Howard Hesling

The Green Party has complained about this cartoon of Zack Polanski by the The Times. They’re deeply unhappy with it. Whatever you do, do not repost!

The state pension is not a random government favour, it’s the back end of a 35–40 year compulsory “contract” where people are forced to hand over National Insurance on the clear promise of a basic pension at the end. Politicians and think tanks helped design an unfunded, pay‑as‑you‑go system where today’s workers pay today’s pensioners, then have the gall to call it “unsustainable” as if the public dreamt it up. If a private firm sold you a retirement product on fixed terms, took your money for four decades, then announced at 66 that you “didn’t really need it” and would henceforth be means‑tested or frozen, they would be in court for mis‑selling and fraud. The crisis here is not pensioners “leeching off the young”, it’s a political class that built a Ponzi‑style NI system, diverted the proceeds for other spending, and now wants to default on the people who kept their side of the bargain. You do not blame the victims of a defective product for believing the brochure; you go after the people who wrote it.

@theadelites Absolutely agree. The big - obvious - question is, can we hold onto him?

It's going to pretty difficult to argue against #LUFC's player of the season being Anton Stach. There are very few all-round midfielders who are able to compete in the Premier League in both defence and attack in their first season in English football. He's created the 2nd most chances in the Premier League this season. He's one of the only midfielders to have 2 shots, 2 tackles and 2 key passes per game, and the only player to hit those numbers for a newly promoted club in 15 years. He's also in the top 5th percentile or better for midfielders in the league for: possession won in the final third, goals, xG, shots, shots on target, expected assists, chances created, big chances created, successful crosses, and touches in the opponents box. He can shoot with his left or right foot and from distance and he is one of the best set-piece takers in Europe. He's played in the 4/6, 8 and 10 positions and done a job all over the park for Leeds. His temperament is excellent too, he works hard but he's fun and good for morale and despite being in the top 20% for tackles across midfielders, he only has 3 yellow cards all season. So his discipline and attitude are exemplary. Leeds have had plenty of outstanding performers across this campaign. Not least Ethan Ampadu, who is so flawless he can sometimes get overlooked. Gabriel Gudmundsson is another contender, as he has been exceptional, but a lack of goal involvements in the league has put him below Stach for me. DCL can also make a very strong claim. 13 goals and an England recall is testament to a fantastic season. His hold up play has been outstanding and his work rate is undeniable - and something that often doesn't show up in raw data. But I would argue Stach has a kind of irreplaceability. What do Leeds look like with him v without him? When Gudmundsson has been injured, Justin has stepped in. When DCL has been out, Nmecha has done a job. I think no one in that Leeds squad can replicate what Stach brings to Leeds' game in all areas: in defence, in attack, in transition and set-pieces. He's a one-of-kind and an exceptional acquisition; and unless something changes in the final few games, probably my player of the season.

What was long suspected is now proven. Attorney General Hermer has been part of a group of ideologically-motivated, government-embedded, Human Rights lawyers that have acted in a vexatious and biased way to persecute British soldiers, not because they broke the law, but to serve some twisted anti-military, anti-British agenda. They, their greed (the made a lot of money doing it), and their crippling ideology, have deliberately misapplied the 1988 UK Human Rights Act to British military operations in ways that not only create a never-ending conveyor belt of Veteran persecutions but also fundamentally undermine Britain’s ability to wage war and thereby defend itself. For the love of Country, he must step down.

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.

If you think Britain is struggling now, hold onto something solid. Because the Green Party, currently polling ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives, has published a programme that makes this government's failures look like a golden age of competence and order. Start with immigration. Not controlled immigration. Not managed migration. Open borders. The Greens' own internal documents describe a system that treats every arrival as a citizen in waiting, entitled to NHS access, welfare benefits and the right to vote in all elections, including those who have never achieved settled status. A Panmure Liberum analysis estimates that under Green government, net migration would run at around 900,000 a year, adding 4.4 million people to Britain's population by 2034. Call it what it is. A demographic transformation imposed without consent. Germany provides the evidence of what happens when a government throws open its doors and works out the consequences later. Angela Merkel's open borders decision in 2015 was greeted with the same progressive applause the Greens would generate. According to German government statistics by 2021, asylum seekers made up 2.5 percent of Germany's population but 13.1 percent of all sexual assault suspects. In 2023 there were 761 registered gang rapes, almost two every day, nearly half involving foreign suspects. Knife crimes in North Rhine-Westphalia nearly tripled between 2020 and 2023. Berlin's own police chief stated publicly that violence in the capital was young, male and had a non-German background. The lesson sits there, documented, ignored, while Zack Polanski's party proposes to repeat the experiment at four times the speed, in a country already facing an active Iranian state threat and twenty foiled terrorist plots on British soil. Then there are the other policies. Legalised heroin and crack cocaine. The disestablishment of the Church of England, severing a constitutional settlement that has held for five centuries. A conference that descended into chaos over a motion declaring Zionism a form of racism while party WhatsApp groups contained messages describing Jews as an abomination to this planet. The abolition of immigration detention. Amnesty for every failed asylum seeker. And the scrapping of Prevent, which for all its flaws has kept people alive, at the precise moment MI5 assesses the domestic threat as the most complex it has ever faced. Picture the Britain that emerges from a single Green parliament. A population swollen by four million, the border a memory, detention abolished, Prevent gone, heroin dispensed on the high street, the Church disestablished, campuses already hostile to Jewish students rendered ungovernable, and the IRGC, which this Labour government cannot bring itself to proscribe, operating freely through networks the state has just defunded its ability to monitor. Labour under Starmer is a kakistocracy, paralysed by demography and incapable of naming what it can see. That is dangerous enough. The Green Party is not paralysed. It has a programme, a growing membership of 226,000, a youth wing that is the largest in Europe and a polling trajectory built on a generation of left wing progressives processed through captured institutions who have been taught to call this manifesto enlightenment. It knows exactly what it wants and it is acquiring the means to deliver it. What is happening now will seem like order.

@TheSquareBall Boom

You might say that Manchester United Football Club didn’t turn up, Rio. Something you know all about.

@henrywinter More truly woeful officiating - let’s not forget that

Leeds marching on together to Wembley. Struijk settles shootout. But what a scare. What a comeback by West Ham, who belatedly realised the FA Cup was worth fighting for - and we’ll be hearing more of young Fin Herrick. Great advertisement for the Cup. #WHULEE 🏆

@DaleJohnsonBBC @apopey Retrospective penalty for the useless referee then?????? Doubt it

The Premier League's KMI Panel unanimously votes that Gabriel Gudmundsson should not have been sent off at Palace. KMI Panel said that there was "minimal contact" by the Leeds defender and "the challenge was careless and not clearly reckless". #LUFC 👇 bbc.co.uk/sport/football…

t.co/yyTUS2tYyZ FLASHBACK: Pure evil in Gaza. Hamas-UNRWA officials caught starving, torturing, and publicly executing their own civilians — for the “crime” of accepting free UN humanitarian aid without paying Hamas extra taxes to fund their jihad war. In the footage: Gazans who took food are thrown into cages, brutally beaten, starved for days, then dragged before a bloodthirsty mob. Before slaughtering them, Hamas carves the word “THIEF” into their backs — giving the crowd permission to rip them apart like animals. This is not “resistance.” This is not “freedom fighting.” This is savagery. This is a death cult. THIS is the true face of Hamas — the same Hamas the United Nations continues to protect and fund. Don’t tell me all cultures are equal. Share this. The world needs to see the barbarism they’re defending.

@coyleneil @NJ_Timothy

Every day before the Commons sits MPs pray in the chamber. Today it’s at 2.30pm. Someone let @NJ_Timothy know so he doesn’t cr*p himself. I know he has a fear of people praying.

@ZackPolanski Hang your head in shame you duplicitous cretin

Horrified by the antisemitic attack in our city. Antisemitism is vile and has no place here. Solidarity with the Jewish community in Golders Green - and with our communities across the country who will be feeling this today.

Reject restrictions on dogs in the British countryside - Sign the Petition! c.org/b5n2dWxfty via @UKChange

@DreyfusJames She is just a C**T

For these people, dying is a just punishment for putting up a flag. Laughing about it is their ugly curtain call. Morally bankrupt, cruel, noxious & NOT the ‘good guys’ they think they are. Wretched. Just wretched…

@advancesarah you’re doing a fantastic job. Loved your interview just now with Mark Dolan. Have an amazing day

@piersmorgan You bandwagon jumping hypocrite

The devastating Covid report confirms what many of us said at the time: when challenged by the worst global health emergency in 100yrs, Britain was led by a bunch of clueless, incompetent, complacent clods whose appalling decision-making cost 1000s of lives. Shame on them all.

@Keir_Starmer You clearly have no power then

I will do everything in my power to guarantee Jewish communities the security they deserve.

Hey @TPExpressTrains Increasingly using your Leeds to Manchester and back service. I’d say 70% of the time it’s late one way or the other, or both. Today it’s the latter, again.

@mrmarkdolan is your guest Luke whatever-he’s-called in the sixth form debating society. Puerile liberal with no attachment to this country. He’s an idiot

@mikeparry8 @Iromg Very ill-mannered that post

OK FOLKS .. Just want to congratulate my old broadcasting pal @iromg on his intense weight-loss programme. Without a doubt he's gone down from 6 chins to 5 .. 🤣 🤣🕺💃🍸