@stephencampbll
Advice researcher & writer at Citizens Advice Scotland • Former welfare rights adviser, poverty researcher, polsci grad • Interested in policy and information for the public good • Outer Hebridean in Glasgow • Inexplicably sporty gayboy 🏳️🌈
"average New Labour minister causes 3 scandals" factoid actualy just statistical error. average minister causes 0 scandals. Scandals Peter, who lives in cave & causes over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
On immigration, Spain's Pedro Sanchez is the only sane leader on the continent.
🔗 www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...
At last, the issue of student loans is properly hitting national politics.
And finally there is an editorial, in which we argue that Donald Trump is "creating a militia which answers only to himself" and how he could use it to "stage provocations pretty much anywhere with impunity, including during elections" if Congress does not step in www.economist.com/leaders/2026...
An online identity tool that underpins the digital lives of Dutch people and has partly fallen into American hands is prompting the country to reconsider its reliance on U.S. technology.
France announced today it’s phasing out Teams, Zoom, etc. to be replaced with a French/European solution called Visio. The data is hosted on Outscale. Transcripts and subtitles are also handled by French providers. The target is set on 2027 for government agencies.
if this guy had any real talent for posting he'd announced he was opening negotiations with Minnesota
A chart showing the estimated annual number of deaths from HIV/AIDS and the estimated number of deaths averted by antiretroviral therapy (ART), from 1990 to 2024. ART is estimated to save over a million lives each year. The data source is the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (2026). The chart is licensed CC BY to Our World in Data.
📊 Explore updated data on HIV/AIDS—
When HIV was first identified four decades ago, nearly 100% of those infected died, typically within a few years.
Thankfully, global public health efforts and medical advances such as antiretroviral therapy (ART) have improved this situation dramatically.
Digital detox is like "giving up smoking", something that's within the power of some individuals, but not for society as a whole. The majority of the decades-long progress on smoking cessation/reduction is policy, not willpower.
Incredible
"The initial response from EU leaders to the Greenland crisis — suspending an EU-U.S. trade agreement, sending troops to Greenland, threatening to deploy sweeping trade retaliation against the U.S. — served as a taste of what might come."
🔗 @politico.eu | www.politico.eu/article/eu-l...
Trump's Davos speech: and I told Denmark don't keep Greenland anymore, you keep Greenland anymore we're going to have problems, and Denmark says "why do you send me a picture of my house?" and I say you're going to have to figure that out Denmark
Me watching Titanic in 1997
not to lib out but if anybody in labour made a speech that demonstrated even 70% of the understanding of what’s happening and, importantly, the willingness to explain what’s happening as that mark carney one, they should obvs just coronate them leader now and save everybody the faff
No Kings is projected on to a mountainside above the town’s lights
Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum.
“The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
As a piece of prose and geopolitical analysis Carney’s Davos speech feels history-making. paulwells.substack.com/p/the-carney...
Chancellor Merz:
Currently,security in Europe is more of a concern in the East than in the West. We see the war in Ukraine. This poses a serious threat to our overall security…
Western Europe,that includes Greenland, isn’t currently threatened by Russia to the extent that some are suggesting
Great interview/profile of him here. I think even if the show hadn’t been successful, the book would still be defeating him, because its great conceit - the POV narratives - just means that it all moves incredibly slowly.
Thanks for the site! What led you to make it?
It's 2026, you shouldn't have to wait months to find out when an appointment is, even a vague November-December 2027 time frame that gets narrowed down as the dates near would be better than the current hearing nothing for months and wondering if it's fell between the cracks again...
That's fair, I don't have any knowledge of the data quality, but presumably not impossible to improve it? I suspect even an imperfect solution could still be an improvement bsky.app/profile/step...
That's a fair point, though I'm not sure it's worse than the status quo where that happens anyway and you're just not told about it until you try to chase it up. The tracker could explain that your position in the queue might fluctuate. I think people hate the uncertainty more than the wait
I live in Glasgow and the First Buses app has a live bus tracker. If our buses are brought back into public ownership @glasgowcc.bsky.social should make sure this function is still available
Two useful tools for anyone interested in actual policy delivery instead of endless Labour Kremlinology:
🔗 Legislation tracker from @dangroshev.com | labourreforms.uk
🔗 Government pledges tracker from @fullfact.org | fullfact.org/government-t...
It continues to be a bad failure that essentially there's a policy debate that is obvious to you if you read a business newspaper OR the gov dot uk website or the MI5 threat update OR a decent policy Substack is basically invisible on the BBC and in 90 per cent of Commons debates.
Agree that behavioural science still has a lot of insight for governance. Uber's big innovation wasn't making the taxis arrive any faster, it was just reducing the uncertainty about when it would arrive. A simple tracker for your position on a NHS waiting list would reduce a lot of frustration
Digital services and GOV.UK are one of the main ways that citizens interact with govt. Whether a service is too complicated, or works brilliantly, can make a big difference. Why passport service and repeat prescriptions work is they fixed a particular (visible) problem, and stopped there. (3/3)
New post just out:
"Troubleshooters"
How fixing the many small frustrations - that make up most of our interactions with the state - can give people faith in goverment's ability to make things work.
And help create a different Whitehall culture.
(£/free trial)
open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/t...
The way politics is being conducted by both the tories and Labour seems surreal to me. We have a lunatic in the WH who simply cannot be relied on to be an ally, indeed the opposite, we need to spend a ton of cash on defence and no-one seems to think voters might need to be, er, readied for all this
