Meet James Purnell. Andy Burnham's chief of staff.
He supported Iraq invasion; ex chair of Labour Friends of Israel; said that Winter Fuel Allowance and free bus passes should not be sacred; supported PFI, lie-detector tests for benefit claimants.
Next?
https://t.co/8Cnj0hIu62
CHANNEL 4 MADE A DRAMA ABOUT THE SEWAGE SCANDAL.
THE REAL WHISTLEBLOWER WAS WATCHING HIMSELF ON TV.
@Channel4 Dirty Business dramatised how water companies dumped sewage while regulators looked away.
One character, a female EA employee secretly leaking data to campaigners, was based on a real man still employed by the agency at the time of broadcast.
His name is Robert Forrester.
What he documented over nine years made the drama look understated.
In 2024, water companies reported 2,778 serious pollution incidents. 98% were downgraded to minor.
Most were reclassified using evidence provided by the water companies being investigated.
Marking their own homework.
With the regulator's blessing.
The Environment Agency has not completed a single prosecution for water pollution in the last five years.
Almost two million sewage discharges. Zero convictions.
Why?
The EA's water regulation budget is £189 million. £149 million of that comes directly from water companies.
The regulator is almost entirely funded by the industry it polices. A brilliant arrangement.
Forrester was suspended during his time at the agency for his whistleblowing.
He left in January 2026. He has since backed calls for former EA chief Sir James Bevan to be stripped of his knighthood, saying regulatory standards began to erode the moment Bevan took over.
The drama finished its run. The sewage is still in the rivers.
Sources: @Channel4News@guardian@thetimes@LBC@Feargal_Sharkey
We do not need to spend more money on bombs and bullets.
We need to spend more on housing, schools and our NHS instead.
A roof over your head. Enough food to feed your children. A public health service you can rely on in your time of need.
That is what real security means.
SEVEN WHISTLEBLOWERS. ONE DEAD WOMAN. ONE KNIGHTHOOD FOR THE MAN WHO IGNORED THEM
In 1999, seven care workers at a BUPA care home in Bromley reported abuse of vulnerable elderly residents.
They followed every rule. They submitted formal evidence. They did everything the law required.
Edna had no family. She was entirely defenceless. Seven people risked everything to speak up for her.
Every one of them lost their job.
Edna died.
The man who received the evidence and chose to act on none of it became Sir Des Kelly OBE, a government advisor on elderly care, head of the National Care Forum, and a welcome contributor to CQC @CareQualityComm policy on the very sector where his inaction let an abuser harm more people.
You genuinely cannot make this up.
These seven became known as the BUPA7. They were the first people in UK history to use the Public Interest Disclosure Act (PIDA), the law that was supposed to protect whistleblowers. The law that failed them so badly that other workers across the country saw what happened and quietly decided it was safer to say nothing.
That silence has cost lives. It still does.
Eileen Chubb @CompassnInCare, one of the BUPA7, has spent every year since building Compassion in Care and supporting over 13,000 whistleblowers. She has seen the exact same pattern repeat itself across the NHS, social care, finance, construction, and local government.
Report wrongdoing. Lose your job. Watch the wrongdoing continue untouched.
Even if a whistleblower wins at an employment tribunal under PIDA, nobody is legally required to fix the problem they reported. The abuse can just carry on. The risks remain. The tribunal hands out a payout and everyone goes home.
Mid Staffs. Gosport. Rotherham. Bristol Babies. Winterbourne View. In every single one of these cases, someone knew. Someone spoke up. And the system destroyed them for it while the wrongdoing continued.
Robert Francis produced his Freedom to Speak Up review in 2015. Joint investigations by Compassion in Care and @PrivateEyeNews later revealed that the CQC @CareQualityComm lied to the public for years, falsely claiming it had closed 100 care homes when the real number was two.
The same CQC had invited Des Kelly's input into its policy on the sector he had already failed so catastrophically.
Nothing meaningfully changed.
Eileen Chubb is calling for Edna's Law. A law that would make it a criminal offence to ignore a genuine whistleblower, put wrongdoers in front of a criminal court instead of an employment tribunal, protect whistleblowers as protected witnesses, and force corrective action on the actual wrongdoing.
The State would prosecute. Not the whistleblower, who is currently expected to become a legal expert and fight experienced barristers alone.
The petition has 7,417 signatures. It has been running for a while.
It is addressed to Sir Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer.
If you want to protect the public, you protect the people willing to protect the public.
Sign the petition. Share it. Write to your MP.
Because the alternative is just waiting for the next inquiry. The next preventable scandal. The next name we will all say we should have done something about.
Sign the petition
https://t.co/bmEI8vHq7w
Here's a radical idea for cutting the welfare budget, have big employers like Tesco pay their staff a living wage , so they don't have to claim benefits. Tax payers should not be subsidising Tesco and the like!
Palantir has been granted “unlimited access” to NHS patient data.
This is the same company that is involved in mass surveillance and genocide.
We did not consent to this. Get Palantir out of our NHS, now.
MEET THE FOUR PEOPLE WHO RAN THE NHS WHILE WHISTLEBLOWERS WERE BEING DESTROYED.
Private Eye @PrivateEyeNews called them the Cussed Quartet. While the Super Sextet were being suspended, gagged, sued, and sacked for raising patient safety concerns, these four were running the show.
All four were present at the top of the NHS system during some of the worst patient safety scandals Britain has ever seen. All four kept their jobs, their salaries, and in some cases, their careers advanced.
Dr Jane Collins was CEO of Great Ormond Street Hospital when Dr Kim Holt @drkimholt and three other paediatric consultants sent a letter warning that the child protection clinic in Haringey was dangerously understaffed and missing vital patient records. Collins commissioned the Sibert report, which confirmed the failings.
She then withheld it from the serious case review into the death of Baby Peter Connelly. When the cover-up began to unravel, her lawyers wrote to Dr Holt claiming the hospital was not aware she had ever raised concerns about child protection. That sentence was designed to rewrite the documentary record.
Collins removed herself from the GMC register, making a referral over Baby P's death impossible. She survived a vote of no-confidence from 50 consultants. She left GOSH in 2012 to become CEO of Marie Curie.
Cynthia Bower was Chief Executive of NHS West Midlands from 2006 to 2008. That is the strategic health authority responsible for supervising Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, where up to 1,200 patients may have died due to appalling standards of care.
Her authority failed to act on very high death rates at Mid Staffs and other hospitals in the region, and commissioned a piece of research from Birmingham University specifically to justify not taking action. She was then appointed Chief Executive of the Care Quality Commission, the body meant to regulate the entire NHS.
Under her watch, the CQC made the lead investigator for the Mid Staffs scandal sign a gagging clause when she left. The CQC also allegedly deleted an internal review that would have exposed its own failures over Morecambe Bay. Bower was later named in that report. She resigned in 2012.
David Nicholson became NHS Chief Executive in 2006. He was previously chief executive of the SHA covering Shropshire, Staffordshire and the West Midlands. Mid Staffs started on his watch. His appearance before the public inquiry was postponed after the Department of Health delayed producing key documents. He was then appointed, without any apparent competition, as chief executive of the new NHS Commissioning Board.
Nicholson was the most powerful person in the NHS for years. He later resigned in 2013 amid sustained public pressure.
Barbara Hakin was Chief Executive of the SHA that oversaw United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust. When Gary Walker, the trust's CEO, wrote to her warning that patient safety was being compromised by the pressure to hit government targets, her response, recorded on an internal email, was: you need to meet targets whatever the demand. Walker was sacked. Hakin was promoted to Director of Commissioning at the Department of Health, where she sat alongside David Nicholson.
The pattern is not complicated. Doctors who raise safety concerns get suspended, investigated, sued, and destroyed. The managers who ignored those concerns get promoted, appointed to national roles, and thanked for their service.
Private Eye @PrivateEyeNews documented this in 2011. Almost nothing has changed.
Source: Shoot the Messenger, Private Eye @PrivateEyeNews Special Report by Dr Phil Hammond @drphilhammond and Andrew Bousfield
The world watched as Israel razed Gaza to the ground.
Now, the world is watching as Israel razes Lebanon to the ground.
War crimes beget war crimes — and the failure to bring Israel to justice for genocide has emboldened it to destroy human life with total impunity.
Israel has passed the death penalty solely for Palestinians, enforced through military courts with a 96% conviction rate.
Israeli Minister Ben Gvir popped champagne.
The Israeli government is raising a toast to genocidal apartheid. The UK government is arming and funding it.
We can’t let Royal Mail go the way of water companies, where bosses are rewarded with millions for causing chaos workers have to deal with.
We need Royal Mail honouring its agreement with the CWU that sets out a positive vision for the company and treats workers better.
Please sign if you are a UK citizen and are opposed to the introduction of mandatory digital ID. The petition is at almost 2.2 million signatures already. Let’s send a message to Starmer. https://t.co/t16uTyTCZM
98 months since we lost 72 loved ones in the Grenfell fire.
As work starts next month to dismantle the Tower, we ask you to continue to keep Grenfell in your hearts and minds until some form of Justice comes 💚
I tweet every day to remind everyone that we need to #savenhsdentists in the UK thousands struggle to get NHS dentists, thousands can't afford private dentists, dentists have been privatised via the back door, please retweet, @wesstreeting@Keir_Starmer