Hampshire Country Council have opened a consultation on what areas they should cut their services to 1.4 million residents, to ensure they meet their £132 million shortfall by April 2025 - following years of austerity cuts.
The options are pretty grim😢
🧵1/
1 - Adult social care charges
Rather than getting people to pay 95% of their care and support, we just go the full whack and charge them 100%
2/
2 - Withdraw funding from grant programs that support voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations.
Given how much we now rely on volunteers to run things, making that EVEN harder doesn’t sound good
3/
3 - Remove the one off grant schemes that go to support community schemes and projects - again, usually helping volunteer run organisations with costs
Again - as a society we rely heavily on these kinds of organisations to support the most vulnerable.
4/
4 - Reduce the Cultural Trust grant that supports arts and museum services.
I mean, who needs culture in a society anyway 🙄
5/
5 - Reducing highways maintenance
I mean FFS - our roads are absolutely awful already
Hampshire ranked 8th in this pothole poll!
Reducing road maintenance, drainage improvements (given recent flooding?!) and surface treatments - is that smart?
To redetermine which roads should be treated as a priority in winter…
You’ve seen what happens when we have more than an inch of snow, right?!
The country grinds to a halt. We should be improving it, not making it worse!
7/
7- Stop all homeless support services apart from their legally obligated requirements.
With homelessness rising across Hampshire (and the country as a whole), to cut support even further is just cruel.
8/
8 - Household waste recycling centres to provide further reduced services.
Hampshire CC contains 13 local authorities. EVERY single one sits in the bottom half of the National ranking of council recycling rates.
Cutting services further is a terrible idea!
9/
9 - Library stock
As if library services haven’t been hit hard enough already.
In a cost of living crisis, libraries are a vital part of our community - providing education, joy, community groups and warmth for many.
10/
10 - Passenger Transport
Yet another area that’s already cut to the bone. Hampshire has huge rural areas which would become inaccessible to those without a car. Cutting further community bus services, school buses etc would be a disaster
11/
11 - Rural countryside parking
So in a cost of living crisis, where there is very, very little pleasure that can be had for “free”, adding on charges to visit nature reserves and conservation sites seems cruel
12/
12 Crossing Patrols
Let’s get rid of the mechanism by which kids can cross safely to get to school.
Nope, can’t see anything going wrong there….😢
13/
13- Street Lighting
Reducing street lighting in both brightness and hours of operation.
Again - what could possibly go wrong! 🙄
14/
Don’t get me wrong - I don’t blame HCC for having to make these cuts. They’re in an impossible situation thanks to #ToryAusterity
We’ve had 13 years of cuts to every area of our lives. The Tories seem hell bent on creating a Britain that is just an empty husk of itself
15/
Do you remember a time when it was given that libraries would be there, street lights were a necessity, councils fixed the roads, ran community bus services to help the vulnerable…..
And now they can only do the absolute bare minimum of what they’re legally obliged to do
16/
This country is broken. Utterly, utterly broken.
We NEED a #GeneralElectionN0W
We NEED to start fixing the damage, investing in infrastructure, councils, public services.
We can’t take any more cuts.
17/
And don’t even think about claiming there’s no money!
If they can find £240 million to throw at Rwanda for a scheme they know will never happen and spend millions on a barge just for some performative cruelty, then they can start finding money to actually fix the country
18/
Im old enough to remember “Global Britain”, “Rule Britannia” “World beating Britain”….
Now we’re just broken Britain, disfunctional Britain, no heart, no soul, just crumbling and stumbling from self inflicted crisis to self inflicted crisis.
Well, that Express headline was always going to raise a few eyebrows!😳
Starmer is responsible for embracing polygamy to appease Muslims, and so he's increasing their benefits??
That's the implication.
After all, this "started in April", right?
Wrong!
🧵1/25
As ever, the first place to check is the article itself.
The Express doesn't make finding context, nuance, or explanation easy!
👇I had to scroll through 8 adverts, 2 blocks of links to other clickbait stories, and a newsletter signup block before reaching anything explanatory
2/
So let's look at the situation objectively.
Polygamous marriage is illegal in the UK.
However, people who have entered into a polygamous marriage while living in a country where that is legal will have that marriage status recognised in the UK under certain circumstances
🧵
These stories really are coming thick and fast at the moment🙄
Guess what?
The Canadian school is NOT 'banning food at lunchtime' during Ramadan🤦♀️
Obviously...
And if you BELIEVED it to be true, then you need to ask why you would choose to believe such an obviously ludicrous headline?
1/20
This story began with an account on X sharing an email from a Canadian middle school (ages 9-15) to parents about lunchtime arrangements during Ramadan, and demanding that people online harass the school
I'll come to the details of the email shortly.
First, a quick look at the Tanya Gaw...
2/
Tanya Gaw is the Founder of Action4Canada.
They want to 'Protect Canada's rich heritage, which is founded on Judeo-Christian biblical principles'.
They also happen to be anti-vax, anti-15min cities, anti-UN, anti-Trans, anti-abortion, anti-immigration, 5G obsessed...🙄
Did you feel the requisite anger and rage at asylum seekers that The Sun was asking of you?
Did you maybe blame Starmer because.... um... it was probably his fault🤷♀️
Would you like to know the reality behind the headline?
Course you would!😜
Let's take a look
🧵
1/25
🚨 The FACTS 🚨
This was a Sun "exclusive" following an FOI, but the story itself is a couple of years old
In 2022, the High Court found that the Home Office and the then Home Secretary Priti Patel, had been acting unlawfully with respect to asylum seekers from April to November 2020
2/
During this time:
1,300+ Asylum seekers had their phones unlawfully seized on arrival
400+ phones have NEVER been returned as the Home Office didn't keep accurate records of who they took them from
3 asylum seekers took the government to court in late 2020, having had their phones seized
3/