Oli Henman

🚨 Today’s Times business page tells you almost everything about Britain’s broken economic model. At the top: lobbyists demand tax-free shopping for wealthy overseas visitors, supposedly delivering an £11.5 billion boost. In the middle: a global bond sell-off, driven by Trump’s war, rising oil prices, inflation, quantitative tightening and vast AI borrowing, is repackaged as pressure on Britain to cut public spending. At the bottom: more than $100 billion of takeover offers as further British companies prepare to pass into foreign ownership. This is the model: 👉 Tax concessions for international wealth. 👉 Austerity and unaffordable borrowing for the public realm. 👉 British companies, infrastructure and productive assets sold abroad. Buying an existing British company is not the same as investing in new British productive capacity. Ownership, profits, intellectual property and strategic decisions can all move overseas, while Britain retains the workers, liabilities and physical risks. Brexit accelerated this fire sale by weakening growth, depressing valuations, devaluing sterling and erecting barriers around British businesses. Yet each overseas takeover is still celebrated as inward investment. Global Britain was never about Britain conquering global markets. It meant Britain itself being sold cheap to the globe.

✅ Always read beyond the headline. The Times declares: *Net zero rush fails to cut energy bills.* The honest headline would be: *Britain’s broken electricity market prevents consumers benefiting fully from cheaper renewable power.* Yet the article confirms (see continuation in next tweet) that gas used to set Britain’s electricity price about 90% of the time and now does so around 60%, with a further fall expected by 2030. Even Civitas’s own report author says bills can be reduced without prejudicing net zero, through better planning, regulatory reform and intelligent use of Britain’s energy resources. So the real story is not that renewable energy has failed. It is that Britain’s broken market still allows expensive gas to determine the price even when cheaper renewable electricity is generating and governments have loaded infrastructure and policy costs onto bills. Fix the market. Build the grid and storage. Stop using net zero as a scapegoat for decades of political failure.

🚨 THE HIDDEN COST OF BREXIT This is totally staggering. Starmer’s UK-US medicines deal commits Britain to raising the net price the NHS pays for new medicines by 25% and, according to this analysis, spending around £14 BILLION more annually on new medicines by 2036. In return, Britain gets zero US tariffs on pharmaceutical exports — for three years. Why could America exert this pressure? Brexit. Inside the EU, trade negotiations are conducted collectively while individual countries determine medicines prices. Washington cannot simply threaten one member state’s exports to force its health service to pay American drug companies more. Britain left that protection and faced Trump’s tariff threats alone. This is what “taking back control” looks like when 68 million people negotiate against 340 million instead of negotiating alongside 450 million Europeans. Sovereignty without leverage isn’t power, it’s economic suicide.

😡 Another right-wing think tank adds together every pound invested in renewables, nuclear and the electricity grid, ignores the assets and energy those investments produce, and presents the total as a bill dumped on households. Britain must upgrade an ageing grid whether we reach net zero or not. The real waste is paying wind farms to switch off bc governments failed to build the transmission network, then burning expensive imported gas instead. Fossil-fuel dependence has already cost Britain around £183 billion in four years and households are now facing another gas-driven price rise. Energy security requires investment. The question is whether we build British infrastructure or remain permanently exposed to volatile foreign gas.