Wednesday 6 January: Our civil liberties have been so easily suspended, how can we stop it happening in future?

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/01/06/lettersour-civil-liberties-have-easily-suspended-can-stop-happening/

1,002 thoughts on “Wednesday 6 January: Our civil liberties have been so easily suspended, how can we stop it happening in future?”

    1. Good Day Folks, just returned from the weekly shop for my folks and I. The new starter motor is so keen that I only had to open the curtains this morning for the engine to burst into life…still had to scrape the windows though.

      The Costa Clyde is the Frosta Clyde once more this morning. It’s been this way for well over a week and is forecast to remain so for another week. Anyone would think it was winter.

    1. Hey, it’s Three Kings today, they should still be up! Last day of Christmas!
      Light here, but I’ve already cleared the snow…

          1. Snow-clearing compulsion. The snow outside your property has to be cleared from pavements & forecourts during daylight unless snow is actually falling.

          3. You get a Mahnung (warning), followed by a fine. It’s in your own interest to comply, because if a pedestrian slips & injures him/herself & you’ve made no attempt to clear the snow & ice, you could be facing a lawsuit.
            Strangely enough, in this country, if you leave the snow, you are in the clear (pun intended), but if you attempt to clear & make a bish of it, you could be liable for injuries.

          4. Good Lord. I haven’t come across the word ‘bish’ since reading Jennings and Derbyshire
            Morning, Peddy.

  5. Policing set to be ramped up in new Covid lockdown. 6 January 2020.

    Policing of the third lockdown is to be stepped up, with senior officers warning of more fines and less tolerance of any breaches.

    “One thing we want to avoid in policing is to damage our relationship with the public to a point where it is irreparable,” said a senior policing source. “In six months, we are going to be asking people to help tackle crime in their area.”

    Morning everyone. One thing about living in a Police State is that their behaviour is predictable and it doesn’t involve asking about local crime!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/06/policing-set-ramped-new-covid-lockdown/

    2. In many cases I think their “relationship with the public” is already irreparable – holding down protestors and punching them is hardly the way to win the protestors’ hearts and minds, especially when the same zeal isn’t on show for BLM, XR etc.

    5. Help tackle crime in their area… forgive me, but that’s your job. As you can’t be bothered I’ll do it myself – but if I do that, you’ll arrest *me*.

      Do you see the paradox you’ve created?

  7. Harmful NHS bureaucracy is being exposed

    SIR – Your letters pages have been rammed with retired doctors and other medical professionals who have volunteered to assist the NHS, yet are being sabotaged by bureaucracy. Experienced clinicians must now demonstrate training in preventing radicalisation, fire safety and conflict resolution.

    On BBC Radio 4’s Today on Monday, Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said: “I agree that some of the training that has been put in place I do not think is necessary. There are reasons that the NHS put it in place, but I want to tackle that. For instance, the module on terrorism training I am sure isn’t needed and we will get rid of that one.”

    But this bureaucracy hasn’t just suddenly arrived, mysteriously, with the vaccine programme. It has been a deeply ingrained and growing part of NHS culture, preventing doctors and nurses from helping patients, for years.

    Public servants create highly paid work for themselves via an expanding set of requirements of purposeless bustle, diverting clinicians from anything useful.

    Someone has to design courses, while others are employed to teach them, then officials check that everyone has the qualification. Meanwhile, others debate in endless committees which other new requirements can be added.

    Dr Raj Persaud
    London W1

      1. It was because of the overzealous application of “Safeguarding” rules that I walked out of Church in 2018 and have not attended since.

        I refuse to engage with any society that places all its members under constant suspicion.

      2. SIR – The massive growth in often nonsensical regulation that was a major factor in my decision to take early retirement from my dental practice is now the major factor preventing me from returning to help in the current crisis.

        Dr Terence Harding
        Kinver, Staffordshire

        2. Apropos, the biggest farce was CPD. 50 or 60 hours/year of study, of which 15 had to be verified. 2 articles twice/month in the BDJ which were to be studied then questions answered. I soon found out that even if you scored 0%, the time could be counted towards your CPD total. All totally irrelevant to modern practice. The only courses worth attending were all-day ones put on in teaching hospitals, with a slap-up lunch thrown in with the fee, & all tax-deductible.

    2. ‘Morning, Citroen, just two words apply ‘Common Purpose‘ and the holders, practitioners and perpetrators need to be rooted out.

    3. I sympathise heartily with Dr Persaud and all his fellow professionals who have to take part in these nonsensical ego trips for bureaucrats.

  8. Good morning from a Anglo Saxon Queen with blooded axe and longbow.

    Its very dark and I don’t know what the weather is doing but I’ll assume its still out there .

    Another day in lockdown, possibly another year, its not looking too positive.

      1. Good morning Mr Viking ,
        Hmm, my axe shall be in the handbag now after reading that .

      3. Umran Araf, 37, of Dunsberry, Bretton, Peterborough, attacked a man who had come to his house on 18 June to collect a compensation cheque he was owed.

        Now there is a surprise!

  9. Never mind about worrying how civil liberties can be protected in the future, the big worry is if and when we will ever get them back.

    1. We’re out of the habit of demanding them. Well, most of us are anyway. There is a shrill minority who are used to demanding things, but civil liberties won’t be high on their agenda.

    2. Apologies Bob, but better to ask if we will ever *get* them. There’s lots of statute over what rights we have but far, far more on how easily the state can take those away.

      Can we sack an MP? Can we demand a referendum on, say the RIAA, which was brought in and forced through via parliament act by the disgusting Mandelson – paid for in a blatant bribe by the music industry? can we prevent the budget put forward by a mendacious and arrogant chancellor?

      When the woman filmed an empty hospital, the police arrested her. Can the arresting officer and his entire chain of command not be charged?

    2. This morning I asked the war queen if we could move to Oregon. I suggested we live in a deserted part, where there was nothing but trees and rolling hills.

      She agreed. Then told me it’d mean living in America.

  11. I missed this yesterday…

    RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: This woke madness goes from Bard to worse

    War Horse author Sir Michael Morpurgo is refusing to include The Merchant Of Venice in a new book adapting Shakespeare’s plays for children under 16.

    He has decided the anti-Semitic portrayal of Jewish money lender Shylock is too ‘raw’ for young minds.

    Without doubt, the play may be considered offensive by modern standards. But that doesn’t mean it should be expunged from the canon of the greatest playwright in the English language.

    It’s one thing social media sewer rats stirring up hatred against everything from Dad’s Army to J.K. Rowling. It’s quite another when one of our most distinguished writers aligns himself with intolerant statue-topplers and book-burners.

    I studied The Merchant Of Venice at school and it didn’t turn me into a raging anti-Semite. Quite the opposite, as it happens. Yes, the portrayal of Shylock is unpleasant, but the play is also a powerful plea for racial and religious tolerance.

    (‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’)

    Should we now ban Morpurgo’s War Horse because it’s hideously white?

    Of course not, but in the current febrile mania for erasing the past and rewriting history, don’t be surprised when it happens.

    Most of our civic institutions have embarked on a deranged orgy of self-flagellation in the wake of the Black Lives Matter madness.

    How long before the Royal Shakespeare Company capitulates, too? Soon every single one of the Bard’s plays will have to be scrutinised line by line by the censors for anything which might possibly cause offence to anyone.

    You can just imagine the RSC committee meeting at Stratford . . .

    Good morning, colleagues. I’ve called you all together to discuss our proposed summer season, that’s if we ever come out of lockdown.

    As you are aware, in the current climate certain productions may be considered problematic. So we must tread carefully in selecting our programme. Let’s start with Romeo And Juliet. Any thoughts?

    Celebrates paedophilia. Juliet is only 13. We’ll have the Jimmy Savile squad kicking the door in before the interval.

    OK, how about Richard III?

    He was a hunchback. The disability lobby aren’t going to like that.

    Technically he wasn’t a hunchback. He had adolescent scoliosis. We could always claim to be raising awareness and get Cumberbatch to make a speech at the end asking for donations to The Scoliosis Society.

    Not a bad idea. Put it down as a maybe.

    Hamlet?

    Wasn’t he bipolar? Mental health issues are always a bit of a minefield. And that’s not counting Ophelia’s suicide.

    As You Like It?

    That’s the one where Rosalind dresses up as a Greek shepherd boy and tries to seduce Orlando before revealing she’s actually a girl. How do you think that will go down with the trans brigade?

    Probably best to give it a miss. We’re going to have the same trouble with Twelfth Night.

    Eh?

    If you remember, Viola disguises herself as a young man. But in Shakespeare’s day, female parts were always played by men. So Viola would have been played by a male actor, dressing as a woman dressing as a man.

    We could always cast Eddie Izzard as Viola.

    It’s a thought. How about Taming Of The Shrew?

    Glorifies misogyny. The feminists will throw a right wobbly.

    Measure For Measure?

    Rapey.

    All’s Well That Ends Well?

    Grooming. Count Bertram spends half the play trying to seduce a young virgin.

    Hmmm. Comedy Of Errors?

    Slavery.

    A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

    Homophobia.

    Homophobia?

    Featuring a comedy character called Bottom, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more. We’ll have Stonewall all over us.

    Titus Andronicus?

    Where do you want to start? With the rape and murder of the daughter or the two brothers Titus kills and bakes in a pie he serves to their mother before killing her, too?

    Fair point. What does that leave us with? Richard II?

    Too Brexity. This sceptered isle, this blessed plot and so on.

    Henry V?

    Anti-EU. Borderline racist. All that ‘God for Harry, England and St George’ stuff . . .

    Othello?

    You must be joking. Not unless you want Black Lives Matter running riot. It was bad enough when Extinction Rebellion glued themselves to the stage blaming The Tempest on climate change.

    That’s about it, then. The Merchant Of Venice is a definite non-starter. Why don’t we just forget about Shakespeare and put on something less controversial?

    Such as?

    War Horse?

    The RSPCA might have something to say about that . . .
    *
    *
    *
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9112957/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-woke-madness-goes-Bard-worse.html

    2. Plenty of chuckles there, but on a serious note, I could only sympathise with Shylock.

      MoV was also anti-trans: what about the antics of Portia & her maidservant?

      1. It sometimes works. Do you remember Olivier’s superb Othello & Fiona Shaw’s Richard 11?

          3. He’s not allowed though, because he married a girl of 6, and she was widowed three years later.

          4. Years ago, I remember a news report on the South African Broadcorping Castration concerning the opening of the Commonwealth Conference by Queen Elizabeth the Eleventh. This was the same news organ that, fired up my recent metrication, reported on the nuclear accident at 5 Kilometre Island. We won’t mention the Fakup Final.

    4. The first Shakespeare play we studied was “The Merchant of Venice”.
      Even as a self-centred 13 year old, I found Shylock’s speech very touching (“Signor Antonio, Many a time and oft ….”) and was appalled at Jessica’s betrayal of her father.

    5. “Should we now ban Morpurgo’s War Horse because it’s hideously white?” I had no idea that the horse was a white one. It looked brown (or bay) to me.

  12. The BBC doesn’t represent me – or half the country. 6 January 2021

    Only seven days into 2021 and already we have a strong contender for least surprising survey result of the year. Nearly half of Britons think that the BBC no longer represents their values. Asked how good the corporation was at reflecting their point of view, 48 per cent said “fairly bad” or “very bad”, against 29 per cent who said “fairly well”.

    I was catching up on my “Columbo” episodes last night and the recording ended in the middle of a BBC News broadcast. To help things along the Corporation had dug up a few victims of Coronavirus to convince the proles that their lives were in terrible danger. The one that struck me, since it was so quintessentially BBC, was the Old Gay Bloke who had lost his lifelong partner to the dreaded lurgy. I turned it off!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/bbc-doesnt-represent-half-country/

    1. What irritates me is that when Boris calls one of his State of Lockdown broadcasts, programmes like “Flog it” & “Pointless” get shunted from BBC1 to BBC2 (if we’re lucky) & the displaced programmes on BBC2 get shunted into oblivion. Why not put Boris directly on to BBC2 & leave the BBC1 schedule undisturbed?

      1. ‘Morning, peddy.

        I think that we would all be better off, let alone the BBC’s schedule, if Johnson and his cabal were shunted into oblivion.

        1. Quite so, Korky, & good morning.

          The Boris Show gets rehashed on the BBC1 6pm News, which in turn gets rehashed on the following London News programme. My region is covered by Look East, which is relevant to me, but for some months & for some reason unknown to me I receive only the London Show.

          1. I am in the Look East area but as I do not watch the BBC I am not aware of the London Show being aired in our region. What, I wonder, has happened to Stuart White & Co?.
            As an aside, I sometimes listened to BBC Radio Suffolk but I have given up as it has become a propaganda arm of the government during this period in our history.

          2. Morning Korky.

            Although I live in Sweden, I am able to watch BBC via iPlayer on my computer (if I feel so inclined). At the bottom of the iPlayer start page is a facility which enables you to choose the BBC region you wish to watch.

            Occasionally that has defaulted to London (since I view via a VPN based there); however, I can easily change back and forth to my two favoured regions: Look North, Leeds (from when I lived in North Derbys/North Notts/South Yorks for most of my life) and Look East, Norwich (from my last decade in Norfolk).

          4. peddy, you must receive the programme to the west of the east.😎 I watched that programme when I was on courses in Milton Keynes.

            Stuart White works out of Norwich alongside a rather buxom lady whose name I cannot recall.

          5. I think it came from Cambridge, although the name S. W. rings a bell. We also had Ben Ando as a reporter, my next door neighbour.

    2. In the vox-pop Coronavirus interviews in the street, there never seems to be a dissenting voice. All the answers (mostly from people wearing masks outdoors!) are more or less the same – “I understand why the government has introduced this lockdown”. If the journos were to interview me, they would never be able to show the clip on the news programmes – it would be full of expletives.

      2. Which is why they wouldn’t interview you, Aeneas.

        The BBC lies by omission. ‘We asked ten people what they thought about covid. Everyone said we should stay locked up until we’ve cured death, and that the NHS should be given your firstborn son.’

        It won’t tell you that it spoke to over a thousand people, or ten thousand. It only gives you the answers that suit it’s narrative.

  13. Yesterday, I received this e-mail from Laurence Fox:

    Dear Reclaimers,

    Last September we hit the ground running and since then we have spent the last three months getting the internal party structure set up. It has been a fascinating, gruelling and extremely satisfying experience for me personally; having spent the majority of my working days in discussions and consultations with many admirable and inspiring people. In addition to this I have been extremely encouraged by your interactions here, on the street and social media. The level of support we have received just goes to show how homeless people feel politically which makes me even more resolute to take on cancel culture and the crisis in free speech.

    We now have a clear focus as to where The Reclaim Party are going and where we feel we can personally make meaningful change. We know that there are lots of you out there who wish to come on board, having received a wealth of C.V.s and letters of enquiries via our website. This is most heartening and we are grateful for you bearing with us whilst we still build internally. We will be advertising potential opportunities as to how you can become more engaged on our website soon so do please look out for those.

    I am very encouraged that the government have finally began to wake up to the assault on our values, our language, our culture and its heritage and I believe that The Reclaim Party can take some credit for making them wake up and challenge some of the hopeless, post modern ideologies that have become
    entrenched in our institutions.

    Whilst this is good, there is much more that needs to be done and this cannot be done without you.

    Thank you again for your support. We will be launching our manifesto soon.

    Live strong and live free.

    Laurence Fox

    While I await a copy of their manifesto, could we have an alternative party that might, just might, believe in restoring the values we were (mostly) brought up with?

      1. ‘Morning, Polly, is Reclaim, fashioning torpedoes? You (We) won’t know, until we see the manifesto.

        1. The only way is to sink ConLab by telling the entire country about the collusion, conspiracy and corruption of senior politicians with the billionaires. Especially Soros and Open Society. There’s a ton of evidence out there, and all of it needs to be dropped. Boom. Bye bye ConLab.

    2. Tut, tut, Laurence!

      I am very encouraged that the government have finally began begun to wake up to the assault on our values, our language…

      1. Yes, that jarred with me too, Peddy but it’s not in my purview to alter his message.

        1. I have sneaking suspicion he didn’t have a speech writer, proof reader, SPAD and media team to produce it.

          In fact, it may have been that he wrote it himself.

    3. With such massive fortresses of the state to overcome, so many entrenched career bureaucrats who arrogantly play the system to ensure absolutely nothing gets done I fear the worst.

      We have a huge number of people in the demos who are simply stupid and blame officials for the pandemic response. They demand Boris must go! because that’s easy for their primitive minds to understand. They don’t want to think about the real complexity because a token gesture is enough for them. it satisfies their lust for ‘action’ over results and pointing a finger is comically easier than addressing the systemic failures inherent in monolithic, centralised bureaucracy that is deliberately invisible to most people.

      Too many want the easy route of blaming Hancock rather than accepting that the civil service is a corrupt, inefficient mess because it’s hard to unravel the labyrinth of statism, difficult to point at a ‘doctor’ who has saved lives but now is intent on forcing through a tax on Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.

    4. This all reminds me of Jonathan Porritt’s launch of the Ecology Party at the 1979 General Election, with a similar message of reclaim – environmental rather than cultural, but much the same message otherwise.

      I joined the SDP two years later, with the express intention of making Porritt’s message mainstream. This is not something that can be achieved as a fringe party, and to date the Green Party has only ever had one MP.

      I would like to see Laurence Fox’s campaign for cultural renewal instilled in every party and every institution before it is too late.

  14. It’s a mystery of our memories that it sometimes pays to forget.

    Rowan Pelling DT 06/01/21

    The other day I was trying to tell friends on a Zoom call about one of my favourite actors. The problem was I couldn’t remember his name, nor the titles of any of his films. I was left saying, “Captain Thingie in the submarine attacked by a giant squid! The most gorgeous voice in cinema history. He was Judy Garland’s impresario, Rommel, and a paedophile – and he was in that film about a pheasant shoot where one of the guests gets shot.” Well done if you’ve arrived at James Mason long before I did. Bonus points if you also notched up, ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’, ‘A Star is Born’, ‘The Desert Fox’, ‘Lolita’ and ‘The Shooting Party’.

    I find that the seniorer I get: the more moments I experience.

      1. Dr Kildare as Dr Maxwell Becker? [seems his only major TV series according to IMDB – a few narrator jobs on other series though]

          1. Sorry – not clear enough! James Mason apparently starred as Dr Maxwell Becker in the Dr Kildare series!

      2. Morning, Maggie. I’m not sure about that one but I remember him as the grumpy and overbearing father of a northern family in Spring and Port Wine.

        He made his wife (Diana Coupland) serve up the same kipper at every mealtime for a number of days before his headstrong daughter (Susan George) would attempt to eat it. He was determined not to lose a battle of wits with a teenager.

        1. I can’t remember that , but I have just had a Eureka moment 😊
          James Mason.. The Forsythe Saga.. grindingly terrible , my elderly aunts loved it , and my imagination was captured when I used to stay with them after a spell of night duty leave!

        2. That was shown to our fifth formers (which is why I have seen it). When my dog turns his nose up at a treat, I tell him, “Spring and Port Wine, Charlie!” 🙂

    2. That happens a lot to me too! What happens in my case is that several hours after such an event, the answer suddenly pops into my head from nowhere.

      1. Morning Araminta.

        I was watching University Challenge t’other day and I knew the answers to many questions. The fact that the contestants recalled those answers a split-century before I did was a cause for much harrumphing!

        1. I found that the questions in the Christmas series for alumni were easier than the questions given to current students. Perhaps I flatter myself in thinking I would have pulled my weight better than some of the people in these teams but virtually all the scientific and mathematical questions are far beyond me.

          1. I’m the exact opposite Richard, anything to do with literature or the arts and I’m stuffed

          2. My expertise tends to be a mix of science and art; however, like you, some of the mathematical questions may as well be in Martian for the sense they make to me.

    6. James Mason was at Marlborough before getting a first class degree at Cambridge in Architecture.

      Lolita was only 12 years old when Humbert Humbert became obsessed with her.

      How should one define paedophilia? The law varies from country to country concerning the ages of consent. Is there a difference in clinical terms between a male who ‘fancies’ girls who have gone through puberty and one who fancies little girls who have not? Whether or not one approves of it many boys of 14 or 15 have sex with girls of their own age who are biologically sexually mature. Does this make them paedophiles?

      We briefly discussed this question on the forum last week. The age of consent is there to protect people but there must come a time – perhaps after the age of 18 or 21 – when we must accept that a girl has grown up and should be able to make her own decisions about whom she sleeps with.

  15. U.S. intelligence community says Russia is ‘likely’ behind major cyberhacks of federal agencies. Jan. 6, 2021

    The U.S. intelligence community stated Tuesday that Russia is “likely” behind a major and ongoing series of cyberhacks of federal agencies and private companies — its first official indication of blame.

    The statement, issued jointly by four agencies in a special task force, counters President Trump’s baseless suggestion last month that the intrusions might have been the work of Chinese hackers.

    It’s likely? No evidence then? The real clue to the nature of this article lies in “Trump’s baseless suggestion”. How does the author know that it is baseless? Is the President of the United States so badly briefed that a Washington Post hack knows better? Worse still how can she make such an assertion absolving the world’s Second Power of malign intent online? Even disregarding China’s international record of aggression and intimidation this is frankly unbelievable. It simply cannot be!

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-community-says-russia-is-likely-behind-major-ongoing-cyber-hacks-of-federal-agencies/2021/01/05/f2d4b318-4f94-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html

    1. The same kind of undermining Trump in the mainstream media that has been going for the last four years.
      But increasingly, our media too, won’t say anything negative about the Chinese.
      There was a particularly nauseating piece in the Mail yesterday, with a headline about Tina Turner, which included quotes by that great source of wisdom, Chairman Mao.
      Mao was responsible for more deaths than any other twentieth century mass murderer – he is way out ahead of Stalin, who is way out ahead of Hitler – yet he was being quoted like some kind of wise old guru!
      I find that sinister in the extreme.

      1. But increasingly, our media too, won’t say anything negative about the Chinese.

        Yes they get a free pass almost everywhere. Is this simply fear of provoking them or is there something more sinister afoot? Much is made of Trump’s supposed allegiance to Putin but the Bidens are much closer to China!

        1. I read somewhere that the CCP have people embedded in every mainstream media organisation in the West. They have been preparing for years.

      2. ‘Morning, bb2. In the killing stakes, Mao’s total has been quoted as between 15m and 55m. Even Pol Pot only chalked up 1.5-2m. Stalin was apparently 6m+ and Hitler’s was of course 6m Jewish lives. These figures are beyond hideous when written down.

  16. Good morning all from a dull but dry Derbyshire.
    -1°C in the yard and not much warmer in the pantry!

    I see China is still blocking WHO’s attempts to trace the source of the Wuhan virus:-

    WHO team investigating pandemic origins prevented from entering China at last minute
    WHO chief expresses disappointment at delay to mission which will try to determine how the virus jumped from animals to humans

    By
    Anne Gulland,
    GLOBAL HEALTH SECURITY CORRESPONDENT
    5 January 2021 • 6:55pm

    A World Health Organization team of experts due to arrive in China to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic has been prevented from entering the country at the last minute.

    Two members of the 10-strong international team of scientists had already set off before getting the news that their visas had not yet been granted.

    WHO director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press briefing on Tuesday that Chinese officials had not finalised the “necessary permissions” for the international scientific team, which was due to arrive in the country over the next day or so.

    Dr Tedros said he was “very disappointed” with the news, as two members of the team had already begun their journeys and others had to cancel travel plans at the last minute.

    “I have been in contact with senior Chinese officials and I have once again made it clear that the mission is a priority for WHO… I have been assured that China is speeding up the internal procedure of the earliest possible deployment. We’re eager to get the mission underway as soon as possible,” he said.

    The origins of Covid-19 remain bitterly contested, lost in a fog of recriminations and conjecture from the international community – as well as obfuscation from Chinese authorities determined to keep control of its virus narrative.

    The international team – which includes England’s former deputy chief medical officer, John Watson, as well as renowned virus hunters and animal and public health specialists from countries including Australia, Denmark and Japan – will work with Chinese experts to investigate how Covid-19 jumped from animals to humans.

    One of its major tasks will be to trace which animals at the Wuhan market where the first cases of the virus came to light may have carried the virus and where they came from. Since the virus first emerged experts have been keen to track its origins and WHO sent a preliminary “scouting mission” to China over the summer, though this team didn’t visit Wuhan.

    However, the organisation warned that tracking the emergence of new pathogens is “a riddle that can take years to solve”.

    Dr Mike Ryan, assistant director general for emergencies at WHO, said the delay was due to visa clearances. He said Dr Tedros had “impressed on Chinese officials” the critical nature of the mission.

    “We hope that this is just a logistic and bureaucratic issue that can be resolved very quickly,” he said.

    “This is frustrating and as the director general said this is disappointing. This disappointment has been expressed very clearly,” he said. He added that he hoped the issues could be resolved in the “coming hours”.

      1. I’d be more concerned about the leverage China has against WHO’s leadership, as well as the rest of the UN.

  17. Exclusive: Pharmacies’ offer to give Covid jabs snubbed by ministers
    Number 10 facing questions over urgency of vaccination programme after industry’s efforts to help are rejected

    High street pharmacies are “desperate” to roll out more than one million doses of the Oxford vaccine every week but have been snubbed by the Government, senior industry leaders have revealed.

    One can’t help wonder if the Government wants to control every vaccination as an exercise for future control regimes.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/01/05/pharmacies-offer-give-covid-jabs-snubbed-ministers/

    1. I’ve had my annual flu jab administered at my local pharmacy the last three years. Now, the government wants to keep the supply chain of the new potions under their control. Why would that be? Nothing to hide, surely?

      1. Perhaps they are concerned that a vial may ‘fall off the back of a lorry’ and be secreted away for analysis….. oh what a tangled web is woven when deceit makes its entrance into the arena.

    2. Morning Tom,

      We were lucky enough to have our flu jabs done last year, and the past few years courtesy of our village chemist shop.
      Why are Ministers being such idiots , is it because most of them are under sixty years old so are not clued up on the annual flu jab rigmarole?

      We decided the chemist was the best place because there is no queueing , and an appointment system unlike the GP surgery where before Covid it used to be rather too busy , full of sneezing coughing patients!

  18. Apropos our departure from the EUSSR. The MR reported to me (she listens to Radio 4) a nice story about the continuing blindness/arrogance of yer European bureaucrats.

    One was asked why the Continentals were not queuing up to buy the Oxford vaccine. “We are waiting for them to apply to the EU Medicines Licencing Authority for approval….”

    Wait on, matey. Brits no longer HAVE to apply to any Euro body! They can choose to supply to their own people!!

    1. If they want to sell the vaccine to the EU they will still need EU regulatory approval. I’m sure the Oxford people would be delighted to sell their vaccine into any market they can.

      What might be amusing is if the vaccine is the best and they sold it everywhere except the EU first.

      1. Of course.

        But the eurocrat was bewildered that a application had not been made. He could not conceive of a “european” company – as he regarded the UK, still, would not be desperate to get EU approval!

        What I was trying to say was that some eurocrats still haven’t got into their heads that we have LEFT!

          1. If Astra Zeneca have sold their manufacturing capacity already there would be little point in gaining EU approval.
            Macron was backing the French Sanofi to supply much of the EU but it failed to work & now has a delivery date of end of 2021.
            France has under 600 people receiving injections up to last Friday.

          2. If Astra Zeneca have sold their manufacturing capacity already there would be little point in gaining EU approval.
            Macron was backing the French Sanofi to supply much of the EU but it failed to work & now has a delivery date of end of 2021.
            France has under 600 people receiving injections up to last Friday.

          3. I understand that there is a large groundswell of people in France who are extremely wary of getting any jab for Covid.

  19. Lead letter in today’s DT. It’s probably been posted here already but it bears repeating:-

    ‘SIR – How was it possible, in this crisis, for our much-lauded human rights and civil liberties to be suspended so easily, without even the right to protest publicly against this?

    Why were ministers and scientists allowed to present statistics out of context in a way that was misleading, without immediate questions from the media?

    What role did Ofcom play in the communication or suppression of anti-lockdown views?

    What happened to the tens of billions of pounds spent on a test-and-trace system that did not work?

    What is the Government’s estimate for the impact of lockdown on the health, education and social mobility on the generation currently in full-time education?

    Perhaps most importantly,: how can we plan for the future, when, at any time, the Government can tear it apart without accountability, using flimsy legislation backed by a constitution that has proved inadequate to the task of protecting our rights?

    When the Covid crisis has passed, we must ask these questions of our masters in government, Whitehall and the judiciary, and we must get satisfactory answers.

    Iwan Price-Evans
    Croydon, Surrey’

    2. Caspar certainly looks as if he has Covid 01 AD so I would advise Melchior and Balthazar to self-isolate.

  21. Sorry about the twaddle , but I ‘ll pass it on to you to chew over .

    The Government has responded to the petition you signed – “Hold a public vote on HS2 project as it is being paid for by the public”.

    Government responded:

    HS2 will transform, and help decarbonise, our country’s transport network, bring our biggest cities closer together, boost productivity and rebalance opportunity across the country.

    As set out in the Full Business Case for Phase One, the Government has carefully considered the merits and disadvantages of proceeding with HS2 and has firmly concluded that it should go ahead. HS2 will transform our country’s transport network, bringing our biggest cities closer together, boosting productivity and rebalancing opportunity fairly across the country. Once operational, it will provide a low-carbon alternative to cars and planes. During construction, we want HS2 to be the most environmentally responsible major infrastructure project in UK history

    HS2 is at the heart of our plans to build back better from Covid-19, creating thousands of jobs and providing certainty at a time when people need it the most. This railway is a long-term investment which will bring our biggest cities closer together, boost productivity and provide a low-carbon alternative to cars and planes for many decades to come.

    HS2 has rightly been subject to a great deal of Parliamentary and public scrutiny. Phase One was the subject of considerable debate in Parliament during the passage of the High-Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Act 2017 (“the Phase One Act”). The Phase 2a Bill is currently being taken through Parliament, and the Government agreed with the Oakervee Review’s conclusion that splitting Phase 2b into smaller sections, and more than one Bill, could facilitate scrutiny in Parliament, and make its management and construction more manageable.

    The Transport Secretary has made a clear commitment to greater transparency on HS2, and Andrew Stephenson, the dedicated HS2 minister, is reporting bi-annually to Parliament on the project. The Department for Transport has also established a monthly Ministerial Task Force to provide strategic oversight, support and challenge for the successful delivery of Phases One and 2a. Earlier this year, Government reset the funding regime for HS2 Phase One including a Target Cost and funding envelope as well as providing revised estimates for the wider scheme, subject to the ongoing work on the Integrated Rail Plan.

    For the reasons set out above, the Government has no plans to hold a public vote on whether HS2 proceeds.

    This Government takes its environmental commitments extremely seriously. That is why the UK was the first major economy in the world to legislate for net zero and why we have published a 25-year Environment Plan setting out what we will do to protect and enhance our natural environment for future generations. The UK is decarbonising faster than any other country in the G20 and is providing global leadership on climate change.

    The environmental impacts of HS2 were closely scrutinised by Parliament during the passage of the Phase One Act, which gives statutory and planning authority for the construction of Phase One of the scheme. Alongside the Act, the Government also published the Environmental Minimum Requirements, a suite of additional environmental commitments to further reduce the impacts of the project.

    As well as environmental protections, a range of measures to mitigate and compensate for environmental impacts have been put in place. This includes a commitment to seek to achieve ‘no net loss’ to biodiversity and the creation of a ‘green corridor’ alongside HS2, which will provide bigger and better habitats for wildlife, and integrate HS2 into the landscape. On Phase One alone over 33 square kilometres of new and existing wildlife habitat will be created, an increase of around 30% compared to what’s there now.

    All environmental measures, whether they be the creation of new habitats or the enhancement of existing habitats, will be supported with long-term management plans and agreements. This will ensure that the new railway leaves a long-lasting legacy for both wildlife and future generations.

    HS2 will give us a step-change in capacity delivering better connectivity between our largest towns and cities. The Government’s decision to proceed with HS2 supports our objectives on climate change as the railway will play a key role in decarbonising our transport sector. This is because, once HS2 is in operation, it will offer a low carbon alternative to cars and domestic air travel. It will also free up space on the existing railway for thousands more passengers to travel by rail and to move more goods by rail freight, taking lorries off our roads.

    Department for Transport

    This is a revised response. The Petitions Committee requested a response which more directly addressed the request of the petition. You can find the original response towards the bottom of the petition page (https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/326850)

    Click this link to view the response online:

    https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/326850?reveal_response=yes

    The Petitions Committee will take a look at this petition and its response. They can press the government for action and gather evidence. If this petition reaches 100,000 signatures, the Committee will consider it for a debate.

    The Committee is made up of 11 MPs, from political parties in government and in opposition. It is entirely independent of the Government. Find out more about the Committee: https://petition.parliament.uk/help#petitions-committee

    Thanks,
    The Petitions team
    UK Government and Parliament

    You’re receiving this email because you signed this petition: “Hold a public vote on HS2 project as it is being paid for by the public”.

    To unsubscribe from getting emails about this petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/signatures/92351140/unsubscribe?token=wAug77XwV6lYwA6BhFZD

      2. Morning Minty

        I knew they would wriggle .

        In this surreal world where cities are are uncities , and big stuff is being dismantled before our eyes , HS2 is a white elephant vanity project ..

        Will HS2 become a freight line instead , thus removing heavy freight from our motorways ?

        Here in these parts our heavy stuff consists of big lorries dong the sand and gravel bit because of the many quarries here in Dorset.

        When the London Olympic arena and other stuff was being constructed , we used to have lots and lots of sand and gravel lorries off loading onto
        train goods wagons in our village , our small country roads were very busy, as you know that this area is very rich in china clay, sand and gravel and oil.

        That height of activity ceased after the London Olympics .

        We have also managed to steer clear of having motorways constructed in this area.

        1. ‘Morning, Belle.

          Re. your last sentence – the remodelling of the trunk roads around the Wimborne area makes things confusing enough.

          2. Good afternoon Maggiebelle

            When I used to live at Allhallows near Lyme Regis I regularly used to drive along that road from Lymington, where my parents lived. When I was in less of a hurry I took the ferry from Sandbanks to Purbeck and drove through Wool and enjoyed the lovely views of the waters in which I used to sail before joining the normal route at Bridport.

            I went to Canford School quite frequently with rugby and cross-country running teams.

          3. Yes I do. The first time I came ‘home’ after many years’ absence, I found it bewildering.

    2. Me too, Belle. And when they feel the need for a petition response of that length, you just know that they are not convinced either.

      1. Oh my dear Janus. They are convinced. More, they just don’t *care*. That puff and waffle is not an argument for it, it’s an F you to disagreement. There’s no interest in what you think. The length is simply the usual excuses and platitudes, the waffle of an arrogant state machine justifying it’s own existence. It has no interest either way except to continue doing whatever it wants.

    3. What happens when the utter reliance on omnipresent and omnipotent electricity runs out (mainly due to a failing in the acquisition of fuel to generate it)?

      Will there be back-up provisions of horses (to pull the trains) and barges (on a rapidly-expanding canal network) as a failsafe system?

      My Theory of Progressive Stupidity (ToPS) becomes more and more apparent each passing day.

      1. Don’t worry about how we’ll move goods around. Worry that we won’t have clean water.

        If big state continues this deranged assault on our energy supply we’re simply not going to have enough for that

      2. It is very likely to fall out due to attacks on electricity generators’ computer systems.

    4. What a lot of total bullshit. Meaningless twaddle. You’ve saved me the bother of reading my email.

    6. When those jobs are paid for by the tax payer, no new wealth is created. Therefore, considering the expense involved, surely it would be vastly more cost efficient to not ‘create’ them at all?

      It’s all nonsense, nothing more than a middle finger.

      As for the eco twaddle – someone actually wrote this: ‘long lasting legacy for wildlife and future generations’ – of what? Dug up trees, destroyed woodland and habitat? Yes, the long lasting legacy will be one of devastation. In fact, I imagine it’s copied and pasted from various waffly long justification documents that are equally useless.

      They want their train set. In a democracy, we would simply be able to return this marked unread and say ‘Not interested. cancel all current and future spending and sack those involved, but we do not live in a democracy.

      1. A Greener Future? – Government Funding for tree planting in a an area for 5 years. …………… Job creation ………..what’s wrong with that?

        No money thereafter for looking after the said forest …………… non-productive trees / waste ground for decades.

    7. Six words in and it loses all credibility for me (decarbonise) the rest is so much piffle and dross

      carbon – a chemical element, generally hard and black ( diamonds excepted ) seen as dirty and bad
      carbon dioxide – a gas , colourless , odourless and vital for plant growth but only .04% of the air we breath yet still seen as dirty and bad

      1. Easy buzz words, Datz. Nice and simple, no thinking required. Carbon bad. Decarbonise good. Of course, that absolutely everything around us is made from carbon you rather wonder what these fools are smoking, but they rely on their drivel never being questioned. When it is, they swamp you with lies and nonsense to such an extent – not to mention the pet BBC, itself invested heavily in green for it’s pensions – that getting the truth out is pointless – and big state knows it.

    9. “HS2 is at the heart of our plans to build back better from Covid-19”

      Ha bluddy ha.
      Well that’s us completely and utterly wrecked by Covid for the next many years.

      1. What started first? – -HS2 – – or Covid? So how can HS2 be helping to BBB from Covid? They are just sticking the Covid word in anywhere -without ANY thought.

  22. 328177+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,
    “Wednesday 6 January: Our civil liberties have been so easily suspended, how can we stop it happening in future?”

    Face facts and stop feeding the three monkeys ,along with stop kissing X YOUR chosen set of political treacherous close shop proven lab/lib/con tossers when entering the polling booth.
    We are ALL suffering en masse the fall out of putting the party before the Country many undeservedly, having seen in the main the true calibre / agenda especially over the last three decades, of the politico’s in power.

    Peoples have the key to freedom, it was surely peoples who,via the use continually of the same voting pattern over the decades since the mid 70s put us in the deep sh!te bog
    and kept us there, proving people power works so why would it NOT work to benefit the peoples of innocence & the Nation.
    The signs are clearly showing that “my MP is a good one”
    will be tested to breaking point when “my MP” is re-placed by an imam.
    The close shop political treacherous trio have tried, these last 4.5 decades their damnedest to surrender these Isles
    to alien forces & that, in parliament, is still very much on the parliamentary canteen menu

    1. Apologies but simply voting for a different party isn’t enough. it shouldn’t matter who is in office. They should only be able to do what we instruct them to do. That they blither on with their own agenda is the fundamental problem. We need genuine constitutional reform.

      1. 328177+ up ticks,
        Morning W,
        No need for apologies, the lab/lib/con have proved to be, after extensive testing over the decades an anti English / GB political force and as such should be erased.
        We are in very dire need of a genuine
        Pro English / GB party.

        In short, the current governance coalition have no intentions of doing what you or ALL decent peoples ask them to do, far from it.

  23. In other news, nothing to do with Covid or the US election for a change, there is a move in Tunisia to re-open brothels. Such medically supervised brothels were closed by the sanctimonious Islamists after the revolution in 2011 who thought they were doing a good deed.

    The girls continued to provide their services but from private apartments with no medical checks. So much for the good deed!

    Tunisian joke: A young man went to the brothel every day which cost him 7 dinars. When he finally got married he naturally spent the first night of his honeymoon with his new wife. But he forgot that he was no longer in a brothel, so he handed her a 10 dinar note. She gave him 3 dinars change!

      1. I used to chat online to a lass who had worked in “The Trade” and she told me of an incident where the father of one of the girls walked into the massage parlour she was working in!!
        Great embarrassment all round!

        1. That’s like the medical student who walked into his first human anatomy dissecting session only to find his own grandmother on the slab.

          1. To avoid that we inherited the remains of last year’s dissection which was just the chest.

          2. We, as dental students, started out with a whole body, an old lady & we studied/dissected the head & neck in detail, but, bit by bit, the medics, who were rivals, claimed the arms & everything below the diaphragm.

  25. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    SIR – It is not fair of Tim Stanley (Comment, January 4) to blame the fall in Doctor Who’s ratings on Jodie Whittaker, the first female Doctor. When the Master regenerated into Missy, that was also a masterstroke of casting.

    The problem is that the writers have turned the programme into a sanctimonious woke-fest. It is they who need regenerating, not the actors.

    David Miller
    Chigwell, Essex

    Now, I doubt that many Nottlrs watch Dr Who, but I do feel that David Miller’s last paragraph could probably be applied to most of the BBC’s current output – and I’m not referring to drama alone!

    2. I’m having great fun watching the first series from the early 60s – highly recommended and very un-PC.

  26. We don’t get much news about immigrant and haulage vehicle problems at Dover, none on glitches in the” provisionally” agreed “Agreement” and its potential problems for the UK, the economic and health cost of the Government’s submission to the small cadre of medics and mathematicians making up the rules.
    We are in a dictatorship at the moment. We are heading for trouble if this situation continues.

    1. That’s Priti Awful…..

      And it is not helped by the woke meeja calling illegal economic migrants “refugees”.

      1. Many charities also give these poor “refugees” help. The Salvation army refused to deny that my donation would be used to provide assistance to illegal immigrants. (This is presumably a crime of some kind?)

    2. Morning all.
      As we all knew it as we grew up this country is, and has been deliberately (polite) stuffed up.
      I feel so sorry for my and many more hardworking family units in their 30s and early 40s who are all ready struggling, but seem to have failed to understand (don’t believe) what is happening. And what the reason for this is, nor are able to understand what will be the eventual outcome when they reach the same stage of their own lives as we are now.
      They are all, apart from the mother of two still working, except for one son who lost his job because the company he worked for was not realistic and competitive in their field. His stupid backstabbing boss blamed him.
      But the harder they all work and the more money they spend, the more tax they all pay. Which is the only way the people who have carried out the irreparable damage to their own country and the lives of others can survive.
      Our younger generations are chasing and funding their own demise.

      1. The have not had a free thinking state education. They have been brought up to believe the state will look after all their needs.

        1. J.N. Maybe ‘across the board’ education might have influenced their outlook. But I can assure you that their parent’s are pretty down to earth and realistic.
          Possibly this period of uncertainty will establish a more realistic outlook on their own future.
          Until the useless political classes opened up the uk, predominantly English doors and allowed completely unfettered ‘immigration’, which they all pay for. Whilst the vast majority of these ‘handily misplaced’ peoples have never contributed a much as a penny to support their growing families. Whilst living entirely off the funding of Britain’s taxpayers.

        2. A few weeks ago I was banging on here on the Nottlers’ forum about the need for Sixth Formers to be given courses on how to think coherently and objectively.

          When I was at school we were encouraged to write ‘For and Against’ essays on topical issues in order to prepare us for ‘The General Paper.’ We also had to sit ‘The Use of English Paper’ in order to encourage us to write lucidly and accurately. And I remember my father buying me three books which I still have on my shelves: The Complete Plain Words by Ernest Gowers, Fowler’s Modern English Usage and Straight and Crooked Thinking by Robert Thouless

          But I knew we were lost when, a week or two after voicing my opinions, the headmaster of Eton vindictively sacked one of his teachers for encouraging his pupils to think for themselves.

          1. Morning Richard.
            As a rational and well educated person and educator, what do think when for instance minister for transport, becomes minister of education in a cabinet reshuffle ?

          3. But H, as we were able to see in the two comedy programmes Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, it’s the civil service that actually run the country. The ministers are only there living off the tax payers, to bask in the limelight and take the can when it all goes pear shape.

          6. Canada has many ministers with real life experience in the areas of their mandate.

            They still screw up, it needs common sense as well.

          8. I have the Use of English certificate (twice over, as it happens, because I stayed on an extra year in the Sixth owing to having taken my O Levels a year early). Look what happened to me 🙂

      2. RE – – Your last line – same as I have put for a while – We are being made to pay for our own extermination.

    3. Good morning, Maggiebelle

      If Brexit Britain is such a horrible place according to the woke leftists at the BBC then why do so many illegals want to live there when they have already arrived in the lovely EU? And why is this question never raised?

      1. It is only a horrible place because there are still decent white people living here. Once we have all been removed they will be happy, living in their 3rd World immigrant African/Asian fanatically religious hell. They will realise there is a problem when nobody is paying taxes to provide everything in their free lives. Of course, that will be OUR fault – for being exterminated.

        1. And what you describe Walter is when all the infighting and religious tensions start.
          Which apparently is why they originally left their own countries.
          Despite the billions of pounds of foreign aid handed to them.
          And of course instead of putting their own houses in order.
          As our parents and grandparents did for our generation.

          1. I said to my workmates many times, before retiring, that the people coming here ONLY want THEIR ways/rules/laws/culture etc – in a country that gives them free housing, money, NHS, schooling etc. Why struggle in your own country when they get it all – for doing absolutely nothing? They mocked me.

          2. And of course you only have to consider how many non British city mayors are deliberately attempting to achieve their goals of culture change.
            It strands out on a daily basis.
            As in the recent removal of union flags from the flag poles of Penzance.

          4. Yep. Thirty years go I said to colleagues that the call to prayer would be broadcast from minarets in Birmingham. Oh, how they laughed.

          5. They aren’t laughing now though. An old workmate gives me a call now and then – and tells me the canteen conversations regularly end up with someone saying – yes – and he ( me ) told us it was going to happen!!

      2. Because they know they don’t have to work and can get everything off doing nothing. Even in jail most of them would be better off than the average British pensioner.

        1. In fact crime is quite a sensible option for some old people who would be far better off comfortably, housed, fed and clothed with interesting company, decent health care, no television licence to pay and no responsibilities.

          The worst result for them would be to come up before a woke judge who ‘gave them a second chance’. who gave them a fine or community service or gave them suspended rather than actual prison sentences.

    4. Would like to see how many crimes these “bringers of wonderful Multiculturalism and Diversity” have committed. And how much they have cost us in housing, NHS, etc etc since arrival. Of course we will never be told the truth on either matter.

      2. It’s all WOKE now, it’s the road to hell for so many ordinary hard working people and their families.

      3. 328177+ up ticks,
        BB2,
        Agreed, may I add they ought to be black & blue via a flogging prior to being kicked out of office.

    1. And what is more, when a left wing government takes over they will make maximum use of it.

      1. We desperately need a party which will have in its manifesto the intent to reform the electoral system, the constituencies and drastically reduce the numbers in the HoL. MPs’ expenses must be reduced by cutting/limiting the items which they can claim. If an MP “crosses the floor”, there should be a bye election in her/his/ its constituency. There is such a party with similar ideas but it seems to be asleep. If it wants to make progress it needs to wake up and get on with it.

        2. 328177+up ticks,
          Morning C,
          We had a party that was proven to be genuine pro UK as in the real UKIP under successful reconstruction via one Gerard Batten.
          ( not to be confused with
          the current ersatz uKip)
          The man who gave us a credible Brexitexit path OUT in 2014 two years prior to the referendum.
          Who’s manifestos were applauded by the close shop party’s who took sections as if their own into their manifesto’s, but NEVER acted on their promises,vows or pledges,
          still saying it was enough for the party ovis.
          The close shop coalition & helpers could NOT allow
          the real UKIP to continue
          building into a major threat
          and antidote to what we were about to receive.
          If a winner of the eu elections one year plus designing & triggering the referendum after 25 plus years gets put down what chance a new party ?
          My vote in place of real UKIP has got to be for
          A M Waters, or L Fox if on the form, no way lab/lib/con.

      2. 328177+ up ticks,
        S,
        The wings have been neutered as in, it is now surely down to right / wrong.
        On the menu is a new re-set rule book which WILL be enforced when past.

      3. As we’ll likely see soon in the US, as I just can’t see Pence giving Trump the win, and even if he did, it looks like the same ‘electoral anomolies’ in Georgia as in the General Election have miraculously allowed the Senate to flip to the Dems during their ‘run-off’ election.

        Get ready for mass censorship and disappearing of evidence of voter fraud, as well as threats against (including arrests) those who continue to give evidence; similarly with COVID and those whistleblowers and independent/citizen journalists digging up all the realities of the pandemic, the response and the agenda behind it all.

        Note also that yesterday, the Chinese yet again denied entry to WHO ‘investigators’ ‘trying to find’ the source of the pandemic. It’s only taken them 10 months to get there – what did they do – walk and row a boat there? Got lost in the Southern Oceans?

        1. Trump may have been correct, but he has made an utter pig’s ear of it all. Donating the Senate to the Democrats may yet be worse than Biden getting the Presidency.

          1. What do mean by ‘it all’? If you mean the Georgia run-off elections, then I agree his petulance has kept many a Trump voter at home (as well as the likely large-scale cheating by the Dems and the MSM apologists).

            But as regards everything else during his presidency, I would respectfully disagree – his one BIG failing was not to change Section 230 to stop big tech/social media platforms doing as they have to censor, cover up and colluded with the cheaters from the Dems and never-Trumpers. Even so, to get that legislation changed, he needed the will of both Houses – one which was, up and recently, significantly in the control of the Dems, the other had still been controlled by the ‘old guard’ Establishment GoPers like McConnell and his arch enemy in Mitt Romney.

            All he could do about COVID was enact nationwide border closures, which he did against fierce opposition from the Dems. Most people knew not to take that seriously his rhetoric about the technical / scientific issures around COVID, but in truth the control of it is entirely by each state/city and not at federal level, as has been shown by the increadibly bad management by NY and California; similar as regards the BLM riots where Dem state govenors and city mayor flatly refused federal help in a deliberate campaign to blame him on BOTH fronts.

            Then came the cheater election, noting that nothing can be done at federal level to stop the cheating, and the FBI has been on the side of the Dems since the mid 90s, so no help on the investigation front. Similarly wrt foreign affairs and the CIA and State Dept.

            The MSM, meanwhile, did the Dems and Establishment’s propaganda work. Trump only won in 2016 because the Dems/Establishment thought there was no way he’d win, so didn’t bother to enact the cheating/propaganda campaign they did this time around.

          2. I was referring to the election, not his record.

            Considering what he was up against with the MSM, impeachment, obstruction at every level, he achieved an enormous amount. I suspect that history might look on his Presidency better than his contemporaries do.

          3. isn’t one of the Trump clan in the middle east today, witnessing another deal between states.

            I don’t think that his personal failings will be overlooked but there could well be some recognition of things done.

          4. He certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the way he has been treated has been dreadful.

            I would not be at all surprised if the Democrats even try to undermine his efforts in the ME and elsewhere.
            It will serve America right if all their major Democrat held cities end up looted into oblivion.

          5. The sickening thing is that even if that does happen, it won’t change anything. They will still believe they are right.

          6. No wars during his presidency, and multiple peace treaties, plus, until the lockdowns started, the best US economy since a LONG time ago, with especially large gains in wealth for the poorest and ethnic minorities. I’m awaiting Joe and Kamala to get their Nobel Peace Prize for cheating at the General Election and not doing anything in office yet.

          7. Especially as he got more votes this time around than Obama did in 2008, and by serveal million. Probably even more if the vote-flipping operation hadn’t occurred.

          8. Something I find very hard to understand is why the Federal authorities have not impounded voting machines and tested to see whether the claims are true.

          9. it is going to be a disaster if there is a democratic senate, there will be no barrier to the real lefty agenda from aoc and co. It needed a republican senate with a few moderates (so that reasonable bills were passed) to keep them under control.

            Just hope that Trumps name calling about sleepy Joe is just that, if Biden is pushed aside then the whole government lurches left.

        2. Anomalies like votes being cast for dems? That will have been the most closely scrutinized election in recent times, claims of fraud are rather old hate and not viable. Watch Trump once again claim electoral fraud.

          But yesterday Trump was claiming that Pence had agreed to overrule the vote, he wouldn’t have lied about that would he?

    1. He was always going to lose Georgia, they just did the same thing they did last time and there is nobody to stop it.

    2. Hang on a minute, even cnn is not claiming the second senate seat yet.

      Interesting seeing the electoral map with urban Atlanta and Savanah totally democrat amid a sea of exclusively Republican rural counties. That country is broken in so many ways.

        1. Voting machines or people that will have been so tightly scrutinized that mass fraud is going to be less likely than in the November election.

          There were something like 7,000 republican poll watchers involved last night, I know that the parrot wil claim that the deep state threatened them all to make them fix the result but open your eyes.

          Georgia is seeing a major population growth, areas around Atlanta are growing rapidly as can be seen in towns like Alpharetta. Guess what, urban areas tend to vote Democrat.

          The Republicans lost and that failure was helped along by bully boy Trump. Nice phone call on Saturday, how many votes did that lose?

  30. Interesting feline development. The pregnant female stray we rescued yesterday turns out to be a chubby young male.

    Very glad to have him out of harm’s way.

  31. Excellent letters today from Iwan Price-Evans (especially), Alan Lorraine, Duncan Rayner, Robert Barlow, Tony Foot, Dr Terence Harding and TV doc Dr Raj Persaud.

    Mr Price-Evans’ letter makes me want to write to the DT (it may be in vain, given they probably have me on their ‘list of trouble-makers’) about the lack of long-term testing of the vaccines for safety, the governments’ (around the wrold) indemnifying the drug companies from lawsuits and the shady past of Bill Gates as regards vaccines, side effects, unethical/illegal human testing and population control, never mind that he’ll make far more from vaccines than he ever ‘gave’ to their development.

    It appears that the government’s own propaganda campaign, pushed by the leftist Civil Service onto meek politicians (Boris has lost his mojo since he got COVID and is now scared) or possibly ones who are aligned (or more) with the agenda (Hancock and Sir Kneels-a-lot) have, with the help of GCHQ & Co got most of the population to freely give up their freedoms and blindly accept everything their told as true and must be done. I bet the now dead Commies in charge of the former Soviet Union are cursing in their graves that they didn’t do something like this to convert so many to socialism/Marxism when they were around.

    On the other side of the coin, very poor letters from Marguerite Beard-Gould and David Miller: the first is yet more playing into the hands of Whittless and the shadowy forces behind the lockdown/Great Reset agenda from naive, information-poor, very risk-averse people.

    The second is either from a male feminist or someone who obviously hasn’t seen much Doctor WHO, or especially read/seen any of Jodie Whittaker’s interviews. She herself freely admitted being fully behind showrunner Chris Chibnall’s woke agenda, saying that they needed to get away from the ‘white male gaze’, never bothered to research the role – including watching a reasonable amount of episodes before agreeing to take the role, never mind afterwards before starting filming, plus she and other cast members (except Bradly Walsh) have also attacked long-term fans and professed their wokeness whilst going along with the terrible direction of the show with nary a peep.

    To say that it’s not Ms Whittaker’s fault is completely incorrect – she is almost as much to blame as Chibs and the BBC execs (for hiring him and agreeing to take her on as a condition). She is compeletely unsuited to the role, has little charisma or chemistry with fellow cast members, and frankly does a poor job at acting in the role, just amping up Tennant to 15 with all manner of daft facial expressions. Mandip Gill is no better – and seemingly more interested in ‘shipping’ with Jodie than developing her role properly, with Tosin Cole and Walsh relegated to not-so-light relief as buffoon men.

    The Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic’s Gary Buechler, and Overlord DVD on their various YouTube channels have consistently shown all this about Doctor WHO to be the case.

    1. I don’t care what she’s like as I haven’t watched Dr Who since the 70s and don’t intend to start now.

      1. The revival of Doctor WHO was actually good from 2005 – 2014 when Peter Capaldi took over, and then the quality started to decline (not his fault – he was good in the role and a great actor generally), and was VERY popular eslewhere around the world, especially in the US.

        I know it’s not everyone’s cup-of-tea, as is often the case with sci-fi/fantasy, but it was the BBC’s second-largest earner next to Top Gear. Both have fallen from grace and now earn the BBC FAR less in overseas licencing revenues. It is their failure due to the woke agenda that should be the story as much as the poor quality of the show and much of the cast and writers themselves.

    1. Nothing beats a bit of banning in the morning, thanks for the heads up.

      A scary observation is that many of these spam accounts were created six or seven years ago and have been sitting idle for the past five years, some spammers have been playing quite a long term game.

      It is a bit like playing whack a mole so I hope that no one clicks on one of the links.

      1. If you are able to do so, can you put up a featured comment to warn people against clicking on any of the links?

  34. SIR – How was it possible, in this crisis, for our much-lauded human rights and civil liberties to be suspended so easily, without even the right to protest publicly against this?

    Why were ministers and scientists allowed to present statistics out of context in a way that was misleading, without immediate questions from the media?

    What role did Ofcom play in the communication or suppression of anti-lockdown views?

    What happened to the tens of billions of pounds spent on a test-and-trace system that did not work?

    What is the Government’s estimate for the impact of lockdown on the health, education and social mobility on the generation currently in full-time education?

    Perhaps most importantly,: how can we plan for the future, when, at any time, the Government can tear it apart without accountability, using flimsy legislation backed by a constitution that has proved inadequate to the task of protecting our rights?

    When the Covid crisis has passed, we must ask these questions of our masters in government, Whitehall and the judiciary, and we must get satisfactory answers.

    Iwan Price-Evans
    Croydon, Surrey

    What may be a ‘satisfactory answer’ in Surrey will never be deemed to be satisfactory in Islington.

    1. SIR – In the past few months, the public sector has demanded lockdowns, tougher restrictions and closure of workplaces. Unions have advised members not to go to their workplace.

      All this has been in the full knowledge that their pay and pensions would be untouched. This is not a luxury that the private sector enjoys.

      The Prime Minister believes that levelling up is essential. When this pandemic is brought to heel, the first area he should look to level up is the disparity between the public and private sectors.

      Alan Lorraine
      Gateshead

    2. Somehow one forgets that Croyden is in Surrey…
      Sorry to be facetious and detract from Mr Price-Evans’ excellent questions – which the laughably named “Opposition” will never ask, and to which we shall never get any answers.
      In fact, it’ll probably be a crime even to ask them soon.

      1. Why would Starmer ask them when his entire attitude would be that the state should have more power to control people?

    3. What is the Government’s estimate for the impact of lockdown on the health, education and social mobility on the generation currently in full-time education?

      The government’s estimate for the impact of lockdowns on our society has not been published because it would reveal the end-game. Iwan Price-Evans should understand that whatever the estimate is it hasn’t yet been reached: hence this latest lockdown without end.

    4. 1. Because people are uneducated and fear is easy to sell.
      2. Politicians lie to get their message across. They have done since the first bloke locked away the oldest man in the village to control knowledge. Journalists are witty but have no time for research and analysis. Their deadlines are all that matter as getting to print is more important than getting the facts to the public. Also, see 1.
      3. Oh give over. It sank into the bottomless well of quango land and was soaked into a dozen budgets, salaries and expense accounts. Stop bothering to ask what it’s been spent on. Auditing and accountability are misnomers to the state.
      4. We can’t. We have never been able to. The first time Blair ignored the war protests, Brown used the army to prevent blockades, that we had to wait for Cameron to call a referendum – which was then constantly, repeatedly challenged by people paid to obey the public – actively refusing to vote as their employers had instructed them it showed just how pointless voting was. Government believes it rules us. We don’t have the ability to prevent it, nor to enforce our will. Our judiciary is corrupt and unaccountable (who appoints judges?) Our upper chamber, so long a bastion of common sense because it wasn’t partisan is now a polluted effluent lake of stooges, thieves and liars. London has a mayor and police chief more interested in propaganda than law enforcement and serving business.

      The boot of the people must rest gently, but firmly on the neck of every upstart like Khan until they obey. The fact this is the route that odious vermin took shows he sees it as him having his pokey tiny feet on us.

      Frankly, if Mr Price-Evans is only just waking up to the inadequacy, incompetence, venality and arrogance of the state he’s twenty years too late.

    1. I wonder what the frail gentleman was arrested for. Perhaps they were rescuing him from the crowd. At least they weren’t roughing him up.

      1. 328177+ up ticks,
        Afternoon C,
        Yet.

        Lest we forget Ian Tomlinson
        RIP newspaper vendor returning from work
        died from a blow ministered by a police officer during unrest in 2009
        lends to peoples thinking the worst.

  36. https://twitter.com/SteveBakerHW/status/1346727795393777664

    I thought of writing to my MP, Wiil Quince, but I decided that I would be wasting my time: he ran as a Conservative but after his poor responses to some of my earlier letters I have come to the conclusion that he is undoubtedly a Tory party man.

    If Baker votes against Johnson’s tyranny then he will go some way to restoring my faith in him. It will be interesting to see the numbers against Johnson’s plan.

    1. As far as Brexit was concerned he fell at the final hurdle as far as I am concerned.

      1. 328177+ up ticks,
        Afternoon R,
        They are ALL party men that are in with a shout now, plus the membership are riddled with them
        regardless of the party’s actions.
        Genuine party,
        Ersatz party,
        Seems to make no difference.

  38. I do wonder if this Covid stuff will ever end, it seems to have settled into a way of life and I certainly don’t expect any normality this year. Just a horrible little feeling of extended eternal lockdown .

    1. WE are locked down under threat of arrest/ criminal record/fines and even jail- – illegals in rubber dinghies still keep coming and are welcomed. Govt priorities are VERY clear.

      1. 328177+ up ticks,
        Afternoon W,
        May one ask, as this has been building for year on year and many innocent peoples are suffering the outcome, come the time of the next much needed GE will these openly treacherous issues make any difference to the voting
        pattern ?

    2. WE are locked down under threat of arrest/ criminal record/fines and even jail- – illegals in rubber dinghies still keep coming and are welcomed. Govt priorities are VERY clear.

    3. It’s much more depressing now than it was in the spring when the weather was warm and we thought it was only temporary. I’m very fed up with the loss of normal activities and social contacts.

  39. CCP running scared of their own boys in WHO?

    China denies entry to team of WHO experts due to investigate the origins of Covid-19 pandemic amid growing suspicions of a cover-up

    Head of WHO said he was ‘disappointing’ the experts did not yet have permission
    A 10-person team of WHO experts is expected to arrive in China this week
    They have been given the task of investigating the origins of the coronavirus
    Mission comes a year after Covid-19 outbreak started, believed to be from China
    Origins remain bitterly contested, lost in a fog of recriminations and conjecture

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9116715/China-denies-entry-team-experts-investigate-origins-Covid-19.html#newcomment

  40. Condom Orders

    A young girl started work in the local chemist shop and was naturally very shy about having to sell condoms to the general public.

    The owner was due to go on holiday for a couple of days and asked if she would be willing to run the shop on her own, so she had to confide her worries about selling contraceptives.

    “Look,” he said, “My regular customers don’t ever ask for condoms; usually they just ask for a 310 [small], a 320[medium], or a 330[large]. The word condom is never actually used…”

    The first day was fine, but on the second day this black guy came into the shop, put out his hand and said, “Er, 350 please!”

    The girl immediately panicked, ran into the back of the shop and phoned the owner on his mobile to tell him of her predicament.

    “Go back in and check to see if he’s got a yellow bucket hanging between his legs,” the boss calmly told her.

    She peeped through the door and saw the yellow bucket hanging between his legs. “Yes!” she said, “He’s got one hanging there!”

    “Right,” said the boss, “Now go back in and give him £3.50…

    “He’s the window cleaner!”

  41. Now they have enlisted Blair to talk up the vaccine that is guaranteed to put everyone off

  42. WARNING

    We are seeing more spammers posting messages with dodgy links.

    Be careful and if you see any please mark them as spam.

      1. It would seem that other forums have a far worse problem than here, e.g. Guido Fawkes (now no longer using Disqus but the [IMHO] awful, DT-like Vuukle). I’ve seen some forums and websites go under because the spammers in particular have got out of control. Yahoo Groups being one that was good originally, but got decimated in short order because of spammers, trolls and phishers, though it didn’t help that many ‘groups’ were unmoderated or to a very limited degree.

        1. We have a team of mods who have been here from the time Geoff set this forum up, so we know we can get rid of them, with the help of all posters who spot them and flag.

          1. That’s good to know. Another site I’m a member of that has a reasonably well-used forum only has one mod, and they can’t directly ban people – they have to liaise with the IT people running the site. I suppose it helps when you use a ‘generic’ system like Disqus on a generic blogger site (which presumably auto-updates the software behind it), rather than one built on a custom-built website or one with little IT support that rarely gets updated (especially on the security front).

          2. When we were all on the DT letters site we had no control at all – so this is an improvement. We are also not bound any more by the naughty words that Disqus thinks we mustn’t use.

    2. What WOULD make things far easier for us all is for legit posters to actually type some proper context text instead of just posting a link to X or Y, because some people could have their PC/accounts hacked and used without their knowledge. We should also be careful of what image/data upload services we use, as some apparently are sources of computer viruses and malware attacks.

      I would also urge eveyone to make use of quality Internet Security software that includes proper firewall, anti-phishing/hacking/spam/ransomware software as well as anti-virus tools, and to always scan files when you donwload them, even from known sources/friends/family – because they could be hacked, as one of my ex-colleagues was a few years ago.

      Note also that spammers and especially hackers/phishers are adept at concealing the true links – the actual hyperlinks often bear no resemblence to the text printed on the link (often hovering the mouse pointer over the link shows the real one); similarly with emails and the email address.

      Blocking spammers and hackers can often be a futile exercise, as they often change their login/email address on a very regular basis, especially if they’ve had many bits from a forum or website. Even IP blocking, if available to moderators and the IT boffins in charge of site/software security can be frustrated as these people can now make use of VPNs or manually change their IP. I’m unsure whether blocking groups of IP addresses works either (i.e from specific countries) due to the increased of of VPNs and similar tech.

      I’m not an expert – this is just what I’ve gleened/hear from other people over the years. One thing I do use, other than the internet Security software (not Windows Firewall – only when I uninstall one package before installing its replacement straight away) is ad-blocking/cookie blocking ad-on software as part of my Firefox broswer. They help stop any pop-ups/unders and warn, like the browser does about possible dodgy links. None of them are 100% foolproof, but they stop the vast, vast majority if used in concert without slowing down my PC that much.

      1. We ban them and they usually move to other sites when they are blocked from here. We have attacks like this from time to time.

        1. You often find their ‘attacks’ go up around bank holidays and New Year, then subside when people are – under normal circumstances – back at work.

          4. Who are they, I haven’t seen anything on here , people keep altering their Avatars , so who is who is puzzling at the best of times.

          5. You change yours more often than most! Some of them look like saucy women, some have no avatar, but they post dodgy links (make sure you don’t click them) and attract followers who post inane comments like “I agree” and “thankyou for the invitation”. They are clearly not our regular people. Just flag them as spam when you see something odd.

  43. Glad tidings of comfort and joy?

    From Al Beeb:

    Former Goldman Sachs banker Richard Sharp is set to be named the BBC’s next chairman, the corporation’s media editor Amol Rajan says.
    Mr Sharp spent 23 years working for the banking giant and was reportedly Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s boss there…….

    1. Not so as you’d notice! I’m guessing he knows as much about running a publicly funded, left-wing, woke, biased, anti-Brexit, anti-Trump so-called entertainment company as the last few incumbents so should do awfully well!

      1. Not exactly Boys from the Black (Lives Matter) Stuff which is a wee bit surpising given how ‘progressive’ society has become.
        [PS I liked my inadvertent typo so I’m not planning to edit it!]

  45. Does Public Health England realise that we are in the middle of a national emergency?
    Given the harm caused by lockdown, there is surely no justification for the decision not to deliver Covid vaccines on Sundays

    Work weekends yourself do you, P O’Flynn, or are you just happy for everyone else to?

    1. Chemist shops are capable of giving jabs , this is an national emergency , yet the idiotic requirements re red tape are slowing everything down. Retired nurses and doctors are so frustrated .

      Vets are also capable of giving jabs , as are the Red Cross.

      1. It used to be quite common to see people in the ladies loos at Piccadilly Circus underground station injecting themselves. These vaccines are injected into muscle and not a vein though, aren’t they? Mind, diabetics also do that themselves?

      1. Ah, but Toms’ terms and conditions of service stipulate that you can be called up to duty twenty four hours a day. (Makes the hourly rate of pay about 47p)

        There was a four day period in Afghanistan when we did just that.

      2. It’s not easy carrying on fighting a war on Sundays, Bill, but one just has to bite the bullet.
        ;¬)

    3. Rather like the assertion that the virus is worse after 10pm COVID closing time. I think O’Flynn’s correct assertion was that if the pandemic is so serious, why haven’t the NHS come up with a plan to commit to 7 day vaccinations (and testing) months ago? He’s not asking staff to work seven days a week with no rest, but for shifts to be altered to cover the work needed to facilitate proper care. As has been said, viruses don’t go into hibernation on weekends or overnight.

      For me, this is a moot point, as I believe the vaccines (especially the Pfizer one) to not yet be proven safe, because none of them have been tested over the long term (several years), as they always have in the past. That’s why governments around the world have indemnified the pharma companies at their insistence. People should cast their minds back to 2010/11 to what happened with Swine flu and those ‘vaccines’, as well as those dodgy ‘trials’ funded by Bill Gates in Africa and India.

    1. As noted on the BTL comments, local authorities have made a rod for their own backs by imposing restrictions and charges on the use of their recycling centres.
      And no, this is not a new C-19 Wuhan related matter, they were doing it long before the virus emerged.

      1. Indeed they were. I caught an oil-tanker lorry driver in the act of flushing his tank in a New Forest stream. I was on my way to work & I sold the Southampton practice in ’85. There were no mobile phones then.

      1. I used to go there, but after 4 visits for a fault in some new glasses – cured by providing “a more expensive lens” – that was the end of the problem, and of my time as one of their customers.

        ‘Morning, B3.

        2. Morning, Hugh.

          I wrote a Without Prejudice letter to the head office of that useless organisation, four years ago, demanding a full refund of monies paid for spectacles after a clueless ‘optician’ in their service failed to diagnose my cataracts and gave me the wrong prescription.

          They gave me my demanded refund but I wanted to make the clown who misdiagnosed me squirm when I visited him. He asked me, “Did you actually write that letter yourself? I was most impressed with your clarity and how you didn’t lose your temper.”

          I replied that I had indeed composed the letter and that, directly due to his incompetence, I was now an ex-customer of the ‘bargain-basement of optics’.

          1. Morning Grizz, to balance things and to be fair to Specsavers I have had 4 pairs of glasses from them and all fine. They even repaired some free of charge. I understand they are a franchise and the one I go to in Dingwall is very good. They also have a mobile clinic for us out in the sticks.

          2. Morning, Spikey.

            I suppose that’s the problem with franchises. Some are good: some are duff.

          3. I bought my latest specs (varifocals) from Asda – about half the price I had previously paid at Specsavers.

    2. 328177+ up ticks,
      Morning SB,
      Canis Lupis in a ovis overcoat, many of us spotted them long ago, sadly many more didn’t.

      1. Canis lupus. If you are going to use latin nomenclature, at least print it properly in italics.

      2. Canis lupus. If you’re going to use Latin terminology, at least try & get it right.

        1. 328177+ up ticks.
          Morning Ptv,
          So I suffer from a typing lisp which you and the ex copper are at great pains to point out ( peoples infliction’s) otherwise being a gent.I would NOT have brought up the fact that your own printed rhetoric at times leaves a great deal to be desired.

          On the cooking front,seeing as the pair of you insist on shoving savory dishes in front of the worlds starving may I suggest a large pot of water brought to the boil prior to the insertion of heads would not go amiss.

          1. …otherwise being a gent. I would NOT have brought up the fact that your own printed rhetoric at times leaves a great deal to be desired.

            Only because you can neither write nor understand plain English.

          2. 328177+ up ticks,
            Ptv,
            With peoples such as you being role models would that not be a benefit ?

          4. 328177+ up ticks,
            Ptv,
            Bear in mind normal size heads take 10 minutes
            in the boiling process please allow double that with yours.

      3. Canis lupus. If you are going to use latin nomenclature, at least print it properly in italics.

        1. 328177+ up ticks,
          G,
          Why because an ex policeman says I must ?

          As a graffiti artist I find italics tend to run, sorry if you find this upsetting.

    3. It’s because she’s missed out on so much schooling and has time on her hands…

      ‘Morning, SB.

  49. Apparently the SAGE scientists have approached the Prime Minister with an urgent new warning on Covid-19 (all variants). In response the PM has called an immediate COBRA meeting of select Cabinet members. SAGE have determined that the virus can be spread very swiftly by intimate physical contact, similarly to HIV/AIDS and bacterial STDs.
    It is now expected that there will very shortly be a legal ban on all sexual activity, without exception. This of course includes all married and cohabiting couples of both sexes. An announcement is expected this evening.

    4. After being traumatised (not really but I was dismayed) by the inadequate people who so obviously took a detour out of my way as I took my walk this afternoon, I can only conclude that some of those people would obey such an edict.

      1. The thing that gets me is people who are driving their car alone, but wearing a mask. Who do they think will infect them? And whom are they going to infect in their turn?

    7. If the called the meeting room ARBTC – Auntie’s Room Behind The Clock – nobody would pay any attention to its vaporising.
      How about ASP – All Stupid Prats?
      Or BOA – Batty Old A@ses.

  50. 328177+ up ticks,
    How about that then,

    WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Denied Bail in UK
    All the while politicians and other known terrorist freely walk the streets.

      1. The story I didn’t like was about Amazon Delivery Drones programmed to record suspicious activity as they make deliveries. If you are prepared to pay a subscription you get to be alerted if someone is acting suspicious at your property and a drone en-route picks up potential trouble…

          1. Sorry my mistake. I thought for a moment it was still….. when did we last have a recognisable competent government?

  53. An inconvenient fact:

    Wittkowski, former Head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design at Rockefeller University, cautioned that, “Influenza has been renamed COVID-19 in large part.”

    According to CDC figures, the cumulative positive influenza test rate from late September into the week of December 19th was just 0.2%, compared to 8.7% from a year before.

    According to Wittkowski, this is because many flu infections are being incorrectly labeled as coronavirus cases.

    “There may be quite a number of influenza cases included in the ‘presumed COVID-19’ category of people who have COVID-19 symptoms (which Influenza symptoms can be mistaken for), but are not tested for SARS RNA,” Wittkowski told Just the News.

    Those patients may “also may have some SARS RNA sitting in their nose while being infected with Influenza, in which case the influenza would be ‘confirmed’ to be COVID-19,” he added.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/40e84b088840a211f567b39ad69a0948bc4d3048f3bd35801afd74a2a8380ff9.png

    Wittkowski challenges the notion that masks and social distancing have resulted in a drop in flu cases, asserting that flu and COVID-19 viruses are “more similar than people want to acknowledge.”

    1. I think quite a few wide awake people cottoned on to this when reports of seasonal flu infections (not ‘cases’ but real infections) were reported as being 98% below average. Maintaining the fear factor by converting flu to CV19 is so obvious but has any ‘journalist’ taken Whitty et al to task on this fraud?

    2. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”

      (Juliet in Romeo and Juliet)

  54. Steerpike
    Brexit causes food shortages – in France
    5 January 2021, 5:14pm

    https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltf04078f3cf7a9c30/blta714ca3eb7faff43/5ff49a1cb08361084bffce9a/GettyImages-1230435278.jpg?format=jpg&width=1920&height=1080&fit=crop

    Since leaving the EU on 31 December, Britain seems to have somehow avoided the apocalyptic scenarios outlined by those most opposed to Brexit last year.

    There have been, so far, no long queues of lorries at Dover; the lights have stayed on; and the nation’s supermarket shelves have remained full of food.

    It appears that Brexit has caused food shortages in one country though. Mr S was surprised to spot today, after all the dire prognostications about Britain’s own food supply, that one shop in France is struggling to get hold of essential grub. According to the news agency Reuters, Marks & Spencer has struggled to fill the shelves of its 19 food stores in Paris since Brexit day.

    As a result, the hungry denizens of the French capital are no longer able to get hold of ‘sandwiches, black rice and edamame bean salad, and turkey tortilla with curry’. If that doesn’t constitute a national emergency, Mr Steerpike isn’t sure what does.

    Who knew that the doomsday Brexit scenario would take place on the other side of the Channel, after all…

    *****************************************************

    BTL:

    tubby Brewster • 17 hours ago
    It’s not just Brexit, it’s an M&S Brexit.

    77
    •
    Reply
    •

    1. I note that the Beeb has disconsolately given up reporting from Dover on the anticipated chaos at the Channel ports.

      1. Maybe they should move to the part where the illegals are ferried in and report from there, instead of keeping quiet about the invasion.

  55. The MR is taking down the decorations. Gus and Pickles think it is a wonderful new game we have arranged just for them.

      2. I rather suspect that defends on your definition “help”. I rather think that it might be somewhat akin to a spaniel puppy’s help in writing one’s Christmas cards 😉

    2. We’ve done the same thing. Now bracing ourselves to stack them neatly in the attic; the roof height is about the same an old mine shaft, so that’ll be me crawling around like a troglodyte.

      1. We cleared out the attic a couple of weeks ago. It is too low to stand upright in. But there is now a lots of space – to be filled with NEW clutter!

        1. Our attic would make easily the best room upstairs, the pity is that one passes through our bedroom to get to it. I’ve often thought of putting in a new staircase and setting it up as a master bedroom, but then we’d probably have to fill the gite with clutter instead, and lose the income.

      2. So’s mine. After banging my head several times when adding more loft insulation, I bought myself a hard hat. No more cuts and bruises on the bonce (the lack of hair doesn’t help).

        1. Our attic is very spacious and was probably made so to allow for a third floor being added to the house.
          Unfortunately I made the mistake of flooring it out, with extra 2×5 joists to take the weight, so it’s now aaaaaabsolutely crammed with junk!

        2. In the next road are houses built by the same builder but about 20 years later than ours.
          I always envied a chum her walk-in attic.
          Maybe the servants were getting stroppy and threatening to go and work in a shop or office and a higher attic roof quelled the rebellion.

    3. Mine are going doolally as well, and telling me not to take the lovely play-tree away!

      1. Ah – we got round that problem by hanging a large holm oak branch from a rafter in the dining room. That was then beautifully decorated by the MR.

        G & P could see it and tried to reach it by climbing on nearby furniture – but it was just too far!

    4. We just played “Hunt-the-cat” in the loft.
      Little Cat went up the ladder whilst we were loading boxes of Christmas decorations. He was less pleased to be seized by the scruff of the neck and unceremoniously hauled out, yowling loudly. Can’t have cats prancing around up there, we can’t get them out – and I don’t want stashes of cat poo there, either. Daft moggy, now asleep on the sofa. Injured pride solved through application of cat treats…

      1. One of my clients converted an old hall-house which had been in use as a byre for a couple of centuries back to a domestic residence. It’s a lovely place with a living space which is open up to the ridge and massive oak beams (10 – 12 inches in both dimensions) dating from goodness only knows when.

        He’s been living there for over 10 years now, but until the middle of 2020 he had a series of old cats which (as they do on farms) turned up and adopted him. Last summer, after the death of the last old cat, he acquired two kittens from a neighbouring farm. Somewhat to his consternation they swarm up the vertical timbers and dance around on the beams (10 – 12 feet above the slate slabs on the floor), fortunately they also seem to have mastered the art of returning to floor level, so he’s getting a bit more accustomed to the idea. Fortunately for his collection of antique china they show no interest in either the Welsh dresser or the mantelshelf, but he has been obliged to clear the window sills as they like to sit and survey their surroundings.

        1. When I returned from Sweden, I rented a 3-storey house for 8 months before buying my own. Missy was a young cat & she would not use the stairs, but shimmy up & down the dark-stained bannisters. Once a week I would have to go over the pale scratches in the wood with a dark tan shoe polish.

          1. His beams are the original oak without stain or varnish and slightly rough in finish; so the kittens don’t leave marks.

            I can only imagine that having such a wilful little cat must have been trying – but then none of our animals have read the rule books, so we should expect such things…

            I trust you manage to move out without your landlord finding the damage.

        2. How lovely!
          That conjures up cosy images – the like of which are found on YouTube.
          :-D)

          1. It’s a lovely house, but I couldn’t post a picture here as it’s a client’s home. The kittens are a tabby queen and a black and white tom, just ordinary farm kittens but as adorable as most kittens are. They have started to investigate my keyboard yet so I’m still rather smitten.

    5. Ours are now down and the Tree is in the yard having completed it’s 2nd tour of duty.

      It will now rest up the garden beside the line path, when I can raise the energy to shift it up there, before carrying out it’s 3rd tour next Christmas.

  56. A COVID-19 vaccine may come without a needle, the latest vaccine to protect without jabbing

    Vaccines are traditionally administered with a needle, but this isn’t the only way. For example, certain vaccines can be delivered orally, as a drop on the tongue, or via a jet-like device.

    Vaccines that appear particularly suitable to needle-free technology are DNA-based ones, including a COVID-19 vaccine being developed in Australia.

    Needle-free vaccines are attractive as they cause less pain and stress to people with needle phobias. But they have other benefits

    https://theconversation.com/a-covid-19-vaccine-may-come-without-a-needle-the-latest-vaccine-to-protect-without-jabbing-146564

    1. I had my first and only ‘flu vaccination back in 1971 (coincidentally, half a century back). Within 15 minutes of being punctured I collapsed and suffered a severe adverse reaction.

      I have never had another once since and, it goes without saying (but I’ll say it nonetheless), I shan’t be having one for “bat ‘flu” either.

      1. I didn’t collapse but was very unwell for a month. The GP said it was, “Pure coincidence”. Yeah, right.

        1. M-i-L gets a severe reaction to the ‘flu jab but has now had both the (non Oxford) jabs with no adverse effects so far.
          Yer Frogs are very wary of this thing even though the ministers seems to be keen for people to get them.

    2. In 1966 the company for which I was working offered us all flu jabs. I accepted. The “jab” was carried out by aerosol jet, no needle just a hypersonic blast – I’m hazy on the detail. The company involved was Crookes Laboratories, a trustworthy business. The device looked like the make-up application sprays used in upmarket cosmetic concessions in department stores, I happen to know. It did not hurt as far as I can remember. I did not get flu for the next 50 years.

    3. You need to be careful if they install new “disinfectant” sprays in the doorway at the local supermarket.

      Are you sure that the water spray onto veggies is really water?

      1. The in-flight fuelling system for fighters had to be fitted with a governor as the full speed fuel jet was powerful enough to pierce the ultra light-weight tanks.

        The idea of a jet of liquid piercing metal makes the mind boggle somewhat.

  57. The dairy is a mess with bottles all ahoo,
    so I’m getting another wine rack, a 30 bottler too.

    2. Just 30 bottles, still doing a weekly shop then?

      One of our wineries is now selling wine in 16 litre boxes, they are obviously expecting many parents to start drinking if home schooling has to continue much longer.

      1. I’ve got one for a dozen and one for six, which leaves the rest sitting on concrete and I don’t want to have an accident when getting a fresh one late in the evening. 16 litre boxes, respect.

      1. Always remember a school chum who wore the legendary Iron Maiden T-shirt, and brought my attention to ‘Bring your daughter to the slaughter’.

        1. He got bored singing and touring so, in his spare time, took up fencing and became Olympic standard. He then got bored again, took flying lessons and rose to become a captain flying Boeing 757s for Monarch airlines.

      3. My wife and I used to enjoy fencing when we were at university.

        One of our fellow fencers was ranked fifth in the world at sabre.

        Although the rules are different, I was always proud that when HG used to fence epée against him she regularly took points, she never won a complete round, but she certainly dented his pride.

        2. I do have the distinction of having fenced for my university. The other oddity is that I also represented them at folk dancing.

        3. Respect!
          I foiled with a staggering level of incompetence for many years. Something to do with a lack of stereoscopic vision, apparently – that, and a lack of talent, too.

  62. I get email notices of “Third Sector” stories. These concern charities. From the various stories which have emerged it seems to me that the charity sector is rife with embezzlement, malpractice and incompetence with quite a lot of public money being squandered.

    Here is one story (no link as registration required) from the “Third Sector”

    “Mystery surrounds £40m ‘potential legal risk’ faced by Office for Civil Society
    05 January 2021 by Stephen Delahunt
    The Office for Civil Society has declined to confirm why it put aside more than £40m last year to mitigate against a “potential legal risk”.
    The department’s latest accounts were revealed as part of the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport’s annual report, which was published at the end of last year.
    According to the accounts up to 31 March 2020, the OCS showed an underspend of £42.8m due to funding held to mitigate a potential legal risk, but which was not subsequently needed.
    The OCS declined to comment on the nature of the case, saying only that the legal risk was “commercial in confidence” and had been resolved.
    As DCMS funding is voted on annually by parliament, underspends cannot be carried forward to be reallocated in the following financial year.
    Public spending at the OCS fell from £176m to £58m, but this was largely due to National Citizen Service funding no longer being included in the department’s budget.
    The NCS Trust became an independent, arms-length body in December 2018 with NCS funding allocated directly to it.
    As a result, the 2018/19 spend for OCS was much higher than that of 2019/20, as it also included NCS funding for the first eight months of that year.
    It is not clear whether the sum set aside for the legal risk related to the dispute between the NCS Trust and former provider The Challenge, which attempted to sue the trust for £26m after it lost a £60m contract to deliver NCS services.
    The case concluded with a £2.8m out-of-court settlement after The Challenge went into administration.”

    My highlighting.
    From that one can glean that the Office for Civil Society (a government department) is refusing to give information. One may also glean that the National Citizen Service receives around £120m a year of taxpayers money, although a look at their accounts indicates that they receive around £160m of public money each year.. National Citizen Service? I attach links. It seems to be some kind of youth club in England and Northern Ireland. As they involve around 100,000 young participant per year, that works out at £1600 per head. (Call me a curmudgeon, but that seems a lot. Well, it is larger than the budgets of some small countries.)

    Please see links.

    https://wearencs.com/about-ncs
    leading to
    https://foundation.lancashirecricket.co.uk/community-programmes/national-citizen-service-ncs/. etc.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget

  63. I feel rather sorry for Stella Creasey who used to be the prettiest woman in the House of Commons who is now being persecuted by her fellow Labour MPs because she has a baby and, according to them, this should debar her from a career.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/01/05/exclusive-stella-creasy-mp-claims-told-quit-leadership-roles/

    I found this BTL comment quite interesting :

    May I remind people that the greatest British prime minister in the last fifty years was the mother of two children and the worst was a woman without any children.

      1. That is only because you are a Scouser, Spikey.

        I find her tedious and, often, ill-informed.

  64. Hmmm – I’ve just completed a survey from the BBC asking me my opinion of their offerings and standing, what I though would be a pleasingly cathartic exercise, being able to vent my spleen and lambast them with my ire, just left me angrier , wanting to put flesh to my 0 in the 0-10 scores (all 0) I made sure any of my comments were factually correct, I got as far as establishing Gary Lineker earns over 10x more than a Surgeon before giving up and continuing with multiple 0s.

    2. I tried giving them an equally resounding review but they didn’t like my non UK ip address. I could have used VPN but couldn’t be bothered going back to fill out a survey when they would ignore my input.

    1. I did see somewhere that it was about 82.5 average, which is bang on what the actual average lifespan is for UK citizens.

        1. Those who reach the age of 82 can expect to live for another 5 years. Averages are fairly meaningless because children still die which makes a huge dent in the average.

  66. Police to stop people in the street and ask them why they are out during the third Covid lockdown. 6 January 2021.

    Police are to stop people in the street and ask them to explain why they are out during the lockdown, senior officers have warned.

    These people are our enemies just as much as the Stasi and KGB were to the societies that they intimidated!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/06/people-face-police-checks-street-explain-third-covid-lockdown/

    1. Let’s hope they don’t do this in areas outside London, but I bet they will, judging by the attitude of a local policeman I know reasonably well. He strongly supported Corbyn in the 2019 election and has the same sort of woke-on-one-side, authoriarian on the other attitude to policing. I wondered why he’s now an inspector.

      God help us all.

    2. And yet a “senior spokesman” says that they don’t want their “relationship with the public” to be irreparably damaged! Too late, mate!

  67. Had a reply on notifications this morning from Hopon – he’s ok but very busy working. I think his birthday (on Rastus’ list) comes up soon – so hopefully he will look in for our good wishes.

    1. Quite a few coming up this month:

      Lady of the Lake tomorrow 7th Jan; 8th Jan – Rough Common; 10th Jan – hopon; 16th – Legal Beagle;18th – Stormy; 23rd – Damask Rose, 27th – Citroen 1.

      Many Nottlers’ parents thoughts clearly turned to love in the Spring – possibly inspired by Robert Browning: O to Be In England Now that April’s There.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cObkNrIdzHs

      2. What have my parents’ spring thoughts got to do with it? They told me a stork dropped me off one winter morning.

    2. Good old Hoppy. He’s one of the top contributors to this column and much missed. Happy New Year, Hoppy! 🍷👍🏻

  68. Bitterly cold here from an overnight blizzard of 2″ snow driven by a stiff north-easterly. However, I’m feeling extremely invigorated due to my new health régime.

    Not only have I adopted the one-meal-a-day regimen, with no alcohol, no sugar and nearly no carbohydrates; I was thoroughly refreshed this morning looking out of the shower-room window at all the snow whilst taking my shower and finishing off by standing under a stream of freezing cold water.

    I need a stronger adjective than invigorating. I feel buzzingly alive!

    I’ll feel even better after I’ve demolished a plate of cassoulet. 😋

    1. I was hoping (yes) that my area of the East of England would get the large snowfalls so I could finally ‘test’ my car’s all-season tyres I bought 2-3 tyres ago. Oh well. Roll on the next two months.

      1. All season tyres are banned in Quebec in winter, car owners there must install winter tyres.

        Softer rubber is better below about 7C and the tread is really aggressive for snow.

        1. Hence why mine (we don’t exactly get much snow in this part of the UK) are summer-biased all-season tyres, but which still have the 3-peak mark so are can work well in sow, except when conditions are seriously bad. My current and previous car always coped (just about) in snow before, even the really bad one from early 2003.

        2. Problem here in the UK (especially over here in the west, the east coast is a little different) is that we don’t get temperatures consistently below 5 – 7 C. We get -3 today and 10 tomorrow. This means that winter tyres wear very quickly and work out very, very expensive.

          All season tyres are much more suitable for most of the UK.

      2. Yesterday I had two new tyres on the car. Then I heard we can’t go out. Just now had the Car Tax reminder through the letterbox.

        1. I just received a letter from mazda warning about a problem with the the hatch sensor. Apparently it can fail to go into standby mode which can result in the battery being drained if the car is left alone for a long time.

          Just what you want to hear in a lockdown.

      1. Er … that’s what I said, Billy. A freezing cold shower to wake you up for the day. I’m still buzzing two hours later!

        1. I see, now. I thought you meant you had a shower then went outdoors into the freezing cold rain!

    3. I am just like that when it is freezing and frosty early in the morning , letting the dogs out in the garden , whilst in my jim jams ..
      I really feel alive because the sudden chill and goose pimples etc are so invigorating .. I have even rolled in the snow before now.

      Moh thinks I am most unusual, he is a shivery wrap up warm type . May be the difference in blood groups perhaps, or me not being so sparsley covered as he , he is a racing snake!

    2. It seems that a black woman supported and was in favour of anti-Jewish comments.

      We clearly must be very selective when deciding when to be indignant and when not to be!

      1. Indeed – I wonder if the BBC are going to defend the white woman against the black woman who, it appears (to me anyway), defended an anti-semite comment from another black man. What I’d like to know is why this woman was even on the show, given other than one small TV acting credit, all she appears to have done (according to the article) is adverts.

    4. I was a student in the 70s and I remember a loud argument in the bar between two ultra-leftwing guys, “You’re an ‘effing fascist and come the revolution you’ll be put up against the wall and shot”, “Me a fascist? The Internationale has a line about cowards and traitors and they meant you. You’ll be shot as an ‘effing fascist coward. Scum”.
      They were arguing about a comma in their latest meaningless handbill that no one would read. That’s where it’s going.

  70. That’s me for this odd day – how bare the house looks; how puzzled the cats! Nothing to attack play with. Apart from the usual, of course!

    To market tomorrow – thank God it is allowed this time round.

    A demain.

  71. It seems that the Democrats have won again.

    Whether they have cheated or not I cannot judge but it certainly smells as Billingsgate must have done did when the water supply, hoses and pumps failed and they could not clean up for days on end.

    Where to now, Polly?

    1. It was Trump that lost it. He was told time and time again by friends and allies to tone it down with the tweets, but he just wouldn’t let go. Every poll, every focus group made it clear what a disaster they were but he would not take advice. It made him seem un-Presidential, and so, despite his achievements, he lost. 56% of Americans thought themselves better off in November 2020 than they did in November 2016, one of the biggest margins ever, and yet he still lost.

      1. I presume you think both sets of elections (I mean presidential and House 2020) were completely free and fair, with practically no cheating by local officials, the media or the tech giants. I mean, do you REALLY think that over 90% of people in some swing states actually voted when previous elections saw 20% less consistently? Seriously?

        1. That is what a deranged candidate does for you. A lot of normally cannot be bothered voters came out to vote for change.

          If there was so much cheating in so many locations by man or machine, one of Trumps lap dogs would have presented it but all they have come up with are suppositions and outlandish claims.

          Trump lost, it takes talent to lose against old guard Democrats but he managed it.

        2. Elections completely free and fair? Can you tell me when one of those happened? And the point is, it’s irrelevant, the side that won is the one in the lead when the fat sings. US elections have always been very bent, and Republicans coming on all virginal is a bit silly.

      3. Refresh, O ancient one. And get another glass of red whilst you’re about it!
        :-))
        Evening, Bill.

  74. 328177+ up ticks,
    Now, now nigie You well knew that when standing candidates down to give johnson an 80 seater win with NOT even a wiff of opposition to taint the placement.

    Farage: Boris Set to Sell the UK ‘Down the River’ on Immigration

          1. The chef told me a trick to alleviate that: a drizzle of red wine vinegar before you start.

            I’ll report anon on its success … or not!

          3. The strange thing is that beans have never made me fart. It’s cabbage that does that trick for me.

    3. Nice!
      I love peasant foods, such as cassoulet. Big dollop, no setting the food out with tweezers, and good flavour when made with fesh quality ingredients.

    1. Currently refreshing myself.
      Cocktail of my own invention, I call it an “Elastoplast”.
      Extra fiery ginger beer, with gin.
      Tastes of, well, elastoplast fabric strip. But, we’re out of other mixers…

        1. Vodya, not vodka?
          I don’t drink water, you know what ducks and fish do in it… ukk!

        2. Water ? Not good for you sweetie; no nutrients, no vitamins, only crap and hormones … Ask Piglet.

          Whereas, a glass of sherry works wonders ! … x

  77. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/24523b0962e09cce897ff816b3eb90aff8b39588210bbe7e3efba63b667f8732.png For those who (erroneously) think that the 1970s was the best decade for pop music singles, I give you that decades first chart, fifty years ago as now [yes, 1971 was the first year of the 70s. I am not numerically-challenged and I am aware that decades commence with a 1 and end with a 0].

    Bloody ‘Grandad’ by Clive Dunn, FFS! It only got worse as that weird decade progressed.

          1. Tell me.
            I’m profoundly depressed by this. I didn’t know (or feel) that I was that old.

          5. Nice to “see” you John.

            Born June 1936, he is 84. The voice isn’t what it used to be, and it was never the very best, but many of the songs are unforgettable.

            That one is a favourite.

    2. It was fairly early on in the 1970s that I lost interest in pop music. Glam rock etc. – what a load of rubbish.

    4. CCS’s Whole Lotta Love was great. The only song I don’t remember on there is Indian Reservation. Or did it go, “Took away their way of life, tommyhawk and the Bowie knife.”?

      2. Collective Consciousness Society’s (Alexis Korner’s loose aggregation of musicians-on-call) cover version of Whole Lotta Love was a reasonable effort; however, it pales against Led Zeppelin’s far superior original.

        1. I’m sure it did. I was more interested in the girls than the music. The other way round now.

          1. Thanks, John. I have a greatest hits compilation of Rory on CD. He is a star in the firmament (literally).

            On a proofreading level, [sic] is better served in square brackets. 😉

        1. Oddly enough, I never bought a single single, and only 2 LPs (for my brother and sister). It was all radio and TV music for me. That probably left me disadvantaged when it came to some great album tracks. But hey ho, I’ve sort of caught up since, especially with the interweb.

    5. Hey, Grizz.
      Do you have any hoops to jump through regarding residency permits etc as a result of Brexit? We have permanent residency from about 15 years ago, but must apply for an identity card – applications entered, breath not being held. How does it work in Sverige?

      1. I really don’t know, Paul, and, to be fair, I really don’t care. No one from the Swedish government has approached me yet and I’ll be ready for them if and when they do.

        I live with a Swedish national in a jointly-owned house which we pay Swedish taxes on. All my income comes from the UK and I pay my taxes on that there.

        I have a Swedish personnummer and a Svensk körkort. Apart from that I can’t see anything changing.

    2. Do you think it would be acceptable to visit my local bank dressed in full ‘highwayman’ garb or motorcyle helmet? Technically COVID-safe…p’raps I shouldn’t bring my umbrella, just in case it gets mistaken for a sawn-off shotgun or musket. 🙂

      My excuse: “But I only wanted to make a deposit!’

    1. As Britons take their leave of the EU, it would seem Americans have taken leave of their senses….

    2. Time for a meal, a walk and a nap. They are off into debating objections. Still on Arizona.

      Popcorn comes when Trump and Pence meet again.

  80. 328177+ up ticks,
    If we look at the ersatz tory party’s actions from outside the box, it could be seen as pay-back for the 24/6/2016 result, if these lock-down are past into law then in time there will be many who would crawl over broken glass to re-enter the eu at any cost, 48% to start with.

    The 4.5 years delay have shown us their true agenda was damage limitations regarding brussels, then the tad stronger flu dropped in their laps, the potential was not lost on the old treachery campaigners.

    I am just wondering under what covert cover we will continue to finance brussels.

    The “deal” before the exit was the catch attachment for future latch lifting.

    By my book it would have been total severance, 1 month
    delay, then answer the phone.

    We are being made to pay and up until now it is being accepted by the peoples.

  82. Brendan O’Neill
    The censorious war on lockdown sceptics
    6 January 2021, 2:44pm

    Britain at the start of 2021 doesn’t only have a Covid problem — it has a censorship problem, too. The germ of intolerance is spreading. Anyone who dissents, however slightly, from the Covid consensus will find him or herself branded a crank, even a killer. They will be hounded and demonised; online mobs will demand their expulsion from media platforms and from public life. I fear that this Salem-like hatred for sceptical voices will, like Covid itself, have a long-lasting and severely detrimental impact on this country.

    In recent days, the censorious fury over Covid scepticism has intensified. The pitchforks are out for experts and commentators who query the seriousness of the pandemic or who suggest that lockdown is not an ideal policy. Karol Sikora, Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and others — all are now routinely branded as reckless, dangerous spreaders of ‘disinformation’, as toxins in the body politic. ‘Stop platforming them!’, columnists and their intolerant army of online cheerleaders scream at the BBC or anyone else who dares to give these sinning sceptics three minutes of airtime.

    It’s the venom in the assaults on the sceptics that is most disturbing. First up for the pitchfork treatment was Karol Sikora, the ‘positive professor’, the celebrated oncologist whose speechcrime is that he spent much of 2020 cautioning against hysteria about Covid-19 and predicting it would fizzle out eventually. Last week, Owen Jones, cancel culture’s witchfinder-general, wrote an extraordinarily vindictive piece about Professor Sikora in the Guardian, accusing him of spreading ‘disinformation’ and of being ‘dangerous’. He should be No Platformed by the media, Jones demanded, the regressive left’s answer to every opinion or argument they disapprove of.

    Spreading disinformation is an incredibly serious charge to make against someone. Disinformation doesn’t only mean being wrong — Professor Sikora, like pretty much everyone else, got some things wrong about Covid-19 in 2020. It means deliberately promoting false information in order to deceive people. Does Mr Jones think Professor Sikora did that? That he concocted a knowingly false narrative in order to hoodwink the British masses? That such charges can be made against clearly honourable medical experts shows how out of control Covid intolerance has become. Just being wrong is now proof of malevolence. ‘You made a mistake? Get to the stocks.’

    Next up was Sunetra Gupta. She’s been getting flak from the mob for months but it reached a crescendo yesterday when she was on the Today programme. Why is the BBC giving space to a nutter, people asked? She isn’t a nutter, of course. She’s an infectious disease epidemiologist at Oxford University. But she bristles against the Covid consensus and that makes her a bad person, virtually a witch, in the eyes of the zealous protectors of Covid orthodoxy. Professor Gupta has written about the barrage of abuse she receives via email. ‘Evil’, they call her.

    Like Sikora — like everyone, at various points, when confronted by this novel virus that exploded in early 2020 — Professor Gupta has got some things wrong. She overestimated how much herd immunity had been achieved last year. But her chief crime, judging from the hysterical commentary about her, is that she is critical of harsh lockdowns. She is a founder of the Great Barrington Declaration, which proposes that instead of locking down the whole of society we should shield the elderly and the vulnerable while allowing other people to carry on pretty much as normal. It is this perfectly legitimate discussion of a social and political question — the question of lockdown — that has earned Gupta the most ire.

    This became clear in a piece written by Sonia Sodha for the Observer towards the end of 2020. Scandalously, the article refers to Gupta and others as ‘agents of disinformation’ — again, that unsustainable charge that they are purposefully propagating false information in order to deceive the public. The idea that there is an alternative to lockdown is ‘magical thinking’, Sodha suggests. Making such claims is ‘corrupt[ing] legitimate debate about social restrictions’, Sodha says.

    There you have it, in black and white. The current surge in intolerance towards sceptical voices is not merely about holding scientists to account for factual errors — it is about chastising them, and others, for making certain social arguments, for criticising political decisions, for challenging the ideology of lockdown. Under the guise of upholding scientific truth, the crusaders against scepticism are in fact circumscribing social discussion about how society responds to crises.

    This is an assault on the freedom of everyone — experts and non-experts alike — to engage in robust discussion about policy and liberty. Apparently lockdown dissent is not a legitimate use of freedom of speech. As Sodha says, ‘Academic freedom does not imply freedom to spread disinformation’. (Remember: ‘disinformation’ now largely means ‘people saying things I disagree with’.)

    We have a precedent, of course, for this chilling of social and political discussion under the cover of protecting science. For years now, anyone who criticised any aspect of climate-change policy — who challenged the alarmism of it all, who argued that economic growth must take precedence over environmental policy — has been denounced as a ‘denier’, as an anti-science heretic.

    Even those of us who accept that climate change is happening, but who think that in a world in which three billion people still live in poverty we nonetheless need massive and ambitious programmes of industrialisation and progress, will be denounced as sinful ‘deniers’. And if you want a taste of how terrifying the censorious war on lockdown sceptics looks set to become, remember that mainstream environmentalist thinkers have previously called for ‘deniers’ to be put on trial. Green author Mark Lynas proposed setting up ‘international criminal tribunals’ for climate-change deniers because they will be ‘partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths’.

    We’ll hear this in relation to Covid sceptics, too, I guarantee it. Chase them off their airwaves, get them out of the universities, hold them responsible for death and destruction. Yesterday’s mercifully brief deletion of talkRADIO’s YouTube channel, apparently on the basis that talkRADIO hosts Covid sceptics, was a disturbing glimpse of how ruthless Covid intolerance will become.

    There’s a great deal of scapegoating going on here. Britain has been in and out of lockdown for nearly a year and the virus continues to spread. Some in the pro-lockdown lobby are looking for people to blame for the failure of the policy they themselves argued for and supported. And they have landed upon sceptics. Just as eccentric elderly women were held responsible for inclement weather and crop failures in pre-modern times — and often burnt as witches — so sceptical voices are treated as the devils of our time, making Covid worse, causing people to die.

    Covid is real. Hospitalisations are rising. Many people are dying. But that does not mean we should suspend public debate about what works and what doesn’t work. On the contrary, in times of crisis we need more discussion, not less. And in times of stifling conformism, such as we have now, we need more heresy.

    It’s the heretics who ensure that we don’t all sink into nodding-dog conformism. Through promoting alternative, possibly eccentric views about Covid and lockdown, they shine an essential light on the possibility that we are currently making a terrible mistake with our constant lockdowns. Sikora, Gupta and others are doing a great service to society; it’s their demonisers and aspiring censors who are wreaking damage by seeking to restrict public discussion and in the process shrink the possibilities for how to deal with viruses and other social challenges.

    Robert Ingersoll, the 19th-century American lawyer, writer and sceptic, put it best: ‘Heresy is the eternal dawn… Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to a new thought. Heresy is a cradle. Orthodoxy, a coffin.’

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-censorious-war-on-lockdown-sceptics

  83. We are watching panorama special Question Time .

    Is Fiona Bruce the sister of Andrew Marr, she is constantly interrupting , and never allows anyone to answer a question.

    1. God help them, especially with (IMHO) nitwits like Anneliese Dodds on the panel. All this will be is yet more pro-Starmer, pro-lockdown, pro-authoritarian measures against free speech and Tory bashing.

    1. How does she think the rest of us feel? And what about parents of young families living in tower blocks?

    2. I have some sympathy with teachers trying to deal with online teaching AND in class work with children on “key workers” who still go to school all the time (a fact not generally understood).

      My darling grand-daughter was telling me how – in online lessons, where teachers post PowerPoint stuff on line – naughty children can get hold of the PP chart and alter it and then re-post it – all innocent like!

      Because she is a self-motivated girl who enjoys slaving away (if that phrase is still allowed) it pisses her off because precious teaching time is wasted while the teachers try to remedy the sitch.

        1. I know nothing, gg. But I am aware of how ingenious children can be at outwitting teachers!

          1. Perhaps then, Bill, they could break into the ONS files and update them with the correct figures. 🤞🤞

    3. If Johnson had any intestinal fortitude, he would order these bloody-minded teachers back to work and withdraw recognition of their unions. He could make it a matter of National Security. If they refuse, he should do what Ronald Reagan did with the bolshie air-traffic controllers back in the 80s and sack the lot of them. Of course, the Liebour Party would kick up merry hell, but what could they do, given Johnson’s majority.

      They could then be offered their jobs back under a new contract, which is a better deal than President Reagan gave the striking air-traffic controllers. The teachers would soon be falling over themselves to sign-up, when the harsh reality of having no income with which to pay the bills kicked-in.

          2. I was too young ( or naive more like ) at the time to equate an academic explaining fourier analysis or 14c Hebrew law with the scruffy CND and such herberts.

        2. I thought it would be worthwhile to start a BA (General) course with the OU when I retired, Maggie, and I wasn’t impressed.

          Fell out with a fool of a ‘lecturer’ who insisted that there was no such thing as pure music and that all classical music was intended to conjure up a picture in the listener’s mind.

          I disagreed and told her she’d obviously never listened to J.S. Bach.

          1. I hear what you are saying DM.

            There are lecturers and lecturers , I spent some time at Southampton Uni a couple decades or more ago doing a catch up course .. I felt it was all so rarified , rather similar to being wrapped up in the pages of the Guardian , brain washed , whilst undoing all my self belief .

            Too much discussion about nothing .

      2. Where the unions are concerned, Boris was always going to be an Edward Heath, not a Margaret Thatcher.
        Britain run by militant teaching unions – it doesn’t bear thinking of!

    4. At least she is still being paid – unlike many others who have lost their jobs and/or don’t qualify for benefits.

  86. Evening, all. I am not sure we shall ever be able to stop it happening again; frighteningly, my local rag has a poll asking if more draconian measures should be taken against those questioning the lockdown. Over 80% say they should! We’re doomed 🙁

    1. So they don’t understand the relationship between economy-work-salary-cash-taxation (nhs:education:services:bennies:pensions etc) all underlined by the FTSE.

        1. Seems to be Thayaric’s solution – well, I don’t know about taxing the rich bankers (who will all emigrate), but certainly he seems convinced that printing more money is the solution.

          1. Looking at how some of those megarich have benefitted for this panic there might be something to be said for recouping the occasional billion.

            Why don’t we just borrow some money from china? They own everything now anyway.

          2. A better idea would be to repudiate all loans that China has made and call it compensation.

    2. Now you see how totalitarian societies survived, rather than being laughed to cabbage.
      My oppo here is the same, Dorset-dwellimg teacher friend too, English boss… nobody seems to be able to think for themselves or understand the implications.
      EDIT: Fucking depressing, isn’t it? Only those who gained some kind of freedom in the last 20-30 years seem to understand. Just ask Poles, Hungarians how it works.

  87. Woman behind UK ‘clap for carers’ announces its return. 6 January 2021.

    Annemarie Plas, a Dutch national living in south London, who started the clap for carers, announced an end to the ritual in May because of concerns it was becoming politicised.

    On Wednesday, Plas tweeted that she was relaunching the weekly clap. She wrote: “We are bringing back the 8pm applause in our third lockdown. I hope it can lift the spirit of all of us.”

    Well I didn’t clap the first time and after what I’ve seen of the NHS in the interim I definitely won’t be doing it this time either.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/06/woman-behind-uk-clap-for-carers-announces-resume-thursday-annemarie-plas

    1. Groan – do we have to go down on one knee while we’re doing it? Two for the price of one.

    2. “Annemarie Plas, a Dutch national living in south London, who started the clap for carers”

      Patient Zero, was she?

    3. Judging by the comments in the Daily Mail, quite a few people are less than thrilled by this news. Hopefully William the Appeaser will resist the tempation as well.

      2. At the time, I used to say “Let’s hear it for shop workers” as I paid at the checkouts of the supermarkets I use. Always raised a smile.

    6. I didn’t clap either and won’t be doing so this time – but our local A&E were good the other night – very professional and efficient.

      1. Good for you and OH.
        They did what they signed up to and get paid for it.
        That’s called a job.

      2. I’ve had to call an ambulance twice in the last four weeks and have no complaints about the service but this was only necessary because my local GP’s have done a runner!

      3. I would never clap.

        The NNUH was excellent in August when I was so unwell – most of the time. Ridiculous delays and long silences from medical people – but very good when they were with me. But that is what hospitals are supposed to do – cure sick people.

        1. There is something very strange about applauding people for the job which they are paid to do.

          1. “All the world’s a stage,

            And all the men and women merely players;”

            The clappometer is broken.

    8. If everyone piles onto the streets to clap for 2 minutes , because they feel obliged to , that is not a good idea , people won’t be able to resist chattering and swopping bugs .

    9. Given the non-help I’ve received from the NHS of late (the OT team are going to ring me about coming to measure up for the extra rail MOH needs for the THIRD time), forgive me if I give them the Agincourt salute.

    10. I would be pleased. to give the NHS Mahagement (a self contained Oxymoron) the Clap

      1. No, however there is a small minority of die-hard Trump supporters who would willingly destroy democracy to keep Trump in power.

          1. I would agree with Cochrane but the damage is already done. Neither side is able to accept defeat honorably, the proud boy marches are just likely to be the final nail in the coffin.

          2. The only way America can get back to fair and impartial elections is to require voting in person and indelible dye added to the thumb of the voter. (Allowances for the Sick and those serving overseas).

          3. The protestors should be dealt with properly, though given the events of the summer one doesn’t hold much hope.

            Better to ask the question: How did it get to this?

          5. No, AC, I meant how did someone like Trump win in 2016? The country was so repulsed by Clinton that it installed Trump. That’s what was so alarming.

            The USA has a long history of violent protest. It didn’t start with Trump.

        2. There’s about as much excitemen and hot air about Trump and miltary coups as there is about rigged votes in Georgia (other states are also available). It’s all hot air and media-driven – where’s the evidence?
          The serious part of all this is the undermining of democracy, same as the denial of the Brexit vote. The individual occurrence is immaterial, but if the attitide takes hold that voting REALLY changes nothing, then democracy dies and totalitarianism takes over. That’s re serious point about cheating, lying and denying – and it goes both ways.

        3. Unfortunately, you are quite correct. It is all about him and his determination not to be considered a loser.

          1. Add the debts from his loss making businesses which are due to be called in and a fairish number of incidents which leave him liable to prosecution and he’s rather caught between a rock and a hard place… all of his own making.

        4. Close, but no cigar

          However there is a large majority of die-hard Biden supporters who would willingly destroy democracy to keep the Democrats in power.

          1. Problem is, it’s as likely to be used against them as for them.
            Playing with fire – everyone gets burned.

          3. No police might be an awakener too when the shit hits the airconditioning – who you gonna call? The undertaker!

          6. Or even by planting stories about rigging votes, so undermining faith in the democratic processes.

          8. so you didn’t see trumps rant this afternoon?

            How about republican state governments rigging the electoral roles to remove democrats from the roles? That one did reach the Supreme court, the voters were reinstated.

            I don’t attempt to claim the dems are saints, Pelosi and Clinton are as bad as any of them. They are all playing a game to beat the other side, to hell with the consequences.

          9. Short-term advantage. It’ll go badly in the long term. Problem is, plenty people will be hurt in the process.

          11. I saw it and I think Trump’s being stupid.

            that But if you think that the democrat’s/Biden’s votes are accurate I suggest you never play cards for money.

            There are far too many anomalies for the votes to be true.

            I don’t think Trump won, but I do think the votes were rigged and having got away with it, the Democrats will repeat the scams in future.

          12. maybe they need an independent audit of the results. Russia, China and Zimbabwe know all of the tricks.

            It’s very good vote rigging when several strongly republican state legislatures and election machines fail to see it going on, let alone stop it.

          13. I think an independent audit might get there, but that presupposes the machines themselves are not swapped.

            It’s a very dirty business and the action should have been taken immediately, it’s too late now.

    3. No – a lot of people who’ve been cheated, lied to, deceived and abused for decades elected a man who worked for them. The media edifice fought him, insulted him – and them – for the entirety of his time in office. Now, that group are celebrating their victory and, for once, the majority have stood up and said no.

      Frankly it’s time we did something similar to push back against the hard Left nutters. They’ll swarm out in their ten thousand or so and really need to face 5 million bearing down on them to realise that twitter is not reality and that fundamentally, they’re wrong and unwelcome.

      1. “…the majority have stood up…”, they really don’t represent the majority, they really don’t.

  90. Carl Sagan writing in 1995:

    “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

    The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

    1. It was also suggested about forty years ago that the US would turn in on itself and become rather insular because internal problems with an uneducated fast breeding mass would out weigh the benefits and successes of previous decades .

      What happens in the US , the UK is not far behind. We should take heed .

      We have practically sold our soul to the yellow peril.

      1. 328177+ up ticks,
        Evening TB,
        Sad to say TB but I would put the UK ahead of the USofA.
        Truth be told,
        @rseholes have sold this nations mass souls repeatedly via the ballot booth ignoring the clearly shown fact the Country was
        deteriorating daily, especially these last three decades.

    3. Arthur C Clarke’s (not my favourite SciFi author, but made some good predictions) 3rd Law; “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

    2. Well if it was like Portland, not much I imagine.

      Quite an appalling state of affairs being encouraged by a sore loser.

          1. No, in fact.

            You just have a very serious case of TDS !

            As well as being extremely tedious of course 🙂

          2. It is Pence that has the.

            So to be even more tedious, show everyone the proof of the fraud. Come on now, not in a couple of days like Giuliani promised.

          3. Are you on the right site ?

            Surely you’d be more comfortable somewhere socialist ?

          6. oh insult after insult.

            If you must know, slightly right of the nominally conservative Canadian conservative party.

            Are you sure you are in the right place? Even Breitbart is not as blindly extreme.

          12. Polly.

            Richard has every right to comment on this forum, he believes
            in free speech, as do most of us on this site;
            You may not agree with his views but please try not to be rude.

          13. But it’s fine when people are rude to me, Garlands, and say the most horrible things.

            At such moments, you are nowhere to be found.

            So as usual, you are as biased as it is possible to be.

          14. Get off your high horse, Polly and stop acting like
            Daddy’s spoiled little girl; I am sure he taught you
            better than that, it is unfortunate you didn’t follow
            his advice.

          15. Look who got onto her high horse first, Garlands.

            You.

            What’s more your bias has long been a feature of this board as you favor and excuse your favorites as a matter of routine.

            So you have no grounds to criticise others at all !

          16. Given the courts used procedural methods to stop actual evidence being presented, and threats were made against people coming forward with evidence, that doesn’t wash. That sounds like a socialist Police state – mainly because leftists control every branch of the civil service (including local and national level – vote counts, electoral commissions, etc) in the Western world, and have done since the 1960s for the most part. Now they are just using the pandemic to make their move to control us all wiothout having to win a legit vote.

            We’re going the same way despite our notionally conservative government, who’ve bowed down to Whitless & Co, the media doing their bidding because they either agree with it (left wing outlets), want the old establishment Tories back (DT/Times [hence their hatred of Trump]), or the tabloid ‘Tory’ papers who don’t give a f*** and are only concerned about sales figures via means of sensationalism, whether true or not.

          17. Wow! Another downvote from JenniferSP. And yet, no explanation. You have to wonder why.

          18. Right. You forget that the partisan US appoints their civil service to suit their stripe.

            Republicans were in charge

          19. They only appoint people to positions in the judiciary that are vacant at national level. The cases heard at state level are not affected by that, whereby judges are appointed by local and state politicians in the same manner. There’s not a ‘clearout’ every time an election flips from red to blue or back.

          20. Do you seriously think that 10M more people voted for Sleepy Joe Biden than Obama in 2008? Or that in some of the swing states, well over 90% of people voted, including 100%+ in some areas. And yet, no voter fraud – nuffin’ to see here, move along.

          21. I believe that Bidens vote count is more believable than the b.s. excuses being pushed by right of right conspiracy peddlers.

            Do you really think that Trump lost because more than 100% voted. In a supposedly republican county (where the election commission would have been republican)? It would have been a pretty dumb bunch of election officials, not forgetting the stupid lawyers who failed to notice.

          22. Each county does not have its own electoral commission – it has, like we have, local council employees (that presumably are NOT appointed by politicians) and it’s at state level that those organisations exist, but like in our civil service, most of the ‘coalface’ workers are not appointed and thus leftists can infiltrate them, as our Electoral Commission has been (IMHO). It was only if a republican-voting senior official notices something odd (and that they aren’t a never-Trumper) that they do something about it and raise the issue/investigate, and even then it’s the state people who can say yea or nay to allowing that.

            Given in most of the swing states, Trump lost by a few thousand or tens of thousands, a few votes here and there over every voting area make a huge difference to the outcome. Of course, it helps when an entire area or city’s official bring in ‘ballots’ where 100% of them are for Biden – what are the odds of that happening? Seriously?

            If the vast majority of the people counting and collating the votes and totals for each area are Dem-supporting local council workers and who’ve seemingly been given instructions to do as some more senior Dem-supporting ‘official’ tells them to do, do you think they’ll all do as their told or spill the beans, letting the cat out of the bag and Trump win?

            If you can accuse Trump/GoP supporting officials of, its naivete in thinking that the Dems wouldn’t cheat (which the have form for, even in their OWN internal elections) and never-Trumper establishment state officials and politicians wouldn’t turn a blind eye in order to unseat President Trump by any means, because the pandemic gave them the opportunity (as is being shown in the UK) to gain power using many useful idiots in the media, ‘experts’ in the medical and scientific fields and civil servants, as well as ‘scared’ members of the public.

            I think that the same would’ve happened here in the UK had the General Election been held in 2020 and been allowed to proceed.

    5. I can imagine the reaction quite easily – police grovelling and abasing themselves while media/politicians/celebs rush to show their solidarity.

  92. Bloody lockdown – I’ve been banned from visiting my wife in the care home – I used to see her through her window on the ground floor – not any more even though the residents and staff have had their first jabs :o(

    4. Terrible news Alec.

      I do feel some sympathy for the staff though. If they don’t comply they will be hung out to dry.

        1. I’m so sorry for you both, Alec. It must seem it’s going on forever, but it won’t. KBO!

      1. I will be trying Maggie but I’d have to ring them first so they could turn her towards the window (she’s not mobile and spends the day in a water filled chair)

      1. I suspect it will be Sturgeon and co rather than the home. Better for all if they comply than be shut down as an example, which I am sure Sturgeon would happily do.

        1. Yup, I meant the bastards are the ones that ordered and enforce such shameful policies, not the care home staff themselves.

          Should have made myself clearer.

      1. They’d recognise me as they often see me in the hi-viz stuff when I’m on recoveries

  93. I seem to be the subject of a scam where we cannot see the end point yet.

    I just received a package from China with a pair of supposed Ray ban sunglasses. Not something that I would order since I wear prescription glasses and they came with adetachable sunshade attachment. No invoice, no unauthorized activity on my credit card, nothing beyond the package. This is the second package that I have received, the last one was a pack of seeds from another anonymous donor in China.

    The police have not heard of this particular scam, the closest that they have seen is someone using stolen credit card details to order goods to be delivered to another address – check for a delivery notification, then nick the package from the front door.

    So there may be a Santa Claus and he is living in china!

    1. I have read something about seeds being sent from China.
      Check it out, RL, because it seems to be dodgy – and, from the seed angle – actually illegal.

      1. Good evening, Anne

        Didn’t a girl called Suzanne use to send tea and oranges that came all the way from China?

    3. Richard, I had a similar gift last year, a sachet
      of, supposedly, sunflower seeds, I had not
      ordered them, they were not in a seed packet.
      Later last year I read that poisonous sunflower
      are being sent to countries by ‘yer Chinese.’
      Apparently these gifts arrive to those who
      order goods which are delivered directly to
      one’s home.

      1. Maybe I am being rewarded for questioning the US election fraud claims?

        Strangely the packages have used my street address which we do not use for mail we have an anonymous post office box for that.

        1. When I said destroy, I meant it. Incineration is best. Don’t just throw them away.

    6. There was a recent scam along those lines my way – but where a fake ‘delivery guy’ pops by your home to ‘return’ the ‘wrongly-delivered item’, when in reality it is to pick it up for him and his chums. It means that the real receipiant of the fraudulently-bought product (say after stealing their post and geeting a credit card, or nicking their own credit/debit card details somehow) gets it WITHOUT having to put their own address on the ‘deliver to’ order.

      Ta-da! Very sneaky.

      1. It looks as though the ability to add pictures has disappeared – possibly something the mods have done to counter the spammers?

          2. She reminds me of some of our cats many years ago. We had a ginger queen and her progeny were rather like Joseph’s coat. We had about 6 generations of them over the years – and every single one was proper hunter.

          3. Lily is a teenager, if the estimate of her age when we took her in was correct. She’s lively but not a hunter, though she may have been when young. She doesn’t want to go out unless it’s sunny and warm. She’s very sweet and definitely a ‘daddy’s girl’.

          6. Yes, I can see that when I click on the link, but it’s the ability to directly post a picture which has disappeared.

      2. It looks as though the ability to add pictures has disappeared – possibly something the mods have done to counter the spammers?

      3. Eddy – I can’t either. I have Boris’s family line from Ali Kemal to present day. Boris studied Classics at Oxford but I cannot find the degree he got if any.

        1. Similarly nobody could remember Obama at his place of further education. Let’s face it he doesn’t even know where he was born or that his mother was white.

    1. not quite what he said to the mob at midday.

      Too late though, he called for his supporters to march in Washington, he gave one of his we were cheated rabble rousing speeches and now it’s anyone’s guess what happens next.

      1. Reports here of shooting.
        Where’s a snowstorm when you need one, to calm the hotheads?

        1. trouble is if there was a shooting was it proud boys, antifa, blm or a surrounded cop who feared for his life?

          Doesn’t matter really, any excuse to start a good riot.

          3. Doesn’t matter really, any excuse to start a good riot.

            By whom?

            The wonderful enriching BLM and antifa have been rioting on and off for much of the last year. White patriots have not though God knows they’ve had enough provocation as their country is taken away from them.

          4. Clearly lessons have been learned from the failure to enforce the Law with BLM and Antifa rioting…..

      3. This is the 2A fantasy brought to life, but it’s only a fantasy. More importantly, it destroys Trump within the GOP.

        2A = 2nd Amendment

          1. Oh I get it, anyone who doesn’t support everything Trump says and does, is part of the swamp.

          2. Do you mean to say it took you until now to work that out?

            The truth, of course, is that the swamp he leaves behind is considerably wider and deeper.

          4. The Committee don’t like him, but the supporters do. They won’t so much after this.

        1. Two recounts in Georgia.

          Do you think that the rioting in Washington is justified as well?

          1. No but understandable as no invstigations have taken place on the election.Its ok for the left to riot but not the right.

        2. The individual States certify their results, and that is done by the elected administration in the State. The Constitution is very clear, Federal elections are a matter for the States. This means that no one has the the authority to question what they do, and the SCOTUS has always been extremely reluctant to get involved. It did half heartedly for Gore, this time it just said no.

          No SCOTUS is ever going to risk the tag “The President chosen by the SCOTUS”.

  97. Watching the Repair Shop on Beeb .

    Re paint, why does egg tempura behave so solidly , from liquid egg yolk to an almost cement like quality ?

    2. Good evening, Maggiebelle

      Who are your favourites? I greatly like and admire Steve who repairs the clocks and intricate machinery and Will who repairs things made of wood. In fact I like them all.

      1. Morning Richard ,

        I like them all, and what I really enjoy is the repair of treasured items .

        Years ago , one of the family cracked a very old beautiful heirloom,whilst vaccuuming the living room, it was a Satsuma ewer, probably a few hundred years old , it was glorious .

        We should have had it repaired , it was more than two foot high , it then lay in 4 bits in a box in the loft for a few years , untill we had a clear out….. sob sob sob!

    3. I’ve always wondered that.
      Mind you, try washing egg off a plate if you forget to soak the night before.

          2. Tempura is Japanese food cooked in batter. Paint is tempera – but there are eggs in both.

          2. One of my very favourites! Have you heard the version of “Winter Song” by Sam Fender? First time I thought it was awful, but its growing on me!

      1. I take it that this issue isn’t a knock-on effect of the recent spammer/hacking/phishing episode? Maybe Disqus updating their software/features?

        1. Had to check a box to permit posting of pix and videos. Seems to work, you might need to refresh.

  99. I’m sick & tired of the ubiquitous expression, ‘roll-out’, in the context of vaccines.

    Roll out the barrel
    Roll-out a road roller
    Roll out a Jumbo jet
    Roll out the red carpet
    Roll out giant stones for Stonehenge and the Pyramids

    Surely, vaccines should be distributed and jabbed …

    1. Don’t forget to roll out the red barrel!

      our vaccines are stored and stockpiled, all that rolls out here are restrictions.

      It is fun to watch the federal and provincial government finger pointing, I just wish that they had lances and were jousting for real.

    2. Many other buzzwords used by the MSM are getting more than tiresome, especially at the moment. I think heqadline writers used to work for the PR departments of washing powder firms (who always said the new ‘improved’ product was 2x as good as the old one, presumably meaning they were useless five iterations ago, are make whites so bright you need sunglasses to put the washing out), given how each one has to go much further than the last, so every small development is a ‘bombshell’, services are always ‘on the brink of collapse’ despite never doing so, yadda, yadda.

    1. The picture icon is missing from the bottom of the posting text box. Hmm… and their suggestion to drag ‘n drop (“Just try it!”) is missing, too.
      Nope, tried everything I know, no luck.
      Bummer! ]:-((

      2. That’s odd – I’ve got the picture icon and posted a pic of Lily but it only showed as a link to open.

      1. Excellent. I can get within a gnat’s crochet of the bass Oktavist’s sound but find it extremely difficult to sustain for any length of time…. 🙁

    4. My Malvolio smile is fixedly in place along with my yellow, cross-gartered stockings and fawning manner. Bill boasts that he has remained the same weight for sixty years so he would play the part of the lean Sir Andrew Aguecheek but who amongst the Nottlers could play the part of Sir Toby Belch?

      Good parts also going for boys pretending to be girls and girls pretending to be boys!

      2. Me, probably, at the moment. Following my NYR to eat less and exercise more in order to lose the lockdown lbs, I have been following the regime. I weighed myself today and I had put on 1 lb! I have suppressed the inclination to give up and go back on the booze, but I’m only giving it until the end of the month 🙁

          4. In the grand scheme of things,
            especially in the world we live
            in today, does it really matter?
            Still it persuaded you to post
            again; I hope you are hale and
            hearty.
            Best wishes to you for a Happy,
            Healthy and Peaceful New Year.

          5. Greetings, John, and Happy New Year.

            I actually typed ‘licence’, as I invariably do. My Yank spellchecker evidently changed it when I was not paying proper attention. I need to be more alert.

  104. 328177+ up ticks,
    Gotta feeling johnson is starting to believe he needs a boost.
    Keep it in mind nobody but nobody in with a political shout
    is truly fighting the English / GB corner.

    Why would the EC go all patriotic at this moment in time ?

    Reform UK! Electoral Commission Approves Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party Name Change

  105. I see that there is a suggestion that retired teachers should assess children’s coursework.

    Having observed the total cock-up of the drive to recruit retired GPs to vaccinate people, one can just imagine the impossible hurdles that would be placed in the way of anyone applying. It will be a real dog’s breakfast.

    1. They’ll need training (and a sustificate) in lifting heavy exercise books.
      Or a course in the dangers of straining their index finger switching on the ‘pooter.

    2. If they are retired, chances are that their standards would be far too high to give many passes.

      1. I kid you not, but years ago, when I was still at the chalk face, I went to a seminar on marking French GCSE. The criterion was that it had to be understandable to give it top marks. While I didn’t agree with that, I followed it and I was the only one to get the correct answer about giving an A to an ungrammatical load of tosh.

    3. I wouldn’t volunteer if they asked! Let other idiots step forward; I’ll be hiding behind the bike sheds 🙂

    1. Well, I guess your cage will be moved out of the Oval office pdq; what are you going to do for the next four years, PP ?

        1. ‘Tis not my Conservative Party, PP; mine would resemble that of Margaret Thatcher.

          You appear to be having ‘a little local difficulty’ – or a rebellion – outside the Capitol just now.

          How good are your First Aid skills ?

    2. Again! What magic do the Democrats have that enables these vertical steps on the vote graph? And why does nobody think it’s worth explaining or investigating?

    3. Oh dear look. More democrats voted than Republicans, it must be fraud!

      You should know damn well that they report results by county and a few large urban counties are solidly democrat.

      How much did your deep state pay Pence to say no to Trumps demands?

        1. Do you mean that the close to $500 million that he conned out of supporters for his election appeal fund isn’t enough for him?

  108. What a day. Scan arranged for 1pm today in Cardiff. One and a half hours drive from home. Nothing to eat after 7am so I am rumbling and still one and a half hours til I get home for supper. Had my radioactive injection and told to wait for 90 minutes before I would be called to go under the scanner. Five minutes later the lights went out. Apparently someone had unearthed the main cable feeding the entire hospital. Not only that, the emergency generator failed to kick in. I was left in a small cubicle with faint emergency lighting. Couldn’t even read my book I had brought to kill time. When the scan finally took place it took much longer as my radioactivity was wearing off. Should be home by 8.15 hopefully.

  110. Some scary pictures coming out of Washington at the moment.

    Hundreds of riot police calmly just pushing the demonstrators away from the capitol without any violence.

    The woman that was shot on capitol hill has just died apparently,I just hope that there are no more.

  112. Such excitement in the Macfarlane house! I have a date for my hip replacement! 19th January, which came a bit out of the blue! Not too much time to worry about it but have to isolate from this weekend and have a covid test 72 hours beforehand! Since I’m fairly sure we had it last February, should be OK! Unfortunately granddaughters 2nd birthday is 21st and she was in New Zealand last year, I’m determined not to miss this one!

          1. Oh Geoff! Tom Coyne as well and Tom Kilgour went to our church! Actually he lived next door to the vicarage and Alan Hull of Lindisfarne lived the other side!

          4. I don’t think so Bob. I think he was from Newcastle. His son-in-law took over when Alan died and I saw them live a couple of years ago at Kinross.

      1. Thanks Belle! It really was a surprise! I expect someone either died, or has covid! The hospital is Forth Valley and it’s about 3 miles away!

        2. That is one of the best hospitals in Europe… yes they use the word Europe , you lucky girl.

          I expect you will have a wonderful experience of care .

          1. They they were absolutely fantastic with my daughter when the twins were born rather suddenly, 7 weeks early!

          4. No. But you would need to be registered with a Scottish GP except in the case of an emergency.

    4. But … but … you will have to give yourself injections.
      Have you have time to complete your Manual Weight Handling Course, Your Diversity Course and round up all 21 pieces of paper to prove your worth?
      All joking aside – Hoorah and Best of Luck.
      p.s. the after care specialists are not called Physioterrorists for nothing.

      1. Haha! Thank you for the greetings! Didn’t you have the same thing quite recently (and survived!) Old man has spent a happy half hour looking at footage of the op! Me? Not so much – I don’t want to know! I mean I’ll be asleep won’t I?

        1. I was offered the choice.
          I very firmly stated that I wished to go to sleep and wake up when the job was done.
          The anaesthetist laughed and replied “THAT is the right decision”.

      1. Thank you Jennifer! I really will! I need to be able to get up off the floor for the grandchildren without groaning!

        1. My father is 88, he had a hip replacement a few years ago and he could still crawl around with a great-grandchild for a little while (at least as recently as last summer when they were allowed to visit his lawn).

          He’s waiting for the other one (should have happened early April 2020) so if you’ve got the go-ahead I hope his won’t be too long now.

          Mum has a steel knee and a titanium one as well as a dicky ticker and severely arthritic feet and she can get down on the floor at all now. She did her exercises very thoroughly but it is very difficult to get a 90° or less bend on an artificial knee joint and the feet are the last straw.

          1. Feet of straw, eh?
            :-))
            Actually, sounds pretty good to me. Long may they play with their grandchildren!

          2. Great grandchildren Paul. The youngest of their grandchildren is almost 22 – and lives in New Zealand along with his parents and elder sister.

            The UK grandchildren are all over 30 and parents.

            My sixth great niece or nephew will (god, or whatever other deity is watching, willing) arrive next week.

          4. Yes. Unless things go really badly wrong and they have to ship one or both to the Simpson which would be their “we can’t cope with it here” step. No real reason to suppose it will come to that, but we are all nervous after what happened in 2019 (when she lost one at the half-way stage and had to have surgery to remove the sad little remains).

            By this time next week we will know. If she doesn’t go into labour earlier she is booked in for a c-section on Jan 12th.

          5. Sorry. My worries getting in the way. Thanks Sue, all good wishes are welcome right now.

          6. Lucy thinks it’s hilarious and I often hear a little voice behind me saying “ough” when I get up! I have no rotational movement at all and I’m walking like a wobbly toy – not much forward motion but rolling side to side!

        2. My father is 88, he had a hip replacement a few years ago and he could still crawl around with a great-grandchild for a little while (at least as recently as last summer when they were allowed to visit his lawn).

          He’s waiting for the other one (should have happened early April 2020) so if you’ve got the go-ahead I hope his won’t be too long now.

          Mum has a steel knee and a titanium one as well as a dicky ticker and severely arthritic feet and she can get down on the floor at all now. She did her exercises very thoroughly but it is very difficult to get a 90° or less bend on an artificial knee joint and the feet are the last straw.

    6. May you have astonishing good luck.

      Do the exercises, do the exercises and then do the exercises some more.

      I did as I was told, (seriously) and that mantra served me well.

      Do the exercises.

      1. Thank you sos! Honest guv, I will! I need to be mobile and not in pain! The grinding and clicking are not nice!

        1. Agreed.
          I had mine done about 15 years ago. It was necessary because the real problem was my knee, but without having the hip done, the knee would have been a waste of time.

          HG’s a physio and she bullied me before and after both ops. A great bully and brilliant results.

          Do the exercises!

    7. Sure it’ll go fine! Look forward to the after, with no creaks, groans or squeaks. :-D)

      1. A long time ago a local cat was called Sammy – it came home from the Vet – Sammy detached….

    2. My furry friend “helped” with the removal of the decorations last night. He kept knocking over the boxes into which the baubles were to be stored and placing himself exactly where I needed to put my feet.

    3. A basketful of mischief.

      They are an amazing colour with very prominent stripes , with long noble noses , could they be Siamese crosses?

  115. UN Agenda 21 – Great Reset – Hancock – Gates – Schwab – Davos – Alert !

    What better way to wreck a nation in pursuance of the sustainability targets of Agenda 21 and Great Reset than to cripple it with an artificially exaggerated public health issue?

    Soon to be followed by further economic crippling through the introduction of net zero into the energy sector……

    As we know from the statistics that 2020 is nothing out of the ordinary insofar as the overall death rate is concerned, there surely has to be an ulterior motive…..

    http://ellse.org/uncategorized/covid-19-and-its-overall-effect-on-england-and-wales-death-rate/

    Hancock smoothing to Klaus Schwab, best friend of Soros and Gates, at Davos…….

    https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/956851034797891584

    Hancock smoothing up to Soros……..

    https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1075319635464081409

    Hancock smoothing up to Gates………..

    https://twitter.com/matthancock/status/1088390904858202112?lang=en

    So this looks like politicians being bought by billionaires and multi million dollar non jobs in the political afterlife just like Nick Clegg !

  117. Skimming through the TV news just now its amusing to note the horror, huffing and puffing at such disorder in DC. For some mysterious reason their responses to the last year of leftist-inspired unrest was very different.

    I for one am glad we have such an unbiased media.

    1. It’s a lefty world, and unhappily, I think it’s here to stay. Until it causes the return of the Dark Ages.

      1. It’s a Lefty world because we on the Right sat with our thumbs up our arses while the Left took over.

    2. John Sopel will be delirious with joy tomorrow on BBC Radio 4 Today programme. He is getting revenge on Donald Trump and savouring it.

    3. As others have pointed out, the violence, looting and firebombing of properties was concentrated in cities under Democrat control and in those streets and areas with high value real estate plots. In other words the activities of Antifa and BLM were coordinated by Democrats and the intention was to devalue properties and thus enable a real estate grab by large corporations.

      Judging by some of the anti-Trump rhetoric on this forum I am beginning to think that quite a few posters are both thick and blind. No need for me to cite names. Just measure the downvotes and the ludicrous insistence by some that Biden was worth 80 million votes.

      The man is a notorious crook and grifter along with the rest of his family. He has advancing dementia and already resembles his death mask. His running mate is one of the most hateful specimens in Washington, even running Nancy Pelosi close, some achievement for a non-entity.

      I just wish as with Sos, Ruth DM and Johnny that folk here would wake up before it is too late.

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