Sponsored content. Not personal financial advice. Gold’s value can fall as well as rise, and you may get back less than you put in. Physical-gold investment is unregulated and is not covered by the FSCS or Financial Ombudsman Service. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.
Downing Street has defended the decision to send the government plane to Manchester to collect Andy Burnham for Chogm, with the No10 spokesman telling Lobby hacks today that travel arrangements are made “on the basis of security, operational requirements and value for money for the taxpayer”. Guido estimated this airborne taxi service cost the taxpayer around £20,000…
The aircraft left Stansted at around 6am without the Prime Minister on board, picked him up in Manchester around half an hour later and then waited on the ground for about an hour before flying on via Canada. The PM’s spokesman said he wouldn’t comment on Guido’s report that the detour cost £20,000, saying only that costs will be published ‘in the usual way’. In other words, a textbook non-denial…
When one hack suggested the police had advised against Burnham travelling from Stansted, the spokesman said that was “a complete mischaracterisation”. So security wasn’t a problem then…
A new IEA paper finds the £18.8 trillion slavery reparations demand facing Burnham in Antigua exceeds the UK’s entire £13.3 trillion net worth per the ONS, and is mostly compound interest. Report author Doug Stokes points out that cutting the Brattle Group’s assumed interest rate by just a fifth of a percentage point wipes $7 trillion off the total. Some useful airborne reading for Andy as he jets across the Atlantic…
The most thorough recent research puts slavery’s boost to Britain at around a decade’s income growth, concentrated in a few thousand families. Ending it cost 1.8% of national income a year for sixty years, five thousand British lives and the £20 million compensation bill, which taxpayers only finished paying off in 2015. Brattle treats even that as a debt still owed. The size of Britain’s national debt – a more pressing issue for the government, you’d think – is now above £3 trillion…
Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all backed March’s UN resolution branding the Atlantic trade the gravest crime against humanity. As Stokes points out:
“The atonement complex has allowed hostile regimes internationally to use Western guilt over slavery as a tool of statecraft, often while deflecting scrutiny of their own conduct regarding slavery.”
Even Starmer didn’t bother going down this road…
The government’s biggest A321 jet took off from Stansted at 6.05 a.m. this morning with no Prime Minister on board, flew 34 minutes to Manchester to collect Andy Burnham, then set off for the Commonwealth summit in Antigua. Guido estimates the detour cost around £20,000 of taxpayer cash. Avanti not good enough for him?
Flight tracking data shows the jet landed in Manchester at 6.39 a.m. and left again at 8.06 a.m., heading for a refuelling stop in St John’s, Newfoundland, before the Caribbean. The government eventually publishes what every trip on the plane costs. Starmer’s same-day trip to Paris in April came to £39,756 at roughly £20,000 a leg. Stansted to Manchester is shorter than Paris, but every additional leg brings its own landing and handling fees. About £18,000-20,000’s worth according to Guido’s fag packet maths…
There is an environmental cost. An A321neo burns roughly 1.7 tonnes of jet fuel on a short hop like this once take-off and climb are counted – every kilo of jet fuel makes 3.16 kilos of carbon dioxide. Ergo, the Manchester diversion pumped out around 5.4 tonnes of CO2. Britain emits only about 4.25 to 4.5 tonnes of CO₂ per person per year…
The whole jaunt, there and back, comes to about 21 hours of flying. Based on Starmer’s £121,239 trip to Yerevan in May and Yvette Cooper’s £148,700 trip to Washington in December, long-haul flying on the plane costs £9,500 to £12,400 an hour. That puts the full trip at about £250,000. And at around 2.4 tonnes of fuel an hour that is roughly 150 tonnes of CO2…
Burnham took the same government jet from Glasgow to Manchester in July to open No10 North, despite a choice of trains. When Liz Truss used the same plane to fly to Australia, Angela Rayner called it a “ridiculous waste of half a million pounds on a private jet trip”. Thoughts on this one, Ange?
Sponsored by TallyMoney
Winning customers, paying staff, chasing invoices: running a business already comes with a substantial to-do list. Deciding what sits underneath the company’s cash balance is not usually near the top.
TallyMoney founder and CEO Cameron Parry thinks it deserves a closer look.
Speaking to Ross Kempsell from Guido Fawkes, Parry explained how Tally’s business accounts bring its gold-based money proposition to companies: an account in the business’s name, with a sort code and account number for bank transfers.
The difference is what the business holds. Rather than a balance denominated in pounds, Tally uses milligrams of gold.
Parry’s starting point is the money a business accumulates for something further down the road.
“Businesses are often running with surplus cash that they need to build up over time for capital purchases, or if they’re building up a dividend or a distribution to the business owners,” he said.
His argument is that businesses should think not just about the number on the statement, but about what that money will eventually buy.
Consider a company putting money aside for equipment or premises improvements. The purchase might be some way off, but the funds are already being accumulated. Parry sees that waiting period as an opportunity to consider an alternative to holding everything in sterling.
He also highlighted commercial property deposits.
A rental deposit may remain tied up for three or five years. In the interview, Parry suggested that a gold-based account could offer a different way to hold that money, subject to the arrangements agreed between landlord and tenant.
That is a proposed use case, not a promise that every lease deposit can simply be switched into Tally.
Nor is gold a guaranteed route to a larger balance. Its sterling value can fall as well as rise, meaning a business could have less available when a planned payment becomes due. Fees also need to be considered.
The appeal, then, is not a claim that every company should replace its banking arrangements. It is the possibility of choosing a different asset for some of the money it holds.
For business owners who spend their working lives questioning costs, suppliers and contracts, Parry is asking one more question: why leave the nature of your money unquestioned?
Explore Tally’s business accounts and current terms through the Business section
Tally gold balances are not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.
Speaking to ITV for another ‘100 days of Burnham’ interview, the PM was asked if inward legal migration is too high:
“Yeah, it it’s come right down. And I think when you have planned migration, it’s difficult to say is it too high or too low because it’s got to be, if you like, following gaps in the economy because if you just put a number on it, we may have a shortage in a certain area…
It’s in a much better place than it was because boat crossings are down and net migration overall is down and down quite significantly. So there’s a much better control of it. What I have argued is that migration and illegal immigration changed significantly with Brexit. And I think we’ve got to be honest about that.”
The legal figures are still well over 150,000 a year net. British voters have backed manifestos promising tens of thousands for decades now…
Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked John Healey: “Just finally, I mean Andy Burnham has been very clear he wants Britain back in the European Union in his lifetime. Do you?”
The Chancellor replied: “I’m older than Andy Burnham. I don’t expect to see that.”
