Just call him John

Here is a rare thing: a tax idea almost everyone agrees is broken. Stamp duty punishes you for the crime of moving house, and council tax is frozen in a 1991 fantasy where your home's value stopped mattering decades ago.

A new Centre for London report wants to bin both and replace them with a single annual proportional property tax. The typical London renter would save around £1.9k a year, first time buyers £8.6k over five years, and scrapping stamp duty could free up 79k homes a year as empty nesters finally downsize. With London prices at roughly twelve times earnings, the current setup is working for nobody under forty.

The council tax half is a slam dunk. It is absurd that a £1.8m five bed in Kensington faces a similar bill to a two bed rented flat in Croydon, all because the bands stop climbing after a valuation that predates the Spice Girls. The IPPR has shown people in modest homes pay a higher share of their home's value than owners of proper mansions.

"But won't this just reward people with loads of properties?" Exactly my worry. A tax that only judges homes by value quietly lets the real culprits off the hook: the people who own three, four, five of them. Stamp duty at least slaps a surcharge on second homes, and I am nervous about scrapping the one lever that makes hoarding expensive. The Fairer Share campaign explicitly taxes second homes, empty properties and unbuilt planning permissions, and there is even an Oxford case for higher rates on second homes and overseas owners.

So, yes to scrapping council tax, yes to ditching stamp duty for ordinary movers, but only if whatever replaces it counts how many properties you hold, not just what each is worth. We cannot keep building a country of landlords where everyone else runs a frantic rat race just to escape renting and reach the "normal" of owning a single roof. Tax the hoarding, not the moving. Get that right and I will gladly wave both old taxes goodbye.

Ninety years after its first flight, the Spitfire could go back into production using wartime composite plans that were abandoned in 1940. The new kit version costs £750k, a bargain compared with the £3m original. Share the good news and the AM Squabble with a British aviation lover.

⌚ Swatch and run. Swatch shut stores across the UK after stampedes broke out at Battersea Power Station and Westfield over a new £335 watch. Police dogs were deployed. A man was arrested in Cardiff. Someone in Liverpool camped outside for two days. It resells for £16k.

🥵 Too hot to work. The UK has laws protecting workers from the cold but nothing stopping employers from roasting them alive. Government advisers now want a legal maximum workplace temperature, pointing to Spain's 27C indoor cap. Last year was the UK's warmest on record.

🎡 Cheaper days out this summer. VAT on theme parks, zoos, cinemas and museums will drop from 20% to 5% from 25 June to 1 September, Rachel Reeves has announced. Children's meals at restaurants get the same cut. Under-16s travel free on English buses in August. Enjoy it before the energy bills go up in October.

🌿 It's the Greens, not Reform. Labour lost 58% of the council seats it was defending in May. YouGov finds the defectors went mostly left, not right. 22% switched to the Greens. 6% went to Reform. The party's problem is not what the headlines suggest.

👑 The King is not dead. Radio Caroline accidentally triggered its Death of a Monarch broadcast on Tuesday due to a computer error, fell silent for 15 minutes, and prompted at least one listener to sprint inside shouting "Charlie is bloody dead!" His wife pointed out the King had been at the Chelsea Flower Show the day before. Computer error. King fine.

GOOD NEWS… for trade after the EU signed a new deal with Mexico, with both sides explicitly seeking to reduce dependence on the US and China. BAD NEWS… for Five Italian tourists who entered an underwater cave system and never resurfaced. All five bodies were recovered at 50 metres depth after a four day search.

💶 Top five richest in Europe. The Netherlands has doubled its real spending power since the 1970s, with GDP per capita now at €65,200, placing it 4th in the EU. In the 1970s, a foreign holiday was so unusual the whole family came to Schiphol to wave you off. Now it's just Tuesday.

⚔️ Sweden's $8bn week. Two years into NATO membership, Sweden announced $4bn in new defence spending and selected French frigates worth up to $4.2bn on the same day. A nation that avoided military alliances for two centuries is now spending 2.8% of GDP on defence and rising. The era of Swedish neutrality is very much over.

🕵️ Palantir gets the boot. Germany's domestic spy agency has chosen a French AI firm over Palantir to handle its intelligence analysis, in a deliberate push for European digital sovereignty. Palantir's CEO says Germany can't afford to say no.

🏭 The great China decoupling. Europe runs a €1bn a day trade deficit with China and is now drafting rules to cap how much of any critical component companies can buy from a single country. No more than 40% from one source. The target is not named in the legislation. It is very much named everywhere else.

💉 Vaccine hope for Ebola outbreak. Oxford scientists are using the same technology behind their Covid vaccine to develop a jab for the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola now spreading in Congo. Clinical trials could begin within two to three months if animal testing goes well. No proven vaccine currently exists for this strain.

📈 Mental health burden doubles. Since 1990, the number of people globally living with a mental health disorder has nearly doubled to 1.2 billion, a Lancet study finds. Anxiety and depression lead the way. The burden peaks in teenagers. Researchers say structural drivers like poverty, insecurity and social disconnection are largely to blame.

🏊 Doping, openly. Las Vegas is hosting the Enhanced Games, where testosterone and growth hormone are not just allowed but celebrated. British Olympic silver medallist Ben Proud has sacrificed his Olympic future for a shot at a million dollars. He says it would take 13 years of world titles to earn the same.

💼 HR gets the chop. Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow has been defending firing his entire HR department for "creating problems that didn't exist." The problems vanished. So did 99% of staff who couldn't adapt, four-day weeks, and unlimited PTO. His company lost 97% of its value on his watch, but sure, it was HR.

💧 One small step for easyJet. A Rolls-Royce jet engine running on pure hydrogen completed a full simulated flight at NASA, from start-up to maximum take-off power. The engineering milestone is real. Commercial hydrogen flights remain decades away. Your Malaga trip is still on kerosene.

🎟️ Nobody's coming to the World Cup. Ticket prices for the 2026 World Cup in the US have fallen more than 30% in a month. Eight in ten host-city hotels report bookings below forecast, with most blaming visa barriers and geopolitical concerns. Turns out hosting the world's tournament requires the world to feel welcome.

By Alister

I went to Arundel Castle on Saturday with zero plan and stumbled straight into the most gloriously chaotic afternoon. Turns out I'd wandered in on their medieval re-enactment weekend, where it is officially the year 1480 and a French raiding party is busy trying to plunder the Sussex coast.

So there I was, baking in the sun, watching actual cannons go off, birds of prey swooping low enough to part people's hair, and fire eaters doing their thing while I queued for a pint. Inside, I nosed around Queen Victoria's bedroom, then waddled into town for some genuinely brilliant food and drink. A perfect day I did absolutely nothing to deserve.

Summer has finally arrived, so go and find your own version. Have a poke around Visit England to see what is happening at the castles and attractions near you. Pick a town you have never bothered with, wander a historic pile, stroll the gardens, and let serendipity do the rest. Mine handed me a French invasion. Yours might too.

By Alister

F1 returned to Montreal and so, tragically, did the groundhog curse.

Alex Albon hit one of the circuit's famous marmots in practice, lost control, and put his Williams into the wall hard enough to wreck the gearbox and power unit, ruling him out of Sprint Qualifying entirely.

Hours earlier, F1's own socials had cheerfully posted "Gary gotta go fast!" Famous last words. A roomful of animal lovers doing 200km/h and one fearless rodent. Pour one out for Gary. 🕯️

New energy caps get confirmed on the 27 May, lock in your energy bills before then! Join us next week for a more refined edition featuring your favourite contributor.

Alister & Meridyth