Dave Baxter

A farmer dies in April 2026. His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847. The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle. On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify. In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable. The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft. The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let. A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up. The Treasury collects £140,000. The land never produces British food again.

They bulldozed vast stretches of the living Amazon basin for a crude highway to help shuttle 50,000 delegates to COP30. This was November 2025 - and modern civilisation was crashing the party of an ancient rainforest in order to save the planet. It was a profound environmental insult already shrouded in the past. Instead of global outrage, its an enduring scar. The road access debacle carved a 13km wound directly into the bloodstream of the protected Belém Environmental Protection Area. A causeway of lifeless red dirt was driven through dense green jungle, as mud-caked excavators sputtered under the banner of summit preparation. This was progress on the march. But this isn’t just 'any' jungle - and it was a real highway only for a moment. Now the 'Avenue of Liberty' is a tawdry access road for the drug cartels, illegal loggers, and opportunistic cattle ranchers. Cash crops like soybean and oil palms are also eating the jungle alive. The legacy of this crime are the fragmented habitats and a massive localised spike in fresh roadkill (in a country losing 475 million wild animals yearly to roads). The global elite descended on Belém, lectured the world on the environment for a few days, then flew away. The bureaucratic class got their photo-ops, but the ecosystem was left permanently changed, and powerless local indigenous peoples were left to rue their shrinking homelands. Now, no one even bothers to remember. It's just another example of the biodiversity nuisance getting in the way of progress.

My dear friend Dick Parry died this morning. Since I was seventeen, I have played in bands with Dick on saxophone, including Pink Floyd. His feel and tone make his saxophone playing unmistakable, a signature of enormous beauty that is known to millions and is such a big part of songs such as Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Wish You Were Here, Us and Them and Money. He played in the last band I had that included Rick Wright for the On An Island Tour and at Live 8 with Pink Floyd. Here are some pictures of him, including one of him and me playing for the ABC Minors at the Victoria Cinema in Cambridge in 1963.

💥💥 Please share 💥💥 If your planning to visit the Lake District over the summer months, please please please can we think about more than just ourselves. Although the Lakes are a place of undeniable beauty and a place for relaxing, they are also a place of work for many and we need to be able to do our job. Once you’ve parked your car, please could you get out and think “would i think this was a stupid place to park” if the answer is yes, then pick another spot. Please don’t park in “Keep clear” and “no parking” or in front of gates. This is not just annoying for us that work these landscapes but also those that keep you safe and rescue you while you’re here. If Mountain rescue needed through this gate at the top of Haweswater today, they would struggle. This isn’t a rant, we want as many visitors as possible for the economy but please think, this is first a workplace. “would i be happy if someone did that at my place of work” *** Also dog shit bags don’t rot FYI***

You'll want to be sitting down for this bit. Water companies are currently £82.7 billion in debt, have paid themselves £85 billion in dividends, leak over a trillion of litres of water per year, dump sewage for almost 4 million hours per year, have been convicted of over 1,200 criminal acts since 1989 and an average of 35% of your bill goes on nothing but paying more interest and yet more dividends. And not a single company has ever lost their operating licence. 👇

Today contractors from National Grid turned up at this farm ready to clear all of this vegetation, including the four oaks, without the required dawn bird survey. It is only because the land owner was on his toes and challenged them that they left. Plus National Grid has not explained why it is ‘not practicable’ to uphold their DCO obligation to avoid nesting season. They were not even able to explain why the oaks need to be felled for a bell mouth when they do not cause visibility issues. This is a horrific disregard for nature. (This is Bramford to Twinstead, ‘only’ 30km long. Imagine the destruction if Norwich to Tilbury at 180km goes ahead as proposed. We seek underground HVDC laid by cable ploughs for N2T)

Say No to Digital ID

Today Starmer is “hailing” a huge deal between Britain and the Gulf states worth £3.7bn. This was made possible by Brexit freedoms (we can now negotiate our own trade deals). But Starmer isn’t “hailing” that. Because his party plans to reverse Brexit. politico.eu/article/keir-s…

Someone should invent a self-replicating machine that removes carbon and pollution from the air and produces food and oxygen. Oh shit hang on, that's just a tree.

The Guga hunt is shameful. Gannet chicks are taken from their nests and killed for a local delicacy - and NatureScot gives licences for it.

#BREAKING Australian actress Holly Valance says that everyone “starts out as a lefty” But then you “wake up” when you try to “run a business or buy a home” “And then you realise how crap their ideas are” Hard to argue, Holly.

Same is happening in Carrington, with numerous red listed birds & endangered wildlife species unnecessarily losing their homes, and their lives!

Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, it is a criminal offence to intentionally damage or destroy the nest of any wild bird while that nest is in use or being built. Every species of garden bird is covered without exception. This is not guidance — it is law.

New research: Pilot whales are struggling to hear over ship noise They're trying to compensate, increasing dB with all their might—but failing—it's too overwhelming Some just give up & fall silent It's hard for us to grasp how profoundly this impacts every facet of their lives.

If you play music in public without headphones, you are a cunt. It really is that simple.

80 combat sorties. 'I'm no ruddy hero' he said. 104 years old with no surviving relatives to attend his funeral, which is at Bodmin Crematorium tomorrow at 11.30. Please spread the word it's the least we can do 🙏🇬🇧 gbnews.com/news/ww2-veter…

Astonishing... From 1973 to 2010, *we paid the EEC/EU* in today's money, £500 billion to take away a cumulative £3.5 TRILLION of manufacturing GDP from us. 3.5 million jobs were lost. #Brexit #LabourWipeout

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers. When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it. They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long. In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it. The flowers attract a standing army to our fields. We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.

A worthwhile read in the Daily Telegraph today, from their Deputy Economics Editor Tim Wallace. "It is hard to imagine any sensible observer from 2016 seeing the economy today and declaring Brexit to have been a calamity". Well said Tim. We agree 100%. telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/…

The UK is the EU's second biggest customer. If I go in to a shop and I do not enjoy the experience, then I do not use that shop again. If the EU is making life difficult for their second biggest customer, then we should stop buying their goods until they provide a better service.