Friday 26 March: Vaccine checks in pubs would be incompatible with a liberal society

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its comments facility (now reinstated, but not as good as ours),
Intelligent, polite, good-humoured debate is welcome, whether on or off topic. Differing opinions are encouraged, but rudeness or personal attacks on other posters will not be tolerated. Posts which – in the opinion of the moderators – make this a less than cordial environment, are likely to be removed, without prior warning.  Persistent offenders will be banned.

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/03/26/lettersvaccine-checks-pubs-would-incompatible-liberal-society/

628 thoughts on “Friday 26 March: Vaccine checks in pubs would be incompatible with a liberal society”

  2. Why shouldn’t schoolkids see cartoons of Muhammad? Spiked 26 March 2021.
    The controversy at Batley Grammar School shows how intolerant our society is becoming.

    One thing that was obvious by mid-morning was that the school had largely given in to the protesters. Somewhat bizarrely, a police officer was sent out to read a statement to a crowd who largely shouted him down. Headmaster Gary Kibble declared the lesson ‘completely inappropriate’ and said it ‘had the capacity to cause great offence to members of our school community’. Teaching materials have now been changed, and the lesson concerned has been removed from the school’s programme. A further audit of learning tools is to follow.

    Morning everyone. While his actions are not admirable in themselves Mr Kibble’s instincts for survival are sharp enough. He must know, as anyone of even moderate perception would see, that he’s not going to get any support for defending Free Speech or indeed Freedom at all. While the Education Secretary has spoken up about the death threats to the teacher, (as he is obliged to do) the rest of the PTB are cowering down praying that no one draws attention to them! If Kibble had spoken up he would now be following his hapless teacher down the road to the Unemployment Office to the accompaniment of a campaign of vilification and abuse that would ensure he never worked again in the Education Industry.

    This is the modern UK: a dysfunctional Police State led by a Cowardly Elite, on the cusp of joining the Caliphate!

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/03/26/why-shouldnt-schoolkids-see-cartoons-of-muhammad/

    1. If only Christians had reacted in the same intolerant way in decades past, I supposed the Left would be counter demonstrating against them, they don’t appear to worry when intolerance is Islamic driven

    2. Those in or aspiring to power are fearful of losing a large potential block of votes that may be the key to winning power in every marginal constituency. That fear being compounded even more if large numbers of the indigenous population in disgust give up voting for parties that pander to vocal minorities. As a number on these threads have commented before, it doesn’t look like it is going to end well.

      1. Morning Stephen. With a modicum of luck, we, and the rest of the Nottlers, will be out of here before the White Holocaust begins!

        1. Morning Minty et al. Too many World leaders don’t have children and I submit have zero investment in the future.

          1. Boris Johnson’s policies rather undermine that theory.
            He’s busy destroying his own children’s future.

      2. If a decent level of spoken English were a requirement of the right to vote, then whole swathes of that ‘community’ would be exempt.

    3. 330803+up ticks,
      Morning AS,
      The instruction manual is resting between the two dispatch boxes & there is halal fodder on the parliamentary canteen menu.

      What sort of stance are the politico’s in with
      a shout taking ?

    4. This is how the law happens in Britain today; no manifesto, no debate, no elections. Just de facto passed into existence by a mob of bullies, craven panderers and a spineless government with no commitment to freedom or principles.

  3. Suez canal blockaded, not much effort being made to clear it, have we moved to stage two in saving the planet?

    2. I would like to see it blocked for as long as possible, so that people have to start doing without their Chinese tat!

        1. My computer is a Fujitsu, made in Japan. I avoid Chinese made stuff whenever I can, though I am aware that their electronics creep in everywhere.

          2. There is a surprising amount of electronics manufacturing outside China too, you know.

          6. And China got richer!
            The day of reckoning for all our little luxuries is almost here. Unlike what the greens believe, it is not some phantom “climate emergency”, it is Chinese power.

          7. I could tell you stories about the 6 little “yellow men” who came to the IOM TT back in the late 50s with their cameras.
            They were back a few years later with their first Hondas….the rest is history.

          9. Other people’s engines.When they couldn’t match MZ on the track they poached their top rider Ernst Degner who luckily “broke down” in the race at Suzuka .Two races later Honda had disc-valve induction…..Walter Kadden’s invention!!

          10. I know this is a popular cliché in the west, but from my experience working with Chinese and Japanese companies, I don’t think it’s altogether true. China has invented plenty of stuff in the past, eg microscopes, gas pipes, gunpowder etc. The reason why they never went further than they did is probably political – only the West gave people the freedom needed to create a technologically advanced society.
            I have great respect for Japanese companies. Spoiler: I worked for Fujitsu for some years.

          13. 330803+ up ticks,
            HM,
            Agreed but I see it as many want UK independence at fire sale price.
            I want total severance regarding the eu
            and a “Made in Great Britain” mass surge on a multitude of products.

            Sadly the lab/lib/con coalition group, voters want ” the deal” it seems.

        2. 330803+ up ticks,
          Morning HM,
          Is that through indigenous preference or we cannot produce our own ?

          1. Everyone wants luxuries they can’t afford. If we paid the real cost of our food, clothes, electronics etc, instead of relying on exploiting animals and low wages in China, we would all realise how poor we are.

  4. Good morning, all. Sort of sunny start to the day.

    I see the oaf Williamson has said something sensible, for a change – though what’s the betting he’ll be ordered to withdraw h statement and apologise?

  6. Mail to YKW…

    I think you’re probably looking at subversion and a soft coup.

    The big question surely is.. why are Mr Johnson and Mr Hancock apparently so unenthusiastic about restoring freedoms and returning the UK to normal?

    The clue is surely in your own words long ago… “this looks like an exercise in global government”

    It surely is “an exercise in global government”!

    I don’t think that Mr Johnson and Mr Hancock are calling the shots. All my research indicates that they have devolved power and that it is Mr Gates who directs your administration on C-19 affairs.

    What’s more, Mr Hancock appears to have more authority than Mr Johnson. That might well be because he has known Mr Gates for some years since meeting him at Davos and so is the original contact.

    I think the foregoing fits in with all events since this started and with what we are seeing now.

    I also think you’ll find this is linked to Legal Net Zero and the likely subversion which brought that about in the UK. As we can see from the “Bright Blue” affair and other coincidences which have just been discovered.

    What’s happening is surely not just about the virus. The virus is, imho, being used as an excuse for something else.

    That something looks likely to be a power grab by Davos in the form of a soft coup led by Mr Gates.

    In effect, I think this is probably the latest manifestation of what has been happening behind the scenes in the UK since at least 1997.

    1. Morning Polly, have you read Conservative Woman yet? There’s a good summary of the probably scenario on there.

    2. The precedent in global government was set in the UK in 2014, when they passed legislation redefining marriage.

      If I recall, there was no democratic mandate for it whatsoever. No Queen’s Speech, no White Paper, no Green Paper, and it was in none of the manifestos of any of the parties standing for election in 2010. Nor was there overwhelming public support for it. All we had was a public consultation where the Minister Lynne Featherstone (Liberal Democrat) announced “you are going to get this whether you like it or not; all we are interested in is how to implement it most effectively”.

      It was guillotined through Parliament. The Second Reading gave front bench spokesmen Maria Miller (Conservative) and Yvette Cooper (Labour) 45 minutes each to speak in favour of the Bill. Those against had to battle it out for the Speaker’s eye for their three minutes alongside the sycophants supporting the Bill. The Lords were whipped to push it through.

      This disgrace was repeated throughout the world. Even Catholic Spain, the home of the Inquisition, pushed it through on the nod.

      Whatever your sympathies for the paramount interests of LGBT, it has now set the model as to how democracy should be conducted in the future. Any further elections or public participation in democracy is therefore a sham.

      Only a revolution or serious constitutional reform can remedy the situation now. Therefore, the ER or the BLM riots are only the start of “interesting times”.

      I am glad I am not young.

    1. UN sticks collective fingers in ears and shouts “La la la we’re not listening, and by the way the brown envelopes are late this month”

  8. Morning all

    SIR – When I voted Tory at the last election I did so because I believed that Boris Johnson was a libertarian and indeed a Conservative. How wrong I was.

    If I have to show proof that I have had a Covid vaccination before I can walk into a pub (report, March 25), Mr Johnson will lose my vote.

    Robert Taylor

    Nottingham

    SIR – Mr Johnson wants us to use pubs but doesn’t want to insist on Covid passports, so has suggested that it may be a decision for “individual publicans” to make.

    The Government has to come off the fence: either we need such passports or we don’t. Has it learnt nothing over the last year about the consequences of confusing rules and laws?

    Mike Metcalfe

    Glastonbury, Somerset

    SIR – Pubs already have to check the age of their patrons, and employ security staff partly for that purpose.

    However, there is also a thriving trade in false IDs among underage drinkers. If vaccine passports are to be introduced, there must be a foolproof way of ensuring that the unvaccinated cannot claim that they are.

    ADVERTISI

    Stella Currie

    Bramhall, Cheshire

    SIR – Mr Johnson has suggested that people want him to protect them.

    If he put that claim to the vote, I suspect he would be surprised by the number of us who would rather make our own decisions now.

    Sandra Hancock

    Starcross, Devon

    SIR – What is the Prime Minister so worried about?

    We have vaccinated 90 per cent of those at risk of dying from Covid, and the vaccine has been shown to be 100 per cent effective in keeping people out of hospital. There is no justification for keeping us locked up.

    As Acton wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Mr Johnson is in danger of losing the country. It is time to get back to normality.

    Ian Rennardson

    Tunbridge Wells

    1. Yo Ep[

      If I have to show proof that I have had a Covid vaccination before I can
      walk into a pub (report, March 25), Mr Johnson will lose my vote.

      The Barclays Banker has lost mine already. Come on Lozza get your party going

    2. “…Has it learnt nothing over the last year about the consequences of confusing rules and laws?…”

      If government learned from its mistakes it wouldn’t be government. It is incapable of learning and changing. It’s run by charlatans, administered by people who haven’t changed in a century and beholden to no one. Realisation and adaptation are anathema. It exists only due to inertia.

  9. SIR – Congratulations to Andrew Roberts for his robust defence of capitalism (“Greed is good and the PM shouldn’t be embarrassed for having said so”, Comment, March 25). It was refreshing (and rare since the Thatcher era) to hear a prime minister express support for the free-market mercantile system, which is the bedrock of anglophone nations’ prosperity.

    As Mr Roberts reminds us, Dr Johnson’s definition of “greedy” as “eager, vehemently desirous” may in the producer promote the interests of the customer.

    I also appreciated his eloquent defence of the common law’s protection of contract and property rights, which are the foundations of capitalism.

    Advertisement

    John Kidd

    Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    1. Careful now – the Left hate capitalism – while they drink their frothy coffees and eat their fast food, wear their silly clothes and graffiti monuments.

      The confusion people have is that market competition and motivation is the bedrock, not the owernship of capital. If Joe can go set up a business selling books then he can compete against Amazon – except he can’t, because the state makes it incredible difficult to do so and actively helps Amazon to profit by applying absurdly high taxes to Joe’s little business that multi national Amazon can avoid by investing in avoiding it.

      I rant about tax a lot but it’s justified as taxes are unfair – not ONLY because they are too high but because they favour the giants over the small competitor precisely because the state sets out to crush as much from the business and worker as possible and in so doing, the majority of the water gets forced out and the little guy gets stuck.

  10. SIR – Like Frankie Cable (Letters, March 25), I had a swollen calf but did nothing, to avoid burdening the NHS, until it became painful, when I visited my local surgery. The receptionist took notes at the door, I had a phone call before I even got home and was given an appointment that afternoon.

    The doctor examined me, said that it could be deep vein thrombosis, and I was able to collect blood-thinning tablets that evening. An exemplary service, for which I was very grateful.

    Charles Francis

    St Ewe, Cornwall

    SIR – I was pleasantly surprised by my phone appointment with a GP and would readily choose this option over an in-person meeting.

    I was given more time to discuss my issues, I felt heard and valued, and I found the whole experience much less intimidating. I do hope this system will continue for those of us who prefer it.

    Eve Wilson

    Hill Head, Hampshire

    1. “”to avoid burdening the NHS”
      Ye Gods!
      You have PAID for the NHS so you should just USE it! Rationing by another name – and people in Britain think it’s normal! Brainwashed!

      1. Should one applaud on the way in (just in case you don’t survive the experience), on the way out, or both?

    2. Back in 1969 my father took me to the local hospital A & E one Saturday afternoon- I could not put one of my legs on the ground- it was agony in my knee which would collapse when I walked or climbed stairs. After waiting around on one leg for an age, the doctor who was patching up a boy who had been injured playing rugby, turned her attention to me, and after a brusque and cursory examination put a bandage on my knee telling me she could see no damage and booted me out- presumably as a time-waster. My father placed me across the car’s back seat as I could not by that stage, bend my knee.
      That evening, I was sweating buckets and the following morning, I was in a very bad way. My mother phoned our GP who lived a few roads away- and he came to see me- which was very unusual on a Sunday morning. He took out a tape measure from his Gladstone bag and measured both my knees. He then asked my mother: “Where is your phone?” My mother enquired as to why on earth he needed the phone and he replied that I was seriously ill, could not be moved and he would be calling a mobile X-ray unit to the house to X-ray me in bed. He further added that I should be given a bowl or bucket for any call of nature. The X-ray man arrived- I had osteomyelitis and nearly lost my leg.
      At a very young age I had learned there was a combination of good and bad in our health service and my GP was the good- there was plenty of the bad lurking in the hospitals I had the misfortune to visit back then in the 1960s.It’s just as well Dr Castle did not try to diagnose me over the phone as I would have probably had my leg amputated at the knee if there was any delay.

      1. That type of tale is frightening.

        Almost pure luck for you that it was a good outcome.

        We were told by our quack that one of our children’s problems was all in his mind. He ended up hospitalised after an emergency admission and had to undergo an immediate operation.

        It wasn’t the only episode of incompetence. We eventually changed practice.

        I don’t expect a GP to know everything, but at least send the patient up the line if unsure, particularly where otherwise healthy individuals suddenly produce symptoms.

        1. Dr Castle diagnosed me with something that had eluded various doctors for two years in our previous town- they had suggested that I might not actually be ill- cooking the thermometer readings. Quite frankly, all GPs have fallen short of his ability since I last saw him in 1973- and I have little faith in doctors in general, these days. In my opinion, you have to be in charge of your own health and not expect much from doctors, who these days do not look at you as an individual but as part of some amorphous group that should be medicated with the drugs relevant to that group. Truly frightening.

          1. We have been extraordinarily lucky since that episode.

            Our French GP’s have been outstanding and the whole system of testing, checking and follow-up has been a real eye-opener after the NHS.

          2. One of my friends married a French doctor- I went to the wedding and he tells me that he is amazed by the endless stories of misdiagnosis he hears from people in the UK. My friend’s brother- who has had a litany of health problems and bad diagnoses was told he had a “double inguinal hernia” and would be operated on. He was going to visit France to see his sister and her husband Jean insisted that my friend be examined which he organised. The clinicians he saw said he had no hernias and the pain he experienced in his upper thigh and groin was a trapped nerve and proceeded to show him how to deal with this problem- which still ails him from time to time.

          3. One hopes that Artificial Intelligence will be routinely used within a few years to query both diagnoses and treatment. Sadly, I know of some recent horror stories, including a leg amputated a week or two after a telephone consultation. (blood clot or infection, leg removed above the knee, 70+ year old in good health)

        2. A few years back I found myself unusually short of breath. I went to the docs, they gave me antibiotics and after another appointment, steroids.

          Those didn’t change me and I was getting worse – showering had me passing out. I went to the docs and was told, in a very calm, very dead pan voice… yes… you should probably go to hospital….can someone drive you?

          Oh, I’ll drive myself!

          No… same calm, deadpan voice.

          OK, I said, I’ll get a taxi.

          No… I’ll arrange an ambulance.

          Crikey, what’s up?

          Well, you’ve an O2 rating of around concrete, so are in imminent risk of respiratory failure and cardiac arrest, possibly brain death through oxygen starvation.

          All in that calm, dead pan voice. It was hilarious. I felt fine – apart from not being able to walk ten metres without stopping.

          1. Great to recall the calm, dead pan voice; imagine the effect on you if he’d gone straight in with:

            “YOU’RE GONNA DIE if you don’t get to hospital NOW”

          2. I think that was pretty much the crux of it! I got in – it’s never taken me half an hour to walk the 500 metres before – and immediately got hooked up to all sorts of blood thinners, injections in the tummy, adrenaline… they set someone beside me to stop me wandering about.

        3. We had a similar experience with our nine year old elder son. Over 18 months “oh, it’s just a virus”; “he’s malingering”; “it’ll go away by itself” and yes “it is all in the mind”. Then a 2.00 am call to the emergency doctor. He was a locum, Indian. Five minutes later he was on the phone to Addenbrooke’s, to expect our son within the next half hour. His developing appendicitis had turned into an emergency.

          1. Morning PM. Your mention of “oh, it’s just a virus”. How many times have we all ears that when going to the doctors? And yet, for a year, we have all been frightened out of our wits, imprisoned, tested and/or vaccinated (maybe). Funny that!

    3. Back in 1969 my father took me to the local hospital A & E one Saturday afternoon- I could not put one of my legs on the ground- it was agony in my knee which would collapse when I walked or climbed stairs. After waiting around on one leg for an age, the doctor who was patching up a boy who had been injured playing rugby, turned her attention to me, and after a brusque and cursory examination put a bandage on my knee telling me she could see no damage and booted me out- presumably as a time waster. My father placed me across the back seat as I could not by that stage, bend my knee.
      That evening, I was sweating buckets and the following morning, I was in a very bad way. My mother phoned our GP who lived a few roads away- and he came to see me- which was very unusual on a Sunday morning. He took out a tape measure from his Gladstone bag and measured both my knees. He then asked my mother: “Where is your phone?” My mother enquired as to why on earth he needed the phone and he replied that I was seriously ill, could not be moved and he would be calling a mobile X-ray unit to the house to X-ray me in bed. He further added that I should be given a bowl or bucket for any call of nature. The X-ray man arrived- I had osteomyelitis and nearly lost my leg.
      At a very young age I had learned there was a combination of good and bad in our health service and my GP was the good- there was plenty of the bad lurking in the hospitals I had the misfortune to visit back then in the 1960s.It’s just as well Dr Castle did not try to diagnose me over the phone as I would have probably had my leg amputated at the knee if there was any delay.

  11. Teacher wins UK poetry prize with poem on dual heritage. 26 March 2021.

    Marvin Thompson, of Jamaican heritage, says he wrote it as a gift for his children, ‘to their future selves’

    The Fruit of the Spirit is Love (Galatians 5:22)

    Dusk reddened a Dual Heritage neck, hands
    and a moustache – its ends curled with wax. Jason Lee?
    I stood below his dreadlocks in woodland

    and reached up to touch his feet. A whirring fan
    greeted my waking eyes, the house sleepy.
    I’d dreamt both Dali’s Christ and someone hanged.

    “… a pineapple on his head…” sang football fans
    and a comedian blacked up as Jason Lee,
    mocking Rastas. Did Jason beg Jah:

    “Please keep this from my kids.” Should I tell mine
    I filled my lungs with ’90s minstrelsy
    and sang, a teen lost in lads’ mag England?

    Who taught me pro-Black talk was contraband?
    The me who cwtched Dad whilst watching Spike Lees
    was shoved down basement stairs, feet tied to hands.

    Embarrassed, should I play my kids Wu-Tang
    and other rap that set my rebel free?

    One day, when they walk their kids through woodland
    will they sing calypsos or ‘Blood of the Lamb’?

    Imagine that!

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/25/welsh-teacher-wins-uk-poetry-prize-with-poem-on-dual-heritage

    1. This poem is bad enough, without it’s stupid phrasing. If it has to exist, why not

      The Fruit of the Spirit is Love (Galatians 5:22)

      Dusk reddened a Dual Heritage neck, hands and a moustache – its ends curled with wax. Jason Lee?
      I stood below his dreadlocks in woodland and reached up to touch his feet. A whirring fan greeted my waking eyes, the house sleepy.

      I’d dreamt both Dali’s Christ and someone hanged.

      “… a pineapple on his head…” sang football fans and a comedian blacked up as Jason Lee, mocking Rastas.

      Did Jason beg Jah: “Please keep this from my kids.” Should I tell mine I filled my lungs with ’90s minstrelsy and sang, a teen lost in lads’ mag England?

      Who taught me pro-Black talk was contraband?
      The me who cwtched Dad whilst watching Spike Lees was shoved down basement stairs, feet tied to hands.

      Embarrassed, should I play my kids Wu-Tang and other rap that set my rebel free? One day, when they walk their kids through woodland will they sing calypsos or ‘Blood of the Lamb’?

      1. Agreed, Stormie.

        But that is the problem with a great deal of “modern” poetry. It is poor prose printed in silly lines.

        1. “But that
          is the problem with a
          great deal of modern

          ….poetry it is…

          Poor prose,
          printed in silly lines”

    3. How can you come from two places? Do you have to cut yourself in half and get it posted to you?

      If I moved to Switzerland I would never be Swiss. I might have that nationality, but I would be British. A little island abroad.

    4. This poem was found in her effects after she died. It was written by Queen Elizabeth I and is a very good example of poetry from the heart and the regrets of old age- as understood by the “Virgin Queen.”

      When I was fair and young, then favour graced me.
      Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.
      But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore:
      Go, go, go, seek some other where; importune me no more.

      How many weeping eyes I made to pine in woe,
      How many sighing hearts I have not skill to show,
      But I the prouder grew and still this spake therefore:
      Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

      Then spake fair Venus’ son, that proud victorious boy,
      Saying: You dainty dame, for that you be so coy,
      I will so pluck your plumes as you shall say no more:
      Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

      As soon as he had said, such change grew in my breast
      That neither night nor day I could take any rest.
      Wherefore I did repent that I had said before:
      Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

    6. Judges Neil Astley, Jonathan Edwards and Karen McCarthy Woolf selected the winning poem from 18,113 poems entered into the competition calling it a poem that “operates on multiple, complex levels yet speaks in a voice that is fresh, honest and brave…

      Which means that there were 18,112 poems submitted that were even worse. Makes one think!

  12. SIR – Anyone, of any age, wearing ripped jeans looks like an idiot. And anyone paying a couple of hundred pounds for ripped jeans is an idiot.

    Maureen Hamilton

    Redcar, North Yorkshire

    1. This is a right proper cause of war in our household. I refuse to buy clothes costing more than about £25 – those are usually my trousers , my t shirts are a tenner, if that.

      The war queen on the other hand, does the label thing (I sewed her name over them all once – never again) where nothing she wears is worth less than 250. Yes, I appreciate she has a standard and expected style. I prefer – and usually am – knee deep in gunk. I’d far prefer rolling about in the garden playing with Mongo and junior.

  13. SIR – In 1953 I was on the bridge of a British aircraft carrier returning from the Korean War. The Suez Canal Company pilot explained that in winter the currents in the canal are diurnal, moving with the tides. During the summer, however, the rate of evaporation in the Mediterranean is greater than the flows into the sea via the Strait of Gibraltar and numerous rivers. The stream is therefore north-going. Certainly we had a few knots of current under our kilt as we led the north-going convoy that day.

    Shortly after we entered the canal our bow touched on the eastern side. The stern swung on to the western bank and we blocked the canal, halting the convoy. A call went out, but the Suez tug in the south was under repair and the Port Said tug in the north would take some time to come round.

    Fortunately there were bollards on the canal bank, so by mighty heaving with capstans and ropes we pulled the stern clear. I was only a midshipman, so no fingers were pointed at me.

    Cdr James Ekins RN (retd)

    Alresford, Hampshire

      1. Each carrier was a maximum of around 32,000 tons – about 1/6th of the tonnage of the container ship.

    3. I imagine that the reaction on the bridge to this navigational contretemps was something like “Bollards!”.

  15. Sir Iain Duncan Smith is amongst those being sanctioned by China for criticising the treatment of Uighurs.
    The BBC quotes him as saying,“Those of us who live free lives under the rule of law must speak for those who have no voice…”
    Well, that is very brave of him to speak up for a group that most people have never heard of, from a place in a faraway land that they could not find on a map.
    We no longer live “free lives”. But who speaks for us?

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56532569

    2. 330803+ up ticks,
      Morning HP,
      The lab/lib/con/greens coalition are a self contained political unit that encapsulates attack / defence within the coalition, this arrangement seems to satisfy the human ovis and their comfort zone voting pattern.

    3. Much as I detest the set of ideas that forms islam, it will be Uighurs today, us tomorrow.

    4. A question.
      From I remember of reports at the time, when the Chinese People Army was first ordered to clear the protesters at Tienanmen Square, the units deployed were largely made up of Han Chinese who refused their orders to go in hard.
      They were then withdrawn and replacement units with a different ethnic make up were deployed who then tore through the protesters killing hundreds, if not thousands.

      Am I right in recollecting that those replacement units were made up of Uighurs?

    5. When he was second in command in Rhodesia I can’t recall him ever speaking out for the welfare of the Rhodesians, whether black, white or khaki.

  17. SWMBO was talking about Bliar and the COVID passport.

    Someone had said, that will get the Passport when Bliar goes on trial for War Crimes

    On a plus point even him, the multi=millionaire ‘Socialist could not afford to employ Bliar Witch to defend him

  18. Joe Biden says he expects to run for re-election in 2024 in his first presidential press conference. 26 March 2021.

    Joe Biden has committed to running for re-election in 2024 when he will be 81-years-old.

    Ratcheting up tensions with China, Mr Biden condemned Beijing for human rights violations and said President Xi Jinping “doesn’t have a democratic bone in his body”.

    He suggested a goal of removing US troops from Afghanistan by May 1 would be missed.

    Thankfully there is not the least possibility of his standing in the next election unless they are allowing the braindead to Campaign!

    Xi is the head of the Chinese Communist Party so I wouldn’t really expect him to be a democrat!

    Afghanistan? That was always a certainty!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/25/joe-biden-press-conference-live-updates-covid-vaccine-guns-immigration/

    1. He had to read his entire answer on N. Korea from notes.

      I wondered if there is any political leader of any country in the world who is incapable of enunciating his or her own policies without notes. Only one, it seems: Joe Biden.

      There are 350 million Americans but the Dems are so vacuous that they have to choose Biden! God help us if there is a serious international crisis, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was handled deftly and with courage by another Dem, JFK, who must be turning in his grave.

      1. There are times when I wonder if Biden is being forced to work from a script that he actually disagrees with and it’s the only way he can stay on message.
        He does not come across well.

      2. Morning Sguest. There is no way that this man is running the United States! It would be infomative to be a Fly on the Wall at a cabinet meeting. We could see who was actually giving the orders!

    2. There’s hardly been anything about this press conference in the newspapers at all. Total whitewash!
      Hope Delingpole covers it!

    3. It would be foolish for any politician being interviewed or questioned to be unprepared, so Biden is right to have little prompt cards. He is the darling of the MSM for the moment so probably won’t be asked any difficult* questions, or any that were not notified in advance.

      * Name/Address…

      1. No problem here. Given what he has to be able to pretend to know, having notes is rational. Hell, I gave a presentation for five minutes on our work and I rehearsed for a week before hand and gathered every scrap of info, set up the movie – no live demos! He’s doing all that live.

      2. Once a year a President of a very large country invites the World’s press to ask him questions over a period of 3 hours. If you’ve ever watched even for a short while it’s difficult not to be impressed with the way he answers questions directly, even hostile inane ones.

  20. If vaccine passports are to be introduced, there must be a foolproof
    way of ensuring that the unvaccinated cannot claim that they are.

    Give the task to Mr Rashid, in the first place

    1. Why?

      What have you got against the unvaccinated ?

      Are we unclean ?

      Are we to be made second class citizens because we don’t need and refuse to have Gates dubious vaccine forced on us by totalitarians with the ulterior motive of global domination ?

      1. Be a little pragmatic Polly. I will have it if they make my life intolerable without it, but I will delay as long as possible. But I have already had my children – my decision might be different if I were younger.

        1. Don’t give in to their threats and coercion. That’s exactly what they want you to do.

          These guys are criminals and have been subverted by bribery to destroy you, your way of life and the country.

          1. Polly, at the end of the day, my priority is that my family survives this shit and that my descendants will be part of the new revolution in time that will throw these corrupt shackles off. We are descended from people who kept their heads down and survived in the past. I’ve seen the way things have been going in the wrong direction mostly, all my life, and I’ve been part of movements that have tried to fight against it, mostly without success.
            So although I don’t want the vaccine, and will not be making their takeover easier by queuing up for it, I recognise that at some point, I might be forced to have it.
            We don’t know how the virus is going to mutate, or what will appear next, or what political pressures will be applied to non-compliers.

          3. More like surrender to force majeure.
            Blackmail is, you need a jab to continue with your normal twenty-first century luxuries.
            The iron fist in the velvet glove is, you need a jab in order to buy food or access proper medical services, or stay out of jail/residential facilities for people suspected of having coronavirus. That’s what I mean by being forced.

            I fear the Save-the-NHS loons will try to implement the healthcare one in Blighty.

          4. Nobody knows what the vaccines will do to people in the long term.

            The strange and suspicious circumstances surrounding the entire awful story make me expect the worst.

            So no vax for moi !

          6. Rather you than me !

            I’ve had C-19 and it was absolutely nothing to worry about. Far less unpleasant than flu and all gone in 4 days.

            No nasty vax for moi !

          8. Underlying factors.

            Only those who have a weakened immune system need vaccination.

            Everyone else is far better off without it.

          9. I’m type 2 diabetic but would still have had it and I would think having side effects (as I did) would mean your immune system was working ok

          10. I agree with everything you say. My Zimbabwean friend also says she’s going to be at the back of the queue!
            The situation will get clearer in a few years, for better or for worse. But in general, there has to be a very strong argument for dosing healthy people, I think. Traditional vaccinations fulfil the criteria. These ones don’t!

        2. The only reason I took the 1st jab (albeit with big reservations) was in the hope it would ‘allow’ me, in due course, to visit my son and young grandchildren in Canada. Holidays elsewhere would be nice but not essential.

    2. It’s all planned. Digital ids.
      Gates has been working on it for some years now. I’m not joking.

      There will be no escape, and I advise you to get ready for life without electricity too, as smart meters provide the perfect sanction for trouble-makers.

      1. I imagine Bill Gates has been working on a polio vaccine slightly more.

        The man isn’t an evil overlord. He’s a rich bloke trying to do good in a stupid age where being thick is seen as a bonus.

        1. Gates idea of doing good is forcing you to do what he wants.

          That’s why Gates wants you back in the Stone Age.

          1. You sure it’s Gates who wants to return us to the Stone Age, Polly? Thought that was Rockefeller’s idea.

            ….. I’ll get me rock hammer.

          2. I wonder whether Fred Flintstone’s computer will be powered in the same way as his car?

        2. https://id2020.org/

          I used to think the same, until I saw a few video clips of him speaking. Now, I think he’s a bit crazy, not nearly as clever as I thought before, and so used to being super-rich that he doesn’t see himself in the same light as he sees other people. He appears to have some kind of Messiah complex.

        3. He is a eugenicist. He has poured money into Sage, Imperial College and various universities. He is definitely evil.

    3. It’s all planned. Digital ids.
      Gates has been working on it for some years now. I’m not joking.

      There will be no escape, and I advise you to get ready for life without electricity too, as smart meters provide the perfect sanction for trouble-makers.

    1. Religion should be mocked. The cartoon should be blown up and projected on the sky.

      These people are guests. Visitors. They’ve no right whatsoever to dictate how we will live. If they won’t fit in, they should leave.

      1. 330803+ up ticks,
        Morning W,
        The the lab/lib/con coalition will have to do better in their striving
        to reach 51% islamic take over figure surely, more submissive,
        appeasement must be shown in many quarters.

      2. I would suggest that religious teaching should not be carried out in UK schools. That should be left to the parents and to vicars, priests, rabbis and imams etc.

        2. That is what they do in France.

          There is however the problem of the fact that our culture, music, art and literature are intricately linked with our Christian heritage.

          For example how do you explain Milton’s poetry or much beautiful music and painting to people who do not understand what inspired the work?

          .

      3. Imagine what would happen if Christians behaved like this in Muslim countries!

        The sad thing is that our politicians want to destroy our culture and mores just as much as the vandals who attack statues.

        When Islam becomes the majority religion in Britain will all our churches be destroyed?

        1. They’ll become mosques. It’s what’s happened in other, now islamic, countries.

  22. Navalny’s allies fear for his life as he complains about deteriorating health. 26 March 2021.

    “My condition has deteriorated, severe pain has spread to my right leg which has lost sensation from the calf downwards. I’m having difficulty walking,” he wrote.
    Mr Navalny blamed the prison authorities for wilfully denying him medical help “to damage my health.”

    Mr Navalny has filed a separate complaint against intrusive surveillance while he sleeps, saying he is woken up eight times a night. “They’re practically torturing me by depriving me of sleep,” Mr Navalny said in the complaint, citing Russian prison regulations, guaranteeing uninterrupted sleep for inmates.

    They sent him for an MRI scan, hardly a symptom of neglect. I can’t even get to see a doctor here in the UK! As to the surveillance, the checking on prisoners is a universal precaution against illness, suicide and absconding. Those detained in UK Police Stations are routinely checked at prescribed intervals! It is also worth pointing out that Navalny is in the NIck from Choice! Had he returned in time there would have been no proceedings let alone imprisonment!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/25/navalnys-allies-fear-life-complains-deteriorating-health/

  23. Nicked

    “Vaccination, of course, is a voluntary decision for every person. It is every person’s personal decision.” – Vladimir Putin.

    Mandatory vaccination for care home staff would be “wholly responsible”. Vaccine
    passports “being considered” for pubs, theatres and sports events. –
    Boris Johnson.

    Truly, we are through the looking glass.

    2. 330803+ up ticks,
      Morning Rik,
      Speaking as a now ex member of UKIP, on hearing post
      referendum victory “now leave it to the tories” we knew
      without doubt that there was trouble ahead.
      The then UKIP party being proved right once more.

  24. Now even some Nottlers are giving in to the repressive new normal.

    Enjoy the repression, the submission and the new corrupt global government !

          1. Only if people take responsibility for their own lives rather than waiting to be told what they can do by the wretched government.

          3. Well done. Our son and grandson visit us for a cup of tea and homemade ginger cookies every couple of weeks.

  26. Perhaps in the weeks ahead these kinds of questions might replace the constant reiteration of the anxiety displayed by broadcasters.
    Lord Blunkett (Lab) London SW1

    1. It is good that a Labourite can see the problem

    2 constant iteration is reiteration

  27. Reposted from last night

    Friday 26th March 2021

    My Beautiful Darling Caroline

    A Very Happy Birthday

    and many, many more.

    With my very fondest love,

    Rastus

    I know that the first cake I have ever baked (with a little bit of supervision!) will not be as good as your delicious cakes but let us hope it proves edible!

    1. And I repeat my comment of last night, Rastus, which is to wish the lovely Caroline a very happy day.

      1. Double thank you, Elsie. As I enter my 60th year, I am still wishing for a few grey hairs to match my now venerable age! No such luck as I take after my mother who died aged 86 with no grey hair at all. I feel some grey would give my appearance the gravitas it usually lacks.

      5. Happy birthday Caroline.
        It looks as though Rastus is trying to peel the egg in the first picture. :-))

        Have a wonderful day.

      6. Ah Caroline! The Master at work…! Well done to him and many happy returns of the day to you! I hope you have a wonderful day and enjoy every moment of it! 💕🎂🍾🎁

      7. My goodness Caroline , your wonderful husband has really creamed that mixture . I expect It will taste wonderful.

        Happy birthday to you and I hope you are experiencing less of a wet day than we are here.

        🍰🥂🎉🎈

      11. Don’t get too excited, Caroline, it looks like a pancake. Happy birthday from me too! 😃 🌺🍸 🍹 🧉 🍾🌻

    6. Happy Birthday, Caroline! Have a lovely day and make it last the weekend. It is Friday, after all!

  29. I plucked up the courage to see what the Guardian had to say about Biden’s ‘Press Conference’ yesterday. They were loud and clear in what they really thought – total silence!

    Here’s a comment from the Washington Times that is slightly more informative!

    It was an hour of incoherent babbling — except for when President Joseph R. Biden read directly from his talking points. The questions were polite and predictable — from preselected, approved reporters. The answers were long-winded, listless and meandering — what we’ve come to expect from Mr. Biden.

    It’s clear Mr. Biden is not up to the job, that’s why his team waited 65 days — the longest of any president in 100 years — to schedule his first solo press conference.

    Mr. Biden came armed with a binder full of notes, which he read directly from while responding to questions about China, North Korea and Afghanistan. It was his cheat sheet, and he needed it. No reporter asked him about it.

    Former press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted he’s never before seen a president bring a typed, multi-page question-and-answers document to a news conference. But this is Mr. Biden’s White House, and his team knows their boss needs a study guide.

    The 10 reporters who got to ask questions were preselected by Mr. Biden’s team. Notably, Fox News’ Peter Doocy was never called upon. Too controversial. He might have asked a pressing question that wasn’t included in Mr. Biden’s prewritten script.

    PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor helped kick off the event, asking a question the Democratic National Committee would be proud of: “The perception of you, that got you elected, as a moral, decent man, is the reason why a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and entrusting you with unaccompanied minors. How do you resolve that tension?”

    Mr. Biden agreed he was a moral, decent man, and as a moral and decent man, he has a plan.

    What is that plan and when will it be executed? He didn’t say. But until it is, the press will be cut off from access at the border. The White House press corps seemed fine with it.

    Mr. Biden said he agreed with former President Barack Obama that the Senate filibuster is a relic of the Jim Crow era. The filibuster was created long before Jim Crow laws and was used way more in the past two decades than it was in the ‘50s or ‘60s, but whatever.

    He then went on to say the use of the filibuster is much different than when he “came to the Senate 120 years ago,” and it was abused grossly last year — when Democrats were in the minority and used it repeatedly to block Republican bills, like Sen. Tim Scott’s police reform legislation.

    Not exactly a coherent argument, but at least it comprised full sentences.

    When asked about gun control, Mr. Biden spoke of infrastructure, and then asbestosis in schools. When he finished, no one could remember what the original question was about.

    “I just find it frustrating,” he said, trailing off and not completing his thought.

    At another point, he asked, “Where am I?” as he looked down at a list of reporters trying to figure out who his team wanted him to pick on next.

    The press just sat there and let him aimlessly wander. There were no interruptions, which were all too common in the Trump era. Yet, you can’t blame the press, as they, like the rest of America, were probably working hard trying to follow Mr. Biden’s train of thought.

    After the press conference ended, the Biden administration called a lid. It was all our commander in chief could handle for the day.

    The press conference didn’t break any big news — which Team Biden probably views as a success. Now they can tuck Mr. Biden into bed, and our foreign adversaries can come out to play, as he will be asleep for the next 18 hours.

    Elder abuse.

    1. Gosh – Yank press criticising a President who is not Mr Trump? Whatever next??

      I wonder whether WaPo says the same….

      1. It was predictably more about the GOP than Biden.

        Biden said: “We’ve got to prove democracy works”. The WaPo opinion piece said this:

        “The country — and, specifically, the Republican Party — does not appear to be as committed to democratic principles as it once was. Following an election in which Republicans lost the presidency and the Senate, GOP state lawmakers across the country are proposing voting restrictions that will make it harder to cast ballots, particularly for Democratic constituencies, based on lies about voter fraud.”

    2. I suspect that each questioner had been told “here is your question, use it or don’t bother to attend ever again”

      And that the questions were taken in the order of his cheat-charts.

    3. It’s very curious the absolute silence from the MSM about such an embarrassing display.

      We felt so bad about it that we switched off the TV after five minutes.

      Never had we seen such an appalling display from a major politician before.

      The Kremlin must be echoing with howls of laughter from Putin.

    1. Just made them a donation. Hope it’s not controlled opposition. Toby Young has had a few successes with the FSU though, so I hope for the best. Looks like a good initiative, but then on the other hand, what does truth matter these days?

      Thanks for posting the link!

  32. BREAKING NEWS

    The ship currently blocking the Suez Canal apparently followed a curious course in the Red Sea before entering the Canal at Port Suez.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a61ed4d59e3f2d669eb7ef043194c3c431e1a856b19a0e0919a82fbbfe582142.png

    Could this – coupled with the huge phallic projection on the ship’s bow which it rammed into the bank of the Canal – be evidence that this grounding was sabotage, a deliberate attempt to f**k up the main East/West trade route?

    1. I don’t believe a word of it, Duncan. The ship would have had a SCA pilot on board. They may crash ships into the side of the Canal – but they don’t mess about.

    2. They progress through the canal in convoys – northbound & southbound have crossing-places. So, he was likely sailing in circles waiting for convoy form-up time.

  33. Morning all.
    https://www.sott.net/article/450540-I-m-done-Britain-When-a-copper-pens-a-heartfelt-resignation-letter-like-this-it-shows-we-live-in-a-warped-and-broken-society
    I’m done with the far left and far right, two sides of the same violent, socially corrosive and destructive coin, trampling over anyone and everyone, destroying anything in their paths, if it doesn’t conform to the ‘right’ narrative or worldview……..And we know exactly how he feels

      1. I know what you mean Bob, there are some around, but most are Just Right and about everything.

  34. I really don’t understand the fuss about the angry mob outside of Battley Grammar School.

    I mean – all schools in the UK have gangs of Muslim men waiting outside them.

    1. 330803+ up ticks,
      Morning BA,
      But that comes under the same umbrella that covered rotherham for 16 plus years until the JAY report revealing.

    2. I mean – all schools in the UK have gangs of Muslim men waiting outside them.

      Well this is how it works BA, some years ago my wife worked in admin at a local further Ed college, she told me of an adolescent type of scuffle and an indecent between two young male students. Within 15 minutes of this occurring a number of taxis arrived at the scene and the drivers were armed with base ball bats and standing by for action. But fortunately the lady in charge of the department took over and peace was resumed.
      There is/or was a police station almost adjacent the college but not one of them bothered to make an appearance. Perhaps they were cowering inside.

    3. What are these people doing in a first world country ..

      Send them back to the land of their great grandparents, the heat , the flies , petty rules and squabbling !

      1. Sh!t running down the street in open sewers, no clean water, no TV, no electricity, burn cowshit to cook over, no gasoline.

        1. Have they no idea what a Grammar school is?

          The Iman should be fined £10.000 for organising an illegal protest, and shutting a school down , interrupting the valued school hours Grammar School pupils need .. The Iman is causing fear mongering and fright which the police should clamp down on.

        2. That’s not a nice way to describe Bradford and it’s not true. There is ‘gasoline’ but it is usually kept in bottles to throw into schools and churches when they get bored of stabbing passers-by.

      2. Most (not all) of these people are inherently lazy and have taken the easy option in not staying at home to put their own houses in order.

      3. Every time we see these African and sub continent travel documentaries on the TV, I see in most of the places visited, litter scattered on the streets and piles of rubbish and god only knows what else all over the place. That alone attracts millions of flies and diseases are then spread so easily.

      4. “What are these people doing in a first-world country?“

        Doing their utmost to convert it into a third-world shithole.

    4. There is a police “presence”, apparently. From the photos it looks like there are more than the permitted outdoor number and they are not “social distancing”*. No arrests have been made. I can prophecy here that no arrests will be made of any muslim involved. I’m not so sure about the teacher though.

      *Should it not be called “anti-social distancing”?

    1. 330803+ up ticks,
      Morning H,
      I do believe that the lab/lib/con/greens coalition political hierarchy are having that put to music to be sang at future conventions.

  36. 330803+ up ticks,
    Do you think this headmaster puts spuds on the fire when celebrating
    Guy Fawkes and co conspirators demise ( Catholics) in 1606.

    The Batley submissive appeasement,

    Gary Kibble issued a “sincere” and “unequivocal” apology, called the image “totally inappropriate” and said the school had “immediately withdrawn teaching on this part of the course”.

  37. What is that bloody person on about ? The outrageous Hypocrisy of her, Von Der Lying again. Are they all so immersed and infected by their own inability to focus on what is the truth, or have they all been taking lessons at the Lord Haw Haw school of quackery and deception ?
    How thick and gullible do they think the people of Europe actually are ?
    Or are they simply stirring up mass tribalism and racial hatred,……… again ?

      2. Origin of the EU: the Germans keep starting wars they can’t win, let’s surrender to them before they start another one.

      3. There was a YouTube video of, I think, the Bundeswehr raising the EU banner where someone had over dubbed the original soundtrack with Die Fahne Hoch but sadly it was removed for violating YT conditions.

  38. Zoological Diets

    A bloke starts his new job at the zoo and is given three tasks. First is to clear the exotic fish pool of weeds.

    As he does this a huge fish jumps out and bites him. To show who is boss, he beats it to death with a spade.

    Realizing his employer won’t be best pleased he disposes of the fish by feeding it to the lions, as lions will eat anything

    Moving on to the second job of clearing out the Chimp house, he is attacked by the chimps that pelt him with coconuts.

    He swipes at two chimps with a spade killing them both. What can he do?

    Feed them to the lions, he says to himself, because lions eat anything…

    He hurls the corpses into the lion enclosure.

    He moves on to the last job which is to collect honey from the South American Bees.

    As soon as he starts, he is attacked by the bees. He grabs the spade and smashes the bees to a pulp.

    By now he knows what to do and shovels them into the lion’s cage because Lions eat anything.

    Later that day a new lion arrives at the zoo. He wanders up to another lion and says “What’s the food like here?”

    The lions say: “Absolutely brilliant, today we had Fish and Chimps with Mushy Bees”

    1. What about the guy who lands a job at the zoo, a week after he arrives one of the gorillas dies, the next day his boss arrives with a large card board box and says, here Pete try that on. It’s an extremely well made and authentic gorilla suit. It fits him perfectly and his boss says right you’ve got the job until the replacement arrives from Africa. The next day he’s let into the enclosure and is made welcome. But after an hour feeling bored he gets a bit carried away and starts climbing the bars and the trees, he over does it, loses his balance and falls in to the lion enclosure next door. Brushes himself off re-focuses and sees three large male lions are standing next to him. Help help he shouts help let me out………..one of the lions gets right up close to him and Says shut up you idiot do want us all to get the sack ?

  40. Good morning, everyone. I have been missing for several days after son’s collie puppy chewed through my broadband cable. Fitted a new cable but no joy. BT engineer arrived this morning after clearing a fault on my phone line at the junction box 1km away. He then completed comprehensive tests on my router and I have broadband back. Excellent service.

    1. Good morning, Delboy! That was a bit ruff! In fact, bordering on the ridiculous!

    2. Good morning DB.

      I know the feeling , when our late African Grey was a young bird , he escaped and chewed through cables and a lovely pair of full length curtains , and an armchair .

      Glad you are happy to be back on line . ( Are you Talk Talk. ) we had problems like that , and how on earth do the engineers know which line is which at the junction boxes so far away?

      All the news seems to be pretty grim recently .

    3. Morning Dellboy36 – The BT engineers/ technicians have been the unsung heroes of this pandemic. They have been out in all weathers on their knees sorting out the tangle of connections in the telephone boxes in the streets.

      1. Well said, Sir.
        We have a couple of junction cabinets over the road from us and I’ll often chat to the lads as their working and offer them a mug of tea whilst they work.

  41. A friend of mine is up in court for throwing some Domestos over the local vicar – he’s be charged with a bleach of the priest

    1. Johnson’s scared of attempting to change discrimination/equality legislation. Too many cats in those bags to escape and make trouble.

          1. Indeed – G & P have one which is very important to them. An earlier cat liked to get into a canvas shopping bag!

    2. Using the NHS app is a really well thought out parochial plan.

      If they ever open up the world for travel, how will a tourist be able to buy a pint / eat in a restaurant / stay in a hotel?

  43. Absurdity of the ‘black reparations’ wokery. 26 March 2021.

    Glenn Loury, professor of economics at Brown University, also opposes reparations, saying: ‘If you redistribute, you may have a short-term impact, but in the long run, unless the differences in these populations, in their capacity to generate wealth, to start a business, to effectively take risks, to save and accumulate within their families, [change] the underlying structure will push you back into a situation of inequality again.’

    Such clearly negative and bigoted considerations do not deter the councillors of the fine city of Evanston, Illinois (population 73,000) who on Monday decided by eight votes to one to offer reparations to black residents to compensate for past discrimination. Around 16 per cent of the city’s residents are black and, on average, they earn $46,000 a year less than white residents.

    The council intend in the first phase to provide $25,000 each to 16 black households for ‘home repairs, down payments or mortgage payments’. A further $10million is pledged over the next decade. The money will come from community donations and revenue from a 3 per cent tax on recreational marijuana.

    This is of course the thin end of the wedge; both in the United States and here, for the payment of vast sums to the distant offspring of Africans deported from their homelands by their fellow blacks. Normally one might advise movement to foreign climes but we Nottlers are too old to go gallivanting around the globe seeking a new beginning. Nevertheless if any young person should cast their eyes on these words might I recommend Eastern Europe, the Balkans or Russia as a destination for those fleeing chaos and white persecution!

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/absurdity-of-the-black-reparations-wokery/

    3. There’s an irony how much effort the ‘progressive’ Left keep looking backward.

  44. Here is another BBC sob story. “Why my ancestral home could be lost to climate change”
    This “British Bangladeshi” – his own description – bewails the changes in his old home in BanglaDesh. He has no intention of going there and working to improve things though. He is here in the UK. He will no doubt be working in his fathers restaurant. If that fails the UK will pay for all his living expenses.
    It must be me. (If these instances were rare and isolated it would not matter much. They are not isolated, there are millions of them. See below for their approach to UK education.)
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-56485667

    1. What a ‘king cheek, if that bright spark had stayed at home he might have learnt that when his country of origin was part of a British colony under of course hard labour, the occupants of his country use to dredge the rivers that flood so badly when ‘it’s been raining’, (Who knew ??). Climate ‘alterations’ has been taking place for thousands of years. The said rivers have not been dredged for between 70 years and 100 years. Perhaps the lazy people of the subcontinent might try and get their proverbial fingers out and try and do some thing about it themselves before it’s too late. And they all have to tramp all they way to Calais and pay for and hire rubber boats and ironically cross the water. Which incidentally until the beginning of climate change, use to be a valley where people were able to cross to the now European mainland.

  45. Apparently there are ructions in France. The French ID card is being upgraded to meet EU rules.
    This allows the ID card to be used, instead of a passport, within the EU Borders.

    What’s wrong with that? – the EU rules state the cards have to have 2 languages on them e.g French & English, German & English
    The reason? English is the EU language for inter country communications.

    Made me smile – a lot!

    1. The French ID card has been used between EU countries for years. French people coming to the UK were able to produce their ID card instead of a passport.

      It is said that the new one is for “better security” and “to fight against identity fraud”. In fact it looks exactly like the identity page in my UK passport.

      1. I thought that the passport stuff was just something the UK did to protect their strong border(?).

        Any time that I have taken the train from Brussels to Paris, there have been no ID checks of any kind during the trip.

        1. In the EU countries, you really only need ID when boarding a plane and being stopped by police. Oh, and to sign for a parcel (sometimes)

      2. All sorts of fake and forged ID has been available for years. Illegals use to travel to Ireland ( they didn’t want them) get a passport and hey presto the European oyster was available and the free non-contributory UK benefit system.

  46. Hello from a Saxon Queen with blooded axe and longbow.
    It was sunny and quite mild earlier this morning but now its windy chilly and grey .

  47. Boris Johnson praises MPs censured by Beijing for ‘shining a light’ on human rights abuses. 26 March 2021.

    Boris Johnson today hailed MPs sanctioned by China and praised their role in “shining a light on the gross human rights violations being perpetrated against Uyghur Muslims”.

    The Prime Minister stressed that he stood “firmly with them” and other British citizens targeted by Beijing in tit-for-tat restrictions.

    He’s not going to be standing with that guy sacked for showing cartoons to his pupils though is he?

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/china-sanctions-mps-iain-duncan-smith-xinjiang-uyghurs-b926373.html

    2. Funny really , because here in the UK , many Muslims commit their own human rights and forbid and encourage many outrages amongst their own, inter marriage etc .

      Why doesn’t this idiot government CONDEMN the persecution of Christians in Africa, and the slaughter of Christians by Muslims in the far East.

      We should keep our snitches out of China, no good will come of it .

    1. I hope they added “within 28 days of having it”, just as they do for dying after a positive test.

    2. We’ve known more who have died of medical neglect in the last year, than have died of Covid.

      Is this unusual ?

      1. 330803+ up ticks,
        Evening J,
        Regarding the lab/lib/con / greens coalition if numbers are to be seen as in anti governance manner then they will be obscured
        in the mists of time, even before time has past.

  50. Either it’s an unfortunate acronym or some body at B.A. has a sense of humour:
    British Airways is offering discounted antigen test kits with Qured using the discount code BATRAVEL15, which are available for delivery to UK addresses.

    1. No masks ??? if the pile of BBC propaganda SHoneT was realistic the whole screen would be covered with dozens of different language subtitles.

  52. Vaccine passports threaten to be just the start of a new biosecurity state

    Illiberal measures fly in the face of the PM’s previous views, but he is convinced they are what voters want

    FRASER NELSON

    When listing his regrets about the pandemic, Boris Johnson has started to tell friends that he was let down by his own liberal instincts. That he hoped for too long that Britain could, like Sweden, fight the virus through consent rather than diktat – getting through this without abolishing basic freedoms. His fear at the time was irreversibility. If sacred principles were jettisoned in an emergency, would they ever be restored? Might he end up unleashing something he’d struggle to control?

    It was a good question. Covid levels are now so low in Britain that the Prime Minister could have proclaimed the second wave over yesterday. Instead, he asked for his Government’s emergency powers to be extended for another six months. Why, if there is no longer an emergency? Sir Keir Starmer didn’t ask. Instead, he voted with the Tories. Even Labour, it seems, has grown used to a life without much in the way of debate, scrutiny, opposition or explanation.

    Big announcements continue to come via people like Prof Neil Ferguson, who still seems to have a Rasputin-like hold over the Government. Earlier this week, he said he thought it may be unwise to book any foreign holidays this summer. This is big news, because what he thinks today tends to become Matt Hancock’s policy tomorrow. “We’re run by scientist groupthink,” says one minister. “But that won’t change until the polls change.”

    Lockdown remains very popular, to the Prime Minister’s initial amazement. But he talks now as if he has been given a new mandate from the electorate. “My impression is that there is a huge wisdom in the public’s feeling about this,” he told MPs this week. “Human beings instinctively recognise when something is dangerous and nasty to them. They can see, collectively, that Covid is a threat. They want us, as their Government – and me as the Prime Minister – to take all the actions I can to protect them.”

    The creation of a “Health Security Agency” was announced this week. An unusual name: British “security” services have not, so far, tended to involve public health officials. But perhaps the language is simply catching up with reality: that the fundamentals of a biosecurity state are now under construction. This is what ministers think the public now want: a big shift in the dial away from liberty so the state can better provide security. It’s happening incrementally, with no real debate.

    Until recently, no government would have thought it was expected to control a virus. The wildest of the pandemic plans did not involve lockdown. But Wuhan showed what public health figures could “get away with” as Prof Ferguson put it – which changed everything. The definition of what government can “get away with” is being expanded week after week.

    Controlling the circulation of viruses can, logically, be done by controlling what people do. So the old inalienable rights – freedom of assembly, of protest, of school education, to leave the country – become privileges to be removed or restored as ministers see fit. This might be the remit of the Health Security Agency. In Whitehall, people are thinking the unthinkable: one idea is citizens sending their temperature in every day using the NHS app.

    Take digital identity cards. They’re common in China, where citizens are given a colour code taking in health status which decides how freely they can move. Might ministers get away with vaccine identity cards here? “We are not a papers-carrying country,” Hancock said in January. Now, Michael Gove is busy working on vaccine passports, which the Prime Minister says we may need to go to the pub. Or, in some cases, get a job.

    Hancock was right, though: at the heart of this is a question of what kind of country we are – and whether liberal Britain became a casualty of the pandemic. Opinion polls show support for vaccine identity cards, curfews, border closures, the works. When Tony Blair proposed identity cards in 2004, Johnson said he’d eat his in front of anyone who asked him to produce it. “Extremism in the defence of liberty,” he wrote, “is no vice.” Blair now is back as the public face of vaccine identity cards, as if he wants to hammer home that, in the end, he won.

    Why, we might ask, is all of this expensive apparatus needed if most adults are vaccinated and Covid levels are so low? This takes us to perhaps the biggest shift. Once government would need to demonstrate – beyond reasonable doubt – that a threat is big enough to justify depriving people of their liberty. Now, the burden of proof has flipped. It’s argued that a new variant might escape the vaccine. Until this can be disproved, it seems, nobody leaves the country.

    This is the “precautionary principle”, perhaps the most influential idea of our times. It transforms the relationship between the individual and the state. It means all kinds of costs can be incurred – and freedoms suspended – just in case. There need be no real plausibility test, no balance of risk. In this black-box democracy, decisions are taken without transparency, Parliament is not consulted and the Cabinet told to get in line.

    They may very well be the right decisions. But if they’re wrong, then there’s not much chance of the mistake being discovered in time. I’ve written before about how No 10 outriders have been attacking academics who criticise the consensus. Recently, even those inside the magic circle of government scientific advisers have been threatened with dismissal for questioning the pro-lockdown consensus.

    This is a new form of illiberal Conservatism, and it is strange to see it all take place under Boris Johnson. When it looked like hospitals might overflow, it made sense to hunker down – which is why I backed lockdown. Partly out of the obvious urgency. But mainly from a sense that we had in No 10 a liberal Conservative who realised the danger and would not do this a day longer than was necessary. But if he has changed his mind, it would mean a change of government without an election – and without debate. We should, at least, have the debate.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/11/lockdown-can-expect-third-wave-no10-needs-admit/

      2. Ali Kemal Bey born 1869 was a Turkish journalist, newspaper editor, poet and a liberal-leaning politician, who was for some three months Minister of the Interior in the government of Damat Ferid Pasha, the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. Great grandfather of Boris Johnson.

        He was lynched by a mob as he was being transported to Ankara to stand in court on a call of treason. It was very bloody by all accounts (the lynching, that is).

        Once again it is seeming that apples do not fall very far from the tree.

        1. They say that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

          If that’s true, perhaps it’s best that the story of Great-grandfather Johnson’s unfortunate demise not be widely publicised.
          ;¬)

    4. 330804+ up ticks,
      Afternoon WS,
      If the peoples are really serious in showing their true feelings the 6th May would be a good start.

        1. 330803+ up votes,
          Afternoon DM,
          There really should be a health warning about supporting / voting
          lab/lib/con/greens coalition.

          1. look how much money the government have given me and to think that labour have promised more! To think lib dems will have us back in the EU and avoiding roaming charges on our mobiles.

            Sorry ogga, we the sheep are not looking beyond the free stuff.

          2. 330803+up ticks,
            Afternoon R,
            If that be the case then the electorate have knowingly gave their
            children, children’s children into poverty & continuing incarceration ongoing, leaving such a legacy via this once decent nation is unbelievably.

          3. “Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
            Lest child, child’s children, cry against you woe!”
            — Richard II (WS)

        1. 330803+ up ticks,
          Afternoon TB,
          Letting any of the toxic trio lab/lib/con coalition in has been a bad idea, especially over the last three decades.

          1. Look Ogga

            There is in our midst a different generation of politicians . They weren’t raised the way we were by wartime parents .

            They have been educated by leftists , libertarians and louche tory types .

            Old ideas and national pride are kicked out of the window .

            All politicians are great pretenders , they are like games show hosts .. insincere and gabby , they don’t spend enough times at their desks , and are Cameron/Blair clones .

            Their policies are hit and miss , and they are ruining Britain .

            They say the Germans scarred our cities and countryside , well hang on , this lot have ruined Britain totally in just over 30 years .

            So much so now, that our essential supplies are sitting on some supertanker west of Suez.. trapped .

          3. 330803+ up ticks,
            TB,
            Precisely, currently the indigenous are fighting an internal
            emema on three fronts and they, the lab/lib/con coalition with outside foreign help are winning hands down.

            In one respect the germans, Heinz Atkins was no different than Tommy Atkins a football match proved that, so much of our presents woes & tribulations surely can be laid at the
            politico’s / governance parties and current supporter / voters.

            Nobody ,but nobody with a common sense mindset returns to power political treacherous trouble manufacturers again & again.

    5. “…… but he is convinced they are what voters want”

      If Boris Johnson is worried about what the voters want then why the hell does he not stop any of the boats carrying illegal immigrants from ever landing in Britain and why doesn’t he scrap both the surrender WA and the disastrous “deal” and go for WTO terms. The behaviour of the EU has given him carte blanche to do so.

  53. At the World Cup Final a man makes his way to his seat.
    He sits down, noticing that the seat next to him is empty.
    He leans over and asks his neighbour if someone will be sitting there.
    “No,” says the neighbour. “The seat is empty.”
    “That’s incredible,” says the man. “Who in their right mind would have a seat like this for the final and not use it?” The neighbour answers, “Well, actually the seat belongs to me. I was supposed to come with my wife, but she passed away. This is the first World Cup Final we haven’t been to together since we got married.”
    “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. That’s terrible… But couldn’t you find someone else, a friend, relative or even a neighbour to take her seat?
    ”The man shakes his head. “No,” he sighed. “They’re all at the funeral.”

  54. Today is the anniversary of the great war between Muslim tribes. West Paki v East Paki (1971). Half a million East Pakistanis here in the UK are celebrating the birth of a new, independent nation, Bangladesh – Half a million! Good job it only lasted 8 months with 8,000 killed, there could have been a serious exodus of refugees. The other 1.4 million West Pakistanis here in the UK are lying low at the moment. Nothing to celebrate – yet!

    1. Hi Ped,

      So who are the primitives protesting in Batley at the moment.

      I do hope they haven’t had their jabs!

      Edit .. hang on a second , do we know what branch of the Muslim tribe are running Britain by menacing the population?

  55. “Human beings instinctively recognise when something is dangerous and nasty to them” – wait until the population realises it is their government, when furlough finishes before the start of the winter months, when there is no money for pensions, state pensions, benefits….. no food, no warmth. Health ‘Security’ will be an irrelevance – it is the result of a weak, pampered, cossetted society that cannot withstand hardship.

    1. Playing to the gallery. “They” think we want the government to “keep us safe”. I certainly think they should butt out and leave me to look after my own health, with reference to NHS if and when needed. I am astonished that the population as a whole is in support of the draconian measures.

      How many of us have been told by our GP “it’s only a virus” and go home and work our way through it. It’s only a virus has been the stock answer for many a medical problem. Perhaps we should introduce a payment system every time we see our GP to cut out the time wasters. Or perhaps scrap NI and everybody join a private healthcare system. That would shake things up a bit!

    2. I can’t wait PP 😏 to date it’s three family holidays we have had to cancel.
      We have a birthday in our family bubble today one of our lovely DIL’s. And will be picking up a Thai takeaway on the way for the evening meal celebration.
      I hope our eldest remembers to pay for it 😉
      I remember my 40th i was stuck in a local pub drinking Coke with ice an lemon. My parents flight from Malta had been delayed 5 hours i had to pick them up and take them home to Mill Hill North London. By the time i had arrive home the pub had closed.

    3. It’s not our “Health Security” that the Johnson/Hancock Axis are concerned with, it’s our rights and freedoms. We must cling to, and then claw back, those two pillars of our society. For the moment the two main parties are lost and therefore the people must stand firm. There’s around 600 MPs who will not support the people but we number in the tens of millions. If we stand firm what could they do?

    2. Our “lived experience” of course defines our limitations. To demand that only their lived experience has any validity is to demand that everyone be brought down to their level. One dusky skinned little sweetie at a departmental “away day” at work actually stated the gem, “We must control their thinking”.

    3. I ploughed through it a day or two ago. This extract sums it up:
      ‘Lived experience’ is the great incontestable. No doubt may be expressed about a person’s lived experience. It is the truth and nothing but the truth.
      Essentially, it’s a form of narcissism. Here’s a song for narcissists:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH7_gdQnkkQ

      1. Unless it’s our lived experience, in which case it’s pure bigotry and prejudice that hasn’t been backed up by a double blind peer reviewed scientific study.

  58. Still no comments allowed under accounts of the Batley blasphemer!

    But here is a BTL comment under a DT article about the EU’s vaccine absurdities.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/03/26/eu-still-has-gun-table-wont-pull-trigger/

    Peter Wookey
    26 Mar 2021 1:53PM
    The more I have thought about the current actions of the EU, the more I think it will be seen by historians as the point at which the EU project was doomed.

    Right from its establishment, the EU spun a façade of a moral quest for international co operation, that the project was aimed to further European peace and stablility. The EU has gone to huge lengths to create an image of itself as representing high moral standards and human rights.

    The events of the past few months has shown to all that this was marketing spin. Brexit had already demonstrated that the EU had a vindictive side, but supporters dismissed that as the understandable actions of a jilted lover, and that the EU remained fundamentally a force for good in the world.

    But no longer. The glimpse that we saw of the real EU when they outrageously used the threat of terrorist violence reemerging in Ireland as a tool of leverage in the Brexit negotiations has now morphed into a full blown demonstration of just how nasty, underhand, devious and gangsterish the EU is prepared to be to deflect from its own incompetence. In so blatantly lying and spreading falsehoods about Britain and Astra Zeneca it has gone down the path of failed dictators throughout history. Hiding their own incompetence by blaming the evil foreigner.

    The EU has lost the moral high ground, and it was that which allowed it to justify accruing powers to itself from national Governments when the people of the members states never wanted that. The pandemic is likely to be followed by another Euro crisis as the southern member states face unpayable debt burdens and I think with one eye on the possibilities that Brexit proved, will prompt calls across the peoples of Europe for repatriation of powers not ever closer union.

    Flag73Like
    Reply

    1. 330803+ up ticks,
      Afternoon R,
      “lost the moral high ground” the eu were joined in that department by the lab/lib/con long term rubber stampers
      willing brussels assets & IMO still at it, via “the deal”

    2. It never had a moral high ground. National governments had to lie to their voters to drag their countries into the mendaciously titled ‘Common Market’. They then had to lie and bully those same voters if they had second thoughts about the aims of the project.
      An organisation build on such a farrago of lies and bullying has possessed no moral high ground from the moment of its inception.

        2. 36 more years to go – mind you have already served almost 33 years of your sentence with me!

        1. Perhaps one day if and when we’re released from imprisonment by this wretched government.

          3. What ! No cake on demand ! What a dreadful household you run !

            I shall complain to the management forthwith…erm…

    9. I am modestly reminded of a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem, The Windhover :

      The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

  61. JOHN REDWOOD.

    Yesterday I was one of a few MPs who voted against a six month
    extension to the powers of the Coronavirus Act. I did so because I wish
    to hold the government to its promise of an end to lock down this June. I
    did so because I think the powers are too sweeping. We need to restore
    our liberties and let people make judgements for themselves about their
    conduct and their health risks. I did so because I do not think
    government can protect us from all harms, and has to avoid taking so
    much action against one threat that it leaves us vulnerable to other
    threats.

    I and others will continue to question and to seek
    to persuade the government to remove this raft of restrictive measures.
    Without the Official Opposition also opposing we lack the votes to
    change things, but we have voices and public support which we need to
    represent.

    2. I think that the treatment of Enoch Powell’s opinions was very significant because it marked the time when freedom of speech began to be seriously inhibited and when the truth had to be suppressed.

  65. Satellite image reveals true extent of the traffic jam caused by mega-ship lodged in the Suez Canal. 26 march 2021.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/951d990afae6c09e70f0a22b7532b4edd0e429bfa1318ffb693a6ae27322ca6c.jpg

    A satellite image taken above the Red Sea have revealed the true extent of the traffic jam building up behind the cargo ship that has lodged itself in the Suez Canal.

    Some 250 vessels are now backed up at either end of the narrow waterway, waiting for the stricken Ever Given – a container ship as long as the Empire State Building is tall – to be moved so they can pass.

    Images taken by a passing satellite show more than 50 vessels at anchor in the Gulf of Suez, one of two ‘fingers’ at the northern end of the Red Sea, where it enters the canal which leads to the Mediterranean.

    Just in passing might I observe that this Traffic Jam means that the number of ships in the South China Sea; a stretch of water claimed by China and disputed by the United States, must be at a very low level and will continue to drop for at least another ten days until the ships moving eastward take an alternative route and those moving West clear the area! An ideal time for military action there! Just saying you understand!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9405423/Suez-Canal-Satellite-image-reveals-extent-traffic-jam-stuck-ship.html

    3. I used to have a yacht building business which was located just north of the breakwater on the left. It wasn’t unusual to see a large number of ships waiting for entry into the canal before President Sisi ordered its urgent expansion, to allow traffic in both directions simultaneously, in 2014. The project was completed in August 2015 at a cost of nearly $10 billion.

      Prior to the expansion, the ships had to wait for up to 12 hours before southbound convoys completed their transit, allowing for northbound convoys to enter the canal.

      By the way, this isn’t the first time that the canal has been blocked by a grounded vessel. It happened in 2004 to the ‘Tropic Brilliance’ which caused the canal’s closure for three days.

  67. Batley Grammar School is closed for a second day I dunno, if I threatened some schoolteacher’s life in Bournville, I’d expect to be arrested in no time, and, ultimately, be on my way to trial and a jail term, and yet, I don’t get the impression there’s been any arrests yet in Batley where a muslim mob are partaking in their usual “let’s kill him” song and dance routine. Perhaps the arrests will be announced shortly …..

    2. Sorry, I may have “jumped the machete”, they are simply calling for him to be sacked for showing the cartoon of Mohammed ……

      GROVEL, GROVEL, GROVEL

  68. Scam Warning,pass it on
    Just got the message
    Royal Mail,your package has a 2.99 shipping fee
    Actions will be taken if you do not pay this fee

    1. I’ve had those.
      That’s when I’m not being offered funeral plans or being told I hold £229,000 worth of Bitcoin.

    1. They have been trying for years to get blasphemy laws on the books. I thought even back when they first started (in the eighties?) that it was a seriously bad idea and that was before I started boning up on islam.

  72. Thumbnail sketch of the Hitlerine’s history:

    “Ursula von der Leyen looks every inch the modern European stateswoman. Her tailored trouser suits, no-fuss hair and assured speeches: what’s not to like?

    When she was put forward by the European Council for President of the European Commission, her fellow Germans knew precisely what to expect. A poll found that only a third said she would be good at the job. Martin Schulz, a former president of the European parliament, did not mince his words. ‘Von der Leyen is our weakest minister,’ he said. ‘That is apparently good enough to head the European Commission.’ Having served as the deputy leader of Angela Merkel’s CDU party from 2010, she consistently achieved the lowest re-election results in the role’s history.

    Merkel had found a loyal protégé in von der Leyen. She’d given her a hand up out of regional politics in Lower Saxony and onto the federal stage. Under Mutti Merkel’s protection, von der Leyen retained her place in the cabinet longer than any other politician, despite various political scandals. She is perhaps best known for her reforms of the German military, an exercise in dubious procurement contracts that saw consultancy firms paid millions of euros while overpriced equipment failed to materialise.

    Just a few months before she quit as defence minister in 2019, US officials found that German forces had been using mobile phones during a Nato exercise because of a lack of encrypted radio equipment. Meanwhile, the Bundeswehr was forced to scrap its standard issue assault rifles when it was discovered that they didn’t shoot straight in temperatures above 30°C. At one stage, German soldiers were performing military exercises with broomsticks rather than guns.

    Von der Leyen hails from the closest thing the European Union has to an aristocracy. Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was the CDU’s minister president of Lower Saxony as well as one of the EU’s first civil servants. His young daughter seemed unsure of what she wanted from her future. She studied at four different universities, switching between archaeology, economics and medicine.

    In 1978 she enrolled at the London School of Economics, living under the pseudonym Rose Ladson and the protection of Scotland Yard. Her father — who nearly became chancellor after receiving the backing of the future German leader Helmut Kohl — had been told that the Red Army Faction was planning to kidnap his then 19-year-old daughter. Reminiscing about her time in London, she said: ‘I lived much more than I studied.’

    Her wild years seemed to have come to an end when she was awarded a medical doctorate in Hanover in 1991. However, a scandal erupted in 2015 when it was alleged that nearly half the pages of her dissertation contained plagiarised material.

    She reached her political nadir in 2018 when even Merkel was ready to drop her erstwhile ally as the CDU’s defence policy came under ever more intense scrutiny. But there was a lifeline from Brussels. Tellingly, von der Leyen announced her resignation as defence minister before her appointment as President of the European Commission was confirmed. The fact that Merkel abstained from voting on her nomination shows just how toxic her former deputy had become.

    Some in Brussels suspect that Emmanuel Macron wanted a weak candidate so he could mould her — and the Continent — in his own image. This may explain it. The EU leaders wanted someone who looked plausible but was ineffective at running a European Commission that they did not want to become too powerful. By that measure, she was the perfect candidate. Perhaps now, as the Commission fails to deal with the pandemic, it will regret its decision, looking at the trail of mayhem she has left in her wake. And it seems that she has not finished yet.”

    WRITTEN BY Katja Hoyer Spectator

    1. “No fuss hair”?! It probably takes an hour and a can of hairspray to glue her hair into place. If her husband tried to stroke her head he would cut his hands…

  75. Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.

    Muhammed cartoons

    An angry group of protesters gathered outside Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire on Thursday to express outrage that a teacher had allegedly shown cartoons of Muhammed to his pupils in the course of teaching them about the Charlie Hebdo controversy in which 12 people were murdered by Islamist terrorists. The school’s head teacher responded by saying: “Upon investigation, it was clear that the resource used in the lesson was completely inappropriate and had the capacity to cause great offence to members of our school community for which we would like to offer a sincere and full apology.”

    The teacher has been suspended pending an investigation. Muslim scholar and director of the Peace Institute Mufti Mohammed Amin Pandor told the crowd that the teacher’s alleged actions were “totally unacceptable and we have made sure that the school understands that”.

    The incident comes less than six months after French teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded on the streets of Paris after showing the same cartoons of Muhammed to his class.

    The FSU has written to the headteacher of the school to complain about his failure to stand up for free speech, as well as to the local Chief Constable asking him to make sure the teacher is protected from intimidation. In addition, we’ve written to Helen Stephenson, the CEO of the Charity Commission, to complain about the fact that a Muslim charity – the Purpose of Life – named the teacher in a letter demanding he be sacked and then published the letter on Twitter. You can read all three of our letters here.

    Toby commented: “We stand in solidarity with the teacher at Batley Grammar who has been suspended at the behest of a censorious religious mob and encourage others to do the same. Schools should be teaching children about the importance of free speech and for the headteacher to give in immediately to the demands of an outrage mob – apologising to them and suspending the teacher concerned – sets a bad example. No one has the right not to be offended.”

    Liberal censorship

    Writing in the Guardian earlier in the week, Thomas Frank argued that the Left, and in particular the Democratic Party, have made a strategic error by devoting so much effort to censoring views they disagree with. He says: “In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an ‘extremism expert’ shushing the world.” What was once a tool of the “puritanical right”, according to Frank, is now the weapon of choice for those who describe themselves as liberals. “What all this censorship talk really is, though, is a declaration of defeat,” Frank wrote. “To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itself.” He concluded: “Liberals believe in liberty, I tell myself. This can’t really be happening here in the USA. But, folks, it is happening. And the folly of it all is beyond belief.”

    Writing in The Critic, David Martin Jones argues that the “distinction between crime and sin was one of the outstanding achievements of secular, western democracies” but that our current debate over “hate speech” risks blurring that distinction. This is paralleled by a shift away from individual morality toward collectivist morality, which “deals with human beings as featureless resources of an enterprise. It manages, disallows and polices speech it considers harmful to a population composed of oppressed minorities. At the same time, it condones speech acts that undermines the morality of individuality, liberty, and private responsibility.”

    Suppression

    Freedom of speech is under threat, according to former Cabinet Minister Liam Fox, in a speech at the Adam Smith Institute on Monday. He called on politicians to defend victims of the cancel culture mob, such as J.K. Rowling, saying: “We must defend the right to disagree. Free speech is everybody’s business. Whether it is online abuse, the bullying mob of the intolerant, the cancel culture, no platforming or unwarranted government intervention, it is up to us all to speak out.”

    Poster company J.C. Decaux has refused to run an ad by the anti-lockdown campaign group Time For Recovery on the grounds that it is too political. However, as Guido Fawkes pointed out, J.C. Decaux regularly runs political advertising and has carried a fair proportion of Government advertising over the past year. The ad reads: “End the campaign of fear. Millions now have mental health problems.” Trafford Council also banned the poster on political grounds.

    Newly appointed editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue Alexi McCammond has been sacked for tweets she wrote when she was 17 that were deemed anti-Asian and homophobic. McCammond responded: “I should not have tweeted what I did and I have taken full responsibility for that.” Stan Duncan, the “chief people officer” of the magazine’s publisher Condé Nast called the move “the best path forward so as not to overshadow Teen Vogue’s work to become more equitable and inclusive”. According to Ben Fenton in the Telegraph, the ordeal is indicative of society’s inability to forgive people for silly things they’ve said on Twitter.

    It later emerged that one of Alexi McCammond’s accusers – Christine Davitt, the magazine’s senior social media manager – had used the N-word in a tweet she sent 11 years ago.

    Bills

    Writing in the Critic, James Gillies takes aim at the Scottish Hate Crime Bill, saying: “It’s evident that our political leaders see citizens outside the parameters of the Holyrood Bubble as a sinister bunch. We are perpetually in need of nannying and educating.” He points out the serious risk “that speech which is merely offensive to some people but which would not ordinarily meet the threshold for criminality will be reported and investigated as an offence under the new law”. Scotland has always treated freedom of speech and expression generously, he argues, but “the new hate crime legislation is out of step with this proud tradition”.

    An amendment to the Domestic Abuse Bill was accepted last week which, when the Bill is passed, will require police to record crimes that are motivated by hatred of the victim’s sex or gender. This is widely considered to be the first step towards making misogyny a hate crime.

    According to Zoe Strimpel, writing in the Telegraph, treating misogyny as a hate crime will result in “more paperwork, more virtue signalling and more opportunities to exploit dubious laws. And very little of what we actually need: which is for the police to actually turn up and do their job.”

    After MPs voted through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill last week, a ‘Kill the Bill’ protest in Bristol turned into a riot, which Home Secretary Priti Patel described as “thuggery and disorder by a minority”. Police vehicles were destroyed, and some police officers were injured. The most controversial section of the Bill gives police the power to place restrictions on public protests and allows activists to be prosecuted for causing “serious annoyance”. DUP MP Gavin Robinson warns that the scope of the Bill is so “incredibly loose” that it could result in the banning of Christian street preachers.

    Canada

    Robert Hoogland, the Canadian father of a 14-year old who was born female but who now identifies as transgender, has been jailed in British Columbia for “misgendering” his daughter. The child was “socially transitioned” without parental consent at the instigation of school counsellors and given testosterone under the direction of “gender ideologue psychologist” Wallace Wong, before undergoing other complex medical procedures. The British Columbia Supreme Court ordered both parents “to affirm their daughter’s new gender identity”. Hoogland was found in contempt of court after a judge issued a court order prohibiting him from using the pronouns “she” and “her” to refer to his child. The ruling did allow Hoogland to “think thoughts” contrary to the ruling, but to voice those thoughts would be to commit “family violence”, said the judge. Dr Jordan Peterson, who rose to fame amidst his opposition to Bill C-16, which enforced the use of preferred gender pronouns in Canada, tweeted: “This could never happen, said those who called my stance against Bill C-16 alarmist. I read the law and saw that it was, to the contrary, inevitable.”

    Canadian news site Rebel Media has been demonetised by YouTube, which founder Ezra Levant claims will cost the company $400,000 a year. The reason for the decision, according to YouTube, was “repeated violations of YouTube’s ad-friendly guidelines, including those related to harmful and dangerous acts, along with other channel monetisation policies”. Levant responded in a video, saying: “If we stop criticising the lockdown, they say we can reapply in 30 days and possibly get our ads back but we would have to stop saying what we say. We’d have to say what they want us to say.”

    Evolutionary behavioural scientist Dr Gad Saad – author of The Parasitic Mind: How Infections Ideas Are Killing Common Sense and a professor at Concordia University – has released a video explaining how sharing an email he received with the subject line “Dirty Jew” got him suspended from Facebook for “hate speech”. Saad, who is Jewish, summed up: “There is some overseer who has decided that me sharing genocidal hate targeting me is a form of hate speech and that’s it. Shut up. Wear your two masks.”

    Sharing the Newsletter

    We’ve received several requests to make it possible to share these newsletters on social media, so we’ve added the option to post them on several platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Just click on the buttons below.

    If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

    Kind regards,

    3. The abandonment of individual morality in favour of collectivist morality – in other words, the abandonment of Christianity for marxism and islam.

          2. “The rioting is wrong but so is the Bill” say two teens

            Taken from local paper quotes…even the kids are waking up now to the ensuing loss of freedom.

      2. Apparently it’s to go on through the weekend with similar protests planned for nearby Bath which could split the police resources.

  78. Just back from dropping the van off at the garage in Cromford, carrying a couple of lumps of tree back with me, and BBC R3 has just started playing Bruckner’s 6th!!
    So that’s me with a mug of tea and a loud sit down for the next hour or so!!

      1. Nah!! Goes in one end and comes out of the other!
        Besides, I’ve only had 4 mugs so far.
        This is my 5th.

          1. Most software developers drink at least that much of coffee per day! It has been said that the software developer is a complex mechanism that converts caffeine and bacon into code.

          2. Good ! I’m glad to hear it, Bob.

            I have known guys – mostly tradesmen – who like four teaspoons of sugar per mug; that could be a risky route to diabetes …

  79. After All –
    It’s only pulling down and desecrating our offensive statues,
    It’s only banning our offensive classic books.
    It’s only censoring and banning our offensive classic films.
    It’s only removing our offensive historical figures from history.
    It’s only renaming our offensive roads and buildings.
    It’s only closing our offensive churches.
    It’s only renaming and re-purposing our offensive historical buildings and gardens.
    It’s only blaming all the native Brits for slavery.
    It’s only blaming all native Brits for their privilege.
    It’s only kneeling for atonement at sporting events.
    It’s only sacrificing our offensive freedom of expression.

    1. Anyone would think that this might stir xenophobic, anti-woke feeling up in the indigenous British population.

  82. The capitulation of Batley Grammar School has been a truly dispiriting sight. In response to protests by angry Muslims it has suspended a teacher for the supposed offence of showing a caricature of Muhammad to his pupils. This is an extraordinary act of moral cowardice. Batley Grammar has buckled to religious extremists, cravenly begging for forgiveness for something that ought to be perfectly acceptable in an institution of learning — encouraging young people to engage with and discuss controversial issues.

    Everything about the Batley Grammar controversy stinks. It began when a teacher at the prestigious West Yorkshire school, as part of a religious education class, showed his pupils an image of Muhammad. Some Muslim groups that caught wind of this fact started stomping their feet. Mohammad Sajad Hussain of the Islamic charity Purpose Of Life said Muslims will feel ‘deeply hurt’ by the teacher’s behaviour and demanded that he be ‘permanently removed’. At 7.30am yesterday morning a group of mostly young men gathered at the school demanding that the teacher be sacked for the allegedly awful sin of displaying an image of the Prophet.

    I cannot read the rest of the article because I am not a subscriber.

    https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1375443481787834378

    1. I’m not a subscriber either, Maggie, but I have my little ways! Just for you, here’s the article in full.
      ;¬)

      The capitulation of Batley Grammar School has been a truly dispiriting sight. In response to protests by angry Muslims it has suspended a teacher for the supposed offence of showing a caricature of Muhammad to his pupils. This is an extraordinary act of moral cowardice. Batley Grammar has buckled to religious extremists, cravenly begging for forgiveness for something that ought to be perfectly acceptable in an institution of learning — encouraging young people to engage with and discuss controversial issues.

      Everything about the Batley Grammar controversy stinks. It began when a teacher at the prestigious West Yorkshire school, as part of a religious education class, showed his pupils an image of Muhammad. Some Muslim groups that caught wind of this fact started stomping their feet. Mohammad Sajad Hussain of the Islamic charity Purpose Of Life said Muslims will feel ‘deeply hurt’ by the teacher’s behaviour and demanded that he be ‘permanently removed’. At 7.30am yesterday morning a group of mostly young men gathered at the school demanding that the teacher be sacked for the allegedly awful sin of displaying an image of the Prophet.

      What happened next was staggering, even by the standards of today’s yellow-bellied culture of self-censorship. Batley Grammar’s headmaster, Gary Kibble, suspended the teacher — pending an investigation — and issued a ‘sincere’ and ‘unequivocal’ apology for the ‘totally inappropriate’ display of the Muhammad image. The school also put on hold the part of the religious-studies course in which the Muhammad incident occurred. And it is being reported this morning that the school has switched to remote learning, telling teachers and kids to stay home.

      Forget the religious-studies teacher, who was only doing his job by encouraging his kids to confront all sorts of issues head-on. The true scandal here is the behaviour of the school. It has surrendered to religious intolerance. What next — Mr Kibble standing outside the school gates and flagellating himself for the blasphemous transgression of allowing an image of Muhammad to appear in one of his classrooms?
      Bizarrely — but also predictably — the school has been cheered on by so-called progressives. Tracey Brabin, the Labour MP for Batley, says she is glad the school has recognised ‘the upset and offence’ it has caused and has now ‘apologised for the offence caused’. Well done for repenting — that’s effectively what Brabin is saying.

      So is it Labour policy to support the suspension of teachers who hold open, frank discussions about Islam? Does Labour support the punishment of public servants who are accused of engaging in blasphemy? We should be told. Many Labour voters in Yorkshire and elsewhere will be keen to know if Labour now backs the public shaming of people who are accused of holding blasphemous thoughts against Islam.
      That’s surely the central point in all of this: Britain is not an Islamic country. We do not live under Sharia law. It might be a punishable offence in Islamic nations to make or display an image of Muhammad, but it isn’t here. So what is going on? Why has a teacher been suspended and a school reportedly closed over something that is perfectly legal and perfectly acceptable in an educational context: encouraging discussion of religious icons and controversies?

      Batley Grammar’s capitulation will inflame religious intolerance. It will embolden those who believe they have the right to bully and silence anyone who ‘disrespects’ Islam. Moral cowardice is the fuel of contemporary censorship. It is the negative energy on which the zealous crusaders for speech-control feast and get fat. Every time a cultural institution, a publisher or a school yields to the demands of the easily offended, the arrogance of modern censorship intensifies and faith in liberty dims further.
      The idea of ‘Islamophobia’ plays a central role in contemporary censorship in Britain. Batley Grammar is being accused by some of inflaming Islamophobic sentiments. This is a slippery way of conflating discussion of Islam with racism; of treating critical discussion about a world religion as a species of racial hatred. But of course, as everyone ought to know, it is perfectly possible to criticise Islamic ideas and even to ‘diss’ Muhammad without harbouring a single hateful thought against the Muslim community.

      This controversy is more than dispiriting — it is chilling. The teacher has reportedly been given police protection. That isn’t surprising given that, just a few months ago, a schoolteacher in France was beheaded by a radical Islamist for also initiating a classroom discussion about images of Muhammad. In such a climate anyone who is whipping up opposition to the Batley teacher, or engaging in spineless apologetics for those who are, should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
      This teacher needs our support. The school has failed to give him its support, so perhaps the Prime Minister will? Boris Johnson, teachers in 21st-century Britain should be free to engage mature pupils in discussions about Islam and Muhammad — correct?

      1. Thank you DM,

        How on earth are we going to sort this out when the government now are falling out with China over their percieved treatment of Muslims . I just don’t get it .

        We must support the teacher . The grammar school isn’t a faith school is it .. the Muslim community have to be reminded that they are here under sufferance , pity we cannot be stronger and not be so fearful of their terrifying culture of intimidation .

      2. An ex (thankfully) in-law living in a similar area will be wringing her church-going, do-gooder hands in anguish that a teacher should show such a picture. She is either totally brainwashed or just plain stupid.

      3. ” ….. The school has failed to give him its support, so perhaps the Prime Minister will? “

        Fat chance – the flabby coward will never have the guts to stand up to Muslim hatred. With the stack of yellow straw on his head it is hardly surprising that he is being mockingly called Compliant Haystacks.

      5. I hope that Tracey Brabin gets put in her place by an imam – forced to use the women’s entrance to a segregated part of the hall, made to smother up from head to foot, told she’s only worth a quarter of a man and can’t go anywhere without a male relative’s permission.

    2. I have often trodden in stuff that smells better than the average prophet (of which there are many), but in this case the teacher must have had a death wish.

  83. Things must be getting tough for the rich.
    A few minutes ago saw a convertible Rolls Royce queuing at MacDonalds Woking. It’s just along the road from Pizza Express.

    Perhaps it was Prince Andrew. :-))

      2. I’ve scrubbed out all islamic references in my diaries and on my calendar. They have no place in a country with an established CHURCH.

    2. Never mind that Easter, which I think Christians regard as the most important event in the Christian calendar, is the week before. he didn’t want to upset the slammers.

      1. Wouldn’t it be great if someone organised a flash mob of Christian worshippers at all Churches for Easter. I would really like to see how the Police dealt with that.

        Medic !!!

          3. Excita furorem, et effunde iram. Up indignation, and pour the rage – sounds just the motto I want for my coat of arms

        2. Well. We are waiting to see what happens in Scotland where closing the churches was declared to be illegal by th court of Session a few days ago.

        3. Unfortunately, Phizzee,
          [ If our Church is anything to go by ]
          two thirds of Church worshippers are
          in thrall to HMG, rather than to God….

          We are able to accommodate, within
          the safe distancing diktats, some
          ninety-five people, albeit in different areas,
          all linked by video communication.
          I shall be surprised if as many as forty
          celebrate Easter by attending our
          Church services!…
          Our Easter Sunday used to commence
          with Communion at 08.30 followed by
          breakfast at 09.00, then our Service of
          Celebration at 10.30, attended by upwards
          of 100-150 people…all regular Church-goers.

          1. Even in yer pagan France we had 11 am communion followed by a roast lamb lunch for anyone who cared to attend.
            Now? Nothing.

          2. Hi Garlands

            I hear what you are saying .

            All I want to hear are church bells ringing and church bell practise.
            I am fed up with softly spoken religious tones , I want to hear the blood and thunder hand waving sermons, I need loud positive voices not cavilling sounds ..

            I wonder what sort of voice either Duncan Mac or Geoff Graham have .. will they throw Latin words and organ music into the flood of dusty light that shines through our church windows.

            I really crave the gravity of mellifluous voices , sincerity and no nonsense .

          3. I want to hear the blood and thunder hand waving sermons, I need loud positive voices not cavilling sounds

            ..Attend yer local mosque.

            };-((

          5. Thanks, Mum, that’s exactly what wish as a downpouring on Westminster and all in thrall therein.

        4. Have your own service, with friends (as many as are allowed). We don’t need spineless fake Christian C of E priests to run an Easter communion.

        1. I’m tempted to do likewise though apparently we have to fill in the silly track & trace form. Presumably hymn singing is still banned.

          2. I expect that we, the plebs, will be forbidden to sing, but there will be music and a chorister (by the altar, probably). I have had to book, so that will be the track and trace, I suppose as they know who I am and where I live – I’m on the Parish Electoral Roll.

  86. Mr Salmond has launched a new Scottish nationalist party, called Alba. The candidates will all be list candidates. If the party receives significant support it could result in a majority of MSPs who will be pro independence. Reading the website, the intention is that Scotland will secede by unilateral declaration, ignoring the hot air from Westminster.
    Another party has been launched, the All for Unity party led by George Galloway. The A4U party will only stand list candidates. Their argument is very much the same as that of Alba. In most constituencies the sitting constituency MSP will win. The only way to get an MSP elected is therefore via the list (d’Hondt*) system.
    That two new parties are attempting to get seats via this tactic is very interesting. Alba seek secession. A4U is attempting to prevent independence parties getting overall control of the Scottish Parliament and thereby prevent secession and retain the UK.

    *Simples:
    https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucahhwi/dhondt.pdf

      2. The Westminster folk must be sitting in their office frantically calculating the possibilities. Never mind fixing the 2014 Referendum, this is the big one. The UK government will be pouring money and support into All4Unity and George Galloway, as wells the Scottish Tories and Labour.
        We can be sure that the undercover people are even now packing to come North with van loads of ballot boxes, papers and printing machines.
        If the SNP constituency vote holds up and the Alba party gets the list vote of nationalists who do not like the SNP, Scotland could be out of the UK by Xmas. There are conservatives who would like independence, not just socialists, commies and nutters.

      3. Careful, Duncan. It is language like that which got Peddy permanently banned from this site!

        :-))

          2. Evening, John. I did indeed (after I’d done the washing). I watched a video I’d recorded and managed to do it without any interruptions – yay! 🙂

          5. Funny, I thought it was Peddy. (Never heard of the other two fellas you mention.)

            :-))

      5. ‘Evening, Duncan, I’m confused, where does the name ‘Alba’ come from? I was always taught that the old names were:

        Scotland = Caledonia
        Wales = Cambria
        Ireland = Hibernia
        England = Albion.

        Does Alba come from the Gaelic and have nothing to do with Albion – perfidious or otherwise?

        1. ‘Morning, NtN.

          ‘Alba’ is just the name of Scotland in Gaelic. Caledonia was what the Romans called it, after an ancient indigenous tribe (allegedly).

          I’ve no idea where the name ‘Albion’ originated nor how it came to mean England.

    2. Two new Scottish parties and two new Scottish party leaders; enough to give Krankie an orkasm …

    4. Isn’t there a poem about a man who, under an obligation of a promise, went to a house only to find it in ruins and no one there?
      The final lines telling us how, when departing, he spoke aloud of how he had kept him promise and come to the house?

  88. That’s me for this damp, chilly day. Still, the first trombetti seedlings are showing – and I potted on marigolds and Bizzie Lizzies.

    Hope it is better tomorrow.

    A demain.

        1. This makes me furious!
          Everything associated with our Country
          is being trashed by our fellow citizens,
          everything we and our antecedents
          lived through, fought for and worked for
          is, systematically, being destroyed.
          To say I am pi**ed orf is a f***ing
          understatement!

    3. That Quack should be castrated, no anaesthetic, made to eat his own balls, but only after they have been marinaded in arsenic and cyanide.

    4. Child molestation , cruelty , manipulation.

      Who are the adults who have allowed this .. they should be put in prison and debollocked!

  90. Worth a read – on Bidens press conference. Dominic Green:
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/26/bidens-first-press-conference-revealing-piece-reality-tv/
    I liked this bit especially:
    “Trump raised the hollow trick of the press conference to a minor art. He enjoyed the back-and-forth, and he accelerated the exchanges like a boxer. Trump wasn’t afraid of a roomful of almost entirely hostile journalists. Biden’s team are afraid of a roomful of almost entirely friendly journalists. They don’t trust him to hold a conversation on an open mike. It’s not hard to see why.

    Asked about the Democratic left’s proposals to dispense with the filibuster, Biden freestyled, and broke out into exuberant gibberish:

    “I have never been poor at calculating how to get things done in the United States Senate periods of the best way to get something done, if you hold near and dear to you that you like to be able to… anyway.”

    His head dropped, as if he was looking for a cue card that wasn’t there. “We are ready to get a lot done,” he said after a pause, his voice low and pleading, “and if we have to, if there is a complete lockdown and chaos as a result of the filibuster, then we’ll have to go beyond what I’m talking about. Okay, hang on… uh… sorry.””

    3. And to think this senile old fool is Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful military machine. God help us all…
      :¬(

    3. Apparently all the crew heard was uncle albert saying” so there i was on the bridge of this massive cargo ship chugging up the suez canal when i thought hang on! I forgot me mask so i decided to turn around and go back and get it”

  92. Six Nations Final at Stade de France

    Scotland v France rugby on BBC1 at 19.30; kick off at 20.00.

    1. A suitable thrashing for the Scots would rub salt in Welsh wounds.

      As an Englishman living in France, what’s not to enjoy?

        1. Having put England/Italy as my wooden spoon match, I’m laughing all the way to the bank!

          A thrashing for Scotland would be icing on the cake.

          Although I suspect that it may be a very entertaining and open match.
          I certainly hope so.

    3. ♬Anything you can screw I can screw better,
      I can screw anything better than you♬

    5. “You’ll take the High road and I’ll take the low road
      and I’ll have Independence afore ye!”

    6. Look, hen, I know ye’ve been eating garlic – currb your enthusiam to celebrate a free Scotland in the EU a while yet. For the sake of yer fellow MSPs.

  95. 330803+ up ticks,

    breitbart,
    Coronavirus Certificates Could Be Needed for Work, Weddings, Theatres: Report

    The assassin gove & co are discussing various options, that alone does not bode well for the peoples.

    There does seem to be a pall hanging over society one of whinge, submittance, reluctant agreement , for the sake of the party.

    May one ask, do the peoples realise that they outnumber these politico types and the peoples really DO have the power to rectify things in so many ways, a major one being telling the politician when & how high to jump.

    There are still peoples out there nowhere near loony to be current lab/lib/con members who could say in no uncertain tone.

    .WE ARE NOT AGREEING TO PERMITS TO LIVE.

    1. Bill Thomas after punting Rastus and Caroline through the tunnel of love on Caroline’s birthday?

      1. We have just had a delicious dinner of fruits de mer (oysters, crab, prawns and whelks) followed by fresh strawberries. I shall now look at the France/Scotland rugby match and shall support either team as long as it does not bend the knee to BLM. I must say I am rather torn – If Scotland wins then Wales will win the the championship but I have a soft spot for the Scots who deserve support after having to put up up with the Odious Mrs Morrell.

        If you have seen the photos of Caroline and me on the site this evening you will notice that Caroline does not look her age even if I do! When she first arrived at the school where we taught all the pupils thought she was a new, very lovely sixth form girl so their flabbers were completely ghasted when the crusty old English teacher married her.

        Anyway, enough of us – tomorrow we shall be congratulating two very excellent Nottlers on their birthdays.

        1. I’m pleased you’ve had such a wonderful day.

          As long as your cake hasn’t donated indigestion into the mix, like us, you’ll be enjoying a good game of rugby.
          The pundits are suggesting it will be a kicking game, I hope not.

          My hope is that France win by a landslide.

        2. Congratulations to you both.

          I have known the a fifty year old who looked seventy and a fifty year old who looked and acted so much younger as though he was thirty.

          Age is all in the mind. Keep the brain working and gaining and disseminating your acumen and age does not matter.

    1. They are blaming us because the problem is the UK variant. What variant did they have before they got ours? Not the Napoleon Complex Variant, surely?

      1. I’m amused/disheartened by the way that the people who identify any variant first, are blamed.

        The way forward is to do NO analysis so that any new variant belongs to someone else.

        And just how pathetic is that?

  101. From Brendan O’Neill’s ‘Spectator’ article:

    The idea of ‘Islamophobia’ plays a central role in contemporary censorship in Britain. Batley Grammar is being accused by some of inflaming Islamophobic sentiments. This is a slippery way of conflating discussion of Islam with racism; of treating critical discussion about a world religion as a species of racial hatred.

    That has been the tactic years; Islam is an immigrant culture so criticism of the culture must be criticism of the immigrant.

    But of course, as everyone ought to know, it is perfectly possible to criticise Islamic ideas and even to ‘diss’ Muhammad without harbouring a single hateful thought against the Muslim community.

    Too many more such incidents and, for some, that will change.

    1. Part of the problem is that muslims take any criticism of what their precious prophet said as a personal insult. When victimhood is the main prize, this gives them more power of course.

      1. Everyone in Britain should print a hundred sheets of A4 with a picture on and put them up on lamp posts, fences, walls. For once, I would not complain about litter if they blow around the place.

    2. When, as appears likely, one of the teaching staff is attacked or murdered, it will be spun as serving them right for abusing Islam, never that Muslims are homicidal maniacs who kill because of their religion.

    3. The Muslim community breeds and harbours rapists and murderers, does it not? (Discussion point.)

    4. Muslims, Blacks and Antifa are promoting racism where none existed before.

      BTW, Islam is NOT a religion it is just an ideology with brain-washed followers.

      I was Christened into the Church of England, converted to Catholicism because my first wife wanted a Nuptial Mass.

      I have now rethought all that and realised that all religions and ideologies just want control over the great unwashed so, while I no longer subscribe to any religion, I will still maintain Christian values.

      1. #metoo, Tom.
        It’s all about control and status.
        The Friends seem much less so, apart from the teetotalling.

    1. Police should have applied existing law last year when statues were being toppled. I’ve no patience with any of them now.

    3. Covid masks.
      If one didn’t know better one might assume that they are available just to hide such protesters, legally.

      1. The best bit was when the Bristol paper interviewed (on video) a long haired type with a spliff in his hand and was high as a kite. Poor bloke was getting lost for words before he finished a sentence.

  103. I have just done a few sums. If the SNP hold their current constituency seats, as is likely, the new Alba party need around 27 of the 56 list seats to bring about a vote to secede from the Union. Two-thirds of the votes for secession would do it. It is certainly possible. That is assuming that the Greens get no seats. They may well get 5 or 6, and the Greens are for independence. That’s my back of the envelope work for today. (Currently the Tories have 31 seats, 24 of them are list seats. They could lose most of them. Labour have 21 list seats and the Labour vote has collapsed and has shown no sign of improving.)
    Because a seat taken by one party is a loss to another, there are lots of possible outcomes. I am sure that even now the spreadsheets and computers at the Home Office are burning on through the night, and all weekend too, quite likely.

    1. For Scotland to vote for independence doesn’t the U.K. Parliament have to pass an act to allow it?

      1. They would say that, wouldn’t they?
        However, the right to self-determination is enshrined in the UN Charter and Articles.
        The UK recognised Kosovo within 24 hours of their Assembly voting for independence. Yet, as far as I know, Kosovo was never an independent nation.

        1. Yes I know laws don’t matter any more but I’m still a law abiding person. Let’s all just go along with the laws we want to and ignore the rest.

          It’s what BLM and the rest of the anarchists do so we’ll just join in.

        2. Kosovo was the theft of a piece of Serbia by immigrant ethnic Albanians, and Britain went right along with it!

  104. 330803+ up ticks,

    breitbart,
    TORY MP TO PRITI PATEL: BRITISH ASYLUM SYSTEM ‘IS A COMPLETE JOKE’
    She I believe said she had heard if often repeated since bliar had the shout

    For some time now apart from lab/lib/con supporters many see mass uncontrolled immigration as a very dangerous, treacherous, daily “joke” played on the decent peoples of these Isles.

    1. My cat Paris on cold nights works her way under my duvet and covers. Very similar to these photos except she is a Russian Blue & Persian mix.

    1. Watching at present. These games are now formulaic and frankly very boring.

      One of the problems is that the rules demand constant referee interventions. These interventions destroy the flow of the game and we wind up with bloody obese forwards denying fit and athletic running backs a place in the game. It is as I say just boring.

        1. The wokish abasement to BLM has destroyed my respect for the players and interest in the politicised activity which can no longer be called sport.

      2. I dont watch regularly nowadays. I cant stand the sham scrums, which take up so much time, and where the ball never gets put in centrally.

  109. This Islamist rhetoric is designed to frighten – and we know where it can lead

    Incendiary accusations at Batley Grammar School threaten the freedom to teach truthfully

    CHARLES MOORE

    The grandly-named Purpose of Life (PoL) is a charity based in Batley, West Yorkshire. Its purposes, as approved by the Charity Commission, are “to help young people of all races and backgrounds while being particularly sensitive to the needs of ethnic minority communities”, especially through education and the relief of poverty. Nothing in its listing on the Charity Commission’s website indicates that it is a Muslim organisation. Indeed, PoL states on its own website: “We are all one family, irrespective of race, religion, colour etc.”

    This week, PoL’s founder and CEO, Mohammad Sajad Hussain, published on Twitter the full text of a letter he had just sent in his charity’s name to Gary Kibble, the headmaster of Batley Grammar School. The letter named a religious studies teacher at the school. “We at Purpose of Life”, it said, had been “deeply hurt” by the teacher named because he had been “showing insulting caricatures”, which proved “what hatred people feel for the beautiful religion of Islam”. His behaviour was “clearly sadistic”.

    “This to me is terrorism to Islam & Muslims around the world”, Mr Hussain added.

    The letter demanded that the named teacher be “permanently removed” from the school. The school’s apology – already issued by Mr Kibble – “does not go far enough”, it said. “This is the stance Purpose of Life takes with any organisation who attacks our beloved prophet Muhammad (PBUH).” Therefore, the school must “recognise its own shortcomings”, it concluded.

    Outside Batley Grammar School, there was a protest in the same cause, addressed by Mohammed Amin Pandor, a local mufti. The crowd shouted: “Get the head teacher”. Mr Pandor also runs a charity (this one explicitly Muslim), called the Peace Institute.

    He can be found on Twitter addressing a public rally, with the Corbynites Rebecca Long-Bailey and Laura Pidcock, in which he praises Black Lives Matter. In other tweets, the mufti attacks India, France, Israel, Hindus and Buddhists and supports the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Yesterday he tweeted an Islamic fatwa from the Deobandi movement (of which he is a part) counselling Muslims against accepting Covid-19 vaccines.

    It is reported that the religious studies teacher whom PoL’s letter named has now gone into hiding.

    Some questions suggest themselves. Why should any charity claim the right to get rid of a teacher? Why would a charity which does not state in its legal governing document that it is Muslim feel it right to attack people for (as it sees it) attacking Islam’s prophet? Why would either of the charities involved here feel entitled to speak for the parents of Batley Grammar School, and why should the school or public authorities recognise such an entitlement? Why would they and other protestors arrange a small mob to stand at the school gates? In a free and plural society, should such organisations be the gatekeepers of what Muslims can be taught?

    There are other questions, too. Why did Mr Kibble, the headmaster, feel it necessary to apologise “unequivocally” for the lesson in question and to relay an apology from the member of staff accused? Why did he describe the use of a particular image as “totally inappropriate”? In a robust statement, the Department for Education said that the protests had been “completely unacceptable”. Why did Mr Kibble give in to them?

    So far, all we know is that the teacher involved was giving a religious studies class about blasphemy. In it, he showed his middle-school pupils a cartoon of Mohammed with his turban rendered as a bomb, probably the one originally printed in Charlie Hebdo. There is a clear, easily justifiable educational purpose here – although of course it is possible that the teacher mishandled the use of the image. In religious studies, children should be taught about what blasphemy means and how different religions deal with it. One would expect such teaching – like all good teaching – to be accompanied by examples. Some pupils at the school seem to agree. They are bravely getting up a petition to support their beleaguered teacher.

    There is also a free speech issue. Mr Hussain of PoL says: “We can’t use the expression, freedom of speech, to offend people.” Where does Mr Hussain get that idea? In Britain, we can, we do, and the law upholds this. If it did not, I could counter by claiming that Mr Hussain’s threatening intervention offends me – which it does – and have him arrested, and soon everyone would be claiming offence about everything and free speech would be destroyed. It was because of this danger that the senior members of Cambridge University recently defied their woke vice-chancellor and voted to insist that freedom of academic speech includes the right not to respect certain beliefs.

    At Batley Grammar, an inquiry into the affair follows. We can already guess the likely results. The “offending” teacher will surely not return to teach at the school, even if he is exonerated of all wrongdoing. The authorities will not dare let him. They will tend to see him, rather than his Islamist critics, as responsible for chucking fuel on the flames. Nor, in all likelihood, will he be able to get another job in the state sector, for similar reasons. Purpose of Life has destroyed his purpose of life, in career terms.

    It has also left him in fear. The phrases in Mr Hussain’s letter are rhetorically violent: they accuse the teacher of hating Islam, insulting its prophet, committing terrorism against Islam and Muslims. Mr Hussain equates the teacher’s behaviour with the great fire that recently burnt many Muslims in a Rohingya refugee camp. Murder, rape and being burnt alive, he says, “will only increase if we allow this [ie the teacher’s] kind of behaviour”, which he also calls “sadistic”. Not only are these uncharitable, horrible accusations to make against anyone, they also, in many cases, contain trigger words to incite anger. Mr Hussain and PoL presumably chose their words carefully. They are being said in a context in which the teacher’s home address has been put online. Why are all of us in the media referring to him as “the teacher” when normally, in a free country, people in news stories can and should be named? I think PoL knows why.

    Where do such things lead? We know the answer. Only six months ago, Samuel Paty, a teacher in a suburb of Paris, was also teaching pupils about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons (in his case, more in reference to free speech than to blasphemy). Even though he allowed Muslim pupils to leave the class or look away while he used the offending pictures, he was shopped by pupils and parents. One parent led an online campaign against him. This in turn inflamed a young Chechen Muslim, who turned up at the school gates. He asked a pupil to identify M Paty, followed him as he left his work and beheaded him. Then he posted a picture of the severed head online.

    How easily could this happen here? It would be wrong to say that people like PoL actually want such a thing to happen, but I hereby exercise my increasingly threatened right to free speech and suggest that they want to frighten the teacher. By doing so, by naming him and by insulting him, they create a climate which can make violent attack more likely.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/26/islamist-rhetoric-designed-frighten-know-can-lead/

    1. We all know the problem and the answer. A cancer in a body is not easily eliminated and only firm action will provide a cure. Sadly, our leaders have no moral fibre and will not act and speak up for our values.

      1. And we all know that our government and politicians have not got the courage or the integrity to sort the problem out.

        But until the problem is sorted out this sort of behaviour, which violates all our lives, will not stop – it will become commonplace.

        1. 330803+ up ticks,
          Evening R,
          As a long term UKIP member now ex I can assure you that we tried to warn the herd
          they were heading for the cliff edge.

          The only time they , the herd , supported UKIP ( the eu elections) nearly four million
          and it proved a success, and they still didn’t learn.

      2. 330803+ up ticks,
        Evening Kp,
        Gerard Batten UKIP leader warned of islamic ideology back in 2005, nec / farage treachery took care of him and the real UKIP party.

          1. 330877+ up ticks,
            Morning Atg,
            The herd are definitely NOT for heeding history especially recent
            history, they never learn from their mistakes sad to say.

  110. Saturday 27th March

    The Lovely Maggie – our veritably

    TRUE BELLE

    A Very Happy Birthday

    and

    Many, many more Happy Birthdays

    With our fondest Best Wishes

    from Caroline and Rastus

    4. Goodness – two spring chickens having birthdays today!

      Hope you have a lovely day, Belle!

    5. Have a wonderful day Belle. Go out, let your hair down and have a great time.

  111. Saturday 27th March

    The Brilliantly Talented Musician and splendidly Spikey raconteur

    FALLIC ALEC

    A Very Happy Birthday

    and

    Many, many more Happy Birthdays

    This is the big one – 80 years young today

    With our very Best Wishes

    from Caroline and Rastus

  112. Since I am up before Geoff has posted today’s (Saturday’s) site, may I join Rastus and Caroline in wishing both Maggie and Spikey the happiest of birthdays at the tail end of Friday’s site. Have a great day, both of you. Love from Elsie.

Comments are closed.