Dr Devra Kay

Strictly Labour. Retired Cllr. Half-fullist. Pre-Thatcherite. Academic Oxford. Women's history & lit 16/17c. Write. Sing. Can't cook.

[Dr Devra Kay @LaBloggeuse]

@GoogleExpertUK It’s scary enough without them

[Dr. Bendor Grosvenor 🇺🇦 @arthistorynews]

David Hockney, what a loss. A powerfully observant eye, in pursuit of the truth, rooted in exceptional draughtsmanship. One of our greatest. RIP.

[Dr Devra Kay @LaBloggeuse]

@ianrich15813274 @LindaWeatherhe1 And poverty for the elderly

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

Rescued from a dairy farm, these cows experience grass for the very first time in their lives.

[Ben 🇬🇧 @BenInRushcliffe]

The UK's new secretary of defence. Rushcliffe born and bred. Former major in the army.

Dan Jarvis MBE.

[Rt. Hon Ben Wallace @BenWallace70]

John Healey shadowed me for over 4 years. While i didn’t agree with everything he did i know he tried his best and had the interests of the Armed Forces at his heart. i know he loved the job and it will have not been easy to resign. His loyalty to his Party and PM was not reciprocated by them when it mattered and i think he was left with no choice. i wish him the very best. His resignation was one of principle.

[Martin Lewis @MartinSLewis]

10 years of scam adverts. I have the misfortune to be in 44% of them according to the police. I've sued. I've lobbied. I've cried at hideous cases of vulnerable people losing everything. Why has nothing been done. Please watch...

[Dr Devra Kay @LaBloggeuse]

@SamaHoole @sandra_cheetham 😱😫

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

This year the Home Office moved to stop expert sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand coming to shear British sheep.

The people who keep the animals comfortable were declared surplus to requirements.

For over a decade, around 75 of the best shearers on earth have flown in each spring on a simple visa concession. In a few brutal weeks they take the wool off up to two million sheep.

A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes. Hundreds a day. Calm hands, no panic in the animal. It is a global trade and a young body's game, and Britain has never grown enough of its own.

The official line? Fourteen years to train Britons, so the door is closing.

Here is what that tidy sentence ignores. A sheep must be shorn every year or she overheats, cannot move properly, and gets eaten alive by flies and maggots. Shearing on time is welfare, plain and simple, written into law and into the animal's own skin.

So a government that lectures farmers without pause about welfare has quietly made the most basic welfare task harder to carry out. After the outcry they allowed one "final" year. Then the experts are gone for good.

A sector already losing money on every fleece, already burning wool it cannot sell, now told it cannot even get the people in to take the wool off.

You could be forgiven for thinking somebody wants the British sheep gone.

[Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 @reformexposed]

Reform don’t do the job.

Rob Kenyon, #Makerfield Reform UK candidate was elected a Wigan councillor a month ago. He’s not attended a single meeting or done a single piece of work on it.

Nigel Farage was elected MP for Clacton. He’s spent 2 years anywhere but Clacton.

[John Slinger MP @JohnSlinger]

I’m sorry @JohnHealey_MP resigned from government. He was a superb Defence Secretary

@DanJarvisMBE is an excellent appointment as our new Defence Secretary.

Like John he’s a minister of utmost integrity, talent & seriousness. Much needed at this time.

https://t.co/AoyZPRzS9F

[Dr Devra Kay @LaBloggeuse]

@Nillo82948721 @Mortimer4Kim And their gross financial inefficiency

[Stephen Kinnock @SKinnock]

We're delivering 2,500,000 more NHS dentist appointments - and the biggest sustained increase in dental school places since 2007, with a dental school in every region.

Lots done, lots more to do on NHS Dentistry - incl. reforming dental contract - but we're making progress.

[Paul Lewis @paullewismoney]

British Gas is cutting the amount it pays customers who have solar panels when they sell surplus electricity back. It did pay 15.1p/unit but is being cut to 12p - a 20% cut - from 6 July. And just 8p for bigger arrays. Has this affected you? DM or reply please. Thanks.

[Dr Devra Kay @LaBloggeuse]

@KathrynPorter26 Wish you a full recovery. ❤️

[Kathryn Porter @KathrynPorter26]

This really worries me

A month ago in Wales I suffered a ruptured aneurysm in my abdomen. I lost over 2 units of blood

But the Welsh ambulance service refused to send an ambulance. I was still breathing so apparently didn't need one

I spent 7 hours lying on the ground in a car park. Every time I moved I threw up from the pain. The owners of the car park called 999 6x

One of the people there was a fireman. He couldn't believe that 999 treated each call as a separate incident and couldn't see the details or link to previous calls. He was frustrated because they could see I was seriously ill but you can't see internal bleeding and so there was no way to persuade 999 that it actually was an emergency

Eventually my husband arrived by taxi, journey of more than 3 hours from our home

He gave me my pain meds (the car park people were worried about liability and I was too ill to get them myself). This meant I was able to crawl into the car and he drove me to A&E

He got me into a wheelchair. We waited 75 minutes to see a doctor. I was shivering, heaped with blankets and threw up all over the floor

As soon as a doctor looked at me I was taken straight to resus. The next day I was transfered by blue light ambulance to another hospital, had a blood transfusion and spent 5 days on the high dependency unit

If my husband hadn't been able to come and look after me I have no idea how I would have survived. As it was I nearly didn't

I would not have been able to get myself to hospital nor would I have been able to log into some digital triage system

This scheme seems to assume if you're seriously ill you'll arrive by ambulance and if not you're well enough to navigate a digital portal

My experience suggests that's a dangerous assumption

A week later, back home in England I had another ruptured aneurysm. This time an ambulance came in 2 hours and again I was taken straight to resus

It wasn't the same because I had a recent diagnosis of a ruptured aneurysm so we could tell 999 I was almost certainly bleeding internally. But I was too ill to get myself down the stairs and out to the car. We still needed that ambulance and I still wouldn't have been able to fiddle around with an ipad

Proper triage REQUIRES an actual doctor to look at the patient. It takes a matter of minutes to differentiate between a life threatening emergency and not a life threatening emergency. That's not minutes to get a diagnosis but to know that the person is stable or not stable and if not that needs immediate attention

Seriously ill people can't do it themselves. It doesn't matter how smart or articulate they are normally. Or how tough. Expecting people to manage their own emergency care isn't what a modern health service should do

https://t.co/RMi7L44fUy

[Dr Devra Kay @LaBloggeuse]

@Parody_PM @electikk2 😱😫😤

[Caroline Lucas @CarolineLucas]

Good news! Ministers have finally given green light to new #NaturalHistory GCSE. Big hats off to tireless advocate Mary Colwell 🙌 Now young people will be able to get to know & love the natural world & gain vital skills to protect it @curlewcalls🌷🌳 🦅🦡 https://t.co/UZ9jvqHGaH

[George Foulkes @GeorgeFoulkes]

There is another side to defence spending.
We have more Admirals than ships.
MOD has more civil servants than soldiers
There have been many defence procurement scandals over the years
As well as needing more money we need to have greater efficiency & a better balance of spending

[HENRY MORRIS @mrhenrymorris]

@Nigel_Farage List of Farage's stepping stones for his own career:

Eastleigh (1994) L
Salisbury (1997) L
Bexhill and Battle (2001) L
South Thanet (2005) L
Bromley and Chislehurst (2006) L
Buckingham (2010) L
South Thanet (2015) L
Clacton (2025) W

(Wins Clacton and doesn't even go to work.)