pat sheehy

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

Drive through almost any corner of the English countryside and sooner or later you pass a ruin: a roofless abbey, a row of broken arches open to the weather, a few worked stones in a field where something vast once stood. We are so used to these skeletons that we file them under scenery. In truth each one is a crime scene, and the oldest warning we have about what the English state does when it decides its own people are there to be harvested.

The fashionable comparison this season is the Civil War: the 1640s, the king against his parliament, the long slide to the sword. The state-as-enemy-of-the-nation. I think it's the wrong century. To see our situation as it actually is, go back a hundred years earlier, to the 1530s, and to the largest seizure of wealth in English history before the modern age - the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

The monasteries were far more than churches. They were the welfare state of their day, among the many other pillars-of-society which they constituted. They ran the hospitals and fed the poor at the gate. They schooled the clever sons of nobodies, took in travellers, lent money, employed half the county, and held perhaps a fifth of the land in England in a kind of standing trust for the people around them. They were the accumulated institutional capital of the nation, built up across four centuries.

In barely four years, the state took the lot.

The way it was done is the whole point. First the audit: Thomas Cromwell sent his men to value every religious house in the land down to the candlesticks - the Valor Ecclesiasticus, a Domesday Book drawn up for plunder. Then the justification: the same men came back with lurid dossiers of monkish vice and idleness, much of it invented and all of it deeply useful, because a thing you mean to destroy must first be declared rotten. Then the disposal. The proceeds went nowhere near the poor who had depended on the place. The land was sold, fast and cheap, to the Crown's creditors and courtiers and the rising, grasping gentry - a new class of men bound to the regime by the very loot they were handed, a good many of whose descendants sit on the same acres now.

When the north rose against it, in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the rising was put down and its leaders hanged on the strength of a royal pardon that was never meant to be honoured.

The result, for ordinary people, was a disaster that took generations to undo. The hospitals shut. The poor relief evaporated. England filled with vagrants and beggars - "sturdy beggars", in fact, which the same government then set about whipping through the streets - because the institutions that had carried the poor had been cashed in for the king's wars and the courtiers' estates. It took the better part of a century, and the Elizabethan Poor Law, to rebuild a fraction of what those four years had wrecked.

This is the English disease in its purest form, and a man ought to know his own country's worst habit when he sees it come round again. The English state has never had much need of tanks or secret police. Its signature is subtler. It finds the institutions ordinary people rely on, declares them corrupt or inefficient or unaffordable, audits them, hollows them, and transfers their substance - the money, the land, the power, the security - to the class that runs the machine.

You have watched it done. The hospitals, the courts, the high streets, the post offices, the savings, the very safety of the streets - audited, downgraded, closed, sold, or left to rot, while the apparatus sitting on top of it all has swollen to £400 billion a year and answers to nobody you can name. The monks are long gone and the method is immortal.

The ruins in the field are a gravestone, but they are also evidence, and evidence is always useful. Once a people learns to recognise the method - the audit, the manufactured rot, the fire-sale to insiders, the whole business wrapped in the word "reform" - it stops working on them.

The English have rebuilt everything that was stripped from them before: the parish relief, the friendly societies, the great Victorian foundations, the hospitals and schools of the last century, every one of them raised by people who refused to accept that the floor under ordinary life was gone for good. We will do it again. The first step is to stop calling the men selling the country reformers, and to call them what Cromwell's men were: looters with a jolly good filing system.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The Great Orme is a limestone headland on the North Wales coast, and it comes with roughly two hundred feral Kashmir goats that answer to absolutely no one.

These are not ordinary goats. Their ancestors were luxury animals, descended from the royal cashmere herd kept at Windsor in Victoria's day. A pair were brought west by Lord Mostyn in the late 1800s, released onto the Orme for a spot of refined grazing, and promptly threw off all civilisation to live as wild aristocrats on a windy rock. They have been up there, magnificently unbothered, for well over a century.

The goats have no view on their own noble lineage. They have strong views on gorse, on limestone scrub, on the timing of the tourist season, and on the structural integrity of every garden fence in Llandudno.

Several times a year, usually when the weather up top turns unacceptable even by Kashmir goat standards, they descend. Into the town. They eat the hedges. They annex the gardens. They stand in the middle of the road with the air of creatures conducting a property viewing. They have been photographed in bus shelters and lounging outside estate agents, radiating the serene confidence of animals that were here before the terraced housing and fully intend to outlast it.

Llandudno has around twenty thousand residents and two hundred goats, and on any given morning it is genuinely unclear which party considers the other a nuisance.

The council's great instrument of control is to put the nannies discreetly on contraceptives and otherwise pretend it has a say.

The goats have never once asked permission. They are descended from royalty, they were here first, and they would like you to remember both.

[Ayaan Hirsi Ali @Ayaan]

Wow! 👏👏👏

[National Theatre Live @NTLive]

A huge congrats to the #LesLiaisonsDangereuses cast and crew👏

There's still time to catch the play in cinemas over the new few weeks, don't miss out!

📸 Sarah Lee

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

Natural England does not just paralyse development. It also paralyses nature conservation.

My business owns land rich in rare species because of work we have done to create special habitats.

I live in fear of @NaturalEngland finding out and declaring it a "site of special scientific interest".

Not because we want to build on it but because we want to go on managing it for nature.

And if it is a SSSI, we would have to ask Natural England's permission every time we dug another scrape, made another island in a pond or changed the management of the vegetation to help nature.

Or untied our shoelaces.

And @NaturalEngland's stated policy is that it takes "up to" (ie, at least) four months (!) to respond to requests. Followed by visits, meetings, correspondence, exchanges of lengthy documents.

[Beatrice Groves @beatricegroves1]

Pretty in pink🌸 #FlowersOnFriday
Centaury, one of the loveliest wildflowers, is named after the herbalist Chiron, the only centaur who deigned to pass on his knowledge to mankind🩷
He is the model for Firenze, the centaur who teaches #HarryPotter🌸⚡️🌸
https://t.co/cVA6FKeNYT

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Manchester Model is also the Miliband Model

David Miliband joined the advisory board of Giant Ventures in September 2020. Five months earlier, his brother Ed had become Keir Starmer's shadow energy secretary. Giant Ventures is a London-based venture capital firm with a declared focus on green technology. Its portfolio includes Field, a battery storage company, and Beams, a green home renovation platform. Both stand to profit directly from the energy policies Ed Miliband now controls as Secretary of State.

Less than three weeks after Labour's election victory, Ed Miliband personally signed the Capacity Market Amendment Rules 2024. The document is technical. Its effect is not. Battery storage firms, including Field, benefited from rule changes that reduced the performance obligations previously required of contracted operators. Field had been a Giant Ventures investment since 2021. David Miliband was a paid adviser to Giant Ventures when his brother signed that document. Giant Ventures refused to disclose his remuneration. The firm's other advisory board members, including Lord Browne, record the position in their register of interests as remunerated employment.

The Ministerial Code requires newly appointed ministers to declare all interests that give rise to a conflict, including those of close family members. It requires them to avoid not merely actual conflicts but the perception of one. When both the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Cabinet Office were asked whether Ed had declared his brother's role at Giant Ventures, both refused to comment. When the department was pressed further, its spokesperson confirmed only that the List of Ministers' Interests would be published "in due course." Giant Ventures declined to comment. David Miliband did not respond. That silence is the story.

Ed Miliband's department has also paid over one million pounds in public contracts to Verian Group, a research and communications firm whose board includes David Miliband, appointed as non-executive director in April 2023. The contracts funded work on public attitudes to Net Zero and secondary heating behaviours. The department's defence is that Verian has provided services to DESNZ for many years and the relationship predates the current Secretary of State. That may be true of the contract history. It does not address why neither department would confirm a declaration had been made, or why a minister whose brother sits on a contractor's board continued to approve payments to that contractor.

The pattern matters because it has a twin.

Andy Burnham governed Greater Manchester for eight years on a platform of clean transport and green infrastructure. His wife, Marie-France van Heel, joined Be.EV as chief marketing officer in July 2023, was promoted to chief customer officer in July 2024, and was appointed to the board of directors in September 2024. Be.EV holds a public contract with Transport for Greater Manchester to operate the city's electric vehicle charging network, a contract awarded in 2019. She holds 252 shares in Iduna Infrastructure, Be.EV's parent company, and is a beneficiary of a long-term incentive plan tied to the firm's commercial growth. Greater Manchester is now tendering a new £166 million EV charging contract. Burnham declares his wife's role. He steps back from relevant decisions. The paperwork is in order, which is precisely the point.

In both cases the politician sets the policy direction. In both cases a family member holds a financial stake in the commercial sector that policy governs. In both cases the defence is procedural. Declaration filed. Recusal noted. Nothing to see.

Britain is being asked to take the Manchester Model national and trust its architect with Downing Street. Before it decides, it should understand what compliance permits. A conflict of interest that has been registered is not a conflict of interest that has been resolved. It is a conflict of interest with a paper trail.

[Steven Barrett @SBarrettBar]

Bit spiteful.

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

The Environment Agency is a textbook example of how many QUANGOs view their job as little more than issuing press releases and overseeing managed decline - or just being on a 4/10 autopilot.

At this point the EA clearly needs to be dissolved and started again.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There are four hens in the back garden of a retired widower in Yorkshire, and there is, unmistakably, a government.

Beatrice runs it. This was never put to a vote. Beatrice is a four-year-old Light Sussex, and she holds office the way the genuinely powerful always have, by being first out of the coop every morning, first to the worms, and entirely beyond challenge. The other three understand the arrangement completely. None of them has ever seen it written down. None of them needs to.

A backyard flock, it turns out, is not a democracy but a small and rigid court, and beneath Beatrice sit the other three in their settled order.

There is Brenda, a Rhode Island Red, the deputy and enforcer, who administers the order of things with the joyless efficiency of a woman who runs the village hall committee and has firm views about how the urn is filled. Brenda does not aspire to the top. Brenda has seen what the top requires. Brenda is content to be second and to make absolutely certain everyone below her knows they are below her.

There is Pam, a blue hybrid of uncertain parentage, who occupies the middle and worries about it. Pam is the first to raise the alarm at a sparrowhawk, a falling leaf, the neighbour's cat, or a carrier bag, and she is right just often enough to be tolerated and wrong just often enough to be a trial to everyone. Pam means well. Pam means well at volume.

And there is Susan, the youngest, a flighty brown hybrid who arrived not knowing the order and learned it the hard way, one firm peck at a time. Susan is at the bottom. Susan has made her peace with the bottom. She gets the worm nobody else wanted and the perch nearest the draught, and she is, for all that, the happiest hen in the garden, because the foot of a settled order is a more restful place to stand than the middle of a contested one. Pam could learn a great deal from Susan. Pam will not.

The man watches all of this from the kitchen window with his tea and believes, in the manner of all constitutional monarchs, that he is in charge. He opens the coop. He scatters the feed. He digs the vegetable bed at quarter past six because Beatrice taught him to, though he would tell you it was his own idea entirely.

He thinks the garden runs on him. The garden runs on Beatrice. The man is, at most, the weather.

He lost his wife some years ago, and a daughter who could not be there every day brought him four hens instead, on the theory that a man does better with something to get up for. The theory was sound. He gets up at first light now, every morning, because four small dependents are counting on him, and because one of them, a white hen with a black collar, will put her head on one side and regard him in a way that has become, without his ever quite deciding it, the first conversation of his day.

He talks to them. He has stopped pretending he does not.

Four hens. One government. A worked vegetable bed, more eggs in a week than one man can get through, two dead rats so far this year, and a reason for a good man to be out in his garden at dawn with the dew coming up and the kettle on.

This is the smallest farm in England. It is also, by a quiet distance, one of the best run.

Eat the egg. Keep the hens. Mind the old men in their gardens. They are doing better than they let on, and so, in their settled and governed way, are the hens.

[Wanjiru Njoya @WanjiruNjoya]

"we only become fully conscious of a culture worth conserving when it is already passing away."

[Lord Moylan @danielmgmoylan]

I simply cannot understand how a British government of any political persuasion can embark on an experiment on children known to have irreversible and harmful consequences.

Will @AndyBurnhamGM stop this? Please.

[Alan D Miller @alanvibe]

Labour now poised to “encourage” farmers to give up beef production and plant lentils to “help combat climate change”

We want meat & we need our farmers to be able to deliver food security to Britain

Stop with the mad net zero mania!

[Iain Mansfield @IGMansfield]

Phillipson's claim that imposing VAT on private schools wasn't 'spiteful' would be more credible if she hadn't abolished the Latin Excellence Programme, canned the IB and slashed advanced maths in state schools.

A small-minded ideology obsessed with cutting down tall poppies.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

This is a disgrace.

Labour’s lame duck Attorney General, Lord Hermer, is once again trying to force through his vindictive pet project: the Chagos Island surrender.

Hermer is the only person who wants this deal. Conservatives rejected it. The Americans have serious concerns about it. And the British people do not want it.

Conservative would use the money Labour put aside for the Chagos surrender to fund our defence.

You do not make Britain safer by giving away strategic assets and paying for the privilege.

Conservatives have stopped this deal before. We will stop it again.

We will not let Labour weaken Britain.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Rick, you're right but the numbers are considerably worse. According to figures given to councillors, the total cost of the scrapped Clean Air Zone is now forecast to reach £115 million. The central government funding awarded to Burnham's authority to cover the abandoned scheme and its successor was even higher, a total of £211 million, of which £22.5 million was paid back. A further £86 million of public money was then pumped into cleaner buses and taxis as the replacement scheme.

Burnham hailed the U-turn as a victory, claiming that charging polluting vehicles had become a pre-pandemic solution for a post-pandemic world. His critics at the time accused him of having bottled the plan when its unpopularity became clear. The proposed scheme would have levied charges of up to £60 a day on the most polluting vehicles across an area of almost 500 square miles, the largest such scheme in Europe. It provoked widespread public outrage, with businesses facing financial ruin, and Burnham backed down weeks before implementation in May 2022.

The money wasted on the abandoned CAZ could have built five state of the art secondary schools or paid for almost 3,000 newly qualified nurses for a year. Instead it produced stickers, a U-turn and a replacement scheme funded by more public money.

This is the record of the man proposing to implement his Manchester model nationally.

[Alexandra @Alexandr4Denman]

WELL DONE MILLIBAND JUST WONDERFUL!
Over a thousand wind turbines across Britain contain banned ASBESTOS in brake parts supplied by Chinese manufacturers .
The chrysotile asbestos banned in Britain since 1999 was found in lift and hoist brakes . A major and very expensive ( paid by the taxpayer ) clean up operation is now underway with costs expected to be substantial .
Not forgetting if any of those brake pads broke and the asbestos got into the ground the fibres don't break down they would stay in the soil for a longtime making the land contaminated meaning it couldn't be disturbed with digging or grown on . Dangerous stuff if airborne
The GMB union is demanding full details from the government .

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Suppose that there was a religion that dictated that anyone born with coloured eyes had to be killed. Would the US allow it to flourish because "freedom of religion"? Now suppose that an existing religion preaches astoundingly worse things than the latter fictitious religion. Why does it get the "freedom of religion" protection?

[Tony Heller 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 @TonyClimate]

Nine hundred years of European heatwaves

https://t.co/OCXxCsGl3P

[Chris Philp MP @CPhilpOfficial]

The rape gang scandal just got worse.

Men from the mainly Pakistani-origin rape gangs are being let out of prison early—even though the government promised they wouldn’t be.

@fionagoddarduk

#UKPolitics #LawAndOrder #Justice #PublicSafety #Accountability #StopEarlyRelease #ChrisPhilpMP