Steve Cartwright

[Lisalovesshells @lisalovesshells]

I never knew he wrote this song about his Dad who died of cancer. Always thought it was a romantic song but for those who have lost their Dads, it hits so different now.

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@keithapearson Anything to make sure Messi’s Argentina get to the final. 🙄

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@Everton I was talking about the release tomorrow.

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@Everton Any chance you can just show the shirt without all the dramatics? I know it’s supposed to be cinematographic but can we have a “vanilla” release video where you get to see the shirt in a clear full frontal shot for us traditionalists?

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@GiuliaBould A home fixture at 3pm on a Saturday??? Wow!!

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@GiuliaBould Giulia, does the fact that Everton are reported to have agreed a deal with Leeds about the very same issue last September not set a dangerous precedent?

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@primarily_prog Now you can have the champagne Phil. Congratulations!

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@primarily_prog Is the champagne on ice Phil? 🤞🏻

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@primarily_prog I’ll wait until I see them/it live!

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

“Let’s spend £4.5 trillion on net zero over the next 25 years. Let’s increase taxes to pay for net zero. Let’s ban new oil and gas licences in the North Sea but spaff away £40billion buying North Sea oil and gas from Norway. Let’s buy coking coal shipments worth £7.2million from Japan but ban UK coal mining. Let’s plaster thousands of acres of farmland with solar panels but spend £50million on sun dimming experiments. Let’s give huge renewable energy construction contracts to China. Lets fail to improve gas storage facilities, Let’s give Drax an estimated £1.8billlion in taxpayer funded subsidies on top of the £11billion it has already received despite Drax burning an amount of wood equivalent to 300 million trees. Let’s give £1billion this year alone to wind power companies not to generate power from their wind turbines. And let’s spend £30billion of taxpayers’ money on carbon capture machines but put pensioners, farmers and the disabled into financial peril by claiming there’s a £22bn black hole.”

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@FPLFocal He scored a tap in into an empty net in the 96th minute. Wow!! 🙄

[Kyle Alves @KyleAlves7]

@Everton @eToro Crazy

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@primarily_prog I know and I really appreciate the heads up but the tickets I was looking at were double that, and that’s before all the admin fees, handling fees etc.

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@AmericanIpa8 @ThatEricAlper I saw Bon Jovi open for KISS at Manchester Apollo in 1984 on their Animalize tour. You knew straight away that they were going to be big.

[Katie Lam @Katie_Lam_MP]

People often say that we need immigration because without it, the NHS would collapse.

This just is not true.

At the moment, we're not training enough medics in this country - but this is a choice. We do not need to rely on staff from overseas.

The NHS has a deeply unusual setup when it comes to its workforce. The Government sets the rules for who can qualify as a medical professional, decides how many medical training places to offer, and controls the flow of medical graduates into the NHS. It decides how much to charge students, and under what conditions.

And because the NHS is by far the country's main employer of medical professionals, the Government also has effective control over the pay and conditions of those who qualify, and is responsible for deciding where medical trainees go, and when.

So the Health Service isn't subject to the same labour market forces as other organisations. The Government controls both the supply *and* the demand of its own workforce.

In 2025, we had 15,723 British-trained doctors competing for 12,833 NHS training posts. Those British-trained doctors had already been whittled down from the thousands of people who apply to train as doctors every year, of whom only half are accepted. Hundreds of those rejected each year have three A* grades at A Level.

The reason that we don't offer more medical degrees is because, at the moment, the NHS doesn't have enough training places for British-trained doctors.

But at the same time, under the current system, British-trained doctors aren't given priority when it comes to the training places that we *do* have.

So not only were those 15,723 British-trained doctors competing with each other for just 12,833 training places, they were also competing with 25,257 doctors trained overseas.

This is rubbish for those British doctors, and a colossal waste of money for the rest of us, because it costs taxpayers about a quarter of a million pounds to educate each doctor to the point of graduating.

But perhaps this means the NHS gets the very best doctors?

No. In fact, doctors trained overseas are 2.5 times more likely to be referred to the GMC, the regulator responsible for maintaining standards in the medical profession. The GMC hears cases relating to professional misconduct and medical malpractice. Exchanging British-trained doctors for those trained overseas is not always a like-for-like swap.

But here’s the craziest twist of all. The training places we do have are *randomly allocated*.

No priority for British doctors, despite the fact we’ve paid to teach them. And no priority for the best graduates, despite the fact we need their skills.

Top performing students have no choice over where they go, and aren't given priority when allocating new training places. They often have to wait months to find out where they're being posted, and will often receive very little notice before being asked to pick up sticks and relocate to another part of the country.

Last summer, one of my constituents qualified as a doctor. He graduated with one of the very highest marks in the year, in the top three, from one of the most competitive medical schools in the country. He is clearly an outstanding student and will make an incredible doctor. In any sane system he would have been placed immediately, and been able to choose his location and specialism to keep him incentivised and happy within the NHS, and to make the most of his obviously considerable talents.

Instead, because of the mismanagement of places and the lottery system, he wasn’t placed in the first round of allocations. He wasn’t placed in the second round. He wasn’t even placed in the third round, or even the fourth. With less than four weeks to go he still had no placement and no sense of where he would be spending the next few years of his life, including whether he might be able to live close to his partner, another doctor qualifying at the same time as him.

He might not have got a training placement at all.

Fortunately, the Government is looking to change the system, so that British-trained doctors are prioritised for training places. This is a great change. We need to train more medical professionals in this country, including doctors. The Health Service does not need to rely on overseas doctors - there is plenty of talent right here.

But we also need a system which prizes excellence, and provides clarity for medical trainees. The most talented, British-trained graduate doctors should clearly get top priority, and should be able to operate within a system that makes it possible to plan their lives and build a career here.

Both medical trainees and patients would benefit from such a system. The alternative is more talented British doctors going abroad, and more reliance on migration.

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

@FPL_Calle GW22: 55pts. Thanks to my back line and no thanks at all from my front 3. 🙄

Up to OVR: 28k

Thanks for asking! 😉

[Steve Cartwright @CartwrightSteve]

https://t.co/FoJywy3Wrv

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

There's a line every Chancellor knows they cannot cross: you do not invent a crisis to plunder the public purse. Rachel Reeves didn't cross the line – she erased it. The facts are clear. On 31 October, the OBR told her she had £4.2 billion of headroom. No black hole. No fiscal cliff. No looming disaster. Yet on 4 November she strode out and spoke as if Britain were teetering on collapse, as if some unseen storm had torn through the nation's books. She talked of "difficult choices," of "consequences," of a shortfall she knew was fiction. That wasn't a slip of the tongue. It was a deliberate lie.

She didn't raise taxes because she had to. She raised them because she wanted to. She froze thresholds, dragged almost a million more people into higher-rate tax, and cooked up the biggest stealth raid in modern times. All of it hidden behind a phantom crisis. The black hole was political theatre, designed to shield a welfare splurge aimed at pacifying Labour's restless backbenches. The story of a collapsing budget was nothing more than an alibi, and a clumsy one at that.

Once you strip away the noise, the truth is plain: Reeves lied to the public so she could tighten her grip on their money. She even blamed Brexit, the Tories, inflation, global instability – anything except her own choices. And when the OBR published the timeline that exposed her, the Treasury lashed out, accusing the watchdog of breaching some sacred "private space." It was an act of panic. The OBR didn't breach anything. It blew the whistle. The only thing the Treasury wanted to protect was the lie.

A Chancellor's authority rests on trust. She signs off every tax a family pays. She shapes the numbers that steer the markets. When that figure misleads the country about the state of its finances, the entire system is tainted. Every forecast becomes suspect. Every Budget becomes theatre. Every future tax rise is greeted with the question she fears most: what are you hiding this time? You cannot run a credible economy when the Chancellor has debased her own currency – the truth.

Even Labour MPs can see it. Graham Stringer says the whole justification for the pain has melted away "like snow on a spring day." Others mutter that "it all looks a bit odd." When your own side begins edging away from you, the dam has already cracked. Kemi Badenoch is right to call for her resignation. Mel Stride is right to say she misled the country. And the public – those who will now pay more on their wages, their savings, their pensions, their fuel – can see the pattern for what it is.

This isn't a one-off error. It is the first real glimpse of how this government works: panic the country, raid its pockets, and hope no one spots the join. Reeves didn't inherit chaos. She manufactured it. She should go. If she stays, it tells Britain that dishonesty is no longer a scandal in government but standard practice. A free people cannot accept that. A country built on plain dealing cannot live under a Chancellor who treats truth as a prop and the public as marks.

Reeves should resign because the office she holds demands honesty, not stagecraft. And because a nation cannot build a future on a lie.

"Reeves didn't inherit chaos. She manufactured it. She should go. If she stays, it tells Britain that dishonesty is no longer a scandal in government but standard practice."

[FinKitch @FinKitch]

Been a while