About taking money away from subsidies for the poor to give taxes for the rich, would you like to comment on this scenario which I happen to know very well.

My nephew has Down's. He's been very well looked after until now despite spending a lot of time in and out of children's hospitals. His mum is a gp, his dad owned a business. Both of them are now too old and weak to carry on. Luckily, tgeir local government picks up the tab for his continued care. I also know two more similar case for 25 years. I cannot stress enough the importance of educational support and social care for all governments regardless of party politics.

Very entertaining

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fesf2-PjdPo

1 hour ago, Woosh said:

About taking money away from subsidies for the poor to give taxes for the rich, would you like to comment on this scenario which I happen to know very well.

My nephew has Down's. He's been very well looked after until now despite spending a lot of time in and out of children's hospitals. His mum is a gp, his dad owned a business. Both of them are now too old and weak to carry on. Luckily, tgeir local government picks up the tab for his continued care. I also know two more similar case for 25 years. I cannot stress enough the importance of educational support and social care for all governments regardless of party politics.

I agree with you about your nephew. He should, and will be looked after properly by any government in the UK.

There is of course as you know, no proposal to cut spending on folk such as your family member, He is an innocent fellow who will always need looking after in a proper and kind fashion. No one proposes anything other than that such people should be fully funded for all their care needs. And absolutely right too. On the other hand, all these twenty somethings who since covid , have started declaring themselves 'Prone to anxiety and depression', and demand an enhanced income under PIP, should be sent straight out of the door to earn their own living.

I don't have the figures to hand right now, but there are huge numbers who have done this in the last two or three years and the money being thrown at these useless, idle lumps of worthlessness, is huge. There are Youtube channels advising them how to guarantee acceptance for PIP, by telling them what to say to mimic the symptoms of illness. We have a large number of scammers claiming support.

This ballooning of mental health and anxiety patients among the young only exists in the UK. Nowhere else is has it. This demonstrates that it is caused by gaming a feeble system - mostly that since covid the tribunals or bodies which decided these matters before with a proper expert examination and discussion no longer happen like that. You simply apply online.

It is my opinion that we used to have a scam claimant here on the forum. I am sure you know who I mean, He used to boast that he had not worked for twenty years, and made it his business to harass and abuse the representatives of the tax payer who got in the way of his freebies. This is a despicable thing in my opinion. Going back more than eighty years, no one in my family ever claimed a penny in unemployment or sickness benefit. They got up and went to work and saved for their retirement. We should be encouraging that, but we don't because if you just give up and claim, the state will now just pay you when you make a claim for a lifetime of PIP on the Internet. When such people become old, the state automatically picks up the tab for their elderly care.

Contrast that with the way my friend, a retired Major in the Army who served as a doctor looking after our troops, before becoming a consultant anaesthetist in the NHS, has had his entire life savings stripped from him over the last four years to pay his wife's care home costs. He does not complain, but he is now down to about £24,000 pounds. A whole life of service at a high level, and he is pretty much penniless before he gets any financial help. We pay wasters a fortune and we strip money from those who did the right thing. He was paying about £1600 a week for his wife's care. They are still bothering him about the fact that his poor wife owns half the house he lives in. They want that from him too.

Your nephew is safe and always will be.

By the way - government does not give taxes to the rich.

On the contrary, the rich pay vast amounts of money to the state. If some of that is reduced, they are not being given anything.

They are just not be robbed quite so badly.

It was a typo. I meant to write tax cuts. I am tired after a day spent trimming trees with a small chainsaw. Here in France, local government employ lots more people than when I was young. Still, trees, lawns, hedges and flower beds are well kept. Plenty of sport facilities in comparison. Taxes are of course higher. Do I prefer it? It's a yes.

Heard the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood on the radio this morning. She was speaking about the persecution of Jews in Britain.

The context of the discussion was of course the latest violent terror attack on two Jewish men who were stabbed in North London yesterday by a Somalian maniac, in a deliberate, sectarian, terror attack.

She was very good, which is quite unusual in this government. Decisive, firm and committed to dealing with the explosion of hatred and violence directed at Jewish people.

BBC News

What we know about the double stabbing in Golders Green,...

Two Jewish men have been stabbed in Golders Green, north London, an attack police have declared a terrorist incident.

There is a very obvious reason that this violence and abuse has blossomed in this country so that it is now normalised for Jewish people to go about in fear. It is the mass importation of Islamism which happened alongside mass migration.

Shabana Mahmood spoke movingly about her disgust at the fact that her, 'Jewish brothers and sisters were living in fear.'

She is a Muslim. The problem is not people like her - it is people who are from a culture of Islamist extremists.

We did nothing to screen out such people at the borders. They are being brought ashore in lifeboats and border patrol vessels by the tens of thousands every year, un-screened, un-vetted and unsupervised.

Seventy-five percent of the security services work is dealing with Islamists, but it seems to me that the focus is more reaction than decisive prevention.

When it becomes commonplace on the streets of London for protesters to cry out, 'Globalise the Intifada', or calling out on Palestinian protests in their thousands about 'Jihad', they are explicitly inciting and supporting terrorism. People expressing support for violence must be arrested at once and dealt with severely. Calls to globalise the Intifada' and promotion of Jihad are not protected by our tradition of 'free speech'. They are an open incitement to violence, and they have been happening in front of police at protests for years now, usually with little or no reaction. For far too long, police have been afraid to act against the obvious criminality of a section of our society which has grown like a cancer among us. Extremist, incompatible, Islamic fundamentalism and criminality.

Shabana Mahmood is an excellent minister. There should be more like her.

Edited April 30Apr 30 by Tony1951

‘The national debt is now larger than the economy’: Watchdog marks 100% of GDP milestone for $39 trillion burden

https://fortune.com/2026/04/30/national-debt-larger-than-economy-gdp-ratio-100-percent/

On 19/03/2026 at 18:41, jonathan.agnew said:

Speaking of which, used to plink rabbits (at earlier attavistic time) with 22 weirauch, lethal out to 50m, but only with very clean shot, what do you use?

While I was out shooting tonight, I remembered your reference to your Weirauch. I usually use .22 Long Rifle - preferring the 1080 feet per second, 40 grain, hollow point bullets. Eley or CCI. But I also have a powerful air rifle on my certificate. It has to be held in secure circumstances like any firearm. It is a Webley Axsor, pre-charged one. It is a bugger to pump up. The cylinder is pumped up to 200 atmospheres and it really wacks the rabbits out to 70 yards. Muzzle velocity is 900 feet per second which is about twice that of an ordinary air rifle, so you get a much flatter trajectory, which makes for a far more humane result in the field where rabbits present themselves at different ranges. It also hits so hard that you get instant kills.

Anyway - I was doing some adjustments to the telescopic sight to get the zero in at 45 yards and after some adjustment, I got this group of three shots at 45 yards. The squares on the paper are 5mm and the bullet holes are 5.5mm. Two shots went through the same hole and all the shots touch each other. I was resting on a tree mind you - I can't shoot like that freehand.

Stcok photo of a webley axsor - not mine. It was sold in the Uk as a standard legal power air rifle and would deliver a hundred shots between mammoth pump up sessions, but it is easily taken beyond the ordinary legal power if you have it on a firearms certificate. Mine has a silencer on it, and the stock is better - a darker shade of walnut, and in better condition. I fired 20 shots tonight and the cylinder below the barrel which holds the air went down by 50 atmospheres. Being tuned for almost three times the power it eats the air in the tank. I had to do 65 pumps with my high pressure stirrup pump before I put it away in the safe again. Funny thing is, these kinds of airguns are twice the price of a proper rifle chambered for .22LR.

Now that I am using this one again I have ordered some proper bullet shaped ammo for it. They don;t usually work out of the ordinary powered air rifles, but I am hoping they will shoot and group properly. These will retain their velocity much better than the ordinary air gun slugs which have a higher air resistance. I only ordered a hundred of these 20 grain ones to test them out.

Edited Tuesday at 21:191 day by Tony1951