In the twelve months to June last year, 6,365 farms closed in Britain. The highest number since records began. For every ten that shut, fewer than six opened to replace them. In the first quarter of this year alone, 1,890 agricultural businesses ceased trading while only 805 started.

The arithmetic is extinction-grade, and it has been accelerating since October 2024, when the Chancellor announced that the full inheritance tax exemption on agricultural land was over.

From this month, a 20% tax applies to inherited farm assets above £2.5 million. That sounds like a generous threshold until you price a working farm in Hampshire or the Cotswolds or the Welsh Marches, where the land alone will clear it before you've counted a single building, a single piece of machinery, or the farmhouse the family has lived in since before the Treasury existed.

These are not cash businesses. A farm's value is in the soil; its margins are in the pennies. The average farm income in England was £25,000 last year. The tax bill on a £3.5 million estate, which is a mid-sized arable farm, not a country mansion, would be £200,000. Eight years of profit, due on death.

The only way to pay it is to sell the land, which is the business, which means there is no business, which means the farm a grandfather built and a father maintained and the son was supposed to pass to his daughter is sold to a property developer or an institutional investor from abroad who will never set foot on it.

The government says only 185 estates will be affected in the first year. Farmers say the government is lying, and given the Treasury's recent record with impact assessments, and the fact that Labour has to lie to you every day to stop its world falling apart, it is not obvious why anyone would take the government's word for it.

But even on the government's own figures: 185 families forced to break up working farms so that Rachel Reeves can close a fraction of a fraction of a deficit that was caused by spending decisions, not by farmers. It is pain inflicted for the sake of it, and thereafter only for the sake of a chickenfeed financial expropriation, and the pleasure of destroying a lineage and a chain of ownership, which I suspect is the part that Labour, who hate history and hate landowners like the jolly faithful Pabloists they are, really enjoy out of all of this.

But leaving the psychopathology of the policy aside, think of it in terms of autarchy: Britain imports 40% of its food. That number has been rising for decades and will rise faster now, because every farm that closes is acreage that does not come back.

You cannot reopen a farm the way you reopen a shop. The soil takes years. The knowledge takes a generation and, like all knowledge, is very easily lost.

The people who are being driven out are the people who know how to feed this country, and they are being driven out by people who have never, in their lives, had to produce anything more consequential than a spreadsheet.

https://x.com/AllForProgress_/status/2044713912839614509?s=20

That's going to hurt

Look at the face of the male vs. female.

Lol

Huge news - Restore Britain has just hit a record 9% in a national poll. 9%. That is massive.

Restore Britain is the fastest growing political party in British political history. I am more and more confident that we will win the next general election...

https://www.facebook.com/share/1Ws68XBUqQ/

Dan Cohen, the Mayor of Leeds 🙄

Reform has squandered its lead. Is it intentional? We are starting to look like a continental country, where traffic light coalitions and short-term governments are inevitable. If this is to be believed Restore has risen from 4% (in a recent poll which didn't specifically mention them in the key metrics offered) to 9% here.

The best option here would be not to video this scene at all. Or, ideally, not to have a mobile phone near you at all.

On Saturday morning, a woman in her twenties was raped outside Epsom Methodist Church on Ashley Road. She had left a nightclub; she was followed by a group of men; the attack took place between two and four in the morning, in the heart of a market town in Surrey that most of the country thinks of, if it thinks of it at all, as somewhere you go to see the horses run.

The residents of Epsom have asked Surrey Police reasonable questions. "Who are the suspects? What do they look like? Is there CCTV?"

Surrey Police has declined to answer. They have said they do not have "sufficient information" to release descriptions. They have urged the public "not to speculate," because speculation "may lead to additional tensions within local communities." Translated from the institutional dialect, this means: we know what you are likely to conclude from the descriptions, and we would rather you didn't.

On Tuesday evening, hundreds of residents gathered in the town centre to ask the question again. The police response was to deploy public order units, riot shields, and helmets against people standing on the pavement of their own high street demanding to know what the men who raped a woman six doors down from them actually look like. The local Lib Dem MP - who represents these people and the town - told the protesters to "take it elsewhere."

"Take it elsewhere."

This is the settled posture of the modern British state toward its own citizens. When a town asks for the most basic information about a violent sexual offence committed on its streets - information that, thirty years ago, would have been on the front of every regional paper within hours - it is met first with bureaucratic evasion, then with riot police, then with a sitting member of parliament telling them to do one.

Epsom is not an unruly place. It is not a place with a history of disorder. It is a comfortable commuter town in Surrey whose residents have been told, in the space of seventy-two hours, that the police will not tell them who is hunting women on their streets, that asking about it constitutes a threat to community cohesion, and that if they persist in asking they will be treated as a public order problem.

There is a specific and ugly contempt encoded in this response. It is the contempt of an administrative class that has decided the British public cannot be trusted with the truth about anything happening to it, and that the job of the state is no longer to solve the crime but to manage the reaction to it, forcibly.

The people of Epsom have not misbehaved. They have done the thing that citizens of a serious country are supposed to do when something terrible happens where they live: they have turned up and asked questions.

And the answer they have received, delivered in riot gear, is that their questions are the problem. https://x.com/AllForProgress_/status/2044842006883475842

A meal for US Naval troops. What the heck is it !

NEW:

🇺🇸🇮🇷 USA Today now reports that sailors reportedly say ships in the region have been rationing food supplies as the deployment wears on

A recent meal aboard the Lincoln CSG, fighting for months off the coast of Iran.

@Megatron_ron

World faces food ‘catastrophe’ if Strait of Hormuz disruption persists: FAO | Food News | Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/14/fao-warns-strait-of-hormuz-disruption-risks-triggering-a-global-food-crisis

Italian PM Meloni: "I ACCUSE Israel of crossing the red line, I CONDEMN the massacre of Palestinian civilians, and I announce that Italy will SUPPORT European sanctions against Israel."

A gay couple in America have caused outrage by mocking and laughing at their surrogate baby.

Asking the baby "Do you want dada or pop?" the baby replies with "Mom". He then replies with "There is no momma", the baby starts crying, and his partner, off camera, starts laughing...

https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/who-is-shane-mcanally-5-things-to-know-about-the-country-songwriter-amid-viral-baby-video-row-101776385207738.html

https://www.instagram.com/shanemcanally