Alison Cornell🌹

Committed Labour supporter and Crawleyite who remembers the comparatively moderate Thatcher years (and never thought she'd say that!)

[Alison Cornell🌹 @frog58]

Ok. So I just can't stand Musk anymore.
So, I know I've said this before, but this time it's for real. I'm off to Bluesky. I will not be looking at this account again. Find me at; @frogs58.bsky.social

[David Baddiel @Baddiel]

Interesting how Donald is not at all uncomfortable with, or even seems to really notice, this thing that is happening in front of him here, called graciousness in defeat.

[Alison Cornell🌹 @frog58]

Welby ought to have gone as soon as he realised what he had done.
"Good" people who do nothing are, as portrayed in "Douglas is Cancelled", worse than the perpetrators, who are assumed to be bad people.
What excuse does a good man have for not acting to protect children?

[Martin Lewis @MartinSLewis]

Just to be really clear if you asked me "Is it worth raising max tuition fees by 3.1% to get a 3.1% rise in maintenance loans (both now confirmed)?". My answer is YES.

Tuition fee rises don't effect most 1st time students (unless so wealthy they opt not to get loans), they affect graduates and the only ones who will pay more due to the rise are mid-high to high earning graduates (and only small % more).

The terrible degradation of living loans has hit those from low income backgrounds - who can't afford to live while they study - and thus social mobility. So a rise is important though more is needed to catch up with the huge past years real term cuts.

Explanations below.

[Martin Lewis @MartinSLewis]

IMPORTANT PLS SHARE. It's rumoured the English £9,250 tuition fee cap may be raised this pm for the 1st time in 8yrs, as University's finances are strained. As student finance misunderstandings abound, I've bashed out a few notes to help...

1. Higher tuition fees WON'T change what most pay each year. For most, they're paid for you by the student loans company and you repay afterwards only if you earn over the threshold. The amount you repay each year (9% over the threshold) solely depends on what you earn not on what you borrow.

2. Increasing tuition fees will only see those who clear the loan in full over the 40yrs pay more. That is generally mid-high to higher earning university leavers only, so the cost of increasing them will generally be born by the more affluent. Most lower and middle earning university leavers will simply pay 9% extra tax above the threshold for 40yrs (and higher tuition fees won't change that)

3. The rise is tuition fees is likely to be trivial compared to the changes the last govt made for 2023 starters. 2023 starters had their repayment thresholds dropped to £25,000 (from £27,295/yr) and had the time they had to keep repaying for (unless cleared) extended to 40years from 30years.

So these higher annual repayments for longer, increased by over 50% the amount many graduates will eventually have to pay back for going to university. Yet they were almost stealth changes because people can't intuitively feel the seismic impact.

Changing tuition fees is a more obvious rise, but in reality has far less of an impact on the amount most will repay (though combined with the 2023 changes it does certainly up the cost).

4. The biggest practical problem for students isnt tution fees (even if raised) its the fact maintenace loans aren't big enough. English maintenance loans have not kept pace with inflation. I'd urge the govt to couple the tuition fee loans with bigger living loans - if not it is a real risk to social mobility, with those from the poorest backgrounds likely to be worse affected.

I could write more, but will stop here, hopefully this gives an idea the issues are less straightforward than many feel.

[Sussex Young Labour @SussexYL]

📣INTRODUCING SUSSEX YOUNG LABOUR 📣
Young members across Sussex played a key role in the General Election, so we're bringing together Brighton, Hove, and Crawley YL to take YL in Sussex to greater heights as part of @YoungLabourSE!

Message us to join our WhatsApp group!

[Alison Cornell🌹 @frog58]

It's hard to know what to say. I almost thought it must be 1st April.
They have 50 buy to let properties FFS! Wherever they live and however much tax they have to pay, they are not poor by any possible measure. They don't need help with heating bills and they don't need sympathy

[James O'Brien @mrjamesob]

Sorrywhatpardon?

[Angela Rayner @AngelaRayner]

Politics is about choices. #Budget2024

[Angela Rayner @AngelaRayner]

Labour was elected on a promise to Make Work Pay.

With a pay boost for millions of working people on the minimum wage, we are delivering on that promise.

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

If you’re still on Xitter, you’re making sure you don’t leave the whole platform to fascism and the lies that go with it. If you still subscribe to @washingtonpost you’re rewarding cowardice and the bowing down before fascism even before it has arrived.

[Hugh Grant @HackedOffHugh]

Sometimes when I go to events my wife comes with me. If the @MailOnline get hold of pictures they put it on their website and hundreds of comments tear my wife to pieces. She’s never thrust herself forward or courted attention in any way. I don’t know if the comments are real or written by the mail. Or by bots. But I do know it’s cyber bullying. And mysoginist. And I think it may be in some way the business model of the @MailOnline . Monetising unkindness.

[Alison Cornell🌹 @frog58]

@elonmusk Do you understand irony @elonmusk ? You seem happy to use your position to criticise foreign leaders on a fairly regular basis.

[Alison Cornell🌹 @frog58]

This is where we are. They just lie and lie, and when they're caught out, they bumble, then carry on lying.

[Georgina Lee @lee_georgina]

Boris Johnson just told Sky News that the Covid vaccine rollout "was made possible by Brexit because we were able to licence those vaccines faster".

But as I reported for @FactCheck in 2020, the UK used *existing EU law* to authorise the first jabs here.
https://t.co/PzQgLAkhFa

[Alison Cornell🌹 @frog58]

Anyone who knows anything about how agreements like this are arrived at would know this was started months, if not years ago - therefore by the Tories. There is no way on God's sweet earth Labour could have got this done in 70 days!

[Robert Peston @Peston]

There seems to be significant faux outrage from Tory leadership candidates Cleverly and Tugendhat about the Starmer government’s transfer of the Chagos islands to Mauritius.

Official sources tell me the transfer would have happened in materially the same
way at roughly the same time if Sunak had somehow won the election.

The point is that the transfer was being negotiated on the recent Tory government’s watch - including by Cleverly as foreign secretary and then by Cameron - and the deadline was in effect set by Washington.

I am told that President Biden wanted the deal done before the 5 November presidential election. Biden wanted certainty about the future of the US military base on the Chagossian island of Diego Garcia, just in case Donald Trump were to win the election.

For confirmation that the deal was clinched on a timetable and in a style to suit the US administration, see Biden’s statement that “it is a clear demonstration that through diplomacy and partnership, countries can overcome longstanding historical challenges to reach peaceful and mutually beneficial outcomes”.

Biden pointed out that the agreement between the UK and Mauritius meant the US had secured “the effective operation of the joint [military] facility on Diego Garcia into the next century.”

It is therefore curious Tugendhat should describe the transfer as “leaving our allies” exposed when the UK’s most important ally, America, has welcomed it.

And Cleverly’s denigration of Starmer as “weak, weak, weak” for formalising it seems eccentric when the negotiations with Mauritius were in full swing when he was in the cabinet.

As for Liz Truss’s assertion that Boris Johnson is to blame, I am told that Johnson was the last PM to wholly oppose giving up sovereignty over Chagos, and that the talks did not start properly till she was PM.

If anyone in the Tory party wants to know the nitty gritty of all this, possibly they could ask for an introduction from the former minister Lord Frost - because his spouse Harriet Matthews has been the lead official negotiator for the foreign office on the Chagos treaty with Mauritius.

[Alison Cornell🌹 @frog58]

A sad reflection on the state of the Tory Party.
I like Sayeeda and may not share her politics, but she is a good woman.
Can you imagine the coverage if this was in the Labour Party.

[Sayeeda Warsi @SayeedaWarsi]

It is with a heavy heart that I have today informed my whip and decided for now to no longer take the @Conservatives whip.
This is a sad day for me.
I am a Conservative and remain so but sadly the current Party are far removed from the Party I joined and served in Cabinet.
My decision is a reflection of how far right my Party has moved and the hypocrisy and double standards in its treatment of different communities.
A timely reminder of the issues that I raise in my book Muslims Don’t Matter

[Peter Stefanovic @PeterStefanovi2]

“Britain is broken” says Nigel Farage during his conference speech today

Imagine his shock when he finds out that by almost every economic & financial measure the Brexit he championed has been disastrous for the UK

[Alison Cornell🌹 @frog58]

Brext progress

[James O'Brien @mrjamesob]

Oh.
https://t.co/0AzXl8bgIH

[Alison Cornell🌹 @frog58]

Utterly delusional. And actually offensively patronizing.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

"I grew up in a middle class family.. But I became working class when I was working in McDonalds"

- Conservative party leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch

[Martin Lewis @MartinSLewis]

Too many smart meters are broken. After we've all, collectively, spent over £10bn on them, it isn't good enough. I sent this open letter to @Ed_Miliband the new Secretary of State for energy today...