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@MrReeceballa The first recourse of failing governments is always communication.

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@ZackPolanski Two sides of the same populist coin.

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@_joebelcher Two sides of the same populist coin.

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@Jennieformby1 @TheGreenParty Midlife crisis?

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@BenGrahamUK Planing costs how much and takes how long?

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@footballclips73 Check return fixture at Elland Road.

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@BootsVernon Ah you are missing the point, oil bought from abroad doesn’t cause global warming.

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Your employer saves £8,378 a year by hiring you for 16 hours instead of 40.
You lose the hours. The taxpayer picks up the tab. Everyone wins except the person funding it.

This is not a glitch. This is the job market now.

Auto-enrolment kicks in at 15.75 hours a week. Walk into any supermarket, warehouse, or care home and count the 15 and 16-hour contracts. That number is not an accident. Rotas are being written to slide underneath it.

An hour of a full-time minimum-wage worker’s life is worth £11.07.

An hour of a 16-hour worker’s life is worth £21.36.

Same shop floor. Same till. Same uniform. Universal Credit is quietly doubling the value of part-time hours and hollowing out full-time ones. “The system working as intended”.

Take a single parent. One 40-hour job costs the state £10,989 a year in top-ups. Split that same job into two 16-hour roles and the bill jumps to £34,790. The employer pockets £8,378. You pay £23,801 more. For identical work.

For couples, it is worse. The maths actively rewards working less. A household can drop from 40 hours of paid work to 32 and end up with almost the same income. Eight hours of British labour vanish from the economy every single week, per household, by design.

Every Chancellor since 1997 has added a brick to this wall. Brown. Duncan Smith. Sunak. Reeves. Four parties. Nobody has pulled one out. Because the cost shows up as welfare spending, not as tax foregone or a wage rise, no minister ever has to defend it at the dispatch box. It just grows.

3.4 million Britons work part-time on or near minimum wage. If even one in ten of those jobs has been engineered to sit beneath the thresholds, the hidden transfer from taxpayers to low-wage employers runs into the tens of billions a year.

This is not welfare.

This is a wage subsidy the Treasury refuses to name.

The worker is not being lazy.

The wage is.

Another belter from the team at @GreatBritishTT

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@LoEl81 Ah but Chelsea were fined £10m, so clearly no bias.

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@DamianLow3 Or crap forecasting by the OBR.

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@ThomasWillett9 From the female section perhaps.

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@cjsnowdon And no employee performance management or any chance of ever being fired.

[UN Watch @UNWatch]

🇧🇪 Belgian MEP Kris Van Dijck: “I have a big problem about how the United Nations works at this moment. The Islamic Republic of Iran was nominated to a U.N. committee shaping policy on women's rights, human rights, disarmament, and terrorism prevention. How is that possible?”

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@Imogenlemon02 She knows exactly what she’s doing but it won’t be for the good of the country.

[James Clark 📈📉¯\_(ツ)_/¯ @mr_james_c]

"with the usual caveat that everyone working in it is doing their best"

No, they're not. That's part of the problem. We should stop making excuses for them.

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@AllForProgress_ Good to include income of those not working and on benefits as another comparison?

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@hwallop Play nice: don’t go letting facts cloud ideology.

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@joemichalczuk @Fox_Claire Agree with everything you said besides everyone working in the NHS doing their best.

[Joe Michalczuk @joemichalczuk]

A shower screen shattered all over my wife this week.

Over the next 72 hours, the NHS got almost everything wrong.

A cautionary tale of a system that is broken (with the usual caveat that everyone working in it is doing their best) 👇

I called an ambulance.

All good at first: “It’s on its way.”
Ten minutes later: “Actually, there are no ambulances for hours - can you get her to hospital?”

So I loaded my bleeding wife into the car, along with the kids and the dog, and drove to A&E.

Ten hours later, she came home - having given up after not even being offered a plaster.

The next morning, we called our GP: “Any chance she could see a nurse?”
“No - as the ambulance referred her to hospital, we can’t see her.”

So I went to the pharmacy and bought a first aid kit.

Because apparently that’s where we are now - me and a pack of plasters, in one of the richest countries in the world.

This morning, still in pain, still untreated, and with a ballooning foot, we went to an urgent treatment centre.

At first, smooth. She was seen in under two hours. X-ray done.
“Nasty cut, but nothing broken.”

Relief.

Two hours later, the phone rang.

It was the hospital.

“Sorry - we got that completely wrong. Your foot is broken and the wound needs antibiotics.”

If it wasn’t so serious, it would be laughable.

And the truth is - anyone who uses the system has a story like this.

We need to stop clinging to an idealised version of the NHS and have a grown-up conversation about how to fix it.

Free healthcare for all should remain a principle - but pretending the current model works isn’t helping anyone.

Almost every other developed country combines public healthcare with some level of private provision - and all deliver better outcomes as a result.

Yet in the UK, even suggesting that tends to get shut down before the conversation starts.

That’s not protecting the NHS. It’s protecting a cult.

We don’t need ideology. We need honesty about what works.

We need a brilliant NHS in practice for all of us - not one we’re told to revere while it quietly crumbles, and where anyone who speaks up is dismissed or discredited.

When are we going to get serious about the things that actually matter - and have the difficult national conversations needed to fix them?

We don’t need to abandon the NHS.
We need to be honest about fixing it.

We shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders.
We have to be better.
We need to vote for real change.

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@Jenny_1884 There is certainly a massive world wide statins lobby, and the thresholds for prescription have reduced considerably over the years. All without definitive proof that they extend life (besides reducing cholesterol).