Cllr Jonathan Gray

Cllr for Kimbolton Ward, Huntingdonshire DC. Views my own.

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

@ReconnectingOx Fortunately we’ve managed to keep this nonsense at bay in Cambridge. Not without considerable effort though, as the LibDems would dearly love to do something similar here. Utterly crazy.

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

@HighwaysEMIDS Hassan, my point is not around frustration- people appreciate the emergency services are dealing with a very difficult situation.

But you have very young and very old people stuck for hours without water/food/access to loos.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Jeremy Clarkson lets slip a number on Clarkson's Farm that explains almost everything wrong with British food. A sausage from his own pigs costs 74p. The identical sausage made from imported pig meat costs 18p.

Most people hear that and assume the foreign farmer is simply better at it.

Britain outlawed the sow stall in 1999, alone in Europe bar Sweden, because the public here decided a pregnant animal ought to be able to turn around. The national pig herd then fell by roughly half.

British people did not eat half as much bacon.

Work out where the difference went. Twenty-seven years on, the National Pig Association reckons around 95 percent of the countries selling pork into Britain still permit the stall. Most of the EU allows four weeks of every cycle. Much of America allows the full sixteen-week gestation. Brazil allows it outright.

The sow was never spared. She was moved abroad, into a shed with looser rules and no British inspector, and the farm that would have kept her shut its gate.

Now watch the same thing happen to beef and lamb, on a far bigger scale.

British beef is grass. Native cattle standing out in the rain on ground that grows nothing else, doing what they have done on those hills since before the language was written down. What the NFU says we are being asked to compete against is a feedlot finishing up to 50,000 head on one site, which it called unacceptable here on both moral and environmental grounds.

The deals were signed anyway. Australian and New Zealand beef rises to a quota of 110,000 tonnes by 2033, and after that there is no tariff at all. Lamb runs to 60,000 tonnes this year and climbs from there, and we already import between a quarter and a third of what we eat.

Every one of those deals was announced with a firm assurance that food standards would not fall. That assurance is true, and it is beside the point.

The standards enforced at our border cover what is in the meat. Hormones stay banned, and rightly. What crosses untouched is how the animal lived. There is no border check for a feedlot, no tariff on a gestation crate, no form anywhere asking whether the thing we made illegal here was used to make the thing arriving here.

So a minister can say food standards are protected and back British farming in the same breath, and be telling the truth twice, while signing the document that finishes the job.

The pattern runs through the lot. Barren cages banned here in 2012, egg products still arriving from countries that use them. Force-feeding outlawed in 2007, foie gras on sale every Christmas.

And the campaigners who won those bans never once came back to see what happened next, because the victory was legislative and the consequence was six thousand miles away. Nobody counts sows in Iowa. Nobody films a feedlot in Queensland.

Clarkson absorbs that 56p on every plate that leaves his kitchen, on television, which is the only reason anybody can see the number at all. Inside a supermarket price it has been invisible for a quarter of a century.

Fifty-six pence is what this country charges a man for obeying it.

He is not competing with foreign farmers. He is competing with his own ban, on a shelf, standing next to the version of himself he was forbidden from being.

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

Absolutely.

[The Ways of A Gentleman @Gentleman_Ways]

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”

-Dale Carnegie

[The Ways of A Gentleman @Gentleman_Ways]

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”

-Dale Carnegie

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

@TheFootyFeed Peterborough is not and never has been in Huntingdonshire!

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

@GrahamH36921247 It’s one of the most irritating things I hear about as a Councillor. There’s never any meaningful consequences: proper fines that stop and make you really think….

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

@arealmofwonder I was introduced to this by an English teacher, on a warm summer day in a stuffy classroom. Still remember both it and him - thank you Mr Lewis 🙏🏻

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

@TLRailUK Get a grip. You’ve cancelled the 6.38 from HUN with 3 minutes notice due to lack of train crew.
Train should have departed PBO more than 10 minutes before, and presumably crew don’t just arrive and jump in a train, you must have been known much earlier.

[Geoff Norcott @GeoffNorcott]

Say what you like about the Tories, at least their coups were entertaining.

This is like a slow-motion car crash between two milk floats.

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

@BenObeseJecty That he knows how to say the words, but not how to actually deliver. Bit of a problem when you’re the leader of the Government 😩

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

Very good news!

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Starmer and Hermer chose to tear up the protections, that Conservatives put in place, to stop our brave veterans being dragged through the courts in their old age. They claim the courts had left them no choice.

Well guess what?

My Shadow Attorney General stepped in, acted pro bono for veterans and won: the UKSC have reinstated immunities and confirmed that the vast majority of our Act is lawful.

When a lower court said the Legacy Act breached the ECHR and the Windsor Framework, Labour did not appeal. It suited them to hide behind international law rather than stand up for those who served our country.

There was no legal duty to betray our veterans. Starmer and Hermer chose to do that. Conservatives chose to fight for them.

I'm proud of @DXW_KC, @AWNDinsmore and my Shadow Northern Ireland & Defence Teams for keeping up this fight.

We are the ONLY party actually holding Labour to account. Farage did not bother to turn up last Monday and vote against Labour’s terrible anti-veterans bill.

Another reason to VOTE CONSERVATIVE today.

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

@BenObeseJecty A classic of the genre. Unfortunately.

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

👇🏻

[Ben Obese-Jecty MP @BenObeseJecty]

"That I didn’t check whether Peter Mandelson had failed security vetting when he was appointed is staggering.

That I didn’t check whether he’d failed security vetting when I was telling Parliament that due process had been followed is unforgivable.

Not only did I not check, no minister checked, and I’m absolutely furious about that.

What I intend to do is go to Parliament on Monday, throw multiple civil servants with no right of reply under the bus, and set out all the relevant facts in true transparency so Parliament has the full picture of just how incompetent we are.”

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Last September, Keir Starmer told Parliament three times that “full due process” was followed over the appointment of Lord Mandelson.

We now know the Prime Minister misled the House.

The Prime Minister must take responsibility.

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

Absolutely.

[Lord Moylan @danielmgmoylan]

John Major’s government had a great deal to do with setting up the Good Friday Agreement and Tony Blair acknowledged that and never used it for party political purposes.

But @Keir_Starmer is a different kettle of fish. Rotten.

[Cian McCarthy @arealmofwonder]

Poems for Lent (Palm Sunday)

G.K. Chesterton

[Cllr Jonathan Gray @cllrgray]

Worryingly close to reality…😩🫣

[Nick, 30 @an0n_Nic]

Once again FT comments never miss. All the features of an authoritarian state, none of the benefits.

[Andrew Griffith MP @griffitha]

The street crime hit that everyone is talking about....though Starmer would rather you didn't.