Tilling the soil to the sound of Rock n Roll. Love life love music love sport love food. Vamos
United Kingdom
Joined November 2011
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sandy watson-steele retweeted
Restore Britain opposes the mandatory fortification of flour with synthetic folic acid.
Food should be left as natural as possible.
This petition is about to hit 100k, and that will allow me to speak in Parliament opposing it.
Please sign/share.
petition.parliament.uk/petit…
sandy watson-steele retweeted
The farm inheritance tax was sold as a tax on the richest estates. It found an ordinary family farm at the second funeral.
April 2026: the tax comes in. The news says only the biggest estates will pay. Dad and his son farm 800 acres. Nobody in the family has ever once called it an estate.
June: Dad dies. Everything passes to Mum, and nothing is owed. The neighbours say it was never meant for people like them.
Two winters later: Mum dies.
Week 1: the son milks at five, buries his mother at eleven, and milks again at four.
Week 3: the valuer walks the farm. 800 acres at the going rate is £6.8 million. With the farmhouse, two cottages, the machinery and the herd, nearly £8.5 million. The family has never seen £8.5 million. They have seen the overdraft.
Week 4: the good news. Mum inherited Dad's unused allowance, so £5 million of the farm passes free.
Week 5: the bad news. Everything above the line is taxed at 20%, and that is the good rate.
Week 6: HMRC argues the farmhouse stopped being a farmhouse the day the widow living in it stopped farming. That part is taxed at 40%.
Week 7: the allowance for the family home tapers to nothing. It was never designed for estates this size.
Month 3: the bill. Around £600,000.
Month 6: the first instalment falls due. The land cannot be sold until probate is granted, and probate will not be granted until the tax is paid.
Month 7: the bank lends the family the money to pay the tax on the land, secured on the land.
Years 1 to 10: £60,000 a year. Interest free on the farmland, with interest charged on the farmhouse.
Defra's own figures put the average farm's return at half a percent of its value. On £8.5 million, that is about £42,000 a year.
The cows are milked at five and four through every day of it.
It was never a tax on the rich. It is a tax on still being there.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
The private sector creates the wealth. The government spends it. The Labour government forgot which one comes first. Every public-sector wage, every benefit, every hospital, every local government salary, every government infrastructure project is paid for by people who take a risk, hire someone, make something, sell something and turn a profit. That is not ideology. That is basic economic arithmetic.
Labour came into power talking about growth and partnership with business. But the Labour government simply do not understand the economic engine room of the private sector. They treat the people who generate the money as a cash machine.
Look at what the Labour government actually did:
They put a tax on jobs. Employer National Insurance went from 13.8% to 15%, and the threshold collapsed from £9,100 to £5,000. That is not a levy on “the rich.” That is a levy on hiring a receptionist, a warehouse worker, an apprentice. Employer NICs then jumped 28% in a year and overtook corporation tax as the biggest tax paid by business. Companies paid almost £345 billion in tax in 2025–26 - up by 12.7%. That money comes out of wages that were not raised, jobs that were not created and investment that was postponed.
The Labour government raised the price of success. They choked off growth. Capital gains tax went up. Business Asset Disposal Relief was watered down. Dividend tax went up. Farmers and family businesses were punished with inheritance tax.
Smalll business founders were told, in effect: take the risk and when you finally sell the thing you built, we will treat the exit more like a success punishment payment to the government. That is not “fairness.” That is a government eating the seed corn of an economy.
They layered cost on cost. Higher minimum wages with no offsetting productivity. Heavier employment regulation. Business rates that still punish the high street. Energy costs that leave manufacturers uncompetitive. Then more government briefings about the next raid — more capital gains tax, more wealth taxes, more “the rich must pay.” More uncertainty for businesses. Uncertainty is a tax of its own.
And then the Labour government act surprised when private-sector activity slumps, businesses close, hiring stalls, and the CBI has to warn the government not to hit businesses again. You cannot squeeze the wealth-creating part of the economy and then demand it produces more growth, more jobs and more tax receipts. That is not redistribution. It is a wrecking ball strategy.
You do not create more jobs by making it more expensive to employ anyone. You do not get more houses by driving builders and investors away. You do not produce more food by punishing those who grow the food. You do not get a richer country by treating profit and employee growth as something that should be plundered by the government.
The wealth of a nation is built by people who could have chosen an easier life and did not. Punish that class long enough and you do not get equality. You get stagnation, fewer jobs and an economically illiterate government still hungry for money that is no longer being made because of their failure to support our British businesses.
If Britain wants better public services, it needs a private sector that is expanding, not one that is being financially punished for the privilege of still being here.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
The authorities announced that they would arrest all protesters wearing balaclavas at today’s anti-immigration protest in Portsmouth
A police officer nearly arrested a gender fluid convert to Islam but quickly backed off once she realized her mistake
sandy watson-steele retweeted
This should be pushed far and wide. Watched in every college class in the U.S. Thank you @billmaher The moral confusion is gross. "It is not a genocide, it is a counterattack in a war...Gaza equals genocide is a lie, an easily provable lie (as I have argued from first hand observations in Gaza). The fact that so many democrats go along with it is to me the party's worse moment since they undid reconstruction after the civil war...words have meaning...genocide, kill or try to kill an entire people, you can't just change the definition of genocide to mean counterattack in a war where people including civilians die, that's every war..."
sandy watson-steele retweeted
Jeremy Clarkson runs at least eight businesses off a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Seven of them make money.
Count them. A farm shop. A pub. A lager brand. A bestselling book every autumn. A streaming series. A merchandise range. And now an app, built by Lisa Hogan, connecting the public to farms.
Then the eighth. Growing food.
Year one, working the ground flat out: £144. By year six, a £5,000 loss where £37,000 had been projected. This summer, two hundred of those acres grew nothing at all, because putting wheat in them was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed.
Every enterprise on that farm turns a profit except the farming.
The lager tells you why, and the chain of cause is on the record. Government subsidies were falling, so in 2021 he decided to brew beer from his own barley. That is the entire origin of Hawkstone. A decision taken in Whitehall turned an arable farmer into a brewer, and the beer worked.
Nothing about the grain changed. Barley sold as barley goes at whatever the buyer offers that morning. Barley in a bottle goes at the price the man who grew it decides.
That one difference is the whole business.
The pub is the same move in bricks. A derelict barn nobody had wanted since 2013, bought for reportedly under a million, now with a queue. On the menu a sausage from his own pigs costs 74p against 18p for the imported version, and he absorbs that gap on every plate. The farm shop, meanwhile, is legally barred from selling food produced more than sixteen miles away, and still cannot keep up with demand.
Now look at what the farming has behind it that yours does not. One of the best land agents in England. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. An agronomist. A production company covering the costs. A queue down the lane. A name that sells anything it is printed on.
It loses money anyway.
And this is the ordinary arrangement, not an eccentric one. Defra's own figures say 72 percent of farms in England now take income from something that is not farming, and diversification accounts for 31 percent of total farm income. The government's own Batters Review found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making outright in 2024.
Diddly Squat is simply the loudest version. The shop subsidises the field. The pub subsidises the field. The television subsidises the field.
A thousand acres of English farmland, and the one thing it cannot do is pay for itself by producing food.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
The BBC has had thirty eight years and £3.8 billion a year to explain British farming to the British public. The job was eventually done by an American shopping website, in eight episodes, fronted by the man the BBC itself dropped over a row about a steak.
Countryfile first went out on 24 July 1988, and its origin is the part nobody brings up. It replaced Farming, a programme that had spent thirty years making news for the people who actually did the work. The new show was deliberately widened to take in everybody who merely liked the countryside as well as those who lived off it. Widened meant softened. In 2009 it moved to Sunday evenings, where five to six million people still watch, and it has been settled ever since into an hour of scenery, a ramble, a calendar competition and the weather.
Then in June 2021 a company best known for selling doorbells put out a series about a man failing to farm a thousand acres, and within a week the British public understood the subsidy system.
Look at what an American retailer put on screen that thirty eight years of Sunday nights had not. A thousand acres, a full year of work, £144 profit. A crop drowning in the field with nobody coming to help. A farmer selling at a price he is not allowed to set. A council able to shut a restaurant standing on a man's own land. The accounts, open, with jokes over the top.
James Rebanks, who keeps sheep for a living rather than for a segment, reckoned Clarkson did more for farmers in one series than Countryfile had managed in thirty years. The NFU said the same thing in nicer words.
Now the funding, which is where it gets genuinely funny.
Countryfile is paid for by £180 a year, rising on 1 April, taken from every household in Britain that watches live television, on pain of prosecution. Twenty three million licences. Three point eight billion pounds. Guaranteed money, a captive audience, a national mandate and a prime Sunday slot.
Clarkson's Farm is paid for by people voluntarily pressing play, and it goes out in more than 240 countries.
The nation's farmers had one broadcaster legally funded by them, obliged to serve them, sitting on the biggest slot in British television. It gave them a weather forecast and a photography competition, and when a bloke with a Lamborghini tractor did the actual job for free, the same building's stars went on a sofa to complain about his opening credits.
The BBC had the money, the mandate, the Sunday night and thirty eight years.
It used them to film the view.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
The England football team lost for the same reason the country is losing: the people in charge fear taking a risk and try to hold on to what they have instead of being ambitious about the future.
This attitude permeates everything and it needs to change.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
It genuinely amused me that people think replacing Starmer will make things better.
From Boris Johnson's election onwards, we've been shuffling the bollards on the Titanic.
You have to actually change direction if you want to avoid crashing into the iceberg:
- End Net Zero
- Make business viable again
- Get welfare under control
- Fund defence
- Ensure equality under the law
- Arrest criminals and keep them in jail
- Deport illegal immigrants and close the border
- Bring the civil service to heel
Burnham will become as unpopular as Starmer within months since he isn't going to do any of that.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
I will take absolutely no lectures about "divisiveness" from the people who gave us two-tier policing, racial hiring quotas and endless race-baiting.
Unlike you, we do not kneel.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
For those mainly Pakistani men who have inflicted the very worst pain imaginable on innocent British children, please know this.
There will come a day when the power of the British state that concealed your atrocious crimes for so very long is turned against you.
It will be swift. It will be brutal. It will be severe.
Because if Restore Britain gets a sniff of power, there will be a reckoning. I promise you that.
We will show you the same mercy you showed our girls.
Your race or religion will not protect you any longer.
A message will be sent that is heard right across the world.
If you rape our children, you will pay for it - and you will pay for it with everything.
That is what Restore Britain will do.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
🇬🇧💔 Never forget Henry Nowak
A young English teenager whose death became a symbol for many Britons of a country they feel is failing to protect its own young people.
He was killed by an armed immigrant and left to die by the police.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
This is massively disingenuous.
Lamb costs have soared because input costs to farmers have gone up. The number of abattoirs has significantly dropped…and supermarkets are setting prices that fleece consumers.
Lamb costs soared over last three years due to climate change, report says
itv.com/news/2026-04-02/lamb…
sandy watson-steele retweeted
Let’s talk about fertiliser. Because before the screeching MSM roll out their fear headlines, the details are key.
Fertiliser is the foundation of food supply. No fertiliser means lower yields and higher prices. Simple.
▪️Britain doesn’t produce its own fertiliser anymore. Because it’s incredibly energy intensive to make, gas alone makes up 60–70% of the cost. Then we bolt on high carbon taxes, it means production simply isn’t economic. Most plants shut down… and we import instead. (So we look like are carbon footprint has gone down)
Then it gets mental!
▪️ the government is about to introduce CBAM (the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) this taxes imports up to 24% based on their carbon footprint, to protect domestic producers…. Only we don’t have a domestic industry left because of point number 1. So it’s just a straight tax.
▪️War in Iran has now vastly increased energy costs and therefore fertiliser prices.
Farmers either pay more or use less. And when they use less, yields drop. That directly hits food prices.
We currently import from North Africa Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Israel, Jordan, US and Caribbean & some remaining European supply
So when you see “food price rises” headlines be aware that successive governments blindly following Agenda 2030 sustainable development goals got you into this mess!
It was engineered by ideology.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
Why did the European Union give an NGO that funds Hamas terrorists and has strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood €40 million?
A thread.
🧵 1/10
sandy watson-steele retweeted
Enormous fears around soaring fertiliser costs due to the Iran war...
We need to urgently boost domestic fertiliser production.
Restore Britain would immediately act to reduce reliance on volatile global supply chains for essential inputs.
Food security is national security.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
They didn’t march for Mahsa Amini.
Nor for the thousands murdered by the Iranian regime.
But they will march for their killers. Disgusting.
sandy watson-steele retweeted
Every football club on earth exists because of this island. 🇬🇧
Kings banned it. The richest schools in England claimed it. They wrote the rules and locked the gates.
Then the working class stole it back.
In 1850, Parliament passed the Factory Act. Work stopped at two on a Saturday. Working men had free time. And they chose football.
Churches formed clubs to keep men out of pubs: Aston Villa, Bolton, Everton.
Factories formed teams from their own workers: West Ham from the Thames Ironworks, Arsenal from a munitions factory.
The FA Cup Final. Blackburn Olympic: weavers, spinners, a plumber. They beat the Old Etonians 2-1. No private school team ever reached the final again.
Then British workers carried it everywhere they went ⚽🌍
Scottish miners in Spain founded its oldest club. A Nottingham lace trader gave Juventus their black and white stripes.
A butcher's son from the same city founded AC Milan. British railway workers in Uruguay named their team after Stephenson's Rocket.
Cornish miners founded Mexico's first football club. A schoolteacher from Kent taught the game to his students in Argentina. His school produced Lionel Messi.
A boy from Southampton brought two footballs to Brazil. They call him the father of Brazilian football.
Real Madrid are said to wear white because of an English amateur team.
From Lancashire cotton mills to every continent on earth.
Three and a half billion people watch football. The most popular sport ever created. And it was created here. By the British people.
Every Saturday, three o'clock. That kickoff time exists because of the Factory Act of 1850. The moment working men were given an afternoon off.
They chose football. And the world followed.
No owners. No sponsors. Just supporters.
Be part of us. 👉 proudofus.co.uk/support 🙏
Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧