A Griff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺

Finding beauty in the ordinary. Truth may offend but it remains truth. #Gryffindor #sexrealist

[A Griff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺 @AGriffe8]

“If our dreams get broken along the way, we have to make new ones from the pieces.”
Lisa McGee, #DerryGirls

[Janet Inglis @ThatAussieWoman]

O. M. G!

The Australian published my comment!

Times really are changing.

Hate Speech is changing sides!

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

The Chief Constable of Essex Police said it was “madness” - the furore after two officers visited my house on Remembrance Sunday.

He described it as “just a five-minute conversation with a journalist”.

There is no “just” about a visit from the police. It is deliberately intimidating and an attack on free speech.

I was accused of a serious offence under the Public Order Act for posting a tweet, a year earlier. No one thinks the tweet came anywhere near the threshold for criminal investigation.

The CPS threw the case out but the process is the punishment.

In the same week, a 15-year-old boy was robbed at knifepoint a few miles from me. Terrified, he called the police and was told it was no longer a live incident!

Feisty tweet - police visit. Knife crime - you’re on your own, mate.

Police now think it’s their business to advise and to lecture to enforce “values”. Usually on the basis of an allegation by a “protected characteristic”.

They look increasingly sinister and ridiculous. They need to return to policing.

Allister did nothing wrong and I hope he joins me in suing the police.

Innocent, decent people must take a stand against tyranny,

Thank god for @SpeechUnion
Do join today if you haven’t already.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

NHS SPENT 11 MILLION POUNDS TRYING TO PROVE ONE CARDIOLOGIST WAS WRONG

Dr Raj Mattu flagged 5 patients crammed into 4 bed cardiac bays at Walsgrave Hospital in 2001. A 35 year old died because staff could not reach him in time.

He told @BBC. The trust suspended him, reportedly hired private investigators, and sent over 200 complaints about him to @gmcuk. All 200 were rejected.

At the 2016 remedy hearing the trust's barrister called him greedy for wanting the compensation he was already owed, then suggested he retrain as a school teacher on 30,000 pounds a year.

He won. Around 1.22 million pounds, up to 2.5 million once tax was added. The legal fight cost the trust over 11 million in public money.

Patients died. He spoke up. The system spent a decade trying to prove him wrong instead of fixing the ward.

Sources: @BBC @Telegraph @itvnews @guardian

[A Griff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺 @AGriffe8]

@SamaHoole I have a fleece rug - shorn off the sheep and felted onto a wool back. No sheep harmed in the process and I love it! Wool is amazing material. We should be using more of it instead of man made fibres.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Scientists have quietly perfected a miracle fibre. Read the spec sheet before I tell you what it is.

- Grows back every year on nothing but sunlight and grass, no oil well in sight
- Biodegrades to nothing in a field within months
- Sheds not a single microplastic in the wash
- Breathes when you're hot, holds heat when you're cold, keeps you warm even soaked through
- Resists fire with no chemical treatment, smothering its own flame where synthetics melt onto skin
- Grows on steep, poor, rain-lashed ground that could never carry a crop
- Cared for properly, one coat outlasts a decade of anything else
- Carried human beings, alive and warm, through the last ice age

It is wool. It comes off a sheep. You shear it, the sheep trots off lighter, and next spring it grows another one, for free, forever.

Now the thing they would rather have on your back. Polyester, which is plastic, which is crude oil spun into thread.

- Sheds hundreds of thousands of microplastic fibres every single wash, into the rivers, the fish, and you
- Will not rot in five hundred years
- Melts in a fire and welds itself to skin
- Sits in landfill long after you are gone

So follow this carefully. The sheep grazing a Welsh hillside is the villain. The oil rig feeding the polyester plant is the saviour. The renewable coat that returns to the soil is the sin, and the fossil-fuel jacket that outlives your grandchildren is the responsible choice.

They have you buying petroleum and calling it green, while a sheep on a mountain quietly does the very thing they claim to want, and gets vilified for it.

Wear the wool. Let them explain the plastic.

[David Atherton @daveatherton]

This is Cllr Rick Rowe, for the Green Party Chiswick Riverside. He proposed to stop outside seating in pubs along the Thames, which was critiallly commented on by Alastair. Rowe sent two police officers to warn him off about X posting on this issue & was threatened with arrest.

Last evening Rowe & his boyfriend visited the pub Alastair was drinking in. He was filmed & Rowe tried to grab his phone.

It appears the @MetCC Police passed on confidential information to Rowe.

[A Griff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺 @AGriffe8]

@MissNothing_28 @HazelAppleyard Try reading it again. It’s the boyfriend writing it - not the girlfriend!

[Lucy Hunter Blackburn @LucyHunterB]

For anyone inducted into the civil service by clever, sane, ethical, analytic people who were really good at the job, and cared about about what their staff did, following the Tempest-DEFRA ET is like reading a workplace version of The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

Just - how?

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Swiss farmers planted flowers between their crops and watched pest damage drop by over half. The UK is now running the same trial across 15 farms. The reason this works is embarrassingly simple.

A Swiss study on winter wheat found that fields with wildflower strips had 40 to 53% fewer leaf beetle pests than fields without. Crop damage dropped 61%.

The mechanism is simple. Wildflowers feed hoverflies, lacewings, parasitic wasps, ladybugs, and ground beetles. Those insects eat the aphids, beetle larvae, and caterpillars that farmers would otherwise spray for. A few meters of wildflowers hosts an unpaid pest control crew that would jump at the chance to whoop some aphid ass.

In apple orchards where no insecticides had been used for five years, plots with wildflower alleyways had 9.2% damaged fruit. Control plots without flowers had 32.5%.

The UK is now running a five-year trial across 15 farms placing 6-meter flower strips through the middle of fields, not just at the edges, because the beneficial insects can't reach the center of a large field otherwise.

This works the same way in a backyard vegetable garden as it does on a commercial farm. Plant native flowering species near your tomatoes, beans, and squash. The pests still show up, but the predators show up too.

Study doi: 20151369

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

Rick Rowe just came to the pub I was in with his boyfriend, knowing I was there, because he’d sent the police to intimidate me earlier. His boyfriend filmed me half the evening. Rick tried to grab my phone twice. It’s on film. He also said confidential information about me that the police had told him. I’m very happy to prosecute him and the police.

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

A rare moment of honesty at r/mtf today. The commenters are not happy.

[Harriet Sergeant @HarrietSergeant]

“This city is ours. No-one touches us here - even the police won’t stop you.”
A convicted people smuggler, boasting to the BBC in Leicester already runs his own fiefdom.
Burnham’s localism won’t stop men like this. It’ll crown them. Mini mayors. Mini despots. Unaccountable to anyone but themselves.

[For Women Scotland @ForWomenScot]

A 13 year old girl! Safeguarding is on its knees in Scotland.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

FAO all who support the UK puberty blockers trial:

'They ruined my life. They shaped and folded my body according to what they thought would look the best... You can't treat kids like that. We're not your art project.'

-- detransitioner Jonni Skinner

https://t.co/DlTYUfzi5H

[Emily Wilding Davison🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @Wommando]

⚠️SICKENING LENIENCY⚠️

➡️Humberside Police’s former Head of Communications, David Drury, 40, has been jailed for a PATHETIC 9 years for sustained "grotesque" abuse and r-pe of a boy under 13.

Drury was senior police spin doctor who attempted to "dissuade journalists" from reporting on a r-pe gang case!

His teacher partner Daniel Sellers, 44, got 4.5 years for helping him do it.

A senior police official.
A teacher.
Positions of authority.
Positions of trust.
Both systematically abused a child over years, shared CSA images, and showed zero remorse for their sick crimes - and they get a PATHETIC 13.5 years between them.

🚫These sentences are sickening - and need challenging. Details below.

[Colin Wynter KC @QcWynter]

A 70 yr old woman has revealed that following a diagnosis of cancer at a southern NHS Trust, she was told she would be put on palliative care.
She sought a second opinion & was referred to Guy's.
Two years on and she is in remission.
Post code lottery but please do search around.

[James Dreyfus @DreyfusJames]

I had deleted my post, after I read the situation re the seating outside the Chiswick pubs had been resolved.

But I’ve just seen the video of the police “having a conversation” with @London_W4 & read this about Rick Rowe’s behaviour.

This is the gurning nit…

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Gerald has a robin. Or, to be precise about the hierarchy, a robin has Gerald.

It turned up in autumn and simply took possession, the way robins do, and now it treats a nine-hundred-kilogram bull as its personal estate, its transport, and its dinner service. It rides on his back. It perches on a horn like a figurehead. It supervises the grazing from the gate with the stern air of a foreman. When Gerald moves to fresh grass, the robin moves with him, because Gerald is, frankly, the best thing that ever happened to it.

There is an ancient bargain underneath it. Long before there were gardeners for robins to pester, there were great grazing beasts, wild cattle and boar and bison, turning the earth and flushing out insects wherever they went. That famous robin boldness, the way one sits a foot from your spade with an expectant eye, was never about you. It is about the enormous animal you are standing in for. For thousands of years, a robin's finest meal ticket was to shadow something huge, heavy, and permanently eating.

Gerald is that something. Every hoof-fall in the wet grass turns up a beetle, a grub, a startled spider, and the robin is there to collect the rent. Gerald neither minds nor notices, which in his case comes to the same thing.

So one of the oldest partnerships in the country plays out in a field near Hereford. The little red tyrant, convinced he owns the bull. The bull, serenely letting him believe it.

Gerald grazes. The robin rides. Neither has read a word about the other, and between them they have it perfectly worked out, which is more than most of us can say.

[Cathy Larkman 💚🤍 💜🦢🏃‍♀️ @JackMerched]

YOUR JOB, Julia Gillard, before you introduce legislation - is to consider the potential consequences. You admit that you didn't. You failed women and girls.

Very proud of the brilliant @WRN_Manchester woman who asked the question and forced the answer.

[teresa smith @treesey]

He’s right