J MacDonald-Smith

Wealth Management the relationship way, seems to have been forgotten recently, but is still done by some of us...

[Royal Mail @RoyalMail]

Moving home?

Remember to redirect your mail ✉️ https://t.co/DgDFRfZ1Hk

[J MacDonald-Smith @Jmac_smith]

@tfchamberlin Rhubarb!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.

Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.

Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.

That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.

This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.

So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.

The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.

And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

[J MacDonald-Smith @Jmac_smith]

@StephenMorganMP "...iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet et duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses."

[J MacDonald-Smith @Jmac_smith]

@EODHappyCaptain @OfficerofEngin1

[Mike Gardner @mikegardner_wb]

BREAKING NEWS: “Starmer denies knowing he was Prime Minister”

Sir Kier Starmer has revealed that no one told him until last Tuesday he won the 2024 election and had become PM.

He told Beth Rigby “I was totally kept in the dark by my officials. I’m really angry about it.”

[J MacDonald-Smith @Jmac_smith]

@SgtMajFrenchie Hurry up and wait…

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

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.

[J MacDonald-Smith @Jmac_smith]

@SiskJerry @SgtMajFrenchie Good one!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

We caught up with Keith this week to put the charges to him directly.

Keith. The accusation, as I understand it, is that you and the wider ruminant community are bent on ecological destruction. Methane. Land use. Water. The usual list. How do you respond?

Keith was on the barn roof.

We climbed the roof to get closer.

Keith, specifically: do you believe that your presence in this field represents a net negative for the British environment?

Keith looked at us.

He looked at the east ditch.

The east ditch, which twelve months ago contained knotweed so established that the Environment Agency had quoted £4,000 and three years to remove it, is clear. The red campion that arrived in the knotweed's absence is flowering.

He looked at the south bank.

The south bank, which six months ago was a bramble monoculture of the specific density that supports nothing, is now open scrub with wildflower establishment at the margins.

He looked at Steve's fence.

We looked at Steve's fence.

Keith looked back at us.

Keith. Final question. Do you have anything to say to the people who believe ruminants are destroying the planet?

Keith pressed his nose to the barn roof ridge and assessed the remaining lichen.

The lichen is approximately 60% present.

The rest of the roof needed managing.

Keith is managing it.

We climbed back down.

Dave's log, that evening: "Keith had a journalist on the roof this morning. The journalist appeared to have fallen off at some point. Nobody was hurt. Keith continued with the lichen. Net outcome: neutral on the journalist, positive on the roof."

Keith was unavailable for further comment.

Keith had identified a new section.

[J MacDonald-Smith @Jmac_smith]

@WeDoNotLearn73 Ouch!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

"Vegan leather" is plastic.

"Vegan wool" is plastic.

"Vegan fur" is plastic.

Every wash cycle releases microplastics into the water. Every year it degrades slightly and releases more. At end of life it will sit in landfill for four hundred years or end up in the ocean.

The sheep, meanwhile, grows a new coat every year, requires it removed, and produces a fibre that has been biodegradable since the Neolithic.

But yes. The sheep is the environmental problem.

The sheep, standing in the Lake District in the rain, growing renewable fibre from grass.

The sheep.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

I see some weird things but this takes the biscuit. A vulnerability in the Companies House website, that let anyone view the private dashboard of any one of the five million registered companies, see directors' personal details.

And modify them.

[J MacDonald-Smith @Jmac_smith]

@Jackson30806812 @sturgios Good one…

[J MacDonald-Smith @Jmac_smith]

@Wisdom_HQ 116

[Katie Lam @Katie_Lam_MP]

https://t.co/D8GywmY8c0

[Paul Rees. ex Rucksack. @HannahIamthest1]

The lady at the charity shop today told me that she wishes people would clear out their children's old toys in the lead up to Christmas rather than after because she always sees a number of parents in the days before Christmas looking for toys for their little ones who might be strapped for cash. She said there's very rarely anything in just before, but that they get inundated with toys in the days after.

And it really made me think about it in a way I never would have before.

If you know your child is going to get lots of presents from Father Christmas this year, by clearing out your cupboards a few days early, you could make another child's Christmas a lot more special too.

Saw this & thought I'd repost.

[Love Music @khnh80044]

The Evolution of Dance😍❤️.
This guy is fantastic!😂Pure talent! 😍🔥

[Rt. Hon. Alan B’Stard MP @NoWayWoke]

Your new Minister for Farming.

Unfortunately she has absolutely NO experience of farming (or any other real-world job)

Just a PPE degree and lots of roles in Trades Unions and quangos…..

[J MacDonald-Smith @Jmac_smith]

@landeur Well done!! From one of the first….