Everything in the news is shit *and* we've lost Peabo, ffs I'm going back to bed
youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Dt...
Over the years the UKRI team worked so hard with Westminster trying to agree workarounds and ways to get info out to potential applicants before the official announcement and sometimes that worked. But fundamentally, ministers care more about politics than about UKRI delivering its funding. /rant.
I think the record amount of time that a call announcement I was involved with sat ready to go but waiting for no.10 comms to agree a date was more than 8 months - during the circus of the latter years of the Tories- but 1 or 2 months was not unusual at all.
It was soul destroying. UKRI is an imperfect organisation but the individuals who work in it are fighting so hard for people in the R&D sector every day, and do not deserve the blame for calls getting held up in a Westminster machine that they can neither change, nor complain about publicly. 3/3
My job at UKRI (in the comms team) felt like a continual battle to get Westminster civil servants to let us do our job of getting money out to people. Day after day just repeating, this project will not succeed if we don't give time for people to apply, and getting blank stares back 2/3
Men who commit this kind of violence with this kind of rhetoric are not protecting women and girls; they are trying to legislate which men have the right to harm women and girls (and of course it's men like them and not those other men).