Paul MacLaren

On a Journey.. Destination unknown - Ardgay Glamping Pods

[Paul MacLaren @paulmaclaren]

@lewis_goodall 🤣

[Salisbury And Wilton Swifts @AndSwifts]

Swifts are a red list Bird of Conservation Concern - so why was a nest in Dorking destroyed? We need answers from Homes England - can you help by signing the petition? https://t.co/rLSXcrAyZe via @38degrees

[Paul MacLaren @paulmaclaren]

@WriterHannahBT @markruskell @ZacGoldsmith @domdyer70 Congratulations and very well deserved! 🙌

[Paul MacLaren @paulmaclaren]

@GWmag Monty deserves his well earned retirement. Can we please have Adam Frost as Monty’s replacement!

[Jacquet @JqJeremy_LFC]

This is home😊❤️

[Mike Morrison @MDMorrison82]

Doing it for the lawn mow’n, socks ‘n sandals wear’n, pun make’n, football watch’n dads out there. Thanks @Airbnb. Someday my carriage will turn back into a pumpkin, but until then, I’ll dance at the ball ⚽️

[Ataque Futbolero @AtaqueFutbolero]

Jürgen Klopp le mangueó la casaca a Alexis Mac Allister, se dieron un abrazo post partido y después la presumió en Instagram.

Qué fenómeno. 😅🇦🇷

[Morgan Barrett @MorganBarrettX]

Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm show on Amazon is the most radicalizing piece of mainstream media I’ve ever seen

Just one example (bear with me):

Badgers became a protected species in Britain 40+ years ago.

The population has exploded and now frequently transmits tuberculosis to cows

But farmers can’t cull the badger population to protect their cattle because the government still considers them to be endangered

Instead of addressing the root cause, the UK has the most batshit testing regime for cattle

There’s no TB vaccine. So the cattle have to get tested. The vets administering the test have to measure welts on the cows neck. Whether a cow lives or dies comes down to a vet trying to discern 1mm on a caliper (reactive vs non reactive).

If a cow tests positive, the farm (already running on super thin margins) is quarantined and starts hemorrhaging money.

Jeremy Clarkson’s cow (pregnant with twins) has an inconclusive test so it’s separated from the herd. It receives a second inconclusive test so they have to kill it (before it can give birth to the twins).

Now here’s the kicker: the autopsy reveals no sign of TB. It was a healthy cow needlessly killed

So - silver lining the farm should be removed from quarantine, right? WRONG - it’s still under quarantine and has to keep testing and can’t sell its beef

Kafkaesque doesn’t even begin to describe how f’d up it is for British farmers

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.

Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.

Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.

That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.

This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.

So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.

The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.

And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

[The Redmen TV @TheRedmenTV]

Bagpipes and Scottish flags to welcome Robbo one last time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

[Paul MacLaren @paulmaclaren]

@TrishMacf @HairyAngus @joannaccherry If you listen to @SirTomHunter you will realise that there is no business acumen or strategic plan within Scot Gov to build growth. You need businesses to grow etc not tax tax tax stifling investment and innovation

[Paul MacLaren @paulmaclaren]

@alanbrazil Get well soon and best wishes on your recovery. You will be back stronger and fitter in no time! Onwards 💪👊

[Paul MacLaren @paulmaclaren]

@GrahamSpiers This is the person you think there’s a lot to “like and admire…??” Delusional

[Paul MacLaren @paulmaclaren]

@WriterHannahBT Thousands of swifts in torremolinos! Hopefully some heading to the UK

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

You’re the energy secretary. Yet you don’t seem to know that BP’s ‘excess profits’ come from its global oil trading division, which is not subject to UK ‘excess profits’ windfall tax, not from its North Sea activities, which are. Remarkable.

[Liverpool FC @LFC]

This angle 😮‍💨

[Liverpool FC @LFC]

One end to the other 😤

A fantastic team move finished by Robbo 🙌

[Paul MacLaren @paulmaclaren]

@JohnSwinney @MareeToddMSP Watch out for the potholes! Make sure you have a spare tyre or two

[Hannah Bourne-Taylor @WriterHannahBT]

Please help get this message to CEO of @networkrail Jeremy Westlake. Email him asking him to unblock the swift nesting sites in the chapel Milton viaduct, Derbyshire. His email is [email protected] @deborahpitman has been asking for ages but she’s been ignored

[Paul MacLaren @paulmaclaren]

@implausibleblog @DeborahMeaden Absolutely unfactual rubbish these comments by Caroline Lucas! I cannot believe you have reposted this, anyone closely associated with the Oil industry will inform you there is an abundance of oil & gas