Dr Alison Booth

I'm not a medical doctor but this call to use our freedom to take responsibility in this pandemic, is well put.

@implausibleblog Just as for the Reform council in Nottingham, only pro media are to be allowed within the hallowed circle. We've seen it from Trump already.

Victoria Derbyshire spend 8 minutes taking apart Nigel Farage's £5,000,000 gift "As you'd expect we asked Reform UK for an interview tonight. One Reform UK press officer asked: with who and to discuss what" "We said we'd like to talk about the local elections, the detention centres in Green areas, and £5m gift from Christopher Harborne" "We didn't receive another reply"

The Reform guide to making your life more shit 1. Pay to see a GP. Farage has floated moving the NHS to an insurance model more than once. Insurance means premiums. Premiums mean American healthcare. The rich skip the queue, you pay for what's currently free. 2. £2m inheritance tax cut. Reform's flagship tax break wipes inheritance tax on estates up to £2 million. You won't inherit £2 million. Neither will I. This is a straight transfer from the public purse to people who are already rich. 3. £150bn of cuts. That's the IFS estimate of what Reform's numbers actually require. It's not an abstract figure. It's your hospital wait, your closed library, your cancelled bus route, your kid's class size. 4. Energy bills chained to gas. Renewables are now the cheapest power on the grid. Scrapping net zero keeps you tied to international gas markets the exact thing that doubled your bills in 2022. Reform wants more of that. 5. Privatising what's left. Water's already privatised. Already pumping sewage into rivers. Already paying foreign shareholders billions. Reform's instinct is more of this, not less, rail, NHS contracts, anything not bolted down. No wonder they want you to hate immigrants. While you're busy blaming the bloke who picked your strawberries, you're not asking why a Dulwich-educated stockbroker is selling off your water and charging you to see a doctor.

Republican efforts to extinguish the last remaining bison (currently at 0.1% of their former numbers) are truly a crime against America. You literally could not make it up. How any American stands by this is beyond comprehension. Shame on @GovGianforte thetimes.com/article/25b3d3…

Reform UK’s billionaire-funded propaganda channel, GB News, exists to protect the interests of the rich. Its key propaganda strategy is to blame and scapegoat minorities and other vulnerable groups, including those who need assistance in the form of welfare. The inflammatory claims in the article below are based on a highly partisan analysis released on 4 May 2026 by the Conservative Party, using Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) administrative data on actual benefit payments. In 2024–25, approximately 625,000 households (down slightly from 668,000 in 2023/24 when the Conservatives were in power, but double the 2019–20 figure) received more than £32,000 in total welfare payouts. This threshold roughly matches the average post-tax earnings of a full-time worker (median full-time gross pay was about £39,000 in 2025, with take-home pay around £31–32k after tax and NI). About 16,000 households received over £60,000, and the Conservatives highlighted that the number of working-age households on high payments (>£30k) has risen. While these claims appear to be broadly accurate, I will now show how they are misleading, decontextualised, lack nuance, and, like almost all GB News and other right-wing news media content, appear to be framed to provoke maximum outrage, anger, and polarisation, and to deflect blame away from the ultrarichrich and the failed deregulatory free-market ideology of successive governments, rather than to objectively report, inform, and educate. A reminder that while it has the word ‘news’ in the title, it is clearly not a news channel. The article frames the data against a ‘£155 BILLION benefits budget’ that is ‘ballooning’ and will soon ‘dwarf defence spending’. The presentation is deliberately provocative, inflammatory, selective, and misleading. Headlines like “Welfare pays more than work” and phrases such as “critics slam”, “abuse the system”, and “golden ticket” imply widespread laziness or fraud among recipients, strongly and falsely implying that large numbers of able-bodied people are simply choosing benefits over jobs. This rhetoric ignores the legal and policy reality: most very high awards go to households with severe disabilities or caring responsibilities, where benefits (especially Personal Independence Payment, or PIP) are exempt from the household benefit cap precisely to protect the most vulnerable. Would they prefer we turn the most vulnerable in British society into beggars? Bring back work houses? Should we ‘deport’ them to somewhere more affordable? I’m reminded of the time privately educated multimillionaire Richard Tice’s Dubai-based privately educated multimillionaire partner, Isabel Oakeshott, referred to people claiming disability support as “parasites” on another right-wing propaganda channel, TalkTV, which is funded by another divisive billionaire, Rupert Murdoch. While, outside of the inflammatory headlines, the analysis itself notes that these payments are the “highest needs” cases, the framing downplays that context in favour of outrage. Key contextual information that audiences need to make sense of the article is deliberately concealed or downplayed, including the composition of the overall UK welfare budget. The £155bn figure cited appears to refer primarily to working-age and children’s benefits (official forecasts for 2025–26 put this at around £145bn). However, the full UK social security system is forecast at £323bn (Great Britain) or £334bn (UK-wide) in 2025–26. Around 55% of that total (£178bn) goes to pensioners, including £146bn on the state pension alone. Pensions are the single largest item and have grown due to the triple lock and an ageing population. The 625,000 high-payment households represent roughly 2% of the UK’s 29 million households and are a tiny fraction of overall spending; the vast majority of welfare goes to retirees who have contributed through National Insurance over decades, not to “work-shy” working-age claimants. Despite the strong impression given by the article, by populist politicians, and by swathes of Britain’s print and broadcast news media, Britain’s welfare costs are NOT unusually high when benchmarked against culturally similar countries. Nor are levels of taxation. Britain is categorically NOT a “high tax, high welfare” country. This is one of the most widely circulating lies pushed by media and political discourse in the UK for several decades, and should be robustly challenged at every opportunity. Using the standard OECD measure of public social expenditure (which covers pensions, health-related benefits, family support, unemployment, housing, etc.): OECD average: ~21–22% Finland: 31.4% France: 30.6% Germany: 27.9% Italy: ~27.6% UK: 23.0% of GDP Australia: 22.9% (net) While the US is just 19.8%, it has much higher private spending and much worse outcomes across many key quality-of-life measures, including lower life expectancy, more poverty, more public debt, fewer worker holidays and protections, and a far higher homicide rate. The UK sits comfortably in the middle of the pack among developed Western democracies, lower than most continental European peers with similar living standards and higher than the US or some Anglosphere nations. Working-age disability and incapacity spending, while rising post-pandemic, remains close to or below the OECD average as a share of GDP. The welfare model that Reform UK wants to impose is far closer to the US model than our European neighbours. Is that really what GB News audiences and Reform UK voters want? Or have they been fed a diet of divisive, misleading propaganda which seeks to promise them everything and actually make their lives far worse should Reform ever get anywhere near the levers of power? Claims of an “out-of-control” or uniquely bloated welfare system simply do not hold up against comparable countries. GB News, owned by Evangelical “Christian” billionaire hedge fund founder Paul Marshall (alongside other right-leaning investors), has a clear editorial incentive to present the story this way. Sensational framing of “benefits Britain” drives engagement among its core audience, who are often older, taxpayer-focused, and receptive to narratives of waste, dependency, and government failure. Highlighting the figures now, under a Labour government, serves to attack current Government policy while glossing over the fact that the benefit-cap loopholes and post-pandemic rises occurred across governments and administrations. It also keeps pressure on Labour to pursue tougher reforms, aligning with the channel’s broader populist-right, small-state, low-tax, anti-union, anti-regulation, and anti-immigrant #TuftonStreet-aligned leanings. Billionaire ownership of media may not be inherently sinister, but it does shape coverage priorities: stories that resonate with anti-Left sentiment and boost ratings are prioritised over dry, balanced, informative fiscal analysis. We see this pattern repeated daily right across the massive media empires owned by Marshall (GB News, UnHerd, Spectator), Murdoch (Sun, Times, TalkTV/Radio), and Jonathan Harmsworth (Mail, METRO, i newspaper), with many non-billionaire-owned news media (Express, London Standard, Telegraph) also adopting this framing. The choice of a non-expert guest from Spiked magazine is also significant for similar ideological reasons. Spiked (originally the Revolutionary Communist Party’s Living Marxism) is a small but vocal, opaquely funded outlet that specialises in contrarian, divisive, anti-welfare-state, anti-migrant, anti-Islam, anti-feminist, anti-tax, free-speech-focused culture-war commentary from a libertarian-right perspective. Its contributors frequently argue that generous benefits create dependency and cultural decay rather than addressing structural issues. Selecting such a guest, rather than, say, a neutral economist, DWP statistician, or disability-sector expert, allows the segment to amplify an emotive, “common-sense” critique without the inconvenient caveats (disability exemptions, pension dominance, OECD comparisons) that a data-focused expert would introduce. It lends an intellectual veneer to an elite populist narrative while staying firmly inside the channel’s ideological comfort zone. This is a classic media tactic: pair selective facts with aligned commentators to reinforce the desired framing rather than test it. @Ofcom have absolutely failed to reign in this clearly ideological approach, making GB News effectively Britain's Fox News. Maybe at the next general election we can look forward to its partisan presenters claiming that the election was fraudulent or “stolen”, should Reform UK do worse than current opinion polls suggest. In short, the raw numbers are real and worth debating: welfare reform, work incentives, and disability assessment are of course legitimate policy questions. As are taxation of the ultrarich, rising inequality, regulation of the financial institutions and crypto, worker’s rights, environmental protections, politicians receiving gifts of £5 million from old men with two names living in Thailand, politicians lying to voters about buying a house in their constituency, and the concentration of media ownership in the hands aof a few right-wing billionaires. But he GB News presentation strips away essential context to manufacture a culture-war-style scandal. The reality about welfare is far more nuanced than GB News claims: the UK spends a middling amount on social protection by international standards, raised by middling levels of taxation, with the bulk going to pensioners, and with the high awards highlighted overwhelmingly going to support people with severe needs who cannot reasonably be expected to “choose work.”

BBC News today “British pubs closing at a rate of almost two per day in 2026” What they didn’t say in local election week- “Between 2010 and 2024, industry bodies like the BBPA & CAMRA consistently recorded between 18 & 30 traditional pub closures per week.” So it’s less then…

@Nigel_Farage You’re literally demonstrating that if you were ever to become Prime Minister, you wouldn’t be a Prime Minister for Britain, you’d be a Prime Minister for Reform voters. Spectacularly poorly thought through.

If you use TikTok, you should read this once. In October 2024, a court clerk in Kentucky uploaded the lawsuit against TikTok with the confidential sections still visible. NPR downloaded it before anyone caught the mistake. By the time the court resealed it, the internet had a copy. What was inside was TikTok's own engineers, in their own words, describing what their app does to a human brain. Not a critic's brain. Yours. Here is what they wrote down. — TikTok ran the math on how long it takes to develop "compulsive use" of the app. The number is 260 videos. With 8-second videos played in rapid-fire succession, that works out to roughly 35 minutes. The company's internal documents call this the compulsive-use threshold. — TikTok's own research describes what compulsive use causes: "diminished analytical ability, impaired memory, contextual reasoning, conversational depth, empathy, and heightened anxiety." That is not a quote from a critic. That is TikTok's own language, in its own internal documents. — A team inside the company called "TikTank" wrote in an internal report that compulsive use on the platform was "rampant." — After 30 minutes of continuous use in one sitting, the company's own documents state that users are placed into "filter bubbles" — algorithmic loops the user did not choose and cannot easily escape. Then there is the screen-time tool — the one TikTok publicly markets as proof it cares. — TikTok ran an experiment on the 60-minute screen-time prompt. Daily teen usage dropped from 108.5 minutes to 107. A reduction of 1.5 minutes. — Internally, the screen-time tool was not measured by whether it reduced screen time. Its top success metric, in writing, was "improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage." — A project manager wrote in internal chat: "Our goal is not to reduce the time spent." Another employee added that the goal was "to contribute to daily active users and retention." — A TikTok executive approved the screen-time feature only on the condition that its impact on the company's "core metrics" was minimal. The lawsuit alleges the company planned to "revisit the design" if the tool ever reduced usage by more than 10%. The "Are you still scrolling?" break videos? An executive admitted in an internal meeting they were "useful talking points" for lawmakers, but "not altogether effective." Then there is the algorithm itself. — An internal report flagged that the For You feed was showing what the company called "a high volume of not attractive subjects." TikTok then retooled the algorithm to suppress those users. Kentucky authorities wrote: "By changing the TikTok algorithm to show fewer 'not attractive subjects' in the For You feed, [TikTok] took active steps to promote a narrow beauty norm even though it could negatively impact their Young Users." That sentence is the entire pitch of the platform, said out loud. — Internally, TikTok also acknowledged that its publicly reported content moderation metrics were "mostly misleading," because they only measured the content the company successfully moderated — never the content it missed. Now read those bullet points again as one continuous case. The company knows the addiction threshold. The company measured it. The company ranked engagement over mental health in writing. The company built a screen-time tool whose internal success metric was PR. The company suppressed people it deemed unattractive to keep you scrolling. The company called its own moderation numbers misleading. None of this is a leaked rumor. None of this is a journalist's interpretation. This is a court filing. The documents are TikTok's. The words are TikTok's. The math is TikTok's. The 14 state attorneys general who signed onto this lawsuit aren't fringe activists. They're a bipartisan coalition. Sources at the bottom: NPR, CNN, AP, Mashable, OPB, The Independent. All citing the same accidentally-unsealed Kentucky filing from October 11, 2024. The next time the company tells you it cares about your wellbeing — the screen-time prompts, the break videos, the safety features, the careful PR statements — remember that its own engineers wrote down, in court-admissible language, that the safeguards were never meant to work. The app is not broken. It is performing exactly as designed. You were the spec.

Last autumn a local Sikh woman was raped in Sandwell. Here’s how a Reform candidate in Thursday’s election responded to the horrific attack: “Good. Reap it.” Don’t let a party that stands people with these hideous views take power in Sandwell this week.

@SarahForRuncorn What about witnesses who might be non-English-speaking tourists or guest workers?

The only language that should be spoken in an English courtroom is English. thetimes.com/uk/law/article…

In September 2024 Nigel Farage said he couldn't do in-person surgeries in Clacton because of safety concerns But in April 2026, Nigel Farage claimed that his £5 million donation in Spring 2024 from Christopher Harborne was for his security Why did Nigel Farage take a £5 million gift for security then not use it for his security so he could run in-person surgeries like MPs are meant to?

@Nigel_Farage Stating outright that you’d violate our constitution. This is illegal and shows that you have no interest in governing equally or with respect to the law. Divisiveness all the way, eh Nige. We know who you’ve learned that from.

If you vote Reform you will not have an illegal migrant deportation facility in your area. We will hold migrants awaiting deportation in constituencies that vote Green instead. You get what you vote for.

@lewis_goodall @campbellclaret @MarinaPurkiss This isn’t tough policy. It’s a clear abuse of public power - essentially collective punishment🧵 1/. Can a government site detention centres based on how an area votes? Short answer: No. Unlawful. Third Reichian and third rate.

@Nigel_Farage Check out how many local councils Boris Johnson lost and still survived.

A crushing defeat by Reform in Labour's heartlands next week will spell the end for Keir Starmer.

Please sign ✍️ the petition..it’s too late for me and my village…my cul de sac will be metres from a 24/7 operational, gigantic rail freight and warehouse park with no direct motorway access for the thousands of lorries generated..the noise and dust is horrendous with the construction and decimation of 420 acres of St Albans #greenbelt..it will be even worse when it’s built..@SEGROplc should not be building here, the site is totally unsuitable for a development like this…residents are trapped as unable to sell their homes..wildlife displaced except Skylarks still nesting near the construction machinery 💔

@King0243_PJC I guess this is called a fake promise. 🙄

Imagine lying this hard for clout. 💀 Reform is out here banning international students from loans they literally already cannot get. Whether you are French, Irish, or from Mars, you cannot just land in the UK and rinse the taxpayer. You have to prove years of residency first. In reality, international students are actually out here subsidising our entire uni system by paying triple fees and paying for the NHS upfront before they even get here. They are literally inventing fake problems to sell you fake solutions. It is embarrassing. 🤡#UKPolitics #StudentFinance #FactCheck

For those who don't know. Gaza now has the highest rate of children with amputated limbs in all of modern history. Something you stand before with great sadness and shock, not a passing news story.

Hi @SuellaBraverman , 48 hours ago I asked you to substantiate or withdraw your claim that “250,000 foreign students took £4bn in UK loans.” That time has now passed. You have provided no evidence, no clarification, and no correction. I have taken the time to examine the data myself. I have reviewed materials from the Student Loans Company, the Department for Education, the House of Commons Library, the UK Statistics Authority, and reporting from Times Higher Education. Across these sources, one thing is clear. Your statement is presented in a way that gives the public a deeply misleading impression. Let’s deal with this carefully. The £4bn figure you reference relates to the total value of student loans issued to non UK nationals. It is not a direct cost to the taxpayer. These are loans. They are repaid over time based on income. Presenting that figure as if it were money handed out or lost is not an accurate reflection of how the system works. Then there is your use of the phrase “foreign students.” This is where the distortion becomes more serious. The fact (which you know quite well) is those eligible for UK student finance are not newly arrived international students. They are people with settled status, indefinite leave to remain, refugee status, or long term lawful residence in the UK. They live here. They work here. They pay into the system. And under the law, they are entitled to access student finance. Standard international students on student visas are generally not eligible for these loans. By leaving out that distinction, you create a very different picture in the minds of the public. One where large numbers of people are arriving from abroad and immediately accessing public funds. That is not what the data shows. You also cited a figure of 250,000 without pointing to a clearly published dataset or transparent methodology. Numbers like this carry weight. They should be used with care, not as loose estimates in politically charged statements. I am not interested in party politics. But I am concerned about what this kind of messaging is doing to the country. When lending is presented as spending, and long term residents are presented as outsiders, it fuels resentment. It deepens division. It creates tension where clarity is needed. And ordinary people end up carrying the consequences of that confusion. Like I was being racially attacked and profiled in my initial response to you in X by supporters of your party who were obviously misled and triggered by your misinformation. I did consider legal action. But the reality is that the law is not designed to deal easily with this kind of broad public misrepresentation. You know that, which is why ignoring a challenge like mine carries little immediate consequence. That does not make it acceptable. I will be submitting a formal complaint to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards regarding your use of misleading statistical claims in public communication. The public deserves accuracy. Not selective framing. Not distortion. And certainly not narratives that risk turning people against each other on the basis of incomplete facts. Stephen Dada.

Labour has already delivered more manifesto pledges than Reform UK has total policies @LondonEconomic

@effthealgorithm @dramdarcy My late mother became computer literate in her late 50s and coped fine until all the ads and pop ups started. She was thrown by the jargon and couldn't work out what was important any longer. So she just gave up.

@boothac59 @dramdarcy To be honest, I was grumpy long before the internet. But the changes to it in the past 5 years have not helped.

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

Why is everyone so obsessed with Starmer going if the local elections are bad ???? Johnson lost 1000 council seats and control of 11 local councils during his tenure but didn't resign or get booted out. Sunak then lost 470 council seats and didn’t lose control or resign.