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.
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...
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
@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.)