Garry Connell 🌸

They really do exist. Look, I've found one 👇

😊😳

@ZiaYusufUK @Grahamws2 The very thought of going in through Starmer's back door is too much for me.

Don’t worry, we intend to use the front door.

If you are old enough to remember driving in Britain in the 1980s, you will remember the windscreen. You could not see through it by July. A journey from Leeds to London in August ended with a front bumper that looked like it had been through a war and a windscreen that needed a proper scrubbing with a sponge at the services. Insects on the headlights. Insects in the wing mirrors. Insects packed into the radiator grille so densely that mechanics had to fish them out. This was simply the weather of the British summer, the cost of moving through a country that was still, in living memory, full of flying things. Get in a car now. Drive the same route. Stop at the services. The windscreen is clean. The Bugs Matter survey, run by Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife since 2004, has been measuring exactly this. Volunteers clean their numberplate, drive a journey, count the splats on a grid. Between 2004 and 2021, the UK average fell by roughly 59 per cent. England alone: 65. Kent: over 70. The 2024 update found a further 63 per cent drop on top of that. The windscreen phenomenon has the data to back it up now. And not just the insects. Between 1970 and 2024, the UK Farmland Bird Index fell by 62 per cent. Turtle doves down 99. Grey partridge down 94. Tree sparrow down 90. A generation of British children has grown up without ever hearing a turtle dove call, because there are, in functional terms, no turtle doves left to call. Defra's own bulletin lists the causes without embarrassment. Loss of mixed farming. The switch from spring to autumn sowing, which took away the winter stubble the small birds had been feeding on since the Neolithic. The grubbing up of hedgerows to make fields bigger for bigger machines. Increased fertiliser. Increased pesticide. Specifically, the pesticides. Neonicotinoids on oilseed rape. Glyphosate sprayed as a pre-harvest desiccant on wheat and barley. Chemicals applied in combinations and volumes that would have seemed psychotic to a farmer in 1950, applied to grow the crops that feed directly into the plant-based shakes marketed to people who believe they are helping the environment. The insects died in the fields where the crops were grown. The birds that used to eat the insects, starved. The windscreen, accordingly, is clean. None of this happened on the permanent pasture that cattle graze. A herb-rich meadow grazed by cattle has more pollinators, more ground-nesting birds, more beetles, more everything per hectare than the arable field next door. The South Downs and the Welsh uplands and the Cotswold commons where sheep and cattle have been grazing for a thousand years are the places British biodiversity is still, just, holding on. The countryside did not empty because of the cow. It emptied because we replaced the cow with the combine harvester, the meadow with the oilseed rape, and the hedgerow with another half-acre of monoculture that needed spraying fourteen times a season to keep it alive. When someone tells you eating a steak is destroying British wildlife, ask them what was on the field before it became the soy farm, the rape farm, the wheat farm that produced the oat milk in their fridge. It was grass. And on the grass, there were cattle. And when the cattle were there, the windscreen needed cleaning.

You walk in out of the rain. The glass door fogs behind you. The smell hits you before the bell stops ringing: hot fat, malt vinegar, newspaper. Four people in the queue. Nobody minds. The lino is worn through in front of the counter where forty years of Friday nights have stood. Cod and chips. The man drops a battered fillet into the fat. Pale gold, dark gold. Salt. Vinegar. Paper. Two pounds fifty. You eat it walking home, the paper warm in your hand, the chips sharp with vinegar and deep with something you cannot quite name. That something was beef dripping. Until roughly 1990, the British chippy fried everything in it. Rendered beef suet, stored in the back in great white blocks, melted in the fryer at the start of the day. Every chip, every cod, every saveloy. The batter was flour, water, a pinch of salt, a splash of beer. Nothing else. The potatoes were from a British field, the fish from the North Sea, the fat from British cattle. A meal a coal miner ate before his shift. A meal a schoolboy got for his birthday. Then the cholesterol panic arrived. Beef dripping was replaced across approximately 10,500 British chippies by seed oil. Palm, rapeseed, sunflower, in various industrial blends. The switch was sold as a health measure, driven by dietary advice that has since been quietly retracted in the research literature without ever being retracted in the public-health guidelines. The beef dripping never came back. Polyunsaturated seed oils, heated and reheated at fryer temperatures for twelve hours a day, oxidise. They produce aldehydes, polymers, and a chemical profile increasingly associated with cardiovascular inflammation. The fat that was removed on the basis of bad science was replaced with a fat that genuinely does appear to cause the condition the first fat was wrongly accused of causing. The chip tastes different. Lighter. Flatter. The batter tastes thinner, because the fat it was fried in has no flavour to give it. Most British consumers under forty have never tasted a dripping-fried chip. They think a chip is supposed to taste the way the supermarket frozen chip tastes. It isn't. The cow is still in the field. The suet is still at the butcher's. The fryer could be filled tomorrow. A few chippies still do it. Find one. It is worth the drive.

@LucyTCWife Rayner might come back! Or worse with mad Ed.

My spidey senses are telling me today is going to be a good day! One by one remember! Rayner went first, he’s going next!!!

@JuliaHB1 @GHWTowler @Keir_Starmer @NitramLevi Starmer a sweetheart? 🤣🤣🤣

This sums up @Keir_Starmer's defence perfectly ⬇️ @NitramLevi

@CharlotteCGill Hasn't the Gargoyle left Britain yet?

Miriam Margolyes was tasked with handing out the trophy for the University Challenge final. Naturally she brought up a time she said the f-word (on UC; oh what a hoot she is!) Was no one else available?

You are being distracted by the Mandelson saga. And I get it, it’s a shit show. BUT ... FOCUS on the money! This is deadly serious. Labour is moving to direct how your pension money is invested! (its your money don't forget) This decision mirrors a global push, from the UNs Agenda 2030 (SDGs) to the WEF “Redirecting capital towards long-term sustainable investments”, in order to funnel citizens’ long-term savings into net zero infrastructure and climate projects. Oh and look … £ TRILLIONS have been promised to the Net Zero global industry. How else would they fund this bollocks? This wasn't Labour's bright idea you know 💣

@_GPeck_ @liz_churchill10 @bertrumtamblyn Same

@GarryC1204 @liz_churchill10 @bertrumtamblyn Yeah I don't agree with his politics at all but this made me actually laugh.

U.K.’S GEORGE GALLOWAY GOES NUCLEAR ON KEIR STALIN… “3 Ukrainian rent boys…charged with arsoning Keir Starmer’s front door…and his BACK DOOR” WHAT?!? There’s an MSM BLACKOUT on this explosive trial. Starmer’s dirty little secret is ABSOLUTELY WILD…

@LucyTCWife @AmandaLovesElon @LeeAndersonMP_ He should have apologised and called him a wanker like the rest of us.

@LeeAndersonMP_ just got lobbed out of commons like I used to get lobbed out the classroom for being a gobshite 😂😂 This is how childish this circus is!! We don’t use those words 😂😂 Why not if they are true???

@ArchRose90 It says a lot about him.

Sadiq Khan has now deleted his St George’s Day post and posted a new one. Imagine being the Mayor of London and not knowing when St George’s Day is.

@alexwickham Jesus Christ, I hope the boring fart doesn't read that out tomorrow.

New: The government has published a statement saying Olly Robbins was not prevented by any law from telling ministers about the Mandelson vetting recommendations Keir Starmer attempting to disprove a key argument made by allies of Robbins in recent days

NARRATOR: JK Rowling had never met Jolyon Maugham. They were never friends. Her close friends remained her close friends. Jolyon Maugham remained a fixated loon.

There's nothing more beautiful than a tactical red card

@LucyTCWife @sa_72 @SarahForRuncorn @GoodwinMJ Splendid. It's a good job Matt's book is typed! 🤣

Fabulous evening in Wigan with the equally fabulous @SarahForRuncorn and @GoodwinMJ Reform people are the best people 🩵

When Lammy supports Starmer over the vetting process you just know he thinks it is something to do with Larry the cat.

@StreuthItsRuth @UKChange No way. His show now is so much better than any he did on Talk.

Reinstate Mike Graham on TalkTV - Sign the Petition! c.org/kPpkBFDTqs via @UKChange