My currently swinging, erm....opinion....is therefore Greens (turning a blind eye to the nuclear debate, just for the minute, because I also agree that nukes are the way forward (bit of a gag there)) and I'll need to look at Lib Dems. I still think red and blue have had their chances and need to be told off and the only way we can make this clear is to not vote for them. I agree with some of the Reform policies but not the other stuff everyone is saying about them, so would be good to know if the policies I agree with are represented elsewhere, as I'm sure they will be. Nothing else through the door as of this morning, other than a cute fridge magnet a young lady I met sent me.
Windmills, don't mind them myself so long as they're not too close. Lived for a couple of years with them visible from rooms in the house - didn't bother me. I know in some countries solar and farming have been combined, some crops are fine. They also found sheep are more productive if grazed under solar panels, no idea why and no idea why this hasn't been jumped on tbh.
It's because wool conducts static electricity and in its natural form acts as an inverter, so the sheep are more efficient.
Now imaging a sheep with a dc power cable coming out its ass and plugged into a solar panel, chewing the grass around it. Thanks for that!
The number 1 spot besides rooftops for solar would be on top of parking lots like they did at a Zoo in America: https://cincinnatizoo.org/new-solar...-pumps-out-power-and-provides-shade-for-cars/ Parking lots are near stuff that uses electricity, they are easy to access for maintenance and the land is is already a concrete wasteland to begin with, so you don't ruin any nature by doing it.
I always thought that Gatwick airport parking would make a suitably huge solar farm. It also has the benefit of already being used in rolling basis based on departure date, so they could take one zone out of service, install, rinse, repeat. Any airport parking around the country would be suitable. And has the added benefit of airports using a chunk of electricity already, so has lots of high capacity power delivery infrastructure nearby already. I also wonder why they don't co-locate greenhouses and/or vertical indoor farms with datacentres, with the waste heat from the datacentre providing the heat for year-round growing.
That's fair enough, I suppose most people don't really care that much. As for sheep being more productive grazing under solar panels? I don't know what to make of it. Well, can't get much greener than that and if the sheep is also plugged into the grid.... Yes, 100%. Farmland is too valuable we need it.
Yeah, I've confused myself with that - it's what the research said but I'll have to go back and look for it because now I'm thinking "productive at what? Do they increase the number of wooly socks they can produce for tkmaxx or something"
Did you find any additional information? I'm thinking it's the shade. They can regulate their body temperature better, which leads to uber grazing speed and to more socks?
https://www.theguardian.com/austral...proves-productivity-so-why-dont-we-do-it-more Yeah, it's increased wool production. Over here, as far as I understand, they've had trouble giving the stuff away sometimes so I'm not sure it's applicable in that sense. Still, looks like it's viable to have solar and grazing combined.
Little Beau Peep She had a sheep It wandered under a pylon 10,000 volts shot up its arse And turned its fleece to nylon
Guys, this is actually required by law in France now. Car parks over 10,000m^2 (~400 spaces) must be at least 50% covered in solar panels by July 1 this year. Car parks over 1,500m^2 (~80 spaces) have until July 1 2028 Disneyland Paris have already done theirs, 11,200 spaces provides 36GWh (17% of the park's power needs) annually. BTW - Cows like shade too:- https://electrek.co/2026/05/01/solar-farm-lets-cattle-roam-under-moving-panels/
One more number worth sitting with. Imagine no income tax at all and you earn £500k a year. Spending nothing, it’d take you 2,000 years to make your first billion. Billionaires aren’t just “rich people but more so” - they hold civilisation-scale assets, and that comes with civilisation-scale influence over what gets built, who gets hired, which papers print what. Eroding that concentration isn’t punishment, it’s maintenance. A 2% annual tax on assets over £1bn is a very mild form of that maintenance. If you were to pick literally the single most important issue to vote on - this is it. Everything else more or less follows from it. Making a reasonable statistical guess around typical British family’s financial situation, it would take you 10x longer to make the first billion. That means you’d have to keep working since preagriculture (roughly ice age) To make top 50 billionaires worldwide you’d have to work since pre-homo-sapiens time. Again spending absolutely nothing and paying nothing in tax. The reason you’re led to believe it’s an erosion of wealth ( it’s not, taxation at fix rate is also very slowly decreasing, so it really just serves as a level cap) is because the numbers are so vast most population lose the sense of scale. Billion is not just a couple of millions, it’s far far far more than that. if you had a billion quid, got taxed 2% every year and made no return for 100 years, you’d still be left with 130million. Run this another 100 years and you still have 17million left.
Yep. I have to be honest, people agonising over the plight of billionaires very much feels like having the wool pulled over their eyes.
If you have a billion quid you’re going to be making 5-10% interest if not way more. Paying 2% in tax won’t even reduce their balance it’ll just offset their gains a little tiny bit.
Heartily agree. I dislike tax on an emotional level but recognise its necessity on a practical one. People who call tax "theft" are salty for the wrong reasons - the problem isn't that they're taxing us (roads, emergency services, healthcare, environmental management, planning, govt, lawmaking, enforcement, all that good stuff). The problem is that they're taxing people on the edge of insolvency for a quarter of what they've got while massive corporations and billionaires get to sequester their wealth in tax havens and they're so big the govt are saying with a straight face, "if we tax them properly they'll go somewhere else!" Tiny violin emoji to that. Enforce your laws better. Want to own property, do business, live or invest here? Pay into it. If Joe Bloggs the shelf stacker can survive getting gouged for an amount of money that literally changes his life outcomes, you can go down one size of yacht this year. Anyway, who do I vote for to signal that sentiment? Also, the solar-vs-farmland is a bit of a red herring, imo. Solar can be put on marginal headland and other bits and pieces that farmers wouldn't use for crops anyway, and doing so makes it particularly ecologically valuable. Didn't realise it also made it better for grazing but personally if I owned solar farms I'd be twitchy about livestock roaming around it all day. I've seen how much damage livestock can do to stuff without even really trying. Solar over car parks is such a win-win it's actually doing my head in a bit. Shade and rain shelter for the cars and walkways. Instant power supplement for the EV chargers and the store itself. Heck most superstores have long pitched roof walkways all the way across them. Ideal. Need to go and read the LibDem manifesto to see what those clowns are about this time, they're still marginally on top of my list.
Tax on UK assets that they can't remove though because many, like the millions of pounds donor to the Reform party (and before that the Brexit party) who bunged Farage £5million, are not UK taxpayers (as he's now living in Thailand). Donations from people who pay no tax here but may have influence on how our future taxes may be spent has to be stopped.
