Benjamin Davis-Rice 🇬🇧

53% of Britons think Keir Starmer has not been honest about how the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to the US was made - just 16% think he has

Oops

Just pointing out that I broke the story 7 months ago that Mandelson failed vetting from the security services and put it to Downing Street...so the idea that Downing Street only found out on Tuesday is complete nonsense. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

🚨 NEW: Yvette Cooper was reportedly unaware that Peter Mandelson failed vetting until the story broke at 3pm yesterday It means that despite Keir Starmer ordering an investigation into what the Foreign Office knew on Tuesday night, Cooper - in charge of it - was not told

Talk about changing tack at the speed of light. I’m not against solar or other renewables. As I have said, they have a place in the overall energy mix. However, you will not convince me that destroying farmland both aesthetically and productively to house solar panels is the best use of said land, when there are other alternatives.

@bdavisrice @AaronBastani You could strap a solar panel to everyone’s head & it would meet the targets, doesn’t mean its a good thing or viable You need ideally south facing roofs,You then need to assess the roofs condition, confer with owner, mounting, have space for an inverter, then a grid connection

Solar panels being installed in the car park of our local hospital. Fantastic! This isn’t ‘woke’. It’s a cheap, reliable source of energy - and is *part* of ensuring British energy security.

Imagine coming into office on the back of a load of promises about propriety, authenticity, integrity and honesty, only to make mistake after mistake and throw anyone and everyone under the bus to save your own skin. The man is a hypocrite. x.com/JAHeale/status…

Keir Starmer has now sacked everyone involved in Mandelson’s appointment - Chris Wormald, Morgan McSweeney, Olly Robbins. But Starmer was ultimately the one who approved it. He’s got no one left to sack. It’s time for him to take responsibility. He should go.

Good to know to be fair, I wasn’t sure of the numbers but I had the self sufficiency rattling around in my head. Still though, as you might know, what’s our exports like with lamb? Can’t imagine our lamb is cheaper than New Zealand lamb? Wool prices were down over time as well, although, again, I recall seeing it’s up short term. Not sure I agree with your ROI statement. Renewables are heavily subsidised here and have been for 30 years. If that’s not long enough for proof of concept then it’s not great is it? We also don’t get the same amount sun exposure as places like Aus etc, which isn’t conjecture. Again, not saying all of it doesn’t have a place in the mix because it does, but to the main point, I still don’t think we should be rolling our large scale farms over any farmland when there’s significant growth to be had in cities, car parks, rooftops etc etc.

My understanding is we don’t have the ROI in the solar here to do that yet? Might be wrong, but essentially Australia gets more sun and produces more energy, which makes the payback of that system better. I also see a lot of this ‘but sheep’ idea. We don’t have that many sheep, in fact we have enough sheep, from a demand point of view, so that’s not really something that’s beneficial here especially considering the topography.

The Welsh Government looked into this back in 2021 and their conclusion said If you don’t remediate the compaction, roots can’t get through it. And in the worst cases, that compaction is permanent. You don’t fix it. Virginia Tech are six years into a study on the same question and their findings are worse. Heavy grading on a solar site can wreck up to 75% of the topsoil, either by stripping it out or compacting it to the point of uselessness. The lead researcher put it about as plainly as you can. On prime farmland that’s been stripped and compacted, yes you can bring it back into production, but don’t kid yourself that it’ll ever be what it was. So when developers tell you the land is “borrowed” and will go back to farming after 40 years, that’s the claim. The evidence says otherwise.

@bdavisrice @AaronBastani It doesn't get destroyed. It remains useful and often still in use.

Cramlington South West (Northumberland) Council By-Election Result: 🌳 CON: 34.2% (+9.0) ➡️ RFM: 26.1% (-13.3) 🌹 LAB: 23.0% (-5.8) 🌍 GRN: 14.3% (New) 🙋 Ind: 1.6% (New) 🔶 LDM: 0.9% (New) No SDP (-6.6) as previous. Conservative GAIN from Reform UK. Changes w/ 2025.

DEFRA’s own figures say 1% of England’s land meets national renewable targets by 2050 , and CPRE’s own modelling shows rooftops, car parks and brownfield could deliver 40-50 GW by 2035 and up to 117 GW by 2050 , yet the NSIP pipeline is concentrating the build-out on the country’s scarcest BMV farmland. Whatever you think of net zero, siting the infrastructure on Grade 1 and 2 land is poor policy even on the Government’s own logic.

@bdavisrice @AaronBastani The amount of space on these magic rooftops is absolutely minuscule. The only way you can get the density of panels needed is by building a big set. It’s also the only way for it to actually be worth spending money on without heavy subsidies

So the story seems to be that Olly Robbins - a career civil servant leading a dept that had warned against Mandelson's appointment - decided of his own volition to overrule the security services and to keep it a secret from ministers. Righto

@MePeterNicholls @AaronBastani lincolnshire.gov.uk/news/article/2…

@bdavisrice @AaronBastani No one is doing it in high grade farmland. You’re thinking of industrial estates.

I would argue we’re already a net importer of food, so and BMV land lost, regardless of what’s done with it, is a bad thing. If it takes productive farm land and makes it unviable to farm, I think it’s fair to say it’s destroyed the farm land. After all, once the solar panels are built and infrastructure is in situ, how practical is it to rip it all out and return it to farm land? I’m not against solar, at all, but I don’t think it should be rolled out over farmland.

@d0m96 @bdavisrice @AaronBastani It doesn't destroy & can improve, especially marginal land, produce & power, whats not to like

@beccajiggens @AaronBastani lincolnshire.gov.uk/news/article/2…

@bdavisrice @AaronBastani Not one solar farm in the UK has ever "destroyed high grade farmland". Not one.

So, if Mandelson failed his security clearance, Starmer clearly misled the House and the public and, according to the @guardian, the Government has tried to conceal this. In real speak, he lied and lied again and conspired to cover this up. On 4th February 2026, he told Kemi Badenoch “There was a due diligence exercise, and then there was security vetting by the security services.” At no point did he mention in his answer that he’d failed vetting. This would be a clear case of Misleading the House of Commons by omission - the act of deliberately leaving out crucial information to create a false impression - which is treated as a serious matter in the UK Parliament and can be classified as a contempt. “At a press conference in Hastings on 5 February, Starmer responded to a question from a journalist by saying there had been “security vetting, carried out independently by the security services, which is an intensive exercise that gave him [Mandelson] clearance for the role. You have to go through that before you take up the post.” “Further documents are due to be released. However, it can also be revealed that senior government officials have been considering whether to withhold from parliament documents that would reveal that Mandelson was not given vetting approval from security officials.” “Any attempt to withhold the documents from the intelligence and security committee could amount to a breach of a parliamentary motion to release “all papers relating to Mandelson’s appointment”. A shocking and unforgivable act for a British Prime Minister.

Ideology over pragmatism, every single time. Reeves, Starmer and Hermer constantly put student politics over what's best for Britain and it's people.