Craig McIntyre

[DAKKADAKKA @DAKKADAKKA1]

Public service announcement. You can watch Zulu for free in high definition on YouTube right now without ads because the DVD manufacturer who owns the rights uploaded it in full—

[Prof. Frank McDonough @FXMC1957]

BBC Radio newsreader John Snagge gives the first news of the D-Day landing at 9:32 AM to the British public.

[Vinnie Sullivan @VinnieSull1van]

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness... I love only that which they defend.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien (Letter to Christopher Tolkien, 1944)

[Connor Tomlinson @Con_Tomlinson]

Reminder: Prevent is controlled by the Home Office Islamic Network.

One member's brother and schoolfriend joined ISIS, but she says monitoring Islamic terror is racist.

No wonder Jihadists keep evading interventions.

The state is putting the public in constant danger.

[Brick Cop©️ @Brick_Cop]

Ah, the use of force ‘experts’ have arrived.

I’ll just leave this here.

#ThinBlueLine 🚨

[Jack Rankin MP 🇬🇧 @jackmrankin]

Over the last thirty years, conservatives have been far too relaxed about the revolutionary constitutional changes made in our country.

Conservatives should understand that we are merely custodians. We should govern not just for the present, but the past and future.

Whilst it is true for now, today need not be the last day hereditary peers sit in the House of Lords.

[Robert Lyman 🇺🇦 @robert_lyman]

Andrew speaks for me.

How have we let this happen?

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Labour Loves the Countryside. It Just Hates the People Who Run It.

A woman walks into a tailor's shop in Helmsley, North Yorkshire. She loves the heather hills, she says. The wooded dales. The purple moorland stretching to the horizon. What she cannot stand is the shooting that takes place on the Glorious Twelfth.
Jeremy Shaw, the tailor, has heard this before. He considers whether to explain that the heather she travelled three hours to admire exists because of the grouse moor she despises. The gamekeepers who manage the land, suppress the bracken, and keep the moorland in the condition that makes it worth visiting. The cake, in other words, was baked by the baker she came to castigate. What is worrying is that the government shares her confusion.

On March 18, Labour published its Land Use Framework. Half a million acres earmarked for solar panels. Nine percent of farmland committed to rewilding. And buried on page 45, a proposal to license game bird shooting, potentially restricting pheasant and partridge releases onto estates. The trail hunting ban came first. Licensing comes next. Each measure arrives with its own rationale. Together they form a programme.

Licensing does not prohibit. Bureaucracy does not ban. Smaller shoots simply cannot absorb compliance costs, fold quietly, and nobody in Whitehall answers for the consequence. A Natural England case near Helmsley shows the method. A longstanding partridge shoot was barred from releasing birds until after the season had already started. Shoot days cancelled. Revenue gone. Natural England's hands formally clean.

Helmsley bucks every trend in British retail. Four pubs in the town square. A Michelin-starred inn nearby. A tailor forty years in business in what a mentor once called a dying trade. Seventy-five percent of Shaw's revenue is shooting-related. The Pheasant hotel runs at sixty percent shooting occupancy through winter. The deli sells local cheese to Norwegian and German sportsmen. Shooting contributes £3.3 billion annually to the UK economy and supports nearly 147,000 jobs. Pull the shooting thread and the weave comes apart.

One Helmsley pub changed hands a few years ago. The new owners decided they wanted nothing to do with shoot trade. They lost heavily, then went back to the estates cap in hand. The market delivered the verdict that policy is not yet ready to impose openly. Licensing achieves the same result without anyone having to take responsibility.

The conservation argument collapses under scrutiny. Grouse moor owners have restored 217,000 acres of upland heath in the past 25 years. The almost-extinct curlew is four times more likely to fledge on a managed grouse moor than on unmanaged moorland. The landscape that Whitehall has identified as the problem is the reason the landscape exists in the form they claim to value.

When asked what economic trade-offs it had actually modelled, the government was vague. Officials said they recognised shooting's cultural importance and would work with industry toward a sustainable relationship. Starmer has been invited to visit Helmsley and see how the economy functions. He has not replied.

He should go. He should meet the gamekeeper loading double guns through winter to keep the household solvent. The beaters earning seventy pounds a day. The tailor measuring 24 keepers for tweed suits stitched with Essex lining and Yorkshire zips.
What rural Britain is being offered instead is a licensing regime that will first eliminate smaller shoots, then larger ones, then the hotels and tailors and pubs, until the moorland reverts to bracken and the towns that shooting sustained join the dying high streets that apparently only the countryside had managed to avoid.

The heather on the North York Moors, Jeremy Shaw at Carters Country Wear, and the market town of Helmsley. All three exist because of shooting. Labour's Land Use Framework puts all three at risk.

[Great British PAC 🇬🇧 @GreatBritishPAC]

WE WON! Right of abode restored for the Chagossians.
The Court has ruled they can remain on their islands.
After decades of injustice, everything has changed.
Immense credit to KC Philip Rule and Barrister James Tumbridge. Thank you to everyone who made this possible. 🇮🇴🇬🇧

[Fleur Elizabeth @fleurmeston]

It's called St Cuthbert's Day. We celebrated it every year at school. The flag bears his cross. He was so revered by King Æthelstan, the founder of our Kingdom, that the king made a pilgrimage to Durham to honour him. Renaming it "Durham Day" erases our history.

[Titular Archbishop of Selsey @AbpJeromeOSJV]

Across Britain and Europe, churches increasingly host Ramadan iftars in the name of interfaith goodwill. Yet when the Islamic call to prayer is recited inside a consecrated church, serious theological and canonical questions arise. Christian sanctuaries are dedicated to the worship of the Triune God, not to serve as neutral venues for the rituals of other religions. Hospitality toward Muslim neighbours can be expressed in parish halls or community spaces without compromising the meaning of sacred space. Especially during Lent, the Church’s witness is better shown through works of mercy—feeding the poor and caring for the needy—than through gestures that blur the Church’s identity and mission. https://t.co/NRhwvUc4jn

[British Royalist Society @theroyalistsuk]

The Royalist Society records its profound regret following the passage of the House of Lords Bill, which removes from Parliament one of the oldest surviving elements of the British constitution.

The peerage is a distinct institution, and the hereditary peers who sit in the House of Lords represent those families which are the preserve of Britain and whose service stretches across generations. Their removal leaves Parliament diminished, and the case for their return, or at the very least for the recognition of their service through life peerage, remains one the Society will press with vigour.

We will work with our colleagues to ensure that this reform, undertaken without sufficient care for what it has undone, is one a future Parliament may yet reverse.

[Rob Rinder @RobbieRinder]

I’ve written to every Member of Parliament today.

Proposals before Parliament would remove jury trials from offences carrying up to three years in prison.

Freedoms rarely vanish overnight. They are chipped away in the name of efficiency.

Juries did not cause the crisis in our courts. Removing them will not fix it.

When the state seeks to take someone’s liberty for serious offences, the judgment of ordinary citizens should never be optional.

This is close to becoming law.

Please read the letter. Contact your MP now.

[Chris Philp MP @CPhilpOfficial]

No. No. No.

We should not show “cultural sensitivities” when it comes to our election law

People in this county must obey the UK’s laws

“Cultural sensitivity” is not an excuse to break the law

[Palmerston @DiploMog]

Palmerston, Diplocat extraordinaire, passed away peacefully on 12 February. “Palmy” was a special member of the Government House team in Bermuda, and a much loved family member. He was a wonderful companion, with a gentle nature, and will be sorely missed.

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

Farage blaming ‘work from home' for Britain’s troubles is just so lazy, whilst attacking the idea of youngsters seeking a work-life balance. It is predictable and it is boring.

For young men and women in modern Britain, finding their way in life is incredibly difficult. No use people of my age telling them that if they stopped buying cappuccinos, they’d all be able to afford a home within a few years. It’s just not true.

Wages are stagnant. House prices are high. Interest is excruciating, on mortgages and student loans.

Everything costs SO much. Rent bleeds them dry, how on earth are they supposed to save 20k for a deposit, if not far more? What, to buy the leasehold on a dingy flat? They don’t even own it, then get done by service charges and whatever else.

Raising a family in Britain is brutally difficult. Childcare is extortionate, so yes - working from home does make that more possible. Good. If British men and women want to have more children, we should be making that as easy as possible.

A lawful relationship between an employee and a private employer is none of our businesses. If they decide working from home is workable, then good for them. If not, that’s fine too.

From my experience in business, happy workers are good workers. They care. They want the business to succeed. That benefits everyone. A healthy work-life balance is essential. Absolutely essential. Anyone who has run a successful business will tell you that.

Politicians of my age are so far away from what young men and women are dealing with. Of course there are many who take the piss, and we should brutally crack down on them. But the good majority of British men and women want to work hard, contribute to society and build a prosperous life for their family.

If they do that from their desk at home, or one in the office, I really don’t care.

[WarMonitor🇺🇦🇬🇧 @WarMonitor3]

British Royal Navy attack helicopter has chased a Russian ship out of British waters today which was attempting to anchor over transatlantic data cables.

Sabotage attempts continue.

[Conservative Peers @HLConservatives]

Shadow Foreign Office Spokesman, Lord Callanan has written to the Foreign Office Minister, Baroness Chapman of Darlington, to clarify whether the Government believes the Chagos Bill and the Treaty with Mauritius breach international law.

[Mary Aspinall-Miles @MAMBarLife]

A letter from today’s ⁦@thetimes⁩ with some fine courtroom humour…

[Gareth Corfield @GazTheJourno]

Revealed: How's China's London mega-embassy could spy on the UK.
Featuring yours truly measuring pavements and going through Chinese planning permission drawings to explain what's going on here.
https://t.co/xUiCwxOKg1