Fi Weeble Petrie

If 'Plan A' didn't work, there are 25 more letters.

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

Dear Adam,

I have taken time to think about your apology. Mostly because, having made a mistake publicly before, I was keen to accept yours. It hurts when people don’t understand that you are sorry for messing up. I get that, probably more than most.

But here’s the thing… I’m not sure you understand what you did wrong. And so you don’t really understand what you are apologising for or why. With that in mind, I want to help you.

I didn’t know Ann, except as a powerhouse in politics and that so many people have spoken of her friendship and great loyalty. How lovely, I wish I had known her.

I am utterly disinterested in her sexual prowess or the state of her virginity. But I would have enjoyed hearing you speak of her great accomplishments. Not as a woman, but simply as a human being.

Here’s a list.

She served in the House of Commons for 23 years and won five general elections.

She served as a government minister in Social Security, Employment and the Home Office, where she was Minister of State for Prisons.

She rose to become Shadow Health Secretary and then Shadow Home Secretary.

She was appointed to the Privy Council.

After leaving Westminster, she built an entirely new career as an author, broadcaster, documentary-maker, stage performer and television personality.

Then, at the age of 71, she returned to elected politics and became a Member of the European Parliament.

She was a longstanding advocate for Britain leaving the European Union and, when the political establishment failed to deliver the referendum result, she left the Conservative Party after more than 50 years and stood for the Brexit Party.

She was elected as an MEP and took the argument for British independence directly into the European Parliament.

She was also an unapologetic defender of free speech. She continued to speak openly on difficult and unfashionable subjects when others chose silence, it was easier to do that, she accepted the criticism and hostility that came with it rather than surrendering her convictions.

Her Catholic faith was central to her life. She converted to Catholicism, met Pope John Paul II in Rome and was later made a Dame of the Order of St Gregory the Great by Pope Benedict XVI for her service to politics and public life.

She remained a powerful public voice well into her late seventies, defending her beliefs despite decades of ridicule and hostility.

That is an extraordinary life of public service, courage and reinvention.

Yet, when asked to speak about her after her sudden and violent death, you chose to tell the country that she was a “spinster”, an “old maid” and a virgin. You discussed a failed relationship and suggested that afterwards she simply dedicated herself to other activities.

Do you understand the reduction involved in that?

You took the life of a highly accomplished woman and assessed it according to whether she had married, whether she had sex and whether a man had wanted her.

That is what was wrong. That is what you should have known.

It wasn’t simply that your words were poorly chosen or badly timed. It was the instinct to view a woman’s entire life through her relationship with men, even when her achievements should have rendered that completely irrelevant.

Nobody discussing the death of an accomplished male politician would think it necessary to tell viewers whether he was a virgin, speculate about his sex life or describe him as an ageing bachelor whose romance had failed.

I don’t want you cancelled. I don’t believe that people should be denied forgiveness when they make mistakes.

But a meaningful apology has to identify the actual wrong.

Ann was murdered after a lifetime of public service. At the moment her achievements should have been remembered, you diminished her to an unmarried woman who apparently hadn’t had sex.

She deserved better than that. And I’m still not sure you get it. But every woman who watched you speak of her and then read your apology does.

Bernie.

[FarmingUK @FarmingUK]

Make sure you back British cattle farming! 🇬🇧 💪

📸 Insta: the_hebridean_cowgirl

[FarmingUK @FarmingUK]

“As we drive around our farm picking up these paper lanterns - that our cows try to eat - we ask you to find something better to do to support your causes.

“There is wire inside the paper that will get on their stomach and kill them

“Donate money directly to your cause please, instead of lanterns or balloons!”

📸 Karen McCartin Foster

[Peter McCormack 🏴‍☠️🇬🇧🇮🇪 @PeterMcCormack]

A minimum wage of £15 would end my coffee shop, it would have to close, as would many other businesses.

I’ll explain for the economically illiterate.

Staff costs are currently half our costs, a £15 minimum wage is actually more than £15 an hour for the company, because you have to add:
- 12.07% holiday
- Sick pay
- Maternity pay if and when required
- National insurance
- Pension contributions

These costs would mean the shop loses money because remember, energy costs are up, rates are up, regulations are up.

Now you can pass these costs onto the consumer - that would mean charging a lot more for coffee, people won’t pay it. The likes of Starbucks and Costa can, because they have economies of scale. The independent doesn’t.

Now the little socialist will say well this is your fault, if you can’t run a business that can afford to pay its staff properly, but the little socialist has never run a business and does not understand the dynamics.

Now I could pay some staff off and fill those hours myself or reduce us to one staff member during certain periods - but this proves the point that a minimum wage costs jobs.

There was a time when these jobs were done by kids, perhaps on the weekend, paid a lower wage, no holiday and no silly employment rights. Perhaps they were even paid cash. The dynamic worked and small businesses like this could operate. It was also a great first job. Sadly now it isn’t worth employing entitlement youngsters at this level of pay.

So alas, I don’t need the stress, the business would close, a number of jobs would be lost.

Economics is about understanding these dynamics, no vibes.

The cost of living is not solved through passing on inflation to the business, it is solved by ending high inflation and creating prosperity. This is what socialists don’t understand, they can’t create prosperity, they can only destroy it.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Man Advising Starmer on National Security. Has He Been Vetted?

Peter Mandelson failed his developed vetting. That failure, and the override that followed, has consumed British politics for weeks. One question has received almost no attention in comparison. Has Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister's National Security Adviser, passed his?

Powell is not a civil servant. He is a political appointee, the first ever to hold the National Security Adviser role. As a special adviser he cannot formally direct MI5, MI6 or GCHQ. The constitutional ambiguity of his position has been noted but never resolved. What has not been established publicly is whether he has undergone the same developed vetting process that Mandelson failed, and whose failure triggered the most serious national security scandal of the modern era.

@GuidoFawkes, which has a track record of breaking stories the mainstream press subsequently confirms, has published what it describes as Powell's full China dossier and the contents are extraordinary.

Before his government appointment Powell met Lt. General Chen Xiaogong, the former head of PLA intelligence, on multiple occasions. He met Cui Tiankai, the former Vice Foreign Minister, repeatedly. He met Shen Xin, Secretary General of the CPAFFC, described by the US Congress as the public face of China's United Front Work Department, Beijing's primary foreign influence operation. These meetings took place through Inter Mediate, the private charity Powell founded and continues to run alongside his government role.

Thirteen days after being appointed as the Prime Minister's Special Envoy for the Chagos negotiations in September 2024, Powell was in Beijing chairing a strategic security dialogue with Chinese experts, some with direct PLA connections. Since becoming National Security Adviser in December 2024 he has met Wang Yi, the Politburo member and director of China's Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, four times. July 2025. November 2025. January 2026. March 2026.

Every parliamentary question about Powell's interests, his vetting arrangements and what was discussed in those meetings has been blocked. The government's responses use language identical to that deployed to block questions about Mandelson. Established mechanisms are in place. The government does not comment on individual cases. Such meetings are sensitive in nature.

Luke de Pulford of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China told Guido that Powell's links to Beijing have a Mandelson-like odour and that if he oversaw the decision to collapse the China espionage trial to avoid upsetting Beijing, his position as National Security Adviser is not tenable.

That observation connects two threads that have run through this series separately but belong together. The China spy trial collapsed because the government refused to describe China as a national security threat in court. Powell, as National Security Adviser, would have been central to that decision. The same man who maintained extensive relationships with PLA-connected Chinese officials through his private charity was advising the Prime Minister on whether to name China as a threat in a national security prosecution. The prosecution died. Beijing was not named. Powell remains in post.

One further question has not been answered. Has British taxpayer money funded Inter Mediate's China engagement? The government has refused to say. If Powell's private charity received government funding while maintaining deep relationships with Chinese officials of the kind Guido has documented, the conflict of interest exceeds anything yet established in the Mandelson affair.

Mandelson failed developed vetting and was appointed anyway. Powell's vetting arrangements have never been disclosed. The government blocks every question. The pattern points toward China. The question is whether the man now responsible for Britain's national security has been assessed against the standard that disqualified his predecessor.

[Bobbie @bo66ie29]

England, a nation of gardeners. A lovely film from 1941 showing the inborn love of Englishmen for a garden.

[No Farmers, No Food @NoFarmsNoFoods]

Farmwashing is the unethical practice of supermarkets misleading consumers into buying British food when, in fact, the food is from overseas. This is done through misleading marketing like using fake farm names or British branding on packaging.

[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.

[Tony @EvacTony]

Its the biggest race hate crime in British history and it was ignored because the victims were white working class and didn't matter to the establishment and because pursuing the perpetrators (Pakistanis in most cases) would risk too much blowback for Government and authorities to deal with, its the same appeasement we see over and over.

I was a police officer, I raised this at the time, we had missing girls in care homes who had been missing 70+ times, we had an operation on Leicestershire when all this came out to establish if it was happening on us, I submitted all names and info I had re patterns of behaviour that seemed to fit, as did other people. The operation concluded there was no GroomingGangs operating in Leicestershire, a place with one of the biggest Pakistani populations in the country.

If you tried as I did over and over to point to the obvious you were shut down and earmarked as racist. I walked away from the job for this and other reasons unable to continue to work for such a dishonest organisation and from speaking to others its been happening for decades.

It must also be noted, this was during the cutbacks that decimated the police, us GDOs were ran ragged for years, unless you came across something directly as a response officer, which I didn't, there was nothing you could do. This was an organisational decision I think, that saw what was happening as lifestyle choice by the girls/victims.
#PakistaniRapeGangs #GroomingGangs

[Donna-Louise @NoLongerTheFuzz]

1/ ⚠️ This thread is graphic and detailed. It contains descriptions of child rape, torture and institutional cover-up.
It is also entirely documented and sourced.
It will tell you what has been done to girls in this country, why it was allowed to continue, and why today's inquiry is not enough.

PLEASE read it all. You need to read it all. 💾🧵

#RapeGangs #GroomingGangs #OpenJusticeUK #Justice #RapeGangInquiry

[FarmingUK @FarmingUK]

🚨 34 pregnant sheep have died after a dog attack in Lincolnshire, leaving a farmer facing up to £15,000 in losses. Police warn livestock worrying is a serious offence — even chasing animals can lead to prosecution under new laws

READ MORE: https://t.co/NmxzXEp2WN

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Trope smearing is confusing…

I was against Covid lockdowns = “far right”

I’m against net zero = “far right”

I’m against digital ID = “far right”

I’m against illegal migrants staying in hotels and costing the taxpayer a fortune = “far right”

But…

I’m against the US-Israel war on Iran = “left wing”

I’m against the Israeli hollowing out of Gaza = “left wing”

I’m against extreme corporate greed and wealth transfer to the super rich = “left wing”

I question the dynamics behind the war in Ukraine = “left wing”

The whole left v right ideological axis is dead. Instead, it is possible to form opinions on an issue by issue basis rather than staying in an ideological tribe on every single issue. But the trope smearing pigeonholing is utterly ridiculous.

[Gauci Reports @GauciReports]

🚨HIGH COURT VICTORY: GOVERNMENT FORCED TO FACE JUSTICE!

Maggie Oliver Foundation WINS permission to sue UK Government for failing to implement IICSA's 20 child abuse recommendations for OVER 3 YEARS.

Nearly £200M inquiry, over 7000 testimonies & virtually ZERO action.

This is betrayal. We're DONE waiting.

It’s time for accountability!

@MaggieOliverUK @TMOFCharity #GroomingGangs #ChildAbuse

[BRITAIN IS BROKEN 🇬🇧 @BROKENBRITAIN0]

🚨 Trevor Phillips has just gone NUCLEAR on the UK government for covering up the predominantly Pakistani Muslim rape gangs 🇬🇧

“This was at an INDUSTRIAL scale. They were chosen BECAUSE they were WHITE.”

It honestly amazes me how The Labour government is still in power, after we know they were complicit in the cover up of the rape of Britain.

[Fi Weeble Petrie @fipetrie]

@GHWTowler Knowing that Andrew would create headlines and noise, whats's happening elsewhere they don't want us to know about...

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

California's Central Valley produces 80% of the world's almonds. Each almond requires 3.2 gallons of actual irrigation water to grow. Not rainfall. Actual tap water pumped from aquifers.

One gallon of almond milk requires 162 gallons of irrigation water. Compare that to dairy milk at 8 gallons of tap water per gallon, with the rest being rainfall that falls on pasture anyway.

But here's where it gets properly grim. Almonds bloom for exactly three weeks in February. During those three weeks, California needs every pollinating bee in North America transported to the Central Valley or the crop fails entirely.

Commercial beekeepers truck in 31 billion honeybees. That's two-thirds of America's entire managed bee population, all concentrated in one valley for three weeks. The bees are packed into trucks, driven across the country, dumped into almond groves drenched in pesticides, worked to exhaustion, then packed up and shipped to the next crop.

The mortality rate is catastrophic. Beekeepers report losing 30 to 50% of their hives annually. That's billions of bees dead. Not from natural causes. From being used as disposable pollination machines for your almond milk.

The pesticides don't help. Almond groves are sprayed with neonicotinoids which scramble bee navigation systems, fungicides which weaken their immune systems, and herbicides which eliminate the wildflowers they'd normally forage on between almond blooms.

Meanwhile the aquifer depletion is permanent. The Central Valley has sunk 28 feet in some areas from groundwater extraction. That water took 10,000 years to accumulate. It's being drained in decades for almond milk.

Your vegan latte killed more bees and used more water than a year's worth of dairy milk. But it's got "plant-based" on the label so you're definitely saving the planet.

[FarmingUK @FarmingUK]

Cold mornings, hard work, and commitment all year round — this is what British farming looks like 🚜 🇬🇧

[No Farmers, No Food @NoFarmsNoFoods]

“Nearly a third of England’s mega solar farms are being built on the country’s highest-quality farmland, raising urgent concerns over food security and land use.”

It’s time to stop mass scale solar panels being installed on prime farmland.

https://t.co/EcU8eAjNNh