Hawkstone

@Keir_Starmer You are the biggest tragedy - tragic because you are the last person to recognise how your blithering, blustering, insincere claptrap is regarded by the British public.

When I say every child should have the opportunity to go as far as their talent takes them, I mean every single child. Children who grew up in poverty, with special educational needs, those who can't get a job. We back them: every young person struggling to find work will get a guaranteed offer of a job, training, or a work placement.

The British family farm is, by every honest measure, the most resilient and most decent food system this island has ever produced. It has held through: - Two world wars - The 1947 Agriculture Act and its push for industrialisation - Foot and mouth in 1967 - EEC accession in 1973 and four decades of CAP distortions - BSE in 1986 - Foot and mouth again in 2001 - The 2008 financial crisis - Brexit - The 2022 fertiliser shock - Three decades of supermarket margin squeeze - A sustained policy preference for everything that wasn't it It is now, finally, being killed. Small holdings have fallen from roughly 160,000 in 1950 to under 30,000 in 2020. English farm numbers are down 22.7% since 2005. Dairy farms have halved in twenty years. Almost ten thousand have closed in the last four years alone. The October 2024 inheritance tax changes, due to bite from April 2026, will push thousands more families to sell up. US-style mega-units grew 30% in the last five years. The system that took the shocks for seventy years is the system being dismantled. The replacement is concentrated, debt-leveraged, antibiotic-dependent, fertiliser-hungry, transport-heavy, and one bad winter from a national food incident. The family farm runs on relationships rather than transactions. The farmer knows the animal. The vet knows the herd. The butcher knows the farmer. The buyer at the auction is the buyer's son, who has bought from the same farm since 1991. None of this is in any business school textbook. All of it is, on the ground, the reason the system has held. Lower inputs. Lower transport. Lower antibiotic use. Higher animal welfare. Better soil. More biodiversity. Local employment. Local economy. The family farm is not romantic. It is, by every quiet metric, simply better. It is also, in 2026, on the brink. Defend it. Buy from it. Pay the small extra cost. It is the cheapest insurance the country still has. While it still has it.

@JChimirie66677 @simianenigma ‘The enemy within’ is how Thatcher described the Labour far left. Delusional and desperate to hold on to power no matter what the electorate thought. Starmer is all of that, far left, delusional, desperate and dangerous. Watch out - see what happens to his critics. Putinesque

Fifteen Percent. Fifteen Hundred Seats. A Ten Year Plan. One Word Covers It. Delusion. Keir Starmer's response to the worst local election result in Labour history is to announce that he intends to govern for a decade. Let that land for a moment. Fifteen percent of the national vote. Fifteen hundred councillors lost. Wales gone to Plaid Cymru for the first time since devolution. Sunderland fallen after fifty years. Gateshead, Blackburn, Tameside. Josh Simons, the former director of Labour Together, the organisation that put Starmer in Downing Street, writing in the Sunday Times that he has lost the country. Forty of his own MPs calling for his resignation. The general secretary of Unite demanding a timetable for his departure. And Starmer's answer to all of it is that he plans to be in Downing Street until 2034. One word covers it. Delusion. A man who has lost the country does not get to decide he will govern it for another decade. Starmer's interview in the Observer contains something even more revealing than the ten year claim. After the most emphatic rejection of Labour's agenda in modern electoral history, driven in significant part by public fury over immigration and the loss of border control, Starmer's bold response is to announce a new youth mobility scheme with the European Union that will allow tens of thousands of young Europeans to come to Britain annually. He describes this as being full-throated and bold. The voters who handed Reform those fifty year Labour strongholds on Thursday will have a different description. Moreover, the Catherine West stalking horse challenge raises a question that deserves to be asked plainly. Is this orchestrated? Under Labour's rules a leadership challenge can only be triggered once per year before conference. If West fails to reach the 81 nomination threshold the challenge collapses and Starmer gains a year of protection. If she reaches 81 and triggers a full membership ballot, Starmer goes on the ballot paper automatically and Labour's membership, which historically skews left, decides. The serious candidates, Burnham, Rayner, Streeting, have all scrambled to distance themselves from West's move. They may have calculated that a failed stalking horse challenge now locks Starmer in and removes the pressure for an orderly transition. The beneficiary of a botched challenge is Starmer himself. Meanwhile the Mandelson files have not yet been fully released. Parliament returns after the King's Speech. Ian Collard's written evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee is still outstanding. The privileges committee referral remains in play. Whatever Cat Little would not discuss in open committee is still sitting in that vetting file. Starmer's ten year project depends on none of that reaching critical mass. It is a considerable bet. Starmer's attack on Nigel Farage's funding is the most transparent deflection in the interview. A Prime Minister facing forty resignation demands from his own MPs, a stalking horse leadership challenge, historic local election losses and unresolved national security questions about his most controversial appointment reaches for a story about cryptocurrency donations to his political opponent. The country is not fooled and neither is the press. Josh Simons, until this weekend one of Starmer's most loyal allies, wrote that Starmer has lost the country and cannot rise to this moment. That is not a verdict from an enemy. It is a verdict from someone who built the machine that put him in Downing Street. A Prime Minister who responds to that verdict by announcing a ten year project has not heard it. A Prime Minister who responds to the worst immigration driven electoral revolt in Labour history by announcing new immigration routes from Europe has not heard it. A Prime Minister who calls a stalking horse challenge a distraction has not heard it. The country spoke on Thursday. This man cannot hear it. And that, more than anything else, is why he has to go.

@JChimirie66677 Are these appointments subject to passing security vetting?!

They Still Don't Get It. And They Never Will. The local election results are barely counted and the Labour messaging machine has already told you what to think. Chris Bryant says Labour must deliver the change the country desperately wants. Heidi Alexander says people voted for change in 2024 and want it delivered faster. David Lammy says the last thing Britain needs is Labour turning inward. They have misread the results so completely that the misreading itself is the story. Sunderland fell to Reform after fifty years. Gateshead fell. Blackburn fell. Tameside fell after forty seven years. Wales, governed by Labour since devolution began in 1999, now has a Plaid Cymru administration for the first time. These communities and this nation did not vote the way they did because Labour was delivering its agenda too slowly. They rejected that agenda entirely. The small boats still coming. The dispersal of unvetted men into communities that were never consulted. The energy bills driven up by net zero dogma. The two-tier policing that jailed people for expressing views on immigration while sectarian marches went unchallenged. The grooming gang inquiry that victims say has been managed to minimise accountability rather than deliver it. The taxation of working people and family farms while billions flow in foreign aid to Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan, regimes that stone women, ban girls from education and sentence apostates to death. The country that funds gender apartheid abroad while failing to protect its own women and girls at home has now delivered its verdict at the ballot box. These are not policies the country wants faster. These are policies the country has rejected. The distinction is fundamental and Labour's entire leadership class has missed it. Starmer's response to the worst local election result in Labour's history is to bring back Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman. Gordon Brown was Chancellor when he sold 395 tonnes of Britain's gold reserves between 1999 and 2002 at near a twenty year low, a decision that cost the Treasury an estimated £7 billion at subsequent prices. He became Prime Minister and presided over the worst financial crisis since the 1930s before losing the 2010 general election. He is now being brought back as Special Envoy on Global Finance to advise a government that has just suffered its worst ever local election defeat. Nigel Farage's assessment was characteristically blunt. An unpopular Prime Minister who lost a general election is now seen by Starmer as the saviour. He meant Labour are doomed. Harriet Harman has been appointed adviser on violence against women and girls. Between 1978 and 1982 Harman served as legal officer of the National Council for Civil Liberties at a time when the Paedophile Information Exchange held affiliated status within the organisation. In 2014 Harman expressed regret after this connection was reported. She denied supporting PIE or campaigning to lower the age of consent below sixteen. Those denials are on the record. What is also on the record is that a Prime Minister whose government lost the local elections in part because of failures to protect vulnerable girls from organised sexual exploitation has chosen as his safeguarding adviser someone whose name has been permanently associated with that controversy. The optics alone represent a judgment so poor it defies explanation. This is the reset. Two figures from Labour's past, one associated with one of the most costly financial decisions in modern British history, one with one of the most toxic controversies in the party's recent record, brought back the morning after the worst local election result in the party's history. The ministers and the Prime Minister are operating in the same closed loop. Same assumptions. Same conclusions. More of the same, delivered faster, by older faces with worse records. The country was clear on Thursday. This government cannot hear it.

@10DowningStreet @vonderleyen @Keir_Starmer The EU are delighted at your stupidity, @Keir_Starmer .Filling all those financial black holes they have since the UK left.

When the UK and the European Union work together, we all reap the benefits. In these volatile times we need to go further and faster on economic, energy and defence security.

@ChrisGPackham fyi

@JChimirie66677 And if you think it looks bad for the defence of our country, take a look at its food security. The government do not even believe agriculture to be a key industry- much less one to invest in. Food shortages in an unpredictable world could bring a government down in an instant.

Britain Is Under Attack on Multiple Fronts. The Government Cannot Respond. Here Is Why. Keir Starmer wrote the preface to his own Strategic Defence Review. His first duty as Prime Minister, he declared, is to keep the British people safe. Lord Robertson, the man Starmer appointed to conduct that review, has now said publicly that he is failing that first duty. We are under-prepared. We are under-insured. We are under attack. We are not safe. Those are not the words of an opposition politician. They are the words of the government's own reviewer, driven to break cover because the investment plan his review recommended was left on the shelf. Tom Tugendhat's assessment at Policy Exchange this week completed the picture. No integrated short range air defence protecting critical national infrastructure. No contracts or budgets to repair airfields if damaged or destroyed. Undersea cables carrying the vast majority of intercontinental data being systematically surveyed by Russian naval vessels. No NHS mass casualty plan. The Cold War infrastructure that provided one was dismantled in the late 1990s on the assumption it would never be needed. We now find ourselves in a world where it is needed and the infrastructure is gone. Charles Moore writing in the Telegraph is right that Britain has rarely faced greater danger and that our leaders remain woefully complacent. Where his analysis needs to go further is in explaining why. The complacency is not accidental. The paralysis has a cause. A government that cannot proscribe the IRGC because it fears the electoral consequences in specific constituencies cannot make the defence decisions Robertson recommended for the same reason. A government that dare not define the Islamist threat because it fears for its Muslim vote cannot enforce a single standard of policing, cannot name the grooming gang demographic, cannot stop the marches that built the permission structure for five attacks on the Jewish community of north London in six weeks. The domestic political constraint and the strategic defence failure share the same root. Electoral demography has made this government structurally incapable of acting in the national interest on either front simultaneously. Robertson described corrosive complacency. The more precise diagnosis is structural paralysis. The coalition that brought Labour to power in 2024 includes constituencies whose priorities are in direct conflict with the national interest on immigration, on Islamism, on Iran and on defence spending. Every decision that would make Britain safer carries a domestic political cost that the coalition will not bear. So the decisions do not get made. The SDR sits on the shelf. The IRGC remains unproscribed. The threat level rises to severe. And the Prime Minister visits Golders Green two days after elderly Jewish men were stabbed in the face outside their synagogue and calls it appalling. Russia is probing undersea cables and airspace. China is infiltrating higher education and infrastructure systems. Iran is directing proxy attacks on British streets and conducting assassination attempts against British citizens. The Islamist recruitment pool grows with every year of uncontrolled immigration from states whose official ideologies include eliminationist antisemitism and a hatred of the West. All of this is documented, assessed and known. The intelligence picture is not the problem. Lord Robertson used the words under attack. He is right. Britain is under attack on multiple fronts simultaneously, external and internal, strategic and civic. The government that should be responding to that attack cannot do so because the electoral coalition that keeps it in power will not allow it. A nation whose government cannot act in its own national interest because of who it depends on for votes is not a nation under complacent leadership. It is a nation under captured leadership. And that is a harder problem to solve than buying more missiles.

In 1900, the average British village of 400 people contained, at minimum: A butcher. A baker. A grocer. A dairyman. A cobbler. A blacksmith. A wheelwright. A brewer. A tailor. A carpenter. A midwife. An undertaker. Usually a fishmonger if the village was within twenty miles of a coast. Occasionally a fellmonger, a candle-maker, or a chandler. Always a publican. Fifteen to twenty productive trades, serving four hundred people, most of them operating out of front rooms or small outbuildings, most of them self-employed, all of them depending on and supplying each other in a web of local exchange that had been running since the Middle Ages. In 2026, the same village of 400 people contains, typically: A Spar. Or a post office with three shelves of food in it. Or nothing. People drive twenty miles to a Tesco. The butcher is gone. The baker is gone. The dairyman is a distant memory. The blacksmith is a man in his seventies doing wrought iron gates as a hobby. This was not inevitable. This was a set of specific policy decisions taken between about 1960 and 2000, many of them on the grounds of efficiency, scale, and consumer choice. The consumer got cheaper food. The consumer also lost the village. The village lost the people who knew how to feed it directly from the land around it. The land around it lost the market for anything it could produce in small quantities. And the nation, which still has the land and the rain and the soil and the cattle and the sheep and the people, discovered that it could no longer feed itself from the things that were still, just about, growing outside the window. You cannot eat efficiency. Somebody should have mentioned that at the time.

@pannowacki @EckerMichiel @OurWorldInData Tell that to a pack of wolves or birds of prey. See if they care.

@EckerMichiel @OurWorldInData There's no cruelty free meat. (since lab grown isn't commercialy viable yet)

In a world that often feels deeply polarized, it is rare to find a topic where almost everyone agrees. The treatment of farm animals is one of them. Surveys across many countries show that a strong majority of people, regardless of their diet, oppose common practices in animal agriculture. In the chart you can see survey data from the UK. Given these surveys, and with the increasing availability of plant-based meat alternatives, one might expect people in these countries to be shifting away from consuming animal products. But the data shows a different story. At a global level, meat consumption is not only high but also increasing. Each year, hundreds of billions of land animals, fish, and crustaceans are farmed and killed to produce food. There is a clear gap between what people want — meat produced without suffering — and what the food system delivers. Understanding this gap is the first step to closing it. In a new article, Pablo Rosado makes the case that one of the biggest opportunities of our generation is to build a system where the food we eat reflects the values we already hold.

Net zero is a scam instagram.com/reel/DXJKpYNCN…

@SpursracesHarry @LSRPlaid @griffo44374 Don’t insult Burger King employees!

@LSRPlaid @griffo44374 Have you had a look lately at who the Champion jockey is In jumps racing? Do some research before you tweet. You're an embarrassing example of a politican, in fairness you're far from alone, get a job in Burger King or similar its more likely the level of your capabilities.

Most states in Australia have banned jump racing on the grounds of horse welfare- this is the debate we should be having. Cruelty shouldn’t be a national sport.

@EmmaforWycombe @BenGoldsmith I’ll say it again. This public money would be better spent on a campaign to prevent cats slaughtering our smaller bird life than introducing another huge prey species. Cats take millions of birds every year. Devastating.

Golden eagles will finally be part of our skies again. We will work alongside partners and communities to bring back this iconic species. This government is committed to protecting and restoring our most threatened native wildlife and this is just the beginning.

@stuartpengs @scale_william Crikey - good on them for that initiative.

@hawkstone444 @scale_william In Welsh govt's defence (and it's rare I'll ever do that!) they were offering up to 50% grants on slurry and organic manure storage upgrades with NVZ on the horizon. (Annex A). gov.wales/nutrient-manag…

I pretty much knew they had it up their sleeve, but just coming out and saying 'we're removing regulations that are aimed at protecting rivers from agricultural pollution' should be a wake-up call to anyone concerned about our environment and thinking about who to vote for in Wales.

@stuartpengs @scale_william Just like to throw in that farm pollution problems have partly been caused by lack of margin in agriculture- no money to invest in storage and handling of manures; also the scale of farming which has had to intensify and expand to stand still.

@scale_william I wouldn't say it's ineffective, just quite rigid. You can now be prosecuted for applying organic manures in inclement weather. Previously you had to prove impact. It's better than we had, but not as good as it could be.

@TWBFarms @loosecollie Most in government think food is supplied by supermarkets- not grown or produced by farmers. The ignorance is frightening. The only thing they grow is the welfare cost.

Has the line now been crossed for UK farming? When more farmers are talking about walking away than carrying on, ministers should be asking themselves how we got here. Food production is not something you can hollow out, ignore, and simply rebuild overnight. This @TheFarmingForum thread gives a real insight into how many farmers are thinking right now. #BritishFarming #FoodSecurity #FarmingCrisis #Agriculture @agricontract @loosecollie @wheat_daddy 'Is there a watershed moment coming?' thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?thre…

@aligreen9999 @Nigelrefowens @JohnPretty2o2o Just look at all the building of houses going on, taking valuable agricultural land and adding pressure on habitat.

@Nigelrefowens @JohnPretty2o2o It's so frustrating: no government has ever asked if we wanted mass migration, it's just been imposed. Increasing our population so massively has obviously impacted our environment. The Green Party used to have a 'sustainable' population target but they've abandoned this sadly.

The foremost reason for curlew decline is the change of land use. But instead humans make other animals the scapegoat.

@GrahamDenny9 @EmmaforWycombe And neither will Emma and co get to grips with the water companies polluting our rivers and seas with raw sewage. That would help nature a lot.

No it won’t you need to bring wildlife into a place of safety clean water interconnecting habitat you need whole countryside community yet you won’t support farming or pay realistically for conservation measures,you don’t know how it works but you have all the answers ! Cash doesn’t clean the water or save no boundary wildlife it’s green wash till you deliver it all but you alienate those that hold the future of countryside. @NoFarmsNoFoods @NFFNUK @NFUPress @RosieP4 @BylinesEast @Jes_Squirrell @SWTWildFarms @Gameandwildlife @CDodson_Thatch @TrooperSnooks @PaddyGalbraith @OakbankGame

This largest ever investment in species recovery will bring threatened wildlife back from the brink. It is a decisive step towards reversing the decline of nature and protecting it for generations to come.

@Keir_Starmer Yes, Nigel did do the decent thing and sacked Simon Dudley. Pity you can’t do the decent thing and resign for all the lies you’ve told and promises reneged upon!

Shameful. Nigel Farage should do the decent thing and sack him.

@JamesMelville I’d be willing to organise a crowd fund to transport Miliband to a different planet because that’s what he’s on. Are you hearing this, Elon. @elonmusk

“Let’s spend £4.5 trillion on net zero over the next 25 years. Let’s increase taxes to pay for net zero. Let’s ban new oil and gas licences in the North Sea but spaff away £40billion buying North Sea oil and gas from Norway. Let’s buy coking coal shipments worth £7.2million from Japan but ban UK coal mining. Let’s plaster thousands of acres of farmland with solar panels but spend £50million on sun dimming experiments. Let’s give huge renewable energy construction contracts to China. Lets fail to improve gas storage facilities, Let’s give Drax an estimated £1.8billlion in taxpayer funded subsidies on top of the £11billion it has already received despite Drax burning an amount of wood equivalent to 300 million trees. Let’s give £1billion this year alone to wind power companies not to generate power from their wind turbines. And let’s spend £30billion of taxpayers’ money on carbon capture machines but put pensioners, farmers and the disabled into financial peril by claiming there’s a £22bn black hole.”

@KemiBadenoch @gethingw It’s getting to the stage where Keir Starmer needs a law court to tell him if he should go to the loo or not. The man has no passion and even less instinct. An alien from another planet.

Russia, China and Iran vote with others to demand trillions in reparations from UK taxpayers…and the Labour government abstain! Britain led the fight to end slavery. Why didn’t Starmer’s representative vote against this? Ignorance…or cowardice? We shouldn’t be paying for a crime we helped eradicate and still fight today.