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https://news.sky.com/story/row-over-new-greggs-vegan-sausage-rolls-heats-up-11597679 (https://archive.ph/5Ba6o)

A heated row has broken out over a move by Britain's largest bakery chain to launch a vegan sausage roll.

The pastry, which is filled with a meat substitute and encased in 96 pastry layers, is available in 950 Greggs stores across the country.

It was promised after 20,000 people signed a petition calling for the snack to be launched to accommodate plant-based diet eaters.


But the vegan sausage roll's launch has been greeted by a mixed reaction: Some consumers welcomed it, while others voiced their objections.

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spread happiness@p4leandp1nk
https://twitter.com/p4leandp1nk/status/1080767496569974785

#VEGANsausageroll thanks Greggs
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7
10:07 AM - Jan 3, 2019
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Cook and food poverty campaigner Jack Monroe declared she was "frantically googling to see what time my nearest opens tomorrow morning because I will be outside".

While TV writer Brydie Lee-Kennedy called herself "very pro the Greggs vegan sausage roll because anything that wrenches veganism back from the 'clean eating' wellness folk is a good thing".

One Twitter user wrote that finding vegan sausage rolls missing from a store in Corby had "ruined my morning".

Another said: "My son is allergic to dairy products which means I can't really go to Greggs when he's with me. Now I can. Thank you vegans."

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pg often@pgofton
https://twitter.com/pgofton/status/1080772793774624768

The hype got me like #Greggs #Veganuary

42
10:28 AM - Jan 3, 2019
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TV presenter Piers Morgan led the charge of those outraged by the new roll.

"Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns," he wrote on Twitter.

Mr Morgan later complained at receiving "howling abuse from vegans", adding: "I get it, you're all hangry. I would be too if I only ate plants and gruel."

Another Twitter user said: "I really struggle to believe that 20,000 vegans are that desperate to eat in a Greggs."

"You don't paint a mustach (sic) on the Mona Lisa and you don't mess with the perfect sausage roll," one quipped.

Journalist Nooruddean Choudry suggested Greggs introduce a halal steak bake to "crank the fume levels right up to 11".

The bakery chain told concerned customers that "change is good" and that there would "always be a classic sausage roll".

It comes on the same day McDonald's launched its first vegetarian "Happy Meal", designed for children.

The new dish comes with a "veggie wrap", instead of the usual chicken or beef option.
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It should be noted that Piers Morgan and Greggs share the same PR firm, so I'm thinking this is some serious faux outrage and South Park KKK gambiting here.
 
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Amin Yasister said:
Reeves now wanting to pay a reward to those individuals that grass up tax avoiders. Avoidance is not illegal, evasion is.
Tax Avoidance is mainly done by, but not exclusively by, higher earners who buy into schemes promoted by taxation and accountancy companies.

Evasion is done by all earners, whether working cash in hand, self employed under declaring their earnings, etc., etc.

Why target avoidance rather than evasion?

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Pay anyone who is self-employed in cash unless they want you to pay otherwise. Some times they need the payment via cheque (remember them?) or card just to make their books look better for HMRC but offer cash first.

Fuck HMRC and the Rainbow Police State.
teriyakiburns said:
The British government, actually legislating over things that matter and potentially improving the situation as a result? I need to stop drinking. I'm hallucinating again.
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If it wasn't for the "two-Tier Kier" nickname they'd happily let this go through and we'd be bombarded with BBC thinkpieces about how we need this. They know people are getting to a boiling point and have shat it. They could have stopped this. No one spoke up when this was under review.
>IMPLYING said:
Paypal or wire a Britfriend 30 dollars and they could do that.
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PayPal record your every transaction and will happily give the details to any tax authority.
 
Chaotic Pizzaparty said:
Now, call this a schitzo theory, but I think the Conservatives have been looking for ammo to sink Rayner, and they hit the payload
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Given everything Rayner has dodged already I doubt it.
teriyakiburns said:
Any serious attempt at catching tax evasion is also very likely to catch party donors and senior government officials in the net. This would be bad.
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Funny you should mention that.

Prosecutions of the enablers of tax evasion have plummeted by at least 75% in the past five years, with fewer than five criminal cases in 2023-2024.
The targeting of enablers – anyone who knowingly helps a client evade tax – is a central part of HM Revenue and Customs’s (HMRC) strategy to claw back cash owed to the Treasury.

Labour hopes to boost the public coffers by billions of pounds with its crackdown on tax avoidance and evasion.
But figures obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveal that fewer than five such prosecutions were brought in 2023-2024, down from 16 in 2018-2019.
The Treasury had previously said that the figure for 2018-2019 was 29 in response to a parliamentary question raised in March 2023, but tax officials now admit that this figure was incorrect.
In its response to a freedom of information request, the tax authorities declined to provide the exact figures for alleged enablers of tax evasion who were prosecuted and convicted in 2023-2024 because of the “risk of identifying the individual involved”.
“This makes a mockery of [freedom of information] laws,” said Labour peer Prem Sikka. “Parliament can’t properly question HMRC because it hides behind a veil of confidentiality [while] ministers just shrug their shoulders and carry on.”

Lord Sikka, who submitted the parliamentary question on figures for convictions in previous years, said that the discrepancy in the figures in 2018-2019 amounted to “contempt of parliament” and that HMRC had made no efforts to clarify the issue. “There is no defence for this,” he said. “HMRC data is not reliable and has never been.”

Claire Aston, director of the investigative thinktank TaxWatch, said the “precipitous decline” in prosecutions shows HMRC “aren’t actively tackling those making money from this crime”. She added that the decision to withhold the exact figures on prosecutions and convictions for 2023-2024 was a “wild misrepresentation of confidentiality”.


HMRC has said the term “enablers” covers a range of professionals, including tax planners and wealth advisers.

The figure of 16 enablers prosecuted in 2018-2019 was the high-water mark of HMRC’s criminal enforcement action, which then declined sharply and has remained low. The downturn is part of a larger recent decline across HMRC’s enforcement teams, which have struggled with the joint shocks of Brexit and the Covid pandemic.

Last year the Observer revealed that prosecutions after HMRC investigations had fallen by more than two-thirds in five years and that not a single company had been prosecuted for enabling tax evasion since landmark powers were introduced in 2017.

The current Labour government has put pressure on HMRC to crack down on tax dodging to help support its substantial spending commitments.

The tax gap – a term used for the difference between the tax revenues HMRC receives and what it calculates it should receive – stood at almost £40bn in 2022-2023, the most recent year for which figures are available.

Last autumn Labour’s first budget for 14 years contained measures to raise £6.5bn by a crackdown on tax avoidance and evasion. New plans announced in last week’s spring statement are intended to increase this by £1bn.

Dan Neidle of the Tax Policy Associates thinktank said the number of tax evasion enablers will grow without ‘visible prosecutions’. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
“The thriving industry of people enabling tax evasion… will continue until there are visible prosecutions,” said Dan Neidle, a former head of tax at law firm Clifford Chance and founder of the independent thinktank Tax Policy Associates.

“A handful of prosecutions won’t change anything,” he added. “Prosecutions are expensive undertakings, but public confidence in the tax system requires them.”

A spokesperson for HMRC said: “The numbers provided to parliament in 2023 on the prosecution of tax fraud enablers were not accurate and we apologise for that. We issued these figures in good faith and understood them to be correct at the time but have since identified errors, corrected them and lessons have been learned.

“Tackling enablers of tax fraud remains a top priority for us and we currently have more than 150 enablers under criminal investigation. We’re determined they face the consequences as much as those carrying out tax fraud.”

Officials said responses to freedom of information requests were subject to appeal.
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I was self employed for a few years while I lived in the UK and just never bothered registering in the first place. It's sort of a loophole really, if you register then they hound you for every penny and get the auditors in, if you never register in the first place they have to notice and prove you're even earning money in the first place.

If you mess around with undeclared cash payments and such like, it can actually be more of a headache if you ever got seriously investigated.
 
To the 'UK is over' cohort: why are you so fucking WEAK.

Are you even of British stock? Was your stiff upper lip replaced by a limp wrist at birth? Letting a nanny state beat you into submission.

You are no better than that which you scorn.

The core problem with the UK at the moment is that we never believe we can win. Unlike our American counterparts that do. It's a mindset problem rather than skill issue.

Even in our darkest it's so over moments, it's always possible to be so fucking back.

Also some of you need to use paragraphs better.
 
BrightonAndHoveAlbion said:
I was self employed for a few years while I lived in the UK and just never bothered registering in the first place. It's sort of a loophole really, if you register then they hound you for every penny and get the auditors in, if you never register in the first place they have to notice and prove you're even earning money in the first place.

If you mess around with undeclared cash payments and such like, it can actually be more of a headache if you ever got seriously investigated.
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I know someone who was a sole trader and would lodge nil returns and somehow managed to aboid prosecution after they investigated him. He never did it again as he said dealing woth them as a thousand times more stressful than the police.

Either you were a cash in hand labourer for very little sums of money or very. very, very lucky.
 
FedPostalService said:
I know someone who was a sole trader and would lodge nil returns and somehow managed to aboid prosecution after they investigated him. He never did it again as he said dealing woth them as a thousand times more stressful than the police.

Either you were a cash in hand labourer for very little sums of money or very. very, very lucky.
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I know someone who was cash in hand for years, about 130k over 3 years and all a hmrc investigator said to him was how to register and pay the bare minimum for them to go away.
 
FedPostalService said:
lodge nil returns
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No you don't lodge anything at all is what I mean. To be self employed and pay tax you have to register first and then you submit returns under that registration. I'm talking about not registering at all in the first place.
SirCliveSinclairdabbing said:
hmrc investigator said to him was how to register and pay the bare minimum for them to go away.
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HMRC are very amenable to payment plans or even just settlements far below the owed amount in my experience. Rather get 10% than have to drag someone uncooperative through the courts which they frankly don't have the manpower for. Plus, you can just declare bankruptcy and they get nothing anyway (with the bonus of you then having 0% income tax for three years).
 
BrightonAndHoveAlbion said:
HMRC are very amenable to payment plans or even just settlements far below the owed amount in my experience. Rather get 10% than have to drag someone uncooperative through the courts which they frankly don't have the manpower for. Plus, you can just declare bankruptcy and they get nothing anyway (with the bonus of you then having 0% income tax for three years).
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It depends on whether they think they can squeeze you for cash. If they look at you and see someone who genuinely can't afford it, they're likely to just write it off in most cases, unless the investigator was having a bad day and decided he was going to punish someone. If they get even a hint of ability to pay, they'll audit you back ten years and pick at every ink spot until they think they've found an excuse to extract money, regardless of whether they have any actual justification for it. My uncle was raked over the coals a decade back for no reason other than because he has a nice car and a nice house. He didn't even go out of his way to avoid unnecessary tax, but they still wanted more from him. They made his life torturous for months in the hope he'd buckle and pay them to go away. Ended up costing HMRC about six months and 30k to get 2k out of him, which they ended up paying back anyway. No better than the bloody mafia.
 
This government loves speed running but they fail to realize that when you subject your native population so quickly to something that they oppose it will build resistance.

All it does is push Tory to the right, and where they should be, the problem is that conservatism has been diluted and muddied so much that most UK residents do not know what true conservatism is. Reform - Lowe is a joke of a "right wing" party, and if the Tories want to break ground, just oust all their leaders post Thatcher and say "our party was co-opted but this is our natural flowition." I think there is a twinkle that Jenrick is seeing this. He has the trappings to be a diamond in the rough. actual working class but then working in London and Moscow, young and switched on, and has hard lines.

Babadook is fucked currently as she is slow to respond and seemingly too much of a coward where Jenrick has learnt from people like Vance to be an attack dog.
 
The Pakis need to be reminded that there's far more whites, Hindus, Sikhs,and Buddhists than them and that the last three groups actively despise them.
 
Chaotic Pizzaparty said:
This government loves speed running but they fail to realize that when you subject your native population so quickly to something that they oppose it will build resistance.

All it does is push Tory to the right, and where they should be, the problem is that conservatism has been diluted and muddied so much that most UK residents do not know what true conservatism is. Reform - Lowe is a joke of a "right wing" party, and if the Tories want to break ground, just oust all their leaders post Thatcher and say "our party was co-opted but this is our natural flowition." I think there is a twinkle that Jenrick is seeing this. He has the trappings to be a diamond in the rough. actual working class but then working in London and Moscow, young and switched on, and has hard lines.

Babadook is fucked currently as she is slow to respond and seemingly too much of a coward where Jenrick has learnt from people like Vance to be an attack dog.
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Political parties have followed the trajectory of businesses and corporations in the sense they're more partial to acting purely on data and the precedent set by past successes and the successes of their competitors rather than taking any sort of risk or going against the grain as insisted upon by the media or push polls. Rather than listening to the complaints of their 'consumers', the general apathy still causing people to participate in a system they're hating more and more every cycle is a more reliable metric to them. Has Labour at all addressed winning the last election based on the smallest electoral turnout since 2001? At all?

The Conservative party today is led by a a cohort of out-of-touch Etonites forging an unholy alloy composed of pro-private sector Thatcherism with the social policies of Blair's Labour/Clegg's Lib Dems. This status-quo was reinforced thanks to persistent victories throughout the 2010s and a complete brain drain of principled and visionary leaders in the upper echelons of the party. I think if you were Left-wing too, you'd probably be similarly pissed off as any Right-winger, since the Labour party's attempt to change course under Corbyn left them whimpering and running back to being a poor imitation of Blair (who basically tried to echo Thatcher) with the added austerity measures of the 2010s Conservatives. Left and Right essentially exist in a state of limbo, where this business-like approach to politics and trying to attain wide appeal has left most parties floating in the centre, showing simultaneously too much flexibility on their principles whilst also being too arbitrarily rigid on issues that most of the populace express discontentment on. All this coupled with general laziness, self-interest, etcetera with individual politicians.

I think you've pretty much highlighted the solution to a lot of this by using Jenrick and Vance, in that you need to replace the out of touch uniform leadership near the top who already began at the top of society with people who didn't already start there. Someone who is familiar and was apart of the working class, with conservative sentiments and ideas, would probably be unstoppable in UK politics (Boris' former popularity and Farage's current popularity can be attributed to them being able to don the illusion of being such). The Conservative political class being led by people insulated since birth from the rest of society is likely one of the many, many things that got us here. Thatcher, who is considered anathema to the Labourite working class, had an upbringing considerably more humble and based on merit than David Cameron, Bandersnatch, and arguably even Keir whose education began with grammar school (Thatcher won a scholarship to attend one after a period in primary school). The last real gift to the working class, right-to-buy, which made it far cheaper to buy a home if it was council owned or apart of a housing association and you had been living in it for decades, was put in place by her, and why subsequent parties have completely gutted it (percentage discounts going as high as 50% now cap at discounts of 25k). In contrast, Blair's introduced minimum wage justified businesses underpaying young people whilst also introducing tuition fees, ending free university education that had been in place since 1962.

BongoMongo said:
The Pakis need to be reminded that there's far more whites, Hindus, Sikhs,and Buddhists than them and that the last three groups actively despise them.
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The main issue is that they outnumber those three groups, so how they feel doesn't factor in. What really needs to be done is to get the first group to despise them more actively and openly, then they might actually start to get nervous. I remember some people mentioning in the summer of discontentment thread early on that during the initial month of the riots, people were perceiving a difference in how they were being treated by their local examples of diversity, assuming said comments weren't just a LARP. If they start to feel unsafe here they might even leave of their own accord, which solves both their problem (lack of perceived safety) and ours (there's too many of them here). That's one of the issues I take with CivNat stuff because it reassures them for the most part and is basically toothless since calling yourself 'British' with no other adjustments is enough. If they have no incentive to leave of their own accord, then they never will.

Apologies for double posting.
 
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>IMPLYING said:
I remember some people mentioning in the summer of discontentment thread early on that during the initial month of the riots, people were perceiving a difference in how they were being treated by their local examples of diversity, assuming said comments weren't just a LARP.
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That summer really put the shits up some people. I wasn't around for it, but I talked to a mate recently that was that told me a mutual friend of ours (who we lovingly call "Dunkel") didn't want to go on a night out because he was nervous of getting beat up. To put this in perspective, the name is ironic - he's like a tiiiiiny bit darker than the rest of us because he has one Malaysian grandparent, but still, he was apparently worried. This was in the North West, fairly near Southport, just for context.

So yeah, I can believe that the violence changed people's behaviours, for sure. All I'm thinking is, well yeah seems like it gets results.
 
@>IMPLYING Can you please fuck off? I don't know where you came from but your thousand word essays contribute nothing to this Greggs,

The fact you like that gay Picard/Data faggy fab video song thing means you should obtain a rope, tie it into a slip knot, and hang your fucking self.
 
Clem Fandango said:
I wasn't around for it, but I talked to a mate recently that was that told me a mutual friend of ours (who we lovingly call "Dunkel") didn't want to go on a night out because he was nervous of getting beat up.
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Thing is a lot of that is the fear porn pumped into us by the media, largely with the government's encouragement as their push around that Netflix series should have made clear for everyone paying attention.

It was like the post Southport riot weekend claims that there would be mass riots and violent action across the entire country on the Wednesday I believe? Despite Monday and Tuesday making it very clear that the protestors had gone back to work and the people out to riot were either bored, hungover or not willing to come out without cover. Yet suddenly, conveniently timed when Hope Not Hate and all the other lot had their counter protests good to go with their various useful idiots riled up, there were "credible reports" of these incoming protests. Verified by police, government, every media outlet you care to name and more. Which scared the living heck out of a lot of people in the areas they were meant to happen and then failed to manifest.

Or to phrase it differently they are all a bunch of lying (I can see the end of Lent, I am going to use every four letter word under the sun when it arrives).
 
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