Carl

Books, travel, sport lover (especially cricket and tennis).

[NPRG @CptHastings1916]

No teacher ever talked to me about mental health, gender, anxiety, politics or the need to carry a water bottle.

Also my school's boundary wasn't marked by seven foot tall metal spikes and you didn't have to be "buzzed in" like you were accessing a bank vault.

[MaxC | Flight Risk Capital @ColeFusionHQ]

Britain has this handy trick it likes to play. Instead of cutting a service, it just makes you wait longer.

This is significant because a cut has to be defended but a system can quietly make you wait a little longer without much fuss. Nobody votes for a wait. Nobody debates it. It never appears in a Budget, because the cost of a wait does not fall on the government department. It costs you in time, money and your rights.

Here is what that looks like across the modern British state:

>>Health.
1. The NHS says no more than 1% of patients should wait over six weeks for a diagnostic test. That standard was last met in November 2013. Today 24% wait longer than six weeks.

2. The referral to treatment standard is 92% within eighteen weeks; the actual figure is 65.6%. There are 7.3m pathways on the list.

3. The cancer standard is 85% treated within 62 days of an urgent referral; the actual figure is 69.6%.

4. In one month, 25.1% of ambulance handovers took over thirty minutes and 7.1% took over an hour. That is 101,316 and 28,681 handovers, and about 63,177 crew hours spent parked. An ambulance waiting at a hospital door cannot answer the next call.

>>Justice.
5. Crown Court open cases stood at 38,016 at the end of 2019. Today it is 80,203, and more than 22,000 of those have waited over a year. Over half of those are sexual or violent offences.

6. When the backlog could not be cleared, the answer in December 2025 was to remove the right to a jury trial for offences carrying under three years. The queue did not shrink, your rights did instead.

7. The immigration and asylum tribunal now has 152,000 cases outstanding, up 68% in a year, taking a mean of 61 weeks. For human rights appeals it is 71.

8. Employment tribunal single claims are up 55% to 64,000. From January 2027 the qualifying period for unfair dismissal drops from two years to six months, which the government's own analysis expects to add 3,000 cases a year.

9. And the law says a care case about where a child lives should conclude in 26 weeks; the average is 37, and only 36% finish inside the limit. These are cases about the best place for a child to live and they take the best part of a year.

>>State Bureaucracy.
10. Half of first registrations at the Land Registry take about eight months. Almost all take about twelve.

11. Enhanced DBS checks are supposed to clear in fourteen days for 80% of applicants, and manage 73.7%; until one clears, the person cannot start work.

12. Callers spent seven million hours on hold to HMRC in a single year, which is 798 years of collective waiting, up from 365 years in 2019-20. That figure appears on no budget line anywhere, which is precisely why it can grow, unlike the callers on the other end.

13. DVSA planned 400 new driving examiners to clear the test backlog. It ended up hiring 83. The wait went from five weeks to twenty two. Each test now runs at a £24 loss, which is £44m a year.

>>Building.
14. Major planning applications must be decided in thirteen weeks. Nineteen per cent are. The figure usually quoted is 91%, but that counts applications where the council asked the applicant for more time and got it, which now happens in 77% of major decisions.

15. The Building Safety Regulator has 1,505 applications in progress against statutory targets of eight to twelve weeks, and median approval times of 22 to 35 weeks. That is high-rise housing, waiting.

16. Over 700 gigawatts of power projects sat queued for a grid connection, and only 14% were offered the date they asked for. Some were offered the late 2030s. Nobody refused them, but they still aren't connected either.

17. Meanwhile 1,340,527 households sit on a social housing register in England, and 134,210 households live in temporary accommodation, including 176,130 children.

>>When it suits them.
18. Passports are issued within three weeks 99.72% of the time.

19. Probate takes five weeks and has not moved.

20. Central government answered 87% of freedom of information requests on time last year, up from 76%.

21. EHCP eligibility narrowed to complex cases, by 2035.

22. A six-month gap proposed between the theory test and the practical. A wait inserted deliberately, on top of the twenty-two-week one.
--
Every figure here is from a government or National Audit Office publication.

When the state decides that a particular wait matters, or is in its interests, it fixes it.

Longer waits do not even always save money. The driving test backlog costs £44m a year to keep.

A cut needs a minister to stand up and defend it. A wait needs nobody to do anything at all.

You wait, so they don't have to pay.

That is the whole trick. It is why there are so many of them and why you should expect to keep queuing.

[Ben Graham @BenGrahamUK]

I’ve travelled a fair bit and seen squat toilets in places including Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt.

Britain should not be importing these standards.

Britain is not a third world country.

How on earth has a British council decided that installing squat style toilets is a good idea?

This is not the direction we should be going in.

[Clarissa Reilly @clarescastle]

It also said a lot about the college authorities that they refused to take any action against the student vandal.

[Marcus Walker @WalkerMarcus]

So after this response - from the Tory councillor who is the lead for Westminster Council’s new licensing policy - made me wonder whether the stories were true or overblown so I read the policy and answered the consultation and it is BAD.

[Adam Sellers @YisraelChaiAdam]

Andy Burnham - All prisoners on early release scheme will be heavily monitored by police

Police monitoring -

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

"By contrast, the BBC routinely deploys its “Verify” unit to fact-check minor internet rumours or political claims, yet it consciously chose not to apply those same data-journalism tools to a high-profile academic scandal that was emerging."

[Looking for Growth @lfg_uk]

"Guys we don’t want to BAN it… we just won’t grant any pub a license unless it is sitting ONLY”

[Nick Timothy MP @NJ_Timothy]

Sadiq Khan: "Mecca is probably the most diverse place in the world."

That's Mecca, where Muslims of many races gather, but non-Muslims are banned.

Also Sadiq Khan: "Islamophobia is rooted in racism."

There's not even a pretence of honesty or consistency.

[max tempers @maxtempers]

These will effectively operate as PIP recruitment centres, packed with leaflets and advisers ready to hold your hand through your claim.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

The Met’s efforts to intimidate a journalist doing public interest journalism cannot simply be excused by its boss saying ‘we dropped the ball.’ This was a direct attack on a free press and free speech. The journalist’s investigations have been vindicated. The Met is meant to protect a free press and free speech. Instead, it’s the threat.

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

Dropping the ball would be ignoring something you should have acted on.

Yet again the Met and its pisspoor commanders picked up a ball which was not their place to touch and ran around naked with it, flicking excrement at the crowd like a bunch of chimps and then apologised when anyone had the temerity to notice.

When are the police going to focus on catching and incarcerating career criminals and those perpetrating violent crimes rather than policing public interest journalism and those who upset the feelings of others

People who know about these things tell me Rowley is a good copper. It’s about time he proved it

[Dennis Noel Kavanagh @Jebadoo2]

Sorry, but this isn't "the odd mistake", this is telling a serious journalist from Times Higher not to contact the Professor because of his mental health. That is a serious interference with a free press and it shouldn't be swept away in this fashion.

[Alasdair 🇳🇦🇳🇿 @Alasdair333]

Our driest summer ever and I’m going to watch Dan Lawrence send down 30 overs after Jordan Cox has batted at 3 and Brydon Carse has more than likely gone at 5 an over, god help us all

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

I understand Jason Arday was once guest editor of @BBCr4today. Guess he fitted the bill perfectly for them. Think how smug and righteous they must have felt. Seems the whole British establishment complicit in bigging up this guy to something he was not.

[Steven Edginton @StevenEdginton]

Pravda level reporting from the BBC. 90% of the article is just quotes from Arday defending himself. Readers are left none the wiser as to the massive evidence of Arday being a fraud and a liar. They instead focus on the original reporter of the plagiarism and attempt to character assassinate him.

[Taz @ItsTaz1989]

This is really just semantics. Of course Britain can continuously produce currency, but whether it continues being money or not is a philosophical question. Was Zimbabwe’s currency still meaningfully money - a mechanism for the exchange of value - at the height of inflation?

[Michael Gove @michaelgove]

I think @StuartLock is right. If only the BBC and others paid as much attention to persistent under achievement in schools as they did to those allegedly too “strict” - middle class liberalism exhibiting the wrong priorities

[Neil O'Brien @NeilDotObrien]

Oh my God, the school she went to literally "picked the books" they had to read in class - made them "be quiet" and even made them wear the "same uniform".
Truly a national scandal, well done BBC.
🫠

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Am I missing something here? Is this perhaps a Brass Eye sketch? All I can see is a school that imposes strict discipline on its pupils to aid their development and learning. And their exam results suggest it is working. Good for the school. We need more of it.