Ali

Farewell and best wishes to Lord McFall who is stepping down as Speaker of the House of Lords in February.

I remember a time when talking on the phone on a train carriage felt like a social taboo. Now it feels normal for people to shout to their phones. Somewhere along the way we lost the sense of what's antisocial and what's acceptable, the unwritten rules of living in a society.

Hi @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social,
Just to flag, there is a little typo with the IfG story.

Love the blog. Many thanks

Just to be clear, our health care system can't be free at point of use for everyone and not be funded from taxation and somehow deliver better quality of care than the NHS.

Reform is misleading the public.

Nigel Farage and Reform want an insurance based system and health care not to be funded by general taxation and yet apparently to be also free at the point of use.

Either they are naive to think they can have it all or they are deliberately lying to you.

BBC's Laura K asks 'when will Labour retire the argument about their inheritance [from the Tories]?'

What Labour inherited from the Tories is important context behind the choices the Govt is making. It's not something that's gonna go away if they just stop talking about it.

By his own admission, Nigel Farage is an inept disorganised MP who 'keep[s] missing stuff'.

It must be difficult juggling 9 different jobs and earning hundreds of thousands of pounds alongside being an MP.

By his own admission, Nigel Farage is an inept disorganised MP who 'keep[s] missing stuff'.

It must be difficult juggling 9 different jobs and earning hundreds of thousands of pounds alongside being an MP.

From July 2024 to Feb 2025, the Labour government has signed up 117,800 claimants to Pension Credit, meaning they continued to receive Winter Fuel Payments and other support they may not have previously received.

This is the kind of story, you may not see covered by the media.

A very good collection by the BBC
www.bbc.co.uk/news/resourc...

By all accounts, Pope Francis was a man of humility and gentleness in a world which is increasingly engulfed in pride and chaos. May he rest in peace.

This is a frankly astonishingly ill-judged thing to write on the BBC website - it’s both a) opinion and also b) not really well-founded opinion either.

US to immediately restore intelligence sharing and 'security assistance' to Ukraine Ukraine also says it is ready to accept a US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire with Russia, after talks in Saudi Arabia.

Good news
www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5...

Is it closing? That's sad

Rupert Lowe (Elon's favorite for Reform leader) has said Nigel Farage acts like a 'messiah', needs to learn how to delegate and that he'd "not be by Nigel’s side at the next election" unless Reform's governance was overhauled.

Yet some commentators hype up Reform as some serious contender for power

As in the one at the Tube station?

For too long, the Iranian state has threatened and intimidated those in Iran and abroad who dared to stand up to the regime.

The measures we’ve announced today will reduce the threat from the Iranian Intelligence Services and help keep our country safe.

www.gov.uk/government/s...

A conversation that smells of big oil

The 2 million extra appointments in the NHS since July is well above the extra 40,000 a week promised by Labour by the way.

Badenoch wouldn't let the truth get in the way of a good story

Slightly mind blowing to think that 9 out of 13 years of New Labour's term in office were when Britain still had a larger economy than China

I have a working theory that by messing around with the algorithms so much, so that your followers who followed you to actually see your tweets no longer see your tweets, Musk has done some of us a favour by making 'tweeting' and 'x' increasingly unappealing

Ransomware attacks threaten our national security & damage our economy.

We’re taking action to deter the cyber criminals responsible by disrupting & defeating their business models.

Our aim is simple: defend our national security & economic prosperity.

The Tory amendment to the Children's Wellbeing Bill was just cynical game-playing to produce disingenuous headlines. Even if voted, it wouldn't have brought a new inquiry.

It would have only thrown out a bill designed to protect vulnerable children from falling through the cracks in the system.

This is on the whole a much better experience than X. But the only downside so far is that it doesn't let you bookmark posts without liking or sharing them.
@bsky.app @support.bsky.team

In september 2022, Amanda Solloway, wrote: “It is for the local authorities in individual towns and cities which are responsible for delivering local services, to commission local inquiries”.

The brassneck of Kemi Badenock to call for a national inquiry into CSE, when not only the last Tory government failed to implement the recommendations of the Jay report in 2022 but their own Safeguarding Minister wrote to an Oldham cllr dismissing a request for a public inquiry.

I have already written down 2024 and had to cross it out

Happy New Year one and all!

Westminster Bridge is utter chaos