Notts County Councillor, Newstead Division. Shadow Cabinet Member for Finance at Notts CC. Newstead Abbey Ward Cllr at GBC. Chair Sherwood Forest Conservatives.
East Midlands, England
Joined February 2017
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Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
White slaves. 🏴🇬🇧
For three hundred years, pirates from Algiers sailed to Britain and Ireland, came ashore at night, and took people from their beds.
Baltimore, 1631. A hundred and seven people gone in one night. At most three ever came home.
Over a million Europeans ended up in chains in North Africa. Nobody bought them. They were stolen.
The kings of Europe paid ransom. For centuries.
In 1816, Britain stopped paying.
Lord Exmouth. Twenty British ships, six Dutch, against one of the strongest fortresses on earth. 27 August 1816. Nine hours. Fifty thousand cannonballs. 128 British sailors killed.
The next day the Dey signed. Every Christian slave freed. 1,083 people walked out of Algiers in one afternoon.
Nobody came for them... Until we did. ⚓🇬🇧💪
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
Update:
In the 27 months since Labour came to power, we've seen;
• Employer National Insurance increased from 13.8% to 15%.
• The employer NI threshold cut from £9,100 to £5,000.
• The freeze on Income Tax and National Insurance thresholds extended to 2031.
• Capital Gains Tax increased from 10% and 20% to 18% and 24%.
• Business Asset Disposal Relief increased from 10% to 14%, then 18% – and now its lifetime limit halved to £500,000.
• Investors’ Relief raised to 18% and its lifetime limit cut from £10 million to £1 million.
• CGT relief on sales to Employee Ownership Trusts halved.
• Carried interest taxation increased and moved into the Income Tax regime.
• Dividend tax rates increased by two percentage points.
• Savings-income tax rates increased by four percentage points.
• Property-income tax rates increased by four percentage points.
• VCT income tax relief cut from 30% to 20%.
• Most unused pension funds brought into the Inheritance Tax net.
• Agricultural and Business Property Relief capped.
• Inheritance Tax thresholds frozen until 2031.
• The non-dom regime replaced with a tougher residence-based system.
• VAT imposed on private school fees.
• Business-rates relief removed from private schools.
• The Stamp Duty surcharge on second homes and buy-to-let raised from 3% to 5%.
• The Furnished Holiday Lettings regime abolished.
• A new annual surcharge on homes worth £2 million or more.
• Pension salary-sacrifice NI relief capped at £2,000 a year.
• The bank surcharge doubled.
• Capital allowances for plant and machinery cut twice.
• Online gaming duty almost doubled.
• The Energy Profits Levy increased and extended, and its investment allowance scrapped.
• Vaping Products Duty brought in and tobacco duties increased above inflation.
• Vehicle Excise Duty increased for many new cars, with electric vehicles brought in.
• A pay-per-mile tax on electric and plug-in hybrid cars legislated for 2028.
• Air Passenger Duty increased.
• Making Tax Digital extended to more landlords and self-employed people.
Together they represent one of the biggest transfers of wealth from households and businesses to the Treasury in decades – with little to show for it in public services.
Whether you're a business owner employing staff, a parent paying school fees, a farmer planning succession, an entrepreneur building wealth or simply someone trying to save for your family’s future...
- You keep less of what you earn.
- You keep less of what you invest.
- You leave less for your family.
Death by a thousand cuts.
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
🚨NEW: A UK bank chief executive, reacting to John Healey's decision to raise the bank's profit surcharge said:
"Taxing the engines of growth to reduce VAT on gherkins is end-of-Rome level of stupidity"
[@FT]
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
For all the talk of today's Budget being a non-event, the scale of the tax squeeze already baked in is massive. Reeves extended the income tax freeze to April 2031. By then, 24% will pay the higher or additional rate compared with 15% in 2021. And Healey left it untouched.
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
Here's the real story of this Budget, the can being kicked down the road. This Labour government is apparently planning spending cuts on most areas of public service spending of 2.6% per year between 2028-29 and 2031-32.
Pull the other one. It's got bells on.
£27,500 pa minimum wage for a 40 hour week. Plus NI, plus pension contributions, plus holiday pay.
Many small businesses already asking if they can afford ANY employees, let alone new employees.
EXCLUSIVE
John Healey will announce plans to increase the minimum wage by nearly 4 per cent but slow the rise for young people after warnings that they are being priced out of jobs
The Times has been told that the national living wage, which applies to those aged 21 and over, is expected to rise from £12.71 to around £13.20 — an increase of 3.9 per cent
However, Healey has decided not to repeat the big rises of the past two budgets in the national minimum wage, which applies to those aged 18 to 21
It will rise broadly in line with the rate for older workers - from £10.85 to around £11.27, an increase of 3.9 per cent
It effectively spells the end of Labour’s manifesto pledge to bring the “discriminatory” minimum wage for young people into line with the living wage for older workers in this parliament
The minimum wage increased by 26 per cent between 2025 and 2026, leading to stark warnings from employers that it risked impeding efforts to get 1 million “Neets” - young people not in education, employment or training - into work.
Healey alluded to the approach in an interview with The Times last week, in which he spoke of the importance of the “trade-off between the level of the minimum wage and the employment rate”
thetimes.com/article/c9142a2…
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
Does @AngelaRayner realise how misleading this is?
Even if not, good journalists should have figures at hand to correct her & other Govt. ministers trying to imply UK exports to the EU have gone down since Brexit.
In fact total exports to the EU have increased since Brexit.
…
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
🚨 NEW: The Government’s entrepreneurship adviser has quit ahead of the Budget
“We treat [innovation and entrepreneurship] as a bit of a sideshow... that mentality is really dangerous for British business as a whole”
Outrageous 👇
🚨 NEW: The Tories say Labour's plan to let HMRC take unpaid tax directly from bank accounts is "outrageous"
"Labour want the taxman to be able to empty your bank account over a few hundred pounds and leave you with nothing to pay the rent. It is absurd that Labour are handing the taxman powers like these. Scrapping these safeguards and collaborating with credit agencies so they can decide which accounts to raid is outrageous... they are once again approaching the Budget looking for yet more ways to squeeze the public so they can bankroll more benefits handouts"
Reducing debt by reducing Government spending must be the first priority of any Administration now, no matter what their politics
The UK government has, since April, spent no less than £61 billion - that’s £61,000,000,000 - on debt interest payments.
That’s equivalent to our entire annual defence budget - on just half a year’s worth of debt service costs, not paying back a penny of our national debt.
For £61bn you could build 40 state-of-the-art hospitals.
Or employ 100,000 nurses for a decade
Or fund free-at-the-point-of-use social care, across the entire UK, for three years.
Watch this short “When The Facts Change” video for more on the UK’s soaring debt interest bill - the biggest national scandal our mainstream media continues to ignore.
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
The Home Office is offering landlords double the market rate to kick out tenants and house illegal migrants instead.
Everything about this is disgusting - including the fact that it takes properties off the market for everyone else.
Yet again, this Government rewards criminals.
Landlords offered bumper rents to evict tenants and house small boat migrants as Labour accused of 'outrageous racket' in broken Britain trib.al/WSjDV6a
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
#OnThisDay 221 yrs ago in 1805 @RoyalNavy was successful in defeating the Franco-Spanish Fleet at #Trafalgar confirming British superiority of the seas. Lord Nelson died before the end, having done his duty, handing over Command to another great commander Admiral Collingwood.
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
A thorough analysis of the scope of capital departure from Britain by Brian Monteith in the Telegraph.
"Available evidence suggests the scale of the capital loss is likely around £200bn to £250bn in just two years," explains Monteith, with copious evidence.
"An obvious example of business displacement is the quadrupling of the number of British members of the Dubai Chamber of Commerce, from 2,402 active Chamber members at the end of 2020 to 10,334 in March 2026. While some of these cases will involve British companies establishing a presence in Dubai, most are likely to be new operations in Dubai run by British citizens".
"Of course", notes Monteith, "those who have left will no longer be expanding their wealth in the UK. Those who would otherwise have stayed to build their businesses will be doing it elsewhere, and fewer will arrive to build wealth here. In the long run, this is probably the most significant factor".
"All of [the anti-wealth] policies will have to be reversed by a future government if truly wealthy individuals are to be attracted back and those becoming successful here in future are not encouraged to also leave. Full abolition of inheritance tax is by far the most sensible policy".
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
France is in flames (yet he wants to rejoin the EU).
Trump is selling out Ukraine, cosying up to Putin again
A cost-of-living crunch is looming this winter, especially fuel bills.
He still hasn’t told us how or when defence spending will reach 3% GDP.
Inflation is rising once more, as are interest rates.
Russian forces are threatening our infrastructure, especially undersea data and energy links.
The Strait of Hormuz remains closed, our Gulf allies are under attack.
And PM Burnham drivels about this!!
It’s like the opening sketch from Saturday Night Live.
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
GB Energy, the useless state-owned company established by Labour, has so far spent £14.2m on running costs — and £5.8m on investments.
Running costs included the almost £400,000/year paid to its ineffective CEO and six executives on more than £100,000 each. What any of them has done to earn these sums is one of life’s mysteries.
Perhaps it’s a blessing it’s invested so little. The £5.8m it has earmarked is for a proposed floating wind farm off the north coast of Scotland — a sure-fire loss-maker if ever there was one.
Cllr Stuart Bestwick retweeted
Some interesting historical examples in the FT of the foolishness of applying the death tax to family firms.
"After the second world war", notes Andrew Hill, "estate duty weighed heavily. To offset the risk that tax might bury a business alongside its owners, companies limited growth, liquidated assets or listed their shares.
Historian Marie Fletcher has suggested this may even explain postwar under-investment in technology."
Labour has revived this anti-investment policy. Before Reeves’ 2024 Budget, Seth Woodmansterne, third generation managing director of greetings card manufacturer Woodmansterne Publications, invested in new warehouse and printing capacity. “I couldn’t make those commitments today,” he told me. “It feels like we’re in survival mode . . . ”
The UK’s family-owned companies employ almost 60% of private sector workers and contribute more than £400bn in taxes. Labour has introduced a policy that will not only raise virtually no revenue but has the specific effect of preventing those companies from investing more. Exceptionally dim.
