Saturday 12 November: Hope that Russia’s retreat signals the beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here.

561 thoughts on “Saturday 12 November: Hope that Russia’s retreat signals the beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin”

  1. Children will never recover from the terrible cost of lockdown

    The risks to childhood development were spelled out from the beginning of the pandemic, and largely ignored

    ROBERT DINGWALL • 8 November 2022 • 12:46pm

    Another day, another report revealing the damage from Covid policies to children and their development. The latest outrage is a 10 per cent annual increase in the number of five and six year-olds in England requiring specialist speech and language support.

    Is it any surprise? This is, after all, the group whose pre-school experiences were the most disrupted by pandemic restrictions on social interaction. The increase is even bigger in Scotland, which had more restrictions for longer. These pupils join a waiting list of over 65,000 under 18s referred for specialist help. They are struggling with basic skills – understanding instructions, taking turns and negotiation.

    Their experiences form an ever-growing body of evidence on the negative impact of lockdowns and face coverings. It is consistent with long-accepted psychological findings that for children, a lack of interaction with peers and caretakers is very damaging.

    Pandemic isolation weighed most heavily on children who were already deprived by poverty. They could be confined to rooms in temporary housing with a single parent for long periods. Councils closed parks and playgrounds where they might interact with other children. Even where parents could work from home, children’s opportunities for language learning and social development were limited.

    When small children could go out, they encountered masked faces everywhere. The importance of faces has been clear to psychologists since filmed studies of mother/child interaction in delivery suites during the 1970s. From the first moment a baby is handed to its mother, it focuses on her face and establishes eye contact.

    Small children need to see lip shapes and movements to be able to form words and make the correct sounds. Too often, these instances were denied. It must be said that these fundamentals of child development were as evident two years ago as they are today. The risks were spelled out by psychologists from the beginning of the pandemic, and largely ignored.

    The question now is: can these children recover? Pro-lockdown policymakers assumed that children are infinitely resilient, believing “whatever we do to them, their development will catch up”. If this were possible, it would be a very tall order. Primary teaching would have to make more use of group work, collaborative projects and learning through play. This would require teacher retraining and lower staff/child ratios, and won’t come cheap.

    Some children may never recover. The psychological evidence on lifetime outcomes is uncertain because of the ethical constraints on experiments with children, but it is likely that there are critical periods in development. If learning does not take place at that time, it may not be possible for it to happen later.

    This question, and others, could be investigated by a large-scale study to monitor the children of Covid over the next 20-40 years. However, I do not have much confidence that this will happen. Today’s children may not even have the consolation that their suffering has yielded some scientific benefit.

    Robert Dingwall is emeritus professor of sociology at Nottingham Trent University and a former member of several government advisory groups

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/08/children-will-never-recover-terrible-cost-lockdown2/

    1. “The psychological evidence on lifetime outcomes is uncertain because of the ethical constraints on experiments with children” …..
      Oh, the irony. An ethical constraint that didn’t apply to one very big experiment.

      1. A colleague and his wife brought their baby into the office during the masking time. Most people were working from home, but I was there, and unmasked, because of the bizarre rule that masks were only needed when walking around the building.
        The parents said how pleased they were that their baby could interact with unmasked people. I talked a little bit to the baby who was sitting in his mother’s arms, and his eyes were riveted on my face while I was speaking.

  4. Putin’s dirty bomb threat isn’t what it seems. 12 November 2022.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2348778391c17e612060b170cc0fd5fcac01c6b7120edc7f1ab276487ee62eec.png

    A digital illustration of a ‘dirty’ bomb explosion over a city.

    Dwarfed by the Russian flag, and sitting hunched on a gold-encrusted chair, Vladimir Putin took a gamble.

    The United States, he said, was turning Ukraine into a “testing site for military biological experiments”. Furthermore, “we know about [Ukraine’s] plans to use a so-called ‘dirty bomb’ as a provocation”.

    A dirty bomb – a conventional explosive laced with radioactive material – is used to sow panic and psychological distress. They can also make swathes of land uninhabitable for years.

    The opening sentence is a pretty good guide to the nature of the whole. This is a piece of obfuscation designed to diss Vlad and Russia. Probably part of a long term propaganda program. This can be seen in the photograph as well. A dirty bomb explosion (5kg of TNT) would be invisible at this scale. As with the Baltic pipeline sabotage operation the simplest explanation is probably the true one. The Ukies did come up with the idea and the Russians heard about it through their sympathisers. Whether it went further than that into actually building one who knows? Certainly calling in the UN nuclear inspection teams speaks to a guilty conscience.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/why-putin-talking-dirty-bombs-ukraine/

    1. At the end of the day there are millions of Russians living in Ukraine.

      Can you see Putin making many friends by radiating them

      It’s only the West that is set on a course of harming their own people through mad agendas

      1. Morning Bob. It would be politically viable for the Ukies though. They could drop it in the Donbass with its Russian population and Russian occupiers. Win/win for them!

        1. I’ve mostly tuned out to events in Ukraine, the chances of getting any truthful reports are net zero.

          So how can an opinion be formed?

    2. I thought dirty bombs were hospital waste from oncology treatment units.
      Judging by the entrance lobby at Colchester General, the explosion would mainly consist of discarded face masks.

  7. Good morrow, Gentlefolk, been battling with Office 16. Let’s see if I can get today’s funny.

    What Do You Think?

    OKAY, Norman and Barry were married in California. They couldn’t afford a honeymoon so they went back to Norman’s Mom and Dad’s house for their first married night together.

    In the morning, Johnny, Norman’s little brother, gets up and has his breakfast.
    As he is going out of the door to go to school, he asks his mom if Norman and Barry are up yet. She replies, ‘No’.

    Little Johnny asks, ‘Do you know what I think?’ His mom replies, ‘I don’t want to hear what you think! Just go to school.’

    Little Johnny comes home for lunch and asks his mom, ‘Are Norman and Barry up yet?’ She replies, ‘No.’

    Johnny says, ‘Do you know what I think?’ His mom replies, ‘Never mind what you think! Eat your lunch and go back to school ‘

    After school, Little Johnny comes home and asks again, ‘Are Norman and Barry up yet?’
    His mom says, ‘No.’

    He asks, ‘Do you know what I think?’ His mom replies, ‘OK, now tell me what you think.’

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6fdd6acb927deeecb0e0d5810603a7ab86fd2a00ddebe827c809418ac33e49de.jpg

    He says: ‘Last night Norman came to my room for the Vaseline and I think…
    I gave him my airplane glue.’

    1. Thanks NtN.
      And there was me guessing that the punchline would be something like

      ‘No, and for the last time the new au pair is called Yetta’.

  8. Weather tracker: unusual cold and snow spreading across North America. 12 November 2022.

    Significant cold is spreading widely across North America this weekend, having already affected northern and western parts so far this week.

    During the night of 9 November, temperatures across central and western provinces of Canada, as well as many western states of the US, plummeted to widely at least 10C (50F) below normal, with some parts of Canada seeing temperatures as low as 20C (68F) below normal.

    Temperatures fell below zero across a large swathe of North America, from northern parts of Arizona and New Mexico up to much of Canada. Minimum temperatures of as low as -25C (-13F) to -30C (-22F) were recorded across many parts of western Canada.

    Ahhh! Climate Crisis deniers at work!

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/12/weather-tracker-unusual-cold-and-snow-spreading-across-north-america

    1. Good morning Minty and everybody.
      “Temperatures fell below zero..”
      That is exactly why Governments are following the guidelines to create a safety Net, to prevent the climate falling below Zero.

    2. “Significant cold is spreading widely across North America this weekend…” – results of the mid-term elections?

    3. It’s hot – Climate Change.
      It’s cold – Climate Change.
      It’s wet – Climate Change.
      It’s dry – Climate Change.

          2. Sadly, HJ, I think that the majority do. Indoctrination from school age onwards by teachers who in turn were indoctrinated in their own childhood. And so it goes on.

  9. 367646+up ticks,

    Morning Each

    That “hoping for” is all very well but, being of English stock whats the chance of this “hoping” turning to realism and being applied to the palace of westminsters political inhabitants.

    Is it not found to be the apex of irony to be standing atop of Shaksspere cliff pointing out the downfall of others at the time a government organised
    invasion is being implemented below.

    Saturday 12 November: Hope that Russia’s retreat signals the beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin

  11. Good morning all.
    Still mild for the time of year, still dull outside with 7°C, dry & overcast.

    1. Still, damp and dark here after the very high winds yesterday! Quite a change! Must be the ‘climate’……
      Apologies – Good morning to all!

      1. Exactly. It’s never been dank and dark in November before.
        Now where’s a gantry over the A12?

          1. Have you watched the ‘interview’ with the splendiferously named Indigo Rumbelow?
            Let’s put it this way. She may be talking out of her arris, but she shrieks, rather than rumbles.
            According to my son, there are memes circulating adapting her name to porn star monikers.

          2. I watched it and got very cross/ furious/ sad! My old man couldn’t believe how thick she was. A brainwashed nutter with dead eyes and an empty head!

          5. She needs hair products, urgently.

            How can someone simultaneously look like a spoilt child and a shrieking old harpy?

          8. I used to work with a chap whose real name was Billy Woodcock. “Timberdick”, “Pine Rooster” and “Okehampton” (think about it!) were among his many nicknames.

    1. Everything the state does is wrong because it starts out with the assumption that because it does it, it should always do more of it at any cost.

    2. I’m reminded of a song we used to sing in my early RAF days
      There’s a nancy boy called Hunt in Mobeel
      There’s a nancy boy called Hunt in Mobeel
      There’s a nancy boy called Hunt
      He thought he had a c***
      But his arsehole’s back to front in Mobeel

  14. SIR – I have been amused by the debate about where the North of England begins (Letters, November 11).

    For a purebred Northumbrian schoolboy in the 1950s, anything beyond Darlington was getting a bit too far into the “soft Sooth”. However, after a 53-year absence I did have to take a dialect-refresher course on my return there.

    Edward Cartner
    Alnwick, Northumberland

    SIR – I was brought up in Whitehaven, Cumberland. The South begins north of Manchester.

    Vivienne Halsall
    Burnham, Buckinghamshire

    SIR – I grew up in a village a few miles north of Mansfield. In Roman times the divide between North and South was the spot on Ermine Street (now broadly the Great North Road) intersected by the River Trent. This is just north of Newark. Mansfield, Chesterfield and Matlock all lie to the north of this.

    If we allow for a buffer area between North and South called the Midlands, then, linguistically, the Midlands term of endearment “duck” turns to “love” somewhat further north. Similarly a Midlands “mashing” (of tea) morphs into a northern “brew”. Mansfield is firmly in the duck and mash camp.

    Either way, this region holds one of the loveliest works of art in Europe – the “M1 South” direction sign at Junction 27.

    Mart Ralph
    Salisbury, Wiltshire

    SIR – Chesterfield (Letters, November 10) is in the East Midlands, not the North.

    For travellers by train from the town, the North begins when you emerge from Bradway tunnel near Dronfield and begin the descent into Sheffield station. For drivers, it starts when you reach the roundabout at the northern end of the Dronfield bypass on the A61, at the southern edge of the built-up area of the city. The invisible boundary at Clay Cross which Alan G Barstow mentions (“Sound of the Midlands”, Letters, November 11) undoubtedly exists, but it separates north-east Derbyshire (drained by the Rother) from mid-derbyshire (drained by the Amber).

    Philip Riden
    Chairman, Chesterfield and District Civic Society

    SIR – Some years ago, in February, my wife and I had to drive from Kidderminster to Glasgow to collect my son from hospital.

    While waiting for his discharge we said to the nurse that we hoped to get off as soon as possible, as snow was predicted up North. Her response was an emphatic: “You’re nae up North here, sonny.” Everything is relative.

    Michael Smith
    Tedburn St Mary, Devon

    Philip Riden (I wonder if he is an incomer?) seems to be labouring under the delusion that physical boundaries on a map delineate what constitutes a region for the purposes of customs and dialects. They don’t.

    County and local authority boundaries are of political origin. They take no heed of the feudal and tribal customs and language of the people who live there. When I first ventured to Derby, the locals all called me a ‘Yorkshireman’ and could not believe that I was born and bred in the same political county as they were.

    The difference in how people speak and act in Derbyshire is all too apparent whenever one ventures south of Clay Cross.

    1. All very amusing but wrong, the North starts just South of where I am, In Norf Zummerzet. 😊
      Morning all.

          3. Based on Anne’s geography, the Midlands must reside from somewhere around Great Horkesley to the southern boundary of Stoke-by-Nayland.

    2. Where’s the boundary between the midlands and the south? I was schooled in north Oxfordshire, as near to midland towns like Warwick, Leamington and Northamptonshire as Oxford. I lived in west Oxon for a while, definitely rural south, and am now in Northamptonshire where the typical accent (at least amongst the 60+ generation) is a mixture of the rural south and the east midland, with a hint of the flat vowels of the latter.

      1. Dunno, you’ll have to ask a southerner. For me, the Midlands is a buffer zone between the North and the South, like a very wide Hadrian’s Wall.

  15. ‘Morning, Peeps. A further break in the monsoon is useful today – a shed roof to re-felt this morning.  Meanwhile, another military obituary for you:

    Martin Sinnatt, troop leader who fought the Korean War in freezing winter but got his only wound in a reindeer crash – obituary

    On top of enemy shells, Sinnatt and his men had to suffer the Korean winter: their milk at breakfast had to be sliced with a knife

    ByTelegraph Obituaries11 November 2022 • 6:20am

    Major General Martin Sinnatt, who has died aged 94, saw action in the Korean War and was subsequently the director of Combat Development at the Ministry of Defence.

    Advanced units of 1st Royal Tank Regiment (1 RTR) arrived in Korea in September 1952 and the regiment was in the country until the following November. Sinnatt, serving with B Squadron, commanded a troop of Centurion tanks.

    Based at the Hook, a ridge of great strategic value above a tributary of the Imjin River, the regiment was supporting the 29th British Infantry Brigade and was closely integrated into the infantry defence plan.

    The task of the squadrons was, by day, to harass the Chinese units – destroying command posts and defence works – and to prevent all forms of movement in the daylight. By night, they were to fire, according to a pre-arranged programme, in front of the infantry positions and in support of the infantry’s fighting patrols.

    This was a war of the hills with trenches, and defensive fire positions for the tanks on the crests. In addition to regular shelling from enemy artillery and mortar units, Sinnatt and his men had to acclimatise to the harsh Korean winter. Breakfast was an ordeal: everything was frozen hard and milk had to be served with a knife.

    Martin Henry Sinnatt was born at Sleaford, Lincolnshire, on January 28 1928. He went to Hitchin Boys’ Grammar School before attending the War Office Selection Board in London on VE Day. That night, he cheered the Royal family and the prime minister Winston Churchill from Whitehall.

    Sinnatt joined the Army in July 1945 and attended a university short course at Hertford College, Oxford, before doing his basic training at Catterick Camp with 59th Training Regiment Royal Armoured Corps (RAC).

    In 1948, he was commissioned from RMA Sandhurst into the Royal Tank Regiment and joined 1 RTR at Detmold, where they were part of the British Army of the Rhine.

    As a keen young officer in command of a troop consisting of two Comet tanks and two Centurions, he also focused on sport, and represented his regiment at swimming and water polo, athletics, rugby, football, squash, hockey and basketball. He also represented the BAOR at rugby and swimming.

    The Korean Armistice was signed on July 27 1953, and after that Sinnatt was appointed aide-de-camp to Lieutenant-General Bruce Clarke, who commanded 1st (US) Corps. This was followed by a staff job at HQ Land Forces UK, where Sinnatt was involved in the mobilisation of reservists during the Suez crisis. He subsequently joined 1 RTR in Hong Kong as regimental adjutant.

    Sinnatt was posted to Aden as GSO 2 (Plans) at HQ British Forces Arabian Peninsula shortly before it became an RAF-dominated HQ Middle East Command. In 1961, he was involved in planning and implementing the British response to Iraq’s threat to Kuwait and moved to Bahrain to establish the forward base for the British intervention.

     leader with Centurion and Conqueror tanks and moved with the regiment to Catterick Camp as the RAC training regiment. In his spare time from teaching wireless and gunnery to former civilians, he contributed to amateur dramatic productions at the garrison’s theatre.

    In 1964, a staff posting as Military Assistant (Personal Staff Officer) to the Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Northern Europe took him to Oslo. He made frequent visits to military bases across Europe, the most important of which was to take part in the annual exercises of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Belgium.

    In the north of Norway, Sinnatt acquired the only wound of his military service when, after a lengthy formal dinner, his sleigh, pulled by a racing reindeer, crashed. He was badly cut above the eye and had to rely on the beast’s local knowledge to get home.

    After returning to 3 RTR, then at Fallingbostel, Lower Saxony, and equipped with Centurion tanks, he led the advance party to Tidworth, Wiltshire, where the regiment converted to armoured cars. From 1969 to 1971, he commanded 4 RTR at Hohne, West Germany. The regiment was equipped with the new Chieftain tank but the multi-fuel engine was liable to break down, and on his first exercise Sinnatt lost a third of his tank strength soon after leaving barracks.

    On a divisional training exercise, the regiment was tasked with carrying out a night-assault river crossing. Heavy rain threatened to turn the event into a shambles, but Sinnatt drove to the river bank and dealt firmly with the problem: as chastened officers scurried back to their commands, out of the darkness emerged delighted divisional and brigade commanders. Sinnatt enhanced his reputation for a robust approach to puffed-up individuals and overstated difficulties.

    A stint on the directing staff of the National Defence College was followed by promotion to brigadier as Commander RAC at 1st British Corps, Bielefeld, West Germany. He was responsible for the effectiveness of RAC training and supervised the introduction of a series of reconnaissance vehicles.

    In 1974, he moved to the MoD as the armoured lead in the Operational Directorate, where he managed the design and development of a wide range of armoured vehicles, helicopters and tank and infantry weapons.

    Attendance at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London was followed by promotion to major general and a return to the MoD as Director of Combat Development. His role was to combine strategy, tactics and technology and look some 20 years ahead. Elements of his research are evolving on the battlefields of today.

    Sinnatt’s final appointment was that of Chief of Staff, Live Oak, based at SHAPE HQ in Belgium. Established to continue to guarantee military access to Berlin under the 1945 four-power agreements, Live Oak was a crisis-management organisation. In the absence of a crisis, he found time to reduce his golf handicap to 21.

    Sinnatt was a strong, practical, versatile soldier, the best of company and blessed with a sharp intelligence. He was admired and respected by the soldiers he led and received great support throughout his career from his wife, Sue.

    After leaving the Army in 1984, he was appointed CB. For nine years, until he retired in 1993, he was chief executive of the Kennel Club.

    Martin Sinnatt married, in 1957, Susan (Sue) Clarke. She predeceased him and he is survived by their four daughters.

    Martin Sinnatt, born January 28 1928, died September 15 2022

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/34359cb9b14e7c400686a6d83b95234d4762b731d66008bac1783ae49b4b39cc.jpg

    * * *

    A BTL with which we can all agree:

    David Tulip 21 HRS AGO

    Oh that this standard of human being could populate the upper reaches of our governing classes. We might be in a much better place now. RIP Sir.

  16. Good Moaning.
    What a perfect storm of events.
    Elderly chum’s house is sold and by this time next week, after a couple more signatures, will be off our hands and her financial future secured at least until she gets her telegram from Charles III.
    Allan Towers is bobbing along and is more all less legally sorted bar one piece of paper from Colchester Borough Council. Blood and stones come to mind, but I hope the nigh on £500 I had to bung them to was enough encourage a riffle through the Town Hall filing cabinets.
    And MB is in hospital with pneumonia. Six hours both of us could possibly have spent more enjoyably.
    Will probably be dropping in at irregular intervals.

    2. Oh Anne! So sorry to hear that MB is not at his best. Sending good wishes and hope they soon set him free! 💐

      1. Not sure whether he is in for one or two nights.
        Angus (elder son) and I were scrabbling around finding overnight stuff for him. Given the amount of packing already done, finding a suitable case was not easy. I could only find a bright pink one one. Fortunately for MB’s dignity, Angus found something more macho in another wardrobe.

          1. MB would be the first to appreciate his girlie overnight case.
            Sonny Boy was keener to keep up appearances.

        3. All the best to him for a speedy discharge from horsepiddle. And to you….. Being the (relatively) healthy one in these situations is not easy. Too much time to think… Take care.

        6. Morning Anne

          So sorry to hear your rotten news .

          I hope antibiotics kick in quickly, and the nurses keep up the fluid levels , and some decent food helps as well .

    4. Oh dear! Hope he is well looked after and recovers soon. Do please give him my love.

      Meanwhile I shall amuse myself with visions of you marxhing up to the Town Hall with a determined glint in your eye and a handbag stuffed with tenners…

    5. Oh – I hope he will have good treatment and be home soon. What a stressful time. Take care yourself.

    1. Heh, I remember those days. File systems are indexed now so there’s no real reason to defragment the disk.

      1. I’ve never had to “de-frag” (whatever the hell that is!). I’ve only ever owned and used Apple Macs.

  18. France pledges to stop more migrant boats leaving for UK. 12 November 2022.

    Britain is set to agree a Channel migrant deal with France as early as Monday where the French will put more police on the beaches, pledge to stop more small boats leaving and establish a joint control centre.

    The agreement – where the UK will pay France at least £60 million – will see a significant increase in the 200 gendarmes and volunteer officers deployed on beaches in northern France. Home Secretary Suella Braverman has previously suggested she wanted it doubled.

    France has also agreed that it will aim for a “much higher” proportion of migrants to be prevented from leaving. This year, it has stopped 29,000 migrants – around 42 per cent of the total – compared with a record near 40,000 having reached the UK.

    Ils ne passeront pas. And as convincing. You have to ask yourself how difficult would it be to prevent anyone crossing the channel in an inflatable. The answer is not at all. A couple of five man teams armed with Stanley Knives would bring the whole thing to a stop within a week. You wouldn’t even have to arrest anyone. The truth is that the present situation suits both Governments. The UK gets its quota of Immigrants and the French get to gurn to their public about discomfiting the Brits and getting rid of a part of their own problem.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/11/france-pledges-stop-migrant-boats-leaving-uk/

    2. France pledges to stop help more migrant boats leaving for UK. 12 November 2022.
      More truthful.

    3. The French also get bunged a healthy wodge of wonga by our govt for supposedly preventing the invasion,

    1. It’ll be eye watering. Waste up, debt up, spending up, taxes up. The only thing that will change is more money will flood into the state. Workers, earners and savers will all be worse off.

      These creatures are fools.

  20. Today’s leading letter:

    SIR – With the retreat of Russian forces on a number of fronts in Ukraine, and the diplomatic humiliation that the country will experience at the G20 summit, we are probably witnessing the end of Vladimir Putin.

    His position was established and sustained through intrigue, the ruthless elimination of perceived rivals, the suppression of free speech and the cultivation of a strongman image. He has distanced himself from his people and relies on a small cabal of advisers. His needless and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and inability to defeat a country fighting for its very survival prove that a greedy empire-builder will never overcome a determined and committed opponent.

    If he is lucky, he will be retired to a small dacha well away from the corridors of power, with plenty of time to reflect on how he has caused his own downfall and brought shame on his country. But many former Russian leaders have not been lucky.

    David S Ainsworth
    Manchester

    I think his ‘luck’ ran out the day he decided to invade Ukraine, Mr Ainsworth. Frankly I can’t see him surviving to retirement, given the number of generals and others who have come to a sticky end – the latest being the victim of an alleged car-crash. At least it’s a variation on the old ‘falling out of a window’ routine. I wonder what they are planning for Vlad?

    2. The EU is frantic to look ‘big’ on the stage’. What it ignores is that it caused this mess in the first place.

      As for walking out – is this a student protest? Are they children?

  21. SIR – The salary of Amanda Pritchard, head of NHS England, is reportedly just under £260,000 per annum.

    Average pay for a nurse is about £34,000, so that equates to seven nurses for the price of the top manager, with some money to spare.

    Consider, moreover, the hundreds of lower managers on between £100,000 and £150, 000, and the sums are startling. Something is surely wrong.

    Jennie Naylor
    East Preston, West Sussex

    Quite so, Ms Naylor. There has already been one report recently about NHS management, although I can’t find it on the interweb. Has snyone seen it? Or has it been parked in a government tray labelled ‘Not now’ ?

      1. I’ll breakdown our nursing team’s bands as an example vvof. We have
        1 x band 8a
        4 x band 7
        9 x band 6
        2 x band 5

        Look at the salary tables you posted and remember most nurses will pick up unsocial hours enhancements on top of that basic.

        I don’t get it. Are they striking because they think they aren’t paid enough or not paid enough for what they do? Plenty of people earn less and manage fine.

        And why just the nurses? Do they think they deserve more because they are who the patient sees? For every nurse, there are dozens other staff who the patient doesn’t see but who also contribute to their care directly or indirectly – pharmacist, porter, IT technician, plumber, theatre assistant, secretary, radiographer, cleaner, clinical engineer, cook, graphics designer, cashier, security guard, data analyst, gardener….. all on the same salary scale. I don’t hear any of them going on strike. The thing is, though, as everyone I’ve listed above is on the same salary scale, there will be hundreds of thousands more people than just the nurses to count to calculate what they’re demanding will cost.

        1. I hope the 812 diversity managers go on strike – nobody will notice which will prove they aren’t needed

          1. They exist only due to government dictat. All such people do is cause more work while achieving nothing (which is pretty much the definition of government).

        2. Thanks for your reply it confirms my view that established nurses have a reasonable salary. How long does it take for a reasonably newly qualified nurse to get to band 6, ie the pay band that covers the average pay quoted.
          I ask because we hear there is a shortage of nursing staff with disquiet being expressed regarding nursing staff having to be recruited from outside the UK.
          It doesn’t surprise me that nursing recruitment is struggling when it is necessary to complete a 3 year university degree with all the debt that entails and then to start your career in the low £20K’s.
          My granddaughters earn nearly half as much again sat at a desk in an office.
          Perhaps a rethink of having to have a degree instead of the previous ways of recruiting and learning on the job would improve the situation, we may even have Matron’s reappearing.

        3. You raise a very good point about the ancillary (that’s not the right term, but i’ll use it) who do all the other work.

          Having recently been in hospital the nurses were great. The doctors, even the one who banged on about my being fat (as if I was oblivious to it).

          Is it that they want more pay for what they do? Comparability with agency staff?

          1. CSWs (Clinical Support Workers) are paid on band 3 or 4.
            (We tend to call them HCAs – Health Care Assistants) CSW is something else in our field
            Commercial sex worker

    2. One has to wonder what she, and no doubt her team do. What does the department for health then do if this person exists? Why have we then trusts as well?

      Perhaps – just perhaps – the problem isn’t money, but plain, obvious inefficiency?

  22. SIR – In recent weeks there seems to have been less comment on the dreadful service offered by the DVLA.

    I doubt, however, that this means the situation has improved. We have been waiting for 12 months for my wife’s driving licence to be reinstated. It was withdrawn 18 months ago for medical reasons. It took six months for the DVLA to acknowledge the application and now, a further six months on, with all the medical evidence provided, the outcome is still awaited. It is impossible to make contact with anybody at the DVLA. Every approach is rejected.

    This department is unfit for purpose and it can only be hoped that the new Transport Secretary is able to knock it into shape.

    Graham Guest
    Backwell, Somerset

    For goodness sake, Mr Guest, wind up your MP, that’s what they are there for!

    1. Judging from the scorn poured on the responses of MPs to letters posted here in NoTTL, the MP are there to wind YOU up, not vice versa.

    2. You seem confused, Mr Guest. government departments are not there to servie you. They are there for you to wait on their every whim.

      My own experience with the DVLA was them asking if they could email or text me the information I asked for. They sent a letter. Which arrived 3 weeks after the decision had been made.

      Government wastes money continually. It is inefficient, unresponsive and has no incentive to change or improve. It gets paid regardless – and that needs to change.

      1. That’d be Stapleford. He downvotes everything ogga posts. This was funny until Ogga posted about the conviction of the pakistani muslim paedophile rapists. It seems stapleford is a bitter but thick individual.

      3. 367646+ up ticks,

        Morning G,
        It’s my personal (no one else receives it’s attention) gauge to confirm I’m on target.

        It does, I’m sure, an unintentional service.

    2. And all too sadly true. If border force won’t defend our borders (their job) then they should be sacked.

  24. The teenage scribblers in the Telegraph have excelled themselves today.

    There is a photograph of Toy Boy and his troops marking the 104th anniversary of the 1918 Armistice…“which ended the Second World War.”

    1. The lack of real integrity, proof reading or just basic common sense is staggering- and they want people to pay for this!

  25. SIR – When I was 10, my family moved to the industrial North. On Remembrance Day, the factory whistle blew and everyone climbed down ladders, crawled out of machinery and hurried to the huge factory yard.

    The steam coal and coke train chuffed to a halt as every man took off his hat and every woman checked that hers sat right. Smoke still billowed from the chimneys, but apart from the slightly hissing train there was total silence. The machines were turned off.

    My parents touched hands briefly. People caught each other’s eyes and nodded their recognition, for everyone in that yard that day had known war. Our father was in all the big convoys, and many friends went down with HMS Hood. Three uncles fought and two never returned (one in Burma, one in France). My mother was in MI5 and her parents at the War Office, refugees from occupied Jersey. Like everyone, they never talked of it, and that’s why the starkness of the day was so moving.

    Jacqueline King
    Castle Cary, Somerset

    I can clearly remember standing still in the playground of my junior school at the appointed time, and traffic in the busy road alongside pulling over. Some people today seem to take for granted all those millions of lives sacrificed. Yesterday a very small group of us gathered around the war memorial in our village. The traffic was relentless, but I was heartened to see three relatively young workmen nearby stop their digging for the duration of our short service, including of course the two-minute silence.

    1. It was as you describe, Hugh, in Newport Pagnell when we lived there.
      Large gathering at the war memorial (just away from our flat), short service, and the traffic all stopped in the road with many getting out of the car and standing with bowed head.

      1. We have a small service at the village war memorial then everyone heads off to the church hall for a free breakfast

    2. I was part of a small crowd that attended an ad hoc commemoration at the local war memorial in 2020. Just before the eleventh hour, a bus pulled up at a nearby bus stop. That bus stayed there until the two minutes’ silence was over. Respect!

    3. We had a Post Office van and a white van stop for the duration of the service at the war memorial on the 11th. Non-commercial vehicles just drove past.

  27. SIR – I am sorry to disappoint Arthur Bayley (“Music lovers turning away from classical radio”, Letters, November 11) but the Proms have already been spoilt by the BBC.

    This year we only tuned in two or three times, as the choices made by the programmers simply did not suit our taste. And earlier in the week my wife was reading about BBC plans to change the output of Radio 3 (Arts, November 9), with more music for the younger generation.

    We have already reduced our listening to Radio 3 because of previous changes, and despair at what will be offered next.

    Barry Bright
    Storrington, West Sussex

    Ditto, Mr Bright. You are not alone.

  28. Local paper has a “How climate-friendly are you?” survey.
    It asks all kinds of questions about your house, car & habits, and asks how much you earn. The result is, the more you earn the more you are climate-unfriendly. How does that work? The more money one has, the more one can afford an electric car, masses of insulation in your house, more expensive eco/green local food, and so on, surely? Or, are they subtly attacking those who are better-off?

    1. An ecomentalist person I know drives a tesla, has solar panels on his roof, grows his own vegetables in his garden – using a mini digger to site his green house (an electric one, of course) and works for a big cloud service provider. His vegetables are driven to him in a diesel truck, picked by foreigners who’ve travelled here.

      The hypocrisy is staggering, and they think they’re righteous heroes.

        1. I don’t think so. Hed’ probably let them run about and be surprised when they were killed.

          He certainly was when thieves took advantage of the storm and pinched all his power tools. Apparently communism doesn’t apply when it’s your stuff being stolen.

      2. If he grows his own veg in his garden, why are they being driven to him in a diesel truck and picked by foreigners who have travelled here?

    2. It might be a good idea for our local paper to ask similar questions, our local council are discussing the possibility of allowing the building of another 600 or so new homes on local greenbelt land.
      More are planned elsewhere in the local district. Limp dems Council.
      And there seems to be a desire to re-state the purpose of the whole of the area inside of the M25, as London. And introduce extra costs for motorists, who have the audacity to already live there.

      1. I tell you, they’d just ignore any objections – that’s what they’ve done here. The local market town has already got more housing than its quota (and another 600+ estate has been approved on farmland despite objections) yet they are to demolish a local landmark for five more houses “despite local objections”.

        1. It all depends on how much the developers offer the councils in bungs.
          It’s amazing how wealthy some people have become due to over development.
          And it’s all a million miles from their fake green/carbon footprint policies.

    4. Periodically my electricity company asks me to fill in a questionnaire. The latest was about putting gadgets like heat pumps in your house and how likely you would be to install them. Naturally, I clicked “not at all likely” and they wanted to know why. I gave them chapter and verse about being non-green, inefficient, expensive to run, requiring considerable distruption during installation, etc. I expect their heads will have exploded.

  29. This exceedingly rapid heating of the world’s climate marks the boundary between the geological epochs of the Palaeocene and the Eocene, and so is known as the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum – PETM for short. Over a very brief geological span of less than 10,000 years, massive amounts of carbon (carbon dioxide, CO2, or methane, CH4) were injected into the atmosphere, creating a powerful greenhouse effect, and the global temperatures jumped rapidly by 5–8 °C in response. This temperature spike made the world the hottest it has been for the past few hundred million years.

    Despite this huge jolt to the environment, no mass extinction on the scale of the end-Cretaceous or end-Permian (see here, here) was triggered, although the ecosystems of the world were utterly transformed. Tropical conditions extended all the way to the poles, with broad-leafed trees, crocodiles and frogs all thriving within the Arctic. The PETM caused the disappearance of some deep-sea amoeba, called foraminifera, that were unable to cope with the warmer waters and reduced oxygen at depths, whereas plankton such as dinoflagellates bloomed in the balmy sunlit surface of the oceans. The global environmental disruption of the PETM also drove rapid evolution in many animals, and in particular this temperature spike seems to have ushered the emergence of the new APP orders of mammals.

    Lewis Dartnell, Origins (pp. 84-85). Random House. Kindle Edition.

    The long view of the Climate Crisis.

    1. Considering mankind’s entire modern existence is barely 3000 years planning to shut down our entire way of life for the monomania of tiresome spoiled Lefties within 5 years is just idiotic.

      But they don’t care. The best bit, though is when having destroyed society and economy the whinging green Left decide they want something like glasses or medicine and find such no longer exists.

    2. Then why did it cool down? All that CO2 caused plant life to grow in abundance, and when it died, become coal & oil?

  30. 367646+ up ticks,

    The big question is, at what daily cost ?

    Dt,

    France pledges to stop more migrant boats leaving for UK
    Deal with Britain would see significant increase in the 200 gendarmes and volunteer officers deployed on beaches in northern France

    Be ironically would it not, England taxpayers build an efficient french police force whilst still supporting hometown police farce.

    1. From what has previously been shown of the Froglè police, they just stand around smoking and watching the action.
      The most effective way to stop this is to confiscate all the rubber boats. It really is that simple. But clearly not to the French.

  31. Good morning all, just a quick dip before heading out to release some golf balls back into the wild. Rain is allegedly over for the weekend, so hopefully a dry Remembrance service tomorrow.

    1. Two of our sons and a friend played yesterday. They had to give up because of 4 old codgers taking ages in front of them on each hole. I understand exactly what they mean.

  33. Morning all 🙂
    Warmish with a few shades of grey.
    Sunnak to cut the defence budget.
    Oh the absolute irony of these people.
    I suppose we could expect the armed forces to retaliate………no, I think not.

    1. Warm? It’s really cold here – actually proper chilly.

      Note they never cut the MoD. A useless, inefficient, arrogant failing organisation. Nor is there redress in the Home office, or closure of BEIS, or reduction of staff in education. The tombstones to failure carry on growing like mold while services are cut.

      1. Warmish…..😉 in fact 12c
        Top Snivel serpents will always survive. It’s their inbred nature.

      2. 10.1C and clear blue sky here. No wind of course, the windmills have extracted all the energy from the air flow..

  34. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH

    HAVE YOU SEEN THE JOHN LEWIS CHRISTMAS AD?

    I shall be writing to ask
    1. Why is it OK to have a man dressed as a woman? Heaven forfend if someone blacked up.
    2. What about women? Are they allowed to use males’ changing rooms?

    I am fed up with this entire trans debacle, but if it must be in the media every day, at least give then same coverage to trans men (really men) as trans women (really women). Men’s rights are dominating women’s all over again. There’s a replacement for the patriarchy – it’s called the tranniearchy

    2. Am I missing something here? The John Lewis ad is about a man learning to skateboard to make his young guest feel more welcome.

    1. I find that quite amusing 😄
      Some of our ‘must have’ neighbours have spent small fortunes upgrading their driveways and electricity suppliers to cope.
      I expect they’ll be company cars. To dodge the costs.

      1. Electric cars have nothing to do with the environment – they are a weapon with which to chastise ordinary people’s use of personal transport. This will lead to people not being able to get to work, do their jobs and earn a living. Electric cars are one of the WEF’s many instruments of punishment to hasten their nefarious ends.

        2. I’m genuinely interested in a second hand market for electric cars. Running one for 5 years, then replacing it probably reduces the battery some 20% of capacity. Now are those batteries more prone to exploding in an accident?

          I saw a fellow continually charging a laptop as a desktop device and the battery had bulged some 20%. It’s a fire and explosion risk. Electric cars use the same battery technology so are they going to exhibit the same problem?

    2. Pity I can’t do that with my personal finances. Deficit & debt looming – just take more money from my employer. Sorted, job done.

      1. Sunak and Hunt are united in their determination to destroy private enterprise in order to facilitate and speed up Schwab’s Great Reset.

  36. Modern Life……

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b4ed0571c3819a47dc091867276514d1f8ccbd3be4ed8e74bb7792eb3a5a84c1.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8244d37e19c239fbd3360cb8c7fa3768e93136bf64dd3ccbcdc5129d09dac923.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1e87039facf0201c1819bb5ab9ebb608770cf2502bda0a7b5a461899fc25ad42.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/da9d3efc2de15ee71397ab52df8c516053c899bc226e084c4c6c216dc81389fb.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/895b961f32c934809a51d28f452f1b76dfd87afb250d52aed8b42ef9468920f2.jpg

    2. Re the swing closure. It’s probably been used for many years with a snow problems at all. We had a similar circumstance in our village after a new development was built. It took the council nearly 18 months to make their minds up regarding the safety of the brand new equipment. The same equipment is used daily by lots of local children. All behind a perimeter fence, no dogs.
      How easy was that.

    3. Prince Andrew was Ghislaine Maxwell’s friend rather than her client and this is why her clients ganged up on them both.

      Prince Andrew may well be a pretty unsavoury character but the fact that his odious brother, Charles, and his odious nephew, William, have joined in with the MSM’s judgment and treatment of him is disgusting.

      1. The Gormless Duke, an amateur when it comes to rich people, fell right into a money trap set by professionals.

        I do not find either the King or the Prince of Wales odious, but each to their own. I think these brotherly arguments is more about whether royals should behave like Americanized (sic) celebs, or whether their position depends on the goodwill of their subjects, and an element of responsibility for them.

        The MSM – now that is odious!

        1. Families – and especially the Royal Family – should stick together in public. I find that Charles and his first son have betrayed Andrew in a quite disgusting manner – you disagree with me but I would never dream of giving you a down vote. Is down voting a fellow Nottler the Nottler way? Charles and his son have certainly down-voted the Duke of York.

          On a more harmonious note: why not post a video clip of you singing in your a cappella motet group?

          1. I did post a video clip of me singing ‘The Star of Hope’ – an aria from Alma Deutscher’s ‘Cinderella’ she released a karaoke version of for Lockdown in 2020. A friend of hers assembled all the contributions into an online choral version. I don’t know how to access it since Google “upgraded” YouTube, otherwise you could downvote it at will.

            When Andrew was born in 1960, he was second-in-line to the throne. He is now eighth. His demotion must have been hard to stomach, especially by a bunch of children – the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th and 7th are all minors. Harry was also second-in-line when he was born, and is now fifth.

            Even when his mother was alive, Charles had to balance family solidarity with public willingness to support in style an extended royal family. The problem with Andrew was his lavish tastes and sense of entitlement, which were more of a threat to the Firm than any criticism over family disloyalty. Anne and Edward and their brood, however, were prepared for a more simple version of royalty, even though one of them is now in the Jungle with Matt Hancock.

            I think referring to our King and Prince of Wales as “odious” merited a downvote. Sometimes our leaders deserve such an insult, but sometimes too they are doing a tough job maintaining national morale and need all the support they can get, especially since Charles and William are both good men at heart. I know the globalist money makers do not like Charles, but he has done a lot of good covering for some pretty dreadful things these people have done.

          2. I did find a clip of you singing on the internet and I enjoyed it – I certainly would have up-voted it if It had been an option.

          3. i remember doing it. It was under the cherry tree on Easter evening with a howling gale and the creaking of the fig tree against an outbuilding like an old ship. I set up the laptop playing the piano accompaniment by the composer, a sound recorder and my camera to catch the video. Then on with the groaning. The composite video had two saws playing along – one was a posh musical saw, and the other you could saw a plank with.

        2. Jeremy, he was trapped by an ordinary businessman, not a ‘professional’. The distinction is that a professionally qualified person should be capable of altruism. For example, a medical Doctor who attends a patient for free, or a solicitor who works pro bonio.

      2. As I’ve said many times, the alleged puffin activity* took place in the UK with a young lady who was, at the time, not only above the age of consent, but also above the age where it was permissible for her to be engaged in prostitution.
        Further cormorant activity* allegedly took place in an area under US jurisdiction, but by then she was, apparently, over the age of consent for the relevant area.

        *Other seabirds are available

    2. 850.000
      And the Mail make a big splash of highlighting one of them.
      Someone as in many others, need to get on with the job.

      2. Well, putting a plastic bag over your head will certainly ensure that you don’t die of Convid, especially if you seal it nice and tightly?

        1. That may be true, but it will still go down as “Dying with Covid” for the official figures, on the understanding that Covid may have been around at the time.

  40. Met vows to overhaul database on gangs

    ‘The Met has admitted the Gangs Matrix is unlawful and that the way it operated breached human rights’

    SCOTLAND Yard has agreed to overhaul a controversial database that holds information on suspected gang members, following a legal challenge that argued it breached the right to a private and family life.

    The Gangs Violence Matrix (GVM) was collated in 2012 in the wake of London riots and was used to record intelligence on thousands of alleged gang members across the city.

    Critics claimed people were added without their knowledge sometimes simply because of where they lived or who they knew and the information could be made available to third parties.

    In 2018 the Met agreed to adapt the way it used the data after an investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ruled it had committed multiple data protection breaches.

    Last month, Sir Mark Rowley, the Met Commissioner, agreed to remove more than 1,000 young men who were on the list even though they were considered to pose little or no risk of violence.

    But Liberty, the human rights organisation, was due to bring a case in the High Court next week on behalf of a musician who claimed he had been the victim of repeated discrimination.

    Awate Suleiman had spent more than two years trying to find out if his name was on the database, but was refused permission.

    The Met has also now agreed that people can apply to find out if their names are on the Matrix and will only be refused in limited circumstances.

    Lana Adamou, lawyer at Liberty, said: “Having defended this claim for over a year, the Met has now admitted that the Gangs Matrix is unlawful – and that the way it operated breached the human rights of those who were placed on it.

    ”Once on the list, people’s data could be shared with third parties including the Home Office, local authorities, the DWP, housing providers, schools and the DVLA – leading to potentially lifechanging consequences.”

    Sir Mark said: “We acknowledge that the Gangs Violence Matrix does need to be redesigned, taking into account improvements in statistical methods and technologies.”

    FFS! Words fail me!

    Gangs, and their members, do not give a monkey’s for “human rights”; it is their raison d’être! Therefore why should law-abiding citizens give a monkey’s about the “human rights” of gang members.

    1. I thought the Met deleted the Criminals’ Database a year or two back.

      Those ending up on DBS report under hearsay and malice evidence, but otherwise without foundation or charge are there for life. No human rights there; it is “Safeguarding”. Likewise those suspected of inappropriate speech.

      Since when did the legal system have any regard to the ‘Right to Family Life’ for discarded fathers, guilty of nothing other than being an inconvenience to someone with a protected characteristic?

      1. “Likewise those suspected of inappropriate speech.”

        Well, I bet most of us are on that Database

    2. Its proper name is The National Council For Civil Liberties. The TNCFCL controls, or is controlled by, a charitable trust called The Civil Liberties Trust. The income of the joint organisation, which operates as ‘Liberty’ was £2.4m in 2021.

      It appears not to be connected with Liberty of Regent Street.

      1. Ah, Liberty of Regent Street. My favourite department store whenever I venture down the ‘Smoke’.

          2. We used to live in Bow, and then Millwall / Isle of Dogs, in simpler times. I’d like to go back for a trip down memory lane, but it’s expensive to get there and I strongly suspect that the old places aren’t there any more.

          3. One of my nieces was a very athletic girl who got blues in rowing and gymnastics at Oxford and was (and still is) fanatically keen on keeping fit.

            I joined her fiancé, a young doctor, who had rowed in the Goldie boat at Cambridge, and a group of friends for his stag night and we visited a pub or two. At one time Joe was asked to give a speech and somebody asked him: “What’s it going to be like married to a woman who is even fitter than you are”? To which Doctor Joe replied : “She has muscles in places where I don’t even have places!”

    3. How can they do their job without collecting this information?
      But why are they making it available to third parties?

    1. These cretins really have lost the plot – who promotes the idiots? Oh, silly me – it’s the higher up idiots, of course.

      1. He went from Constable to Assistant Commissioner in 11 years..…

        I bet Grizz has a view…..

    4. I wear a vest when it’s cold out.
      Does he ram dildoes up his jacksey to understand gay men?

    5. Imagine what his teams are saying behind his back… Oops, I think he just lost all vestige of authority there.
      Arse.

      1. If, as Bill suggests, he went from Constable to Assistant Commissar [deliberate] in just 11 years, then I doubt he has much respect anyway.

        1. No doubt fast tracked along the favoured career path. Heck, that he’s more interested in the menopause than criminals (and with 70% of Met police not arresting anyone) it’s no wonder the country is in a mess.

        2. Not old enough to have accumulated experience of life or the job to have a position like that.

    4. Er, isn’t the teacher supposed to do something about their spelling rather than complaining that spell-check doesn’t work?

      It makes sense to use tablets for textbooks, as one tablet is lighter than ten books. But they should NEVER replace pen and paper!

  44. First pint of this season’s cider. Not bad at all, for a young cider! Be even better once it has matured a bit.

  45. Arsenal star Oleksandr Zinchenko wins prize for his protests against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 12 November 2022.

    Oleksandr Zinchenko has received an award following his protests against Russia’s invasion of his war-torn homeland of Ukraine.

    The Arsenal star won the Media Diversity Champion of the Year prize at the UnitedHealth Group’s European Diversity Awards on Friday.

    Media Diversity Champion of the Year? God give me strength!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-11418063/Oleksandr-Zinchenko-receives-award-work-protest-against-Russias-invasion-Ukraine.html?ico=topics_pagination_desktop

    1. Good morning Minty.

      Did Bill Thomas mis-pronoun you yesterday as he referred to you as ‘him’ ?

      Would my old Latin declension be correct using the assumption: Araminta – feminine; Aramintus – masculine; and Aramintum – neuter.?

      1. Unless, of course, it follows the pattern of agricola – a farmer – masculine, but declining like a feminine noun.

    2. A number of BTL comments ask why he’s making speeches in England and not actually fighting in Ukraine? I liked this one too – “Why he was not protesting against the extermination of Eastern Ukrainians by the West in the last 8 years” although I think for West you should read “other Ukrainians”?

    1. Interesting that the position is open to foreigners.

      They are obviously worried that they won’t get enough British applicants.

    3. The “employer” pension contribution isn’t too shabby :

      A Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 27%!

    1. Tax payer funded of course. Someone very important, needs to give this government a massive kick up the backside.

      1. Every member of the home office needs taking out and shooting.

        This is their fault. May should be disembowled. We need to repeal multiple laws that give these fools the power to flood this country with vermin.

        1. I’m coming round to that idea. I understand now why our forebears had powerful men hanged, drawn and quartered then stuck their heads on a spike. Mind, a lot of popular meme makers forget that was also the fate of William Wallace. Rebellions were crushed in the same manner as power grabs.

  48. It’s the London Lord Mayor’s show today massive parades. Ill bet there’ll one person in particular who will not be there.
    The audience/spectators and participants seem to be hideously white as well.
    Just sayin’……

    2. Assuming you’re referring to the grand mullah, I believe it has nothing to do with Khan, if it did it would be ruined.

      1. Agreed but he should show respect and get on his knees at Mansion house.
        Every one else seems to be there this morning.
        The new Lord Mayor’s hat is a huge triangle with around 2ft long sides.

  49. In Milford-on-Sea in the 1960s they used to organise a hockey match on Boxing Day on the Village Recreation Ground and everyone who turned up was invited to play meaning there were about 30 players on each side.

    Two teams were organised – those wearing hats and those not wearing hats. In the pantomime spirit and for fun many hatted male players put on make up and falsies and dresses or skirts. A male friend of mine was spending Christmas with us and we borrowed hats and clothes from my mother and joined the hatted team.

    After the match many of us repaired to the house of one of my village friends for tea. Our host, who had failed to see through his disguise, quietly and in some concern was heard to say about the chap who had spent Christmas with us : “Who is that extraordinarily grotty woman in a green dress?”

  50. Kwasi Kwarteng has got his revenge on Liz Truss… but who was really to blame?
    Everyone involved in the mini-Budget agrees it was a disaster. But they all seem to think it’s someone else’s fault
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2022/11/12/kwasi-kwarteng-has-got-revenge-liz-truss-who-really-blame/

    I am not convinced that everyone agrees that the mini-Budget was philosophically a disaster though its delivery was clumsy.

    BTL

    The are some very evil forces at work.

    After betraying Kwarteng Liz Truss meekly replaced him with one of the most loathed men in politics and one who was completely opposed to her own economic philosophy.

    Can anyone think of a coherent reason other than that she was being threatened or blackmailed as to why she should have made Hunt her chancellor?

      1. I think that would require a degree of intelligence…clearly lacking in the case of Untrussworthy.

      2. But Sunak probably wanted Hunt but used dark forces to ensure that it was Truss rather than himself who appointed him. They now form a completely malignant globalist duo.

        The whole thing stinks to heaven.

        1. As I observed a few weeks ago, I am beginning to believe that a Labour government would be a good thing to get it over with quickly, rather than the death by a thousand cuts we are getting.

          1. It shouldn’t matter who infests parliament. The lot of them should be powerless without our say so.

        2. 367646+ up ticks,

          Afternoon R,

          Tis no matter what the politico’s do it’s the name that counts, even though it’s a nine bob note name.

          It is the family tree vote, weave always dunnit.

    2. We suspect that she was being threatened.

      Now Hunt, a raving Remainer, can call the shots.

      Not good for Britain or the Tories.

      1. The globalists got their way. Depression, recession and crippling costs. The entire state machine is deliberately engineering this to force the destruction of this country and it’s ramming back in to the hated EU.

    3. I honestly don’t know how else it could have been introduced. It was a budget. No one squealed when Brown destroyed our pensions and kept borrowing trillions.

      We finally get a tax cutting budget that would leav pepole better off and it seemed the entire Treasury was on the Wail fighting fervently about the scrapping of the upper rate. No mention of anything else, just that issue. The bankers should have been ignored. The IMF clearly said ‘Look, you’re going back in the hell of the EU. we have decided this. This stops that. Undo it. All of it, or else.’

    4. She didn’t willingly replace him – she was forced to by globalist puppet masters. Just as she was subsequently pushed out in favour of Sunak.

  51. 367646+ up ticks,

    We should have as decent peoples, a picture card deck of our clearly seen
    current political enemas, hunt would be current odious top flavour of the week

    No Other Way’ – Globalist Hunt Prepares British Public for Tax Hikes, Service Cuts

    1. Something else that our political classes have effed up.
      It’s hard to believe how stupid they all are.

        1. Those who purport to rule us are overruled by the globalist blob. They may be both stupid and malicious but I don’t think they are in charge. We saw how easy it was to get both Boris and Truss removed when they didn’t toe the line.

      1. Comment withdrawn, I don’t want our front door smashed in by the other old bill.
        Present company accepted 😉😊

  53. How about this for absolute insulting cheek.
    I worked and consequently paid into the system for 53 years. Turn up uninvited in a rubber boats and your seen without question.
    A letter arrived today from the NHS regarding my recent knee flare up. With my current back problem I’m walking like a friggin’ penguin.
    The letter told me orthopaedic consultant will see me on the 7th of june 2023. FFS !!!!

    1. You will be either dead or better by then (as my old GP said to me many years ago) but that’s how they try to fob off those who are relying on them to solve a problem. Complain. It got you seen before.

        1. Really, it’s ‘amazing’ how they can line people up at a drop of a hat to inject poison into our systems, but when medical help is required, it is clear off and get on with it. FOAD is being more and more implemented by the day.
          I’ve had bone rubbing on bone for at least 5 years. They have given me exercise to do !!! What a waste of time that was. I’ve tried knee supports, but of course they don’t work. Steroid injections only work twice after it goes wrong for the second time, you’re on your own again.

          1. I’ve sent a polite and pleading email to PALS.
            I found out, it can cost nearly 14 k for the knee op. Not only I can’t afford it. Why should I pay. I paid in for 54 years.

          2. Can you not be referred to another area where the waiting list is shorter? I’m pretty sure we can ‘choose’!

      1. My hair is too light in colour. ………err dye and make up perhaps.
        But they do not have my DNA or fingerprints. So I’m in with a chance. But maybe the gendarmes might spot me and arrest me. And of course, medical records might surface. Nah I’ll try and bang on the door at Palls they were pretty good last time. But i won’t hold my breath. That’s really what they are after. I’m going to try and look up my medical records and present them with the facts. ………I maybe some time.

        1. Stop you illegally exiting France towards the UK … you daft or suffin’ (c) Bill Thomas of this parish.
          Seriously for a moment, hope you get it sorted ASAP.

      1. I don’t think they let me become a member with my ongoing conditions.
        And that op can cost around 14 k.

      1. I have my fathers copy of the Just So Stories, illustrated by Kipling. All the initial letters of the stories are like illuminated manuscripts and illustrations are fabulous! I particularly like the Elephants Child getting his new ‘dose’ and beautiful Balkis in the Butterfly who Stamped!

        1. “Led go you’re hurting be.”

          (You must have been your father’s best belovèd in those long and far off days)

  55. Nottlers, good day!

    This is a war, the culmination of centuries of covert evil and perversion, that has finally been broken out of cover prematurely by the 2016 US election, an event that was definitely not meant to result as it did. The virus outrage was a tragic farcical failure, and the black hats have been scrabbling to catch up
    ever since. Had we lost 60 million to the Wuhan re-functioned bug, as Gates so blandly forecast just after Trump’s election, it does not take much to see that the submisson to the wickedness and belief in the propaganda would have been near-complete.

    The subversion of global food security is a base part of the evil strategy. Hungry people is the aim. One thing you can be damn sure of – Gates and his cabalistas will not be giving up rare meat any time soon if they can help it.

    In the meantime the longer we take to fully understand the binary choice we are faced with the harder and more painful will be the cost of putting these parasites into history and finally acknowledging that our own weakness and materialism has brought us to this low ebb.

  56. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/415e9dfd78f49f1d82c5125c97a22c88b16200d44e5e01353386d25166039624.jpg Where’s Philip?
    I bet you can’t top this, pal. Tomorrow I’m going all Jamaican with some barbecued pigtails! Oh yes! I’ll present another photo when they are ready to devour.

    I shall not use all the pigtails though: I shall save one for the necessary flavouring (along with coconut milk, thyme and scallions) for the Jamaican side dish of “rice ‘n’ peas” (in reality rice and kidney beans). Can’t wait. 👍🏻

  58. 367646+ up ticks,

    There were many happy clappers on question time when one politico with voice raising to a crescendo ( hitler style ) said “we should never have come out of the eu

    I did think he had done it in his trousers.

    Then one lab surely political reject said, we are thinking of the children, and I thought as you were in 2014 when the Jay report was published in regards to rotherham.

    Nothing like it since the 40s and haw haw.

    1. But she’s not wrong is she ?
      Now we have a race against time.
      If our political idiots do something soon this terrible situation will get completely out of hand. And very, very, dangerous.

      1. Indeed.
        When the forces of peace are perceived to be impotent, the forces of evil will move in and take over.

        2. “A country that does not respect its own army will one day learn to respect someone else’s” – Napoleon Bonaparte

      1. I greatly enjoyed this song but I must confess that I have never had a girlfriend called Maggie and it now too late to have one! Susies, Annies, Rosies, Sarahs, Pennys, yes – and maybe a Jane or a Jenny or two but no Maggies and just one Caroline!

      2. Oh yes Grizzly,
        I was engaged in 1968 then got married , and my friends teased me like mad but MOH hated the record , I feared it was a sign of things to come ..!!

          1. The best team on the day wins 🤗what can you do. The England manager wasn’t very happy. 🤬

    1. Well done!
      Par 4 for me.
      Wordle 511 4/6

      🟨⬜⬜🟩⬜
      🟨🟩⬜🟩⬜
      ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

      1. Effing Bogey Five for me!

        Wordle 511 5/6
        🟨⬜⬜🟩⬜
        ⬜🟩⬜🟩⬜
        ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟨
        🟨🟩🟨🟩⬜
        🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

      3. Me too.
        Wordle 511 4/6

        🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨
        ⬜🟨🟨🟨⬜
        ⬜🟩🟨🟩🟨
        🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  64. From the DT

    Sick pensioner who called NHS 111 given Tesco phone number before being admitted to hospital

    Elderly woman awaits surgery for blocked intestine after health service
    sends wrong number for local pharmacy and daughter takes her to A&E

  65. If the headline looks bad…

    Solar Energy Firm Collapses Owing £655 Million to British Taxpayers

    …then the source of the money should be of concern to everybody.

    Toucan Energy Holdings 1 Ltd., which owns 53 solar farms across the country and was run by the financier Liam Kavanagh, had borrowed £655 million ($773 million) over four years from Thurrock Council to fuel its expansion.

    In September, Rob Gledhill, the former leader of the council, resigned after the government appointed a commissioner to take over the Conservative-led authority. At the time of his resignation, Gledhill said in a statement: “As Leader of the Council the political buck stops with me and as such it would only be right, and expected, that I resign as Leader of the Council.”

    What was a Council doing getting involved in these deals?

    Daily Sceptic – Solar Energy Firm Collapses

    BTL has some interesting comments.

    2. Near the top of the BTL “most voted” list is this one: “In this absurd drive to pretend to save the planet, government will chuck our money about like confetti. They throw good money after bad everywhere in this insane ideological group think madness. Desperate to be rid of the fuels that work and provide us with affordable energy (coal oil and gas), they continue this splurge of taxpayers money on energy that doesn’t work and is hugely expensive. They jet of to the junkets and pronounce how virtuous they are in the hope of getting a little gold star on their lapels from the UN planet savers. They are prepared to spend one and a half trillion on NET ZERO with no idea whatsoever how that nonsense can ever be achieved, in total disregard of the consequences for our well being or for the country’s finances.————-Who are these politicians really working for? It certainly is NOT US.”

      1. And this is interesting “Toucan energy was incorporated 22/7/20 with 100, £1 shares. It’s never submitted any accounts.” And yet is owes the Government [so it’s our money!] £655M! I wonder how many brown envelopes have changed hands?

  66. Interesting Twit thread – a few thoughts about control through fake freedom.
    I became aware a long time ago, that in Britain, anyone has the freedom to do bad stuff. As long as you don’t want a mortgage (which need cause you no particular hardship, as you can sponge off the taxpayer), you can lie, cheat, fornicate, break small laws, not pay your bills and generally go your own sweet way, and nothing will ever happen to you. When the court summons comes, if it reaches you at your new address, you just don’t turn up. They won’t do anything.
    The only thing you must avoid is criticising any of the sacred cows like minorities, a certain religion or the NHS, and of course, avoid damaging any property belonging to the Upper Class or a billionaire*
    *unless Russian.
    https://twitter.com/Kanthan2030/status/1588802255834460161

  68. Governor Greg Abbott (Texas) announced the latest transportation of illegal immigrants to so-called “sanctuary” cities on Twitter on Nov. 11.

    “The 300th Texas bus of migrants just left for Chicago,” the Republican governor wrote. “As [President Joe] Biden does nothing, Texas will continue taking unprecedented action to relieve our overwhelmed border communities & secure the border.”

    A statement from Abbott’s office on Nov. 4 said that Texas has bused almost 8,300 illegal immigrants to Washington, D.C. since April, over 3,500 to New York City since Aug. 5, and more than 1,100 to Chicago since Aug. 31 as part of its effort to secure the border.

    The governor’s office says the busing mission is “providing much-needed relief to our overwhelmed border communities.”

  69. Mahya Tousie speaks a lot of sense. Here he is talking about how Rishi Sunak is destroying British fuel independence by not producing shale gas in Britain but buying it from the US.

    I wonder how long it will take the British public to understand that Sunak and Hunt are completely evil in their intentions and actions against the British people.

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

      1. Envious. G & P simply won’t do that. They will tolerate being picked up and cuddled. Pickles likes to sit on my lap and suck a disgusting jumper he is fond of. But jumps off when the mood passes.

        When the MR and I were successively poorly, Gus would sleep on the bed – but out of reach!

        It is clear that they are feral cats who like having a handy hotel and restaurant…..

        1. Perkins loves his human. And vice versa. Fixated, so he is. A lovely cat, completely out of his tree.

  72. That’s me for today. Have a jolly evening. We shall watch another episode of the Russiantrauma series. Brilliant. You can see why Russia is the way it i…

    Armistice Day church parade tomorrow. Interested to see what the new vicarette makes of it. Two of the village soldiers will read The Names. One former CO of 2nd Batt Coldstream Guards; the other from The Regiment. Weather looks cloudy – but dry.

    A demain.

  73. 367646+ up ticks,

    My one ask a hypothetical question

    If 500 shop floor workers each hired a plane and turned up at the same airport say for a pool match, would they get a political dressing down for this anti climate action or for the 100 more planes ?

    Climate conference = orders issued for future actions, RESET problems ironed out.

    ‘Hypocrisy and Elitism’ – 400 Private Jets Land in Egypt for UN Climate Conference

  74. The King gives staff up to £600 ‘out of his own pocket’ to help with cost of living crisis
    Monarch uses his private income to hand bonuses to household workers, paying out tens of thousands of pounds in total

    The King’s household staff are set to receive a bonus of up to £600 to help them cope with the cost of living crisis, it has been reported.

    The bonuses, to be paid on top of this month’s salary, will amount to tens of thousands of pounds and will come from the King’s private income.

    Staff earning less than £30,000 a year will receive £600 in a one-off payment. Those on between £30,000 and £40,000 will receive £400, and those who are paid between £40,000 and £45,000 will receive £350, said The Sun.

    It is understood that no taxpayers’ money is being used in the payments.

    The King helping the ‘lowest earners’
    “The King is giving money out of his own pocket to the lowest earners working for the household to help them cope with the cost of living crisis,” a source told The Sun newspaper.

    It is to target where it is needed the most in the Royal Household and reflects the reality of the economic situation the country faces.”

    Over the summer the monarch, when still Prince of Wales, held private talks with Martin Lewis, the consumer champion and money saving expert, about how ordinary people were being hit by rising prices.

    Monarch ‘extremely conscious’ of cost of living
    In June, a royal source said the Royal family was “extremely conscious” of the crisis hitting people’s pockets, with the King said to be paying “very close attention” to the issue.

    “The King is very much aware of the soaring energy bills people are facing and worried about the economic wellbeing of loyal palace staff and doing what he can,” added the source.

    According to the royal accounts for 2020-21, there are 491 full-time equivalent staff across the royal palaces paid for from the Sovereign Grant, with the wage bill coming to £23.7 million.

    The King employs 101 staff at Clarence House. His coronation in May is expected to be scaled down amid the cost of living crisis.

    “It is being given on a ­sliding scale, with those most in need and on lower wages getting the most money.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2022/11/12/king-gives-staff-600-pocket-help-cost-living-crisis/
    I am stifling a choking sound ..

    I thought the salaries came out of his own pocket .. does the tax payer pay for their salaries ?

      1. Yep, create the problem then pretend to have the solution. Not sure the king thinks it through in those terms but he’s still complicit whether knowingly or not.

      1. It’s a shocking price in UK. Would get excellent caviar from Iran but not alas here.
        Not being one of the mega rich, it’s something I will remember.
        Like Figs (£1.00 each when I last looked) and dates that cost an arm & leg for something my Omani friends wouldn’t feed to their goats. .

    5. This is an old tradition, normally celebrated on Maundy Thursday each year.

      It is a token gesture, but perhaps as King, he hopes to set an example to all employers, or shame those who claim to owe the United Kingdom no loyalty despite profiting from British hospitality, culture and infrastructure.

    7. If Charles III was interested in the cost of living of his ‘subjects’ the idiot would advocate scrapping the Green agenda and Climate Change/Build Back Better/Cilmate Change bollocks and grow a pair.

      And then go into exile to Davos.

  75. The King gives staff up to £600 ‘out of his own pocket’ to help with cost of living crisis
    Monarch uses his private income to hand bonuses to household workers, paying out tens of thousands of pounds in total

    The King’s household staff are set to receive a bonus of up to £600 to help them cope with the cost of living crisis, it has been reported.

    The bonuses, to be paid on top of this month’s salary, will amount to tens of thousands of pounds and will come from the King’s private income.

    Staff earning less than £30,000 a year will receive £600 in a one-off payment. Those on between £30,000 and £40,000 will receive £400, and those who are paid between £40,000 and £45,000 will receive £350, said The Sun.

    It is understood that no taxpayers’ money is being used in the payments.

    The King helping the ‘lowest earners’
    “The King is giving money out of his own pocket to the lowest earners working for the household to help them cope with the cost of living crisis,” a source told The Sun newspaper.

    It is to target where it is needed the most in the Royal Household and reflects the reality of the economic situation the country faces.”

    Over the summer the monarch, when still Prince of Wales, held private talks with Martin Lewis, the consumer champion and money saving expert, about how ordinary people were being hit by rising prices.

    Monarch ‘extremely conscious’ of cost of living
    In June, a royal source said the Royal family was “extremely conscious” of the crisis hitting people’s pockets, with the King said to be paying “very close attention” to the issue.

    “The King is very much aware of the soaring energy bills people are facing and worried about the economic wellbeing of loyal palace staff and doing what he can,” added the source.

    According to the royal accounts for 2020-21, there are 491 full-time equivalent staff across the royal palaces paid for from the Sovereign Grant, with the wage bill coming to £23.7 million.

    The King employs 101 staff at Clarence House. His coronation in May is expected to be scaled down amid the cost of living crisis.

    “It is being given on a ­sliding scale, with those most in need and on lower wages getting the most money.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2022/11/12/king-gives-staff-600-pocket-help-cost-living-crisis/
    I am stifling a choking sound ..

    I thought the salaries came out of his own pocket .. does the tax payer pay for their salaries ?

    1. Below the line I think (I.e. comments like wot we are doing).

      (Assuming not buy-to-let!,,)

  77. 367646+ up ticks

    Gerard Batten
    @gjb2021
    ·
    3h
    I wonder, could this be the plan?

    Buy Twitter at an inflated price. Fire the staff. Bankrupt it. File for bankruptcy under US law that allows it to continue operating (Chapter 11?). Walk away from the $44bn price tag (could that be done?).

    Remake Twitter in a new format Go back into profit under a slimmed down operation.

    Is this to far fetched? Has Musk just misjudged the situation? What do you think?

    https://apple.news/A1003DAOGSgy6DV… warns of Twitter bankruptcy as top executives jump ship – Metro…more
    Musk warns of Twitter bankruptcy as top executives jump ship — Metro
    Musk warns of Twitter bankruptcy as top executives jump ship — Metro

    Twitter is $13 billion in debt after Musk’s takeover deal.

    apple.news

    Gerard Batten
    @gjb2021
    ·
    5h
    That’s true but, the US is a worse case than the UK. They have a $30 trillion plus sovereign debt crisis, & their elections are as fixed as any banana republic. And every loony politically correct idea originates from there.

    Our problems have the same causes: A political class out of touch with reality, an education system captured by Marxists, & a rotten to the core media establishment. But at least they have Trump, we have nothing.

    We have farage and with him & co in with a shout we would be staring firth world status straight in the eye.

    Welcome to the fifth world, a subreddit described by its founder as an “ultra-oppressive insanitocracy where the soup of the day is murder.”.

          4. This is one of the first records I put my hands on to play on my parents wind-up gramophone. Even as a four-year old, I could hear exotic lands issuing forth from the melody (or cacophony of sounds). I liked the way the pianist toddled off to assist the drummer and returned to finish his cuppa before the final flurry. Oh, those were the days, indeed.

          6. Perhaps you never got there?

            Acker Bilk is never in my lexicon.

            Chris Barber was much better …

          11. Don’t like trad jazz: but Miles Davis & Keith Jarrett do make some great music, not forgetting John Coltrane.

          16. That’s where we diverge, AL; I dislike the music of Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett (?) and John Coltrane.

            Jazz ceased?

            R & R took over.

        1. I was introduced to this genre by my former neighbour a lovely Persian woman, married to a Brit. Interestingly one of her female relatives gets a mention in Robert Byron’s ‘The Road to Oxiana’ for admonishing the Shah on a visit to her relative’s household!

          1. Robert Bryon also penned this fine piece of prose. Sadly he never had a son as he was drowned when the boat he was on was torpedoed in the early years of WWII:

            “All These I Learnt by Robert Byron

            If I have a son, he shall salute the lords and ladies who unfurl green hoods to the March rains, and shall know them afterwards by their scarlet fruit. He shall know the celandine, and the frigid, sightless flowers of the woods, spurge and spurge laurel, dogs’ mercury, wood-sorrel and queer four-leaved herb-paris fit to trim a bonnet with its purple dot. He shall see the marshes gold with flags and kingcups and find shepherd’s purse on a slag-heap. He shall know the tree-flowers, scented lime-tassels, blood-pink larch-tufts, white strands of the Spanish chestnut and tattered oak-plumes. He shall know orchids, mauve-winged bees and claret-coloured flies climbing up from mottled leaves. He shall see June red and white with ragged robin and cow parsley and the two campions. He shall tell a dandelion from sow thistle or goat’s beard. He shall know the field flowers, lady’s bedstraw and lady’s slipper, purple mallow, blue chicory and the cranesbills – dusky, bloody, and blue as heaven. In the cool summer wind he shall listen to the rattle of harebells against the whistle of a distant train, shall watch clover blush and scabious nod, pinch the ample veitches, and savour the virgin turf. He shall know grasses, timothy and wag-wanton, and dust his finger-tips in Yorkshire fog. By the river he shall know pink willow-herb and purple spikes of loosestrife, and the sweetshop smell of water-mint where the rat dives silently from its hole. He shall know the velvet leaves and yellow spike of the old dowager, mullein, recognise the whole company of thistles, and greet the relatives of the nettle, wound-wort and hore-hound, yellow rattle, betony, bugle and archangel. In autumn, he shall know the hedge lanterns, hips and haws and bryony. At Christmas he shall climb an old apple-tree for mistletoe, and know whom to kiss and how.

            He shall know the butterflies that suck the brambles, common whites and marbled white, orange-tip, brimstone, and the carnivorous clouded yellows. He shall watch fritillaries, pearl-bordered and silver-washed, flit like fireballs across the sunlit rides. He shall see that family of capitalists, peacock, painted lady, red admiral and the tortoiseshells, uncurl their trunks to suck blood from bruised plums, while the purple emperor and white admiral glut themselves on the bowels of a rabbit. He shall know the jagged comma, printed with a white c, the manx-tailed iridescent hair-streaks, and the skippers demure as charwomen on Monday morning. He shall run to the glint of silver on a chalk-hill blue – glint of a breeze on water beneath an open sky – and shall follow the brown explorers, meadow brown, brown argus, speckled wood and ringlet. He shall see death and revolution in the burnet moth, black and red, crawling from a house of yellow talc tied half-way up a tall grass. He shall know more rational moths, who like the night, the gaudy tigers, cream-spot and scarlet, and the red and yellow underwings. He shall hear the humming-bird hawk moth arrive like an air-raid on the garden at dusk, and know the other hawks, pink sleek-bodied elephant, poplar, lime, and death’s head. He shall count the pinions of the plume moths, and find the large emerald waiting in the rain-dewed grass.

            All these I learnt when I was a child and each recalls a place or occasion that might otherwise be lost. They were my own discoveries. They taught me to look at the world with my own eyes and with attention. They gave me a first content with the universe. Town-dwellers lack this intimate content, but my son shall have it!

          3. I have a copy of that book, an excellent read.
            My enjoyment of this genre of music, came from many nights listening to improvised Oud playing at Khasab Oman and I must admit, several beers.

  81. No mention on here as far as I am aware of the large crowd of Albanians in Westminster today protesting about the way the Albanians are being treated and demanding that the Home secretary be dismissed. What cheek. Civil disruption is starting.The government has lost control.

      1. I saw it on GBNews, I looked down the Nottler comments until I got to where I left off but missed your comment. It was a noisy but relatively peaceful gathering but could have developed into something worse. The invaders want more from our pathetic government.

        1. Surprise me. Everybody with their hand out, and nobody in government willing to tell them to eff off.

          2. If they do, I hope that the police are very quick off the mark, I would hate to see veterans arrested for kicking nine flavours of shit out of them!

          3. Brits are usually too tolerant. It’s not the British way to criticise… but the tolerance can eventually run out of patience.
            It would be good for tomorrow to go off well. Let’s focus on the poor bastards who never came home, and those left abandones by their not coming home.

  82. Sorry about the continual updates on FTX…it’s like getting hooked on some trashy TV show, “I’m a Democrat Criminal, Get Me Out Of Here” or something like that. This post is a list of Sam Bankman-FriedEgg’s VERY WEFwell-connected family, and all the people at FTX who are in the whole Democrat scene.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Wallstreetsilver/comments/ytgkg8/crypto_crash_ftx_was_a_dnc_money_laundering/
    Looks like a bunch of crook money-laundering!

  83. Here’s one for T_B – Eugyppius’ take on Musk, Twitter and Censorship.

    https://www.eugyppius.com/p/musk-twitter-speech?utm_source=substack&publication_id=268621&post_id=84151809&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1ODkwNDQ5NSwicG9zdF9pZCI6ODQxNTE4MDksImlhdCI6MTY2ODI4MjA5MCwiZXhwIjoxNjcwODc0MDkwLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjY4NjIxIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.UUh8XM46tBuTKRN_Qp0nbaexCCKvrLs1wIOfLtCJjlU

  85. I have just read quite a few excellent comments on the DT letters

    BT

    Brian Thorne
    33 MIN AGO
    ‘ Britain not to blame for historical climate change….’
    Ah, thanks very much.
    I guess if it wasn’t for Britain the world would still be in the stone age?
    Britain: the world’s punchbag from climate change to colonialism to saving Europe, we always get it wrong?
    And what thanks do we get……..?
    Zilch, zero, nil, nothing.
    But…….everyone wants to come and live here?
    Funny that.

    NG

    Northern Girl
    25 MIN AGO
    Made me smile Brian. You know really why ‘everyone wants to come and live here’. It’s not for our once great nation and its wonderful people, it is because our government displays on its many websites, for all the world to see, just what it will ‘pay’ people, should they need to come here. They come because we’re a soft touch and ultimately all the bad white people will be banished/left/whatever and it will be their new country. They forget that they will then have to start all over again, because they don’t ‘do’ work.

    BT

    Brian Thorne
    11 MIN AGO
    I know, NG, what’s the agenda though and what happens when this country is finished?
    Do the ingrates all go elsewhere to scam and live off benefits while the indigenous rebuild the nation?
    Fortunately, by the time that happens, I shall be long gone.
    Good luck to the next generations.
    They’re scre wed.

    1. “our government displays on its many websites, for all the world to see, just what it will ‘pay’ people, should they need to come here.”

      In all the appropriate languages, just to be safe of course.

      1. I’ve always found that to be disgusting. The language of the nation is Engllish. If the Welsh want a translation, they can pay for it. Same for the Scots and Irish. Everyone else will either learn the language or feck off.

        No translating it into foreign.

        1. It’s one of the most important means of transmitting culture. No wonder the wreckers don’t want English to have primacy.

      1. The Telegraph one is well known – Gates used to fund a Health Editor. Before the Gates funding, I don’t think they had one. The BBC gets a lot of funding from different dodgy sources.

  88. Evening, all. Went shopping with a list (as usual) and came back without the top two items! I’m beginning to wonder if I’m losing it!

  89. Shit, shite and bloody buggeration!
    Went for a walk tonight. Decided to do my 4 pub circular, The Nelson at Middleton, Rising Sun at Rise End and rather stupidly didn’t turn my torch on coming back onto the High Peak Trail and went off the bloody path!
    Gave my already knackered right knee a heavy jerk and what seemed initially a slight twist to my ankle.

    Got back onto my feet and found I could still walk so carried on down the trail before turning off to Cromford for a pint in the Bell at the end of North Street.
    After a rather nice pint of Citrus Gold, I got up to cross over to the Boat and found my knee and ankle had stiffened up.

    Hobbled across to the Boat for a pint of Timmy Taylor’s Landlord and realised that knee & ankle had stiffened up even further to the point that I had to call the DT out to pick me up.

    I’m not a happy bunny tonight and am off for a bath!!

    1. On a bad night or two I’ve ended up in the ditch on the walk home. Pulled a few people out too.

      3. When I was a lot younger I’d had too much to drink and walked home alone from my local, The Adam and Eve. NW7.
        The footpath home had high chain link fencing either side. I staggered and fell over, but grabbed hold of the fence. And suddenly was aware of a hot smell bearing down on me and my had being made wet. I looked up and saw a cow’s head, it was licking my hand. Sympathy I imagined.
        Shoulda drank more milk.

    4. Timmy Taylor’s Landlord – worth it just for that. Thinking of the Spread Eagle, Walmgate, York 1983-1985.

    5. That was unfortunate. But it sounds to me that if a tiger bit your leg off you would still have completed your itinerary.

  90. Thanks to the people that said it’s fine to allow your pets to sleep on your bed.
    My goldfish is now dead.

    4. It reminds me of a joke.
      A little girl named Charlotte is seen digging a hole in her garden. The neighbours look over the fence and ask her what she is doing. She replies, I’m burying my gold fish from our pond. The neighbour says…..that’s a great big hole for a gold fish Charlotte.
      She answered, well, it’s actually in your cat.

      1. I buried a goldfish when I was quite young. I wanted a nice plant to put on its grave. I found a willow herb and we could never get rid of them after that.

      2. I buried a goldfish when I was quite young. I wanted a nice plant to put on its grave. I found a willow herb and we could never get rid of them after that.

    1. 367646+ up ticks,

      O2O,
      I believe that if the 650 feel in any way threatened then
      the herd will find out the real reason for the standing in 5* hotels army.

  92. How Britain fell out of love with classical music radio
    Our musical tastes haven’t changed, and yet listeners are deserting Radio 3 and Classic FM

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/radio/what-to-listen-to/classic-fm-radio-3-how-britain-fell-love-classical-music-radio/

    The only chance I have for listening to the radio in peace is when I am travelling from a to b in the car .

    Fortunately for me my journey to either Dorchester or Weymouth takes 30 minutes more or less.. and a little longer going to Blandford or Wimborne , so I manage to get some nice listening in .. Alexander Armstrong and a few others are a little irritating .. and R3 has a flattening effect on me . I will probably be out in the car tomorrow morning , the Archers and DDiscs may or my not satisfy my soul.

    Rememberance parade will be given a miss this time .

    1. I get a lot of my (classical/jazz) music from French/Swiss radio channels these days.
      UK seems to have abandoned serious classical music.

    2. I have R3 on in the car but don’t go very far these days. Tomorrow we are going to a concert – one of our regular Music Society ones. Roderick Williams sing Vaughan Williams and other English songs.

  95. 367646+ up ticks,

    Could it be that these governing politico’s knowing their game is coming to an end and what we are taking as being thoroughly bad governance in point of fact was / is anti Brit intentional,

    Plus could we be about to receive a political windrush of odious issues implemented prior to the next General Election.

  96. I’m drifting off watching Jools Holland.
    I’ll get along now, shame to disturb doggo. Wake her up to put her to bed.
    Night all.

  98. 367646+ up tick,

    Ten points to one it doubles,

    Ten-point migration plan to end ‘Hotel Britain’
    Use of ‘unsuitable’ hotels for surging number of asylum seekers must stop so Britain is not a ‘destination of choice’, says Robert Jenrick

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