Robin Travis

MD of family SME. Enjoy reasoned discussion to find the truth. love the countryside and outdoors

[Jen k 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @Jenny_1884]

I won’t use the likes of Deliveroo, Uber Eats & Just Eat because you never know who’s going to be knocking at your door.

On the rare occasion we have a takeaway we collect ourselves.

Anyone else do the same?

[Anthony Boutall @anthonyboutall]

This is odd. When HMRC tried to make Gary Lineker pay £4.9 million three years ago, he spent lots of money avoiding it… 🤷‍♂️

The good news is that he can change his mind & pay all that & more to the treasury if he wishes, on this website:

https://t.co/fZJu88k2Vz

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

Why does no one care?

In Africa, Arab Muslims are enslaving black African Christians.

Mainstream media, progressives, pro-Palestinian protesters, the UN, and even the Pope remain silent.

[Sedd @SeddSezz]

Norway's North Sea oil giant has achieved $11bn in profit.

Equinor, 67% owned by the Norwegian government, delivered higher earnings after the Iran war drove up global prices for oil and gas.

All the while, the British government refused to approve new oil licenses and get drilling...

How has Miliband just been announced as Foreign Secretary when he should apologise profusely to the public?

His egregious decision-making in his crazed and corrupt pursuit of Net Zero has cost Britain dearly.

Miliband should be behind bars, let alone resign from the Cabinet.

[Stuart Powell @stuartpowell]

42K - come on folks, it only takes 10 seconds to object to the government putting folic acid in food.

https://t.co/RwbvOissEn

[Renée Hoenderkamp @DrHoenderkamp]

If you don't want folic acid force fed to everyone in the nation.... sign this.

https://t.co/UX2AmxCkle

[Nat @Arwenstar]

2021: mass medication of people with manufactured consent.

2026: mass medication of people without consent, manufactured or otherwise.

Not safe and effective in either case.
Not ethical either.

We should not be allowing this.

[Gill Gentles @gillygen]

I am honestly horrified at this government overreach. It's essentially treating the entire UK population like children, mass medicating us 'for our own good'. It's so wrong.

[Benonwine @benonwine]

I don’t know how Cadbury gets away with still using the famous ‘Glass and a Half’ logo when its chocolate contains less cocoa and milk than it used to, and far more palm oil and sugar.

If the recipe has changed so much, should they still be allowed to market it with a symbol that many people associate with quality and a high milk content?

[Britain Unbound @BritainUnbound]

Opponents to Brexit contend that the referendum in 2016 was advisory and that children were not able to vote in it, so therefore the result should somehow be invalid.

Some thoughts.

1. The 2016 referendum had 33.5 million valid votes, over 72% of the electorate
2. Children cannot vote because they are children - they quite literally have no basis or capability on which to make a decision
3. The UK Government and Parliament both decreed that they would abide by the decision made in the referendum, on a simple majority vote - so it was not advisory in practice
4. The following election in 2017, as well as the two elections in 2019, for EU and UK Parliaments were also strong voters endorsements for leaving the EU

Those who want a second referendum, forget that we essentially had four before we left - and every time the largest result was to leave.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Someone explain this to me slowly, because I'm clearly the idiot here.

We plant a Mediterranean nut in a Californian desert. It doesn't rain there, so we drain a ten-thousand-year-old aquifer until the ground itself sinks a foot a year and whole towns get shorter. The trees can't fight off fungus, so we spray the lot. They can't pollinate themselves, so every February we truck thirty billion bees across a continent and let a fair share of them die in the crush. Then we chill the harvest and sail it six thousand miles to Britain, where it rains constantly and always has, to be blitzed with water and gums and sold to you at £2.40 a carton with a green leaf on the side.

That is the environmentally friendly option.

Twelve miles down the road there's a bloke with cattle in a field. Rain falls on the hill. Grass drinks it. Cow eats grass. Nothing pumped, sprayed, chilled or shipped. No bees died. Her entire supply chain is weather.

That is the planetary emergency.

And it'll be explained to you by someone holding a carton of desert water, wearing a fleece made of crude oil.

Asking for the cow. She's been very patient about it.

[Katie Lam @Katie_Lam_MP]

Burnham wants to spend £16.5 billion on foreign aid.

That could pay for:

- running all prisons for nearly 2 years
- running all courts for nearly 6 years
- 27,500 new prison places
- salaries for nearly 400,000 nurses

But he's sending your money abroad instead.

[Higgy @higgyboson]

Raising the price of something by 50% and then reducing it to the original price while declaring the reduction to be an innovative initiative to save people money is somewhat dishonest.

Anyone disagree?

[S A M M Y Woodhouse @officialsammyuk]

An Eritrean illegal migrant with a beard and Adam's apple has been ruled to be a child by a court, with the British taxpayer now footing his costly legal bill.

The male, who has not been named, broke into Britain on the back of a HGV in February 2024 after being blocked from entering the country multiple times.

——-

The judges making these decisions need to be investigated and removed.

https://t.co/k3rs9xaoQo

[Johnny Midnight ⚡️ @its_The_Dr]

Hmmm 🤔

[English Gentleman 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧🇺🇸 @EngGentleman7]

One watches the latest footage from the Enfield Morrisons with the same mild, incredulous expression one might adopt upon discovering that the local pub has replaced its real ale with a dedicated range of non-alcoholic date juice “to better reflect the community.”

There, under a vast navy-blue banner bearing the word HALAL in both English and Arabic, stands what was once a traditional British butcher’s counter. The glass cabinets that used to hold proper cuts of British and Irish beef, lamb and pork now stand largely empty or have been quietly reassigned. In their place one finds row upon row of Shazans packaging, the familiar orange-and-black branding of Morrisons’ dedicated halal range, and a service counter whose sole remaining purpose is the provision of meat slaughtered according to Islamic rites.

The traditional Market Street butchery – the very feature Morrisons once advertised as the heart of the store – has, in this branch at least, simply evaporated.

Customers who prefer their meat free of religious certification, or who simply wish to speak to a butcher about the thickness of a sirloin without first navigating a concession operated under the British Halal Charter, are left with the refrigerated packaged goods or the option of shopping elsewhere.

Enfield’s Muslim population stands at approximately 18.6 per cent according to the last census. That is a substantial minority, certainly, yet one searches in vain for any parallel arrangement in which a supermarket has surrendered its entire fresh-meat counter to the dietary rules of any other group.

The Christian majority, the growing number of those of no religion, the Hindus, the Sikhs – none have been granted exclusive dominion over the cold cabinets. Only one faith appears to possess the demographic leverage, or the corporate compliance, required to achieve this quiet displacement.

Morrisons has, of course, long operated Shazans counters in areas of higher Muslim concentration. The company has always insisted that its own-brand fresh meat remains non-halal and pre-stunned.

That is true as far as it goes. Yet when the only service counter left standing is the halal one, when the skilled British butcher has been removed or reduced to pre-packing, the practical effect is clear: the ordinary British shopper is invited either to accept the religiously certified product or to take his custom elsewhere.

Choice, in the meaningful sense, has been withdrawn.

One notes the wider context with a certain weary familiarity. Morrisons has spent the last two years closing or heavily altering traditional meat counters across dozens of stores in the name of cost-saving and “modernisation.”

In certain locations the vacuum has been filled not by a return to ordinary butchery but by the expansion of the religious concession. The pattern is elegant in its predictability: first the dedicated counter “to serve the community,” then the gradual erosion of the ordinary offering, then the claim that customers simply demand it. Demand is a curious thing when alternatives have been carefully removed.

The animals in question are, we are told, stunned. That is preferable to the non-stun methods still permitted under the religious exemption and still used for a non-trivial proportion of sheep.

Yet the deeper objection remains.

A British supermarket, operating on British soil and selling the produce of British and Irish farms, has chosen to reshape a core part of its offering around the ritual requirements of one minority religion.

The rest of us are expected to regard this as progress, or at least as inevitable.

It is neither.

It is a small, telling illustration of a larger failure of cultural confidence.

When a national retailer decides that the traditional craft of the British butcher is dispensable while the religiously certified alternative is indispensable, something rather important has been conceded.

The discerning customer is under no obligation to accept the concession. He may simply shop where the ordinary meat counter still exists and the ordinary British customer is still treated as the default rather than an afterthought.

Until Morrisons restores a proper British butcher’s counter in every store and abandons this quiet surrender of a traditional British service to the ritual requirements of one particular faith, the only response consistent with self-respect is to take one’s custom elsewhere.

One does not reward a national retailer for treating the ordinary British shopper as an afterthought in his own country.

Boycott the place, tell them why, and let the empty aisles speak more eloquently than any petition.

Yours in profound contempt,
A Gentleman from the Old School

#Morrisons #Halal

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

It takes a thousand years to build three centimetres of topsoil. We lose a football pitch of it every five seconds.

A third of the world's farmable soil is already dead. The UN warned that if the stripping goes on, we have sixty harvests left.

Iowa, the richest ground in America, has lost close to half its topsoil since 1850. Ploughed loose and sent down the Mississippi.

Warming gets the summits and the placards. The soil that grows ninety-five percent of your food is washing away right now, and that is the one that starves you.

Here is the part that stays off the stage.

The deepest, blackest, most fertile ground on earth, the American prairie, the Russian steppe, the Ukrainian black earth that feeds the world, was built by one thing.

Vast herds of grazing ruminants. Trampling, dunging, moving on. Tens of millions of bison, roots fifteen feet deep, packing carbon into the ground for ten thousand years.

The plough switched that off. The cow, moved like the wild herd, switches it back on. Graze it right and the carbon sinks, the soil thickens, the rain soaks in instead of tearing the field away.

The best machine ever built for saving the soil is the animal they want off your plate.

A tractor cannot build soil. Fertiliser cannot build soil. Only the herd ever has.

But healing the world's dirt means more cattle on grass, not fewer.

So you will hear about the cow's burp right up until the last of the topsoil reaches the sea.

[Sedd @SeddSezz]

Burnham’s Net Zero Secretary wants to raise tax to stop people flying.

Miatta Fahnbulleh advocated frequent-flyer levies that would add hundreds of pounds to the annual costs of regular travellers.

She previously pushed for green taxes on plane tickets to drive down air travel.

As if I should cut down on travel when billionaires and politicians travel on their jets at will...

They most likely burn through more fuel in a couple of weeks than the average person burns in a year!

[Adam Brooks AKA EssexPR 🇬🇧 @EssexPR]

Why did the police and Keir Starmer tell Nigel Farage that Ann Widdecombe was murdered in a burglary gone wrong ?

[Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope]

An interesting idea on how to stop dangerous offenders being released under the early release scheme in September from former Conservative minister @EdwardGarnier a few weeks ago in the House of Lords: "There are 3,650 women in prison in England and Wales. There are 12 women’s prisons and, as it happens, all 12 of them are in England. Of that 3,650, 2,500—that is about 70% of the women’s prison population—are in custody for non-violent offences.
"Why do the Government not release them, or at least some of them, and redesignate some of the women’s prisons to house the rapists and child molesters that seem to be about to be released?"