On the flipside of this: adolescence is an extremely important part of life where we make thousands of decisions that impact the whole rest of our lives. We sit exams that determine whether or not we do higher education, and therefore what opportunities we have later in life. Teenagers can get arrested and thrown in jail, or just excluded from schools and denied the essential education that they need in later life. There are far more children in jail than are on puberty blockers. The idea that individual agency starts at 18 is a myth.

And I don’t really agree with the comparison with alcohol and smoking. Puberty blockers aren’t an indulgence or vice - for a teenager going through gender dysphoria they can be the line between life and death. Plus, let’s face it - lots of us are drinking and smoking a few years before 18.

Cool I guess we’ll all just die then.

Experience of having a massive fucking head.

Sounds like they’re hiding something there and they really don’t want us to go…

Again, it’s a difference of opinion about how it’s delivered, not whether it’s delivered. Can you find me a single example of someone saying they don’t want the NHS at all unless it’s 100% publicly delivered? Because that’s the imaginary person you and Wes Streeting are arguing against.

My point is that it’s not only middle-class people using private healthcare who think this. And Wes Streeting knows that. He just doesn’t want to argue for his market-based approach (because it’s really unpopular) so he just mischaracterises the opposition to it.

Nobody’s asking for worse outcomes - it’s a difference of opinion of what will actually work. Saying people want everyone to suffer so they can have their way is just being disingenuous.

Every election has a new party to essentially do what the BNP does.

2010: BNP

2015: UKIP

2017: UKIP

2019: Brexit Party

2024: Reform UK

2029: Tea Party UK?

The far-right voter base moves between these, and each of these parties tries to paint themselves as something refreshing and new. Remember when Nick Griffin went on Question Time and said his Holocaust denial was “mainly just about the numbers”? They’ve learned a bit more about dogwhistling since then.

Wanting the NHS to remain in public hands isn’t a middle-class opinion, it’s a left-wing one. The reason he uses the word “middle-class” is to characterise that argument as one that can only be made by someone in an ivory tower, insulated from the real problems of the world where we have to use private providers. And I disagree with that characterisation: I think that our use of private providers to fill gaps in the NHS has massively increased the cost and only served to enrich the private medical industry. But making that point makes me a middle-class luvvy who doesn’t know the real world, unlike Wes Streeting who has worked in student politics, think tanks and political parties his entire life (apart from that time he was at PwC as a public sector consultant, helping these companies get more of those lucrative contracts).

Don’t get me wrong I like those policies, and hope Labour win, but the messaging for the past few years has been very alienating to anyone on the left. When Labour frontbenchers are going out and calling Margaret Thatcher a “visionary leader”, or Wes Streeting blaming “middle-class lefties” for opposing NHS privatisation then it makes you think “maybe they’re not the party I was hoping they were”. These aren’t gaffes, they’re part of a coordinated strategy to target more naturally right-wing voters. Because they don’t think the left have anywhere to go (and they’re right, but they might stay home).

But of a change in message from “we don’t need you lefties, fuck off and vote Green or whatever”

In a leaked video published by The Times, students can be seen dancing and laughing to the song before one member spots the camera and says: “Don’t film!”

“You’re not supposed to say that Darrell, you know you’re not supposed to say that”

Yeah you can already see how they’re trying to rewrite the last 14 years. Everything was going fine until Johnson and Truss ruined everything. Never mind that austerity stripped our public services to the bone so we were unprepared for anything, let alone a global pandemic.

Is it that controversial? Kids run around naked all the time. The idea of this bike ride is that people can be naked just for the hell of it, without being sexually objectified. Banning kids from it would fly in the face of that.

When that 10-year-old grows up I imagine they’ll be quite proud that they made a bunch of stuffy town councillors bust a blood vessel just by riding a bike around naked.

There’s also a lack of funding for the regulator which means the BBC is the one finding these spills, not the agency that’s responsible for tracking then.

Happy birthday! 🪅🎉🔥

We’ve been spending much more per capita in the NHS in recent years than we used to. Part of that is the aging population and Covid, but a big part is probably the increase in privatisation. Paying agency workers to fill up chronic staffing shortages etc

Roman Polanski is still living in France, being shielded from accountability from his crimes. So when the French film industry complains about child actors being too well-protected from abuse, I’m going to take that with quite a lot of seasoning.

I won’t believe in nominative determinism until Usain Bolt quits his athletics career to become a machinist.

I think part of it is not wanting to be mugged off. Even though it doesn’t materially affect you, having someone come in everyday and nick stuff in front of you would probably wear you down. No excuse for violence of course but I can see how it comes to this.