John Roberts

Father, runner, climber and team player. Now enjoying retirement. These views are my own.

[Rebel Ada @DearRebelAda]

The moment Alex Scott speaks the unpalatable fact that her Jamaican great-great-great-great grandfather owned 26 slaves.

Equally unpalatable is the fact which follows: that the British government forced him to set them free, compensating him and other slave-owners “to the tune of 20 million pounds”.
Reparation is going to be a bit complicated, isn’t it?

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

For thousands of years, a solar eclipse has been a prophetic harbinger of a spectacular, epoch-making event. Just saying. #VoteBinface #Clacton

[John Roberts @JohnSimonRobert]

Petition to stop the early release from jail of PC Andrew Harper's killers - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/7ehb5hZ3s1 via @UKChange

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A farmer in Shropshire is selling his farm this September and nobody has died.

Two hundred and twenty acres. A hundred and forty ewes, seventy suckler cows, a shed with one end held up by a telegraph pole, and a tractor bought new in 1994, which is the last thing on that farm that was bought new. His grandfather bought the place outright in 1961. He is 54 and has never had a penny of debt.

The books say the farm lost eleven thousand pounds last year. It lost money the year before as well.

He is not bad at this. The government's own review, chaired by Minette Batters, found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making in 2024.

On paper the same farm is worth £1.9 million.

Pasture in his county averaged £8,600 an acre last year, and not a pound of that was set by anything he grows. Two blocks within nine miles went to buyers he has never met. One for solar. One described in the particulars as a natural capital opportunity.

His mother is 81 and lives in the bungalow at the top of the lane. When that comes across with the other half of the ground, the two halves clear the £2.5 million threshold, and twenty per cent of the excess is a bill in six figures on a business that has not made money in three years.

His son is a radiographer in Telford and is not coming back. He said so once, kindly, and never made his father ask twice.

So it goes now, while he can still choose which fields and to whom. He is selling the good ground first, because you cannot raise a bill off the rough.

The Treasury collects nothing from any of this. The sale happens years before the tax event, so there is no tax event left to have.

What Britain loses is a hundred and forty lambs and seventy calves a year, off ground that will never produce food again, in a country that already imports forty per cent of what it eats and has just had its worst cereal harvest since records began.

That is one farm. There are thousands of them, doing the sums at the same kitchen table this month.

The beef on your shelf this Christmas will come from Brazil, and the price will be higher, and nobody will connect the two.

[John Roberts @JohnSimonRobert]

@roseveniceallan Would never describe a day a where I am lounging in the sun, in a swimsuit, in the garden of what looks like a Mediterranean villa as a ‘shit’ one… But perhaps I don’t have the same sense of entitlement!

[John Roberts @JohnSimonRobert]

@JohnHansel77066 Happy birthday😊

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Waitrose sold 193 percent more thick-cut British sirloin after the fourth series of Clarkson's Farm went out. Jersey Royals up 89 percent. Red Leicester up 50. Cox apples up 52, Gala up 30, British asparagus up 25. One television programme about a man losing money in a field moved the meat counter of a national supermarket chain by figures no marketing budget in this country has ever bought.

Then look at what happened at the shop itself.

Diddly Squat opened its farm shop in 2020 and people drove across counties to stand in a queue in a field for it. Traffic backed down the lane. Clarkson admitted in front of the village that the place had been swamped, while pointing out that the village shop, the village cafe and the village pub were all taking more money than before.

That is the demand. Now the paperwork.

The shop's planning permission legally caps what it may sell: produce from the holding, or from producers inside a 16 mile radius, or whatever else the council will agree to in writing. His agents asked for 30 miles and were given 16. In January 2022 the restaurant was refused, on the grounds that a farm building on a farm was out of keeping with the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. In August that year the council issued an enforcement notice, describing the operation as unsustainable and incompatible with its countryside location, and ordered the dining areas shut. The appeal in June 2023 saved the shop, the cafe and the car park for three years. The restaurant was refused again, and the inspector ruled that six weeks was ample time to put the land back the way it had been.

Six weeks to undo a farm building. Two years to get permission for one.

Now sit with the shape of this. Every government of the past twenty years has stood up and said the words food security, shorten the supply chain, support British farming, buy British. A man then built the shortest food chain in England, forty yards from the field to the till with nobody taking a cut in between, and the machinery of the state spent three years making it smaller.

Meanwhile the country answered the question nobody actually asked it. Acceptances onto agricultural degree courses rose 8 percent in 2024 and are up around 20 percent since 2019. Britain has roughly 1,580 farm retailers employing 25,000 people, and the Farm Retail Association reckons the tax changes could shut as many as half of them.

Nobody in this country needs persuading to buy food from a farmer. They queue for two hours in a field for the privilege, in the rain, in a place with one road in.

The queue formed on its own. It took three years, two appeals and a planning inspectorate to make it shorter.

[John Roberts @JohnSimonRobert]

@iAmJoshHunt Love a ‘systems thinker’. Do you follow @JohnWSeddon ?. He is worth a look!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Two hundred of the thousand acres at Diddly Squat grew nothing at all this year. That was a decision taken in advance, on a spreadsheet. Wheat or barley on that ground was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed, so Jeremy Clarkson left it bare and explained why in his Sun column this week.

One line from it went everywhere. Farmers have reached the point where it is quite simply impossible to make money from growing food. Every paper carried that sentence, and every paper stopped there.

The list underneath it did not get printed anywhere.

Because he went on to set out what two hundred acres of good English ground could do instead of feeding anyone, and there were four items on it.

- Rent it to a global agri-company growing crops for anaerobic digesters.
- Cover it in solar panels.
- Put a data centre on it.
- Sell the farm to a Chinese company for a multistorey high-intensity piggery.

Every one of those pays. The only use of that land which reliably loses money is the one that puts food on a British plate. He added that he was not being ridiculous, and that anybody in 1926 would have laughed you out of the room for suggesting the factories would be gone by 2026.

Now the bit with a date on it.

From 1 January 2027 the UK's carbon border tax applies to imported fertiliser. The Treasury's own costings put the take at £140 million in 2027-28, rising to £180 million the year after. Estimates of the hit run from around £33 a tonne to £75, which is a fifth to a quarter added to the largest input bill an arable farm carries. The Central Association of Agricultural Valuers has warned that a typical 500 acre cereals farm could be down as much as £70,000 once fertiliser and fuel costs land.

So the fertiliser that grows the wheat gets taxed on a known date, in writing, by a government that says out loud it wants food security.

Nobody in Whitehall has ever signed a policy to stop Britain growing food. They have signed a great many that make every alternative pay better, which arrives at the same field.

And understand whose field this is. Diddly Squat has a television crew, a farm shop with a queue down the lane, a pub, a lager brand, a bestselling book every autumn and one of the best land agents in the country. It is the most commercially advantaged thousand acres in Britain, and two hundred of them were left bare this year because putting seed in them was the losing move.

Every arable farmer in England is doing that same sum this autumn. Almost none of them have a production company to cover the difference.

Those two hundred acres have not gone out of production. They are waiting to hear which industry wants them more than you do.

[John Roberts @JohnSimonRobert]

@henrywinter Although painfully sad it is fitting that the day after the world unites in condemnation of the antics of Argentina, we are reminded what real footballing class looks like. God bless you Kevin Keegan.

[César A. Hidalgo @cesifoti]

Argentina’s behavioral crisis in the World Cup final has brought to light traits many of us in Latin America have internalized and that we need to come to terms with.

In many countries, emotional self-control and the ability to admit mistakes are seen as virtues. A behavioral problem in parts of Latin America is that there are social circles where the opposite is often celebrated.

This is the idea that someone who remains in control of their emotions is a coward or, depending on the situation, a traitor.

If someone offends you, your family, your team, the reaction that is celebrated in these circles is not restraint but flipping the table. The more berserk you go, the more you show that you care. That is a harmful value to hold, and also, one that many of us once shared. I certainly had it internalized when I left Chile 20+ years ago. In fact, I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to unlearn what I grew up believing was the socially acceptable behavior.

The second trait is an unwillingness to admit mistakes. You can always find an excuse, move the goalposts, or, once again, start a fight instead of publicly accepting that you’ve made a mistake. Admitting fault is a sign of weakness. Defending a losing position is a symbol of courage or, in sports, a test of loyalty.

Together, these two traits are behavioral dynamite. People explode because they cannot admit fault, and double down. Instead of learning from their mistakes, they become prisoners of them.

I grew up watching football with my father. When I was 10 or so, I was learning what was right and wrong from the way he interpreted the game. This included behavior both on and off the field. Only later in life did I realize that every penalty he called for, or contested, had little to do with the play itself. Whether a call was fair depended entirely on which team benefited. He was happy if his team received a nonexistent penalty or an opposing player got an undeserved red card.

These traits are among the things that pushed me away from the continent. They are certainly not exclusive to Latin America or the Southern Cone. I’ve encountered them in people all over the world. In an important sense, these are behaviors that all of us exhibit as children. What strikes me as unusual from the place I am from is having been part of social circles where these behaviors were not seen as flaws of character but as virtues to be admired, celebrated, and enforced.

These excessive forms of pride are not conducive to learning. They make it psychologically difficult to update one’s beliefs, accept responsibility, or improve. Although they become particularly visible in sports, they are by no means confined to them.

Something I am proud to have learned is to apologize quickly and often. Not because it is too difficult, but because it was like learning a new language at old age. That doesn’t mean becoming a pushover. But I’ve learned that a man who never apologizes cannot be a man of integrity, because we all make mistakes.

Argentina’s behavior on and off the field during the World Cup final was, to me, a particularly blatant expression of values that many people continue to defend. In some circles, these attitudes have become intertwined with ideas of national identity and loyalty. Yet they are shackles that ultimately limit our development, not because they make us lose a football match, but because they make it harder for us to learn from our mistakes.

The right thing to do now is the least likely: offer an honest apology. If my interpretation is even partially correct, we are more likely to see the opposite. Never back down. Never apologize. Never control your emotions. There is such a thing as having the wrong values. I hope that one day we can do better.

[Zach L @ZachMovesAbroad]

🇬🇧 After living in the UK, I noticed 5 things Brits truly ace over us Americans. 🇺🇸 From the subtle to the surprising, these differences make UK life calmer, kinder, more human. 🤔 The last one blew my mind! Watch til the end. Agree or disagree? #BeKind in the comments! 😅

[John Roberts @JohnSimonRobert]

@piersmorgan Only beaten by FIFA!

[John Roberts @JohnSimonRobert]

@GOPIsrael Presumably on this basis you will encourage the US to return to being a colony in of the UK - as self determination clearly does not matter.

[John Roberts @JohnSimonRobert]

@ValentinaForUSA Managed to keep you out though…

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Worth watching. Proper, measured, thoughtful response.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

UK tax has gone up significantly over the last 25 years

But the tax paid by the average UK worker has not

This apparent miracle was achieved by taxing “other people”: higher earners, capital, property, banks, etc

The strategy has run out of road

A 🧵 on what happens next.

[Troll Touchline @TrollTouchline]

🚨🗣️ | Pep Guardiola Shocked on Arsenal fans Reaction towards Gabriel Magalhaes after missing the Penalty: 🤯

“I have to say something because I saw this and, honestly, it blew my mind. It blew my mind. We know how this business works. Usually, in a Champions League final, a player misses a crucial penalty against a top, top team like PSG, and the next day... it is a disaster for him. The social media, the media, it can be very, very cruel. Very ugly. You expect the anger, the threats, the terrible words. We see it all the time.

But what the Arsenal fans did for Gabriel? Wow. It is something else. Truly. To see a player fail in the most painful moment, and the response from the stadium, from the people, is just... pure love? I am told his shirt sales went up by three hundred and fifty percent in a few days. Three hundred and fifty percent! This is incredible. I have been in football a long, long time, as a player and a manager, and I have never seen anything like it. Never.

You know, you open Facebook, you open Instagram or Twitter, and the narrative is always the same. 'Arsenal fans are insufferable. They are the worst fanbase, they are annoying.' You hear this tag all the time. But I look at this gesture and I think, 'How?' How do they have this tag? If a fanbase can wrap their arms around a player like that, in the darkest moment of the club's history a trophy they have been dying to win for decades then everything we are told online is a lie. It is a massive misconception. They have been judged so harshly.
This shows me who they really are. It shows their class, their humanity, and their loyalty. To behave like this? It is not annoying, it is not insufferable. It is beautiful. They deserve incredible praise for this, because this is what football should be about”

[John Roberts @JohnSimonRobert]

@iAmJoshHunt When the cost of benefits (largely given to those not earning enough to pay tax) begins to exceed the revenue from tax (largely taken from those earning just enough to pay tax) - taking more from those same people in a different way is neither a moral or practical answer.

[John Roberts @JohnSimonRobert]

@Vfynn_ Says former Man City goalkeeper!