🧵I’m a bit hacked off with a police force in England.

A Black PC gave me info about an incident whereby officers were racist + faced no consequence, despite the PC’s attempts to highlight the racism.

This info was used in a news feature for a mainstream national media outlet.

Aggregate Result of the 168 Council By-Elections for 170 Seats Since LE2023:

LDM: 52 (+19)
LAB: 50 (-2)
CON: 29 (-18)
GRN: 16 (+6)
IND: 16 (+3)
LOC: 5 (-2)
PLC: 2 (-1)
SNP: 0 (-5)

Tomorrow, the Carer’s Leave Bill introduced by Wendy Chamberlain MP comes into force. This bill will allow employees who are carers to take up to a week of unpaid leave every 12 months.

The work unpaid carers do is so vital yet is it extremely underappreciated.

A self-serving, awful argument - full of straw people - for unproportional (read unfair, and false) representation. (But an excellent rundown and summary of Benn by Richard.)

Far too many people are being left in limbo, waiting for weeks on end to get a GP appointment when they need one.

Doctors are working as hard as they can but they’ve been let down by the Conservatives.

In the last decade, 1 in 4 peerages have gone to party donors.

Those donors have given £58 million to political parties, of which £53.4 million went to the Conservatives

Seats in Parliament are being given out as subscriber benefits for party fundraising
tortoisemedia.com/2024/04/04/hou…

This is a marked increase from my peer-reviewed academic research into the previous decade (2006-14), which showed that 1 in 9 peerages were going to party donors.

Now it’s 1 in 4. The problem is getting worse, not better.

I analyzed a bunch of Suno's output, and found it generates music that closely resembles well-known, copyrighted music: melodies, chord progressions, lyrics, instrumental parts, and styles. This raises serious questions about what it’s trained on.

Here are some examples 👇🧵

'Someone could be considered a “nuisance” merely for sleeping in a doorway, having an “excessive smell”, or looking as though they might intend to sleep rough. If the current proposals stand, the bill would “punish people simply for being homeless”.'. thetimes.co.uk/article/fee4bb…

Looks like we might have finally found a bit of legislation so pointlessly cruel and unpleasant that the 'one nation' Tories will actually rebel.

“My ambition for the next ten years is that we don’t call it same sex marriage, we just call it marriage.”

Baroness Featherstone, former minister who drove forward marriage equality, looks back on ten years since the first gay marriage ceremonies were held.

@LFeatherstone

We do love some selection history.

Liberal Democrats Lynne Featherstone brought forward equal marriage, and more of of your party voted against it than voted for it.

But hey, senior party in government.q

Aggregate Result of the 163 Council By-Elections for 165 Seats Since LE2023:

LAB: 50 (-2)
LDM: 50 (+20)
CON: 28 (-18)
GRN: 16 (+6)
IND: 14 (+2)
LOC: 5 (-2)
PLC: 2 (-1)
SNP: 0 (-5)

Absurd.

So this...

- Gives Councils yet another statutory housing responsibility in cleaning up after S21 evictions
- Basically indefinitely postpones the abolition of S21
- Promises more grounds for removing tenants in the new S8
- Gives landlords new safeguards

Prisons nationwide are in crisis, with many unable to recruit or retain enough officers to cope with rising numbers of inmates. Figures suggest almost all jails across England and Wales are already either full or close to capacity, with fewer than 500 places left in men’s jails.

This is deeply concerning and should result in questions across the board and consequences for the agency in question.

Only an anecdote but my (NHS funded) op was done in a private hospital and they had to rush me to an NHS one when it became apparent I was seriously ill from a post op infection. It was picked up much later than it should have been.

“Ask yourself what you would want to happen to you if this country was an unlivable, intolerable basketcase”

The Liberal Democrats’ Tim Farron says the government are using the lives of the world’s “most desperate” people as “political footballs”

#bbcqt bbc.in/43xpJFl