Maisie

Mother, wife and Toffee

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

My mind is blown. I’m finally here right now at Flatford Mill, with the millpond and Willy Lot’s cottage in the background. You’ll have seen it in The Haywain by John Constable. One of the most famous paintings ever, it was painted in 1821 and the scene is almost identical today

[Gracie💙 @Gracie_Blue89]

HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL:

"We've raised the pride flag! Diversity is important!"

I'm hoping their next video is them confirming absolutely ZERO potholes, every bus runs on time, all public transport in tip top condition, every street light working and that residents feel their council tax is worth what they're paying.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The summer of 1976 ran fifteen consecutive days over 32 degrees, and a British child could walk into any kitchen in the country and find nothing in it he was able to eat.

Not nothing in the house. Nothing he could eat. The fridge held ingredients: milk, a bit of bacon, the end of Sunday under a plate, butter, a lump of cheese going hard at the edge. The cupboard held flour, tea, tins and sugar. Every item in that room needed an adult, a pan and a decision, and the adult had a running order and no interest in your opinion of it.

Sweets and crisps existed, obviously. They were not in the house. They were in the shop, bought one at a time with your own money if you had any, and eaten on the pavement within ninety seconds. Keeping a week of crisps in a cupboard would have struck your mother as a peculiar thing to do with money she did not have.

So eating happened three times, at fixed hours, sitting down:

- breakfast, cooked, before anyone left the house
- dinner at midday, at home or in a canteen
- tea at five or six, cooked

Ask at four and you were told you would spoil your tea, and that was the end of the conversation.

Which is how children went out of the door after breakfast in that heat and came home at teatime having eaten nothing at all, and not one adult thought it worth remarking on. Three meals inside eleven hours, then thirteen hours with nothing, every night of the hottest summer any of us can remember, in a country with no name for it, no watch that mentioned it and no opinion about it whatsoever.

Then it moved indoors. The multipack. The family bag. The vending machine in the corridor. The forecourt open till ten.

And the packet turned out to be an excellent mood regulator, which is exactly what it was built to be. Bored on a wet Tuesday, flat after a bad shift, sitting on your own with the telly going, and there is something within arm's reach designed by a food scientist to answer that precise feeling in under a minute. Boredom in 1976 got a bike, a job that wanted doing, or a cup of tea and whoever else was in the room.

Every parent now standing over an untouched dinner is losing an argument to a bag opened at four o'clock.

Your mother never had to win that argument. She decided what came into the house, and she has been replaced by a multipack.

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

🚨 just so you know, an unelected regulator has approved rolling 3 hour BLACKOUTS across Britain, with just 8 hours warning, through a “code change” WITHOUT MPs voting for this new policy.

So now deliberately switching off electricity to millions of homes no longer requires a national emergency or input from MPs

Welcome to technocracy 🚨

[Mike Graham 🇬🇧 @Iromg]

Here’s an everyday fix. Lower taxes so people can spend their own money…

[Kathryn Porter @KathrynPorter26]

This is what happens when you build windfarms KNOWING the output can't be used

All because of an idiotic policy called "Connect & Manage"

Literally £billions of OUR money wasted because these costs go on the bill

This has to stop. @UKLabour needs to stop encouraging windfarms to start up unless at least 90% of the output can be used

Right now we're connecting windfarms like Seagreen. That opened in October 2023...

In 2024 67% of its output was curtailed
In 2025 it was 75%

That's right. 3/4 of the output of Seagreen was literally thrown away last year. Except we didn't just throw it away, we bought it first and then threw it away

Total. Waste. Of. Money

@AndyBurnham says he cares about the cost of living... Prove it... Stop forcing us to buy electricity that can't be used

@Miatsf @mgshanks @ClaireCoutinho @AndrewBowie_MP @griffitha @NJ_Timothy @TiceRichard @DavidGHFrost @mattwridley @cmackinlay @ColinMoynihanUK @Iromg @AllisonPearson @MerrynSW @EdConwaySky @mattotele @jonathan_leake @afneil @julietsamuel @ofgem @energygovuk

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The British government has spent public money telling you to eat less of the most tightly regulated beef on earth, while the docks fill up with the alternative.

Here is what stands behind a British beef animal:

- Grass, and almost nothing else. Around 90 per cent of the lifetime diet.
- Two thirds of British farmland, which grows grass and nothing else ever will.
- Rain. Over 90 per cent of the water in that animal fell out of the sky.
- A herd of 27 head. That is the British average. A family, a dog, a field.
- No hormone growth promoters. Banned here in 1988. Standard in the United States.
- No ractopamine. Banned here. Legal in twenty-odd countries selling to us.
- No routine antibiotics for growth. Banned across the UK since 2006.
- Traceability from birth to plate. Every animal has a passport and a number.
- CCTV in every live-animal area of an English abattoir since 2018.
- A carbon footprint under half the global average for beef.

Cattle and sheep together are 5.7 per cent of this country's emissions.

The official advice, published and funded and taught in schools, is to eat less of it.

Now the trade figures. Beef imports have surged. The English cattle herd is at 4.91 million head, the lowest since records began in 1984. Farms held since Victoria are selling the cows and letting a fund plant trees on the field.

None of that reduces the beef eaten in Britain by one kilo. It moves where it comes from. Dismantle the highest-welfare beef system on the planet, and backfill it with beef raised under rules we outlawed in 1988, shipped six thousand miles, sold on the same shelf under the same word, a fifth cheaper.

An outsourcing arrangement with a rosette on it.

Ask the man at the counter where it came from. If he cannot name the farm, buy it somewhere he can, and buy the fatty cuts while you are there.

They are not asking you to eat less meat.

They are asking you to eat somebody else's.

[Andrea Meanwell @ruslandvalley]

Come and camp on our farm this summer. https://t.co/e6fW1zUtdI

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Over 1,300 British farms have joined a new app in about twelve weeks. It is called Only Farmers, it was named deliberately after OnlyFans, and the parallel runs deeper than the joke intends.

Both are platforms where the producer sells direct access to themselves, because the people who used to pay them stopped paying enough to live on.

Lisa Hogan built it with her son Wolfe Bentinck, after five years of farmers coming into the Diddly Squat shop to thank her for the programme and then tell her their own version of it. Her words: this is for smaller farmers who do not have a marketing budget or Amazon.

Look at what is being sold.

Farm stays. Vineyard tours. Cheese-making. Beekeeping. Weddings. Lambing days. Clarkson's own summary this week was that you could walk an alpaca or milk a cow.

Every item on that list is something a farmer does anyway. Unpaid, at four in the morning, in February, as part of a job that a government review found loses money on nearly a third of British farms.

The novelty version pays. The work does not.

A family will hand over real money to stand in a shed for two hours and watch a ewe give birth. That same lamb, reared for months and sold through the proper chain, goes at a price the farmer is not allowed to set.

The second half of the app is grimmer still, because it also runs farmer-to-farmer equipment rental. Farms hiring kit to each other, because too few can justify owning their own.

None of which is a criticism of Hogan. She has built something useful, after listening at a till for five years. Book the alpaca. The money goes where it should.

But 1,300 signups in twelve weeks is not enthusiasm for an app. It is 1,300 farms reaching the same conclusion in the same season, which is that the dependable money is in the experience rather than the food.

We have arrived at a country where a farm earns more reliably from charging strangers to watch it farm.

Nobody thought that was worth remarking on.

[Rosie Duffield MP @RosieDuffield1]

There are some wonderful, hard-working, serious, experienced backbench MPs who watch this kind of vacuous performance crap in total despair.
MPs whose years of work is never even acknowledged while the latest, (and usual old crowd) of fave nepo families get all the jobs and take all the credit...

And this, the endless shallow TikTok fluff that makes a mockery of Parliament, and legislation, and shows the total lack of comprehension and twisting of a law passed by the Labour Party, years ago, to protect everyone's rights...

Roll on the next General Election!

‘Summer of sex’ Labour MP criticises trans guidance from sun lounger

https://t.co/dqYBSigbch

[The English Oak Project @TheKentAcorn]

After being told that I care too much about ancient woodland & not enough about the economy, I have decided to cut back on the amount of idiots I listen to

[Intel Lady @intel_lady]

Some MPs go on holiday & not feel the need to make performative outrage videos about Women's spaces being protected, but 'Summer of Sex' campaigner Samantha Niblett couldn't resist the chance to make sure people don't forget about her & her opinions #parody

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A farmer in Shropshire is selling his farm this September and nobody has died.

Two hundred and twenty acres. A hundred and forty ewes, seventy suckler cows, a shed with one end held up by a telegraph pole, and a tractor bought new in 1994, which is the last thing on that farm that was bought new. His grandfather bought the place outright in 1961. He is 54 and has never had a penny of debt.

The books say the farm lost eleven thousand pounds last year. It lost money the year before as well.

He is not bad at this. The government's own review, chaired by Minette Batters, found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making in 2024.

On paper the same farm is worth £1.9 million.

Pasture in his county averaged £8,600 an acre last year, and not a pound of that was set by anything he grows. Two blocks within nine miles went to buyers he has never met. One for solar. One described in the particulars as a natural capital opportunity.

His mother is 81 and lives in the bungalow at the top of the lane. When that comes across with the other half of the ground, the two halves clear the £2.5 million threshold, and twenty per cent of the excess is a bill in six figures on a business that has not made money in three years.

His son is a radiographer in Telford and is not coming back. He said so once, kindly, and never made his father ask twice.

So it goes now, while he can still choose which fields and to whom. He is selling the good ground first, because you cannot raise a bill off the rough.

The Treasury collects nothing from any of this. The sale happens years before the tax event, so there is no tax event left to have.

What Britain loses is a hundred and forty lambs and seventy calves a year, off ground that will never produce food again, in a country that already imports forty per cent of what it eats and has just had its worst cereal harvest since records began.

That is one farm. There are thousands of them, doing the sums at the same kitchen table this month.

The beef on your shelf this Christmas will come from Brazil, and the price will be higher, and nobody will connect the two.

[Connor Tomlinson @Con_Tomlinson]

NHS staff are complaining that patients are refusing to be treated by non-white doctors and nurses.

It’s not because of “racism.” It’s because frontline care is getting worse after thousands of foreign doctors and nurses who barely speak English, lack compassion, and have fraudulent qualifications have been hired in recent years.

Despite funding increasing every year, now to £225 billion, and 1.5 million staff, the NHS cannot meet demand. Arbitrary caps on medical school and hospital placements mean we reject qualified British doctors and nurses, and recruit inferior counterparts from the Third World instead.

The NHS spends £3 billion in annual malpractice payouts and £40 billion on mandatory DEI training, teaching them to resent their white patients.

The result is poor care, long wait times, missed diagnoses, and preventable complications and deaths. But politicians are too afraid of blaspheming against Britain’s national religion to admit it.

This week, my wife, now twenty-five weeks pregnant with twins, suffered a blood clot and severe swelling in her left leg. She spent seventeen hours waiting for an assessment. She was seen by an African nurse who barely spoke English and made multiple spelling errors in her referral letter, and another who shouted at her for speaking too slowly and in too much detail about her symptoms.

I documented the ordeal in a series of X posts, which attracted millions of views. The comments were filled with people sharing similar horrifying stories. Thank you to everyone who provided their prayers, advice, and concern for my wife and children.

The NHS is forcing patients to either risk being called "racist" or not receive proper treatment. I would rather offend someone than let my loved ones die.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could scrap public sector DEI, stop replacing qualified domestic talent with incompetent and fraudulent foreigners, and stop running the NHS as an international health service that spends billions on translation services.

That would require a government willing not only to abandon antiracist ideology and reject the mantra that “Diversity is our strength”, but also to challenge the sacralised status of the NHS.

The longer they don’t, the more lives are ruined and lost to incompetence.

[Janet Murray @jan_murray]

Man explains to women that being female is a ‘performance’.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

You cannot digest grass. She turns it into milk.

You cannot digest straw. She turns it into beef.

You cannot digest the stalks left standing after the harvest. She turns it into butter.

You cannot digest brewers' grains. She turns it into cheese.

You cannot digest sugar beet pulp. She turns it into cream.

You cannot digest citrus peel. She turns it into suet.

You cannot digest almond hulls. She turns it into tallow.

You cannot digest cottonseed. She turns it into leather.

You cannot digest apple pomace after the cider. She turns it into bone broth.

You cannot digest rape meal after the oil is pressed. She turns it into yoghurt.

You cannot digest the spent mash from the whisky. She turns it into ghee.

You cannot digest the trimmings off the vegetables you did eat. She turns it into marrow.

Twelve inputs. Twelve things we made, could not use, and would otherwise pay a man to take away. She eats the lot and hands back the best food on the planet, for free, in a field, in the rain.

There is a building in California where they are trying to do a fraction of this in a steel tank, on grid electricity, on sugar grown by a tractor, funded by a man who has never once been in a shed at four in the morning.

We have looked at the only machine that turns our rubbish into our dinner and decided the problem is that it exists.

She is not competing with you for food.

She is doing the washing up, and we are drawing up plans to sack her.

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

Morning you lovely lot. Yesterday I was photographing a lady and her bookshop and there on the shelf, after a search of over forty years, was the book: Fly Fishing by J R Hartley. Available now at Whyte Books in Wilton to save you searching the Yellow Pages.

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: The full statement from PC Andrew Harper's widow accusing Andy Burnham of "betrayal" by not excluding his killers from the early release scheme

"This is disgusting. I am beyond appalled and bristling with anger to hear that Andrew’s killers are soon to be free to roam the streets.

"What abhorrent message does this send? How dare Ministers say the killing of a police officer is not enough of a ‘sickening crime’ that deserves the stiffest of punishments.

"The level of disrespect the Government are showing to Andrew and other victims – and to their loved ones such as me – is beyond contempt.

"The killers of Andrew have shown no remorse... they robbed us of our future. They are vile criminals, and they should remain in jail.

"To release them early from their already pitiful sentences is an affront to justice. The Government and the justice system have not just let me down... they have added insult to injury. They are meant to be on our side.

"This is an utter betrayal - and it's one I will not be able to forgive or forget"

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Jeremy Clarkson has been refused permission to sell food he grew himself, twice. In the same window, central government overruled a Lincolnshire council to put solar panels across 1,214 hectares of grazing land, an area the size of Heathrow.

Run the two columns side by side, because the pattern is the whole story.

He asked to open a restaurant in his own lambing shed. Refused.

He asked for a car park for the people already blocking the lane. Refused.

He asked to sell food produced more than sixteen miles away. Capped at sixteen.

He asked for a barn to store his own harvest, so he would not have to sell at whatever price August offered. Full application required.

He asked about the restaurant again. Enforcement notice, and six weeks judged ample to put the building back as it was.

Now the other column.

Had he covered those same fields in solar panels, the council could have refused and been overruled from Whitehall, as Lincolnshire was in October 2025.

Had he grown maize to feed an anaerobic digester, nobody would have written to anybody.

Had he taken £532 a hectare from Defra to grow a legume fallow, he would have been paid to leave a crop standing that may not be harvested, grazed or sold. Defra cut that rate this year and gave the reason in writing: it had become attractive enough to take land out of food production.

Had he sold the lot to a data centre, a battery park or a Chinese pig unit, all four of which he listed in his column last week, the paperwork would have moved considerably faster than a farm shop's.

There is your planning system. Every use of English farmland is easier to permit than farming.

Two hundred of his acres grew nothing at all this year, and the queue of people who want that ground for something other than food is already forming.

He is not being stopped from developing the countryside. He is being stopped from feeding it.

[Tom Holland @holland_tom]

A thrilling episode today on @TheRestHistory, as we set sail with the single most swashbuckling Englishman of the Elizabethan age, SIR FRANCIS DRAKE!

Treasure, sea dogs, heists, skeletons in gibbets, treasure, California & treasure all feature!

https://t.co/UUiTlhO9c1