AEConran @ConranAE

Harriet Cowan turned up on Clarkson's Farm with her lashes on and a certain kind of viewer decided that a woman on a tractor was a modern invention. The last time this country was genuinely in danger of not being fed, eighty thousand women did the feeding. They were called the Land Army, and by 1943 there were more than eighty thousand of them. A quarter went into dairy. Others felled timber. Some were put on rat squads, because wartime Britain was overrun, and two of them are reckoned to have killed twelve thousand between them in a single year. Most had never seen a farm. They came out of London and the northern cities into hostels with no heating, learned to milk by hand in the dark at half five, and worked forty-eight hours a week in winter and fifty in summer with no holiday of any kind until 1943. The pay was twenty-eight shillings a week, and fourteen of those went straight back for board and lodging. The men working beside them on the same farms got thirty-eight. Then the receipt, and it is in Hansard, 14 February 1945. The Land Army women were barred from the forces canteens. Italian prisoners of war, under certain conditions, were allowed in. A member stood up in the Commons and said so out loud, along with the plain fact that these women had been treated as civilians when it came to privileges and as servicemen when it came to being moved across the country at a day's notice. Two days later the director of the Land Army resigned. She went because the government had decided her women would be excluded from the settlement given to everyone else who served. So the men came home to a gratuity, a suit, and the legal right to their old jobs back. The women who had kept those men fed got a rail ticket. Recognition finally arrived in December 2007. The badges went out the following summer to around forty-five thousand survivors, sixty-odd years late, by which point the great majority of them were in the ground and the rest were in their eighties. A badge. In the post. And this is the country that now regards a young woman on a tractor as a curiosity worth a segment. Her great-grandmother's generation ploughed eighteen million acres, ran the dairies, and was told she could not have a cup of tea in a canteen that would serve a captured Italian. Harriet is not the new thing. She is the oldest thing on that farm.

🚨 Over 4,000 people have signed my petition against local government reorganisation proposals. Cities such as Lincoln and Leicester are being prioritised, while our Market Towns, villages and rural communities are being treated as an afterthought. We deserve better than this. That’s why I’ve launched a petition to send a clear message to the Government that we will not be taken for granted. ✍️ Please sign the petition below and share it far and wide! aliciakearns.com/local-gov-re-o…

🚨 Have you signed my petition against local government reorganisation? The Government has chosen to press ahead with plans to break up local government across our area, putting the interests of Leicester and Lincoln ahead of our towns, villages and rural communities. Rutland is set to lose its independence, Stamford is being forced into a huge new Lincolnshire authority, and several Harborough villages are being absorbed into Leicester City. Our communities made their views clear, but they have been ignored. I'm asking as many residents as possible to sign my petition so I can show the Government that our communities will not be taken for granted. 🖊️ Please sign the petition below and share it with your friends, family and neighbours. Every signature strengthens our case. aliciakearns.com/local-gov-re-o…

Most people know Dutch artist Piet Mondrian for his block colours and geometric abstraction, but here also are two of his earlier, naturalistic works created before 1910 ~ Apples, Ginger Pot and Plate ■ Still Life with Oranges

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‘Great Inventions, 1961’ Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope Artist: Robert Ayton

The obvious answer to losing our foreign shearers is to simply train our own. Britain already does. Training was never the problem, and here is what actually is. The country has fourteen million breeding ewes and about three months to shear them, because the fleece has to come off in a short warm window or the animal suffers. A mountain of work crammed into one season, then nothing for nine months. So think like someone weighing up the trade. You spend years mastering one of the hardest physical skills in farming, shearing hundreds a day with calm hands and no harm to the animal, and the reward is twelve brutal weeks in summer and three quarters of a year with no work and no money. Nobody builds a life on that. So they don't, and who could blame them. The shearers who fly in have solved the one problem Britain cannot. A top shearer works four countries a year, New Zealand, America, Britain, Australia, three months in each, chasing the season round the planet until twelve weeks becomes fifty. That is what makes it a career instead of a summer job, and no single country can recreate it, because no single country has more than one season. There used to be British gangs on this circuit. Contractors who travelled, who trained the next lot, who knew every shed in the dale. That world thinned as the wool stopped paying and the young went to jobs that ran all year, and the gap was filled by the shearers who fly in, who now teach the British newcomers coming up, because the knowledge had nowhere else to live. Cut them off and you do not force Britain to train its own. You remove the last people still doing the teaching. And this is what makes it so hard to stomach. Seventy-five people, in for twelve weeks, gone the day the job is done, costing the taxpayer nothing and leaving the flock shorn. If any arrival on earth is the useful kind, it is this one. A government serious about who comes and goes would fling the door open to exactly these people and spend its energy on the arrivals it genuinely cannot account for. It has done the precise reverse. A hard No for the seventy-five it could see, needed and time-limit, while the numbers it cannot explain carry on untouched. They looked at a skills chain held together by seasonal workers and decided the workers were the problem. They were the only reason it still existed.

Andy Burnham stated that British food production is a matter of national security and wants public procurement to do more to back home-grown businesses. He also promised greater powers for rural communities. Let’s hope his actions match his promises. Starmer did the opposite.

WE ALMOST LOST THIS 900-YEAR-OLD CHURCH. ⛪ St Mary's in Kirkby Lonsdale has just been given a massive boost, with £370k in Lottery funding to get a huge restoration project underway. This isn't just any church either. It's a Grade I listed building that's been at the heart of the town for over 900 years, but it was at real risk of closing if nothing was done. The plans are to fix the roof and tower, protect the church for the future, and make it an even better space for the local community and visitors. Really good to see a place like this getting the chance it deserves.

This is a bona-fide backdoor into the UK for Iranian agents. For years I’ve worked to get the “Islamic Centre of England” an indoctrination hub, shut down. The head of the centre is Iran’s Supreme Leader. How has the Govt given it visa granting rights?! Preposterous. As I said in the Telegraph yesterday, the Charity Commission should be given urgent powers to shut it down.

GB Politics @GBPolitcs

7 days ago

🚨NEW: The Home Office has given the ‘Islamic Centre of England’ powers to sponsor visas for “skilled workers” and religious ministers This charity is an alleged outpost of the Iranian regime in London [@Telegraph]

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Stonehenge parch marks are super visible this year due to the dry weather and multiple heatwaves 🤩 via Nick Bull 🙏 Parch marks at Stonehenge are areas of parched, discolored grass that appear during hot, dry summers. Caused by buried archaeological features like ancient stone holes, they revealed that the outer sarsen circle was likely completed by builders. A serendipitous discovery in July 2013 highlighted this phenomenon when a steward noticed parched patches in a quadrant usually left unwatered by site caretakers. These marks perfectly indicated the positions of four missing megaliths (Stones 13, 17, 18, and 20). Archaeologists used this to confirm the outer circle was once a complete structure. #parchmarks #history #historical #July #summer #heatwave

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The Bumblebee Conservation Trust warns UK bumblebees could fall sharply as heatwaves intensify: above 28–32°C they can't fly without overheating. But we can help: plant native wildflowers (even a pot on a windowsill), add a small pond, & offer shade to give them food and refuge.

I meet amazing ppl all the time. Mia Hansson is one of them. 10 yrs & 58 metres in, she is stitch by stitch recreating the Bayeux Tapestry Her full-time job is caring for her disabled son, & no, she doesn’t have tix for the exhibition! C’mon @britishmuseum ©️BBC/BritishMuseum

Live anywhere near Mansfield? Make sure you visit Mansfield Museum from this Saturday. That’s the opening of my exhibition: The Wonderful World of the Ladybird artists. Sneak preview today. It’s looking grand ☺️ Free entry

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.

French superstar Kylian Mbappé in a recent interview was asked if he feels bad for Lionel Messi after Argentina’s loss to Spain in the World Cup final. “First off, I respect Leo, He’s a legend of the game, no doubt about that. But to be honest… I don’t like him and I don’t like the Argentine team. I don’t feel bad for him at all. I’m even happy they lost the final to Spain.” When he was asked about the 2022 world cup match against Argentina Mbappe continued: “Back in 2022, the referee was clearly in favor of the Argentina team. That VAR goal they awarded was clearly offside. They’ve been rigging the World Cup since the days of Maradona till now, so no I don’t feel bad for him at all.”

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Former Spain and Real Madrid legend Sergio Ramos in a recent interview about the 2026 World Cup final between Spain and Argentina. “I love Messi, yes he’s a genius,” Ramos said. “But him and the Argentine squad were really playing dirty in the final. The game and the officials were clearly supporting Argentina. They tried as much as they could to rig it, just like they did in the 2022 final. Thank God the Spanish team is different we rose above it and deserved the win.” When pressed about Argentina’s controversial match against England earlier in the tournament, Ramos doubled down: “The Argentine squad should have been suspended and stripped of their world titles after raising that flag and Enzo’s celebration. FIFA overlooked everything. There were so many calls that were not credited. It’s unfair. But I'm glad they lost".

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🚨 Over 2,500 people have already signed my petition – will you join them? The Government has ignored our views and chosen to reorganise local Government in one of the worst possible ways for our communities across Leicestershire, Rutland and Lincolnshire. Our market towns and villages have been treated as an afterthought, with city proposals imposed on us despite the strength of local opposition. I’m taking this fight to Parliament, and every signature strengthens our message that our communities will not be taken for granted. If you haven’t done so already, please do add your name via the link below and share far and wide! 🔗 aliciakearns.com/local-gov-re-o… Together, we can make our voices impossible to ignore.

Do these maps show the Council you want to be served by? I suspect not - Stamford and South Kesteven thrown in with a council serving Gainsborough and Skegness. Lots of our harborough villages forced into Leicester City. Rutland subsumed into a mega-council in Leicestershire. If you think it’s wrong to move local govt so far away from our communities, and that we will be the losers in our corners of the councils, sign my petition today: aliciakearns.com/local-gov-re-o…

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the people's real final match

Braunston-in-Rutland is flying its flag at half mast after the Government’s decision to scrap Rutland County Council and absorb us into a mega-council with Leicestershire. Unless the Government acts, when the Council ceases to exist, so too will our wonderful county.