Peter Brown

Retired CEO, former Lancashire and Middlesex League Cricketer, MCC Member and cricket enthusiast. Golfer when I get time.

[Darren Grimes @darrengrimes]

This is my favourite clip of Rod Liddle on the hypocrisy of Labour politicians.
We have lost an absolute legend.

[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.

[Academy of Ideas @acadofideas]

"The 6th biggest economy in the world is run by infantile fantasists with no understanding of financial markets.... There's nothing progressive about driving the economy of a cliff"📉⛰️

@LiamHalligan @ #BattleFest 2025 "From steel to railways: can the state revitalise British industry?"👨‍🏭🚆

👇

[Peter Brown @pieman1951]

@FanElonMuskrut Hope

[Peter Brown @pieman1951]

Just been to the Hans Zimmer concert at the O2…
The biggest load of self indulgent shit I have heard in a long time. Left at the half time interval. Some great music ruined by awful arrangement.

[Lord Ashcroft @LordAshcroft]

For every retweet of this post, I will donate £1 to the @VC_and_GC_Assoc up to £50,000.
Time is running out following @I_W_M’s decision to close the Lord Ashcroft Gallery.
Visit while you still can, to honour the bravery of those who risked so much to protect our great nation.

[Peter Brown @pieman1951]

@JMPSimor Yes. About time you woke up to what is happening to our country. Communities are being disrupted across the nation by this “invasion” from cultures which do not have our values. Are you oblivious to this? If you are I suggest you get out more..

[Rush @exRAF_Al]

Robert Jenrick is on fire. @Keir_Starmer - what is your response?

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

A crazy 1.2 million foreign-born people claim £7.5 billion each year in Universal Credit.
Before you slash disability benefits for Brits change the eligibility for foreigners.
Live here 10 years and pay taxes before you get benefits.
Other countries do this!

[Peter Brown @pieman1951]

@ElonMuskAOC Stunning colour… my wife would love it!

[Peter Brown @pieman1951]

@themajorityscot Bollocks

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

You work hard, you're successful, you earn money, you get old, you want to pass those rewards to your children.

What happens?

It gets taxed, massively. AGAIN.

I say scrap inheritance tax for EVERYONE.

[Adam Cherry @_adamcherry_]

Just landing on Whitehall. “Rachel’s Think Tank” leading the way.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Milton Friedman was spot on

[Peter Brown @pieman1951]

@leeharris @elonmusk @LiamHalligan Liam is 100% correct as he is most of the time… Why can’t our political class grow a set and sort this out? They have been ducking it for years. This is horrendous stuff and any perpitrator should be jailed and then deported. Where is the outrage from the Pakistani community?

[Lee Harris @LeeHarris]

'Why won't Labour have a national inquiry? Is it because Keir Starmer was DPP during this period?'

'I personally hope @elonmusk keeps pushing for a national inquiry.'

'This is one of the biggest scandals in British history'

Utterly superb from @LiamHalligan 🔥

[Peter Brown @pieman1951]

@joerichlaw IMO this is a complete disgrace… and not gross misconduct… he should be reinstated forthwith.. and whoever made this decision sacked immediately

[Peter Brown @pieman1951]

@LiamHalligan @GBNEWS You are the best in the business…a big mistake by GB News

[Peter Brown @pieman1951]

@TheLeaverland @LiamHalligan @GBNEWS Me too..

[Peter Brown @pieman1951]

@BLAIMGame @jreynoldsMP No I don’t..