Compassionate Britain? HMRC Slams Mac Fac. Kiev's $400k for Trump Lawyer.

Baits Bite Lock, Milton, with cyclist and river boat.

Some new wonderful examples of of the compassionate Britain we now live in. There is the nurse who went to Jamaica on her retirement after 30 years in the UK, to look after her parents. She continued paying UK taxes on her pension. But when she became ill on a return visit to the UK, receiving the shock diagnosis of bone cancer, she was then hounded for £4,388 before she could receive further treatment. Yes, since April 2015, if you leave the UK to live somewhere else, you will have to pay for medical treatment if you become ill on a visit to the UK. Then there is the former mayor of Ipswich. She had lived for 40 years in the UK, married a Brit and became a Liberal councillor for 19 years. The Home Office rejected her application for citizenship, which cost her £1,282, because it “cannot be satisfied” that she is permanently a resident in the UK.

Hard Brexiteers were dealt a harsh blow today, by none other than the Chief Executive of HM Revenue and Customs Jon Thompson. He suggested that a hard Brexit would necessitate an estimated 200 million customs declarations at a cost of £20 to £50 each for companies, accruing to between £17bn and £20bn a year. This is more than the £16bn cost of EU membership for 2016. Theresa May's preferred option of a customs partnership would in contrast cost about £3.4bn a year. In either case, the HMRC thinks it would 3 to 5 years to bed in any new system, and that would start from next year's brexit date.

Meanwhile President Trump had two irritations today. The first was that sources in Kiev claimed that Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had received a secret payment of at least $400,000 (£300,000) to fix talks between the Ukrainian president and President Trump. This was of course denied, and POTUS himself was not party to this. The second was the judgement that President Trump could not block people on Twitter from viewing his tweets if they held views contrary or different politically from his own. He can mute the tweets, ie, he can choose not to see the critical responses from individuals.

Spent today conducting a longer interview for my COS history research and arranging some more appointments. Took a walk down to the river this evening and tried taking a photo of the lock using my Huawei P10, held stable on a surface, with surprising success.