Donna Pasquill 🏳️‍⚧️

This is why people love Prince William. Credit to catherine_of_wales on TikTok

@AngelaRayner @PeterStefanovi2 Talk is cheap. My wages are gone on rent, council tax and utilities. I am going to have to start walking 4 miles to work and again home after my shift finishes in one of the most dangerous parts of Blackpool because £82 a month is unaffordable now

Our party has suffered a historic defeat. Many good Labour colleagues have lost their seats despite working hard for those they represented. We have lost good Labour administrations and lost the chance for more. What we are doing isn’t working, and it needs to change. This may be our last chance. The Labour Party must now live up to our name: we must be the party of working people. We’ve heard the same on the doorstep as we’ve seen in the polls - the cost of living is the top issue for voters of all parties. People have turned to populists and nationalists because we have not done enough to fix it. Living standards are barely higher than they were a decade and a half ago. People feel hopeless - that the cost of living crisis will never end, and now they see oil and gas companies use global instability to post record profits. Once again, ordinary people are paying the price for decisions they didn’t make. It’s no wonder that across the UK, working people feel the system is rigged against them. Things can be so much better than this. Countries including Spain and Canada have shown that economies can grow and people can thrive when governments stay true to labour and social democratic values and put people first. We need to learn from that. In London, we lost young people who fear they will never afford a home. In my patch and across the north, we lost working people whose wages are too low and costs too high. In Scotland and Wales, people do not currently see Labour as the answer.  We are in danger of becoming a party of the well-off, not working people. The Peter Mandelson scandal showed a toxic culture of cronyism.  Decisions like cutting winter fuel allowance just weren’t what people expected from a Labour government. For too long, successive governments have allowed wealth and power to concentrate at the top without a plan to ensure the benefits of economic growth are shared fairly. The result is an economy that does not work for the majority, with wealth concentrated in too few hands. This level of inequality, alongside squeezed living standards, is the outcome of a model built on deregulation, privatisation, and trickle-down economics. But we have the chance to fix this.  1/2

@BPL_Transport you have taken the 8 out of service at 7pm on a bank holiday without notifying everyone at the bus stop waiting for it. It pulled into the 7 stop and went out of service absolutely disgusting

@OpenAI ChatGPT is broken. It is taking commands and ignoring them. It then rewrites it to reinforce its own view. If you argue with it, then it tells you to ring the Samaritans. All my workflow is toast. It can’t even accept sora closing.

@warriorgurlll This is awful and should be removed I hope the giraffe is ok

@premnsikka I went back as a mature student in my forties, I got loans, benefits wiped out as they treat the loans as income. That means maximum loans have to be taken out to live. So you are treated as if it is earning but also treated as if it’s a debt. The system is set up badly

England's Student Loan system is blighting the life of million. Young adults burdened with £267bn debt, rising to £500bn by 2040. Repayment forced when earning less than median wage, paying real rates of interest. I offered the Minister policy choice. Watch the reply.

@BPL_Transport you update an app then log users out, then you tell me I logged in on another device but I didn’t. Threaten to ban me for something I did not do. Not good when my ticket cost £80

@JasonLoch So if you have criminal convictions you cannot have an award of this kind? I never knew that

The Gazette has announced that the King has directed that nine individuals be removed from the Order of the British Empire. This is done on the advice of the Prime Minister; the relevant submission looks like this.

@AJG71 @SallyMi83941850 Or the private contractor reduces the hours of the cleaner but expects same level of work as previously and with more tasks added. I live this as a cleaner

@SallyMi83941850 Services get outsourced to "save" money. If you are paying a vendor to carry out your services, you are paying a profit margin. That margin is usually made from paying workers less and/or reducing levels of service. Also paying for layers of management who do nothing but cost £££

There is money in the NHS but it’s not going to patients…. Years ago when I first worked as a physio there was no private organisation in health, every penny went on clinical care. Then it started. First with the cleaners. 1/5

@theiaincameron Where I live the drivers act like zebra crossings are ornamental road markings, drive through while you are on them or sit on them when waiting to go round the roundabout, one good thing though, at least I will stay sprightly on my legs into old age 🤣

Once again on this morning's run I found out that the level of ignorance on rule 170 (H2) of the Highway Code is widespread. Despite the HC changing in 2022, many drivers in the UK remain unaware that they should yield when pedestrians are either waiting to cross or have 1/2

When Blair was in Government as PM he joined USA in war on Iraq. Starmer is PM and the USA are going to war on Iran. Labour certainly seem to be in power when a war starts and join in. Apparently UK planes were involved.

@Maggiewitdsauce I wonder if they thought it was theirs as they were waiting for a DBS too. Maybe that is what they meant by what are the odds. This could be a genuine mistake

I recently moved into my new address and had a letter delivered to my flat. Another tenant opened the envelope, read its contents, and then pushed it under my door with a handwritten note. The envelope clearly displayed my full name and flat number. It was also marked in bold with “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL – FOR ADDRESSEE ONLY.” My name and flat number were visible again through the transparent window. There was no ambiguity about who the letter was intended for. Although the person included an apology, I do not accept it. What particularly stood out to me was the phrase “what are the odds,” which felt dismissive and trivialising of what was a clear invasion of my privacy. I had to use marker pen to respond to the person and also slid the paper under the person's door which read. " NEVER YOU OPEN MY MAIL AGAIN. MY NAME WAS BOLDLY WRITTEN ON THE MAIL AND I DO NOT ACCEPT YOUR APOLOGY, SORRY CANNOT FIX THE FACT THAT YOU INVADED MY PRIVACY. I am still not satisfied. I have contacted the letting agent with the evidence and asked for this to be handled and also a part of me feel like being very petty by opening every mail that comes for that flat 7 till i am satisfied.

@GregorioSh64773 Oh and mine will let me spell a word then wait till I hit send and goes “no that don’t sound right let’s just put a random word there instead”

@GregorioSh64773 I feel like my keyboard has had me put on several do not fly watchlists cos people will think I am suffering so sort of mental incapacity

Is anyone else having this issue with their iPhone? Yes! 🤣🤣🤣

@BPL_Transport What about monthly bus ticket/pass currently at £80 no mention of it there

From 1 March, there will be a slight increase to some of our fares. We’re continuing to offer great value across our tram and bus network. See the full fare list here 👉 ow.ly/MFpE50YgWIw

@r0ck3t23 Also universal basic income will not be enough to live on as the government’s in western societies are already struggling to pay out the meagre amount they allow the unemployed to live on. Society will collapse and then what happens?

@r0ck3t23 Prices will always stay high no corporation wants to lose money by lowering prices. We see it with supermarkets. Rather than reduce prices and sell stock about to go out of date, they would rather throw it away. Prices will lower when people no longer have money to spend.

Elon Musk just said saving for retirement becomes pointless in 10 to 20 years. Not speculation. Math. Musk: “Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in like ten or 20 years. It won’t matter.” We passed the event horizon. Retirement savings assumes scarcity persists. It won’t. AI and robotics collapse labor costs to zero. Living costs follow. You’re not saving for security. You’re saving for a world that stops existing. Musk: “If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.” Age of Abundance isn’t vision. It’s physics. Economic laws executing whether you believe them or not. 5,000 days. Fourteen years. Global GDP uncaps. Production approaches infinite. Net worth as concept dies. Only scarcity left is meaning. Money stops being the constraint. Timeline is shorter than your brain accepts. Fourteen years. We transition from survival work to Universal High Income in that window. Event horizon isn’t coming. You’re in it. Operating under old rules while ground disappears beneath you means you already lost. Production costs hit zero through automation. Everything priced on human labor reprices instantly. Housing. Food. Goods. Services. All reset when scarcity evaporates. Traditional planning assumes structure persists. Save for decades. Retire on capital returns in scarcity markets. That model shatters when abundance becomes baseline. You’re optimizing for a world vanishing while the replacement materializes. Your strategy becomes obsolete before you finish executing it. The retirement you’re building toward assumes costs stay high. They collapse. And your savings designed for expensive scarcity become irrelevant in cheap abundance. Every dollar you put away for future scarcity is a bet against the transformation already happening. And that bet loses the moment production costs hit zero and the economy you planned for stops functioning. You’re not preparing for the future. You’re clinging to a past that’s ending whether you accept it or not. And fourteen years from now, the question won’t be whether you saved enough. It’ll be why you wasted time saving for conditions that don’t exist anymore.

@BPL_Transport No buses are showing on any trackers on the map

Happy Sunday! If you’re heading out today, check for service updates and plan your journey using our app or website before you go 🚌 ow.ly/KHFn50Yckys

@PeterStefanovi2 The biggest issue I have with the loans system is that Doctors and nurses pay student fees, take out loans to train, they then go on placement to learn in the NHS, work for free while studying, then have a graduate tax in essence after already giving free work.

Rachel Reeves promises to lower student loan costs by tackling inflation 'By getting inflation down, we can also reduce the interest on student loans and I think that will make a big difference in making that more affordable’ Not sure students will see it that way

@PeterStefanovi2 Someone needs to check the utility bill prices when Labour came in to power track the increases to when this £150 off starts. I would think the bills would still be higher so no money off, I notice the £300 has halved now.

BREAKING: Chancellor Rachel Reeves says “Wes Streeting said yesterday he was wrong in his text messages to Peter Mandelson because the economy has grown this year… we’ve got the right economic plan & it’s beginning to deliver for people in our country & we will be sticking to that plan”