Mickey Hall

Terf adjacent.

[Yuan Yi Zhu @yuanyi_z]

A lot to chew on. But this doesn't reflect well on Prof. Arday.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Carbon capture at scale is a money pit with no guarantee of success or return. So it was wise to bin it. It also creates very few jobs, being capital intensive. So the trashing of 100,000 jobs is nationalist fantasy.
I’m not saying separatists are stupid, but …

[Daniel Sugarman @Daniel_Sugarman]

Last month, Diane Abbott stood up at a conference in London and described Ukraine’s defence against Russian invasion as, and I quote, “the NATO campaign against Russia” (watch from the 1 minute mark).

Labour are genuinely mad to let her back in.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Nauseating hypocrisy. You and your party’s green mongering over the years have driven BP and others away. You gave virtue signalling priority over jobs, families, communities. And now you express concern for them. Pass the sick bag. Scotland is truly run by a kakistocracy. But Scots only have themselves to blame. They keep electing self-serving numpties.

[Daniel Sugarman @Daniel_Sugarman]

Infantino now that Uefa, CONCACAF and the AFC have all told him to get in the sea

[Joo @JoosyJew]

Classic western saviour syndrome, trotting around the world thinking you can just do what you like and those dumb Asïan countries will comply and bow to your moral superiority. Just play your Bristolian trip-hop and stfu.

Massive Bell-Ends.

[L.A. Matthews @TheLAMatthews]

Do you have any idea how shit at your job you have to be to have 55 European countries actually agree on something 😂

[Helen Staniland @helenstaniland]

Where @owenjonesjourno can't imagine that women have actual lives outside of what he sees on social media.

[Jonathan Sacerdoti @jonsac]

I have been informed by the Oxford Union that the video of the Islam debate I spoke in has not been published because "two speaker consent forms were outstanding." All the speakers on my side consented – they forced us to sign before they would allow us into the debate.

So it seems that two of the speakers on the other side were permitted to speak without signing, and are now afraid of the debate being seen.

@Jacob_Rees_Mogg did you consent? Or was it the President herself? Or 'Abdullah al Andalusi' (Also known as Mouloud Farid and as Wazir Leton Rahman) or Michael Dawud?

[Akua Reindorf KC @akuareindorf]

@AlexXanthaki Yes, I'm afraid you are. It's not just you, there are plenty of others.

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

This is quite mind bogglingly bad. It's like listening to an adolescent troll from here in 2020.
Zero understanding and massive smugness.
It's entertaining, in a way, until you realize how much it discredits any serious human rights work at the UN.

[Mickey Hall @Mickey_Hall_UK]

@rinireg You're such a fucking liar, you don't see 'happy young people', you see lots of men. MEN!

[Mickey Hall @Mickey_Hall_UK]

@Arvandor131295 @rinireg It's a fucking bloke mate.

[Akua Reindorf KC @akuareindorf]

@AlexXanthaki Yes of course they're men. They're male adults. I don't use "man" & "woman" to refer to the indefinable concept of "gender identity". It has nothing to do with sport, for starters. And I reject "gender", which is just sex-based behaviour/presentation stereotypes. It's harmful.

[Akua Reindorf KC @akuareindorf]

@AlexXanthaki Thanks. The reasoning is astonishingly specious. A near perfect illustration of the obliteration of women’s rights in discrimination and human rights law which inevitably follows from redefining “women” to mean “women and some men”. I’m amazed you think it’s convincing.

[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.

[Róisín Murphy @roisinmurphy]

The TQ+ movement is homophobic; that's a big part of what I'm against. Identifying and calling out homophobia is difficult because liars like you grossly misuse the language.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The BBC has had thirty eight years and £3.8 billion a year to explain British farming to the British public. The job was eventually done by an American shopping website, in eight episodes, fronted by the man the BBC itself dropped over a row about a steak.

Countryfile first went out on 24 July 1988, and its origin is the part nobody brings up. It replaced Farming, a programme that had spent thirty years making news for the people who actually did the work. The new show was deliberately widened to take in everybody who merely liked the countryside as well as those who lived off it. Widened meant softened. In 2009 it moved to Sunday evenings, where five to six million people still watch, and it has been settled ever since into an hour of scenery, a ramble, a calendar competition and the weather.

Then in June 2021 a company best known for selling doorbells put out a series about a man failing to farm a thousand acres, and within a week the British public understood the subsidy system.

Look at what an American retailer put on screen that thirty eight years of Sunday nights had not. A thousand acres, a full year of work, £144 profit. A crop drowning in the field with nobody coming to help. A farmer selling at a price he is not allowed to set. A council able to shut a restaurant standing on a man's own land. The accounts, open, with jokes over the top.

James Rebanks, who keeps sheep for a living rather than for a segment, reckoned Clarkson did more for farmers in one series than Countryfile had managed in thirty years. The NFU said the same thing in nicer words.

Now the funding, which is where it gets genuinely funny.

Countryfile is paid for by £180 a year, rising on 1 April, taken from every household in Britain that watches live television, on pain of prosecution. Twenty three million licences. Three point eight billion pounds. Guaranteed money, a captive audience, a national mandate and a prime Sunday slot.

Clarkson's Farm is paid for by people voluntarily pressing play, and it goes out in more than 240 countries.

The nation's farmers had one broadcaster legally funded by them, obliged to serve them, sitting on the biggest slot in British television. It gave them a weather forecast and a photography competition, and when a bloke with a Lamborghini tractor did the actual job for free, the same building's stars went on a sofa to complain about his opening credits.

The BBC had the money, the mandate, the Sunday night and thirty eight years.

It used them to film the view.

[Kat Rosenfield @katrosenfield]

And here we go! I wrote for @thefp about Sophie Cunningham, George Orwell, and the emperor whose naked ding-dong everyone is very tired of pretending not to see

[Alex Hearn @hearnimator]

You’ll never guess who’s to blame for the immigration crisis in Spain