Ed

Opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one. LUFC, Dorset

[Ed @cheeno64]

@SpammyFritter Bet it was lapped up

[Joo @JoosyJew]

The moronic symbol of performative politics, with an awkward-shaped head and gormless expression.

Picture alongside Count Binface.

[Adam Sellers @YisraelChaiAdam]

“Yes the illegal in the blue top and no passport fresh off the boat, your question please”

[Keir Wrong Un @keirwrong]

Soon Labour will have a difficult decision.

Option 1: An arrogant socialist with glasses from the north

Option 2: An arrogant socialist with glasses from the south

Choose wisely, you weirdos.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There is a dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi the size of New Jersey. Here is what feeds it.

- Synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, sprayed on the corn belt every year
- The soil cannot hold it all, so the excess washes down to the Gulf
- It feeds algae blooms that strip the water of oxygen
- Almost nothing survives. It hit a record 8,776 square miles in 2017.
- Over 40% of that corn is grown to become ethanol, a fuel additive

Cattle get a documentary made about their burps. The corn monoculture quietly suffocates an area the size of a small state every summer, and keeps its halo.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

A welcoming present just out this morning for a Mr A Burnham to underline just how limited his latitude as PM will be:
The UK government borrowed £23.3 billion last month, 30 per cent or £5.4 billion higher than a year earlier.
It was also more than the £18.8 billion expected by most economists and the £17.7 billion forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s independent fiscal watchdog.
 The interest payable on government debt rose to £11.7 billion, the highest ever recorded in any May.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Remarkable victory for the Tories in Aberdeen South, beating SNP 50% to 29% — as resounding as Burnham in Makerfield. But it’s not replicable for the Tories on a national scale — and before the year is out Labour will discover that neither is Makerfield.

[DutchModerate 🇳🇱🇪🇺 🟠✝🌱🇺🇦 @DutchChrInd]

I love democracy

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

Will be interesting to see how this result shapes voter opinion on the right. I expect a few waverers will conclude that the right simply doesn't have the luxury of pratting about with start-up splinter parties when the differences are marginal. This narcissism of small differences is ultimately a gift to the left. Moreover, while there are measures Restore could take to iron out its structural flaws, their egos won't permit them. These clever little boys can't be told anything. It's never going to be much more than what it currently is.

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

🚨The BBC have been caught RED-HANDED

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

The CEO of the open borders ‘charity’ posing with the illegal migrants the BBC let her plant on Question Time.

All of them were chosen to ask a question!

The BBC is a disgraceful propaganda channel!

[Adonis Storr @theadelites]

#LUFC could be planning some of the largest lawsuits in football history.

The precedence set by the £35m in damages Everton now owe Burnley, is already having a ripple effect.

This excellent analysis explores Leeds' legal options and how they could be owed much more than £35m.

[James Wright @JPBWFarm]

Almost 8,000 of you have signed my letter to protect our moorland ponies.
A quango wants Dartmoor's grazing cut, condemning up to 9 in 10 of them.
We don't hate Natural England enough. Bat tunnels, fish discos, and they still can't protect biodiversity. We are all poorer for it.

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

Thank goodness I believe this will now be stopped. As a kid I grew up with most weekends spent either on the beach or on Dartmoor. Who are these quangos!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

You have already used the cow several times this morning, and it probably is not even nine o'clock.

You washed with soap. A great many bars are made on a base of tallow, rendered beef fat.

The tyres that got you to work contain stearic acid, often from cattle fat, used to cure the rubber.

The capsule in your supplement cabinet is very likely a gelatine shell, gelatine being collagen rendered from cattle.

Your shoes, your belt, the sofa, the seat of the car: leather, or finished using cattle-derived products.

The medicines in the cupboard may have been developed, tested, or stabilised using ingredients from cattle. Insulin came from cattle pancreas for sixty years and kept a generation of diabetics alive before we could make it any other way.

A single beef animal yields well over a hundred distinct products, woven so deeply through ordinary life that you cannot reach lunchtime without touching several of them.

People picture banning the cow as simply removing a food they have decided to disapprove of. What they are actually proposing is pulling a structural thread out of soap, tyres, medicine, clothing, and half the cupboard, and trusting the rest to stay standing.

Dinner was always the least of it. The cow is quietly holding up a remarkable amount of the day you take for granted.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A country that cannot stop talking about food security has found a way to tax it at the graveside.

From this April, the unlimited relief that let a farm pass whole from one generation to the next is gone. Ministers will tell you the threshold is generous. The first £2.5 million of agricultural property is spared, £5 million for a couple, and they recite those figures like a defence. Then go and value a real farm. A few hundred acres, before the sheds and the machinery are even counted, clears the first threshold on the land alone. A working arable farm of five hundred acres or more sails past the couple's five million without trying. The number was built to sound like a mansion. It describes a medium family farm.

That is the part they would rather you missed. The tax scales with the land, and the land is how you grow the food. The more a farm feeds the country, the more acreage it needs, and the harder this falls on it. They sold it as a levy on wealthy men sheltering money in fields they never walk. It lands instead on the family that has walked those fields for a century, rich on paper and skint in the bank, clearing barely a wage from millions they cannot eat.

So when the farmer dies, the heirs meet a bill they can only pay by selling the very ground that grew the food. The asset is the farm. The income is a rounding error. Whatever sits above the threshold is taxed at twenty percent, half the normal rate, offered up as though a smaller knife were a kindness.

It got darker during the protests. A shadow minister said families had begun openly discussing whether they could afford for elderly relatives to live past April, because surviving into the new tax year might hand the next generation a bill that ended the farm. Believe it or not as you like. The fact it could be said out loud at all tells you exactly where we have arrived.

Tractors in Whitehall. Pensioners doing inheritance arithmetic against their own heartbeat. Banners reading no farmers, no food.

But food security is the priority. They say so in every speech.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Dartmoor's hill ponies have grazed those commons for longer than there has been a country called England. Fewer than a thousand are left, down from six thousand a generation ago. The United Nations listed them as endangered in 2023. So, naturally, the body charged with protecting nature has decided to get rid of nine in ten of the survivors.

There is a process, obviously.

Natural England's new grazing contracts now count the ponies in the same bucket as the cattle and sheep. A commoner with a fixed quota has a choice: keep a semi-wild pony worth nothing at market, or use the slot for a lamb he can sell. Guess which one survives the spreadsheet. The rest are gathered in the autumn drifts, and with nowhere to put thousands of unhandled moorland ponies, the next stop is the abattoir.

Natural England would like it noted that it has not ordered a cull. It has merely built a machine whose only output is a cull, switched it on, and handed the bolt gun to a farmer so the fingerprints land elsewhere. Very tidy.

And now the funny part. The pony is the best tool on the entire moor for eating Molinia, the coarse purple grass strangling Dartmoor into a brown monoculture. Cattle and sheep won't touch it. The ponies hoover it down and clear the ground for the orchids, the wildflowers and the insects behind them. Remove the ponies and the moor chokes into precisely the lifeless scrubland the contract was meant to prevent.

So the conservation strategy, in full: protect the habitat by deleting the animal that maintains the habitat. A masterclass.

Better still, Natural England's own Fursdon review looked at this exact question and told them, in plain English, not to lump ponies in with cattle and not to cut pony numbers. They read it, praised it, said they fully supported it, then did the precise opposite.

Four thousand years these animals have run Dartmoor with no committee and no contract. They could be gone within one, and the people who did it will write it up as a win for nature.

[#Marcher @MarcherReborn]

Deliveroo app
Uber Eats app

Ban these today and watch the income stream for illegal immigrants dry up overnight.

Then ban vape sales….all of them. No one needs them, they’re absolutely pointless

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

This is the video Andy Burnham doesn’t want you to see 👇

[Ant Middleton @antmiddleton]

Everyone in Makerfield must see this! A misplaced vote taken from Reform is a vote for the far left @UKLabour and Andy Burnham! Whatever it takes, we must get Labour out… 👊🏼🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿