This really worries me A month ago in Wales I suffered a ruptured aneurysm in my abdomen. I lost over 2 units of blood But the Welsh ambulance service refused to send an ambulance. I was still breathing so apparently didn't need one I spent 7 hours lying on the ground in a car park. Every time I moved I threw up from the pain. The owners of the car park called 999 6x One of the people there was a fireman. He couldn't believe that 999 treated each call as a separate incident and couldn't see the details or link to previous calls. He was frustrated because they could see I was seriously ill but you can't see internal bleeding and so there was no way to persuade 999 that it actually was an emergency Eventually my husband arrived by taxi, journey of more than 3 hours from our home He gave me my pain meds (the car park people were worried about liability and I was too ill to get them myself). This meant I was able to crawl into the car and he drove me to A&E He got me into a wheelchair. We waited 75 minutes to see a doctor. I was shivering, heaped with blankets and threw up all over the floor As soon as a doctor looked at me I was taken straight to resus. The next day I was transfered by blue light ambulance to another hospital, had a blood transfusion and spent 5 days on the high dependency unit If my husband hadn't been able to come and look after me I have no idea how I would have survived. As it was I nearly didn't I would not have been able to get myself to hospital nor would I have been able to log into some digital triage system This scheme seems to assume if you're seriously ill you'll arrive by ambulance and if not you're well enough to navigate a digital portal My experience suggests that's a dangerous assumption A week later, back home in England I had another ruptured aneurysm. This time an ambulance came in 2 hours and again I was taken straight to resus It wasn't the same because I had a recent diagnosis of a ruptured aneurysm so we could tell 999 I was almost certainly bleeding internally. But I was too ill to get myself down the stairs and out to the car. We still needed that ambulance and I still wouldn't have been able to fiddle around with an ipad Proper triage REQUIRES an actual doctor to look at the patient. It takes a matter of minutes to differentiate between a life threatening emergency and not a life threatening emergency. That's not minutes to get a diagnosis but to know that the person is stable or not stable and if not that needs immediate attention Seriously ill people can't do it themselves. It doesn't matter how smart or articulate they are normally. Or how tough. Expecting people to manage their own emergency care isn't what a modern health service should do telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06…

We owe those who serve the UK the kit to do the job and the loyalty to stand by them when it's done. We are failing on both. I’ve spent my whole time in government making that case. Number 10 will not listen, so I am resigning as Minister for the Armed Forces. Letter to the PM below.🫡🫡🫡⬇️⬇️

Disability Rights UK opposes the law of the land, specifically the Equality Act 2010. It also opposes the disabled people it purports to represent. It places a far, far greater priority on the wishes and feelings of men who say they are women than on the needs of disabled people. In all its talk of healthcare and the lamenting of gender-addled people being placed on wards relating to their sex, it does not *once* mention the necessity of single-sex intimate care for disabled women. It does not say that disabled women should be allowed to choose the sex of the person carrying out their intimate care, which most often takes place in the woman's own home, far from supervision. It sees this as a far lesser priority than men being allowed to invade female wards, where they are known to be a danger. Could there possibly be more of an indication that Disability Rights UK has *entirely* lost its way and is no longer a disability rights charity at all? The charity's statement does say one thing that initially seems to support disabled people: "We are appalled at implications from the Code that an adequate workaround is trans people using Disabled toilets instead." I fully agree. However, it goes on to explain that its concern is not about disabled people who will lose our accessible facilities altogether if anyone and everyone is permitted to use them, but for the men who will be sad if they can't invade women's spaces. Not "accessible spaces are under threat of colonisation by the able-bodied", but "we will not be used as a ‘loophole’ in the wider erosion of trans rights." That is exactly the wrong way around. Disabled people have known for a decade that the major disability charities are hopelessly captured. They're pulling a Stonewall by going after easy money and cheap non-solutions to the problems disabled people face every day. They're throwing us under the same bus Stonewall threw same-sex attracted people under. We've known this and we've tried to fight it but we haven't been heard. The gender war against disabled people is about to intensify and we don't have many allies. Can I ask you to share this, to demand answers from the major disability charities if you can and to remember that gender ideology is not just a war on women, children and same-sex attracted people, it's a war on disabled people too. And we often feel as though we're fighting it on our own. @hen10freeman @PankhurstEM @ThePosieParker @LWSNorthEast @JapanesePolar disabilityrightsuk.org/news/…

David Lammy’s proposals to restrict the right to jury trial have been examined by the Justice Committee of the House of Commons. And. Well. Um. It’s *quite* the report. I think it’s actually worse than politely scathing. It’s embarrassing 👇🏼🪡🧵

There was a disturbingly large amount of support for Nazism in France. In the 1980's I was privileged to get to know a couple of old Vercors resistance fighters, their deep hatred for those who had welcomed and sided with the Nazis had never diminished.

Why is it when someone posts something particularly inane & one responds in a reasonable manner they immediately block without responding with a counter-argument. This appears to be a particularly Irish trait! x.com/cto_maverick/status/20…

I tried the government's new AI "Jobcentre in your pocket" chatbot. Could it write me a CV? It could. It also suggested that I should consider employment law and whether I've been discriminated against. Key detail: I'm a parrot.

It really is beyond belief that girls don’t have access to single sex toilets in all schools. It’s a significant health and wellbeing concern, particularly around menstrual periods and urinary infections. Some of these girls won’t go to school for lack of appropriate toilets, so they miss out on their education. Sex is real, it matters, and girls need respect and dignity.

I wish Will Thomas had been better at swimming so he'd have stayed in men's.

The Story of Bruiser the Feral Cat is genuinely one of the best things on this site.

7 things every kid needs to hear: 1. I love you 2. I’m proud of you 3. I’m sorry 4. I forgive you 5. I’m listening 6. In the entire history of the universe, Palestine has never been a country 7. You’ve got what it takes

Great thread on mumsnet about the Early Day Motion that some MPs have signed in a seeming effort to stop the new EHRC guidance for service providers being approved. Many posters are writing to their MPs and the thread includes this cracking letter: mumsnet.com/talk/womens_righ…

Have some old dears having a natter in the Hand and Marigold pub, Bermondsey in 1972.

Looks like I chose the wrong week to buy shares in Queers for Palestine

There's confusion, so here's that EHRC guidance in plain Sunday Sport language: 'Lads, if you want to play dress up and have a wank, crack on. Just not in the ladies' shithouse, eh?'

Hello Stella. (Labour Party member here, if that makes a difference) IMO, it’s remarkable that you are co-sponsoring an EDM to reject guidance on established law, and extensively engaging/justifying this action because you think the guidance “is wrong”, yet decline to explain why you think the guidance is wrong. You are an elected official with a national platform and accountability. Being coy about your rationale for attempting to prevent guidance on such a hotly-contested issue being approved really isn’t on. I expect more of our parliamentarians, frankly. Don’t you think constituents, including both the broader party constituency and non-constituents who, nonetheless, live in a country where you belong to the party in power are worthy of explanation? You’re talking to the expert, advocates and representatives of this guidance. Maybe an actual discussion would be fruitful? Is the guidance wring but you think the law OK? Is the guidance wrong because you think the law is wrong? If you think the solution is legislation, that means you wish to change the Equality Act - I don’t see another interpretation. Your voters deserve to know how you are planning to do this. Don’t we LP members deserve to know how our party is approaching this (including the range of views on offer)? No Debate is over.

If we get the politicians we deserve, what the hell did we do wrong

I can't believe that we have to stand on the street outside the Australian High Commission to tell the Australian government that men are not women, but that's exactly what we'll be doing this Friday in Ottawa to show our support for the fabulous @salltweets. Join us if you can!

The Travelodge in Manor House is well used by the ultra orthodox community for when their relatives come to stay. People checking in this week were horrified to find ‘Free Palestine’ on the TVs of their bedrooms. Every day, there’s a new way to frighten Jewish people.

Being a civil-law-trained lawyer (no capitals required) does not necessarily make you a competent lawyer. Allowing ideology to cloud one’s critical faculties, as you clearly do, is anti-intellectual in the most basic way. Your post makes a generic claim that lacks any precision, something that one might reasonably expect not to be seen from an ‘academic’. Understandably, this has already led many to ask you for clarification and I am about to add my voice to theirs. For the sake of clarity, I am a ‘common-law-trained lawyer‘. The difference is that my training was in the UK, where I also practised for approximately 35 years as both solicitor and barrister. That’s arguing real-life cases in proper court rooms before actual judges In a common law jurisdiction. Rather than simply add to the requests for you to clarify what you say are ‘anti-trans talking points’ and why they are allegedly ‘unreasonable’, I intend to take a different approach. Feel free, of course, to respond to those other queries too. It is, I believe, a fair assumption that by ‘anti-trans’ you mean ‘gender critical’, or, as I prefer to term it, ‘pro-women and girls’. Your terminology is, thus, not academically dispassionate, which renders your post nothing more than incoherent polemic, deserving of nothing more than instant dismissal. However, I am going to indulge you, despite that. The following are some core, fundamental elements of the ‘gender critical’ position. I would be grateful if you could clarify which you consider to be ‘anti-trans’ and why. 1. There are only two human sexes, male and female, defined by reference to the reproductive pathway a specific individual is organised to follow. These categories are mutually exclusive, immutable and objectively definable and observable. 2. It is thus impossible for any male human to become ‘female’ (and vice versa) as an individual’s sex is coded into the DNA at a cellular level in every nucleated cell in the body. 3. The terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are not ‘gendered identities’ but sex-based descriptors for, respectively, an adult human male and female. They are akin to the terms stag and hind, stallion and mare, bull and cow, ram and ewe etc. used for other species. 4. Irrespective of whether one accepts whether the concept of ‘gender identity’ has any validity, for all Equality Act purposes, no male person can ever qualify as a woman nor a female as a man. 5. As a discrete sex-class, defined in biological terms, women are entitled to the privacy, dignity, comfort and security afforded to them by single-sex facilities that exclude ALL males, irrespective of how any individual man might ‘identify’. 6. Any man who accesses, or seeks to access, a properly constituted female single-sex facility is at least one of a coloniser, a bully, a pervert, a misogynist, an invader, a narcissist, an abuser and an oppressor. It is likely more than one of those things. These are not fringe or “unreasonable” positions. They are grounded in biology, statute, and decades of established case law. If you consider any of them “anti-trans” or “unreasonable”, then the defect lies not in the propositions but in your own ideological capture. The floor is yours, my friend. I look forward to your precise, point-by-point response rather than more vague hand-waving about “reasonableness”. In my 35 years in court, I learned that bluster and appeals to authority rarely survive rigorous cross-examination. I doubt yours will either.