Sooz

Nature lover, woman 🪻☘️

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Democracy only works when people have access to the facts. That's why I'm supporting @ChrisGPackham's petition calling for a UK-wide public briefing on climate and nature risks.

Help us reach 100,000 signatures:
https://t.co/aRWsZ9TC1S

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

This document should keep you awake at night.

The govt’s National Risk Register now ranks losing our drinking water alongside a PANDEMIC as one of the two biggest threats facing the country

This year, in the right-hand document: The chances of “Catastrophic impact” on our drinking water supplies - up to a one in four chance.

Last year, same document (on the left) rated it a minor risk. Bottom of the chart.

So what changed? Nothing changed!

Water is still in private hands and depute the Water Special Measures Act deteriorating rapidly.

This is where 36 years of privatised water has brought us.

Tens of billions handed to shareholders. Over £60 billion of debt racked up on water assets that should belong to al of us.

Leaking pipes. No new major reservoirs. Sewage in our rivers, on our beaches, in our sea.

They didn’t invest. They extracted. And now the state’s own risk experts are telling us the tap water could go.

And the regulators? They watched. Fines for pollution became a business expense. Thames Water’s creditors are now asking for their pollution fines to be written off. You couldn’t make this stuff up!!!!

So let’s cut the crap about ‘tougher control’ of water companies. We’ve tried that for 36 years. It ended with drinking water on the national risk register next to a pandemic. You can’t regulate a cash machine into caring about you.

There’s one answer. Bring water back into mutualised public ownership. Run for people, not profit. Answerable to bill payers, not bondholders. Every single pound going back into the pipes and reservoirs we should have built decades ago.

Water is life. And yet we’ve watched it turned it into a payday.

Time to take it back.

[Sooz @SooziStudio]

@jo_bartosch @Andreia_O_Nobre It doesn’t feel too far away from requiring us to refrain from the workplace during menstruation

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

In England, you're allowed to clear about 20 metres of silt and rubbish out of a river on your own. Anything past that needs a permit from the Environment Agency. Paul Powlesland's volunteers cleared a 250-metre stretch of the River Roding with a hired digger, which is why a barrister who hauled out 200 bags of trash is now under criminal investigation.

The Roding runs through east London. Powlesland lives on a boat moored on it, and for years he and a group of volunteers have pulled out shopping trolleys, needles, old appliances, even weapons. Kingfishers, herons and dragonflies came back to water that used to be buried under junk. This one job took 10 days and a digger that cost £1,000 to hire.

The rule that caught him is oddly specific. Under England's water rules, scooping silt off the bottom of a river the agency officially manages counts as a "flood risk activity", and the law treats that the same as building a structure in the water. Do it without a permit and the offence carries up to two years in prison. The agency says it is also looking at waste the volunteers left on the floodplain. Powlesland is an environmental lawyer who has used these exact laws to protect rivers and trees, and a conviction could cost him his licence to practise.

The agency's reasoning isn't unreasonable. Dredging done badly can push flooding onto people downstream and wreck the habitat that protected animals need, which is what the permit is meant to prevent. The 20-metre allowance is there for small jobs. And no decision to prosecute has actually been made.

While investigators were knocking on a volunteer's door within a week of his cleanup, water companies discharged raw sewage into England's rivers and seas for a combined 3.6 million hours in 2024, more than 400 years of spilling packed into a single year. Only 14% of English rivers are in good health. Between 2015 and 2025, the Environment Agency investigated water companies for pollution 11,474 times. Fifty-eight of those ended in a prosecution. For serious pollution over the last five years, the number of water companies actually taken to court and convicted is zero.

So the message comes out backwards. Spend ten days and a thousand pounds making a river cleaner and an officer turns up within the week. Pump sewage into that same river for years and the chance of seeing a courtroom is close to zero.

[Sooz @SooziStudio]

@DrCarlHindy @Pagan5242 There are much wider & deeper issues here, which impact the future of democracy. If truth gets you punished. If free speech is undermined. If politicians are ok with denying reality to get votes. If truth and reality don’t matter anymore. If women aren’t allow boundaries.

[Sooz @SooziStudio]

@theasewell05 @MaeveHalligan @CUSocOfWomen Wow, superb! Well done you awesome women

[Sooz @SooziStudio]

@epballou I’ve never been diagnosed but I so relate to this. I can’t even walk properly if I think someone is observing me! I go all stiff and awkward, lose my flow. It’s been a major problem all my life, always hated being seen - just thought it was from trauma

[Sooz @SooziStudio]

@Matt_Pinner No!

[Sooz @SooziStudio]

@PompeySteph Please could you stop fighting to remove rights and boundaries from women? Do you have any idea how horrific it is as a women to see people like you constantly trying to remove our safeguards, rights and opportunities? Trying to dismantle our women only spaces? Please stop!

[Dr Rachel Clarke @doctor_oxford]

This week the NHS will undergo one of the most radical – and scandalous - changes in its history. From 1st April (the public are the fools in this), GPs will be contractually obliged to seek remote, electronic “advice and guidance” from hospital ‘clinicians’ (note, not necessarily doctors), making it even harder for patients to see a hospital specialist.

Does this sound part of a plan to genuinely ‘fix’ the NHS, as Wes Streeting vowed he would do so effusively when taking up office - or more like a tactic to ration hospital care by overriding GPs in order to massage the waiting list figures?

It is, of course, the latter, an extra layer of bureaucracy that at best will delay patients’ access to the specialist treatment they need, at worse sacrifice those patients on the altar of fake news about “falling” waiting lists.

You don’t need me to point out the patient safety risks it potentially entails. We all know that time, in medicine, can be everything. The Royal College of GPs has been crystal clear: “The use of advice and guidance should not be mandated in any area… We have heard reports of risks of delays, with tests being required before any referral, lost messages and staff without appropriate senior clinical oversight handling requests.”

The aim, says the Times, is to reduce the number of hospital outpatient appointments by 30 million annually. And the government, in a really quite breathtaking example of political spin, is presenting this as “good” for patients - as though all those people who’ve been waiting years months or even years for the first Rheumatology, Neurology or Orthopaedics appointment they so desperately need are just, you know, malingering. (I recently spoke to a patient with a new diagnosis of multiple sclerosis who’d been waiting over six months to see a neurologist for the first time – simply scandalous.)

I believe this is a national health scandal from a government that apparently cares more about good spin than it does about good patient care.

If you feel the same, please – please – write to your MP or the Secretary of State and tell them why. Please shout about this online, in the press, anywhere you can. Don’t let this slide. Thank you.

[Natural Philosophy @Naturalphilosy]

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”

— Charles Dickens

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"Thames Water sewage spills set for record high."

Hard to believe isn't it, even after all of the outrage, all of the publicity, all of the anger Thames Water is well on course to dump more sewage this year than at any point in the last 10 years.

Time for govt to act, time to take back TW.

https://t.co/lLNWci8pI8

[Sooz @SooziStudio]

@treesey She was always my favourite politician, she gave me hope for a better future. For the 1st time in my life I genuinely feel I have no party to vote for. I’ve never been on the right, but I have no confidence in the left anymore.

[Sam Morgan @CrunchAlias]

If the police consistently and purposefully describe men as women, that doesn't mean journalists should write stories where they pretend men are women. It means they should write stories about how the police are consistently and purposefully lying to the public.

[JmRoyle #LFC #YNWA #BLM #RejoinEU @MyArrse]

Breaking:
Wales has become the first country in The World to bring in rules to sack politicians for lying or for misleading the public.
It is a major shift toward accountability and political honesty and it sets a precedent other countries have never taken this far before.

[Nick Wallis @nickwallis]

Philosophy of law in practice mixed with genius in a ten minute ted talk. If you ever wondered how meaning is breaking down, Sarah can show you why, from the frontline. This is affecting real people’s lives.

https://t.co/ayQMSMctfr

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

If you don't consciously pay attention like this, you might not even notice it in your everyday life

[Sooz @SooziStudio]

@SonyaDouglas

[Sooz @SooziStudio]

@cleanupbritain I would agree most is from a young demographic from what I pick up, but I find tons of dog poo bags too, and that seems worse as it’s probably adults, presumably out enjoying nature and the countryside as they walk their pets :(