Studio in the hills

@educationgovuk @bphillipsonMP Wtf? As tone deaf as you could get - what about teaching by kids to aim high and have aspirations? I hope no payer funds were used to make this.

Gemma Collins is in the building and she's got questions. Coming soon📷 @bphillipsonMP

@blazeduncle @HadleyFreeman You do know that that is physiologically impossible? Why do you fall for this idiocy?

@HadleyFreeman Anything in the exhibition about how the IDF rapes Palestinians with dogs? nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opi…

The Nova exhibition in London is absolutely incredible and everyone should see it, whatever your politics or religion. Immersive and unforgettable, tragedy narrated with devastating clarity

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

@Keir_Starmer I think you only know your little corner. Regardless of what one thinks of Robinson et al, you have clearly taken a two tier approach and let the pro-Hamas/ Intifada/Anti-Semitic marches go on with faces cover, chanting horrific words. An appalling, undemocratic government.

I’ll always champion peaceful protest. But the Unite the Kingdom march organisers are peddling hatred and division. We’ve already blocked visas for far-right agitators who want to come here to spew their extremist views. They don't speak for the decent, fair, respectful Britain I know.

When considering Andy Burnham as prime minister.. just remember his wife always seems to be perfectly placed to gain from any of his projects, firstly she was connected to the company that marketed all the failed clean air zone in Manchester, and now she sits on the board of Be.Ev, The car electric charging company that is winning contracts all over Manchester.. Cronyism at its finest..

@WasAcop Just follow the money. The newly formed donor company (sole director Paul Jordon using family trust money it seems) has a strong connection to Jordon Group who were bought by Bellrock who is now owned by the rather controversial private equity firm Sun European Partners.

🚨You cannot make this up. Angela Rayner just got HMRC clearance on her £40k stamp duty dodge… and in the very next breath she’s quietly raking in another £50k from the same Oldham “fridge company” (Refrigeration House Ltd). That’s £150k total from one local business since she quit as Deputy PM in Sept 2025. All registered as “towards staffing costs for the Office of Angela Rayner Limited”. But here’s the kicker: she doesn’t have to tell anyone how a single penny is actually spent. No receipts. No breakdown. No public audit. Just “trust me bro, it’s for the office” while she builds what looks suspiciously like a leadership war chest. Normal? Considering IPSA provides MPs with a staffing allowance to cover salaries, National Insurance, pensions, and related costs for staff who support parliamentary and constituency duties. Or just another day in the Westminster cash-for-questions merry-go-round? #Rayner #Labour

@WinstonLBrown1 @MarkStretford @BoobooPriestess Bellrock is owned by a huge European private equity company. It stinks. Follow the money

Angela Rayner has received £150,000 in declared staffing support from Refrigeration House Ltd, a newly incorporated Oldham company directed by Paul Jordon, the former Jordon Group boss whose refrigeration and shopfitting business merged with Bellrock in late 2024. Companies House records show the donor was created shortly before Paul Jordon ceased significant control of the old Jordon holding company and before the Jordon business moved its registered office from Oldham to Bellrock’s Leicester address. The donor has not yet filed accounts and its PSC filings appear unusual, listing three people each with 75% or more ownership/voting rights. The donations helped fund staffing for The Office of Angela Rayner Ltd, a political organisation company directed by Rayner and her former chief of staff Nick Parrott. 🤔

Yesterday the left made everything about donations. So let’s play their game and have a look today. Look at Rayner’s recent donors. One of them has presumably just paid her £40K tax bill to allow her to stand. Question is, which donor? members.parliament.uk/member/4356/re…

@trussliz Let's not forget: Angela Rayner bumped up her Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k. Then sold her 25% share to her son’s trust for £162,500 - money used towards the £800k flat in Hove. Local sales prove it was heavily overvalued. Classic paper shuffle. Abhorrent.

Amazing coincidence of timing by an "independent" Government agency.

@PatrickChristys Let's not forget: Angela Rayner bumped up her Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k. Then sold her 25% share to her son’s trust for £162,500 m- money used towards an £800k flat in Hove. Local sales prove it was heavily overvalued. Classic paper shuffle. 'On the take'

Angela Rayner forced to pay £40k tax bill. Meanwhile…in comes a £50k donation for ‘staffing costs’.

@afneil Angela Rayner bumped up her Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k. Then sold her 25% share to her son’s trust for £162,500 - money used towards an £800k flat in Hove. Local sales prove it was heavily overvalued. Classic paper shuffle. Typically 'on the take'.

BREAKING NEWS — Angela Rayner says she’s been cleared by HMRC. She’s paid stamp duty due without a penalty being added.

@GuidoFawkes Angela Rayner bumped up her Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k. Then sold her 25% share to her son’s trust for £162,500 - money used towards an £800k flat in Hove. Local sales prove it was heavily overvalued. Classic paper shuffle. Abhorrent in government.

Labour Tax Expert Dan Neidle Says HMRC’s Exoneration of Rayner Is ‘Generous’ and ‘Hard to Understand’ order-order.com/2026/05/14/lab…

@AngelaRayner It looks like you bumped up your Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k. Then sold your 25% share to your son’s trust for £162,500 - money used towards an £800k flat in Hove. Local sales at the time prove it was heavily overvalued. Classic paper shuffle? Abhorrent in Gov.

I welcome HMRC’s conclusion, which has cleared me of any wrongdoing. I have been exonerated by HMRC of the accusation that I deliberately sought to avoid tax. When purchasing a home of my own with a mortgage, I did not own any other property and had no personal financial interest in the court-instructed trust set up to manage my son’s financial award. I was advised by experts that I should pay stamp duty at the standard rate. I set out to pay the correct amount of tax. I took reasonable care and acted in good faith, based on the expert advice I received, and HMRC has accepted this. I have always sought to act with integrity, and I believe politicians should be held to high standards - that is why I resigned from government and cooperated fully with HMRC.  I wanted to ensure that I paid every penny that I owed, and have done so. I am relieved that my family can now move on - and that I can get on with my job.

@JuliaHB1 @AngelaRayner Angela Rayner bumped up her Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k.Then sold her 25% share to her son’s trust for £162,500 - the money then used towards an £800k flat in Hove. Local sales prove it was heavily overvalued at the time. Classic paper shuffle.

Please publish your correspondence with HMRC @AngelaRayner

I’ve written and researched the whole seven front war since 7th October. It has been my whole professional life. I’ve written many papers and have just finished my book. I have written both positive and negative critiques of the war. All of that feels irrelevant in this context. The most meaningful thing I have done since 7th October is bear witness and relay the horrors done that day. I have seen part of the sexual crime evidence in this report (above and beyond the 47 minute reel) and it remains the most horrific thing I have seen in my life. Nothing Israel has done in Gaza comes remotely close to the horrors of 7th October. The Gaza war and 7th October don’t deserve to be in the same conversation when it comes to atrocity. No comparison. The rapes are the thing Hamas and their supporters are most scared of being exposed to the world. Every time I have written about what I have seen, 5x the usual amount of bots descend upon my replies. Abuse and outright denial. Now, the evidence I have seen, and more, is out there. When Yoav Gallant said Israel was fighting human animals in Hamas, he was absolutely correct. Read it for yourself: civilc.org/silenced-no-mo…

@AngelaRayner The problem is that it’s not a good deal for workers if those policies end up destroying jobs which is exactly what has happened. The failure of Labour to demonstrate’joined up thinking’ is astonishing.

No matter what they say, Reform UK will only let down the working class. They voted against our better deal for workers. With your support, we got it done. Only Labour will work for working people. Vote Labour 🌹

@zatzi And thousands of small businesses

Thanks Labour - looks like Rachel’s growth is strategy is going really well 😡😢 In last 6 months alone: 🚫239 Brewers Fayre/ Beefeater 🚫150 TG Jones (WH Smith) 🚫270 William Hill 🚫39 River Island 🚫88 Cancer Research 🚫5 GAME 🚫23 Quiz 🚫137 TOFS 🚫9 The Real Greek 🚫35 TGI Fridays 🚫22 Leon 🚫68 Pizza Hut 🚫21 Revolution 🚫10 BrewDog 🚫33 Russell & Bromley 🚫20 Fired Earth And now up to 300 Poundstretcher / Poundland stores Estimated impact is between 10,400 and 13,000 jobs, with several thousand more potentially at risk. Fewer shops, fewer restaurants, fewer jobs a bigger benefits bill. Socialism at work. 🤦🏻‍♀️ “Poundstretcher faces ‘no choice’ but administration as discount giant begs for restructuring lifeline to save 300 shops” thesun.co.uk/money/39039128…

@DPJHodges I wouldn’t isolate it just to Starmer - they seem to want Labour gone. Labour policies are destroying the economy, employment (esp.youth), education, small and medium sized businesses, the creative sector & more. It’s not just Starmer…

Keir Starmer is living on a different planet. The voters haven't sent a message about "the pace of change". They've sent the message they want him gone.

@UKLabour Your Workers' Rights bill (along with your ridiculous tax & rates rises) has created a RISE in unemployment - especially for young people. People aren't hiring and business in every British town are closing at a heartbreaking rate due SOLELY to your policies.

This Labour Government has delivered the biggest uplift to workers’ rights in a generation. Labour is the only party that stands up for working people.

@RachelReevesMP The economic issues predate the war in Iran - all created by your hand. You are destroying our high streets, our small businesses, our children’s futures ( unless they’re on benefits!) and any aspirations for people to better themselves. To use Iran as an excuse is lazy & lying

We didn’t start this war. We didn’t want it. And working families in a cost of living crisis shouldn’t have to pay the price for it. That’s why this government is focused on de-escalation and keeping energy bills down. mirror.co.uk/news/politics/…

@RachelReevesMP With or without the situation in Iran, your abhorrent policies and this government are destroying the economy. Small & family businesses, all taxpayers, up & down the country are going under due your your policies that only encourage a life on benefits.

For too long, our country has been exposed to global shocks - and households and businesses have paid the price. We will learn the lessons of the past, and build a Britain that is stronger and more resilient. thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…