Happy New Year, friends! May the approaching year be kinder, more generous and peaceful than the departing one. May you have the best health possible, and all the good days and joys, and the best friendships waiting for you in the year ahead. 🥂🧡

Campaigner turned down MBE over ‘scapegoating’ of people with disabilities www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d... 👏👏👏 New Year, new start — may everyone locate their moral compass in 2026. 🧭#Disability #NewYear2026

Happy Christmas! From @northwestbylines.co.uk

A Very Bylines Christmas A Bylines twist on the classic Jingle Bells | Gemma Gould @gemmagould.bsky.social @centralbylines.co.uk

A bylines twist on the classic Jingle Bells | Gemma Gould

1/ We have now exceeded over 4 million reads of our Powerful Citizen journalism in 2025 and rising. Help us look forward to a brilliant 2026 by supporting citizen voices and becoming a friend of Bylines Network bylinesnetwork.co.uk/friends-of-b...

Germany gives €500m funding boost to research for Long Covid and other post-viral conditions www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Please support this call to reinstate #NHS workers' eligibility for NHS Covid vaccinations. #SafetyAtWork petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74...

Until *9th December* your donation to #LongCovidKids @longcovidkids.bsky.social can be doubled when you donate via #BigGive @biggive.bsky.social Here: donate.biggive.org/campaign/a05... A great way to #help this #Christmas 🌟🎄❤️

This needs to be read by everyone #Covid 👇 Open letter by CATA (COVID-19 Aerosol Transmission Alliance) to Baroness Hallett, #CovidInquiry chair. (Shockingly, NHS England stated in *July 2024* that trying to halt Covid transmission would be a "waste of public health resources"⁉️ #FFP😷? #CleanAir?)

Natasha Hirst, NEC Disabled Members’ rep, said: “Disabled people’s human rights have been consistently under attack in the UK. Disabled people are told they must return to the workforce in greater numbers. Yet the government makes policy decisions that remove the very tools required to do so.”

Today marks International Day of Disabled People. The NUJ Disabled Members’ Council urges journalists to challenge harmful portrayals about disabled people and calls on government to reverse plans to impose VAT on Motability. www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj...

Work ability trajectories and sick leave in individuals with post COVID-19 condition: 3-year follow-up of a population-based cohort The Lancet Regional Health Europe #LongCovid #Work #SicknessLeave #Employment #Covid www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

"The NUJ Disabled Members’ Council calls on journalists to challenge harmful portrayals about disabled people and shift the narrative from blame to one centred on rights, access and inclusion." The NUJ statement on the #InternationalDayOfDisabledPeople www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj...

Together Alliance against the far right, backed by disabled people's organisations and trade unions, among others. The pushback just when it's needed. Follow them at @togetheralliance.bsky.social www.togetheralliance.org.uk?s=09

The most misleading thing about Rachel Reeves’s budget? Who it was really for | Aditya Chakrabortty www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Where does the X #Disability hate campaign end and #RachelReeves begin? How #Motability cuts went from a rightwing online campaign to Rachel Reeves’s #Budget. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

#TheRedTreeandME are collecting finds for #MECFS research. 🎄 They have a Christmas tree at Chester Cathedral decorated with red leaves 🍂, each beating a message of hope from #ME researchers. Please consider donating, one red 🍁 at a time ❤️ www.justgiving.com/page/one-red...

#LongCovid has a significant impact in #workplaces. Policymakers and employers should be listening to those who still work with Long Covid. Key point: LC is preventable by cutting Covid infections. The best thing to do as a policymaker or an employer is to create Covid-safe workplaces. #CleanAir 😷

An alternative viewpoint to Boris Johnson's self-exonerating conspiracy theory ramblings in the Mail

Ex Dresdner Kleinwort investment banker Tim Horlick, who was previously married to City Superwoman Nicola Horlick (née Gayford), bought an £8.5m Pimlico flat after supplying 50 million faulty PPE masks. He has now had a criminal restraint order imposed on the property. Ben Ellery in @thetimes.com

The not-at-all racist man to address a not-at-all racist German far right rally at the invitation of Hitler's finance minister's granddaughter. And people only claim he said racist things because they don't like his not-at-all racist politics. Got it. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/e...

Serious howls of outrage in the media this morning at what is a relatively modest Budget from Labour that does nothing more than fiddle around the margins. It does highlight the missed opportunity. If you’re going to get this reaction anyway, why not at least get it for attempting a big swing?

Our conversation about immigration is framed entirely on Nigel Farage’s terms. Labour has completely capitulated the ground to the far right, the racism & the hate. We no longer have a conversation AT ALL about how we need immigration & when we cut it, we pay the price. #r4today

Today we’ll get latest net immigration figures - They’ll show immigration for work is plummeting. Why is this not part of the discussion on Rachel Reeves balancing her books & stalled growth? For every 100,000 drop in net immigration, the OBR adds £7bn to the deficit. #r4today

Byline Networks starter pack 2. Follow for good regional.and national citizen journalism and just some nice folk go.bsky.app/L5nN6tD

Patients shouldn't be risking their lives and health when going *into hospitals* for diagnosis or treatment. #Petition: Review #NHS policy on #masks, safe air & ventilation to protect vulnerable. Please sign and share. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74... #Covid #CEV #CovidIsAirborne #CleanAir

Please sign and share. #Petition: Review #NHS policy on masks, safe air & ventilation to protect vulnerable petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74... #Covid #CovidIsAirborne #CleanAir #CEV

I'd like to see the response to this if the question added "if that that means universities have less money to spend on UK students".

"Factors such as insecure immigration status can heighten young people’s vulnerability to further harm, placing them at significant risk of re-trafficking and renewed exploitation" What do ministers think denying more children secure immigration status would do? www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

This is one of the big accounts boosting Tommy Robinson, Farage and Reform and ‘English Patriots’. It’s Russian.

Wonder where all the British "based patriot" accounts that UK politics, including the No 10 team, are desperately pandering to, are really *based*... www.thedailybeast.com/top-maga-inf...

I've signed... have you?

Looking forward to next week's piece by Boris Johnson, Columnist on "The woke myth of Marital Fidelity" and the Daily Mail's new weekly food column on "London's best Pizza Places to take the sweat out of planning a family meal", by Mr. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor #CovidInquiry

Sometimes there’s so much pain I could swim in it take a deep breath and jump right in just like a sparkling silver and pink and blue fish swim to the very core where all the pain starts and where all the pain comes back home

Trump's "peace plan" is for Ukraine to capitulate on Putin's terms, including surrendering parts of its territory not even occupied by Russian forces. We can't fix politicians, but we can help people 🙏🏻 donate.redcrossredcrescent.org/ua/electricity

This is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future. In the meantime, it benefits unnamed Russian and American investors, at the expense of everyone else. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Overseas-trained doctors leaving the UK in record numbers. Direct result of racism and insecurity unleashed by major political parties. Not enough home trained doctors. Takes years and high debt to become a doctor. A healthcare crisis in the making.

Unfortunately, the important thing that should have happened today didn't - the second reading of Ella's Law, to ensure a right to clean air. But it can still happen. And things can happen regionally too 👇Thank you @sianberry.bsky.social

BREAKING: As Reform UK's former Welsh leader and Nigel Farage associate is sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison for taking bribes to spread pro-Russian propaganda, @peterjukes.bsky.social reports on why it opens the door to a broader investigation of Russian interference in our politics

Former Reform UK leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, sentenced to 10 and a half years. Wow.

Deadline: 12 December. If everyone who lost a job or knows someone who lost a job in the #NHS to #LongCovid responded, maybe the NHS could rethink exposing its workers to #Covid with no PPE. Roughly 1 in 3 people losing jobs as a result of having Long Covid are health or social care workers.

“According to The Economist’s global excess deaths tracker, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic may have killed more than 30 million people worldwide. COVID killed more people in four years than HIV/AIDS did in 40.“

“TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE”, VALIDATION FOR PEOPLE WITH LONG COVID The Covid-19 Inquiry has found that the UK Government should have acknowledged Long Covid and made the risks clear to the public. It has found that by Oct 2020 the UK Government knew #LongCovid was a significant health and policy issue.

This is a fairly terrifying read, particularly if you have any knowledge of how the NHS tries to function. Just those six words: Flu has come five weeks early. www.bearlypolitics.co.uk/p/the-punish...

I am done defending the BBC. It can't be defended from itself. Nick Covid's Just A Winter Bug Triggle covering the Covid inquiry. They should commission the Andrew formerly known as Prince to cover the Epstein files.

Galling to see Nick Triggle reporting from the Inquiry for the BBC: he shilled for Johnson throughout the pandemic, and is worth a paragraph or two himself in Dame Heather's report.

What a summary, articulating the pitfalls of forced complicity and silence as the tools of power for its own sake.

This👇🏻 lt's been sickening seeing the worst of humanity gloat over "smashing the Overton window" today. Pandering to hate has handed them a victory and legitimised their bigotry. It'll do nothing for Labour except cause more decent people to cross the street to avoid it. Most voters are NOT Reform.