Debbie Blake

We're finding comfort in your kind words shared as part of the #SaveDenby campaign. After tough market conditions, we may be forced to close. Help us: - Share #SaveDenby - Sign-up denbypottery.com/pages/save-den… - Buy Denby - Visit Denby Pottery Village Read more: denbypottery.com/pages/save-den…

In 1809 Joseph Bourne found some clay in Derbyshire and began to make pots. He prospered and the name of “Bourne Denby” became famous. The very same clay still make @denbypottery today. Isn’t that alone worth saving? Sustainable since 1809. #savedenby

We need your help to #SaveDenby! We are sad to share that we may be forced to close and a British institution could be lost. We need your help: 1. Share this post 2. Sign the government petition 3. Buy Denby 4. Visit us at the Pottery Village Read more: denbypottery.com/pages/save-den…

Please share ❤️

Keith the Apocalypse Bringer is a three-year-old Anglo-Nubian goat in a field in Devon. Keith should not be underestimated. Keith has been systematically dismantling the ecosystem since approximately 7am, when he ate a bramble. This is significant because bramble is an invasive scrub species that outcompetes wildflowers, reduces biodiversity, and creates dense monoculture thicket that nothing else can use. Keith ate it. Keith does this every day. Keith does not charge for this service. 8:15am - Keith ate a thistle. Thistles are also considered invasive scrub in managed pasture. Goldfinches eat thistle seeds, but Keith's grazing will ensure the pasture remains open enough for the ground-nesting birds that can't use dense scrub. Keith has not attended a conservation workshop. Keith arrived at this conclusion by being a goat. 9:00am - Keith dismantled a section of hedge. This was less helpful. Keith does not have a perfect record. 10:30am - Keith escaped the field. He was in the road for eleven minutes. He ate a neighbour's rose. This is not being counted in Keith's environmental impact assessment. 11:00am - Keith was returned to the field. Keith regarded the farmer with the specific expression of an animal that does not recognise the concept of property. 12:00pm - Keith ate more bramble. His digestive system: four stomachs, a rumen full of specialised microorganisms, the ability to extract nutrition from lignified plant matter that would defeat any other animal on this field, is converting scrub vegetation into milk with a fat content of approximately 4.5%. The milk will become cheese. The cheese will be sold at the farm shop. The farm shop is four miles away. The cheese food miles are: four. 3:00pm - Keith produced manure. The manure will grow the grass. The grass will grow the bramble. The bramble will be eaten by Keith. This system has no inputs. It has been running since goats were domesticated approximately ten thousand years ago. Keith is not aware he is saving the planet. Keith is thinking about whether the fence on the north side has a weak point. It does. Keith found it at 4:45pm. Keith got out again.

Once the countryside is gone, it’s gone forever, never to return. We lose our green and pleasant land (and our food security) at our own peril.

@JChimirie66677 I still don't understand why Starmer wanted to get rid of Chagos in the first place. What did he give as his reasoning? Why was he also planning to annually pay out for doing this? I don't understand the basic facts at all. 🤔

Keir Starmer's Chagos project has collapsed. Not because new facts emerged, nor because Parliament suddenly woke up, but because the United States finally looked closely at what Britain was doing and said no. The moment Washington raised the 1966 treaty, the whole structure gave way. A deal sold as urgent, lawful, and essential to security could not survive contact with reality. For months, Starmer insisted there was no alternative. He spoke of inevitability, of international law, of security imperatives that demanded speed. Yet the International Court of Justice opinion he relied upon was non-binding. No court order compelled action. No hostile force threatened Diego Garcia. No deadline loomed. The urgency was political, not strategic. And that fiction has now been exposed. The fatal flaw was never Mauritius. It was the treaty Starmer treated as an afterthought. The 1966 UK–US Exchange of Letters is clear. The Chagos Islands are to remain under British sovereignty to ensure the operation of the joint base. That agreement was not obscure. It was foundational. Any competent government would have resolved its status before drafting legislation to hand the territory away. Starmer pressed ahead regardless, confident that the United States would fall into line later. That confidence was misplaced. Trump's earlier acceptance was casual and conditional. But when the legal consequences sharpened, and the treaty could no longer be waved away as a technicality, the White House pulled the plug. Trump called the plan an act of great stupidity, and suddenly the bill vanished from the Lords' schedule. The same government that spoke of urgency now cannot proceed. This exposes the lie at the heart of the deal. If national security were the driver, the treaty would have been the starting point. If legality mattered, Parliament would have been told the full cost and the unresolved risks. Instead, Starmer claimed the handover would cost just £3.4 billion, a figure he falsely linked to the OBR, while his own officials estimated the real bill at more than £35 billion. Parliament was expected to nod it through after the fact, armed with a number that was never true. He hid behind an authority that had not endorsed the figures and rushed a handover that would have placed British sovereignty in legal limbo while tens of billions flowed out of the defence budget. What we are watching is not diplomacy gone wrong. It is statecraft conducted by assumption. Assumption that international courts must be obeyed. Assumption that allies will acquiesce. Assumption that Parliament will rubber-stamp. Assumption that Britain should give first and argue later. That mindset is managerial, legalistic, and deeply hostile to the idea of national power. The bill was pulled because the bluff was called. Once the treaty surfaced, the security argument inverted itself. Once Washington objected, Starmer had nowhere to go. A Prime Minister who claimed there was no choice has now discovered that his choice could not stand. This episode will endure as a warning. Not about Trump's temperament or transatlantic spats, but about a governing class that treats sovereignty as an inconvenience and treaties as paperwork to be tidied up after the fact. Britain was inches away from giving away territory in breach of a live defence agreement, on the back of a non-binding opinion, financed by a fiscal fiction, all to satisfy an international audience that does not vote here and does not pay the bill. Starmer did not stumble into this. He built it on sand. And when the tide came in, it washed away the pretence. "The moment Washington raised the 1966 treaty, the whole structure gave way. A deal sold as urgent, lawful, and essential to security could not survive contact with reality."

British sheep produce 70,000 tonnes of wool annually. Used for carpets, insulation, textiles, and traditional products. The environmental alternative is petroleum-based synthetic fiber. Which is plastic. Made from oil. Non-biodegradable. Sheds microplastics in washing. Ends up in oceans. But sheep are unsustainable and we should use more plastic instead. The mental gymnastics required to call wool environmentally harmful while promoting polyester is Olympic-level. Wool is renewable. Grows annually. Biodegradable. Carbon-neutral. Traditional craft. Insulates better than synthetics. Flame-resistant naturally. Lasts decades if cared for properly. Polyester is fossil fuel. Requires industrial processing. Never biodegrades. Sheds microplastics. Inferior insulation. Needs chemical flame retardants. Lasts but damages environment entire time. Yet environmental groups campaign against wool while wearing fleece jackets made from oil. The sheep are not the problem. The people campaigning against them are.

The most cost effective, beautiful, efficient and sustainable carbon capture machine of them all. 🌳

God bless our farmers after this, the most tumultuous moment for British agriculture in living memory.

Share if you believe in home-grown food and hardworking British farmers! 🚜 🇬🇧

Britain crosses these lines brazenly now. No debate. No shame. A government decree, a police order, and suddenly the people who feed the country – the most rooted, law-abiding citizens we have – are the ones being marched away in handcuffs. Not for rioting. Not for violence. For turning up to protest a tax raid that threatens the survival of family farms. This is what decay looks like when it turns into something darker: the state deciding who may speak and who must be silenced. The images from Westminster should chill anyone with a sense of Britain's old freedoms. Dozens of tractors draped in Union flags. Farmers who spend their lives in mud, dawn light and hard graft, standing in the capital because Rachel Reeves has reached for the most brutal tool in the Treasury drawer – inheritance tax – and pointed it straight at the land itself. One death in the family and the farm breaks into pieces, sold off to pay the bill. That is the reality behind the Budget's polite language. These men aren't in London for show. They are there because their futures have been put on the block. And what did the state do? The Met, which can't find the strength to stand up to eco-fanatics or pro-Hamas mobs, suddenly discovered iron in its spine the moment it faced peaceful rural protest. Section 14 orders. Sudden bans. Farmers singled out and cuffed like criminals. Officers who were helping them park an hour earlier switched roles and started clearing them out. This is not policing. This is obedience enforcement – selective, political, and aimed squarely at the demographic this government thinks it can steamroller without consequence. The excuse was "disruption." As if tractors circling Trafalgar Square for a morning threaten the life of the nation, while city-blocking marches and flag-waving fanatics do not. It's the same double standard we've seen for years: indulgence for the activist Left; force for the ordinary citizen who dares to object. A country that treats its farmers as a nuisance is already half-lost. A country that arrests them for standing in public is well on the way to something worse. This isn't happening by accident. It's the logical end of a government drunk on its own authority. They raid family farms for cash; then they send the police to muzzle the people affected. They ban tractors for "serious disruption" while gutting the mechanisms that once protected the public from the state. Speech tightened. Protest restricted. Juries stripped from trials. Now this. One brick at a time, the wall between the government and unchecked power is being pulled down. Farmers don't protest unless they have been pushed to breaking point. A ruling class that still understood the country it governs would know that. This one doesn't care. It sees them as an obstacle, not a backbone. And that is why the images from Westminster matter: they reveal a state no longer restrained by shame or tradition. A state that believes it can handcuff the hands that feed it and get away with it. The truth is simple: a government that fears peaceful farmers fears the country itself. And a government that turns the police on them is not preserving order; it is testing how far it can go. Britain isn't at the end of this road yet. But the direction of travel is plain to anyone with eyes open. "Farmers singled out and cuffed like criminals. Officers who were helping them park an hour earlier switched roles and started clearing them out."

This tiny white square is man-made CO2: 0.0016% of the atmosphere. They’re taxing you, robbing your income, and enslaving your life over something essential for plants and a greener planet. Climate alarmism isn’t science, but a global scam. Wake the fvck up already!

Rachel Reeves’ cruel Family Farm Tax will destroy British farming. She’s waging war on rural Britain. Taxing farms out of existence. Putting local Post Offices at risk. Hitting pubs with the Jobs Tax. This is an emergency. The Family Farm Tax must be scrapped in the Budget.

Delighted the @FarmersGuardian are supporting the campaign

If you are a farmer or owner of a farm shop please send us details / images of your business. We have a big following on here and would love to help you to promote it.

Absolutely horrendous.

The most cost effective, beautiful, efficient and sustainable carbon capture machine of them all. 🌳

China emits more CO2 than the entire developed world combined…while Keir Starmer grandstands at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil about a UK net zero policy that will cost the taxpayer £800bn over the next two decades - which will make no difference whatsoever to the climate.