Farage's £250k 'Robin Hood tax' is a free ride for non-doms, says reader
Nigel Farage's so-called 'Robin Hood Tax' is an outrageous, Sheriff of Nottingham-style con (Metro, Tue).
The Reform UK 'Britannia Card' idea is that non-doms, instead of paying tax annually like the rest of us, make a one-off payment of £250,000, which 'Hood' Farage promises will be used to benefit 'the poor'.
According to the Chartered Institute of Taxation (using figures from HMRC) the tax yield from non-doms for the year ending April 5, 2022, averaged out at £120,000 each.
So Farage's one-off payment amounts to just over two years of tax at 2021-2022 rates followed by a permanent free ride at the expense of other taxpayers.
Public services, already cut to the bone, will get even worse and the poor will suffer to support the wealthy. Paul Johnson, Ilford
Sir Keir Starmer has described Palestine Action group throwing paint over fighter planes at RAF Brize Norton (Metro, Tue) as 'disgraceful'.
He is right, the lack of security that allowed it to happen is indeed appalling and, as the leader of the government that takes responsibility for it, the buck clearly stops with him.
With his new-found humility, the prime minister could perhaps now thank the organisation that exposed the weakness.
What if they had been terrorists? Phil Goater, Sunbury-on-Thames
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How do you find a secret base in Iran? You look for the building guarded by a man with an AK-47. How do you find a secret base in Israel? You look for the building guarded by a man with an Uzi machine gun.
How do you find a secret base in the UK? You look for the building guarded by nobody – they're all asleep and the personnel officer is in charge. Jeff Sutton, Erdington
Dennis Fitzgerald (MetroTalk, Tue) claims we 'can't bomb people into peace, only into surrender'. He's wrong.
When we bombed Nazi Germany into surrender, it led to the birth of a peaceful and democratic country. Why should Iran be any different?
Most Iranians hate the murderous regime that stole their country 46 years ago. Israel understands this. That's why the Israeli Air Force targeted Iran's notorious Evin prison – not to harm civilians but to help those oppressed by the Ayatollahs' regime escape and get a chance at freedom. David Frencel, London
Are you able to consider this witticism in keeping with the recent 'doctor jokes' theme for your excellent newspaper? More Trending
Ronnie O'Sullivan went to the doctor recently and said, 'Doctor, I feel like a snooker ball.' The doc replied, 'Get to the back of the cue.' Stevie 'Whirlwind' Duggers, Sheffield
Another doctor joke. I went to the doctor today to get a vaccine. Nervous, I asked, 'Is it going to hurt?' The doctor said, 'It will hurt a bit today but tomorrow will be fine.'
Immediately I replied, 'Can we reschedule for tomorrow, then?' Pedro, Hammersmith
MORE: The Metro daily cartoon by Guy Venables
MORE: Met Police boss grilled into apologising to ITV's Selina Scott after vicious mugging
MORE: Drug kingpins guilty of plot to murder rival and smuggling £5,000,000 of cocaine
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Metro
14 minutes ago
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Why Egypt won't take Gazans, Ukraine's future and American irony
Do you agree with our readers? Have your say on these MetroTalk topics and more in the comments. Malcolm (MetroTalk, Thu) asks why Egypt isn't taking in refugees from Gaza. The reason is Israel has historically refused and is currently refusing the rights of Palestinians to return to land that Israel controls or occupies, so Egypt doesn't want to assist in permanently displacing a population. Israel is also a neighbour of Palestine but has not processed or taken any refugees, despite having two crossings compared with Egypt's one. I'm sure a well-funded state such as Israel has the capacity to sift out terrorists. It seems to know who they are when it uses 'targeted attacks' on Gaza. Malcolm says Israel is 'as responsible for the deaths in this war as the Allies were in killing the millions of innocent civilians in Germany and Japan in World War II'. International law is clear on the matter of civiliacns being killed in war and had those laws – and a willingness to enforce them – existed at the time, the Allies would have been in breach. Crimes in the past do not excuse crimes in the present. Paul Smith, Bristol Malcolm wonders why Egypt won't fling open the Rafah gate and whisk 2.3million Gazans into Sinai, as though refugee policy were a drive-thru. Egypt manages one crossing while Israel controls airspace, sea and every other exit. When Israel bombs the Rafah gate and then occupies it, Egypt can hardly run an open-door policy. Egypt remembers 1948, when Palestinians fled and were never allowed home. Opening Sinai now would help turn temporary 'shelter' into permanent expulsion. When your neighbour's house is on fire because someone else set it alight and blocks the exits, you don't blame the neighbour for not jumping through your kitchen window. Israel imposed the siege, launched the air strikes and controls the crossings – that's where accountability lies. Az Moss, London It's not only deeply troubling but simply exasperating to see zealots congratulating themselves for being arrested for showing support to Palestine Action, a proscribed terrorist organisation (MetroTalk, Wed). How does supporting the perpetrators or terror and blind hatred do anything for the people of Gaza? And their calls of Israeli 'genocide' are similarly misguided and an affront to the millions around the world currently suffering genocide – such as those in Sudan and Yemen. Sara, London How do we bring peace to Ukraine and Russia? We need Ukraine restored to its 2014 borders in return for giving up attempts to join Nato and the EU. We also need Nato to pull back from eastern Europe and the establishment of demilitarised zones on Russia's side of Nato's border as well as on both sides of the Ukrainian-Russian border. The only obstacle to this is Nato and the EU, especially the latter as it wants to absorb Ukraine to exploit its markets. Since the Soviet Union's collapse, the Warsaw Pact buffer zone has been gobbled up by Nato and the EU. Alan Meadowcroft, Oldham It is farcical the US is trying to accuse other countries of going backwards in terms of human rights and free speech. More Trending This is from the government that set up Ice, whose officers hide their faces when they arrest people for deportation, despite many being US citizens. A government that has been voting to take more rights away from its people. And a government that threatens to sue people because they dare to report on the president's sordid history and refuses to let certain circles of the free press attend White House briefings because it can't handle answering questions that don't blindly praise everything it says or does. The UK is not perfect but it's laughable for a country determined to take so many rights and freedoms away from its people to be so desperate to divert attention from itself that it attacks how other countries handle this. Matthew, Birmingham MORE: The Metro daily cartoon by Guy Venables MORE: Cost of Mounjaro weight-loss drug to go up by 170% in the UK within weeks MORE: A-level results day 2025 map shows how well your area did
Metro
an hour ago
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'I was a top UK cocaine smuggler and I think Top Boy is completely ridiculous'
When you've lived a life 'comfortably in the top 1% of cocaine smugglers', watching the drug trade play out on the small screen can make the flaws hard to ignore. Take Ronan Bennett's Top Boy, which was touted as a realistic portrayal of life on a Hackney council estate with the 'shotting' (selling), 'food' (drugs) and 'Ps' (cash) in the mix. Yet reformed drug smuggler Andrew Pritchard, 58, says elements are 'completely ridiculous' and 'exaggerated'. Pritchard hails from Hackney and Stoke Newington and so knows a lot of the cast of the Netflix show. 'It's so far from the mark it's unreal,' he tells the Metro. He says shows like it 'raise the bar with kids' for what they might expect from a life in London's criminal underworld. 'They think it's normal to go and shoot and spray people,' he said. 'They don't realise that one drop of blood costs more than 100 kilos of cocaine. The minute you put blood on the street, the police are all over you.' If you're in the market for the more genuine article, Pritchard recommends This City Is Ours on the BBC. Wake up to find news on your TV shows in your inbox every morning with Metro's TV Newsletter. Sign up to our newsletter and then select your show in the link we'll send you so we can get TV news tailored to you. The way he tells it, his own story is ripe for screen adaptation – and he would undoubtedly be a stickler for authenticity. Retreading his own misspent youth is part of what he does now with The AP Foundation, giving young offenders a glimpse into the life of a top drug smuggler; one that was a thrilling, addictive ride but that hurt people and ended with 15 years in prison. By the time Prtichard was 21, it was the height of the 1980s house party craze, and he was behind some of the largest illegal warehouse raves in the country. The guest lists weren't anything to be sniffed at either, with Pritchard reeling off names like Milli Vanilli, Boy George and the Pet Shop Boys. It was through these parties that he also became 'open to the criminal elements' and started to build an elaborate drug smuggling operation, spanning Europe and the Caribbean, where his mother arrived in the UK from as part of the Windrush generation. As Pritchard details in the new Sky docu-series Amsterdam Narcos, first came ecstasy, then cocaine. To be more specific, 'vast' amounts of ecstasy, which wound its way into clubs and venues. He used friends at the fruit markets in New Covent Garden and New Spitalfields to get the stuff over from Holland – where the round design-stamped pills was booming. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video 'Holland was a very big exporter of apples and potatoes,' Pritchard explains, speaking rapid-fire, because he knows this inside-out. 'But apples were a really good choice because of the boxes they come in. They had different crates on them and also they were quite heavy. 'So what I discovered was that if we could simply place a bulk of ecstasy at the bottom of each crate, and obviously put trays of apples above them, they were quite a good transport. They were perishable goods so they would come through customs very quickly.' The Sky docu-series gets into this, but it's staggering to hear the number of places you can hide drugs in transit. 'Places you possibly couldn't imagine,' says Pritchard. 'We had them everywhere from the nose of the plane to the cargo bins. 'Everywhere you could imagine, on a ship, plane or passenger, we hid drugs.' With drugs, violence inevitably follows. Pritchard doesn't shy away from the brutality, describing people he's seen 'shot in the head, put in the boot of a car and set fire to'. But there was never any point in having a security team, he says, because 'the kind of people you deal with will just drive by and spray everyone'. 'You're your own security. It's how you do business with people,' he explains. 'You have to become a person they can't afford to lose in that chain, because a lot of people rely on you, so they wrap you in cotton wool.' He says that was his 'protection blanket', alongside a good deal of luck. When a close call forced Pritchard to flee to Jamaica, with the help of extended family on his mother's side, he moved into cocaine. In the noughties, an estimated 20% of the cocaine in Britain came through Jamaica. Pritchard's contact book was stuffed: people on the wharfs, docks, planes, from Montego Bay into Schiphol Airport, to Heathrow and Gatwick. So how much money was he making? That, he's less candid about. 'It's very difficult to put a button figure on it,' he says. 'Turning over hundreds of millions, yes, but what you could actually say you may have at some point received would be a different figure altogether.' As with every great crime drama, from Goodfellas to Scarface, there's always the third act looming, when it's time to pay the piper. Pritchard's arrived in 2015, when he was sent down to Belmarsh. But since he was released and set up his charity to help young offenders, Pritchard's life has been a series of 'surreal' moments. Including attending a knife crime conference at the Old Bailey, only to meet the judge who sentenced him. When the judge, no longer wearing his wig and gown, started to apologise for issuing such a lengthy sentence, Pritchard stopped him. 'Don't apologise, I said, because you changed my life. If I hadn't put in that time and come to my senses, I would be here in front of you in handcuffs again, not sitting here advising kids why not to live this lifestyle,' he told the judge. Prtichard has even brought in a number of fellow reformed offenders to help with his foundation, including Stephen Mee (former drug lord turned artist) and Kenneth Noye (of the Brink's Mat heist, or Jack Lowden's real-life character in The Gold, for TV fans). More Trending 'They know what it's like to sit in prison for 30 odd years and watch people you love die while you're wasting away,' says Pritchard. Now their role is to tell those at the start of a life of criminality that it isn't all it's cracked up to be in shows like Top Boy and Gangs of London. 'You have to tell them the truth, tell them what it is. It seems glorious. And I'll say to you, yes, it's glorious in parts. 'There's two sides to this coin, but when it flips, that other side is not a nice side.' View More » Amsterdam Narcos airs 13 August on Sky Documentaries and streaming service NOW . Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. 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Daily Mirror
2 hours ago
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Southport victim Bebe King's family slam new plans to share suspects' ethnicity
Bebe King's grandfather said the actions of the far-right and Nigel Farage's Reform UK party in bid to "make a political gain" had been "despicable" in the wake of the horrific tragedy Southport victim Bebe King's family have urged the government to shelve new police guidance encouraging forces to publish the ethnicity and immigration status of high-profile suspects. Little Bebe was the youngest of the three little girls killed in the horrific knife attack last year. The six-year-old was murdered alongside Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Bebe's grandfather, Michael Weston King, said they had been failed by the "despicable" far-right who "tried to make a political gain" from their loss. Mr Weston King urged ministers to reconsider their support for the new official guidance, slamming it as "completely irrelevant" information about suspects. He also hit out at Nigel Farage's "despicable" Reform UK, whose party has been calling for the guidance to be an enforced policy. Mr Weston King told the Guardian: "This apparent kowtowing to the likes of Farage and Reform, who surely want such a policy in place, is extremely disappointing, though perhaps not surprising. 'I not only speak for myself but for all of the King family when I say that the ethnicity of any perpetrator, or indeed their immigration status, is completely irrelevant. Mental health issues, and the propensity to commit crime, happens in any ethnicity, nationality or race. 'The boy who took Bebe had been failed by various organisations, who were aware of his behaviour, and by the previous government's lack of investment in [the official anti-extremism strategy] Prevent . As a result, we were also failed by this.' He added that the family 'were failed further, by the likes of Reform and the right wing, as they tried to make political gain from our tragedy, only causing further misery to us and others, which was despicable'. Teen killer, Axel Rudakubana, was jailed for a minimum of a 52 years for his attack on the Taylor Swift themed dance class full of children in July last year. In the days that followed, fascist thugs used the tragedy to incite riots across the UK. They spread false information that Rudakubana, a black Brit born in Wales to a Christian family, was in fact a Muslim asylum seeker. The unrest saw scores of police officers injured, mosques and asylum hotels targeted and people of colour lynched indiscriminately in the streets. Home secretary, Yvette Cooper, welcomed new police guidelines released on Wednesday, despite criticism from anti-racism campaigners and women's groups. It follows claims of police 'cover up' that two men charged in connection with the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, were asylum seekers. The far-right then staged an anti-immigration protest, where some worw Nazi imagery on their clothes and told a crowd the 'far right must unite'. A judge defied court guidance to publicly name underage Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time of the attack, in a bid to stop the riots. But the violence only stopped once hundreds of thugs involved began receiving prison sentences. Mr Weston King said: 'Though we are not interested in retribution or revenge, we were glad to see that the rioters, along with those who spread lies and hatred online, received prison sentences. I very much hope that the mood and opinion of the nation is in keeping with ours, and that this plan does not go ahead.'
