George Donald @gmdonald.bsky.social

Retired after 35 years in IT.
Arthritis and a long wait for a hip replacement (36 weeks) led to a retirement project on NHS performance data.

[George Donald @gmdonald.bsky.social @GMDonald]

Latest threads on NHS performance data for all four UK countries:
NHS England - https://t.co/euwe29mERC
NHS Scotland - https://t.co/EXlbAPZ1pK
NHS Wales - https://t.co/bFYz50acJN
NHS Northern Ireland - https://t.co/6jtYfEJDNP

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

GenAI isn’t good enough to replace millions of employees, so there is basically no way the capex is going to earn out.

[Karl Flinders @Karlfl]

Staff working on Capita's botched Civil Service Pension Scheme contracthave raised serious concerns over data accuracy, data protection, and possible impacts for scheme members https://t.co/8ztgv2uD7N

[David Henig 🇺🇦 @DavidHenigUK]

Slightly in awe -"the free world will need to self-insure against the prospect of the American and Chinese governments running a protection racket on the rest of the world" is such acute analysis. We don't do that by following in some pound / euro shop way https://t.co/kxIjOw6gEL

[Will Hutton @williamnhutton]

A sad day but few care, especially the British right obsessed by the ECHR and its faux threats to British sovereignty. Today we lost ITV to US media group Comcast and EasyJet to US private credit company, Castlelake. Britain is ever more a vassal economy in thrall to the USA.

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

Hugging Face has just been sued for alleged copyright infringement for hosting & distributing copyrighted images, used for AI training.

It's been almost a *year* since I flagged to their CEO that they were distributing copyrighted works that their co-founders seemed to have uploaded themselves.

He said "Ok let us take a look and get back to you".

A year on, that dataset is still live, being downloaded 11k+ times per month.

[jeffrey lee funk @jeffreyleefunk]

A CEO who “vowed to fire anyone who doesn’t use AI in 2025” now says AI could not replace her executive assistant. This says a lot about how many big believers in AI have realized that AI is not as good as they thought.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

It's pathetic and revealing when politicians react to a report by attacking the journalist, rather than responding to the content of the report.

[Ben Zaranko @BenZaranko]

Greater fiscal devolution within the UK could promote economic growth, but has its challenges.

Giving mayors a % of local tax revenues would give them more incentives to make growth-friendly decisions, but might mean "postcode lotteries" and wider gaps between regions. [1/4]

[Ed Conway @EdConwaySky]

📽️ It is arguably the single biggest issue facing humanity. A precipitous fall in the birth rate, across the world.
But why's it happening and how worried should we be about it?
V privileged to have the legendary @jburnmurdoch join me at the big screen to help explain👇

[George Donald @gmdonald.bsky.social @GMDonald]

The mythbuster: Technology’s false promise - Steve Black HSJ - https://t.co/RwamD8Cll8

[George Donald @gmdonald.bsky.social @GMDonald]

Not sharing information effectively is a bigger problem than privacy - Patricia Hewitt HSJ - https://t.co/sgwTTXCFTg

[Digital Health @digitalhealth2]

NHS England is accelerating the rollout of AI tools across the health service, including integrated ambient voice technology (AVT), as part of a £10bn tech investment over the next three years.

https://t.co/T4SRGV27sQ

[Gabriel Pogrund @Gabriel_Pogrund]

In response to the amusing if bewildering accusation I’m a Labour stooge, please do pass this on to the following comrades:

— Keir Starmer and Waheed Alli, whose gifts of suits and spectacles to the PM was a story I broke

— Jeremy Corbyn, who furiously denounced a book I cowrote as “tittle tattle”

— Matthew Doyle, whose association with a convicted paedophile I exposed

— Tulip Siddiq, whose housing deals I examined and formed part of the inquiry leading to her resignation

— Keir Starmer (again), who said the thesis of a second book I wrote was “bollocks”

— Morgan McSweeney, whose group’s £750,000 of unlawfully undeclared donations I exposed

— Labour Together, which paid a US lobbying firm tens of thousands to investigate my work

— Ann Limb, who had her Labour peerage deferred after I revealed she made up part of her CV

— Joe Docherty, who was suspended as a Labour peer after I revealed his workplace sexting

— Angela Rayner, whose trip to New York alongside her boyfriend I revealed was funded by Waheed Alli

I recall many Reform figures vigorously agreeing about the public interest in those stories. Some have even referred to them in order to highlight the wrongdoing of the left since yesterday.

But also, it isn’t “my” story, it’s the Sunday Times investigation team, Insight’s story. It could not, would not have happened, without the whole paper, especially @ManuMidolo @venetiamenzies @GeorgeGreenwood whose revelations were indispensable and who have not to my knowledge (yet) been accused of being Labour activists.

Moreover the Sunday Times isn’t a Labour paper, or paper which exists to serve anyone or any party other than its readers and, to the best of our abilities, the public interest.

[David Aaronovitch @DAaronovitch]

Idiot. By the time the US entered the war Germany had given up on invading Britain and were stuck outside Moscow. Thanks for Lend Lease though even though your 1940 equivalents opposed even that

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

NHS SAFETY REGULATOR SACKED THE ONE INSPECTOR WHO ACTUALLY DID HIS JOB

Here's a fun one for you. The Care Quality Commission exists to catch hospitals doing dangerous things. It is the referee. The body every NHS trust in England has to answer to. So when one of its own inspectors kept flagging genuine safety problems, the CQC @CareQualityComm did the only logical thing a safety regulator can do. It sacked him.

Meet Dr Shyam Kumar @ukorthopod, an orthopaedic surgeon who worked part time as a special advisor for the CQC from 2014 to 2019. His job was to help inspect hospitals. Somewhere along the way he made the fatal error of taking that job seriously.

From 2015 onwards Kumar raised concern after concern. He said he was expected to simply rubber stamp inspections rather than actually inspect anything. He flagged safety failings at his own trust, University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay. He reported bullying and obstruction inside the CQC itself. Nobody acted on any of it.

In December 2018 the CQC terminated his contract, accusing him of misconduct including using his position to manipulate colleagues. Three of the four allegations were later quietly dropped. The fourth was a letter he wrote trying to resolve a dispute, which CQC lawyers spent years insisting counted as bullying. It did not.

In 2022 the Manchester Employment Tribunal ruled Kumar had been unfairly dismissed and found the safety concerns he raised played a significant part in the decision to get rid of him. He was awarded 23000 pounds. Small price for silencing a problem.

The CQC is a legally designated Prescribed Person under whistleblowing law. That means it is officially supposed to be one of the safe places NHS staff can turn to when they are ignored everywhere else. A decade earlier the Mid Staffordshire Public Inquiry had already found the CQC harmed its own whistleblowers.

Same organisation. Same pattern. Just a different decade to be embarrassed in.

BMA council chair Philip Banfield @TheBMA said it is paramount doctors can raise safety concerns without fear of recrimination or backlash. The CQC's response was to say it accepted the findings and had learnt from the case. It always has learnt. It never seems to remember.

Kumar summed it up better than any regulator ever could. He said the whole energy of a few individuals in the CQC was spent gunning him down rather than focusing on patient safety. That is not a rogue department having a bad week. That is the watchdog eating the only person still doing its job.

[Ash Paul @pash22]

Digital tools can support @NHSEngland reform, but without process transformation and effective implementation, technology alone will fail to deliver productivity gains, writes @sib313 .
The NHSE 10-Year Health Plan is riddled with threads of argument that more technology will solve big NHS problems. The words “technology” and “digital” occur on about one page in every three of the plan.
https://t.co/TVM0ZeEMPI
If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride!

[David Henig 🇺🇦 @DavidHenigUK]

At its core the EU is a permanent negotiation between members therefore its relations with neighbours must also be.

Not sure why UK politics struggles so much to understand this. https://t.co/puqgTvAaNO

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

“This study cuts through the optimism surrounding medical AI by showing how easily benchmark success can be
mistaken for real readiness. In medical AI, impressive scores are clearly not the same as trustworthy capability.”

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

over a million deaths attributable to DOGE and counting: https://t.co/AWG7aqRVjG, with sources

[Andrew Clifford @sentinelcurrent]

Financial Times UK
FCA warns of AI arms race spreading in financial sector.
Monday 6 July 2026
A look at #TomorrowsPapersToday