An absolutely incredible week in Tunisia 🇹🇳

Perhaps an unpopular take, but I hate it when MPs are described as out of touch. They meet a greater variety of different people than 99% of the population, often in order to hear their complaints. They think far harder about issues than ordinary voters do.

Yes IME MPs tend to be extremely attuned to the concerns of their constituents. If they weren't the cuts to PIP would have happened.

With this and Polanski's rubbish today the Greens really are leaning into the easy populism stuff arent they.

It's rubbish that corrodes our politics, but they don't care. Its just a game for them

OK, let me explain this really simply for those struggling with reading comprehension. Just because MPs do things that you dislike (and maybe I dislike too!), does not automatically make them out-of-touch. Politics is fundamentally about trade-offs, external pressures and wicked problems.

What I learned from my first few weeks as a Green MP? Most politicians have no clue how tough things are out there | Hannah Spencer With this escalating cost of living crisis, so many are really suffering – yet Labour lacks the imagination, boldness and will to do anything about it, says Green party MP Hannah Spencer

This sort of facile populism is really damaging to trust in politics. Most British MPs are highly attuned to the cost of living crisis and challenges faced by their constituents.

What I learned from my first few weeks as a Green MP? Most politicians have no clue how tough things are out there | Hannah Spencer With this escalating cost of living crisis, so many are really suffering – yet Labour lacks the imagination, boldness and will to do anything about it, says Green party MP Hannah Spencer

Im not sure how many of us Hannah has bothered to talk to before writing this, but it’s insulting and over simplistic.

I would suggest she engages with colleagues, rather than making populist slurs like this - feeding anti trust in politics. Really disappointing tbh.

Four excellent days in Italia 🇮🇹

People need to learn how to be on their phones with headphones. JFC

5% for MPs while their staff only get 3.5% is an insult, especially when the reasons for the 5% figure apply to staff far more than they do MPs.

And sure, I’m happy to pay a bit more tax to fund services for others, but I also want this govt to do something for me? And I suspect most graduates are in similar positions.

I know govt figures will argue about improved public services, but this isn’t a group that uses those services too much. No kids, very little to do with education and usually a healthier part of the population.

For all of the comments about Gorton & Denton, I’ve not seen many touching on the middle class young professionals cluster of voters - a group that we in Labour have taken for granted over the years, but what have we actually delivered for that group?

The issue here is the conflation of current students with graduates who have Plan 2 loans.

If you’re a graduate with a Plan 2 loan, bringing back maintenance grants doesn’t help you - the damage of high maintenance loans has already been done.

The real “fighting age men” we need to be discussing are the ones sat down on the tube at rush hour when there a full carriage of women stood up??

Even the ICB’s response put the concerns on the family, not on Lucinda herself expressing them. What a horrific deprivation of liberty.

Great to see the Conservatives wanting to reform student loans. Would like to see an account for Osborne replacing maintenance grants with loans in 2015. This has left poorer students with bigger debts vs richer ones for a whole decade, compounding inequality between rich and poor. It’s scandalous.

Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.

Except we do copy and paste answers to those clicktivism emails. When you get hundreds of them a month, it still takes bloody ages to do the copying and pasting!

If I could send this to literally everyone at IPSA, I would. Alice has done an excellent job of shining a light on something that doesn’t often get the attention it merits!

I reposted this earlier in between dealing with a man whose cancer appointments have been cancelled SIX times and a woman who can’t use HMRC’s online services because she doesn’t have ID.

But I’m so grateful to Alice for reaching out and speaking to me (and others!) for this article

Very good thread. Depressing quote: "... my team has to spend a reasonable part of their week trying to make sure none of us get murdered".

This thread is extremely accurate as to the reality of life in an MP's office. Sadly the systems just aren't set up for what the public expects of us in 2026 (1/)

Casework Crisis: Increase In Constituency Caseload Takes Its Toll The inexorable growth in casework is stopping MPs from fulfilling their other roles. Alice Lilly sifts through the inbox looking for what might be ...

The workload facing MPs and their staff is growing, in ways that aren't visible to the public: casework and the inbox.

For @thehousemag.bsky.social, I delved into what the workload looks like, why it's growing, and what this means for how MPs can balance the different aspects of their role

The sheer fucking cheek of Lib Dem MPs talking about Plan 2 student loan debt

I have today been informed that, despite personal assurances to the contrary, the Green party have once again used my image and misrepresented my words on a second leaflet circulated in Gorton and Denton ahead of the by-election. I have now lodged an official complaint with the returning officer.

They really, really aren’t.

This is very serious (I know someone with a conviction for forgetting an imprint!)

To be honest, I thought they’d paused this - so few and far between are the refurbished trains on the line.

Just got used to the Central line being totally shit.

Think it’s pretty distasteful to use a debate about, at its heart, victims of sexual abuse, to ‘settle’ petty factional scores