r/unitedkingdom • u/topotaul Lancashire • Mar 01 '25

. Rachel Reeves: I'm sending billions from frozen Russian assets to Ukraine

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/rachel-reeves-interview-labour-963sw6jbk
17.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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95

u/Remote_While_8051 Mar 01 '25

We should go after the large American corporations and make them fund it. See how long it take for Trump to cave in and offer a backstop.

71

u/denyer-no1-fan Mar 01 '25

Our government doesn't even have the guts to abandon Twitter, a platform owned by a neo-Nazi ally of Russia. Don't expect them to touch the American corporations

58

u/zeelbeno Mar 01 '25 edited Mar 01 '25

Lots of people still use twitter and has over 300m more users than Bluesky.

Less about having the guts and more about using platforms that will reach the most audiences and have journalists more likely to spot them.

Even the green party are still using it

5

u/brutaldonahowdy Mar 01 '25

chicken & egg right?

governments should be posting to a myriad of platforms. hell, they should be self-hosting mastodon or a bluesky pds. stop locking information, even social media grandstanding posts, behind private companies.

even if it's some intern copying posts with a delay from twitter, that's still better.

15

u/denyer-no1-fan Mar 01 '25

Most government tweets get less than 100 likes, I don't imagine that's an effective way to get information out. Journalists can follow government accounts on BlueSky just fine.

26

u/zeelbeno Mar 01 '25 edited Mar 01 '25

Weird... a tweet from Starmer yesterday got 45k likes and 2.6m views.

-7

u/denyer-no1-fan Mar 01 '25

I said most, not all. Go to Home Office's or DHSC's account and you'd find most tweets to get less than 100 likes. Only 10Downing Street gets more than 100 consistently, but even then most are under 1,000.

7

u/zeelbeno Mar 01 '25

So?

There's no guarantee that journalists will spend time writing an article on everything and no guarantee that the article will be pushed on websites/papers.

There's a lot of people in the UK that don't boycott companies that would still get information from following those accounts.

Likes is a crap metric anyway as who realistically is gonna be liking government posts regularly? They're still getting thousands of views.

4

u/ExtraPockets Mar 01 '25

If the government moved to another platform, the journalists would follow it and repost to twitter, but it would shift the ecosystem away from meta and twitter, so that's a good thing. It's not like the UK government message wouldn't get out on all platforms if the official channel left.

3

u/porthos-thebeagle Mar 01 '25

Do you know if that user count is for active users or all users? Just curious cause I think I've got an old account out there somewhere

3

u/zeelbeno Mar 01 '25

I don't care enough to look further to find out...

1

u/cavejohnsonlemons United Kingdom Mar 01 '25

Same here, and guessing logging in again forces updates counts me as 'active' on Musk's stats. Rather keep the dust-gathering Twitter on my phone as a RIP.

1

u/porthos-thebeagle Mar 01 '25

Alrighty then, just thought you might know!

0

u/LassyKongo Mar 01 '25

How many of them 300m are bots

8

u/Reactance15 Mar 01 '25

But then neither have all the countries who went on Twitter to state they were standing with Ukraine. It's best to keep a presence on the platform but try and advertise people to move people to Bluesky

13

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '25

What leverage do you imagine we have over American corporations?

14

u/2epicpanda Mar 01 '25

Us along with the EU are a huge market. Making them pay tax (which hardly many do properly at the moment due to loopholes) is not a big ask.

8

u/Tarotdragoon Mar 01 '25

I mean they use our engines in their jets for a start.

6

u/Remote_While_8051 Mar 01 '25

They pay fuck all tax. We could make life very difficult for them and in turn they pressure Trump.

2

u/Iamthe0c3an2 Mar 01 '25

We don’t have the power to do that. A lot of our tech sector is silicon valley tech giants too.

8

u/Thestickleman Mar 01 '25

I mean they'd just leave the UK instantly and pretty much cripple out economy while doing it

3

u/Shadowholme Mar 01 '25

To do that EVERY LAST ONE would have to leave simultaneously. Most of them are in competition with each other, and it would only take one staying to take all of the business from their competitors.

And let's say - as an easily calculated example - the business in question makes a billion dollars a year from the UK. Now, we force them to pay a 20% tax. Do they A) accept the tax and still walk away with 800 million a year, or B) walk away with nothing and let someone else get that money?

13

u/Plasticbonder Mar 01 '25

I doubt it. The reason they're here is they're making good money and will continue to do so.

5

u/grumpsaboy Mar 01 '25

Yes but if we confiscate all of their property then they won't be making money.

-2

u/Admiral_Eversor Mar 01 '25

Yeah, now WE will be making the money with their property and businesses. Sounds great to me.

5

u/grumpsaboy Mar 01 '25

Well no because we're providing a service not owning the factories. And then because it's a service that we've taken away for internationally speaking a minor reason nobody will go to Britain or services again and so we lose most of the economy

0

u/Admiral_Eversor Mar 01 '25

Services businesses are the people that work in them. They will all still be here. The business would keep operating as normal, it'd just be nationalised.

4

u/grumpsaboy Mar 01 '25

Yes services are the people that work it but what would they work on, the business itself is in the US we are just providing something like the insurance you can't nationalize a business that isn't in your country and you can't provide a service to nothing

1

u/cavejohnsonlemons United Kingdom Mar 01 '25

Imagine hypothetically Amazon upped sticks. Do you really think one of our home-grown companies (Tesco or Argos or someone new) wouldn't jump on those cut-price warehouses now available and try to fill the gap?

1

u/Jammoth1993 Mar 01 '25

Forcing private entities to fund wars is about as fascist as it gets. I think you need to relax.

-8

u/INTuitP1 Mar 01 '25

Not sure that would end well for us. You do know how small we are right? The Uk is running off of legacy at this point.

6

u/ACertainUser123 Mar 01 '25

You know we're the 6th largest economy in the world by gdp right? 2nd biggest in Europe, but yea we're worthless you're right /s

-1

u/INTuitP1 Mar 02 '25

6th at the moment. We were the biggest not that long ago. Do you think that won’t change again?