It turns out that the vile, cruel decision that @RachelReevesMP and @Keir_Starmer have taken to maintain the 2-child benefit cap will COST taxpayers £billions. https://t.co/dxrINKPTUL..
This tells you all you need to know...
Burnham wouldn't have Corbyn back in the party (if he applied), but he "would like to continue working with Simons," who was a key player in the Mandelson-McSweeney-Starmer project.
Burnham is business as usual. https://t.co/XJ6Hutr4of
This country might be about to have its 6th Prime Minister in 7 years.
Why? Because they’ve all failed to take on a rigged economic system that enriches the few at the expense of us all.
People want a society where children don’t go hungry. That is really not too much to ask.
I called for time for serious discussion, no precipitous coup & fully democratic process if leadership election.Instead Wes Streeting has launched coup for fear of a democratic process & whilst candidates are blocked. Handing leadership to Mandelson’s protege is gift to Reform
Every now and then, whilst watching the demise of this awful so called Labour government, I remember how they trashed the hope Corbyn gave to hundreds of thousands of people — just to deliver us this complete and utter shitshow.
Starmer's resignation is not enough. What needs booting out is the politics he represents: corporate greed, anti-migrant rhetoric and endless war.
My piece for @tribunemagazine.
https://t.co/AP7VwxXVRZ
Under Corbyn, Labour lost 380 councillors in the 2017 local elections. There was massive pressure for him to step down with the results presented as a 'disaster' in the media and the right of the party.
Starmer just lost 1,406 councillors. Let that sink in.
There is a myth, very widely held in Labour, that we achieved an huge popular victory in 2024 under Starmer.
In fact we won 9.7 million votes, over 3 million fewer than in 2017 and half a million less than the 'disastrous' 2019 poll.
We won because the Tories imploded in 2024.
HE PROTECTED 54,000 DOCTORS. THE @NHS PROTECTED ITSELF.
In January 2014, Dr Chris Day (@drcmday) was working overnight in the intensive care unit at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich. Two locum doctors didn't show up. The unit was running at double the patient load the national guidelines allow. He raised the alarm. He reported unsafe staffing. He linked the situation to two patient deaths.
That's what the NHS calls a whistleblower.
What followed was eight years of litigation, a legal battle all the way to the Court of Appeal, and over £700,000 of public money spent by Health Education England (@NHSE_WTE) and Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust (@LG_NHS) trying to stop his case being heard at all.
Here's the really elegant bit. HEE's opening legal argument wasn't that they'd done nothing wrong. It was that whistleblowing law simply didn't apply to them, because they didn't directly employ junior doctors. They were just the organisation that controlled the career progression of every single one of England's 54,000 junior doctors. Totally different thing.
Dr Day fought that argument to the Court of Appeal and won. The law was clarified. All 54,000 junior doctors below consultant grade in England now have statutory whistleblowing protection. One man, crowdfunding against three QCs, changed employment law for an entire profession.
No formal apology from the NHS. No reinstatement. No path back to a consultant career. He has worked as a locum A&E doctor ever since, doing overnight shifts while his opponents collected salaries, pensions, and the occasional glowing tribute to NHS transparency.
During the 2022 tribunal hearing, the communications director at Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust deleted up to 90,000 emails. The director whose entire NHS email archive was also deleted during live litigation happened to be the instructing legal client in the case. The tribunal described the conduct as extraordinary. Nobody was prosecuted. The trust issued a partial apology about a press release.
The system did exactly what it always does. It absorbed the cost, deflected accountability, and waited for the man it destroyed to run out of money or energy.
He hasn't.
Sources: The Guardian | @BBC | BMJ | Westminster Confidential @davidhencke | Protect @WhistleUK | @BylineTimes | @CrowdJustice
This may seem arcane, but it’s a deeply concerning & spectacularly cynical move from this government to sideline NICE - the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence - whose role is vitally important in protecting NHS patients from the lobbying clout of the Pharma industry lobby.
Until now - and since 1999 - NICE has made independent, evidence-based decisions about which medicines constitute value for money for the NHS to buy. Largely free from political manipulation, it’s renewed internationally as a model of how to protect patients against excessive drug company prices. It enables the NHS to strike hard bargains with Big Pharma.
But @wesstreeting has just used a statutory instrument in parliament (that no-one has voted on) to award himself power to dictate what the NHS pays for drugs, overriding NICE’s vital role in insulating the NHS from pharmaceutical price gouging.
Why would he do something so self-evidently bad for patients? Because, it seems, this is a price the government is willing to pay to do a deal with Trump on US-UK drug pricing.
What an outrageous power grab for a man who claims to care about patients. Already hospitals up and down the country are cutting staff and closing services under pressure to make cost savings. But every pound spent on, essentially, increasing profits for US Pharma is money that *doesn’t* get spent on nurses, doctors and treatments we know are good value for money.
As the editor of the BMJ, @KamranAbbasi, wrote this week, this: "will end up harming vulnerable people to boost the profits of already obscenely profitable drug companies."
Starmer has shamelessly caved in to the White House. Even the former Tory Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, now a Lord, has joined forces with Labour and Lib Dem MPs opposing Streeting’s power grab.
Truly an appalling move from a government that claims they’re rebuilding the NHS while, in this case, blatantly undermining our abilities to provide cost-effective care.
The world watched as Israel razed Gaza to the ground.
Now, the world is watching as Israel razes Lebanon to the ground.
War crimes beget war crimes — and the failure to bring Israel to justice for genocide has emboldened it to destroy human life with total impunity.
Yesterday, the government passed a law effectively banning repeat protests.
The government is fed up with people protesting about genocide. Well, we are disgusted by its complicity in the greatest crime of our time.
The government wants to silence us. It will never succeed.
The government has given Trump the right to dictate how much of our NHS budget we hand over to Big Pharma.
This is less a trade deal, more an agreement to pay tribute to Trump’s mates. Stop the Pharma deal!
https://t.co/FWlrbR8ynp
On average, an MP will claim more than 10 times the amount of money someone on higher rate PIP gets for their parliamentary expenses, on top of their 100k per year salary.
And they want you to think disabled people are greedy?
So...according to Starmer and all his Labour Party 'Friends of Israel' the US bombers daily leaving UK shores are for "defensive" activities only......The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.....
Nearly 9 years later and not a single person has been put on trial for killing 72 people at Grenfell.
Justice is only for shoplifters and protestors, mass murderers walk free so long as they are rich.
What a disgraceful and patronising way to treat healthcare staff working hours on end to look after us all.
These training posts are vital for the future of our NHS. To use them as bargaining chips is appalling.
Time to end privatisation and fund the NHS properly instead.
This is the (cough) "man" who wants to impose a digital ID system on 70 million people for their "convenience".
It's the same person who's trying to convince the World that when a phone is stolen all the data on it is lost, FOREVER.
Anyone smell a rat?
BREAKING : Trump exposed by Starmer
Trump 🇺🇸: Iran's missile went 2500 miles to hit an island under UK's control
Starmer 🇬🇧: "There were no missiles that hit the Chagos Island. We aren't being targeted in that way at all" 🔥😂
Trump has become a joke 😭
So, as a doctor I can’t accept a plastic pen from a pharmaceutical company because it might influence my prescribing decisions, but MPs can accept thousands in cash from those who want to privatise the NHS and it won’t affect their decision-making??? CTFO
https://t.co/ax78s1RSRJ