Martin Elliott

please just keep my food cold

Astonishingly, Cardiff University is adding insult to injury in its cuts by closing their Humanities library with a three-week notice. Do sign the petition against it: you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save… via @38degrees

Tom Baldwin has hit the nail on the head, and doing it right there on Times Radio makes it even better. The UK media has developed a toxic addiction to manufacturing chaos and chasing headlines instead of reporting real substance. They are trying to use the exact same destructive recipe to shake a government that is actually delivering stability and growth. It is about time journalists took some responsibility and looked in the mirror. You cannot build a stable country when the press is constantly trying to set it on fire for clicks. 10/10 for calling them out.

A few home truths for the University of Nottingham’s senior management, in this open letter (nottinghamphysics.github.io/Open_Letter/) But will they even read the letter, let alone reconsider their disastrous policy? I doubt it. But please prove me wrong.

Labour should act on this, properly enforce licence conditions, squeeze these foreign owned entities until the pips squeak - they're polluting our country and enriching themselves - in the worst example of what privatisation has to offer. We don’t have to accept this status quo. thetimes.com/uk/environment…

Tesco boss’s pay rises by more than £1m to £10.8m. 3m Britons skip meals, can't afford to buy food. Tesco profits hit £3.15bn. There are no controls of fat-cattery. Shareholder votes are advisory, not binding. Workers have no say. Customers have no say. theguardian.com/business/2026/…

“Don't swim' at 12 of 14 river bathing sites, as more locations announced.” Here’s something to wrap your head around. The only stretch of river graded as ‘Good’ is at Friars Meadow, Sudbury yet from 13th March to the 13th April Anglian Water dumped sewage into Friars Meadow nonstop 24 hours a day for 31 days straight. If you went swimming there during the Easter holidays you were probably swimming in human waste but none of it shows in the data because the EA don’t even bother testing until the middle of May. PS the EA don’t actually test any bathing site in the country for most of the year 7 and a half months in fact. You go swimming between 1st Oct one year and 15th May the next you’re on your own. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

Why is renationalising water not even being discussed by the present government? Even though nobody's sure who the government is. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

Hi @EnvAgency, I planned to go swimming in my river (River Roding) and checked the water quality and it’s full of sewage (often 5-7 ppm ammonia near outfalls) due to illegal outfalls putting over a billion litres of raw sewage into the river every year. The EA has not prosecuted a single one of these illegal spills or even asked Thames Water to fix them. What should I do now?

I think it’s the worst thing Labour could do right now, there’s no reason to panic over some adverse polling less than two years into a ten year project - and some of what we’re seeing is more opportunism than panic - but if there is to be a leadership contest my first choice for the job would be Keir, that’s who I’ll back. The NHS has been battered for 14 years by Tory neglect and underfunding. Just as things are starting to turn a corner, Wes decides to walk away from a job he’s actually good at. Because he’s lost confidence apparently. Hard to square that with his talk of being proud to fight in the trenches with Keir at the general election. When the going gets tough and all that…... People around Ed Miliband have been briefing that he’s urged Keir to set a timetable to walk away - unhelpful enough to say it - worse to leak it to the press. Ed is seen as a potential contender, I’m not convinced. A few weeks ago,  he told the country he would finally break the link, the market mechanism that drives our energy bills sky-high in a crisis - the following week he announced the details and he did not break the link or even weaken it. Ed misled the country in my view and the Prime minister. Keir's top team should be standing behind him right now - and not with knives in their hands. How about some policy ideas? This whole leadership circus is a massive distraction from the job, not just at a time of global crisis but at a time when the people of Britain are making clear they want more change, they want to feel the change in their lives. The answer to that, some seem to think - is to have a new leader. That’s a delusion and often enough a conceit, sold to us on the premise it’s in the national interest or the party’s interest - when the truth is much closer to home. Labour has a job to do and a mandate to do it. Let’s get on with it.

This roadside verge reveals: A total absence of personal responsibility A rejection of the notion of community pride A failure of legal enforcement against criminals A complete embarrassment for Britain It cannot go on. @benonwine

@PiperTanya @wendyburn I had a day washed out after the second jab. Plus about 10 days of a painful arm.

@wendyburn I had the x2 shingrex privately. The pharmacist said they thought it would never take off at that £££ but demand was huge - from people like me who had seen friends suffer with this awful virus. Beware the second one is a bear - schedule some recovery time!

Just had my shingles vaccination, had to pay as not eligible on the NHS. Told the vaccinator I was doing it to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and she said her last customer was a neuroscientist there for the same reason. 💉

@LorrieSays @wendyburn @DeeNoonan Your GP is definitely wrong. It can flare up again.

@wendyburn @DeeNoonan Ive had shingles but my GP said it wouldn't happen twice.

@USAP09 @wendyburn @Grava71 My surgery also in Wales said 70. And no notice was sent out - I had to remind them!

@wendyburn @Grava71 In Wales or at least my surgery in Newport, it’s 65.

In Wigan, Reform won 96% of the seats on 46% of the votes. In Westminster, the Conservatives won a majority on 35%, while @TheGreenParty won 18% of the votes without gaining a single seat. The time to change the voting system is *now* @MakeVotesMatter

Just imagine if Margaret Thatcher hadn't flogged off BP for a song...

The latest suicidally stupid blow in the MAGA war against science; against knowledge itself - instead we get a casino ballroom, a Las Vegas- classical arch and a screaming blue swimming pool . And instead of history we'll get statues and a cage fight.

I have expressed my fears about the changes the government are making as a result of the US pharmaceutical deal which undermine the independence of the National Institute (NICE) giving US big pharma potential of immense influence over our drugs policies. theguardian.com/politics/2026/…

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue. On April 21st, the left screen moved first. I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug. At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy. On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me. At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire. Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83. I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags. My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports. The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026: Reviewed. That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one. Let me show you my flags. March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it. March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it. April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it. April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it. April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it. That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one. The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March. Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012. Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence. Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets. The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade. I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email. The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action. One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared. One account is a coincidence. But there were six. Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000. My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger. March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes. The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event. The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting." Then the White House sent the email again. I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread. I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated. But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed. Zero prosecutions. As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations. I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations. The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still. In my field, we call this price discovery.

CARE WORK IS HIGHLY SKILLED WORK and only paid so poorly because of the failure of successive governments to value it properly. The Prime Minister’s plan to offer rapid routes to settlement for those earning six-figure salaries whilst punishing and making lower-paid workers wait appears to be based on the notion that care workers are “low-skilled” because they are low-paid - thats an absolute disgrace. It would be reprehensible to punish migrants who have come to this country at our invitation - to work in our health and social care sectors - by forcing them to wait 15 years before being granted indefinite leave to remain instead of the five years they were promised before they made the decision to uproot their lives to come and work here. Contact your MP and ask them to oppose this