Friday 16 April: Masking the Queen will be the crowning act of Covid heartlessness

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/2021/04/15/lettersmasking-queen-will-crowning-act-covid-heartlessness/

494 thoughts on “Friday 16 April: Masking the Queen will be the crowning act of Covid heartlessness”

  1. Yippee – first today; normally still asleep, but today I had some research to do! Morning all!

    1. Don’t put the bunting out yet ! The page was late.

      Well done anyway.

      Good morning. :@)

      1. You take what you’re given!! A few years ago I was the English Open Double Trap veteran’s champion – the fact that I was the only Vet who turned up is beside the point!!

  2. US has ‘low to moderate confidence’ in reports of Russian bounty on US troops. 16 April 2021.

    US intelligence agencies have only “low to moderate confidence” in reports last year that Russian spies were offering Taliban militants in Afghanistan bounties for killing US soldiers.

    The reports in the press citing intelligence sources sparked outrage and demands from Democrats for the Trump administration to confront the Kremlin over the issue.

    Morning everyone. Mine is nil. This story was dreamed up by the CIA desk at the New York Times. There is no evidence for it and even worse it is a stupid idea. A little thought tells us it must be a scam. Why would the Russians pay the Taliban for something they quite happily undertake for free every day of the week? American losses in Afghanistan have tailed off to almost nothing since they withdrew from a combat role so even if it were true it would be futile. This aside the difficulties of who killed whom and when and why in a battlefield environment would render such a scheme totally unworkable. Why not just send them weapons?

    One has to imagine how these stories affect the Russians. Vlad takes a phone call from Biden who surrounded by aides, prompts, idiot boards etc. reads from a pre-prepared card (I refuse to believe that there was a conversation) that lists this and a whole series of other (Salisbury etc.) complaints that you absolutely know to be false. How do you respond to this? Is Biden merely senile? Does he actually believe this stuff or is there something more sinister going on? If he’s not giving the orders who is? In such a situation diplomacy is not likely to work. In my opinion the Russians have given up on this and will play this game but resort to other means to protect themselves from a hostile and criminal United States!

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/15/russian-bounty-us-troops-afghanistan

  5. Geoff: Friday 16 April: Masking the Queen will be the crowning act of Covid heartlessness. This posting is not appearing via the usual access. It may need reposting to make it available to all. (8.36 European time). – – – – OK now, 8.38

      1. Slept in? Good grief – whatever next?

        Good morning, Geoff – hope all is well.

      2. You slept in and I rose early! Like the conjunction of Venus with Uranus, this is probably a ‘once in a lifetime’ event. 😃

  6. From BBC News [yes, I know, but …] “A company in which Health Secretary Matt Hancock and his sister have shares has won contracts from NHS Wales, it has emerged. NHS Wales gave the company, which specialises in the secure storage, shredding and scanning of documents, £300,000 of business this year. Labour said it amounted to “cronyism at the heart of this government”.

    A government spokesman said that Mr Hancock had acted “entirely properly” and there was no conflict of interest. In March this year, Mr Hancock declared in the MPs’ register of interests that he had acquired more than 15% of the shares of a company called Topwood Ltd.”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56768601

      1. The Cons are in the driving seat just as peoples’ fury over corruption is boiling over, yet it was Blair who first started this shameless fill-yer-boots mentality.

    2. Buying shares is one thing, accepting them as a gift is another. I know that it is very nice to be given a present, but did it not cross his mind that there might be a reason that is not just delight in his company, admiration of his profile, and appreciation of his intelligence, wit and humour?

    3. Buying shares is one thing, accepting them as a gift is another. I know that it is very nice to be given a present, but did it not cross his mind that there might be a reason that is not just delight in his company, admiration of his profile, and appreciation of his intelligence, wit and humour?

    4. The BBC report also disclosed that Hancock’s sister was a director in Topwood which was formed in 2002.

  8. I took aim at Prince Philip in my cartoons – and he loved it

    The Telegraph’s Matt Pritchett has been lampooning famous figures for years but he didn’t expect to count the Duke among his fans
    By Matt Pritchett
    16 April 2021 • 5:00am
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    I’ve sent cartoons to prime ministers, celebrities and all manner of other public figures, but until April 2006, never to Buckingham Palace.

    That month, the Queen turned 80, and received some 20,000 birthday cards. I don’t often draw cartoons about the Royal family, but it felt appropriate to mark the occasion. And so I did, with this cartoon depicting two footmen perusing cards displayed on a mantelpiece in the Palace:
    https://cf.eip.telegraph.co.uk/responsive-image/content/c842115a4c84aecd05504767bc507625d9c1927e/1618510269079.png

    I didn’t think much of it, though a reader got in touch to lightly admonish me for being disgracefully disrespectful in joking about the Queen’s age. Not long afterwards, however, I received a letter from the Palace, stating that they loved the cartoon and someone – I think the subtext was “someone very senior” – had requested I send the original. Enjoyably, I was able to tell the disgruntled reader that I was sorry they’d been offended, but if it was any comfort, the butt of the joke clearly felt otherwise…
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    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2021/04/15/Matt-Duke_Embeds_2_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqn_fQrCOxBpu01mvafgwdVwIbjrdNMGrwZGMfsVweghU.jpg?imwidth=680
    *
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    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/16/took-aim-prince-philip-cartoons-loved/

    1. Pah, the government have nothing to worry about. After years of dumbed down state education turning out mathematical illiterates, nobody will understand the significance of that figure anyway.

  10. Revenge Is Sweet

    After a miserable weekend of high-stakes poker in Vegas, a successful businessman lost the shirt off his back. He was left with nothing but a quarter and the second half of his return ticket. All he had to do was somehow get himself to the airport. So he went out to the front of the casino where there was a cab waiting. He got in and explained his situation to the cabby. He promised to send the driver money from home, he offered him his credit card numbers, his driver’s license number, his address, etc, but to no avail.

    The cabby just kept saying, “If you don’t have fifteen dollars, get the hell out of my cab!”

    So the businessman was forced to hitchhike to the airport and was barely in time to catch his flight.

    One year later the businessman, having worked long and hard to regain his financial success, returned to Vegas. This time, he won big.

    Feeling pretty good about himself, he went out to the front of the casino to get a cab back to the airport. Well, who should he see out there at the end of a long line of cabs but his old buddy, the cabby who refused to give him a ride when he was down on his luck! The businessman thought for a moment about how he could make the guy pay for his lack of charity, and he hit on a plan.

    The businessman got in the first cab in the line. “How much for a ride to the airport,” he asked?
    “Fifteen bucks,” came the reply.
    “And how much for you to give me a blowjob on the way?”
    “What?! Get the hell out of my cab!”

    The businessman got into the back of each cab in the long line and asked the same questions, always with the same results. When he got to his old friend at the back of the line, he got in and asked “How much for a ride to the airport?”

    The cabby replied “fifteen bucks.”
    The businessman said, “Okay,” and off they went. As they drove slowly past the long line of cabs, the businessman gave a big smile and a thumbs-up to each and every driver.

    …and another little story that shews that we are not the only ones – suffering ‘Down Under’.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia0bfWbOLjY

  11. Today’s gems from the FCDO 77 Bde interns

    SIR – I agree with Michael Staples’s letter (April 15), boggling at the “sheer heartlessness and scientific inanity of the present government rules”, which will see the Queen having to sit alone, in a mask, at the funeral of her husband. Do others share my despondency?

    I’m tired of masks, tired of social distancing and I’ve lost faith in Boris Johnson’s élan to lead us dynamically out of this situation – which only suits those who love regulation and bossing people around.

    We’ve done our bit and protected the NHS. Now we need to resume the normal behaviour of a free and loving society.

    Caroline Egleston
    Alton, Hampshire

    SIR – Boris Johnson’s comments that the reduction in Covid cases and deaths is not due to the vaccination programme fly in the face of common sense, as well as scientific analysis.

    I am at a loss, having voted for him to become Tory leader, as to why he has become so negative and cautious.

    This does not just erode trust in the Government’s position (Comment, April 15), but runs the risk of devaluing the efficacy of the whole vaccination programme, which has been amazing.

    Please Boris, let’s have some positive thinking and a dose of your infectious enthusiasm to lift our spirits after the miseries of lockdown.

    Wesley Hallam
    Ubley, Somerset

    SIR – Boris Johnson asserted on Tuesday that the recent reductions in hospitalisations and deaths were achieved largely by lockdown, not the vaccination programme.

    Is this a U-turn on encouraging the take- up of inoculations, or an attempt to justify a disastrous government policy for the inevitable inquiry into how it handled the pandemic?

    Ian Goddard
    Wickham, Hampshire

    SIR – I wish the media would stop moaning about the speed of lockdown relaxation. Most people I know would rather the Government takes the time it needs to be safe.

    David Kidd
    Petersfield, Hampshire

    SIR – I was disheartened to read that David Walters (Letters, April 14) was refused service at the Angel Inn in Corbridge because he doesn’t own a smartphone.

    Our son is autistic with learning difficulties and enjoys his pub lunches. Fortunately for him, we (, his parents and carers), purchased and got to grips with smartphones in 2020, otherwise we mightay have found ourselves in a similar situation.

    It is very sad that we are even having this conversation. A pub in the heart of a village such as Corbridge should be inclusive, and show kindness and care to the community and the visitors it serves.

    I sincerely hope Mr Walters finds a more welcoming and helpful local.

    Julie Thompson
    Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire

    Thatcher and schools

    SIR – I, too, had respect for Shirley Williams’s decency and sincerity (Letters, April 14), while disagreeing with her politics. I was irritated by her claim, without any context being given, that Margaret Thatcher approved the closure of more grammar schools than she.

    Newly promoted in 1970 to the junior Cabinet post of education secretary in Edward Heath’s government, Mrs Thatcher was duty-bound to implement the Conservatives’ manifesto pledge: “We will maintain the existing rights of local education authorities to decide what is best for their area.”

    One of her first acts when elected prime minister in 1979 was to scrap the previous Labour government’s legislation, instigated by Mrs Williams, compelling councils to implement comprehensive schemes.

    Mrs Thatcher consistently defended academically selective education, which is one reason among many that former grammar school pupils from modest backgrounds, myself included, became her fervent supporters and continue to defend her legacy.

    Philip Duly
    Haslemere, Surrey

    SIR – Not only did Shirley Williams destroy many grammar schools (fortunately not Sir William Borlase’s in Buckinghamshire, where I taught), but ironically she also created more independent schools by removing the direct grant, which included my alma mater, Barnard Castle School.

    Tony Craig
    Barnard Castle, Co Durham

    Spelling didn’t count

    SIR – I once employed a student on a placement as part of his degree. Near the end of his time, he asked me to look at his report on his experience.

    I thought I should point out any spelling mistakes (Letters, April 15), but after a dozen red marks in the first couple of paragraphs I gave up and merely commented on the content.

    He achieved a first-class degree in mathematics.

    Chris Yates
    Peasedown St John, Somerset

    SIR – I once applied for a job as a merchandiser. The job included a car.

    In my handwritten letter of application I wrote: “I have been driving since I was 17.” My writing was such that my manager read it as: “I have been divine since I was 17.”

    I got the job.

    Vicki Williams
    Holyhead, Anglesey

    Census glitches

    SIR – While field staff are repeatedly contacting people who have submitted their census form (Letters, April 15), the Office for National Statistics (ONS) database of addresses remains suspect.

    After close liaison with ONS staff on behalf of the collegiate university to ensure addressing was accurate for student residences, they have still managed to issue letters and chase up addresses that do not exist. On Tuesday, I received one for a property that has not been subdivided as shown on the letter in almost 40 years.

    Since my file does not show the same mistake for the past three censuses, one can only wonder at how such errors are made. So much for taxpayers’ money being spent on a private firm to prepare the database.

    Mark Blandford-Baker
    Home bursar, Magdalen College
    Oxford

    SIR – We have had an amazing response to Census 2021. More than nine out of 10 households have replied to ensure they are represented with services like school places and GP surgeries. I thank all who have taken part.

    This is a major operation across England and Wales. Field officers are visiting households where records show we have had no response and we are sending reminder letters.

    It is vital that we strive to count everyone and that no communities are missed, so we get the best possible information. Combined with new data sources, we will have the richest and most accurate picture ever.

    In a small number of cases, people have been contacted after responding. We are listening to concerns about multiple visits or letters, and have systems in place to minimise these. We have categorically denied that there are IT issues (report, April 15) and are proud to uphold the 200-year history of keeping census information safe.

    Some people have started their census but not yet clicked submit; we urge everyone to complete it as soon as possible.

    Pete Benton
    Director of Operations, Census 2021
    Fareham, Hampshire

    Quango cronyism

    SIR – For many years, the metropolitan liberal establishment, of which doubtless Sir Keir Starmer (Sketch, April 15) would consider himself part, has used its power and influence to create numerous expensive quangos of questionable need, then stuffed them full of its own cronies. Why is Sir Keir not attacking this aspect of cronyism?

    Peter Mansion
    Blockley, Gloucestershire

    Land Rover ruse

    SIR – In 1983, I was a civil servant redrafting regulations for minibuses (vehicles with nine to 16 seats). The Long-Wheelbase Land Rover had 10 seats, so was caught and could have been killed off because of a rule that no passenger door is allowed on the offside of a bus, and the Land Rover has a rear offside passenger door.

    To get around this, I added a simple exemption for “a vehicle known as the Land Rover”. We were accused of trade protection and our minister, Lynda Chalker, asked if this could be defended. I replied: “Yes, minister. We have recently been combined with the environment department and you are now also responsible for ancient monuments. And the Land Rover is an ancient monument.”

    She laughed and laughed. The exemption was never challenged and, as far as I know, is still there. The Long-Wheelbase Land Rover survived nearly another 40 years.

    Anthony Reynolds
    Amersham, Buckinghamshire

    Locals know how best to run national parks

    SIR – Seventy years ago, the first English national parks were set up. The Government recently said that they represented one of the most outstanding environmental achievements of the past 100 years.

    Since 1995, the national park authorities have been independent statutory bodies, with a majority of local councillors on their boards. However, according to documents leaked to the BBC’s Countryfile programme (shown March 28), the Government now plans to bring all the functions and responsibilities of the protected landscapes into a single organisational structure, effectively a new national quango.

    This would reverse 70 years of local knowledge and accountability, and is at odds with the Conservative manifesto of December 2019, which said: “The days of Whitehall knows best are over.” What is going on?

    Norman Cowling
    Chair, Dartmoor Preservation Association 2014-2020
    Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Devon

    A royal yacht to kick-start British shipbuilding

    SIR – I would support the idea of a new royal yacht (Letters, April 14) if it enhanced the Royal family’s name for environmental stewardship and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme.

    To achieve the former, there should be an open competition for design of a carbon-neutral ship that uses hydrogen fuel, solar and wind power – a scheme that would help kick-start the British shipbuilding industry to catch up with the early progress already achieved in air transport.

    Then, for a month a year the yacht should be made available for Duke of Edinburgh gold award winners to participate in a marine exercise, and for the rest used for royal and trade purposes, and multirole ocean surveillance.

    Tim Oliver
    Professor emeritus, Barts Cancer Institute
    London EC1

    SIR – A new royal yacht should commemorate the great partnership between the Queen and Prince Philip, and be named HMY Elizabeth and Philip, following the precedent set by the yacht Victoria and Albert.

    Lt Cdr Brian Smith (retd)
    Dunfermline, Fife

    SIR – A benefit of naming one of the Type 26 frigates being built HMS Duke of Edinburgh (Letters April 14) is that she would be able to escort HMS Queen Elizabeth.

    Admiral Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
    London SW1

    SIR – The new royal yacht should be named the Prince Philip. By the time it is launched, Edinburgh could be the capital of a foreign country, which may merely be a cash-strapped satellite EU state, and no advertisement for an effulgent Great Britain.

    Tony Jones
    London SW7

    1. That arse West – far-left politician, useless sailor – gets bloody everywhere.

    2. And today’s MRD award goes to – Pete Benton, Director of Operations, Census 2021

      1. it’s a cracker, almost as good as his title. 2nd contender is the one immediately above: Mark Blandford Baker, who in reality is a new age traveller of no fixed abode, is not a bursar and doesn’t live in Oxford

      2. I would like to see the census database matched with the benefits database.

        They might save themselves £69 billion mistakenly paid out or fraudulently claimed each year.

    3. And today’s MRD award goes to – Pete Benton, Director of Operations, Census 2021

    4. Mrs Egleston, your mistake was to do your bit and protect the NHS, thus establishing a pattern of the public serving the bloated public sector.
      Do not imagine that the public sector will want to change the status quo any time soon – and it is they who make the rules.

      1. Mrs Egleston posted on the wrong paper, it should have been the Grauniad. She kindly quoted an extract of her CV hidden in the narrative “only suits those who love regulation and bossing people around”

    5. “…Most people I know would rather the Government takes the time it needs to be safe. David Kidd”
      OK, Kidd. How long will it take to be safe? How will you tell? Will you rely on the Government telling you when? If so, why? Don’t you think that if they are “following the science”, and have been for 15 months, there should now be very clear markers to tell us when it will be safe? Markers that are well-defined and, above all, public?

    6. You don’t need a smart phone to get a drink or meal at a pub. They’re all talking rubbish. Just a landline phone number is sufficient, or even your address.

          1. My favourite would be the NHS number that keeps calling me about the injection. 0333 202 0299
            That should be fun if everyone used it.

        2. They already have all the regular locals’ numbers. If I book a meal somewhere they get your email address when booking online. Smart phones really don’t have to come into it.

    7. If a ship were to be named HMS Duke of Edinburgh it would probably be named after Prince Edward, who apparently will inherit the title when the Queen dies.

      1. I thought Edward was still wrapped up in recreating It’s a Knockout. Aside knowing he’s obviously alive, he’s a touch more sensible staying out of the MSM glare

    1. The old boy’s got confused. I used to love his wildlife programmes but not now he keeps banging on about climate change.

    3. “There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
      And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
      And frogs in the pools singing at night,
      And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

      Robins will wear their feathery fire
      Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
      And not one will know of the war, not one
      Will care at last when it is done.

      Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
      If mankind perished utterly;
      And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
      Would scarcely know that we were gone.”

      Sarah Teasdale 1918

    4. “the natural world which would be in a better state without us.”
      That cannot be denied.

    5. Then why is he stubbornly hanging in there at the age of 95?
      If he is that bothered about being a plague on the planet, he should do the decent thing.

  14. Yo All

    SIR – A benefit of naming one of the Type 26 frigates being built HMS Duke of Edinburgh (Letters April 14) is that
    she would be able to escort HMS Queen Elizabeth.
    Admiral Lord West of Spithead (Lab)

    Admiral West knows quite well, that both the Carriers, QE and PoW, will havebeen scrapped
    before the Type 26 Frigate become operational, especiallyafter the Greens have had their input
    and demanded that, they follow the way of the motor car and are ‘all electric’, with Wind Power of course

    1. Around the time ‘Rule Britannia’ was written, the British navy sustained one of the largest empires in history.

      The ships were entirely wind-powered.

      2. True, but so were the ships of every other navy.

        How long do you think a wind powered ship would last in a modern engagement against a “standard” modern adversary?

      4. …and quite often more than 30 per cent of the crew died of typhoid, scurvy or malnutrition on regular voyages and even more on trips to the Far East and the West coast of America. Going ‘Green’ can have serious consequences.

  15. Yo All

    SIR – A benefit of naming one of the Type 26 frigates being built HMS Duke of Edinburgh (Letters April 14) is that
    she would be able to escort HMS Queen Elizabeth.
    Admiral Lord West of Spithead (Lab)

    Admiral West knows quite well, that both the Carriers, QE and PoW, will havebeen scrapped
    before the Type 26 Frigate become operational, especiallyafter the Greens have had their input
    and demanded that, they follow the way of the motor car and are ‘all electric’, with Wind Power of course

    1. The sun’s strong enough to clear the frost quickly except in the shade of the hedge.

      2. Yo Nd

        Cut the hedge down………….

        I have been up near Authorpe Hedgehog Hossypital over the last few days, do you know it

        1. It’s not our hedge- it goes round the field and is home for lots of birds and other creatures.
          I don’t know the Authorpe hedgehog hospital, no.

    2. The sun’s strong enough to clear the frost quickly except in the shade of the hedge.

  17. I see the DT is describing the Duke’s funeral as “planned to military precision”.

    Well, as the military are doing it……

    Holds head in hands

  18. Good morning all from a beautifully bright, sunny but distinctly chilly Hampshire!
    Down here with the DT as she continues trying to sort out her mother’s doll collection.

    1. Good morning from sunny Hampshire. Blue skies. Nothing but blue skies. From now on. :@)

    3. Elderly chum had a doll collection; those mock Victorian efforts that I find rather creepy.

  19. The BBC has a new Black Looting Martyr – Adam Toledo. The poor lad was just going about his normal routine – the teenager was with a 21-year-old man, Ruben Roman, who had just fired a gun at a passing car. According to the BBC account (which is being repeated every15 minutes this morning) the hapless child was gunned down in cold blood by a trigger happy cop, even though he, Toledo, was running away and had already dropped the weapon he was holding at least one tenth of a second before he was so cruelly wiped out.

      1. Not seen the video yet, but it sounds like he dropped the pistol he was carrying and was putting his hands up as the Officer was squeezing the trigger on his pistol.

      2. That’s the one. Just out with his 21 year-old mate on a revenge killing spree. Learning the trade, probably. Nothing out of the ordinary in suburban Chicago.

    3. Police go to a scene of a reported 8 shots fired. A policeman chases someone with a gun who has ignored police demands to stop. He then turns towards the policeman who has a split second to decide whether the person still has the gun and will fire at him. Police are trained that hesitation means death. The policeman fires thinking his life is in danger.

      Cue knee-jerk condemnation omitting the facts that 13 yr old was carrying a gun having been involved in shooting at others and that he largely brought it on himself, only have done to him what he was trying to do to others. Cue rioting that blights the lives of poor people, mostly black/Hispanic like themselves.

      I bet the police are really plssed off that they risk their lives to safeguard the public only to be shafted by the people they are protecting when things aren’t perfect, as they often aren’t. They deserve our support.

  21. Matt Ridley
    Britain is in danger of repeating its post-war mistakes
    From magazine issue: 17 April 2021

    https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltf04078f3cf7a9c30/bltfe2097ecc7164de7/6076e92d2999957477a78fe9/Matt-Ridley-Getty.jpg?format=jpg&width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds

    In search of wisdom about how an officious government reluctantly relaxes its grip after an emergency, I stumbled on a 1948 newsreel clip of Harold Wilson when he was president of the Board of Trade. It’s a glimpse of long-forgotten and brain-boggling complexity in the rationing system. ‘We have taken some clothing off the ration altogether,’ he boasts, posing as a munificent liberator. ‘From shoes to bathing costumes, and from oilskins to body belts and children’s raincoats. Then we’ve reduced the points on such things as women’s coats and woollen garments generally and… on men’s suits.’

    Does this remind you of anything? One day in November, George Eustice, the environment secretary, uttered the immortal words that a Scotch egg ‘probably would count as a substantial meal if there were table service’, only for Michael Gove to say the next day that ‘a couple of Scotch eggs is a starter, as far as I’m concerned’, later correcting himself to concede that ‘a Scotch egg is a substantial meal’. This is the sort of tangled descent into detail that central planning always causes. We have seen it again and again over the past year. What is essential travel? Is a picnic exercise? Can you go inside a pub to get to its outside space? Ask the man from the ministry.

    Three years after the second world war ended, the government was still micromanaging the decisions of consumers. Incredibly, it was nine years of peace before rationing ceased altogether. Bread was rationed for the first time in 1946, potatoes in 1947. Only then did the slow liberalisation of shopping begin. Flour was derationed in 1948, clothes in 1949, petrol, soap, dried fruit, chocolate biscuits, treacle, syrup, jellies and mincemeat in 1950, tea in 1952, sweets in 1953, cheese and meat in 1954. The black market thrived.

    The reluctant withdrawal of the state from rationing (and the even longer persistence of price controls, wage controls, exchange controls and central planning generally) infuriated at least some of the British people, though much of the anger was, as now, directed at cheating rather than the rules. The Ealing comedies of the time are suffused with dreams of liberation and rebellion against the tyrannical inspectors that plagued people’s lives. In Passport to Pimlico (1949), a self-governing micro-state abolishes rationing and a pub crowd tear up their ration books in the face of a furious policeman.

    Conventional wisdom has it that Britain’s slow return to normality was inevitable, given the country’s need to earn foreign exchange to pay for imports. But across the North Sea a very different experiment was tried. Ludwig Erhard was the effective finance minister of West Germany under allied military control. A keen follower of Friedrich Hayek, he believed that central planning was a disaster (‘the more the state plans, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual’) and that rationing was the cause, not the effect, of shortages. Erhard announced, a month after Wilson’s complicated speech, that he was abolishing almost all rationing and price and wage controls with immediate effect. He introduced a new currency the same day. He told Germans: ‘Now your only ration coupon is the mark.’

    Erhard chose a Sunday, 20 June, to make his announcement, knowing his military masters would be off duty. The British, Americans and French were aghast. One US colonel complained that he had no right to alter a system of price controls imposed by the allies. ‘I have not relaxed rationing; I have abolished it!’ came the reply. General Lucius Clay, the US commander, telephoned him to say: ‘Herr Erhard, my advisers tell me you’re making a terrible mistake.’ Erhard: ‘My advisers tell me the same thing.’

    The result was felt immediately. The next day the shops were brimming with food and clothing, as retailers realised there would be ample demand and that money was now worth earning. Economic output began to shoot up, absenteeism to plummet and shortages soon vanished. The German economic miracle was born. Only, Erhard insisted it was no miracle. ‘What has taken place in Germany,’ he later wrote, ‘is anything but a miracle. It is the result of the honest efforts of a whole people who, in keeping with the principles of liberty, were given the opportunity of using personal initiative and human energy.’

    Meanwhile across the North Sea, under Butskellite planning, Britain ignored the lesson. ‘A British government spokesman said that there was no prospect of ending rationing in Britain for some years,’ read a newspaper report reacting to the German decision. As Britain fretted under miserable controls, its economic performance fell ever further behind, its complacent masters refusing to acknowledge the obvious lesson from Germany: that freedom works.

    We are doing the same again now, as one of the most socially restricted major countries in Europe but the one with the lowest death rate. We risk allowing officials to cling on to their beloved levers of control too long, and to squander the advantage won by our vaccine taskforce. If a new variant of the virus threatens a third wave, permanent lockdown is very unlikely to stop it anyway. And if the new variant is vaccine-resistant, then vaccine passports will be useless.

    When things are controlled by bureaucrats, it takes a real effort of imagination to envisage them not being so. We assume that in the absence of direction, chaos must ensue, forgetting the lessons of economics. ‘How does Paris get fed?’ asked Frédéric Bastiat in 1845, and answered: not through the efforts of brilliant and omniscient food commissioners — that way lies inevitable disaster — but through a market that blindly matches demand with supply and thereby summons up the collective genius of millions of ordinary people.

    With few exceptions, the tribe of academic scientists and hospital doctors which now controls our government has literally never heard such arguments. Their worldview is a top-down one: they assume things happen because somebody ordains that things happen. Spontaneous order is a foreign concept to them. This is surprising, given that it is the essence of evolution, but when it comes to society they are in thrall to intelligent-design theories. They are political creationists.

    So of course the scientists will hesitate to recommend liberation. The politicians must bear this in mind. Erhard’s motto, said one later economist, could have been ‘Don’t just sit there, undo something’. This year, by happy coincidence, 20 June is also a Sunday and is the day before the date on which we were promised the abolition of all restrictions — before the backtracking began.

    Erhard’s lesson is that the best way to bring in reforms is fast. The best way to get rid of rules is all at once. The best time to liberalise an economy is far sooner than the experts think you should. Who will make a new version of Passport to Pimlico, with a gleeful crowd in a pub tearing up vaccine passports in the face of a bossy policeman?

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

    jingbrit •
    The British public is too enthralled by its own suffering and the virtue it believes it represents to take any notice of this advice.

    1. Matt Ridley would’ve done better if he’d also included Suez, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria all intentionalised “post war” mistakes

    3. 331625+ up ticks,
      Morning C,
      Many seemingly are trying the re-create a wartime
      peoples unified society, without the doodlebugs.

      Maybe it’s the run of treacherous,odious political overseers that has installed in the peoples these last three decades a feeling of despair and the misguided
      feeling that the only escape is reliance on the governance of the day.

      That reliance is complete BOLLOCKS and should be rectified via the polling booth, the peoples are masters of their ….. NOT some pinstripe clad tw@t
      in westminster on 80K a year + exs + scam kickbacks.

    4. All very true, with one slight caveat.
      The Americans screwed Britain for every last cent of Lease Lend debt; an arrangement based on Rooseveldt’s obsession with destroying the ‘evil’ British empire.
      The Germans and Japanese (who started it) were rebuilt free of charge.

      1. both now “vassal States” to US [Marshall Plan etc]. Gorbachev made a core comment that the EU Commission had modelled itself on the Soviet Politburo

    5. I have asked my MP to circulate this to all MPs. SAGE and other ‘scientific experts’.

  22. We are hearing a lot about Ponzi schemes at the moment, this got me thinking, (careful)
    All this wokery we are suffering at the moment is like a left wing intellectual and socialised Ponzi scheme, those at the top gain through it by getting in early and getting jobs they are not really fit for, the BBC, institutions and corporations invest in it, the poor people at the bottom have to suffer the consequences in psychological and physical damage due to loss of freedom of speech and the losing the will to live, because like all Ponzi schemes it is based on nothing but thin air.
    Climate change is just the same and so is the pandemic, if you think of them as Ponzi schemes then they at least begin to make sense.

    1. mng. Given you posed the Q, honest answer = no. Given it’s the Grauniad link [and I’ve not lost your point of irony], without reading it, I’ll stake a claim it’s myopic waffle quoting septic Experts this and Prof that all sounding off on the basic education they chose not to undergo, none of whom have ever been close to thinking about doing a day’s real work. To close the loop, much like politicians

      1. Scientists confirm they have produced ‘chimera’ embryos from long-tailed macaques and humans

        1. they’d have to. If you want to deep digging, check Fort Detrick, HIV and Ebola all developed from same loc and same big pharma behind Agent Orange and C-19 Vax [the written evidence is there] but posting it is another issue

        2. Because that is all that’s needed to make the world a better place.
          Honestly, I despair sometimes, especially now that fools are elevating science to a religion.

          2. Churchill’s quote about Christianity being sheltered in the strong arms of science appeared appropriate at the time. But equally, science needs to be reined in by the strong arms of Christianity, because on its own it becomes a satanic master of humanity.

          3. I’m beginning to understand where Galileo’s persecutors were coming from. They were anticipating C21 mindless worship of The Science.

          4. I was in the cathedral in Strasbourg recently, and there is an amazing mechanical model of the sun and the planetary system, with a tribute to Copernicus. Commissioned by the Catholic church.

    2. Boris is the Westmonster Jungle VIP, he’s reached the top and had to stop and that’s what bothers Carrie. I don’t whether it’s macaque dna he’s got or just a lot of cack.

  25. Human brain cells grown in monkeys The embryos are known as chimeras, organisms whose cells come from two or more “individuals” Guardian

    The BBC has objected to this gross misuse of embryonic political control. It is concerned that the news and entertainment industry may be swamped with potential employees and may not be able to accommodate them all. Radio 4 and World Service already have more than their share of man-made morons which are being turned out in their thousands by the UK’s top universities. The TV tax will have to be increased to counter this potential threat to its monopoly.

    1. Putting all BBC staff in a zoo [permanently] will provide excellent reality TV and no adverts as they hold regular diversity group meetings

    2. Well monkeys brain cells have been growing in some humans for decades, most of them finding their way into politics

    1. his “shredding expertise” was probably called upon by Bliar and Cherie before they left No.10. And he and Johnson still have the ongoing case in court over illegal awarding C-19 contracts

      1. 331625+ up ticks,
        Morning AWK,
        Would old cocko have scredded ALL of b liars material, could very well have held onto some purely for colouredmail future
        use.

  27. Would you lend money to this guy or to any company he’s associated with?:

    Cameron: ‘I’ll stay as PM if I lose EU referendum’

    David Cameron has said that he will continue as prime minister if he loses the forthcoming EU referendum.

    Speaking to the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Mr Cameron said that he would abide by what the British public said, adding: “I hope that answer will be staying in a reformed Europe”.

    The government has promised to hold an in-out referendum on EU membership before the end of 2017, once the prime minister has negotiated reforms to Britain’s relationship with the 28-member bloc.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-35275515

    1. Morning Lewis – what are the odds on the EU 27 agreeing to Boris’s “cave in” Trade Agreement in a fortnight’s time? If they don’t come to an agreement will Boris, once again, give them a further 2 month extension or longer to make their decision? I think our PM has been too lenient with his EU “friends” and must pull the plug on the EU.

      1. 331625 + up ticks,
        Morning C,
        My belief is that this Pm / cabinet / party are still very much brussels assets, and evermore will be so.

        1. Morning Bill – Only what my doctor prescribes and only if I agree. Are your 2 celebrity cats in good form this morning?

      3. This was part of Cameron’s problem. He went to visit the national heads of government for the nations chained to the EU.

        Ignoring that the majority get vastly more out than they put in and that Germany’s economy depends on the continued forced buying of German goods by euro nations, visiting the government heads is pointless.

        They have no ability to negotiate, no independence, no power. They were – and Cameron either knew this and was posturing or he didn’t and is incompetent.

        I suspect he did and the whole thing was a faux marketing exercise to support the lie that nations governed themselves while in the bloc.

      4. Johnson is a treacherous and nasty idiot whom we should not trust one inch. How has he succeeded in taking so many people in?

    3. Staying in a reformed EU was never on offer. CAmeron could not even tell the truth then.

      I think people are only now beginning to realise what a totally repulsive and mendacious person this piece of sub-human excrement actually is.

  28. slowly emerging here [under the radar – local feedback from community elders] UK company trying to break into Kenya land /agri market https://www.farmlandgrab.org/post/view/30243 parent company registered in Cobham https://www.silverstreetcapital.com/ backed by HMG via FCDO’s CDC group https://www.cdcgroup.com/en/about/ , debt facility from the DFC [Development Finance Capital], a US government department [subsidairy of USAID], and political risk insurance through MIGA (the World Bank). In essence sitting behind smokescreen of SA C-19 non existent strand, and the dropping of Magafuli. Strong resistance from Kenyan farmers / landowners. UK High Comm flunky due in meeting this am with Kenya Govt, elders / farmers / owners told Uhuru’s people “not interested”.

    1. Strange that after 4 1/2 years of cringing negotiation and appeasement, the British government still couldn’t get an agreement with Brussels satisfactory to Mr Coveney.

      1. 331625+ up ticks,
        Morning J,
        What is really stranger to me is that these governance parties still find favour with the peoples 4.1/2 years after leaving .

        I and the party I was a member of wanted total severance, that and wanting other common sense issues resolved with action taken NOT just rhetorical was the reason for it’s treacherous closure.

      2. Not really – in my view. The Republic of Ireland was used as catspaw by the EU to make Brexit as difficult as possible for the UK and to make Northern Ireland almost unviable thereafter. It worked very well. The Irish decided to ignore the financial help that the UK gave them when everything financial crashed in 2008. Ingrates.
        I am at a loss to understand why the UK does not hold up in Customs every item coming into the UK from Eire until they really feel the pinch.
        We no longer buy any item from Ireland. Mr Coveney can shove his sausages up Mr Varadkar.

        PS The Good Friday Agreement is pretty well irrelevant according to my reading of it.

    2. This chap survived his years at the hideously white Sir William Borlase School during the 1920s at the same time as my father was there. 1940’s Blitz London – not so well.
      He was the goalie in the school 1st II. In the photo, he towers above his fellow pupils.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_“Snakehips”_Johnson

      1. Good morning Anne

        A request please , would you mind reposting that wonderful historical link you put on here a few days ago re the late HRH’s background history . It was a very heavy read, but I didn’t save it , read most of it , and need to read it again .

        Ta muchly .

        1. Cripes, Maggie. Can you give me a few more clues.
          Sonny Boy and I bat so many historical items between each other, that I lose track of what I’ve posted.

          2. Is this the one?

            https://unherd.com/2021/04/he-was-never-really-phil-the-greek/

            “He was never really ‘Phil the Greek’

            Though most people know that Prince Philip was born in Greece and almost immediately exiled, the precise circumstances of this leaving of his native country are surprisingly obscure. How many are aware, for example, that if Ataturk had lost the 1921 Battle of the Sakarya River, outside Ankara, not only would modern Turkey not exist, but neither would Princes Charles, William and Harry?

            The existence of our future kings is the chance product of the tumult accompanying the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It is a dramatic illustration of the Butterfly Effect, whereby random events on one corner of the European continent totally reshaped timelines on the other: indeed, we could declare the prime mover in the events that placed the Duke of Edinburgh as our Queen’s consort to be an aggrieved Greek monkey.

            On 2 October, 1920, Prince Philip’s uncle, King Alexander of Greece, was taking the air in the grounds of the royal palace of Tatoi, outside Athens. His German Shepherd dog, Fritz, attacked a Barbary Macaque belonging to a member of his staff. As the King rushed to extract the screaming monkey from Fritz’s jaws, the macaque’s furious mate sunk its teeth into the king’s leg. Alexander contracted sepsis, and died just over three weeks later, throwing Greece into a succession crisis, and totally reordering the subsequent history of the Near East. As Churchill later wrote, “it is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite”.

            King Alexander’s septic leg, like the rest of the Greek royal family, possessed not a drop of Hellenic blood — something Prince Philip reportedly made clear to a Greek visitor to Buckingham Palace who dared to claim ethnic kinship with his host. Back when the small Balkan nation finally won its independence from the Ottoman Empire, in 1831, the European Great Powers had decided on the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty to rule the poor and volatile Greeks. When the Wittelsbach King Otto was forced from his throne by the revolution of 1862, the Great Powers reconvened, and chose the 17-year old Prince William of Denmark, Prince Philip’s grandfather, as Greece’s new king. As he would later instruct his children, “You must never forget that you are foreigners in this country, but you must make them [the Greeks] forget it.”

            Retaining his markedly un-Hellenic surname of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderberg-Glücksberg (to this day, the Hellenic Republic refers to his deposed descendent ex-King Constantine II as Citizen Glücksberg), Prince William adopted the regal name of George I, King of the Hellenes.

            This styling was significant: where the luckless King Otto merely styled himself King of Greece, George’s title expressed a desire to expand his little kingdom’s reach to encompass the still unliberated Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, who outnumbered the population of Greece itself.

            In this, his reign was markedly successful: first, Greece was granted the Ionian Islands, including Prince Philip’s birthplace of Corfu, as a coronation gift by Britain. Then, following the unsuccessful 1897 war against Turkey, Greece was nevertheless awarded the rich farmlands of Thessaly and Central Greece by the Great Powers. Most dramatically, under the inspired generalship of King George’s eldest son, Constantine, Greece doubled its territory by conquest in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, winning control of the wild and ethnically-mixed Balkan provinces of Epirus, Macedonia and Western Thrace (my own great-grandfather, a Corfiot army officer, met and married my great-grandmother, a peasant girl from Epirus, while taking part in Constantine’s successful campaign).

            The Greek monarchy won unprecedented acclaim from its people following that succession of victories against the vastly superior Ottoman armies. It came as a great shock, then, when King George was gunned down during a stroll through the newly-liberated port city of Thessaloniki by a Greek, Alexandros Schinas, variously described as either a socialist or a lunatic (his subsequent fatal flight from a 30-ft window during detention unfortunately leaves his true motivation a matter of debate).

            When George’s eldest son, Prince Philip’s uncle, assumed the throne as King Constantine I in 1913, it was as the victorious commander of the First Balkan War as well as Greece’s first Greek-born king. Immensely popular, Constantine won further accolades for his generalship of the Greek armies in the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria, which broke out a few short months after his accession. Annointed Conqueror of the Bulgarians, awarded the rank of Field Marshal by his premier, the liberal Cretan statesman Eleftherios Venizelos, Constantine had reached the summit of his career.

            The outbreak of World War I a year later would quite literally split Greece in two, and set in train the events that would lead Greece to catastrophe and the infant Prince Philip on his path to Britishness.

            Educated in Germany, and married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s sister Sophie of Prussia, King Constantine had no desire to lead a Greece exhausted by two years of war into a greater European conflict, regardless of Britain’s offer of Cyprus as an inducement. Venizelos, however, saw the war as an opportunity for further Greek expansion into the Balkans and Asia Minor; he intrigued with the Allies to effect Greece’s entrance into the conflict. When the premier allowed British and French forces to land in Thessaloniki to establish the Macedonian front against Entente forces, it enraged Constantine, and escalated the National Schism between liberal and monarchist elements in Greek politics to previously unimaginable heights.

            In 1916, Venizelist officers in Thessaloniki mounted a coup to commit their forces to the Allied cause; in Athens, a Franco-British landing to force the King to enter the war on the Allied side was defeated by Greek royalist volunteers. French public opinion would never forgive Constantine for the death of French marines in this brief engagement. As Churchill would later remark, Constantine became “a bugbear second only to the Kaiser himself in the eyes of the British and French people”, a fact that would have tragic repercussions for Greece.

            In June 1917, following an Allied naval blockade of Greece and the seizure of the Greek Navy, the French landed troops in Thessaly and forced Constantine to abdicate the throne in favour of his son Alexander. Greece entered the war on the Allied side, fighting doggedly against German, Bulgarian and Austrian forces on the Macedonian front, and winning the country the approval of the Allies once again.

            Through Venizelos’s expert diplomacy, Greece was awarded a share of the Ottoman Empire in the peace conferences that followed the war’s conclusion. Greek troops entered Eastern Thrace, raising the Greek flag over the historic city of Adrianople, even as Greek forces landed in the ancient port city of Smyrna, in Asia Minor, home to a Greek ethnic majority. The Greek battleship Averoff sailed through the Bosphorus to Constantinople, the lost Byzantine capital now bedecked with Greek flags under Allied occupation: it seemed that the Greek Megali Idea, of the uniting of the Greek people in a rich and powerful nation of “two continents and five seas,” had finally come true.

            Then that random monkey bite changed everything.

            In a plebiscite on who would replace the luckless King Alexander, the Greek people overwhelmingly chose his exiled father Constantine, hero of the Balkan Wars, to the horror of both Venizelos and the Allies. Constantine returned home, exiling Venizelos in turn, and took over command of the Asia Minor campaign. The Turkish nationalist forces under Ataturk, fighting the Italians in Southwest Turkey, the French in the south and east and the Greeks in the west, had withdrawn into the country’s deep interior, settling on the ramshackle village of Ankara as their revolutionary capital.

            Winning battle after battle against the Turks without ever landing a decisive blow, Constantine’s forces pressed on into the country’s waterless interior in the pursuit of total victory. The king was unimpressed with the new lands he had won, and the squalid villages his men passed through. “It is extraordinary how little civilized the Turks are,” he wrote home, “it is high time they disappeared once more and went back into the interior of Asia whence they came.” Had he won his war, an independent Kurdistan as well as an Anatolian Armenian state would likely have accompanied the Greek victory, and modern Turkey would not exist.

            Among King Constantine’s generals was his younger brother Prince Andrew, Prince Philip’s father, a career cavalry officer who had been appointed command of Greece’s II Army Corps. Andrew was the “most Greek” of the Glucksberg dynasty: as a child, he made a conscious choice to speak only Greek where his relatives conversed with each other in German and English. A sickly infant, he had grown up in the ramshackle Athens palace built for King Otto (today Greece’s parliament), even contracting typhoid from its single squalid bathroom.

            Prince Andrew, Philip’s father, with his wife, Princess Alice, in Athens, January 1921. Credit: Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty

            As he marched his forces across Anatolia’s Great Salt Desert, omens of impending doom flit across his mind. He had no great affection for the Asia Minor Greeks of republican sympathies for whom he was fighting, once writing that “the people here are generally disgusting. A swollen Venizelism prevails… It would really be worth handing over Smyrna to Kemal [Ataturk] so as to kick all these worthless characters who behave like this after we have poured out such terrible blood here… My God, when shall I get away from this hell here?” Andrew’s death in battle outside Bursa had already been erroneously announced in the world press.

            Back in Corfu, at his home of Mon Repos, a Regency villa built for the island’s former British governor which could have been lifted straight from Bath or Cheltenham, his Anglo-German wife Princess Alice of Battenberg gave birth on the kitchen table to a son, Philippos.

            But here in the depths of Anatolia, the Greek high command, split between officers of royalist and Venizelist sympathies, was internally divided. The Army’s supply lines were dangerously over-extended, and its baggage train was harried by Turkish cavalry along the long route to Ankara. “There are still some villages where dangerous fanaticism still reigns, and then the Turks go out by night and massacre, in the most atrocious manner, our men or the lorry drivers who happen to be isolated,” Constantine had written home. “They mutilate them or even skin them, which enrages our soldiers to such an extent as to give rise to disagreeable reprisals. The war is developing into wild fighting, and that is the reason why we have so few prisoners — they are all massacred on the spot.” Some Greek sources note that Prince Andrew was given the epithet of “hut burner” by his men for his treatment of the Turkish villages along his path.

            At the winding Sakarya river, some 35 miles outside Ankara, the Greek and Turkish forces readied themselves for the decisive battle of the war. The Greek inability to decisively defeat Ataturk’s forces, along with Constantine’s return to the throne, had caused the British and French attachment to Greece’s cause to wane dangerously. For Greece to retain Lloyd-George’s support against what Churchill described as the “pro-Turk bias” of the British Conservative Party, Foriegn Office and military establishment, Constantine would need a decisive victory at the Sakarya. Unfortunately for the Greek people and its royal family, he did not win one.

            After three weeks of bitter fighting along a 60-mile front, in a battle which could at any point have gone either way, the Greek general Anastasios Papoulas disengaged his forces and began the retreat westward. The bodies of thousands of men on both sides littered the field of battle. Ataturk had won a famous victory, regarded now as the moment which led to the birth of the modern Turkish state. Years later, the Turkish General and future president Ismet Inönü remarked of Sakarya that Papoulas was too nervy to be an effective commander: “Papoulas avoided disaster. But he never won a battle,” he would later write.

            Papoulas saw things differently. He lay the blame for the defeat directly on Prince Andrew, who had refused a direct order to commit his II Army Corps to the fray at one of the battle’s decisive moments.

            Prince Andrew requested to be relieved of his command position, and was refused, though his chief of staff was sacked. Papoulas was replaced with the mentally unstable general Georgios Hatzianestis, who was too preoccupied with the delusion that his legs were made of glass to command effectively. Back in Smyrna, Andrew would write presciently of the darkening situation that “something must be done quickly to remove us from the nightmare of Asia Minor… we must stop bluffing and face the situation as it really is. Because finally which is better? – to fall into the sea or escape before we are ducked?”

            Permitted three months leave, Andrew finally returned to his wife in Corfu and held his newborn son Philippos for the first time. After nearly a year of stalemate in the trenches west of Ankara, during which time Greece’s Western allies abandoned their support of the Greek cause and began treating with Ataturk, the Turks launched an offensive that would see the Greek forces fly in headlong retreat towards the Aegean. Greeks call the result, simply, “the Catastrophe.” When the victorious Turkish forces reached Smyrna, the city and its predominantly Greek inhabitants were put to fire and sword, leading to the flight of 1.6 million Christian refugees to Greece and all but ending a 3,000-year Greek presence in Asia Minor.

            In Athens, a military coup unseated King Constantine, restoring Venizelos to negotiate the Treaty of Lausanne which established the modern borders of Greece and Turkey. As Constantine abdicated, the revolutionary government arrested six of the royalist generals and politicians blamed for the defeat, and sent troops to Corfu to arrest Prince Andrew and bring him to Athens for trial. He was accused of disobeying a direct order to attack, and abandoning his position in the face of the enemy “with disastrous results not only to the corps under his command but to the entire army”.

            After a brief trial, the unlucky six were sentenced to death by firing squad, positioned at the edge of a hastily dug pit and shot without blindfolds. A 2010 court case would later overturn their convictions for treason. Prince Andrew’s trial began two days later. The revolutionary general Theodoros Pangalos, Andrew’s contemporary at the Hellenic Military Academy and briefly the country’s future dictator, visited him in detention. “How many children have you?” he asked, nodding when Andrew answered. “Poor things,” he replied, “what a pity they will soon be orphans!”

            As the historian Michael Llewellyn-Smith noted in his excellent book on Greece’s Asia Minor campaign Ionian Vision, “whether or not Andrew had been guilty of insubordination, it was an absurd charge to bring fifteen months after the event, given that he had not been relieved of his command at the time.” On 3 December, Andrew took the stand. A staff officer, Colonel Kalogeras, stated that Andrew had refused to attack despite direct orders. Colonel Sariyannis and General Papoulas both attested that if Andrew had carried out Papoulas’ orders, the Greeks would have won the day at Sakarya. Andrew was unanimously found guilty of disobedience and abandoning his post and sentenced to be stripped of his rank and banished permanently from Greece.

            Andrew expected to be executed in his cell at any moment. However, in the background, the Greek revolutionary General Nikaloaos Plastiras, a future three-time Prime Minister of Greece, had been negotiating with the British government, which had broken off formal diplomatic relations with Greece since the execution of the Six. They agreed that Andrew would be permitted to leave Greece on a British warship.

            And so, a few months after his birth, Prince Philippos of Greece left Mon Repos, Corfu and Greece on the British destroyer HMS Calypso, along with his mother and father and into a life of exile. Philippos was, famously, carried onto the warship in an orange crate instead of a cot. His father Prince Andrew settled into a life of exile in France, writing a book Towards Disaster, translated by Philip’s mother Princess Alice, which aimed to justify his actions at Sakarya as necessary to avoid a pointless loss of life in a losing battle. When the monarchy was restored in Greece, Andrew refused a commission for Philip in the Hellenic Navy, saying “‘Never the Greek Navy! In the Greek Navy after a bit they would throw him out – that’s what they did to me, not once, as you know, or twice, but three times!’”

            Instead, Philip served gallantly in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, and was awarded the Greek War Cross for his actions at Cape Matapan. While his son Prince Charles became a benefactor of the Greek monastic republic of Mount Athos and frequent visitor to Corfu, and who is widely considered to be a Phillhellene with a strong mystical attachment to the Greek Orthodox faith of his grandparents, Prince Philip described himself as “a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction”. For despite his nickname as “Phil the Greek”, he felt no great affection for the country and the uneasy crown it offered its foreign rulers. As he once said of the land of his birth and the mercurial people it contains, “I certainly never felt nostalgic about Greece. A grandfather assassinated and a father condemned to death does not endear me to the perpetrators.”

          3. That’s the one , I found the link on your time line .

            Powerful stuff, I sent that onto my sister in SA .

            I don’t even think our politicians have studied anything like that. Pacts are so fragile aren’t they .

            If Edward the 8th had not abdicated , we would have been sold out to Germany !

  31. From the DE…
    Putin blocks foreign warships from entering Black Sea amid Ukraine war fears

    Bloody hell..he must have invaded Turkey overnight when no one was looking!

    1. I wish he would invade Turkey. Might stop a few jihaddis in their tracks. The country is full of them.

          1. The US invasion of Iraq started the ball rolling.There were no attacks in Britain before Blair helped Bush.

          2. I would say that the spineless lack of reaction to the Bradford bookburning in 1989 probably gave them ideas.

          3. Rubbish.

            Muslims have been killing Muslims for being of the wrong sect for centuries, long before the USA even existed.

            Show me a single region anywhere where Muslims have got to a critical mass and they have not tried to remove other faiths and change the rules/mores of that region to suit their religion.

          4. Not bothered about muslims killing muslims.We were talking about Jihaddis entering Western countries.

          5. I guess you must have been asleep when Muslim terrorist Jihaddis entered the USA and crashed all those planes.

          7. Donkey’s years. And before them the British, and before them God knows how many different countries, but the real spark to the powder keg was, is, and will continue to be, Satan’s religion.

            You were the one who wrote:

            “The US invasion of Iraq started the ball rolling. There were no attacks in Britain before Blair helped Bush.”

            The attack on the WTC pre-dated the Iraq war.
            Muslims have been forcing their views, sometimes violently, in Britain since before the Iraq invasion.

          9. I regard fatwas, book burnings, and threats of violence towards individuals so that they have to go into hiding in fear of their lives as attacks on Britain and its subjects.

            You may think they should just be accepted as part and parcel of Islam in our midst, I don’t.

          10. It was the Kaiser who stoked up the Holy War – he thought Germany could profit from it.

        2. The Western support of the Mujahideen against the Soviets was grabbing the tiger by the tail. Fools.

      1. Which is at the NE end of the Black sea and is accessed through the Kersh Straits..Russian territorial waters.
        You book in advance to use the Strait..the same system as Turkey applies to The Bosphorus.

        1. Yes…I was on a frigate sailing up the Dardanelles into the Bosphorus for a courtesy visit to Istanbul in winter…snow everywhere.

          We passed some Russian warships which seemed to be painted a shade of green.

    3. He’s probably the only one who can sort out Erdogan.
      Our cabal of cultural cringers just look the other way.

  32. China Joe moves against Russia. 15 April 2021.

    The Chinese are clearly in the “driver’s seat” with their agent Joe, our first foreign agent president. Imagine the store of incriminating evidence of Joe’s treason that the Chinese government possesses with regard to the Biden Crime Family.

    The Russians and Putin are upset by Joe’s accusations against them? What a surprise! It must be particularly frustrating to realize how well the Chinese have played the game against all the “round-eyes,” including them.

    Biden’s attempts to divert American hostility to Russia is pathetic but will be welcomed by all “good” wokie inhabitants of the Bidonian version of “1984.”

    George Orwell would weep.Pat Lang.

    The View from the States.

    https://turcopolier.com/china-joe-moves-against-russia/

    1. Demented Joe’s “self isolating”. Pre Cursor to his Hollywood style “State funeral” with coverage provided by Oprah and Mrs Wallis Simpson Jnr?

    1. It started over 2,000 years ago and still the same old same old goes on.
      For those who haven’t seen the TV programme, take a look at Simon Sebag Montefiore’s documentary about the occupants of Grenada.
      https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rwgdf Blood and Gold
      Slavery was rife and white northern European children were the main target.
      Those who didn’t come up to scratch were fed to the pride of pet lions.

      1. I’ve visited the Alhambra and apart from beautifully laid out gardens, the building itself failed to impress, full of empty rooms and exquisite carvings but – in common with Islamic ideology – no reproductions of human/animal forms so quite boring in its repetitious way.

        1. I had a similar reaction to the Palace of Versailles. Just an empty barn. You would think they would make an effort for the Palace of the Sun King.

          Should have gone to Fontainbleu instead.

          I visited Casablanca once. No architecture to speak of and the place stank. I have no intention of visiting anywhere muslim ever again.

        3. In the programme Simon told about the vast numbers of children held captive, as many as 6 thousand. They were rounded up by muslim pirates from the coast of France, Ireland, England and wales. Not mentioned in these times of course, the very thought of it would be anti slammer and racist, looked at in a certain way.

      1. That the truth should remain silent I had almost forgot.

        [Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatre]

  34. Good morning all.

    Blue sky .. frost earlier and now glorious sunshine and where is the rain we were promised ?

    I received a letter from my GP surgery telling me I was overdue for a pill revue , failing to do that would interfere with repeat prescriptions.
    Believe me , ringing the surgery is a pain, always engaged , so I went down to see them yesterday , conversation through an open window, no access to the surgery unless by prior appointment .

    The revue would mean a phone call from a doctor .. not that easy .. would you believe mid May?

    Seeing a patient would involve full sterilisation of a room and doctor wearing Hazmat stuff.

    The waiting room consists of 3 chairs 6 ‘ foot separation , and the chairs are sterilised afterwards!

    So we wait in a separated queue to talk to a receptionist through an open window next to a public path!

    Is this typical of everyone else’s experience.

    Thank goodness the weather is kind , queueing in the rain or a sharp wind is not nice.

    1. They want us all simply to die – quietly
      and so they can record millions more
      “covid” deaths.

    2. Fortunately I haven’t needed to contact the surgery for two years (apart from when I went for my flu jab) but OH has no complaints with the service he’s had. Our last doctor (the one who came out to see me twice – and also had a look round the hedgehog shed) has retired, and J’s new one phones him back very promptly, but he still hasn’t seen him face to face.

      1. I’m touchingly grateful that the surgery seems otherwise engaged; whenever I visit I react as if I’ve been sent to the headmaster’s study.

    3. We have reviews booked, this week, for the end of the month. I made it clear neither of us would be wearing masks and was told “that’s not a problem “. We know the nurse in question and she’s always been OK with that.

    4. The Practice is overreacting. I went this week and had blood taken No fuss. No hysterical reaction to another human being.

      I also went to the Dentist. No problems at all.

      I asked a reception to make me an appointment with the hygienist at the first opportunity when he got back to being allowed to provide a full service.

      They said it was unlikely to happen this year !

      I said in that case i would do it myself.

      That got a laugh. At least i made someone happy.

      1. I asked a reception to make me an appointment with the hygienist at the first opportunity when he got back to being allowed to provide a full service.

        They said it was unlikely to happen this year !
        Was that NHS ?

        I tend to agree, i used the comparison with dentistry when i had yet another online consultation with a MSK representative who wanted me to follow another exercise regime regarding my painful worn out left knee joint.
        I asked him if he thought the MSK consultant realising (in fact knowing) exercise was painful and futile, might have not put up with all the pain and subsequent inconvenient difficulties if the consultant found themselves in the same situation to myself, and paid for an op. I likened it to visiting the dentist and being treated with in hours or days. But of course one has to pay dearly when they go to a dentist. And according to family members something that use to cost 300 pounds few years ago has now risen to 900 plus.
        Fobbing people off seems now one of the most significant parts of NHS procedure, short of charging patients for much needed surgery.
        I’m not going to stick my neck out, but i wonder how much longer i would be suffering if i could afford to pay.
        I also know three other people who are having exactly the same problem with painful knee joints.

        1. Sorry to hear of your knee troubles.

          My Dentist is private. I pay £30 a month for Denplan. I don’t get charged for anything except Lab work.

          My current Dentist is the best i have ever had and if he were to move to a different practice…i would follow him.

          1. I’m also with Denplan. It’s only good for check ups and cleans though. Anything else comes with a bill.
            I’m currently coming to the end of five month’s dental appts related to the same piece of work which is going to cost me £6000.

            I reconcile myself by realising how much other parts of the body must cost to keep in good nick and being grateful that health care is free at the point of use.

          2. Not sure i understand. Are you only paying a small amount to Denplan?

            My £30 a month covers all work except Lab work and 4 hygienist appointments a year are included.

            I am having a crown fitted next week and rather than £500 it is costing me £90 for the Lab work.

          3. I have had to be referred to a specialist
            Our little village dentist isn’t cut out for complex procedures 🙁

          4. I might clobber you to ask about Denplan. £30 is a bit expensive, but if it were about 10 or even 15 it’d spread the cost over the time.

            Having to find £500 for a crown recently wasn’t fun either.

          5. The amount I pay for the cover I get depends on the state of my teeth.

            I had a lot of restoration work done and quite a few crowns all of which i paid for.

            Then i went on Denplan with a very good rating.

            I believe I am getting very good value for money.

            Unlike the Pet Insurance !

            £360 a year easily covers one crown uninsured.

          6. Problem is as you probably know Phiz if you have a known complaint you have no chance of insurance.
            I worked for 53 years and hoped that my 100% record of paying taxes and national insurance might have covered me in case of problems. But by my reckoning successive governments have been dishing out none contributory welfare and medical assistance for decades.

    5. ‘Morning Mags, my prescription list is littered with ‘Review’ dates.

      I’ve not been asked to attend any in the 4 years I’ve been with the practice.

    6. I shared my experiences of drug intolerances on patient.co.uk.
      After swatting up on line some pretty exhaustive web based cardiology courses I got 80% marks in a rigorous on line basic cardiology examination but only 40% in the advanced test.

      Nevertheless I was credited in my contributions to patient.co.uk with being of more help to one individual than three previously consulted cardiologists.

      I now have a better understanding of what they don’t know and the uncertainties surrounding the prescription of appropriate drugs.

      The concept that science has got anything to do with professional medical treatment should be treated with degree of scepticism.

      I do have a first class degree in science but I think the Sc in B.Sc. stands for scepticism.

      1. Blimey…a brainbox in da room. You would never know from your usual posts. :@)

        Well done to you.

    9. Yet a few weeks ago I was at the dentist for root canal treatment and a new crown. The dentist has to sterilise everything after each patient but surely that would happen anyway?

  35. Morning all.
    My word Vine doesn’t seem to to know when enough is enough, today he’s still trawling for possible family scandal about HRH’s funeral. I imagine his supercilious and somewhat superfluous expectations and worries are, as they are wearing masks they might be talking about him………
    And over on the BBC some ( Giles Bandwidth) one who apparently met HRH a few times, is feeding If’s and But’s into everything else.

    1. Giles Again claims to have known the late Duke for about 40 years, and that’s quite possible. He wrote a warmhearted tribute which appeared in the Telegraph.

      1. I know some one who knew the royal family for around the same time and probably had more intimate contact with them than GB did. But he’s not making such a big issue out of it. 😎

          1. Close. But he was a man with a camera.
            I read your little Maud had died sorry to hear that PT very sad indeed.
            I was Ten when our family cocker spaniel/retriever cross died, i cried my eyes out, Skipper was my mate. I can still remember my father and the guy who came to collect his body carrying him out to a car that evening.

          3. Our neighbours opposite have a little chap they call Eric 10 inches high, he’s the image of Maud. Eric is very very yappie though. A tennis ball usually keeps him quiet. 😃
            They look after our Lab sometimes when we go away. The two dogs get on well together.

        3. The newspapers are soliciting his input.

          GB is a vain man and cannot resist.

          From Wiki.

          He was described in a contemporaneous publication as “Oxford’s Lord High Everything Else”.[4] Christopher Hitchens suggested that Brandreth “set out to make himself into a Ken Tynan. Wore a cloak.”[5]

          I quite like him though.

          1. I must admit i quite like him. But he was on again this evening rabbiting away. But his many truisms may have been sinking in to the dull minded a bit.

          2. I feel the same. I have read enough.

            Selling off the lions at the base of Nelson’s Column always made me wonder about him………… :@)

  36. Good morning, my friends

    Joan Bakewell has not really improved with age:

    Today’s new Puritans will not hold sway over our culture for ever
    British intellectual life has seen a process of taboo-busting across the arts. The censoriousness of the 21st century isn’t the last word

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/todays-new-puritans-will-not-hold-sway-culture-ever/

    Here is a BTL comment by a Cyril Wratstrangler with which I agree:

    Wasn’t Jane Bakewell once described as “the left-thinker’s toasted teacake”? At any rate whatever sort of patisserie she used to be compared with she is certainly more half baked than well baked nowadays!

    It is beginning to look as if different races and different religions can no longer co-exist in harmony. Will some sort of apartheid become the only way forward?

    The Christians of today are certainly more tolerant than they were six centuries ago. Even though they may think that attacks on their religion are cruel and bigoted they do not think that the perpetrators of blasphemies against Christianity should be punished by death – or that people – such as the Monty Pythons – should not be allowed to poke fun at them.

    1. It looks as if Cyril Wratstrangler’s comment has been removed but Richard Tracey’s as, above, remains.

      Come, come, Cyril, people will think you schizophrenic.

      1. Rumbled

        I think that Cyril is related to a chap called Thelonius Runt-Futtock who also uses the same pseudonym of Richard Tracey when posting comments under DT articles.

  37. Anyway, Vlad won’t meet with Joe “Soros” Biden.

    Why ?

    Because he knows Joe is not the President of the United States.

    In other news, when Kim Jong Un was ill a year ago and disappeared, where was he treated ?

    In the US. As a guest of President Trump !

          1. You are seriously ill.
            You are given a choice,
            a) treatment in a hospital in North Korea, or
            b) treatment in a hospital in the United States.
            Just saying.

    2. Strange how quickly all those communist values evaporate when it’s their neck on the block.

      1. Sadly Teresa of Calcutta worked on the same principal. The sick taken in by her in Calcutta were lucky to get an aspirin (she was more interested in babtising and despatching them to heaven) but when she became ill she was flown to Switzerland for the best care available.

  39. So what was the reason for Theresa May’s “Legal Net Zero” legislation of 2019 and the rush to electric cars ?

    The Davos Dollar Pot !

      1. In the USA , one of my son’s dogs had to have 2 expensive life saving operations to remove socks from his bowels.

        1. Little Cat even broke into other people’s houses to steal socks and bring them home!

  43. Here we go again – Sky News reporting that an Indian COVID double mutation has entered the UK and has the hallmarks of a very dangerous virus.

    4. that’ll be Ben Stokes breaking his finger in opening Indian Pension League [IPL] game and flying back to UK for operation in Leeds. But Sky couldn’t put that out and presumably no hospitals in India, accepting most of their tained staff are in the UK

    5. that’ll be Ben Stokes breaking his finger in opening Indian Pension League [IPL] game and flying back to UK for operation in Leeds. But Sky couldn’t put that out and presumably no hospitals in India, accepting most of their tained staff are in the UK

  44. Here we go again – Sky News reporting that an Indian COVID double mutation has entered the UK and has the hallmarks of a very dangerous virus.

  45. Once again, the BBC shows its ignorance (Shirley knot, I hear your cry). The Red Chinese economy (not their term) grew 18% in the first quarter of this year. No it didn’t. I’m not, on this occasion, accusing the CCP of lying. The figure quoted is the annualised rate of growth in Q1. (The Chinese, like the Americans, annualise (or indeed annualize) everything.) The actual growth in the period concerned is such that, if compounded over further three quarters, would amount to 18%. 4 1/4 % comes pretty close.

    1. Stil about 8 times ours. Why’s that? Oh, let’s look at some evidence:

      China economy: Beijing unveils $298bn tax cuts to boost growth
      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47450223

      Feck me! it’s as if high taxes destroy growth! Goodness! It’s as if low taxes raise more money! Whodathunkit!
      https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/us-companies-bring-home-665-billion-in-overseas-cash-last-year.html

      The correct response is obvious. Why then does our cretinous government insist on doing the oppposite?

      1. Er, because they want to buy our votes – China is effectively a dictatorship but in our democracy too many voters are gullible, short sighted and, all too often, full of envy and hate for others that do well.

  46. 8 killed at a shooting in Indianapolis Fedex facility . Police say the attacker shot himself.

      3. Hoodie, not named and the BBC reports ‘he was acting alone’. One wonders if they’ changed from ‘lone wolf’ to acting aone to hide the loo and a snack bar seekers.

        1. Would they risk calling him a lone pig – or would that be considered a blasphemous insult if he turned out to be a follower of the RoP?

    2. I see the DT is all over the Police shooting of a non-white gunman but I see nothing on the FedEx shooting. Am I missing something? It can’t all be black and white, can it?

  47. Just back from leafletting the village about the 6pm Service of Thanksgiving for the D of E.

    They are risking having it in church….

    2. We had a Memorial Evensong for him in church last Sunday, which was also recorded and is still on YouTube.

    1. Looks like a typical drop out dope head. Why should i listen to anything he has to say. Wanker.

  50. 331625+ up ticks,
    Maybe old digit dick scredded his post it reminder,

    Matt Hancock failed to declare family connection to company awarded NHS contracts
    Matt Hancock is facing fresh challenges of cronyism this morning, after it emerged that he and his sister have shares in a company that was awarded a contract with the NHS.

    Last month the Health Secretary declared in the MPs’ register of interests that he had acquired more than 15 per cent of Topwood shares, but did not mention that his sister Emily Gilruth owned a larger portion of the shares and is a director of the firm, according to the Health Service Journal and Guido Fawkes.

    Shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Reynolds told Sky News “it feels like we are back to 1990s levels of Tory sleaze”, following days of revelations about the influence of Greensill Capital within Whitehall.

    Justin Madders, shadow health minister, added: “This Conservative Government has been infected with widespread cronyism and is unable to identify where the line is drawn between personal and departmental interests… There are serious questions to answer from Matt Hancock and there needs to be a full inquiry.”

    A Government spokesman said: “Mr Hancock has acted entirely properly in these circumstances. All declarations of interest have been made in accordance with the ministerial code. Ministers have no involvement in the awarding of these contracts, and no conflict of interest arises.”

    Bear in mind I do believe that the wretch cameron was digitwillys role model.

    1. In breaking news, a masked man in a pin stripe suit robbed the Lloyds Bank branch in Pall Mall. Police have identified the suspect as a member of the Cabinet. A Government spokesman said: “in this instance there have been no breaches of the ministerial code”.

  51. UK and Ireland should strike bilateral deal to replace Northern Ireland Protocol, claims ex-Irish ambassador

    Ray Bassett tells the Planet Normal podcast the implementation of the protocol had been ‘very heavy handed” and had lost unionists’ support

    By Harry Yorke, WHITEHALL EDITOR • 15 April 2021 • 6:00am

    The UK and Ireland should broker a bilateral deal to replace the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol, a former senior Irish diplomat has claimed, as he accused Dublin of being too close to the EU.

    Ray Bassett, who previously served as Ireland’s ambassador to Canada, Jamaica and the Bahamas said he believed the new post-Brexit trading arrangements were fuelling “such a disillusionment” among unionists and should be overhauled.

    Mr Bassett, who also served as joint secretary to the British-Irish intergovernmental conference, told The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player above, that the implementation of the protocol had been “very heavy handed” and appeared to have “destroyed” good will in Northern Ireland.

    While acknowledging that the reasons behind the recent loyalist rioting in Northern Ireland were complex, he added that the protocol appeared to have been the “trigger.”

    Even if the EU now made concessions to reduce the red tape and checks on goods moving across the Irish Sea, Mr Bassett said he feared it would not be “enough” due to the hostile views of unionists towards it.

    His intervention comes as Lord Frost, the former Brexit negotiator now in charge of EU relations, heads to Brussels on Thursday evening amid ongoing efforts to resolve disagreements over the protocol between the two sides.

    While the UK and EU insist the protocol must remain in place, Mr Bassett said: “I just do not think that tinkering with the protocol at this stage is going to do the trick.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/04/15/uk-ireland-should-strike-bilateral-deal-replace-northern-ireland

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6jrTqbhUZQ

    1. The EU has not signed the “deal” so we still have a chance to escape.

      Boris must show the testicular strength as well as the humility and honesty to admit that both his WA and the deal are complete catastrophes and he must cancel them both immediately.

      Humility, strength, honesty? My fear is that the Bonking Buffoon does not possess any of these qualities.

      1. What amazes me is that the European Parliament is holding the Commission hostage.

      2. Boris, testicular strength? Humility and honesty? Richard, yer ‘avin’ a giraffe.

        ‘Twill never happen in our life time, nor will any of the other suggestions made on these pages, that would result in a strong, single-minded, Christian society for our children and grand-children to inherit.

      1. Addendum from my smarty-pants know-it-all Big Bruvver

        “Thanks for this. Reminded of lots of forgotten street and area names. The writer could have made something more of Nottingham and machine breaking, before the two became associated at the time of the Luddite frame breakers in the 1800s. Akwright of Water Frame fame actually left Lancs for Nottingham c1768 for fear of machine breakers (hand spinners of cotton), who had already destroyed a number of Hargreaves’ Spinning Jennies in Lancs. Once in Notts, where there was no tradition of cotton spinning, but there was one of complicated machinery in the form of the stocking frame, he got an investment of £500 from two wealthy local hosiery manufacturers, Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need. They wanted thread for their knitting machines on which ribbed stockings were made. They had a factory employing 300 in Notts, powered by horses, before the move to Cromford in Derbyshire where Arkwright built his key water-powered factory.

  53. So in case you missed it….

    The green organization which advised George Soros where to invest a billion dollars in the green sector financially sponsored, via a roundabout route, the Conservative think tank, lauded by Environment Minister Michael Gove MP, which recommended Theresa May to go for Legal Net Zero.

    A few days after Uncle George bought a recommended green company, it received a $100,000,000 bung from the US Department of Energy.

    Then Treasa made a quick million dollars plus for eight hours work doing speeches !

    The Green Pot – Making Everyone Rich !

  54. A challenge to Sturgeon: have your independence – only if two-thirds of Scots want it
    Boris Johnson need not say “No, never” to a second referendum on the Union – but some home truths are needed

    Tom Harris DT article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/15/challenge-sturgeon-have-independence-two-thirds-scots-want/

    A BTL comment from a poster called Sir Lee Sassanach (who is possibly using a silly pseudonym)

    Britain had to pay to several billions to leave the EU and now receives no money from the EU.

    The Barnett Formula should be scrapped immediately; Scotland must receive no money at all from English taxpayers and indeed, Scotland should pay to leave the UK just as the UK had to pay to leave the EU.

    (Amendment added)

    1. “Scotland should pay to leave the EU”
      would he mean ‘pay to leave the UK’?

      1. Thank you for pointing that out. That was clearly what Sir Lee Sassanach must have meant so I have amended the post! The old chap is probably just as senile as I am.

    2. In addition to that, I’d have Scotland pay a fee to continue to use Sterling, that they assume a per capita share for the debt at each citizen equating to 1.5 people. They vote for Labour and 2. Brown.

      Then we remove all public sector jobs from Scotland – they are for British institutions, after all.

      At a stroke, Scotland is indebted, impoverished and it’s primary employer annihilated. Then they can be independent as much as they want, but they’re going to start 6 trillion in debt.

    3. My 2 wishes for Scotland are:
      1. Either shut up or go away in ‘independence’. The current having-your-cake-and-eating-it situation is unsustainable: we English taxpayers are fed up with you leeching off us and having independence on most issues through Holyrood whilst insulting us and voting in the HoP on devolved issues.
      2. If you go, take your share of the UK’s debts and liabilities, paying with real money not worthless IOUs, and don’t come crawling back when it all goes wrong (go to your precious EU instead, ha ha).

      However, despite being an investment capital manager for years, I see no chance of Scotland getting the money to take its debts – at some £70,000 per taxpayer I can’t see Scots coughing that up each and what financial institution would lend Scotland money without BoE guarantees? Any cowardly Westminster government/party that surrenders will lose my vote for evermore.

    1. And will there be a single word of cynical protest from the wokists who literally let BLM get away with murder? Is it surprising that a tiny bit of embezzlement – just enough money to buy a few mansions – mansions is not important.

      Indeed they would claim that they have biblical support. After all:

      In my Father’s house there are many mansions. If it were not so I would have told you!

      1. They can meet up with Blair to compare notes on how many mansions they managed to cream off from the mugs.

  56. Why Denmark is stripping Syrians of residency and sending them home. 16 April 2021.

    Copenhagen orders refugees back to Damascus claiming security has ‘improved significantly’

    Denmark has become the first European country to revoke the residency permits of Syrian refugees after claiming that the security situation in parts of the war-torn country has “improved significantly”.

    Almost 200 Syrians have so far had their renewal applications rejected, while around 500 people originally from Damascus and the surrounding areas are still having their renewals reviewed.

    We ought to send them home as well. Particularly those nice “White Helmets” who did so much good in Jihadist territory! I’m sure President Assad will be glad to see them!

    https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/world-news/europe/952533/why-denmark-is-stripping-syrians-of-residency-and-sending-them-home

    1. It should be made clear to people seeking refugee status that their permit to reside in the UK is only temporary, and will be withdrawn when the situation in their home countries is judged to be no longer dangerous.

    2. Would that our pathetic government had the balls and resolution to recognise the fifth column within our walls.

      Denmark has it about right and we should follow, identifying not just Syrians but all Muslims and Islam as a terrorist organisation.

      Not only send them home but demolish the mosques here, declare meetings of Islamic people as a potential mosque and demolish the house.

      We resolve the housing crisis, we remove the terror threat and reduce the Middle Eastern influence in our government both national and local.

      Let those of darker colours be aware that they might be next.

    3. “We ought to send them home as well. Particularly those nice “White Helmets” who did so much good in Jihadist territory! I’m sure President Assad will be glad to see them!”

      What we ought to do and what Johnson is prepared to do are very different things.

    4. Just like the “Dutch” Somalians every single one will be fleeing to the UK
      No benefits in Syria……………

    1. There was always going to be a new lockdown. Just as the ban on foreign travel expires…

  60. Enough’s enough, I’m going for an afternoon nap in front of the idiot lantern before preparing my dinner of Garlic-yogurt based chicken.

    Slayter perhaps.

    1. Sleep well, NtN. I now enjoy a daily afternoon nap. I’ve just woken up from one such and am now revitalised to go outside and work in the garden. (During the freezing outside temperatures this morning I stayed indoors and started a long “Spring clean” of the kitchen/diner.)

    1. He wouldn’t be. If he says lockdown – effectively kicking the can of immunity resistance down the road – the whole point of locking people up is lost. All the damage done, all the sacrifices, the tax hikes – all now proven unnecessary.

      2. They’re all untreatable except for using paracetamol. That’s one of the features of viruses.
        Two surgeons I’ve seen this year recommended vitamin D minimum 5000iu daily to boost immune system.
        They were not enthusiastic about the so called vaccines that provide no immunity.
        Even us bowlers will not get enough vitamin D even if we were in the sun all summer long according to one of the surgeons.

        1. Hi Alf.
          We open our green tomorrow. We also open the bar and there will be lunchtime hot snacks available. We nave mowed to 6mm. I sent a couple of woods up this morning and they were running well with little effort.

          1. Good luck for tomorrow Delboy.
            Not sure what the green will be mowed to but our green keeper will be there early to cut the green in the morning prior to our Open Morning. We’re not opening our club house until June. No refreshments or food.
            I am the lone individual on the committee who is not terrified by this virus.

          3. Just back. We had 19 and 17 signed up for further coaching and promises if another 4 to be arranged. That’ll be enough to keep our membership at about 105.
            Quite surprised at the numbers but delighted with the turnout.
            Hope yours went well.

      3. 331625 + up ticks,
        Afternoon Db,
        I said the same indoors, they will run out of Countries, then down to cities, towns, villages
        endgame will be “it was reported this morning
        in Midsummer Scam that a ne…………”

    2. When I see such people, and the census assault force, I realise that our government is disgustingly over funded.

  64. Just checked my Kraken. Dogecoin Crypto currency has surged again by 125.10%. That is 200% in 3 days.

    I wonder what the Hedge Funds know. Possibility of War probably plays a part.

      1. I watched it go to £140 then drop back to £110. There is a lot going on on there. I shall wait and see. My ‘exposure’ is somewhat less than Greensill.

      1. If the frogs are selling i’ll keep mine. The authorities do whatever they can to darken the image of Crypto. Mainly because they have zero control over them.

    1. How short the memories of Lefties. Labour were at it just as much, and far worse. Selective memory helps them out hugely doesn’t it?

      1. 331625+ up ticks,
        Afternoon W,
        I put labs inglorious moment down to when the Jay report revealed the long term rotherham cover up,an ALL party input.
        So as an odious close shop they cannot be bettered.

    1. A joke, huh?
      Our local authority got their booking system muddled uyp, by mixing the 12 hour with the 24 hour clock, and inviting a load of crumblies to be innoculated in the wee small hours… Nobody turned up, apparently.
      Idiots.

  69. That’s me gone. A lovely afternoon in the garden surrounded by cats (well, it seemed like it!)

    Leaving early because of the 6 pm Thanksgiving Service. Not a believer any longer – but it seems the right way to show ones respects.

    A demain.

    1. I’m probably clueless but shouldn’t the Royal Standard be half way up the flagpole?

      1. Clueless.
        It should be half way down the flagpole.

        Joking aside, I suspect that as it is supposed to be Windsor, and as the Queen will presumably be in residence, it should be at the top; there will be some arcane protocol that determines such things.

        1. After i posted i realised it was for HM.

          Up down who cares :@)

          Mine is still slumbering in the middle. Can’t wait to get it up.

          2. It’s a bit tatty at the moment and frayed at the edges. Other than that…the flag is fine. :@(

      2. Yo Phil. Half mast (or more correctly, “half-staff”) requires the flag to be lowered by a third of the height of the pole. At the very least, the flag should be the equivalent of the height of the flag from the top of the pole.

        1. Mine is positioned correctly then. It helps being surrounded by ex RN and RS types.

          Thinks…Why am i talking to this person…hmmmm. He comes to my stomping ground and has a drink and doesn’t tell me. I must have done something to upset him. I know…I’ll brazen it out and pretend it didn’t happen.

          How are you? :@)

          1. Yo, Phil. I’m great, thanks. ‘Twas a fleeting visit. I owed Dianne a Christmas present, and she owed me a birthday present. So she now has a load of Denby plates, and I have a few tops / jumpers from Crew Clothing Company. Meanwhile, the queues at Nike and other plebby outlets were a joy to behold…

          2. We have our union flags (3 of then) planted in a garden container by our front door. I like to think it annoys our semi-detached, lib dem (Bristol University) neighbours next door (apologies, quite a bit of tautology there). In fact, it gives me a good deal of satisfaction (annoying the neighbours, that is).

        3. The British Army Ceremonial Manual stipulates that the flag should be raised to the top, then lowered so that the top of the flag is one flag-width from the top of the pole.

      4. No. It should be about one flags width down. It is/was a signal of distress. If it was to low on the mast it may not have been seen and acted upon.

      5. I thing the Royal Standard is only flown half mast when the sovereign dies. That’s why they had to put a Union flag on Buck Palace when Diana died because the great unwashed demanded a flag, any flag, to fly at half mast.

    1. I treat them all with the contempt they not only deserve but have worked hard at earning.

      1. …have worked woked hard at earning.
        Most of the bastards have never actually worked in other than wokery.

  72. I saw my dearly beloved today for the first time since he had the vaccine about ten days ago.
    He’s been telling me he’s OK, but….his skin was slightly hot, he had slight red blotches on his face and his lips were blue. He also commented about feeling tired and lethargic.
    Are these symptoms common?

        1. Worrying. People with other symptoms with lethargy may be confused. And don’t wish to cause a fuss. Only you know what to do.

          1. You are right, I hadn’t thought of that. He seemed compos mentis, just a bit tired. He won’t pick up his phone while driving, so I can’t contact him.

          2. It could just be something innocent but is he normally tired and lethargic after work/driving?

            I’m not a medic BTW but i hate to think ‘i’m fine’ are last words.

            I really don’t wish to worry you. So i shall shut up.

          4. When he gets home, can you contact him? The blue lips are worrying; perhaps you could encourage him to get a pulse oximeter? They aren’t necessarily expensive – Amazon has loads.

          5. I might get him a pulse oximeter.
            Curse this vaccine. We’re pretty sure he had the virus last January anyway.

          6. The supposed experts say that you can catch the virus again but that isn’t really relevant (I hope).

            Why wait, call 111 or whatever it is!

          8. I’m pretty sure it paid me a fleeting visit in Feb 2020. My friend and ex-partner had “the worst ‘flu ever’ in January 2020. I spent a week at her new place in Devon, building a truckload of IKEA furniture. She buggered off to NZ, and may have been one of the last visitors to those islands. I had a week or so of a slightly moist nose, a couple of hours of shortness of breath, and half a day of anosmia. A neighbour had the same.

          9. We’re sure MB had it last January/February. It cleared just in time for his birthday on 10th. February.

          10. We’re sure MB had it last January/February. It cleared just in time for his birthday on 10th. February.

    2. Time to talk to a doctor. There is too much talk of blood clots to ignore.

      I have heard of people being tired for a day or two is one thing but a week?

        1. The incidence of clotting with AZ or any other jab, seems to be no higher than normal happenstance.

        2. It seems that Pfizer has the same clotting propensity as the AZ, just less mentioned for some reason. Get medical assistance pronto, the blue lips are not a good sign, insufficient oxygen in the blood.

        3. There was some chat yesterday about the preservatives in the Pfizer jab, there have been some side effects.

          My wife and I had the Pfizer vaccination a week ago. I was mighty sleepy for a day before bouncing back to normal, my wife had no issues at all.

    3. Sounds rather prolonged and excessive.
      Hie thee to a GP – or more likely – a walk-in centre.

      1. Walk-in centre? You MAD or suffin’?? They all shut as soon as the plague was spotted.

      2. I just talked to my friend, and am slightly reassured. She has similar symptoms, and hasn’t had the vaccine, so maybe it is a cold with fever.

    4. “Causes of blue skin or lips (cyanosis) Cyanosis can mean there’s not enough oxygen in your blood, or you have poor blood circulation. It can be caused by a serious problem with the: lungs, like asthma or pneumonia.”

      I would seek emergency treatment, Blackbox2 …

      1. I probably shouldn’t have let him just drive off! But as I posted below, I have just discovered that a friend has similar symptoms, and is putting it down to a common or garden virus.

    1. I don’t have a medical degree but I have had experience of a degree of inappropriate medical treatment.

  75. RACCOONS would thrive in the UK by settling in urban, coastal regions like London, Brighton and Liverpool D Fail

    Would thrive? Are thriving – they have colonised nearly every city centre and hundreds of towns throughout the United Kingdom. Who was it that brought these parasites here in the name of diversity? They are breeding like rabbits and destroying the very fabric of the countryside. Time to restrict their breeding and return then to the wilderness they came from.

    https://th.bing.com/th/id/R2451709344003c1710ae94dc1449043d?rik=bpk7gefketH32A&pid=ImgRaw

    2. We are already being overwhelmed with dinghy rats. Why would we want to introduce more vermin?

    3. if you would like to borrow some, we have a few of the pests round here. They are a great reason to oppose gun control.

    2. Good advice but sitting outside in the cold is not very appealing to be fair.
      I prefer to have a drink indoors in the warm

      2. Couldn’t believe the snow first thing Monday. But we persevered, did some retail therapy, had a lunchtime pint, and an extremely cold dinner in a pub garden.

        1. You didn’t have salad did you? 😦😦😦
          Sounds as though you’ve had a good start to the week. What about the rest of it?

          1. No – flat iron steak, which I recommend. I had salad on Tuesday. Mainly because I’d forgotten my insulin. D. went home to Devon yesterday. Meanwhile, with her assistance, I’ve been taming the neglected garden.

          2. I find it hard to get enthusiastic about salad. I’ve just eaten a Boost and then more than half of a Galaxy caramel bar. It’s weird. I can go for ages without chocolate and then … I go barmy. I always feel guilty afterwards but that’s not much help is it. I consoled myself today with the thought that I’d just done all the ironing. Funny how we can always justify our actions 😂😂😂.

            So was your new garden a wilderness and you were clearing it? I’ve planted a few Pittosporum s, a couple of Daphne’s and some thyme. We have quite a few gaps in our back garden and I’m itching to buy and plant new things but it’s still a bit cold. And also the Bowls season starts tomorrow.

          3. Yo, Maggie. The back garden here has been neglected for at least a year. The former tenant went somewhat doolally. My immediate neighbour used to help, until that became problematic. There are several roses, which I’ve pruned. Three hydrangeas, which I’ve dead-headed. The “lawn” is struggling. The clay soil has risen above the general level in several places. I’ve just spread 4 bags of lawn dressing over it, and some grass seed. I don’t think I’m about to have a bowling green, but hope for an improvement…

          4. Haven’t dead headed our hydrangeas yet, started but it turned very cold. My fingers nearly broke! Sounds like you’re doing a good job Geoff. Our grass looked absolutely awful last year in the heat but at least now it’s green. We have Lawnmaster come to treat it. Used to do it ourselves but when John did the feeding the spreader splodged it all in lumps. Much better for the professionals to cone and do it. KBO.

          5. Yo, Mags. I have clay soil. The borders are OK, but the lawn has issues. I’ve realised that this isn’t new. My parental home was similarly close to a brickworks. I’ve chucked four bags of lawn dressing over the grass, but I suspect the end result will leave something to be desired…

          8. Knowing who you are tells me you’ll soon have the garden under control and under your thumb. 😃😃😃

          9. I try to stick to 80% chocolate. It’s extremely high fibre and good for you, practically a health food. I can go ages without it as well, as long as two hours sometimes!

          10. I have tried to graduate to 80% dark chocolate but relapsed very badly today. I will try again.

          12. The time you really need to worry is when he gets hard being enthusiastic about salad.

          14. That describes my relationship with chocolate exactly. Months can go by, and suddenly…… I feel like chocolate. It can sit in the pantry for weeks and weeks and weeks, then one day it will call me. It is in the house because I have usually intended to make something with it, but not quite got around to it.

          15. It’s so good to hear I’m not the only one! I’ll keep trying the dark choc and I should gradually get better at it. I hope!

          16. I have to be careful with dark chocolate, it can give me migraine…. but not every time. Sometimes it takes red wine as well…. sometimes stress with it too…. it lulls me into a false sense of security by giving me no problems time after time then wham! – it gets me with the most awful pounding one-sided headache at 4.00 am.

          17. Neglected garden.

            I’ve had many, and my approach from bitter experience:
            Year one, only cut away things you really don’t want, otherwise let it do its own thing and see what appears.
            Try to remember the bits you liked.
            Year two, slaughter the rest! I’ve found that trying to mix and match causes more trouble than it’s worth.
            Then plant up what you like.
            Year three. Discover that you have ground elder, Japanese knot weed, bamboo, and ragwort. You missed them in year one.
            Year four, consult astroturfing and concrete suppliers.
            Year five, move house.

            Rinse and repeat.

          18. Cheer, sos. In reverse order, at £260 pcm, I won’t be moving. There are several roses. There was a rusty metal obelisk, which had long since failed to support it’s rose. Lawn: I’ve spread some lawn dressing and grass seed. Mowhammed, the robotic mower is currently stood down.

            The front ‘garden’ is largely grass, and is tended (badly) by contractors.

            Otherwise, I agree with your approach…

          20. I was looking at rental properties up to £1250 pcm this time last year. This place is owned by a local housing society. It was founded by Frank Taylor of Taylor Woodrow fame. I was one of 40 applicants. The committee was made up of church folks. Was it a fair process? I don’t know…

          23. Nah. It’s not what you know.

            It’s not who you know.

            It’s what you know about who you know. :@)

          24. Dear Geoff
            Yes it was – stop feeling guilty and think of all the time you’ve donated over the years without expecting anything in return!
            Yours, The Universe

    3. Monday morning, around 11 am, I had a pint of London Pride at Gunwharf Quays. Monday evening, dinner at the Jolly Farmer, Puttenham, in their new courtyard garden. Good food, but bloody freezing. Tuesday lunchtime – The Good Intent, in a marquee. Prolly non-compliant, but a few degrees warmer…

      2. Portsmouth Geoff ?
        I’ve never been there, perhaps we’ll make the effort this year.

        1. I heartily recommend the Mary Rose Museum. Even if you don’t care for museums much you will enjoy this.

          2. I’ve almost run out of the strong stuff. 🤔 Our middle son was supposed to be getting me a couple of different bottles of single Malt , he needs a reminder.

  77. Just back from first meal out with alcohol in ages! Excellent! Great atmosphere too. 😁🍷💨

    2. Was it wholemeal in the mill – with alcohol for cleansing – and the roof was open ???

      1. Nope. Inside, wine, beers… and a great atmosphere! One forgot how much one missed it.

  78. Loathing of the English unites Alba and the SNP in ahistorical self-pity

    The ethno-nationalism of their claims has many flaws and rests on ugly terrain

    DOUGLAS MURRAY

    The Alba Party released its first party political advertisement this week. And it was as enjoyable as you would have expected. For in it Alex Salmond’s new party showed its desire to go forward into the 21st century by going back to the 14th. The whole advert focused on Robert the Bruce. Indeed, to a background of pipe-music and soaring images of the Scottish mountain-scape, it pretended that the broadcast was actually delivered by Robert the Bruce, who has been summoned back from the dead to do voice-over work.

    The great warrior should have brought his speechwriter with him, because the ones the Alba party gave him weren’t up to much. They started off well enough, stirring up the old resentments by talking of “the forces of freedom” (the Scots) being “vastly outnumbered by those of the oppressor [the English] in the year of our lord 1314.” This is all good, pseudo-archaic, underdog stuff.

    But then the script writers seemed to lose themselves in the detail. Facing another defeat we are told that King Robert ordered his “camp followers” to go away to Gillies Hill. Why? Were they getting on his nerves? We are then told of The Bruce delivering a “fresh demonstration of people power by the small folk of Scotland”. A decent editor would have pointed out that this summons up images not of a mighty army crashing down on their opponents but rather of the king cruelly sending his most diminutive followers into battle first. Something from The Hobbit at best.

    What this tale inevitably builds up to is the tall claim that this early demonstration of people power ended up being “the straw which broke the spine of English superiority”. The English commander ended up fleeing “south”. A word almost spat out by the Bruce impersonator. We then have a few more soaring images of King Robert’s statue, are told by him that “I was there” and then informed that “Alba will unite the clans”. Which is why you should vote for the Alba party if you are lucky enough to have a vote in Scotland on May 6th.

    Of course, the ethno-nationalism of this claim has quite a number of flaws. But all such potential trouble is avoided by the detail being as portentous and vague as possible. Alex Salmond is digging as deep as he can dig in order to rally the Scottish public to his side. His fallout with the SNP was as sordid and degrading as it is possible to be. Now he will rouse himself – and, he hopes, his followers – by appealing to the grandiose and the historic. No more talk of who groped whose knee after which ceilidh. From now it will be Bannockburn all over again, with the portly, sweaty, unlikely figure of Alex Salmond erecting himself [!!!!] to lead the charge.

    As is usually the case with ethno-nationalists, all this is at once ridiculous, bathetic and sinister. The most crucial component, as in all Scots nationalism, is self-pity. It is all about the Scottish people somehow being held down. As though the English with their “superior” attitudes somehow keep down the little folk of Scotland, and that if only the English could be sent packing then the little folks would again be free to do unbelievably great things.

    What are these things? Are they things that keep the Scots within the bounds of their traditions (kilt-weaving, sword-dancing, haggis-making?) or are they things that allow the Scots to roam the world and leave a great impression wherever they go? It is not clear. All that is clear is that the Scots can neither breathe out nor breathe in because of the presence of the English. And that as long as any Scotsman or woman feels remotely unhappy in this life, they can blame it on the haughty English coming up here with their fancy ways.

    It would be nice if this ugly terrain were being fought over only by Salmond and his small-band of renegades. But, of course, Salmond is only reaching for the same bogus historical endorsements as his one-time friend and protégé Nicola Sturgeon.

    The SNP indulges in the same pseudo-historical nonsense whenever it can. Sturgeon rejoices in presenting herself as one of the little people having to battle the mighty English forever rallying at their camp in Westminster. And while Sturgeon herself is motivated by nothing but hatred of the English, she and her party love to present themselves as actually being the party of all things lovely and progressive. Indeed, among the claims made in the SNP’s manifesto for next month’s election is that the party aims to create a Scotland of “compassion, equality and love”, as if that is in the gift of any government.

    There are a hundred things that the SNP needs to do and could do. For instance, they could sort out poverty in the East End of Glasgow or address Scotland’s declining education standards. But like Alba they will do no such thing. Why would they when they have the easier option of bloviating about “the year of our Lord 1314” now and until the end of time?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/16/loathing-english-unites-alba-snp-ahistorical-self-pity/

    Scots being held back by the English = BAMEs being held back by whiteys. “We’re victims we are, we’re telling ye!”

        1. We seem to have got rid of our knotweed.

          Regular use of Roundup did the trick.

          1. 20 or so years ago I made the mistake of planting ‘a rather magnificent bamboo’ at the bottom of our garden. Apart from all the useful canes i managed to harvest, it ruined our pond by puncturing the liner and cam up in our neighbours garden. I even tried to dig the roots out and broke snapped two prongs off a Jewson industrial strength garden fork. I tried a concrete breaker to no avail. It took weeks to get rid of it, i ended up pouring diesel on it and setting it alight.

    2. Actually, is this in any way different to the rubbish poured out by the Tories Lib/Dems?
      Interestingly, Labour are challenging the SNP government with a list of fifty failures in their governance. Just as I suggested to Mr Sanwar two months ago.

      1. The unashamed targeting of another group to be the recipients of everyone’s resentment and hatred, is different.

    3. …and, despite all that, in 1707, they went bust and had to get their English friends to bail them out.

    1. I’d be very tempted to let us (say) spray one of the ads with a can of aresol. 😎

  80. Just wishing you all a pleasant life, we have just been locked down again! Barstewards have even closed all golf courses for the next month, just as they were set to open.

    There has to be a script that they all follow. Just like happened in the UK, travel across the country is now banned but the international border is still open for anyone mad enough to come here.

    1. I have a couple of friends who live near Toronto they have ben telling me that the Jabs are not being distributed effectively. It’s about time as they often say, they had a new and better PM/government. It wouldn’t be very difficult.

      1. The way things are going, Trudeau may well get re-elected, we despair. This was once a great country but now we wonder if we need to move.

        Toronto is getting more of the vaccines than the rest of Ontario but they also have more cases. At least we have had a break, if your friends live in the urban area they have probably been in lockdown since October.

    2. Lockdowns are going around the world like a Mexican wave. They will keep this going for years, until the people have had enough and take things into their own hands. Remember the Ceaucescus? It gives me hope.

    3. mng Richard. For sure there’s a script, collapse SMEs / business as the economic model’s collapsed then rebuild on elites’ own terms. It’s planned for July 9th 2021 https://sociable.co/technology/prepping-cyber-pandemic-cyber-polygon-stage-supply-chain-attack-simulation/ the usual suspects: Schwab, Blair et al plan to collapse economic system [phase 2 – the cyber pandemic], which is why it’s being ramped up against Russia / China over cyber attacks now..

      Different angle, same language, attempt to reinforce failed targeted numbers of C-19 and use lockdown tools they believe give them more control. The watered down attempt at deception exists only in supposedly “elite heads” so people will buy into what they’re told. but it’s definitely in the planning. Here’s Schwab’s offical link https://www.weforum.org/projects/cyber-polyon you can even apply to join

    4. mng Richard. For sure there’s a script, collapse SMEs / business as the economic model’s collapsed then rebuild on elites’ own terms. It’s planned for July 9th 2021 https://sociable.co/technology/prepping-cyber-pandemic-cyber-polygon-stage-supply-chain-attack-simulation/ the usual suspects: Schwab, Blair et al plan to collapse economic system [phase 2 – the cyber pandemic], which is why it’s being ramped up against Russia / China over cyber attacks now..

      Different angle, same language, attempt to reinforce failed targeted numbers of C-19 and use lockdown tools they believe give them more control. The watered down attempt at deception exists only in supposedly “elite heads” so people will buy into what they’re told. but it’s definitely in the planning. Here’s Schwab’s offical link https://www.weforum.org/projects/cyber-polyon you can even apply to join

  81. Well what ever I did today (touch wood) seems to have reverted my pulse rate to around 65 – 70 and reduced my BP to 140/36.
    Because of my recent health problems I have been putting it off, but I had to finish the job of replacing a rotten hard wood double door sill on a roof terrace for and old golfing mate, he had water coming through the lounge ceiling below. I had to remove all the rotten timber and mortar, seal the leak with bitumen and bond 300 mm wide Flash Band to the damaged area and top it with lead flashing the full width of the shallow guttering under the sill. Turn the lead up on the inside and replace the sill with a new one. It was hard work but. Maybe the stress of it all put my heart back into kilter. A medical first perhaps.
    And when i arrived home today and so soon after my visit to A&E last Saturday, i had a letter from the hospital for an appointment early *next month* for Electro cardiogram investigation.

      1. It hasn’t been a good day; the dog has been sick and had the runs, MOH has had incontinence problems meaning three loads of washing and I’ve heard that we have to self-fund any care. Well, you did ask!

        1. I feel so sorry for you old chap i really do. Life shouldn’t be like this for any one. Why can’t you have a carer come in a couple of times a day ?

          1. Firstly we’d have to fund it and secondly, neither of us is keen on having strangers in the house. I know of people who have had carers in and they have been more trouble than they’re worth.

          2. It’s not right is it ? It just should not be like this.
            I don’t want to get political over this sort of thing, but a lot of pensioners would be far better cared for if they were in jail. It’s not a good enough and not a good reflection on the social services and the attitude to elderly needy and infirm people in this country.

          3. I agree. I was pretty incandescent about the finding that we’d have to self-fund. I have spent some of MOH’s savings on essential house maintenance. They think I’ve deprived them of assets. I don’t think we should have to pay for care, anyway; MOH has a brain disease and in my view, diseases are the business of the NHS.

          4. I think the problem lies many years ago, when no government was willing to tell people that care was going to cost a fortune, and everyone was encouraged to believe that the NHS would care for them from cradle to grave. The fact is, we just haven’t been paying for it over the years.

            I have a private care insurance that I took out in Germany – it costs quite a lot, but the benefit is that I get care cover at any point in my life. It pays out for family members to look after me if necessary.

            In Germany, if you have children, the bill for any care you need that isn’t covered by the state run care insurance scheme or your private care insurance, will be sent to them automatically. Of course the usual suspects can’t pay and don’t pay, which is the achilles heel of all western social democracies.

            If the British government brings in a care scheme, it will be the same useless ponzi scheme as pensions, and the same con as the NHS, where you can’t opt out, thus killing all meaningful competition. We need a culture of saving for one’s old age, not a socialist mindset.

            None of this helps you of course. A family I know had male au pairs from Poland to help with long term care (for an elderly sick man), which I gather was a success. The young men were able to attend English classes and learn the language and earn some cash, and they provided much-needed help. There are restrictions on how many hours they can work, but 30 hours a week (which was the help we had with childcare) can be invaluable, and in my experience, you can usually negotiate longer hours for more money if they are happy with that. Au pair girls from Poland have a very good reputation in Germany.

          5. We had carers for my wife’s’ father and mother. It cost about £250,000.00 over a period of four years or more.

            Live-in carers cost a bomb and once ensconced with their own rent free accommodation viz. a bedroom, ability to to dictate a diet which we had to provide and compensation to allow the carer two hours per day release from caring altogether without financial compensation.

            The entire system of care for the elderly is both broken and corrupt.

        3. I wish i could help.
          In his late 70s early 80s My father had several strokes and my mother had to cope with most of his care they had a ‘carer’ from Nigeria who use to help himself from the drinks cupboard. And were robbed by unknown culprits twice. I do know but not first hand what it was like for her it was awful to see him ‘craned’ out of bed and wheeled to the bathroom. On that basis alone I’m quite happy to take a daily statin, my cholesterol was zero last check.

  84. Until the morning – and we go to Stowmarket for Best Beloved to have her 2nd Pfizer at 09:00. I’ve the Blue Badge so I have to drag along.

    The things you do for love. Good night.

    1. Night night NtN – I will be curling up with your book very shortly, I am about a third if the way through, there us a lot of detail there! I will report back when I finish it. I hope BB’s pfizer goes well.

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