Henry Campbell-Ricketts

Conservative. Resident of Bullbrook in Bracknell Forest. International security/foreign policy specialist. 🇬🇧 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

[Henry Campbell-Ricketts @BullbrookHenry]

https://t.co/3w7n7k84ys

[The Farmer's Dog @FamersDog]

An update and a message from Jeremy.

“Thank you so much for all the kind messages I've had but now, an announcement.”

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

It is NOT ok to experiment on kids as young as 11 and make irreversible changes to their bodies.

We must protect children from dangerous ideology.

Conservatives will not just sit back and let this happen. I refuse to believe MPs, if given the chance, would let this continue. That is why we will force a vote, not just to pause this trial but to stop it completely.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

>Be leather
>Worn by humans since we first put a rope on cattle, ten thousand years back
>Ten thousand years of continuous service and not one recall notice
>Durable: a properly made boot outlasts the marriage you bought it for
>Biodegradable: when it finally gives up, the earth quietly takes it back
>Breathable: your foot lives in it rather than stewing in it
>Ages with dignity: takes on a patina, softens, learns the shape of you
>Repairable: a cobbler can resurrect the same boot for decades on end

>Be leather, circa 2010s
>A man with a placard decides you are a moral failing
>Brands panic and pivot to "vegan leather"
>Vegan leather is PVC or polyurethane in a costume
>PVC is polyvinyl chloride, which is petroleum in a party hat
>Sheds phthalates and dioxins on its way out of the factory
>Starts cracking inside two or three years like cheap sunburn
>Cannot be repaired by anyone, anywhere, for any money
>Releases a little plastic confetti every time you bend your foot
>Goes to landfill and refuses to leave
>Refuses
>Still sat there in five hundred years, smug and intact

>Be leather
>A byproduct of feeding people, nothing grander than that
>The hide was always going to exist the moment the animal did
>You took the offcut and gave it a second life instead of binning it
>Now filed under crimes against decency
>The petroleum understudy gets called sustainable
>And not one soul thinks to ask who paid for the campaign that swapped them over
>A petroleum company would dearly love you to stop buying the boot
>A petroleum company is enormously keen on you buying the barrel instead

[Conservatives @Conservatives]

Congratulations to @DLumsden_MSP, the new Conservative MP for Aberdeen South!

[Vote Conservative @ToryVote_]

🚨 BREAKING: Another U-Turn!

@Conservatives have forced the government to drop their deranged plan to slaughter the Dartmoor ponies.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

"Just grow crops on that land instead of raising cattle."

Lovely idea. Have you ever actually stood on it?

I mean the hard country, the two-thirds of British farmland that can grow nothing else. The land the postcards leave out. Go and look at what it actually is.

It is a Cumbrian fell at four hundred metres, where the soil is shallower than your hand is long and the rain comes in sideways for most of the year.

It is a Welsh hillside so steep that a tractor on it becomes a cautionary tale, retold in the pub for a generation.

It is the high Pennines, where the frost hangs on into June and the wind has strong opinions about anything that dares to grow upright.

It is Dartmoor, the Highlands, and the moor above your nearest market town: peat, bracken and acid grass, where the closest thing to an arable field is wishful thinking.

Nobody is hoarding these places. No farmer is sitting on prime wheat country out of spite, running cattle on it for a laugh. On this ground, the grazing animal is the entire harvest. There is no better crop for it to be blocking.

Sow wheat on a fell and it will sprout, shiver, take one look at the weather, and give up. Scatter quinoa across mid-Wales and the sheep will watch it fail with the calm of creatures who have seen this film before.

The people demanding crops have mistaken a relief map for a menu. They are ordering dishes the land was never able to serve. Strip the animals off these hills and you free up nothing for vegetables. You simply switch the food production off and hand the rain back to the bracken.

Grass grows there because nothing else will. The cow eats it because nothing else can. That is the entire arrangement, and it is the only one on the table.

So before you redraw British farming from a laptop, go and stand on the land you mean to convert. Wear good boots. It will not have changed its mind by the time you arrive.

[Henry Campbell-Ricketts @BullbrookHenry]

Please, Jeremy.

[Benonwine @benonwine]

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this.

For years, Sunday nights meant Top Gear. We’d sit down at 8pm and watch Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May do what they did best.

Now, through Clarkson’s Farm, Jeremy has introduced a whole new generation to the realities of British farming and earned the respect of millions all over again.

He’s made us laugh, he’s frustrated us, and he’s entertained us for decades.

Get well soon, Jezza.

The country is rooting for you. ❤️🇬🇧🙏

[Benonwine @benonwine]

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this.

For years, Sunday nights meant Top Gear. We’d sit down at 8pm and watch Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May do what they did best.

Now, through Clarkson’s Farm, Jeremy has introduced a whole new generation to the realities of British farming and earned the respect of millions all over again.

He’s made us laugh, he’s frustrated us, and he’s entertained us for decades.

Get well soon, Jezza.

The country is rooting for you. ❤️🇬🇧🙏

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Winter fuel payments...
Grooming gangs inquiry...
Family Farm Tax...
Phones in schools...
Chagos surrender...
U16s on social media...
Now killing ponies.

It doesn't matter who leads this rubbish government, the @Conservatives will keep forcing it to u-turn and do the right thing

[Conservatives @Conservatives]

A government quango has ordered the mass slaughter of beloved Dartmoor ponies in the name of ‘biodiversity’.

We cannot let this happen.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Dartmoor's hill ponies have grazed those commons for longer than there has been a country called England. Fewer than a thousand are left, down from six thousand a generation ago. The United Nations listed them as endangered in 2023. So, naturally, the body charged with protecting nature has decided to get rid of nine in ten of the survivors.

There is a process, obviously.

Natural England's new grazing contracts now count the ponies in the same bucket as the cattle and sheep. A commoner with a fixed quota has a choice: keep a semi-wild pony worth nothing at market, or use the slot for a lamb he can sell. Guess which one survives the spreadsheet. The rest are gathered in the autumn drifts, and with nowhere to put thousands of unhandled moorland ponies, the next stop is the abattoir.

Natural England would like it noted that it has not ordered a cull. It has merely built a machine whose only output is a cull, switched it on, and handed the bolt gun to a farmer so the fingerprints land elsewhere. Very tidy.

And now the funny part. The pony is the best tool on the entire moor for eating Molinia, the coarse purple grass strangling Dartmoor into a brown monoculture. Cattle and sheep won't touch it. The ponies hoover it down and clear the ground for the orchids, the wildflowers and the insects behind them. Remove the ponies and the moor chokes into precisely the lifeless scrubland the contract was meant to prevent.

So the conservation strategy, in full: protect the habitat by deleting the animal that maintains the habitat. A masterclass.

Better still, Natural England's own Fursdon review looked at this exact question and told them, in plain English, not to lump ponies in with cattle and not to cut pony numbers. They read it, praised it, said they fully supported it, then did the precise opposite.

Four thousand years these animals have run Dartmoor with no committee and no contract. They could be gone within one, and the people who did it will write it up as a win for nature.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

An Iraqi Too Westernised to Deport. A Nigerian Too Possessed. An Albanian Not Extreme Enough. This Is the System Philp Wants to Dismantle.

Chris Philp announced something this week that deserves more attention than it has received. Leave the ECHR. Repeal the Human Rights Act. Abolish the immigration tribunal system entirely. Replace it with Home Office decisions subject to a quick internal appeal. The only remaining route to court would be judicial review on a single ground, that the government had acted outside its legal powers. Philp estimates this would remove 98 percent of immigration cases from the courts.

Judge the policy on its own terms, because the cases Philp cites are real and devastating. An Iraqi drug dealer avoided deportation because a judge ruled he had become too Westernised to safely return. A Nigerian armed robber assessed as presenting a high risk of serious harm to the public won his appeal because mental healthcare in Nigeria was deemed inadequate and he might be considered possessed there. An Albanian burglar with 50 convictions was allowed to stay because a judge decided his offending was not very extreme. These are not edge cases. 93 percent of small boat arrivals whose claims are decided are permitted to stay. Only 12,000 failed asylum seekers were removed last year against 80,000 rejected applications. Twenty thousand foreign criminals who should be deported by law remain in Britain.

Philp's diagnosis is correct. The problem is not that Parliament has failed to legislate. It is that whatever Parliament legislates, ECHR jurisprudence and a tribunal system staffed in part by judges with documented backgrounds in open-borders advocacy will find a way to reach the same outcome.
Shabana Mahmood's reforms, restricting Article 8 to immediate family, a 28 week appeal limit, a single appeals body, operate entirely within that framework. Philp's point, that Labour is tinkering, is hard to dispute when the tinkering leaves intact the legal architecture that produced the Iraqi, the Nigerian and the Albanian rulings in the first place.

Reform's own proposals go further in one respect, an outright bar on asylum claims for anyone arriving illegally. On the core mechanism, removing the courts from the centre of immigration policy and returning the decision to elected ministers, the two parties are not describing different destinations. They are describing the same destination by routes that converge.

Which is why the silence around this announcement is worth examining. A policy this radical, more radical in its institutional implications than anything Labour has proposed, has been almost entirely absorbed into the noise of Belfast, Makerfield and the social media ban. The government's response, that this is far too late and that Labour has already announced a system addressing this, is not really a rebuttal of the policy. It is a rebuttal of the messenger, and it works because it's not wrong about the messenger. The Conservatives had 14 years and the Boriswave happened on their watch, with Philp himself serving as a minister inside that government.

That history is real and it matters. But it doesn't make the policy wrong, and the people most likely to privately agree with it, Reform voters who have spent years insisting the Conservatives are part of the problem, are the least able to say so without seeming to concede the argument that got them to Reform in the first place. That's not a comment on the policy. It's a comment on how thoroughly trust has collapsed, to the point where the right answer and the credible messenger for it currently belong to different parties, and voters are left choosing between the two rather than getting both.

Philp is right about the courts. Whether anyone believes him is now a separate question from whether he's correct.

[Nick Timothy MP @NJ_Timothy]

Today a group of Muslims prayed next to the Ministry of Defence, facing the Iraq and Afghanistan memorial.

As I have said before, choosing to pray in this way in public is a political act. It is a social statement and, yes, it is an act of domination.

Anybody who understands Islamism understands that the domination of public spaces is part of the modus operandi. It is done so Islamists can show who is in charge - and to show other Muslims and the wider public that the authorities will bend to their will.

There is quite obviously no need to pray here. The decision to do so is symbolic and pointed.

It is not welcome. We have freedom of religion in this country, which is why there are mosques. But we are not a Muslim country and this is not welcome. It should be stopped.

[Crewkerne Man @CrewkerneMan]

Kemi Badenoch was fearless today, ripping into Labour’s disgraceful choice to protect a bloated welfare state while Britain’s defences are left exposed.

With Dan Jarvis nowhere to be seen, Kemi stood up, led from the front, and put national security first.

[Susan Hall AM @Councillorsuzie]

Why on earth is anyone feeling sorry for those ghastly four who have been jailed for attacking a Police Officer and causing over £1 million worth of damage?

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Our Armed Forces cannot defend Britain on empty promises and delayed plans.

Keir Starmer’s Defence Ministers resigned as his plan falls short. Their warnings are extremely serious.

I’ve written to the PM offering the support of my MPs to vote to cut welfare to fund defence.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

I pay tribute to the brave Royal Marine Commandos who boarded a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker overnight in the English Channel.

Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine is funded by their oil exports in defiance of sanctions.

As Leader of the Opposition, I support the Government in standing with Ukraine.

[Conservatives @Conservatives]

Happy Birthday to His Majesty King Charles III.

God Save the King! 🇬🇧

[Henry Campbell-Ricketts @BullbrookHenry]

@ZackPolanski Are you insane? However strongly I supported the cause, I would not equate GBH and serious criminal damage with lawful protest. Shame on you, you have no place in British politics.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

These thugs fractured the spine of Sgt Kate Evans, who spoke in court of the medical and emotional trauma she still lives with.
Prison is where they belong.
Unlike Zack Polanski, I want serious consequences for anyone who attacks police officers risking their lives to protect us.