately needs.
Instead, it’s money that could be going on interest. And the bill doesn’t disappear. Someone still has to pay it… who?
The men coming from small boats? The taxpayer? We can all make an educated guess can’t we.
🤖 WE’RE NOW TALKING ABOUT BANNING SUPER AI
A Labour MP has introduced a Bill to prohibit the development, deployment and operation of artificial superintelligence systems.
Yes. The same Government that is already using its own AI tool, Consult, that has been used to analyse more than 50,000 responses to the Government’s review of the water sector. Another Government AI tool, Redbox, has been used by civil servants to summarise documents and draft briefing notes.
So apparently we’re stuck between:
“AI is incredibly useful. Let’s use it in Government.”
But also:
“What if AI gets too powerful? Let’s ban it.”
It’s only a Private Member’s Bill at this stage, and it hasn’t even reached its second reading yet, that’s scheduled for November.
Meanwhile, King Charles is hosting AI bosses from companies including Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic this week to discuss the risks and how AI should be developed responsibly. Left hand not talking to the right? 😌
🍿 A PCC WALKS INTO A THEATRE…
Norfolk’s new Reform Police and Crime Commissioner Colin Sutton has announced a 130-date national theatre tour next year.
Oh no he didn’t. Oh yes he did.
The Police and Crime Commissioner voted in just 59 days ago.
His live show is based on his career as a former Metropolitan Police detective and his work bringing serial killer Levi Bellfield to justice.
Was this something Norfolk voters knew about when they were voting for him?
If you’re standing for election as the person responsible for overseeing policing across an entire county, surely voters deserve to know if you’re planning to spend much of the following year travelling around the country performing 130 theatre dates?
He says it won’t interfere with his PCC duties and will be in his own time. How much time does he get off?!
130 dates. Plus travel. Plus running a police force. The joke writes itself, sadly at tax payers expense. Again.
🎬 AND FINALLY…
London has a new statue. Lady in Blue has now taken her place on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.
The bronze sculpture allegedly depicts a contemporary woman and is described as a modern “everywoman”, representing today’s Londoners…. Accurate representation?
In 2020, the Churchill statue was heavily attacked and covered during the 2020 protests, so here’s the double standard again.
When historic figures don’t fit the modern narrative, we’re told we should question, contextualise or even remove their place in our public spaces.
But then we commission entirely new statues to represent the values and identities of?
So which is it?
The good news is it’s not permanent. The bad news is it’s staying until 2028.
Just another week in Britain. 🇬🇧😂
📢 What have we missed?
What’s stopped you in your tracks this week?
We’d love to hear it 👇🏼
