John Readman

Does this mean a decent price for wheat?

@SamaHoole Not just the Magpie in Whitby, plenty of the others do

Chips fried in beef dripping were a different object to what passes for a chip today. Walk into a Whitby chippy in 1978. The fryer has been on since 11am. The fat in it is beef dripping, held at 180 degrees by a man in a white apron who has been frying chips since he was fifteen. There are no seed oils in the building. The idea would not occur to anyone. Thick-cut Maris Pipers, ninety seconds in the dripping. Dark gold at the edges, fluffy inside, crisp in a way that sets your teeth against them. Salt. Vinegar. Paper. Two bob. You eat them walking home along the harbour wall. The chip tastes of the chip and also of something underneath the chip, something deeper, something you don't have a name for because you are nine and nobody names it, it is just what chips taste like. That taste was beef dripping. By 2002, 90% of British chippies had switched to rapeseed, palm, or sunflower oil, on the advice of public health officials citing research since quietly retracted. A stable saturated fat used for ten thousand years, swapped for an industrial oil invented in 1911, oxidised at fryer temperatures for twelve hours a day. A seed-oil chip is lighter, flatter. The crust doesn't hold. The flavour stops at the potato. No deeper note. No roast beef on a Friday. Ask a British person under thirty what chips are supposed to taste like and they will describe, with complete sincerity, the chip they have always eaten. A chip their great-grandfather would have considered a practical joke. They cannot miss it, because the reference point was removed from the national palate before they were born. A handful of chippies still fry in dripping. The Magpie in Whitby. A few survivors in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Black Country. Go. Drive. Queue. Eat them standing up, out of the paper. You will understand, in one bite, what was taken. The cow is still in the field. The suet is still at the butcher. The fryer could be switched back tomorrow. A whole country forgot what a chip was.

It's a bit of a rich comment from him, and then the fertilizer tax coming in next year 🤷‍♂️

Labour Loves the Countryside. It Just Hates the People Who Run It. A woman walks into a tailor's shop in Helmsley, North Yorkshire. She loves the heather hills, she says. The wooded dales. The purple moorland stretching to the horizon. What she cannot stand is the shooting that takes place on the Glorious Twelfth. Jeremy Shaw, the tailor, has heard this before. He considers whether to explain that the heather she travelled three hours to admire exists because of the grouse moor she despises. The gamekeepers who manage the land, suppress the bracken, and keep the moorland in the condition that makes it worth visiting. The cake, in other words, was baked by the baker she came to castigate. What is worrying is that the government shares her confusion. On March 18, Labour published its Land Use Framework. Half a million acres earmarked for solar panels. Nine percent of farmland committed to rewilding. And buried on page 45, a proposal to license game bird shooting, potentially restricting pheasant and partridge releases onto estates. The trail hunting ban came first. Licensing comes next. Each measure arrives with its own rationale. Together they form a programme. Licensing does not prohibit. Bureaucracy does not ban. Smaller shoots simply cannot absorb compliance costs, fold quietly, and nobody in Whitehall answers for the consequence. A Natural England case near Helmsley shows the method. A longstanding partridge shoot was barred from releasing birds until after the season had already started. Shoot days cancelled. Revenue gone. Natural England's hands formally clean. Helmsley bucks every trend in British retail. Four pubs in the town square. A Michelin-starred inn nearby. A tailor forty years in business in what a mentor once called a dying trade. Seventy-five percent of Shaw's revenue is shooting-related. The Pheasant hotel runs at sixty percent shooting occupancy through winter. The deli sells local cheese to Norwegian and German sportsmen. Shooting contributes £3.3 billion annually to the UK economy and supports nearly 147,000 jobs. Pull the shooting thread and the weave comes apart. One Helmsley pub changed hands a few years ago. The new owners decided they wanted nothing to do with shoot trade. They lost heavily, then went back to the estates cap in hand. The market delivered the verdict that policy is not yet ready to impose openly. Licensing achieves the same result without anyone having to take responsibility. The conservation argument collapses under scrutiny. Grouse moor owners have restored 217,000 acres of upland heath in the past 25 years. The almost-extinct curlew is four times more likely to fledge on a managed grouse moor than on unmanaged moorland. The landscape that Whitehall has identified as the problem is the reason the landscape exists in the form they claim to value. When asked what economic trade-offs it had actually modelled, the government was vague. Officials said they recognised shooting's cultural importance and would work with industry toward a sustainable relationship. Starmer has been invited to visit Helmsley and see how the economy functions. He has not replied. He should go. He should meet the gamekeeper loading double guns through winter to keep the household solvent. The beaters earning seventy pounds a day. The tailor measuring 24 keepers for tweed suits stitched with Essex lining and Yorkshire zips. What rural Britain is being offered instead is a licensing regime that will first eliminate smaller shoots, then larger ones, then the hotels and tailors and pubs, until the moorland reverts to bracken and the towns that shooting sustained join the dying high streets that apparently only the countryside had managed to avoid. The heather on the North York Moors, Jeremy Shaw at Carters Country Wear, and the market town of Helmsley. All three exist because of shooting. Labour's Land Use Framework puts all three at risk.

@BumbleCricket At Uni in the 80's, we used to go there on a Sunday night. Happy times

Great pub .. and Manchester has plenty

@tomhfh Better to bring back the Danelaw

I, as an Anglo Saxon, demand reparations from the Danes.

@BARRA72 Would be good not to need a pee after 2, age catching me up

I see folk saying how they’re giving their grass its first cut. Not for me …. That’s like be on a boozy night out and going for your first pee after two pints. Don’t go too soon ….

@PolitlcsUK @thetimes Every parish already has a name, use them

🚨 NEW: The proposed names the Government is considering calling its new towns - Elizabethtown (after the Queen) - Pankhurst (after suffragette Emmeline) - Attleeton (after ex-PM) - Athelstan (first King of England) - Seacole (after nurse Mary) [@thetimes]

@ret_ward Somebody, somewhere has to though, why not the UK?

Electric arc furnaces can produce steel of the purity required for all U.K. needs. We do not need to produce virgin steel from pig iron. This is not the 1960s.

Or if the Vikings had won, the country would have also been united, but ruled from York, not Wessex

@afneil In the olden days, failed politicians ended up in the Tower, now it's the House of Lords

Agreed. But nor should you deserve a vote because you’ve been a second/third-rate cabinet minister but greased up enough to a prime minister for him/her to send you to an unelected parliamentary chamber to do their bidding and live out your twilight years in comfort and status, lording it over the rest of us who had no say in your choice. No more democratic than hereditary.

@BaldyDavitt Not just us then

Bollocks. The words we read with terror...... "Your package is now with the courier, Evri....." Best start searching behind the hedgerows and walls then.... #InAFieldSomewhere

@Joe___Allen Bet they have food at the events

"The economic contribution of the professional events industry is nearly five times that of all the country’s farms."

Yep

@MatthewStadlen Didn't the lib dems used to be the by election winners?

Whoever wins the Gorton and Denton by-election - Labour, Reform or Greens - Westminster hacks will be desperate to tell you it has huge significance nationally. But it’s a by-election. And it’s a by-election with a very particular set of circumstances. Of course the winning party will be delighted, but don’t read too much into it.

or play 1st class cricket during the summer on dry wearing pitches. The Hundred is the spoilt brat of cricket

@MichaelVaughan The ECB don't own the teams though do they? Cricket has sold its soul for the Hundred. The ECB look like they don't care about the Test or 1st class game anymore either

The ECB need to act fast on this .. they own the league and this should not be allowed to happen .. the most inclusive sport in the country is not one that allows this to happen ..

@Keir_Starmer A lower world oil price feeds into a lower petrol price, nothing to do with any UK Government . World wheat prices are also down.

The choices this Labour government has made means inflation has fallen today to its lowest rate in a year. Lower food and petrol prices are helping ease the pressure on household budgets. I know there’s more to do, cutting the cost of living is my number one priority.

@EasterbyTim Teddymor

We need your help! 🤔 We are looking for a name for this lovely grey gelding by Kodi Bear out of the mare Alamora. Comment your suggestions and we will pick the best one to be his official racing name! We will even throw in two O&T’s badges to watch him make his debut!* 🎟🏇 Get your thinking caps on! * O&T badges are at the discretion of the horse’s owners at the time of his debut.

@elonmuskPBG A couple have, not has.

@Sharpr1966 We call it bracing over here

Most of the old parts of the Yorkshire Dales are built for prevailing westerly weather. Copses on the south west side of farms, buildings built into banks with south facing and east facing fronts. We’re not prepared for prevailing wet and cold easterly weather.