691 thoughts on “Friday 15 November: Tactical alliances are undermining the democratic spirit of the election”

  2. Labour pledges free broadband for all homes and firms in UK. Thu 14 Nov 2019

    Labour has promised to provide free “full-fibre” broadband for every home and business by part-nationalising BT.

    In a speech due to be delivered in Lancaster on Friday, Jeremy Corbyn will outline his proposals to create a new British broadband public service, saying it will “bring communities together in an inclusive and connected society”.

    Morning everyone. There will also be Free Circuses every Tuesday and Saturday with Hovis and cucumber sandwiches served gratis!

    When Caesar was seeking to buy the votes of the Roman Assembly he had the decency to use his own money or more accurately the money he had borrowed off of Crassus. Now we are bribed with our own!

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/14/labour-pledges-free-broadband-for-all-homes-and-businesses-in-uk

    1. It worries me greatly that Labour could even be considered as
      a government with that hard left lunatic Corbyn as leader
      regardless of policies, he is a friend of terrorists, dangerous,
      extreme, full of hate and intolerant. The hard left are nuts and
      are of another century .

      1. Pity they alll have to learn the hard way about the left. But they have all been brainwashed in schoool about such things.

        1. There are a lot of daft students that believe it though. You would have thought they would have learnt from Clegg and his No tuition fees fiasco

          1. Anyone who uses the argument that Socialism fails when it isn’t socialist enough is clearly not open to thinking things through for even a moment.

          3. It is.

            Unfortunately, it’s being used as an instruction manual by the Social Sciences faculties.

          5. A diabolical nightmare or an Utopian dream?

            As I used to say: ‘One Blair wrote it, another tried to implement it.’

        2. The hard left are a different kettle of fish all together,
          once in we’ll never get rid of them . Scary times .

          1. “We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.”
            — King Lear (Act 1 Scene 2)
            :¬(

          5. the hard left could form a government. SNP + Liebour + the Greens + Plaid wotsits + Sinn Fein. Oh, and the Lib Undems.

      3. Lunatics is the right word when they start coming out with Free Broadband. BT estimate the costs to them would be a £100B a year but then you have all the other providers who overnight would be out of business as who will use them if BT is providing it for Free add o the tax take losses as well if its is free there is no tax to collect on it

        1. Yes so very true, I really truly don’t understand why
          Labour voters listen to them, they’re not all stupid
          or brainwashed. Surely deep inside they must know
          how dangerous and deceitful Labour is, especially
          now. Labour isn’t for the working class traditional
          voter as it once was.

    3. That free broadband would become another State Propaganda Medium. Remember the loudspeakers on every street in the DDR?

    4. HE makes no real mention how he will pay for it. The other issue this technology continually changes and we are already lagging behind much of the world largely due to BT who are not investing that much in Broadband but when in most areas you have a near monopoly in the local loop why would you. THey know their customers have no where else to go

      BT are rolling out FTTP but at a snails pace. If you are not going to be paying for broadband even that investment would stop

      1. Yup. It’s absurd.

        BT own the ducts and tunnels. Rolling out fibre will take decades at this rate. A chum in Singapore has just gone to 10gb. Worse, he has two lines coming in to his house. For those who say ‘who’d need it’ he does a lot of 3d design and rendering – those walk throughs of big buildings, for example. Blasting out a 3gb video file is de rigeur. A job that can’t be done in the UK by a private individual because as Bill says, our internet connections are absurd.

        1. BT reckon the cost of providing Free Broadband would be a £100B and that’s just BT costs. What happens to Virgin Media and KCOM and all the other ISP’s they will all be out of business overnight so they will have to compensate them that will run to hundreds of billions

          I am afraid that Labour are not even competent to run a market stall

    5. This is a great opportunity for job creation. Just imagine all those clones of GCHQ being created and staffed to monitor all our traffic and hurty words. Some people do not look beyond the initial cost and miss the benefits further down the line.😎

    6. ‘Morning, Minty, ‘Morning, all, “…a new British broadband public service…”

      Eagerly monitored by the thought police in order to know where you’re going, who you’re talking to and what’s the latest plot against Big Brother.

      What’s not to like?

    8. This is good news for Fishlake residents who wish to pull their communiity back together again using optic fibres which will also serve the 3,000 houses planned to provide the extra homes needed on the flood plain (BBC R4 news this morning).

      Just hope the Labour manifesto has factored in the cost of the larger sized optic ducts necessary to pump the water away.

      1. What they need is a reservoir to contain the water, and perhaps to dredge the river to carry the rain water away.

        Ooops! Both controlled by the EU.

      1. Dont worry today Corbyn will promise us a free Unicorn each

        I dont think Labour realise just how daft they sound with all these endless promise that they cannot deliver

        Look at how Clegg got caught out with his promises of No tuition fee, Once he gained some power he found it was impossible to deliver

    10. Think of all the redundancies in the other providers who overnight will be out of business an think of the tax loss to the government. This is Corbyns daftest idea to date

    11. Isn’t it always the way? The way they’re going to fund it is terrifying though. Compulsary purchase of the broadband arm of BT using government bonds. Bonds that are practically junk. I remember BT the monopoly. It was crap. We had dial up at 28.8k and ISDN lines costing £500 for 64kbps while my chum in Singapore was getting fibre optic for £40 or so a month. He’s on 10gb synchronous now.

      Why doens’t Corbyn say something useful, such as ‘council tax will be cut by 40%’?

      1. “Compulsory purchase of the broadband arm of BT using government bonds. Bonds that are practically junk.”

        Which was how Britain’s railways were stolen by Attlee’s government.

        1. The railways annoy me because people moan about them being privatised but they never see the frachising diagram, which is, being polite here, the work of a demented, psychotic, drunken sadistic imp who was given access to the crayon box while being introvenously fed LSD and cocaine.

  3. Good morning from a Saxon Queen with Long Bow and Axe

    It’s dark, wet and very windy and I am on my pillows quite chilly .

    1. Morning, Æthelflæd.
      Is it you or the pillows that are chilly? One likes to be precise, you know. :-))
      And yes, it’s dark. The bit that I like least about November – dark, chilly and raining, miserable until the snow comes. Then light & nice! But November – best time to take a month vacation in Australia.

      2. The pillow is warm unlike myself earlier this morning 🙂
        November is dreary cold and wet, reminding you that it’s
        a long way to spring. Snow does add some brightness
        especially with a clear blue sky, but if it does come it’ll
        be just a few days here and will soon be grey slosh.
        My cousins late in-laws used to visit Australia every other
        late autumn at this time ( November to March ).

        1. You need an electic blanket with multiple settings so you can leave it switched on low. It makes for a very snug bedtime.

          2. I’ve used one almost all my life having been brought up in icy houses. The most recent one I bought can be left on whilst you lie on it (early ones you weren’t supposed to do that though I did without problem) so it is possible to leave it on low all night if it’s really cold. Using them with a timer works so if you don’t want it on all night it will automatically turn off, so you don’t have to worry about turning it off before falling asleep. The danger only arose if the wires got bent or twisted and created hotspots, which if you are lying on it you can feel. You can get double blankets with controls for each side in case you share with someone whose heat requirements differ. I couldn’t live without one.

  4. Wiltshire Police wins world class policing award for its response to Novichok attack. Wiltshire Times. John Baker. 6 hours ago.

    The awards ceremony took place at the Grosvenor Hotel in Park Lane, London. They were presented by BBC broadcaster Jeremy Vine.
    Attendees included chief police officers from across the globe as well as winners, their partners and sponsors.

    More commonly known as a freebie for the bosses and their wives courtesy of the taxpayer! Pretty much everyone who entered, and they were 90% Brits, won something. An exercise in administrative onanisn.

    https://www.wiltshiretimes.co.uk/news/18037998.wiltshire-police-wins-world-class-policing-award-response-novichok-attack/

  5. … democratic spirit…”
    HA HA HA! What democracy? It’s clear that the UK is not a democracy by any stretch of the imagination. I wonder if that has anything to do with people being mean to politicians, which Cathy Newman seems to be whining about on behalf of the female ones.

    2. It makes one think of democratic ghost….from times past.

      No comments allowed – the DT are just a bunch of spoilsports these days.

      Morning Oberst

  6. Good Morning, all

    SIR – Our voting system is not perfect, but it reflects reasonably well the will of the voting public.

    Recently it was felt that an independent body was needed to ensure that electioneering and spending were fair. That body is the Electoral Commission. It has a budget of millions of pounds and its job is to scrutinise everything in the interests of fairness and freedom of choice.

    Why, then, has it not called a halt to the likes of Gina Miller and her Remain United Tactical Voting website, which is attempting to skew the outcome of the general election?

    Why hasn’t it called on Mrs Miller to reveal the sources and extent of her organisation’s funding? Why hasn’t it censured the social media platforms that are carrying messages that could cause electoral disruption?

    The commission was launched in 2001 with much fanfare. Its powers have since been extended, but it lacks the guts to use what it has been given to carry out its purpose.

    Justin Smith
    Salisbury, Wiltshire

    We be backward in these parts. News hasn’t reached Salisbury that the Electoral Commission is a temple of Remainerdom. Gina Miller is untouchable.

    1. The commission was launched in 2001 with much fanfare. Its powers have since been extended, but it lacks the guts to use what it has been given to carry out its purpose.

      Its purpose is to maintain the status quo!

  8. Morning all

    SIR – I understood that the purpose of a general election was to allow the public to choose its representatives.

    Your report (November 14) about which seats will be contested by which parties demonstrates an unprecedented level of tactical manipulation, which seriously undermines the spirit of an election.

    I thought one of the key objectives of Brexit was to restore real democracy and self-government. Surely this amount of wheeling and dealing by party leaders diminishes the trust that would be necessary to achieve this.

    Ken Clamp
    Aston-on-Trent, Derbyshire

  9. SIR – I am one of the hundreds of Brexit Party candidates who have been stood down by Nigel Farage (report, November 12).

    Most of us accept this as a necessary sacrifice. Despite giving time and money and being heavily criticised, we would offer to stand again. My only regret is that, like many thousands of voters in Conservative-held seats, I now have no one I can vote for, as the Tories do not offer a true Leave option. Boris Johnson’s deal is simply not Brexit.

    Tory MPs have treated their constituents with contempt in the knowledge that their seats would not be contested, and as a result many voters now feel disfranchised.

    Ahmad Malik
    Chesham, Buckinghamshire

    SIR – I share Nigel Farage’s concern that Boris Johnson’s deal does not represent a true Brexit, as it leaves Britain bound to the EU in many areas, but surely the question to ask now is this: will the deal restore sovereignty to Britain in sufficient measure to allow us to sever unilaterally the remaining connections whenever it suits us to do so?

    Only if the answer is yes can it be regarded as satisfactory.

    Tony Morgan
    Taunton, Somerset

  10. Morning again.

    SIR – The case of the man who died after chiropractic treatment (report, November 12) raises again the issue of the public being misled by people who style themselves “doctor” but are not medically qualified.

    The same applies to many who call themselves “surgeon”, but are not members of any of the Royal Colleges.

    It is time these terms were defined in law.

    David Nunn FRCS
    West Malling, Kent

    2. Good morning everyone.

      Interesting that Mr Nunn recently stopped using his ‘FRCS’ after his retirement, but has revived it for a medical matter.

      1. I use my academic & other titles when I’m communicating on matters relevant to those titles, so I guess Nunn does, too.

  11. SIR – The sale of British Steel to a buyer planning to maintain it as is (report, November 12) does little more than delay the next inevitable crisis: the world has more blast furnaces than it will ever need again even if we don’t act on climate change, and if we do, we’ll shut them faster than currently planned. Selling Scunthorpe is a wasted opportunity to think more ambitiously about a sustainable steel industry fit for the 21st century.

    Britain produces 10 million tons of scrap steel every year, most of which is exported. Instead of shipping it around the world, we could be melting it down and re-rolling it for use in our cars, homes and infrastructure.

    If blast furnaces such as those used by British Steel were to be replaced by electric arc furnaces, it would be possible to satisfy much of Britain’s demand for steel through recycling scrap, rather than through the environmentally damaging business of reducing iron ore with coke. It would be possible to power this process through renewable energy and strategically we could link it to a renaissance in downstream British manufacturing of products compatible with a zero-carbon future.

    Globally, the amount of scrap being recycled is likely to treble in 30 years. With an ounce of imagination, Britain could lead the way by re-tooling its industry for a greener, less wasteful future.

    Julian Allwood
    Professor of Engineering and the Environment
    University of Cambridge

    Fat chance with the UK’s electricity pricing. The whole thrust of the Kyoto Accord and subsequent pronouncements is to give an unassailable economic advantage in primary industries (including electricity generation) to the developing world. The UN’s and other bodies’ aim is to undermine the Western economies for the benefit of the rest. The overt environmentalism is a gloss, a chimera. The actual consequence is an increase in global emissions and pollution. The global shift in primary industries helped put Trump in the White House.

    1. Correct all our Aluminon plants closed down due to high energy costs, We now import it all

    2. To achieve Professor Allwood’s dream, for that is all that it is, presupposes that governments of any colour available in this country have people capable of identifying cause and effect within their disastrous policies. In this instance, reduce our generating capacity, push up the cost of electricity and then watch industries wither on the grid.

    3. I agree with the Professor that we need to have more steel production in the UK but how much less energy is required for electric arc furnaces than for traditional iron reduction plants? The UK will never be a carbon neutral country if the carbon used abroad to produce our imports, is added to the UK’s carbon emissions. The additional carbon cost of moving these goods back and forth should also be added to the UK’s carbon bill. Our Green politicians are trying to fool us. We need to bring our industries back home and give our youngsters productive work at, more likely, less impact on the world’s carbon emissions

      1. Entirely agree, clyde. The dishonesty in accounting for ‘carbon emissions’ stands alongside politicians’ dishonesty in other accounting matters. They are conveniently ignorant.

        As noted here several times over the past year, there are plenty of authentic pollution streams that could and should be tackled but don’t get the headlines.

      2. The Miller report (Z linked below) says that the effects of exporting UK manufacturing to China has made the CO2 emissions worse, as (for example) the UK smelted aluminium in Wales using mainly hydropower to generate the electricity, but China uses coal.
        Plus – the smelting happened at night, when electricity demand was at a minimum, so balancing the power flows throughout the day and allowing effective use of all generating capacity. Now there are huge peaks and troughs, meaning plant is brought on and taken off all the time.

    4. Maintain things as they are = continue with huge losses. Who would buy into that?
      Einstein apparently said “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity”.
      And he was right.

  14. SIR – As a young officer in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, newly qualified as a helicopter pilot, I was posted to 2nd Battalion the Royal Green Jackets in Penang.

    I arrived with my wife, who was seven months pregnant, to find Dwin Bramall (Obituaries, November 14) and his wife Avril waiting to meet us – an out-of-the-ordinary kindness. He inspected every house on offer to ensure that my wife, by then alone, was properly looked after.

    He later suggested that I might transfer to his regiment but, when I declined, insisted that I wear the black buttons and whistle cord of the Green Jackets, which I was proud to do. He was a remarkably kind and thoughtful man, cruelly treated in his latter years.

    Tim Toyne Sewell
    Nether Wallop, Hampshire

    1. SIR – I did not serve with Field Marshal Lord Bramall but I did see him at my son’s Afghanistan medal parade after 2 Rifles’s return from Operation Herrick 10, a particularly bloody tour in 2009.

      Despite the parade being held outside near the coast of Co Down on a raw November day, the Field Marshal, as colonel of the regiment, spoke to every soldier to whom he presented a medal – not bad for an 85-year-old.

      Roger Little
      Tisbury, Wiltshire

    1. You have to have seen the John Lewis Christmas adv. to appreciate that one.

      ‘Morning, Clyde.

      1. Morning and thanks Peddy.I wondered what the connection was.Edited to say that I hadn’t connected the apology to John Lewis the firm which isn’t a household name in this part of the Yorkshire Region.

  16. SIR – Dr Michael Fitzpatrick’s article on GP home visits (Comment, November 13) reminded me of my years as a nurse and midwife.

    Patients in their own homes are more at ease than they are in a doctor’s surgery, and reveal more about their situation. I have found that delivering babies is much better at home too. I had two of my four daughters at home, and remember the wonderful moment of having the whole family kneeling round the bed, thanking God for their baby sister. I also remember the joy of bathing the baby I had delivered in a prefab in Plymouth, with the father and the other children watching.

    Amid the pressures on doctors and nurses today, such moments are precious. A doctor’s visit at times of illness and death can be an intimate and heart-warming experience – and it must not be sidelined.

    Peggy Darch
    Taunton, Somerset

    1. Home births can be good, but it depends. If there are post partum problems, two ambulances may be required, one for the baby and one for the mother.

      1. Both my sons were born at home.
        But that was back in the days when we were allowed to make up our own minds – with the advice of a GP who was also allowed to make up his mind.

  17. Why do Nigel Farage’s complaints about Conservative interference in his party decisions differ so much from Boris Johnson’s responses? Is there a third party involved in the Downing Street negotiations with Brexit Party candidates? have the Conservatives infiltrated the Brexit Party with 3rd column Conservatives? Is Boris Lying? Is Nigel Farage lying? In any event neither party is benefitting from this unseemly dispute.

    1. Johnson and the Conservatives have a similar philosophy as Putin, one party state much the best option, as long as it is my party.
      The difference between Johnson and Putin is everyone knows Putin prefers a one party state, not many do with Johnson.
      If you consider this line of reasoning to be extreme, Farage has stood down 317 candidates but Johnson wanted another 300 odd in addition. Out of 650 seats in the HoC, that to me looks like a one party state philosophy.

      1. It’s perfectly normal for all parties to want to abolish all other parties…

        They’re exactly the same as cats at feeding time.

      2. VVOF,
        As I have maintained for years the lib/dems are the most honest of all the in-house political cretins, as in no pretense.

      3. The root of the problem is that Johnson is determined not to take Britain out of the EU in any meaningful way. He would rather lose the election to the Lib-Lab-Green-SNP coalition than have any dealings with The Brexit Party.

        After all the anti Brexit Coalition would cancel Brexit but the Brexit Party might call his bluff, blow his gaff and make him have to go for a proper Brexit rather than BRINO.

        1. Absolutely correct Rastus, he is no different than May or Cameron.
          I have looked at my constituency list of candidates, my choices are, Labour, Limp Dum, Green or Conservative. At present the seat is held by a tame Tory (voted 3 times for May’s surrender treaty) so it looks very likely my choice will be to walk down if it is dry and make my own Brexit Party box and place my X there or sit at home and keep dry.
          One thing is for sure, none of those standing will be getting my vote.

        2. All sound and fury that comes to nothing.

          No one has the right to hold me to ransom like some
          gangster with a gun to my head. And no one has
          the right to threaten me with the thought of a
          very dangerous extreme Hard left government
          that would terminally damage every day life of
          all those who actually live in this country.
          Whilst having lunch out yesterday, my husband
          heard the man on the next table say he’d kill
          himself if Corbyn wins. He said he liked Nigel
          Farage, but it’s not about who you
          want to have a pint in a pub with and chat about
          how wicked the EU is. This is about our everyday
          lives being under threat at every angle on a personal
          level, from big government to local government
          issues, all things that effect us and Labour are a dangerous
          threat. A lot of Labour voters are terrified of Corbyn and
          think him and the hard left are lunatics, but they don’t get
          much airing on the news. They think Boris Johnson is a
          buffoon at times but he’s not nuts like Jeremy Corbyn.
          On Friday the 13th December no one wants Jeremy Corbyn as PM.

      4. You may find that it was Jeremy Corbyn who was in the KGB
        not Boris Johnson – just a little point.

        1. If Johnson was in the KGB and was any good at it, you would know nothing about it, – another little point.

          2. What is your point, Corbyn bad, Johnson better?
            That I can agree with but Johnson could do so much more for the country especially when he gets elected with a workable majority. The sad thing is he won’t though, he is just another Tory pretending to be a leaver. When he is in effect in the same position as Putin, without challenge, watch him thrust BINO upon the country. Then watch all the Tory Boys and Tory Girls try to excuse him. A pox on both main political parties

          3. What about issues apart from that of the EU ?
            How do you suppose the hard left would run
            public services how will they tax you etc …
            Real everyday life issues that affect everyone in
            this country EU to be or not to be …

          4. There is only one issue, do we leave the EU and become a sovereign nation or are we tied to the EU with no say in how our country is run.
            Everything else is secondary, taxes , public health, matters not a jot in comparison.

    2. Johnson and the Conservatives have a similar philosophy as Putin, one party state much the best option, as long as it is my party.
      The difference between Johnson and Putin is everyone knows Putin prefers a one party state, not many do with Johnson.
      If you consider this line of reasoning to be extreme, Farage has stood down 317 candidates but Johnson wanted another 300 odd in addition. Out of 650 seats in the HoC, that to me looks like a one party state philosophy.

    3. Morning C,
      I my book the brexit group ARE the tory party, a subsidiary,unbeknown to many as such who have made a blood oath never to vote tory again.
      The tories are masters at running a defence / attack campaign, example is how the brexit issue has been on a wearing down exercise for nearly 4 years.

  19. Heyup All!
    And it’s a dull, overcast, but at least not yet raining morning in Derbyshire.

    1. Morning Belle. The BBC is beginning to look like a feminised version of Deutscher Fernsehfunk (DFF) the East German TV channel that served propaganda instead of the viewers!

    2. Nagger Munchbutty would be a absolute disgrace in an impartial broadcast organisation, but as a biased pinko interviewer she fits in really well at the BBC!

    2. Brothers Grimm?

      Horror stories, fairy stories or comedy gold? All fit the nonsense being spouted i.e. pounds sterling are available as required.

    2. GCHQ are messing around with it Anne. It will probably return to normal after the election!

    3. It’s that black hole they’ve created at CERN and kept very quiet about. It’s slowing down the speed of light in the fibre network. Another reason why Corbyn’s plan to fibre the Country is a waste of time and money.😎

      2. Yup. I’m having to check my junk mail rather carefully instead of automatically zapping it.

    6. Is your inbox a tin box? If so, the broadband waves won’t get through.

      Mine’s plastic and seems OK. Cardboard also works well.

    8. Is tha Russians!

      They’ve nobbled you into a Hard Right Wing Fascist and know where you live ™!!!

  23. Energy Demand

    Demand 41GW

    Wind 8.9GW

    Total Wind Capacity 22GW

    Load Factor 28% and this is a good day

  24. Boris on BBC 2 TV at the moment answering questions from the public filtered by the BBC. Set to contimue until 10.15.

    2. typical BBC – Boris answers the viewer’s question then the presenter adds more aggressive matters to the question. I expect Laura Kuensberg and the “fact checker” will appear at any moment. This is online and BBC Radio 5 Live as well. I will continue watching later

        1. I am off for a bike ride. I cannot watch this . No doubt the News items will be full of selected clips of this interview.

          1. Morning Plum,

            I cannot bear gesticulators.. pointy finger types.. I am more of a hand on my hips type , with head at an angle .. squaring up sort .. now that says alot about me!

          2. I’m listening to Boris on the radio, I don’t have to watch his lips moving…..

            Morning Belle

      2. Watching LK over the last few days, I get the impression some Beeboids have clocked that their gravy train is in danger of hitting the buffers.
        Her questions seem more balanced; as in she’s sharper with Labour etc…

  25. All revolutionaries capture the media first…..

    Clever Corbyn Communist Correctness Broadband !

        1. Correct, if Corbyn and his mates are involved. However, reports that tractor production has increased would be well received.😎

          2. When I joined the PO in 1965 there existed plenty of the old open wire system but nothing like that. As an apprentice I did some work on removing open wires as cables were either being buried or strung between poles in aerial cables.
            The poles in that picture do not look strong enough to take that many wires. I remember a very tall pole behind what was Blomfield’s dept store and the old auction rooms at Headgate. It was THE largest pole, both in height and girth I ever saw; it lived up to its designation as ‘stout’.

          5. A lot would have been railway related, signals telegraph instruments for example as well as the telephone communications within the railway network.
            I believe the Military Telephone service was also routed along the railway.

  26. Conservatives to reopen railway lines closed under 1960s Beeching cuts. 15 NOVEMBER 2019.

    Boris Johnson will reinstate local railway lines axed under the Beeching cuts in the 1960s as part of a package of measures to rejuvenate provincial towns.
    The Conservatives will make a manifesto pledge to spend £500 million opening branch lines that closed more than 50 years ago, starting with routes in the north of England.

    Writing in The Telegraph, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps promises the plan will: “Banish the shadow of Beeching and restore those connections which made our country great and brought our people together.”

    This is just farce! Why not a chauffeur driven limousine for each of us with its own bar and air conditioning? Surely no one believes any of this stuff?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/11/15/conservatives-reopen-railway-lines-closed-1960s-beeching-cuts/

    1. Bridges demolished, eroded tunnels, embankments and cuttings, road crossings, signalling requirements etc. Half a billion will not go very far. Perhaps a raised monorail would be more future proof and provide engineers with exciting projects and the possibility of manufacturing and exporting opportunities. We need politicians who have a long-term forward looking vision for the Country instead of those harking back 50+ years for inspiration.

      1. A more sensible approach would be laser guided trolley buses. Where the track bed still exists they can run along that where id does not they can divert around it. It also means they can run into the towns and villages as many of the old line the stations were about a mile away from the areas they were supposed to serve

      2. At least 50 years ago we had not entered the Common Market/European Economic Community/European Community/European Union/European State.

    2. Most of the lines no longer exist, The track and stations are long gone as are most of the bridges and tunnels and many have been built over

      1. In addition, many of the railway lines were being decommissioned just as the natural gas pipeline network was being established in the late 60s and early 70s. The railway routes were ideal for installing the pipelines. I have conducted pipeline surveys along many such routes. They would be totally unsuitable for new railway use.

      1. Two that have been suggested are relatively intact: Blyth and Ashington in Northumberland and the South Staffs Railway – Stourbridge, Dudley, Walsall, Lichfield, Burton.

        2. Which reminds me that on the bridge over the railway on the outskirts of Bishop Auckland someone had painted: “Jesus is coming”
          to which a local had added underneath: “Only if he remembers to change at Darlington….”

    4. He’ll have to buy back an awful lot of land, restore embankments and cuttings and build a lorra lorra bridges.

        1. I was just going to type that comment. When we were boys we would wander along the old railway tracks at the weekend. One end ran for a couple of miles and ended in a fence with lots of housing built on the other side.

          The other end went on for further than we could walk in hours, but did pass through a very long underground tunnel that we would creep through in the dark, and came out in a disused quarry before continuing onwards. The joys of rambling as a boy and finding a quarry that looked very similar to so many planets on Blake’s 7. 🙂

    6. The New Borders Railway, is a single track line operating over the original Edinburgh-Carlisle line as far as Galashiels. Re-instating this 35 miles section between Edinburgh and Galashiels cost £353m.
      So spending £500m will reinstate around 50 miles of track. How many lines on how many routes will that be?

      1. The Borders Railway went a long way over budget and wasn’t future-proofed – some bridges are single-track and cannot be doubled-up.

        1. Indeed so. That was to keep the costs down and to prevent its extension to Carlisle*. Cost overrun is endemic in any Scottish Government contract involvement.
          The Dundee V&A was originally budgeted at £39m. It came in at £80m and is described as on budget. You have to hunt the archives to find the truth.

          *No, they don’t do logic. Part of the costs were to get across a bypass. When the bypass was built (before the railway) there was a request to take account of the planned new railway. They did not.

      2. The track still exisits on a lot of the routes in question. They’ll be the most likely to be reinstated.

        One of them will be the old Blyth & Tyne from Newcastle to Ashington and Newbiggin, spurred off to Blyth. It was closed to passenger traffic at the end of October 1964, but the route all bar a mile or two was retained for coal and (later) aluminium traffic. The pits and the aluminium smelter closed, but I saw a train only half an hour ago as I passed Ashington delivering chipped and dried American forests (another story) to the converted power station at Lynemouth.

        There has been pressure for many years now to have the line reopened to passenger traffic and according to reports in the past year or two it looks like its going ahead in the near future. It won’t be cheap. They’ll have to lift and relay the line to accommodate the higher track reqirements of passenger traffic and they’ll have to build some new bus shelter type stations, but it’s not impossible and a lot cheaper than reopening a line that was removed altogether. This old idea with be one of the shiny ‘new’ ones on Boris’s list.

        1. Had they the foresight, they could have kept the colliery link through Lynemouth colliery, then via Ellington & Linton back to Ashington and upgraded it for passengers to form a loop with a reinstated Newbiggin stub.

          1. There are plans put forward by one group based in Ashington to also reinstate the line from Ashington towards Linton, which was until recently used for coal traffic from Butterwell Opencast DP and make use of the disused spur which gave a link onto the ECML, opening the branch up to the north as well as the south.

    7. It’s a brilliant idea if we get away from diesel trains and go back to Heritage Steam Engines (but that’s me just being a boy 😉 [We could call it HS2!]

      1. Yes, Heritage Steam 2 has a splendid ring to it and steam whistes are so much pleasanter than the modern horns.

        1. There are two stations in Kidderminster.

          One is a pretty neo-Gothic creation built in 1989 with wrought iron, waiting rooms, a concourse and steam trains.

          The other is a depressing 1970s bus shelter made of gobbed-over security glass, peeling-paint effect aluminium and the concept that rail travel is something to be tolerated, rather than celebrated.

    8. This is just empty promises Araminta.

      The much needed Uckfield- Eastbourne rail link has had its track bed kept open for many years, but there has been continual inter-departmental squabbling over who should pay for bridge repairs and renovations.

      It could pay for itself within the year if ever the government gets its act together

  27. Morning Each,

    Old Ken Clamp ( first letter) has a grip of common sense about tactical voting and it finds agreement with me as I have seen tactical voting used by the toxic trio keeping honesty / common sense out of parliament, no doubt of it.

  28. Now watching BBC2 listening to Boris .. another lippy BBC bint who is also on Radio 5, Rachel whatever her name is.. Labour infused .. paid for by licence payers .. Biased .. Boris is good natured and showing humour and politeness .

    The BBC are giving him a hard time .. the worse termagants are interviewing him this morning ..

    1. This country is predominated with leftist ideologies.
      My husband read something yesterday, the NHS
      Is the world’s 5th largest employer and of course Labour
      and it’s public servants / unions benefit from that,
      thanks to Gordon Brown.
      The BBC are not remotely unbias and Cameron should have dealt with
      It when he had the chance but of course he didn’t.

      1. They must have reduced their staff then, I’m sure that it used to be said they were second behind the Chinese army…

      2. The evil that men do lives after them …. This Shakespearean tag from Julius Caesar reminds me of Nick Clegg but in his case there was no good to be interred with his bones.

        Why did we get the fixed term Parliament?

        Why did we get no reform of constituency borders?

        Because of course Clegg insisted on these things because, without them, his coalition with the Conservatives could have collapsed at any time.

        And of course Cameron, the weakest prime minister in living memory, gave in to Clegg.

        1. Prior to Cameron we had 15 years of Labour
          who flooded the public sector, increased immigration
          of those from the Middle East, deliberately to
          change the face of England.
          Jack Straw said Blair wanted to destroy the Tories but
          we didn’t realised just how many would turn up here.
          Public services, education, culture, the arts etc
          have been gradually indoctrinated by leftist ideals
          and the ” evil Tories want to take away our freebies ” .

          Cameron was weak and someone more obsessed with his
          Big Society and blasted ‘Compassionate Conservatives ‘
          being in coalition with the Lib Dems to ‘ stop the Tories being
          Nasty’. Cameron was never a true Conservative, he was a
          Lib Dem at heart whereas Boris Johnson isn’t ashamed
          of being Conservative – Cameron was .

    2. What is awry is ALL of our politicos have a vision of this Country that is 180 degrees out line with the people’s vision. The driver is globalism and only a radical clear-out of the political class will avert a disaster. It will happen but not in my lifetime.

      1. I am not convinced by that at all.

        I doubt you could get even 1% of the voting population to all agree on any “vision”.
        The politicians themselves between them represent every conceivable vision.

        I even doubt that you could get everyone who contributes to Nottle to agree on anything and this is a very efficient echo-chamber.

  30. I find it difficult to believe that Labour with it’s hard left
    lunatic Marxist terrorist loving leader is 28% in the polls,
    we don’t do extremes in England but Labour is certainly that .
    I was having lunch in a pub yesterday with the husband
    when we heard a man on the next table say that it
    Corbyn gets in he’ll hang himself. Corbyn is a terrifying
    thought, unfortunately his acolytes are good on the
    ground with campaigning and are utterly relentless and
    ruthless. I am truly fearful .

    1. Aethelfled – Do not be concerned. 🙂 The public polls are lies commissioned by a pro-EU media, carried out by pro-EU companies to produce pro-EU results. They are a shallow attempt to make people believe that there is a danger of a Labour government when the party is imploding in front of our eyes.

      The leading polling companies were asked after the EU elections why their predictions had been so wrong in the previous THREE elections. They shrugged their shoulders with a smile because they could not say: “Well, we made the numbers up of course!”

      The polls are there to frighten you and control the way that you vote by telling lies. YouGov are jokingly called the political polling wing of the EU. But only because it is true, especially when you look at the jobs that the founders have had and who they are married to. 🙂

      Here is one beautiful example of how the polls are used to try to influence people, especially “floating voters” who want to be on the winning side. It is from our American cousins in the last Presidential election:

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0c3768cf607297e1c23743a0c10969d696d98c7ae60ef7a99b48c658f6029c7e.jpg

      1. Lord Ashcroft’s poll is the most precise and with a lot
        of analysis. You are quite right, how those who in
        electoral reality are irrelevant yet appear in polls
        and in the news only to vanish on election day –
        I find quite bizarre. I am concerned that far Left
        dangerous extreme lunatics like Corbyn are in polls
        whatsoever .
        That vile Hilary Clinton woman is doing a lot of stirring in our
        election atm and gets away with it. If Donald Trump did the
        same then they’d be spitting pins .

    2. Corbyn is just the visible tip of the Marxist iceberg and his chain is being pulled by far more sinister people. He’s as thick as mince, incapable of independent thought, but the hard-Left believe his affable ‘magic grandpa’ mask is useful window dressing, as they try to pull the wool over the eyes of the electorate.

      Comrade McDonnell is the real threat. I’m willing to bet that should the unthinkable happen and Corbyn get the keys to Number 10, within less than six months, he will retire – probably for reasons of health – and McDonnell will slip in to replace him.

      That’s the nightmare we face because, make no mistake, the poisonous McDonnell is the stuff of which dictators are made.

      3. I said much the same a year or so go, but I was thinking it would be Watson who would seamlessly take over without a vote, in the same way as May and Johnson have done. Watson is gone and Comrade McDonnell remains.
        The dismissive attitude towards Corbyn is somewhat foolish. In Leith they say that a pig with a red rosette would be sure to win. Corbyn has never lost. However tumultuous the Labour Party and its myriad factions may appear, that is its natural state. Something for everyone.

      4. You think the same as what my husband says .
        He also said it’s not so much Corbyn but the
        sinister thugs pulling his strings.
        Corbyn was just the bearded softer guru face
        to fool students who think Corbyn fresh .
        McDonnell and the others are very dangerous extreme thugs.

      1. Morning J,
        Not to every bodies satisfaction the same obnoxious element would want, out of five.
        Besides with a second referendum you have
        destroyed democracy,surely.

        2. So she is saying: “If the people don’t want any one party or ideology to be in control, if they don’t trust the word of any of our parties in our dealings with the EU, then they must be forced to vote again.”

          When she really means: “If we cannot fool enough people to vote for parties that will keep us in the EU, if people are so appalled at all of us and our fake promises, then they must keep voting until we can keep us in the EU.”

          They are sounding less democratic and more authoritarian by the day. No wonder they love the EU so much.

  34. Latest mail to Mr Redwood…………….

    ————————-Labour Free Broadband———————-

    Corbyn Communist Correctness would ultimately make independent thought and communication literally impossible because correctness authorities would withdraw the actions and words required to express such aberrations..

    Every concept and human interaction would be rigidly controlled with meanings precisely defined by government rules and all non approved alternatives extinguished and soon forgotten. The process would still be continuing long after the British have tried but failed to escape the EU behemoth.

    Every year fewer and fewer words and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.

    Even now, of course, according to senior correctness officials, there is no reason or excuse for having independent thoughts, it is merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control.

    But in the end there won’t be any need even for that, because through Corbyn Communist Free Broadband central authorities would enter our brains to prevent it and control us all..

    Polly

    1. “Guy Gibson’s dog was male.”
      …. Thar goes the front door …..
      “Morning, Constable, Earl Grey or builder’s?”

  36. A Bum Idea…..

    A four-year-old girl was hospitalised with constipation because of her school’s strict toilet roll policy, her mother has claimed.
    Kitchener Road Primary in Canton, Cardiff, does not put toilet paper in the pupils’ toilet cubicles.
    Instead, the children aged four to 11 must take what they think they need from a single tissue dispenser in the public area before going in.
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7688051/Girl-four-HOSPITALISED-constipation-school-removed-toilet-roll-cubicles.html

    1. They probably got fed up with rolls of paper on the floor. But I bet the kids these days don’t have to put up with the hard stuff we had to use in the 50s.

  37. Q & A Guide to the 2019 Election (1):

    Q: If we get Free Broadband in the UK with Labour will anything else be free?

    A: Yes, there’ll be Free Entry into the UK

    1. I think that’s already one of their policies no payments for visas or right to remain etc and no annul payment that they currently have to make in order to use the NHS(Non EU nationals)

  38. Checked the list of candidates for my constituency (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) presently held by Drew Hendry for the SNP.

    Although the Tories pulled themselves up from fourth place to second at the last election, I’m thinking they’ve shot their bolt. They’d need another 5% swing to take the seat and there’s no chance of that happening – three years of May’s foot-dragging have seen to that.

    But we do have a Brexit Party candidate, one Les Durance. Never heard of him but I believe he has been involved in local government for some years. What the hell, rather than waste my vote on the Tories, I shall waste my vote on him.

    1. Over in Wester Ross we’ve been swamped with SNP and Libdems leaflets and posters, nothing from Tories or Brexit Party. I will probably spoil my paper anyway.

    2. ‘Morning, Duncan, there doesn’t yet seem to a list of every constituency and all the candidates standing.

      Can anyone point me in the right direction, Please?

        1. Thanks, Duncan, I’ll try that, although I am interested in the wider world – or the UK at least.

      2. As far as I know the official list will be released tomorrow, It may be some of the newspapers will crawl through the multitude of Web sites to put a list together

    3. Even if your vote is just for the idea of serving the good of the country, then when it comes time for “the cleansing” having a Brexit Party vote on your history will prove you were on the side of the “good guys.” I’d vote for TBP instead of the sorry Liberals that I have standing down here, but I won’t get the chance.

      1. Alternatively, if the ‘bad guys’ get into power, I could find myself wearing a blindfold, up against the wall with the rest of the ‘good guys’.
        :¬(

        1. Alternatively Duncan you could find yourself in the woods with your wrists slashed. Another tragic suicide.

        2. If the bad guys get into power, it’ll affect every part of your daily
          life, all of it, day to day life. If hard Left monsters get in you’ll
          have a choice between a cyanide pill or a shotgun.

        3. Duncan – Life with the “bad guys” in power will be no life at all. They are still far weaker than they appear though.

          Watching the EU attempt to throw its weight around on the world stage is very amusing, especially when the USA defines them as a business organisation and not a country. Their “ambassador” stopped being invited to real political dinners if I recall correctly. 🙂

          Watching the EU Commission seethe at that insult was worth the price of admission to the cinema alone.

  39. Good Morning Comrade Prole
    Welcome to your free internet surfing
    Username Worker 463,000
    Password I love the Party3
    We have enabled your broadband for all approved sites,please note Party Message pop-ups are both free and compulsory
    Enjoy
    In other news we have assessed your laptop as band B in the new digital tax regime with a current annual tax rate of 2k,don’t worry about setting up a monthly DD for payments,we are a full service party and as we control your internet banking we have already done it for you
    Why 12 payments of 200 for a 2k Bill??
    Well administration costs must be covered comrade,those Zil lanes wont build themselves you know!!

  40. Q & A Guide to the 2019 Election (2):

    Q: After yesterday’s stuff on A & E and Immigration, can you give me any positive reason for voting Conservative?

    A: No, of course not. The only reason would be if your vote can help stop Corbyn, Swinson, Salmond, Tusk (or any of the ex-Conservative Remainers) – and that depends on your constituency.

    1. Unfortunately the best reason I can give for voting Conservative is that they are the least worse

  41. Q & A Guide to the 2019 Election (3):

    Q: Would it be a good thing if Corbyn’s plan to (re)unite families where the husband is already here were enacted?

    A: Have you ever seen the passengers (grandparents and kids) disgorging from the planes landing in Birmingham from Islamabad?

  42. I find it deeply depressing that the Johnson ‘deal’ is not properly examined and debated in the MSM. We heed to know both the positive and negative parts of it.

    Remember when children asked why they should not do something they were often given the dismissive reply: “Because Daddy/Mummy says so.”

    So we are being treated like children. When we ask why the Johnson deal is a ‘fantastic deal’ we are fobbed off with the unsatisfactory answer: “Because Boris says so.”

    1. After three years I think we know the score, we just don’t want to face facts….

      We don’t live in a democracy…

      1. They are doing their best to kill off what remains of our democracy, but you can still catch them looking very worried at unfolding events at times, and some of them almost go mad in their insane attempts to defend the indefensible. With what is happening across Europe, with more and more people starting to notice that all is not going well, then there is still hope for all of our futures.

        They would be sat back with their feet up in the Sun if they had already won, not scurrying from place to place trying to patch together fake deals to mislead the public for a few more years. It is on a knife-edge whether we wake up and stop them peacefully before they panic and knock the board off the table and send in the EU Army.

        As they don’t have the EU Army yet, they are really hoping that people don’t realise what is happening, because we can still choose to stop them. 🙂

    3. Afternoon R,
      A great multitude of the electorate are
      of the rubber stammper persuasion.
      Giving leeway for the politico to do the thinking, sod the consequences.
      The repercussions of this has in affect
      cost lives, and in child welfare scarred
      many far beyond acid ever could, mentally for life.

    4. It’s the inability to actually ask the questions that bothers. Instead we get the lightweight assault of trivia to discredit rather than any meat. It’s because the BBC just can’t manage it. Munchetty simply can’t debate rationally at the high level. Can you imagine her – or anyof them talking about the CAP farming subsidy?

    5. The Johnson “deal” does not need to be debated rastus.

      It was already agreed last March when the extension was negotiated that the May “deal” would not to be changed.

      Apparently Tory supporters are happy and content with BRINO.

      Certainly Blair and Mandelson are!

  43. Q & A Guide to the 2019 Election (4):

    Q: If it takes 10 years to train a customer ready GP and we are short of GPs, surely the Labour Government’s spending splurge of 2000-10 must be seen as rather ineffective, and Labour should bear quite a bit of responsibility for present woes.

    A; Well, it gave us the best paid medics in Europe and very much improved many lives – holidays, cars, houses, early retirements …

    1. Meanwhile, the politicians promising and who spend billions of our dosh don’t need any training at all for their job.

    2. Most training has shortened with the use of modern technology. They can surely get it down to no more than 7 years

      I looked at comparison with France and Germany and the ratio of GP’s to patients is not much lower than those two country’s so I think there are other issues at play

      2. BJ,
        Any of the toxic trio in governance can knock the training time down to a six months gov, training course to knock out a GP.

  44. Another mail to Mr R……….

    This statement about ”protect the EU’s decision making process” is really funny.. I can hardly stop laughing !

    ”The commission told EUobserver in reply to an access to documents request that the need to protect the EU’s decision-making process weighed heavier than any public interest in what was discussed last January in Davos.”

    Would that be because ”the EU’s decision making process” is apparently heavily influenced, or even maybe dictated, by Open Society which had a stunning 72 meetings with the European Commission in 2018…………..

    https://lobbyfacts.eu/representative/1742c4e55b744063a6c757ce939ef91c

    Don’t you think Brits deserve to know what is going on in the background ?

    I think they would be pretty horrified !

    Polly

    1. Morning PP,
      If they stopped to think what they have
      condoned via their kiss in the polling booth over the last couple of decades
      petrified,terrified & horrified, would not even begin to cover it.

  45. It is here. The Greens are offering Free Money for all. No need to lift a finger no need to look for work

  46. This must be the biggest project overrun

    Work on the cathedral began some 137 years ago but is not expected to be completed until 2026 – the centenary of Gaudí’s death.

    1. They should start again with a new architect.

      I know we’re supposed to love it, but really!

      It’s as ugly as sin.

    2. That isn’t bad as cathedrals go is it? I think that Peterborough cathedral took around a hundred years to build.

        2. York Minster took 252 years, from 1220 to 1472. When Edward III and Philippa of Hainault were married there in 1328, only the east end was completed.

          1. It’s been said that Edward fell for Philippa when, applying the Plantagenet Court Strategy, she went straight from Hainault to Mornington Crescent, thus securing for herself the All-England MC Championship of 1326. Ever after, she was known as “Philippa of Hainault”.

            Not a lot of people know that.

        3. Does Salisbury hold the record at 38 years? 1220-1258 for most of it, hence the unified style (which I’m sure you are fully aware of).

  47. ‘Have you ever used a mop before?’ Boris Johnson hits out at Naga Munchetty as she grills him over whether he’s ‘relatable’, his privileged upbringing and girlfriend Carrie Symonds (as well as his tea-making skills)

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7688961/What-ridiculous-thing-Boris-Johnson-hits-Naga-Munchetty.html

    I have never ever used one of those strange stringy mops before either… they are smelly and unhygienic ..

    Husband has never ever shopped for groceries or meat apart from buying milk ..

    What on earth do they mean by being relatable .. I don’t understand .

    How relatable are any of you to everyday people.. What has so called privilege got to do with things.. We all have our roles in life , don’t we . Moh only once pushed the children’s pram .. for a few yards .

    I do think the BBC are up their own backsides .. I mean all these BBC wallahs do is chatter and get paid a small fortune for opening their mouths , and grimacing !

    1. I don’t relate to what relatable means. A meaningless BBC non-word.

      Just back from doing the weekly shop this morning; my normal Friday morning task.

      Hope that doesn’t mean I’m in some way ‘relatable’.

      1. I think it’s what most people would call ’empathy’. Of course in Bbc-speak it means you can only show empathy with another group if you are of that group yourself or live in Islington, otherwise you are just being patronising.

        3. Since my husband retired very early he always wants to
          come grocery shopping with me, he likes it but it
          drives me nuts. I don’t like my trolley reorganised by husband !

          1. What an antiquated society you live in. Packing bags is what supermarket cashiers are supposed to do.

          2. Assuming they know not to put potatoes on top
            of eggs or yogurt next to bleach. They don’t take that amount
            of care when it’s not their shopping.

          4. Stuff goes into my bogie so that it lies in the order in which I want it to come out and into the right bags, heaviest first, bread & eggs last.

            My wife is barred from grocery shopping with me. Too much flitting about, saying things like ‘this would be nice’ without having a slot in the following week to eat it in, even supposing we’d thought of some accompaniments for it (which we haven’t) and back-tracking to pick up stuff from aisles we’d already have passed along if we hadn’t suddenly had to go for something to fill another ‘light-bulb moment’.

            I go in and come out at the other end unstressed with everything we need in 30-35 minutes. If she’s there we come out in over an hour, ready for a divorce and with stuff that will never be eaten.

          5. When SWMBO goes for some milk, it takes 40+ minutes and several carrier bags to bring it out to the car.

          6. That’s why we have milk delivered.
            The milk is more expensive, but I’m not faced with temptation.

          10. In defence of your wife and all us women 🙂

            We think ahead further then one week.
            Something might be there one day but not there
            tomorrow,,such as Gressingham legs .
            Some times you return to an aisle because you
            have remembered something that you might run out
            of soon – especially if you are the one doing the cooking .
            Men don’t always look at the sell by date as women do,
            or check that things should look as they do, or
            sqeeeze food to check for ripeness… so there ; )

            PS.. You do sound very well organised, I must admit 🙂

          11. People who squeeze fruit to check for ripeness should be forced to buy the product they have squeezed.

            No matter how gently you may think you might have squeezed it you will certainly start off a bruising/rotting process that causes the fruit to deteriorate rapidly around the paw-marks rather than ripen consistently.

            If you get, for example, an avocado that some clown has squeezed, you will find that it discolours and rots where it has been pressed, peaches, nectarines etc. are the same. Please don’t do it.

          12. How do you know something is ripe unless you touch it ?
            Especially from supermarkets where they place food
            In chillers that are too cold and therefore fruit remains
            hard / unripened and goes mouldy when ‘ defrosting ‘
            from the chilled cabinet.

          13. Look at the “signs”.

            An avocado will show the stem piece separating, a peach will be starting to separate there too. A nectarine will show darker colour as will many other fruits. Sense of smell is also a good indicator. Most ripe fruit smells ripe, if it smells too strongly it is almost certainly over-ripe, if it smells of nothing it is almost certainly under-ripe. Better to get something under-ripe and ripen it at home than buy something that has been squezed. If I can see an indentation then I tend to avoid it.

            It’s a real bugbear of mine, getting fruit and vegetables home that someone has squeezed or pressed too hard, only to see it starting to rot at the pressure point.

            I would recommend that you buy from the market and ask the stall-holder (yes I know we have a huge advantage in France on that score) and I would be very wary of buying fruit that is on display in a chiller.

          16. I do the cooking. I retired before my wife so I got into the habit of having her dinner on the table when she came in from work, as she had done for me before then when I got home later than her. She’s now barred from the kitchen other than for baking and she’s happy with it. She’s a very good cook, but she says I’m good to, so it works.

            Being the cook I buy what needs cooking.

            Use by dates decide whether I buy an item or whether it goes back on the shelf (as this morning, something that would normally be on the weekly menu maybe for the second half of the week went back on the shelf because it expires on the 19th). If we’re running out of something, I know before it happens and deal with it. If I see stuff that will keep, such as toothpastes, coffee, soaps, etc on special I buy 2, 3 or 4 of them. I never squeeze food. It bruises it for the next customer.

            I never need to return to an aisle except in rare circumstances.

            I plan shopping like an engineering job.

            Get in, do it, get out. No faffing.

            I also make a point of not standing with the trolley across the aisle at arm’s length while I read the back of every identical jar of something on a shelf, wondering if it might possibly come in handy sometime.

          17. Yup, it’s a commando raid. Get in, get what you want, shoot a few chavs, get out again. Preferrably via a different window.

            The only time I’ve had to go back somewhere I’ve been is when they change things. Stop it Tesco! It doens’t make me buy more, I buy LESS because I can’t find the stuff I had before.

          18. #metoo.
            I’ve been finished work for 20 months now but the DT is still working so I have meals ready when she & the SaH get home.

          19. I tend to put together a dairy bag of milk and cheese and maybe cold cuts together, with bread as a cushion (crisps as well, if nothing’s leaking). That’s if the milk is in a carton, not glass. But eggs at the bottom of their own bag, with vegetables and salad greens to cushion (nothing too heavy).

            Putting eggs on top (as the checkers prefer) seems to guarantee an oozing mess by the time I get home.

          23. On a different topic, I do hope you get a chance to post some more lovely photos, bassetedge. Maybe not in this subthread.

            The bird photographs were really spectacular.

          26. The canned tomatoes on top of the bell peppers is my favourite, and the fresh bread under the potatoes. Argh!

          28. Can’t be doing with anyone else packing my bag at the supermarket checkout. What irritates me most is when they stand bottles and milk cartons upright in the bag instead placing them in horizontally. Everything falls down and heavy bottles keel over onto more delicate items the moment you lift up the bag. Has it never happened to them, that they don’t learn?

          29. You stack bottles upright but in the centre of the bag and place other items around it as padding.

          31. Maybe that’s how it works in Waitrose, but bag-packing cashiers went the way of cheque guarantee cards a long time ago in the supermarkets that common folk use.

          32. The woman on the checkout this morning asked if I’d like her to start packing while I was putting my stuff on the belt. Kind of her, but I declined. I have my own way of packing.

            What’s a Waitrose?

          33. An island of sense and reason in an insane and out of control world.

            Said because they put a water bowl out for Mongo in the summer and their butcher person knows what sort of bones to get him.

          34. Ah. I’ve done a search. There are a couple just 25 miles away and another in Hexham. That’s 50 miles.

            Not quite convenience stores.

          35. The cashiers pack your bags for you in Fauchon. Last time i was there they were all in Ball gowns.

          39. When my beloved and I go to a supermarket together, we are always fighting by the time we get to the third aisle.

          40. I admire your self control: we barely get past the coffee and cereal in ALDI and I have blood before my eyes.

          41. Aaaarrgghhhhhh …. occasionally I take MB with me; he’s barely laid hands on the trolley and I’m homicidal.

        4. I’m the shopper in our house. I take junior along and if he’s bored – as he usually is – he takes the dog around the park or, even worse, to the coffee shop where he’ll get a milkshake or something.

          I, however, am a bit of a pro at the old weekly. Crash in through the windows on a rope, grab a basket, belt around the aisles knowing exactly what I want and get out again. If I use the beeping machines I make sure to break them as quickly as possible so an assistant does it for me then out the door. The record so far has been 26 minutes. Admittedly I didn’t have to get the vegetables.

      2. Spend less? Who moi?

        I always find it easy to go off shopping list and find stuff that appears to be good value.

        1. But I am sure you don’t buy extra things just in case Annablel unexpectedly comes for the weekend, or stock up in case there is a hurricane next month and you can’t get out ?

          1. Heavens no. Extras normally come from the high calorie bad for you list.

            But I have been known to go to the supermarket for salad and buy a turkey because it was on sale.

      4. H’mmmmm ……. as long as you count a trolley laden with junk as spending less.
        “Mr. Kipling makes exceeding expensive truck. ” 🙂

        1. Yup – they can do a whole week’s shop without buying anything with which you can make a complete meal. I don’t know how they do it.

    3. Everybody should be capable of looking after themselves – shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc. Whether they choose to specialise when in a relationship is summat else.

    4. I’ve used one of those “stringy” mops before because they were the only items available for use. The key thing to remember is that you are cleaning a dusty / dirty floor, so you will need to change the water regularly, otherwise you look as Boris did, just pushing around already dirty water. I was cleaning steps outside of a building, so I was told to throw in some disinfectant to the water as well. I don’t know if that would work for some indoor floors.

      As for them getting smelly in the first place, when you have finished cleaning get them really wet in a final tub of clean water and disinfectant / bleach and wring it dry by pushing down on the bucket lid (which has holes for the water to drain through.) This means there is little chance of it going “smelly” as it is clean and dries quickly. Such are some of the things that you learn in your youth that stay with you 30 years since you last touched one. 🙂

        1. Yes – darn I had forgotten to say that. I was shown to store it that way as well. 🙂

    5. Munchetty doesn’t seem to realise it is tripe like this that keeps her paid less than her male colleagues.

      She thinks she is being clever, and showing how privileged Boris is to the nation, that he’s a ‘Tory Toff’. Those people who see the interview will just think her line of Q weird and affronting.

    6. BoJo: “That’s a matter for other people, I can’t possibly say I’m relatable, what a ridiculous thing.” Well said, and if I might add, I find Naga Munchetty wholly un-relatable.

      (Greetings, TB).

  48. I’m just reading the Kelly report (link posted yesterday) about the actual status and engineering challenges of CO2 reduction, and several sentences from the introduction stand out in the text – my emphasis (Deffo worth downloading a copy!):
    – The global climate models seem to show heating at least twice as fast as the observed data over the last three decades.
    – First, we use twice as much energy in the UK for transport as we do for electricity. Little progress has been made in converting the fuel energy to electricity, as there are few electric vehicles and no ships or aircraft that are battery powered. Note that if such a conversion of transport fuel to electricity were to take place, the grid capacity would have to treble from what we have today
    – Some of the measures introduced by the Climate Change Committee have actually made global emissions worse.
    – But in fact it is the heating (of houses and offices – ed) that is the real problem. Today that is provided by gas, with gas flows varying by a factor of eight between highs in winter and lows in summer. If heat were to be electrified along with transport, the grid capacity would have to be expanded by a factor between five and six from today. How many more wind and solar farms would we need?
    – The total pumped storage capacity in the USA would run its grid for three hours, while the installed battery storage would run it for five minutes.
    – Figure 11a shows that renewables are not even close to meeting the growth in demand, let alone reducing existing levels of fossil fuel use.

    2. Some comparisons of power generation:
      • A Siemens gas turbine weighs 312 tonnes and delivers 600 MW. That translates to 1920 W/kg of firm power over a 40-year design life.
      • The Finnish PWR reactors weigh 500 tonnes and produces 860 MW of power, equivalent to 1700 W/kg of firm supply over 40 years. When combined with a steam turbine, the figure is 1000 W/kg.
      • A 1.8-MW wind turbine weighs 164 tonnes, made up of a 56-tonne nacelle, 36 tonnes for the blades, and a 71-tonne tower. That is equivalent to 10 W/kg for the nameplate capacity, but at a typical load factor of 30%, this corresponds to 3 W/kg of firm power.
      • A 3.6-MW offshore turbine, with its 400-tonne above-water assembly, and with a 40% load factor, comes out at 3.6 W/kg over a 20-year life.
      • Solar panels for roof-top installation weigh about 16 kg/m2, and with about 40 W/m2 firm power provided over a year, that translates to about 2.5 W/kg energy per mass over a 20-year life.

      In the UK, 45% of carbon dioxide emissions come from heating air and water in buildings (27% in the domestic sector, and 18% in all others).
      And: you’d need 360 5-MW wind turbines (of 33% efficiency) to produce the same output as a gas turbine, each with concrete foundations of comparable volume.
      The late David MacKay showed that the land areas needed to produce 225 MW of power were very different: 15 acres for a small modular nuclear reactor, 2400 acres for average solar cell arrays, and 60,000 acres for an average wind farm.

      1. (© Cathy Newman) So what you’re saying is, renewable energy provision is inefficient and a waste of both time and mucho lucre? Who knew?

      2. A load factor of Wind turbines of 30% is being optimistic. 20% to 25% is more realistic

        In the UK climate solar is all but useless for most of the year and produces almost no electricity in the winter months even in the summer months the outpot from them is not great and for much of the time the output is not need if we have a nice warm summers day. Hydro, nuclear & Wind meet the demand

        1. Those figures accord with figures I remember from a report on Scottish wind by the John Muir Trust some years ago (time flies – it’s over 10 years now and the idiots still haven’t got the message).

          The trust looked at outputs from actual Scottish wind farms and came up with an average load factor of 22% at a time when the wind producers were claiming 30% and the DTi 26%.

          Now there’s more wind in Scotland than there is in England and wind farms have proliferated since then. There have been several built near the Northumberland coast equipped with turbines of 2MW capacity and about 420 feet high, blighting views for miles, even affecting the famous views of the mainland from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. A glance at the Wind Resource Map for the UK shows that the wind speed in the locations they’ve been built is less than the UK average, so I would be surprised if the English subsidy farms are getting as high as even 22% output.

          They’ve been located where avaricious landlords and supine local authorites have allowed them to be, not where there is most wind.

        2. And each turbine takes about 5% of the energy out of the wind. So, the one downwind of the first can only ever produce max 95% of nameplate capacity.

          1. IT depends how they are calculating load factor as well. I suspect it is only measured when the turbine is actually operating and not when it sits idle

          2. It will be taken as a percentage of actual MWh output over the course of a year compared to the plated capacity over the same period (Plated capacity x 24 x 365).

          3. Some years ago my life-long friend from grammar school and I were discussing wind generation of electricity. Part jokingly, I asked him if he thought that mass provision of turbines would have an effect on the weather by extracting energy from the wind. We were enjoying a convivial meal at the time and I cannot recall our thoughts on the outcome. Interesting that the loss between turbines is as high as 5%.

          4. There was a report a while ago (I seem to have lost my copy) that said that large-scale wind turbine generation would actually increase global warming at the earth’s surface, due to impeding air flow across the face of the earth. This actually collects heat & rises, cooling by dumping the heat into space. Much like blowing over the top of your tea to cool it a bit. Stop/slow that blowing, and…

    3. It’s a good read, innit. I was struck by much the same stuff as you have listed above and below, most especially the inadequate grid capacity.

      For them wot may have missed it, here’s the path to the pdf file.

      Prof. Michael Kelly: Energy Policy Needs ‘Herds Of Unicorns’
      Date: 11/11/19Press Release, Global Warming Policy Foundation
      Utopian thinking is putting the economy at risk says Cambridge professor
      https://www.thegwpf.org/pro…

      The 2019 Annual GWPF Lecture
      Energy Utopias and Engineering Reality

      [the pdf file is not as long as it first appears to be. No knowledge of engineering is needed to understand what the Prof is getting at, merely common sense]

      2. “No knowledge of engineering is needed to understand what the Prof is getting at, merely common sense” – sadly that means that the Greeniacs won’t understand it – no common sense at all!!

  50. SIR – It appears that Marks & Spencer has a policy of refusing to sell in its stores any Christmas cards with a reference to the meaning of Christmas, let alone a Nativity scene.

    I have correspondence from M&S which states that there is no demand for such cards, and so they are not stocked. I do not think this is the case.

    Anthony McGinty
    Bearsden, East Dunbartonshire

    1. Well if they don’t stock them they will see no demand. It is all a part or the reason that M&S is struggling to survive

      1. We went into M&S last week.

        MOH wanted a pair of jeans.

        They only had two pairs of 38″ waist on the shelves…but lots and lots of very small and very large sizes.

        I don’t think that M&S management are concentrating.

      2. We went into M&S last week.

        MOH wanted a pair of jeans.

        They only had two pairs of 38″ waist on the shelves…but lots and lots of very small and very large sizes.

        I don’t think that M&S management are concentrating.

        1. I buy jeans online.
          My build and age means that shops rarely stock anything presentable.
          The dreaded lower waists mean I look like a badly stuffed sausage.

    2. Some years ago, SWMBO asked about a certain ware in a shop and was told “Oh, you’re the fifth to ask about it today. We didn’t stock it because there is no call for it.”

      1. ‘Morning Paul
        Now the craze fo endless varieties of gin is fading the bloody fashionistas have turned their sights on rum,endless variation on “spiced” “old” etc etc
        Do they stock the best,Wood’s Navy?? do they hell
        Wanders off down supermarket aisle muttering foul curses

        2. Watson’s Trawler Rum. We used the last of some Thornton & France overproof rum in the Xmas puddings a few years ago. I acquired the bottle when were selling off Thornton & France stock after taking over the owners, the Matthew Brown brewery.

  52. Flooding

    A lot of blame has been aimed at Boris and Westminster but there seems to be little basis for this

    https://dmbcwebstolive01.blob.core.windows.net/media/Default/Emergencies/Documents/Template%20Community%20Flood%20Wardens%20Plan%20Nov%202010.doc

    There are processes for dealing with flooding and that starts with the Environment Agency, If they issue a flood risk warning they notify various bodies. Exactly what happened depends on the level off the flood warning. You are also supposed to act on the local flood plan which I doubt anyone has ever heard of

    For the Highest Level of alert the South Yorkshire Police take the lead

    Below is what should happen for the lowest level of flood warning. Although the bit below does not mention it there are community flood wardens who would be put on a alert. There role is to monitor river levels etc and report back to the environment department

    What it means
    Flood alert -A flood alert will indicate that flooding is possible and that you need to be prepared.

    When is it issued?
    Two hours to two days in advance of flooding.

    What to do
    • Be prepared to act on your flood plan
    • Prepare a flood kit of essential items.
    • Monitor local water levels and the flood forecast on our website

    Other considerations
    • Be aware of water levels near you
    • Check on the safety of pets and livestock
    • Ensure mobile phones are charged
    • Keep radio on
    • Ensure vehicle is filled with fuel ready to move to a safe place
    • Pack any essential items
    • Update and involve older children
    • Ensure you have a sufficient stock of medication
    • Involve close relatives
    • Consider alternative accommodation

    What else will be happening?
    On issue of a Flood Alert by the Environment Agency – the lowest level of Flood alert, close monitoring of the flooding risk will be undertaken by the DMBC Neighbourhood Teams and the Emergency Planning Team.
    This message is sent to relevant organisations such as local councils and the police, and is also put on to Floodline and the Environment Agency website.

    This is the Highest Level of Flood Warning actions

    Severe Flood Warning

    What it means
    Severe Flood Warning – will tell people that there is severe flooding and danger to life. These will be issued only when flooding is posing significant risk to life or disruption to communities.

    When is it issued?
    When flooding poses significant threat to life

    What to do
    • Stay in a safe place with a means of escape.
    • Be ready should you need to evacuate from your home.
    • Co-operate with the emergency services.
    • Call 999 if you are in immediate danger.

    Other considerations
    • Avoid electricity sources
    • Avoid walking or driving through floodwater
    • Listen to the Emergency Services
    • Act on your Flood Plan

    What else will be happening?
    Following the issue of a Severe Flood Warning by the Environment Agency and the recommendation to evacuate residents identified as being at risk. South Yorkshire Police will lead the emergency response arrangements, supported by the Emergency Services, Environment Agency, Local Council and Partners.

    Flood Warning and Severe Flood Warnings are sent to individual properties which have registered for the service, as well as being put on to Floodline and the Environment Agency website.

    2. What else will be happening?

      Certain little snivel serpents at the Environment Agency will be asking their superiors, “What is this ‘dredging’ and why didn’t we do it?”

    1. Click ‘Reply’.
      Subject ‘RE: Discrimination’
      In body of email type ‘Fṳck Off’
      Regards – A normal person.

      2. Or reply with:

        “We have received your information request but, as I am sure you understand, there are many activities that a business takes part in every day. We only have the time to reply to legitimate requests from real solicitors.

        Please stay online for the next 2 hours so that our outbound IT department can trace your IP number and verify your dialling address. This will be published as your contact address on our site for all of those parties wishing to take part in future direct information exchanges with you.”

        That should get the snowflake staying offline for a while.

    2. I caught a few snippets of LBC’s Ferrari debating ‘trans’ issues this morning. The subject of school uniforms came up and the idea of a young boy wearing a skirt and blouse to school exposed how farcical the defence of this behaviour is becoming. The farce worsened when Ferrari suggested that a young post pubescent girl who thought she was a boy could rightly decide to wear only boy’s trunks when learning to swim at school, exposing her breasts to all and sundry, did meltdown approach. In these debating scenarios Ferrari is up there with the best and he was very provocative on the trans issue today.

    3. Oh dear, I’ve seen quite a few “trans people” but I’ve yet to come across one who had any dignity to violate.

  54. Three surviving versions of iconic Elizabeth I Armada Portrait to go on display for first time. 15 NOVEMBER 2019.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0c28e3acf7c67862cbcba11bff01ec22c46e0551792211f51fc50b2d83e12c46.jpg

    The trio of portraits will be brought together publicly for the first time in their 430-year history for an exhibition at the Queen’s House in Greenwich from February. Experts say they are unlikely to be brought together again for the foreseeable future.

    Here she is! England’s greatest ever ruler! Oops! Forgot! She was obviously a slave trading, racist, colonialist oppressor. Her Hispanophobia and Xenophobia are well documented; after falsely accusing the Catholics of burning people alive for heresy she then accused them of being behind the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. She encouraged far right nationalism and selfish patriotism with her support for Shakespeare and the English theatre while instigating a policy of sinking the ships of freedom loving moderate Spanish immigrants as they sought safety in England.

    What’s not to like eh?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/15/three-surviving-versions-iconic-elizabeth-armada-portrait-go/

  56. Connect to Labour free broadband – Full of exciting government approved words to enslave your day….

    Call 📞 Communist Correctness Connection on 1984 to get yours now !

  57. Jennifer, a manager at a local B & Q store, had the task of hiring someone to fill a job opening.

    After sorting through a stack of resumes she found four people who were equally qualified.

    Jennifer decided to call the four in and ask them only one question.

    Their answer would determine which of them would get the job.

    The day came and as the four sat around the conference room table, Jennifer asked, ‘What is the fastest thing you know of?

    ‘The first man replied, ‘A THOUGHT.’ It just pops into your head. There’s no warning.

    ‘That’s very good!’ replied Jennifer. ‘And, now you sir?’, she asked the second man.

    ‘Hmmm…let me see ‘A blink! It comes and goes and you don’t know that it ever happened. A BLINK is the fastest thing I know of.

    ‘Excellent!’ said Jennifer. ‘The blink of an eye, that’s a very popular cliché for speed.’

    She then turned to the third man, who was contemplating his reply.

    ‘Well, out at my dad’s property, you step out of the house and on the wall there’s a light switch. When you flip that switch, way out across the pasture the light
    on the barn comes on in less than an instant. ‘Yep, TURNING ON A LIGHT is the fastest thing I can think of’

    Jennifer was very impressed with the third answer and thought she had found her man. ‘It’s hard to beat the speed of light.’ she said.

    Turning to Willy, the fourth and final man, Jennifer posed the same question

    Old Willy replied, ‘After hearing the previous three answers, it’s obvious to me that the fastest thing known is DIARRHOEA.

    ”WHAT !?’ said Jennifer, stunned by the response.

    ‘Oh sure’, said Willy. ‘You see, the other day I had a rotten pain in the guts, so I ran for the bathroom, but before I could THINK, BLINK,
    or TURN ON THE FUCKIN’ LIGHT, I shit meself!’

    Willy is now working at a B & Q near you!

  58. Ok.. so now we know….

    With free Labour Corbyn Communist Correctness Broadband there won’t be any other broadband… only that one.

    Only the broadband Corbyn likes with his fingers all over the control panel.

    So Corbyn Britain would be a totally different Britain and controlled by him and McDonnell from beginning to end.

    It probably means the end of NTTL and everything else which doesn’t comply with the new central communist control authority.

    1. WE are interrupting your broadband for a party pollical Broadcast from the Corbyn Labour Party

  62. Apropos an earlier post on Tusk’s comments.
    Here’s a link to an article in an English languageFrench newspaper.

    I can’t help smiling when I see him refer to the EU’s sovereignty when he spent his presidency trying to destroy the sovereignty of Europe’s Nation States.

    https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Brexit/UK-would-become-second-rate-player-after-Brexit-says-European-Council-president-Donald-Tusk?fbclid=IwAR0_cuPF9mpGD-Kj0tonCNAVgyvcXqEiR8lAa8JyHESdyiO4VD3nwizMQ-M

    1. A dickie bird told me that production for China has been put on hold and all plants are currently working 24/7 to cater for our politicians’ pork pies.

      1. Afternoon E,
        I do agree with you on their continual use of
        porkie pies ( proper English = lies) to calm the worried brow of the electorate, works every time.
        The current politico in the toxic trio & others
        currently involved with the brexitexit, doesn’t matter how long the barge pole, would get near anything appertaining to a pig, and they would disclaim any knowledge of ever knowing anyone having anything to do with pig like associates, ie bacon etc,etc.
        ( Although the wretch cameron was known to have some sort of relationship with a porker)
        The politico’s adhere strictly to the unwritten
        rulings of the PC / Appeasement insanity code.

        1. Afternoon ogga.

          My mind’s made up as to where my Brexit cross is going and so, since nothing will persuade me otherwise, I’ll be letting the political stuff waft over my head.

  66. Prince Andrew will speak publicly about relationship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein for first time in ‘no holds barred, no questions vetted’ interview with BBC’s Emily Maitlis agreed after six months of negotiations with Buckingham Palace.

    Prince Andrew has finally broken his silence on his controversial friendship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein in a prime time BBC special to be shown tomorrow evening after six months of planning.

    The Duke of York was interviewed by Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis at Buckingham Palace last night and the show: ‘Prince Andrew & the Epstein Scandal’ will be broadcast on BBC 2 at 9pm on Saturday.

    The BBC has not released any footage – but Ms Maitlis said today it was a ‘no holds barred interview’ with ‘no questions vetted’ by Andrew or palace officials, who were pondering taking part since May, it emerged today.

    Six months of negotiations to agree on straightforward questions eh? I shall record this so I can have a good laugh on Sunday afternoon!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7688777/Prince-Andrew-speaks-publicly-relationship-paedophile-Jeffrey-Epstein.html#comments

  67. ‘Morning All

    Free broadband for all. Yippee goes the BBC.
    Free TV for over 75s. We’ll go bankrupt goes the BBC
    I don’t think the Al-Beeb has thought this one through……………………………….

  68. O’Neil

    “More alarmingly, Tusk admitted, openly for once, that he has

    tried to stymie Brexit. ‘I did everything in my power to avoid the

    confrontational No Deal scenario and extend the time for reflection and a

    possible British change of heart’, he said. And there it is: a Eurocrat

    confesses that he dragged out the Brexit process in the hope of beating

    down our democratic desires and bringing about a ‘change of heart’.

    What we have here is a powerful foreign politician admitting to using

    his considerable power – ‘everything in my power’ – to prevent the

    enactment of the largest democratic act in our history.”

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/11/14/good-riddance-donald-tusk/

    1. Of course he did! Why would he not? The EU don’t want the UK and the moneybags to leave, and it dents their pride.
      Why would anybody be surprised at this piece of news. In fact, I would be amazed had he not tried to stymie Brexit.
      People who find this kind of article a surprise are the reason why the UK is such a fcuked up place. Get real, folks, not Woke. There are no safe spaces in business or politics.
      Sheesh…

    2. Next time, Donnie, don’t look westward for protection against Germany’s need for a larger living room.

  70. There’s been a cock-pheasant chasing our hen pheasant around and around the garden in and out of the shrubbery for the last 15 minutes. Not sure if she needs rescuing but surely it’s too early for them breeding. His colours are very very bright though.

    1. Just sit back and rename then Bojo and Jo and hope at least one of them gets Fupt on Dec 12th….

      1. Concerned about the hard left terrorist supporting loons
        on 20% , Conservatives need to be much higher.
        Lib Dems are doing better than most realise as they have
        the ear of the 48% and others who want to stop Brexit,
        no one is speaking of them but they unfortunately are doing
        very well whilst no one is taking any notice of them .

  74. List of General Election 2019 candidates

    102 candidates are standing across Northern Ireland

    The full list of candidates standing in the 2019 General Election has been announced. There are 102 candidates, which is down from 109 standing in the 2017 General Election.

    The candidates are arranged in alphabetical order, by surname

    Belfast East

    Naomi Long (Alliance)
    Carl McClean (UUP)
    Gavin Robinson (DUP)

    Belfast North

    Nigel Dodds (DUP)
    John Finucane (Sinn Féin)
    Nuala McAllister (Alliance)

    Belfast South

    Paula Bradshaw (Alliance)
    Claire Hanna (SDLP)
    Michael Henderson (UUP)
    Emma Little-Pengelly (DUP)
    Chris McHugh (Aontú)

    Belfast West

    Gerry Carroll (People Before Profit)
    Monica Digney (Aontú)
    Paul Doherty (SDLP)
    Donnamarie Higgins (Alliance)
    Paul Maskey (Sinn Féin)
    Frank McCoubrey (DUP)

    East Antrim

    Steve Aiken (UUP)
    Danny Donnelly (Alliance)
    Oliver McMullan (Sinn Féin)
    Angela Mulholland (SDLP)
    Philip Randle (Green Party)
    Aaron Rankin (NI Conservative Party)
    Sammy Wilson (DUP)

    East Londonderry

    Gregory Campbell (DUP)
    Richard Holmes (UUP)
    Cara Hunter (SDLP)
    Chris McCaw (Alliance)
    Seán McNicholl (Aontú)
    Dermot Nicholl (Sinn Féin)

    Fermanagh and South Tyrone

    Matthew Beaumont (Alliance)
    Tom Elliott (UUP)
    Adam Gannon (SDLP)
    Michelle Gildernew (Sinn Féin)
    Caroline Wheeler (Independent Labour)

    Foyle

    Colum Eastwood (SDLP)
    Rachael Ferguson (Alliance)
    Darren Guy (UUP)
    Shaun Harkin (People Before Profit)
    Elisha McCallion (Sinn Féin)
    Anne McCloskey (Aontú)
    Gary Middleton (DUP)

    Lagan Valley

    Robbie Butler (UUP)
    Jeffrey Donaldson (DUP)
    Sorcha Eastwood (Alliance)
    Ally Haydock (SDLP)
    Gary Hynds (NI Conservative Party)
    Alan Love (UKIP)
    Gary McCleave (Sinn Féin)

    Mid Ulster

    Mel Boyle (Alliance)
    Keith Buchanan (DUP)
    Denise Johnston (SDLP)
    Francie Molloy (Sinn Féin)
    Conor Rafferty (Independent)
    Neil Richardson (UUP)

    Newry and Armagh

    Mickey Brady (Sinn Féin)
    Pete Byrne (SDLP)
    Jackie Coade (Alliance)
    William Irvin (DUP)
    Martin Kelly (Aontú)
    Sam Nicholson (UUP)

    North Antrim

    Margaret McKillop (SDLP)
    Cara McShane (Sinn Féin)
    Patricia O’Lynn (Alliance)
    Ian Paisley (DUP)
    Stephen Palmer (Independent)
    Robin Swann (UUP)

    North Down

    Alan Chambers (UUP)
    Alex Easton (DUP)
    Stephen Farry (Alliance)
    Matthew Robinson (NI Conservative Party)

    South Antrim

    John Blair (Alliance)
    Paul Girvan (DUP)
    Declan Kearney (Sinn Féin)
    Danny Kinahan (UUP)
    Roisin Lynch (SDLP)

    South Down

    Paul Brady (Aontú)
    Patrick Brown (Alliance)
    Glyn Hanna (DUP)
    Chris Hazzard (Sinn Féin)
    Jill McAuley (UUP)
    Michael Savage (SDLP)

    Strangford

    Grant Abraham (NI Conservative Party)
    Kellie Armstrong (Alliance)
    Joe Boyle (SDLP)
    Ryan Carlin (Sinn Féin)
    Maurice McCartney (Green Party)
    Jim Shannon (DUP)
    Philip Geoffrey (UUP)
    Robert Stephenson (UKIP)

    Upper Bann

    Doug Beattie (UUP)
    Delores Kelly (SDLP)
    Carla Lockhart (DUP)
    John O’Dowd (Sinn Féin)
    Eóin Tennyson (Alliance)

    West Tyrone

    Órfhlaith Begley (Sinn Féin)
    Thomas Buchanan (DUP)
    Stephen Donnelly (Alliance)
    Susan Glass (Green Party)
    James Hope (Aontú)
    Daniel McCrossan (SDLP)
    Andy McKane (UUP)

  75. Seriously considering not voting in this election, it has become a mindless disgrace of ridiculous promises and has been subverted by the EU remain agenda, people have no choice of a Leave candidate in the majority of the country.
    The electorate should go on strike until we get a proper adult choice of policies and a choice of a Leave party.

  76. No, there is no conspiracy to keep Britain in the EU………..

    Ummmmm…………..

    ”Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson ‘pulling the strings’ of Remain alliance”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/09/10/tony-blair-peter-mandelson-pulling-strings-remain-alliance/

    ”Details of EU Brexit talks with Blair and Soros kept secret”

    https://euobserver.com/brexit/144724

    ”The European Commission is keeping secret details of talks between EU commissioner Pierre Moscovici, former UK prime minister Tony Blair and Hungarian-US billionaire George Soros, about a second Brexit referendum.”

    The commission told EUobserver in reply to an access to documents request that the need to protect the EU’s decision-making process weighed heavier than any public interest in what was discussed last January in Davos.”

  77. Donald Trump is in the UK for a NATO conference in early December.

    I wonder which of our disrespectful politicians will seize the opportunity to snub or abuse the President of the USA?

    2. One thing you can be sure about. Donald won’t just brush it off and pretend he didn’t notice it.

  78. “time to make the very fastest full-fibre broadband free to everybody”

    On the face of it this looks like a very attractive idea. However, when every household and business premises is given a free fibre termination nothing will happen unless there is exchange equipment to send data down the fibre and also network termination equipment to convert it into the various formats required by the end user products.

    However the faster the data goes the internet super-highway, the higher energy consumption of all this transmission equipment and the more windmills we shall need by 2050. What is more, as we all know, all this has to stay on 24/7 otherwise we won’t get all those timely on-line firmware updates for all our smart domestic products, the kids won’t be able to watch their porn under the bedclothes and adults won’t instantly get their social media upticks.

    In the old days, the leased GPO telephone was powered down the copper wires from the exchange battery which itself was usually backed up by a generator to ensure that communications were the last utility to remain in operation should the national grid fail and all the lights go out.

    Infrastructure investment for all is important but 24/7 electrical power generation deserves priority.

    1. Angie, I’m gaining the impression that our politicos believe that, similar to the money trees they are preparing to harvest, they believe that there exists orchard after orchard of 240v electric power trees.
      As for telephone exchanges in the old days, it is my experience that only town and city exchanges had generator backup and village exchanges had a battery designed to hold the load for about 24 hours. The problem with that was if a blackout occurred (or snow, thick fog etc) people would all try and ring friends and family to check with them and the load would peak when it was expected to hold steady. I’ve been in a mid sized electro-mechanical exchange when a heavy snowstorm started and there was pandemonium as just about everyone started calling everyone else. The noise was awful.

  81. After Labours announcement of Free Broadband for all many people contacted Labour to say they would be disadvantaged as they had no computer so it has now been extended to include Free Laptops for all

  82. Lib Dems pledge £100bn climate fund over five years.

    Labour promises free superfast broadband for every home.

    Conservatives to reopen railway lines closed under 1960s Beeching cuts.

    They’ve all lost their marbles. Somebody has put something in the water in Westminster!

          1. He would be good company these days, we have MP’s who have no influence in British policy, and we can start in Downing Street and work down.
            For British Policy please ask EU what is current.

    3. Somebody has put something in the water in Westminster!

      Whatever it was it wasn’t strong enough. (originally I ended this sentence with ‘to make them incapable’ but when I read it back I realised I’d offered an open goal to one or more on here)😎

    4. No, I think they have all realised that political parties’ promises and pledges are meaningless and nobody expects them to be honoured. This means they can say what they like and promise what they like.

      I seem to remember that at the last general election 80% of the people who were elected pledged themselves to upholding Article 50 and getting Britain out of the EU. Is anyone surprised that we are still in it and will be tied to the EU for the foreseeable future with BRINO?

  83. HAPPY HOUR – Remember this ….it was called fun. What happened….?

    British expats and tourists have paraded through the streets of Benidorm for the annual ‘bad taste’ fancy dress.
    Britons ‘black up’ as gollies, Asian tourists and police pigs for Benidorm festival

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3dd3f431813cc5c0f2fd3cb34c508884b230a50d31cfda3840dcd01680a4f0f6.jpg
    Two men went to the Benidorm annual fancy dress party dressed as gollies and wore ‘black face’ as well as the waistcoats, jacket and trousers that traditionally go with the dolls.

    2. Choices, choices; a tranny gollywog in an SS uniform or a white male heterosexual wearing a suit and a tie?

        1. I defer to your expert knowledge, but is that the lacoste look-a-like competition?
          Sweetie!

          Apologies lacoste, too tempting.

  85. Boris should listen to this evening’s ‘PM’ on Radio 4. A report from the West Midlands included a Tipton family who had always voted Labour but will vote Tory because it’s time to get out, they don’t want to split the vote, they like Boris and hate the Labour party for abandoning the working class.

    Get it right BJ. You mustn’t follow Spencer Perceval into the history books.

    1. The BBC must have thrown their hands in the air and cried “Allan’s Snackbar!” when they managed to find a Labour voter who said that they would vote Conservative. All of the ones that I have seen in online reports and in chat rooms have said they are voting for The Brexit Party.

      Still, they are the BBC. They have put people up who have said “I voted Leave but now want to Remain” – that is the Holy Grail for them. They don’t ask too many questions about whether they were Remainers all along.

      2. They did find a long-settled Muslim, once a Labour voter who later joined the Tory party but who is a Remainer and thinking of abstaining. Does that count?

  87. Have Labour not realised that we would have to Leave the EU if they want to renationalise key utilities?

    1. Of course they do.

      That’s why they promise such things because they can then blame the EU for not being able to complete their manifesto.

    1. The idiots don’t seem to realise quite how many people there are who would not work if they were just handed enough to live on.

      3. There are enough now who don’t work because they get enough to live on (plus allowances, housing benefit, free prescriptions etc. etc.) Apart from what they might make doing things they don’t declare…

          1. Well we have already to the stage where foreign migrants come in and get housing that we pay for, and that indigenous Brits can’t have – because they, unlike the immigrants, don’t breed like rabbits (many of which offspring are going to suckle at the benefits teat in their turn).

            And we have to house some of their offspring, who don’t behave and just stab and steal, in gaol.

            (See I am not just targeting one lot of immigrants, but several – so I am not discriminating.)

          2. We don’t actually need immigrants, we have far more than enough home-grown for what you describe

    2. That comment is a coincidence as I have just typed somewhere else the things that I found out about the Green Party at the last election. I looked at their own website and it was a revelation about what they really are.

      Just two of their policies were to end the Monarchy, making the Queen Mrs Windsor, and take back all Royal lands and castles. They would also disband the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force because “The world is a safer place and we have not needed a national defence force in 70 years.”

      These people are hard-core Marxists behind their Green flags and environmental smokescreen. I suspect that the vast majority of their voters have no idea what they want to do and would not want to disband our armed forces.

      1. When the Senior Officers were asked about the proposals to disband the armed Forces, there was a unaminous decision:

        All leave will be topped until morale improves

    1. And he expects to teach without half the class laughing at him? And the other half giving him the old come one just to get him going.

      1. In a primary school, I doubt they would know, but if my grandchildren were there and knowing he had a predeliction for young boys I would be very uncomfortable that he might turn a blind eye to others who liked them ven younger.

    2. A bent teacher mucking about with seventeen-year-old kids on or off the premises is not something that pupils’ parents would accept.

  90. An old one for your Friday evenings…

    An elderly man suspects his wife is going deaf so he goes about 20ft behind her and asks, “can you hear me?”
    No response, so he moves to 10ft behind and asks again, still no response. Finally, gets within 5ft and yells “can you hear me?”
    Her response, “For the third time, yes!”

    1. What a choice. They might as well put a poster up saying:

      “Labour’s immigration policy will overrun the country 3 times faster than the Conservative’s will. Vote Conservative and savour the extra years you will have to watch your country disappear before your eyes.”

      Or vote for a party that will take us out of the EU, except that you cannot have that choice in many seats now. I have 6 candidates standing here that have been revealed so far, 4 of them pro-EU and two whose position’s are unclear.

      Green (Marxist), Labour (Marxist), Conservative (Remainer), Mebyon Kernow (Cornish Nationalist), Liberal Party(?), Liberal Democrat (Globalist.)

      Yet they still try to pretend that we are a democracy. Promising us all baubles under the Christmas tree if we vote for them. That illusion is wearing very thin now.

      1. Maybe wearing thin in Nottleland, but I think the majority of the population swallow it hook, line & sinker.

  92. Trans woman demands stall, start up cash and media training in 3….2….1…………………….

    A women-only street market has opened in London’s East End.

    Lady

    Lane Market, which forms a part of Petticoat Lane Market, features nine

    stalls although more are due to open in the coming months.

    All stallholders have been given council-funded business and social media training.

    The

    project is part of a Tower Hamlets Council and City of London

    initiative to regenerate the area, at a cost of £2.7m over four years.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-50426904?ns_campaign=bbcnews&ns_source=twitter&ns_mchannel=social&ocid=socialflow_twitter

  93. Some idiot presenter saying at least a Million people in thee UK cannot get the Internet which is total bs. There my be a million people not on the Internet because they don’t want to be. There are tiny number of black spots typically very small businesses that decide to et up in some very remote farmhouse

  96. The turkish delight / amnesties R me Pm declares he is pro immigration.
    ……………………….Gettaway.

    1. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9c7e7a44be7c957184eb522a95a4cece14179af96430efca0ce8c3da839d3458.jpg

      On a tenuously related note – I recorded a film from those channels that show lots of older ones and many black & white ones too. It was not that old and was called “Flight of the Doves” about two children who run away to Ireland to find their auntie. It had lots of famous people in it and I remember it from being a child. It was well-loved by the Irish government for showing a diverse Ireland even back then, with all the religions under the Sun living in peace there.

      As it started there were the words “Warning. This film contains language or ideas of the time that some people may find offensive.” I wondered what on Earth they could be referring to. So I looked for anything that might stand out.

      There was a parade with lots of cultures all marching together, so that was not it. But then they had soldiers in uniforms with rifles, marching and dancing with the people, which caused my spidey-sense to tingle slightly. Then they had the Orange Orders marching bands moving happily in the parade which made the tingly feeling jump up a notch.

      Later they had a scene where there was a “rural market” and the narrator said: “Here the locals gather together. There are games of chance. Livestock are bought and sold. Whole tinker families get involved. The Ginger Children Beg For Coppers.”

      I thought – that’s the one. That’s the comment which would make the politically correct break out in a rash.

      1. This week on Radio 3 they have had an announcement after Composer of the Week everyday about where to go if you’re feeling fragile (can’t remember the exact wording) – but they were clearly worried about triggering mental health problems or somethng after recounting the life of Malcolm Arnold (alcoholism, mental break down, attacking various wives, drink driving, incarceration in mental hospitals etc). Mmmm – I suppose that little list is enough to send snowflakes into meltdown. The wonder is how he managed to compose at all.

      2. Very good.

        Just wondering whether the copper felt slighted by being called a pr### or the fact that he was a Scottish ginger ####### and had been teased at school .. some one with a mighty chip on his shoulder.. People can be very peculiar and hypersensitive .

    2. It is all nonsense. A Sheriff in Inverness dismissed a case against a man accused of calling a policeman a “bastard”. The Sheriff told the policeman, “what did you expect?”. Thus is precedent set.

  98. Blindfold were on sale half price today so I bought one. Can’t see myself wearing it though.

          1. Neither of them could see or hear too good of late, they used to bump into each other occasionally .

        1. So sorry to hear this, my condolences to you for a family member called home. 20 is a good age for a cat, many hunting years there, enjoying every minute, being in that minute. The Rainbow Bridge awaits.

        1. I saw that one a year ago and saved it at once. I also had a cat at one time many years ago. Losing one was enough. Now the neighbours cats come and walk all over me.

    12. So sorry, Bob. How hard it is for those left behind, but take comfort in what a good life you gave him.

  101. Well johnson does acknowledge it is werzel gummage’s
    turn in number ten next, that is how this coalition works
    as in alternating power.
    The PM ( prime mover ) as an eu asset states he will not cap immigration.

    2. When you live in a big city, you never see any of this stargazing stuff. Even the Man in the Moon has problems.

      1. Oh dear , sorry .. but at least you have the benefit of lights , and don’t have unlit lanes and deer running everywhere in front of your car!

        1. Dark is your friend.
          “Yea, though I walk through the valley of darkness I fear no evil, for I am one mean b’stard!”
          With sincere apologies to the Parachute Regiment for plagiarism, but I couldn’t help myself!

  106. 13th December 2019.

    An important date for many of us, since it’s roughly the time when the sun reaches its lowest point in the evening sky, after which the nights start getting lighter. Mornings, though, will be getting darker for a week or two after this date.

    Sunrise and sunset times.

    It’s also the date when the election lunacy will have stopped and our taxes will double to pay for all the goodies we’ve been promised.

      1. Yo pm

        May I fiddle please

        But not the shortest day leasterester number of hours of daylight, which occurs at the solstice 21-22 December.

        (The day is still 24 hours)

    2. E,
      Could that come about as consequences of who was kissed in the polling booth ?
      If so, why were they kissed yet
      again,again,& again ?

      1. That’s a new one on me – all I get is a pencil.

        Incidentally, and I’ve never thought about it before, who sharpens the pencils?

    1. With my ‘restless legs’ syndrome, probably the result of too many long bloody haul flights, no I couldn’t, Belle.

    3. Maggie dearest: it would be more comfortable to sit within the plane – access to food and booze etc. …

    4. Don’t like flying at the best of times, Maggie, never mind for twelve hours.

      In fact, I dislike it so much that on several occasions in the past, I was compelled to leave the aircraft in mid-flight.
      ;¬)

      1. Oh DM ,

        You are so funny ..

        Er yes , and I expect your first experience was tumbling from a tethered balloon .. and then the rest came with a bit of a shock .. and encouragement .. and you had to take your luggage with you!!

    5. Not now T_B, have pretty much given up flying, too much hassle! ( The best years for air travel were the 80’s and 90’s as far as I am concerned)

      1. The same for me .. JL, absolute hassle as you say ..

        There is nowhere I really want to go to.. quite content here in my nest and this area where I live .

      2. Yes, far too stressful, and that’s just the bit on the ground. I now know what ‘live exports’ must feel like. On the rare occasion we venture into Europe it’s on Eurostar.

        1. Very wise. The bloody trousers fall down when you remove your belt, your leather shoe laces are a bugger to undo and you have to suffer the indignity of having the wife’s handbag uncluttered by the removal of anything in a bottle plus the scissors and sewing repair needles and that most essential corkscrew wine bottle opener.

          What an effing mess we are as a country and all because we have let in hordes of bloody Muslims and other undesirables who actively wish us all harm.

    6. My only long trip was to the States in 2002. I loved the flights so much I vowed that it was the first and the last.

      1. I’ve not have many flights, barely a dozen, air-trooping to/from Germany, BZ-Cyprus & back in ’78, Aldergrove-Newcastle for Northern Ireland R&R in ’79, but the worst was Heathrow-Baghdad in ’89 to do some Morris Dancing.
        Departure was delayed for several hours to allow an incoming passenger to make the flight which meant we were on the plane for the best part of 12 hours.
        I’ve never flown since.

    8. A flight we took in August 1994 from the old Osaka airport (OMG, the humid heat) into a blessedly grey and cool Heathrow lasted 15 hours. The route was an unusual one flying over Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland. The scenery was stunning as II noticed when taking walks around the large aircraft.

    9. In Coastal Command 18 hour reconnaissance trips were the norm and we ended back at base where we started.

    10. When I flew to Hong Kong in 1980, it was 18 hours, with a 1 hour stopover in Bombay (as it then was). But because of cholera, we could not leave our seats for that 1 hour. So it was 18 hours inside the aeroplane.

  111. This is from the Guardian ( a bit different from mine, below, but not much )

    Prince Andrew has said that he failed to uphold the standards of the royal family when he visited Jeffrey Epstein after the paedophile’s release from prison, admitting: “I let the side down, simple as that.”

    The prince made the statement in an interview with the BBC’s
    Newsnight programme, the first time he has spoken publicly about his
    friendship with Epstein, to be broadcast on Saturday night.

    In a pre-recorded interview with Emily Maitlis, understood to have
    been the result of six months of negotiations with the royal household,
    Andrew also said he had “no recollection” of ever meeting Virginia Giuffre, the woman who claims to have been coerced into having sex with the royal by the financier Epstein.

    Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate – sent direct to you

    Read more

    Andrew said he regretted remaining friends with Epstein after
    he was found guilty of sexual offences: “I stayed with him and that’s …
    that’s … that’s the bit that … that … that, as it were, I kick myself
    for on a daily basis because it was not something that was becoming of a
    member of the royal family, and we try and uphold the highest standards
    and practices and I let the side down, simple as that.”

    Asking the prince about the alleged sexual encounter with Giuffre,
    which Giuffre alleges took place when she was flown to London on
    Epstein’s private jet aged just 17, Maitlis said: “She says she met you
    in 2001, she says she dined with you, danced with you at Tramp Nightclub
    in London. She went on to have sex with you in a house in Belgravia
    belonging to Ghislaine Maxwell, your friend. Your response?”

    Andrew replied: “I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever.”

    Asked again if he had any memory of meeting her, he repeated: “No.”

          1. Yup I agree. I am not sure what else the Duke of Edinburgh could have done to try to instil some Danish discipline into this pitiful trio of defective sons. I suppose the genetic composition of wimp Germans and pompous Russians lives on.

            The only Child close to being an assertive man was Anne and she was a nasty piece of work unless you happened to be a horse.

          2. The Duke would have had absolutely nothing to do with the raising of the children. Anne turned out more normal than the others. She is greatly admired by the Armed forces and particularly the RN for her unswerving support and loyalty.

        2. Prince Andrew was dubbed “Air miles Andy”
          because of his penchant for using helicopters and planes on official
          engagements when he could use a train or car. … That included £2,939
          on a helicopter he used to make the 120-mile round trip to Oxford, and RAF planes to fly to St Andrews for two golfing jaunts.

          1. Sounds like Harry. No wonder Harry and Meg look like running off to America/Africa.

            ***Hope it’s Africa. Meg will hate every minute of it. :o)

          2. Yup. I recall he was very keen on visiting countries as some faux trade ambassador. His visits often coincided with golf tournaments. I am not sure whether he played much but always thought he was the idiot who shouts ‘in the hole’ when a pro golfer tees off.

    3. I can understand him having contacts with the MegaRich. It was his non-job after all. What i don’t quite get is why he chose to take advantage of young girls.

      The BBC has given him an easy ride…much like the tight vaginas he amused himself with.

      The BBC will bring him down.

      He was a damned fool to say anything at all.

      Always was a wanker and he can’t march in step.

  113. I’ve just seen an advance copy of the TV interview with Prince Andrew, televised tomorrow night :-

    E:Good evening, your Highness; I’m privileged that you have come here

    to let me interview you.

    A:No problem, Emily, I’m pleased to meet you. And I must say you look very young; what are

    you doing after the interview ?

    E: Well, we can talk about that later. First I have to ask you some questions about yourself and Mr. Epstein.

    A: Oh, Mr. Epstein – yes, he was very fond of the Beatles, but he liked Pete best.

    E. No, your Highness, I’m referring to Jeffrey Epstein.

    A: Oh, I understand now. It’s about that lovely Caribbean island. I used to let him visit me there.

    It is one of the American Virgin Islands, although everyone knows there’s no such thing. Ha ha Ha ha.

    E: People are saying that he brought little girls to the island, and shared them with you ?

    A: No, I never had anything to do with his little girls. It was just a social relationship.

    E: Are you certain about that ? Paedophilia is a ver bad accusation.

    A: That’s the trouble with the media. They never get it right. It wasn’t there, it was Philadelphia.

    And it wasn’t a girl. It was cream cheese. That’s what my mother told me to say.

    Now that’s it for now. You wouldn’t like to join me for the rest of the evening, would you ?

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/522456887afff12d1119e9e762de0fe7e294a0083d79cbdd519bbada79c9ff8f.jpg

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