Nigel

Ex Military, served my country for 25 years, I now run a Cardiac Health and Fitness Group. EU is not Europe.

[Nigel @Twoddley]

Coolest bloke in the world I bet his name is "Jack"

[Nigel @Twoddley]

Can anyone remember who are new PM is 🥸

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@Goosey30111568 It is quite hard when you don’t watch GB News 🤓

[Rɪᴄʜᴀʀᴅ Kᴇᴍᴘ ⋁ @COLRICHARDKEMP]

IDF Chief of Staff today: “We will continue to pursue those responsible, & we will not relent until we bring everyone who played a part in the 7 Oct massacre to justice. This is a permanent & ongoing mission.” Hamas should have remembered what happened after the Munich massacre.

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@daveatherton @Cambridge_Uni Now on his way to the House of Lords 🤔

[Steven Barrett @SBarrettBar]

France does not get to decide whether or not we have a border.

We do.

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@georginalibbie You ruined my Axminster, I just spat my tea all over it 🫤

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@EvacTony The Messsiah from up Norf has spoken, whilst waving his magic Bap 🥸

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@SBarrettBar Because at the moment He is still riding the ‘he is not Starmer wave’ but it will soon break on the shore.

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@slingcamp Go to Weyhill in Andover Sunday morning 👍

[Tony @EvacTony]

Well @andyburnham, if you set out to make yourself look like a complete idiot, to show people that you're completely unsuitable and out of your depth as PM, if you were determined to beat even Kier Starmer in the speed in which all credibility was lost and to turn yourself in to a figure of fun.......Sit back, relax, you've got the job done 👍🏻.

All it took was 30 odd tiktok videos and a bread roll.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

The level of gaslighting we've had in the last 24 hours is absolutely off the charts. You can fuck off with this shit:

- "Cueta is in Africa so it's not really Spain"

Pearl Harbor is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean so it's not really the US then?

- "A lot of them have gone home"

If 60,000 people break into your home and then leave that is better than them all squatting in your home permanently, but they still broke into your house.

- "They're refugees fleeing the climate crisis" (James O'Brien came up with this gem)

No, they're not. If I was fleeing the climate crisis, I'd bring my wife and kids, not 59,999 other men. They want a better life. They can apply for a visa and if they meet our rules, we'll decide which ones we want to accept and which we do not. Otherwise they're queue-barging and can fuck off.

- They can't get from to Cueta to mainland Europe because there's a stretch of water and a border there.

Uhh, we're letting boatloads of illegal immigrants into Britain on the daily. There is absolute no evidence European countries have any desire to enforce their borders.

- It's not a migrant invasion, it's just Morocco doing it on purpose

Oh, it's an *organised* invasion. What a relief.

Fuck my life.

[Nigel @Twoddley]

🤨

[Politi_Rican 🇵🇷 𝕏 🇺🇸 @TheRicanMemes]

Meanwhile on the other side of Spain 😭

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@vonderleyen Who are you ?

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@Jessrocks71 @andyburnham Oh Jes you are so correct, he is just an ordinary bloke who loves ordinary things and does ordinary bloke stuff every day and on a Friday has a chippie tea and a Crème Du Menthe and is a true ‘Mancunian’, sorry I meant a ‘Woollyback Scouser’ in a fish net vest and a thong 🥸

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@NannyPete_ @Wirralpix @David90shaw Pray tell us what you would rather pay then Deb? The Government or the money grabbing nursing homes ?🙄

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@juneslater17 @Zak2096 The new Mayor should kick him out of that building as the cost for the saga is going to come out of their budget 😬

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@andyburnham You won’t read the responses on here to this monumental utter shite idea, but I guess you should 🙄

[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.

[Nigel @Twoddley]

@mitsyarty 🫣😆

[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.