Loving grandad of seven grandsons, one gone to heaven early. Campaigning for reduction in infant pedestrian deaths on UK road’s. Comments my own.
Weybridge
Joined July 2011
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Richard Thorold retweeted
Cette image résume tout de l’attentat a Cracovie elle est glaçante.
Un fonctionnaire de police, à genoux sur le pavé de Cracovie, radio à la main, l’arme de l’assaillant posée à ses côtés.
C’est Jakub Kulik, ancien parachutiste de la 6e Brigade aéroportée, devenu policier. Face à un homme armé d’une carabine, d’un gilet pare-balles et d’un casque, il n’avait que son pistolet. Il a avancé malgré tout.
Trois impacts de balle. Il reste néanmoins en position, jusqu’à ce que la scène soit sécurisée.
Un homme qui a accompli son devoir au moment où cela était nécessaire, au prix de sa propre intégrité.
L’image dit ce que les mots peinent parfois à exprimer : le courage silencieux, la responsabilité tenue jusqu’au bout, le prix payé pour protéger d’autres vies. Sans lui, le bilan du 7 novembre aurait
été plus lourd encore.
Respect éternel.
Pray for Pologne. 🇵🇱 🙏
Richard Thorold retweeted
For the many UK politicians @UKLabour and journalists @BBC who don't know anything about UK trade, here are the highlights:
1. The UK is now predominantly a service exporter. 57% of UK exports are services, which are not affected by EU 'red tape'.
2. UK goods exports have dropped from almost 70% of our total exports in 1997 to just 43% in 2025. This trend began long before Brexit and is tied to Net Zero mandates, high UK energy prices, and EV mandates.
3. Machinery and transport goods, such as cars and aircraft parts, are 42% of all UK goods exports. This is by far the UK's largest export sector, although it is also falling. It was 50% of UK exports in 2000. But if the UK joins the EU's CBAM, companies in this sector will see their imported material costs rise, making their exports even less competitive.
4. Chemicals are the UK's second-largest export sector. They account for 19% of UK goods exports, but this share is shrinking due to UK and EU energy costs and Net Zero regulations. These will increase if the UK joins the EU ETS.
5. Miscellaneous Manufactures account for 11% of UK goods exports. This is still the UK's third-largest export sector, even though it includes many goods the UK no longer makes because of our high Carbon taxes, which will increase if the UK signs up to the EU's even higher ETS on November 20th.
6. Fuels account for 9% of UK exports. This is still the UK's 4th largest goods export sector, even though the current and previous governments are/were trying to destroy it with bans on new exploration and ultra-high taxes.
7. Material Manufactures account for 8% of UK goods exports. This sector includes iron, steel, aluminium, ceramics, and glass manufacturing - industries that have gone, or are going, out of business in the UK because of high UK energy costs, which will rise if the UK joins the EU ETS.
8. These five sectors make up almost 90% of UK exports. The other 5 industry sectors are insignificant. But the government and our journalists think the UK is New Zealand and that the only goods we export are food and live animals to the EU. We don't! UK food and live animal exports to the EU were just 1.3% of the UK's total exports.
9. The government is about to sacrifice all of the export industries listed above to slightly reduce the IMPORT costs of a handful of Supermarkets, at least two of which are privately owned German companies.
These savings will not be passed on to UK shoppers because the government has also increased wages again, and supermarket energy costs will increase if we join the EU's ETS.
10. UK exports of food and live animals will not increase because we are paying farmers to not produce them, this has nothing to do with EU red tape. Instead we are paying farmers to plant trees and wildflowers or plaster their farmland with solar panels. (54% of UK electricity is coming from gas today, 12% from solar and 3% from wind.)
11. Write to your MP and tell him to #StoptheReset.
If you don't stop this, don't complain when all of our goods export industries have closed because of EU higher carbon taxes, EU higher carbon import tariffs, and the cost of complying with the EU's new packaging and process regulations.
Richard Thorold retweeted
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Remembrance Sunday
Richard Thorold retweeted
You gave your tomorrows so we could live ours today. I Thank you ❤️💙
#RemembranceSunday
#LestWeForget
Richard Thorold retweeted
Ten cajt je ABSOLUTNÍ BADASS!!!
Vy to asi nevidíte, ale on vědomě vyměnil svůj život za to, že toho útočníka aspoň co nejvíc zraní.
Bylo mu jasný, že jde v hadrech s pistolkou, proti někomu s dlouhou a ve Fool gearu a tak nemá smysl moc taktizovat a prostě se rozhodl rozdat co největší damage jaký stihne.
Absolutně chladnokrevně a přesně vysypal co měl i když sám inkasoval a jak viděl, že mu to vyšlo, tak se ještě stihl aspoň částečně sám ošetřit.
To je přesně podle vojenskýho - Když jsi jedinej kdo může, tak musíš!
Kolik životů zachránil, výměnou za svůj?
Velitelskej materiál.
Doufám, že to dá.
Dnes se všichni pomodlete.
Richard Thorold retweeted
"We were never the establishment. We were opposed to big government, to fashionable opinion within the beltway, and to the endless round of so-called liberal solutions to problems the liberals themselves had created.
As Ron once put it: the nine most dangerous words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”. As usual, he was right.
Ronald Reagan helped America – and so America could help the world - because he rejected that approach.
He believed, and he never stopped proclaiming, that the talents of a nation, not the wisdom of bureaucracy, forge a country’s greatness. Let our children grow tall – he urged - then they can reach out to raise others higher too."
― Speech paying tribute to Ronald Reagan (2002)
Richard Thorold retweeted
Boy George. Helen Mirren. Jon Voight. Jerry O’Connell.
Not one of them is Jewish.
Every one of them stands with Israel, out loud.
You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist.
You just need a spine.
THANK YOU❣️ 🇮🇱
Richard Thorold retweeted
In 1965 Malaysia kicked Singapore out of the Malaysian federation, and Tunku Abdul Rahman thought he had won. He had dumped a port city with no oil, no farmland, no fresh water, and two and a half million people crammed onto an island smaller than Lake Tahoe. Sixty years later Singapore's GDP per capita runs past $84,000 while Malaysia limps along under $12,000. The man who got expelled built the richest patch of dirt in Asia. The man who did the expelling built the New Economic Policy.
Let's study what happened.
Start with what Singapore lacked. No resources. No hinterland. No domestic market worth the name. By every theory that says a nation needs raw materials to prosper, Singapore should have starved. Instead Lee Kuan Yew made his country a place where capital felt safe. Low tariffs. Easy entry for foreign firms. Courts that enforced contracts instead of shaking down the parties. Corporate tax dropped to 17 percent, personal rates capped at 22, no tax on most capital gains. Money flowed in because money is not stupid.
Malaysia chose the opposite. The New Economic Policy was racial central planning dressed up as fairness. Bumiputera quotas demanded that ethnic Malays hold 30 percent of corporate equity, that government contracts favor Malay-owned firms, that universities admit by race rather than ability. The state picked winners by bloodline. Predictably, the productive Chinese and Indian minorities took their capital and brains elsewhere, much of it to (where else) Singapore. You distort prices and incentives long enough, the talented people leave. They always leave.
Lee Kuan Yew was not perfect. The man jailed opponents, sued journalists into poverty, and ran a soft authoritarian state with a fondness for caning. He banned chewing gum, which is the kind of thing a control freak does when he runs out of real problems. Singapore is no libertarian paradise. The government owns Temasek and GIC, sovereign wealth funds sitting on close to a trillion dollars combined, and public housing covers 80 percent of the population. Plenty there for a free market thinker to dislike.
But here is the lesson Malaysia missed. Lee understood the difference between an interventionist government and a parasitic one. Singapore's state stayed mostly out of the price system. It kept inflation low, the currency credible, the bureaucracy clean, and trade open. Transparency International ranks it the fifth least corrupt country on earth. Malaysia sits at 57th, with a former prime minister, Najib Razak, currently serving time for looting 1MDB to the tune of billions. One country treated public office as a trust. The other treated it as a buffet.
Capital responds to incentives, not slogans. When Singapore guaranteed property rights and kept the rules predictable, Exxon and Shell built refineries, banks set up regional headquarters, and the port became the busiest transshipment hub in the world. When Malaysia told investors that race would override merit and that the rules could change whenever a minister felt like it, the smart money discounted everything by a risk premium. Over fifty years that premium compounds into a $70,000 gap in living standards.
Richard Thorold retweeted
Liam Halligan is one of those strange beasts - a phenomenal brain with enormous curiosity, littl cynicism bags of enthusiasm and always, always a kind word and thoughts for many people around him. You can tell most things about a person by how they treat someone who’s “not important for
their career or advancement”
As well as being a brilliant economist he has straddled the old world of newspapers into this new media arena. He manages to make complicated issues understandable - the opposite of academy-speak and the obscurantist snobs - and he is thoroughly one of us - a man of the people, an Everyman whose fierce intellect is matched by passion for fair play
This is such a loss for @Telegraph and along with @AllisonPearson I have seen so many cancelling subscriptions now
Even in this announcement @LiamHalligan is dignified, or as some of us might say, a proper fella.
The new owners at Telegraph seem hell bent on turning it into an EU light ents rag
Liam and Allison doing any podcast will be massively well received.
If we could have him as chancellor things would be much better too….
I was hoping to be able to announce this in my own time – but the media rumour mill is swirling, I'm being contacted by various reporters and others, and I don't like denying the truth, so ...
I wrote my first "Economic Agenda" column in The Sunday Telegraph 27 years ago, under the editorship of Dominic Lawson – filling-in occasionally during the late-1990s, before being given my own weekly slot from 2003.
Since then, while I've been heavily involved in television, and am perhaps better known as a broadcaster, penning "Economic Agenda" for The Sunday Telegraph each week has been the backbone of my journalistic life.
On Thursday, the @Telegraph rang to tell me my column is being scrapped.
I was asked, and have agreed, to write "Economic Agenda" until the end of November, as per my contract. After that, my Sunday Telegraph column will be no more.
Why this decision has been made, and whether or not my columns were any good, is for others to judge.
All I will say is that, as the first person in my family to attend university, sustaining a weekly column in a leading national newspaper for a quarter of a century has been a source of enormous pride for myself and my family.
Lots of people have been asking me about the future of "Planet Normal" - the hugely-popular Telegraph podcast which I co-created and co-present with the brilliant @AllisonPearson
"Planet Normal" has, over the last 330 weekly episodes, also become a major part of my professional life and my broader identity.
With Allison reportedly leaving the Telegraph as well, there is a lot of speculation about whether or not the podcast will continue to impart "news and views from beyond the bubble" with our usual blend of sharp analysis, humour and occasional outrage !
Well, I am delighted to confirm that Co-Pilot Pearson and myself are deeply committed to our joint podcast – and, above all, to our beloved listeners.
We will, as and when notice periods allow, continue our voyages through space every Thursday – perhaps to "Planet Normal", or maybe to another part of the solar system – so we can "gaze down each week at the madness of Planet Earth", as we have done since the Spring of 2020.
So citizens of Planet Normal, stand ready ! The "rocket-of-right-thinking", the "flying refuge of reasoned views", will soon be launched once again 🚀🪐👨🏭👱♀️🎙️📺
I poured my heart and soul into "Economic Agenda" and "Planet Normal". The Telegraph's decision to scrap them is obviously a huge personal blow. But I will always be grateful for the opportunities the paper has given me.
Above all, I would like to thank the illustrious list of successive Telegraph business editors I've worked with since the late-1990s, many of whom have become and remain good friends - including @Peston @RobertsDan @larmitstead @neilbenet @benjaminmarlow @cg_williams @kamalahmednews @MarkKleinmanSky @jamesrquinn (sorry if I've forgotten anyone, it's been a long time!)
On Friday, even though I almost always write my column from elsewhere, and despite being extremely disappointed by the paper's decision, I decided to go into the Telegraph and write today's column sitting in the newsroom.
I am glad I did - as being at the heart of the paper at such a difficult time allowed for lots of conversations, with everyone from junior production staff to senior reporters and executives, which reminded me that journalism, despite being an industry at the whim of seemingly endless and often brutal commercial and technological upheaval, is not only hugely important to our country, but full of talented, decent people.
See picture below, having just filed my piece, as I was heading out the door ...
Richard Thorold retweeted
Dubai's free zones are the closest thing to a controlled experiment in what happens when you strip government interference down to its skeleton.
The Dubai International Financial Centre operates under English common law, a 0% corporate tax rate, and full foreign ownership. Companies in JAFZA (Jebel Ali Free Zone) move $200 billion in annual trade with customs procedures that would embarrass Singapore for their simplicity. Over 45 distinct free zones now operate inside the UAE, each competing to attract capital by offering something radical: predictable rules and bureaucrats who mostly stay out of your way.
This matters because the alternative is everywhere you look. France's business licensing process averages 66 days. Argentina's capital controls have driven investment offshore for decades. Compare that to a foreign founder who can incorporate in DMCC (Dubai Multi Commodities Centre) in 72 hours with 100% profit repatriation rights intact.
Capital flows to jurisdictions with predictable rules, low regulatory burden, and property rights enforcement. You don't need natural resources. You don't need centuries of institutional tradition. This is what free market economists spent a century arguing, and Dubai demonstrated it.
Free markets create a metropolis out of a desert within 20 years.
Richard Thorold retweeted
This is a big mistake from the Telegraph. @AllisonPearson is one of the most fearless journalists today. She is the Telegraph!
She firmly stood her ground during lockdown despite the fierce pushback and articulates many "elephant in the room" subjects well.
Absolute madness.
Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson is reportedly about to leave the newspaper amid significant job cuts to the newsroom theguardian.com/media/2026/o…
Richard Thorold retweeted
Michael Kitchen and Honeysuckle Weeks in "Foyle's War," excellent WW2 series.
Richard Thorold retweeted
من #وریشه_مرادی، ۴۱ ساله، فعال محیط زیست و زنان به اعدام محکوم شدهام. صدایم باشید!
Richard Thorold retweeted
○ Dijo una vez Margaret Thatcher: “El derecho de un hombre a trabajar como quiera, a gastar lo que gana, a poseer propiedades y a tener al Estado como servidor y no como amo son la esencia de una economía libre, y sobre esa libertad dependen todas nuestras otras libertades.”