Farmers who convert farmland into woodlands, wetlands or scrub face having to pay inheritance tax. The Government wants to get 75% of farmers in England “engaged in low-carbon practices by 2030”, but has overlooked the fact that the children of any farmers doing the Government’s bidding would have to pay 40% inheritance tax on the value of the land. The Telegraphhas more.
Landowners in England are currently exempt from paying inheritance tax on land that is used to grow crops or rear animals, under policies designed to ensure farms can be passed down through generations.
But land that is turned into woodlands, wetlands or scrub, in line with the Government’s goals to restore nature and help tackle climate change, would currently be subject to inheritance taxes of 40%.
Archie Ruggles-Brise, who manages his father’s 2,000-acre Spains Hall Estate in North Essex, said the tax risk was holding back green ambition.
Mr. Ruggles-Brise is part of a pilot scheme run by Natural England to create better habitats for wildlife and plant life to be sold as credits to developers to offset the impact of new homes.
Archie Ruggles-Brise says tax risk is holding back green ambition
The scheme is one of several being rolled out as part of the Government’s overhaul of its £2.4 billion agricultural subsidy regime to help meet its goals to reverse nature loss by 2030 and cut carbon emissions.
But Mr. Ruggles-Brise said the threat of inheritance taxes has forced him to compromise on what he does on the land, which is currently mostly used to farm crops.
“We have had to make allowance as part of that process for the massive amount of uncertainty around taxation,” added Mr. Ruggles-Brise.
He said the ultimate tax bill could end up costing tens of thousands of pounds and force him to sell off part of the family estate, which he hoped to pass down to his own children.
“You have to sell things to meet the tax burden, which means that you then get fragmentation of farms and estates,” he said.
The tax threat is stopping Mr. Ruggles-Brise from converting land to scrub or wetland, which Natural England said has significant ecosystem benefits for carbon sequestration, water quality and birdlife.
It may also be holding back the development of woodland, which is vital to meet the Government’s climate change targets. Only woods planted for commercial forestry, such as conifers, are currently exempted from calculations of the value of the estate, which does not include valuable native broadleaf trees, which suck up more carbon as they mature.
“It’s a massive disincentive for us to push the boundaries to what is environmentally the best thing,” Mr. Ruggles-Brise said.
“To achieve the Government’s 25-year environment plan aims and to deliver on things like its plans for water, we need large-scale land-use change. And this is one of the things that is standing in the way.”
Removing the inheritance tax burden could spare farmers a £120 million annual tax penalty, according to analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a think tank, and Strutt & Parker, a rural property consultancy firm.
You’ll need to set up an account to comment if you don’t already have one. We ask for a minimum donation of £5 if you'd like to make a comment or post in our Forums.
I can see why Trump is getting irritated with Putin, If Putin isn’t careful he will attract the full ire of the Trump administration and that means tens of billions in aid not just the odd billion! Trump will start supplying the real top notch stuff!
If Trump does then Russia will use its own “top notch stuff” that will lead to WW3.
Putin is a master of international law and he is surrounded himself with military strategists.
Trump wants to wash his hands of Ukraine so he can concentrate on war with Iran and/or China.
Russia will achieve its goals either by negotiation or on the battlefield.
Here’s a suggestion which I believe to be really helpful in this situation: Please tell Putin that he’s free to insert as many of his nukes as deeply into his rectum as he feels comfortable with. This will then have put them to some otherwise unachievable good use. There’s a German proverb Hunde die bellen, beißen nicht — dogs bark because they don’t dare to bite — which is very applicable to this recurring nuclear sabre-rattling.
Complete rubbish as you are fighting the wrong war. A drone costing a few hundred Roubles and produced on a daily basis will knock out your $50m dollar tank that will take two years to replace for example. The whole of NATO are set up to fight a different war.
I may be wrong about this, but I think Russia’s goals are more modest than Ukraine would have the world believe. The Ukrainian People of Crimea voted in a 2014 referendum to BREAK AWAY FROM UKRAINE and join Russia, and I reckon the Crimea is all that Putin wants to claim as Russian territory, which is full of Russians anyway.
I don’t see how this is anything for the West to get involved in at all, except to protest on humanitarian grounds at the Horrific Mass Slaughter of Slavic Warriors caused by both Putin & Zelensky in their insane Meatgrinder War.
Crimea is a Russian naval base whose native population (Tartars) got deported by Stalin. That personnel of and civilians attached to a Russian military installation occupied by Russian military at that time ‘voted’ to become Russian is completely meaningless. That’s a trick originally invented by the Bolshevists who came up with concept of self-determination of the peoples the American president of that time (Woodrow Wilson) just copied from them.
In full splendour, it works like this:
Bolshevist hordes invade a country, dispose of the legitimate government and start killing everyone who looks suspiciously rich, ie, everyone who owns a house or even more.
‘The people’ (who haven’t been killed yet) then ‘vote’ to become Russian subjects.
Second- and third-line Russian politicans also don’t exactly keep their desire to restore the status quo ante 1990 in full secret and there’s even a Russian political theorist who claims that this is Russia’s mission to bring racial justice for global majority people to the world by subjugating the white European racists/ Nazis.
People with some background in history will recognized this as a modernized variant of the theory of Moscow as the third Rome and thus, rightful ruler of all Slavs everywhere, no matter if they want this or not, and – by grace of Roosevelt, Churchill and God (in no particular order) – ethnical cleanser of all impure countries infected with non-Slavian people (although there’s probably little left to do here in Europe).
Apart from Crimea, Russia want the 4 Russian speaking Oblasts – Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia as a DMZ or Buffer Zone between RF and NATO controlled Ukraine. It would be designated Novorossia and initially controlled from Moscow – that is what they wanted!
The idea that Russia plans further conquest seems risible, there is nothing to suggest they have any expansionist plans beyond those Russian speaking Oblasts. This seems to be a political and media fiction.
However, NATO should take steps to make any such attacks (on existing NATO countries) extremely damaging – trust, but verify and prepare to defend if necessary – after all we are constantly reminded NATO is a defensive coalition.
Any attacks Russia have made further into Ukraine appear to be reprisal attacks, when targets have been hit inside Russian territory, or following assassinations.
WAR is terrible, war is awful and innocent people die, sometimes in large numbers – the answer to that is peace! Zelensky needs to be removed and replaced, he seems to have forgotten he’s not in a movie, this is real, and many people are dying!
Mogwai
1 month ago
So petty and unprofessional, from yesterday’s fencing. Check your politics at the door and demonstrate proper sportsmanship, like the Italians seemingly can;
”Swiss fencing team branded ‘disrespectful’ for refusing to turn during the Israeli National Anthem, after Israel took gold at the U23 European Championships.”
As for the sudden Pakistan vs. India flare-up, I read somewhere that India’s Modi is threatening to cut off Pakistan’s main water supply, by blocking off the upper reaches of the Indus River. Looking at the map below, I don’t understand how that is possible, since the British essentially gifted the whole of the Indus River Valley to the new Muslim country of Pakistan that was carved out of Indian territory 70 years ago at the Partition of India, which means Pakistan is a younger country than Northern Ireland. Any thoughts on this?
And look how Pakistani Muslims showed their gratitude: by swarming into Britain, bringing drugs, honour killings, human trafficking & rape gangs with them, while crushing hapless Pakistani Christians in a debt-slave system back home in Pakistan. According to international agencies, “Every brick in Pakistan is made by a Christian Slave.”
It isn’t and it can’t. Interesting to see Baluchistan which is bound up in the Kashmir terrorist murders.
MajorMajor
1 month ago
As Orwell described it in 1984, totalitarian systems necessarily exist in a permanent state of war, or at least war psychology.
War provides an excellent opportunity to implement extreme measures and exert total control over the population.
I suspect a lot of western governments, having had a taster session of absolute control over the population courtesy of Covid, would rather like a war situation that would provide them with justification to obtain unprecedented powers again. And that’s probably why there haven’t been any serious attempts by these governments to come up with a peace plan; the only way forward is more and more weapons, which of course translates into more and more corpses on both sides of the conflict.
The claim “Sadly, it takes two to make peace” is generally correct but Trump could have ended two wars with a pen-stroke on his first day in office simply by stopping all weapon deliveries to Ukraine and Israel. It would have been so easy. Instead, Trump now bears responsibility for the continuation of two wars, whereby the Gaza conflict means Trump is additionally aiding and abetting the worst of all crimes: genocide.
The author refers to “The worst attack on Jews since the holocaust” but there is no mention of the infinitely worse attacks made by Israelis against Palestinians.
During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, approximately half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people, were expelled from their homes or made to flee through various violent means, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of the State of Israel, by its military. Dozens of massacres targeted Palestinian Arabs and over 500 Arab-majority towns, villages, and urban neighbourhoods were depopulated. Many of the settlements were either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jews and given new Hebrew names. Israel employed biological warfare against Palestinians by poisoning village wells. By the end of the war, 78% of the total land area of the former Mandatory Palestine was controlled by Israel. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba)
And the Israelis initiated the 1956 war, they initiated the 1967 war, they initiated the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and now they are mounting a full-scale genocide against the Palestinian people, not to mention attacking and bombing practically every neighbouring country in the area.
I cannot conceive of any set of circumstances under which I, as an American citizen, would condone, legitimate or promote mass murder and expulsion of millions of people from their homes in Gaza. And it makes no difference to me whether the people there are Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims, Christians or Jews, or Chinese or German or Russian or Ukrainian or anything else.
Israel is waging a war of annihilation against a group of people that they have condemned as subhuman, as animals, and not exclusively there by the way: I haven’t seen much evidence for mercy offered to anyone in Lebanon or Syria or anywhere else in the region who stands up and opposes Israel and its dominance, its hegemony.
Israel has murdered more than 200 journalists and more than 400 aid workers in Gaza. Only recently, Israeli soldiers murdered 15 ambulance crew members and buried them underneath their flattened ambulances (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjMhqIe0wus).
Since 18th March, when Israel broke the so-called ceasefire and resumed its mass-scale slaughter in Gaza, nearly 1,900 Palestinians have been killed and around 5,000 have been injured. That figure includes approximately 600 children killed and approximately 1,600 children injured in just five weeks. (https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/israel-imposes-starvation-design-gaza)
Israel has now imposed more than 50 days of a complete siege on the Gaza Strip, prohibiting entry of all humanitarian aid, water, food, fuel and medical supplies, while Israeli forces accelerate the forced displacement of Palestinians, pushing them into smaller and smaller areas.
What we need for peace – and the whole world is saying it except for Netanyahu and the Israel lobby – is we need a State of Palestine living alongside a State of Israel. This is the whole story for peace in the Middle East …
There’s one vote only that separates us today from peace and that is the US veto in the UN Security Council that blocked Palestine becoming the 194th UN member state [“because of the iron grip that the Israel lobby has on American foreign policy”] … It’s one vote, it’s our vote. Israel has no veto over a State of Palestine.
The International Court of Justice ruled last year that Israel’s boundaries are the boundaries of 4th June 1967. The United Nations, by an overwhelming, overwhelming majority – 95% of the world’s population – has called for there to be a State of Palestine.
But still we are only reminded of the holocaust during WWII. No criticism of Jews is ever allowed.
‘…..the deal now available to Ukraine will be worse than what was within their grasp in the negotiations in March to April 2022’
In all probability, had Russian terms of surrender been accepted in April 2022, Russian forces would by now be in control of Kyiv, Odessa, Chisinau, quite possibly, the Suwalki corridor and much else. We know this quite simply because that is what they tell us themselves.
‘From day one, we were taught that Russia is and must remain a derzhava— a “great power.” Not just one country among many, but a pole in a multipolar world. A country destined to challenge the West. That belief — fused with resentment, imperial nostalgia and a constant sense of grievance — forms the backbone of Russian diplomacy.
At MGIMO, we were taught to cite international law while violating its spirit, to defend norms while dismantling them and to speak of peace while justifying and waging wars. Georgia. Syria. Ukraine. These weren’t deviations. We deployed whichever claim of “Territorial integrity” or “self-determination” suited the day’s talking point. This is Russian anti-normism in action.’
Britain now requires an annual defence budget of £130bn. VAT must rise by 5% immediately in order to pay for this.
As that distinguished soldier, General Sir Richard Dannatt, so eloquently points out in today’s DT, Ukraine has bought us time to rearm.
We must not waste it.
Kornea112
1 month ago
The knowledge surrounding these wars and political confrontations is like a floating iceberg. Only 10% of it is visible. 90% of the true driving factors and benefitting parties are never public knowledge. Even after major conflicts are finished, the victor manages the story. It’s like living in a made up fairytale.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I can see why Trump is getting irritated with Putin, If Putin isn’t careful he will attract the full ire of the Trump administration and that means tens of billions in aid not just the odd billion! Trump will start supplying the real top notch stuff!
If Trump does then Russia will use its own “top notch stuff” that will lead to WW3.
Putin is a master of international law and he is surrounded himself with military strategists.
Trump wants to wash his hands of Ukraine so he can concentrate on war with Iran and/or China.
Russia will achieve its goals either by negotiation or on the battlefield.
Here’s a suggestion which I believe to be really helpful in this situation: Please tell Putin that he’s free to insert as many of his nukes as deeply into his rectum as he feels comfortable with. This will then have put them to some otherwise unachievable good use. There’s a German proverb Hunde die bellen, beißen nicht — dogs bark because they don’t dare to bite — which is very applicable to this recurring nuclear sabre-rattling.
We categorically don’t care.
Sorry but nukes are Putins only big play, he can never win a conventional proxy war with a fully US backed Ukraine,
See for yourself!
Oreshnik.
I had to look up the meaning of “Oreshnik”, and found this:
Russia’s Oreshnik missile: What we know – BBC News
Wow, so you think the US has nothing to counter this? Crikey
“US Space Force General David Thompson warned that American hypersonic missile capabilities are “not as advanced” as those of China or Russia, implying that the US is falling behind in producing the newest and most cutting-edge weaponry.”
https://sputnikglobe.com/20211121/space-force-general-admits-that-us-lagging-behind-russia-china-in-hypersonic-weapons-1090894495.html
Complete rubbish as you are fighting the wrong war. A drone costing a few hundred Roubles and produced on a daily basis will knock out your $50m dollar tank that will take two years to replace for example. The whole of NATO are set up to fight a different war.
At the behest of Israel re Iran…
I may be wrong about this, but I think Russia’s goals are more modest than Ukraine would have the world believe. The Ukrainian People of Crimea voted in a 2014 referendum to BREAK AWAY FROM UKRAINE and join Russia, and I reckon the Crimea is all that Putin wants to claim as Russian territory, which is full of Russians anyway.
I don’t see how this is anything for the West to get involved in at all, except to protest on humanitarian grounds at the Horrific Mass Slaughter of Slavic Warriors caused by both Putin & Zelensky in their insane Meatgrinder War.
Crimea is a Russian naval base whose native population (Tartars) got deported by Stalin. That personnel of and civilians attached to a Russian military installation occupied by Russian military at that time ‘voted’ to become Russian is completely meaningless. That’s a trick originally invented by the Bolshevists who came up with concept of self-determination of the peoples the American president of that time (Woodrow Wilson) just copied from them.
In full splendour, it works like this:
Second- and third-line Russian politicans also don’t exactly keep their desire to restore the status quo ante 1990 in full secret and there’s even a Russian political theorist who claims that this is Russia’s mission to bring racial justice for global majority people to the world by subjugating the white European racists/ Nazis.
People with some background in history will recognized this as a modernized variant of the theory of Moscow as the third Rome and thus, rightful ruler of all Slavs everywhere, no matter if they want this or not, and – by grace of Roosevelt, Churchill and God (in no particular order) – ethnical cleanser of all impure countries infected with non-Slavian people (although there’s probably little left to do here in Europe).
Apart from Crimea, Russia want the 4 Russian speaking Oblasts – Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia as a DMZ or Buffer Zone between RF and NATO controlled Ukraine. It would be designated Novorossia and initially controlled from Moscow – that is what they wanted!
The idea that Russia plans further conquest seems risible, there is nothing to suggest they have any expansionist plans beyond those Russian speaking Oblasts. This seems to be a political and media fiction.
However, NATO should take steps to make any such attacks (on existing NATO countries) extremely damaging – trust, but verify and prepare to defend if necessary – after all we are constantly reminded NATO is a defensive coalition.
Any attacks Russia have made further into Ukraine appear to be reprisal attacks, when targets have been hit inside Russian territory, or following assassinations.
WAR is terrible, war is awful and innocent people die, sometimes in large numbers – the answer to that is peace! Zelensky needs to be removed and replaced, he seems to have forgotten he’s not in a movie, this is real, and many people are dying!
So petty and unprofessional, from yesterday’s fencing. Check your politics at the door and demonstrate proper sportsmanship, like the Italians seemingly can;
”Swiss fencing team branded ‘disrespectful’ for refusing to turn during the Israeli National Anthem, after Israel took gold at the U23 European Championships.”
https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/1916491396170604884
As for the sudden Pakistan vs. India flare-up, I read somewhere that India’s Modi is threatening to cut off Pakistan’s main water supply, by blocking off the upper reaches of the Indus River. Looking at the map below, I don’t understand how that is possible, since the British essentially gifted the whole of the Indus River Valley to the new Muslim country of Pakistan that was carved out of Indian territory 70 years ago at the Partition of India, which means Pakistan is a younger country than Northern Ireland. Any thoughts on this?
And look how Pakistani Muslims showed their gratitude: by swarming into Britain, bringing drugs, honour killings, human trafficking & rape gangs with them, while crushing hapless Pakistani Christians in a debt-slave system back home in Pakistan. According to international agencies, “Every brick in Pakistan is made by a Christian Slave.”
War is great for the political/media class and shite for everybody else.
Working people trying to raise their kids NEVER start wars, but always end up paying the consequences of politicians’ and religious leaders’ choices..
Absolutely right you are! The Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote,
“When the Rich wage war, it’s the Poor who die.”
Or as an English commenter said,
“War makes the rich richer, and the poor dead.”
It isn’t and it can’t. Interesting to see Baluchistan which is bound up in the Kashmir terrorist murders.
As Orwell described it in 1984, totalitarian systems necessarily exist in a permanent state of war, or at least war psychology.
War provides an excellent opportunity to implement extreme measures and exert total control over the population.
I suspect a lot of western governments, having had a taster session of absolute control over the population courtesy of Covid, would rather like a war situation that would provide them with justification to obtain unprecedented powers again. And that’s probably why there haven’t been any serious attempts by these governments to come up with a peace plan; the only way forward is more and more weapons, which of course translates into more and more corpses on both sides of the conflict.
Good points! Is it also part of the Globalist Depopulation Agenda?
Plus it is a distraction from their incompetence at home .
They all want their Falklands moment.
Hear, hear!
War should certainly not trump peace.
The claim “Sadly, it takes two to make peace” is generally correct but Trump could have ended two wars with a pen-stroke on his first day in office simply by stopping all weapon deliveries to Ukraine and Israel. It would have been so easy. Instead, Trump now bears responsibility for the continuation of two wars, whereby the Gaza conflict means Trump is additionally aiding and abetting the worst of all crimes: genocide.
The author refers to “The worst attack on Jews since the holocaust” but there is no mention of the infinitely worse attacks made by Israelis against Palestinians.
During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, approximately half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people, were expelled from their homes or made to flee through various violent means, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of the State of Israel, by its military. Dozens of massacres targeted Palestinian Arabs and over 500 Arab-majority towns, villages, and urban neighbourhoods were depopulated. Many of the settlements were either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jews and given new Hebrew names. Israel employed biological warfare against Palestinians by poisoning village wells. By the end of the war, 78% of the total land area of the former Mandatory Palestine was controlled by Israel. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba)
And the Israelis initiated the 1956 war, they initiated the 1967 war, they initiated the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and now they are mounting a full-scale genocide against the Palestinian people, not to mention attacking and bombing practically every neighbouring country in the area.
Quoting Col. Douglas Macgregor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djo10WRZrIg):
I cannot conceive of any set of circumstances under which I, as an American citizen, would condone, legitimate or promote mass murder and expulsion of millions of people from their homes in Gaza. And it makes no difference to me whether the people there are Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims, Christians or Jews, or Chinese or German or Russian or Ukrainian or anything else.
Israel is waging a war of annihilation against a group of people that they have condemned as subhuman, as animals, and not exclusively there by the way: I haven’t seen much evidence for mercy offered to anyone in Lebanon or Syria or anywhere else in the region who stands up and opposes Israel and its dominance, its hegemony.
Israel has murdered more than 200 journalists and more than 400 aid workers in Gaza. Only recently, Israeli soldiers murdered 15 ambulance crew members and buried them underneath their flattened ambulances (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjMhqIe0wus).
Since 18th March, when Israel broke the so-called ceasefire and resumed its mass-scale slaughter in Gaza, nearly 1,900 Palestinians have been killed and around 5,000 have been injured. That figure includes approximately 600 children killed and approximately 1,600 children injured in just five weeks. (https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/israel-imposes-starvation-design-gaza)
Israel has now imposed more than 50 days of a complete siege on the Gaza Strip, prohibiting entry of all humanitarian aid, water, food, fuel and medical supplies, while Israeli forces accelerate the forced displacement of Palestinians, pushing them into smaller and smaller areas.
One single week’s worth of Israeli atrocities are documented here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1tVFNGr73M.
All the while, a solution for peace would be easy. Quoting Prof. Jeffrey Sachs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL_0GSOQkf8):
What we need for peace – and the whole world is saying it except for Netanyahu and the Israel lobby – is we need a State of Palestine living alongside a State of Israel. This is the whole story for peace in the Middle East …
There’s one vote only that separates us today from peace and that is the US veto in the UN Security Council that blocked Palestine becoming the 194th UN member state [“because of the iron grip that the Israel lobby has on American foreign policy”] … It’s one vote, it’s our vote. Israel has no veto over a State of Palestine.
The International Court of Justice ruled last year that Israel’s boundaries are the boundaries of 4th June 1967. The United Nations, by an overwhelming, overwhelming majority – 95% of the world’s population – has called for there to be a State of Palestine.
But still we are only reminded of the holocaust during WWII. No criticism of Jews is ever allowed.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/28/putin-trump-zelensky-war-peace-defence-spending-4pc/
‘…..the deal now available to Ukraine will be worse than what was within their grasp in the negotiations in March to April 2022’
In all probability, had Russian terms of surrender been accepted in April 2022, Russian forces would by now be in control of Kyiv, Odessa, Chisinau, quite possibly, the Suwalki corridor and much else. We know this quite simply because that is what they tell us themselves.
‘From day one, we were taught that Russia is and must remain a derzhava — a “great power.” Not just one country among many, but a pole in a multipolar world. A country destined to challenge the West. That belief — fused with resentment, imperial nostalgia and a constant sense of grievance — forms the backbone of Russian diplomacy.
At MGIMO, we were taught to cite international law while violating its spirit, to defend norms while dismantling them and to speak of peace while justifying and waging wars. Georgia. Syria. Ukraine. These weren’t deviations. We deployed whichever claim of “Territorial integrity” or “self-determination” suited the day’s talking point. This is Russian anti-normism in action.’
Britain now requires an annual defence budget of £130bn. VAT must rise by 5% immediately in order to pay for this.
As that distinguished soldier, General Sir Richard Dannatt, so eloquently points out in today’s DT, Ukraine has bought us time to rearm.
We must not waste it.
The knowledge surrounding these wars and political confrontations is like a floating iceberg. Only 10% of it is visible. 90% of the true driving factors and benefitting parties are never public knowledge. Even after major conflicts are finished, the victor manages the story. It’s like living in a made up fairytale.
War never trumps peace.
Peace is achieved through deterrence.
Deterrence trumps war.
Unfortunately, arrant stupidity trumps everything……