Yes, everyone here trembles under my tyrannical rule. I try not to let it go to my head.

Gosh, how strange. I expected him to say, ‘He’s a total cunt and I’m only pretending to like him because it’s part of my job’.

Destroying healthcare by… increasing funding for the NHS and for social care, ending strikes by negotiating with the unions, and hitting their initial appointment targets years early?

Is this one of those things where they’re using technical legal language or is it an actual walking back of Lammy’s comments?

EDIT: I mean like if this was a domestic criminal case in progress, they’d always say ‘the suspect’ in an official statement, even if it was overwhelmingly clear that ‘the suspect’ was the perpetrator. Is something similar happening here?

‘Cancelled the Rwanda scheme?’

‘Cancelled the Rwanda–? Oh, shut up!’

This is, in fact, baseless. There are experts in, e.g., ADHD, who thinks it’s over diagnosed, so the base assumption here is: he’s referring to those experts.

Given the real questions about over-diagnosis, your assumption, ‘I bet in this interview I didn’t listen to he was referring to a report I haven’t read’ is, indeed, baseless.

‘Bet folding money’ or ‘speculate baselessly’?

Sure! These are some things that I think were good. Obviously it’s fair enough if you don’t agree! I’ll try and keep these fairly recent.

On the environment:

• UK emissions fall 3.6% in 2024 as coal use drops to lowest since 1666

• Record breaking funding for clean energy in Britain

• The Nature Restoration Fund in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill

On workers’ rights:

• UK unions welcome moves to bolster workers’ rights bill: Unions delighted there has been no watering down of plans, which will apply to England, Scotland and Wales

On housing, homelessness and renting:

• Renters’ Rights Bill. (I had to use the government website for this because it’s been so under-reported that literally all I could find about it other than this was landlords moaning about it!)

• Rough sleeping winter funding tripled to help people off the streets

On health:

• Pledge of two million extra NHS appointments met, PM says

• Abolition of NHS England ‘final nail in coffin of disastrous’ 2012 Tory health reorganisation

On foreign policy:

• Starmer backs Zelensky after Trump calls him ‘dictator’

I could go on but I don’t want to take up too much of your time (or mine!). Byline Times had a good recent list (some overlap with my suggestions).

Of course you might think that the bad outweighs the good, but it’s important to acknowledge the good is really happening. Also, a lot of the above I would argue doesn’t go far enough (but that’s typical of me), so if that’s how you feel, you’ll get no argument from me.

On the particular issue Nesrine Malik is discussing in the original post, I completely agree that it’s a terrible decision (I actually just emailed my MP about it this morning to ask him to vote against it), but even on that, the government has been listening to criticism and they have walked back some of the worst aspects of it (as this article describes). That said, I still think it’s a horrible plan.

When asked if he agreed with experts that warn of an overdiagnosis of mental health conditions, Streeting said he wanted to "follow the evidence and I agree with that point about overdiagnosis" (my emphasis).

Is this really an unreasonable exchange of views? Shall we perhaps hold off on the outrage till we’ve read the whole article? Or even the whole of the sentence in question?

I mean, sure. If you ignore all the good things they’re doing, they’re only doing bad things.

No, it isn’t, because the first thing I said was:

You’re right

And the rest of my comment simply pointed out that it would be complex and risky - which is true.

I’m afraid there is, because Trump’s vindictiveness won’t stop with intelligence! Tariffs would be just the start.

You’re right but it would be enormously complex. We’d actually have to set up a new, separate system, first, then leave, and do that without upsetting a notoriously thin-skinned sociopath, who would still, during the process, have all our secrets.