Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦

Saints fan since 2016. Bellringer for 45 years.

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

@UKChange 😳😢I assume this is from the next series next year?

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

@Lost___London @BygoneBritain @PubHistoryTours Do you by any chance have any pictures of the Whitechapel bell foundry? Sadly it closed a few years ago. As a bellringer I had the pleasure of visiting the foundry many years ago.

[Tom Jones @RealSirTomJones]

To celebrate Tower Of Song…I thought I’d share with you the original Music Video from 2012. Thank you for all the love on the track this past week, it’s been a real pleasure to read and hear your comments on The Voice UK performance. I hope you enjoy the video 🙏

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

@EastleighFC @_GSPhotography 👏 love that!

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🚨 Bernard Matthews, a major British food producer, is warning that rising costs, taxation and supply-chain pressures are threatening UK food production, while closing its Derby processing site with around 600 jobs reportedly at risk.

“A lack of Government action could leave the UK increasingly reliant on lower-quality imports and weaken food security.”

Farmers losing productive capacity, processors losing capacity, and imports being treated as the automatic replacement.

This is what government still doesn’t understand.

Lose a farm and you lose production.

Lose a processor and you lose the infrastructure that allows surrounding farms to produce.

Lose enough of both and supermarkets simply replace British food with imports.

Except we’re entering a world of climate-driven crop failures, geopolitical instability and disrupted fertiliser and energy supplies in which there may be less surplus food available on world markets.

You cannot assume somebody somewhere will always have cheap food to sell Britain.

Food security isn’t a supermarket shelf. It’s the entire productive system behind it.

Once that capacity has gone, rebuilding it is enormously difficult.

🇬🇧 Food security is national security.

@andyburnham @labourlewis

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

Spot on!

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🚨 BRITAIN IS LOSING THE CAPACITY TO PRODUCE

This isn’t just happening in farming.

The Times reports that smaller housebuilders are now struggling to sell even one new home a month.

In 1980s small and medium-sized builders produced around 40% of Britain’s new homes.

🔥 Today it’s less than 10%.

And the industry is warning: “We risk losing the very capacity that the government’s targets depend on.”

Sound familiar? Farmers are warning they may not have the cash to plant next year’s crops or replace livestock.

Housebuilders are stopping buying land, scaling back and conserving cash.

🤨 Yet government wants more homes AND greater food security.

This is Britain’s underlying economic disease.

We keep squeezing the people who actually produce things until production becomes unviable, then announce targets demanding they produce more.

Houses. Food. Energy. Manufacturing.

Once productive capacity disappears, it takes years to rebuild.

Britain 🇬🇧 doesn’t just need growth. It needs to start producing things again.

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

This has been coming. Farmers need more financial support from the #LabourParty We need to stop building on farmland and perhaps consider growing our own fruit and vegetables at home. We can’t always rely on imports from Europe, they have a shortage problem of their own!

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🚨 BRITAIN FACES FOOD SHORTAGES WITHIN MONTHS

Farmers have been warning about this for years. Now more than a dozen farming organisations say British agriculture has reached 🔥 crisis point 🔥

This isn’t simply about a poor harvest.

Farmers are warning they may not have enough money to plant next year’s crops or replace livestock.

Think about what that means.

🌾 The worst harvest since records began in 1984.
🥔 Potatoes and carrots expected to be smaller than usual.
🐑 500+ bluetongue cases.
🚜 Agricultural input costs soaring.
💰 Farm cashflow collapsing.
🌍 Fertiliser supply and prices exposed to the war in Iran and Strait of Hormuz.

And livestock farmers are already using winter fodder in August. Some are being forced to sell animals they cannot afford to feed.

Those rising cattle kill numbers aren’t evidence of abundant food. They may be evidence of Britain’s productive capacity being liquidated.

Kill the breeding herd and you don’t replace it next spring.

Fail to plant the wheat this autumn and you don’t harvest it next summer.

Lose farmers and productive capacity and cheap imports may disguise the problem … until the imports aren’t cheap or aren’t available.

This is why I keep saying food security is national security.

🆘 Britain needs an emergency COBRA-level food-production plan now, not after shortages appear on supermarket shelves @andyburnham @labourlewis

🇬🇧 You cannot import your way out of a global food crisis.
🔗 https://t.co/HZJ3VJNPsG

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

@GeoffreyLean We are losing much needed farmland to the construction of Data Centres, battery storage, solar farms and expensive houses, all being given the green light at break neck speed. Planning regulations have recently been altered to make it easier to ride roughshod over councils!

[Brendan May @bmay]

The facts. This is how to edit a newspaper.

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

This 👇

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

The Uberisation of water must be stopped.

Profiting from scarcity in an essential of life is bad enough. But these companies helped create the scarcity.

🚰 No major reservoir built since privatisation
💧 2.9 billion litres leaked every day
🏗️ Just one operational desalination plant

For 35+ years, they’ve sweated the assets instead of investing in them. Now they want us to pay even more for their failures.

Water is a common good, not a commodity.

Bring it back into public ownership.

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

@ShaneTate72 @premnsikka Appalling idea. Financially punish the public during heatwaves due to water companies greed and dereliction of duty as a provider of clean safe water. Burnham and the Labour government need to “kick some ass” as the saying goes!

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

@ShaneTate72 @premnsikka Full article on Gov UK website. This was announced last year while Starmer was still PM.
“Ofwat to be abolished and a new, single, powerful regulator to be established to cut water pollution in England’s rivers, lakes and seas, and protect families from massive bill hikes.”

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

This article is so on the money. The water companies should be ashamed of themselves for what they have allowed to happen. So short sighted. #buildmorereservoirs https://t.co/NfqbtCdJlm

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

👇👇

[The New Forest - Forestry England @EngNewForest]

⚠️ In light of the Government's severe alert regarding wildfires we would like to remind everyone:

🚫 All BBQs - including disposable ones - campfires, and outdoor cooking equipment including stoves are permanently banned in the New Forest.

👇

[tern @1goodtern]

I saw three sheep dead on the hills yesterday and mentioned it to the farmer. He said it was this 👇and it was wrecking his flock. He had them vaccinated this week - but it takes 3 weeks for immunity to build.
He said they weren't warned early enough.

https://t.co/km5CkKwdm7

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

@paulpowlesland I had no idea about the knock on effect on a tidal river connected to an estuary when there is a drought. It’s mind blowing. I just wander how many people really know how serious this can get. Thank you to you and all river guardians for all the hard work you all do on the river.

[Richard Corbett @RichardGCorbett]

Since water services were sold off by Thatcher to be run for private profit, the water companies have:
- amassed debts of over £50bn
- paid £78bn to shareholders
- raised CEO pay to £1-3 million a year
- lose 2.87bn litres of water a day through leaky pipes
- polluted EVERY river

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

It’s the usual smoke & mirrors from the Environment Agency on this.

The EA manipulates the data to make the current disastrous state of our rivers look better than it is by carefully choosing sampling points. I was surprised (given my knowledge of the river) to find out from the EA that the River Roding was ok & improving on most metrics. Then I found out that they have only *one* sampling point on the whole lower river & it’s conveniently located just above where the largest amount of sewage enters the river (see picture below) & where the river is most physically modified. How can we actually restore our rivers, rather than just pretending they are fine, without having a genuine picture of the health of the river?

Even worse, tributaries like the Aldersbrook aren’t even monitored at all, despite them being important enough to warrant a permit regime with threat of jail if you touch the river without consent. I wonder if there should be a new ‘Water Framework Directive’ classification of ‘Ecologically Dead; no plans to resurrect it’ for rivers like the Aldersbrook?

[Caroline Emerson 💙 🇺🇦 @SoftSallySaint]

‘It’s irreplaceable’: Fury over Reform plans to expand quarry in ancient Kent woodland https://t.co/Lgpd3X4U4E

[dominic dyer @domdyer70]

So Telegraph in it’s desperation to avoid recognising climate change is now blaming rewilding for wildfires