Darius G Laws 🇬🇧

Dad. City of Colchester Cllr. (Conservative)
❤️ vinyl, drones & old stuff. Tweets = personal. Promoted by South Suffolk Conservatives of PO Box SSCA.

[Darius G Laws 🇬🇧 @dariusglaws]

Last night, tis true...

[Conservative Councillors' Association @CCACllrs]

Tonight, the Conservative Group have taken control of Colchester City Council.

Congratulations to Cllr Paul Dundas on becoming the new Leader of the Council.

[Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1]

This is wrong. It doesn't matter who you vote for, but Kemi Badenoch expressly stated that ALL lives matter and it shouldn't be about someone's race. This sort of "attack ad" isn't about facing up to important issues, it's just a lie.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Keir Starmer is handing Putin £1bn buying dirty Russian oil, while banning drilling of British oil in the North Sea.

This is madness, morally and economically. We should back Ukraine and back our oil and gas industry in Aberdeen and beyond. That’s what @Conservatives would do.

[Kevin Hollinrake MP @kevinhollinrake]

How many more Ukrainians will die due to this shockingly bad decision?

Gen Lord Richard Dannatt, the former head of the Army:

“This is a morally bankrupt move by a Government focused much more on short-term popularity and not on issues of greater significance, namely the lives of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.

Shameful is the word that comes to mind.”

Phil Ingram, a former colonel in Army intelligence, accused Labour of “playing politics with people’s lives” and said the move was an “immoral” and “sickening act”.

Urgent U-turn needed.

[Conservatives @Conservatives]

Keir Starmer’s assault on our North Sea oil and gas industry is ending 1,000 jobs a month. Meanwhile he’s paying Putin to import Russian oil.

That is insane.

So today we are launching a campaign to Back British Oil.

Sign up to join the fight ➡️ https://t.co/96q9HojnD0

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Here's why you need to vote Conservative today👇

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Today is the day!

After weeks of campaigning across the country, now it’s time to send a message.

Get out, take your ID, and vote Conservative🗳️

[James Cartlidge MP 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 @jcartlidgemp]

Brilliant to be out championing local businesses with @KemiBadenoch in South Suffolk - in particular, pouring a pint & toasting her plan to scrap business rates for the High Street.

[Daily Express @Daily_Express]

"Kemi Badenoch is the real deal" Tory candidate Darius Laws gears up for the upcoming local elections in East Bergholt 🗳️

#dailyexpress #tories #suffolk #eastbergholt #localelections

[The Secret History of Gold - out May 5 @DominicFrisby]

Listen to me reading this masterpiece or finish reading or see pics or do all three here - https://t.co/Tn5ROvEvVf

[The Secret History of Gold - out May 5 @DominicFrisby]

Constable Country and the Cracks Beneath

This weekend, on the advice of ChatGPT, I visited Constable country. That is Essex, the villages of Dedham and East Bergholt, by the River Stour, which John Constable so famously painted.

Having just spent a fortnight in Namibia, I’ve become attuned to stunning landscapes. Even so, I was blown away by the beauty of the place.

I went with a French friend who wanted to see the “real England”, but not too far from Stansted Airport.

As we drove into East Bergholt, I began, as I always do as soon as I see them, to despair at the ugliness of modern buildings. No wonder we have so many NIMBYs, when what gets built around beautiful villages is so bland and ugly. Objection is both rational and natural.

But then we turned a corner and everything was suddenly stunning.

It’s not a part of the world I knew. I had lazily assumed all of Essex looked like Basildon. It doesn’t. It was glorious. You could really see the Dutch and Flemish influence in the architecture and the colours they were painted - so different to the equally beautiful Cotswolds, where I was last weekend doing gigs.

We were only sixty miles from London, but it still felt like an England of old, unblighted.

My French companion could not understand what I had been moaning about when I complain about decline. This was the England she knew, and she got excited by everything. Scones. Tea. Churches. Beautiful landscapes. Polite conversation. Phone boxes. Properly kept gardens. Even the beer. “It’s not cold,” she said, before promptly downing it.

My oft-cited complaint that the England she knew is disappearing seemed nonsense. There was no evidence of it here.

As we walked into Manningtree, the buildings got ugly again. Warehouses and industrial buildings, in particular. Nineteenth century warehouses were often things of beauty. Why can 21st century warehouses not be? (The answer lies in our system of measurement, but that’s for another day).

Then we learnt about Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, who operated here, exploiting the social upheaval of the English Civil War to have hundreds of women executed as witches. Among his methods of getting to the “truth” he used sleep deprivation to extract confessions; he tied victims to chairs and dropped them into the estuary. If they floated, they were witches. If they sank, they weren’t. I guess the victims lost either way. He strip-searched women looking for signs of the mark of the devil. If he couldn’t find any he pricked them with knives until he found the signs he was looking for. Just horrible. Maybe the English past isn’t quite so idyllic after all.

Here’s what makes it worse. For every witch he successfully hunted down, the government gave him fee. He got very rich. Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. A lot of innocent dead women. An early gruesome example of the law of unintended consequences. Remind me why I’m a libertarian again.

Today, if we are heading into the civil war many think we are, who knows what kind of witch hunts we are going to see in the name of some nuts ideology?

We caught a train from Mistley back to Manningtree. More grim modern housing. Lots of it too.

More walking then a short river boat tour. We mentioned we were staying at a village up the road, East Bergholt, and one of the locals declared this was the last chance to enjoy it before more new-build goes up. “We need 1.5 million homes,” he said. “The question is, do we have 1.5 million people who are going to buy them?”

Articulated right there is the property crisis coming to a town near you.

I have long argued that beautiful property will keep its value. Ugly new build won’t. Beautiful is pretty much synonymous with period. It was built using traditional measures, where proportion is intrinsic. No such proportion is inherent to metric.

We are already seeing the unravelling of the new-build market in London. That unravelling is coming to everywhere there is ugly new build, whether blocks of flats or houses.

We did find one modern close in East Bergholt that was actually beautiful by the way. So it’s possible. But it’s the exception, not the rule.

This is one of the reasons I invest so much of my capital outside the UK. I don’t like sterling, so I hold gold and bitcoin, and I don’t like gilts. A weakening property market, which is happening right on cue, will create problems for both.

Idyllic corners of England do still exist. Many of them. UK shares already offer value. There is a lot to like in the UK, as my French companion kept pointing out. But there are also big problems ahead, with a leadership class that, shall we say, falls short.

If you want to see some snaps they are here: https://t.co/McRXRGfzHv

[Conservatives @Conservatives]

Happy St George’s Day from the Conservative Party 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

[Darius G Laws 🇬🇧 @dariusglaws]

Local elections matter. #localelections video: https://t.co/EMhzhKBcxj

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

“The Prime Minister lied.

It’s now in the national interest he goes.”

Keir Starmer’s words…not ours.

We’re only holding him to the standards he set himself.

[Rupert Myers @RupertMyers]

Well said @KemiBadenoch

[James Cartlidge MP 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 @jcartlidgemp]

To govern is to choose 👇

[Darius G Laws 🇬🇧 @dariusglaws]

Strong campaign day for the @Conservatives in Essex / Suffolk

[Darius G Laws 🇬🇧 @dariusglaws]

𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐲𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 and there is nothing green about it (video):

https://t.co/Yyz7Q2Noty

[The Spectator @spectator]

In all the recent hoo-ha about banknotes and who or what to put on them, one name has been curiously absent – that of John Constable.

Born 250 years ago this year, he was the son of a prosperous Essex miller and merchant who would rise to become probably the greatest proponent of landscape painting in history.

✍️ Alec Marsh

Article | https://t.co/Nzb1QVc5u4