Proud to be featured in CPRE The countryside charity #Voice magazine with photos by @lhschiefer - talking about my campaigning career with Open Spaces Society RamblersGB Dartmoor Preservation Association Campaign for National Parks which has been & continues to be hugely enjoyable & rewarding Crispin Truman now posting on Bluesky

One issue exposed by the farming IHT kerfuffle is as old as farming itself. Old patriarchs not handing farms onto children & grandchildren at a decent age. Sons waiting into late middle age, infantilised by the old man, often embittered, is something of a fixture of farming life.

Because recognising when it’s your son’s or daughter’s time to take the reins is an act of love, without which the idea of a ‘family farm’ is meaningless.

For me, the government reforms of Agricultural Property Relief (APR) miss two big opportunities 1. The political opportunity Labour had coming in to win over more farmers & ‘deep rural’ voters 2. The policy opportunity to use APR more imaginatively A 🧵 on what I mean…

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

This is suggestive on the impact of wells and water bottling plants on local water supplies but where are the hydrologists in the discussions? theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2…

I’m open to the idea that the govt’s IHT relief on farmland might be re-thought, but we need to hear loud & clear from the NFU & the CLA etc is that the sale of any inherited land, at any time, will be subject to IHT at the rate everyone else pays on an inheritance.

Quick note of congrats to Dr Ally Louks. Sounds like an excellent thesis & I admire how she’s dealing with the trolls.

As Owen Polley & Ronan McGreevy clash over Irish neutrality during WWII, here’s my attempt to work through the issues in the London Review of Books from 2006. I might well put things a bit differently today, but I reckon the line of argument still broadly stands up. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/…

Ah Dominic Sandbrook, thank you for the mention during the Wojtek the bear episode of The Rest Is History. Perfect excuse to give Finding Poland a plug, complete with your kind endorsement on the cover! For more on the extraordinary experiences of Polish deportees / refugees during WWII…

So delighted that Seth Lakeman will be heading a new festival I’m helping organise; we also have Guy Shrubsole Kate Ashbrook Matthew Kelly and many more … westcountryvoices.co.uk/new-festival-i…

Obscure #Dartmoor question. Does anyone have a photograph of the old GPO Repeater Station at Bush Down (up the road from the Warren Inn & Bennett's Cross)? Legendary Dartmoor does your encyclopedic knowledge extend to this? I'd like to dig myself out of this rabbit hole... Ta.

Wasn’t the Butter War a 1970s European trade dispute?

Starting to digest the judgement in the Darwall case, which can be found here: supremecourt.uk/uploads/uksc_2… On a procedural point, it appears that even if Darwall had won the substantive statutory interpretation argument on the meaning of “open air recreation”, he wouldn’t have

This is how to do it.

Nothing speaks more eloquently to the credulity of the human being than the ‘ripe and ready’ pear.