- Location
- Buxton, Derbyshire
The whole furlough thing, I'm just telling you what he'd told me when I saw him back in September! No idea why they were furloughed, or how long for, or why?!
National Trust destroys decades-old Bassenthwaite grassland
- Thread starter Phil P
- Start date
- Location
- Fife
In mainland Europe and the US farmers are now being paid to graze the uplands specifically to reduce this kind of fuel loading.
Netherfield
Member
- Location
- West Yorkshire
Latest update, some total tw*t setting off fireworks.
Still see loads of smoke coming off.
Av Gorritt
Member
- Location
- NE Ches / SE Lancs
Fairly local to me , and I was quite surprised to see a lot of fire brigade equipment being withdrawn at 8 p.m. the other night . Apparently they aren't allowed to work on the moor after 8 pm - H and S I think . The local gamekeepers and farmers were left to their own devices until 2.30 a.m. battling a mile long fire . They had to leave a few smouldering bits , which apparently started up again . Fortunately we've had a (small) downpour of rain down here which might have helped . Hope so anyway .
Possibly they are not as oveloaded with 'ologists there?
- Location
- Carmarthenshire, West Wales
article in the paper
Paula Vennells is one of those gilded people in public life that float frictionlessly from one well-upholstered berth to the next CREDIT: Post Office/PA Wire
How does Paula Vennells sleep at night? In the small hours, do the thoughts of the former chief executive of the Post Office stray to the men and women whose lives were irrevocably ruined thanks to their employer wrongly prosecuting them for theft, fraud and false accounting? And to those people subsequently being jailed for their crimes, an outcome which the Court of Appeal just called “an affront to the public conscience”.
On Friday, the court quashed the convictions of 39 of those former Post Office workers. That’s the largest number ever affected by a miscarriage of justice in the UK, although the fight for at least 700 more subpostmasters goes on.
In 2007, Janet Skinner ran a post office in Hull when she was taken from her two children and imprisoned for nine months over a shortfall of £59,000. Janet insisted the fault lay with the Horizon computer system, which had been used to manage post offices’ finances since 1999. Seema Misra, the sub-postmistress at West Byfleet, was pregnant with her second child when she was jailed after an audit found a discrepancy of £74,000. For two years, she had been trying to fill the mysterious holes in her accounts, even borrowing money from relatives. Like the other victims, Janet and Seema had no idea that their fellow sub-postmasters were being prosecuted and convicted in large numbers.
These decent, hardworking people found themselves in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Is there anything worse than not being believed? After release, many of the innocent failed to get jobs (or insurance) owing to their criminal conviction. Some lost their homes. Three poor souls died with a cloud over their reputation. Seema Misra became a virtual recluse, scared to go out after her reviled family relocated. “If I hadn’t been pregnant, I definitely would have killed myself,” she says. “It was so shameful.”
That shame belongs to Paula Vennells (and her predecessor, Adam Crozier) and other Post Office managers as well as to Fujitsu, which provided the flawed Horizon system. Neil Hudgell, who represented 29 of the former sub-postmasters, said the Post Office was: “found to have been an organisation that not only turned a blind eye to the failings in its hugely expensive IT system, but positively promoted a culture of cover-up and subterfuge in the pursuit of reputation and profit. They readily accepted that loss of life, liberty and sanity for many ordinary people as a price worth paying in that pursuit.”
Although MPs raised concerns about Horizon back in May 2012, claiming 100 Post Office employees had been “unfairly dragged through the mud”, prosecutions were still going ahead. Year after year, the Post Office brought an average of one successful prosecution a week against a staff member.
Did the Reverend Paula Vennells, who was at the helm from 2012 to 2019, not think it was slightly odd that so many Post Office employees had their hand in the till? Did elementary human curiosity not lead her to explore the coincidence that all of the accused claimed there must be a problem with the computer system?
As Lord Justice Holroyde said in court, the Post Office knew there were serious issues with the IT system, but they continued to claim that Horizon was “robust and reliable” and “effectively steamrolled over any sub-postmaster who sought to challenge its accuracy”.
I find it very hard to disagree with Harjinder Butoy. Speaking after his name was cleared, Mr Butoy, who was convicted of theft and jailed for three years and four months, said that those responsible for the scandal “need to be punished, seriously punished”, adding: “They’re just bullies, that’s all they are. Somebody needs to really, really sort this out and charge them for this.”
The heavens themselves cry out for vengeance after a tragedy of this magnitude. Realistically, what are the chances of that happening?
Paula Vennells is one of those gilded people in public life who seem to float frictionlessly from one well-upholstered berth to the next. She was appointed CBE in 2019 for her services in turning the Post Office around and for “her commitment to the social purpose at the heart of the business”.
After leaving the Post Office, she walked straight into a job as Chair of Imperial College NHS Trust, a role she appeared to give up with some reluctance in March. Last year, she temporarily stepped down from a role advising the Church on its ethical investments. (No mention was made of the Horizon scandal although an insider told me they believed that was the cause.)
After the Court of Appeal verdict, she finally stepped down as a non-executive director for high-street chains Dunelm and Morrisons. When an outraged campaigner wrote to Morrisons last year, demanding to know why Vennells was still on the board, the chairman, Andrew Higginson, replied complacently: “It is both my own and my colleagues’ assessment that Paula is an excellent non-executive director who brings great experience and a strong moral compass to the table.”
Welcome to the wonderful world of the institutional aristocracy, where having run an organisation for seven years – one that a judge said had presented “partial and misleading evidence” – which was complicit in the ruin of hundreds of innocent lives is no bar to having a strong moral compass.
After the postmasters’ triumph on Friday, Paula Vennells also left her post as an associate minister in the dioceses of St Albans. The Bishop of St Albans admitted he had taken legal advice about removing Vennells following complaints last year, but formed the view that, despite her role as Post Office chief executive, he couldn’t “simply impute” to her the failures of the organisation.
Paula Vennells has said she is sorry and is committed to co-operating with the government inquiry which will report in the summer. “I was deeply saddened by the sub-postmasters’ accounts,” she said in a statement, “I am truly sorry for the suffering caused to them as a result of the convictions which the Court of Appeal has overturned.”
Truly sorry? Sorry is a sticking plaster on the vast, gaping wound of human misery caused by the Post Office. As the former Reverend Vennells knows full well, that suffering was not caused to all those people by their “convictions”. It was caused when their employer threw them and their families under a bus to spare itself embarrassment and expense.
It is hard not to see this David and Goliath story as emblematic of a wider rottenness in British institutions. The Post Office has been the rock-solid heart of every community for over 350 years, not a rapacious master devouring its own servants. Until Friday, the criminal justice system had failed those 39 entirely innocent men and women.
In Northern Ireland, old soldiers who served their country in appallingly difficult circumstances almost 50 years ago find themselves on trial for the murder of a man whom the IRA claimed was responsible for the deaths of 15 British soldiers. They have been thrown to the wolves by a Conservative government which promised legislation to protect them from prosecution. (Johnny Mercer displayed an integrity which seems practically extinct in our institutions when he resigned as Veterans Minister in protest.)
Meanwhile, the Church of England also fails to protect people on the frontline by allowing the dioceses to advertise lavishly-salaried, otiose positions while slashing the number of vicars on whom the most vulnerable rely.
Shame on the lot of them. Everywhere we look, we see a failure to value the poor bloody infantry allied to a self-justifying management culture hiding in its own byzantine “processes”.
“Lessons have been learnt” is the catchphrase of these slippery, unaccountable Establishment cronies. It is not enough to have a review set up “to establish a clear account of the failings of the Horizon IT computer system” and assess whether – here it comes – “lessons have been learnt at the Post Office”.
The victims don’t care if sodding lessons have been learnt. So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable, although the High Court judge did say he would refer Fujitsu to the Director of Public Prosecutions for possible further action, because he had “grave concerns” about the evidence of the company’s employees.
We need a full public inquiry. Nothing less will do for one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in our history. Unbelievably dreadful things were done to ordinary, good postmasters and postmistresses. As the court said, it is an affront to the public conscience.
You can read Allison Pearson’s column every Tuesday. Click here to read last week's column
Paula Vennells is one of those gilded people in public life that float frictionlessly from one well-upholstered berth to the next CREDIT: Post Office/PA Wire
How does Paula Vennells sleep at night? In the small hours, do the thoughts of the former chief executive of the Post Office stray to the men and women whose lives were irrevocably ruined thanks to their employer wrongly prosecuting them for theft, fraud and false accounting? And to those people subsequently being jailed for their crimes, an outcome which the Court of Appeal just called “an affront to the public conscience”.
On Friday, the court quashed the convictions of 39 of those former Post Office workers. That’s the largest number ever affected by a miscarriage of justice in the UK, although the fight for at least 700 more subpostmasters goes on.
In 2007, Janet Skinner ran a post office in Hull when she was taken from her two children and imprisoned for nine months over a shortfall of £59,000. Janet insisted the fault lay with the Horizon computer system, which had been used to manage post offices’ finances since 1999. Seema Misra, the sub-postmistress at West Byfleet, was pregnant with her second child when she was jailed after an audit found a discrepancy of £74,000. For two years, she had been trying to fill the mysterious holes in her accounts, even borrowing money from relatives. Like the other victims, Janet and Seema had no idea that their fellow sub-postmasters were being prosecuted and convicted in large numbers.
These decent, hardworking people found themselves in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Is there anything worse than not being believed? After release, many of the innocent failed to get jobs (or insurance) owing to their criminal conviction. Some lost their homes. Three poor souls died with a cloud over their reputation. Seema Misra became a virtual recluse, scared to go out after her reviled family relocated. “If I hadn’t been pregnant, I definitely would have killed myself,” she says. “It was so shameful.”
That shame belongs to Paula Vennells (and her predecessor, Adam Crozier) and other Post Office managers as well as to Fujitsu, which provided the flawed Horizon system. Neil Hudgell, who represented 29 of the former sub-postmasters, said the Post Office was: “found to have been an organisation that not only turned a blind eye to the failings in its hugely expensive IT system, but positively promoted a culture of cover-up and subterfuge in the pursuit of reputation and profit. They readily accepted that loss of life, liberty and sanity for many ordinary people as a price worth paying in that pursuit.”
Although MPs raised concerns about Horizon back in May 2012, claiming 100 Post Office employees had been “unfairly dragged through the mud”, prosecutions were still going ahead. Year after year, the Post Office brought an average of one successful prosecution a week against a staff member.
Did the Reverend Paula Vennells, who was at the helm from 2012 to 2019, not think it was slightly odd that so many Post Office employees had their hand in the till? Did elementary human curiosity not lead her to explore the coincidence that all of the accused claimed there must be a problem with the computer system?
As Lord Justice Holroyde said in court, the Post Office knew there were serious issues with the IT system, but they continued to claim that Horizon was “robust and reliable” and “effectively steamrolled over any sub-postmaster who sought to challenge its accuracy”.
I find it very hard to disagree with Harjinder Butoy. Speaking after his name was cleared, Mr Butoy, who was convicted of theft and jailed for three years and four months, said that those responsible for the scandal “need to be punished, seriously punished”, adding: “They’re just bullies, that’s all they are. Somebody needs to really, really sort this out and charge them for this.”
The heavens themselves cry out for vengeance after a tragedy of this magnitude. Realistically, what are the chances of that happening?
Paula Vennells is one of those gilded people in public life who seem to float frictionlessly from one well-upholstered berth to the next. She was appointed CBE in 2019 for her services in turning the Post Office around and for “her commitment to the social purpose at the heart of the business”.
After leaving the Post Office, she walked straight into a job as Chair of Imperial College NHS Trust, a role she appeared to give up with some reluctance in March. Last year, she temporarily stepped down from a role advising the Church on its ethical investments. (No mention was made of the Horizon scandal although an insider told me they believed that was the cause.)
After the Court of Appeal verdict, she finally stepped down as a non-executive director for high-street chains Dunelm and Morrisons. When an outraged campaigner wrote to Morrisons last year, demanding to know why Vennells was still on the board, the chairman, Andrew Higginson, replied complacently: “It is both my own and my colleagues’ assessment that Paula is an excellent non-executive director who brings great experience and a strong moral compass to the table.”
Welcome to the wonderful world of the institutional aristocracy, where having run an organisation for seven years – one that a judge said had presented “partial and misleading evidence” – which was complicit in the ruin of hundreds of innocent lives is no bar to having a strong moral compass.
After the postmasters’ triumph on Friday, Paula Vennells also left her post as an associate minister in the dioceses of St Albans. The Bishop of St Albans admitted he had taken legal advice about removing Vennells following complaints last year, but formed the view that, despite her role as Post Office chief executive, he couldn’t “simply impute” to her the failures of the organisation.
Paula Vennells has said she is sorry and is committed to co-operating with the government inquiry which will report in the summer. “I was deeply saddened by the sub-postmasters’ accounts,” she said in a statement, “I am truly sorry for the suffering caused to them as a result of the convictions which the Court of Appeal has overturned.”
Truly sorry? Sorry is a sticking plaster on the vast, gaping wound of human misery caused by the Post Office. As the former Reverend Vennells knows full well, that suffering was not caused to all those people by their “convictions”. It was caused when their employer threw them and their families under a bus to spare itself embarrassment and expense.
It is hard not to see this David and Goliath story as emblematic of a wider rottenness in British institutions. The Post Office has been the rock-solid heart of every community for over 350 years, not a rapacious master devouring its own servants. Until Friday, the criminal justice system had failed those 39 entirely innocent men and women.
In Northern Ireland, old soldiers who served their country in appallingly difficult circumstances almost 50 years ago find themselves on trial for the murder of a man whom the IRA claimed was responsible for the deaths of 15 British soldiers. They have been thrown to the wolves by a Conservative government which promised legislation to protect them from prosecution. (Johnny Mercer displayed an integrity which seems practically extinct in our institutions when he resigned as Veterans Minister in protest.)
Meanwhile, the Church of England also fails to protect people on the frontline by allowing the dioceses to advertise lavishly-salaried, otiose positions while slashing the number of vicars on whom the most vulnerable rely.
Shame on the lot of them. Everywhere we look, we see a failure to value the poor bloody infantry allied to a self-justifying management culture hiding in its own byzantine “processes”.
“Lessons have been learnt” is the catchphrase of these slippery, unaccountable Establishment cronies. It is not enough to have a review set up “to establish a clear account of the failings of the Horizon IT computer system” and assess whether – here it comes – “lessons have been learnt at the Post Office”.
The victims don’t care if sodding lessons have been learnt. So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable, although the High Court judge did say he would refer Fujitsu to the Director of Public Prosecutions for possible further action, because he had “grave concerns” about the evidence of the company’s employees.
We need a full public inquiry. Nothing less will do for one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in our history. Unbelievably dreadful things were done to ordinary, good postmasters and postmistresses. As the court said, it is an affront to the public conscience.
You can read Allison Pearson’s column every Tuesday. Click here to read last week's column
An excellent, biting and justifiably scathing article.
Devil's advocate
Member
- Location
- Posh side of Barnsley
They really do annoy me, these NT types.
Watching look North, the presenter (who is a local farmers son) gave the NT boss such an easy time. Why was he not asked why these fires are almost always on the rewilded moors, the amount of ungrazed molinia was a total disgrace
Once they have destroyed one moor, they always want to start rewilding the neighbouring moor.
I do see logic in trees on some moors & holding back flood water with leaky dams. But the moors need sheep & cattle.
Watching look North, the presenter (who is a local farmers son) gave the NT boss such an easy time. Why was he not asked why these fires are almost always on the rewilded moors, the amount of ungrazed molinia was a total disgrace
Once they have destroyed one moor, they always want to start rewilding the neighbouring moor.
I do see logic in trees on some moors & holding back flood water with leaky dams. But the moors need sheep & cattle.
- Location
- Devon
Well they've been busy on Dartmoor tonight.
Could see the fire (and the blue lights with binoculars) from here.
Yep its going to happen, mate is a bailif in Manchester & has recently been at court getting all the paperwork signed etc to go start knocking on doors in Manchester
- Location
- Carmarthenshire, West Wales
I have just emailed my MP, urging a public enquiry and also prosecution, maybe if everyone does that we may get one. I am outraged, at the way these large public bodies walk over the "little people", whether it NT, Natural England, Post Office, it seems to be all the same.
pycoed
Member
- Location
- Pontarddulais, UK
I REALLY REALLY wish that Allison Pearson was the PM. She invariably writes with common sense & a strong sense of what is "right". It's just a crying shame that virtually all of our MPs are devoid of any of the same. Tories are just spineless, Lib Dems are that & wrong about everything as well, & Labour are just anti British anything full stop. As for the rest, a bunch of delusional, self interested snouters...article in the paper
Paula Vennells is one of those gilded people in public life that float frictionlessly from one well-upholstered berth to the next CREDIT: Post Office/PA Wire
How does Paula Vennells sleep at night? In the small hours, do the thoughts of the former chief executive of the Post Office stray to the men and women whose lives were irrevocably ruined thanks to their employer wrongly prosecuting them for theft, fraud and false accounting? And to those people subsequently being jailed for their crimes, an outcome which the Court of Appeal just called “an affront to the public conscience”.
On Friday, the court quashed the convictions of 39 of those former Post Office workers. That’s the largest number ever affected by a miscarriage of justice in the UK, although the fight for at least 700 more subpostmasters goes on.
In 2007, Janet Skinner ran a post office in Hull when she was taken from her two children and imprisoned for nine months over a shortfall of £59,000. Janet insisted the fault lay with the Horizon computer system, which had been used to manage post offices’ finances since 1999. Seema Misra, the sub-postmistress at West Byfleet, was pregnant with her second child when she was jailed after an audit found a discrepancy of £74,000. For two years, she had been trying to fill the mysterious holes in her accounts, even borrowing money from relatives. Like the other victims, Janet and Seema had no idea that their fellow sub-postmasters were being prosecuted and convicted in large numbers.
These decent, hardworking people found themselves in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Is there anything worse than not being believed? After release, many of the innocent failed to get jobs (or insurance) owing to their criminal conviction. Some lost their homes. Three poor souls died with a cloud over their reputation. Seema Misra became a virtual recluse, scared to go out after her reviled family relocated. “If I hadn’t been pregnant, I definitely would have killed myself,” she says. “It was so shameful.”
That shame belongs to Paula Vennells (and her predecessor, Adam Crozier) and other Post Office managers as well as to Fujitsu, which provided the flawed Horizon system. Neil Hudgell, who represented 29 of the former sub-postmasters, said the Post Office was: “found to have been an organisation that not only turned a blind eye to the failings in its hugely expensive IT system, but positively promoted a culture of cover-up and subterfuge in the pursuit of reputation and profit. They readily accepted that loss of life, liberty and sanity for many ordinary people as a price worth paying in that pursuit.”
Although MPs raised concerns about Horizon back in May 2012, claiming 100 Post Office employees had been “unfairly dragged through the mud”, prosecutions were still going ahead. Year after year, the Post Office brought an average of one successful prosecution a week against a staff member.
Did the Reverend Paula Vennells, who was at the helm from 2012 to 2019, not think it was slightly odd that so many Post Office employees had their hand in the till? Did elementary human curiosity not lead her to explore the coincidence that all of the accused claimed there must be a problem with the computer system?
As Lord Justice Holroyde said in court, the Post Office knew there were serious issues with the IT system, but they continued to claim that Horizon was “robust and reliable” and “effectively steamrolled over any sub-postmaster who sought to challenge its accuracy”.
I find it very hard to disagree with Harjinder Butoy. Speaking after his name was cleared, Mr Butoy, who was convicted of theft and jailed for three years and four months, said that those responsible for the scandal “need to be punished, seriously punished”, adding: “They’re just bullies, that’s all they are. Somebody needs to really, really sort this out and charge them for this.”
The heavens themselves cry out for vengeance after a tragedy of this magnitude. Realistically, what are the chances of that happening?
Paula Vennells is one of those gilded people in public life who seem to float frictionlessly from one well-upholstered berth to the next. She was appointed CBE in 2019 for her services in turning the Post Office around and for “her commitment to the social purpose at the heart of the business”.
After leaving the Post Office, she walked straight into a job as Chair of Imperial College NHS Trust, a role she appeared to give up with some reluctance in March. Last year, she temporarily stepped down from a role advising the Church on its ethical investments. (No mention was made of the Horizon scandal although an insider told me they believed that was the cause.)
After the Court of Appeal verdict, she finally stepped down as a non-executive director for high-street chains Dunelm and Morrisons. When an outraged campaigner wrote to Morrisons last year, demanding to know why Vennells was still on the board, the chairman, Andrew Higginson, replied complacently: “It is both my own and my colleagues’ assessment that Paula is an excellent non-executive director who brings great experience and a strong moral compass to the table.”
Welcome to the wonderful world of the institutional aristocracy, where having run an organisation for seven years – one that a judge said had presented “partial and misleading evidence” – which was complicit in the ruin of hundreds of innocent lives is no bar to having a strong moral compass.
After the postmasters’ triumph on Friday, Paula Vennells also left her post as an associate minister in the dioceses of St Albans. The Bishop of St Albans admitted he had taken legal advice about removing Vennells following complaints last year, but formed the view that, despite her role as Post Office chief executive, he couldn’t “simply impute” to her the failures of the organisation.
Paula Vennells has said she is sorry and is committed to co-operating with the government inquiry which will report in the summer. “I was deeply saddened by the sub-postmasters’ accounts,” she said in a statement, “I am truly sorry for the suffering caused to them as a result of the convictions which the Court of Appeal has overturned.”
Truly sorry? Sorry is a sticking plaster on the vast, gaping wound of human misery caused by the Post Office. As the former Reverend Vennells knows full well, that suffering was not caused to all those people by their “convictions”. It was caused when their employer threw them and their families under a bus to spare itself embarrassment and expense.
It is hard not to see this David and Goliath story as emblematic of a wider rottenness in British institutions. The Post Office has been the rock-solid heart of every community for over 350 years, not a rapacious master devouring its own servants. Until Friday, the criminal justice system had failed those 39 entirely innocent men and women.
In Northern Ireland, old soldiers who served their country in appallingly difficult circumstances almost 50 years ago find themselves on trial for the murder of a man whom the IRA claimed was responsible for the deaths of 15 British soldiers. They have been thrown to the wolves by a Conservative government which promised legislation to protect them from prosecution. (Johnny Mercer displayed an integrity which seems practically extinct in our institutions when he resigned as Veterans Minister in protest.)
Meanwhile, the Church of England also fails to protect people on the frontline by allowing the dioceses to advertise lavishly-salaried, otiose positions while slashing the number of vicars on whom the most vulnerable rely.
Shame on the lot of them. Everywhere we look, we see a failure to value the poor bloody infantry allied to a self-justifying management culture hiding in its own byzantine “processes”.
“Lessons have been learnt” is the catchphrase of these slippery, unaccountable Establishment cronies. It is not enough to have a review set up “to establish a clear account of the failings of the Horizon IT computer system” and assess whether – here it comes – “lessons have been learnt at the Post Office”.
The victims don’t care if sodding lessons have been learnt. So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable, although the High Court judge did say he would refer Fujitsu to the Director of Public Prosecutions for possible further action, because he had “grave concerns” about the evidence of the company’s employees.
We need a full public inquiry. Nothing less will do for one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in our history. Unbelievably dreadful things were done to ordinary, good postmasters and postmistresses. As the court said, it is an affront to the public conscience.
You can read Allison Pearson’s column every Tuesday. Click here to read last week's column
the bassenthwaite field was on local itv news tonight I’ve tried to up load it on here but i can’t .daughter says I’m maybe not allowed to.any idea? Watch from 14.06 minutes on the link below
www.itv.com
Watch the ITV News Border evening programme | ITV News
You can catch-up with the ITV News Border programme on weekdays for 24-hours after it is broadcast on ITV.
www.itv.com
beardface
Member
- Location
- East Yorkshire
I'd like to see some archaeological proof that the moors were covered in trees. Look a pretty unforgiving environment for millions of trees to have resided. I actually think the moors looked pretty similar albeit more areas of tree groves. Possibly grazed by large ruminants, deer and aurochs.
This NT ploughing up an ancient pasture and likely getting away with it just shows how f**ked up the job is at the minute.
Sounds extremely irresponsible to get rid of all of the team responsible for thousands of acres...... I'm sure they would have been needed to stay in work if there wasn't a government furlough scheme to pay thier wages??
About time we jailed one of these irresponsible CEO’s, so they learn abusing the “ little” people has consequences
- Location
- Carmarthenshire, West Wales
in Isabella Trees's book on rewilding the Knebb estate, she demolished the idea that Britain was wall to wall trees, rather in prehistoric times, it was a savanah of grazed grass with copses of trees. She is also not very complimentary about ecologists who decide to manage this habitat for this or that species. I think the NT and other environmental bodies are guilty of both of the above ideas. I am sure I have also shared a study from Norway, showing tree/scrub encroachment in their open hills is releasing carbon and contributing to global warming.
I have just been listening to the Today programme on radio 4, talking about problems in Staffordshire with a "stink" from a landfill, of course if people had pigs to eat the swill from their kitchens there would be no waste food landfilled (I know the problems with F&M disease, answer do not import pig products). Law of unintended consquences.
The benefit of having a FREE Press - which those who make up "the great and the good" in the UK, including people like Venereal, would like to be muzzled.