outstanding public service here

Councils ordered not to adopt four-day week Communities Secretary warns local authorities they may be classed as ‘failing’ if they cut hours but not wages www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/202...

Dog-whistle and factually incorrect. Ladies, raise your hand if you were sexually assaulted by a boy at school? I’d wager this or a family member is most women’s first experience of sexual violence

ill say again, the Spectator under Fraser Nelson did more to normalise & legitimise racism & paranoia about migrants, amongst posh people, tho Elon Musk’s X is now reinforcing it. Every single week from at least 2020 the Speccie’s weekly 1 page news round up had “small boat numbers” as a key item.

christmas singalong dilemma solved

fair comment (I respect different political traditions too - just not fascist ones - and in my experience most local Labour activists feel the same and aren’t gonna like these absurd attempts to equate Polanski and Farage)

Mate, I’m embarrassed for you

told you

By continuing to use X, our government provides free content & credibility for Elon Musk, helping him promote holocaust denial, funny how Lab ppl who were so worried about antisemitism, they expelled a NE mayor for appearing at arts event where Ken Loach talked about his NE films, are cool with this

UK and US governments making this their growth strategy may want to think again

If AI poisons Wikipedia then things are not looking good.

Wikipedia has a nice article on the tell-tale signs that an LLM did your homework. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

i know this is hardly a new take but isn’t it WILD that wikimedia has to ask for donations to keep itself afloat when every LLM in the world has been trained on wikipedia data?

David Walliams hosted an ultra-sleazy secretive men-only dinner where the waitresses were seriously sexually harassed, propositioned, groped, & frightened, 3 years running, and never really apologised, and somehow got away with it www.thebookseller.com/news/trade-r...

Genuine question that I feel the AI spinners need to be interrogated on much more. Anyone got any ideas?

The prison which reportedly denied an ambulance to hunger striker Qesser Zurhah, HMP Bronzefield, is fully privatised (Sodexo runs prison & medical) & has had a string of scandals including 2 recent deaths & an earlier baby death metro.co.uk/2025/08/04/t... & www.theguardian.com/society/2024...

As Rachel Coldicutt has pointed out, by not publishing the detail of the questions, the government’s new AI agency gets the headlines but tells us very little. The question included “social communication“ - if I‘ve ever let Gmail’s LLM autocomplete an email sentence, am I included in this figure?

We often hear (as in this column www.theguardian.com/technology/n...) that the future of education will be about training people to use and “manage” AI. But given the nature of it (proprietary black box algorithms crunching mind boggling amounts of unspecified data, I genuinely don’t understand…/

Alienating doctors, nurses & other health profs who keep our NHS afloat was the worst thing Jeremy Hunt did, in a *very long list of bad things*. Hunt called them greedy, lazy & cruel, blaming staff for his own failings. Now Wes follows Hunt's playbook. & (now Sir) Hunt reinvents as benign elder

"Qesser Zuhrah has been refusing food for almost 2 months now" #C4News last night. The first time I've seen the mainstream news cover the Palestine hunger strikers.

🧵/ How has political opinion changed over 2025? In voting intention, Labour have made the biggest losses, while the Greens have gained most, and Reform UK have established a clear lead Ref: 28% (+3 from 12-13 Jan) Lab: 18% (-8) Grn: 17% (+9) Con: 17% (-5) LD: 14% (=) yougov.co.uk/politics/art...

I don't usually speculate about D-notices but in this case you do have to bloody wonder. And the jury trial point is... on point.

Christ, the reported details of neglect & callousness are chilling. "You don't decide if you go to hospital, I do" MOJ, NHS, & Sodexo (who run the prison) all refused to comment. www.middleeasteye.net/news/can-you...

MPs laughed. David Lammy tells families of hunger strikers he doesn’t know anything about it’ Social media is awash with jokes about food and thousands of people can’t tell the difference between charge and conviction. We all die a bit now. www.thenational.scot/politics/257...

One of the 1st political events seared into my young brain was a nightly litany of IRA hunger strikers dying & dead. An early lesson in state brutality. I'd thought we had grown more civilised since. But it would seem not. Now, we seem willing to kill people who have *been convicted of no crime*.

The prison which reportedly denied an ambulance to hunger striker Qesser Zurhah, HMP Bronzefield, is fully privatised (Sodexo runs prison & medical) & has had a string of scandals including 2 recent deaths & an earlier baby death metro.co.uk/2025/08/04/t... & www.theguardian.com/society/2024...

Hm, it's almost like the stated reason to scrap jury trials (to benefit crime victims) is not the actual reason... unrelatedly i'm sure (🤨🤔), criminalisation of climate & peace protest continues, as does the establishment's terror of jury habit of acquitting on basis of preventing a greater crime

(things that were a piece of cake 20 years ago in a long since discontinued version of a once perfectly functional, now utterly enshittified product, part 2892392370)

Nice little explainer thread on why doctors are angry and many can’t find jobs, despite the NHS being in crisis

People knowing their rights just isn't in the interests of our current ruling political classes. Indeed, it's something that they've turned into a sneer ("I know my rights!"). No wonder people end up veering towards conspiracism / feeling things have shadowy unspoken rules & huckster solutions.

In our battle (community & staff) to stop a local, huge NHS privatisation, Unison were frankly pretty hopeless; this was back a few years, when McAnea was Unison's head of health, before becoming Gen Sec. So the election of Egan feels... hopeful?

Or, you know, if we'd fixed our (extraordinarily low, by international standards) levels of statutory sick pay (rather than just tinkering round the edges), having elected a Labour government... if your choices are living on £120pw or going to work sick & spreading bugs - some 'choice'

Really, *really* hoping that @faizashaheen.bsky.social is not too far behind, then my cup would spilleth over!

Oh wow 🤩 this is *brilliant* news - the former Labour Mayor of North Tyne, and one of the most genuinely impressive left-wing politicians in recent years, has joined the Greens! Welcome, Jamie! You will be such an asset 💚

I wonder how much lower flu would be right now if we’d fixed sick pay properly during COVID so that your colleague didn’t come to work sick, give you flu, which you passed on to your granny before you realised

Because it’s the end of year and I’m in reflective advent mode, I’ve been thinking about that thing that no-one ever wants to talks about (well, for a bit of Boris-sniping)…/

Andrea Jenkins: “I’m pro private healthcare.” Zack Polanski: “… You’re pro private healthcare.” Andrea Jenkins: “You’re putting words in my mouth.” 🤦‍♀️ @boldpolitics.Bsky.social

Richard Tice says Reform is moving on from "made up twaddle" about "50 years old allegations" that Nigel Farage wanted black classmates to "go back home" in an interview about Reform mayoral candidate Chris Parry, who messaged that David Lammy should "go back home". Different day, same racism.

These posts are a much needed balm on these dark mornings, but they are also a masterclass in evocative yet efficient alt text.

One for my more technical BlueSky friends - have #microRNA / #mirna salivary tests demonstrated real clinical utility? How likely are they to in future? I see there's quite a lot of hype for a French healthtech product (Ziwig) claiming to speed #endometriosis diagnosis (for £1k!) & I'm always wary/

A warm welcome to our five new councillors! 💚

I work in the NHS and resident doctors have my full support. NHS staff must have full pay restoration if we are to provide the NHS patients deserve.

If you read one U.S. president's remembrance of Rob Reiner today...

once more, with feeling 🧵

A short thread on why Wes Streeting isnt the person to “save the NHS” (and sorry folks but nor is Andy Burnham, whose role in all of this as health Secretary & shadow has tended to be inadequately scrutinised)

Blair, Cameron & Starmer’s dishonest halfway house to NHS privatisation by a million stealth decisions is extraordinarily expensive in terms of management time. Which is why English NHS, just 10-15 yrs ago so administratively cost effective (compared internationally), has rapidly lost that advantage

I'm on my way to a Chanukah event. It should be a celebration but instead our community is once again mourning. I will be thinking of everyone in Australia and those around the world in the Jewish Community who know this fear and loss. We stand with you.

The main thing you need to know about Fraser Nelson is that he pushed “small boats” as a “top story” in *every issue* of the latter yrs of his Spectator editorship. Ppl just switched from death trap trucks to boats when the former became more policed; it’s Fraser more than any1 who created the panic

Alan Sked, the founder of Ukip, has made such an allegation, saying that the 33 year old Farage spoke about black voters being unreachable for Ukip using racial slurs in 1997, the year Farage replaced Sked as leader. See this 2014 interview www.theguardian.com/politics/201...