But there's a vast difference between what corporation tax does to firms who've had so much money from the surge in energy prices - money they've done little to earn and don't know what to do with - and small companies squeezed tighter by energy costs than they've ever been.

And this was before the big hike in corporation tax took effect (this month). The problem is that if you focus all the public support on subsidising energy bills, then only tax energy firms quite lightly, everything gets a bit unbalanced.

As as if the whole economy - households, government and businesses - has suddenly decided to throw huge sums of money at oil companies - and only tax it back quite modestly, pushing us into greater borrowing.

Meanwhile everyone from military commanders wanting to support the war in Ukraine to unions begging the government to fix desperate skills shortages affecting patient safety are told there's not a few billion to spare.

What the public too often too meekly accept is this idea that government's are constrained by the public finances in the same way that households are. This is (insert suitable fruity word).

As the £300bn spent in the financial year 2020 demonstrated, when the government refuses pleas for necessary spending (or, if you prefer, tax cuts) on the basis that it can't afford something, it is not saying 'we can't' but 'we don't want to'.

Only once you realise those important facts can you have a rational debate about whether fiscal policy is doing what you want it to - whether it's stimulating the economy out of slowdown, building a green economic future, or improving health and education.

As long as we labour under the delusion that financial choices are the same for a government as they are for households or firms, who don't have a bank or a money printing machine in their front room whenever they need to spend, we'll be having the wrong conversations.

And that's a pity when there's so much to be done. Whatever policy goal you have, until you talk about it with the right information, you're never going to know whether or not it's feasible.

If you'd said, 'next year, the government will shut most business down completely and offer to pay private companies wage bills', anyone listening would have thought you were off your head.

Similarly, if you'd said to someone in 1895, 'fifty years from now we'll have universal education, universal health care and everyone will pay about a third of their income in taxes', they'd have carted you off to Bedlam.

It's only because people - from Lloyd George with his people's budget in 1913 to the founders of the welfare state (on both sides of the House of Commons) - had both the imagination to envision and the determination to enact these things that we grew up benefiting from them.

By 2025, households will be no better off than they were 20 years before. Now if you'd told someone that in about the year 2000, they'd have thought you were off your head too. In almost every year from 1945 to 2005, real incomes rose.

Stop the sympathy for civilians! Stop it!

“Target Israel, and we will target you." ICC prosecutor says world leaders 'threatened' him over Israel arrest warrants thecradle.co/articles-id/26…

Starmer smeared a left movement of half a million with Jew-hate so he could take the party and turn it into a Thatcher tribute act. 'Integrity' is just funny at this point. #ItWasAScam

Remember when Hodge secretly recorded a meeting with Corbyn because she thought he'd say something antisemitic, and of course he didn't, and everyone just kind of pretended it never happened? Now in the House of Lords. For life. Funny country, this one. #ItWasAScam

This is part of an extremely important thread written by BBC journalist, Andy Verity as the political rhetoric started to shift towards austerity and away from the idea of investing in public services.

ℹ️ Not The Torygraph 💚 #SaveOurNHS #ScrapNHSBill Laurence Fox Sigh. Its never explained that for every 1 degree you heat a volume of air, it is capable of absorbing 7% more moisture. What goes up? Must come down.

Loving Andy’s candour here - “This is (insert suitable fruity word)”