About the only good news I could find for education is that colleges will get 10%increase admittedly this won't repair the damage but it won't get poor worse. The HE sector is poorly but FE's health is far worse

A slide from the draft Scottish Budget papers which shows exactly why local government is struggling, and will continue to struggle, under the SNP.

It's a good headline but there are too many caveats in what she actually said and there is too much equivocation in comments from government spokespeople. Government departments, ministers, backbenchers all need to get off the Nazi child abuse site yesterday.

More of this please.

Don't think Labour MPs are in any mood to drop this any time soon...

Scotrail now not even apologising for running two carriage trains at rush hour on the Borders Railway. Scotrail also continuing to use Twitter/X, the Nazi/child abuse site, as their main online interface to customers. Which means they won't hear from me about it. Ho hum.

Remember when the GERS figures were published with a fanfare serenaded by Salmond and Sturgeon.

The magical time is here! As the SNP's proposed budget is published today we enter the brief interlude in Scottish politics where everyone has to accept that Scottish budgets are written by Scottish ministers. The rest of the year the SNP and their followers insist it's imposed on us by Westminster.

As Michael Forsyth is elected the new Lord Speaker I'm reminded of how, on 3rd May 1997 after he had lost his seat and his position as Secretary of State for Scotland, he was late to a function in Stirling having been held up by traffic, for which, he said in his speech, "I blame the government." 😂

The tech bros are fully integrating their operations into the Trump administration.

Hahahahahaha. Zawahi made repeated demands for a peerage from the Tory leadership, and when he was refused defected to Reform, according to multiple Tory sources.

Statement from the UK Technology Secretary, whose most recent post on Twitter was 9:10am yesterday

Nothing says "Ofcom is seriously considering strong sanctions against X" like the fact that they are using X as the primary social media site for publicising their action.

Ofcom's first post here in 6 months. There's supposed to be a thread following this (hence the down arrow) but for some reason they've only posted that to the site they're investigating

‘For Women Scotland’ mentioned too, I see.

Reading about Ofcom launching a formal investigation into X over Grok producing CSAM calls to mind the committee scene in Life of Brian. "Right! This calls for immediate discussion!" "New motion?" "Completely new motion, that there be immediate action..." "Once the vote has been taken..."

The Cardiff Lions do an annual Drag Rugby charity match for children’s charities and it’s as beautiful as you imagined

Badenoch gets away with her stupidities because they do not get the scrutiny they should. How on earth does she get to lecture anyone on crime, when she has admitted committing a serious crime herself? Because she is never, ever put under pressure on it.

Politicians are not experts, and good politicians remember that, speak with care and try to avoid demonstrating ignorance. And then there's Kemi Badenoch, a different type of politician altogether, whose wells of ignorance are deep and who is determined to ensure everybody knows it. Remarkable.

Iranian-linked Scottish accounts fall silent again. Such a bizarre story. ukdefencejournal.org.uk/iranian-link...

An absolute nightmare for the 'London has fallen' brigade

I thought the Iran internet outage would have silenced a lot of these bots.

I regret to inform that there's been another Murphy in The National, and it's a doozy.

Kemi, this is just a population density map

Glad to see Sex Matters being held to account here. They have been actively working to dox as many trans athletes in the UK as they can. It's appalling, Nazi-adjacent behaviour and anyone who supports them should be ashamed.

Very handy if you're looking for Labour MPs to follow.

Oh this is horribly accurate.

Twitter is the world’s largest generator of CSAM & non-consensual porn by a margin of about 8000%, and somehow… MSM isn’t even reporting on it. (also includes advice for reporting ‘deepfake harassment’ to police if it escalates to a point where restraining order is necessary) youtu.be/p71qQKmIGhQ

a post-meeting summary in a bullet point list with weird emphasis and prioritisation, and emails completely lacking any sense of the person's actual tone - love the modern workplace!

genuinely though imagine the arrogance you'd have to have to publicly interact with real life bravery through your own made up characters/value systems, even having that thought internally would make me cringe for a year

[sombrely, with tears in eyes] "truly the people of Iran embody the great spirit of Flumpo The Fart Wizard" - author of Flumpo The Fart Wizard

I see populist Zack is giving it tight to Labour about using X while the greens still us it themselves.

Rupert Lowe exposes the rank hypocrisy of Reform and ‘gender critical’ transphobes who use the rhetoric of “protecting children” to attack healthcare for trans kids… while simultaneously lobbying to enable billionaires to make even more money from paedophilic AI manipulated porn! 😣

Missing the wit and wisdom of David Gow, former Germany correspondent and European business editor of the @theguardian.com, who died aged 80 on 3 November 2025. www.theguardian.com/media/2025/n...

For UK folk the NCR is akin to The Tablet here - i.e. on the liberal end of Catholic thinking. So this isn't quite the strong statement from the Catholic Church that some are painting it as. Still good though.

"The vast majority of Labour MPs, MSPs and councillors – along with the vast majority of representatives from most other parties – are still using the child abuse platform as a primary means of communication. Indeed many are using it to condemn the child abuse feature. This is just not sustainable."

One of the big factors stopping politicians and journalists ditching Twitter/X is that over the years it has become their key reference for what is and is not popular, and of course leaving the platform is not popular on the platform. That is also, of course, the primary reason why they must leave.

Armed militias, wrongful detention and kidnapping? All of those things are happening in the US too, with the addition of summary executions of citizens by the armed militias. So on balance you might be safer staying in Venezuela.

Honestly, having read the piece it really isn't a lot deeper than the headline (unlike say, the FT piece on whether Trump is a fascist) it does just make the argument that X is bad, but would be worse if everyone who disapproved left.

This headline absolutely deserves the shit it is getting, but given that for most people the article will be behind a paywall it's also a great example of how social media consumes headlines as summaries of opinion rather than the clickbait they actually are. I don't know what she actually wrote.

Doing ironing and realising my red "Trans rights are human rights" t-shirt that I got for Scottish Labour conference last year is absolutely the best quality and most comfy t-shirt I own, and therefore gets a lot more wear than others. Message t-shirt manufacturers - this is a good selling point!

It could be worse, this has happened to some people’s eyes. www.bbc.co.uk/news/technol...

I have a BT Smart Cam which I bought about seven years ago; it's not been in use for a while but I recently had a need for it. I discovered that BT had discontinued the app needed to run it and are just saying "Sorry, we decided to stop your camera working. Here's how to throw it away properly."

That’s the thing I don’t get, you’d think there would be some kind of political gain to be made from leading rather than following.

Let's be clear on the Twitter/X situation: every single politician, government function and public entity that has an account on there can stop using it whenever they want, and can delete that account whenever they want. Only Ofcom can ban the site, but anyone can leave at any time. And they should.

Graham's all about 'protecting women'

Except that as per usual for this government, they end up in worst of both worlds because they bestow the swastika bikini app with some residual legitimacy while deriving absolutely zero benefits, not clear how exactly their posts on there can be said to be 'contesting the battle of ideas'

In my case similar but the TV for the Spectrum was black and white

We got round this issue by connecting the Spectrum to the old black and white TV. Playing chuckie egg II in colour for the first time was a revelation...

The telly had four mechanical channel buttons, each tuned using a screwdriver in a hole in the middle. We used the fourth one to connect the ZX Spectrum computer until Channel 4 was launched at which point it became a huge bone of contention with my eldest brother and the computer was banned.