Farage is a very good snake oil salesman but what most of the mainstream media seem to have misunderstood is that a lot of people are happy buying snake oil. Whether it works or not is irrelevant to that. Buying snake oil is an emotional decision not a logical one and you can’t defeat emotion with logic or facts. Brexit and Trump showed us that.

When looking for who to blame for the state of this country people conveniently forget that from 1945 to 1997 Labour only had a working majority for 11 years during which they created the NHS and the welfare state and built huge amounts of social housing. Britain hasn’t voted in a left wing government with a working majority since Harold Wilson in 1966 in spite of the fundamental improvements that only 11 years of such a government brought. It’s a sobering thought and no suprise Labour has abandoned that political ground as it is barren electorally.

Maybe I’m daft but I can’t help wondering how it is that in the past the country could afford to give people a grant to go to university, we had final salary pension schemes, retirement from 60 years old, an NHS that worked, GP visits at home, affordable housing, hundreds of thousands of new council houses, we owned the public utilities and all the time while spending huge amounts on defence during the Cold War. Where has all of our money gone?

From the comments and media coverage this has been a very successful PR opportunity for Prince William @KensingtonRoyal but I find it very unsettling and indicative of how deeply embedded social inequality is in this country. Being parachuted in for a photo opportunity with someone who is experiencing homelessness isn’t helping the homeless @KensingtonRoyal, it is helping yourself. There is a massive imbalance of power here and using someone else’s bad situation to make yourself look good is not authentic or genuine, it is exploitative & unethical.

Billy in his tent under an abandoned building, York, from the Outsiders project. Now Suella Braverman wants to make giving tents to people like Billy illegal. Billy has learning difficulties and cannot get support or shelter. The tent is all he had through last winter. The impact of banning tents while have no proper strategy to end homelessness is that more people will die when sleeping rough. Billy has been failed by the system but is just about surviving due to having some shelter & she wants to take that away. Basic humanity is missing in these people

Children working in a coal mine, Pennsylvania in 1911 by Lewis Hine. He was commissioned by the National Child Labor Committee to document working conditions for children in America and took thousands of photos like this between 1908 and 1924. Manuel, five years old, a young shrimp-picker with no shoes and a mountain of child labour oyster shells behind him. Biloxi, Mississippi in 1911 by Lewis Hine.

Why does a country with no risk of tsunamis, major earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes or other extreme weather events need an emergency alert system? And who got the contract? It seems to be that just like the proliferation of CCTV cameras this is all about creating a climate of fear and dependency, because a fearful population is a compliant one. As well, of course, as creaming off public money and handing it to their cronies.

The legacy of Lawson and Thatcher’s obsession with privatisation is the sewage you now see in our rivers and beaches, a broken and dysfunctional rail network, and unaffordable energy prices while private firms make record profits. If that’s genius I’d rather have stupid. We were told privatisation would mean great services, savings for the government and an investment boom. It was all a big lie…
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

People have the mistaken impression that being housed in a hotel equates to a life of luxury. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most hotel rooms have no fridge, no cooking facilities, no clothes washing facilities. Imagine being housed in a hotel room with your kids for months on end with no prospect of proper housing. How would you feed them? How would you wash their clothes or keep them entertained or deal with anxiety or health issues? Get them ready for school? Hotels aren’t designed to be lived in, they are designed for staying a few days.

I have a visceral dislike of artificial intelligence, chat bots, image generators and the like. They are all soulless garbage whose main purpose will be to maximise corporate profit at the expense of the incomes of creative people. They contribute nothing and devalue everything. Any company that replaces people with automation or AI should be compelled by law to pay the equivalent in tax and NI that would have been paid had a person been employed to do that work. Companies shouldn’t be able to bypass their obligations to society by using automation.

John, Newcastle from the Outsiders project. He told me he had been homeless since he was about 15. Speaking about the behaviour of photographers he said “photographers treat us like scum” and described how he had his trainers stolen one night and woke up the following morning with only bare feet and no money to buy more shoes. A photographer spotted him, walked up and took a photo then laughed and walked away. His experiences of being photographed regularly like an exhibit in a zoo were overwhelmingly negative.

In the 1970s Bobby Vincent-Emery produced a film for Shelter. It was about 34 minutes long, was narrated by Jim Douglas Henry and featured the photos of Nick Hedges. It isn’t in the Shelter archive. Can Twitter find a copy of this film for the archive and the Outsiders project? The photography for the film was done by Martin Bell, David Geen and Tony Leggo, sound was by Nick Flowers, Charles Lagos and Tony Milne and it was directed by Graham Sergeant. The production was by Photomedia documentaries Ltd.