A cartoon showing soldiers sitting in a transport plane with jump door open. One soldier asks "Where are we heading, sarge?". The soldier next to him answers "Not sure. But @DonnieJunior just made a $150M Polymarket bet on Kharg Island beachfront futures. By Wintersart (substack.com@wintersart).
This is all too real. These days, satire is just news but in teaser format.
They've trialled it - tomorrow it becomes mandatory.
So sorry to hear all this - what an ordeal for you ☹️
Yes, exactly. It won't increase capacity, just hide/ignore/fail to meet demand imo.
The Times piece is linked above (but paywalled) but this one, though in the Mail, isn't -
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...
I believe this is a national health scandal from a govt that apparently cares more about good spin than it does about good patient care.
If you feel the same, please – please – write to your MP & tell them why. Please shout about this online, anywhere you can. Don’t let this slide. Thank you.
..for the first Rheumatology, Neurology or Orthopaedics appointment they so desperately need are just, you know, malingering. (I recently spoke to a patient with a new diagnosis of multiple sclerosis who’d been waiting over six months to see a neurologist for the first time – simply scandalous.)..
..The aim, says the Times, is to reduce the number of hospital outpatient appointments by 30 million p/a. And the government, in a quite breathtaking example of political spin, is presenting this as “good” for patients - as though all those people who’ve been waiting months or even years..
..The Royal College of GPs has been crystal clear: “The use of advice and guidance should not be mandated in any area… We have heard reports of risks of delays, with tests being required before any referral, lost messages and staff without appropriate senior clinical oversight handling requests.”..
..that at best will delay patients’ access to the specialist treatment they need, at worse sacrifice those patients on the altar of fake news about “falling” waiting lists.
You don’t need me to point out the potential patient safety risks. We all know that time, in medicine, can be everything..
Does this sound part of a plan to genuinely ‘fix’ the NHS, as Wes Streeting vowed he would do when taking up office - or more like a tactic to ration hospital care by overriding GPs in order to massage the waiting list figures?
It is, of course, the latter, an extra layer of bureaucracy...
Screenshot of Times piece with headline "Millions to be denied hospital referrals in drive to cut waiting lists."
🧵/ The NHS is about to undergo one of the most radical – and scandalous - changes in its history.
From 1st April (the public are the fools in this), GPs will be contractually obliged to seek remote “advice & guidance” from hospital clinicians, making it even harder to see an NHS specialist.
"Care is being undermined from every direction – from corporate kindwashing to the tech bros’ definition of empathy as weakness, from populist politicians stoking grievance & hate to the notion that if it can’t be counted, then it doesn’t have value."
Numbness & hopelessness are understandable responses to the powerlessness we feel today. But we are *not* powerless. Each of us has the capacity to do something radical & transformative here, now, today - by paying our full attention to another human being & relating to them with care. (4/4)
We are facing a crisis of carelessness.
Care is being undermined from every direction – from corporate kindwashing to the tech bros’ definition of empathy as weakness, from populist politicians stoking grievance & hate to the notion that if it can’t be counted, then it doesn’t have value. (3/4)
It draws upon everything I've learned from my years in the NHS & as a journalist & author.
It boils down to this: a fundamental, fierce conviction that the simple acts of care we extend to one another are not only the vital glue of human existence, but also our radical superpower. (2/4)
I am incredibly honoured be giving this year’s State of the Nation Lecture at Cambridge Lit Fest on Saturday 25 April, 12pm, in the beautiful setting of the Cambridge Union.
My talk is entitled:
“A Kindwashed Nation? Who Counts, What Counts and Making Britain Care Again” (1/4)
Golden Hill. Dazzling good. Never met anyone who didn’t love it.
So it turns out Reform are laundering their donations through crypto, before converting them into cash, hiding the original source of the money.
So who is really funding Nigel Farage and Reform UK?
observer.co.uk/news/nationa...
Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó gave Russia inside access to EU meetings by calling Lavrov during breaks and sharing real-time updates, WaPo reports.
It was the honour of my life to win last year’s Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction & the madly idealistic, de Beauvoir-devouring 18-year-old me I describe in the piece above would have collapsed in astonishment if she had known what was to come.
Glorious recommendations in the full piece - enjoy. (2/2)
Thank you so much @tomgatti.bsky.social & @theobserveruk.bsky.social for showcasing the richness of non-fiction by women & the vitally important work of @womensprize.bsky.social in championing women's voices in literature. (1/2)
observer.co.uk/culture/book...
photo of cover of the book Nonesuch
What an absolute BLAST of book this is! Pure joy from start to finish. The sheer exuberance of these rollicking, riotous, fabulous pages. Francis Spufford is a storytelling genius. Thank you for giving me so much fun. Read this book, everyone - make your life sing!
McGowan: You're saying 46 Americans died, so we should attack this country. Here at home, 68,000 Americans die a year because they don't have health insurance. So, if we're going to spend billions of dollars on something…
That's funny, I could have sworn he said something about not needing Royal Navy vessels because the war was already won.
You broke it Don, you fix it.
When I said 'Kemi Badenoch is so partisan, under her the Tories would oppose puppies and kittens if Labour said something nice about them', I didn't mean it literally.
A judge even tried to ban the word ‘rape’ from the courtroom. Throughout it all, her refusal to be cowed - and her insistence that shame must change sides - were, and remain, utterly inspiration.
Thank you, Gisèle Pelicot.
#IWD2026
