If I told you that the Bank of England upgraded its growth forecasts yesterday, would you believe me?

It did....

i HAvE nOt gOne CRazY - honest

This is a hill I am prepared to die on - the BoE and others (all central banks, IMF, OECD etc etc) report their "forecasts" in a terrible way

🧵

No10 chiefs frustrated over how long Liz Kendall is taking to find benefit cuts DOWNING Street chiefs are “pulling their hair out” over how long the Welfare Secretary is taking to find benefit cuts. Liz Kendall promised in October “radical” reforms would slash her department’s…

FFS.

In 2010 the Treasury/George Osborne ordered DWP/IDS to cut an arbitrary 20% from the cost of Disability Living Allowance, without any analysis of how.

Result: Personal Independence Payment and a multi-billion pound *increase* in costs.

www.thesun.co.uk/news/3287759...

Starmer

PM attacks those 'spreading lies' on grooming gangs as he hits back at Musk The prime minister says those who spread misinformation about child sexual exploitation are "not interested in victims".

The BBC risks slipping into false equivalence with this sort of reporting. There is zero evidence to sustain the sickening smears being spread by trolls on Twitter/X and elsewhere. Eg, there’s no need for quote marks around that word, lies. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Your reminder that neither the Conservative Party nor Reform UK called for a new inquiry into grooming gangs in their manifestos just six months ago. I won’t bother searching for editorials from the same period but I don’t imagine such calls were there either

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper criticises the previous Tory government for failing to implement any of the 20 recommendations from a 458-page, 7-year independent report into child sexual abuse which interviewed 7,000 victims, considered 2 million pages of evidence and led to 61 reports/publications

We know Jenrick is both a shameless opportunist and an overt racist/ethnonationalist.

But the test is now for Badenoch.

Ted Heath, to his great credit, immediately sacked Enoch Powell.

Does she have the same moral courage?

I do not believe that political editors are qualified to judge whether we are at threat from ballistic missiles. Their aim is to generate a political crisis and their reporting might best be judged through that lens

Oh sweet, sweet Gods of schadenfreude.

What mighty gifts you have bestowed upon us.

Child and sexual abuse survivor hopes book about traumatic experiences inspires others to speak out Richie Barlow, who runs The Dog Walker, has written a book about his traumatic childhood. It’s a story of inner strength against the odds and hope in dark times. Laura Reid reports.

Hi Victoria, I’m a survivor of child trafficking & rape from the early 90s. I was part of the IICSA report.

People who are focusing on a small minority of perpetrators are making a mockery of all child abuse survivors. We’re not their political footballs. www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/people/...

Some people in recent days have alleged a ‘cover-up’ over the grooming & rape of hundreds of young girls in predominantly northern UK towns, leading to calls for a ‘national’ public inquiry into child sexual exploitation

FWIW here’s a non-exhaustive list of inquiries into #CSE in last 12 yrs…

Feels like 'dishonest reporting' is an understatement here. It's downright misreporting to be so declarative about a view held by less than one in three respondents, especially when - I presume - it's not even the plurality response.

Similarly poor for the BBC to then credulously repeat it.

Short thread on our post-election survey research on Reform UK members 🧵1/n

Demographics: average age is 61: hardly any of them are aged 18 to 24; very nearly half of them are over 65 and a third of them are aged 50 to 64. Predominantly middle-class: 6/10 are ABC1s. And 6/10 members are men. 2/n

The only thing worse for your brain than having hundreds of strangers publicly saying mean things about you is when that's combined with hundreds of other people publicly worshipping you.

Some of the people Twitter drove craziest were those with both many critics and utterly fanatical fan-bases.

Nigel Farage is watching hungrily as the far right sweeps to power across Europe In 2025, European liberal democracy will be in a fight for its survival

The far-right is rising across Europe, but we're seeing early tentative signs that they can be frozen out of power. What's required is an absolute refusal from decent people on the centre-right to work with them inews.co.uk/opinion/nige...

£10bn is more than all of the cost to eradicate the NHS high and significant risk maintenance backlog (the 'will disrupt treatment if it doesn't just kill people' problems). Cost in 2023/24 was £7.6bn.

Which would be a better use of this money if it was just knocking about somewhere.

He died as he lived, clicking “Forgot password,” then checking his inbox for a code, then putting in that code, then setting up two-step verification, and then waiting for the text message that doesn’t come, and then calling the 800 number, and then downloading an authenticator app, and dying.

“It’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them” Gisèle Pelicot

Time magazine may have named Trump Person of the Year, but we all know 2024 belongs to this incredible woman:

Great thread