Peter Robert

Overly frustrated early adopter, inventor and traveller.

[Alex Deane @ajcdeane]

If

- you’d been privately educated; and

- you educated your children privately; and

- you got to choose the topics you wanted to air…

Wouldn’t you choose another topic, rather than voluntarily choosing to say this, knowing how anyone will react?!

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@HowardFarran Got my first case tomorrow- I’ll let you know!

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@MichelleDewbs The summer riot season has brought out the workfree feckless youth…

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@bphillipsonMP You say that private school pupils have an “unfair advantage” over state school kids - is that simply because they are independent of your control?

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@MartinSLewis Leaving aside the ideology of taxing education, is VAT on independent school fees not a personal finance fairness issue?

Families planned for years, then faced a sudden 20% tax on school fees.

Does this fall within your remit as a financial fairness campaigner?

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@Rebecca_SPaul She says “private schools” instead of “independent schools” for a reason.

It is deliberate- to make parental choice sound like privilege, then tax it.

We see the trick. Taxing education is always wrong.

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@David__Osland I can’t afford a BMW so everyone must drive a Fiesta!! Grrrr 😡

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@susanpow @David__Osland 💯

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@vickygrayson_ @JoosyJew In fact Ms Sultana attended the selective, some might say “elite” King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls …

[Victoria @vickygrayson_]

@johndotwills Sultana didn’t even go to her local comprehensive- she went to a grammar school. Unclear why she thinks Prince George should go to a comprehensive when she/her parents decided it wasn’t good enough for her.

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

Crikey @JeremyClarkson - that REALLY needed a spoiler alert! Hope the recovery is in the bag - as it were…

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@TheGreenParty Gosh you have both been busy - hopefully you fitted in the boring-old needs of your constituents somewhere??

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@DreyfusJames What’s with the blatant product placement at the beginning?

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@ISC_schools @katie74RT VAT is a tax on consumer spending, added to goods and services and ultimately paid by the customer. Education is not ordinary consumption. Adding VAT to private school fees looks less like fairness or consistency, and more like political motivation posing as tax policy.

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@alexhrbfc @matthew_elliott What a silly little Rage Vampire you are Alex 🙄

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@OptimoPrincipi It was just ridiculous and unbelievable - who catches live sharks, ships them alive to Rome then fills the coliseum with sea water???

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@MichelleDewbs Apparently, they were wearing the finest quality ladies clothing, made by two wandering tailors, of a magical silk cloth that ONLY INTELLIGENT people can see - sorry Michelle… 😉

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@KemiBadenoch @anaboultertv Keir Starmer looks like a tone-deaf conductor trying to lead an orchestra where Reeves Miliband Philipson et Al are playing their own tunes. John Healey and the Al Carns are warning that the rest are out of time. Tap the baton PM - or let someone else conduct.

[Peter Robert @DrPB]

@SamaHoole @sharrond62 https://t.co/X8VGSF5IWI

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

This year the Home Office moved to stop expert sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand coming to shear British sheep.

The people who keep the animals comfortable were declared surplus to requirements.

For over a decade, around 75 of the best shearers on earth have flown in each spring on a simple visa concession. In a few brutal weeks they take the wool off up to two million sheep.

A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes. Hundreds a day. Calm hands, no panic in the animal. It is a global trade and a young body's game, and Britain has never grown enough of its own.

The official line? Fourteen years to train Britons, so the door is closing.

Here is what that tidy sentence ignores. A sheep must be shorn every year or she overheats, cannot move properly, and gets eaten alive by flies and maggots. Shearing on time is welfare, plain and simple, written into law and into the animal's own skin.

So a government that lectures farmers without pause about welfare has quietly made the most basic welfare task harder to carry out. After the outcry they allowed one "final" year. Then the experts are gone for good.

A sector already losing money on every fleece, already burning wool it cannot sell, now told it cannot even get the people in to take the wool off.

You could be forgiven for thinking somebody wants the British sheep gone.