Aging country lad. Rural life. Shooting & fishing. Beginner beekeeper. Probably spend too much time in the kitchen.
North Shropshire
Joined October 2013
- Tweets14.9K
- Following589
- Followers1.2K
- Likes22K
James WD retweeted
A Labour MP texts:
“I cannot believe, or sadly I can, that the PM has said there should be a rape unit in every police force when he presided over the abolition of the Greater Manchester one when he was Mayor”.
James WD retweeted
Giving countless millions to the Third World while boasting that you're knocking tuppence a jar off gherkins for Brits sounds a *bit* like a recipe for trouble
James WD retweeted
Customer: "Why did mutton disappear? My gran talked about it like it was Sunday itself."
Butcher: "Because you stopped wearing wool."
Customer: "What's wool got to do with it?"
Butcher: "Everything. For a thousand years this country kept sheep for the fleece. The wool paid the rent. A ewe was clipped every summer for six or seven years, and when she'd given her last fleece she gave you Sunday dinner. Every leg of mutton was a sheep that had already paid for herself."
Customer: "And lamb?"
Butcher: "A luxury. You'd no more eat a lamb than burn a five-pound note. That's seven fleeces walking into the oven."
Customer: "So what changed?"
Butcher: "The jumper went plastic. From about 1960 a fleece was worth less every year until it was worth nothing, and today a farmer gets roughly what it costs him to shear her. Nobody keeps a sheep seven years to collect two pound a time, so they bred her for the one thing left that paid."
Customer: "Meat."
Butcher: "Fast meat. Lambs that fatten by four months and leave before they've cost anything. Inside one generation the sheep went from a wool animal with a dinner at the end to a dinner in a hurry that grows a coat nobody wants."
Customer: "And the old ewes?"
Butcher: "Still coming off the hill every autumn, and still the best eating in this shop. Five years of grass and heather in the fat, meat the colour of beef, and she's never seen a bag of feed in her life. Grass-fed is the label people pay double for on a steak. On her it's just Tuesday."
Customer: "Why's she half the price, then?"
Butcher: "Because nobody asks. A leg feeds eight, low oven, four hours, and the gravy off it will make you forget lamb was ever invented. The old boys who come in for it never bother with anything else."
Customer: "My gran used to say the fat was the point."
Butcher: "Your gran was right about most things. The jumper went to plastic and the roast went with it, and nobody noticed they were the same sheep. You can undo the whole thing in one shop. I've got the leg. The jumper's your problem."
James WD retweeted
French maths test question:
Gaspard has thrown 17 stones at three police cars and set fire to four town halls.
How many pairs of trainers does he have?
James WD retweeted
It's not the first occasion that Alastair Campbell has facilitated a Prime Minister in directly deceiving the public.
James WD retweeted
The Greens have fielded candidates who called Jews “cockroaches” and “devil worshippers”. Their members have smeared political opponents as fascists while cheerleading actual fascism in the form of Hamas. And now this.
The Green Party is the new BNP.
Greens labelled 'first openly anti-Semitic party in the UK' as members approve Zionism is Racism motion - but leader Polanski skips vote trib.al/0uxG7Zs
James WD retweeted
Free blood test Prostate cancer checks for farmers (and others) available at Bakewell and Shrewsbury markets November 23rd and 24th!
Please share!🤝
James WD retweeted
“The fasten seat belts sign is on”.
This is a message I received early this morning from one of the UK’s most experienced, savvy and respected financial traders. Someone I have come to know and trust for the last 25 years.
10-year bond yields are now almost 4.5pc - up some 50 basis points over the last month.
30-year yields this morning went above 6pc - a 28-year high.
Yet the UK’s political and media class continues to focus on party posturing and folksy rhetoric, ignoring the slow-motion disaster that has been happening on the UK’s sovereign bond markets for at least the last 18 months - a disaster that will inevitably, unless we drastically change course, turn into a fully blown market meltdown.
At that point, the UK government won’t be able to borrow enough money to finance our already spiralling debt interest bill.
Britain’s financial management will be taken over by overseas technocrats - that will be the condition of additional borrowing, to maintain the basic functions of the state, as happened in Greece and Italy back in the early 2010s and here in Britain 50 years ago this year (when we were forced in 1976 to apply to the IMF for a bailout).
The austerity then imposed on Britain would make 2010-2019 feel like a picnic - far, far worse than it would be if we took serious action now to control our public finances.
Lower-income households would suffer most - and there would be serious damage done to the UK’s already rapidly-fraying social fabric ….
I have been warning about these looking fiscal dangers publicly, in my newspaper columns and elsewhere, since at least early 2024.
Doing so hasn’t been easy or fun. I have been dismissed and derided by numerous economists, “economists”, officials and policymakers - as well as lots of journalists.
I absolutely don’t want a disastrous 1976-style outcome - which is why I’ve taken the blows and issued the warnings.
The state is too big. Public spending is out of control. Our fiscal rules are a convenient nonsense - designed to kick the can of financial reality into the future. We need to get real … and take bold action to tame the growth of spending, push back a now totally over-bearing state and snap the British economy out of today’s high-tax-high-borrowing-low-growth doom loop - the result of myopic, counter-productive policy-making by successive governments for the last decade and more …
Other prominent economists who agree with me - ie who are financially-literate, can read a yield curve, have a passing interest in economic history and who understand the dangers of some 80pc of UK government borrowing going on debt interest as it currently is - need to chuck “career risk” in the bin, and start saying publicly what so many of them have, for quite a while now, only had the bottle to say to me in private …
Remember: “The fasten seat belts sign is on”
James WD retweeted
In 1997 the Tories bequeathed New Labour:
- 3.5% GDP growth
- 4.5% wage growth
- 4.6% manufacturing output growth
- Energy independence and falling energy prices
- A brand new nuclear power station (1995)
- New reservoirs (1992)
- Construction of Manchester airport's second runway
- Falling unemployment
- London as the world’s leading foreign-exchange centre
- A newly opened Channel Tunnel
- Debt at just 37% of GDP
- On track for a balanced budget
Andy Burnham just said that this was failure. Somehow.
James WD retweeted
Are you partial to the toothsome delights of Badger ham a la layby or a highwayside haunch of Roe?
Roadkill in the kitchen. My latest for @Telegraph
telegraph.co.uk/gift/f48691d…
James WD retweeted
A major new review brings together 20 years of GPS data from 626 Eurasian Curlews across Europe. It shows that tracking is no longer simply telling us where birds go, it is revealing what Curlews need to survive and where conservation must act. 🧵
📷 E Eng Recovery project
James WD retweeted
Tuchel’s game management has been great in this tournament but that was 25 minutes of pure Southgate
James WD retweeted
Norfolk Fishermen Being Bullied Off Their Own Waters for Failing Wind Turbines
This is John, an eighth-generation fisherman. He and his family have been hauling crabs and lobsters out of Cromer for generations. Now a big wind farm company has arrived, forcing them to move all their gear for surveys and pushing them aside as if they don’t matter.
John represents 21 boats and there are many more like them. These are proper family boats, run the traditional way. Not massive corporate operations. Just honest Norfolk fishermen trying to protect the fishing grounds their grandfathers worked.
This is completely wrong. All of this is being sacrificed for unreliable wind turbines with questionable efficiency, massive subsidies, and serious damage to bird populations and our coastline. We’re throwing away real jobs and a proud heritage for green targets that fail to deliver steady, reliable energy.
If we don’t stand up for our fishermen, who will?
While the nation focuses on politics, issues like this are being left behind.
I’m just highlighting what’s happening so more people see it. Follow Marcuspearcey on ⏰ for more.
James WD retweeted
WARNING!🚨
At 8:05pm last night 17/06 Hartley road opposite Rosset sports centre.
This man pulled up and started asking my 10 year old son where he has been and where he was going. If he was walking home from school or going to the park, luckily he was in the phone to me so I heard the questions. He started running as he was only 1 minute from home.
The man then went up to the park, and when I caught up with him to question him he said he liked talking to little boys and he reminded him of his brother. He then went on to change his story to he was delivering parcels. There were no parcels in the car just baby wipes on the parcel shelf.
Police have been informed.
James WD retweeted
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.
