It will be a sad day when we lose contact with the Voyagers - they’ve been communicating with us from deep space since I was 9 years old! I watched them launch, watched them arrive at Jupiter, Saturn and, in the case of Voyager 2, Uranus and Neptune. I remember when Voyager 1 returned the Pale Blue Dot photograph. They feel like old friends and I do occasionally think about them out there in the darkness. Contact with Voyager 1 was lost and then re-established earlier this week using the low power S-band transmitter on the spacecraft that had not been used since 1981! Astonishing. That’s before Duran Duran released the Rio album :-) !!
We need doctors to take on leadership roles – so why do we bring them down?
Really thoughtful piece from @mancunianmedic in @bmj_latest
Well worth a read!
Since the election, the right wing media in the UK has parted company from reality much as it has in the US. We now have nonsense articles about how everything has gone wrong for Starmer to create a counter-narrative, whilst in reality government is just governing.
I’m not buying this line of argument. Johnson knew, as everybody in the Conservative Party knew, that the Brexit referendum was about heading off the (over-stated) electoral threat from UKIP and simultaneously dealing with a fringe group of MPs in the party who were a distraction and wouldn’t shut up. Nobody, Johnson included, thought the country would actually vote for it. There was never going to be a White Paper because nobody sensible could think of anything to put in it. The expectation was that the electorate would sort the Conservative Party’s internal squabbles out for them by decisively rejecting it and all would be well. As an aside, we have the choice of continuing with this failed non-policy or not, and the current government have chosen to continue with it. I would love to see a White Paper laying out the case for staying out of the single market and customs union.
I’m in my mid 50s. I live in Crouch End. I own Travis, Blur and Snow Patrol CDs. If I don’t see at least 10 fellow Generation Xers I know at Ally Pally tonight I’ll be very surprised! In fact I’ll eat my proverbial quinoa, kale and tahini hat…
#genx#GenX#NorthLondon
Thanks to everyone for their kind words about my appointment as the new government's Prisons, Probation and Parole Minister.
It's a real privilege and I'm looking forward to improving the system for hard-working staff, turning more lives around and cutting crime.
The challenge for political broadcasting is enormous, and rather satisfying to watch. After years of personality-driven and chaotic, shallow politics coverage across much of the media, which was largely about instability, gossip and leadership crises we now have a govt with massive majority, widespread internal agreement and no likelihood of massive instability anytime soon. A great environment for a programme like #c4news full of policy nerds and people who prefer to argue about what ideas work than who should be the front person.