Simone

Repeat after me: 1) PIP isn't an out of work benefit. It is a benefit paid to disabled people to pay for the extra costs of living with a disability. 2) Some PIP claimants work. Some PIP claimants will never able to work at all. 3) Impoverishing people doesn't get them closer to employment

This is an online screening of the People's Emergency Briefing for anyone who can't safely or easily attend in person - including Clinically Vulnerable and disabled people. Please share, Green friends 💚 @greensagainstcovid.bsky.social @disabledgreens.bsky.social @greenparty.org.uk

📢 Please join us for a special online screening of the People’s Emergency Briefing on the climate and nature crisis on Saturday 24th October at 4pm. The film features Chris Packham alongside leading scientists, celebrities, and a host of ordinary Brits. 1/

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So they're at it again 🙄 Torturing valid HMRC data to create wildly misleading headlines, designed to invoke fear and anger about immigrants. Same old, same old... (and you'll see just how old shortly!) 🧵1/28

so I've been going through my old work for mundane reasons, and came across clips in which I reported on abusive sexual misconduct -- a teacher and a reporter (diff cases). Both from 1992. It just made me stop & ponder. How tired I am. Don't really have a grand pronouncement to make. Wish I did.

On 7 October, a video shared by Stand Up to Racism Scotland, with the caption This is what happens when you keep telling racists that they have "legitimate concerns"... appeared to show a group of black-clad men ‘patrolling’ the streets of Glasgow while making racist threats.

When this young man was one of the greatest players in the world, his country rewarded him with racism and double standards. Then Chelsea bought him, and benched him, at his career peak. This is all that needs to be written about him www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Govt minister Josh MacAlister claims unemployed young people are paid with PIP to be out of work. Except PIP isn't an out of work benefit, plenty of people who receive PIP are in work & PIP enables them to do that. Josh knows this. What hes doing is whipping up anger towards disabled people.

It’s much much harder now to be an anti racist than it is to be a racist. That’s one of the things I learned from talking to Rachel Marsh, who has been doxxed and abused for standing up to the far right. www.thenerve.news/p/rachel-mar...

People do have "legitimate concerns" about things like housing, rising cost of living, NHS waiting lists etc. That's absolutely fair. Despite political and media rhetoric, absolutely none of those concerns are solved by attacking asylum seekers and other migrants. 1/

"Proscribe the extreme far right groups before it's too late" via The UK Against Hate

I have spent weeks shadowing the RNLI and I can tell you, they do it out of nothing more than compassion. Wrote about the heroes I've met over the years in this free-to-read post. nicolakelly.substack.com/p/the-rnli-a...

The RNLI rescued Luftwaffe pilots in WW2 because the organisation is there to 'save life at sea' - it's something to be immensely proud of. But as I've said many times before Farage and Co don't seem to have pride in Britain and its institutions beyond flags and crap Enoch Powell said 60 years ago.

“There’s an unwritten rule that says disabled people should just be grateful for what we’re given by the state, lest be scroungers or burdens. I say unwritten. It’s written in newspapers most weeks.” My col. on the care users fighting for the right to go abroad. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I would love to ask a prominent BBC journalist to give me an example of an illegitimate concern. Is seems to me that it has become a question not of fact, logic, or ethics but of volume. If a big enough proportion of a village was anxious about Bigfoot or Chemtrails, BBC would cover it in a way...

a great letter in the times today. perhaps worth sharing in these troubled times. #RNLI #heroes

The snobbishness about this comes in part from the fact you can no longer pay all your bills doing a minimum wage job. If you work 35hrs a week you should be able to pay rent, pay utilities, buy food & have a little left over for a few beers on a Friday. This never used to be a controversial view.

"His hilariously controversial opinions, that he has every week, to a deadline...it's almost as if they weren't real."

It would be no surprise if we saw more black clad far right thugs making threats this weekend. Likes of BBC actively giving them a prominent platform, and Labour Ministers and MPs spouting tripe about "legitimate concerns", is giving them what they want and helping "normalise" this racism. #r4today

I’m on Opinion newsletter duty this morning and I wanted to start with a few words on The Telegraph’s toxic “How having a disability became cool” article.

PM: Pharmacy First makes a huge difference "especially for... those who are vulnerable". CVF welcomes it, but has concerns: e.g. You take methotrexate and get a sore throat. It might be a sign of a dangerous drop in white blood cells. 111 suggests Pharmacy First, so you go. 1/

RNLI volunteers put themselves in harm’s way to save lives. They should never face abuse or threats for doing so. That includes the crews based on the Thames, who respond to hundreds of incidents every year. They deserve to be thanked, not attacked.

Remember you all to watch Channel 4's 'Dispatches' at 10pm on Wednesday in which an investigative team spent a year investigating the finances of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, raising serious questions about the high-profile right-wing campaigner.

On what would have been his 80th birthday 🎂 With thanks to the talented @happytoast.co.uk for this treasured art. #ReadyFreddie

A thoughtful return to @thenerve.news by Stewart Lee, for some bizarre reason, Ofcom has decided to uphold a complaint against, from the Tufton Street mafia. How about GBnews or the nazi Hellsite known as X? www.thenerve.news/p/stewart-le... Sent from my iPhone

@zackpolanski.bsky.social Hi! Was wandering down memory lane as a result of this pub thread and found out (from Wikipedia) you had studied at Ridge Danyers College in Marple - I worked there until October 1998 so did our paths cross? 😁 @owenjones.bsky.social went there too!!

(1/3) With Dolly Parton's passing, I want to put good words on the wind for her. Feel free to quote reply with your own. Dolly became the single largest donor for the Moderna COVID vaccine because of a chance encounter and friendship with a Vanderbilt researcher Dr. Naji Abumrad years earlier. She

One of the first "outrageous" claims I saw as Jason Arday's media hounding unfolded was that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days! Wow! What a thing to claim! And the newspapers all suggested there was no evidence he actually did it. Well, they clearly didn't look very hard 🙄 🧵 1/26

BBC invited Palestinian writer, researcher and analyst Muhammad Shehada on to talk about Israel’s decision to investigate the killing of Hind Rajab. Below is Muhammad’s account of what happened next. Full disclosure: I know him years and he’s a regular on the pod. So naturally I believe him 100%.

Here are a few actual facts about welfare payments in the UK in response to fairly nasty, baseless headlines like the below, which are numerous and unfortunately widely believed by the UK population. 🧵

In these challenging times someone might need one of them: Childline: 0800 1111 Samaritans: 116 123 Domestic Violence Hotline: 0808 2000 247 Mind: 0300 123 3393 Age UK: 0800 169 6565 Alcoholics Anonymous : 0800 9177 650 Cruse Bereavement Care: 0808 808 1677 MH text support: 85258 Please share. TY x

I didn’t discuss Jason Arday on my show for this exact reason. If he had been white and behaved unprofessionally it would have been handled internally by his employers. As it is, it became clear that certain commentators wouldn’t be satisfied until he was dead www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Why is this allowed to be said in America without any accountability? Why are even Democrats so quiet about this?

The UK Home Office policy of dispersing asylum seekers to places far from support is an old and perfidious policy that has contributed to racist violence

Do you want to hazard a guess at what this “jaw-dropping” list of freebies included? What luxuries asylum seekers might be being given “for free” in Thetford? Xboxes? Plasma TVs? iPhones? Ferraris? Let's take a look👀 🧵 1/22

The right to seek safety exists for the moment life changes overnight. It’s the emergency exit for when home is no longer safe. And it’s a right that belongs to all of us.

NEW | A corrective to the gushing tributes… LIDDLE TO BE CELEBRATED An honest obituary for Rod Liddle, dead at 66, dead inside for many years before that. brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/liddle-to-...

I will never hear a bad word said about Ian McShane since he came up with this gem. Hang it in the Louvre.

As someone who sat on the Education Policy Institute’s working group on disadvantage gaps during covid, I’m under no illusions about the enormous educational and psychological harms of school closures – especially for working‑class and BME children. Those impacts are real and must not be downplayed.

Yes lockdown was really tough for kids. Lots of those kids are teenagers now so maybe as a thank you our establishments could stop deliberately making even more things worse for them due to a weird systemic hatred of our own youth

🧵On @thenewsagents.co.uk yesterday, school closures and the lab leak theory were offered as two examples of legitimate questions that were hard to ask. Both have in fact been asked constantly since 2020. But here's a thread on why I think they were wrong and dangerous on school closures 1/12