Business, Occupation

Well, I am all stocked up for the winter. I do not know where the farmers and gamekeepers were, but that was the best day's poaching in 25 years. Then again, how long shall I be here to enjoy the fruits of it? This does not feel the way people of a certain age describe the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in fact we are closer to the edge than that was. American long-range missiles have already been fired inside Russia.

We do not know that they did, but why would the Russians not have cut undersea telecommunications cables between NATO countries? Finland and Sweden wanted NATO, and this is it. Yet a negotiated settlement is now majority opinion in Ukraine; follow that link, from May 2022, for the only form that that settlement was ever going to take. Unless everyone in the world had been killed first, of course.

My enemies in local politics call me "The Cockroach" because I would survive a nuclear war, but if the nukes had not killed everyone else, then the pensioners, at least, will freeze or starve to death, since the Government has today admitted that its withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment had put an extra 100,000 of them into poverty.

One struggle, brothers and sisters. If you stood with the farmers in India, then stand with the farmers in Britain. If you regret the defeat of the miners, then stand fast against the defeat of the farmers on the same principles. Resist Peter Mandelson's lobbying for the retention of leasehold, and resist his little fanboys' ruse to drive families off the land in favour of the same interests. Remember what Kemi Badenoch did to the farmers when she was Trade Secretary, remember that Nigel Farage consistently voted against help for small farmers when he was a Member of the European Parliament, and remember that Jeremy Clarkson openly bought his farm to avoid inheritance tax on the money that he had largely been paid by the BBC. Do not let them deceive you into giving ammunition to the rest of the Establishment.

And insist on, not least by being, better voices against a Government in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer had falsely claimed that her "business occupation" was an economist when signing a legal document to become a director of a charity. Even against the background of a World War, the only way that Rachel Reeves could possibly still be in office is that there is absolutely no one else.