Andrew Malcolm

'Let us not grow weary of doing good,
for in due season we will reap,
if we do not give up'

All views my own. Re-tweets/Likes not necessarily an endorsement.

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

What a truly depressing set of pictures on how we treat animals

[Earth @earth]

So, you're tired of isolation?

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

A chilling reminder of the global security issues we face, from a man who knows. Yet, from @Keir_Starmer
whose primary role is the defence of our Nation, we have an abdication from this role - despite dire warnings from those with more integrity and exerience. #NotFitForOffice

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

The next war won't be won by armies, navies or air forces alone.

It'll be won by the country whose 19 year olds can code, whose factories can build drones in weeks not years, and whose grid stays on when someone tries to switch it off.

Industry. Society. Economy. That's the fight now.

We're not ready. And we're not being honest about what getting ready will cost.

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

@ZackPolanski 'Gut wrenching'! A Police Officer was attacked with a sledge-hammer, and you make this type of comment! You really are a half-wit - and a dangerous one at that - along with the other radicalised ideological idiots who follow this path. Grow up, develop some integrity. Be useful.

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

@ZackPolanski 'Gut wrenching'! A Police Officer was attacked with a sledge-hammer, and you make this type of comment! You really are a half-wit - and a dangerous one at that - along with the other radicalised ideological idiots who follow this path. Grow up, develop some integrity. Be useful.

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

Very sad to hear this news. Alongside Caravaggio, Hockney was my favourite artist - different, yet alike in so many ways. Both were geniuses, and Hockney's work in particular was a master class in observation.
RIP David Hockney

[BBC Breaking News @BBCBreaking]

British artist David Hockney has died aged 88, his publicist has said https://t.co/nvCAwmcR9t

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Here’s the problem. The liberal political class wants us to treat atrocities like Belfast as single, random, isolated incidents. “Yes, it’s horrific, but don’t overreact,” they say. “Let the police do their job. Justice will be delivered. Let’s remain united,” and so on.

But the public can see that such incidents *aren’t* random or isolated. They are, in fact, all the consequence of massive state failure in the area of asylum and immigration. All roads lead back there.

That’s why people are angry.. They are sick of the platitudes that get trotted out after each fresh incident. They don’t want to hear them anymore. They know that the decisions of establishment politicians have brought us to this current pass, and they don’t trust those same politicians to fix things, especially when some of them refuse to even recognise that the public’s anger is justified.

There has been a huge vibe shift in recent years. Imagine - God forbid - there were another 7/7. Does anyone think the public response would be anything like as restrained as it was then? We are in really dangerous territory.

The public don’t want flowers and candles and “Don’t let them divide us.” They want someone who says, “I recognise that the state has failed abjectly. We have allowed far too many people to settle in the country without knowing who they truly are. It has disrupted your communities. Your anger is justified. And I will do everything in my power to put things right.”

Any politician unwilling to articulate that message, fully and sincerely, is effectively sanctioning more years of growing social disharmony and discord. Things cannot heal until those in power recognise the extent of the problem and what it will take to fix it. And, on both counts, most of them don’t.

That’s why the next few years are going to be very, very turbulent.

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

We Will Remember Them

[Turning Point UK 🇬🇧 @TPointUK]

Remembering our heroes 82 years later.

Lest we forget.

D-Day 82.

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

@DanielJHannan 'A culture of compliance has displaced a culture of conscience' ... it also seeks to remove from the Police 'tool-kit', common sense and 'sixth-sense', that feeling that something isn't quite right so you question it. Policing without fear or favour devastatingly neutered.

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

@DanielJHannan 'A culture of compliance has displaced a culture of conscience' ... it also seeks to remove from the Police 'tool-kit', common sense and 'sixth-sense', that feeling that something isn't quite right so you question it. Policing without fear or favour devastatingly neutered.

[Father Roger Parker @SCathsParsonage]

Blower illustrates a contemporary take on Lowry.

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

'What we’ve done to deserve all this isn’t clear. Perhaps electing them is the first clue. In other words we reap what we sow'. 
A magisterial assessment by @afneil of what is, in effect, a huge deficit of integrity in politics & society. We're being #takenforfools Time to change

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

My monologue on today’s The Times at One with
ANDREW NEIL on our political leadership deficit @TimesRadio

I think we can pretty much all agree this is not exactly a golden age for British political leadership. 

The UK Prime Minister is such a lame duck he virtually quacks. 

The former First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, once feared by Scottish journalists and feted by the London media, is now held in such low regard north of the border that she’s moving to London. At least she’ll avoid the higher taxes she imposed on her fellow Scots. 

And the glitzy capital is probably a more fitting habitation for the Imelda McMarcos de nos jours than the grime of Glasgow or the grey of Auld Reekie (aka Edinburgh). 

But it does leave the current First Minister, John ‘Jobsworth’ Swinney, to deal with the fallout of the biggest scandal to hit Scottish politics since — well maybe since forever. 

In other leadership news, the Lib Dems are led by a man whose main claim to public recognition is falling in the water, the Greens by a man who seems to have more skeletons in his closet than Davy Jones’s locker. 

Nigel Farage has his followers but so far his political abilities have been as an insurgent rather than somebody who could run a country. 

In a dispiriting field, Kemi Badenoch is just about the only political leader to shine. But she leads a brand which could be tarnished beyond repair. 

Keir Starmer clings to power, perhaps emboldened by the lacklustre efforts of those who would unseat him. 

Wes Streeting, who resigned as Health Secretary to challenge Starmer, had second thoughts and now strikes a somewhat forlorn figure, launching a battle of ideas without a single new idea to offer. 

Andy Burnham, fighting the Makerfield by election as the springboard to his own challenge to Starmer, has hardly set the heather on fire with his campaign. That could be because he’s so dizzy from all the policy U-turns he’s executing. 

The Starmer-Streeting-Burnham performance is emboldening others even less talented to think they might be in with a chance of the big job. 

The Times reports that Darren Jones, barely a household name in his own household, is thinking of throwing his hat in the ring. 

What we’ve done to deserve all this isn’t clear. Perhaps electing them is the first clue. In other words we reap what we sow. 

Makerfield might be par for the course. Burnham is favourite to win, even if not runaway favourite. 

The British, of course, can be, every now and then,  notoriously curmudgeonly and contrarian. Perhaps the good people of Makerfield will decide it’s time to display such characteristics once more. 

If Burnham does go down to defeat on June 18 it could be because voters have had enough of being taken for granted. But what happens to Labour after that is anybody’s guess.

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

@Photomusicrock Beats throwing a bean bag to each other 😁

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

@Photomusicrock Beats throwing a bean bag to each other 😁

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

He's not even gone for the ball!

[The Football Feed @TheFootballFeed]

HOW ON EARTH HAS HAVERTZ NOT BEEN SENT OFF FOR THIS?!🤯📷❌

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

@Jonathan_Hinder Well said @Jonathan_Hinder from one who's been there to another who has: "... if you know - you know"!

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

Scott Parker seemed a man of humility & some integrity. He took us to the PL, but we all know how difficult it is to stay there - I'm sure it wasn't for lack of trying. Thank you for your efforts.
Whoever manages our club now has a big job on their hands.
#UTC #ForeverBurnley

[Burnley FC @BurnleyOfficial]

Club Statement: Scott Parker

Scott Parker has left his position as Head Coach of Burnley Football Club by mutual consent.

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

https://t.co/25OBZp6aYT
@metpoliceuk Absolutely right to support the brave officers & let's not forget the civilian who helped them too. Unless you've had to deal with an extremely violent person, you have no concept what is needed to do so

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The Ruminati live in conditions of persistent suffering, hidden from the public by the bucolic propaganda of British agriculture. Below, a single day in their captivity.

5.47am. Gerald.

Awake. Forty acres of permanent pasture. No fences blocking his view of the eastern hedgerow. He has chosen, of his own free will, to graze the south corner. He has chosen the south corner every morning for four years. The fact that he keeps choosing it is itself a sign of how thoroughly his spirit has been broken.

6.13am. Doris.

On the 380-metre contour. Wind at her back. Frost on the turf. She walked there at her own pace, by a route she chose, because the pressure was dropping and Doris, after six years on this fell, has internalised the relationship between barometric pressure and where she would prefer to stand. The cruelty of allowing her to make this decision herself, rather than confining her to an indoor unit with piped music, is not yet under review.

7.02am. Keith.

On the barn roof. He ascended unprompted at 6.51am. The route involves a stone wall and a 1.8-metre gap. He selected it from four available alternatives. He is now standing on a 12-degree slope at five metres, eating moss. Dave is watching from the kitchen window. Dave has not intervened. The systemic failure here has been to permit a goat to do, by his own choice, what goats have been doing without supervision for ten thousand years.

8.30am. Eduardo.

Walking the perimeter at his own pace, in his own time, for his own reasons. No farmer. No whip. No bell. Humming. He has, by 8.30am, found three things, filed them, and confirmed each as fine. The captivity continues.

9.45am. Freya.

Stripping bark from an ash on the western boundary of her twenty-hectare enclosure. Narrow vertical strips. The cambium will heal by autumn. Three lichen species not previously recorded on the estate will colonise the dead wood by year end. The cruelty of allowing a four-hundred-and-fifty-kilogram bison to do, on a Welsh hillside, what bison have been doing on European hillsides for two hundred thousand years, is ongoing.

11.00am. Gerald.

Lain down. Nobody asked him to. Cortisol within normal range. Heart rate approximately 50bpm. He has, by every available metric, transcended the concept of mild discomfort.

1.30pm. Doris.

Went in the bog. Came out of the bog. Has not, in any available behavioural indicator, acknowledged the bog occurred. Stoic abuse, by any reasonable definition, is taking place.

4.40pm. Keith.

Down off the roof. Now in Steve's garden. Eating the bindweed Steve has been losing to for a decade. The bindweed will be gone by Wednesday. Steve will file complaint number twenty-seven before Friday. Keith will not be informed of either development.

7.30pm. Across the Ruminati.

Gerald is lying down for the night. No rope. No tether.

Doris is at the east wall, in the spot she found at five months old.

Keith is back on the barn roof. The reason for the second visit is not on any record.

Eduardo is at the geometric centre of his field, kushed, humming.

Freya is somewhere in the trees.

Marged is asleep under the apple tree.

The cruelty, it is clear, is unrelenting.

The animals have, at no point in the day, been confined indoors, restrained, transported, supplemented, or particularly inconvenienced. They have been allowed to do exactly what their species was designed to do, on the land they belong on, at the pace they prefer.

If this is suffering, the framework needs revising.

It's nearly May. The fells are greening. The lapwings are back. The barn roof has new lichen. The bindweed is making its annual run at Steve's south wall.

Go and have a look.

[Bootneck Stuff @BootneckStuff]

Royal Marines boxing up against US Navy boxing. It won't be hard to guess what happened...

[Andrew Malcolm @NorthernCleric]

Our club will go on - because we are more than just football.
#UpwardsandOnwards
#UTC
#Relentless
@BurnleyOfficial

[Burnley FC @BurnleyOfficial]

A statement from the Club following the confirmation of our relegation from the Premier League.