Tom Scott

@DuncanWestbury Guilty Professor … I learned my lesson the hard way. 🤦‍♂️

@TRGScott Yes! Most people forget about that, otherwise you are creating a spotted woodpecker lunchbox!

My design for earwig shelters also works great for solitary bee hotels in our fruit cage. #BeeHotel

@NoContextCounty YES! 👍

Ben Foakes ton today, would you have him back in an England shirt this summer?

@JChimirie66677 @Nick_Wilson3 “The almost-extinct curlew is four times more likely to fledge on a managed grouse moor than on unmanaged moorland.” 👌

Labour Loves the Countryside. It Just Hates the People Who Run It. A woman walks into a tailor's shop in Helmsley, North Yorkshire. She loves the heather hills, she says. The wooded dales. The purple moorland stretching to the horizon. What she cannot stand is the shooting that takes place on the Glorious Twelfth. Jeremy Shaw, the tailor, has heard this before. He considers whether to explain that the heather she travelled three hours to admire exists because of the grouse moor she despises. The gamekeepers who manage the land, suppress the bracken, and keep the moorland in the condition that makes it worth visiting. The cake, in other words, was baked by the baker she came to castigate. What is worrying is that the government shares her confusion. On March 18, Labour published its Land Use Framework. Half a million acres earmarked for solar panels. Nine percent of farmland committed to rewilding. And buried on page 45, a proposal to license game bird shooting, potentially restricting pheasant and partridge releases onto estates. The trail hunting ban came first. Licensing comes next. Each measure arrives with its own rationale. Together they form a programme. Licensing does not prohibit. Bureaucracy does not ban. Smaller shoots simply cannot absorb compliance costs, fold quietly, and nobody in Whitehall answers for the consequence. A Natural England case near Helmsley shows the method. A longstanding partridge shoot was barred from releasing birds until after the season had already started. Shoot days cancelled. Revenue gone. Natural England's hands formally clean. Helmsley bucks every trend in British retail. Four pubs in the town square. A Michelin-starred inn nearby. A tailor forty years in business in what a mentor once called a dying trade. Seventy-five percent of Shaw's revenue is shooting-related. The Pheasant hotel runs at sixty percent shooting occupancy through winter. The deli sells local cheese to Norwegian and German sportsmen. Shooting contributes £3.3 billion annually to the UK economy and supports nearly 147,000 jobs. Pull the shooting thread and the weave comes apart. One Helmsley pub changed hands a few years ago. The new owners decided they wanted nothing to do with shoot trade. They lost heavily, then went back to the estates cap in hand. The market delivered the verdict that policy is not yet ready to impose openly. Licensing achieves the same result without anyone having to take responsibility. The conservation argument collapses under scrutiny. Grouse moor owners have restored 217,000 acres of upland heath in the past 25 years. The almost-extinct curlew is four times more likely to fledge on a managed grouse moor than on unmanaged moorland. The landscape that Whitehall has identified as the problem is the reason the landscape exists in the form they claim to value. When asked what economic trade-offs it had actually modelled, the government was vague. Officials said they recognised shooting's cultural importance and would work with industry toward a sustainable relationship. Starmer has been invited to visit Helmsley and see how the economy functions. He has not replied. He should go. He should meet the gamekeeper loading double guns through winter to keep the household solvent. The beaters earning seventy pounds a day. The tailor measuring 24 keepers for tweed suits stitched with Essex lining and Yorkshire zips. What rural Britain is being offered instead is a licensing regime that will first eliminate smaller shoots, then larger ones, then the hotels and tailors and pubs, until the moorland reverts to bracken and the towns that shooting sustained join the dying high streets that apparently only the countryside had managed to avoid. The heather on the North York Moors, Jeremy Shaw at Carters Country Wear, and the market town of Helmsley. All three exist because of shooting. Labour's Land Use Framework puts all three at risk.

🎯 and agreed @nfergus

@DuncanWestbury 🎯

Non-native, get excited if it’s a grey partridge!

@CricketopiaCom SOAAC … Same Old Aussies Always Cheating

Steve Waugh had a habit of pushing the line - this clip shows it clearly. He claimed a bumped catch and still urged Krishnamachari Srikkanth to walk after he stood his ground. A poor fielder and certainly questionable sportsmanship.

“Its misleading when you say the Chancellor has gotten debt down. Debt has risen since you’ve taken office” Sky’s @WilfredFrost challenges Chief Secretary to the Treasury James Murray

@WilfredFrost @PeterStefanovi2 Well done Wilf … totally fair point re rising debt… … “relative to GDP”, is irrelevant.

This followed the claim that borrowing and debt were down. Important to note that debt is NOT lower today than July 2024, & indeed will be higher at the end of the parliament than today - it will be up from 93.2% of GDP to 95.1%. True that by the final year it will be marginally lower than the penultimate year but that’s very generous spin to claim “debt is falling”. (And fair to say these forecasts are very optimistic in light of everything anyway!)

We have yet to feel the full force of oil and gas price spikes and energy shortages.  But they’ve started in Asia, the destination for most oil and gas that went through the Strait of Hormuz. They’re now coming our way, arriving by the middle of April at the latest, as they roll west across the globe.  Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it isn’t going to. Energy shocks unfold sequentially NOT simultaneously.  People and politicians haven’t yet woken up to this. Yesterday on this show we spoke to Greg Newman, an experienced energy trader. He warned of major problems coming down the pike. He’s right. It was a wake up call we’d do well to heed.  What’s already happening in Asia is a harbinger of what’s in store for us. Huge rises in the price of oil and gas. Growing shortages in diesel and jet fuel. Knock on effects on everything from fertilisers for the spring growing season to microchip production.  About a third of the world’s fertilisers, needed for food production, and a third of the world’s helium, needed for chip production, are produced by the Gulf’s petrochemical industries and come through the Strait of Hormuz. No longer.  Western governments need to wake up to the economic tsunami coming their way. The Starmer government in particular needs to get a grip.  The PM and his ministers are dangerously insouciant in the face of what’s about to hit them. They speak in generalities, with no sense of urgency, complacently out of their depth. I fear they have no idea what’s in store.  They talk about average household energy bills falling by over £100 from tomorrow. What they never add is that they will rise by almost £300 come July.  Soon the price of everything from petrol at the pump to food at the check out counter will soar. Central banks will panic at the sight of inflation reignited — and jack up interest rates.  Remember this — every major energy shock in the past has led to recession. Not because energy prices went through the roof but because central banks pushed up interest rates in their wake, killing consumer spending, the property market and business investment in the process. AND ushering in recession.  There is every chance history is about to repeat itself. Especially since we’re now run by people who are wholly ignorant of that history.  Of course, peace could soon break out and, after a rough spring and summer, normality could beckon before winter is again upon us.  But if the Strait of Hormuz is still closed in a month’s time we will all be paying a steep price for a war — Trump’s War — we did not start and did not ask for. And having to deal with an increasingly deranged White House.  2/2

@PhillipsPOBrien Just 1026 days left of Trump Presidency. Unfortunately for the rest of the World, his symptoms of Deranged Trump Syndrome are likely to get even worse.

Worth noting that Donald Trump just announced the end of NATO and the Special Relationship in one tweet.

@JamesMelville Just heard the idiot Hegseth. “We’ve done the Lion share of the work…” They’ve created the problem, as Gen. Powell said, “You break it, you own it.” aka The Pottery Barn rule.

Trump to the UK: “Go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.” The Strait of Hormuz was open until his war of monumental stupidity. And now he’s suggesting letting everyone else sort out the shitshow that he created.

@FrankRGardner Thank you Frank. Yes, bar Putin, I struggle to see who benefits from this war. — The apparent lack of planning with no clear, achievable and realistic Military objectives is simply extraordinary… …and that’s before so little consideration of (obvious) Iranian retaliation.

@TRGScott Not sure about your first question but yes there is a lot of frustration that what Thea re as a war of choice appears to be failing and making life much worse for everyone.

After spending much of this month in the Gulf covering the war from Saudi and Qatar I’m not optimistic as to a quick way out of this mess. A ‘deal’ would involve either US or Iran making big concessions. #Iran has both geography and time on its side. A ground war cd be v messy.

@Forestry_UK We planted a lot of willow ~30+ years ago… … would have been great to have made some 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Willow bats… … but they have become Beaver Buffet.

“We have a modern take on the industry." FULL FEATURE: forestryjournal.co.uk/features/fores…

Israel blocks Catholic cardinal from Holy Sepulchre on PALM SUNDAY via @FT “Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa…was prevented from entering the fourth-century church, built over a site where Christ is said to have been crucified, the Patriarchate said.”🤷‍♂️ ft.com/content/ec7981…

@theiaincameron 💚 them. The most Kenneth Williams sounding bird of them all…

Puffin season is upon us. You’ll want the sound on, trust me.

@sussexfarming Snipe “heaven”…

Cows, shits means food and habitat , what else is providing this level of insect interest on a cold March morning? The very start of the food chain . Your cow free life isn’t!

@StanCollymore What A Team Stan…

The West Indies, 1984 England Tour. Batsmen Clive Lloyd(C) - Guyana Larry Gomes -Trinidad & Tobago Gordon Greenidge -Barbados Desmond Haynes-Barbados Gus Logie-Trinidad & Tobago Viv Richards-Leeward Islands Richie Richardson -Leeward Islands Wicket Keepers Jeff Dujon-Jamaica Thelston Payne-Barbados All Rounders Eldine Baptiste -Leeward Islands Roger Harper -Guyana Bowlers Joel Garner -Barbados Michael Holding-Jamaica Malcolm Marshall -Barbados Milton Small -Barbados Courtney Walsh-Jamaica "Nuff said"

@DuncanWestbury Wonderful Duncan.

This used to be part of own front lawn, now a mini-woodland: Wild garlic, wood anemone, bluebells, primroses…