Rick Leslie

Human, Realist, Seeker of Truth.

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

@Liza137823 Another Karen!

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

@ABridgen Reform should pull out of the race, otherwise they will be splitting the vote.

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

Petition: Ensure access to non-whole meal flour without folic acid fortification

We call on the Government to amend the law to ensure there are at least one non-wholemeal flour option without folic acid fortification, and to exempt organic flour.

https://t.co/e7plOBMPNM

[No Farmers, No Food @NoFarmsNoFoods]

Energy use by AI data centres in the UK could cause emissions of 123m tonnes of carbon dioxide – as much generated by 2.7 million people over 10 years.

So while cow burps are blamed and farmers get punished with a carbon tax on fertiliser, the tech giants are rewarded with AI data centre contracts.

[Andrew Bridgen @ABridgen]

We need to stop the mandatory introduction of Folic acid into flour, it’s will be harmful to a large proportion of the population. So far no debate in Parliament just an announcement it’s being introduced into all flour in the UK including organic flour.
‘Safe and effective’ again ?

[No Farmers, No Food @NoFarmsNoFoods]

The looming threat of carbon tax on fertilisers, which the Labour government have earmarked from January 2027. Yet another financial hit on cash strapped farmers.

The cumulative financial hit could amount to an extra £80,000 for a standard 1,000-tonne wheat farm.

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

@Bowen85AI @CallumLyon @Anniewee5 Ukraine, foreign nationals, friends of those who are supposed to be public servants… the list goes on!

[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.

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

@RachelD1892 If Restore weren’t standing, I’d spoil my ballot paper.

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

@BhattiLaib9960 Enough guns

[Andrew Bridgen @ABridgen]

If you want to know what the ‘Cost of Net Zero’ is look at these average domestic energy bills across countries. Imagine what the commercial energy bills are for businesses trying to compete in world markets ?
Energy for UK businesses is 5 x higher than in China and 4.5 x India

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

@benhabib6 @RestoreBritain_ @reformparty_uk Wow! Until I read some of the comments on here, I hadn’t realised just how terrified of Restore many of the Reform supporters are.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The funniest maths in modern environmentalism.

One almond requires 12 litres of irrigated water to produce. Peer-reviewed, ScienceDirect, 2017. A glass of almond milk contains roughly 50 of them. 600 litres of water before the carton is filled.

The water comes from the San Joaquin Valley in California, which sits over one of the most over-extracted aquifers on earth. The valley floor has subsided by up to nine metres in places due to groundwater depletion. The carton is then refrigerated, sailed across the Atlantic, refrigerated again, lorried to a Manchester Tesco, and bought by someone who is concerned about the environmental impact of dairy.

Meanwhile, in Cheshire.

A British dairy cow drinks roughly 70 to 100 litres of water a day and produces around 28 litres of milk. That's about 3.5 litres of water per litre of milk. The water is rainwater that fell on her field or came from a local stream fed by the same rainwater. The rain was going to fall on the field whether the cow stood in it or not. 80% of her moisture intake comes from the grass itself, which is also rain.

She converts the grass, free of charge, into a litre of milk containing seven times the protein and four times the calcium of almond milk, and shipped roughly 18 miles to the same Tesco.

To recap.

600 litres of stolen aquifer, flown halfway round the world for nutritionally worthless beige water.

Or 3.5 litres of rain that was already falling, converted by an animal you can pet, into actual food.

The shopper picks the almond.

She has been told this is the ethical position.

The aquifer would like a word.

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

@WorkElizab By area, skin.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A farmer dies in April 2026.

His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847.

The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle.

On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify.

In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable.

The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft.

The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let.

A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up.

The Treasury collects £140,000.

The land never produces British food again.

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

@benonwine Two, intelligent, people who have come to similar conclusions, supporting the same ideology. One has the money, the other has the position to bring about the necessary changes.

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

Save Victoria Snooker Centre - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/9Amo3taQCx via @UKChange

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

@Paulrestore @RupertLowe10 Way more than I trust Starmer the farmer harmer.

[Rick Leslie @RickLeslie]

@Alinavisooo D