Student of Pirandello & Ionesco. Fairy manquée. Dance, karate, opera, rabbit & cheese lover. Linguist. Gardener. Book hoarder. Volunteer Clonter Opera. European
UK Ooop Nawth
Joined July 2014
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I'm not a medical doctor but this call to use our freedom to take responsibility in this pandemic, is well put.
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
People (including me) have been saying this - it is not a good idea to remove landlines especially without a solid power network and particularly for people in rural areas. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6x2…
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
🤨 This is extraordinary.
Government says food shortages are a national security risk, creates a national food resilience war room and tells households to stockpile.
Then the Environment Secretary @angelaeagle says there will be no major central government intervention in food strategy.
Food security cannot be national in a crisis and local the rest of the time.
Britain 🇬🇧 needs a national food strategy bc feeding Britain is a national responsibility.
Plus on the one hand, doesn't want to get involved in a food strategy.
But on the other, delighted to step in and pledge cash to contribute towards a land purchase.
thegrocer.co.uk/news/eagle-r…
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
Reform plan to bring back imperial measurements to help boost US trade, not realising that US imperial measurements are different from UK ones.
So dense a black hole is empty space by comparison.
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
NEWS! Reform promises to rescue Britain by taking money from people who can’t work and giving tax breaks to people who don’t need to newsthump.com/2026/10/26/ref…
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
Some are claiming that freedom of movement with the EU would mean hundreds of millions of Europeans wanting to come to Britain.
They didn’t do that before 2016.
The scale of the claim is absurd.
And more importantly, free movement never meant anyone could simply move here indefinitely without meeting any conditions.
After three months, people who weren’t working, studying or genuinely seeking work could lose their right to reside if they also lacked sufficient resources and health insurance.
David Cameron’s government chose not to enforce those rules.
Blaming free movement for that choice doesn’t make the scare stories true.
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
The same view that Ravilious painted as it looks today.
Strawberry Nets, Eric Ravilious, 1932. This watercolour was commissioned by Sir Geoffrey Fry at his country home Oare House, near Pewsey, in #Wiltshire. The original artwork is in a private collection.
Is nothing and nowhere sacred any more? These ancients spaces provide a city’s equivalent of an ancient forest or a bleak moor: somewhere to disengage from the noise and clamour of everyday life, contemplate beauty, understand your smallness against the background of history.
Went to Lincoln for confession. Afterwards, newly shriven and perky, I went to visit the cathedral. It’s wonderful.
Unfortunately, a band was loudly tuning up for tonight’s ‘ABBA By Candlelight.’ Couldn’t really think, let alone pray. And it cost thirteen quid to get in.
I know it costs loads of money, money, money to maintain a cathedral (let alone pay all those slavery reparations) and the CofE performs a valuable public service by keeping them open, but even so…
Thank you for the (choral) music CofE but knowing me, knowing you, I’ll take a chance on the pub instead.
‘A serious house on serious earth, it is’ writes Larkin in Church Going. Not in Lincoln it’s not.
ABBA by bloody candlelight!
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
I wish that the CofE would realise, locally and more broadly, the power of keeping some spaces different — sacred, even — so that they are distinct from the world lapping all around them, as a reminder that there is more to life than all that chatter and irrelevance. They own buildings of remarkable beauty, history and holiness, but seem almost embarrassed by this, hence undermine these places at every opportunity.
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
John Adams was in Paris 95 years earlier and wouldn't let himself stop for art. To Abigail, May 1780: "I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy," so their children would have "a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick." Canvases like this were the point.
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
🚜 You cannot explain the crisis in British 🇬🇧 farming while refusing to talk about Brexit.
Excellent piece in Farmers Weekly from Matthew Mountain, a Lincolnshire farmer, responding to @RupertLowe10 criticism of Defra.
Matt agrees with much of the diagnosis: chaotic farm support, the SFI fiasco and the impossibility of running a farming business when government policy keeps changing.
But there is an enormous hole in the argument. 🔥 Brexit.
British farmers lost frictionless access to our biggest neighbouring market. We left the Single Market and Customs Union.
We lost our influence over the rules governing that market.
And while British farmers face new barriers exporting to Europe, post-Brexit trade policy has exposed them to greater competition from producers operating under different cost and regulatory structures.
As Matt puts it: “Pooling sovereignty strengthened our bargaining power over the conditions under which farmers competed.”
That goes to the heart of what Brexit did to British farming.
We supposedly “took back control”, but gave up our seat at the table where the rules affecting our most important agricultural market are made.
The answer now isn’t to pretend Brexit never happened.
Repair farm support.
Protect family farms.
Restore access to the Single Market.
Because food security is national security and British farming cannot afford another decade of politicians refusing to confront what Brexit has done.
Excellent work, Matt. 👏🇬🇧🇪🇺
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
Interactions with very angry and in-denial Leave voters in the last two days show that NONE of them thought about the massive economic damage Brexit would cause.
How could you vote for something without even a forecast whether it would be positive or negative for the economy?!!
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
The new Chair of OfCom has rather oddly suggested I should set up a left wing version of GB News. This suggests he doesn’t quite know what his job is. But I have taken him at his word… independent.co.uk/voices/gb-…
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
I had no previous idea that this existed.
Marc Chagall - utterly entrancing- windows in All Saints Church, Tudeley, Kent.
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
The more I look back at 🇬🇧 history, the more it seems political tribalism helped create the tragedy.
Public ownership became left wing so it had to be dismantled.
Unions became the enemy so they had to be broken.
State investment became socialism, so assets had to be sold.
Europe became foreign control, so leaving became an article of faith.
Once economic policy becomes tribal identity, evidence stops mattering.
And decades later we are left asking why Britain sold strategic assets, lost productive capacity, hollowed out communities and became dependent on other countries for things we once produced ourselves.
Policy should be judged by whether it works not by which political tribe first proposed it.
Here is why population size misses the point. Norway’s fund is now worth about NOK 22 trillion.
By mid-2026 only around NOK 5.5 trillion of that represented net money paid in by the state. Around NOK 15.2 trillion came from investment returns.
That is what happens when you convert a finite natural-resource windfall into a permanent national asset.
It compounds.
It keeps earning.
It can support generations who were not even alive when the oil was extracted.
A fund does not become worthless because your population is larger.
The question is whether Britain could have built a sovereign asset worth hundreds of billions potentially far more over decades instead of consuming almost all the windfall as it arrived.
Norway proves the principle. Oil runs out. Capital does not have to.
🔥 And Britain was told privatisation would liberate us from the state.
Instead, in parts of our infrastructure, we ended up swapping our state ownership for somebody else’s 👇👇👇
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
Either the President was lying or Musk was lying, but the decision to slow down satellite speed and access has life or death consequences for Ukraine.
This deserves a full investigation by the Senate. Elon Musk should be compelled to testify before Congress and under oath.
National security decisions should be made in our national security interests, and not based on the personal whim of an unstable executive.
Breaking: Elon Musk ordered the Starlink slowdown that blindsided Ukraine on.wsj.com/4sgcpBv
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
I'm a double amputee.
I recieve 3,600 a year in PIP
@Helen_Whately receives *39,000* a year in housing.
If our Hels wants to cut down the welfare bill I've an idea where she should start...
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
To understand why this is so appalling, it’s important to know the facts. Congresswoman Omar came to this country with her father when she was 12 years old. Five years later, her father became a naturalized citizen. If Ilhan had been 18 at the time, she would have had to apply for citizenship separately. But because she was 17, she became a naturalized citizen automatically.
Congresswoman Omar went on to graduate from college, work as a community organizer, become the first Somali-American legislator elected to public office in the U.S., and win a seat in Congress. There, she has been one of the Trump Administration’s fiercest critics, which has led the president to repeatedly single her out as someone who he believes does not belong in this country.
Now the Administration is actively trying to deport Congresswoman Omar, seemingly based solely on the unsubstantiated theory that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized, and therefore is not a citizen. Federal agents have raided her home, confiscated personal records, and seized her phone — all to try and uncover a nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago that will somehow make their case.
Think about that. The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president. And it’s not the first time this has happened. Under President Trump, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies — from the Attorney General of New York, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve.
In those cases, the prosecutions either stalled or were dismissed for having no basis in law, and the same is likely to happen in this case. But not before Congresswoman Omar’s life has been turned upside down, her legal bills have piled up, and she’s been forced to spend time fighting unsubstantiated charges instead of serving the people of Minnesota.
The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.
Dr Alison Booth retweeted
On a beach in West Africa the fishermen now haul in more clothes than fish, and the clothes have your charity shop's label on them.
The beach is in Accra, the capital of Ghana. A mile inland is Kantamanto, the biggest second-hand clothes market on earth. Every week about 15 million garments arrive there in bales, from Britain, Canada, China and America. Most of what you drop in a clothing bank ends up on its way to a place like this.
The locals have a name for the trade. Obroni Wawu. It means dead white man's clothes, because nobody could imagine a living person giving away so much.
The traders open the bales and sort them. 40 years ago nearly everything sold. Now about 40% of every bale is rubbish before it leaves the market, because the garments were built to be worn 5 times. That is 6 million pieces of clothing a week with nowhere to go.
The city collects what it can. The rest goes into the gutters, the lagoon and the sea.
Then it comes back. The waves roll the clothes together into ropes of knotted polyester as long as a boat, and the beach monitors who count them have a word for those too. Tentacles. They logged 2,344 of them along 4 miles of shore in one year. Fishermen's nets come up full of trousers. Propellers foul on them. Men have had their canoes capsized by somebody's old leggings.
A fishing community cannot fish, because of what the rest of the world was too virtuous to throw in its own bin.
When those clothes were wool and cotton they would have rotted on that beach in a season. Instead they are becoming the coastline.
