Thanks - the christmas season has now officially started

To these editors and journalists everything is a game isn't it. No seriousness professionalism or integrity. They'll have been laughing to themselves as they wrote this, knowing full well they'd have celebrated the numbers were Farage or Johnson in #10

What is this? A memorial for ANTS?

They literally think it means not definite.
Don't worry about this candle on the bed, the duvet is inflammable

I live v close and just floors me to imagine it as a total ruin long before Horsforth, Headingley etc was there

There's definitely two halves of TokTok in that respect - those who swallow the far right content wholesale, and those who mock it. And the algorithm probably makes sure the two sides never cross paths...

I was v surprised to learn my 13yo daughter knew who Kirk was thru TokTok, and feared the worst in terms of influence. But actually all the content she saw was tiktokers calling out his bs, which was kind of encouraging

True but most of the senior comms advisers are all about the message not the method - so everything becomes an argument about the content. But fundamentally, good politics is about convincing people of your argument - the content is almost irrelevant, its about tactics and approach, the method.

And since then he went away and did great things in a different public service role where he probably learned an awful lot and probably changed quite a bit?

Whenever anyone is using a telescope I can't help but say "use the open eye, Frank"

Oh yes totally unlucky for Siraj but think the game finishing on a bit of an oddity helped take the sting out of what has been a bit of a testy atmosphere

Of all the ways to get out too!

Find the % taken as profit to be v high, it can't be true. Private Providers receiver the same money for a procedure as an NHS provider would, and these are nailed down prices, the majority of which is used to pay the drs. Just no way those fees have headroom for 40% profit

The difference is that I can think without speaking. And I can learn things in one context and genuinely test the truth of them in another using my own intuition and intelligence rather than needing feedback from an external source.

Quite insane

You're right that most spend comes at the end, in the last years or months of someone's life. In that's case, is there that much of a difference between the spending in the last few years of a 50yr old smoker's life compared to an 85 yr old's

The ousting of sue gray, the one person in labour who knew definitely knew something about actually running a government machine, was a very bad early sign that labour was going to do a Cummings

And ten years after that, there are no humans left able to do the specialized stuff AI can't do, because the work they needed to do to gain the necessary foundational skills and experiences was done by AI....

Strange to think but last time Labour were in power, there wasn't really much social media, let alone the kind of agenda-bending 24/7 politicised SM we now have.

Seeing how the centre/left react online to a labour govt for the first time is proving quite depressing.

V good thread

Citing a lack of progress on your new govts objectives as the reason for being frustrated, while also announcing progress against those objectives, and forgetting you also explicitly told everyone to wait for your 10 year plan before making any big changes . Cunning.

Shout out to the staff in the NHS and DHSC affected by today's announcements about NHSE - please remember none of this is about you

Saying to my wife "that reminds me of how we got together" whenever people kiss on TV/film, no matter how outlandish, inappropriate or extreme the on screen situation...

Those justices who are Trump appointees and apparent lackeys - they are in post for life right? So it's not like they are still actually beholden to DT - they could just grow a spine and not do what he wants, right? Or is there some other hold he has over them?

Knob...

Totally

Playing test innings as if they are ODI innings has worked relatively well. But now we seem to be playing ODI innings asif it's a T20.

No

I often wonder if we will ever go back to a situation where govt invest in public campaigns on things like public health and so on - they seemed to die away during the early austerity years

Its not either/or. We're also upping capacity - NHS activity is at record levels. And there's investment - 22bn extra capital next year. But that will take ages to translate into new beds and facilities, so we ALSO look to the IS (Inc charities, SE, not-for profit etc ie not all evil profiteers)