Richard Powell

Richard Powell

@rcpnorfolk.bsky.social

Spent career in the natural environment working with some FAB people creating landscapes I love landscapes their form function and place

127 Followers 155 Following 59 Posts Joined Nov 2024
7 hours ago
Preview
The Guardian view on Kemi Badenoch and the Iran war: confusion reveals a lack of serious thinking | Editorial Editorial: The Tories and Reform UK have abandoned British interests to become ideological satellites of radical US conservatism

“Reform and the Tories are now ideological satellites of extreme US conservatism, adopting Maga-coded positions on culture war issues and foreign policy by default”

Badenoch was clumsier on Iran than Farage. But both paraded just how dangerously useless they are.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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1 day ago
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Today I will mostly be trying to bribe people with cheap petrol, in the hope that they will forget that I have been cheering on the orange idiot whose war is pushing up fuel prices.

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1 day ago
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Please just believe us when we promise to save you loads of money in government. Whatever you do, don’t look at what we have actually done in practice with the local authorities we run, which is increase taxes, cut services and lose 1 in every 10 councillors.

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1 day ago
Farage standing in front of petrol forecourt sign 
25P OFF
WITH FARAGE 
REFORM UK 


All this fawning over Donald Trump - where has it got Nigel Farage? Today, he is back in the rainy old UK, standing on a petrol forecourt in his faux-toff outfit, whingeing about Rachel Reeves putting fuel duty up by a few pennies - a tax that has been frozen since 2011. Besides, his mate Donald has done more in the past week to put up the price of petrol, with his continued bombing of Iran, than the chancellor.
Tell that to White Van Man, Nigel.

“Farage… helped fool everyone about Brexit - which he wants to renegotiate, naturally. Surely the British people can't take this absurd man seriously again? After all, even Trump doesn't.”

Beyond time to boot Farage and his stale band of Tories off the stage.
www.independent.co.uk/voices/nigel...

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1 day ago

Been up a couple of times when I was an auxiliary coastguard, good view 😀

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2 days ago

Who do they represent? Themselves.

Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman missed NINE votes in Parliament last night, all because they had a more important Reform UK rally on the Isle of Wight.

They think they are too big to do their job.

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2 days ago
Preview
Nigel Farage takes significant stake in Kwasi Kwarteng’s Bitcoin company Farage’s investment in crypto company Stack, headed by executive chairman Kwasi Kwarteng, comes after Labour asked the Electoral Commission to investigate crypto donations to Reform UK

So, as people stuggle with their mortgages and bills, Farage invests £215,000 in Kwasi Kwarteng’s crypto business.

And plans to deregulate that high-risk industry by removing our rights and consumer protections.
He’s laughing at voters. All the way to the bank.
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

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3 days ago
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As a man of the people, I naturally used a private jet provided by a crypto billionaire based in Thailand for my latest publicity stunt.

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3 days ago
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Graham Eardley, the Reform councillor suspended for behaving aggressively towards a female volunteer, has defected to Restore Britain, no doubt attracted by Rupert Lowe having been accused of bullying two female members of staff.

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5 days ago
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Boris Johnson says Keir Starmer has made us an irrelevance on the world stage...

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6 days ago
Billionaire brothers who backed Tories give Reform £100k
Oliver Wright

Extracts

Britain's
second-richest family have
begun giving money to Reform UK after years of supporting the Conservatives.
A company linked to the property tycoons David and Simon Reuben donated £100,000 to Nigel Farage's party the first time the brothers have given to any party other than the Tories.
Reform has also received £3 million from Christopher Harborne, 63, an entrepreneur who now lives in Thai-land, adding to the ty million he gave in August. At the time, that was the biggest single donation to a UK political party by a living donor.
In the last quarter of last year, Reform received more than £5.4 million in do-nations, the Conservatives were given £2.4 million and Labour received
£1.9 million.
The Reuben brothers - David, 87, and Simon, 84, who own property including Millbank Tower and Admiralty Arch in London — have donated almost El million to the Conservative Party since 2008. They also supported Boris Johnson after he left No 10, giving him office space worth £85,000. Their family wealth was put at £26.87 billion in The Sunday Times Rich List last year.
Reform UK has its headquarters in Millbank Tower, but it is not known whether the brothers donation linked to reduced rent payments.

Other Reform donors include David
John Grainger, the co-founder of a biotech firm, and Gary Dutton, a double glazing entrepreneur, who both gave the party £250,000.
Reform also received £100,000 from Isabel Goldsmith, sister of the former Tory minister Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park. Her father, Sir James Gold-smith, was seen as the godfather of British Euroscepticism.
For the second quarter in a row Lord Bamford, the chairman of JCB, gave £200,000 each to the Conservatives and Reform. At the time of his first do-nation, the company said he was "sup-portive of pro-business political parties that create the conditions for these businesses to grow and prosper".

More billionaire cash bankrolling Reform.
JCB’s chairman, Bamford, said he was “supportive of pro-business political parties that create conditions for these businesses to grow and prosper."

Reform wants to repeal the Equality Act.
Prosperity for them means loss of rights and pay for us.
(Times)

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1 week ago
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Crypto investor based in Thailand donates further £3m to Reform Christopher Harborne’s gift is latest to party’s election war chest and comes amid calls for cap on political donations

Who the hell is this guy? And what does he want as a return on his £millions invested in Reform? Because it sure as shit isn’t a fairer, more progressive, equal and prosperous UK with good public services and well-regulated consumer protections.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

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1 week ago
Reform fury as someone else wins
by Our By-election Editor
Tim Shipsink
The losing candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Matt Goodwhinge, has demanded an immediate re-run of the election on the grounds that he lost
comprehensively to someone else.
"It's totally unfair and rigged,"
said Goodwhinge.
"I shouldn't
be required to sit there and suck it up, just because I lost."
Mr Goodwhine continued, *I can't believe that all those voters I demonised failed to back me.
Especially after I was endorsed by Tommy Robinson and ten million Russian bots on X.
"We have clear evidence of family voting, where people voted in order for me to stop deporting their families."
Mr Badloser concluded. "I'm the victim of colour prejudice.
They didn't vote for me simply because I'm not green."
Reform leader
Mr Farage,
speaking from a sun lounger on a rock near the Chagos Islands said,
"It's a tragedy that the people of Manchester won't see Matt in Westminster, but my constituents don't see me in Clacton either."

PLUMBER DEFEATS
MATT GOODWIN

Photo of Hannah Spencer with speech bubble saying… 
I've stopped the cock

Beautiful from Private Eye on the massive toddler-tantrum that Matt Goodwin and Reform are having, because they got whooped in Gorton and Denton.

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1 week ago
A luminous full moon rises in the sky, prominently featured against the dusky blue of early night. In the foreground, a line of Eurasian cranes is silhouetted in mid-flight, their long legs and necks stretched out as they navigate by the moonlight.

Look to the sky tonight for March's full moon 🌕🍃

Also known as the Worm Moon, it marks the shift in seasons as the soil warms, earthworms re-emerge, and nature awakens.

It has many other names including: Lenten, Plough, Crow, & Sap Moon.

🕖 Moonrise: 18:09*

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1 week ago
A crop of a 1996 ad for The Wildlife Trusts featuring illustrations of various examples of British wildlife and plants (HAT63_43)

Today is #WorldWildlifeDay - here's a detail from a 1996 ad for The Wildlife Trusts featuring several examples of British wildlife

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1 week ago

Nigel Farage lied multiple times at his press conference today - including saying no-one who voted Green in Gorton and Denton has a job and he's "certain" Reform won most British born voters in the by-election, based on zero evidence, and yet not a single journalist there pushed back on them

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1 week ago

Farage cannot cope with his own unpopularity. At all.
With the media’s help and huge foreign donations, his ego has been massaged into such a state of entitlement that he thinks he’s answerable to no one and simply owed power.
It’s become a national imperative to prove him wrong.

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1 week ago
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A lone daffodil against a stormy sky for today's photo taken in Glastonbury. As we welcome Meteorological Spring today I don't think Winter is quite ready to leave us being as it is now raining and very grey. 😂

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1 week ago
Under a Reform UK government, only
British citizens will be able to vote.




FARAGE: Letting non-British citizens vote in
UK threatens democracy

Farage and Reform are bad losers.

Their failure to secure the seat was down to the vast majority of voters roundly rejecting their hate because Gorton and Denton is a progressive place.

68% of voters in the constituency voted Green, Labour or Lib Dem.

Don't let them use lies to twist the truth.

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1 week ago
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March sees the return of bumblebee queens as they emerge from hibernation – here are some of the common species you can spot this month 👀

Have you spotted your first bumblebee of 2026?

🔎 Brush up on your bumblebee identification skills: https://ow.ly/af3U50Yi2iq

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1 week ago

Trump is against mail-in voting, so, Nigel Farage is making his Gorton & Denton by-election loss about mail-in voting. Doubtless Trump will now mention 'mail-in voting fraud in the UK' to bolster his own argument against mail-in voting. Then, Farage will use that soundbite to bolster his argument.

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1 week ago

A useful record of Farage’s failure and his inability to cope with it. A cheat and a very bad loser who would happily trash democracy to get the result he wants. And then remove our rights to stop us holding him to account.
Such a corrupt, egomaniacal liar should have no hope of getting power.

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1 week ago
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The real threat to democracy doesn't come from 'family voting'. It comes from the losing side refusing go accept they've lost

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1 week ago
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@zackpolanski.bsky.social : "Once again Reform are spreading misinformation & smears, and the press & the media seem to repeat them.. its really important that the media.. take responsibility so when Reform or Farage says something they don't just keep repeating it"👏👏👏

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2 weeks ago
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Look.

People get divorced for all manner of reasons, and it's nobody else's business.

However.

When a politician is using the slogan:

Family. Community. Country.

It's perfectly reasonable to point out that they are recently divorced and live in the SE of England miles from Gorton and Denton.

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2 weeks ago
Photo of Yusuf at a lectern saying “shadow Home Secretary” (Wot?)

Reform's plan for a 'British ICE' combines cruelty with stupidity Project forward to 2036 under a majority Reform government and the picture darkens further. Britain would be smaller, older and whiter; more isolated from Europe; paradoxically, more vulnerable to foreign interterence and less able to fund its own defence.
The welfare state would shrink to a skeleton. Charity would fill the gaps.
Flags would proliferate; rights would not. The police and courts would be politicised. The BBC could disappear.
The NHS would survive only as a minimal safety net. Protections against discrimination would erode - you might indeed be sacked for being disabled.
Migrants and even their British-born children could find their rights curtailed unless they were deemed to
"contribute" sufficiently. Meanwhile, the wealthiest would enjoy a generous, low-tax regime.

“Rarely has a British political party unveiled a programme that combines cruelty with impracticality on such an extravagant scale.”

Chilling on Reform’s increasingly confident fascism. High on viciousness and greed. Very low on wisdom. A ruinous combination.
www.independent.co.uk/voices/zia-y...

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2 weeks ago
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These people are poison. They will unleash racist thugs on the streets of this country and call it security. They will subjugate us to the US and call it patriotism. They must be stopped. There is no more important task in politics.

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2 weeks ago

Back in 1979 I caught one of the last otters in Broadland in a coypu trap here, it was released of course, otters became extinct for a while but gradually came back after whitlingham and the Norwich chemical factory cleaned up, Love Rockland

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2 weeks ago
Preview
Reform would create ICE-style agency and end leave to remain, Zia Yusuf to say Nigel Farage’s party plans to deport up to 288,000 people a year on five flights a day and expand stop and search

Yusuf: “We will secure our borders, leave the ECHR, and deport those here illegally. My message to the British people is simple: I will secure our borders and make you feel safe.”

There is nothing safe about these vicious inadequates turning racism into policy.
www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

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