Guinness808

[A View From Yorkshire @models_by_Russ]

Dear HM Government, (UK)

Firstly, congratulations. You’ve managed to discover a brand-new definition of transparency.

Apparently, the people who write the laws can have their criminal records kept secret from the very people expected to obey those laws. That’s an impressive piece of political gymnastics.

The rest of us apply for jobs, volunteer roles, taxi licences, security passes, and all manner of positions where background checks are considered perfectly reasonable. Yet when it comes to those entrusted with running the country… suddenly privacy becomes the highest constitutional principle.

Forgive us if we’re a little confused.

If a criminal record is irrelevant to holding public office, then explain why. If it is relevant, then surely voters deserve to know before they hand over power at the ballot box.

Democracy relies on informed consent. It’s difficult to make an informed choice if important information about elected representatives is deliberately withheld.

This isn’t about conducting witch hunts or judging people for minor mistakes made decades ago. It’s about accountability. Those who expect the public’s trust should be prepared to earn it through openness, not secrecy.
Unlike the government’s pursuit of Veterans 🤔

So, a simple question:

Why should MPs and ministers be held to a lower standard of transparency than many ordinary citizens applying for everyday jobs?

After all, “nothing to hide” seems to apply enthusiastically to taxpayers, but rather less enthusiastically to taxpayers’ employees.

Is transparency now something that’s only expected of the governed, while the governors are exempt?
Abit like the COVID vaccine 🤔 there is a pattern,

Perhaps we’ve misunderstood how equality works. We foolishly assumed the same standards applied to everyone. It would appear they do… right up until someone becomes an MP.

The British public doesn’t expect perfection.

We do, however, expect honesty, accountability, and the same standards from those who make our laws as they expect from those who obey them.

Yours, slightly bewildered,

A Taxpayer 🇬🇧

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"Watchdog accused of ‘giving away’ billions of litres of spring water to foreign bottling giants."

Yep the EA are up to their old tricks again. The EA are charging Coca-Cola £6,070 a year to abstract water from the north of England which Coca-Cola then sells for £30 million.

Did I mention that according to the EA by 2050 in England we will need to find another 5 billion litres of water per day just to keep our taps running and to try and save our chalk streams.

What a hoax of a regulator.

https://t.co/i4R1bahBuz

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

No one voted for hundreds of energy and natural resource guzzling data centres to plastered around the country.

[James Hogg @JamesAHogg2]

In celebration of the new heatwave, here's a Public Information Film from the 1970's that you might just recognise. It's one of four films featuring two characters enjoying the good weather: Joe, complete with a handkerchief on his head, and his bespectacled wife, Pertunia, who has a tongue like Gene Simmons from Kiss! 

Joe was voiced by Peter Hawkins (Bill & Ben, etc) and Wendy Craig voiced the first three films as Pertunia, followed by Bridget Forsyth. The films were made by the same people who brought us Willo the Wisp!

 Bit of Public Information Film trivia for you. Did you know that Charley the cat from the Charley Says series, was voiced by Kenny Everett!

Toodlepip.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Wool is a technology so good that if a startup unveiled it tomorrow, it would raise a fortune.

Run through the spec sheet with a straight face.

It keeps you warm even when it's soaking wet, which almost nothing else does. It is naturally flame-resistant. It doesn't catch and melt onto your skin like plastic does. It chars, refuses to sustain the flame, and puts itself out when you take the fire away. It manages moisture, breathes, and resists smell so well you can wear it for days. It bends tens of thousands of times without snapping.

And when you're finally done with it, you can put it in the ground and in a matter of months it's gone, rotted back into the soil, feeding it nitrogen on the way out.

Then there's the supply chain, which is the part no engineer could ever replicate. It grows back. Every year, on its own, on nothing but grass and rain, on a sheep that was going to stand on that hillside anyway. A self-renewing, fireproof, compostable insulation fibre with a production input of weather.

We replaced it with polyester. Oil, spun into thread, that melts on you in a fire, sheds plastic into the sea with every wash, and sits in landfill for centuries when you're done.

We had the better version the whole time. It says baa.

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

When the UK says it’s lowering its emissions remember this …

The UK exports 50 MILLION used tyres a YEAR about 43 MILLION of them to India!

70% are then BURNED to extract crude oil, black carbon and scrap steel.

so we can pretend we’re hitting net zero targets 🤡

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Swiss farmers planted flowers between their crops and watched pest damage drop by over half. The UK is now running the same trial across 15 farms. The reason this works is embarrassingly simple.

A Swiss study on winter wheat found that fields with wildflower strips had 40 to 53% fewer leaf beetle pests than fields without. Crop damage dropped 61%.

The mechanism is simple. Wildflowers feed hoverflies, lacewings, parasitic wasps, ladybugs, and ground beetles. Those insects eat the aphids, beetle larvae, and caterpillars that farmers would otherwise spray for. A few meters of wildflowers hosts an unpaid pest control crew that would jump at the chance to whoop some aphid ass.

In apple orchards where no insecticides had been used for five years, plots with wildflower alleyways had 9.2% damaged fruit. Control plots without flowers had 32.5%.

The UK is now running a five-year trial across 15 farms placing 6-meter flower strips through the middle of fields, not just at the edges, because the beneficial insects can't reach the center of a large field otherwise.

This works the same way in a backyard vegetable garden as it does on a commercial farm. Plant native flowering species near your tomatoes, beans, and squash. The pests still show up, but the predators show up too.

Study doi: 20151369

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

This is how the Net Zero bollocks works …

The “green” ferry project in Scotland was supposed to cost £97 Million. And has actually cost taxpayers about £500 MILLION! … and now they will fund another £600,000 for specialist consultants because ferry staff need training to handle imported LNG.

And that LNG is imported via Kent before being transported hundreds of miles to Scotland…. Using diesel.

After all of that, the CO₂ saving is less than 9% er …. And that’s optimistic!

The entire exercise has been a pointless waste of Taxpayers money for private companies profit! … 🤡

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

Trees. Plant them everywhere.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Bhutan did something almost no country on Earth has done: they put trees in the constitution.

Not a vague "we care about nature" type promise but an actual number. At least 60% of the country must remain under forest cover for all time.

They met the goal and blew past it.

About 70% of Bhutan is forested, which is one reason this small Himalayan country is one of the few carbon-negative nations on Earth. It absorbs more carbon than it emits.

That doesn't mean Bhutan has no emissions. It does. But its forests and land absorb more than the country puts out.

Which is kind of wild when you think about it, because most countries treat forests like a resource to be used and abused as needed.

Bhutan treated them more like national infrastructure. They looked at their forests and decided they weren't just leftover land waiting to be used for something.

[dominic dyer @domdyer70]

We can be certain of one thing as a result of these catastrophic heat waves, we all need to fall in love with trees

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

On a stretch of the River Roding in Barking strewn with waste and detritus, a barrister named Paul Powlesland did something the British state has spent decades failing to do: he cleaned it and made it look like a river again. He now faces legal action.

Yep. He and a group of volunteers hired a digger for £1,000 of their own money and hauled more than 200 bags of filth out of the water - packaging, broken appliances, used needles, even weapons. By any sane reckoning it was a small act of public good, civic spirit at its most potent and wholesome.

For his trouble, he received a letter from the Environment Agency informing him that he is under investigation for working without a permit, an offence that carries up to two years in prison.

The same Environment Agency that found the will to come after a volunteer for cleaning a river without the right paperwork has not, on that same river, prosecuted a single one of the illegal sewage spills that have fouled it for years. Not one. It's too fat, scrofulous, and indolent to fight the sort of people who'd do this. But it has energy to spare for the man with the digger and the bin bags because they expect he's likely to be a reasonable sort of Englishman who pays his taxes and honours procedure, however unreasonable it may be, when levied upon him.

Protecting rivers? They have no interest in that.

This is the thing about our institutions that the public grasps in its bones and the people who run them never will. Our institutions fail, and the manner of their failing is the worst part of it - the bloodless, box-ticking, permission-withholding callousness of bodies that have forgotten they exist to achieve anything at all.

They should all be cleared out; every decision-making body in the building responsible for the dereliction of duty, and for daring to persecute a member of the public, must be hollowed out. The whole thing started from scratch.

Better yet, I'll tell you what an outfit like Progress will do once it gains power; we'll put people like @paulpowlesland in charge of the very body now threatening to jail him. The institutions meant to look after this country - the Environment Agency and a dozen like it - are dying of exactly the defensive, do-nothing culture that sent that letter. They need to be run by people like him who actually give a toss. People with the brains to understand the problem and the plain human instinct to go and fix it themselves, while the rest stand on the bank writing their little sociopathic missives to the ones who already did.

I don't know the first thing about Paul. I've never met him. I don't know what his political preferences are, the shape of his beliefs, what else we would agree or disagree on. None of that means a thing to me. He's a good man, and the right kind of man to make things work; and Progress is an attempt to make the country work, not a club made to serve a certain type or belief profile. A country is made to work by the people who, whatever their politics, cannot walk past a problem without trying to solve it. There are such people everywhere in Britain - on the rivers, in the schools, the wards, the workshops - and almost none of them are running anything, because the institutions have been built to keep that exact kind of person out.

Drop the case against him. Then go further: find the hundred other Paul Powleslands the country is currently ignoring or threatening, and give them the keys. Put the responsibility and the authority, together, in their hands. Britain will be cleaned up - its rivers, and a great deal besides - in no time. It will be done by the people willing to get in the water, not by the ones writing letters about permits from the bank.

[PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE @Protect_Wldlife]

Denmark's Bold Stand: When Animal Welfare Meets Religious Tradition 🇩🇰

In 2014, Denmark drew a line in the sand. Every animal entering a slaughterhouse must be stunned before slaughter. No exceptions. No religious exemptions. The reason? To minimize suffering in an animal's final moments. 💔

This meant the end of unstunned kosher and halal slaughter practices that had previously been permitted. Animal welfare advocates cheered. The government was clear: protecting creatures from extreme pain takes priority. 🛡️

But the response wasn't unanimous. Jewish and Muslim communities pushed back hard, arguing that Denmark was trampling on their religious freedoms and centuries-old traditions. Some observers agreed, saying governments should protect both animal welfare AND religious rights. ⚖️

The law's supporters had a counterargument though: stunning animals doesn't ban religious meat production entirely. It simply adds one step—a humane one—before the traditional process continues. Today, halal meat is still produced in Denmark when this requirement is met. Kosher meat, however, is largely imported from elsewhere. 📍

Denmark isn't alone. Other European nations have adopted similar standards, turning this into a defining debate of our era: tradition versus compassion, rights versus welfare.

So we ask you: When deeply held beliefs clash with animal suffering, where should society draw the line?

Do you agree with Denmark's choice?

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

The fact that animals life on Earth has been reduced by 70% in the last 50 years isn’t sickening enough people

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

The UK now hosts more than 500 active data centres (the third largest in the world). They have been rammed through despite huge local community concerns about the impact on their local landscapes, farmland, energy and water consumption.

These enormous data centres are giant industrial facilities consuming vast quantities of electricity, water and land while placing increasing pressure on the UK’s energy infrastructure.

▪️Water consumption by data centres is expected to reach 9.3 trillion litres, while CO2 emissions will rise to 400 million tons.

▪️ A recent report by the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health confirms that unchecked AI data centre expansion could produce nearly 400 million tonnes of CO2 annually by 2030. This rivals the annual emissions of the entire UK.

▪️Annual power consumption from data centres is projected to double to 945 TWh by 2030, around ‌the ⁠same as the whole of Japan’s energy consumption, with AI accounting for 40% of the total.

▪️It is estimated that data-centre power and water consumption could double by 2030 due to AI growth.

▪️Research suggests that large AI facilities can create localised warming effects around their sites, sometimes described as a “data heat island” effect.

Numerous campaigns against these data centres are being organised by local communities. No one voted for this. Power for the people, not the AI data centres.

[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.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

AI data centres are expected to consume 9.3 trillion litres of water annually by 2030 - the equivalent amount to the water supply requirements of 1.3 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Plundering the natural resources requirements of people for the greed of the tech giants.

[Cat @catdeans]

This is awful. The last ever Denby Pottery going to the kiln. Why is there not uproar? Where’s the government in this?? We all have Denby in our homes, in family heirlooms, as our history and now it’s closing through lack of support, such a sad sad day. #SaveDenby @denbypottery

[No Farmers, No Food @NoFarmsNoFoods]

Dairy farmer Charles Goadby gives this powerful message against Ed Miliband’s “net zero at any cost” which includes drastic reductions in meat and dairy consumed. Miliband has no mandate to do this. No one voted for this.

[PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE @Protect_Wldlife]

🚨 Ban Catapults NOW!! 🚫

There is a major and highly concerning surge in teenagers and children using high-powered catapults to kill and torture wildlife and pets across the United Kingdom. Animal welfare charities, police forces, and local communities are actively campaigning for stricter laws to curb this trend, which is largely driven by viral social media challenges.

Perpetrators are primarily targeting large, slow-moving water birds like swans, Canada geese, and ducks. However, attacks have also been recorded against pigeons, gulls, squirrels, foxes, deer, and domestic pets like dogs and cats.