Britsky retweeted
It doesn't give me any joy to note, but. Those who have followed me for a while know that I was narrating the death of BOXER Batch 2 months ago already, long before gov was made to admit it.
And long, long before that I predicted the "BOXER for everything" was a financially demented proposition, doomed to die.
And it died. Nobody should be surprised it did, but once again plenty of surprise to go around.
I don't consider myself a genius or a prophet. I consider myself a rational person who can read data and take a reasonable stab at what that data implies.
But evidently even that is quite uncommon.
Britsky retweeted
Budget Week.
With the Budget coming this week, here is why a £50,000 salary in 2026 feels nothing like £50,000 used to, and the numbers to explain it.
My salary is £50,483.
Since I started as a trainee accountant on £20k in 2017:
Personal Allowance frozen at £12,570 since 2021.
Dividend allowance cut from £5,000 to £500.
Capital Gains allowance cut from £11,300 to £3,000.
Employee NI was actually cut from 12% to 8% in 2024. While this seems to be positive for the employees, it was a backhanded change. The rise was on the employer side in April 2025, and the threshold where it starts cut from £9,100 to £5,000. On my salary it’s roughly 2% extra my employer has to cough up. That’s money that could have gone into pay rises
Plan 2 Student Loan takes £139pm each month while adding £225pm in interest
Our household bills jumped from £1,241pm in 2020 to £1,695pm in 2026
Our remortgage is jumping from 4.49% (£1,170pm) to 5.52% (£1,321pm) from March 2027
Every pound I earn above £50,270 is already taxed at 51% before it touches VAT, Council Tax, or fuel.
Which allowance do you think gets raided next in the Budget: Pensions, ISAs, or CGT?
Britsky retweeted
Footage of Ukrainian Storm Shadow cruise missiles slamming into Russia’s Energia military electronics plant in Yelets this weekend.
At least 7 missiles hit the plant, damaging multiple workshops that produced batteries for a number of Russian missile systems.
Type 26 and Type 31 late. Type 23 rapidly dying. Bets on magical hybrid navy.
The window of risk is long and not closing for many years.
Britsky retweeted
The pre-pandemic rate was £8.21/hour; £13.20/hour represents a more than 60% increase in five years.
People keep saying businesses who can't pay it shouldn't employ people.
So they're not.
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…
Britsky retweeted
An increase to £13.20p/h equates to a minimum wage of £27,456, based on a 40 hour week.
Once you factor in employers NI and basic pension contributions, the MINIMUM cost to hire a 21 year old for a company would be £31,461.
This is before you factor in any overarching business costs like office space, laptops, phone, software, training, support staff, vehicles etc.
This is going to be devastating to SME's who cant put together a simple 12 month budget without the goalposts being moved & their margins squeezed.
It'll also be catastrophic to youngsters opportunities because businesses will simply not be able to afford to hire them.
What's also incredible is that anything above £50,270 is seen as 'high earnings' in the UK and is taxed at 40%!
We are governed by financially and economically illiterate morons.
This will not end well.
Britsky retweeted
A new episode of new drones spotting in British use.
Defence imagery calls this SAKER, operational with 32 RA.
It tags it as an AeroVironment WASP, which it clearly is not. I will assume it has or is REPLACING the WASPs that were in use.
From visual, it's a SkyWatch RQ-35.
Britsky retweeted
⚓📰🚨 #USNAVY UPDATE: Joint Statement, USS Colorado (SSN 788) Announced as First Submarine for Submarine Rotational Force – West
U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Richard Marles, and UK Secretary of State for Defence Wes Streeting are pleased to announce the designation of the USS Colorado (SSN 788) as the first U.S. Navy Virginia-class fast-attack submarine assigned to Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-West) beginning in late 2027.
Britsky retweeted
Minimum wage going up to £13.20 sounds great until you realise businesses only have 3 options:
Raise prices.
Employ fewer people.
Cut costs elsewhere.
Workers need better pay. But if everything else gets more expensive, how much better off are we really?
Zero energy security under net suicide policies. I think we will hit black outs at some point in the future, ditto for water security.
Britsky retweeted
Ars reported this back in June, fwiw. At the time Roscosmos told NASA officials it would decommission the PrK module. NASA made no public statements because it did not want to embarrass the Russian space agency.
arstechnica.com/space/2026/0…
An unstoppable air leak on the ISS' Zvezda module forces permanent closure of its compartment, in turn requiring redocking of all future Russian cargo ships between two ports for cargo delivery and orbit corrections.
DETAILS: russianspaceweb.com/2026.htm…
Britsky retweeted
An unstoppable air leak on the ISS' Zvezda module forces permanent closure of its compartment, in turn requiring redocking of all future Russian cargo ships between two ports for cargo delivery and orbit corrections.
DETAILS: russianspaceweb.com/2026.htm…
Example of frigate collapse. No Type 23 available for the carrier as is the norm. Just barely managing a Type 45.
Britsky retweeted
HMS Prince of Wales arrived in 🇳🇴Hammarnesodden, Norway today.
namdalsavisa.no/70-000-tonns…
Just over a week out for HMS Agamemnon doing delivery trials after first arriving at Faslane.
Probably 12-18 months or so before this boat is on operations.
Still expecting HMS Audacious to return from long delayed refit next month.
Britsky retweeted
One working ASW frigate has been the norm on many occasions over the last couple years.
The RN is only just about managing to maintain 1 frigate on TAPS and even thats a struggle and often double hats carrier duties.
The reality is the frigate fleet has almost collapsed.
🚨 ROYAL Navy is on track to have just ONE working ASW frigate available for ops next year.
They need 13
They have 5
2 could be ruled “unseaworthy” in months as per @NavyLookout
That leaves 3, all over 24 yrs old
1 on ops
1 in work up
1 in maintenance
thesun.co.uk/news/40806181/n…
Britsky retweeted
The ‘have three, only have one is available for ops’ is a well-known thing, which has been recklessly discounted by the British 'to do more with less' for many years. Originally 16 x Type 23s. Three sold to Chile 2005, left 13. Therefore four approx avail for global ops (though more could be deployed in time of crisis/war).
But in recent years there have only been eight anti-submarine specialist (ASW) Type 23s, as rest general-purpose vessels. And so, even then only three max T23s (at any one time) could actually fully handle the vitally important ASW roles (protecting the deterrent working in northern seas and monitoring Russian submarine routes more generally).
The UK also failed to replace 6 x Type 22 (Batch 2) ASW ships that were axed late 1990s/early 2000s, then binned 4 x T22 (Batch 3, ASW/general-purpose) without replacement in 2011.
The T23s were meant only to replace Leander Class and Type 21 frigates btw.
The abandonment of common sense 3:1 rule and so having a fleet with, say, 10 frigates available for global ops at any one time, coincided with the notorious 17-year 'frigate building holiday'. Fewer ships left in service were pushed harder and wore out even quicker.
We are now fast approaching a nadir in British naval history (esp with no SSNs on ops) - even a shocking a low in modern global naval history for a so-called leading maritime power. But it should surprise nobody, especially in government or the higher reaches of the military (recent past and present) .
And certainly not a surprise for readers of @WarshipsIFR magazine via our repeated warnings of where things were going, since the first edition in 1998, plus the numerous warnings of other naval specialists on here and elsewhere.
ALT Type 23 (Batch 3) frigate HMS Cumberland receiving a refit in the covered sheds at Devonport Dockyard, 2001. Photo: 2001.
Britsky retweeted
This is what happens when you don’t build a single new reservoir since 1992, and grow your population by 12 million people in the meantime.
Exc: Ministers have been secretly warned that some English reservoirs are at risk of running dry, hitting water supplies to homes in the run-up to Christmas.
The government’s emergency committee, known as Cobra, is meeting up to twice a week to discuss the situation in the southwest of England and Sussex.
A secret “reasonable worst-case scenario” was drawn up, anticipating that several reservoirs’ water stocks could fall to 0 per cent — dubbed “day zero” — within weeks.
Officials warned that without action, supplies to some homes could be affected, along with disruption to the construction of a nuclear power station and operations at a prison.
Steps have been taken by ministers and water companies to try to mitigate the risks, which insiders stressed were already starting to push back the “day zero” dates.
Experts on the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) have also been brought in to help review water companies’ modelling for protecting stocks for the weeks ahead.
Heatwaves over the summer left half of England in drought. Sussex and the southwest were the most severely affected.
Wimbleball reservoir, which supplies more than 400,000 people in Somerset, has 13 per cent of its capacity, while Ardingly, which serves 280,000 customers across West Sussex, is at 17 per cent, figures from yesterday show.
Reasonable worst-case scenario plans were drawn up by the government, setting out a “day zero” envisaging Wimbleball and Ardingly reservoirs’ stocks being completely depleted by December.
Subsequently, the government privately said it was told by South West Water that it did not anticipate Wimbleball running dry due to measures it had put in place. South East Water is also taking action that has shifted Whitehall “day zero” forecasts at Ardingly into next year. Even if the reservoirs did run completely dry, water companies would probably be able to transfer supplies from elsewhere.
However, significant concerns remain in government about water disruption to properties supplied by Devon’s Venford reservoir in early November. “Day zero” risk monitoring has also started for Cornwall’s Stithians and Drift reservoirs.
Water companies were asked to model the impact of water-saving measures, which have been scrutinised by members of Sage. Ministers were told that shortages could affect daily operations at HMP Exeter and the construction of Hinkley Point C, a nuclear power station being built in Somerset.
Normal levels of rainfall over autumn and winter will not be enough to counteract the effects of the drought, which was extended to cover Yorkshire this month. Officials have calculated there will need to be 120 per cent of long-term average rainfall over the next six months for a nationwide recovery.