Ben Goldsmith

@ArchbishopSarah @CottrellStephen @York_Minster Isaiah was a Jewish prophet from Judea. Today, your synod voted to deny Jewish history in the land of Israel. As an Anglican, I am truly appalled by the dark turn the Church of England is taking under your leadership.

This morning, I preached at the York Minster. As we gather for General Synod this week and look to grow as a church, we heard a reading from Isaiah, who offers a beautiful image of God tending the soil. This is a good image for us to think about as a church, and it is the work of each of us, if we are to rebuild trust and grow hope. That work is already underway. I have seen that soil tended in parishes, churches and communities around the country, making space for hearts to be transformed by the seed of God’s word. It is inspiring to see the life of the church, in the ordinary lives of God’s people doing extraordinary things. I pray that we can recognise God at work - tending the soil in which trust grows, lives can be changed, and hope restored. Photo Credit: York Minster

This disgraceful act took place just days after the murder of a senior politician, the third of my colleagues in a decade. It is a shared responsibility of all of us in our democracy to call out and condemn violence and threats against politicians. I hope the Green Party leadership takes appropriate action this time. #Echobox=1783974412-1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…

Latvia authorises hunters to begin slaughtering wolves this week. There is no good reason for this. Predation of livestock is minimal. Shame on Switzerland, Norway and Sweden for setting a grotesque example in Europe on wolf killing. eng.lsm.lv/article/societ…

Why I'll never eat farmed salmon again: It's the most popular fish in Britain, but the Mail's star food writer TOM PARKER BOWLES reveals why he won't be getting it again... and the truth about the 'organic' label | Daily Mail Online dailymail.com/news/article-1…

@CHinchliffMP Well said Chris.

73 million birds gone. England's dawn chorus silenced. Our national inheritance squandered. Our daily lives impoverished. This is where "greed is good" leads. Time to face the truth: A society endlessly exponentially consuming more and more isn't just a con; it's a death cult.

It is shameful that the Church of England General Synod has recommended engagement with Kairos II. This is a document full of falsehood, which openly rejects dialogue, uses extreme rhetoric to challenge the very existence of Israel and objects to existing peace agreements in the region. Though it poses as a route to understanding, Kairos II in fact functions as an egregious barrier to it, reducing one of the world's most complex conflicts to a single, warped narrative, which can only harm the cause of peace. This is a sad day for Jewish-Christian relations.

The government is way off track on its commitment to restore 30% of land and 30% of sea to a good state of nature by 2030 – even though we were the ones who led the charge internationally for the countries of the world to make this pledge. theguardian.com/environment/20…

The fishing industry, which thinks only of how many fish can be extracted *now* without any care whatsoever as to the future health of our fisheries, somehow has our politicians and officials in a vice-like grip. The cowardice of the latter is breathtaking.

“Along England’s southern shores, adult cod populations have plummeted 99 percent since 2012 with the Marine Conservation Society warning British consumers to “completely avoid” all home-caught cod this spring.” ht: @fionaharvey

Lovely article about the sanctuary in today’s @DailyMail 👏👏👏 mol.im/a/15965057

In 1926, the last wolf pack in Yellowstone National Park was exterminated. Over the following seven decades, the absence of wolves reshaped the park's vegetation in ways that took researchers years to fully understand. Without wolves, elk populations grew and their behavior changed. Elk grazed continuously in riparian areas, the stream banks and river valleys where grass and willows were most accessible. They spent as long as they wanted in any given spot because nothing threatened them. Willows, aspens, and cottonwoods along Yellowstone's streams were grazed so intensively that they could not regenerate. Stream banks destabilized. Channels widened and shallowed as root systems disappeared. The vegetation that would have shaded and cooled the water was gone. In 1995 and 1996, 41 wolves were reintroduced from Canadian populations. The changes that followed were not simple, but they were documented. Elk populations declined, and elk behavior changed more significantly than numbers alone explained. Elk no longer grazed continuously in open riparian areas where wolves could hunt them. They moved more frequently, spent less time in any exposed spot, and avoided the most vulnerable terrain. Where elk pressure reduced, willows and aspens began to regenerate. As willows grew back, beavers returned to streams where they had been absent for decades. Beaver dams raised water tables and created wetland habitat. Stream channels narrowed and deepened as root systems stabilized banks. A wolf killed elk. An elk that feared wolves ate differently. A willow grew where an elk used to stand and eat it. A beaver returned to a stream where willows now grew. The river changed. This is a trophic cascade: the effect of one predator propagating through an ecosystem not just by killing prey but by changing how prey behave. Part of Yellowstone's forest was restored not by planting but by fear. The lesson is not that wolves fix everything. It is that ecosystems are organized around relationships, and that restoring one relationship can propagate through a system in ways that are difficult to predict from first principles and rewarding to observe when they occur. #Yellowstone #ecosystems #nature #forestfacts #science

This is so awful these highly intelligent marine mammals locked in a fish bowl prison looking out at squirrels with such wonder

British fish stock are collapsing. This was a choice. Successive governments have shied away from setting aside real no-take zones; and from setting science-based quotas; all while allowing vast, often foreign-owned vessels to plunder our waters. Why? insideclimatenews.org/news/07072026/…

The UK can once again be the most dynamic country in the world. Today we launch the UK Dynamism Fund, a new philanthropic fund to support the believers and the builders of UK dynamism. Apply now: ukdynamism.fund

Senator Lindsey Graham was a conservation advocate. He backed legislation to protect public lands, wildlife habitat, national parks, forests, wetlands.  And he was a lead Republican sponsor of the cross-party initiative to create a new public-private fund to mobilise hundreds of millions for the protection of wildlife and critical ecosystems around the world.  I didn’t know him, but nature has lost a rare US ally

Reminder that horses evolved in North America — they are not an invasive species and they are not being “managed” for ecological reasons. They are being eradicated from public lands to benefit the ranching industry and shipped en masse to slaughterhouses in Mexico.

Challenge: pick a corner of your lawn and stop mowing it for the rest of the summer. See what pops up and makes it home. Clover, violets, self-heal, and wild strawberry might already be in your grass waiting for exactly this. Within a couple weeks, flowers will pop up. Within a month you'll have more insects and small animals visiting. In the fall, it'll be there to provide important overwintering habitat. The lawn is already full of habitat. Let it grow.

My @Telegraph column this week: When you live among moral grotesquerie for long enough, you eventually lose surprise when it breeds still more and greater forms of moral grotesqerie. "Us (sane) Jews always hope that maybe, just for once, we’ll be left alone, that the condemnation of our homeland via vicious untruths and libels will not become a political announcement. Maybe if they won’t help us they could just forget about us?" Course they can't. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/1…

Frédéric Bastiat captured the essence of modern politics in a single sentence: “The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” Once the state becomes the primary mechanism for distributing resources, politics stops being about protecting rights or creating the conditions for voluntary cooperation. It becomes a contest in which every group attempts to extract wealth from others through taxation, subsidies, regulation and welfare. Farmers demand agricultural subsidies. Pensioners demand higher benefits. Students demand free tuition. Corporations demand bailouts and protection from competition. Each group frames its demands as a matter of justice or necessity, while ignoring that the money must come from someone else’s labour and property. This creates a deeply corrosive dynamic. Instead of producing value through trade and innovation, people invest time and resources in political activity designed to redistribute existing wealth. The result is not greater prosperity, but higher taxes, expanding bureaucracy and a culture of dependency, victimhood and resentment. The state transforms society into a zero-sum game. When everyone is encouraged to view government as a source of unearned benefits, the moral and practical foundations of a free society are steadily undermined. The fiction eventually collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.