Monday 31 May: If dentists can continue to operate during a pandemic, why not GPs?

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/2021/05/30/letters-dentists-can-continue-operate-pandemic-not-gps/

533 thoughts on “Monday 31 May: If dentists can continue to operate during a pandemic, why not GPs?”

  1. Ah, Jazus, Paddy, Not You Again?

    Bloke at a horse race whispers to Paddy next to him “Do you want the winner of the next race ?”
    Paddy replies “No tanks, I’ve only got a small garden.”

    A coach load of Paddys on a mystery tour decided to run a sweepstake to guess where they were going. The driver won £52!

    Paddy’s racing snail is not winning races anymore. So he decided to take it’s shell off to reduce its weight and make him more aerodynamic. It didn’t work, if anything it made him more sluggish.

    Paddy finds a sandwich with two wires sticking out of it.
    He phones the police and says ” I’ve just found a sandwich dat looks like a bomb.”
    The operator asks, “Is it tickin?”
    Paddy says “No I tink it’s beef”

    The Irish have solved their own fuel problems.
    They imported 50 million tons of sand from the Arabs and they’re going to drill for their own oil.

    Paddy says to Mick “Christmas is on a Friday this year”
    Mick says “Let’s hope it’s not the 13th.”

    Paddy’s in the bathroom and Murphy shouts to him. “Did you find the shampoo?”
    Paddy says “Yes but it’s for dry hair and I’ve just wet mine.”

    Paddy and Mick found three hand grenades and decided to take them to the police station.
    Mick says “What if one explodes before we get there ?”
    Paddy replies “We’ll lie and say we only found two !”

    Paddy goes to the vet with his goldfish. “I think it’s got epilepsy” he tells the vet.
    Vet takes a look and says “It seems calm enough to me.”
    Paddy says “I haven’t taken it out of the bowl yet.”

    Paddy spies a letter lying on the doormat.
    It says on the envelope ‘DO NOT BEND ‘.
    Paddy spends the next two hours trying to figure out how to pick the letter up.

    Paddy’s dog goes missing and he’s inconsolable.
    His wife says “Why don’t you put an advert in the paper”.
    He does but two weeks later the dog is still missing.
    “What did you put in the paper” his wife asks.
    “Here Boy” he replies.

    Paddy’s in jail. The Guard looks in and sees him hanging by his feet.
    “What the hell are you doing” he asks.
    “Hanging myself” Paddy replies.
    “It should be round your neck” says the Guard.
    “I know” says Paddy “But I couldn’t breathe”.

    An American tourist asks Paddy “Why do scuba divers always fall backwards off their boat?”.
    Paddy replies ‘If they fell forward, they’d still be in the feckin’ boat”.

  2. Morning, all Y’all!
    Sunny day – breakfast outside. Fair bit of tidying this morning after yesterday’s barbie. Nice! No beer left, though :-((

  3. Good Morning Folks,

    Cloudy and breezy out there at the moment but a good afternoon is forecast.

  4. Mng all, lets see what’s online served this am: Nothing seismic, usual chuntering:

    SIR – At the height of the Covid pandemic I visited my dentist to have five tooth implants fitted.

    At one of the sessions and wearing full protective gear, he practically disappeared down my throat to fit the necessary screws into my jawbone. He reappeared after about two hours, completely unscathed. I, too, came through the experience without any infection and reasonably comfortably.

    Meanwhile, I am unable to make any contact with my GP, who is hiding behind a receptionist and a telephone system that does not even allow me to have a long-distance conversation with him.

    Shame on them, their excuses and their timidity.

    Sydney Smith
    Peterborough

    SIR – While there may be a role for telephone or virtual GP appointments, this cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach. It is lazy medicine and does a huge disservice to patients. In medical school we were taught that in order to assess and diagnose a patient’s condition a tripod approach was required: history-taking, physical examination and investigation. Remove one leg of the tripod and it will fall down.

    By removing the ability of patients to see a doctor or nurse, one is removing a central tenet of accepted good medical practice. The effects of this new NHS ideology will be seen when excess complications, mortality and litigation become apparent.

    Matthew Trotter FRCS
    Rowney Green, Worcestershire

    SIR – I feel that the fact being overlooked in the discussion over continuity of care is that GPs are the people patients have to go to in order to get referred to a consultant.

    I have been trying for nearly six months to get a referral and have been fobbed off by my GPs. It has been taking three weeks to get a telephone appointment with a GP; then one has to go through the whole rigmarole of X-rays, then the three weeks to get another telephone appointment with a GP to discuss X-ray results and then another to discuss physio results.

    I now have an appointment for this week, and, as this was a telephone appointment when booked, I had to ring and ask for it to be changed to face to face. It has been changed to face to face – but I had to wait for 37 minutes for the phone to be connected to a receptionist. GPs have been the problem throughout.

    Carol White
    Northwold, Norfolk

    SIR – The stance of the British Medical Association (report, May 21) is that the “needs of the profession” should be pre-eminent.

    This continues to promote the concept of an outdated model of care where the patients were subservient to the medical profession. As taxpayers, we are the customers, and the medical professionals in primary care are there to meet our needs, not vice versa.

    Marion Ansell
    Tonbridge, Kent

    Israeli territory

    SIR – The report “Ireland attacks Israel’s ‘de facto annexation’ of Palestinian land” (May 27) is, of course, quite correct in stating that most countries view settlements Israel has built in territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war as illegal.

    What is almost never taken into account is that in 1948 Jordanian forces attacked the newly born Jewish state and seized the West Bank and east Jerusalem. In 1950 Jordan annexed them – a move not recognised by the UN or the Arab League, nor by any countries except Britain and Pakistan. When in 1967 Israel succeeded in regaining control of them, it would have been logical for the UN – and most countries – to applaud Israel for liberating illegally acquired territories. They did not seem to see it that way.

    Neville Teller
    Beit Shemesh, Israel

    Scrap the TV licence

    SIR – I do not watch sport or television at all. My Amazon Prime subscription is considerably less than the licence fee. Amazon makes superb dramas (with no adverts), which are of the same standard as the BBC. So why do I need an expensive television licence?

    I think it’s time the BBC became a commercially run company with a board who have business experience in the global market.

    Belinda Stevens-Fairchild
    Moretonhampstead, Devon

    SIR – Alternatives to the licence fee have been looked at in the past and all have been shown to have significant drawbacks. In March, the DCMS Select Committee looked at funding models for public service broadcasting and concluded that none of them were “sufficiently attractive to justify recommending for the next Charter period”.

    William Hern
    Maidenhead, Berkshire

    PMs marrying

    SIR – Boris Johnson is the fourth prime minister to marry while in office, not the third (report, May 25).

    Shortly after the death of his first wife in 1737, Robert Walpole married his long-term mistress; she died three months later in childbirth. The little-known third Duke of Grafton, a man noted for his “idleness and pursuit of pleasure”, began a long and happy second marriage in 1769 during his two-year premiership. In 1822, the uxorious (but virtually friendless) Lord Liverpool filled the void in his life created by the death of his first wife by marrying her best friend.

    Mr Johnson is only the second prime minister both to divorce and remarry while at No 10. When Grafton’s first wife was about to give birth to another man’s child in 1769, the marriage was dissolved by Act of Parliament, the only way divorce could at that time be obtained. Spurning the scandalous mistress with whom he had lived openly for years (they were alleged to have had sex in an opera box), Grafton persuaded the virtuous daughter of the Dean of Worcester to become his new wife. They had nine children.

    Lord Lexden
    London SW1

    The matter with meat

    SIR – Claire Finney (“I’ve given up being a vegetarian – to save the planet”, Features, May 25) writes an article with valid points. But the main issue for many vegetarians and vegans is simply the slaughter process. I dare say many would be happy to eat meat again if it wasn’t for the end point in the animals’ lives.

    No matter how humane we are told the process is, there is undoubtedly great suffering. How can it be avoided when so many animals have to go through it to feed so many of us?

    Carol Burke
    Oswestry, Shropshire

    Assisted dying for those with terminal illnesses

    SIR – Baroness Campbell has been a brave and effective fighter for disability rights for many years, but in opposing assisted dying, she is wrong to lump terminal illness with disability. They are completely separate issues, and the law presented to the House of Lords last Wednesday has nothing to do with disability, and everything to do with allowing people who are actually dying to have a good death.

    Palliative care is wonderful, and of course we need more of it, but it is naive to think that it can treat everything, including the intense distress caused by complete dependence, incontinence and a miserably drawn-out end game.

    I spent time recently by the bedside of someone dying of an inoperable cancer. The one thing he desires is to have control over his inevitable end. Baroness Campbell wishes to deny him that right.

    Dr Tim Howard
    Wimborne, Dorset

    SIR – Suicide has no medical pathway, and is often driven by depression and despair. The act itself is lonely, often violent and destructive, and leaves family and friends a legacy of guilt.

    By contrast, an assisted death is voluntary and safeguarded. The death is peaceful, and can be accompanied by friends and family. Grief can be mitigated. It is the antithesis of suicide.

    The choice of assisted dying is the one of the last great human rights still to be won. It’s time to change our law for the better.

    Michael Murray
    Matlock, Derbyshire

    Student panels

    SIR – I am a teacher of modern foreign languages with an Ofsted rating of “outstanding” and a good track record.

    After a recent school tour, I applied to a nearby state school with an Ofsted rating of “requires improvement”. When I received the interview schedule, I was staggered to find that a student panel was part of the process.

    These panels use students of all ages and have been known to ask prospective teachers to “Sing your favourite song” or “Tell us a joke”, as well as asking: “Why are you working as a supply teacher?”

    Some schools have been known to use their worst-behaved students on these panels as proof of the “value of their voice”, in the hope of improving their attitude. To date I have only had interviews in independent schools and state schools that were classed as “outstanding” or “good”; none used a student panel.

    I have since withdrawn my application.

    Rosamund Dal-Molin
    Corton, Suffolk

    Fair skies are ahead for makers of barometers

    SIR – While I enjoyed your article “Winners and losers in Britain’s great crafts renaissance” (May 24), I was somewhat dismayed by the suggestion that, as a barometer maker, I am on the “critically endangered list”.

    We repair, service and rebuild all kinds of barometers, and have never been busier. We refill and replace mercury tubes for stick and wheel (banjo) barometers, and refurbish aneroid movements. There must be untold thousands of barometers in English homes. Many will be heirlooms with sentimental value, and perhaps will have got out of order through neglect over the years – but nearly all of them are capable of being restored.

    Although old, these instruments are still surprisingly accurate at predicting what is in store –particularly dirty weather or storms, when they drop like a stone. No home should be without one.

    Matthew Wesley
    Norwich

    Keep your coal

    SIR – My great-uncle Morgan was a coal man. When he couldn’t get a reply at one household he opened the unlocked kitchen door (Letters, May 29) and found a note propped up against a teapot: “Coal-man, empty sacks under kitchen table.”

    Apparently the occupiers were not best pleased when he followed their instructions to the letter.

    Andre Baker
    Wellington, Somerset

    Unhelpful banking

    SIR – George Teasdale’s unhelpful experience with Halifax bank (Letters, May 27) reminded me of a similar experience I had when I took a 92-year-old lady to a local building society branch, where she had been a customer for over 60 years; all she wanted to do was to reinvest a matured bond. The cashier asked her: “Have you any photographic ID, such as a passport or driving licence?”

    “No,” she answered. After consulting a document, the cashier, in all seriousness, asked: “Do you have a gun licence?”
    John Fox
    Stamford, Lincolnshire

    1. The comment about the coal-man must have been before the nuclear scare of 1980 when Jimmy Carter was talking of a “limited nuclear war” in Europe. I know we were all instructed under ‘Protect and Survive’ to clear out under the kitchen table because that’s where we were supposed to be, with our fireproof identity labels attached, when the bomb dropped.

      1. Don’t forget the spare doors stacked round the kitchen table to turn it into a Wendy nuclear bunker.
        You were then fine as fallout that looked and sounded like Tinkerbell cascaded around you.

    2. The letter from Mr Mathew Trotter about good medical practice misses the point.

      The object of the exercise is to get the community to accept triage over the ‘phone, then the triage function can be transferred to India, or Pakistan, or

      the Philippines, saving considerable amounts of money as the NHS can then dispense with many expensive GPs.

      1. janet mng, agree. Add to that triage over the phone and corporatise the captured data. Re NHS, it’s another weakening link in the chain towards privatisation, dressed as Public Private Partnership [PPP]. I did wonder though if “Matthew Trotter” is related to Del Boy?

    1. Notable who those people are as well – the backbone of Britain. The workers, the middle class, the educated professionals.

      Not a splash of chanting, braying, graffiti spraying, defacing, abusive thugs. Just decent people who pay for the wasters to complain bitterly about why they should be given more of other people’s money under ‘communism’.

      No stupid rainbow flags, no weirdos, no pathetic rentamob proclaiming that oxymoron ‘socialist worker’.

      1. mng wibbling, agree. As you posted the other day, the people / backbone are the plebs who happen to be 99% not the purported elite 1%. In other words, the real representation of democracy

      2. Don’t forget those who work with their hands and know instinctively that real-life evidence trumps even the most sophisticated theorising.

        I have made three new friends on these protests; a university lecturer, an actress and a retired assistant chief constable. Not quite the hysterical low-information morons the MSM are trying to portray.

  6. We’re not drifting into segregation, we’re hurtling perilously towards it. 31 May 2021.

    And yet paradoxically, just as millions of citizens are showing the successes of multiracial Britain, its failures are becoming more apparent, too. The segregation identified by Phillips is growing worse, and fuelling a new sectarianism between minority groups. In many ways, our predicament is more visible and alarming than it was even in 2005.

    In the past week, we have seen continuing race hate and incitement to violence on British streets. Pro-Palestinian protestors have, quite openly in front of cameras and police officers, demanded “Jewish blood”, and called for “Muslim armies” to march. A BBC journalist is under investigation after tweeting that “Hitler was right”. Salma Yaqoob, who was backed by some Labour figures to become the party’s candidate in the West Midlands mayoral election, called for an “intifada” in British cities.

    Morning everyone. All this was predictable. There are no successful multiracial Societies except in the short term where they run on the political capital of the established order. Once the demographics change, so does the society which begins to adopt the attitudes and beliefs of the incomers promoting division and conflict. We are not “hurtling toward segregation” but latent Civil War!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/30/not-drifting-segregation-hurtling-perilously-towards/

      1. Knowing a fair few young people – 20 somethings – in London they think London [insert city ofyour choice, as they’re all toilets for the same reason] is amazing.

        Then they’re victims of crime. Not once, but multiple times. Then, slowly – because they’ve been told this is normal DIVERSITY STRENGTH and all the tosh about ‘this is expected’ and worse, normal. Then they starta family and that’s when it hits them: They don’t want to raise their children in a gang drug zone, don’t want their 6 year old running about with blacks carrying knives, or Bulgarians offering them heroin, or Romanian pick pockets. They don’t want their school to speak Urdu first.

        And then they look to leave for a better life because they’ve been forced out by crime, violence, drugs and, frankly; aliens.

        Another generation of kids – the same 20 somethings abuse the white, middle class families who left the violence of cities behind – abuse such as boomers, racists, ‘old’ and then… slowly, they get the same concerns – usually after the same violent criminality but this time it’s far worse, not a mugging or a gun robbery. it’s a rape or a murder and so… the next generation of natives move away.

        The problem is, they’re that much more violent, that much more aggressive – because the over run, vicious city has innured them to violence and thuggery as a survivial trait. The decent people, the ones who remember and know that actually, this isn’t normal and it isn’t right, those wanting a better life are pushed further and further away as the spite and nastiness ripples ever further outward and society is fundamentally changed for the worse.

        1. Don’t go dissing the cool guys. It’s not “violence and thuggery”, it’s “respect”. Nobody gets a lifestyle without it.

          1. Maye that’s the issue. Those kids constantly demand respect, but they’ve no idea what it is.

      2. mng, the elected reps, govt instruments / tools are setting their stall out and salad dress as “racial, cultural” etc, their intentions while deflecting attention. As Araminta made the original point re civil war, it’s pointing towards it and, as you put, it won’t be taking a knee or lying down

        1. I’m all for an uprising – at the appropriate time of course! 😉

          1. Chilling out day today. How about 4.0 pmish tomorrow?
            I’ll bring the scones if you provide the cream buns. We’ll need all the energy we can get.

    2. The problem isn’t racial, it’s cultural.

      When we have different cultures we have conflict because there is chaos. The expectations change. One group demands one thing from the others.

      When Labour forced millions upon millions of immigrants on this country the first thing to go was shared resources, but that was the point. It was the creation of a massive client state. The problem that brought was that too many people arrived too quickly who were literally aliens to our way of life. When those aliens were not told to fit in and vanish – again, for political reasons – they created chaos and thus a two tier system.

      The state loves immigrants as they are the consumers of all sorts of big state services. It hates the white nuclear family as that needs nothing, wants nothing from the state. So the state lobbies for it’s client and thus itself.

      1. 333612+ up ticks,
        Morning W,
        The lab were the instigators the tories then took the baton, the wretch cameron “I will reduce numbers” then promptly raised them.
        The DOVER ongoing invasion is under the watchful eye of the tory (ino) group.
        They are & have been for decades a coalition sharing the
        evil consequences of mass uncontrolled immigration
        ( invasion) ie paedophilia, terror alerts / actions and daily
        murder / murders.

    3. 333612+ up ticks,
      Morning AS,
      The main political cripperling component of this nation is, you MUST vote tory (ino) to keep out lab (ino) you MUST vote lab (ino) to keep out tory (ino).
      ALL the while the LLC coalition is working to its own semi covert agenda
      the new “normal” as in reset, replacement.
      The electorate, as seen over the last three decades have been behind these governance parties ALL the way as the voting pattern shows, they surely have done their bit as we are witnessing today.

    4. As the events in Batley and the protests over Palestine have shewn, we are already in a Latent Civil War.

      1. Does that mean it will be difficult impossible to find an open bank?
        Will we notice?
        Morning, B3.

        1. There has been a move to normality here in the sticks; my bank has extended its opening hours to 5pm. At the beginning of the panic, they shut at 2pm, then it was 3pm (and I still couldn’t manage to get there in time!). There’s a chance I may be able to do some banking transactions now.

    3. If you want news, Yes. Ham CC 178 for 9 in their allotted 35 overs. Shalbourne CC 35 all out (which included a ‘six’ granted by the scorers when a whippet caught the ball and ran off over the hill towards Oxenwood) Full match report will follow later after coffee.

  8. Good Moaning.
    More sun. This is terrible news. It will be the death of us …. We’re all dooooooomed …… Grumble, grumble ……
    And here’s a little something for the blood pressure.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/29/like-teletubbies-charge-prison-bosses-use-playgroup-sessions/

    “‘Like the Teletubbies are in charge’: Prison bosses use ‘playgroup’ sessions to uncover prejudices

    Justice Secretary Robert Buckland tells his top civil servant to get a ‘grip’ of the situation, after being alerted by The Telegraph

    29 May 2021 • 5:00pm

    Ministers have reacted with fury to “playgroup” style meditation sessions that prison bosses are using to flush out biases among staff.

    The sessions involve prison and probation staff closing their eyes to imagine walking through a park where they come across different people, after which they are challenged to say if everyone they “saw” was white, able-bodied or in a heterosexual relationship.

    It is part of a series of activities and resources issued this month to prison and probation managers to teach staff about “intersectionality,” a concept defining discrimination and privilege coined by the black civil rights activist and feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw.

    The session, entitled Walk in the Park: guided walk/meditation, says it aims to spark an “honest conversation” among participants about their norms and stereotypes to find ways of “changing the status quo”.

    LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – DECEMBER 01: Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland arrives for a weekly meeting of cabinet ministers at Downing Street in London, England on December 01, 2020. (Photo by Tayfun Salci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

    A source close to the Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland, seen here arriving for a weekly meeting of cabinet ministers at Downing Street, said he was at the ‘end of his tether’ Credit: Tayfun Salci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

    However, after being alerted to the initiative by The Telegraph, Justice Secretary Robert Buckland, told his top civil servant to take action and get a “grip” of it. It comes after The Telegraph revealed prisoners have been rebranded as “residents” and offenders as “supervised individuals”.

    A source close to the Justice Secretary said he was at the “end of his tether.”

    “This isn’t the first time we’ve found this kind of drivel circulating around civil servants at the department,” said the source.

    “Prisons are places where we lock up ruthless criminals who have ruined people’s lives but there is a blob in the department who act like they’re running a North London playgroup.”

    Ian Acheson, a former prison governor, said: “On Friday an inquest jury delivered a devastating verdict on the failure of the prison service to manage terrorist offenders.

    “Instead of obsessing over this sort of woke gibberish, senior managers should be solely focused on the real priorities – restoring public confidence that this is a law enforcement agency that protects the public.

    Ian Acheson joined the Prison Service as a prison officer, rose to the rank of governor, and has extensive involvement in operational command of serious prison incidents, according to his website

    Ian Acheson joined the Prison Service as a prison officer, rose to the rank of governor, and has extensive involvement in operational command of serious prison incidents, according to his website Credit: News Scan

    “Ministers simply must get a grip on HMPPS [HM Prison and Probation Service] leadership or replace them with people who care more about security and order than pronouns.”

    Another long-serving prison source confronted with the material commented: “It’s like the Teletubbies are in charge.”

    The internally produced “toolkit” is branded with the HMPPS logo and is designed for “every team” across HMPPS to have a “safe and structured conversation about intersectionality”.

    It provides information, activities and recommended reading including Diversity, by June Sarpong, the BBC’s director of creative diversity, and Ms Crenshaw’s Demarginalising the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of anti-discrimination doctrine, feminist theory and anti-racist politics.

    The first 30-minute activity aims to encourage participants to learn about “intersecting” identities such as lesbians from ethnic minority backgrounds, gay people living in poverty, Muslims with a disability or transgender Christians.

    Staff organising the second activity, A Walk in the Park, are told to put on slow, soft music and keep the pace of the exercise “slow and calm.”

    Participants are invited to shut their eyes and imagine a “summer’s day, the trees are heavy with leaves and the sun breaks through to make you feel warm”.

    They are invited to imagine birds singing, the smell of cut grass, a slight breeze on their faces as they walk past a child kicking a football, two smiling adults apparently with the child, two people on a bench, a couple holding hands and a group of men on a bench laughing.

    The participants leave the park and enter their building where they are asked questions including whether they assumed the two people on the bench were white and able-bodied, if the smiling adults were parents and whether the couple holding hands were two women or two men.

    “Was everyone in your park white? No visible disabilities? Young or middle-aged? Were there couples of the same sex? Were there any retired or old people? Were there different ethnic groups in your park?” the document asks.

    It coincides with Phil Copple, director-general of prisons, issuing an internal anti-racist message about the disproportionate number of white staff and pictured taking the knee outside Durham prison.

    “It’s not straightforward to have insights into racial discrimination when you’ve not been on the receiving end of it,” he wrote.

    A prison service spokesman said: “Our staff remain focused on cutting crime and protecting the public. We are building more prisons, recruiting more probation officers, and this guidance is not government policy.”

    1. When I tried the “walk in the park” exercise, all I could see were damned squirrels. Do they count as evil white binary heterosexual colonizing men?

          4. Au contraire. Grey squirrel populations illustrate the dangers of uncontrolled immigration.

    2. Yo anne

      I look forward to reading about the the play-groups for the prisoners, where they are shewn the error of their ways, with regard to:

      Paedophilia
      Rape

      Terrorism
      Assault
      Fraud
      Gun crimes
      Knife crimes

      to name just a few

      1. How to hide your AK47 in a sandpit.
        Best way to conceal cocaine in a Lego brick.
        How to turbo charge your pedal car after snatching Grannie’s handbag.

      2. Pah! What a strange list – all things that get you respect among the cons.

        There is only one error that interests them:

        Getting caught.

        1. The old gaol in Walsingham had a treadmill – it was used to grind corn.

    4. 333612+ up ticks,
      Morning Anne,
      Should not ” end of his tether” read as end of a rope.

    5. … “say if everyone they “saw” was white, able-bodied or in a heterosexual relationship.”
      I call the bosses out right away!
      Is the only disability a physical one? Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. What about those with terrible eyesight, the deaf, those with mental issues?
      How can you “see” someone in a hetero relationship, unless the bloke has his parked in hers? M+F could be friends, as could M+M and F+F. Or not.
      Arseholes, the lot of them.

        3. Film on Netflix starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford always makes me giggle “Our Souls at Night”

    2. Rather brief. He or she could have been a little more explicit.

      I will fight for truth, freedom, medical freedom and the health, rights and freedoms of others so long as I have breath in my body. Signed, Anonymous

    1. I heard on the wireless that the NHS was months behind in operations.

      One has to ask ‘why’. Yes, there was a pandemic. However there were not the legions of deaths and there was no reason for the NHS to simply stop doing what it did before. If it suddenly stopped then we need to look seriously at why and critically examine the failure to plan in the NHS.

      1. The consultant phoned me the day before my hip replacement, in January asking if I wanted to go ahead with it. Apparently, the risk of cross infection within the hospital was growing, due to staff shortages and them having to work in other departments! So they knew cross contamination was happening but the cleaners etc were still using the same mops and buckets across the hospital! An epic fail! Anyway, I went ahead with the op as the next date he offered me was March!

        1. The NHS continues to build big multi-discipline hospitals. Babies are born in wards that share the air conditioning with wards that treat transmittable diseases. Same nurses, cleaners, admin staff, working here and there as part of the HR “family friendly, work/life balance” policies that now trump every other consideration.

        1. As absurd as those poncing idiocy were to see, a nurse chum of mine said she found it brought discredit to the profession as it was only a small number but obviously inappropriate given the circumstances.

      3. 333612+ up ticks,
        Morning W,
        I see it as proof of political controlling power over the herd,
        they, the politico’s have the baton & are orchestrating the moves.

  11. A Russian Doll review – from St Petersburg with hate. 30 May 2021.

    Cat Goscovitch’s gripping play explores the Russian troll factory that used social media to manipulate the Brexit vote.

    Liz Da Costa’s set of room-size clear boxes set inside one another suggests Russian doll layering. At the heart of this construct is Masha, surrounded by computer screens. The goal, for the team she is part of, is to get people in the UK to vote for Brexit. Masha takes us through the devious means by which she creates opportunities to introduce politically directed hashtags into unrelated exchanges with influencers – #BetterOffOut is one. Chillingly, she shows us how fictions created for the oligarch by psychologists are used to incite racism. Masha believes that her hidden persuasion has referendum-influencing consequences.

    I see! Vlad and his cronies made us all vote for Brexit! Why one wonders, since he possesses this power, didn’t he arrange for Jeremy Corbyn to win the General Election or how come Donald Trump lost the Presidential fight with Biden? Why is the Western MSM not strewn with Pro-Russia articles? The very idea that you can influence voters to any degree by online postings is a myth. Not only because if it did this blog would be inundated with Left Wing comments, but because changing people’s minds with a few written words is impossible; you need a full on MSM Campaign for that and even that is unreliable.

    https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/may/30/a-russian-doll-review-barn-cirencester-cat-goscovitch-russian-troll-factory-brexit

    2. Seemed to work when installing fear and trembling into the brave British public over Covid, though – so not to be lightly dismissed.

      1. Never again will the British be able to smugly dismiss 1930s Germany as something that ‘couldn’t happen here’.

    3. Dear freekin’ life. They don’t get it, do they? We left the hated EU because it is a toxic midden. There was no co-influence, no Russia troll, just people sick and tired of Left wing stupidity.

      We rejected you. There was no secret society, no hidden agenda, just people saying no to guardian esque nonsense.

    4. Did those dreaded Ruskies manage it by shining moonbeams directly into our brains?

  12. Good morning all.
    Another overcast but dry start in Derbyshire with a cool 6°C on the thermometer.

  14. Morning all, a glorious morning here in Norf Zummerzet. 11deg and lots of sunshine. I am going to spend the Bank Holiday in typical VVOF fashion, staying home and avoiding the traffic jams and crowds, just spending time in the garden.

    1. Morning VVOF. Never go anywhere on a Bank Holiday! If the weather is not rubbish the roads will be packed!

      1. Morning Minty, the last trip I done was when the kids were very young, the family went to Weymouth on a hot sunny day, but we went by train.
        I admit I had just a touch of smugness on the trip home looking out the window as we past miles of stationary traffic.

        1. I was a very keen hillwalker (age has now brought it to an end) and used to wait for Easter to get away, until one trip where I went to the Lake District in glorious weather and it was FULL. Literally. The Car Parks! The Pubs! The Fells!

          Never again!

          1. One of the advantages now of maturity, we can choose our getaway moments. Personally I never go during Bank Holidays and school holidays, always outside these times. I even avoid weekends when visiting garden centres. I like my space.

          2. Nick Robinson is doing his BBC Radio 4 News programme for Bank Holiday weekend from the Lake District and one local said the place was heaving with people. I used to walk in the Lake District when I lived near Carlisle but haven’t been near the lakes for about 30 years. Keswick was very crowded at holiday time and Windermere was very much worse. I prefer the Yorkshire Moors now and pick my time to avoid the crowds..
            The growing population is destroying the usual favourite holiday spots in Britain

          3. If you ever find a nice quiet place to relex, tell everyone about somewhere else

          4. When did we give our permission for the country to be turned into a holiday Disneyland for anyone to roll in, and spoil?

          5. Slight alteration: “The growing population is destroying the usual favourite holiday spots in Britain”

  15. To the article:
    A baby boom was expected at the start of the first lockdown – people having nothing to do but conjugate.
    But that has not happened. Not surprising really – people need confidence to want children, and the abortion clinics never skipped a beat.

    1. No one knew what the future held. In addition, no one knew if they’d be able to afford to have a child.

      The same group who were breeding without thought for the consequences are still doing so. It’s the decent people wanting to work who struggled.

      3. Lockdown should have made it difficult, for one section of the community

        The ‘father’ would not have been able to get from house to house!

    2. Nottlers conjugation

      …
      This Grammar.com article is about Conjugating the Verb “To Be” — enjoy your reading!

      Form To Be

      Infinitive 1. be
      Present Tense 2. am 3. is 4. are
      Past Tense 5. was 6. were
      Past Participle 7. been

  16. 333612+ up ticks,
    Dt,
    British WHO scientist dismisses Wuhan lab Covid leak claims as ‘conspiracy theories’
    Peter Daszak, part of the team investigating the virus, has been accused of a conflict of interest over his links to the Chinese institution

    Thinking outside the letterbox,
    Any truth that in certain quarters letter boxes are getting bigger, allowing to accept fatter ……..

    1. mng, Dasziak knows he’s collateral damage, so has to show his credientials to his “employers” he’s a good boy. In his case it’s not letterbox, it’ll be his, and others, inbox

      1. 333612+ up ticks,
        Morning C,
        With some serious thinking & adjustments it could prove useful in a power cut say.

    2. At the time of the Profumo scandal in 1963 when I was a schoolboy with a rather prurient sense of humour there was a rather weak joke which did the rounds:

      Mandy Rice Davies: I am happy to look after your pet parrot for you when you go on holiday – but won’t you miss him?
      Christine Keeler: Don’t worry. I plan to have a cockatoo while I’m away.

      2. …and Christine Keeler having to see the doctor about the splinters in her thighs…

        …’cos half the cabinet had been through her!

      3. Mornin Rastus, I met Mandy Rice Davis when she was married to an Israeli, they ran a chain of restaurants in Tel Aviv & I had lunch with some American friends in one and Mandy was there at time acting as the hostess, greeting diners at the door, showing them to a table & bringing them menus. She sent over a waiter to take our order & towards the end of the meal asked if everything was satisfactory & we briefly spoke when I said that the meal was excellent ( which it was ) . My American friends had no idea who she was & after we left the restaurant & walked off our meal & ended up at the seafront to have ice creams & cold drinks at a Cafe where I told them in brief about the Profumo scandal & who the lady who was that had shown us to a table at Mandy’s Restaurant on Dizengoff St. in Tel Aviv.

      4. What’s the difference between Christine Keeler and the M1?

        The M1 knackers your tyres.

      5. The difference between a rooster and Christine Keeler?
        The rooster goes “cock-a-doodle-do” and Christine Keeler goes Any cock’ll do”

    1. Hover the mouse over the link and at the foot of the screen, the actual link is seen. DON’T CLICK!!

    1. who the hell is that bean cushion? Given the value for money argument, they’d have been better with a Hesco barrier

    2. Oh dear – well done Daily Fail – “Lord Ian West, head of the Royal Navy“!! Let’s start with the fact that he’s Alan West, aka Lord West of Spithead and move on to the fact that he retired in 2006!

      Wiki: “Alan William John West, Baron West of Spithead, is a retired admiral of the Royal Navy and formerly, from June 2007 to May 2010, a Labour Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the British Home Office with responsibility for security and a security advisor to Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Prior to his ministerial appointment, he was First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff from 2002 to 2006“

  21. Good morning, my friends

    We’re not drifting into segregation, we’re hurtling perilously towards it
    A growing mood of sectarianism threatens to undo the many successes of multiracial Britain

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/30/not-drifting-segregation-hurtling-perilously-towards/

    BTL

    But surely if Britain has an established Church of which the monarch is the Head then it should be possible to have Christian schools?

    Funnily enough many non-Christians – including Muslims – are keen to go to CoE schools but I have not heard of any great demand from Christians or non-Muslims wanting to go to Islamic schools.

    1. Catholic schools in Scotland are supported by the State. This is an arrangement that came about around a century ago when the privately funded Catholic schools were adopted by the State, Now these schools are stuffed with muslims.

    2. Funnily enough many non-Christians – including Muslims – are keen to go to CoE schools
      The only reason they want to be there is to cause as much trouble as they possible can, it’s their only raison d’étre.

    1. Some 20 years ago I bought a job lot of mechanical bits that included a forward/reverse gearbox that I wanted and a load of other stuff I had no use for, including a 1300 Ford crossflow engine and bits for a pre-crossflow engine including a pre-crossflow cylinderhead fitted with a water-cooled inlet/exhaust manifold.
      I’m currently photographing the bits and slowly getting them up on E-bay!

        1. I quite like sitting, though.
          Sometimes I sits and think. And sometimes I just sits.

          5. He really was like a Neanderthal. If he ever visited a zoo he would have never been let out again.

          6. He really was like a Neanderthal. If he ever visited a zoo he would have never been let out again.

          10. Mornin Eddy Neander-Troll is a fine fellow, honest, outgoing & always carries a big club to greet new people with, in fact the term “Clubbing” so popular with the hard drinking hoi polloi originated with him clubbing Homosapiens over the head !

      2. I love sitting on a completely deserted beach. The appearance of just one more human spoils the experience for me.

  25. Switzerland is right about the EU – Britain must also go it alone
    The Union’s essential problem in its relationship with both Switzerland and the UK stems from its ambitions for uniformity and integration

    Roger Bootle : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/05/30/switzerland-right-eu-britain-must-also-go-alone/

    BTL Comments

    We need a new ‘Free States of Europe’ as an alternative vision to the EU. A loose alliance encouraging cooperation and diversity.

    Start with the UK, Switzerland, and Norway and others will follow…

    Response:

    That’s the sort of thing many of us thought we were voting for in 1975 – but we were deceived by the lies of the monstrous Mr Heath who said that the Common Market was just an economic club with no political aspirations.

    I confess I voted for the Common Market in 1975; I did not vote for the EU – but how many people who voted for this in 1975 actually want to vote for the EU today?

    1. Actually nobody voted FOR the Common Market in 1975; what they (and I) voted for was to stay in (we joined in 1972, effective 1st Jan 1973). All based on false assurances that there would be no loss of sovereignty and it was just a trading arrangement. May that liar Heath burn in hell!

  29. Do not get caught with this vile image in your possession.

    King’s College, London apologises for ‘harm’ caused to staff by photo of Prince Philip – white racist bástard!

    Vanessa Farrier, the college’s head of partnership and liaison, was among the staff angered by the Duke featuring in the email. She has demanded that they “decolonise” the King’s College library.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2021/05/30/TELEMMGLPICT000000742505_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqKsbLem-PIbgxc1PV-wSLq3BwJdTbHtUQgmXJIPG-Z2M.jpeg?imwidth=680

      1. Good Morning Jules, she is probably referring to the fact that the ancient Greeks kept slaves & therefore Phil as a Greek prince was responsible!

    2. If demanding is acceptable, then I demand that Vanessa Farrier be sacked!

    3. Why is a person with such hideously twisted views, allowed to be in any position to demand anything, other than a razor to slit her wrists and give peace to all?

      2. Decolonise? If they took away her colon what would be left of this arseh*le? Reminds me of the village idiot in the Ball of Kirriemuir!

  30. 333612+ up ticks,
    “Monday 31 May: If dentists can continue to operate during a pandemic, why not GPs?”

    Fair play to the dentists for they have the gum ption to
    fillin & extract the best from a bad lot.

  32. I was a child in St Mawes where we lived in a substantial detached house on the sea-front with an acre of garden looking straight out to sea.
    I saw in the DT yesterday that property prices in St Mawes have grown by 48% in the last year – more than in anywhere else. The family sold our house in the early 1970’s for £35,000 – it must be worth well over a hundred times that now.
    Anyway, bang goes any chance of our buying a house in St Mawes and spending our declining years in the village where I was a boy!

    1. If you remember the actual address – you could look at Zoopla and find out what it sold for last time.

    2. Only 48%? Houses in our neck of the woods have increased by over 70% in the last year and prices are still rising.

    1. Lovely stuff 🤩
      For me……..It knocks current ‘pop music’ off the edge of it’s precipice.
      Our eldest son is on holiday we have just had his new red Fender telecaster delivered to our house, I sent him a photo of the box and he told me to open it and now i’m about to plug it in.
      https://youtu.be/JPMaU87TYL8
      Not me,…. i have a lot more hair.

      1. I always think that Tele’s that are minus the traditional ‘ashtray’ bridge cover look a bit scruffy.

        1. My eldest has a nice Gibson ES 335 sunburst. And a Gibson Les Paul Standard.
          He always thought the Tele’s looked too much like a shovel. I think he’ll like this one. Their soon to be six year old son has started to strum on the cigar box guitar his dad made earlier this year.
          I’ve got a Strat but I hardly ever use it.
          I have a few acoustics as well, and a Yamaha AEX 1500 once made famous by Martin Taylor.

  34. One to ponder – who wrote:
    ‘It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live’.

    No cheating….I’m watching you!

    2. Yet, let’s change the phrasing just a bit:

      “Minorities should be provided a space of their own, free form persecution and oppression to set and create their own attitudes and opinions freely, unfettered from the old, traditional societies. A place of their own. A free land.’

  36. The BBC has said that hundreds more Afghans and their families are to be allowed to settle in UK. No! Not hundreds, thousands, and their families, cousins, neighbours, uncle Tomm Kobbli and all, to join the thousands already here. I thought we were full up – Not just full up but fed up too! Why don’t the do-gooders go to these God forsaken countries and reform them from within instead of burdening the people of Britain with potential poverty, pestilence and death?

    1. Tony War Criminal Blair along with half-wit George Bush Jr. invaded & helped destroy their shit-hole of a war torn drug growing country & so they are simply returning the compliment by invading the UK & helping the millions of other Paki-Turds, Bangli-Turds, Afri-Turds & other evil 3rd world scumbags that Labour imported into the UK to finish off the UK completely !

    2. Import the 3rd World – become the 3rd World. How many more drug dealing gangs? – how many more young white girls raped by grooming gangs? Guaranteed one thing – none of these imports will be living anywhere near those allowing them in. The NHS can see to them, use more expensive translators for us to pay for – taking up multiple appointment times so the likes of us can’t get an appointment. As I’ve said many many times – We are being made to pay for our own extermination.

  37. The BBC has said that hundreds more Afghans and their families are to be allowed to settle in UK. No! Not hundreds, thousands, and their families, cousins, neighbours, uncle Tomm Kobbli and all, to join the thousands already here. I thought we were full up – Not just full up but fed up too! Why don’t the do-gooders go to these God forsaken countries and reform them from within instead of burdening the people of Britain with potential poverty, pestilence and death?

  38. Morning all.
    LoP – I’ve just woken up after a night shift.

    Slow night last night so as I often do I tried to log into Nttl on my work PC to read the day’s comments, only to get the message that I was trying to access a prohibited site. It’s never blocked me before.

    What has piqued our IT dept’s I wonder. Probably picked up a right wing leaning. (The patients on the wards are only allowed left wing newspapers )

    1. How do you know you have woken up? Perhaps you are dreaming that Discurse won’t allow you in….{:¬))

  39. 333612+ up ticks,
    May one ask,

    Does it still stand that 48% of the electorate still want foreign rule, in the main to safeguard two weeks holiday
    periods, and against 52% ?

    How close are we to the 51 % of these Isles inhabitants being of a NON INDIGENOUS ilk ?

    Lest we forget grandads axe, the politico’s / supporters
    lab/lib/con replace the head then the shaft, who can then legally lay claim to the axe.

    The head ( london) has obviously fallen under replacement, get the picture ?

    breitbart,
    ‘Enough is Enough’: Protest Against Illegal Migration Held in Dover as Over 400 More Boat Migrants Land

    1. Add the Fri and Sat figures its 480 – families to follow soon. Or in plain English – about 5000 in total. Housed, Schooled, NHS and translators. No wonder so many houses are being built – can ONLY be for them – and all paid for by US.

      1. 333612+ upmtics,
        Afternoon W,
        Sad to say it has that has been the case for many a decade while we still have a waiting list for social housing regarding the indigenous, all the time the mass uncontrolled immigration, ongoing lab/lib/con coalition party finds regular
        support / votes the ballot booth tells us it is the right thing to do.

    1. It must be quite complicated trying to line up those little holes between each sheet.

        1. They used to have that in the public conveniences at Edinburgh Castle!

          5. As have we upvoters, though I must admit it was my Mama who used to listen, at some time around 4 o’clock.

        2. It is still being broadcast – with the same cast. It’s called the 9 O’clock News.

  43. Why should Dr Christian Jessen’s fans pay his legal bill? 31 May 2021.

    Dr Christian Jessen, who appears on a Channel 4 show called Embarrassing Bodies, has been ordered by a Belfast court to pay £125,000 in libel damages to former Northern Irish first minister Arlene Foster for tweeting the false allegation that she was having an extra-marital affair. It is believed that legal costs could add a further £300,000 to his bill.

    How to pay? Not, apparently, from his earnings as a celebrity doctor. Jessen has set up a crowdfunding page, claiming that he is suffering from serious mental health issues and that he is considering launching an appeal. By Monday morning, he had raised £7000 of the £150,000 he is hoping to raise.

    Unfortunately there is as yet, no cure for stupidity.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-should-dr-christian-jessen-s-fans-pay-his-legal-bill-

    1. It is extremely likely that the vast damages will be reduced to about £30,000.

      Before the tosser gets his begging bowl out, he should appeal to the Court of Appeal.

      1. He went after AF because she’s N Irish and isn’t too keen on gays.
        In his keenness to insult her, he forgot about boring stuff like evidence.

    2. He’s now saying that he’s down to his last £ 20,000 and may have to declare himself bankrupt.

      1. Having never reached a “first” £20,000, never mind last – have I been bankrupt all my life?

    4. During this past year there has been no need for doctors?
      Maybe he’d have done better as a humble GP rather than a telly tart.

  44. Told you so, fellow NoTTLers. They are determined to crush us:

    “UK in first stages of third Covid-19 wave amid rise in Indian variant cases, Government adviser warns
    Microbiologist Professor Ravi Gupta called for the 21 June date to be revised”

    1. We should just ignore any Lockdown

      A concerted do as we wish and let the Per lice sort it out

      If 10 are doing the same wrong and only one person is arrested make protests.

      Challenge any court decisions

      Employ Bill as as your First Resort

        2. I was not going to pay you

          I was looking for a Nottler Freebie/Pro Bono

    2. We should just ignore any Lockdown

      A concerted do as we wish and let the Per lice sort it out

      If 10 are doing the same wrong and only one person is arrested make protests.

      Challenge any court decisions

      Employ Bill as as your First Resort

          1. Do you remember the “Demi wave”? My mother put on in my hair when I was about 15 and I looked like Dougal from the Magic Roundabout for about 6 months! Gawd knows what it was!

    4. aftn bill, congrats 1st of all re your grand daughter, that’s the important bit.

      Now the guff: Gupta, SAGE schizophrenics, Mr Symonds, Halfcock etc, all virtue signal their intentions ahead of time. Expect the zig zag post the G7 circus. Their intent is to run this gig til March 2024

  45. Vicarious thrill for an aging grand-father.

    My beloved (and highly talented) grand-daughter entered three of her best paintings for the Royal Academy Youth Exhibition 2021.

    About 20,000 children enter the competition.

    One of her paintings has been selected…..an enormous feat. Now we wait to see whether she will be among the prize-winners. I have warned her not to bank on it. Looking at winners in previous years, there is a great deal of talented opposition. A lot of diverse and inclusive entrants, natch. some of whose work is very good – though some rubbish.

    Nonetheless, I shall treat myself to a beer at lunch.

    2. Wow, well done her. Have you got a photo of her painting to show us Bilty?

    3. Many congratulations to her!
      Does she have an instagram profile for her art?

    4. I’ll bank on a painting of someone unable to breath will triumph over one with some enormous feet. Does she do hands as well.

    5. Clever girl who is lucky enough to have a very clever talented Grandpa.

      I hope she excels , and then you will show us her work x

    6. Congratulations. Even if she doesn’t win a prize, having had a picture selected is a great achievement.

    2. they tend to permanently remove them this side of the pond, with replacements lined up.

      In 2016, USA withdrew its $472 million aid from Tanzania, thinking then President John Magufuli would get on his knees and beg, but the now “late” Magafuli in public address responded “We need 2 Stand on our own. If you’re a farmer, you need 2 farm hard, if you’re a fisherman fish hard / if you’re employed anywhere work hard so that Tanzania & Tanzanians can get rid of donor dependency”.

      Then had him killed, citing C-19. His replacement Mheshimiwa Raisis, a member of World Economic Forum [WEF], paid by Schwab, B&M Gates Foundation and Clinton Foundation. The one prior to Magufili, Kikwete, just happens to now be “appointed Director of World Education Fund” [similar but different WEF to Schawb]. Also now chair of Global Water Partnership & onto Board of Directors of Nutrition International [same funding route as current TZ President Raisis].

      Having bought off Uhuru here, it’s 50/50 whether there’s an election next year. Both Kenya and TZ have complicit MSM, but wanachi both sides ignore them

    4. Now the next question is will she be invited onto GB News when it is up and running, and will they try to talk over her to silence her and her message?

      1. No, or using the SAGE prediction model if she is invited, then talk to her in sign language. Then roll her out of the top floor window

      1. Sorry about that, lacoste – they really were desperate to shut her up but she refused to be intimidated and she got her point across even though they did their best to talk over her.

        I joined Twitter in 2015 to read someone’s recommended post and did nothing for another six years – I found it really confusing but suddenly it all fell into place and (this is really sad) it added another dimension to my online experience. In the space of three weeks I have almost 400 followers (not bad for a 74 year old, eh?). ‘Stalkers’ – snorted poppiesdad.

    1. Afternoon, Rik

      If Alexa was any good, she’d tell the dope in the ad that Pompeiians running from Vesuvius wouldn’t speak English, a language that didn’t even exist till more than a thousand years later.

      1. And that nobody in 79 AD knew it was 79 AD, as the Christian dating system didn’t come into effect until centuries later.

    1. An excellent writer, with. a sense of humour as well. I like “Three to Conquer”.

      1. Yo bb2

        Not ven for obstructing, just on suspicion of doing it,

        The same for the public order offences

        Disgusting

        They have been “Tommy’d”

        That word should enter our vocabulary.

  50. Here’s the full article that Araminta headlined earlier.

    We’re not drifting into segregation, we’re hurtling perilously towards it

    A growing mood of sectarianism threatens to undo the many successes of multiracial Britain

    NICK TIMOTHY

    After the 7/7 terror attacks, Trevor Phillips, then the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, issued a stark warning. “We are sleepwalking our way to segregation,” he declared. “We’ve emphasised what divides us over what unites us. We have allowed tolerance of diversity to harden into effective isolation of communities, in which some people think special separate values ought to apply.”

    Sixteen years later, optimists will point to the minorities reaching the top of UK business and government. The Business Secretary is black, the Chancellor and Home Secretary have Indian heritage, the Foreign Secretary is the son of a Jewish refugee, and the recent London election saw a black Tory challenge a Muslim Labour mayor. Many minorities are thriving at school, building successful careers, and raising confident and happy families, secure in their identities.

    And yet paradoxically, just as millions of citizens are showing the successes of multiracial Britain, its failures are becoming more apparent, too. The segregation identified by Phillips is growing worse, and fuelling a new sectarianism between minority groups. In many ways, our predicament is more visible and alarming than it was even in 2005.

    In the past week, we have seen continuing race hate and incitement to violence on British streets. Pro-Palestinian protestors have, quite openly in front of cameras and police officers, demanded “Jewish blood”, and called for “Muslim armies” to march. A BBC journalist is under investigation after tweeting that “Hitler was right”. Salma Yaqoob, who was backed by some Labour figures to become the party’s candidate in the West Midlands mayoral election, called for an “intifada” in British cities.

    Schools have reported huge spikes in anti-Semitic abuse of pupils. In Leicester, gangs of college students were filmed stamping on tables and chanting “Allahu akbar!” The intimidation of Jewish pupils and teachers grew so severe that the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson wrote to schools warning that while pupils are allowed to express political views, anti-Semitic language and threats must not be tolerated.

    In response to the Williamson letter, Miqdaad Versi, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, complained that the Government was being “one-sided”. The letter, of course, was not about events in Israel, but the harassment of British Jews. In suggesting there might be two sides to racism, Versi revealed more than he intended about why the Government refuses to engage with the MCB.

    And yet they and other organisations such as Mend, a controversial campaigning group accused of increasing hostility by the Board of Jewish Deputies, are treated by many MPs, local councils and other parts of the public sector as unproblematic and representative community bodies. But by engaging with them, the state is contributing to the sectarianism and hatred it should be doing its utmost to prevent.

    Tahir Alam, the teacher banned for life after leading the Trojan Horse plot to take over state schools in Birmingham, was previously the MCB education committee chairman. Purpose of Life, the Muslim charity that named the Batley teacher who showed pupils cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, has provided training workshops for the teaching union. Mend was even invited to provide evidence for the independent inquiry into discrimination within the Conservative Party.

    Labour is now a full participant in the new sectarianism. Its response to the Israel/Hamas conflict was so one-sided that it was accused of stoking anti-Semitism. Many Labour MPs – and West Midlands mayoral candidate, Liam Byrne – have adopted aggressively anti-Indian positions regarding its stand-off with Pakistan over Kashmir. In Batley, former local MP and now West Yorkshire mayor, Tracy Brabin, failed to defend the teacher after he faced death threats. Her successor, the Labour candidate in the forthcoming by-election, has posed for photographs with pro-Palestine protestors wearing T-shirts showing Israel wiped from the map. [Why not mention that the candidate is Jo Cox’s sister who only recently joined the party and so has not met its requirement for selection of having been a member for a year?]

    Do we really want to live in such a divided and sectarian society? Already, different ethnic groups lead separate lives. In the 2001 census, 25 per cent of non-white British minorities lived in “minority majority” communities. By 2011, the number was 41 per cent. By the time the next census is published, it might be higher still.

    In schools, segregation is even more pronounced than in the broader population: 60 per cent of ethnic-minority children attend schools where minorities form the majority of pupils. Professor Eric Kaufmann finds that where white British children comprise more than 80 per cent of pupils, schools attract yet more white British children. But when the number falls below 70 per cent, schools start to lose white British children and gain more ethnic minority and foreign-born white pupils.

    This is all a disaster for social cohesion. Studies across different societies show that increased diversity reduces trust between strangers; even between neighbours and residents of the same ethnicity. This is a challenge we can and simply must overcome, but we will fail as long as we accept separation and tolerate sectarianism. Robert Putnam, the liberal American academic, says “immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital”.

    Yet instead of taking urgent steps to correct the problems identified by Trevor Phillips all those years ago, we risk deepening our crisis. Critical race theory and claims of structural racism threaten to formalise and institutionalise racial and religious divides. We are no longer invited to eliminate discrimination and overcome racial disparities. Instead, we are told that integration is racism, unifying institutions and customs are oppressive, and discrimination – now apparently a good thing – should be allowed to right historic wrongs.

    It took our worst terrorist attack and the death of 52 innocent people to prompt Phillips’s warning that we were sleepwalking to segregation. We should hope it does not take further violence to realise we are picking up speed. Despite our undoubted successes, we are hurtling dangerously towards a future of sectarianism and social unrest.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/30/not-drifting-segregation-hurtling-perilously-towards/

    The Batley & Spen by-election is looking really interesting, especially with the dangerous George Galloway standing. Here’s the result from Dec 2019:
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/70484376bd01784b9ae8b51f6c7769a3a1693580552264d570ad9ec30253c6a3.jpg
    Candidates so far:
    Kim Leadbeater – Labour
    Ryan Stephenson – Conservative
    Jo Conchie – LibDems
    Corey Robinson – Yorkshire Party
    George Galloway – Workers Party of Britain

    1. Depressingly this article, open to comments for some hours, has had all comments removed. One of the most popular was by (comedian/satirist) Rory Bremner … which had nearly 500 likes when I looked.

      Telegraph behaves like a frightened woke hedgehog much of the time

      1. the context of the article keeps the official Grauniad alive to try and stoke things up being part of the divide/rule agenda when they know the reality is nowhere near it. Official Grauniad has to be seen to support woke Labour as a long time ago the party realised that the Moose limb block vote ( fraud and all) was worth far more [to their own careers] than the Jewish / white vote so they ceased to matter to woke Labour. So they have to stoke the fear in the hope of securing the block vote with usual woke promises of more mosques, house with a roof and power, free things.

        Telegraph is also well entrenched into its spams of wokesim trying to do similar propaganda exercise for Tories spouting the “official garbage”

      2. I posted a comment under the article which I copied and pasted here a few hours ago. I was making the point that many Muslims choose to go to Christian schools but nobody who isn’t a Muslim wants to go o a Muslim school.
        In some parts of France you get the strange situation where the majority of pupils in a Catholic school are not Christians. This is because these schools have a better academic reputation and better discipline.

        1. 333612+ up ticks,
          Afternoon R,
          Same in many parts of England the RC school is a much better option.

      3. Probably not the real Rory Bremner, who is a bit right-on at times…

        The removal of comments has been noted under the letters column, which is usually the place to go to comment on closed articles.

        1. No, I’m sure it is the real Rory Bremner … for at least 10 years he has been complaining about the threat of muslim violence,

      1. guarantee woke Labour will be all in Moose Limb block vote, Tories will be pushing extended furlough scheme til Spetember, get by-election done before Mr Permanently Skint Symonds walks back on ending Lockdown on 21 June. Not sure what Limp Dems’ll offer, probably an olive branch to anyone to give them another thrashing

    3. A brief clip on the BBC News on the big new vaccination centre at Twickenham showed that the information for those being”jabbed” is in half a dozen or more languages. That is not integration. It is pandering to those who will not integrate,who will not become British. If people don’t come here to be British then they are no more than leeches and parasites.

  51. The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline has been billed as a vital part of European energy security. But, to its detractors, it could be a shady Russian scheme to cut Ukraine off from energy. Now, Moscow is seeking to dispel those fears.
    Speaking to RIA Novosti in an interview published on Monday, Dmitry Birichevsky, the director of economic co-operation at the country’s Foreign Ministry, said that fears Russia could turn off the tap on supplies to its neighbor were unfounded. “We have no plan to suspend gas supplies through Ukraine,” he said, insisting that “Russia has never used energy or natural resources as a tool of pressure or blackmail.”

    In April, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Aleksey Reznikov, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the pipeline was an existential threat to his country’s security and economy. He claimed that Moscow has previously “tried to bully Ukraine” by threatening a shut-off of energy supplies.

    That argument found support among officials in former President Donald Trump’s White House, with top Washington politicians saying the project amounts to a “grave threat” to Europe’s “energy security, and American national security.”
    Nord Stream 2 will bypass Kiev’s borders, linking Siberia’s gas fields to consumers in Western Europe via a conduit under the Baltic Sea, which will make ground in Germany. While Birichevsky insists it will not be used to cut Ukraine off from supplies altogether, it is likely to lead to a substantial decrease in revenue for Kiev in the longer term, given that Moscow pays substantial sums for the right to move gas through the country.
    In 2019, Russian state energy firm Gazprom penned a deal to keep the fuel flowing for another five years, handing over an estimated $7 billion as part of the agreement. The network was built on Moscow’s orders during the Soviet era, prior to the breakup of the USSR. While Ukrainian politicians have warned that the country “stands to lose billions of dollars in transit revenue,” Birichevsky said that no short-term changes were expected. He added that the deal, which expires in 2024, is still valid, and that, after it expires, “there will be negotiations between Gazprom and their partners in Ukraine.”

    An explosive report published late last year found that lobbyists for Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz, as well as at least one representative of the country’s security council, actively launched a lobbying campaign in Washington aimed at securing US sanctions against its construction. Naftogaz’s Vadim Glamazdin is said to have claimed that new measures being mulled by American politicians would be “the final nail in the coffin” for the project. “When these sanctions are finally voted and become law, there will be no practical way to build this pipeline,” he is said to have added.

    1. Nordstream II is soon to go into full swing supply and Demented Joe waived sanctions. Imposing sanctions would have sunk the supranational INGO EU. German business didn’t want that and Rosneft Chair Gerhard Schröder spelt this out recently if sanctions were imposed, then litigations would have torpedoed most EU States, the EU would be flushed and US-Germany relations would be severely damaged.

      1. Ukraine have 3 years to get their act together.The next round of negotiations will be a lot tougher.
        I suspect payments will be a lot less…….if at all.
        By then,the spur lines of Turkstream will be up and running .It will supply the Balkans and other countries to the Northeast.

        1. Zelensky’s got to figure out quickly where his real bread’s buttered, stop being the proxy puppet comedian, or look for a new career

          1. The bizzare thing is..he was elected on a platform of improved relations with Moscow and carrying through the recommendations of The Minsk Agreement.Last i saw his popularity was at 15%.

    2. Notwithstanding the ethnic divide in Ukraine between the Black Sea and Eastern regions with historical links to Russia, and the large agricultural inland area around Kiev with historical links to the Baltic, these conditions make any Russian intervention pointless:

      1. The Russian naval port and the Crimea are secured to Russia.
      2. There are no NATO military bases anywhere in Ukraine.

      That’s about it. Trading with the EU need not work out bad at all for Russia, since they have a handy trading post in Ukraine without having to commit to EU regulation themselves. Encouraging Ukrainian neutrality allows Russia to gain valuable influence with the EU without awakening resentments in former Warsaw Pact countries borne of the Cold War. There is a lot of cultural and social common ground with social conservatives in the Visegrad bloc, and cordiality between Vienna and Moscow could well be mutual.

      This creates an interesting situation in Germany. The CDU only narrowly avoided choosing a popular Bavarian Conservative to be the next Chancellor, only to have the Greens claiming it off them. If German Greens are anything like Austrian Greens, they are happy to work with Conservatives. If Putin can discover the merits of a Green agenda, in tune with his own conservatism and his eagerness to exploit any political situation going, then there could be a schism in the EU with Western progressives – the holy grail of Russian politics in Europe. Putin can also keep supplying oil, although the Greens are not supposed to know about that.

    1. I’m very impressed! Love the stripes on the tea towel echoing the tablecloth! And the bread…you must have been an inspiration to her! Well done to her!

    2. Very good! Wasn’t sure whether it was a painting or not. Some talented lass there!

      1. She named it after her grandfather, “reconstructed creation”

        You were all wrong weren’t ya!

    4. That is a very sophisticated image for one so young. But the cats picture that you posted last year was also far more mature than one would expect from a teenager.
      Is she planning to study art?

      1. She submitted the cat painting, too. A different genre.

        I have no idea what she’ll end up doing. She is a brain on legs – top of the class in every subject. She sings, plays piano and guitar – and composes. Is very sporty – and has represented the Borough at Netball. She has a cracking sense of humour.

        In addition – and I really AM being objective – she is a very nice, modest young lady. She coped with the death of her father when she was 9. She asked to be left alone with his body for half an hour on the morning of his death. She wrote and read a poem at the crem.

        I just hope I live long enough to see how she turns out. She is my pride and joy!

        1. She is a wonderful tribute to her family from what you have shared with us.

        2. 99% of art students are as thick as planks, therefore if one has a brain, one should only study art if genuinely suffering from the art bug (viz an inability to stop drawing and painting).

    5. Processed meat and dairy product? Let’s hope the RA panel isn’t vegan…

    6. I’m not a huge fan of paintings of that genre, but I like it and it’s technically very good.

        1. Excellent..
          Your granddaughter has captured the dreamlike, fluid quality of Matisse. The
          feet almost melting into nothingness.
          Great stuff …you can lose touch with reality with a few simple brush strokes. I often feel like taking up my brushes again if tennis is off the menu..
          Thanks for posting.

  57. And yer tell some folk and they’ll never believe yer!

    How the state used behavioural science to scare a nation into submission

    We need an inquiry into the use of fear tactics during the pandemic, which has caused immense collateral damage

    LAURA DODSWORTH

    Given a choice, would the British people choose dictatorship or democracy? Would they choose transparency and trust, or ‘nudge’ and the weaponisation of fear?

    Last week we learnt that Dominic Cummings believed the Covid-19 emergency would have benefitted from the “kingly authority” of data scientist, Marc Warner. This is exactly the style of authoritarian, top-down ‘state knows best’ style of government we need to move away from. It does not befit one of the cradles of democracy and the British people deserve better.

    Of course, this attitude should come as no surprise.

    Back in 2019, Mr Cummings predicted “The future will be about experimental psychology, and data science.” Well, the future is now. And the use of ‘nudge’ to encourage compliance with the rules has changed our lives and our relationships with each other, and irreversibly shifted the social contract between individuals and government.

    All of this was predicted in the report MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy, a Cabinet Office discussion paper from 2010. It warned:

    “People have a strong instinct for reciprocity that informs their relationship with government – they pay taxes and the government provides services in return. This transactional model remains intact if government legislates and provides advice to inform behaviour. But if government is seen as using powerful, pre-conscious effects to subtly change behaviour, people may feel the relationship has changed: now the state is affecting ‘them’ – their very personality.”

    Using fear is ethically dubious at best. If psychologists were provoking fear in a laboratory experiment they would need the consent of the people taking part. Yet we never signed consent forms, and this huge social experiment has not been through any ethics committee.

    We didn’t notice, maybe we didn’t even care, when behavioural psychologists were ‘nudging’ us into paying taxes on time, or cutting down smoking, but their underhand tactics have certainly got our attention now. You could argue that frightening people to make them follow the rules during an emergency was in our best interests. But what about the opposing arguments that it affected our personalities, our mental health and our agency?

    The insufficiently fearful were deliberately alarmed. Horror film styled advertising, laws to manage the minutiae of our daily lives, the most punitive fines since the Dark Ages, encouraging social conformity and the alarmist use of statistics were just some of the government’s tactics during the pandemic, signalling their lack of trust in the public’s ability to understand risk and behave sensibly.

    Even children were not exempt from such blame. Indeed, they were explicitly targeted with messaging warning “Don’t kill granny.” This shocking slogan looks even more abhorrent given the allegations that the elderly were not tested before being transferred from hospital to care homes – who killed granny, exactly?

    The policies of the last year affected our daily lives, weakened our social bonds, and disrupted the most intimate human rites of birth, marriage and death. We need to be cautious about policies which invade our humanity. We mustn’t let a medical crisis strip us of our freedoms or our ideals.

    If you concede that behavioural science and the weaponisation of fear are acceptable tools for one crisis, will you accept them for the next? One recent report from a team at the University of Bath already shows how behavioural psychologists hope to segue from Covid to climate behaviour change while “habits are weakest and most malleable to change”. ‘Nudge’ is likely to play a bigger part in future government attempts to transform us into model citizens.

    Last week, every MP was sent their own copy of my book A State of Fear, donated by a group of concerned people and the Recovery campaign. In a letter to MPs, they described the book as ‘essential reading’ and questioned, as I do, the ethics of fear messaging and behavioural psychology.

    Nudge undermines free will and removes our choices without us even knowing. Nudge is not fair play. It is not democratic. A crucial part of the United Kingdom’s recovery must be the restoration of trust and transparency, and this will only happen once we are honest about the tactics that were used, the ethical questions they posed, and most of all, their impact on the population.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/30/state-used-behavioural-science-scare-nation-submission/

    If there is a public inquiry, I suspect the psychological warfare will be some way down the agenda.

    1. your summary’s right, for that to all happen, all current political parties would need to be history. then the honesty about truth, tactics used for personal gain would tsunami any need for an inquiry

    5. If there is an public enquiry, it will find that the government did nothing wrong, that all parties should be exhonerated, that SAGE were perfect, PHE were right to continue their sugar tax campaign despite the pandemic and that all the fault lies with a chap who answers the phone in an office on Monday afternoons and was on holiday at the start of it.

    2. My God that’s dire. Perhaps they should have hired someone who could act!

    4. This is why the BBC icence fee must be scrapped. When it has to make what people actually want to see, it won’t be able to support, endorse and promote this sort of drivel.

    1. The end of Western Christian Civilisation within twenty years. Only Russia might make it!

  60. “America’s warriors are the single greatest force for justice, peace, liberty, and security among all the nations ever to exist on earth”
    Said Donald Trump today while keeping a straight face.
    That must take hours of practice.

  61. 333612+ up ticks,

    breitbart,
    The odious rotherham issue, uncovered by the JAY report is the common denominator linking ALL mass ongoing uncontrolled immigration parties as in the lab/lib/con coalition.
    The contents of these parties have left their mark on 1400/1600 children we know of, mentally, for life.
    The rotherham issue was bad enough but this paedophilia plague is countrywide.

    ALL governance overseers, many overseers employees,
    council members were / maybe are ALL in it together.

    Keep that in mind next time you enter a polling booth,
    don’t feed the three monkeys.

  62. It’s been a quiet holiday weekend in WV. Due to the unseasonably cool weather, the 17 year cicadas were almost silent. Making up for it today, with the sun and warmer temps. they are getting very loud and tropical sounding.

    1. Come on, they’ve got 16 years of silence to make up for (unless the nymphs are noisy under the ground).

      1. Hello Anne, No, we do not see swarms in a biblical sense, they pop out of the ground when the soil warms up, then they climb up trees, making their terrible noise to attract mates.After having a great time, the larvae burrows back underground for the next 17 years.

          1. As one or two lady NoTTLers have said – how disgusting he must look when unclothed…

          2. Urgh.
            An image not easily wiped from the imagination… pass the mind bleach!

          7. I’ve painted a few male models/posers in my time to appreciate the male form…..

            Amazing what a few gentle brush strokes can do…(no, don’t go there) !

  64. I am off – a glorious day. Trombetti frame fixed in its permanent position. Tomato frame completed. Climbing beans (var: COBRA) planted out. Tomorrow we plant out tomatoes and brassicas, leaving, at last, some room in the greenhouse.

    So I wish you all a pleasant evening, preparing your spare rooms for the “new arrivals”…(if you know what I mean…!!)

    A demain.

  65. Had a pleasant surprise on this sunny afternoon. I wandered up to Holland Park to discover that the summer theatre is back and there was a dress rehearsal of La Traviata going on, which those of us perched on the front steps could hear very well even though we couldn’t see anything. Sounded very good. The season opens tomorrow and is completely sold out, with ticket prices in the £50-£100 range.

  66. Will there be a G7 Covid variant in the UK as a result of the Meeting on 11-13 June of Government Leaders from the G7 countries plus other heads from other countries including India. The meeting takes place in Cornwall at Carbis Bay. The Media will be housed in Falmouth. Roads will be closed and residents will have to produce IDs to get about. The Police have produced their plan to control the event but as far as I know no Covid 19 protocols, if any, for the politicians and their hangers on has been developed and produced. There could be a backlash if cases rise as a result of this G7 meeting.

    1. But they are ‘special’ and aren’t any risk to we biohazard plebs. If the China flu was that dangerous, these ‘important’ creatures would not be travelling across the world to all mix together. I bet none of them, regardless of the covid status of their countries, will have to quarantine for so much as a day. Further proof that the scare mongering, lies, falsified statistics and continued denial of freedom are all part of the scam.

    2. I’ll believe the risk is as real as they are trying to tell us if they all mix and create and catch a new variant and 80% of them die.

    3. For once don’t worry about trudeau bringing anything to the meeting, he has been hiding in his cottage (government talk for posh mansion) since last April.
      He has caught nothing, not even a bit of common sense.

    2. Reminds of challenging my then 9 year old son to learn to play The Entertainer on his keyboard. Much to my amazement, he worked it out within a few weeks! He also played guitar, acoustic then later adding in electric, to grade 8 standard. We have no idea where his musical talent came from.
      I must send him the link to this guitar piece.

      1. I thought that the arrangement I made of The Entertainer wasn’t too bad – but this chap, Richard Smith, put me very firmly in my place.

      2. Many years ago, walked past Firstborn’s closed bedroom door, and heard accordion music from his room. Sounded like the radio, but he doesn’t listen to accordion… he was playing a cheap one we’d bought for £1 because a couple of reeds were broken, and taught himself!
        I have so little musical talent, playing a CD is about my limit.

    3. Reminds of challenging my then 9 year old son to learn to play The Entertainer on his keyboard. Much to my amazement, he worked it out within a few weeks! He also played guitar, acoustic then later adding in electric, to grade 8 standard. We have no idea where his musical talent came from.
      I must send him the link to this guitar piece.

  68. The Covid-19 man-made theory was dismissed too quickly

    Human error wouldn’t be a conspiracy theory, and it’s unscientific to exclude an idea before it’s been conclusively disproved.

    TELEGRAPH VIEW (Saturday)

    If the origin of Covid-19 is a mystery, so is the reluctance to entertain the possibility that it started life in a Chinese lab. Accidents happen: as the science writer Nicholas Wade has noted in the Telegraph, smallpox escaped from UK labs in the 1960s and 1970s, three times. It is an astonishing coincidence that ground zero for Covid, which belongs to a well-known family of bat viruses, just happened to be Wuhan, home to a leading world centre on coronaviruses; or that one resident at this institute, Dr Shi Zhengli, is called “the Bat Lady” because of her interest in such diseases; or that Dr Shi is alleged to do some of her work in conditions akin, in the words of one biologist, to the safety levels of a “standard US dentist’s office” (though she would’ve been in line with international rules).

    The theory that human error was involved was condemned early in the crisis by scientists (some, potentially, with a conflict of interest) and denounced as a conspiracy theory. But error would not be a conspiracy, and any suggestion that it was racist of Donald Trump to point the finger at China is bizarre given that the alternative explanation doing the rounds was that it emerged in a Chinese wet market: either way, China was in the spotlight. Surely it was unscientific to dismiss a theory before we could conclusively test it? Given the scale of death and potential for a repeat, the world has to pursue every angle of inquiry – hence Joe Biden’s instruction to intelligence services to take another look.

    Whatever the outcome, all this touches upon two difficult subjects. One is the balance of risk of carrying out virus research. We do know that scientists have been manipulating viruses to make them more dangerous, on the ethical grounds that we need to stay one step ahead of nature to be prepared. But is the public comfortable with scientists taking such risks, especially in densely populated areas? The other question is how we handle China. If conspiracy theories flourish around China then it is because the communist party is a giant conspiracy, and its manipulation of international bodies, its control of information and persecution of whistle-blowers makes it difficult to sort fact from fiction.

    If it emerges that Covid was indeed “made in China”, that would also make it responsible for the near-destruction of the Western economy. Many Western governments would demand that it pay a heavy price for what would be the greatest man-made disaster in history.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/05/29/covid-19-man-made-theory-dismissed-quickly/

    As if any of Europe’s governments would ever dare to confront China…

    1. Very little surrounding this whole hysteria comes even close to the truth.
      You only have to read the last paragraph; “…that would also make it responsible for the near-destruction of the Western economy.”

      No. The only people responsible for the destruction of the Western economy are corrupt, foolish politicians and scientists and their friends in the media.

    2. Very little surrounding this whole hysteria comes even close to the truth.
      You only have to read the last paragraph; “…that would also make it responsible for the near-destruction of the Western economy.”

      No. The only people responsible for the destruction of the Western economy are corrupt, foolish politicians and scientists and their friends in the media.

    3. The truth if revealed would prove that China committed an act of Biological war against the rest of the world & under the NATO charter an attack on one member is an attack on all & in this case it was an attack on all NATO members & requires that NATO take resolute military action against China but it simply wont happen as the West is now politically, military & economically impotent vis a vis the Communist Chinese behemoth & China knows this and so acts unilaterally with impunity !

      1. Disgusting thought for the day:

        Wipe out China.

        Wipe out most of the world’s debt, reduce the world’s population, bring back jobs, industry technology, and release a huge tract of land for immigrants and asylum seekers from Africa etc. to create their own brave new world.

        1. As we have learned today China has upped the limit on the number of children that can be born to a family. That number is now three, which mens that China is setting out to increase its total population well beyond replacement numbers. Where will this extra half a billion Chinese go?
          Maybe when the vaccines have done their work around the world over the next twenty years there will be wide open spaces in India, Africa and Europe?

          2. A maximum of three children does not necessarily result in massive population growth. There will still be many women who won’t or can’t have any, let alone three.

          3. Um, true, partly. However, when the starting point is 2bn, any increase is going to be a large number?

          4. It will, but at the moment the one child policy has ensured far fewer females of child bearing age are now available.

            Families had a tendency to dispose of females and even when the policy was changed to two, the parents favoured boys. The imbalance is quite extraordinary and the demographics are not good still.
            It badly backfired on the authorities.

          5. You are right, I hadn’t thought about that aspect. Nevertheless, a country of 2bn is seeking to increase its population while expanding its economic power through the entire world. I still think it is a recipe for a future conflict.

  69. Britain must confront this wave of anti-Semitism

    Robert Jenrick, the Communities Secretary, warns that this spike in bigotry is perhaps not merely unconscious but evidence of “extremism”

    TELEGRAPH VIEW (Sunday)

    In May, according to the Community Security Trust, Britain reported the largest number of anti-Semitic incidents on record. This is a scandalous development.

    The excuse for such activity is the recent conflict in Israel: there have even been protests in schools, forcing the Education Secretary to warn head teachers of the rise of anti-Semitism and the need for staff to remain politically impartial.

    Rational, balanced, fact-based debate about Israeli policy is fine: one can find plenty of it within Israel itself (it is a democracy, unlike virtually all of its neighbours). But the new, self-defined anti-Zionism exploits the same lies and paranoias of historical anti-Semitism, and the demands it makes of Israel are tellingly unique.

    There is rarely any such passion about China, Iran, Myanmar or North Korea – actual dictatorships that persecute religious minorities, unlike Israel. The insistence that Israel cede its very right to exist – again, required of no other nation on Earth – expunges the fact of the ancient Jewish presence in the land of Israel. Jews have almost all been expelled from practically every other country in the Middle East. Abolishing the state of Israel would condemn its citizens to ethnic cleansing.

    The use of woke terminology – anti-colonialism, even the grotesque hijacking of civil- rights themes – seeks to legitimise an old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In an interview with this newspaper, Robert Jenrick, the Communities Secretary, warns that this wave of bigotry is perhaps not merely unconscious but evidence of “extremism”. It must be confronted, urgently.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/05/29/britain-must-confront-wave-anti-semitism/

    As if any of Europe’s governments would ever dare to confront Islam…

        1. A number of times in the 2014 conflict Hamas passed on photos of children wounded in Afghanistan & Iraq as being Gazan children hurt by Israel & the BBC, Reuters , AP, AFP & other western media published the falsified claims of Hamas as being true.

          3. That’s not fair.

            Those pictures were taken from the final of the relay race for Palestinian freedom, she was the baton.

      2. Don’t bother, we’ll kill a few more here and say it was you. It worked every other time.

    2. Islam, it is a poison.

      An alternative view of the Palestinian question:
      https://www.takimag.com/article/israel-and-palestine-what-else-is-new/

      I do not agree with Taki’s “take”

      I would also add that every other displaced “tribe” over the planet over the years has accepted their situation and has moved on. Not the Palestinians.

      Funny how there are probably five times as many displaced Palestinians now, (at an absolute minimum) as there were in 1948.

      If the Arabs had accepted their brothers AND had the Arabs not tried, time and again, to destroy Israel, the states could have co-existed. But Islam is Islam and coexistence is only acceptable when it is Dhimmitude.

      1. Spot on. The ‘Palestinians’ have been given land with a sea front, cultivated from the desert by Jews, and have had decades in which they could have developed a prosperous society.

        Regrettably, their hatred of Jews has expunged any hope of their devoting resources to the good of their citizens. Instead they have colluded with Iran and other despotic states in the region to undermine the almost universally desired peace between neighbours.

        Arafat himself stole millions from ‘supporters’ and stowed the funds away in Swiss bank accounts.

    3. If you behave reasonably you will be punished for it.

      Why do Muslims get away with monstrously barbaric behaviour while Jews are held in contempt.

      And when Brexiteers tried to present reasoned arguments in support of their cause they were vilified and insulted. Indeed the whole EU mindset is based on behaving despotically and barbarically in order to bully people into submission.

  70. Britain must confront this wave of anti-Semitism

    Robert Jenrick, the Communities Secretary, warns that this spike in bigotry is perhaps not merely unconscious but evidence of “extremism”

    TELEGRAPH VIEW (Sunday)

    In May, according to the Community Security Trust, Britain reported the largest number of anti-Semitic incidents on record. This is a scandalous development.

    The excuse for such activity is the recent conflict in Israel: there have even been protests in schools, forcing the Education Secretary to warn head teachers of the rise of anti-Semitism and the need for staff to remain politically impartial.

    Rational, balanced, fact-based debate about Israeli policy is fine: one can find plenty of it within Israel itself (it is a democracy, unlike virtually all of its neighbours). But the new, self-defined anti-Zionism exploits the same lies and paranoias of historical anti-Semitism, and the demands it makes of Israel are tellingly unique.

    There is rarely any such passion about China, Iran, Myanmar or North Korea – actual dictatorships that persecute religious minorities, unlike Israel. The insistence that Israel cede its very right to exist – again, required of no other nation on Earth – expunges the fact of the ancient Jewish presence in the land of Israel. Jews have almost all been expelled from practically every other country in the Middle East. Abolishing the state of Israel would condemn its citizens to ethnic cleansing.

    The use of woke terminology – anti-colonialism, even the grotesque hijacking of civil- rights themes – seeks to legitimise an old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In an interview with this newspaper, Robert Jenrick, the Communities Secretary, warns that this wave of bigotry is perhaps not merely unconscious but evidence of “extremism”. It must be confronted, urgently.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/05/29/britain-must-confront-wave-anti-semitism/

    As if any of Europe’s governments would ever dare to confront Islam…

      1. that last one is pretty much what we were told every time we sat in the co pilot seat on the company plane.

    2. “Sorry ‘guv.
      Covid struck, and we’ve only done the demolition bits.
      We can return in 2023, but you’ll need to pay up-front”

          2. If I were to Send you instructions could you get to the River on Thursday for a day trip?

  73. Keep that panic going!

    Covid-19: “UK in early stages of third wave”

    …Prof Gupta – a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) – said ending restrictions in June should be delayed “by a few weeks whilst we gather more intelligence”.

    bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57304515

    5. Nervtag and intelligence in the same sentence. That stretches the imagination.

    2. Wasn’t it an anti lockdown protest? Rather different to the anti vaccination protest mentioned in the article.

    2. Schizophrenic husband cannot handle the eight kids, didn’t know she was doing wrong.

      Sure!

  77. Biden has embraced woke ideology – and now the only way is down

    It’s become clear that, by pandering to the diversity agenda, the President isn’t going to reverse America’s decline: he’s hastening it

    ZOE STRIMPEL

    At 16, I arrived in Britain, where I was born, from America, where I grew up, to undertake A-levels at a bohemian-ish independent boarding school. Two years later, in 2000, I vowed to leave Britain again – never to return. I was done, and very much felt: America, here I come; I was a fool to leave you.

    The reason for my haste to get back to the Land of the Free was that I had been mocked snootily and constantly by my peers for being American (in reality it was only an American accent). I was fed up of having to defend both myself and the country that I still believed was the greatest in the world, despite its significant drawbacks. I had grown up under Clinton, a time of optimism and faith in government. I was proud of America as the world policeman.

    How it’s all soured since. I no longer waste much breath on defending the US. Since the Obama era and the erosion of all vestiges of moral clarity or courage, together with any appreciation of the market capitalism that made America great in the first place, the US has gone right off the boil.

    Trump was a disaster [oh, yeah?] but my true disappointment lies with Biden, who was meant to turn it all around. But it’s become clear that Biden isn’t going to reverse America’s decline: he’s hastening it. Sure, there’s the enormous spending and the tax hikes, with businesses as well as individuals being clobbered.

    But I am more concerned about a different aspect of America’s decline, stemming from the Biden administration’s love affair with the deeply damaging, deranged ideology of the social justice movement and the diversity agenda. Instead of ignoring or rejecting it, as is desperately needed, the White House is helping disseminate woke ideology to all remaining nooks and crannies of American life.

    Since George Floyd’s death and the rise of Black Lives Matter, America’s already overzealous adherence to seeing everything through the lens of race and skin-colour-based victimhood has gone into overdrive. An unexpected masterstroke of Trump was his 2020 ban on federal agencies and federal contractors forcing critical race theory training on employees. Critical race theory argues that established institutions are inherently racist and that prejudice against non-whites is built into society.

    On his first day in office, Biden rescinded this order. The results are hideous and damaging. It puts America on a deeply antiliberal, dangerous track, one in which the very ideas of hard work, timekeeping, objectivity, deferred gratification, the written word, and even essays are increasingly seen, especially in higher education and charities, as intrinsically racist.

    The results, on a personal level, are grim. I wrote recently about the struggles of a good friend of mine who works for a state agency in New York. On being told to turn up for mandatory unconscious bias training – which is rooted in the critical race theory idea that all white people are racist, no matter what – my friend wrote an email explaining why she took issue with such training being mandatory. She didn’t think that what she thought privately, or her “levels of enthusiasm” for rewiring her thinking, fell within the scope of her workplace. As a result she was hauled before the top dogs, mocked, threatened and accused of being racist. Trembling, she gave up the fight, as she can’t afford to lose her job. It was naked ideological bullying. Another American workplace email I’ve seen recently announcing the start of mandatory unconscious bias training concluded with the line that unconscious race bias can “lead to a society where everyone is operating from their own viewpoint” – as if this is a bad thing. All this Biden could have made illegal, but instead, he has chosen to enshrine it.

    Biden’s domestic policy council has also been hot off the mark with talk about America’s “systemic racism”. It is simply not true that all inequality in America today is down to “systemic” racism. Insisting that this is so creates a vast demographic of victims, many of whom would be, or are, thriving perfectly well outside the prison of critical race theory.

    As Candace Owens, the black American conservative, put it: “Stop selling us our own oppression. Stop taking away our self-confidence by telling us that we can’t because of racism, because of slavery. I’ve never been a slave in this country.” If only Biden and his party could listen to voices like Owens’s. But alas: while she may be a person of colour, she’s got the wrong views, and so is merely pilloried by the hegemonic, hypocritical Left. I want the old America back. But as long as the Biden era insists that everything must be seen through the sickly hue of woke ideology, there is only one way it can go: and that is down.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2021/05/30/biden-has-embraced-woke-ideology-now-way/

    She’s right about where Biden is taking the USA but she sounds almost surprised. And Clinton good, Trump bad? Get outta here!

    1. How long before Americans are reciting from Biden’s ‘Little Blue Book’?

    2. Biden is / will be the disaster of the century for the USA, democracy and Capitalism.

      1. If Biden were in prison ‘on suicide watch, he would die, just like it has happened to ‘people with knowledge’ allegedly

        Watch this space.

        It would not be first suspected assassination of a POTUS

      2. yes, the article is delusional. How come she only just noticed the rot? She’s one of those people who move away from California because it’s got so hard to live there without understanding why!

      3. yes, the article is delusional. How come she only just noticed the rot? She’s one of those people who move away from California because it’s got so hard to live there without understanding why!

  78. Biden has embraced woke ideology – and now the only way is down

    It’s become clear that, by pandering to the diversity agenda, the President isn’t going to reverse America’s decline: he’s hastening it

    ZOE STRIMPEL

    At 16, I arrived in Britain, where I was born, from America, where I grew up, to undertake A-levels at a bohemian-ish independent boarding school. Two years later, in 2000, I vowed to leave Britain again – never to return. I was done, and very much felt: America, here I come; I was a fool to leave you.

    The reason for my haste to get back to the Land of the Free was that I had been mocked snootily and constantly by my peers for being American (in reality it was only an American accent). I was fed up of having to defend both myself and the country that I still believed was the greatest in the world, despite its significant drawbacks. I had grown up under Clinton, a time of optimism and faith in government. I was proud of America as the world policeman.

    How it’s all soured since. I no longer waste much breath on defending the US. Since the Obama era and the erosion of all vestiges of moral clarity or courage, together with any appreciation of the market capitalism that made America great in the first place, the US has gone right off the boil.

    Trump was a disaster [oh, yeah?] but my true disappointment lies with Biden, who was meant to turn it all around. But it’s become clear that Biden isn’t going to reverse America’s decline: he’s hastening it. Sure, there’s the enormous spending and the tax hikes, with businesses as well as individuals being clobbered.

    But I am more concerned about a different aspect of America’s decline, stemming from the Biden administration’s love affair with the deeply damaging, deranged ideology of the social justice movement and the diversity agenda. Instead of ignoring or rejecting it, as is desperately needed, the White House is helping disseminate woke ideology to all remaining nooks and crannies of American life.

    Since George Floyd’s death and the rise of Black Lives Matter, America’s already overzealous adherence to seeing everything through the lens of race and skin-colour-based victimhood has gone into overdrive. An unexpected masterstroke of Trump was his 2020 ban on federal agencies and federal contractors forcing critical race theory training on employees. Critical race theory argues that established institutions are inherently racist and that prejudice against non-whites is built into society.

    On his first day in office, Biden rescinded this order. The results are hideous and damaging. It puts America on a deeply antiliberal, dangerous track, one in which the very ideas of hard work, timekeeping, objectivity, deferred gratification, the written word, and even essays are increasingly seen, especially in higher education and charities, as intrinsically racist.

    The results, on a personal level, are grim. I wrote recently about the struggles of a good friend of mine who works for a state agency in New York. On being told to turn up for mandatory unconscious bias training – which is rooted in the critical race theory idea that all white people are racist, no matter what – my friend wrote an email explaining why she took issue with such training being mandatory. She didn’t think that what she thought privately, or her “levels of enthusiasm” for rewiring her thinking, fell within the scope of her workplace. As a result she was hauled before the top dogs, mocked, threatened and accused of being racist. Trembling, she gave up the fight, as she can’t afford to lose her job. It was naked ideological bullying. Another American workplace email I’ve seen recently announcing the start of mandatory unconscious bias training concluded with the line that unconscious race bias can “lead to a society where everyone is operating from their own viewpoint” – as if this is a bad thing. All this Biden could have made illegal, but instead, he has chosen to enshrine it.

    Biden’s domestic policy council has also been hot off the mark with talk about America’s “systemic racism”. It is simply not true that all inequality in America today is down to “systemic” racism. Insisting that this is so creates a vast demographic of victims, many of whom would be, or are, thriving perfectly well outside the prison of critical race theory.

    As Candace Owens, the black American conservative, put it: “Stop selling us our own oppression. Stop taking away our self-confidence by telling us that we can’t because of racism, because of slavery. I’ve never been a slave in this country.” If only Biden and his party could listen to voices like Owens’s. But alas: while she may be a person of colour, she’s got the wrong views, and so is merely pilloried by the hegemonic, hypocritical Left. I want the old America back. But as long as the Biden era insists that everything must be seen through the sickly hue of woke ideology, there is only one way it can go: and that is down.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2021/05/30/biden-has-embraced-woke-ideology-now-way/

    She’s right about where Biden is taking the USA but she sounds almost surprised. And Clinton good, Trump bad? Get outta here!

  79. Goodnight all Nottlers, bedtime music: All About That Bass – Postmodern Jukebox European Tour Version. Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” in the style of PMJ ft. Kate Davis, of course. Not only does it feature vocalists Haley Reinhart, Morgan James, and Ariana Savalas rocking some Andrews Sisters- style harmonies, but it also features a sweet four hand bass solo by Casey Abrams and Adam Kubota.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLnZ1NQm2uk

  83. Evening, all. The short answer to the headline question, as I’m sure others who have been here before me will have given, is that dentists only get paid for the patients they see, whereas GPs get paid for the number of patients on their books. They have no incentive to actually deal with the troublesome sick.

  84. Good night good people – I’m away to my bed as it’s just gone midnight and I don’t want the laptop to turn into a pumpkin.

  86. And a stupid o’clock good morning to all.
    Up early to run the S@H in to work. He’s got his car in for MOT and is heading up to Shap for the week.
    Beautiful bright start this morning with a cool 5°C in the yard.

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