Steve

[Steve @OldChads]

@silkiecarlo You don't say

[Steve @OldChads]

@NetZeroWatch Its a UK tax, not an EU one, Westminster has just decided to follow the EU and really doesn't have to

[Pat Smith @patsmithcomedy]

Congrats buddy

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

John Cleese on extremism. Still relevant today:

"You can be as nasty as you like and feel your behaviour is morally justified."

[Calgie @christiancalgie]

The nation reacts in unison to Burnham giving us all heart attacks to state the bleeding obvious about the heat

[joe-lincs @lincslincs]

@LibDems @CountBinface You lot are collapsing in the polls lol

[Steve @OldChads]

@WriterHannahBT Still here in south Cheshire, but our piggies help provide them with food.

[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.

[Steve @OldChads]

Petition to stop the early release from jail of PC Andrew Harper's killers https://t.co/nSHrcvqcMi via @Change

[Steve @OldChads]

@joncoupland

[Steve @OldChads]

@zatzi @Camlowandslow I worked at some new school and health centres being built under PFI mid 2000's, there were just a cash extraction tool for companies. Tied into outrageous maintenance contracts once built, replacing a network port faceplate on a wall, costs sub £10, charged £120 (plus labour)

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Two hundred of the thousand acres at Diddly Squat grew nothing at all this year. That was a decision taken in advance, on a spreadsheet. Wheat or barley on that ground was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed, so Jeremy Clarkson left it bare and explained why in his Sun column this week.

One line from it went everywhere. Farmers have reached the point where it is quite simply impossible to make money from growing food. Every paper carried that sentence, and every paper stopped there.

The list underneath it did not get printed anywhere.

Because he went on to set out what two hundred acres of good English ground could do instead of feeding anyone, and there were four items on it.

- Rent it to a global agri-company growing crops for anaerobic digesters.
- Cover it in solar panels.
- Put a data centre on it.
- Sell the farm to a Chinese company for a multistorey high-intensity piggery.

Every one of those pays. The only use of that land which reliably loses money is the one that puts food on a British plate. He added that he was not being ridiculous, and that anybody in 1926 would have laughed you out of the room for suggesting the factories would be gone by 2026.

Now the bit with a date on it.

From 1 January 2027 the UK's carbon border tax applies to imported fertiliser. The Treasury's own costings put the take at £140 million in 2027-28, rising to £180 million the year after. Estimates of the hit run from around £33 a tonne to £75, which is a fifth to a quarter added to the largest input bill an arable farm carries. The Central Association of Agricultural Valuers has warned that a typical 500 acre cereals farm could be down as much as £70,000 once fertiliser and fuel costs land.

So the fertiliser that grows the wheat gets taxed on a known date, in writing, by a government that says out loud it wants food security.

Nobody in Whitehall has ever signed a policy to stop Britain growing food. They have signed a great many that make every alternative pay better, which arrives at the same field.

And understand whose field this is. Diddly Squat has a television crew, a farm shop with a queue down the lane, a pub, a lager brand, a bestselling book every autumn and one of the best land agents in the country. It is the most commercially advantaged thousand acres in Britain, and two hundred of them were left bare this year because putting seed in them was the losing move.

Every arable farmer in England is doing that same sum this autumn. Almost none of them have a production company to cover the difference.

Those two hundred acres have not gone out of production. They are waiting to hear which industry wants them more than you do.

[Steve @OldChads]

@officialsammyuk as long as there is an option for "none of the above", and if gets the most votes a new election is required.

[Steve @OldChads]

@clark_aviation So last post I saw from you was 16th July, jut had a catchup looking at your profile....

[Steve @OldChads]

@RachelReevesMP a liar and a failure as Chancellor, if you truly believe what you have posted you are seriously deluded

[Ricky Gervais @rickygervais]

This wasn't allowed in public incase it offended anyone. So please don't retweet it. Thanks 🙏https://t.co/1stbtsNZG1

[mike erwydd. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇬🇧🇮✝️ @mikeerwydd1968]

Facts.......

[Steve @OldChads]

@PaulCoxComedy amazed they never blamed the ruskis for that one, war is a profitable business though

[Steve @OldChads]

@thesundaysport different cheeks, same arse

[House Of The People @HoTPOfficial]

MPs can vote against the clear wishes of the people who elected them, on every bill for five years, and face no consequence until the next election.

By then there have been hundreds of votes, most of which you never heard about, on laws that shape your taxes, your rent, your care, your children’s schools. One ballot, once every five years, is meant to cover all of it.

We built House of the People so it doesn’t have to. A say on every bill, as it happens. https://t.co/WVi7iKrI6t