Lawrence Monk

@ClarksonsFarm1 Good luck with your tea plantation.

National food security should be a top priority!🙌🏼

@Burkino_1 @SeraJadeAtPSA Now do how much healthcare costs. China - $0.00 USA - ?

@SeraJadeAtPSA There's a huge difference in what extreme poverty is in the US and China. In the US you have to make less than $8,160 a year. In China it's $1.90 a day ($693.50 a year).

This story will stick with me because when China announced it's historic victory in being the FIRST country EVER to ELIMINATE extreme poverty, part of that included free clean drinking water. After the announcement, it came out a particular village still had dirty water and...

@MikeBre14267200 @FlowerdewBob

@FlowerdewBob And FYI I have been both landlord AND tenant simultaneously many many times, both domestically and internationally. I understand who wants to rent and why, I understand the value of the private rental market that government can never replace.

oh definitely evil - I have no hatred for the small owner of a property allowing others to use it for appropriate recompense, I have disdain for slum landlords, and worse corporate landlords. Why do you find discourse on this subject uncomfortable? Are you a Rentier?

@MikeBre14267200 @footandgun @FlowerdewBob

@footandgun @FlowerdewBob It's hard to say if Bob is just ignorant or evil. It would indeed appear that Bob's hatred of the private landlord means he's quite prepared to see families homeless or in ludicrously expensive and unsuitable accommodation as long as private landlords are gone.

if landlords were abolished there's still be the same number of homes, just they'd be owned by someone not expecting to make a huge profit annually as rent, plus capital appreciation

@LovejoyActual The ingredients come to £12.

batch cooking, the preferred snake oil of massive dickheads

@dad_advice82855 @WorldFactHQ The Japanese don't like to stand close to Westerners because we smell of sour milk.

@trendylefty @WorldFactHQ You misunderstand. This isn't the old Democrat racism. This is modern reality race-awareness. I genuinely feel bad for them for being unable to succeed in Western Civilization. Have you ever wondered why White people smell differently to them? x.com/i/status/20579…

George Stinney was only 14 and too small for the electric chair, so they gave him a Bible to sit on. this was 1944, South Carolina. George was Black and the two girls he was accused of killing were white. the case against him: police said he confessed. there were no written records of the confession. no lawyer present when he gave it, his parents were turned away from the jail and never allowed to see him. He was transferred to a prison 50 miles away, 14 and alone, cut off from everyone he knew! the trial lasted one day, and the all-white jury took 10 minutes to convict him - 10 minutes. while the trial was happening, his family was being run out of town. his father lost his job at the local sawmill. they lost their home. the entire family was forced to leave Alcolu before George was even sentenced. he weighed 95 pounds when they walked him to the chair, during the execution, the mask slipped from his face. George was executed 83 days after his arrest. in 1944 South Carolina, a Black 14-year-old accused of harming two white girls had no realistic chance of a fair trial. the system didn't malfunction that day...it worked exactly as it was designed to. in 2014, seventy years later, a judge overturned the conviction. no fair trial or real investigation. the confession almost certainly never happened. he was innocent. had been innocent. His sister Amie had said so for seventy years. she was with him that afternoon...the two of them picking flowers in a field. she told anyone who would listen. Nobody listened until he had been dead for seven decades. She was 80 years old when the judge finally said what she always knew. the exoneration made headlines for a week. George has been dead since 1944. George never knew his sister spent her entire life fighting for him, he died thinking no one believed him. @WorldFactHQ

@TrevorPTweets @EHRC You chose Peter Mandleson to be your Best Man. I'd give the "keeping women and girls safe" issue a wide berth If I were you.

My thoughts on the @EHRC guidance laid yesterday; this is not about non-existent "rights". It is about the safety of women - mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. We men need to hear their voices. Virginia Woolf : "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes". My intro on @TimesRadio yesterday: Where I live there are two different routes to and from the tube station. One, let’s call it Acacia Avenue, is quiet and residential. The other, London Road, is a busy major route with lots of traffic. At all times of the day, I automatically head for Acacia Road. It’s just much nicer. The women in my family, on the other hand, will never willingly make that walk after dark. They live with an anxiety that most men find it hard to imagine, and frankly, rarely think about unprompted. Last year 739,000 women were sexually assaulted in Britain. Virtually all such assaults - nine out of ten - are perpetrated by men. One in four women have been attacked at some time in their lives. Acacia Avenue is exactly the sort of place in which most women fear that they become vulnerable, and they are right. As the author Virginia Woolf once wrote " Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes". I think this is the right context in which to understand the furore over the guidance being laid today by the government, over the meaning of the words man and woman when it comes to providing services and facilities in workplaces. Many men think this is about a rather arcane dispute about who gets to use what loo. For their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, it isn’t. In a previous life, as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I had a hand in writing this country’s equality laws, in particular the 2010 Equality Act. It never occurred to any of us that there could be any confusion or dispute over the meaning of the words man and woman. But it has taken a decade of campaigning, a Supreme Court judgement and now hundreds of pages of guidance to settle the issue. This is not about so called trans rights, which are completely unaffected by this guidance, since no-one has ever had the right to walk into a changing room reserved for teenage girls. What it does mean is that women and girls are guaranteed the protection they deserve, and that their safety, which we spent half a decade drafting law to ensure, is protected. But the whole business illuminates some serious issues in our politics. First that many of our institutions, in spite of the fact that they always knew what the right thing to do was, decided to ignore the fears of their women customers and employees, under pressure from noisy pressure groups. Instead, the people who were supposed to be the grown ups behaved as though the law said what campaigners wanted it to say, rather than what it actually said. They settled for what they hoped would be a quiet life. In a democracy, there’s little point in Parliament deciding anything if the law is then made an ass by activists intimidating bosses in companies, schools, universities and the media into doing something different. Second, at the heart of the campaign to undermine the Equality Act is an idea that we specifically rejected in 2010, so called self-identification. That is to say, that it should be up to the individual to decide whether they have what’s called a protected characteristic - are you male or female, are you black or white. The problem is that self-ID would destroy the operation of any law against discrimination. Look, it would almost certainly have been to my advantage as a young man to self-identify as a handsome, white public schoolboy. None of those things is true of me. And at various points I am pretty sure it’s been to my disadvantage. It is certainly statistically likely to have been to my disadvantage. But according to the logic of those who say that self-ID should be the rule and that anyone should be able to decide for themselves whether they are male or female, black or white or Asian, were I to complain about racial discrimination, it would be difficult for anyone prove that I’d been discriminated against because of my race since anybody to whom I’d lost out could just tell the courts that they too were black. I know that sounds like Alice in Wonderland but you can google the case where a chap, both of whose parents are white, insisted he should get money from the Arts Council because he so identified with the black struggle that he considered himself black, and everyone should accept his point of view. In the United States and Brazil exactly such outlandish claims have been made and people rewarded to the disadvantage of people actually born into minority families. I have even been told about firms who, when reporting their gender pay gaps have put men who just happen to like wearing dresses at weekends - nothing wrong with that, let me be clear - into the female column and told their women employees that they really haven’t got anything to moan about because statistically they are paid equally, and they should get back in their box. So today’s guidance isn’t just another tiresome chapter in culture wars. It is , I hope, a halt to the efforts to undermine one of the most important pieces of legislation on the statute book, by people who, for their own reasons, would prefer us to be living in the 1950s world of Mad Men.

@55SweetThing These guys are so weird, I can't believe they're not Austrian. 😂 @d__herbert

Perhaps the most unsettling moment of “The Muppet Show” was in 1977 when Jim Henson invited Swiss mime troupe Mummenschanz to perform👇🫣🤗

@BanGaoRen I can't imagine the depravity of someone burning sleeping families alive. I'm not religious, but I can't think of a better description than the word evil.

This isn't warfare. This is techno-sadistic ethnic cleansing.

@_imey @adamndsmith They couldn't use Glinner because everyone knows he doesn't use human toilets. He lives under a bridge.

@adamndsmith OK but Darren Grimes is not very masculised. There's a reason they used him and not Glinner

The “we can always tell” crowd just got bodied by an edit of Darren Grimes in a beard

@dad_advice82855 @WorldFactHQ Trying to imagine how utterly empty your mind must be to still be locked into a century old kind of racism.

@WorldFactHQ Actual real life photos of the young man exist, but I'm guessing the same vacant, empty eyes as people in 2026 see in teenage gang bangers, murderers, and rapists in the same demographic is a bit too off-putting. Best to post the fake Hollywood images to get the desired effect.

@GordonDComstock Just goes to show they've always been rubbish. 😂

@trendylefty McDonald's did not open in the West End until the early 80s in Soho. It was cheap but no knives and forks and the burgers were warm and flacid. One of the other early ones was in Golders Green.

We didn't go to fast food outlets back then because there were hardly any. McDonalds first arrived here in 1974.

@brianstwitfeed Ooh, made me look that up - Liverpool held out till 1985!

@trendylefty Most of the UK it was even later, here in Nottingham it was 1982 that the first McDonald's opened

@zoester73 Plenty of chippies around. I don't think I went to a burger joint till the 80s though.

@trendylefty What, so no Wimpy or local chippy then? 🤔

@danielc27712614 We've still got a Wimpy. That's nothing to brag about I know. 😭

@trendylefty In the Whitgift Centre, Croydon. Made a nice change from having to go to Wimpey for a burger.

@ChrisCorney1 Nobody believes in the two state solution. Everyone still saying is a liar. Don't vote for liars.

Calling for a 2 state solution without action to enforce it is the equivalent of saying: carry on, I like what youre doing.

@HorrorPaperback The ones with the .. the.. artistic.. beautiful scenery and .. err.. shut up.

@trendylefty And what kind of scene might that be, Lawrence?

I love a digitally remastered horror movie as much as the next person, but I sometimes think movies were scarier when you watched a slightly worse-for-wear VHS tape though an old CRT TV. #horrormovies #VHS #horrorcommunity

@GMB Deliberate disinformation from ITV. Blue badges are not issued for ADHD, full stop. Make a complaint to Ofcom here ofcom.org.uk/make-a-complai…

Having ADHD shouldn't give you an automatic right to a blue badge - according to the Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander, who warned misuse of parking permit ‘undermines’ disabled people.  The number of people receiving blue badges for hidden disabilities has trebled in the past five years since the criteria was changed. Should we crackdown on blue badges?

There are no such things as 'weeds'. They are flowers growing in a place someone doesn't want them.