581 thoughts on “Wednesday 27 November: Prospect of the most catastrophic hard-Left government ever seen”

  1. Jeremy Corbyn just gave the worst political performance of modern times. Spiked. Brendan O’Neill 27 November 2019.

    That must surely rank as one of the worst political performances of modern times. Jeremy Corbyn in his grilling by Andrew Neil came across as listless, disengaged, impersonal, irritable, unprincipled and outright bored. Especially when asked about Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis and the fact that 80 per cent of Britain’s Jews think he is anti-Semitic. He looked bored. And of course he started banging on about Islamophobia. He couldn’t believe someone was asking him about those pesky Jews when all he wants to talk about is lovely Muslims.

    Morning everyone. I don’t think Brendan was impressed. Lol!

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/11/26/jeremy-corbyn-just-gave-the-worst-political-performance-of-modern-times/

      1. Good morning Bob

        Corbyn has that perfunctory sniff that is so annoying .. He was ghastly.. he tried to be superior to AN.

        Corbyn has some sort of unshakable cool calculating confidence that his letterbox brigade, his music festival followers , and the oddball collection that is called Momentum , his praetorian guard has given him . (Increasingly, from the 2nd century CE, the Praetorian Guard were used as a useful army reserve and they often took to the field of battle, aiding their emperor defend the empire or their candidate of emperor-to-be achieve his goal.)

        I don’t know whether to laugh or cry .. politics has really reached such terrible depths.

        Andrew Neil could sort the country out .. he is our attack dog .. good man.

    2. Yesterday evening Comrade Steptoe gave even the most ardent Liebour supporter 400bn reasons why he would be an utter disaster.

      ‘Morning, Citroen.

  5. For NoTTLers without Premium

    Shame on those willing to throw British Jews under a bus just because they’re anti-Brexit
    ALLISON PEARSON – 26 NOVEMBER 2019 • 7:00PM

    Those who are holding their nose and supporting Labour are cowards of the highest order, says Allison Pearson
    On the same day that the Chief Rabbi said that he believes Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of anti-Semitism made him “unfit for high office”, Sir Richard Evans, former Regius professor of history at Cambridge University and world authority on the rise of the Nazis, tweeted: “I’m voting Labour. Great manifesto, pity about the leader, shame about Labour’s support for Brexit, though at least they promise another referendum. The failure to deal with antisemitism in the party makes me very angry. But in my constituency only Labour can beat the Tory.”

    Take a minute to process that. The author of The Third Reich Trilogy, a man who knows in excruciating detail how demonisation of the Jews took hold in Germany, eventually leading to the murder of six million men, women and children, is angry about Corbyn’s failure to tackle anti-Semitism. But not so angry that he would consider voting for another party. Or denouncing Labour, which has seen Jewish MPs like Luciana Berger resign after complaining in vain to her leader about disgusting and insidious abuse.

    Clearly, Sir Richard, who has been feted and ennobled for his scholarship on the Holocaust, doesn’t mind throwing British Jews under a bus so long as we avoid what he sees as the true horror of leaving the EU and having Boris Johnson as prime minister. He doesn’t even have ignorance as a defence. To come across such moral squalor in a professor who has dedicated his life to tracing the roots of anti-Semitism is like seeing a conservationist posing beside a lion he just shot.

    Where are the protests in academia? Cambridge University, which acted swiftly to take down a 17th-century painting of a fowl market because it wanted to show “sensitivity” to vegans, has issued no statement distancing itself from the warped conclusions of its former Emeritus Professor.

    So great is the hatred of Boris and Brexit among Remainers like Richard Evans that they think anything – literally anything – is preferable. Hold your nose, comrades, and vote for Corbyn! What, even when Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi, says that “the overwhelming majority of British Jews are gripped by anxiety” at the thought of the Labour Party forming the next government? Yup, even then.

    Just imagine if the situation were reversed and it was the Conservatives who had been accused by a religious leader of “fostering hateful prejudice”. The far-Left Momentum stormtroopers would be swarming all over social media, spewing their righteous bile and accusing anyone planning to vote Tory of “hate crime”. Boris is routinely called “racist” for his notably tolerant remarks about the burka. If, like Corbyn, he had celebrated groups which actually want to wipe out a minority of British citizens he would be denounced on every TV channel and front page as a danger to our country. Rightly so.

    Different standards apply to Labour. Most political correspondents and TV journalists are virulently anti-Brexit. There appears to be a tacit consensus that a “far-Right Boris Johnson government” (in reality remarkably Blairite; check out that cuddly Tory manifesto!) which would honour the referendum result must be stopped. In such a strategy, the Jews are expendable.

    Polls which show that Corbyn’s party still commands the support of up to a third of voters should horrify all decent people. I feel physically sick if I see his numbers edging up. Blame a complicit media and Establishment which have failed to point out to the public that this is not a normal Opposition. (Too busy dumping buckets of ordure over Boris, I’m afraid.) The old Labour party, the one it was safe to vote for, has been taken over by a Marxist cabal which owes its first loyalty to our enemies, most of them disgusting anti-Semites and hardline Islamists.

    “The way in which the leadership has dealt with anti-Jewish racism is incompatible with the British values of which we are so proud,” the Chief Rabbi observed with painful clarity. So where are the Labour moderates willing to come forward and denounce leaders that they know stink to high heaven and which most backbenchers are praying won’t get into Number 10?

    Tony Blair is tied up trying to secure a hung Parliament and stay in the EU. (Shame on him; the former Labour leader knows full well what manner of snaggle-toothed beast Corbyn is.) How about Ed Miliband, who unleashed this madness when he allowed Labour supporters to vote in the leadership election for just £3? From a Jewish background himself, Miliband must feel as guilty as sin. Why won’t he speak out?

    “I am more sorry than words can say,” Wes Streeting, MP for Ilford North, tweeted. Wes wouldn’t want to actually do anything, of course. Don’t want to go alienating our Muslim voters, eh, Wes? The same goes for La Lachrymosa herself, Jess Phillips. Jess also took to Twitter, saying: “The only response to the Chief Rabbi that is moral is, ‘I’m sorry and I’ll do whatever I possibly can to win back your community’s trust’.”

    Moral? Try self-serving and cowardly. One way to win back Jewish trust would be for all non-loony Labour MPs to publicly withdraw their support from the Corbyn cult. Even at this late stage it could make a difference.

    Let decent Labour MPs consider the lessons of history. Were there “good Germans” in the Waffen SS who were “sorrier than words could say” about the Jews while secretly hoping Hitler might be toppled? I guess we’d need to consult Sir Richard Evans about that.

    Photo of Sir Richard Evans, who is wearing glasses and a suit, sitting at a desk by a window
    Historian Sir Richard Evans tweeted about how he would be voting Labour to avoid Brexit CREDIT: EYEVINE/DAVID LEVENE
    Jess Phillips got over 8,000 likes for her tweet. Proof, if any were needed, that there are plenty of Labour activists who prefer to think of the Chief Rabbi’s attack on Corbyn as “an orchestrated political smear” rather than a horrifying home truth.

    For me personally, this matter comes very close to home. The weekend before last, we had dinner with our former Jewish neighbours. To sit at a kitchen table with my beloved friend, with whom I have gone through so much these past 20 years, and to hear her express fear for her family because our mutual homeland might soon be hostile to them was surreal. How could this actually be happening? Like many British Jews, our friends were lifelong Labour voters. No longer. “We’re a small minority and nobody cares,” my friend said bleakly.

    “That’s not true,” I snapped. “I care. Telegraph readers care. We’re with you.”

    Did I speak out of turn? I hope not. Surely, there must be millions of us who would form a Praetorian Guard around British Jews to protect them from the friends of Hamas if that dark day came and they formed the British government.

    Being a minority, Jews are reluctant to draw attention to themselves. You never know when someone might try and slap a yellow star on you. Safety lies in being the same as everybody else, keeping beneath the radar. So it took a hell of a lot for the Chief Rabbi to speak out.

    Ephraim Mirvis was absolutely right to do so. What choice did he have when “Nice manifesto, shame about the antisemitism” is considered to be a respectable point of view for a historian of Nazi Germany? However bad you think Brexit might be, just wait until you see Prime Minister Corbyn. It’s high time the media stopped treating the Labour leader as a perfectly acceptable candidate for PM. He isn’t.

    Sadly, this column went to bed before the great Andrew Neil interviewed Jeremy Corbyn on BBC1 last night. I can only hope that, after Neil finished with him, all that was left was a small, grizzled pizzle and the faint strains of the Bolivian national anthem.

    The Chief Rabbi wondered how bad someone would have to be before they were deemed unfit for the highest office. “Is describing as friends those who endorse the murder of Jews not enough?,” he demanded.

    God knows, there can only be one answer to that plea. This is not just a general election, ladies and gentlemen. “The very soul of our nation is at stake.”

    2. The Corbyn/Momentum axis will not stop after ‘dealing’ with the Jews. People of their stripe have to have an enemy to attack and so they will have their little list. The Labour Party allying themselves with jihadist movements should scare every decent person in this Country. It’s now clear from the news yesterday and this morning that the islamists are attacking Johnson and the Tory Party with accusations of islamophobia in an attempt to deflect criticism from Corbyn’s anti-semitism problems.

      1. I, for one, Korky will stand up and own to being Islamophobic.

        With their culture and ambition to rule (by terror if necessary) they scare me shiitless.

          1. In today’s parlance, Bleau, how else might I describe my fear – the libtards don’t/can’t/won’t understand the diference between irrational and rational?

        1. Let’s hope so, NtN.
          I hold no brief for Johnson as I think he’s as duplicitous as May but Corbyn is dangerous at a wholly different level. The latter’s affiliation with jihadist groups and the Labour Party’s deliberate grooming of the moslem vote are as dangerous as their madcap economic policies.

          1. It’s not even Corbyn who’s dangerous – he is merely a bumbling front-man for the Labour Party. As soon as they’re elected the likes of McDonnell and Starmer will throw him (and Abbot) out and take over – then Heaven help us.

  7. US says Russian troops are destabilizing Libya. CNN 26 November 2019.

    David Schenker, the State Department’s assistant secretary for near eastern affairs, told reporters that Russia is deploying troops in “significant” numbers to support Libyan Gen. Khalifa Haftar, whose Libyan National Army launched an April offensive to seize Tripoli from the UN-backed Government of National Accord.

    US officials have previously told CNN that they believe hundreds of Russian mercenaries affiliated with the Wagner Group, a paramilitary organization with ties to the Kremlin, have been in Libya for some time, working on behalf of Moscow and helping Haftar in his bid to capture Tripoli, however Schenker said that Russia is now deploying regular uniformed personnel there as well.

    The destabilising of Libya came when the UK, US and France overthrew the regime. They have since made no effort to restore order; have in fact inhibited and undermined it as they did in Syria. It is in the interests of all ordinary people that the Russians succeed in countering this. It will eliminate the Jihadists presence, shut down the migrant highway from Central Africa and restore peace to the Libyan people.

    This is what we are reduced to! Relying on the Russians as our protectors against the activities of our own leaders!

    https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/26/politics/us-russia-destabilizing-libya/index.html

  8. There is not a single lefty cause that will not be championed/distorted by the BBC

    Farmers start beef with BBC as meat documentary’s claims come under fire
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2019/11/26/TELEMMGLPICT000217345137_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq-wioWl5aH7fAEJ8IWJw2Yw_hdviTmVO3LOKbtZ3uvfI.jpeg?imwidth=1240
    It was meant to be a documentary exploring the impact our carnivorous ways was having on the planet.

    But the BBC’s ‘Meat: A Threat To Our Planet’ has become embroiled in a row with British farmers, who fear the show could damage their reputation.

    The show, headed up by Liz Bonnin who has presented on Springwatch and Blue Planet Live, took viewers to the Amazon rainforest to see the destruction to the rainforest to make room for meat production.
    *
    *
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/26/bbc-farmer-criticises-broadcasters-meat-documentary-nfu-accuse/

    2. I have no doubt that a ban on meat is coming and has already been decided at world government level.
      The mainstream media is always used for softening up the public.

      1. The experiment on Daffodill where Liz was able to poke around in the cow’s stomach was appalling.I was left wondering which is more of a threat to our planet. Scientist or farmer?

        Ah well back to the bacon sandwich…

    3. ‘Morning, Citroen, I wonder if the BBC, indeed any of the lefties, have given consideration to the fact that, due to increasing population, Brazil, in common with many countries (Indonesia for example) are just looking for ‘lebensraum’?

      Population is the polluter – keep it in your trousers or practice Onanism.

    4. The logical answer therefore is for me to boycott any beef originating from Brazil in favour of beef coming from Britain, even if it costs more.

      I therefore no longer buy corned beef from Lidl or Sainsbury, but found a source of British corned beef from Aldi and Tesco, bringing me into their shops for other things.

      Ever since I lived in Herefordshire and seen at first hand the environmental damage done there by converting farmland from pasture to arable, I have had serious reservations about the environmental benefits of veganism, certainly in the UK.

    6. For the same reason, I have given up on R4’s Farming Today. It has become a load of non-stop self-righteous greenwash, where ‘sustainability’ and ‘meat-hating’ has become the latest religion. I do not wish to be force-fed this greenie garbage any more.

      ‘Morning, Citroen.

  9. The worthy Left’s strange passion for alternative facts is creating fear and false headlines
    CHRISTOPHER SNOWDON – 26 NOVEMBER 2019 • 6:15PM

    From child poverty to death by austerity, there’s been an epidemic of terrible economic predictions

    When Iain Duncan Smith’s office was vandalised yesterday, certain apologists from the far-Left argued that the crime was partially, if not wholly, mitigated by the Tories’ alleged murder of 120,000 people. The murder weapon was “austerity” and the evidence is in a paper from BMJ Open in 2017.

    The idea that austerity has claimed 120,000 lives has become a fact in some quarters. The evidence itself is less compelling. The authors of the BMJ Open study note that improvements in life expectancy slowed between 2012 and 2014, at a time when increases in healthcare spending also slowed. The estimate of 120,000 lives comes from their extrapolation of how many fewer deaths there would have been between 2010 and 2017 had mortality continued to decline at the earlier rate, and assumes that the slowing of life expectancy (which was observed in many other countries at the same time) was due to spending constraints rather than other factors.

    As various fact checking experts have concluded, this is speculative stuff. The claim that austerity has killed 120,000 people strikes me as a classic example of a political factoid. It falls somewhere between the truth and a lie. It cannot be called a lie because it is impossible to disprove, but it would be a lie to call it a fact because it cannot be proven.

    Remainers rightly complain about the £350 million a week for the NHS that was famously promoted on the side of a bus during the referendum. For them, it is the flagship example of a political lie. Leavers, meanwhile, complain about the Government’s prediction of an immediate recession and 800,000 people out of work in the event of a vote to depart the EU. The former is considered a lie because it could not mathematically be true. The latter also turned out to be untrue but is not considered to be a lie because while the prediction may not have been made in good faith, a deliberate attempt to deceive cannot be proven.

    I suspect that the Treasury’s forecast of imminent recession had more impact on voters than the bus (which could have used the more defensible figure of £280 million and had the same effect). Bad predictions might be more honest than premeditated lies, but they are no less misleading.

    The last decade has seen an epidemic of terrible economic predictions. The Resolution Foundation (RF) is perhaps the worst offender. Relentlessly pessimistic about incomes, wages, poverty and inequality, they have spent a decade making Eeyore-ish predictions which grab headlines but never come true. In 2012, it claimed that by 2020 “even on optimistic growth assumptions”, poorer households would have incomes 15 per cent lower than in 2008. In reality, the income of the bottom fifth never fell below 2008 levels and was 15 per cent higher within five years of the RF prediction.

    Last July, the think tank’s CEO said that “child poverty is likely to have increased last year”. Office for National Statistics data show that it didn’t. In February, RF produced a ‘nowcast’ claiming that there had been “zero growth” in the incomes of working people between 2017/18 and 2018/19. Official data published a few months later showed that there had been income growth of 1.3 per cent – £400 a year – with the Office for National Statistics noting that this was the sixth annual increase in a row.

    Child poverty is a particular favourite. Usually measured in relative terms, a child is considered in poverty if they live in a household which has an income below 60 per cent of the average after housing costs are paid. The rate was 31 per cent before the financial crisis, fell during the recession as average incomes declined, and has been at 30 per cent for the last three years. According to RF, child poverty is always on the brink of spiralling. In February, they projected it to rise to a record 37 per cent by 2023/24.

    Today, with an election approaching, they have made the front page of Guardian with the claim that child poverty will hit a “60-year high under the Tories”. Their estimate for 2023/24 is now 34.5 per cent, lower than the previous figure but nobody at the newspaper seems to have asked why. A record high is a record high, I guess, and even 37 per cent looks rosy compared with the 41 per cent projected by 2021/22 in a report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

    It is too early to say definitively that these forecasts are wrong, but suffice to say that current trends in child poverty are better news for children than they are for forecasters. And we know for a fact that predictions of spiralling poverty and inequality made by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation towards the start of this decade were way off. Predicting the future is difficult and projections are almost bound to be wrong to a greater or lesser extent. The telling aspect of the forecasts above – and I could cite many more like them – is that they are all wrong in the same direction. Put simply, they all predict that things will get worse.

    Obesity forecasts are no different. Obesity rates have been rising in Britain for the last 20 years, but far more gradually than “public health” experts predicted. In 2007, when the male obesity rate was 24 per cent, we were confidently told by leading experts that 36 per cent of men would be obese by 2015. The current figure is 27 per cent. In 2010, we were told that 80 per cent of men would be overweight by 2020. The rate was 68 per cent at the time. It is currently 67 per cent.

    Rates of obesity are high and the economy has had a terrible decade, so why the need for further exaggeration? The suspicion is that predictions of this kind are not designed to guide us to the future but to shape the present. The pressure groups and academics who produce forecasts of spiralling obesity, poverty and other evils do not present their forecasts as inevitable, but rather as what will happen if the government does not change its policies. Whether it’s welfare reform or sugar taxes, the underlying message is political.

    At it happens, the government generally doesn’t change its policies and the scary outcomes still fail to materialise, but everybody has forgotten about the predictions by then, not least because a new set of predictions – accompanied by political demands – has taken their place.

    What should we call such factoids? ‘Fake news’ seems too harsh since the forecaster cannot know for sure that their forecast is wrong, and there is always a chance that they are making an honest effort to read the runes. If we are going to borrow a phrase from the Trump universe, ‘alternative facts’ is a better description. Wild estimates become a substitute for official statistics, with the former getting acres of news coverage while the latter are barely reported at all.

    “Falsehood flies”, wrote Jonathan Swift more than 300 years ago, “and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.” Vanishingly little has changed since then, except that falsehood flies even faster today.

    Christopher Snowdon is Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute for Economic Affairs

    1. Apropos my earlier comment about population being the polluter, could it be said that ‘austerity’ is a crude form of population-culling.

      …and the weakest shall go to the wall.

    2. ‘the £350 million a week for the NHS that was famously promoted on the side of a bus’

      No it wasn’t. It was £350 million a week for the EU. No figure for the NHS was mentioned.

      You’d think a ‘Head’ at the IEA would be able to read two short phrases without misunderstanding them.

      1. That slogan on the bus became very useful. It was clear that what it said was being twisted to pretend that it said something else, and this was obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of English. So whenever any commentator or politician mentioned it, they instantly lost all credibility and you could just look at them and say “Liar.”

    3. “there is always a chance that they are making an honest effort to read the runes”
      Sorry I call bullshit,this is politicking aimed at specific ends,fake figures,fake facts to fulfill an agenda,see “climate Emergency” for further details……….

  10. This is a welcome antidote to George the Poet & his pals and worth a read

    COFFEE HOUSE
    Jeremy Corbyn is wrong about the evils of the British Empire
    Sam Akaki – 26 November 2019 – 6:04 PM

    Under a Corbyn government, we learn today, historical ‘injustice’, colonialism and the role of the British Empire will be taught in the national curriculum. It’s quite staggering: anti-Britishness will be taught in British schools. Make no mistake: this would not be the story of Africa. It would be political propaganda designed to do Britain down.

    I loathe identity politics, but I have to say: a lot of the people making the Corbynite proposals are white. Perhaps as a proud African Brit, the descendant of people who received the British and then fought against them in Uganda, I might have ‘privilege’ – as the Corbynistas would doubtless say – to point to another side to the story.

    Before the British and other western powers arrived, much of Africa was a borderless wilderness inhabited by warring tribes and clans who were collectively vulnerable to killer tropical diseases, blinded by ignorance and often enslaved by superstition. It was the British Church Missionary Society, followed by colonial demonstrators who risked their lives in deeply inhospitable territory seeking to liberate fellow human beings from the bondage of poverty. They pioneered education and modern health service and introduced cash crops, industrialisation and English as a unifying language.

    The Corbyn agenda will doubtless focus heavily on slavery, making out that it was an evil that sprang from the blackness of British hearts. For the real story, don’t take it from me. Read the renowned African-American academic, Dr Thomas Sowell, himself a descendant of the transatlantic slave trade, who has intensively written about the history, magnitude and scope of slavery down the ages.

    As Dr Sowell shows, slavery was never about race or creed. Rather, it was about the competition for power and accumulation of wealth. Larger, more organised and better armed groups attacked, killed, robbed, enslaved and humiliated the weaker ones. Europeans once enslaved other Europeans, Asians enslaved other Asians, African enslaved other Africans, indigenous peoples of the western hemispheres enslaved other indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere. People were a commodity, in every culture in the world.

    Sadiq Khan, Labour’s Mayor of London, has supported proposals for a museum of slavery. If one is built, I hope it tells the full story. That Slavs were so widely used as slaves both in Europe and the Islamic world that the very word “slaves” comes from the word for “Slavs”, not only in English, but also in other European languages – German, Italian – as well as in Arabic. Roman conquerors enslaved the proud but weak British tribes used them as slave labour to build roads, forts, baths and to work in the mines or as during their 400-year long occupation and exploitation in this island.

    It’s a fair bet that the Corbynite history books will start the history of slavery at the dawn of the British Empire. Children won’t be told that at least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates from the 15th to the 18th century and some Europeans were still being sold on the auction blocks in Egypt long after the emancipation to free African slaves in the United States.

    I know as a fact that my chiefly ancestors in Uganda were owners of slaves captured in war, or received as reparation in exchange for our relatives (who had been killed by the opposing clans and tribes).

    In his book Empire, Niall Ferguson has this to say:

    “Today, per capita GDP in Britain is roughly 28 times what it is in Zambia. But to blame this on the legacy of colonialiasm is not very persuasive when the differential between British and Zambian incomes was so much smaller at the end of the colonial period. In 1955, British per capita GDP was just seven times greater than Zambian. It has been since independence that the gap between the coloniser and ex-colony has become a gulf. The same is true of nearly all colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.”

    It is a complicated picture. But one theme emerges: that the British Empire, while it lasted, made Africa a far better place for Africans.

    **************************************************************************************************************8

    BTL:

    Blindsideflanker • 12 hours ago • edited
    The left bang on about colonialism for if they didn’t people would see the real villain of the piece, the left wing Governments most newly independent African nations installed.

    At independence Ghana was a reasonably well off country, with a GDP per capita of $490 it was the same as South Korea , after a decade of ‘Scientific Socialism’ as Nkrumah called it…. a new capital, and after the National Construction Corp, the State Steelworks Corp, the State Gold Mining Corp, the State Fibre Bag Corp, the Vegetable Oil Mills Corp, the Ghana Fishing Corp, the State Farm Corp, all of which lost money hand over fist, in fact he set up these state organisations by robbing from the Cocoa producers via the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Board (an organisation the terrible colonial authorities set up to ensure Ghana’s Cocoa farmers got a stable income) with the result the cocoa production halved… the country’s economy was wrecked, and he had also destroyed the constitution with an attempt to make it a one party sate. The current GDP per capita difference between Ghana and South Korea is $2,200 vs $33,300. But its all the colonialists fault isn’t it?

    Then there was Nyerere in Tanzania and his Arusha declaration that resulted in the nationalisation of the banks, insurance companies, food producers, export trading companies, sisal plantations, manufacturing companies, commercial companies and private homes, and most damaging of all his Ujamaa village scheme, which meant transferring all rural populations into state villages, all with the inevitable result of a collapse in food production and exports, covering only 40% of their imports. Shortages of soap, sugar, cooking oil, with a standard of living collapsing 50%. In 1972 they had to admit Tanzania was poorer then than at independence, but its all the colonialists fault isn’t it?

    Zambia squandered its riches from copper on high cost loss making inefficient state corporations. Senegal’s parastatal organisations employed four times the manpower they needed. Guinea setup canning factories with nothing to can, textile factories which had no cotton to weave, and cigarette factories without sufficient tobacco to roll into cigarettes, but its all the colonialists fault isn’t it?

    The figures for African industrialisation are horrifying, In the 60’s it was growing at 8% out pacing developed countries, by the 70’s it was 5% growth, by the 80’s it was de-industrialising, but its all the colonialists fault.

    In agriculture it was even worse. In the 60’s agriculture grew by 2.3%, food production 2%, while population growth was 2.5%. In the 70’s population growth was 2.7% agriculture growth fell to 1.3% growth, and food production to 1.5%. Between the 70’s and 80’s 5$billion of agricultural aid came from the World Bank, who later estimated 33% of its West African, and 50% of its East African projects failed, again colonialists fault.

    The fact is the left have done a brilliant job of blaming colonialism, when a lot of the fault for Africa’s ills lie at their door. In fact they have done such a brilliant job of diverting the blame they have us, in Aid money, paying for their screw ups, and have us believing we are at fault!

    1. Children won’t be told that at least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates from the 15th to the 18th century and some Europeans were still being sold on the auction blocks in Egypt long after the emancipation to free African slaves in the United States. Interestingly (I hope) when we visited Iceland (country, not food store before anyone comments) they were still highlighting the stories of slave raids by Barbary pirates as part of the tours!

      1. Recommended reading : White Gold Giles Milton.

        This is the forgotten story of the million white Europeans, snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of North Africa to be sold to the highest bidder. Ignored by their own governments, and forced to endure the harshest of conditions, very few lived to tell the tale.

        1. I’ve not long finished this and the net result is I now have an almost insuppressible and violent urge to grab POC race card players by the throat and scream #metoo you tedious whining pile of self-righteous merde #metoo now STFU!!!!!!!!.

    2. The fault really lies with Bob Geldorf, ‘cos he hasn’t organised any Band-Aid Concerts recently in order to finance the current corrupt African despots.

  12. Good morning, Chums.

    On Monday evening a friend telephoned me to tell me her husband had just received a call
    to say a cancellation had occurred for a cataract operation on Tuesday, would her husband
    like to fill the cancelled appointment? Friend said * Yes, Please!* then phoned me to ask me
    to take them to NGH. So yesterday we set off and arrived at NGH at 11.20, I dropped them off
    and set about parking; I set an all time record, it took only ten minutes to find a parking space!

    When I reached the Eye Dept, the friend had already been checked over, BP taken, eye drops
    administered, his appointment was for 12.00 so everything was early, not many people waiting
    for various treatments [perhaps a dozen] so we were all comfortably seated, we sat…….and we
    sat……………at 13.30 the Surgeon sauntered through the area and disappeared [to have his lunch?]
    At 14.00 my friend was called for his operation, by which time the waiting area was overflowing
    with perhaps 50/60 patients and carers/helpers.

    My point is…….during the two and a half hours I sat/sitting a nurse was very busy, selling raffle tickets
    and telling people the draw was to be held on 13th. December, the day after the election, when, if
    BJ won then the NHS would cease to exist!…………….This was from a nurse who did nothing else
    but spread propaganda, she did nothing to earn her salary which you and I pay for………

    And we are short of nurses!?…………….Really?

    1. Morning Garlands

      Nursing, Hmmm .

      Nursing used to be regarded as a vocation, a calling , pure and simple .. a need to help people to get better .. Well that is the way many of us thought .

      I think that the NHS is riddled with hysteria and panic , it is catching , it is a victim of it’s own success .. used and abused .

      I find it so sad that hard working good people are being mentally battered by propaganda . I suspect that some NHS surgeons are working in the private sector , and their public clinic lists are secondary .. or there are lots of meetings to attend .. I have no idea , but certain pressures seem to be causing problems .

      What do you think?

      1. ‘Morning, Mags, you may agree with me that, since the introduction of graduate nurses, the profession has ceased to be a vocation and become a career with those graduates continually vying for promotion instead of getting on with the job.

        Drop the graduate requirement and bring back on-the-job training under Sister Tutor, with Staff Nurses running the ward, all under the care, supervision and guidance of Matron. It worked before, it can work again.

        All the current (mis)Management, empire-building and virtue-signalling has led to the NHS being virtually privatised and disfunctional.

        1. Wards were run overall by a sister or charge nurse. Staff nurses were in charge of each shift.
          There was a different arrangement in psychiatric nursing because the unions were stronger (there were more male nurses and many of the older ones had been redundant Welsh miners).
          There was one sister to each ward and she worked 08:00 to 17:00.
          There were two charge nurses to each ward – one for each shift.
          They earned the same as the sole sister in charge of her ward.

  13. Theresa May would get £22,000 under Corbyn’s £58billion WASPI proposal. Cheap at the price if she would retire and disappear from public life.

      1. …and what about all the years when women received their pensions at age 60 while men had to wait until 65?

    3. Like the PPI scam that’s been milking taxpayers and savers for years, it’s just another handout for rich self-serving go-getters.

    4. Morning Z,
      To late for that, she was stage two of the cameron ( the wretch) eu re-entry rocket,final stage still in flight.
      She played her part to perfection &
      treachery pays well.
      PS,
      I can still hear the echo’s of victory is ours, “job done, leave it to the tories”
      That coming on top of 6 years under the cameron (the wretch) may odious combo.

  14. Morning all

    SIR – Even if Lord Kerslake (report, November 26) is right and Labour is willing to remove Jeremy Corbyn as leader to facilitate a coalition of Remain, in the event of a hung parliament the Liberal Democrats should run for the hills, because it won’t change anything.

    The hard Left has taken control of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Mr Corbyn is well known to be a life-long Eurosceptic but has been forced to equivocate.

    Moderate Labour MPs and candidates continue to be deselected or forced out by other means (Sally Gimson, Kate Hoey).

    Anti-Semitism has been allowed to flourish with only lip service paid to stamping it out. This behaviour won’t stop just because the leader changes.

    The Liberal Democrats should be very careful about whom they get into bed with, after what happened with the Cameron-Clegg alliance.

    Jo Swinson likes to make the fine distinction between a coalition and a confidence-and-supply arrangement with Labour, but the electorate won’t. They will watch her party, as junior partner to Labour, enabling the most catastrophic hard-Left government this country has ever seen, and they won’t thank her for it.

    Alison Levinson

    Hastings, East Sussex

    1. SIR – In relation to yesterday’s report of the Chief Rabbi’s statement, history tells us that we Jews are always the first to be attacked, but never the last.

      In Germany it was then the homosexuals and the gypsies; in what was Yugoslavia it was the Muslims; in the Middle and Near East it was the Baha’i and now the Christians.

      Who will be the next in Britain? The committed Christians or the Muslims? We have seen examples in the past few years of each.

      Remember, we are never the last.

      Jeremy Montagu

      Wadham College, Oxford

    4. Even if found not guilty, which would be a surprise, she should have been fired by now. She is, in my opinion, bringing the Met into disrepute and that is gross misconduct. However, she is still in employment with the Met as a Chief Superintendent. Well, I know what I think of the Met and its senior officers.

  16. SIR – My wife had booked a three-day trip to Paris next week for our wedding anniversary.

    On Monday, Eurostar informed me that our train journeys have been cancelled due to the forthcoming French general strike.

    It’s a shame not be going. It would have given us a glimpse of how life would be with Mr Corbyn as PM.

    Geoff Boyes

    Teddington, Middlesex

    1. Depending on the result on 12th. December. Mr & Mrs. Boyes can have the same experience without leaving Teddington.

    2. Morning E,
      It is my belief GB that things will be the same under governance of any of the toxic lab/lib/con trio as the past four decades build up should show us.
      Old Werzel just gets these Isles to the point of total destruction , quicker.

  17. SIR – In the late Fifties, as a student at Guy’s Hospital, I accompanied a midwife to a home confinement in Bermondsey. My mentor, having deemed the birth far from imminent, left me to observe the mother while continuing her rounds. It soon became apparent that the baby was impatient to arrive: there was no phone and the father was nowhere to be seen.

    Meanwhile, a large Alsatian dog had crept into the room and I suddenly felt it grip my hand, gently but firmly. Happily we came to an understanding, and my first and totally unexpected delivery was completed safely.

    My subsequent 35 years in general practice brought many more home visits, some tinged with sadness, but most educational for both me and the patient. Above all, they cemented a lasting bond.

    I know that times have changed and my successors have no less a sense of duty and care, but not to see patients in their own surroundings is to be deprived of a valuable resource.

    Dr Sandy Macfarlane

    Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire

  18. SIR – The solar panels on my roof have generated hot water for several months this year, but recently, if I hadn’t had my trusty gas boiler, it would have been cold showers or boiling kettles for washing. Forfend the day my gas boiler is ruled illegal.

    Lorimer Burn

    Guildford, Surrey

      1. We had hot water solar panels on two holiday homes we rented; one on the Costa del Sol in early September when it was nice and hot and the other in South-western Turkey in May, with the sun even stronger.

        Both gave us piping hot water when we came home late afternoon on a sunny day. Both gave us a cold shower the following morning. If it was cloudy for any appreciable part of the day, especially between 10.00 and 15.00 the teatime water was tepid at best.

  19. SIR – My wife and I will soon be moving to an 1850s Cotswold-stone house. We tried to transfer our home insurance policy, but the company told us its computer did not recognise the term “Cotswold stone”, and was therefore unable to offer us cover. What do owners of Cotswold-stone houses do for their insurance?

    David Morris

    Nether Westcote, Oxfordshire

    4. It may be stone from the Cotswolds, but that’s not a rock type.

      Tell them it’s limestone, or more specifically oolitic limestone (which it is). Job done.

  20. As the election approaches, I am left with only one option – to spoil my ballot paper.

    I am dismayed by the preoccupation with concocted non-issues such as “antisemitism” or “islamophobia”. Are the British really so stupid? It appears that they are.

    Whilst I support Boris in his efforts to resolve the stalemate that is Brexit despite the quite appalling obstructionism from Parliament and from the Supreme Court, I am deeply worried about what comes next. Must we have such a close relationship with Trump and his evil cohoot of tyrants such as Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Prince Mohammed and Kim Jung Un? I have personal experience how commercial pharmaceutical interests bump up the price of generic medicine to local surgeries quite brazenly (like raising the price from £8 to £220 just to profiteer at the expense of patients and the taxpayer. Getting into a trade deal with the Americans just makes this sort of thing legal, and I want no part of it.

    Then we get to the cloud cuckoo land that is Labour. They really do not have a clue about how to raise revenue and how to spend it wisely. I really do not care about “antisemitism” and wish they’d shut up about it, but I do care about the preoccupation with “equality” and “diversity” which actually means supremacy for selected favourites on the grounds of personal identity, much of which is pretty hostile to society in general. Again, I want no part of it.

    Don’t get me started on the Liberal Democrats – an authoritarian one-issue party of turncoats and Big Business globalists, led by an aggressive feminist who hates me for being the “wrong sort of person” – the exact opposite of the liberalism I once campaigned so hard for in the 1980s.

    I have high hopes for the Brexit Party. I have always liked Ann Widdecombe, the hospital matron of politics – fearsome, but keeps the wards clean and the patients fed. However capable and charismatic their Leader is, surely the UKIP experience cannot pin the hopes of the nation on one man for long – he needs time off same as everyone that is human, and he does not only need to learn to delegate, he needs to work with those who may rub him up the wrong way sometimes, because in any village there are more than one type of person. However in their wisdom, they will not put up candidates where there is Tory incumbent. So that’s that then.

    Despite serious misgivings about their national campaign, and a bizarre set of lunatic policies if they ever get a majority Government, which honestly I feel about as likely as me winning the lottery without buying a ticket, the candidate put up by the Greens is an honest old sailor and small businessman, and the very type of person I feel we need to represent us in Parliament. I’d love to vote for him, but he’s just not bothering. He never replied to my email, I have had no campaign literature and even the local Green Party website has not even been updated to inform the public that he is standing. If he is just a paper candidate and does not want the job, why should I vote for him?

    1. Good morning JM

      My MP doesn’t respond to emails either.. perhaps if I were a chap , matters may be different ..

      When I used to email our previous MP , Lord Knight (Jim ) .. his office was organised and he was a Labour minister , his responses were quick , generous and to the point. ( he was a male version of Kate Hoey)

      I may just spoil my ballot paper .. only 4 choices .. the usual lot you know, nothing different.

      So shall I or shan’t I.. what will you do ?

        1. To my mild disgust I see the greatest threat to our countries future as coming from handing over final legal authority in the United Kingdom to the European Union, for an unspecified number of years. Boris says 1, but he has said a lot of things that I don’t believe. Barnier says at least 3. “Independent” observers say that making a treaty like that with the EU will take 10 years with their track record.

          My current Conservative MP is a Liberal Remainer, I have no Brexit Party candidate. Even with my fears for the future I cannot vote for Corbyn. So, in this marginal seat that the Liberals held the last time, I am going to be forced to vote for them in an attempt to reduce Boris’s number of MP’s by 1 to stop him selling our country to Europe.

          As I despise the Liberals this should tell you how bad that I and many others think this Withdrawal Agreement is. The EU wrote it to break our country. Theresa May was prepared to destroy the Conservative Party to pass it, by promising a 2nd Referendum and working with Labour to get it through.

          As those who have been watching events closely have pointed out, it was the intention of the EU to make this agreement so painful for the United Kingdom that we would beg the EU to let us back in again. That cannot be allowed to happen if it can be avoided at all.

          The Lib Dems have no chance of winning so one more seat for them will be trivial, but it could stop Boris forcing this deal through if he has one seat less and he is denied a majority.

          To vote Liberal though… It leaves you with a sick feeling to your core. What a disgraceful position our politicians have put us in that such a course of action is the least damaging to save the United Kingdom from the control of a foreign power.

      2. Morning, T.
        My MP is Owen Paterson, who is, as far as I can make out, a straight up never come down honest as the day is long Brexiter. However, a vote for him is a vote for Boris, whom I don’t trust.

        There are 4 candidates to choose from. The usual 3, plus an independant – but he is a rabid Remainer.
        I shall probably write ‘Brexit Party X’.

        1. Trust Owen, he is a decent man and friend of the farming community. Boris won’t last long as PM.

          1. Nottlers will remember that when Cameron stood down I very much hoped that Owen Paterson would become the party leader and I hoped for the same thing when May went.

            There are so few people in politics with integrity and clarity of purpose; two of them are Owen Paterson and Kate Hoey. How I wish that they had both joined the Brexit Party along with Anne Widdecombe and Anunciata Rees-Mogg.

          2. I had ten quid on OP for next party leader at 80/1. Maybe if he hadn’t spent so much time away after a riding accident……

      3. Good morning Lovely Truthful One

        What does your MP, Richard Drax, think of Boris Johnson’s sell out? When he was pressurised he voted in favour of May’s surrender deal and said he was deeply ashamed at having done so. Would he still be ashamed if he voted for the same thing again but now relabelled as “The Boris Brilliant Deal”?

        My support for the Conservative Party evaporated when Steve Baker and Mark Francois revealed themselves to be traitors to the cause of a proper Brexit. But our country is in a total mess because the alternatives to the Boris Bonkers are even worse.

        I am sure you will remember Arthur Clough’s poem ‘Say not the Struggle, naught availeth? The last line contains some optimism:

        But westward, look, the land is bright.

        But to the immediate west of your constituency we find one of the most repulsive people in the House of Commons, Oliver Letwin.

        1. Dear clever learned one

          Yes agree with you .. am very confused and hurt by all the fuss and blathering . Drax has been too quiet .

          Letwin has gone .. yes , stood down .. West Dorset may fall .. poss Lib Dem territory now .. We shall see.

        1. Greetings Ndovu, OLT (below) has set the Upvotes/Downvotes as a ballot. Read below for the details.

      5. Yo T_B

        We Nottlers will take a vote on it for you

        An uptick on your post means ‘Spoil the paper’

        A downtick on your post means ‘Vote for someone’

    2. Morning jM – I have a bad feeling about the forthcoming election. I am not sure that Boris and his party will win. There is no Brexit Party in this safe Conservative seat, The Conservative candidate is a “soft” Leaver. I was going to abstain but eventually I have supported the Conservative candidate and my postal vote has gone off to the Electoral officials. Once we Leave the EU we will have more power to make our MPs toe the line.

      1. Clearly in mine, Labour, narrowly held with Momentum activists around only a few miles away, are worried about the Brexit party. The flyer wrapped around the local free rag is from Labour and the message is ‘only a vote for labour can stop the Conservatives!”

    3. Morning JM,
      This train of events has not just happened it has been ongoing for years especially since Margaret was knifed in the political back .
      The treacherous build up by political rubber stampers was condoned by the electorate time after time.
      The “nige” wanted his life back, first things first though, destroy UKIP.
      The “nige” after the anti UKIP rant
      maligning 30000 members & on reflection is highly suss.
      We in the UKIP party, after sorting the problem at an EGM when Gerard Batten took the leadership
      he asked the membership for £100000 & received £300000 we were on the rise again.
      That activated an anti UKIP faction within which is being rectified as we type & that is more than can be said of the treacherous trio lab/lib/con that is still finding support.

      1. We’ve had this out over UKIP before.

        I actually think Gerard Batten was the best leader they had since Farage and voted for them in the euros. It wasn’t Nige that trashed UKIP though, but the bickering going on at NEC level where they clearly could not get on with one another, let alone form a pact with the nation.

        Nor did they convince me that they had the personal qualities required to run a country any better than the numpties on offer from the other parties. I saw very little capability as public servants. Fixing pavements or emptying the bins may be mundane, but it is a valid test whether they are up to running the country.

        As regards policies – I do not agree with them over their dislike of environmental protection (perhaps because it interferes with “Free Market” globalism), and thought they were too dogmatic over international aid. I felt they lost a good selling point by tailoring it to ensuring their populations stayed put and worked on making their own nations fit to live in, rather than exporting excess people over to us.

        As regards their “islamophobia” which was the prime reason Farage and his supporters broke away, I might suggest that anyone who does not submit to Islam may be considered an islamophobe, as indeed anyone who is not a Friend of Israel could be considered antisemitic. Christians, secularists and indeed those from any other religion may well be both islamophobes and antisemites by some officially-approved definitions. It is quite a ridiculous concept, and mostly there to suppress democracy and free speech. I find it quite insidious, and this was the main reason I voted UKIP in the euros.

    4. So what happened to your argument that Donald let down the Kurds ?

      Ummmmm…….

      Oh, it collapsed. Donald didn’t let down the Kurds. Very cleverly by feigning withdrawal he tricked Turkey, threatened them and stopped the war.

      Clever Donny. You don’t understand the highly complex situation in the US, and you don’t realize he’s your friend.

      As to North Korea, what happened to all those launches and nuclear threats ?

      Oh, all that’s been stopped too.

      Clever Donny !

      1. Donald didn’t let down the Kurds. Very cleverly by feigning withdrawal he tricked Turkey, threatened them and stopped the war.

        You should try telling the Kurds that! How they would laugh!

        1. A Merry Morning Minty

          What do you think of the PKK?

          They are considered a terrorist group even by the EU and yet they have offices in Brussels.

      2. By my use of one word ‘Erdogan’ I continue to condemn the way Trump betrayed the Kurds. This is not an issue in this election, since nobody is in any position to challenge our membership of NATO under these circumstances, but it may come up.

        I do not accept your analysis. The prime beneficiary has been Assad, the Russians and probably Iran, as the Kurds are forced into an alliance with them to protect them from NATO aggression. Was this really what Trump intended?

        I agree with you about North Korea, so I hesitate to include Kim Jung Un in the list of villains. Trump actually pulled a blinder there, and should be given credit for it. Nixon did much the same thing with Red China, and Reagan with the Soviets.

        1. Q. What does Little Misss Muffett have in common with Recep Erdogan?

          A. They both have curds in their whey.

        2. So you were wrong about North Korea.

          Back to the Kurds.

          Is there a war on them by Turkey ?

          No.

          Is the US the Kurds personal defence force ?

          No.

          Looks like Donny has this right.

          1. If you must answer your own questions, please do attempt to get the right answer, even when there are only two choices.

            The answer to both of course is Yes (although the latter ceased to be after that infamous phone call). The only defence force the Kurds can rely on now is the Peshmerga.

            It’s stretching my imagination a tad to suggest the North Korea is a benign democracy, but you are entitled to your opinion of it.

          2. But your ”Yes” is ridiculous.

            There is no war on the Kurds. The US stopped it.

            The US is supplying them arms.

            The US is not their protector, and is striking the right balance.

            I never said North Korea is a ”benign democracy”. Where do you get that weird idea.. ?

          3. That was the case before Trump’s dreadful decision to abandon them. The deal was that America would support the Kurds in Syria and Iraq on condition that they did not cause trouble in Turkey. In return for keeping a lid on Kurdish terrorism in Eastern Turkey, America would act as Dog in a Manger in Northern Syria, to prevent any cross-border incursion from Turkey into Syria, leaving the Kurds to mop up and deal with Islamic State, and become a moderating force to Assad and the Russians.

            Turkey has been persecuting the Kurds since the Middle Ages, and they are not about to stop. I attended a protest rally in Vienna in 2017 about Erdogan’s attack on Kurds in Afrin, Northern Syria. Turkey was actually helping Islamic State attack Kurds in Kobane, fearful that not to do so would open up a corridor between Erbil and Afrin.

            If anyone has halted Erdogan’s annexation of Northern Syria, it has been Assad and the Russians, who are no friends of the Kurds, but are on balance probably better protectors than the Turks and resurgent Islamic State.

          4. That’s what you read in papers like WAPO or the Guardian.

            The reality however is different as I explained, which is why Turkey is not attacking the Kurds, and why the Kurds are able to defend themselves.

          5. Since I have not read either for decades, or at all (what is WAPO?), how do you know that’s what I read?

            What planet are you on when you suggest that Turkey is not attacking the Kurds?

          6. What evidence do you have to demonstrate Turkey has ignored the truce brokered and enforced by President Trump ?

          7. http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/humanitarian-crisis-looming-the-kurds-northern-syria

            https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/24/a-look-at-the-worsening-refugee-crisis-in-northern-syria.html

            If this is the way America treats its friends, then what hope is there for a post-Brexit Special Relationship brokered by Boris?

            Very little, if anything, is coming out of our media here. They prefer to carry reports on fluff such as “antisemitism”, “islamophobia” or what Prince Andrew might have done with a consenting hooker in the past.

          8. Both sources are anti Trump and part of the ”fake news” media which so often has been wrong.

            Have you anything reliable ?

          9. Nobody who is “reliable” would publish anything but fake news. It’s all whipped-up things about who’s offended who online. There’s lots of things they don’t want us to know and therefore will suppress, such as the plight of the Kurds in Syria.

            How about you posting some evidence to back up your claims for once?

          10. What does that guy in Coventry say who apparently can see what’s happening from his bedroom window ?

    5. Liberalism according to Swansong

      You do as I say, no other words or deeds will be tolerated

  21. I was detained in the UAE. I learned that Britain puts trade before its citizens. Matthew Hedges. Tue 26 Nov 2019

    I was held for seven months in horrific conditions. Like other imprisoned Britons, I received little Foreign Office support.

    Welcome to the real world! Oh for the days of 1868 when the UK government launched an expedition to save several Brits detained by the mad Emperor of Abyssinia. This was by modern standards, almost impossible; the terrain, expense, likelihood of success all spoke against. So why did they do it? The answer is of course that Brits wherever they were could rely on the realities of their nationality. They were members of an exclusive club that transcended wealth or position. They were citizens of the UK and this entitled them whoever they were to the protection of the state. Needless to say the operation was carried out with an astonishing panache that would make the SAS look like slackers. The hostages were rescued and the safety of all other Brits anywhere in the world was thus enhanced. Such foresight is now denied to us by leaders that possess no quality of Patriotism or National Pride.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/26/detained-uae-britain-trade-citizens-foreign-office

    2. That brings to mind a quote from The West Wing from President Bartlet when an American transport plane full of Doctors was shot down by troops in a country that they were flying over. It referenced the time when the Romans were the dominant power:

      “Bartlet: Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the Earth unharmed, cloaked only in the protection of the words civis Romanus — I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally understood as certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens.

      Where was Morris’s protection, or anybody else on that airplane? Where was the retribution for the families, and where is the warning to the rest of the world that Americans shall walk this Earth unharmed, lest the clenched fist of the most mighty military force in the history of mankind comes crashing down on your house?! In other words, Leo, what the hell are we doing here?!”

      All empires fall, from stagnation within or attack from without. These days the dominant empire would be those who rule with money. Or they would like to be. They are trying to undermine countries around the world so that they can rule us all. Our morality and ethics get in their way.

        1. Is it possible that you can stop making errors when replying to me? 🙂

          I was quoting from a script from a television program called The West Wing, which is highly enjoyable and loved by many, whatever their political standing. When quoting a characters comments you do not add words to “correct” them.

          I would not change the final words of Rutger Hauer in the film Blade Runner if i felt they could be more accurate. They are good enough as they are.

          But, as you were. I know that you cannot stop yourself. 🙂

          1. In the same way as you can’t stop making silly mistakes: 2 in your second paragraph & 1 in the third. Can you spot them? 😉

  22. ‘Morning All

    Douglas Murray

    One of the few advantages of going on

    television or radio is that in time you meet all the leading nutters in

    the land. In most ordinary situations, I would never have encountered

    Holly Rigby. She says that she is a ‘teacher’, though seems to be part

    of that miraculous class of leftist activist able to juggle a full-time

    job with popping up on media channels at any hour of the day or night as

    a full-time activist for Jeremy Corbyn.

    Last week, I found myself on air with Holly for an hour

    on the BBC’s ‘Politics Live’. She seemed harmful enough. I don’t think

    there was an answer she gave which did not begin with the words ‘As a

    teacher’. Presumably as some kind of appeal to authority. And she

    gleefully trotted out every known far-left trope.

    But when we got around to the discussion of my recent book (copies of which can be found
    etc etc) it became clear what she was really there for. Without having
    read the book under discussion or being in the slightest way familiar
    with its arguments she immediately launched at it. Specifically she
    appeared to think – or was content to pretend that she thought – that my
    book was some kind of cover for murdering people, or making them kill
    themselves.

    She then waited till I said something she
    could portray as bigoted (on this occasion I referred in passing,
    casually to the whole ‘trans thing’) so that she could let out the great
    denunciation she had been working up to.

    For anyone unfamiliar with this trend,
    the Corbynistas do this solely in order that their supporting chorus of
    fellow crackpots online can celebrate a great ‘destruction’ of a
    right-wing monster. It is the best chance that the Hollys have of
    something that feels to them like stardom.

    Afterwards it was brought to my attention
    that Holly had been braver on social media than she had been in person.
    Specifically she took to Twitter to portray herself as a great warrior,
    who had had to suffer an hour in the presence of a person she described
    as a ‘racist, transphobic bigot’.

    In recent years I have taken money off a
    number of Holly’s comrades for such accusations. Only earlier this year,
    a little-known left-wing smear-merchant called Peter Jukes was forced into a grovelling apology and libel pay-out to me.

    Since Holly unwisely revealed during the
    programme that her father is a higher-rate tax-payer, presumably there
    would be some money to take if the spirit moved me. But
    on this occasion I decided to save time and money by simply stressing
    that if it came to that I was perfectly willing to play Holly’s game.

    After all, the Labour party is a racist
    political party. The most successful racist party in Britain since the
    BNP – though wildly more successful than Nick Griffin’s gang ever
    managed to be. So if I were a paid or unpaid activist for the Labour
    party these days I’d be wary about throwing around accusations of
    racism. As for ‘transphobia’ – this is just the accusation made against
    anyone who won’t automatically nod through medical experimentation on
    children. So while I’m not happy about it, I’m content to roll with it
    for now.

    And that was that. I thought that Holly’s
    smilingly ignorant face would never bother my mind again. But fanatics
    are extraordinary things, and this morning – after the chief rabbi
    issued an unprecedented denunciation of the Labour party’s high-command
    for its anti-Semitism – Holly was one of those who attempted to mount a
    retaliatory strike.

    For Holly, it matters enormously that
    ‘racism’ remain a tool that their ilk can wield, but one that can never
    be used against them. And so Holly – in her infinite wisdom – chose to
    retaliate to the chief rabbi’s criticism of the Corbyn-ite Labour party
    for anti-Semitism by attacking the chief rabbi.

    Once again, Holly showed herself to be
    deeply untroubled by facts. Nobody who knows anything about rabbi Mirvis
    could describe him as any kind of unalloyed ‘supporter’ of Boris
    Johnson. Nobody who knows anything about the chief rabbi could describe
    him as ‘an uncritical supporter of Netanyahu.’ These
    are claims so laced with presumption and ignorance that it is hard to
    know how Holly can embarrass herself so publicly. Or rather, it would be
    hard to imagine, if I hadn’t experienced Holly’s weapons-grade
    ignorance myself only days earlier.

    Anyhow, I’m pleased to see that the
    medium Holly has adopted in order to try to become famous – Twitter –
    has now roundly turned on her (she appears to have since deleted her
    account). But if this country actually wants to confront the sort of
    zealotry that Holly practises perhaps it is time to adopt some of the
    tactics she would so gleefully use against others.

    Perhaps it is worth finding out precisely
    where Holly does teach and what it is that she teaches her pupils?
    Perhaps it is worth parents at that school asking why one of their
    children’s teachers appears to spend so little time in the classroom?
    Why she seems to prioritise her work as a leftist activist over her work
    as a teacher?

    Perhaps, indeed, people could make Holly
    unemployable – as eagerly as she and her ilk would make someone
    unemployable if they did anything similar from the opposite political
    direction. Perhaps we should employ these tactics ourselves, for a time.

    Of course there are downsides, but the
    desire to give the Hollys a taste of their own vindictive medicine must
    have crossed more than one mind over recent days.

    1. The main requirement of being a follower of the tenets of Cultural Marxism is an unalloyed stupidity so that logic and reason do not inhibit your arguments.

      1. Marx on his deathbed said I am not a Marxist.

        His ideas – of fairness, of shared ownership, of returned value were vaunted and good. Look at bonus schemes! So many companies offer them now. Look at healthcare agreements, at market salaries. At share options. These were what Marx was pushing for, he just couldn’t imagine them in his time.

      2. Very well put – I have borrowed this and e-mailed to to one of my sons who, with his girlfriend, is living in a postgraduate flat on the campus of Lancaster University. I shall be interested to get their reaction.

        (Henry is working on writing software programmes and studying for an external M.Sc in computer technology from York University while Jessica has a MSc in Maths from London University and is now being paid while she studies for a PhD in Epidemiology at Lancaster.)

    3. Sadly when a normal person points out that the emperor is wearing no clothes the fevered mob who rely upon said emperor for their livelihood attack the speaker.

      These days instead of the boy speaking sense, he would likely be beaten senseless, insulted, abused, his parents locked away and the child put into an indoctrination camp so severe you’d think it something form that other monstrous Left wing hideousness; Nazi Germany.

      Weirdly, I don’t believe for a second that Jeremy Corbyn, the man is anti semitic. I just can’t. I don’t believe he believes in anything apart from communism. However, what we know is that again, sadly but deliberately due to Blair’s malice – that his voting block – especially in London – is. Thus while Corbyn sits there thinking ‘bloody hell, I just wanted to say let’s all talk about this mess and why are they going on about one sodding word?!’ his support base has seen this as acceptable when I imagine Jeremy the man isn’t at all.

      It’s a horrible mess. Someone could suggest I hate Muslims because I find the Burqa to be deeply racist, divisive and utterly against the prinicples and philopshy of this country. That I know we have a problem with Muslim terrorism. These things are true, but I don’t hate Islam or anyone with that belief. We’re all individuals and we need, as individuals, with our own voices, without fear of insult or abuse (which the Left so love to silence that very debate) to talk about the problems we see and to learn, grow and that we can call integration. That discussion, of multiple views is diversity. At the oment the Left have enforced rigid, deliberate and utterly separate enclaves – thus their terror at being called anti semitic. It creates the conversation they so desperately want to avoid.

  23. Good morning all. An accurate turn of phrase ? ….

    ” PC Christopher Leach, 37, had five allegations of misconduct proven against him at a disciplinary hearing.

    A panel found he had filmed himself engaging in “lewd behaviour” at Cathays police station in Cardiff with a woman who he had met on the job.”.

    3. I wish that Peddy would organise a special course to teach reporters basic grammar. He could start with: who, whom; who’s, whose; its, it’s; they’re, there, their; sat, seated; lay, lie; etc. Any more suggestions for Peddy?

          1. And onto Hilda Baker, “I was sat sitting…”; “I was stood standing…”

            But she made it, and all her other malapropisms, sound funny.

      1. Imagine the letter to Santa.
        1. Trannie doll.
        2. Accessories for trannie doll. (followed by detailed list)

        1. Morning Anne,
          Talking of pop up surprises, I was asked by an Indian in Libya, that returning from the UK would I bring him back a pump up doll,
          I had to refuse on the grounds of passing through Tripoli and the lid of my case being lifted prior to everything being turfed out up
          pops Delores the inflatable, bad enough getting a beer kit in.

    4. Is that model behind him/her from the “We’re tired of being lied to, politicians head on a pike” range?

    5. I remember the hoo hah over Ken – Barbie’s squeeze being … um …. incomplete.
      Was he ahead of his time?
      And wasn’t there a craze for anatomically correct dolls, much favoured by social workers trying to get convictions for kiddie fiddling?

  25. Good afternoon/morning all
    It’s 28 degrees here with just 31% humidity. About to have a bite to eat then off to the pool for some exercise.
    I can feel the vitamin D rippling through my body.

      1. Afternoon Belle – well, it is here. We’re in Dubai, now 4 hours ahead of the U.K. and it’s lovely weather just now. Either November or February are good times to visit, if you have family here as we do. Our daughter, husband and two granddaughters are out here, have been for 6 years +.
        Architecture is amazing, all shapes and sizes, modern of course, mostly glass, and they are building like there’s no tomorrow. All for expats though.

        1. I have a thing about Arabs , and how they stuck a sack over Daddy’s head.. riots, that sort of thing, Suez 1956.

          Nice that you are with your family .. I had happy family pictures as well, until all hell broke loose.. the heat and flies .. and calls from the Muezzin do nothing for me .

    4. You can go off people, you know. I mean, I didn’t go on endlessly as I sailed around the Med or the Baltics on The Most Expensive Cruise Ship In The World, (as seen in the Channel Five documentary) enjoying first class cuisine, fine drinks, cocktails, hot and cold running waiters and maids, did I? Never mentioned it, not once.
      Ok, maybe once.
      Or Twice.
      Possibly more…

  26. Corbyn forced to admit that some of the poorest will be hit hardest by his proposed tax changes

    Example of this are the transferable tax allowance for couples which Labour will abolish. This allows up to 10% of the personal allowance to be transferred to the other partner./ This benefits couples where one parent stays at home or works part time to look after the children. It also benefits pensioners on a very low income this could be typically where the wife had paid the married woman’s stamp

    Another change that will affect the poor is the removal of the single persons council tax discount. Another of Corbyns changes is the tax treatment of dividends which will have an adverse impact on pensions

    Various other tax changes will push up costs for everyone such as the 38% increase ibn corporation tax and the much higher level of deficit and debt Corbyn will run up

    1. But hey, there are few married couples now, we’re in the minority, youngsters don’t bother with getting married so no need for transferable anythings!

    2. Yes, I can see how a 38% increase in Corporation Tax will benefit the country. All those businesses falling over each other to relocate elsewhere, will do wonders for the unemployment figures.

    3. Labour hates poor people really. Why else are they offering huge handouts to rich career women of a certain age?

      Wasn’t it a Labour mayor of London who is about to slap a daily fine on Londoners running pre-2005 bangers because they cannot afford Chelsea tractors?

  28. Masterchef TV star Gary Rhodes, famed for his spiky hairstyle, dies aged 59 ..
    RIP Gary

    My one and only fave TV chef.

      1. Great Ambassador for British food.

        Delia’s kitchen was too pristine and unsullied for my taste.

        2. Delia’s prissiness got right up my nose.
          With hindsight, I suspect it was due to an humungous hangover.

    3. He was only 59. I find it very sad when people much younger than I die. I lost several very good friends who were in their fifties and sixties.

  29. Phobias to be criminalised…….

    Should Arachnophobia be a crime??

    The British Council of Spiders think so

    Details are on their Website
    (I’ll get me coat)

      1. Claustrophobia and Agarophobia are common phobias.Prisons would need to be carefully selected for each phobia.

    2. My daughter’s alleged arachnophobia was investigated by a child psychologist back in the 1990s, when her mother and maternal grandmother were trying to pin patriarchal abuse on me in order to freeze me out of the family post-divorce.

      He asked her what she would do if she encountered a spider. She told him “I’d stamp on it and squash it until it was dead”. He reported that a true arachnophobe would have run a mile; my daughter just didn’t like spiders.

      While there was no charge of arachnophobia to answer for, there is this little matter of animal cruelty…

      1. I’m an arachnophobe – but luckily I have a husband to throw them out of doors without harming them.

          1. An old Bob Monkhouse joke:

            When my grandchildren nicknamed me Spiderman I used to think that they thought I was a super-hero. I then discovered it was because I find it difficult to get out of the bath.

        3. I do not kill spiders. I use a glass and a sheet of paper to capture them and then I put them in the garden.

    3. They should learn that a phobia is an irrational fear. Fear of Islam is perfectly rational given their record of terrorism.

      I’d better watch out for the knock on the door……… oh! It was just our neighbour……..phew!

  31. So when you listen to, or watch, a BBC political program, to whom do the views and opinions you hear actually belong ?

    Where does the program trail actually go ?

    1. One day surely there must be a confrontation between the Left’s dogmatic agenda on sexuality and transgenderism and the rigid Muslim teaching on such matters.

      I wonder how this confrontation will play out and if any resolution is possible or even desired by either side.

      1. The confrontation has been going on outside a school in Birmingham. Yesterday, I believe, the courts outlawed any such demos outside the school. Gay, trans issues trump all those old values such as morality and indeed feminism.

      2. Morning R,
        If the peoples insist on carrying on with no drastic change in the voting pattern
        then shortly heads will roll,
        literally.
        Submission is well underway regarding the lab/lib/con coalition party.

  34. There is much criticism of Jeremy Corbyn who was mauled by Andrew Neil and was revealed as even more incompetent than we thought he was.

    Is Andrew Neil going to interview Boris Johnson and if so when?

    I would very much like to see Johnson put firmly on the spot about the very dire flaws in his rehashed May Surrender deal with the EU.

    1. What gets me is the number of people, including the ERG, who think it will eventually lead to a full Brexit.

      1. Morning AA,
        They are all as one, especially the erg & mogg
        running the attack / defence campaign against may erring strongly on defence, right up to the wire, again.

      2. Our Tory MP has said that. I quote,“The deal on offer ensures we leave the EU. You should not under estimate the attempts by those trying to stop Brexit. A vote for this deal delivers Brexit.” Dated 19th October 2019

        1. I think my Tory MP said the same to me and referred me to a Martin Howe QC article. Howe did say it was better than May’s deal but when I read further it also outlined the dreadful pitfalls. I wrote to him again pointing that out and that we would still be paying vast sums of money and ruled by the ECJ. It’s the only email I’ve sent him that he didn’t reply to. Says it all, doesn’t it.

        2. What annoys and frustrates me is that those who claim that the Boris bodge is a proper Brexit are so extremely vague on detail.

          There are certain searching questions that need to be addressed and not only are these questions not being answered they are not even being asked. I sincerely hope that Andrew Neil has a quiver full of sharpened points to direct at Boris Johnson.

      3. When Steve Baker and Mark Francois betrayed us and then collapsed without a murmur I knew that Brexit was dead under the Boris Johnson regime and that we would have a BRINO inflicted upon us which is even worse than Remain.

        If only Nigel Farage had managed to get more good people to join his party. John Redwood, Owen Paterson, Bill Cash and Kate Hoey would have made a tremendous difference if they had joined Anne Widdecombe and Anunciata Rees-Mogg.

        Why do not more people realise that having a proper independent Britain is far more important than any political party or any individual?

    3. Good Day, Down Voter

      Does your down vote imply that you do not think that Boris Johnson should be compelled to give us facts and details about his ‘brilliant Brexit deal’ rather than fatuous waffle which is all we have had from him so far. Are you a mushroom that you prefer to be kept in the dark and fed on manure?

      1. Come on DV, man up, who are you?

        Your repeat down vote confirms that you prefer to be an anonymous mushroom!

        I never down vote fellow posters. If I disagree with someone I say so openly.

        Why is it possible to see who up voters are but not to see who the down voters are. It rather implies that down voters are too cowardly and shamed to identify themselves.

        1. rastus – it lives and thrives on attention and hates to be ignored. So I ignore it. 🙂

          I wish that I could ignore that pleasant “comfort food” lunch that I have just indulged in. I may need to put on an old black & white film and “rest my eyes” for an hour. The delights of a comfortable reading chair.

  35. “It has never been hard to tell the difference between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.”

    A thought that kept running through my head as The Fish Wife dirged on until MB switched off the telly and decided to get himself a life.
    She makes Jonah seem like an incurable optimist.

  37. Surely nothing any of the governing bodies / people
    sign going forward without the peoples consent can be considered legal ?
    Did not the political bastards in the HP sauce factory
    declare a war of treachery & deceit on the peoples commencing 25/6/2016 ?
    ALL side actively engaged in the brexit issue are as one IMO, & that sure ain’t for leaving.
    Answer me, why would one political hierarchy unit want to stop the continuance of golden eggs being laid ?

    1. Michael Crighton’s book, State of Fear, tackled precisely that scenario, i.e. climate activists deliberately creating situations that they could blame on the Climate. Well worth reading if you can get hold of a copy.

    1. Images such as that affect me more than child abuse. A child can recover and learn to live a normal life.

    2. One comment says that it’s from a U.S. nursing home.
      Which is not saying that it doesn’t happen here.
      I’ve been listening to the Nigel Farage QT programme, and there was the usual “we need all the immigrants to staff the care homes.”
      I don’t know about other care homes, but in three that I personally know of in Essex, the great majority of the staff were white British locals, with a just a few exceptions. Agency staff tend to be non-English/British, but most of the regular staff are not.
      What is the experience of others here?

      1. I must say that in my mother’s care home she had carers from Bulgaria and other parts of Eastern Europe and these carers seemed to me to be kindly angels. Some even showed for my mother;s funeral – definitely above and beyond the call of duty.

        BTW the care home had quite a few who were vegetables, and little better than new-borns irt bodily functions …. but with relatives with few private assets paying nothing for their care.

      2. I have an aunt who’s 100 years old and lives in a nursing home in Waltham Abbey in Essex. The staff are a fairly even mix of local and foreign but all very kind and caring. They need to be local or have their own transport as it isn’t an easy place to get to using public transport. One bus an hour to Loughton station when I go to visit on Sundays and nothing after 7.20 pm.

  42. I see that the vote counts have now stabilized and are going up in real time but all the comments from the old free threads are gone, leaving a big gap between the Telegraph days and the beginning of this blog. Perhaps the disappearing numbers really were just Disqus clearing out the old threads and they’re not out to get us after all?

        1. As far as I can tell, my comment numbers are unchanged.

          The points stopped falling for about a week and then started falling again and then stopped falling a few days ago.

    2. ‘Afternoon, Sue, just ‘cos you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re NOT out to get you.

    3. Sue – many people have been hit by this bot for months and months, even years, before Disqus had its “adjustment.” There are many people whose name I have known for 2 years or so whose visible upvote score is 0 and whose actual score in is the -100,000’s as the bot keeps lowering the scores indefinitely. That could not happen with just balancing.

      It is far more likely that as more and more people started thinking that it was Disqus themselves doing the stripping, that they have just stopped running the program for a while. Or the sad little leftie who managed to defeat Disqus security and run it from home has been sent on a work placement scheme to keep getting his benefits, so he does not run the program at the moment.

      But no amount of “account adjustment” could leave you with -100,000 votes.

    4. Just made a note of mine to see if they start going up again. I lost about 8,000+ upvotes but I think the comment count is still as it was. Not sure I’ve got the patience to see where they begin.

    5. Hi Sue – it took an hour to trawl through old comments and see if they’ve all disappeared…. they have! All old comments on my record prior to our new site have disappeared. I think the total comment count still includes all comments I have ever made.

  43. Oh my goodness me !

    Up pops Dave Cameron, ex UK PM, to give a lecture at ”Transparency International”, which allegedly is part funded by George Soros. Of all the organizations in the world it would just have to be that one !

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2017/12/14/david-cameron-soros-lecture-trumps-criticism-mainstream-fake-news-dangerous-real-enemy-russian-bots-trolls/

    This is the same organization alleged to be linked to Jo Swinson.

    Interestingly, Dave Cameron is apparently taking an anti President Trump line in his speech and supporting the mainstream media which Donald has been attacking as ”fake”. (Donald has been proved right and Dave Cameron wrong)

    I think the speech looks absolutely compliant with the views and opinions of George Soros in every respect !

    What an amazing completely innocent random coincidence !

      1. I just heard him interviewed by Rick Nobinson on R4, he came across as an incompetent lightweight, Nobinson had him on the back foot throughout.

    2. Insult to yer thickos…Burgon is in a class of his own, with a Masters in Stupidity.

      ‘Morning, Belle.

        1. “Thick as mince” is an expression that has always confused me.
          Possibly too many encounters with school and hospital mince has skewed my understanding.

          2. I made mince and onions for dinner last night, with spuds mashed with bagie, a knob of butter and a splash of milk and steamed veg (brocolli, carrot batons and savoy cabbage.

            Nice and thick. A pound of mince, two good sized onions and a heaped desertspoon of plain flour with three-quarters of a pint of boiling water.

          3. Well, that has started a slight drooling process and will fixate my mind on food for the next 3 hours until lunch. I have all of those ingredients as well, apart from the broccoli.

            I foresee comfort food on the menu.

          5. Self-raising flour, half that quantity of suet, water to make a stiff dough, salt, black pepper, (I like a good teaspoon of oregano too) flatten by hand then fold, and fold, and fold, about 8 times is good. Roll into small balls and sling them into the pan of mince 20 minutes before it’s due to come off the heat.

            THAT’S comfort food.

          6. Gosh! It’s years since I made suet dumplings! Must have look for some suet when I do the shopping!

    3. “Boris Johnson is a Tory”

      Oh, well spotted, I’d never have known it if you hadn’t pointed it out to me.

      Thank you – bell-end. (Burgon, not you, Mags).

  46. Looking at Andrew Neil’s interview many things are evident:

    Corbyn’s press team have done an amazing job of turning a Lefty student activist from an attack dog into a poodle – or put Corbyn on valium.

    Corbyn hates marriage. He hates the idea of tradition and believes that such should be punished – by removing the tax allowance. We don’t get it but that’s because the last three Conservative governments have sought to punish the worker and creator.

    None of Labour’s policies are remotely close too realistically costed – and he knows this. He simply doesn’t care. I point at Corbyn the man as the rep for the Labour party, not as an individual.

    He desperately seeks to punish private wealth, investment of any kind and those enjoying any form of income not from the state: that he’d go after my paltry dividends to take more than half – of £250 – is evidence of this.

      1. Not sure what an augusto interval is?

        I think we (those who can) should leave the country. The man is obviously a danger, one who specifically hates everything that binds society together. Yes, I’m sure there are people living together with children. However, marriage is a step beyond that. A commitment that should be rewarded and encouraged. Corbyn seems to hate the very idea preferring this disconnected, can leave at any time no vows, no commitment no integrity approach to society.

        But then, he doesn’t care about it. What he really wants to do is punish the traditional, Christian, work ethic promoting decent average joe to create a dependent society.

        1. Afternoon W,
          We could have said run in 1939 / 45 we didn’t.
          Plus many of those doing the running could have been lab/lib/con supporter / voters without whom we would never have got, as a country, in such an odious state.

    2. You have forgotten that Cameron introduced the transferrable tax personal allowance as a recognition of marriage. He wasn’t all bad.
      (The only problem with that allowance is that in practice that half the country don’t know about it, and the rest are beaten by the hassle or deterred by the practicalities).

      1. It was the having to claim for it that annoyed. Anyone would think these government departments sat in isolation to one another, that work and pensions have no idea to talk to births marriages and deaths to HMRC to the welfare people.

        If war queen and I decide to have another small person (junior wants a sister as his best friend has one) you’d think they’d all be able to sort out the change in circs, adjust welfare, get the various school places in place and so on and so forth but no, it can’t. It’s like dealing with the great wall of China for every department.

        1. Mind you, the trouble these days is that whether someone is married or in a ” relationship ” can change with the weather, When I completed tax returns for clients before I retired, it was sometimes not easy to ask straight out whether they were married, and if so, whether their wife paid tax on her earnings. Mostly they had difficulty answering either question.

    3. Oooh, I don’t know; for someone who hates marriage, he’s had three goes at it.
      Triumph of hope over experience?
      Is he a slow learner?

  47. I have to say that the Conservatives do not appear to have much in the way of intellect or aggression in going for the blatant lefty lunacies coming from the Corbyn-McDonnell team. They have nobody who’s speaking for the average Joe, who has no truck for PCness and State Ownership – where is the ability to put in front of the public, the inefficiencies of the National Coal Board, British Rail, the Gas Board, the horrors of telephones (or rather lack of em) under the Post Office.

    Margaret Thatcher once said to me: “There are no final victories in politics”. She was right: many of the hard lessons we learned in the Eighties are in danger of being unlearned or forgotten. It is astonishing that, in 2019, the Conservatives should be facing a major political party with serious proposals for nationalisation, workers on the boards of companies, increased powers for trade unions, and public spending at perhaps 50 per cent of GDP, all of which imply crippling levels of taxation.

    So far, the Tory campaign has not been in full-throttle attack mode on Labour’s plans for the economy, choosing instead to keep the focus relentlessly on Brexit. The proposals for nationalisation have barely been mentioned – not just the cost, but the delusion of imagining governments can run industries.

    But, while the party has every reason to be pleased with the way its campaign has gone so far – with the authoritative pollster Sir John Curtice predicting a good chance of an overall majority at this stage – it is important not to be complacent. That is when things can go wrong, and a small increase in Labour’s percentage now could radically change the outlook. It may be difficult to maintain the focus on Brexit for another two weeks – during which time Labour will continue at every opportunity to push their unaffordable public spending pledges. But the longer Labour’s economic plans go unchallenged, the greater the risk that they will get away with the nonsense they are peddling.

    One should not assume that wildly extravagant spending plans will have no buy-in from voters. The young may like the idea of free broadband; civil servants, the salary increases; pensioners, the deferral of the retirement age. Some commuters may conclude that suburban trains are so unreliable they have little to lose from nationalised railways. And all too many people will fall for the plainly wrong idea that only the top five per cent need to pay higher taxes to finance Labour’s expensive programme. If democracy means robbing Peter to pay Paul, Paul may well vote for that.

    But this is the road to ruin, as we saw in the Seventies: skyscraping taxes that destroy growth, suppress incentives and innovation and produce only stagnation, misery and rising unemployment. So far it is mainly the newspapers that have been exposing the recklessness of Labour’s spending, and the terrifying threat it poses to the country’s standard of living. But in an election you need an attack dog – someone who will tear into Labour and does the negative campaigning, while allowing the PM to be above the fray. Boris Johnson is a brilliant campaigner, and he brings much-needed energy, enthusiasm and drive. But there are dangers, as we saw in 2017, in concentrating on the leader alone.

    Where, then, is the Norman Tebbit of this election?

    One of the advantages of the Conservative party is that it has plenty of experienced ministers who could take on this role, while Labour’s shadow ministers are, at best, inexperienced novices naively flirting with dangerous ideas they barely comprehend. Much of the campaign is being fought on social media, especially Twitter, which makes the election elsewhere appear rather unstructured, with a few set pieces. But even the messaging on social media is soft, emphasising 20 more hospitals and only cursory slogans about the economy and taxation. I suspect you can’t win the argument on social media if you don’t also win it in the mainstream media as well.

    I hope that in the next stage of the election campaign we will see more of the Chancellor and his economic team. What he has said on the economy needs saying again and again.

    This is a Brexit election, but the Conservatives need also to make the case for wealth creation, prosperity and liberty. They should not be afraid if the debate moves on to the economy, because they have all the winning arguments. Labour’s programme needs to be so thoroughly shredded that no Labour Party dares present anything like this to the British public ever again.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/11/26/tories-need-new-norman-tebbit-serve-attack-dog-election/

    1. “They (the Conservatives) have nobody who’s speaking for the average Joe”

      Could that have something to do with the innate arrogance of many of them and their ‘mummy knows best and explain nowt ‘cos we’re ahead in the polls’ attitude to the Hoi Polloi?

  48. I found it really painful listening to Iain Dale of LBC last night. Much of the programme was on ANTISEMITISM.

    Caller: “I would certainly be even more wary of going round in Jewish headwear in the South of France than here

    Iain Dale (audibly stiffening): “Oh, why is that?”

    Caller: “well, it’s the demographics there”

    Iain (very tense, can’t say the M or I word) Dale: “Oh”

    eventually, it comes out …. and we arrive at ….

    Iain Dale: “Of course, there are many sources of antisemitisn other than …. ”

    ———————————-

    Later on in the show he congratulates Naz Shah (Bradford, Labour MP) for a very sincere apology in Parliament for her antisemitic tweets …. and it’s as if he’s interviewing one of the kindly nurses from my mother’s care home.

    1. Many sources, indeed. I,ve probably played or sung the Advent hymn, Lo! He comes with clouds descending over 100 times, without realising that I was being anti-semitic in the process. Thanks, CofE, for explaining this…

    2. She never apologised for basically saying that young white girls could get raped but should shut up in the interests of multi-culti (by that she means her own culti).

    3. I’d say that Iain Dale suffers from Islamophobia, i.e. he’s scared of the possible repercussions of shallows an honest debate…

  50. Morning again
    SIR – How sad to see someone whom I have always respected and admired – Lord Heseltine – attempt to do so much damage to the party of which he claims still to be a member.

    His intervention is not just damaging but also foolish if he really believes that taking his advice (to vote for an independent ex-Conservative MP or a Liberal Democrat candidate) will result in the worst of all outcomes: a Corbyn-led government or a hung parliament and another few years of instability.

    Sir Bernard Zissman
    Stanmore, Middlesex

    1. “…will result in the worst of all outcomes: a Corbyn-led government or a hung parliament and another few years of instability.”

      I would disagree with the latter point. With what we have seen from our crop of MP’s at the moment, sadly including what was once the Conservative Party, the worst outcome for the United Kingdom is any of them gaining a majority. The instability of a hung Parliament will throw a spanner into their plans to make us bow down to the European Union. Temporary paralysis is better than a death sentence.

      The fog of uncertainty about the motives of our politicians might well blow away when we see the ever-closer integration that the EU will pursue in the coming months and years. That might finally convince the majority that we do not need to reach a deal while still tied to the EU before we can leave. We should just leave and then get a deal when they are not controlling the negotiations and dragging our country down.

    2. Yes, Mr Waste-Of-Time really is an attention-seeking turncoat, who should have been slung out of the party a ling time ago. Fortunately, I think most voters have little time for yesterday’s men, and they are best left to their traitorous rantings.

      Unlike Sir Bernard, I have never respected or admired this self-important loner.

      ‘Morning, Epi.

    1. So many great comments, this one is among my favourites – “Corbyn couldn’t run a bath never mind the UK”.

    1. Undoubtedly one of the luvvies, but he directed some good stuff. As usual one must separate the area of specialisation from their general views.

    2. This article is interesting, I think, He does not seem to have been a good father , despite doing the good PC luvvie things, like sending the children to the local state school.. But then it was not ‘as other state schools Jim’. The locals seem to have been a sort of latterday Bloomsbury set, and to this day, probably have an excessive influence in many quarters:

      https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/24/gloucester-crescent-by-william-miller-review-my-dad-jonathan-miller-and-me

      But I wouldn’t wish a decay into Alzheimers on anyone.

  53. Nicolas latest trick is to demand England spends as much as Scotland does ion its NHS. Now there is a reason for this as under the daft partial hybrid devolution we have it means under the Barnett formula Scotland , Wales and NI would automatically get more money

    In my view it is long over due that the UK moved to a proper federal UK and the Barnett formula would go. It is no longer fit for purpose I any case as it was never intended to work with devolution

    1. Thing is, Scotland spends so much because England gives it to them.

      Therefore…. we should spend as much as Scotland does by cutting the money we give to Scotland and spendng it here.

      1. Bu the no longer fit for purpose Barnett system demands that when ever England spends more money a pro rata amount has to go to Scotland, Wales and NI. It is a crazy system

  54. For those who may not have seen this already, including George the Poet:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMDFaqSPlvg
    Labour to Teach British Children to Hate Their Own History
    Jeremy Corbyn pledges to teach kids about the “injustices” of the British Empire, and George the Poet has no idea about Ugandan history…but hates the British nonetheless.

    “Uganda has a long history, but few records of early settlement, although the country seems to have been inhabited very early. Bantu peoples were engaged in agriculture from 1000 BCE and working in iron can be traced back to about CE 1000.

    In the fertile south and west, powerful social and political orders developed, including the Bunyoro, Buganda, Busoga, Ankole and Toro kingdoms. In the 17th and 18th centuries, they formed profitable links with the Sudanese slave trade (which dominated the regional economy) and formed alliances among themselves. By the 19th century, the Buganda Kingdom, which was allied to the powerful Shirazis of Zanzibar, gained the ascendancy. Buganda was ruled by Kabaka (traditional kings) whose power was circumscribed by a council of nobles. Buganda’s standing army and well-developed agriculture allowed the kingdom to survive the decline of the slave trade.
    Various Europeans appeared during the 19th century. English Protestant and French Catholic missionaries came at the request of Kabaka Mutesa I”
    https://thecommonwealth.org/our-member-countries/uganda/history

    1. Afternoon Ims2,
      I was in the Torro area and one of the local lads with plenty of tribal marks, in the gang ask me was there tribes in the UK, I said yes pointing out my
      chickenpox scars on the forehead and telling him it was signifying I was a member of the crib tribe, 15/2 15/4.
      I am sure he called me a bloody liar in Swahili.

  55. On this day, November 27th 1944: The Great Fauld Explosion.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4da2eb9383cb543d215ff71e2d74a576de1fe5a2b5d487d338d4187e80e6c23c.jpg

    I had never heard of this until it was featured in the weekend newspapers in 1994. Here are some extracts from the Sunday Telegraph article of the 27th November of that year:

    John Hardwick, 21, was working in a field about half a mile away when the blast happened. He saw a 2½-acre wood go up, rising as steadily as a Saturn 5, until the trees were lost to sight. Farmers ploughing in subsequent years found some of the trees, only they found the roots first, then the trunks, as though they had been thrown in like darts.

    Roy Gregson, 17 at the time, said “Yes, I remember the sound. It was an enormous HOOOOOMP and up she went…and up…and up. The sky went black as the soil went up and I could see the boulders rolling about above.” A piece of alabaster weighing 20 tons came down three-quarters of a mile away.

    Chance played a part in some deaths. The farmer at Upper Castle Hayes (right on top of the mine) was on his way to market but had stayed on at the farm because a delivery of grain was late. He did not die in the explosion but in the wave of rubble which engulfed the car as he drove away with his wife.

    …There was so much mud and so many craters that farmers left dead animals where they lay and in the spring collected the skulls and rib-cages left by the foxes…

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7726671/Haunting-aerial-photographs-huge-crater-left-Britains-biggest-explosion-75-years-ago.html

  56. My only post for the day; Two articles from John Ward’s The Slog.
    In the first he uses hie professional experience to dissect the tosh around the current crop of opinion polls:

    https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2019/11/26/at-the-end-of-the-day-916/

    The second is a more light hearted read. Enjoy:

    https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2019/11/26/exclusive-new-write-in-party-set-to-sweep-streets-on-road-to-power/

    “The word manifesto first appeared in Britain in 1620. It stems from the Latin word manifestum, meaning clear or conspicuous. No environs quite pervert the meaning of a word with the same clinically diametric accuracy as those inhabited by the State and its lackeys.
    A column in the mainstream media this morning referred to a semi-retired Labour politician as idiosyncratic. This word comes from the Greek sunkratikos, a good translation of which would be ‘peculiar mixture’.
    So referring to the Labour offering for the 2019 election as ‘an idiosyncratic manifesto’ (as another MSM hack did today) probably represents one of the great oxymorons of our time.
    The hapless scrivener was of course trying to say that the manifesto was somewhat eccentric, but actually she got very close to the truth – albeit inadvertently. For Il Manifesto alla Labori Momentum does indeed involve both a peculiar mixture of contradictory irrelevance, and some very conspicuous expenditure”

  60. What do spiders live on?

    I’ve just put a spider out (kept catching fire) which made its appearance in my annual brush behind the bathroom towel rail. There can’t be many insects wandering around at this time of year so what do they eat and how long can they survive without a meal?

    P.S. I’d rather walk ten miles with a stone in my shoe than do housework but, since needs must, I’d better crash on and may be some time (at least half an hour).

    2. A lady friend of ours whose home is considerably cleaner and tidier than ours has a decorated sign hung on her kitchen wall declaring:

      Only boring women have immaculate houses.

      4. Incidentally, Rastus, although I haven’t transed as yet, I must be an extremely interesting character.

    3. They eat insects & other spiders, even of the same species. I have lots of spiders indoors, mainly cellar spiders (they look like daddy long-legs) in the bathrooms.

  61. So if you were running a really expensive political propaganda and lobbying office in London, where would you put it ?

    Very close to parliament and Downing Street sounds a pretty hot idea…

    Then what would you expect that really expensive office to do ?

    Ummmm…..

    Oh, get the top politicos and media types onside so you get what you want, right ?

    If the really expensive office did really well, you’d make it bigger still for even better results, right ?

    Welcome to reality, folks, it’s happening !

  62. I wonder why the BBC and the very expensive political propaganda and lobbying office not far from parliament and Downing Street apparently take exactly the same line on everything related to politics ?

    Must be just an innocent random coincidence !

    Mustn’t it ?

  64. Then what would you do ?

    Ummmm….

    Oh, get your smart new media friends to promise never never never to publish a word about it !

    Bingo… done !

    1. The phrase “unfit for for purpose” seems designed especially for the “Supreme” Court?

  66. The postal voting fraud revelations in Plymouth today are too late,the votes have already been farmed and nothing can or will be done
    Banana Republic anyone…….

    1. Pure accident of course. They accidently registered thousand of people who had not applied to be registered

      I would love to know how you can accidently register people. They need a form off of each voter to register them

      Unfortunately levels of fraud in the UK are higher than in many banana republics

    3. Which publication are you referring to? Sorry to be obtuse, but I’ve had no time to catch up and a link would be very useful, please.

  68. Ambulance chiefs draw up plans to take fewer patients to A&Es

    It is quite clear the 999 ambulance services is being abused and that the majority of calls don’t actually need a 999 ambulance and most do not even need to go to an A&E. It is not helped by the almost non existent out of hours GP service

    The London Ambulance Service is aiming to reduce the number of patients it takes to hospital to ease pressure on A&Es over winter, the Evening Standard can reveal. Plans were agreed yesterday to avoid “conveyances” to emergency departments by treating more people in their home or at the scene, or by referring them to GPs or community services.

    Pressure on A&E departments is already at record levels, with the number of patients treated within four hours falling to 83.6 per cent across England last month.

    LAS chief operating officer Khadir Meer said: “Where appropriate, we will be avoiding dispatch [of ambulances] to reduce pressure.”
    It came as the Office for National Statistics revealed today there were 23,200 “excess deaths” across England and Wales last winter. This was the lowest figure for five years but shows how bad weather sends demand on the NHS soaring.

    LAS already takes fewer than six in 10 patients who call 999 to hospital, but bosses want to reduce that number to about 50 per cent by advising people with non-urgent needs to seek help elsewhere and by expanding its mental health services.

    In addition, some non-critical patients will be taken to urgent treatment centres rather than emergency departments.

    A pilot scheme using fast-response mental health cars in south-east London was able to reduce A&E “conveyances” by a third.
    LAS chiefs estimate each car can prevent 170 patients a week with mental health issues ending up in A&E. The service receives almost 9,500 calls a month to “category one” incidents — patients who are unconscious or not breathing — and faces a constant battle with crews unable to hand over patients at overloaded A&Es.

    Handovers are meant to take no longer than 15 minutes but latest figures show LAS crews were delayed for 1,462 hours in September, even allowing for 30 minutes per patient.

    D

    1. He of the stick out ears?

      He was a Labour Minister and a complete philistine who proclaimed that the Study of Fine Art was a complete waste of time.

      1. Looked like a real bruiser…

        Education Secretary….destroyed grammar school education…along with Tony Crossland

    1. Interesting. The actual ballot papers are – supposedly – not opened until polling day.
      Have these votes been photographed by the postal votes ‘harvesters’ before they are sealed in their envelopes?
      Sort of thing students might do.

      1. That is what seems to have happened here.

        Labour long ago lost the ability to win an election fairly so are now happy to turn to illegal / immoral means to do it.

        Anyone else fancy a second referendum under these circumstances?

  71. Migrants throw oranges from cold lorry in bid to be rescued

    It is difficult to say exactly how many are getting into the UK this way. It is pretty safe to assume only a small number are actually detected. It is probably about 20%

    Migrants were discovered by police in the back of a refrigerated lorry after they threw oranges out of a hole in a bid to be rescued.
    Motorists in a traffic jam called police on Tuesday after spotting the fruit being tossed from the side of the lorry on the westbound A14 at Brampton, Cambridgeshire.

    It’s understood those inside the lorry were getting cold, amid allegations they may have been smuggled into the UK.
    An air ambulance was called to the scene and landed on the dual carriageway. Cambridgeshire Police said three people ended up being taken by land ambulances to the nearby Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon, but none were found to be seriously hurt.

    2. “…amid allegations they may have been smuggled into the UK…”
      This is complete nonsense. This particular group of tourists had been booked to fly to the UK with Easyjet. The flight was cancelled by the operator “for technical reasons”. So instead Easyjet transferred them to the economy replacement service which uses ground transport.

  73. Victoria Beckham fashion label makes another loss

    If it has never made a profit in 10 years in my view it is not a viable business

    Victoria Beckham’s fashion business has posted another annual loss as demand for the former Spice Girl’s high end clothes “plateaued”.
    Victoria Beckham Limited, which has not made a profit since it launched in 2008, reported a loss of £12.3m for 2018.
    Sales slipped 16% to £35m, amid weaker wholesale demand.
    Chairman Ralph Toledano said sales of clothing and accessories had levelled off after years of growth.
    “The performance was in line with expectations, so we were not surprised. Our goal is to reach profitability as soon as possible,” he told trade journal Business of Fashion.

    1. It’s only a hobby for her. Has Posh guaranteed to indemnify the creditors when ( not if ) the company goes up the spout ?

      1. Don’t be silly it is a Limited Company so her money is Safe. She might normally lose a bit if the shares become worthless but I suspect she will have been paying herself very generously so the loos of the value of the shares to her would be small beer

  74. Just when you thought the world couldn’t get any crazier

    “The world’s first sperm bank for

    HIV-positive donors has launched in New Zealand, aiming to fight stigma

    surrounding the illness.

    Three HIV-positive men have already signed up to donate – all of whom have an undetectable viral load.

    This means virus levels in their blood are so low that HIV cannot be transmitted through sex or childbirth.

    Sperm Positive was launched by three charities ahead of World Aids Day on 1 December.”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-50571017

    1. A bit like a burglar giving his stolen goods away and claiming that burglary is beneficial to the community.

    1. Obviously to deflect attention away from her husband’s company being given zillions in EU grants…

    2. I really don’t know who is worse – Swansong or the Fishwife.
      They are both miserablistas with grating, hectoring voices.

    3. I like looking at pictures of attractive women. Can you find one for me please; I’m afraid that Swinson woman does not qualify.

  77. Everything we do with tax is wrong
    Our hugely complicated tax system takes huge chunks of our cash — yet only makes inequality worse
    BY DOMINIC FRISBY
    *
    *
    https://l35h2znmhf1scosj14ztuxt1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Screen-Shot-2019-11-26-at-2.20.51-PM-300×235.png
    *
    *
    The longer a code is, the more loopholes there are. One group have the resources to find the loopholes, especially multi-nationals, and exploit them; the rest of us don’t and so pay more on a proportional basis. The result is inequality.

    Hong Kong proved one of the most successful economies of the second half of the 20th century, going from shanty town to futuristic city-state in barely 50 years. It did so with taxation that never exceeded 14% of GDP, and in which only the very rich paid income taxes. On the supply side its education, health and transport systems are all superior to our own. Its code is 1.5% the length of the UK’s.

    Yet it had one tax we do not have — a tax on land value.

    With 60 million acres and a population of 65 million, there is enough land in the UK for everybody, in theory, to have an almost acre each. Yet about two-thirds of UK land is owned by fewer than 6,000 people. In many cases they receive subsidies for the land they own; the ownership of prime city real estate is the domain of the few, while an entire generation cannot afford anywhere to live. Yet houses don’t cost a lot of money to build.

    We should tax land, not labour! If a politician really wants to get to the root of society’s ills, and make them good, then he or she should focus all their efforts on tax reform. If only all the political effort that has gone into stopping Brexit had instead been expended on reforming taxation, oh, what might have been!
    https://unherd.com/2019/11/everything-we-do-with-tax-is-wrong/

        1. I hope you’re right, although I didn’t regard Miller as a “celebrity” in quite the same way as the other two.

      2. Clive James lost his father who died in an aircrash, I think it was, when he was returning from a Japanese POW camp at the end of WW2.
        He was about my age, I enjoyed his Aussie humour but felt great sympathy for him in his father’s loss.

        1. The Americans decided to fly Albert James and other prisoners-of-war home rather than send them by ship. However, the plane carrying them crashed in a typhoon and killed Mr James. The crash occurred on September 10th, 1945, 10 days after the war ended.

  80. To overcome Labour’s shroud waving – distraction from Jezza’s interview with Brillopad – something a little snappier than this is required. The facts may be right, but what a tedious read:

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/11/factcheck-corbyns-nhs-for-sale-claims/

    Factcheck: Corbyn’s ‘NHS for sale’ claims | Coffee House

    Jeremy Corbyn claims he has the ‘proof’ that the NHS is at risk in a post-Brexit trade deal with the US. The Labour leader this morning called a press conference to reveal a series of leaked UK papers from trade talks with the US, which he said contained comprehensive evidence that the NHS was for sale to the Americans. But do Corbyn’s claims actually stack up with what the documents say? Mr S. examines the facts:

    Drug patents

    Labour claim:

    ‘Labour and experts said big US corporations want to force up the price our NHS pays for drugs as part of the toxic deal being negotiated with Trump. The Conservatives said this was nonsense. The documents show that we were right. In fact, negotiations have advanced even further than we feared they had. The US and UK have already finished initial discussion on lengthening patents for medicines.’

    Reality:

    In the US, pharmaceutical companies are allowed to extend their patents on drugs, when the patent approval process has been delayed by US officials. The patent extensions are for half a day for every day the US clinically examines the drugs, and one day for every day the FDA takes to grant market approval.

    The US has lobbied for these extensions to apply in the UK, but in the trade documents, the UK clarified that as we have an ‘accelerated approval for patents’, the extensions are not really relevant here. These extensions would not normally apply to our drugs, as the UK approval process is faster. Elsewhere, the documents do not seem to support Labour’s claim that the US would somehow manage to jack up drug prices in Britain.

    The NHS is on the table

    Labour claim:

    ‘Labour has been warning that NHS services will also be on the table in trade talks for a sell-out deal with Trump… The Tories have denied it, but the documents show that on this occasion, Trump was right and so were we.

    The new breed of trade deals are not only – or even mainly – about tariffs on goods at the border. They are also about services – including our health service. And these documents make clear that for the US, to quote page 41 of the third meeting report, “everything is included unless something is specifically excluded.” They want, I quote: “Total market access” as the “baseline assumption of the trade negotiations.” “Total market access.”’

    Reality:

    The part of the document Corbyn is quoting is a UK assessment of what the United States’ trade position will be in the talks. But Jeremy Corbyn appears to have helpfully left out the second part of the quote from the document which supposedly confirmed that NHS services were on the table in talks. The full sentence reads:

    ‘The NCM [US] approach makes total market access the baseline assumption of the trade negotiations and requires countries to identify exclusions, not the other way around’ (emphasis added).

    In essence, the US starts off by presuming that everything is on the table in trade talks, but asks other countries to identify the services they want to exclude from the deal. The UK would presumably exclude the health service from the talks.

    The UK did not ask for the NHS to be excluded

    Jeremy Corbyn then claimed that UK officials had not demanded the NHS be excluded from the talks:

    ‘But surely you can’t believe that British officials would demand the NHS be excluded? Apparently not.

    In fact, on behalf of the Conservative government, officials reassured their counterparts that “the US should expect the UK to be a liberalising influence” and that together they could “fly the good flag for services liberalisation.”’

    Reality:

    The quote Corbyn cites is actually from a different round of talks, in which the exclusion of the NHS has not actually been mentioned. The two parties are instead discussing the liberalisation of services in general. The documents do not appear to make any mention of the UK allowing the health service to be opened up in the trade talks.

    Chlorine chicken

    Labour claim:

    ‘How about chlorine-washed chicken on our dinner tables? Have a look at the second meeting, on page 42 and 43, where the US even agrees to share its “public lines” to help our government with its “media narratives.”’

    Reality:

    The document does say that the US offered to give the UK its public lines on chlorinated chicken, but does not say if the UK ever used them. Part of the ‘public lines’ appear to be attempts by US officials to make clear ‘that US poultry producers don’t use chlorine in their food processes.’

    Climate change

    Labour claim:

    ‘You might want to look at how Trump’s America absolutely refuses, absolutely refuses, to even mention climate change in the deal – see the second meeting, page 17.’

    Reality:

    The US does advise against inserting references to climate change in the deal. The documents say that their trade representatives are barred from putting greenhouse gas reductions in trade deals by Congress. This has nothing to do with Trump though. The US officials confirmed these laws have been in place since 2015, when Obama was in office..”

      1. Oh Yeah,the NHS hasn’t been ripped off over drugs that have had their patent expired

        No Sireeee

        Millionaire businessmen have been increasing the price of drugs bought by the NHS by up to 12,500 per cent.

        A

        small group of entrepreneurs has made vast sums after raising the cost

        of medicines by £262 million a year — the equivalent of funding an extra

        7,000 junior doctors a year, an investigation has found.

        They

        are taking advantage of a loophole that leaves them free to impose

        “extortionate” price rises on drugs if they drop an existing brand name

        and sell it under its generic name instead.

        https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/extortionate-prices-add-260m-to-nhs-drug-bill-8mwtttwdk

        1. Their actions mean some people no longer get the medication they need. They are akin to grave robbers.

          1. I brought this to the attention of this forum a while back, after I was denied the only antidepressant that does not interfere with sleep architecture, the tricyclic Trimipramine (Surmontil) which I have been on now for twenty years. After it went generic, the price (according to the NHS Drugs Tariff) went up from £8 for a pack of 28 to £220, so the Clinical Commissioners banned it, and instructed my GP to put me on an inferior alternative, lying to me that it was for clinical reasons, rather than because the drugs companies were profiteering to keep up executive bonuses.

            Earlier this year, I was going out to Northern Germany to attend a premiere of a new work by the composer Alma Deutscher. So, I managed to get a private prescription that was valid in Germany. I got 100 tablets for about 17 euros from a High Street retail pharmacist. So much for the Drugs Tariff!

            No doubt the Government response will be to shut off that route, and put a ban on any information online that could help me. The business interests will insist on it. Also I am not sure that British prescriptions will continue to be valid in Germany post-Brexit. All I can do is to ration out my German supply as long as I can – 1/2 tablet twice a week should give me two years, even if this means disturbed nights most of the rest of the time. I find that Valerian + Mg and B6 makes 1/2 tablet as effective as a full one without.

    2. Labour also miss the point that extending the patent period will reduce the need to charge higher prices to recoup R&D costs, so in theory drug prices will fall.

      1. Under EU legislation US companies can already bid for NHS supply contracts. They are competitive bids so unless a US company has a monopoly on a particular drug they would bot be able to force up prices as they would not win the tender

  81. The Irishman is on Netflix. If you like gangster movies like the Godfather you will like this. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci. They ganged up on Pesci to come out of retirement to do it.

  82. Sir Jonathan Miller, 85, who turned his back on medical career to become acclaimed opera, theatre director and comedian dies after long battle with Alzheimer’s.

    A brilliant mind R.I.P
    Thanks for all the good times

    1. I’m not sure I’d call it a battle. If it is, it’s very one-sided, where the person is already defeated before they realise it, before the diagnosis is given.
      It’s a long, slow, almost complete loss of self, not merely memory. It is desperately sad and horrible. I would not wish it upon anyone.
      Except maybe Tony Blair, and all the politicians of his ilk that have sold their people out.

      We recently watched Jonathan Miller, along with Cook and Moore and Bennett, on YouTube, in their very successful stage show Beyond the Fringe. MOH has been reading the biographies of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, both brilliant in their own way. Ditto Miller.
      R.I.P indeed.

  83. COFFEE HOUSE – Clive James: a tribute
    Douglas Murray – 27 November 2019 – 4:17 PM

    Clive James died last weekend at his home, surrounded by his family, after a long illness. The poet, writer, critic and television star was one of the most remarkable, talented and insightful members of his generation. Loved by millions, he was an incomparable presence in the lives of his friends and readers right up until the end.

    In 2014, when he seemed very near that end, I went to see him at his home in Cambridge to talk about life, love, poetry and the proximity of death. I feared that it would be our last conversation. Thank medicine it wasn’t. But before I’d even got home, Clive had written again to say that he wanted to re-emphasise to me the ‘gratitude’ he felt about his life. It was a very Clive sentiment that.

    There is much to say. But for now I just wanted to republish that interview, with the reflection that I know his numerous friends and fans will all share in that gratitude. Gratitude for an extraordinary life and body of work and gratitude for the bonus years and all the love and life he packed them with.

    Here is the full interview:

    Clive James has published a new poem days before we meet. It opens, ‘Your death, near now, is of an easy sort’. It is about a Japanese maple his daughter has planted in the garden of his Cambridge home where we are sitting, and whether the poet will live to see the leaves flame red this autumn. The poem has made news.

    ‘At the moment,’ he says, laughing, ‘I am in the slightly embarrassing position where I write poems saying I am about to die and I don’t. My wife is very funny on that subject.’ It is part of an astonishing late body of work. This month there is a new book of writing on poetry, Poetry Notebook. He still hopes to live to see a new Collected Poems out next year, perhaps finish a final volume of memoirs and write a sequel to his immense 2007 work Cultural Amnesia.

    ‘Although I have only got half my energy I am probably writing at the rate I always should have. But other things got in the way. I liked those other things, I don’t blame them for getting in the way. But I am in ideal conditions now so there is no excuse for not getting on with it. The only drawback is I don’t really know when it will all get switched off. You see the trouble with this thing, I have a lot of things, as you can hear, but the one that you can’t see is the one that’ll get me, it’s a brand of leukaemia. It’s a nifty little fella. It can get beaten into remission, but it gives no indication of when it’s coming back. When it comes back, that’s when you have to fight. My chest I fight all the time. I have only just finished a bout of pneumonia — any infection turns to pneumonia almost instantly but the leukaemia will put a limit on things.’

    In Cambridge he is close to his family and also to Addenbrooke’s hospital, where he receives treatment. Yet here are these amazing works, highly praised, technically and emotionally heart-stopping poems reflecting gratefully on a life, as well as a recent translation of Dante. ‘I am getting the kind of praise now that poets dream of,’ he admits. ‘I wonder if you have to be standing on the edge of a cliff to get it, though. Has that occurred to you? If that’s true everyone will start doing it! Look, no parachute!’

    James’s famous voice twinkles even in his weakened state. But we dare to venture into the garden only briefly on this bright September day. ‘I can’t really see anyone for longer than about an hour and the trouble is — this is great, I’m loving this — but the trouble is, loving it is what wears you out, so the more successful your conversation, the more it is likely to be prostrating in the aftermath. It’s a terrible pity but I lasted this long so I give thanks.’

    Aside from writing poetry he talks and writes about poetry with an enthusiasm which must have been embedded early. He did the usuals — Gray’s Elegy and Dorothea Mackellar — while a schoolboy in Kogarah. How would he set a child off on it now? ‘Forbid it and penalise it and jail anybody that’s caught dealing in it and give severe punishments to anyone caught reading it and then it will be popular.’

    He caught it fully himself at university: Auden, Eliot and, back then, Pound. He says in Poetry Notebook, ‘There is always more room in the pantheon, because the pantheon is not a burial chamber for people who have said things, it is an echo chamber for things that have been said.’ At Sydney, ‘I would pop around corners of buildings and jump out of bushes at the university reciting E.E. Cummings. I was lucky to be at university. There was a great change going in Australian society because [Robert] Menzies, a conservative prime minister, had done a revolutionary thing, his government created the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme, which meant for the first time that anyone could go to university. In a previous generation, if you didn’t have the money, your family didn’t have the money, you couldn’t go.’

    You sometimes hear it claimed that James’s omnivorous intellect, like that of Peter Porter, came partly with the passage from Australia. In a 2010 obituary for Porter, James describes how his friend spent much of his life ‘punished in Australia for trying to please the Poms, and punished in the UK for being an Aussie expatriate with a frame of reference above his station’. Did James feel that too — that somehow he had to do more? ‘That’s not national, that’s personal,’ he says. ‘I just felt I owed it to the ruins of my family, I owed it to my mother and father, for the life they might have had, to do what was within me.’

    He was born in 1939, and was an only child. His father survived the war, but the plane bringing him back crashed on the way home. The passage describing this in James’s first volume of memoirs, and the poem he wrote on visiting his father’s grave later, are both devastating.

    ‘I was born into it,’ he says. ‘Just when I was being born the massacre was actually already on in Poland, and while I was a little kid, trainloads of children were getting gassed. When I found out, it formed my worldview. My worldview isn’t formed by my personality. I like to think I am a merry man who has a good time, spreading laughter all around. But that’s not my worldview. My worldview is tremendously pessimistic. I think it’s a miracle we’re here, considering what human beings can do to scorch the earth. Democracy itself is a miracle.’ He claims no prescience, but of the 1960s student rebels he says, ‘I knew they were talking bullshit, but I didn’t realise to what extent they were talking bullshit. There was something about the way the enthusiasts for China wrote that told me the whole thing was a bill of goods. Then the facts started to come out and they were there if you wanted them. There is a crucial stage in big alterations of opinion on a world scale where the facts are there but people don’t yet want them, and sometimes you just have to wait.’

    What are the facts we are waiting for now? ‘Watch out for the deep water. I don’t want to get into the middle of a jihad. But we’ve known for a long time now that the Islamic cultures and countries were the enemies of women and women’s rights, but not even our feminists made anything of it until quite recently. It took a few unbelievably brave Islamic feminists to say these things. All this has been available but it just took time to come out because it’s too uncomfortable. Now it must, I think.’ His political worldview is neither right nor left, but consistently and straightforwardly anti-totalitarian.

    I remark how lucky his generation has been. ‘You’re not kidding. We’ve gone all the way through without a single war we had to go to. I used to illustrate it with the image of Buster Keaton standing there with the facade of a house behind him and it falls forward and the doorway which is empty fits just over him. That was us — the whole fucking house fell in and it didn’t hit us. It is a stroke of luck I think you have to pay back if you can.’

    It requires an awful discipline to leave him. We talk of friends living and dead, the power of ideas and how particular writers like Robert Conquest have changed history. His talk is Eichmann and Stalin, but also Auden, Eliot and Les Murray. He scorns a description of himself as a pioneer. ‘If you stick around long enough, you end up being a pioneer of everything. You practically invented ice cream.’

    What has he learned along the way? ‘Well I learned the hard way to drink moderately and don’t smoke.’ And of course he learned how to work. ‘I have seen very talented people waste themselves, it’s a terrible spectacle, people I’ve known. I don’t know how they can do it. It’s like not really understanding how people can commit suicide — although sometimes when you look at the world you wonder why everybody doesn’t.’

    He speaks of his daughters and wife with a quiet, touching pride. And what about him, I ask, as we steal a final minute outside his library, looking over the maple tree. Did he get what he wanted from this life? ‘Oh yes,’ he replies. ‘More than I deserved.’

  86. So, this idea of a global conspiracy of the elites is nothing more than a far right fantasy and scare-mongering over nothing, eh??

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JIIww4Xv11Y
    The New Plantation of Ireland

    Source material: https://nationalparty.ie/mary-mcaleese-and-the-new-plantation-of-ireland/#
    Mary McAleese and the New Plantation of Ireland
    In Ireland “today, 17 per cent of our population comes from somewhere else. The last time that happened was probably the Plantation [of Ulster]. But this has been a different kind of absorption, and I think in general we have done a really, really wonderful job.” — Mary McAleese
    Contained in this one quotation is the naivety, the cognitive dissonance, the lack of foresight and the lack of self-reflection that characterises a broad section of the Irish establishment. If only Mary McAleese had been around in 1609 to 1690 to ensure the welcome of the English and Scottish settlers, and to oversee a “different kind of absorption”, the destruction of Gaelic Ulster which was one of the great crimes in the history of the world, could have been achieved more efficiently and bloodlessly, with diversity classes and migrant quotas and “Say No to Racism” days….
    Someone passing through Ireland this week, who picked up a few newspapers, would conclude that the primary issue affecting Irish life is racism and immigration. The sheer number of words that have been expended on this topic in recent weeks is almost comical. Dozens of articles, all saying the same things, all employing the same straw-men, all written from the same ideological perspective. All convinced that if only the “insidious” elements of Irish society were eliminated, all would be well. If only the elderly generation died off, or if only rural Ireland would go away, or if only the working class would know their place, then Ireland would be free of hatred. And of course if only the “far right” groups would disappear, everything would be fine….
    There is a shallowness to the new political hysteria. A sense of phoney surprise and fake indignation. The only real surprise is that they’ve maintained their charade for so long. Everything about diversity and muliculturalism was supposed to be bright and beautiful. Now we hear establishment voices concerned for migrant children in Irish majority class-rooms. To which one must ask two questions. Firstly, did this occur to them just now? In other words, did the capacity for division intrinsic to multiculturalism suddenly hit them over the head? If so, it is an indictment of them both as policymakers and as people, because twenty or thirty years ago was the time to be having these eureka moments. Secondly, what about the Irish child in a majority migrant class-room? Have politicians gotten around to thinking about them? Or do we have to wait another twenty years for them to make the calculations? We may wait in vain, because it is already decreed from on high that that Irish child has no rights. No right to country, no right to kin. No higher court to proceed to when bullied. No hate crime legislation to protect them from the tribalism of others. But establishment politicians don’t care about that child and never will care. The fewer Irish people as a proportion of any given scenario is now the measure of its success…
    For twenty years, we have been told that Ireland is the exception. Ireland is the place where mass-immigration will work…

    They are trying desperately to keep the lid on a situation that is increasingly beyond their control. Their promises, their delusions, their treachery are out in the open now, and will not be forgotten, not by this generation or by the generations who follow.

    The ramifications of the Ulster plantation did not end in the 17th century, as McAleese is well aware. They continue to this very day. It doesn’t matter how well intended or badly intended your plantation is.You cannot alter a country’s demography in such extreme ways without creating centuries of conflict.The fact that McAleese views the current plantation as a success is a testament to her myopia. And the myopia of her whole political class.

    Twenty years. Hmmm. What a coincidence. That’s when Labour introduced mass immigration into the UK. One could almost suspect an international conspiracy, but that just paranoia, right?
    It’s worth reading the whole original article, and watch Dave Cullen’s video. If nothing else, it tells us we’re not alone, and other voices across other countries are speaking up. And it’s good material to present to those who try to claim that we’re racist, etc, for not wanting to give up our homeland. If they think it of the English, are they also prepared to say the same of the Irish??

    2. ♫ “I close my eyes and picture
      The emirate of the sea
      From the fishing dhows at Dingle
      To the soukhs at Dunardee
      I miss my halal Irish stew
      And the mosques in Dublin town
      Where the colleens all wear burqas
      And they’re forty shades of brown” ♫

  87. The BBC is at it again. This report (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50572454 ) is close to the truth and tells us little we hadn’t already heard but the 11am news summary on Radio 4 this morning told it quite differently: Corbyn had the evidence that the NHS was up for up sale. As presented it was made to sound quite alarming. Unfortunately, the Radio 4 website playback doesn’t preserve the news bulletin at the start of each of its programme recordings so I can’t offer you the transcript. Listen out for this today.

    2. The Radio 4 lunchtime news had that report about the NHS being for sale and that there was a multi-page report on the offending trade negotiations with the USA. I think it involves a USA drug company wanting a foot in the door. Jeremy Corbyn needs to find such threats to get himself out of the hole he is in.

      1. I know. That’s what the website report says i.e. US companies want access to existing NHS supplier contracts. The radio headlines made it sound quite different.

    3. So what am I bid for this bankrupt organisation which is free at the point of use and has never produced a profit. Anyone….. national treasure, envy of the world, …..

  88. The UK’s Last Horse drawn Bus

    The very last horse drawn bus ran in 1932. It ran between Wickhambrook and Newmarket, in Suffolk on market days only

  89. Firefighters race to scene as part of fire-ravaged Claremont Hotel collapses

    Fire crews have returned to a Victorian seafront hotel days after it was engulfed in flames after part of the building collapsed.
    The Grade II listed Claremont Hotel in Eastbourne “remains unstable” and two fire crews and council building control officers were called to the scene at about 4pm on Wednesday, the fire service said.

    Members of the public have been told to stay away from the area and cordons are in place.

    1. Firefighters race to scene as part of fire-ravaged Palace of Westminster collapses.

      Fire crews have returned to the nine hundred year old building which has been re-built since destruction by earlier fires.
      On this occasion none of the Members of Parliament were present, although the fire service warns that they are still unstable.

      Members of the Public and Boris Johnson have been told to stay away from the area and condoms are in place.

  94. ”

    General election 2019: Row over Labour’s ‘NHS for sale’ claim ”
    Off topic a bit, but I’ve noticed that everything anyone says recently is reported on the BBC as a ” row “.
    Can they not go back to the genteel English way of simply saying …” a dispute …” ?
    I always understood a ” row ” to be a husband-and-wife thing, where the wife threw the frying pan at the husband.
    Or just an Oxford v. Cambridge thing.

    1. Row, row, your boat…
      Most Beeb elitists are Oxbridge graduates. (not John Humphreys I suppose)

  95. Off topic
    In case anyone is wondering, BT is still alive and well, avoiding ladders and enjoying galleries and museums.

    Of course he doesn’t realise that he’s in great danger of being put in a display cabinet.

    };-O

  96. When will we ever start getting things right in this country?

    ‘The utterly unfair prosecution of a highly decorated officer is another disaster for the CPS

    27 NOVEMBER 2019 • 4:53

    Superintendent Williams has been made to register as a sex offender, had her relationship with her sister ruined and her career shattered – all over a picture she didn’t even look at.

    The prosecution of Superintendent Novlett Robyn Williams for possession of an indecent video of a child has been a textbook example of how sometimes it is not in the public interest to prosecute, even when the evidence can support a conviction.

    At first glance, one might ask why would it ever be a mistake to prosecute someone, especially a police officer, for possession of child abuse images?

    But this was a very unusual case. The defendant, everyone agreed, was no paedophile secretly salivating over a library containing pictures of thousands of abused children. She was a Metropolitan Police officer with 36 years of unblemished service. She had won numerous awards, including the Queen’s Police Medal and most recently a commendation for her work with victims of the Grenfell Fire.

    The video came into her possession without any act on her part; she had not wanted to receive it, and she did not – as expert witnesses agreed – look at it. Her sister’s partner had seen it circulating on social media, and her sister sent it to Williams – and 16 other people – accompanied by the message: “Sorry had to send this it’s so sad that this person would put this out please post this and let’s hope he gets life.” By doing so, despite her motive, she committed the offence of distributing an indecent image of a child.

    Williams did not, unfortunately, report the video. Unlike the other 16 recipients she did not look at it, so she did not know exactly what it showed, but she must have known that it was, at least, very likely to contain illegal images.

    The main accusation was that the omission to report was deliberate, to protect her sister from the charge of distributing an indecent image. One can understand why any possibility of corruption needed to be dealt with openly and in front of a jury. The CPS cannot be criticised for bringing a charge of corruption.

    In the event, after hearing the evidence, the jury decided that Williams had not acted corruptly and acquitted her of that charge. That ought to have been an end to the matter. It was very probably negligent and a dereliction of her duties as a police officer, but the jury’s verdict meant that the omission was not corrupt and therefore not criminal.

    The police have their own effective disciplinary system for dealing with dereliction of duty. Had Williams’s conduct been been dealt with at a tribunal, possible sanctions would have ranged from dismissal down to an interview without coffee with Cressida Dick. Her career might well have suffered, but she would not have acquired a criminal record for a sexual offence.

    What in fact happened was vindictive and ridiculous. As well as the corruption charge, prosecutors chose to include on the indictment a count of “possession” of an indecent image. Once they established she had the image on her phone, about which there could be no dispute, her only hope was – in a reversal of the usual burden of proof – for her to prove that she had not retained the image for an “unreasonable” length of time.

    She failed to discharge that burden, and the jury, over 10 hours of deliberation and despite the disagreement of one of its 11 members, eventually felt obliged to convict her. The law made it very difficult for them to do anything else.

    She was sentenced on Monday to perform 200 hours of unpaid work. It is, as the judge acknowledged, a far lighter sentence than would normally be imposed for such an offence. The automatic consequence of the conviction, however, is that Williams is now, absurdly, required to register with the police as a sex offender – which she patently is not – for the next 5 years, and if (as seems quite possible) she is now dismissed from the force, she will have to notify any potential employer of her conviction.

    On the positive side, I suppose, the CPS have “achieved” a conviction. Perhaps in some statistical analysis this prosecution will be marked as a “success,” to be set in the balance against other “failures.”

    Yet from the point of view of the public that the CPS exists to serve nothing worthwhile has been achieved. A decent officer who has devoted her working life to serving the public has been singled out for prosecution over something she did not want, did not ask for and did not look at.

    None of the other 16 recipients of the video (all of whom, unlike Williams, actually opened and viewed it) were even prosecuted. She alone has been humiliated, her future career prospects have been blighted, her relationship with her sister has been destroyed and someone who is nothing of the sort has been made to register as a sex offender.

    As CPS successes go, this one has been a complete disaster.’

    2. I can’t help thinking that words and figures differ here.

      How many times does anyone totally ignore an email or a twitter or a linked in etc etc message from their sister, brother, mother or father?

      And just how convenient is that excuse when the message in question is a career poison?

      I’m sorry, I don’t believe her.

      AND if it had been Bill Smith of the white police officer’s association what would have happened?

  97. So farewell Clive James – my second favourite Australian.
    You remind me of a better, kinder world.
    Cue the ‘music’ of Margarita Pracatan as you walk through the pearly gates

    1. If a condition of publishing such predictions, that turn out to be completely wrong, was ritual suicide, I wonder how many of these “scientists” would put their names on the research.

    2. We’re all doomed I tell ye, doomed. Just One degree and we’re all fooked. I don’t suppose the temperature on Earth has ever changed by that much before. Oh, hang on..

  99. Tata to axe 1000 steel jobs in the UK

    I suspect they may close the Llanwern site it is already run down and much of what is done there could be moved to Port Talbot

  100. Palm Oil

    This has backfired on Extinction Rebelion it is proving very difficult to phase out and in some products it has proved impossible. For those it can phase out the alternative is animal fats

      2. About 50% of supermarket products use Palm oil. It is low cost and healthy and incredibly versatile

        Example uses are :-

        Retail Foods & Snacks
        Personal Care and Cosmetics
        Biofuel & Energy
        Animal Feeds
        Industrial

        1. Palm oil is utterly destructive of the planet. There is no such thing as “sustainable” palm oil.

  101. Why are our politicians prepared to give away our fishing, yet again? This article confirms what many of us already know – but: it occurred to me that this kind of “Associate Membership” which was mooted in the Five Presidents’ report (I believe) is what leaving will end up us. Out in name, but associated members by status. What perhaps Cameron meant by remaining in “a reformed” [two tier?] EU.

    EU Demands Fishing for a Free Trade Deal Confirms Fishermens’ Worst Fears

    Posted by Fishing For Leave | Nov 27, 2019 | Brexit | 4 |

    EU Demands Fishing for a Free Trade Deal Confirms Fishermens’ Worst Fears
    The ultimatum issued by Brussels on fishing yet again confirms the uncomfortable reality of the deal Britain is walking into with eyes wide shut. A reality which Fishing for Leave have been desperately pointing out but which is met with heads in a bucket of sand as it conflicts with the narrative being construed that a bad deal is somehow palatable and can deliver a simple Free Trade Deal.

    The revealing comments in the Telegraph merely back those in the recent article by RTE. That the EU is determined to continue its ability to pillage UK waters for 60% of our resources, all whilst also enmeshing the UK in regulatory alignment with the CFP through “associate” membership. (Paragraph 118 & 120 of the Political Declaration)

    The Conservative manifesto may pledge to take back full control of our water, but the reality is we re-obey the CFP for the Transition period and then – as shown by the RTE Article – the EU has painted the UK into a corner on fishing with the terms of the Political Declaration.

    Terms which the Withdrawal Agreement under Article 184 would legally oblige the UK to ratify as the basis of the Future Relationship and Free Trade Agreement which will be enforced by the European Court of Justice.

    If the Withdrawal Agreement is ratified then the UK may nominally be an “independent coastal state” but one obliged under the Political Declaration to have a fisheries agreement based on;

    “non-discrimination” – the founding principle of equal access to a common resource.
    “level playing field” – only achievable by binding the UK to regulatory alignment with CFP rules.
    To be bartered as “part of the overall economic partnership”.
    This is what ratifying the Withdrawal Agreement means. We are obliged to swallow this and have fishing levered. The EU has now spelt this out crystal clear. Surrender fishing a second time or no Free Trade deal.

    It is clear to the most optimistic that trying to ratify a Free Trade Deal with the EU by the summer is near impossible. It is clear to anyone who can read that the Political Declaration is constructed to ratchet the UK into concession after concession as another “cliff edge” approaches. The key is – what the hell is Boris Johnson and the Conservatives’ response to this? If it is silence that is deafening, then alarm bells will ring around coastal communities and constituencies.

    It will show that a Conservative government would have no intention of telling the EU to get stuffed but will capitulate to bully boy tactics of being asked to surrender our nation’s greatest natural resource for a trade deal. Something no other nation or government in the world will have ever done – little Iceland and Faroe… No! Norway – erm – no! Yet all sell huge volumes of fish and other goods to the EU.

    It shouldn’t and needn’t be like this – fishing is one of the Brexit poster children, being one of the biggest economic and political benefits of Brexit. We can automatically take back complete sovereignty over all waters and resources under Article 50 which causes all current CFP access and resource shares to “cease to apply” on exit.

    Economically this repatriates a £6-8bn pound industry, injecting an adrenaline hit to maligned coastal communities which if husbanded can provide billions every year, year after year, for generations. Politically it exorcises the ghost of Edward Heath surrendering Britain’s fishing as “expendable” which still haunts the Conservative party decades later. It should be a huge totemic win for any government. Yet, the May Government, and the majority of the wider political establishment, have allowed the EU to paint us into a legal corner to the point that fishing is hanging by a thread of being surrendered a second time.

    Many in the political establishment say fishing – and by association with it – coastal communities don’t really matter. Well then why is the EU pushing so hard for being able to continue to pillage our water? The answer – because catching 60% of our fish represents a third of their NE Atlantic catches. Coupled with their huge demand on our seafood exports means they have a critical dependency on UK seafood as a staple of their population’s diet.

    It means the UK has a huge position of strength with a clean break on Brexit. We regain billions of resources. The EU (as in the RTE article) recognises tariffs are no impediment to our supplying them and the UK will have a captive market with the EU’s huge dependency.

    The response from Boris and the Conservatives is critical – are they men who will stand up for the national interest or mice who will be blackmailed to surrender something even though it will politically bury them? They MUST scrap the Political Declaration on fishing or be blackmailed into surrendering fishing for a trade deal – something Boris told the Commons in July in response to Owen Paterson “would be a reprehensible thing to do”.

    Either that or we are back to No Deal – which, given the Conservative Brexiteers’ correct assertion that the EU is a diminishing part of our trade which tariffs wouldn’t unduly afflict, should be embraced now!

    Rather than signing up to a Withdrawal Agreement where the EU is going to use our obligation to ratify a FTA based on the Political Declaration to squeeze the UK till we scream.

    The EU is testing them on a totemic issue – their response will be telling – particularly in coastal constituencies.

    https://independencedaily.co.uk/eu-demands-fishing-for-a-free-trade-deal-confirms-fishermens-worst-fears/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=INDEPENDENCE+Daily+Newsletter1

    1. Afternoon HL,
      Because the electorate over the decades insist on keeping them as
      “our politicians”

    2. Remind us again, just which partner in the current UK-EU trade arrangement has the greater net balance?

    4. We have known this for a while. I wrote this very thing to Bertie Armstrong of the Scottish fishermen’s Association just over a year ago. I have repeatedly badgered my Tory MP with this – pointlessly, of course.
      Here is an extract from my letter;
      “You will be aware, I know, that Mrs May mentioned the fishing industry very specifically in her speech at the recent Tory Party conference.
      While she said that we would leave the CFP, she did not say that the entirety of the economic zone and all the related quotas would revert to UK control. Perhaps because the fishing industry was mentioned only in order to attack Ms Sturgeon.
      Yesterday in Parliament in Prime Minister’s Questions, Mrs May referred to fishing.
      From Hansard;
      “Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
      Q3. Members of the Scottish Fishermen’s Association and the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations are jointly lobbying Parliament today. They ask for a very simple undertaking from the Prime Minister—namely, that in negotiating the Brexit deal she will not trade away their right to fish in UK waters. Will the Prime Minister give our fishermen that undertaking? [906972]
      The Prime Minister
      I absolutely recognise the importance of the fishing industry across the UK and particularly in Scotland. I reassure the right hon. Gentleman that as we are going through these negotiations, we will be very clear that once EU rules no longer apply to the United Kingdom, we will be an independent coastal state and we will be making those decisions. We will control access to our waters and we will be seeking to gain a fairer share of quotas.”
      Mrs May said she will, ”be seeking to gain a fairer share of quotas”. That is not Brexit. They are our fish. All of them.
      This phraseology hardly corresponds to what is required as reassurance. It is an acknowledgement that the UK Government is expecting to allow foreign vessels a quota of UK fish for an indeterminate period in the future. Moreover it suggests that we will be the supplicant, not the controller.
      If memory serves, various UK Governments have twice handed over portions of our fishing areas to the EU, effectively handing our fish to to foreign fishermen so that they can support their families in France, Holland and Spain, while our fishermen are either tied up for several days every week or are looking for jobs on land.
      … I asked for reassurances from my MP.
      Here is the relevant extract of his reply, dated 17th July 2018;
      “Personally, I believe that the Prime Minister’s proposals represent a realistic and practical vision that delivers the referendum decision in full. The UK will leave the EU, including the Single Market and the Customs Union on 29 March 2019. As we leave the EU, free movement and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice will no longer apply and the days of sending vast sums of money to Brussels every year are over for good. We will also leave the Common Agriculture Policy and the Commons Fisheries Policy and we will once again be able to strike our own trade deals.”
      Mr Lamont has also been quoted in the Press on this subject. From the Herald 20th March 2018;
      “John Lamont, the Tory MP for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, asked if he would vote down the final Brexit deal, if it did not include total control of fish stocks and vessel access, tweeted: “Yes.”
      It is also worth bearing in mind that the so-called transition period of two years may well allow the EU to set quotas for UK fishermen without anyone from the UK having any say in it whatsoever. We have to take it on trust that our quota of our fish will be fair. We also have to take it on trust that the French and others countries’ fishermen will take only their proper quotas, and not leave our EEZ a fishless desert when the time comes for them to leave our EEZ in two years. Anyone who believes that they will obey the law and play fair is simply delusional.
      I did ask the Scottish Government for copies of correspondence with the UK Government on this subject under FOI.
      This was refused”

      It does not seem to be possible to contact Fishing for Leave as they don’t put details on their website.
      It is important to keep in mind that UK farming will be similarly under the control of the EU under any WA. Subject to any and all EU controls but with no UK say on anything. The UK will not be able to replace EU subsidies with UK grants unless the EU agree.

  102. Just a reminder.

    On 30 January 2007, Plusnet was acquired by BT Group, but it continues to operate as a separate business.

        1. Yes & No. It is a wholly owned subsidiary company with its own P&L and directors so the BT group is just a shareholder in Plusnet

          1. But there is “just a shareholder” as I am in many companies and “just a shareholder” where you’re big enough so the company rings you up to check if you approve of A, B, or C.

          2. The BT group have no direct control of Plusnet. Their control is at the annual board meeting where they can fire directors etc

          4. What is their shareholding? “Control” has a legal definition – for all sorts of different purposes.

        2. I moved from BT to Plusnet from BT without realising that. But ( I hope I don’t eat my words tomorrow ), Plusnet has been both cheaper and first class. I threw out BT because they were expensive and appalling. 10 out of 10 for Plusnet and 0 out of ten to BT.

  103. Welsh Assembly has passed a bill to allow voting from aged 16 and inclusive of foreigners. The theory goes that they should have a stake in their future. Exactly, once they have all voted for free stuff aged 16, they will be stakeholders in the repayments for the rest of their working lives, not me, I have my feet up already! Foreigners will just return home as per student loans.

    1. From next year the Welsh Assembly has voted to allow sheep to have the vote )ok for the snowflakes this is not true at least at present

    2. The wee Scottish woman proposed the same globalist holy grail for our elections in the recent past. It is not the foreign students who go home that are the problem, it is the idea of foreigners being allowed to vote in our elections at all that is their goal.

      With the “5 year process” to become a British Citizen, before being allowed to vote, thrown out of the window, then lo and behold what occurs. With those here now and the new arrivals in the next 3 years, then that is a sudden extra 5 million Remain votes for the next referendum and we become permanent members of the EU.

      British Nationals whose parents were living here over 50 years ago can shut up and start waving that blue flag with the stars on it.

  105. Night All

    https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2019/09/Cat-cone.png?resize=768%2C696&ssl=1

    https://media.giphy.com/media/BtMgDj2mZLzws/giphy.gif

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5d4be05ac98a290d275bcf1411ad0bdc49fc9a1386e56257ad2fc5022d84f19d.gif

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a5b52b9d9575082238e5b5c9b6fd2ec87531c0f26ff653d5f198f9b9a201e4b3.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4319b2277f7fe4f438c195a5976d6710da357b42ca9a112df6782b2509361af0.jpg

    2. Fortunately that poll comes from the EU propaganda wing otherwise known as YouGov. So you can dismiss the numbers as made up and an attempt to manipulate the outcome of the election.

      It would be a dark day for us, and our country would be finished, if Boris had that sort of majority. It is “odd” that all of those Labour voters who say that they will be voting for The Brexit Party, and would never vote for the Conservatives at all, do not seem to show up in these polls.

      It is almost as if YouGov, and their very good friends that they have teamed up with at Sky News, want to pretend that TBP do not exist. Support for them is almost blanket where I am, but they are not standing a candidate, so that is a missed opportunity.

      Edit – Aha. I have just seen the name Sam Coates as the Sky “journalist” involved – that man’s bias has to be heard to be believed. He makes the BBC look balanced and fair. 🙂

      1. It is very strange how the Brexit Party has vanished from sight on both the BBC and the Guardian. OK, Farage isn’t saying much, but it is obviously a deliberate decision in both places,
        I am planning to be a spoiled paper.

  108. I have just turned off the ‘Apprentices who have been fired’ prog on BBC2, because of the presenter and one panelist

    My question is:

    Does the BBC employ any heterosexual men. I am fed up of LGBTQWERTers

    Even the ‘adverts’ for future programmes was about Elton John and Graham Norton

    1. The BBC thinks 95% of the UK are Gay. Lesbians or transexuals. The reality is that less than 5% are

  109. Recent by election results show a slight trend to the Conservatives from both Labour and the Lib Dems. It is though difficult to read much into local council by elections. The Conservative’s taking a seat from Labour in Cardiff is an interesting one

  112. There are already cracks beginning to show in the ‘unanimous’ Boris Johnson party line on Brexit:

    DM Story

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-7463307/Nicky-Morgan-I-vote-remain-EU-second-referendum.html?ito=chromelessDM_0

    Nicky Morgan: I would vote to remain in EU in second referendum;

    Nicky Morgan will be remembered as saying that a person is the sex he, she or it thinks he, she or it is regardless of medical evidence and regardless of whether he, she or it possesses a penis or a vagina.

    It is good to see that Boris Johnson will probably pack his new government – if he wins the general election – with Remainers whom he can blame when he fails, yet again, to deliver even the rottenest and feeblest of Brexits.

    2. Do be fair.

      Ladies look away now.

      Nicky Morgan can’t decide whether she is:
      A cúnt or a prick

          5. I did noodles for supper tonight. Dark and light Soy. Rice wine and a handfull of chilli. Enough to blow your socks off served with chicken Yakitori. Dolly liked it too. I have the mop at the ready. :o(

          6. We’re eating home made chicken noodle soup for lunch at the moment. Delicious.

            I’m a great fan of noodles and often eat them at the night markets around here in July and August. They make a good change from the ubiquitous duck we get here.

          7. I have been watching Rick Stein Secret France and guess what? He was in a market !… in Perigord. He raved about Enchaud de Porc. I do enjoy Rillettes but haven’t seen this before. Nice sliced and served with salade.

          8. We have been watching and enjoying that series too.

            It was in our area this week. We’ve eaten at two of the restaurants mentioned. HG has stayed in the nunnery where they make the Échournac cheese.

            The Enchaud is popular, served as he described and like you we enjoy rillettes, pork and duck and being horribly incorrect we adore foie gras, duck and goose. He was 10/10 on confit, give me confit over magret every time,.

            Creysse, the fish one by the Dordogne, is our favourite for marchés nocturne in July and August. It’s the least British and great fun, line dancing, great views over the river and yer French talk to us. The tables are communal, first come first served, so it’s pot luck who one is near. The fish stall is exactly as shown.

            We are thrice blessed living here.

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