Amazing Grace

@Jo_Coburn As always Jo, fresh and honest insights into the current political situation this morning with Laura K. We need more of your contributions!!

@JeremyDoku @JeremyDoku Col. 3 v 23 Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward.

Grateful to be able to experience this and win trophies. May all Glory go to you Jesus 🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️

@BBCGaryR I commend you for your interview with Douglas Stewart. The questions were more open and you stopped shadow boxing.

@BBCGaryR Please consider your tone Gary. Ask the same questions sure - but try and not be a prosecutor and show a bit more empathy. Laura K the hour before you does it well

@labourlewis Regrettably your dissenting views have put me off the Labour Party. I really don’t understand why you have to attract so much disaffection.

I know the news Andy Burnham has a route back to Westminster will divide opinion. So, before anything else, I want to speak plainly – to Labour members and voters, to those who have left us, and to anyone on the centre-left, whether you vote Green, Lib Dem, or are simply looking for a politics that hasn't given up on you. Last week's local election results were, for many of us, existential. Not disappointing. Not a setback. Existential. Look across Europe and beyond at what happens to social democratic parties that refuse to step outside the economic orthodoxy of the last forty years – the one that hollowed out our public services, privatised what was ours, drove inequality to indecent levels, and cleared the ground for the authoritarian right to march into. That is the path we are on. Keir Starmer has refused to see it, and the country cannot afford another general election spent finding out the hard way. So let me be direct. The Prime Minister should set out a timeline for an orderly transition. I have said this before. I say it again now because the stakes have changed. Reform is not a protest – it is a project. And it will not be beaten by a Labour Party that mistakes managerial caution for strategy. As regards Andy, I want to set down here that I do not see him as some kind of messiah. Far from it. As someone who has been around frontline politics for more than twenty years, he has made his fair share of mistakes. But for the last ten years he has been a serious, grounded, and effective Mayor of Greater Manchester. The party and the country need their strongest players on the pitch, and he has a great deal to offer at a moment when the national stage has rarely mattered more. I hope the NEC will listen to the overwhelming view of the Cabinet, the PLP, the membership, and the unions, and let Andy stand. And I hope and believe the people of Makerfield will send him back to Parliament. But that is not a given. We know Reform will throw everything at this by-election. We must do the same and then some. Reform have spent a year being told they are inevitable. Makerfield is where we find out whether that is true. Every advance has a limit. This is where we set it. Millions of people, including my constituents in Norwich South, need this government to succeed. They need housing, working public services, secure jobs, water and energy that serves them rather than extracts from them. That work is not finished. But the honest truth is that stopping Reform and rebuilding the country is bigger than any one party. It will take a progressive politics willing to listen, willing to cooperate where the public interest demands it, and willing to drop the tribal habits that got us here. The country is ahead of us on this. It is time we caught up. Makerfield is one of many places where Labour has lost trust. It is an area Andy knows and has lived in for many years. If selected, he will work hard to win that trust back and make the case for a Labour Party worth voting for again. That case has to be made not only to people who once voted Labour, but to everyone who believes the answer to Reform is a serious, democratic, social alternative – not a paler imitation of the politics that created the problem. This by-election is not about one seat. It is a test of whether Labour understands the moment we are in. No single party is going to stop Reform on its own. The progressive majority in this country is real – but it is scattered across Labour, the Greens, the Lib Dems, nationalists, independents, and millions of people who have stopped voting altogether. Our job is not to demand they all come back to us. It is to earn the right to work with them, on shared ground, for a shared future. To former Labour voters: come and talk to us again. To Green and Lib Dem voters: we are not enemies. To Labour members and MPs: this is the fight. Let's get on with it. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@BBCGaryR Disappointed in your interviews today. You try to be clever with your rehearsed questions but are painful to listen to. Be honest with the SNP as you seemed to be with Labour - he gave you clear answers about Starmer but you were a Rottweiler on your planned question

@JeremyDoku Bless you @JeremyDoku. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

“But Jesus looked at them and said to them, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” - Matthew 19:26 NKJV What a week! I know none of this is possible without the Lord Jesus Christ. All glory to Him, and I pray He continues to be glorified 🙌🏾🙏🏾✝️❤️

@MrsNickyClark I learned almost 50 years ago that my grandmother worked as a housemaid to th e Daphne Du Maurier household in London in 1920.

A lovely clip of Daphne Du Maurier aged 64. I miss this generation of women who looked as they were and felt no shame. Refusing to be crushed by ageist, sexist expectations & not being modified to look 35 forever. #actingYourAgeCampaign #DontCastHerOut

@The_Sam_North Really appreciate your match day reviews and for supporting Scottish football.

🤩 Still can’t get over what happened last night! Here’s the moment Scotland qualified for the World Cup!!! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

@Wolves Delighted for Wolves fans getting the win today. Their loyalty has been rewarded!

“It’s amazing, the fans singing my name and having our backs. Even when we haven’t been performing, they were behind us.” A word from Mateus Mane 🗣️

@Victor_UmBongo @chrishall62 He was so rude to Pooley “you are the mathematician “.

Adam Mars-Jones on #ChristmasUniversityChallenge is really up himself! Seems to like the sound of his own voice

@BearGrylls Aporeciated you sharing your thoughts and faithful testimony on SoP today. Keep 💪 in the faith!

@ShabanaMahmood Genuinely think you are doing a fantastic job with an extremely difficult portfolio. I really hope you can convince your back benchers to support your bill. I was a disillusioned Labour supporter and now I see a chink of light at the end of the tunnel.

@CamillaTominey @Telegraph Tim Davie has perhaps already been involved in too many difficult situations where he has had to defend the Corporation

🚨BBC Director General Tim Davie set to resign following @Telegraph revelations of BBC bias … More to come

@AerialKiwi @MartineBBC @LukwesaBurak @BBCNews @BPGPressGuild @TRobinsonNewEra Calm down. She speaks for everyone who values a bit of common sense and prefers not to dance on the head of a pin.

@MartineBBC @LukwesaBurak @BBCNews You should be ashamed of yourself! You should be fired & BBC shutdown! You have a code of ethics don't you? You owe some huge public apologies for the violations @BPGPressGuild @TRobinsonNewEra

Join ⁦@LukwesaBurak⁩ and me ⁦@BBCNews⁩ 7-9am GMT

@JeremyDoku @ManCity @JeremyDoku - you are an amazing role model. Top class sportsman and all round good bloke

“And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father.” Colossians 3:17 NLT

@themartinecroxall I just want to say that you do a fantastic job as a news presenter and never change the way you work please 🙏

@jk_rowling @scotmacscotbot If you weren’t SNP, you were seen as the enemy. Had Kate Forbes outlined even the basics of the business case, I would have paid attention. The referendum prospectus and its validity is still a concern.

@scotmacscotbot My ‘No’ vote wasn’t cast out of a belief that Westminster is flawless and would never again make decisions I disagreed with. I don’t think anyone who voted No claimed that, did they?

Here’s the thing: I was always (and remain) open to persuasion on independence for Scotland. I have close pro-Indy friends who are good, clever, thoughtful people. I’m well aware there was a respectable argument to be made for independence and there still is. I voted against it in 2014 because I believed the inevitable economic destabilisation and upheaval was being seriously underplayed by the SNP, and that the impact would be felt, as it always is, by the poorest and most vulnerable. I still think the SNP had no good answers to serious, good faith questions and Sturgeon offers none in her book. IMO, the SNP was asking us to simply cross our fingers and jump in the belief that myriad complexities would magically resolve themselves. As I said at the time, people like me weren’t the ones who were going to suffer serious injury if the landing turned out to be a lot harder than promised. Did pro-union people behave badly, as well as nationalists? Yes, without a doubt. In any binary contest, you will look around and find a lot of people standing in your camp you don’t have a single thing in common with except on a single yes/no question. There’s a reason, though, that far more nationalists than unionists look back fondly on the run up to the referendum time. Pro-independence politicians were happy to impugn remainers’ motives in very ugly ways, and plenty of elected MPs and MSPs contributed enthusiastically to online toxicity. When people who call a country home and love it are called traitors and Quislings by their own elected representatives for having questions about currency unions and sterlingisation, their feelings about that country inevitably shift. I used to see the Saltire in such a positive way. I felt it belonged to everyone; it was a flag with no negative associations whatsoever. Then 2014 happened and I realised my naivety, because I was told (along with millions of others) that it didn’t belong to me, that I had no right to it, that I was insufficiently good and Scottish to be included beneath it. I know very well those sentiments weren’t shared by everyone in the Yes camp, because, as stated above, I admire and indeed love certain Yessers. The fact remains that a lot of people on the No side came through that referendum with certain illusions about Scotland shredded. Sturgeon sees everything through the prism of identity politics. She assumes all No voters must have been deeply attached to a British identity, but that simply isn’t the case. Lots of us were persuadable, but if the knee jerk response to common sense questions is ‘you’re a unionist traitor, a scaremonger and no true Scot’, don’t be surprised if the questioner becomes sceptical about the inclusive, egalitarian, welcoming utopia independence activists swore we’d be living in once they were in charge.

@VoteEwing @VoteEwing You are a conviction politician like a previous MP for Banffshire Hamish Watt

After a week of silence, our FM eventually gets round to support his DFM and criticise the disgraceful “cancellation” of Kate Forbes by Summerhall arts venue in Edinburgh. 1/5

@mmgeissler @JohnSwinney @ScottishLabour @BBCRadioScot I have never been one for bias by the BBC however today there were two sets of questions posed by @mmgeissler which differed in their intensity. The first time I have noticed this by an otherwise trusted brand.

Big #bbcsundayshow this morning… FM @JohnSwinney and @ScottishLabour leader Anas Sarwar will be with me. Join us from 10 on BBC1 and @BBCRadioScot