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  It’s right to highlight how #Sunak and #Starmer ‘s governments were completely asleep at the wheel on #wildfire risk and preparedness…but which ministers and departments dropped the ball? The Fire Service is currently overseen by Minister for Building Safety, Fire and Resilience…but under #Tories was Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire? Where is #Defra in all of this? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/04/government-dropped-plan-england-countryside-wildfires

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  A whiff of incompetence and misogyny from Wes Streeting this morning… “Thank you to that member of the public. She has done exactly what we would hope that someone in that extraordinary situation would do. I’m really grateful to her – I think she acted, by her own admission, quickly and thoughtfully, and she did the right thing. With respect, though, she does only have a partial picture. And that’s as far as I wish to go this morning.” #ukpol #RAFFairford

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  The #AfD move to ban ‘stumbling stones’ that commemorate not just Jewish lives taken by the Nazis, but that show where they last lived. Being a Brit I’d not heard of them until now, but I love the psychogeographical nature of their purpose. A chance encounter with them, a means of viewing a street scene through a Time Machine and to read them you must pause and bow your head. They are small but convey so much about the extent of the Holocaust. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqm2mm4y5dkko

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  Anyone British or Irish of my generation and older has surely woken up this morning thinking ‘what deliberate fuckwittery took place in the wee hours?’ #ukpol #NorthernIreland

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  I am just speechless. The Orwellian wording of a ‘minimum wait’ of 2 years before the real clock even begins to even start ticking of getting a diagnosis for #Autism and #ADHD is just spite. It’s wrecking kid’s lives. Waiting lists have existed for years, but this is a period of being locked out before you are even on the waiting list. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/sep/24/nhs-integrated-care-boards-england-two-year-waiting-times-adhd-autism-assessments

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  Three aspects of this story horrify me: 1) It’s taken 8 yrs for the family to get any kind of justice 2) The property developer and ‘facade contractor’ found responsible for the window falling 26 stories onto the victim were fined total of £1.3 million. The luxury flats in the block sell for £3 million each 3) The piss poor design of the window is approved by the Health and Safety Executive (#HSE ) and has been installed widely across the country #UK #construction https://www.theguardian...

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  Yes, the fascists are gonna fash… But I naively wasn’t expecting it to be done in such an ugly, stupid, straight up criminal way. Silly me. Assuming this is what happens when #Musk ‘s Grok is tasked with instantly creating authoritarian US state tv. #Trump https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/22/trump-launches-youtube-channel-amid-boycott-by-us-networks

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  Asked one of my kids today who really loves history to name anyone dead or alive who they thought was a genius. I was expecting Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton or maybe Alan Turing. But no. They said Dolly Parton….and then said “not a lot of people know this, but she didn’t have kids, but she loved them all with her Imagination Library” We then later sat down and watched her Glastonbury set as it happened to be on. We watched her play guitar, banjo, fiddle and saxophone

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  Don’t expect the #techbros to tell you when their apocalypse seeking LLM has almost reached its goal… #Google #OpenAI #Anthropic #AI https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/18/google-gemini-ai-hack

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  Too on the nose? #AI #Fascism #Racism #bayeuxtapestry The Bayeux Tapestry of Fascism: The Stephen Collins cartoon https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/picture/2026/sep/18/the-bayeux-tapestry-of-fascism-the-stephen-collins-cartoon?CMP=share_btn_url

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  Political donations have always been about buying favour and privilege. A true democracy would not be dependent on donations. They undermine concept everyone has one vote and those votes count equally (they don’t in the UK also because of FPTP). Notice that neither #Labour nor #Tories are suggesting political donations be banned from UK residents - just capped. #Reform are just making clear how obscene and undemocratic political donations are by the scale of those they accepted. #ukpol

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  Free Greenland/Danish healthcare vs. US insurance based healthcare? The latter leaves between 44,000 and 90,000 dead a year because they don’t have cover. It also leaves 550,000 families bankrupt a year from medical bills. This is classic ‘photo op going over the heads of leaders direct diplomacy’ from #Trump but smells of #Vance. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/22/greenland-does-not-need-us-hospital-boat-sent-by-trump-says-denmark

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  Looks like now the #Met have had #Reform ‘s overseas fundraising actions smeared in their faces by Channel 4, they’ve deigned to say there are potential crimes to investigate… Imagine if we actually had an Electoral Commission and police force in the UK that actively enforced political donation laws, rather than being embarrassed into taking action long after rogue parties have benefitted in elections from their crimes. #ukpol

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  You know you’ve made it almost to the end of the first week of September when you start to sneeze and feel a soreness in your throat… It seems no amount of sunshine, fruit, Vitamin C or D ever wards off a cold. I blame being a school pupil, then being a uni student, then working in universities, then having children who then became school pupils. Do people who claim to never get colds, have amazing super functioning immune systems…or just never meet anyone under the age of 25? #sneezes

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  Came home yesterday to find my partner fuming that someone had been whipping up a campaign against an old pub being converted into a mosque by putting a glossy leaflet through door. He usually leaves the fuming to me…but this time it had inspired him to put in writing his support of the planned mosque to the planning department. We are not even in the same postcode as this pub. Who is funding this subtle but glossy Islamophobia? #Norwich #Planning #islamophobia https://www.edp24.co.uk/n...

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  Operation Bluebird - could a new bird site rise from the flames? Holds no particular appeal to me, but I wouldn’t underestimate the appeal and pull of a distinctive brand name. #Twitter #Musk https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/twitter-blue-bird-returns-platform-challenges-x-trademark-1816864

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  Decided to be wildly optimistic and purchase solar eclipse glasses tonight for whole family online in the hope that: A) they arrive by Wednesday B) the weather is not cloudy on Wednesday evening C) we can find a west facing hill that we can get to by 6pm that won’t also have half of Norfolk there #SolarEclipse #Norfolk

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  I can well believe that the playing fields of #Norfolk and #Suffolk are too rock hard to play football on right now. They are parched and dusty with many threadbare in terms of grass. Falling on them would be like landing on concrete. Again this is where sport, #ClimateChange and class intersect… Golf courses and private school pitches are still lush green. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/08/scratch-of-the-day-local-football-season-postponed-due-to-rock-hard-pitches

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  I’m not sure that being labelled a future benefit claimant at primary school is the great motivating force that Milburn and #Labour think it is. We abolished the 11+ in the UK because we didn’t want children to be written off at that age and wanted equal opportunity of education. Primary school kids think of jobs in a similar way to how they think of fairytales…this will be just crushing and become a self fulfilling prophecy. We need to raise the morale of all kids. https://www.theguardian...

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  How about the UK government stop doing business with US companies that have no intention of ever properly paying taxes against the income they generate in the UK…would that be wild or just common sense? In 2024 the company [#Palantir ]paid just £2.1m in UK corporation tax, despite declaring profits of over £25m, giving an effective tax rate of just over 8%, researchers found. The UK corporation tax rate was 25% that year and remains at that level. #EatTheRich #FairTax https://www.theguardian...

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  Imagine a US president so easily manipulated, that he entered a costly and open ended war he never needed to wage, immediately used up most of his stockpile of long range missiles to kill innocent citizens and manipulate the markets, had zero diplomacy skills to negotiate a meaningful ceasefire and so left his country wide open to its long term enemies…it’s so dumb, you can only assume he is actively working for the enemy. #Trump #Iran #usdefence https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-stockpile-lon...

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  ‘Whether or not #Farage takes the Clacton seat, the number of voters who chose #Binface instead may be used as ammunition by critics and comedians for the rest of his career. There is a further irony: what counts as “fringe” or “ridiculous” is constantly renegotiated. Farage himself spent years cast as a fringe obsessive before becoming one of the most consequential figures in current British politics. It’s a reminder that the boundary he polices against Binface is one he once crossed himself’

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  “If you destroy nature, you destroy the core on which our economies depend. And that got people’s attention. This is not some kind of a flower-power, tree-hugging exercise. This is core economics. This is core financial stability, core price stability.” Frank Elderson, a member of the European Central Bank’s executive board #ClimateBreakdown #EcosystemCollapse #Economics https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/01/ecb-climate-wildfires-global-economy-stability

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  If BP don’t think the #NorthSea is profitable for them…maybe that’s because it’s simply not and production has bean in decline for over a decade. This is already being seized upon by so called analysts (the rentagob quote used in Guardian comes from a graduate in War Studies) as evidence that there is no business faith in the new #Labour government. Such a surprise… #FossilFuel #Burnham https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/31/bp-north-sea-oil-and-gas-business-up-for-sale

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  I took this photo a week ago of Chapelfield Gardens in Norwich…it’s a dust bowl. A couple of days ago the only person I saw on it was a teenager learning to use roller boots because there was no grass left on it. Why is it that public parks are allowed to wither and die, while private schools and golf courses, the preserve of the rich, are allowed to remain lush and green? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/31/england-hosepipe-ban-drought-private-schools-golf-courses-green-grass

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  Colliers Wood is in South West #London…many years ago I used to live there, so glad this is no longer the case. Located between South Wimbledon and Tooting (Merton) often used as a location for The Bill. Much gentrification has taken place in recent years so I’m told….aka building huge glass towers to exploit councils for social housing in surrounding boroughs. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/30/families-in-london-fighting-to-keep-cool-amid-air-con-dispute-with-local-councils

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  #Norwich #Pride Today! ❤️🩷🧡💛💚💙💜 Never seen it this big… #lgbtq

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  I know I’ve been to the Royal Pavilion in #Brighton once before in the past 25 years…but I can’t picture quite when. It might have been having refurbishment works at the time, because I remember coming away thinking it was ok, but we didn’t feel like we’d seen much… Today, wow! It was stunning and there was lots to see. We loved spotting the devastation caused by the dragons and the black and white cat who reminded us of our much missed moggy, Griz.

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  Why does #Burnham want to drill the North Sea? 🔥⛽️ And why it’s ecologically and economically illiterate… #FossilFuel #NorthSea #ClimateBreakdown https://rupertsreads.substack.com/p/why-would-burnham-drill-north-sea?r=16nb1y&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

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  What I have suspected for decades - #asbestos and the #London Underground. And this one whistleblower case shows exactly how they’ve been shutting down any investigation into it for decades: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/18/london-underground-passengers-should-know-about-toxic-dust-risks-whistleblower-says