Katie Napper

[Cat @catdeans]

This is awful. The last ever Denby Pottery going to the kiln. Why is there not uproar? Where’s the government in this?? We all have Denby in our homes, in family heirlooms, as our history and now it’s closing through lack of support, such a sad sad day. #SaveDenby @denbypottery

[Emma Harriet Nicholson @Baroness_Nichol]

Hmmmmmmm & S

[Katie Napper @KTNap]

@QuibbleUK Utility companies working in the road who subcontract out the traffic light provision which is then set up too early or left in place too late, just extends the traffic delays.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

>be British
>eat British beef
>someone online: "you're causing Amazon deforestation"
>me: "my beef is from Wales"
>them: "cattle farming causes deforestation"
>me: "in Brazil. not Wales."
>them: "but globally"
>me: "my cow was in Pembrokeshire eating grass in horizontal rain"
>them: "but the system"
>me: "the Welsh hills were deforested 3,000 years ago by the Iron Age. Take it up with them."
>them: "but your demand for beef"
>me: "for British beef. from British farms. eating British grass."
>them: "but"
>me: "there are no rainforests in Wales. There is one tree on a hill near Tregaron and it looks tired."
>them: *googles Brazilian beef statistics on iPhone shipped from Shenzhen*
>them: "but this article"
>me: "that's Brazil. 6,000 miles away. Different cow. Different continent."
>them: "but"
>me: "you're stood in Wrexham blaming a Hereford for the Amazon"
>geography, apparently, is now a controversial subject

[David O'Connell @moogsurf]

Fourteen thousand records of known, documented, categorised software failures. Sitting in a database. While hundreds of subpostmasters sat in the dock.

Why has no-one from the post-office and Fujitsu been prosecuted?

[Monsieur Cholet @stugoo17]

https://t.co/Wmzvchbs9r

[Katie Napper @KTNap]

@TVNaga01 sorry to hear that you’ve had a tumble….. how about “came a cropper” it’s much less aging than “had a fall” (recent personal experience!)

[Monsieur Cholet @stugoo17]

https://t.co/nvHXLVWpYE

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

When the Defence Editor of @TheEconomist plays with AI a hilariously cute map of the Strait of Hormuz is the result. Here is the prompt used by @shashj: "A hydrologically accurate cut-away of the Strait of Hormuz, drawn by Richard Scarry, drawing on current AIS data." I'm not a fan of using AI in dataviz unless we fact check every single pixel.

[Orla Minihane @orlaminihane]

I had to share this. If you haven’t seen this lady in action - you soon will !!! What a legend!!! THIS is the passion and honesty we desperately need in British Politics!! @SorchaEastwood 🇬🇧 I solute you Sorcha !

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Exercise Turnstone: What the Government Knew and Wouldn't Tell You.

Peter Kyle went on television this morning to tell us to relax. Enjoy your beer, he said. Enjoy your meats. Enjoy your salads. This from a minister whose own government has been war-gaming, under the codename Exercise Turnstone, a scenario in which Britain's carbon dioxide supplies collapse to 18% of normal levels by June. A scenario in which chicken and pork disappear from supermarket shelves. A scenario in which competition rules are suspended and emergency legislation is rushed through Parliament within days. The war in Iran is the convenient explanation. But convenience and truth are not the same thing.

Britain did not arrive at this moment of food vulnerability because of events in the Strait of Hormuz. It arrived here because of choices made in Downing Street and the Treasury long before a single missile was fired. The Iran conflict is the match. This government built the bonfire.

Start with the land. At the last count, ground-mounted solar panels already cover an estimated 52,000 acres of British countryside. The government's own target requires solar capacity to increase to nearly three times its current level by 2030, with up to 65% of that coming from large-scale ground installations. CPRE analysis shows that 59% of England's largest solar farms sit on productive agricultural land, with almost a third classified as the nation's best and most versatile farmland. Fields that grew wheat are being sealed under panels for up to 60 years.

Rewilding compounds it. Hundreds of tenant farmers across England, Wales and Scotland are being removed from land their families have worked for generations, replaced by carbon credit schemes, ESG funds, and institutional investors. The National Trust has plans to rewild 250,000 hectares of its estate. One farmer walked away from land he had worked for 30 years after being told to cut his livestock by 85%. The government's own land use targets earmark 760,000 hectares, nine percent of all agricultural land, for full conversion to non-food use by 2050. Nine percent. Gone.

Then there is what the Chancellor has done to the economics of farming and food production. The April 2025 National Insurance hike and the minimum wage rise, up 40% since 2020, have driven costs through the entire food supply chain from field to shelf. Food inflation hit 5.1% by August last year. The Food and Drink Federation forecasts it will reach at least 9% by December, and that projection was made before the Iran conflict added further pressure. These are not global commodity prices at work. Analysts are explicit: the current round of food price inflation is domestically driven, a direct consequence of fiscal decisions made in the October 2024 Budget.

The IMF has already said Britain faces the worst economic hit in the G7 from the Iran conflict. That is partly because we are more exposed than we needed to be. A government serious about energy security would not have banned new North Sea licensing while Norway, drilling from the same sea, reached a 16-year production high and sold us £20 billion worth of oil and gas last year. A government serious about food security would not be converting prime arable land into solar parks and rewilding estates while war-gaming CO2 shortages in secret.

Peter Kyle said the public should be reassured. Reassured by what, exactly? By a minister telling them to enjoy their salads while Cobra plans for the shelves to empty? The government does not have a food security problem caused by Iran. It has a food security problem caused by itself. The war simply made it impossible to hide.

[Katie Napper @KTNap]

@jones_mog Don’t forget it includes VAT - £6.50 I think

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

A Parliament of Charity Workers and Lobbyists. In a Time of War.

Of 238 new Labour MPs elected in July 2024, 72 worked in the charitable sector, 72 were political employees and 70 worked in communications or lobbying. Roughly ninety percent have never worked in defence, manufacturing, engineering, medicine or law enforcement. A parliamentary source quoted in the Sunday Times put it plainly. If only we had the same number with defence or military experience, maybe we'd be in a different place.

Maybe. But the problem runs deeper than defence spending. It runs to the question of what kind of person ends up in parliament, what professional formation shapes their instincts, and whose interests they are constitutionally equipped to represent.

Charity sector workers are trained to see the world through the lens of vulnerable groups, international obligations and institutional compassion. Political employees are trained to manage narratives and avoid uncomfortable truths. Communications and lobbying professionals are trained to advance the interests of whoever is paying them. Not one of those professional backgrounds prepares you for the question of how to defend a sovereign nation, manage a border, hold a foreign state accountable or protect a citizen from an Iranian proxy group that is firebombing Jewish ambulances on British streets.

The parliament that responded to the Golders Green firebombing by debating the language used to describe it is a parliament staffed by people whose entire professional lives have trained them to manage perception rather than confront reality. The government that rolled out an anti-Muslim hostility definition while twenty Iranian backed terrorist plots were being planned on British streets is a government whose instinct is accommodation rather than accountability. The thirty six MPs who wrote to the Parliamentary Commissioner demanding Nick Timothy's investigation were not all acting from professional instinct. Several have documented histories of antisemitic language or associations. Others represent constituencies where the Muslim vote is the primary electoral consideration.

The Sunday Times source suggests the problem is defence spending priorities. It is that. But it is also the Trafalgar Square response, where Keir Starmer reached for Tommy Robinson rather than engaging with a theological argument he knew he could not answer. It is the Attorney General deploying his Jewish identity to provide cover for a false equivalence he knew to be false. It is the parliamentary machinery mobilised to silence the people naming what is happening while the people doing it operate without consequence. All of it flows from the same source. A political class whose professional formation is compassion, accommodation and message management, governing in a moment that requires clarity, resolve and the willingness to say plainly what the evidence shows.

Britain is not short of intelligence assessments. MI5 has thwarted twenty Iranian plots. The Walney report documented Iranian influence operations in the charitable sector. The security services know what is happening. The problem is not knowledge. It is the absence of the professional formation, the instincts, the language and the willingness that would allow the people in power to act on what they know.

Ninety percent of the new Labour intake came from charities, political offices and communications agencies. They were never going to see it coming. And even now that it has arrived, on the streets of Golders Green, in the WhatsApp groups of the Green Party, on the Embankment where death to America was chanted on a Sunday afternoon, they are still reaching for the tools their professional lives gave them. Compassion. Accommodation. Message management. And the instruction not to take the bait.

"Ninety percent of the new Labour intake came from charities, political offices and communications agencies."

[Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope]

This is an astonishing fact from today’s Sunday Times. At least 224 out of 257 new Labour MPs elected in July 2024 came from either charities or communications/lobbying agencies, or were formerly “political employees”. It explains so much about Labour backbenchers’ priorities.

[Denby Pottery @denbypottery]

We're finding comfort in your kind words shared as part of the #SaveDenby campaign.
After tough market conditions, we may be forced to close.
Help us:
- Share #SaveDenby
- Sign-up https://t.co/qoyniagzzF
- Buy Denby
- Visit Denby Pottery Village
Read more: https://t.co/6W1D10P655

[Claire Coutinho @ClaireCoutinho]

Last year we lost a THIRD of our refineries.

Under Labour, crippling Carbon Taxes are killing off our heavy industry.

Leaving us more reliant on foreign imports just as the world gets more dangerous.

Economic suicide.

[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.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There is a number attached to beef that gets cited at dinner parties. 15,000 litres per kilogram.

Almonds: 3,500. Avocados: 2,000. Pistachios: 11,400. Beef, the headline says, uses more than all of them.

Here is the thing nobody mentions at the dinner party. Water has categories.

Green water: rainfall. Falls on a field, absorbed by vegetation, returned to the atmosphere. Recycled. Continuous. Not extracted from anything. The rain was going to fall on that land whether Gerald was on it or not. Attributing it to the animal standing in it is an accounting choice, not a physical reality.

Blue water: groundwater and surface water. Pumped from rivers, drawn from aquifers. The water that, when it's gone, is gone. The water that is sinking the San Joaquin Valley. The number that matters.

Gerald's blue water per kilogram of beef: approximately 50 litres. Californian almonds: 3,785 litres. Per kilogram. From an aquifer that took centuries to accumulate.

The 15,000 litre figure is almost entirely green water. British rainfall, on British fields, falling regardless of Gerald. The dinner party number is the wrong number. The right number is 50 litres, and the almonds aren't close.

[Monsieur Cholet @stugoo17]

#PostOfficeScandal #HorizonScandal #Justice #PostOffice #Accountability

"CLEAR AND TRANSPARENT" — A MASTERCLASS IN MINISTERIAL FICTION
Howe+Co Solicitors have written to the Business and Trade Select Committee and the picture they paint of the MoJ's stewardship of the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Act 2024 is, to use the technical term, an omnishambles.

Let us count the ways:

The MoJ admits it has no idea how many people are eligible under the Act — and, crucially, no methodology for finding out. It simply waits for names to drift in, like a lifeboat crew that refuses to look at the sea.

73 cases — over 7% of known potential beneficiaries — have sat untouched for two years. A further 56 people deemed initially ineligible were never even contacted, because the MoJ couldn't trace their addresses. In 2026. With the full machinery of the state at its disposal.

Most delicious of all: Minister Alex Davies-Jones told the Committee under oath that there was "a clear and transparent appeal process." The MoJ's own written response? There is no separate appeals process.

One wonders which word — "clear," "transparent," or "process" — the Minister found most challenging.

The case of Mrs Glenys Eaton distils the farce into human terms.

Convicted alongside her husband at the same time, same place, same alleged victim — yet somehow only he appeared on the MoJ's list. It took 13 months, pro bono legal work, Subject Access Requests to extract information the MoJ already held, and a threatened judicial review before the Department conceded she was eligible all along.

Their excuse? "Fresh evidence." The evidence was fresh in the way that a library book is fresh — it had been sitting on their own shelves the entire time.

Parliament passed this Act to lift wrongful convictions. The MoJ appears to regard this as a suggestion.

Howe+Co are calling for the MoJ and DBT to be hauled back before the Committee to explain why it was given inaccurate information — and to be compelled to actually do the job Parliament instructed them to do.

One might have thought that after the worst Miscarriage of Justice in British legal history, the least the state could manage was competent paperwork. One would, apparently, be wrong.

@liambyrnemp @CommonsBTC @HoweAndCo @MoJGovUK @TimBushLondon @ElCShaikh @nickwallis @BBCEmmaSimpson @CastletonLee @Janetsk20073533 @DanNeidle @SpotlightJustiz @Lewislegal2024 @rbrooks45 @chrishead @chrish9070 @edwardhenry1 @biztradegovuk

Read the full Howe+Co letter to the Business and Trade Select Committee (24 February 2026) below 👇
🧵 1 of 7

[Joe Stanley @JoeWStanley]

A major issue with neonic flea treatments entering waterways in very large quantities, a pathway previously blamed on agricultural use (banned since 2014).

The entire neonic saga has been a case study in unintended consequences & misappropriated blame.

https://t.co/GLnKmVZyyP