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I once organised a Valentine’s weekend away for my partner and me at a boutique hotel in a charming town.But there’s a reason I’m never put in charge of organising things. There’s a reason my partner is the one who takes care of all our get-aways and vacations. It’s because I am completely inept.I’d booked the hotel, but I’d failed to book the hotel restaurant for our meal. It hadn’t even occurred to me that due to Valentine’s Day the tables might well be booked far in advance.It suddenly dawned on me the night before we left. I phoned the hotel, and the owner informed me that all the tables were indeed already booked. He was very empathetic and apologetic. But, it was my own fault. He kindly gave me the names of all the other restaurants in his town, in case they had openings.I phoned them each and got the same response: ‘Well, it is Valentine’s weekend, so we are fully booked.’Shit on it! We had a perfect hotel to stay in but nowhere to eat.The Inn was just beautiful. Every room had its own theme and was tastefully decorated with flair. I can safely say that out of all the lovely places we’ve stayed over the years, it remains our favourite.Upon hearing that we had not managed to book a meal anywhere, the owner told us not to worry. He offered to serve us in our room.Wow. How nice.At 7 O’clock, he and a waitress arrived at our door with trays of cutlery, plates and glasses. They set our table and when we were seated comfortably, he ran through the menu with us. They both went on to serve us three lush courses in our room in exactly the same fashion they would’ve done in the restaurant. It felt intimate, romantic and exclusive. Like we’d won some kind of raffle.It was incredibly good of them to oblige us in that way, climbing up and down windy stairs umpteen times with all that food and drink. And doing it all with a smile and enthusiasm.There you have it— my story of a surprise gone wrong in the best possible way.Many thanks to Roland, proprietor at Swann House in Beccles, Suffolk.

The most important thing that city folk don’t understand about the British countryside is that if the current vogue for a plant based diet continues the countryside as we know it will be destroyed. This is not hyperbole. The very pro plant based diet BBC recently reported that a quarter of British mammals are now under threat.Quarter of UK mammals 'under threat'I fully respect the right of anyone to follow whatever diet they wish but, equally, I do wish that those espousing a plant based diet would appreciate the immense, and wholly detrimental, impact their philosophies would have on British wildlife and our countryside’s contribution to reducing global warming.It’s one thing to sit in an urban office and look at the world through a double glazed window but the reality of a plant based diet in the countryside is vastly different.First, Britain has been intensively farmed for a long time – something in the region of 5-8,000 years - depending how you want to date the start of agriculture. During this period, the whole of our rural infrastructure has become adapted to a wonderfully balanced, and highly integrated, rural “economy”.The core of the issue is how do we, as a society, maintain the countryside. To understand this question, it’s necessary to look at some very pragmatic, and far from media friendly, issues. For better or for worse, these are not Tweet, TikTok or soundbite mattersGive or take, it’s not practical to use a combine harvester in a field much smaller than 5 acres. To use the much hackneyed metaphor, about 5 football pitches. Combines are the central players in the plant based diet lifestyle because someone, somewhere, needs to grow, and harvest, a LOT of vegetables and grains if a meat free diet were to become popular – and there needs to be emphasis on “LOT”!The solution to this issue is simple: make sure that all the fields are bigger than five acres. How to do this? Again, the solution is clear: grub up the hedges and trees which take up so much valuable space.Getting rid of all the hedges also removes another dull, utterly uninteresting but rather important challenge. You can’t get a combine through a 12 or 14 feet wide gate. Ideally, the best thing is to remove all the gates so that you have lots and lots and lots of empty space where big, tracked machines can work properly.We currently have something in the region of 500,000 miles of hedgerow in Britain – about half of what we had in 1940. I am neither a scientist nor a mathematician but, working on an average of nine feet wide, that’s about ½ million acres of broad leaf, bio diverse woodland – or something over 200,000 hectares. This compares with a total of 3.19 million hectares of officially recognised woodland – much of which is coniferous and vastly less bio diverse.In case you think that this fake news, or hyperbole to make a point, hedges are being currently being grubbed up where we are now: this weekend. You simply cannot economically run a £250,000 combine in a small field.Look at our key arable areas, in the east of England, and you’ll see how many hedges have been lost.The hedgerows are vastly important to Britain on many levels. First, they are a key source of plant diversity and are at the top of the food chain for much insect life. Then they are key habitats for not only birds but a huge range of ground based animals from newts to foxes.This is what it takes to plant a single new hedge only 1/2 mile long. It could be grubbed up in a single day.Vegans who love animals need to be aware of the genocide they would commit on British wildlife if the country moved towards a plant based diet.Of course, our hedgerows also play a key part in absorbing carbon dioxide. My wife and I manage about 2 miles of hedges with around 200 trees. During their 100 year life time, the trees alone will absorb about a tonne of carbon dioxide each.It is silly to say that farmers can be paid to maintain hedges. Looking after hedges is expensive, labour intensive and time consuming. Why shouldn’t the hedges be grubbed up? Would an urban based office worker give up 10% of his or her salary, every year, to help bio diversity or assist in carbon absorption?The next issue for animal loving Vegans to address is the mass extinction of thousands of species which a move to plant based diet would mean. It’s not a simple matter of the mainstream, commercial, animals like Holsteins, Welsh Black, Charolais, Hereford and Aberdeen Angus cattle which would disappear very rapidly but also the main sheep breeds such as Texel, Suffolk and Merino. We have more breeds of sheep in Britain than any other country in the world and Vegans must face the harsh reality that they would disappear – and quickly too.In fact, this is a slight exaggeration. There would be tiny, zoo number of animals such as the primitive sheep we keep in order to protect the Manx Loaghtan breed, which hovered on the point of extinction 50 years ago. But our passion is an expensive one because it costs about the same amount to keep a pet sheep alive as it does a pet dog.Again, would someone sat in a London office pay £250 a year to keep one sheep alive and well?With a plant based diet, you can say goodbye to ever seeing these creatures on your day out in what will become the mega farm agro desert.There are currently less than 500 breeding Manx Loaghtan ewes in the world and so they are already hanging on by a very thin thread. A plant based diet will soon wipe them out completely.The situation is even worse in upland areas of the country where arable farming is impossible. For example, if the Herdwicks are taken out of the Lake District then the landscape would soon fall back to being a bracken wasteland and, without the farmers, who would maintain the countryside for tourists to visit?What arable crops are going to be planted here and what will happen to the hill farmers who care for the countryside? These are the real questions.The animals we keep also support a plant based diet and, once more, things are not what they might first seem. Animal muck is a perfect fertiliser for Britain not only because it feeds the land but also because it supports a huge ecosystem both during its production and when it is spread. Remove muck from the land and that whole ecosystem collapses.Animal muck is also benign in terms of the damage done to the environment after run off.By contrast, “bag muck” as it is known – artificial, nitrogen based fertiliser – has a huge environmental impact during its manufacture and also supports nothing.And those who want a plant based diet better understand that without immense amounts of bag muck, the land will not produce the quantity of crops they want to eat.The next inconvenient issue for Vegans to address is the source of their diet. Who is going to grow sufficient quantity, and variety, to support 68 million people? With the British countryside depopulated, it isn’t going to be our local farmers. What will be the financial, and environmental, cost of these huge imports?With the big agro-industrial farms comes very clever land management and this includes an extermination of the native wild flowers which populate our field borders. With no hedges, every millimetre of a field can be made productive and if this wipes out a vast number of insects by way of collateral damage who cares?And you don’t need rubbish like this when you can squeeze another metre of maize into your huge, combine friendly, field.Finally, a move to plant based diet would see a depopulation of the countryside on an epic scale. Small, mixed, farmers are already struggling to make a living and the only people who could farm for a plant based diet would be the huge agro industrial giants employing tiny numbers of people and a huge inventory of heavy machinery.In summary, a plant based diet is not good for the environment and will not play a part in reducing global warming. It will be an ecological disaster for Britain and will destroy our environment. None of this cannot be avoided because the economics of farming will make it happen.That’s what city dwellers don’t know about nature.ADDENDUM:I wanted to respond to this lovely comment by Craig Love because it is outstandingly the best response I have received in 1.2 million views on Quora:“if the Herdwicks are taken out of the Lake District then the landscape would soon fall back to being a bracken wasteland” According to the national park website, this land was once forest: “Around 7,000 years ago most of the land was covered in forest.” PrehistoryIt was turned into “bracken wasteland” because of human impact. “The Neolithic agriculturalists deforested areas of woodland in the British Isles in order to use the cleared land for farming. […] the trees died after being debarked by domesticated cattle” Neolithic British Isles - WikipediaPresumably (if livestock were kept off) it could become forest again.I used to work full time in the tourism industry and so the idea of Neolithic encactment holiday in the Lake District is really attractive - and so much better than all this gourmet dining, boat trips, Goretex clad hill walking and festivals.Disregarding the ever so slight problem that re-foresting an area takes decades, not weeks or even “soon”, it would be great to see families left to feed themselves on a plant based diet for a week whilst sleeping in tree branch shelters, keeping dry in their (synthetic, clearly) fur clothes having lit their campfire with a couple of pieces of flint.Clearly, wolf packs, bears and boar would also be introduced on the grounds of authenticity and would raise interesting animal welfare issues. If your first born child is about to be eaten by what is an extremely carnivorous animal, how would you deal with the situation? Have a chat with the alpha wolf or maybe offer to play a game of chase with a hungry Mummy bear?Craig’s well intentioned comment just shows the immense gulf between those who keep us alive with British produced food and those who consume it with no idea of how it got to their plates.

I wish we could get someone on the progressive side to define “fair”.If you’re a self-made, hard-working wealthy person, your life is funded by “income”. Let’s look at a practical example of someone that manages to earn a million dollars of income in one year:The Federal Income Tax on $1M income is $335,688.00 for 2019.State taxes vary. In a state like NJ, the State Income Tax on $1M income is about $75K. In California, it’s $95K, and in NY, it’s up to $80K depending on whether you live or work in NYC or not.Real-estate taxes. These also vary by location, but presumably someone earning a $1M salary is living in an expensive home, maybe an apartment in a big city like NY where the average real estate taxes run roughly $60K on a $3M apartment ($3M gets you about 1400 square feet in NYC, by the way). If you like the suburbs, a similar priced home in NY’s Suffolk County comes with an average of $75K in real estate taxes, and in the Chicago area, about $85K.Social Security Taxes (FICA and Medicare) are about $30,000 for $1M in income in 2019. Note that this doesn’t include a similar amount that the employer pays on behalf of the employee, so there’s really another $30K or so being paid here - you just never get to see it.Sales tax, gas tax, etc. Let’s say about a third of your after-tax income gets spent on things subject to sales tax. In states like NY or CA, our $1M earner spends roughly $15,000 on sales tax. Plenty of other products can be taxed, depending where you live - from alcohol and cigarettes to soda and unhealthy foods. On average, Americans pay an extra $1000 a year in these taxesSo when I add it up, a person making $1M a year in taxable income pays $517K to $552K depending on where he lives. That’s more than half (52–55%) of all he makes…in other words, he works Monday, Tuesday and a bit more than half the day on Wednesday for various governments, and he gets to keep what he earns Thursday and Friday for himself. What a generous gesture on behalf of our government…Ah, but you say there are all sorts of loopholes to let these evil wealthy people avoid all these taxes…well, what exactly are they?Trump’s tax law eliminated most SALT deductions, so my mythical person only gets to deduct $10,000 of the $135K-180K he actually spends in state and local taxes. In other words, at the 37% tax rate, this saves him about $3700.The most common tax deduction is home mortgage interest, and this is currently capped at the level of the interest paid on a $750K mortgage. Assuming our $1M earner has the maximum here, this is roughly a $28,000 deduction saving the homeowner about $10K in taxes (the amount varies over the life of the loan).Unless our mythical million dollar earner has substantial health issues, makes unusual contributions to charity, was involved in a natural disaster or is something like a farmer or oil well operator, there aren’t too many other deductions - you know, “loopholes” - that he can take. If you think I’m wrong, by all means list them here for all to see and prove to the world that I’m ignorant about this stuff.Even if our hero didn’t itemize and just chose the standard deduction, he’d be entitled to $12,200 in deductions, or $24,400 if he’s married. Assuming he’s married, the benefit he gets from itemizing is roughly $5,000 on a $517–552K tax bill. About 1%.Sure, people will talk about setting up offshore tax havens, trusts, living off capital gains in lieu of income and all sorts of other schemes, many of which are illegal. Truth is, many of these sound great on paper but they all come with risks and expenses that make them only appeal to tiny numbers of taxpayers. Plus, things like the AMT exist to make sure that even if someone benefits from one of these unusual situations, there’s still a minimum amount of tax paid - and this “minimum” is many times higher than folks in the lower brackets pay.The simple truth is that there’s just not all that much the vast majority of “wealthy” income earners can do to dramatically lower their taxes, and this is all spelled out in the IRS statistics.As an example, in 2016 (the latest year the IRS has released data for), the average American paid 14.2% in taxes, but the 1.4 million families earning between $480K and $2.1M paid nearly double that, or 27% (remember, this is just the Federal Income Tax rate…has nothing to do with the other taxes shown in the table above). Compare this to the bottom half of income earners in the US that pay an average of about 3% in Federal taxes. Indeed, when you look at the IRS data showing effective tax rate by income, it’s completely clear that the more income you have, the more taxes you pay - both in absolute and percentage terms.No matter how you look at it, a million-dollar income earner is still handing the majority of his income over to government. If you think there are all sorts of exemptions that help wealthy people pay no income taxes, then you’re mistaken…just ask yourself if these loopholes were so prevalent, then why does the top 1% pay a 27% Federal income tax rate instead of exploiting loopholes?The one thing that seems to confuse our progressive friends is the notion of capital gains. As a reminder, capital gains occur when someone invests money for a length of time, and then makes a profit. Because America taxes ordinary income at high rates, the tax code tells citizens that it’s better to earn money through capital gains than through ordinary income.Thing is, as a society, we want this, because it encourages people to make investments that benefit all of us…you know, like by creating jobs. To get the behavior we want, we tell Americans that if they take their savings (that they’ve already paid taxes on) and risk it in an investment, part of the rewards they get are a 20% tax on any profits instead of the 37% tax on income. Any American can take advantage of this, and indeed many do - no matter what your income level.Of course, some call this a “loophole” because wealthy people sometimes get to the point where they have no income and thus live exclusively off of their capital gains. This is now Warren Buffett, for instance, manages to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. As we’ve seen in the past, when you raise capital gains rates, people have less incentive to invest in US companies, job creation slows, retirees and others that live on fixed incomes get smaller returns, and the entire economy suffers.Now, with these facts in mind, please tell us what the definition of “fair” might be? How much should a person be coerced into surrendering to his government so that illegal aliens and the bottom half of the country can continue their free ride?