SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine

Coaching in leadership and soft skills. Supporting women in STEM. Looking to a return to 🇪🇺. A believer in science and sex realism.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

Magnificent!

[Emma Harriet Nicholson @Baroness_Nichol]

A big Trades Union seems ignorant on Employment Law

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

@SusannaRustin You’re welcome, @SusannaRustin. You write well and truthfully.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

A reasonable and fair minded case made.

[Susanna Rustin @SusannaRustin]

https://t.co/0Jq7JqeGT1

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

Beautifully outlined and depressingly true.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.

Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.

Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.

That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.

This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.

So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.

The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.

And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

[Caroline Farrow @CF_Farrow]

I want to recap what actually happened at M&S, because some people seem determined to turn this into something it was not.

I went early evening because I thought the shop would be quieter. I was shopping with my teenage daughter, who is autistic and has sensory issues around clothing.

Anyone who parents a child with sensory difficulties will understand how hard clothes shopping can be. Fabric, fit, seams, tightness, waistbands, labels, texture, all of it matters. Something can look perfectly fine on the hanger and be completely unbearable once worn.

Ordering several sizes online and returning them is neither logistically nor economically feasible for us, and in any case my daughter likes to touch and see things before deciding whether she is comfortable with them. That approach simply doesn’t work for her.

So, for the avoidance of doubt, nothing would have suited me better than for my daughter to be able to try the clothes on and ensure she has enough things to see her through Summer.

That was the whole point of going to the changing rooms.

I was not looking for confrontation. I was not trying to make a political point. I was trying to make an ordinary shopping trip work for an autistic teenage girl who finds clothes difficult.

I walked into the changing area calmly and practically. My intention was to find a suitable cubicle, ideally the larger disabled one, check that it felt safe and manageable, and then encourage my daughter to follow me in.

That was the plan.

Had she been able to try the clothes on, it would have saved time, stress, uncertainty, returns, and the familiar nightmare of buying something that later turns out to be impossible for her to wear.

So the idea that I somehow wanted there to be a problem is absurd.

The changing room was supposed to be the solution.

The problem arose when my daughter became distressed by the presence of a male member of staff supervising the changing area. I had not anticipated her reaction. It was not scripted by me. I did not wind her up. I did not march in looking for a row.

She reacted. I saw her distress. I took it seriously.

And yes, I think a teenage girl, particularly an autistic teenage girl, is entitled to feel safe and comfortable in a changing-room environment.

This is not complicated. It is not about hating anyone. It is not about being difficult. It is not about “vibes” or emotional projection or whatever patronising theory people wish to attach to it online.

It is about a vulnerable young woman trying to buy clothes, and finding that the space provided did not feel safe or appropriate to her.

Parents of autistic children spend a lot of time trying to prepare, adapt, reassure, smooth things over, and make ordinary life manageable. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

On this occasion, it didn’t.

But I will not apologise for taking my daughter’s distress seriously. Or believing that M&S should change their policy.

[Billymawa @Billymawa]

I live in Ince. This utter weapon is spewing nothing but hate and lies. It’s NOT a mosque, it’s a community centre that includes a small prayer room, amongst other things (such as a foodbank). Take your disgusting racism @RobKenyonReform and fuck off out of my constituency.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

All power to his elbow. Now we need swift boxes as well!

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

A bricklayer in East Yorkshire has spent 35 years putting up barn owl nest boxes on weekends. This year, the region saw 308 owlets hatch.

His name is Robert Salter. He's 56 and does bricklaying full time. In 1990, he saw a piece on the news about a man in Lincolnshire installing barn owl boxes, and decided he'd do the same. He started with five.

He now has more than 350 boxes scattered across fields, farms, outbuildings, and trees in East Yorkshire. Every June, he takes four weeks off from bricklaying and visits them with his wife Sue. Scrambling up ladders, ringing chicks, cleaning boxes, repairing the ones the weather got to. He's a licensed bird ringer for the British Trust for Ornithology.

In 2024, the region ringed 95 owlets. In 2025, the count was 308. The Barn Owl Trust says that nationally, this year was "pretty poor" for barn owl breeding, but east Yorkshire is the exception, and it's the exception because of one man with a ladder.

The barn owl population in the UK was estimated at 4,000 pairs in the mid-2000s and crashed to roughly 1,000 by the early 2010s. The species is still recovering.

Most of conservation is one person who refuses to give up.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

I’m shocked at this absurdity.

[Graham Linehan @Glinner]

I've received a statement from Emanuel Brünisholz, who starts a ten-day prison sentence in Switzerland tomorrow for saying that men and women have different skeletons. You can write to the Swiss Federal Dept of Justice and police at [email protected] to protest this disgraceful situation.
*******
In 2022, I wrote on Facebook that a human skeleton can only be male or female. I pointed out that if, two centuries from now, someone were to unearth the remains of today’s LGBTQI people, they would find nothing but male or female skeletons. To imagine that one would find anything other than male or female struck me as a fantasy divorced from reason, so I described it as a a mentally ill idea. 

For that remark I was fined 500 Swiss francs. I refused to pay, and so, on the 2nd of December 2025, I will serve ten days in prison. It is worth noting that, legally speaking, this prison sentence is not a punishment for refusing to pay the fine. Instead, the prison sentence is an alternative way to be punished for the Facebook post itself. I have chosen to trade a monetary fine for time behind bars.

I am fully prepared to go to prison, if that is what it takes to expose the absurdity and authoritarianism of the trans ideology that has now taken root in Switzerland. I intend to face it with good humour; I will not let myself be bent or broken by those who hope to silence me through pressure or intimidation. That, after all, is their aim: to wear me down until I fall quiet. I have no intention of doing so.

The LGBTQ+ movement behaves like a zealous sect. They try to brand me a homophobe to shut me up. I am nothing of the sort. I repair wind instruments for a living, and I come from a left-wing, tolerant household. What troubles me is watching the activists in that movement exploit ordinary LGB people for political ends that strike me as dangerous nonense. These tactics have begun to cast a long shadow over Switzerland and Europe alike, as a kind of woke dictatorship. 

My thanks go to Graham Linehan, who understands this battle all too well. In times like these, solidarity among reasonable people who are willing to speak freely and plainly is essential. 

- Emanuel Brünisholz

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

@Supernatural979 Grateful too for your observation. Have blocked both.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

I was raped at 9 by boys aged 12-14. It has taken me the best part of 50 years of working on myself to recover from what they did and I still dissociate from time to time. This judge was reprehensible in his remarks and actions.

[LBC @LBC]

'Of course they knew what they were doing.'

After three teenage boys avoided jail in a gang-rape case, @aliciakearns tells @ShelaghFogarty she believes the judge 'cares more about the future of the boys than the girls'.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

@Supernatural979 Good advice.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

@MemoryMedieval There's the wonderful book “From The Holy Mountain” by Wlliam Dalrymple that charts the journey following two monks across the Byzantine Christian world in the modern middle east. He talks of his experiences on Mount Athos.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

@Supernatural979 @The_Darwinist52 @Belinfante46138 @LoyEllie2 A troll?

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

@Supernatural979 @The_Darwinist52 @Belinfante46138 @LoyEllie2 Grateful for your determined support. And my heart goes out to you for your experience. It’s too many women and girls. Feel for you.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

Very exciting.

[Varun Guru @iamvarunguru]

Three 16 year old Indian students can remove microplastics from water using tamarind seeds.

And they've received a $12,500 grant from The Earth Prize to develop this solution.

How did they do it?

Tamarind seeds have something called polysaccharide - which is a sticky compound that can natural polymer. Kinda like a plant-based glue.

This glue when mixed with water can pull out microplastics and clump them together.

And these kids are using the same principle to develop their product called "Plas-Stick" - which is just this power made from waste tamarind seeds.

Now, "Plas-Stick" is still in its developmental stage and there is a lot that needs to be done before it can be scaled.

But if they pull this off - we could have a simple, biodegradable and scalable solution to purify water for billions of people in the world.

And that's something.

Kudos to Vivaan Chhawchharia, Ariana Agarwal, and Avyana Mehta.

P.S. Video and Picture taken from @TheEarthPrize

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

@cozPacker @DeborahMeaden My mistake😂!

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

The power of small rodents to prevent local authorities from spending millions of pounds on infrastructure!

[Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar]

London Underground station flooding has reportedly been reduced by around 90% thanks to a group of engineers: beavers.

After conservationists reintroduced a family of beavers into a nearby city park, the animals built dams and restored wetlands that now absorb and slow floodwater naturally.

Authorities had planned major man-made flood infrastructure, but the beavers effectively created their own system — while also boosting biodiversity and restoring the ecosystem around them.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

@elaine_duff @tanishabramwell What about feeding them now and sorting out the poverty later?

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

@tanishabramwell Well done, Tanisha. Showing the world how it’s done. Your parents must be so proud. You deserve to be proud of yourself.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

Can this be true? Or is this a send up?

[TheBossRoss 🇪🇺 🧶 ❄ 📷 6x💉 @BettinaSRoss1]

"Reform Councillors one week into their new job"

😉

#Reform in #councils

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

@Saint_Chevalier @JoannaMElliott @rob_jewitt @MrSamOSullivan @The_Darwinist52 The rapes I experienced over a 6 month period were in 1961-2. The consequences were even worse. I had therapy in my 30s. Talk of race is no relevant, sex is. Some men will rape. Many of any race will not. Protect the vulnerable, esp women and girls.

[SarahMcCloughry 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇬🇪FBPE #StandwithUkraine @anrah]

@The_Darwinist52 They were male.