A Griff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺

Finding beauty in the ordinary. Truth may offend but it remains truth. #Gryffindor #sexrealist

[A Griff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺 @AGriffe8]

“If our dreams get broken along the way, we have to make new ones from the pieces.”
Lisa McGee, #DerryGirls

[David Atherton @daveatherton]

This is Cllr Rick Rowe, for the Green Party Chiswick Riverside. He proposed to stop outside seating in pubs along the Thames, which was critiallly commented on by Alastair. Rowe sent two police officers to warn him off about X posting on this issue & was threatened with arrest.

Last evening Rowe & his boyfriend visited the pub Alastair was drinking in. He was filmed & Rowe tried to grab his phone.

It appears the @MetCC Police passed on confidential information to Rowe.

[A Griff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺 @AGriffe8]

@MissNothing_28 @HazelAppleyard Try reading it again. It’s the boyfriend writing it - not the girlfriend!

[Lucy Hunter Blackburn @LucyHunterB]

For anyone inducted into the civil service by clever, sane, ethical, analytic people who were really good at the job, and cared about about what their staff did, following the Tempest-DEFRA ET is like reading a workplace version of The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

Just - how?

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Swiss farmers planted flowers between their crops and watched pest damage drop by over half. The UK is now running the same trial across 15 farms. The reason this works is embarrassingly simple.

A Swiss study on winter wheat found that fields with wildflower strips had 40 to 53% fewer leaf beetle pests than fields without. Crop damage dropped 61%.

The mechanism is simple. Wildflowers feed hoverflies, lacewings, parasitic wasps, ladybugs, and ground beetles. Those insects eat the aphids, beetle larvae, and caterpillars that farmers would otherwise spray for. A few meters of wildflowers hosts an unpaid pest control crew that would jump at the chance to whoop some aphid ass.

In apple orchards where no insecticides had been used for five years, plots with wildflower alleyways had 9.2% damaged fruit. Control plots without flowers had 32.5%.

The UK is now running a five-year trial across 15 farms placing 6-meter flower strips through the middle of fields, not just at the edges, because the beneficial insects can't reach the center of a large field otherwise.

This works the same way in a backyard vegetable garden as it does on a commercial farm. Plant native flowering species near your tomatoes, beans, and squash. The pests still show up, but the predators show up too.

Study doi: 20151369

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

Rick Rowe just came to the pub I was in with his boyfriend, knowing I was there, because he’d sent the police to intimidate me earlier. His boyfriend filmed me half the evening. Rick tried to grab my phone twice. It’s on film. He also said confidential information about me that the police had told him. I’m very happy to prosecute him and the police.

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

A rare moment of honesty at r/mtf today. The commenters are not happy.

[Harriet Sergeant @HarrietSergeant]

“This city is ours. No-one touches us here - even the police won’t stop you.”
A convicted people smuggler, boasting to the BBC in Leicester already runs his own fiefdom.
Burnham’s localism won’t stop men like this. It’ll crown them. Mini mayors. Mini despots. Unaccountable to anyone but themselves.

[For Women Scotland @ForWomenScot]

A 13 year old girl! Safeguarding is on its knees in Scotland.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

FAO all who support the UK puberty blockers trial:

'They ruined my life. They shaped and folded my body according to what they thought would look the best... You can't treat kids like that. We're not your art project.'

-- detransitioner Jonni Skinner

https://t.co/DlTYUfzi5H

[Emily Wilding Davison🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @Wommando]

⚠️SICKENING LENIENCY⚠️

➡️Humberside Police’s former Head of Communications, David Drury, 40, has been jailed for a PATHETIC 9 years for sustained "grotesque" abuse and r-pe of a boy under 13.

Drury was senior police spin doctor who attempted to "dissuade journalists" from reporting on a r-pe gang case!

His teacher partner Daniel Sellers, 44, got 4.5 years for helping him do it.

A senior police official.
A teacher.
Positions of authority.
Positions of trust.
Both systematically abused a child over years, shared CSA images, and showed zero remorse for their sick crimes - and they get a PATHETIC 13.5 years between them.

🚫These sentences are sickening - and need challenging. Details below.

[Colin Wynter KC @QcWynter]

A 70 yr old woman has revealed that following a diagnosis of cancer at a southern NHS Trust, she was told she would be put on palliative care.
She sought a second opinion & was referred to Guy's.
Two years on and she is in remission.
Post code lottery but please do search around.

[James Dreyfus @DreyfusJames]

I had deleted my post, after I read the situation re the seating outside the Chiswick pubs had been resolved.

But I’ve just seen the video of the police “having a conversation” with @London_W4 & read this about Rick Rowe’s behaviour.

This is the gurning nit…

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Gerald has a robin. Or, to be precise about the hierarchy, a robin has Gerald.

It turned up in autumn and simply took possession, the way robins do, and now it treats a nine-hundred-kilogram bull as its personal estate, its transport, and its dinner service. It rides on his back. It perches on a horn like a figurehead. It supervises the grazing from the gate with the stern air of a foreman. When Gerald moves to fresh grass, the robin moves with him, because Gerald is, frankly, the best thing that ever happened to it.

There is an ancient bargain underneath it. Long before there were gardeners for robins to pester, there were great grazing beasts, wild cattle and boar and bison, turning the earth and flushing out insects wherever they went. That famous robin boldness, the way one sits a foot from your spade with an expectant eye, was never about you. It is about the enormous animal you are standing in for. For thousands of years, a robin's finest meal ticket was to shadow something huge, heavy, and permanently eating.

Gerald is that something. Every hoof-fall in the wet grass turns up a beetle, a grub, a startled spider, and the robin is there to collect the rent. Gerald neither minds nor notices, which in his case comes to the same thing.

So one of the oldest partnerships in the country plays out in a field near Hereford. The little red tyrant, convinced he owns the bull. The bull, serenely letting him believe it.

Gerald grazes. The robin rides. Neither has read a word about the other, and between them they have it perfectly worked out, which is more than most of us can say.

[Cathy Larkman 💚🤍 💜🦢🏃‍♀️ @JackMerched]

YOUR JOB, Julia Gillard, before you introduce legislation - is to consider the potential consequences. You admit that you didn't. You failed women and girls.

Very proud of the brilliant @WRN_Manchester woman who asked the question and forced the answer.

[teresa smith @treesey]

He’s right

[Scottish Express @ScotExpress]

Pleas of orphaned 13-year-old girl at St Mary's Kenmure ignored after being locked up with older teenage male offenders https://t.co/0kLOT2UuS1

[lillyprim @lilly_prim]

@ScotExpress "Records from April to July 2024 showed a stark gender imbalance in the use of force: out of 152 incidents of restraint applied to the 16 children held there at the time, 127 of those incidents were applied to the only two girls in the facility."

[Lin 🇫🇮 @Lfromthenorth]

"Management fully integrated her with young offenders despite being placed in the secure accommodation for social welfare reasons."

So she wasn't even a violent offender herself. Yet she was placed as the only girl on a ward with 15-17 y/o male violent offenders.

THIS IS WHY SINGLE-SEX SPACES AND CHILD SAFEGUARDING MATTERS!!!

[Colin Wynter KC @QcWynter]

It is a mystery that our current sentencing guidelines do not oblige our criminal judges to sentence anyone convicted of rape to a custodial sentence.
There should be no circumstance in which a boy or man can rape and, upon conviction, walk free with a judicial slap on the wrist.

[Jill Foster @JournalistJill]

Do watch this. It is shocking.
In April alone there were 26 incidents of sexual or violent crime and six vehicle crimes in one small post code of Chiswick. Alastair himself cites a crime just up the road that the police wouldn’t attend.
Yet here they are - acting as ‘heavies’ for a local councillor when no crime has been committed. Shameful.