Reform UK Councillors Gone: Updated
Daniel Devaney has resigned
➡️ Kicked Out
Brian Black
Oliver Bradshaw
Paul Thomas
Bob Ford
Bill Barratt
Ed Hill
James Regan
Mark Broadhurst
Paul Bean
Adam Smith
Daniel Taylor
John Allen
Nicole Brooke
Patrick Lambert
Maxine Fothergill
Ian Cooper
Edward Harris
Isabella Kemp
Aaron Roy
Jay Cooper
➡️ Defected
Amelia Randall
Nicola Brown
Christopher Marriott
John Roddy
Peter Colley
Dean Burns
Jack Goncalvez
Charles Whitford
Chris Large
Luke Cooper
Scott Cameron
Kieran Mishchuck
Kathryn Shaw
Joanne Blythe
Alistair Hendry
Graham Eardley
Andrew Barry
Todd Ferguson
Owain Clatworthy
Dawn Saunders
Cain Parkinson
Brandon Dodd
Roger Tarrant
Susanne Desmonde
➡️ Suspended
Lynn Dean
➡️ Disqualified
Andy Osborn
➡️ Resigned
Mark Whittington
Jack McGlenen
Gaynor Jean-Louis
Wayne Titley
Donna Edmunds
Luke Shingler
Desmond Clarke
Andrew Kilburn
John Bailey
Sam Booth
David Maclean
Robert Bloom
Rowland O’Connor
Rob Parsonage
Christine Parsonage
Karen Knight
Anna Thomason-Kenyon
Richard Everett
Jack Bradley
Angie Nash
Richard Morgan
Daniel Thomas
David Cumming
Desmond Watt
David Taylor
Michael Ramage
Stuart Graham
Andrew Thorp
Shaun Knowles
Tony Hill
Todd Ferguson
Sarah Shields
Ewen Sinclair
Daniel Devaney
NHS ENGLAND RIGGED ITS OWN CARE PANELS
Michelle Cox was a Continuing Healthcare manager at NHS England (@NHSEngland) North West. Her job involved deciding whether elderly and vulnerable patients received NHS-funded care or had to pay for it themselves.
In 2019 she spotted something that should have set off alarm bells across the organisation. NHS England was placing its own staff onto so-called Independent Review Panels that were supposed to make impartial funding decisions for patients. That is not independence. That is a conflict of interest baked into the system.
She raised it with her line manager Gill Paxton. Paxton dismissed it. Claimed she had cleared it with the legal department. The employment tribunal later found no evidence that she had.
What followed was years of targeted harassment. Cox was excluded from team away days, blocked from recruitment processes she was supposed to lead, and had her confidential health information shared without consent. The tribunal found Paxton had acted with the purpose and effect of unlawful harassment and that she would not have treated a white employee this way.
In January 2023 the tribunal ruled unanimously. NHS England was guilty of racial harassment and whistleblower detriment. Every single claim upheld.
The line manager who was found to have harassed Cox has since been promoted. So has the original investigator. NHS England's own internal investigations were described by the tribunal as woefully inadequate.
Dr Minh Alexander (@alexander_minh) wrote to former NHS England CEO Amanda Pritchard (@AmandaPritchard) in February 2023 asking whether the organisation would conduct a lessons-learned review. No response was ever received.
Nobody knows how many patients received unfair funding decisions from those unlawfully constituted panels. Nobody in charge has been held accountable. And the woman who flagged all of it may never work as a nurse again.
That is what NHS England does to the people who try to protect patients.
Source: Employment Tribunal, Cox v NHS Commissioning Board, Case 2415350/2020 | Dr Minh Alexander (@alexander_minh) | Health Service Journal (@HSJnews),
This deserves to be circulated.
A former Red Cross staff member got in touch.
She testifies about @ZackPolanski's role.
For transparency: her name is Brea Thibodeau.
The whole thing is a desperate smear.
I report here for @bylinetime that Reform UK’s treasurer and three other major donors who gave £1.55m to Nigel Farage’s party are all linked to a single address: One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge: the ultra-luxury apartment block long associated with offshore wealth, oligarch capital and secrecy.
https://t.co/M8I5lh643k
Marco Rubio Has Discovered That NATO Exists
Marco Rubio stood at a podium recently and said, with the confidence of a man who has never read anything, that if NATO can’t be used to “project to other contingencies,” then “we have a problem.”
He is correct. There is a problem. The problem is Marco Rubio.
Article 5 of the NATO treaty has existed since 1949. It says, in language so simple a golden retriever could grasp it, that an attack on one member is an attack on all. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
You don’t need a law degree. You barely need literacy.
What Article 5 does not say, and what no page of the NATO founding treaty has ever suggested, is that 31 sovereign European nations signed up to serve as a strategic parking lot for American military adventures on the other side of the planet.
Denmark did not join a defensive alliance in 1949 so that, 75 years later, it could help Washington bomb a country it got bored looking at.
NATO is a shield. Not a sword. Not a taxi service. Not a valet for whatever impulsive geopolitical tantrum is trending in Washington this quarter.
The Americans have now spent 15 months confused by this distinction.
Their finest minds, their cabinet secretaries, their very best people, staring at the treaty like a dog watching television. Ears up. Deeply engaged. Understanding absolutely nothing.
The good news is that Europe has finally understood something too: you cannot outsource your survival to people who find a single sentence intellectually challenging.
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
Public responsibility also implies the moral obligation not to look the other way.
It is an honour to award the Order of Civil Merit to a voice that sustains the conscience of the world.. 👏@FranceskAlbs, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.
If the brutal win the future, their brutality becomes the official story.
If they don’t, their brutality becomes the evidence against them.
Witnessing is the only defence against a future owned by brutality.
🤔🌎☮️⚖️🏴
La responsabilidad pública también implica la obligación moral de no mirar hacia otro lado.
Es un honor otorgar la Orden del Mérito Civil a una voz que sostiene la conciencia del mundo: @FranceskAlbs, Relatora Especial de la ONU en el territorio palestino ocupado.
I bought an apple in New York. I brought it home to Europe and placed it next to an Italian apple on my kitchen counter.
The Italian apple was gone in two weeks.
The American apple sat there for almost two years.
I am not a scientist. But I started asking questions. What followed was three years of research into one of the most important and least discussed differences between life in America and life in Europe.
The short version: the food industry has been running two different experiments on two different populations for fifty years.
One population was protected by strict government regulation. The other was left to the industry to regulate itself.
The results are now visible in the hospitals.
In this piece: the eight substances banned in Europe still found in everyday American food, the two gut bacteria your diet is systematically destroying, what a Norwegian hospital discovered when it transferred bacteria from healthy people into IBS patients, why Americans are dying of heart disease at ages Europeans are not, the trick the food industry uses on every health-conscious shopper, and the embarrassingly simple conclusion hundreds of research studies have reached.
You are not doomed. But you do need to know what you are dealing with.
https://t.co/pZ0IjbY2gi
@MartinSLewis Why don't they make it a legal obligation of pension funds to track down owners based on NI number. and have a register for people to check against
“Thanks Martin, I found a lost pension from when I was 22, it’s now worth £45,000!” So can you do what Rose did? Martin shows you how to check…
This is just a snip from the full Martin Lewis Money Show Pensions Special watch it on ITVX
Their unwarranted fears won't stop me voting for @TheGreenParty on May 7th, 2026 #LocalElections .... so they can keep printing, I don't buy their rags nor care to read them....
I will vote for the party giving me reasons to vote for them, inspiring me... not the ones showing and telling me they hate me, take my rights away, do all they can to make me feel unwelcome yet expect my vote..... 😏
@ZackPolanski Media coverage of the Green Party, in early 2026, has seen intense scrutiny from both political opponents and the media, amidst a rise in the party's electoral success
They establishment have disproportionately amplified right-wing voices, to insure that the status quo continues
@ZackPolanski Polanski is on our side
What he's up against is a system the poisons community, rivers, soil, air, seas, food, knowledge, democracy, housing,work, culture, healthcare, childhood, old age and the beauty of life
The system that wants to destroy Polanski will destroy all our futures
The billionaire class are terrified because we're coming for them - we're going to tax them fairly and end rip-off Britain.
Let them attack. We're here to win.
https://t.co/0qbagSvIYp
HE PROTECTED 54,000 DOCTORS. THE @NHS PROTECTED ITSELF.
In January 2014, Dr Chris Day (@drcmday) was working overnight in the intensive care unit at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich. Two locum doctors didn't show up. The unit was running at double the patient load the national guidelines allow. He raised the alarm. He reported unsafe staffing. He linked the situation to two patient deaths.
That's what the NHS calls a whistleblower.
What followed was eight years of litigation, a legal battle all the way to the Court of Appeal, and over £700,000 of public money spent by Health Education England (@NHSE_WTE) and Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust (@LG_NHS) trying to stop his case being heard at all.
Here's the really elegant bit. HEE's opening legal argument wasn't that they'd done nothing wrong. It was that whistleblowing law simply didn't apply to them, because they didn't directly employ junior doctors. They were just the organisation that controlled the career progression of every single one of England's 54,000 junior doctors. Totally different thing.
Dr Day fought that argument to the Court of Appeal and won. The law was clarified. All 54,000 junior doctors below consultant grade in England now have statutory whistleblowing protection. One man, crowdfunding against three QCs, changed employment law for an entire profession.
No formal apology from the NHS. No reinstatement. No path back to a consultant career. He has worked as a locum A&E doctor ever since, doing overnight shifts while his opponents collected salaries, pensions, and the occasional glowing tribute to NHS transparency.
During the 2022 tribunal hearing, the communications director at Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust deleted up to 90,000 emails. The director whose entire NHS email archive was also deleted during live litigation happened to be the instructing legal client in the case. The tribunal described the conduct as extraordinary. Nobody was prosecuted. The trust issued a partial apology about a press release.
The system did exactly what it always does. It absorbed the cost, deflected accountability, and waited for the man it destroyed to run out of money or energy.
He hasn't.
Sources: The Guardian | @BBC | BMJ | Westminster Confidential @davidhencke | Protect @WhistleUK | @BylineTimes | @CrowdJustice
Reminder that during Boris Johnson's time in Westminster 11 of the 12 bathrooms were found to have traces of cocaine in them.
Since then the Police have been banned from Westminster.
I have expressed my fears about the changes the government are making as a result of the US pharmaceutical deal which undermine the independence of the National Institute (NICE) giving US big pharma potential of immense influence over our drugs policies.
https://t.co/iNwBDvHcG1
SHE LEAKED THE MEMO THAT COULD HAVE STOPPED THE IRAQ WAR.
In January 2003, Katharine Gun was a Mandarin translator at GCHQ, Britain's signals intelligence agency. She showed up to work one morning, opened her email, and found a memo that would destroy her career, threaten her marriage, and land her in court facing two years in prison.
The email was from Frank Koza, chief of staff at the NSA's regional targets division, asking GCHQ to help spy on the private communications of six UN Security Council nations whose votes would determine whether the world approved an invasion of Iraq.
The goal was to gather intelligence that would give US policymakers leverage over smaller nations.
Angola. Cameroon. Chile. Guinea. Pakistan. Bulgaria. Countries with no dog in this fight, being bugged so Washington and London could fix the result.
Gun printed the email, slipped it into her handbag, and eventually passed it to a journalist. In March 2003 the memo was published by The Observer, creating a media firestorm and raising serious questions about the legality of the Iraq War.
Then they came for her.
She was charged under Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act in November 2003. She refused to plead guilty. Her legal team decided the best defence was to prove that the war itself was illegal, and demanded the government hand over its own legal advice to Tony Blair.
And here is the part that tells you everything you need to know about how power actually works.
The case came to court on 25 February 2004. Within half an hour it was dropped. The prosecution offered no evidence.
In May 2019 The Guardian reported the case was dropped because the prosecution realised that evidence would emerge showing that even British government lawyers believed the invasion was unlawful.
The government could not prosecute the whistleblower without putting the war on trial. So they quietly walked out of court and hoped everyone would forget.
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, called Gun's action the most important and courageous leak he had ever seen.
Three UK inquiries into the Iraq War never once examined her case.
Sources: The Observer / The Guardian