@ChazzerEvans Well, it’s one way to stop the zealots from proceeding with more vanity projects
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David Owen 🏴
3.6K posts
David Owen 🏴
@iDafydd
🏴 Entrepreneur - Restaurateur - Retired - Reinstated Nuclear Engineer
Katılım Ocak 2011
759 Takip Edilen374 Takipçiler
Plaid Cymru wants mandatory community ownership of energy projects. Lovely idea so now tell us which skint Welsh village is raising £40 million for their 25% stake in a wind farm. We'll wait.🙄🙄🙄
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Scandalous
Get them out
Right over Left Everytime@RightSide_Uk
🚨 MPs’ renting scandal just went nuclear — and the snout-in-the-trough champion of the week is none other than Labour’s own Deputy Leader, Lucy Powell. It’s now been exposed that a whole string of MPs have been renting rooms and entire homes to each other at full taxpayer expense. Powell raked in over £30,000 last year alone by renting out a room to another MP. Taxpayer-funded second homes, taxpayer-funded rents flowing straight into fellow MPs’ pockets — a cosy little Westminster property scam that makes the old expenses scandal look like pocket change. This is the same Labour Party that lectures working Brits about “fairness”, “austerity” and “paying your share” while their own elite treat Parliament like a private members’ club with an unlimited bar tab on your dime. While British families are crushed by sky-high rents, energy bills and taxes to fund this circus, Labour insiders are quietly lining their nests by renting to one another — all perfectly “within the rules,” of course. Because in two-tier Britain, the rules are written by the grifters for the grifters. Lucy Powell isn’t some backbencher caught with her hand in the till. She’s the Deputy Leader. The second most senior figure in Starmer’s government. The same government that’s busy hiking your taxes, slashing services and telling you to tighten your belt while they play Monopoly with public money. This isn’t a mistake. This isn’t an oversight. This is systemic corruption dressed up as “MP accommodation.” The silent majority has had enough of these champagne socialists treating the British taxpayer like a bottomless ATM. We pay for their second homes, their rents, their expenses — while our own kids can’t get on the housing ladder and pensioners choose between heating and eating. We demand: ✅ Immediate full public audit of every MP’s property dealings and expenses — names, amounts, everything. ✅ Resignations for anyone caught in this rental racket — starting with Lucy Powell. ✅ A complete overhaul of the MPs’ expenses system — no more second homes, no more self-dealing, no more pigs at the trough. ✅ Real consequences for the entitled elite who think the rules don’t apply to them. Labour isn’t just failing Britain. It’s looting it — one taxpayer-funded rental agreement at a time. Starmer Out. Powell Out. The whole rotten Westminster cartel out. The British people are watching. And this time we’re not forgetting. 🇬🇧 #MPSRentingScandal #LucyPowellExposed #TwoTierBritain #LabourGrift #RestoreBritain #PutBritainFirst #MPsExpenses #BritainIsBroken #EndTheCorruption
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@JacotheNorth @Plaid_Cymru Obviously a woman of her word…..
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Newly elected @Plaid_Cymru Senedd Member for Caerdydd Penarth.
Where exactly are these left wing paradises? Because if they exist, then surely the lefties would be migrating to them?
This is the quality of Plaid's Globalist-Woke intake.
God help Wales. Because they won't.
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David Owen 🏴 retweetledi
The asset-rich middle is the designated payer, as usual.
Not the top, who have trusts, BPR, agricultural relief, and lifetime gifting advice.
Not the bottom, who have nothing to tax.
The squeeze is - true to form - on the band roughly £500k to £2m of estate, which is now a terraced house in Wandsworth plus a DC pot.
Threshold frozen at £325k since 2009. Houses doubled. That’s the tax rise. No vote, no debate, no despatch box. Inflation does the work.
IHT take: £2.7bn then, £8.5bn now, £14bn by 2030. Share of estates paying: 2.7% to nearly 10%. Not because Britain got richer. Because the number stayed still.
Pensions in scope from April 2027 sits on top. Threshold was calibrated for a world where pensions were outside the estate. Removing the exemption without uprating is a double tightening. Hence the £34k average extra bill.
Same trick everywhere. Income tax bands frozen. Personal allowance taper. Dividend allowance gutted. Savings allowance. £40bn a year by 2028 per the IFS. Zero rate changes.
Closing a loophole is just the cover story. The policy is a stealth wealth tax on the asset-rich middle, collected by inflation.
Expect more of these taxes as the state continues to spend spend spend.
Neil McCoy-Ward@NeilMcCoyWard
🚨Your pension is about to be raided and HMRC just confirmed how.... From April 2027, pension schemes will be allowed to withhold up to half of your retirement savings to cover inheritance tax. They can hold onto that money for up to 15 months while they work out what is owed Pensions used to sit outside inheritance tax entirely. From April 2027 they get hit with the standard 40% rate like everything else So your family loses up to 40% of what you spent a lifetime saving. The pension company sits on the other half for over a year before anyone sees a penny. Funeral costs, mortgage payments, school fees, none of it can be covered while the money is locked up The policy was announced by Rachel Reeves in the 2024 Budget. The operational detail confirming the 50% withholding rule was quietly published by HMRC this week, with final guidance not due until spring 2027, weeks before the deadline 10,500 estates will be dragged into inheritance tax for the first time. Another 38,500 will pay more. Average extra bill, £34,000 And this is how these things always work. The threshold starts high, the public is told it only affects the wealthy, and the numbers stay frozen while everything else rises The inheritance tax threshold has been stuck at £325,000 since 2009. House prices have nearly doubled in that time Every year, more ordinary families get pulled in without a single rule changing The government calls this closing a loophole. What it actually does is treat your pension like another revenue stream for the Treasury. Money you saved out of taxed income gets taxed again on the way out If you have a pension, this affects you. Check what your scheme is planning before April 2027 arrives Follow me to stay informed
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@adavies4 When they say sustainable…..they mean tax rises to pay for it
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I asked Rhun ap Iorwerth, First Minister of Wales:
'You know what happens when a new government comes in promising change & can't deliver as quickly as the electorate wants. What early, tangible changes can the people of Wales expect from a Plaid Cymru government?'
His reply⬇️
with #c4news team @c4marcus @daibaker
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David Owen 🏴 retweetledi
Nonsense, Eluned Morgan has bounced around Brussels, HofL and Cardiff Bay since the 90s, and this week, the music finally stopped. She had stated that if she were to become First Minister, she would renounce her peerage but when she actually became First Minister, she instead simply 'paused' it. This professional socialist trougher will go back to the Lords instead of showing a little humility and getting a proper job for once.
Paul Mason@paulmasonnews
Eluned Morgan has been a brilliant, progressive voice for Welsh Labour - she was handed a mess by her predecessors and campaigned with vigour and good humour in a way Labour's UK leadership should learn from. Politics in Wales, and Pembrokeshire, will be poorer without her 🏴⛳️✊
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We must respond to the message that voters have sent us and break with the status quo once and for all.
We must confront the big challenges the public face with real answers.
That is how we will deliver the change that people are desperate for and build a stronger and fairer country.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
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@rachelmillward @piersmorgan Why can't you answer the question though?
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Really @piersmorgan, you do have a weird obsession witn people's genitalia!
Politics UK@PolitlcsUK
🚨 WATCH: Piers Morgan and Green Deputy Leader Rachel Millward clash over Zack Polanski's stance on trans people Morgan: "Do you think women have penises?" Millward: "I think you have a uniquely strange obsession with people's genitalia"
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@Caiwilsh The biggest issue about polls, particularly now, is that there is a stigma surrounding voting reform. But in the ballot booth…….. 🤫
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The English results will dominate the overnight coverage but (and I'm biased) I think the most seismic result will be Wales. I talked to a dozen Welsh ministers, Senedd members, and candidates to get their take.... 🏴🧵
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No matter what they say, Reform UK will only let down the working class.
They voted against our better deal for workers. With your support, we got it done.
Only Labour will work for working people.
Vote Labour 🌹
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David Owen 🏴 retweetledi
This PLAID CYMRU candidate says the party promises to make the country a haven for people coming to the UK illegally.
They will demand new human rights laws to stop the choirboys being ‘removed from their community’.
Wake up, Wales. Before it’s too late.
Just one more sleep.
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David Owen 🏴 retweetledi
The OBR drew this chart.
Yellow line is what the state takes.
Green line is what the state spends.
The gap will be filled by stealing from you, your children and their children.
By 2074, UK debt hits 270% of GDP. The state's own watchdog admits it in writing.
Yesterday the bond market read the chart.
UK 30 year gilt: 5.76%. Highest since 1998. UK 10 year: 5.08%.
The market knows what comes next. When yields rise too far, the Bank of England will step in.
They will print. They will buy. They will debase. They will steal from your children's future and their children.
Just like 2022. Just like covid. Just like 2008.
Savers smoked. Pensioners smoked. Gilt holders smoked.
The pound will lose another generation of purchasing power in months, not years.
You have been betrayed.
And this is only the beginning.
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@darrenpjones Benefits, that’s unearned wealth
Pension after years of benefits and not contributing, that’s unearned wealth
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What is it that the Conservatives and Reform don’t like about a Labour government standing against unearned wealth?
What is it they don't like about raising money for our state schools, our hospitals, our police, and to lift children out of poverty?
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NW business owner addressing the elephant in the room.
NHS & schools trail England despite higher spending. PC just enable more of the same.
Why’s considering Reform UK treated as disloyal to Welshness?
Reform offers real pro-business policies:cut red tape,lower taxes
#Senedd2026
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David Owen 🏴 retweetledi
Chips fried in beef dripping were a different object to what passes for a chip today.
Walk into a Whitby chippy in 1978. The fryer has been on since 11am. The fat in it is beef dripping, held at 180 degrees by a man in a white apron who has been frying chips since he was fifteen. There are no seed oils in the building. The idea would not occur to anyone.
Thick-cut Maris Pipers, ninety seconds in the dripping. Dark gold at the edges, fluffy inside, crisp in a way that sets your teeth against them. Salt. Vinegar. Paper. Two bob.
You eat them walking home along the harbour wall. The chip tastes of the chip and also of something underneath the chip, something deeper, something you don't have a name for because you are nine and nobody names it, it is just what chips taste like.
That taste was beef dripping.
By 2002, 90% of British chippies had switched to rapeseed, palm, or sunflower oil, on the advice of public health officials citing research since quietly retracted. A stable saturated fat used for ten thousand years, swapped for an industrial oil invented in 1911, oxidised at fryer temperatures for twelve hours a day.
A seed-oil chip is lighter, flatter. The crust doesn't hold. The flavour stops at the potato. No deeper note. No roast beef on a Friday.
Ask a British person under thirty what chips are supposed to taste like and they will describe, with complete sincerity, the chip they have always eaten. A chip their great-grandfather would have considered a practical joke. They cannot miss it, because the reference point was removed from the national palate before they were born.
A handful of chippies still fry in dripping. The Magpie in Whitby. A few survivors in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Black Country.
Go. Drive. Queue. Eat them standing up, out of the paper.
You will understand, in one bite, what was taken.
The cow is still in the field. The suet is still at the butcher. The fryer could be switched back tomorrow.
A whole country forgot what a chip was.
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A reasonable audit of what the British farmer is actually doing, measured against what he is currently being accused of.
What he is doing:
- Up at 5am. Earlier in lambing. Finished at 9pm last night. Doesn't consider this notable.
- Producing 60% of the food eaten in the UK.
- On a land area smaller than Oregon.
- Maintaining 400,000 miles of hedgerow.
- Several hundred thousand miles of stone wall.
- The entire drainage infrastructure of the lowlands.
- Every postcard the country has ever printed.
- Sequestering carbon into the soil beneath his livestock at rates that offset a significant fraction of his sector's emissions. Not widely discussed.
- Feeding, clothing and tanning a population that has mostly forgotten where any of this comes from.
- Lambing in March at his own expense.
- Calving in April on no sleep.
- Silage in June on three hours a night.
- Harvest in August.
- Ploughing in October.
- Feeding stock through January in conditions any urban professional would call a humanitarian emergency.
- Watching his son decide whether to take over the farm, knowing what the answer is likely to be.
- Earning less per hour than the barista who served the coffee to the journalist writing the article about him.
What he is not doing:
- Destroying the ozone layer. Hasn't been near it.
- Flying almonds in from California.
- Clearing the Amazon.
- Running a data centre.
- Operating a private jet.
- Producing microplastics.
- Failing to recycle his packaging. He hasn't got any.
- Causing the climate crisis. The climate crisis is two hundred years of industrial activity he wasn't around for.
- Lobbying Parliament. Can't afford it. He's in a field.
- Complaining about any of this. He hasn't got the time.
The audit concludes.
The defendant is out feeding the cattle.
He'll be back for supper if the tractor holds up.
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David Owen 🏴 retweetledi
People ask me why I'm so passionate about sheep.
Here's why.
A sheep wakes up on a hillside nothing else will live on. 32-degree slopes. Acidic soil. Wind off the Atlantic. Rain in quantities most European crops would consider insulting. She walks out, eats grass nobody asked her to grow, and turns it into meat, milk, wool, lanolin, and the maintained landscape beneath her feet.
She requires no pesticides. No irrigation. No imported feed. No lab. No patent.
She takes the sun, the rain, the soil, and the specific botanical composition of a particular upland, and produces the leanest, most nutritionally complete meat in the British food supply. Every gram of lamb contains complete protein, zinc, iron, B12, selenium, and the conjugated linoleic acid your metabolism actually asked for.
She also produces, as a side effect, the landscape the tourists photograph. The wildflowers the campaigners claim to care about. The birdlife the charities fundraise on. The stone walls the poets write about. The curlew, the skylark, the golden plover, the red grouse, the hen harrier. None of it exists without her.
And we have spent the last fifty years being told this animal is wrecking the countryside.
The audacity.
I'll take my chances with the creature that has been shaping these hills for ten thousand years over the pea protein isolate that was patented in 2017.
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David Owen 🏴 retweetledi
Black pudding is one of the very few offal foods in Britain that survived the 20th-century collapse of traditional cooking.
When the British kitchen turned against liver, kidney, heart, tongue, tripe, sweetbreads, faggots, and trotters, black pudding somehow got through. The generation that grew up in the 1970s rejecting their grandmothers' offal made an unspoken exception for the thick black disc on the breakfast plate. It survived by stowing away inside the Full English, carried through the century by the cultural weight of a breakfast format no government campaign has managed to dismantle.
The recipe has not changed in six hundred years. Fresh pig's blood, pinhead oatmeal, beef suet, onion, salt, pepper. Stuffed into a natural casing, coiled into a ring, simmered until it sets. Stornoway defends its version under PGI. Bury uses pearl barley and eats it boiled with mustard. Every butcher from Morecambe to Fraserburgh has a recipe his father handed him.
A ring from a decent butcher costs about £5. Per 100 grams it delivers substantial heme iron in the form the human gut actually absorbs, substantial B12, complete protein, and the specific lipid profile of real rendered suet.
Approximately 20% of British women of childbearing age are anaemic. The NHS response is ferrous sulphate tablets at £4 a month, which cause nausea, constipation, and dark stools, and must be taken for six months to correct a deficiency that two slices of black pudding a week would correct in a fortnight.
Faggots went. Brains went. Tripe went. Sweetbreads went. Black pudding stayed.
It stayed because the British breakfast refused to let it go.
Eat it. Support the butcher who makes it properly. That is what kept it here in the first place.
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David Owen 🏴 retweetledi
Mutton was the meat of Britain for 800 years.
A British sheep, at full adulthood, has grazed for two or three years on British grass, weathered several winters, raised lambs, and developed the deep, slightly gamey, mineral-dense meat that the British diet was built around. Mutton fed the medieval monasteries. Mutton fed the Industrial Revolution. Mutton was the Sunday joint of approximately every Yorkshire working-class family until the First World War.
In the 1890s, refrigerated steamships began arriving from New Zealand and Australia carrying cheap frozen lamb. The British butcher discovered that lamb was easier to sell. Younger meat. Milder flavour. Faster cooking. Less consumer education required.
By 1970, mutton had almost disappeared from the British butcher's window. The sheep that used to produce it were now being slaughtered at six months instead of two years, because the economics of lamb beat the economics of mutton on every spreadsheet except the one measuring nutritional density.
Mutton contains roughly double the iron of lamb. Higher conjugated linoleic acid. Higher creatine. Higher carnosine. Its fat profile concentrates the fat-soluble vitamins A and K2 at levels that lamb simply has not had the time to accumulate.
King Charles III, before he was king, ran a Mutton Renaissance campaign for fifteen years. He got some London restaurants interested. A few specialist butchers took it up. Farmers with older sheep found an occasional market.
The supermarkets did not follow.
There is now a generation of British adults who have never tasted mutton and who, if served it, would reject it as "too strong."
Sheep is not a mild meat.
We only get to taste the version that is slaughtered before it becomes itself.
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