Rita Elizabeth Mendelson

Former Labour Party member who still believes in socialism. Proud Geordie but spent most of my life elsewhere.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

As wildfires rage, Andy Burnham still won't rule out airport expansion.

He still hasn't commited to ending new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.

The incoming Prime Minister can't say the climate crisis is an emergency whilst backing policies that make it worse.

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

The Clacton by-election really is the establishment vs the people not in the way the way Farage wants you to believe.

He isn't an outsider. He’s a Trojan horse for a wealthy establishment of city financiers and fossil fuel lobbyists pulling the strings, whose real aim is to shred hard-won protections for ordinary people.

If in doubt: just follow the money.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Fascinating image from @FarmingUK

The contrast between the UK and Portugal

Another challenge for @andyburnham how to make the country healthier

[Shockat Adam MP @ShockatAdam]

A hospital director who dedicated his life to saving children is now fighting for his own.

“They brought me here to kill me. I don't see myself surviving. This is the end.”

If these are the final words of a Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the world will have failed him.

After nearly two years of detention without charge, he has been beaten, starved and held in prolonged solitary confinement.

The UK government must demand his immediate release, unrestricted access to urgent medical care, and the release of all Palestinian detainees, including the 83 other healthcare workers still held in Israeli prisons.

[Will Hutton @williamnhutton]

A sad day but few care, especially the British right obsessed by the ECHR and its faux threats to British sovereignty. Today we lost ITV to US media group Comcast and EasyJet to US private credit company, Castlelake. Britain is ever more a vassal economy in thrall to the USA.

[Palestine Solidarity Campaign @PSCupdates]

URGENT: RELEASE DR. ABU SAFIYA IMMEDIATELY

Israel has detained Dr. Abu Safiya without charge for 18 months - he is now in a critical condition.

TAKE ACTION NOW! Share this thread & tag your MP & @FCDOGovUK

Email: [email protected]
Tel: [phone]

1/7

[Richard Burgon MP @RichardBurgon]

Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of a major Gaza hospital, is in immediate life-threatening danger.

Detained by Israel without charge since 2024, he has new head, eye and neck injuries.

I call on our Foreign Secretary to demand Israel provides urgent treatment and releases him.

[Rita Elizabeth Mendelson @mendelson_rita]

Cutting education for women and girls to boost "defence": who are we defending here actually?
https://t.co/cLMKmRrGgF

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Andy Burnham looks like he might cancel the NHS England contract with Palantir, they also have one worth 2.5x as much with the MoD.

RT if you want them both out of the UK.

[Rita Elizabeth Mendelson @mendelson_rita]

@fiagirly We can wait. Soak it in. Jealous, moi????

[Rita Elizabeth Mendelson @mendelson_rita]

@fiagirly @LewisHamilton P1 Lewis 🇬🇧 P2 George 🇬🇧 P3 Lando 🇬🇧

[John McDonnell @johnmcdonnellMP]

Every week there is a new expose of the disastrous implications of a 3rd runway at Heathrow. It’s time to out an end to this threat to our environment.

[IslamophobiaUK @uk_islamophobia]

Two Muslim men pulled an elderly couple and their grandson from a burning house in Leeds last Friday.

You probably didn’t hear about it.

Mohsin Qayyum. 22.
Mohammed Yusuf Iqbal. 20.

Both from Bradford.

They drove past the garden. They saw the fire. They ran straight in.

Sheila Robinson, the grandmother who was trapped inside, posted on social media:

"My family and I will be forever grateful to these young men."

Her granddaughter Kayla wrote:

"Drove past the garden, seen it, and ran straight in and made sure everyone was okay without a second thought."

Everyone got out. The house can be replaced. The family is alive.

Every outlet that covered it called them heroes.

They deserved every word.

But not one headline told you they were Muslim men.

We have seen this before.

Two weeks ago, a teacher was stabbed in the neck protecting his pupils from a knife in his Manchester classroom.

Maysum Abdullah. 27. Science teacher.

LBC named him a hero. So did the Independent, the Manchester Evening News, the Mirror, the Sun.

He ran towards the blade.

A hero in every paper. A Muslim man in none of them.

This is the pattern.

When a Muslim name appears in a crime, the faith leads the headline.

When a Muslim name appears in a rescue, it vanishes from the page.

Now look at who that erasure clears the path for.

Bradford, the same district these men come from, is now led by Reform as its largest party.

One of their candidates, Daniel Devaney, topped the poll in his ward after writing on Facebook that Muslims were "pure scum" and that he wanted to "blast [them] off the face of the earth."

He was not deselected. He was not suspended. He was elected.

They are loud about our religion when they want to call it a threat.

They are silent when that same religion sends two young men running into a fire.

The book they want to criticise is the same book that commands us to save a life.

"Whoever saves one life, it is as if he had saved all of mankind."
— Qur'an 5:32

Qayyum and Iqbal lived that verse on a Friday in Leeds.

Abdullah lived it in a Manchester classroom.

And the headlines recorded the act, but erased the faith that drove it.

When we are the suspect, our religion is the whole story.

When we are the rescuer, it is not worth a line.

Their names are Maysum Abdullah, Mohsin Qayyum, and Mohammed Yusuf Iqbal.

Muslim men.

Say both.

Sources first comment.

Report: https://t.co/D9amGp2yxO
Keep us alive: https://t.co/Z8H0Flg44Y
Substack: https://t.co/9x6sqmwMge
IG: @islamophobiauk

[Diane Abbott @HackneyAbbott]

Alf Dubs is right. These are scandalous changes to the immigration and asylum systems and should be rejected.
Chasing after Reform's voters with Reform's policies was always foolish.
After Makerfield, it is competely misplaced.

https://t.co/bCmdAI4lus

[Paul Holden @pauleholden]

Like lots of people, I don't want to pre-judge a Burnham government. But appointing Purnell - the CEO of Flint Global - as his Chief of Staff is dispiriting. It appears no lessons have been learnt.

At the most basic level this is a good governance and conflict-of-interest disaster. Burnham has appointed a CEO of lobbying and advisory firm into the heart of Number 10 - a firm that already acts as a revolving door between business and government.

It effectively means that Burnham's government operation is now conflicted whenever it deals with a matter that touches on the interests of Flint Global's clients. Flint's clients are not publicly listed but have been reported to include Amazon, Meta and Uber.

The government might look to mitigate any conflicts, but that won't cure public perception. I'm not sure anyone will be mollified by undertakings of mitigation following the revelations that Starmer was having unminuted meetings with Palantir in the company of Peter Mandelson. And if mitigations are put in place, it means that Burnham's Chief of Staff can't be involved in all sorts of key aspects of government policy.

Flint Global advises across a whole range of sectors, including on defence. This has has already produced serious questions about good governance. Only last year it was revealed by DeClassified, Democracy For Sale and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism that James Clark, who leads Flint's 'Defence Advisory Practice', was also the secretary of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Defence Technology. That APPG was temporarily shut down after it was revealed its secretariat had been funded by a British subsidiary of Israeli arms firm Rafael. Clark was a Tory candidate in the 2024 election.

His own LinkedIn shows that Clark was a special advisor to Defence Minister Grant Shapps between October 2023 and July 2024 and that he gave 'expert advice' on 'various crisis events including... Gaza.' So he was advising Grant Shapps as the UK was giving near-unstinting support to Israel's 'plausibly genocidal' assault in the Gaza strip.

Is it fair to link Burnham and Purnell to what Shapps did on Gaza via Clark? Maybe not. But that link will be made in the mind of the public anyway, and that is always the cost of appointing figures like Purnell into government.

Can the Labour Party, for once, just appoint people who aren't lobbyists? How bare is the cupboard that this is the best option?

[Rita Elizabeth Mendelson @mendelson_rita]

@MrJohnNicolson My comment wasn't meant to be critical of the Scots! I love your homeland John and will be back again soon....

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

22 YEARS LATER AND NOBODY HAS ANSWERED FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO DR DAVID KELLY

His name was Dr David Kelly. Most people have forgotten him. They shouldn't.

He was a quiet, mild-mannered scientist who spent his career inspecting weapons facilities around the world.

He knew more about Iraq's arsenal than almost anyone alive.

In 2003, Tony Blair's @InstituteGC government published a dossier claiming Saddam Hussein could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes. That claim was used to justify a war.

Kelly knew the intelligence behind it was being exaggerated. He said so, privately, to a @BBCNews journalist.

That one conversation destroyed his life.

The government found out he was the source. Instead of protecting a man who had served his country for decades, they quietly let his name reach the press. He was publicly identified, dragged before two parliamentary committees, and grilled by his own employer.

His wife said he came home a broken man.

On the afternoon of 17 July 2003, he left his house for a walk in the Oxfordshire countryside. He was 59 years old. He never came back.

His body was found the next morning in woodland. A knife beside him. A blister pack of painkillers nearby.

Here is where it gets worse.

Tony Blair personally intervened to replace the normal coroner's inquest with a private inquiry run by Lord Hutton.

The original inquest was suspended before it even properly began. It was never resumed. To this day,

Dr David Kelly is the only person in England and Wales in living memory to have died in unexplained circumstances without receiving a full coroner's inquest.

Lord Hutton concluded suicide. Case closed.

Except eight senior doctors and a former coroner wrote to @thetimes saying the verdict was medically unsafe.

The wound found on Kelly's wrist, a severed ulnar artery, would not cause fatal blood loss in a healthy person.

There were no fingerprints on the knife. The painkillers found were not in a quantity that experts considered lethal.

The government's response, delivered by Attorney General Dominic Grieve in 2011, was essentially: the Hutton Inquiry was good enough, stop asking questions.

Think about that. A man quietly raised concerns about the biggest political deception in modern British history, a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He was publicly exposed, professionally destroyed, and found dead days later and the government personally made sure there would never be a proper independent investigation into how he died.

Tony Blair went on to become a Middle East Peace Envoy. He has a knighthood.

Dr David Kelly got a private inquiry, a rushed verdict, and a sealed post-mortem report that was not released to the public for years.

Nobody was ever held accountable. Not for any of it.

This story should be on the front page every single year. Share it if you think it matters.

Sources: @BBCNews @guardian @thetimes @PrivateEyeNews

[Declassified UK @declassifiedUK]

Once again the UK says Iran must never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons.

While British officials continue to defend Israel by refusing to acknowledge its own possession of nuclear arms.