New report: UK housing offers the worst value for money out of all 38 OECD countries 🧵 resolutionfoundation.org/publications/h…
The UK has a lot of high rent-to-income ratios. But for comprehensive international comparisons we need to look at the 'imputed rents' of homeowners as well as actual rents. Having done that, total rents are a larger share of expenditure than in almost every other rich country.

Most people know that factory farming involves many horrors. But it's hard to remain concerned about things that are out of sight. So here’s an intermittent thread on how humanity is committing a terrible atrocity, which we should urgently try to end. (Warning: difficult content) 86% of pigs in the UK are killed by being lowered in cages into gas chambers, which is clearly highly distressing and painful, as in these videos from Australia:
&

Read philiplymbery.com/gas-killing-is… for more info
(2/n)

What is 'income'? A short(ish) thread based on this @resfoundation report: resolutionfoundation.org/publications/w…

Aggregate economic measures like GDP are important, but we also want stats that get closer to actual households' living standards and inequalities. Good stats matter! But exactly what counts as income can be debatable.

e.g. In current household income stats, if you receive your pension as an annuity, that will count towards your annual income. But if you take some/all of it as a one-off lump sum, that isn’t considered ‘income’.

Here’s a new report about replacing business rates with a land value tax – an idea that people of all parties have been interested in. d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/libdems/pages/… Some conclusions... (1/20!) Why are business rates bad? Well, they’re a tax on physical structures as well as land. So it’s a building tax, a lighting tax, a blast furnace tax, a wind turbine tax, a railway tax, a broadband tax. Tax profits, sure, but it’s mad to tax physical infrastructure each year.