Darren Hankey

Principal of the overlooked, undervalued, underfunded yet marvellous @Hartlepoolfe. Raised on a diet of broken biscuits & FSM. Views my own.

[Darren Hankey @HCFEprincipal]

"Hartlepool has the highest share of students going into higher technical qualifications in all England."

@hartlepoolfe #TransformingLives since 1849

[Fraser Nelson @FraserNelson]

Odd to see Tories claim "mass migration is still happening" as if there has been no change.

Here's the latest:-

[Adam Crafton @AdamCrafton_]

Infantino currently arguing that World Cup average price of $500 for all games (even group games) is fair enough because Knicks play offs games are expensive. Oooook

[Philip Aldrick @PhilAldrick]

Brexit’s ten year anniversary is approaching. New Bloomberg Economics analysis shows the hit to GDP has been 2-4% so far, with a central estimate of 2.5% in the long run. For context, that’s £30bn in lost tax every year. 1/
https://t.co/piPcQxm0ZA

[Tommy 🙋🏻‍♂️ @ProudlyPastoral]

When will exam boards be held to account? This seems to happen multiple times, year after year. It's not acceptable.

[Financial Times @FT]

Is the UK enjoying a productivity rebound? https://t.co/ZDVod9yOBv

[Full Fact @FullFact]

The latest asylum figures show a 58% decrease in the number of asylum cases waiting for an initial decision since Labour took office.

Our updated explainer looks at the government’s progress with the asylum backlog.
https://t.co/iTlIXnR04n

[National Literacy Trust @Literacy_Trust]

📢Good news! 📢

Our latest research shows a modest upturn in children and young people's reading engagement in 2026.

This is positive, but we must keep going to embed reading into their everyday lives.

Find out more about the work we're doing: https://t.co/iWdTYe4Xq6

[Stuart Lock @StuartLock]

Last year's teacher pay deal was published on the 22nd May.

This year the Secretary of State (correctly) asked the STRB to bring forward their recommendations so that schools would be better able to plan ahead and "fully reset the timeline in 2026-27".

[Brian Groom @GroomB]

Uptick in children and teenagers enjoying reading for first time in 5 years - National Literacy Trust. https://t.co/tZK58KQ65R

[George Eaton @georgeeaton]

Labour needs to have the honesty to admit that you can't fund a universal welfare state and public services without higher taxes for all, not just the wealthy.

The Tories and Reform need to propose more genuine cuts: e.g. scrap the triple lock, roll back free childcare and school meals, £20 fees for GP appointments.

Both are in states of denial at the moment. https://t.co/CM3ZJTzqmF

[Mark Shuttleworth @mshutty3]

My lad @DShut7946 has transformed this wasteland on our estate to something that young kids use and have a kick about with their pals.
He doesn't want college full time and is desperate for an apprenticeship, unfortunately there hard to come by😟
Anyone know any in cental lancs

[The New Statesman @NewStatesman]

HOW BRITAIN LOST CONTROL by Anoosh Chakelian

When George Orwell was working on The Road to Wigan Pier in 1936, he lodged at a tripe shop riddled with beetles on this street. He had asked a local to point him towards the worst place to stay. On the same quest today, he would have had plenty of suggestions. Darlington Street and its offshoots are thought around town to have Britain’s highest concentration of Serco-run and other “HMOs”. HMOs are houses in multiple occupation, and Serco is one of the private outsourcing companies with a government contract to rent them out to asylum seekers.

Serco leases houses from private landlords and runs them on their behalf. I have heard from landlords who are being paid between £1,000 and £2,000 a month in rent on these properties, depending on the number of bedrooms, location and condition. The money these landlords are receiving comes from the Home Office, which agreed ten-year contracts to outsource the accommodation of asylum seekers in hotels and houses to Serco and two other firms: Clearsprings and Mears. These contracts are projected to have cost the taxpayer a total of £15.3bn by 2029.

There are 93,653 asylum seekers housed in Home Office asylum accommodation in the UK, around 22 per cent of whom are in hotels, some of which Serco also runs. The government has prioritised closing hotels. As a result, the number of people being quietly dispersed to houses is rising every year – there are now 68,719 in tens of thousands of houses across the country.

Emotion runs high. The UK’s asylum accommodation model has led to rioting and protests for two consecutive summers across Britain. Protesters direct their rage at the government, the council, police and asylum seekers. But occasionally, you see signs reading “Serco Out”.

Serco is so integral to the British state that the Labour politician Margaret Hodge has called it “too big to fail”, because “there are too many services that would collapse” if it went bankrupt. It simply runs too many state functions for it to be feasible to allow it to go bust.

It’s not just Serco. So much of the state, from welfare, prisons, and asylum to the NHS, security and social care, is in the hands of gnomically named companies most voters have never heard of: Capita, Sodexo, G4S.

Thatcher is often accused of “selling off the family silver” when she privatised public utilities and state-controlled industries. But less attention is paid to the services she pawned off, now in the hands of outsourcing giants. The question is whether a potential future prime minister, such as Andy Burnham, could overthrow the outsourced state.

Cover illustration by Gregori Saavedra

[Lewis Goodall @lewis_goodall]

There may well be serious questions about policing and equality guidance. But there is still no conclusive evidence that anti-discrimination policy caused the actions of officers the night Henry Nowak died. But half of British politics is acting as if there is.

Piece from me on the endless unreality of Britain's culture wars.

https://t.co/Igzwa7Gcxu

[Adam Crafton @AdamCrafton_]

NEW @TheAthleticFC

Infantino floats in & out of the Oval Office, hangs out with Trump officials, squeezes host cities for cash & cloaks FIFA in MAGA.

Now, FIFA wants to be considered powerless.

Free to read column on Gianni’s visa disasterclass.

https://t.co/f4xDFOgQsx

[Hend Amry @LibyaLiberty]

The U.S. World Cup in one horrible photo:

[HLTCO @HLTCO]

If my timeline could refrain from showing an AI photo of Nigel Farage decking someone on Question Time every 4-6 posts, I’d really appreciate it.

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

The right wing and the far right have not tweeted about this Nazi who tried to behead a Kurdish barber with an axe.

Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Robert Jenrick, Rupert Lowe, and all the usual suspects were silent. But they are very vocal about incidents like the horrific attempted murder in Belfast and Henry Nowak’s murder.

They are opportunists who use horrible incidents involving minorities to sow division and hatred.

A Saudi student was stabbed in the neck outside student accommodation in Cambridge by a cocaine user, and they did not say F all.

[Darren Hankey @HCFEprincipal]

Your party's 2017 apprenticeship reforms reduced opportunities for young people.

[Laura Trott MP @LauraTrottMP]

We need to stop pushing young people into courses that leave them with huge debts, minimal face time & no job prospects at the end. It’s not fair & demoralising for graduates. Our New Deal for Young People would fix this by capping dead end degrees & investing in apprenticeships.

[Thanos Angelopoulos @Th_Angelopoulos]

Call you old fashioned? Alright, old-fashioned, @PatrickChristys, let us go through the decades you prefer.

The 1960s: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley tortured and murdered five children, buried them on Saddleworth Moor, and recorded their screams on tape.

The 1970s: Peter Sutcliffe murdered 13 women with hammers and screwdrivers across Yorkshire.

Dennis Nilsen began strangling young men in his London flat, dismembering them, boiling their skulls on his stove, and flushing the remains down the drains.

The 1980s: Michael Ryan shot 16 people dead in Hungerford. Fred and Rose West were raping, torturing, and dismembering women and girls and burying them under their house in Gloucester. Their own daughter among them.

The 1990s: Two 10-year-old boys abducted a toddler from a shopping centre in Liverpool, tortured him, and bludgeoned him to death with bricks and an iron bar.

Thomas Hamilton walked into a primary school in Dunblane and shot 16 five-year-olds and their teacher. Harold Shipman was murdering his patients by the hundred.

The 2000s: James Watt and his family enslaved a man for a decade, tortured him with baseball bats, air pistols, boiling water, and pit bull attacks, then decapitated him and dumped his body in a lake.

Mathew Hardman, 17, murdered a 90-year-old woman, cut out her heart, placed it on a silver platter, and drank her blood.

The 2010s: Derrick Bird shot 12 people dead across Cumbria.

Thomas Mair shot and stabbed an MP in the street while shouting "Britain first".

The 2020s: Jemma Mitchell decapitated her friend, stored the body for two weeks, and drove 200 miles to dump it.

Those are the decades you prefer. And for each decade there are 20 other equally horrific incidents.

And here is the thing, old fashioned Patrick. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, violence, burglary, and car crime have fallen by close to 90% since the mid-1990s. The ONS confirms that violent crime is two-thirds lower now than in the 1990s.

The country you live in today is measurably, statistically, dramatically safer than the one you are nostalgic for. That's not an opinion, it's a fact.

And I am not even touching Glasgow and its past knife crime epidemic.

So, which decade was better, Patrick? Tell us.