Sandra Cheetham

This “work will cure you of mental illness” is no different to “Arbeit Macht Frei” - work sets you free.

I'm not interested in any coverage of Tony Blair's views that makes no mention of the fact the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) is bankrolled by billionaire Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle. From 2021-2025, Ellison donated or pledged £257m to the TBI. Of course he's an AI evangelist!

Spending on working age welfare has barely shifted as a fraction of national income in decades. True that spending on some incapacity and disability benefits is rising but others are being squeezed. Torsten is right. That is not what is pushing up total spending and taxes.

This country has heard enough from Tony Blair.

I don't care what political party you represent, Tory, Labour, Green, Lib Dem, Reform. I was taught, quite rightly, that the Holocaust was humanity's greatest crime. I did Holocaust Studies as part of my History/ Politics degree at Uni of Bham with the late great Professor Grenville, himself a Jewish refugee who escaped the terror of Nazi Germany as a kid. If you are not calling out the current genocide we are painfully witnessing in Gaza and Lebanon, a live streamed and documented genocide then you are dead to me. Labour, Green, Reform... Dont care. Start with a clear moral position on that before you tell me about how you will tax me and what your policies on education are or the environment etc or what you plan to do with the 20 mile an hour speed limit. I dont give a shit. Start with something we were taught would never happen again because of silent complicity. Tell me how you feel about children being shot in the head for fun or the raping of prisoners or the 100s of 1000s of dead and missing. Tell me about how you filter the unimaginable horror, the insane bombing and murder, day after day, week after week, months and now years. Dont just have an opinion. Show me that you're actually human and everything else (after a live streamed and documented geneocide that slowly destroys my own sense of humanity on a daily basis) will follow that.

There are plenty of lessons that can be learnt from Tony Blair’s legacy. For example, that privatisation has been disastrous and following the US into illegal wars is wrong. But his latest “rare political intervention” - calling on the government to abandon net-zero, further privatise the NHS, deregulate Big Tech, and cosy up to Trump - shows that he hasn’t learnt any of them. Whatever you think of Gordon Brown, his contributions after leaving office have been focused on trying to improve people’s lives. Tony Blair simply does the bidding of Silicon Valley billionaires and petrostates.

Digital ID cards link Starmer, McSweeney, Labour Together, + Tony Blair. The timing of Starmer’s announcement was no coincidence. Bastard Blair is back and he wants to make some very rich people even richer. I’ve been researching since Thursday, + I’ve got you their names…🧵

Blair has said "the rising number of people on disability benefits was unsustainable and must be cut as a priority." So what does he want the disabled to do, go away and die? What a hideous man he is. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

This is just indiscriminate slaughter of unarmed civilians. And nobody lifts a finger…

A labour policy bigwig asked me if I even knew anything about social prescribing this weekend. The bro is a politician. I have been a clinician and researcher for over two decades.

The hero Hossam Abu Safiya 🇵🇸 Refused to leave patients in a war zone Kidnapped by 🇮🇱 Tortured by 🇮🇱 Now one of the 9,600 Palestinians 🇵🇸 who could be executed by 🇮🇱 Silence from Keir Starmer An apartheid 🇮🇱 state passing fascist laws & Starmer is silent Shameful.

Successive UK govts have dehumanised disabled people, and they have also dehumanised the poorest people - many of whom are disabled people. This has been intentional, damaging and shameful.

I'm Jewish, British & 64 All my life, I wondered how the Holocaust could have happened. I understood that Hitler & other leaders were EVIL, but how did millions of ordinary people go along with it? NOW, seeing how so many in the West rationalise & defend the Gaza Genocide, I feel I have an answer and it is profoundly disturbing

THE MAN WHO TRIED TO SAVE 134,000 CARERS GOT SACKED FOR HIS TROUBLE Enrico La Rocca spent 27 years working for the Department for Work and Pensions (@DWP). From 2018 he kept raising the alarm internally: the Carer's Allowance system was broken, data alerts were being ignored, and unpaid carers were quietly racking up thousands of pounds in overpayment debts they had no idea about. DWP's own 2019 internal audit found that two thirds of earnings-related Carer's Allowance overpayments over £2,500 could have been stopped earlier, had DWP simply acted on the data-matching alerts already sitting in its own systems. The alerts were there. The staff were not. Nobody did anything. La Rocca pushed harder. Concerned by media reports of carers having their cases referred to the Crown Prosecution Service despite DWP's failure to address these systemic problems, he contacted the CPS to request that the National Audit Office report, already in the public domain, be shared with the court to ensure a just outcome. That act of basic human decency, asking for a public document to be used in court, became the justification DWP used to sack him. Despite assurances from DWP permanent secretary Sir Peter Schofield that La Rocca would be protected, he was dismissed in 2020 and reinstated in 2021 only after parliamentary intervention. Ministers then had to intervene again when his managers tried to block him from giving evidence to the independent Sayce review. The problems he flagged never went away. As of early 2023, DWP was chasing more than 134,000 unpaid carers to recover over £250 million in overpayment debt, with nearly 12,000 cases involving debts between £5,000 and £20,000. Some carers had their inheritances seized. Some faced prosecution. All of this while DWP called them "unsung heroes" in press statements. The government-commissioned Sayce review later acknowledged La Rocca's contribution directly, noting it was not easy to raise issues in a large institution and that he deserved thanks for persisting across time. A junior civil servant with no power, no platform, and 27 years of service spent seven years trying to protect some of the most vulnerable people in the country. The department thanked him by sacking him, blocking him from giving evidence, and then quietly accepting the conclusions he had been trying to force on them since 2018. That is what whistleblowing looks like in the real world. Not a dramatic Senate hearing. Not a Netflix documentary. A man in Preston repeatedly telling the truth to people who did not want to hear it. Sources: @TheCanaryUK @BBCNews @VoxPolitical @guardian

OK, so Helen Whately and the Express are doubling down and going all out hysterical at this point...🙄 They've actually "calculated" the state benefits a man with ELEVEN WIVES could claim!! And this time, they've done it behind a paywalled article🤷‍♀️ But don't worry, I got behind it!🤓 🧵1/20

Finally, fewer than 10 polygamous households are claiming these benefits in the UK FEWER THAN 10... 6/

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Here’s Tony Blair sweating like a pig during a record-breaking May heatwave… while calling to scrap Net Zero policies. Couldn’t make it up really.

Whatever world Tony Blair inhabits appears to be one without climate change & where UK temperature record for May hasn’t just been smashed by over 2C. How else to explain his extraordinary dismissal of net zero & erroneous claim that fossil fuels are cheaper than renewables? 🙄

.@faizashaheen: "Firstly on Blair, he should be held accountable for what he did with the Iraq War, when he lied to all of us, I just find it shameful that he can come out & expect to give us advice on anything" Spot on.