Sunday 19 November: The Chancellor should be brave and ditch the most hated tax in Britain

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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469 thoughts on “Sunday 19 November: The Chancellor should be brave and ditch the most hated tax in Britain”

  1. Good morrow, Gentlefolk. today’s story

    Wrong Number
    It’s Saturday morning and Bob’s just about to set off on a round of golf, when he realizes that he forgot to tell his wife that the guy who fixes the washing machine is coming around at noon. So Bob heads back to the clubhouse and phones home.

    “Hello?” says a little girl’s voice.

    “Hi, honey, it’s Daddy,” says Bob. “Is Mummy near the phone?”

    “No, Daddy. She’s upstairs in the bedroom with Uncle Frank.”

    After a brief pause, Bob says, “But you haven’t got an Uncle Frank, honey!”

    “Yes, I do, and he’s upstairs in the bedroom with Mummy!”

    “Okay, then. Here’s what I want you to do. Put down the phone, run upstairs and knock on the bedroom door and shout in to Mummy and Uncle Frank that my car’s just pulled up outside the house.”

    “Okay, Daddy!” A few minutes later, the little girl comes back to the phone. “Well, I did what you said, Daddy.”

    “And what happened?”

    “Well, Mummy jumped out of bed with no clothes on and ran around screaming, then she tripped over the rug and went out the front window and now she’s all dead.”

    “Oh, my God! What about Uncle Frank?”

    “He jumped out of bed with no clothes on too, and he was all scared and he jumped out the back window into the swimming pool. But he must have forgot that last week you took out all the water to clean it, so he hit the bottom of the swimming pool and now he’s dead too.”

    There is a long pause.

    “Swimming pool? Is this 854-7039?”

      1. Strange that we,yesterday we had proper ham, baked beans and baked potatoes. That wot we used to eat back home Lancashire.

  4. Good morning all.
    A dry start with 6°C and the somewhat overcast sky is starting to lighten up.

    2. BTL and Tw@ter comments:-

      R. Spowart
      13 MIN AGO
      Message Actions
      Waffle, waffle, waffle.
      Anyone landing on our shores without full documentation should be photographed, DNAed & finger printed, then held in a secure facility until their identity and origins can be confirmed.
      Those claiming to be minors should, if there is the slightest doubt, be subject to the necessary examination to confirm their age.
      At no time should the EVER be entitled to more than basic food, shelter and necessary medical treatment.

      https://twitter.com/bob_bonsall/status/1726141047758008462

      1. Morning Bob. I can’t find a single supporting comment on the threads. They will close it down shortly I imagine.

      2. Good morning,
        Those claiming to be gay or claiming to have converted to Christianity without proof should also rejected.

      3. Didn’t bother to read it.
        My BP is under enough strain already.
        Ineffectual lies would send it nuclear.

  9. Good morning, all. Grey – dreary looking day – again. Today would have been my 58th wedding anniversary… Not many people know that!

    3. Uncle Bill, you are Maurice Micklewhite and I claim my five bob postal order. (Good morning to you and the MR, btw.)

  10. The Chancellor should be brave and ditch the most hated tax in Britain

    Probably Ulez at the moment

  11. The Government must confront anti-Semitism. 19 November 2023.

    Even the most ardent believers in free speech concede that there must be carve outs to prevent threats and calls for violence. Inciting racist hate is rightly illegal. The behaviour of some pro-Palestine protesters has crossed numerous lines time and time again, and yet the Government seems paralysed. It cannot be the case that each weekend, our streets play host to displays of anti-Semitic hatred that leave many Jewish people afraid to venture into their town centres.

    It is paralysed! Not only the people on the street but large sections of the Civil Service i.e the Home Office, are supporters. The Government (such as it is) fears the police will simply ignore their instructions and they will be exposed as ineffectual and the situation will actually worsen! The complete and final collapse of democracy in the UK cannot be ruled out. This is where multi-culturalism has brought us!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2023/11/19/confront-anti-semitism/

    1. There was once a chap who wrote, about 2,500 years ago I believe, that democracy contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Plato, I think his name was.

      1. Morning McPhee. Yes, it’s not a perfect system by any means. Still, Churchill’s stricture applies. It’s better than anything else!

          5. And anybody who commits a misdemeanour before obtaining citizenship is disbarred from becoming one.

      2. Morrning McPhee. Yes, it’s not a perfect system by any means. Still, Churchill’s stricture applies. It’s better than anything else!

      3. There is no democracy, currently, anywhere in the world. What is advertised as ‘democracy’ is nothing more than an elective oligarchy. In a true democracy the electorate have the choice of who are posited as candidates. They don’t! Candidates are selected for them by the parties and the choice then becomes one of “who is the least worst”.

    1. Well, that’s the mummy sorted. However, how do they import the daddy and the horde of offspring?

  14. Here is apparently the next iteration of Aliens-ate-my-covid

    Mr Global keeps putting out these wars, crises and dramas to distract us from the real story, which is the end of fiat currencies and the end of the long economic cycle. Nobody really bought the aliens found in Mexico story despite it coming from “trustworthy” sources, so now we have MH370-disappeared-in-a-gravity-hole.
    Kim Dotcom has just taken it up
    https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1725935763085484538

    Apparently the US has technology so advance that mere mortals can hardly dream of it! They wish!
    The most believable part of this story is that the American military destroyed a civilian airliner full of passengers by mistake. That I can very well believe.

    1. I liked this reply “These portals they [sic] cause objects to disappear are everywhere. In fact, I’ve had a small one in my sock drawer for years.”

      1. They do. They shot down an RAF Tornado in the Gulf, killing the crew. Far too trigger-happy.

        1. Unfriendly fire. The Americans are NOT our friends. The only ‘special relationship’ we have with them is as a poodle.

        1. Indeed.
          My take on it is that they flew into a panic and reacted irresponsibly. Cost a lot of people their lives.

  16. Good day all,

    A bit of a dull start at the McPhee demesne, rain soon. Wind remains oin the South-West and it’s a tad cooler than yesterday at 10℃≫12℃.

    Oh, goody we’re back to one of my favourite topics – Inheritance Tax. In fact, all tax since it’s at such a level and all-pervasiveness that I have come to regard it generally as nothing more than legalised theft. Anyway, back to Inheritance Tax Three letters on it:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4b41ed87c49d3e35d0b1d1f02d5228c5bf88b69918b73fd62b8f6b136c1b7667.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8666593ea75b55ef01a9d03469227ac8f2919fabcd34e245d2dd6598e6366cad.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7911568ae200fe57921aaaa14c242b486adcc9395815cb9e325c44d473239f8f.png

    I take Dr Robert McKinty to be practising the art of sarcasm and satire when he writes that he has proudly paid an enormous amount of tax. Peter Collins unwittingly points out why IHT will not be abolished – a reduction in the requirement for civil servants , lawyers and accountants (unless AI does it first). Andrew Cook hasn’t thought too deeply or he doesn’t think much of his fellow humans. In funeral parlours and at funerals people’s thoughts are not usually on pecuniary matters. That comes some time later when the will is read.

    1. I wonder if the funeral director realises that the inheritance tax bit usually comes well after the funeral is done and dusted.

    2. DON’T TRUST THE TORIES ON IHT!

      (In fact they are untrustworthy on everything)

      Remember Cameron proposed raising the IHT threshold to £1m and £2m. Hunt’s IHT plan is paltry and insignificant when you compare it with Cameron’s promise before the 2010 general election:

      “David Cameron said he would like to ensure that only the “very wealthy” pay inheritance tax as he voiced support for raising the threshold at which the tax is paid.

      The prime minister said he would like to ease pressure on people who do not regard themselves as “in any way the mega-rich” but whose estates are subject to the tax.

      George Osborne transformed Tory fortunes at the party’s conference in 2007 – and spooked Gordon Brown into abandoning plans to call an early general election – with a proposal to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m. This would have been doubled to £2m for couples.

      But the pledge was quietly dropped after the 2010 general election in the coalition negotiations as the policy appeared out of place in times of austerity. This means that inheritance tax of 40% has to be paid on estates worth more than £325,000.”

      [Source – The Guardian]

      1. Carbon copy of the tactics on immigration. Talk the talk but totally fail to walk the walk, to use an irritating piece of management-speak.

      2. A couple of weeks ago Jacob Rees-Mogg raised the racism issue when Civil Service training schemes were offered exclusively to those of ethnic minorities and those of mixed race. These schemes specifically said that white people were not eligible because they were white!

        It appears that white people are being outbred by people of other ethnic backgrounds by an alarming ratio – so much so that it will not be long before white people are in a minority in Great Britain.

        If it is not racist to discriminate against white people when offering training schemes why should it be racist to discriminate in favour of white people when this could solve a problem?

        How about scrapping IHT completely but just for all white couples with at least two white children? This might encourage white people to do a bit more breeding. It would also encourage them to work harder in the knowledge that the wealth they had accumulated during their lives would pass to their children and not to the state.

    3. Without many others proudly paying tax the good doctor wouldn’t be paid from the pubic purse!

  17. Good day all,

    A bit of a dull start at the McPhee demesne, rain soon. Wind remains oin the South-West and it’s a tad cooler than yesterday at 10℃≫12℃.

    Oh, goody we’re back to one of my favourite topics – Inheritance Tax. In fact, all tax since it’s at such a level and all-pervasiveness that I have come to regard it generally as nothing more than legalised theft. Anyway, back to Inheritance Tax Three letters on it:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4b41ed87c49d3e35d0b1d1f02d5228c5bf88b69918b73fd62b8f6b136c1b7667.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8666593ea75b55ef01a9d03469227ac8f2919fabcd34e245d2dd6598e6366cad.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7911568ae200fe57921aaaa14c242b486adcc9395815cb9e325c44d473239f8f.png

    I take Dr Robert McKinty to be practising the art of sarcasm and satire when he writes that he has proudly paid an enormous amount of tax. Peter Collins unwittingly points out why IHT will not be abolished – a reduction in the requirement for civil servants , lawyers and accountants (unless AI does it first). Andrew Cook hasn’t thought too deeply or he doesn’t think much of his fellow humans. In funeral parlours and at funerals people’s thoughts are not usually on pecuniary matters. That comes some time later when the will is read.

  18. Good day all,

    A bit of a dull start at the McPhee demesne, rain soon. Wind remains oin the South-West and it’s a tad cooler than yesterday at 10℃≫12℃.

    Oh, goody we’re back to one of my favourite topics – Inheritance Tax. In fact, all tax since it’s at such a level and all-pervasiveness that I have come to regard it generally as nothing more than legalised theft. Anyway, back to Inheritance Tax Three letters on it:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4b41ed87c49d3e35d0b1d1f02d5228c5bf88b69918b73fd62b8f6b136c1b7667.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8666593ea75b55ef01a9d03469227ac8f2919fabcd34e245d2dd6598e6366cad.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7911568ae200fe57921aaaa14c242b486adcc9395815cb9e325c44d473239f8f.png

    I take Dr Robert McKinty to be practising the art of sarcasm and satire when he writes that he has proudly paid an enormous amount of tax. Peter Collins unwittingly points out why IHT will not be abolished – a reduction in the requirement for civil servants , lawyers and accountants (unless AI does it first). Andrew Cook hasn’t thought too deeply or he doesn’t think much of his fellow humans. In funeral parlours and at funerals people’s thoughts are not usually on pecuniary matters. That comes some time later when the will is read.

  19. Good day all,

    A bit of a dull start at the McPhee demesne, rain soon. Wind remains oin the South-West and it’s a tad cooler than yesterday at 10℃≫12℃.

    Oh, goody we’re back to one of my favourite topics – Inheritance Tax. In fact, all tax since it’s at such a level and all-pervasiveness that I have come to regard it generally as nothing more than legalised theft. Anyway, back to Inheritance Tax Three letters on it:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4b41ed87c49d3e35d0b1d1f02d5228c5bf88b69918b73fd62b8f6b136c1b7667.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8666593ea75b55ef01a9d03469227ac8f2919fabcd34e245d2dd6598e6366cad.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7911568ae200fe57921aaaa14c242b486adcc9395815cb9e325c44d473239f8f.png

    I take Dr Robert McKinty to be practising the art of sarcasm and satire when he writes that he has proudly paid an enormous amount of tax. Peter Collins unwittingly points out why IHT will not be abolished – a reduction in the requirement for civil servants , lawyers and accountants (unless AI does it first). Andrew Cook hasn’t thought too deeply or he doesn’t think much of his fellow humans. In funeral parlours and at funerals people’s thoughts are not usually on pecuniary matters. That comes some time later when the will is read.

  20. Good day all,

    A bit of a dull start at the McPhee demesne, rain soon. Wind remains oin the South-West and it’s a tad cooler than yesterday at 10℃≫12℃.

    Oh, goody we’re back to one of my favourite topics – Inheritance Tax. In fact, all tax since it’s at such a level and all-pervasiveness that I have come to regard it generally as nothing more than legalised theft. Anyway, back to Inheritance Tax Three letters on it:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4b41ed87c49d3e35d0b1d1f02d5228c5bf88b69918b73fd62b8f6b136c1b7667.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8666593ea75b55ef01a9d03469227ac8f2919fabcd34e245d2dd6598e6366cad.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7911568ae200fe57921aaaa14c242b486adcc9395815cb9e325c44d473239f8f.png

    I take Dr Robert McKinty to be practising the art of sarcasm and satire when he writes that he has proudly paid an enormous amount of tax. Peter Collins unwittingly points out why IHT will not be abolished – a reduction in the requirement for civil servants , lawyers and accountants (unless AI does it first). Andrew Cook hasn’t thought too deeply or he doesn’t think much of his fellow humans. In funeral parlours and at funerals people’s thoughts are not usually on pecuniary matters. That comes some time later when the will is read.

  21. Good Moaning.
    Storm Annie Warning.
    I am starting a non-coffee week. I recognise the signs; edginess accompanied by lethargy.
    Perversely, for a few days, this regime will make me even grumpier and edgier.
    Apologies in advance if I post anything more excoriating and rude than my usual efforts.
    Don’t take it personally.

    1. What????? You are planning to call us Very Silly Sausages, Annie? Lol.(Good morning, btw.)

        1. Ah…….maybe the cause of my tinnitus and diplopia then? I don’t drink huge amounts of coffee though. Does it noticeably improve when you abstain?

  22. Does anyone know anything about the business ‘thirtyoneeight.org’?

    This has been set up to organise ‘Safeguarding’ in all spheres of life, and took over my church this morning with their “Safeguarding Sunday” which coincides with the Children’s Mass. I have been asked not to sing the psalm today, despite it being my normal slot in the month, but that’s just as well. I have no intention of attending mass this morning, since I believe that Safeguarding – where one regards the whole congregation with suspicion – to be a violation of the Eucharist and the unconditional peace that is essential to its preparation.

    1. I’ve done the CofE “safeguarding” course. As with BBC “unconscious bias” training, one understands the agenda and gives the required responses, fully aware that it’s complete bullshit.

      1. I’ve also done ‘safeguarding’ courses for table tennis. All another money-making scam for those who design and run them.

  23. Well, the dreariness was replaced, briefly, by watery sunshine. Gone now, of course.

    Two questions for switched on NoTTLers:

    1 I know the square root of sod all about wendyball – but WHAT have Everton done to be so vilified? As all clubs spend trillions – why should their trillions be castigated?

    2 Why is George Osborne supposed to be “posh”?

    1. 1 They didn’t hire the right accountants and lawyers but it is possible other teams will also be punished, and potentially harder.
      2. Perfectly Organised Shirt Hoister?

        1. I know it’s the beeb, but this article will give some back ground.
          https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/67459084
          In essence the objective is to stop clubs living beyond their means and going bust but at the same time ensuring that the clubs with the richest owners don’t totally dominate the sport by buying all the best players and paying silly money in salaries to get them. This is happening in Saudi.

          2. The best sides have relatively few home nations qualified players, they are busy buying the best from abroad and as you noted the other day indigenous UK players at youth level hardly get a look in when they are eligible for more senior teams in their clubs.

          3. On t he rare occasions that I look at the back pages in The Grimes, I am amazed how many wendyballistas are quite definitely not European – in the widest sense! Many appear to have arrived directly from the deepest African jungle.

          4. I guess that probably means you know how to tell the properties of all the different sods…..?

    3. I am proud to say that since I was a teenager not one penny of my hard-earned dosh has gone in support of wendyball or any of its associated spin-offs.

    4. In Everton’s case, they have funded their spending through excessive indebtedness and too much of that spend has been on playing staff. It’s an attempt to introduce a notion of fairness into the Premier League whereby it’s OK to spend large sums on playing staff from income, but not too much from borrowing.

    5. What is posh apart from Port Out Starboard Home ? Cooler cabins.
      My sister once lived in Harpingyarr as it known locally.
      Their neighbours on one side were horrible, it was difficult to understand exactly what they were saying.
      Other side a very nice chap as was his wife. He was a TV personality. Long gone now. Proposed me for the golf club.

  25. Good morning all

    Wind , no rain 12c.. and son is running in the Wimborne 10k this morning

    SIR – In more than 30 years as a funeral director I have never once heard a bereaved family mention Inheritance tax. Many, however, have seen everything their parents worked for swallowed up in care home fees. I strongly suggest that the Chancellor look in this direction first.

    Andrew Cook
    Willingham, Cambridgeshire

    Not forgetting the huge expense of care the family has to contribute to, and the low house prices that we all experienced years ago, when a house was sold to pay for care .

    Care home fees are eye wateringly excessive , and there are the same mediocre standards whether the elderly is self funded or Council funded

    1. The added bonus of course is that self funders pay around £300 per week more than what the LA pays the care home for the same accommodation / service.

      Edit: Morning TB and all.

      1. Somebody has to pay. LA gets a lower rate because private funders pay more to make up the difference.

      1. Moh’s late parents paid into the Co op funeral scheme for many decades .

        When Moh’s father died in Hampshire , he was buried , double plot , nice headstone , no fuss and near other relatives .

        Nearly 8 years ago, Moh’s mother sadly died in the care home near here , ( Dorset ) she was 92 yrs old .

        All was taken care of by the Co op, she was removed from Dorset to Hampshire, small funeral and buried with her husband who had died in the 1990s . The gravestone lettering had to altered and that was it .

        Seamless organising at a very difficult time .

        We want a no fuss removal for us because we don’t possess a funeral plan , which is a bit of a worry.. just a swift exit.

        1. Funeral plans are just saving schemes. You are better off keeping the money invested in your own accounts and funding your going-away do from the estate, its an allowable expense against IHT. I shall be put in an urn on the mantelpiece. Its worthwhile stating in your will what type of funeral you want, it saves the inevitable question and any disputes amongst the rels.

          1. Hello Kaypea.

            The Co op saving scheme always seemed to me to be a generational thing , because I can remember Moh’s grandparents doing exactly the same thing .

            Hard earned money in much earlier days used different methods of saving . Moh’s mother had brown envelopes for this that and the other , stashed away.

            Even when she used the phone , money went into little box near the phone in the hall. She hardly rang us !

          2. I get calls suggesting such plans with the message that it saves my heirs from having to find the money for a funeral. My stock response is, that I dont care because I will be dead when the bill comes in. But in reality, the money put away in a scheme would be better off remaining in my bank to fund a decent bash.

          4. My godmother had a long flat tin with several slotted compartments in it.
            One was for phone calls. I think the others were lecky, gas and so on.

          7. My MiL was asked by a neighbour if she had some scales the neighbour could borrow? MiL asked why? She replied that her husband who was from India was returning for a short holiday and wanted to divide his late mother’s ashes (kept in an urn on their mantlepiece) so that half could be give to his relatives in India……

          8. Yuk! Wouldn’t want ashes in my next cake……….. he could just as easily just tip some into another pot without worrying about each tiny gram.

          9. That reminds me of the old 1940’s joke about the Christmas cake ingredients sent by relatives in Australia to family members back in bleak, rationed Blighty.
            Amongst the dried fruit etc was rather coarse flour, not unlike the stuff used for the utility bread.
            In her thank you letter, the mother mentioned this flour. Her relatives explained that they’d forgotten to mention that there had been a family death and that the departed wished to return to England.
            “Oh Gawd” exclaimed mother. “We’ve just eaten Uncle Tom.”

          10. My mother told me of an occasion during the war when they received a care package from SA which contained a few sticks of biltong. She knew what they were but didn’t much like biltong so passed them on to a neighbour but neglected to tell her what to do with them. She thought they were tobacco quids and tried to shred them and smoke them but without success.,

        2. I’ve donated by body to Medical Science.

          Well, someone has to give Medical Students something to make them laugh.

          I surprise myself that I’ve lasted 79 years.

          2. Not at all but it gives my executrix about £3,500 that would otherwise go on funeral charges .

        3. Both my parents ashes were place together at different intervals, in a pleasant patch of grass in our local cemetery. Names DOB etc, on plaques next to each other fixed to a neat timber memorial fence.
          Neither came from the area. Both north London.
          Met at Hampstead (where I was later born) fair between the wars.

      2. Someone has to pay for the huge cost of advertising funerals on TV.
        I would stick my neck out and suggest most people turn off when this daft stuff comes up.
        I can’t be the only one.

    3. The first thing I will do when my parents pop their clogs is moan to the funeral director about IHT. Obvs.

      What a plonker.

    4. People need to make provision for care home fees or being looked after at home. I have a care insurance from a reputable company that also pays out if I am looked after by a family member at home.
      It was always unrealistic to expect the state to provide good quality care for free.

      Why would people discuss IHT with the funeral director anyway? Separate issues!

      1. Those who have either never worked or pissed up their earnings against the wall seem to get good quality care for nothing.

        1. By “make provision for” I just mean save or have an insurance. I have a care insurance, but I sometimes think I would have been better off saving the money myself! The advantage of the insurance is that it covers me in the event of accidents all my life.
          It’s a product that I got in Germany – I checked before taking it out that they pay out anywhere in the world. Frankly, I would not trust a UK provider to pay out. You need a doctor to certify that you meet internationally agreed level of care requirement, and they pay up.

  26. Morning all 🙂😊
    Brighter today cloud rushing across from SW.
    Just had a phone call from hospital Dr.
    Monitoring at home. My BP is much better now and stability is increasing. He’s taken me off the emergency list. What a relief.
    And cataract removal mid January in Hitchin. Not far to go.
    As the old song goes……things can only get better.
    Watched an excellent and very poignant film last night, “1917”. Brilliantly produced directed and acted.
    Tax reduction? We can’t possibly expect our government to anything that might please the majority of our population. Their heads are in the wrong place.

    1. I agree with you about “1917”. A few “improbables” but very well and convincingly made.

  27. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cb08dace9b81c2654d9d2e31a86694497f28569149ab3c12d0a476998eb1c987.png
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/19/trump-presidency-means-world-biden-election-2024/

    BTL

    Those who support Biden hate Britain and want Britain to fail.
    Those who support Trump love Britain and want Britain to prosper.
    Those who do not support Biden love Britain and want Britain to prosper.
    Those who do not support Trump hate Britain and want Britain to fail.

    A bit simplistic – but basically true.

      2. I think this referred to the UK’s view of Trump.

        O’Barma and Biden are both very anti-Britain as are the British left.

  28. Presumably there were thousands of slammers peacefully desecrating memorials and Jewish premises yesterday.

    The press seems strangely silent…. Can’t think wy.

  29. Good (mid) morning, chums. Good to see a bit more sun today after a thoroughly wet day yesterday.

  30. Hamas has lost the war. It may yet win the peace. 19 November 2023.

    If the Middle East is to enter a new period of peace and stability once the Gaza crisis has passed, it must be on the basis that the Arab world fully accepts that Iranian-backed Islamist terror groups like Hamas, not Israel, are the threat to the region’s future security.

    So no chance then Con? In my view Israel has won the military battle as any sensible person knew that it would do, but it is going to lose the war. Hamas cannot be destroyed since it represents the views of millions of Palestinians. You may disarm it and gaol its leaders but its aims will live on. Worse. When the next outbreak occurs; as is inevitable, Israel will stand alone. Europe will be a part of the Caliphate and the US will have withdrawn from the Middle East!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/19/hamas-has-lost-the-war-it-may-yet-win-the-peace/

      2. Vitamin B12 is often a necessary supplement for senior citizens. Medicines will not do everything, you also have to make an effort.

    2. The USA would not surrender Israel. Like Cyprus and Diego Garcia and other dots on the map, it is an unsinkable aircraft carrier.

  31. Good to read in the DT that a putative Scottish Independence would require a new Scottish currency. Here’s a BTL comment with one helpful suggestion:

    “BigD Armani

    The new Scottish currency could be called the Krankie
    600.000 Krankies buys you a new motor home and 8 billion Krankies buys 2 ferries that don’t work.”

    1. The currency question is a distraction (I refer learned colleagues to the currency history of the Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland). Scotland’s real problem will be raising money on the international markets.

    1. ABC He’s such a dopey wokie divot, a self appointed leader of his own version of ‘diversity’.
      Obviously his memory is failing as so many others have.
      Israel was living in a relatively peaceful state. Then one day not long ago filled with bursting long standkng hate, hamas terrorists based in Gaza launch many rockets from hospitals and murdered hundreds of people who were not a threat to anyone.
      Full stop !
      What doesn’t he appear to understand about that ?

      1. I lost any residual respect I might have had for him when he closed all the churches for months for a cold virus.

      2. When our priest praised the ABC’s opening speech to synod about Gaza I would have put money on the Archprick picking the islamic side.

  33. The last sentence in this Sunday Terriblegraph column by Jake Wallace Simpson is very good I thought:

    “My Jewish daughter is being tortured by TikTok. Yesterday, she opened the app and gave me a guided tour. First came videos of teenagers surrounded by antiIsrael slogans, singing along to the notorious Michael Jackson song They Don’t Care About Us: “Jew me, sue me / Everybody, do me / Kick me, k— me / Don’t you black or white me.” There were endless examples, created by children in a herd drive for likes.

    That was the tip of the iceberg. Another featured Ayatollah Khamenei smiling beatifically over heroic music. Who’d have thought that dropping our children into the grip of a Chineseowned platform was a bad idea?

    In a fiery Zoom call with TikTok execs this week, the actor Sacha Baron Cohen accused it of “creating the biggest anti-Semitic movement since the Nazis”. He and other Jewish figures described how it was awash with comments like “Hitler was right” and “I hope you end up like Anne Frank”. In isolation, these could be dismissed as schoolyard insults. En masse, they are a toxic social movement.

    On Friday, TikTok was forced to delete the #lettertoamerica hashtag after shares of Osama bin Laden’s 2002 manifesto – which justified 9/11 by the sins of the Jews and the West – spiralled out of control. Millions of users were besotted, saying their eyes had been opened to a hidden reality. A transgender writer called Gretchen Felker-Martin praised 9/11 as “probably the most principled and defensible thing he ever did”. In February, Felker-Martin had expressed a desire to slit JK Rowling’s throat. Things have come to a pretty pass when a trans woman becomes infatuated with a jihadi and expresses a wish to kill a children’s author.

    Before our eyes, a generation of young people is augmenting its luxury beliefs with support for jihadism. This is moral and intellectual vacuity, an internet brain-rot arising from a propaganda mechanism the like of which the world has never seen. On the surface, it is utterly bewildering.

    Look deeper, however, and this content on the platform is a digitally enhanced and dumbed-down version of a long convergence between Western radicals and Islamist fanatics.

    Arising in the 20th century, a political phenomenon sought to restore the dignity of the Muslim world – which had been eclipsed by the power of the West – by opposing Western decadence, which Sayyid Qutb, the godfather of jihadism, derided as pre-Quranic jahiliyyah, or barbarism. This Islamism blended easily with the decolonisation movement; guerrilla uprisings against the French in Niger and Algeria showed how Islam could be instrumentalised by an anti-imperialist agenda.

    The latter conflict has a particular resonance for Hamas. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, an attritional terror campaign by the savage Front de Libération Nationale sapped the morale of colonial France. The brutality of Paris’s response alienated both ordinary Algerians and the metropolitan French, causing international support to collapse. This playbook is being followed by Hamas today. In an interview with Lebanese television, its former leader Khaled Mashal said: “The Algerian people sacrificed six million martyrs over 130 years… No nation is liberated without sacrifices.” Unsurprisingly, a major part of Hamas’s strategy is to manipulate Israel into killing civilians.

    The old-fashioned anti-imperialism of the likes of Jeremy Corbyn has become the guiding principle of a generation radicalised by social media. In 2021, Black Lives Matter became its racial wing; Hamas is now its religious column, with jihadi rapists refashioned as symbols of resistance. Facilitated by anti-Semitism, this is an achievement Islamic State could only dream of.

    In another TikTok trend, youngsters film themselves weeping performatively over Gaza. If idiocy and narcissism is the hubris of our society, Hamas has become our nemesis.”

    1. Unsurprisingly, a major part of Hamas’s strategy is to manipulate Israel into killing civilians.

      And IMHO that is exactly what hamas was aiming for and has done.
      The Israelis obviously know this and good luck to them in finding a wiping out any hamas member were ever they might be.

    2. Tiktok is a Chinese app and it is thought that China influences the content. It sounds revolting.

  35. Harry and Meghan ‘would accept offer to spend Christmas with the royal family at Sandringham…but are yet to receive an invite from King Charles’

    DM Story.

    Instead of expecting the King to invite them maybe the Duke and Duchess of Sussex ought to invite the King, his wife, The Prince and Princess of Wales and their three children for Christmas with them. And while they’re at it why not invite both the Duchess of Sussex’s mother and father. What a great family Christmas that would be!

    They could offer each one of the guests his or her own bathroom.

    2. According to Diane Abbott, 157% of black people have experienced racism before, compared to only 9 out of 7 Jews.

  37. Well, here’s a non-surprise.

    https://twitter.com/Togetherdec/status/1726148308127621196

    As current chairman and extremely keen advocate of the C40 Cities scheme; a scheme designed to erode Londoner’s rights across many areas e.g. food rationing, restrictions on movement, rationing of clothes etc. how will this disgusting example of the human race lie about the horrors that that plan will bring to the people of London?

    Language alert.

    https://twitter.com/UnleashedComedy/status/1725933240559477125

    2. From the Institute of Advanced Motorists. They think it’s because driving standards are getting worse. I think it’s because motorists (in London) are being targeted by Plod and we are being done for doing 22 in a 20. I don’t regard this as dangerous. What i think is that they are desperate to force motorists off the road, and they are doing it via a variety of methods including banning us from driving and prohibiting us from buying ICE vehicles.

      “There are more than half-a-million drivers with six points on their licence who are a text, like or an emoji away from an automatic driving ban, according to new analysis of DVLA data by UK road safety charity IAM RoadSmart.

      The penalty for using a handheld mobile phone at the wheel can result in a £200 fine and six points on the licence, putting a whopping 542,287 drivers already carrying six points at of risk of a driving ban. Worse still, a further 94,088 drivers with nine points on their licence are even closer to temporarily losing their right to drive. Those totting up 12 or more points within three years face an automatic six-month driving ban… The proportion of drivers with three, six and nine points on their licence as of 5th August 2023 has increased quite markedly on the same period last year, most notably among those with nine points where there is an 8% increase on the 86,849 who had nine points in August 2022….[A spokesman from the IAM said]: “There is a more-widely held suspicion that driving standards are deteriorating and the worrying jump in the number of people with points on their licence should be a wake-up call to the government to roll out new enforcement measures and to publish their updated road safety strategy.”

  38. Good moaning all, just.

    Make sure your BP tablets have been taken: Taxpayers’ Alliance news:

    Over £13.5m is being spent on 336 diversity roles across the country on 111 NHS trusts. It the madness doesn’t stop there. NHS England recently announced plans to create 3 new departments and hire over 200 additional EDI staff. This is all despite the then Health Secretary Steve Barclay demanding the funds be redirected to the front line.

    😱 what the hell is going on? NHS England have seemingly assumed powers that override what their “boss” tells them. How do you feel about that then.

    1. Morning vw. All the UK Governmental institutions are independent of Goverment control. They do as they like.

      2. As in the TV comedy series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, it’s the dreaded Whitehall run the country. Politicians don’t have a clue what they are supposed to be doing about anything at all. And never have or never will have.

  39. Good moaning all, just.

    Make sure your BP tablets have been taken: Taxpayers’ Alliance news:

    Over £13.5m is being spent on 336 diversity roles across the country on 111 NHS trusts. It the madness doesn’t stop there. NHS England recently announced plans to create 3 new departments and hire over 200 additional EDI staff. This is all despite the then Health Secretary Steve Barclay demanding the funds be redirected to the front line.

    😱 what the hell is going on? NHS England have seemingly assumed powers that override what their “boss” tells them. How do you feel about that then.

  40. Another puzzle for an ageing pensioner.

    What is the difference between “sponsored content” and an “advertisement” – in a Sunday (other days are available) newspaper?

    1. An advertisement is an invitation to buy. Sponsored content is what the government does when it pays media to convince people to kill themselves.

    2. Sponsored content is a more subtle form of advertising whereby reading matter resembling editorial content, but flattering to the sponsor, is inserted into the newspaper and paid for by the sponsor.

    3. ‘Sponsored content’ is paid for propaganda and an advert is simply to get you to buy their stuff.

  45. A Twitt link, sorry.
    Moderna have a whole bunch of mRNA vaccines in development apparently. There is a graphic in the post, with vaxxes named things like “flu” “covid 19 next generation” and so on, and the stage of completion that they are currently at.
    The bottom one is labelled “pandemic flu.” Which flu “pandemic” would that be then? The one they’ve got planned for a couple of years from now?
    https://twitter.com/Inversionism/status/1726029722029588693

  46. Remember:
    Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

    Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see a gleam in his eyes, do some baking.

    Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach a person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks, months, maybe years

    Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in the hospitals, dying of nothing.

    All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

    In the 60’s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

    Life is like a jar of Jalapeno peppers– what you do today, might burn your aRs tomorrow.

    Don’t worry about old age–it doesn’t last that long.

    https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.J2iS37vxDUB3kuIfnORwqQHaHK?w=209&h=201&c=7&r=0&o=5&dpr=1.1&pid=1.7

    1. I am a health nut insofar that should I feel peculiar I have a plethora of diagnostic tools to challenge any treatment from a medical professional who may prescribe an inappropriate treatment.

      Today I came across this video:

      https://youtu.be/f5xC5ofq4aE?si=7JJy40VRH6tNTuwH

      which graphically and succintly describes what I previously
      deduced from my pulse oximeter as SupraVentricular Tachycardia.and referred myself to A&E.

      Fortunately the triage medic in A&E cofirmed my suspicions and diagnosed me as having SVT and I was rapidly tranferred to Resus.

      I had already tried valsalva and neck massage but now I was to experience a dose of Adenosine in the Resus unit. This video explains what is involved. Essentially it means stopping your heart for the limited time that the drug is active – it felt like my heart was beating outside my body:
      https://youtu.be/6PRxhMr3Rtw?feature=shared as in Tom any Jerry.

      This video is useful in explaining similar heart rthythym irregularities that could be seen on pulse oximeters that display the blood flow waveform in the measured finger:

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ca3c4cdddf047515950bcc2830e80dbff6ad302c1fc2ffe3d1b2d5c06986571e.jpg

  48. Good day to you all! It looks like some sunshine and flowers from my stroll around the parks of Palermo here in Buenos Aires might be welcomed, so here are just a few photos. (Edit: two. They wouldn’t let me upload most of them.)

    Interesting times here; the Argentines elect their president today (last month’s elections narrowed it down to two candidates). Very divided views amongst the people I’ve spoken to.

    The Peronists are running the man who was in charge of the economy in the current government, Sergio Massa. The economy is a total disaster, but his supporters say that he must be supported or democracy will die.

    His opponent is a flamboyant libertarian with a tendency to come over as a wild-eyed coke fiend in arguments, Javier Milei. He is opposed to rule by The Blob, and proposes to axe many layers of government, take subsidies in hand*, and dollarise the peso.

    I am watching in fascination. When asked, I have to say that I don’t know enough about the political situation to have an opinion.

    * Public transport, for example, costs pennies. I charged my travel card with the equivalent of three pounds when I arrived, and it’s only just run out, despite me using buses and the tube every day! Electricity is ridiculously cheap, too. I don’t see how this can be undone without chaos ensuing. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ac9d7e9ed59fbe085e8569a5ff70b953fb486f843baa48e7e82a8d07002c0aa3.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/48057f1ad93201bb639b6588efe040a5aedaea695b70904f41797e15c72fbe95.jpg

    2. Lovely hibiscus! I could enjoy some of that sun, and colour. Hope you’re having a lovely time, Ashes!
      Greetings from a land that’s mostly grey & white, to with my hair & beard like it is, I fit right in.

          1. Ashes showed me the correct stance and posture for different Tango moves. She had me completely under her control. I blushed !

        3. I have a picture of you on the wall beside my screen. You have flowers in your hair.
          I’m poking my tongue out at you !

    4. I’m in two minds about Argentina. I’d like Milei to win, but I don’t want Argentina to be in a position to beef up its military again. Not when so many Argentinians still seem to cling to the belief that a set of islands which were never theirs and never inhabited by Argentinians are, well, theirs…

      If he does win, that’ll make two populists. Bukele seems to be doing well in El Salvador.

  50. Some commentators in the media have suggested that the UK should copy the USA and allow the executive to bring in its own senior managers to implement policy. Last week’s revelations from the CS whistle-blower and earlier photos showing groups of Home Office immigration staff consisting almost entirely of African and Asians show that Whitehall is sticking up two fingers to the government and the people (the ancestral people, anyway).

    The flaw in this argument is that it requires a competent government with the required policies. Should Labour win the GE, it will find the CS it wants is already in place.

    Make Civil Service TWaTs work in the office full time

    Productivity in public services has flatlined. If we want improvements, government employees must return to the office

    ROSS CLARK • 17 November 2023 • 12:42pm

    Forget Gaza, forget Rwanda, there is an even more serious breach of human rights which is troubling Britain’s enlightened liberals: the government has demanded that civil servants return to their offices for at least three days a week.

    It’s painful to imagine the hardship that this will cause. For starters, it is an awfully long commute to Whitehall from the Dordogne. Yes, the First Division Association (FDA) – the union which represents senior civil servants – really did pass a motion last year demanding the right for ‘international remote working’ in order to benefit their family life.

    I apologise if I missed the details, but I don’t remember the FDA suggesting that civil servants who no longer go into the office be stripped of their London weighting. I wouldn’t be surprised if they demanded an overseas weighting instead, to cover the cost of running a villa and all those flights home.

    I have a better idea for the government: stop pussyfooting around and demand that civil servants return to their desks five days a week. I have nothing against people working from home if that is what suits their employers – something which I have been doing for the past three decades. But if you are going to employ someone then surely you have the right to determine where and when they work. And if the government doesn’t feel that the civil service is performing properly, then ministers should not shy away from demanding that staff do a full week’s work in the office.

    Large sections of the civil service simply are not functioning at the moment. It was painful to read the testimony of Foreign Office whistleblower Raphael Marshall, who resigned after the shambolic evacuation from Kabul after the Taliban returned in August 2021. At times, he said, he was the only person on the desk handling the evacuations, while senior staff were trying to work from home. Even now, the Foreign Office’s desks are only at 57 per cent capacity. HMRC offices are at only 55 per cent capacity; meanwhile, taxpayers have been tearing their hair out trying to get assistance.

    We have endless studies and webinars extolling the benefits of working from home – one of them which involved the UK civil service, funnily enough, was sponsored by Dell, which might just have a vested interest in supplying the necessary equipment. But the truth is it requires an iron discipline to work with all the distractions of home life around you. That is one thing when you are paid by the task; but if you are paid by the hour, as most civil servants are, the temptations to sneak away from the desk and towards the TV or fridge must be insurmountable.

    We have ended up with the wrong people working from home: clock-watchers who are motivated by an aversion to hard work rather than freelancers who have escaped the office because they want to be in charge of their own destinies. The civil service is drifting away from what it is supposed to be – an organisation responsible for enacting government policy – and towards becoming a giant club whose primary purpose is to give civil servants an enjoyable and rewarding lifestyle.

    Productivity in the public services has hardly shifted in 25 years, with modest gains in the years from 2009 to 2019 undone by a change in attitudes brought about by the pandemic. It is time the government got a grip and forced civil servants back to the office full time.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/17/civil-service-work-from-home-fda-productivity/

    2. It is time the government got a grip and forced civil servants back to the office full time.

      The Government no longer runs things!

    3. The canadian civil service has grown about 40% in the past few years which partially masks the inefficiency of the whole government shambles.

      Sonny boy has now chosen to go into the office one or two days a week. His work is task oriented and he enjoys the opportunity to isolate himself from the distractions

          1. Sorry – I misread your comment. I assumed that “sonny boy” referred to Trudope.

            My apologies for a terrible slur on your son.

  51. S.S. Stanbrook.

    Complement:
    20 (20 dead – no survivors).
    Ballast.

    At 02.13 hours on 19th November 1939 the unescorted Stanbrook (Master Archibald Dickson) was hit on the port side in the stern by one G7a torpedo from U-57 (Claus Korth), broke in two and sank quickly west-northwest of the North Hinder Lightship. The master and 19 crew members were lost. The torpedo had been a tube runner and hit despite being launched manually due to the short distance to the target.

    Type IIC U-Boat U-57 sank at 0015hrs on 3rd September 1940 at Brunsbüttel after an accidental collision with the Norwegian steamship Rona. 6 dead and 19 survivors.
    Raised on 9th September and decommissioned at Kiel on 16th September 1940. Repaired by Deutsche Werke AG and returned to service on 11th January 1941.

    Scuttled on 3rd May 1945 at Kiel after being decommissioned in April 1945. Wreck broken up.

    https://uboat.net/media/allies/merchants/br/stanbrook.jpg

    Stanbrook at dock in Oran, Algeria during the Spanish Civil War. She just ran the blockade and rescued 2,000 Republicans.

  52. Conservative Bob Stewart has announced he will step down as MP for Beckenham after being convicted of a racially aggravated public order offence.

    55 and counting…..

    Edit:

    The Beckenham constituency is expected to be changed at the next general election, following a regular review process.
    The Boundary Commission for England has proposed a new constituency of Beckenham and Penge.

    Even without the current farce that should easily mean a Labour victory…..

      1. Is that all he did? I thought at the very least he’d stood in a public square and shouted “I hate all n@ggers”! I suppose that would be a hanging offence.

        4. Educated black people are perfectly fine. It’s the uneducated and the stupid that are the problem. And the ragheads.

      3. The ‘THEY’ are the most important element on the planet. And ‘just out to get’ anyone anywhere anyway.
        The real scum of the earth.

  53. Conservative Bob Stewart has announced he will step down as MP for Beckenham after being convicted of a racially aggravated public order offence.

    55 and counting…..

    Edit:

    The Beckenham constituency is expected to be changed at the next general election, following a regular review process.
    The Boundary Commission for England has proposed a new constituency of Beckenham and Penge.

    Even without the current farce that should easily mean a Labour victory…..

    1. Logging in to his compulsory digital ID to find out what he is permitted to do/eat/buy and where he is permitted to go that day.

  55. The decadent West has come face to face with the future – and the end of its dominance. 19 November 2023.

    We in the West like to imagine that liberal democracy spread because others were attracted by its intrinsic merits. It didn’t. It spread through military victories – a fact that the rest of the world has not forgotten.

    Only now, perhaps, are we learning how limited its appeal is. Several countries which we thought were in our camp turned out to be pro-Western only contingently and transactionally. The moment they saw our power waning, they began to look elsewhere.

    We see the shift in the reluctance of states beyond Europe, the Anglosphere and a handful of East Asian democracies to join sanctions against Russia. We see it in the UN votes positing an implicit equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas. When the world’s dominant power declines, violence and disorder rush to fill the vacuum.

    We see it most in the financial and moral corruption of the Political Elites. Just look at them! There’s not one worthy of their position. The President of the United States is a senile pederast and his western deputies are hardly less foul. Most of them are anti-democratic and servants to the Globalist cause. None of them possess a shred of patriotism and would sell their Mothers for a directorship. The West is in General Decline and the UK is poised to collapse utterly. A whole civilisation that has ruled the world for five centuries is in the process of dissolution and the people responsible have no interest in it.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/18/decadent-west-come-face-to-face-with-the-future/

  56. The decadent West has come face to face with the future – and the end of its dominance. 19 November 2023.

    We in the West like to imagine that liberal democracy spread because others were attracted by its intrinsic merits. It didn’t. It spread through military victories – a fact that the rest of the world has not forgotten.

    Only now, perhaps, are we learning how limited its appeal is. Several countries which we thought were in our camp turned out to be pro-Western only contingently and transactionally. The moment they saw our power waning, they began to look elsewhere.

    We see the shift in the reluctance of states beyond Europe, the Anglosphere and a handful of East Asian democracies to join sanctions against Russia. We see it in the UN votes positing an implicit equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas. When the world’s dominant power declines, violence and disorder rush to fill the vacuum.

    We see it most in the financial and moral corruption of the Political Elites. Just look at them! There’s not one worthy of their position. The President of the United States is a senile pederast and his western deputies are hardly less foul. Most of them are anti-democratic and servants to the Globalist cause. None of them possess a shred of patriotism and would sell their Mothers for a directorship. The West is in General Decline and the UK is poised to collapse utterly. A whole civilisation that has ruled the world for five centuries is in the process of dissolution and the people responsible have no interest in it.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/18/decadent-west-come-face-to-face-with-the-future/

  57. The UN Development Programme last week officially launched their new initiative promoting “Digital Public Infrastructure” (DPI) around the world. No stealth here, folks: a big tub-thumping global media launch featuring….. Bill Gates. It will render 50 nations across the world fully DPI in five years [oh look, just in time for 2030] and the public project – not secret – is called 50in5. It will involve the creation of 50 “Data Exchange Systems” covering all worlds and national governments on every continent blithely sharing any citizen of one country’s data – public and personal – with another member of the Fascist Fifty in a sharing (and uncaring) tongue-twister of a euphemism, ‘interopability’.

    Now take a look at the main underwriters involved: UNICEF, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. The dozen or so guinea pigs chosen for the scheme so far are Bangladesh, Brazil, Estonia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Moldova, Norway, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Togo. My cynical conclusion here is that the drivers are unipolar (Washington interlopers) but the nations involved are designed to make this Global Tech look multipolar.

    Did anyone ask the electorate in these countries if they wanted this? They did not.

    Off Guardian is smart enough to point out that – on the same day as the 50in5 launch – the European Parliament and Council of Europe agreed on ”a new framework for a region-wide European Digital Identity (eID) system”.

    Already in and of itself an upside-down anti-democracy Gross Europeanische Reich, the Eunatics of course tell all their lucky citizens how blessed they are in that:

    ‘The revised regulation constitutes a clear paradigm shift for digital identity in Europe aiming to ensure universal access for people and businesses to secure and trustworthy electronic identification and authentication. Under the new law, member states will offer citizens and businesses digital wallets that will be able to link their national digital identities with proof of other personal attributes (e.g., driving licence, diplomas, bank account). Citizens will be able to prove their identity and share electronic documents from their digital wallets with a click of a button on their mobile phone’.

    No cliche has been spared: the paradigm shift, universal access for the People, authentication, the click of a button on your Smartphone. It’s IABATO* on steroids, folks – nosey parkers able to read your personal bank account for crying out loud…

    *It’s All Bollocks And That’s Official

    From J Wards The Slog….

        1. If everyone threw their sabot into the machine they would lose control. We carry our own ball and chains with us.

      3. They will offer a safe and convenient implanted chip! Free! You’ll never have to worry about forgetting your phone again!

        🙄🙄🙄

    2. Pure evil. Once again, the so-called conspiracy theorists have been proven correct.
      I’m glad I am in my sunset years.

    3. And how many trans-continental gimmegrants will be thus tracked?

      None

      Are you sure?

      Yep, none.

      And if they perform Jihad?

      So what, you deserve it you filthy white bastards.

    4. Are you sure canada isn’t in the list? Trudeau signs us up for any UN scam going and he so wants a seat on some UN committee.

  58. And five hours later he staggers back from the oldies’ lunch.

    Kir, nibbles, soup, pate de foie gras, Guinea fowl and selected vegetables, cheese, desserts, chocolates, red wine, white wine, coffee ,various liqueurs to chose from.
    At the princely sum of 0 euros.

    It’s a hard life…

      1. It’s the only one I’ve ever encountered.

        Of course we pay via local taxes, but it’s mostly the younger generation who do the heavy lifting.

      1. If you live in the commune as a permanent resident, and are over 70, you get an invite.
        There were about 120 today who accepted.

          1. It was surprising how much went back to the kitchens, but even more surprising was how the oldies stacked their plates and also how many finished their soup “Chabrol”

          7. Try it, you might be surprised.

            The amount of red wine is small, traditionally poured over the back of the spoon and then mixed with the last of the soup, drink it directly from the bowl and gently “smack” your lips then smile and santé your fellow diners.

        2. That is the type of event where i would have been doing the cooking. The biggest was a three course Christmas dinner for about 200 oldies. The club secretary gave me five beer tokens. I didn’t expect anything but he did look a bit sheepish.

          When i did manage to get to the bar i asked the landlord if i could have a drink and he said ‘you my son can have whatever you like’.
          The pleasure given is its own reward.

    6. Memories, memories…!

      Last week some Dutch friends who have a house in Laure sent us snaps of the village restaurant which was on the point of opening when the Plague struck. It had been closed for years. Two women bought it, spent a lot on it and now run a very successful resto du coin.

      The preparations for opening were in hand as we were emptying the house – and we sold the girls several nice bits of furniture and gave them heaps of china and other odds and ends (the MR’s father’s cabin trunk, for example and a framed map of “Le Norfolk”.)

      We never saw the resto open – so it was a delightful reminder of what we miss – all the “stuff” will be there until the girls retire in 20+ years.

    7. All we got was samples at a local craft fair. A few nibbles and samples of some not too bad wine. It was free as well but probably lacking in most of what you had.

    8. I wouldn’t go without Caroline and she is far too young.

      Our Irish friend, Jim is 88, and his main problem is he was never a very fluent French speaker and he is losing much of the French he had and so he finds it difficult to communicate with the local people.

      However he goes to the Club des Aînés which organises meals and excursions. It also organises entertainments, and theatre visits and he even once went with the club to a cabaret venue in Rennes with topless dancers which rather surprised him. The club has also organised foreign trips and he has been to Spain and Corsica.

      1. Ours is oldie plus partner so you would both have been welcome here.
        I don’t know how long that will last.

          1. Not here apparently.
            Even with the new Macon communisation we’re still fairly small, and looking around I doubt there were more than two or three under age attendees.

          2. And here in England the organisers would have to do a risk assessment. The people preparing the food would need certification. The venue would need to be licensed. There would need to be security wearing hi viz. Welcome to Soviet UK.

          3. You commented on your own voluntary involvement earlier.
            As an aside, to show how much voluntary work goes into it.

            Every place setting has a chocolate/toffee on their napkin.
            There is a small red cardboard box with a bowed ribbon on the top and at the front it has a white panel printed in black stating “meal for the oldies”.
            When you open the box there are more sweets and on the inside of the box each course of the menu is printed on one of the “walls”.
            It must have taken several hours to print the things off, stick them to the walls and then score and fold the boxes together; even if one can buy the boxes.

            We love these do’s.

          4. The younger members of the club did the serving and also got 5 beer tokens! Things like printing would have been an expense from outside so it wasn’t done. Easy with Christmas dinner though as everyone knows what that is.
            Your event is the cultural glue that binds. I’m not surprised you enjoy it.

          6. But they did.
            Here’s the minutes of the risk committee meeting.

            What are the important risks:
            Oldies might not enjoy themselves, Oldies might need the toilets more than young people.

            Risk migration:
            More booze and more food and open both the toilets.

            Passed
            “nem con”

  59. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4590a261b81816a77df51b0e51d65b81c0de4788ca7ac11c7fc6215e76e83017.png
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/rugby-union/2023/11/18/maro-itoje-future-england-saracens-pay-cut-france/

    BTL

    Isn’t professional sport sordid?

    Rugby was a far better game when it was amateur.

    If you think about it it the word ‘sport’ implies doing something which is a diversion and is not your work or profession.

    Ergo professional sport is a grubby oxymoron.

  60. Just popping off to middle son’s for dinner.
    I’ll have to record the European Tour golf from Dubai……yes you heard. 🏌‍♂️🏌🏌‍♀️🤔😏
    No locals taking part, a long white skirt and a funny head covering could be difficult to play in.
    Fairways Nice and green and a bit of water on the course. Even trees.
    Desalination must have been working hard eh.
    Victor Hovland from Norway 🇳🇴 in the lead. Minus 18.

    1. Sod the golf, let us know what have for dinner. I’m always interested/nosy in how others entertain.

      1. Nothing special last night, roast chicken and veg, 5 veg including roast potatoes. Very tasty.
        He’s too busy with young children to be a specialist.
        But he did work at Gleneagles Hotel for six months.
        Now works in head office at ISS.

  61. Applauding Australian sportsmen goes against the grain but today is an exception. Hats off to their cricketers for silencing the Hindu hordes and wiping the smile from Virat Kohli’s face in the World Cup final, played in the huge arena that is the Nahendra Modi stadium in Ahmedabad

    Modi is not a modest man. He proposed the building of the stadium when he was the Chief Minister of Gujarat and the president of the Gujarat Cricket Association. Naturally he had it named after himself.

    There’s a man who probably looks eastwards with envy at the Chinese setup…

    1. Build huge entertainment palaces while most of the country doesn’t have decent sanitation. Priorities are all wrong.

      4. I think the same could be said about the 1851 Great Exhibition.
        Indoor plumbing and running water were not generally available in Britain at the time.

  62. How the Supreme Court got ahead…by conning you with a cunning plan

    By PETER HITCHENS for THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

    Isn’t it amazing that, when the Government shut the country down in a wild panic in 2020, the courts would not intervene? Yet the same courts can barely contain themselves when they are asked to dismantle any attempt to limit mass migration.

    The basis for the Covid lunacy, which did the nation and its people permanent damage from which we shall never recover, was an obscure piece of public health law.

    It was plainly not designed for this purpose, and was probably chosen because it did not require the Parliamentary scrutiny that proper emergency laws demand. More than one attempt was made to get the courts to rule on whether the whole thing was in fact legal. They refused even to hear the case. I repeat. They refused even to hear the case.

    These were the same courts which had rushed to judgment over Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson’s attempts to get us out of the EU and against his decision to send Parliament home for a short while.

    Personally, I thought the judges were legally right in the first case†, and legally wrong over prorogation. But I don’t care. I don’t think it was any of their business either way, as I shall explain.

    Yet the fact was that they stepped in swiftly and effectively in these issues – which greatly expanded their power and authority. But when the whole country was being closed down, causing immense damage to the economy, to public health and to our future prosperity and stability, they were just not interested. They will expand their own freedom. But they won’t protect ours.

    The legal profession and the courts in this country are a key part of the machinery of covert, slow-motion revolution. They take sides. They value some liberties and scorn others.

    It is like this because, especially since judicial appointments were revolutionised in 2005, judges are increasingly radical and Left-wing. So of course are many lawyers – products of schools and universities long dominated by liberal thought.

    Left-wing lawyers, especially those gathered round Derry Irvine, were a huge part of the Blair Revolution. This was a giant power grab, the biggest constitutional upheaval in this country since the days of Oliver Cromwell. But it was far more successful than Cromwell’s, since it was done in committee rooms and by moving amendments, not by troops stamping around Westminster waving swords and shouting.

    The makers of the ‘Supreme Court’, which last week once again belittled our Parliamentary Government, knew what they were about. Just before it began work in 2009, its future President, Lord Neuberger, spoke of the possibility of ‘judges arrogating to themselves greater power than they have at the moment’. Lord ‘Charlie’ Falconer, whose years as Anthony Blair’s flatmate wafted him to the highest judicial office in the land, did not hide his joy, and exulted in the change. He said he ‘happily predicted’ that the Supreme Court would be ‘bolder in vindicating both the freedoms of individuals and, coupled with that, being willing to take on the executive’.

    For ‘bolder’ read ‘more aggressive’, and of course more revolutionary. And the ‘freedoms’ he sought were the ones Blairites like above all, the vague and limitlessly stretchy ‘human rights’ which have made it so very hard to enforce old-fashioned common-sense law in recent years.

    The process was simple and subtle. Lord Neuberger, after he had retired, explained to a little-noticed student gathering in Cambridge that Britain’s Supreme Court lacked the huge powers of the US Supreme Court to give orders to Congress and the President. But he didn’t quite mean it, for he added: ‘We get round that, the judges get round that, by what Baldrick might call a ‘cunning and subtle plan’ of being able to ‘interpret’ statutes, and sometimes we interpret them quite, um, imaginatively’.

    For a reticent and cautious Judge, that is quite a startling confession. It has never attracted the attention it deserved.

    Meanwhile, the court increases daily in power and authority, making a nonsense of the ancient English idea that Parliament is supreme, or that actual public opinion may have a voice in government. It is the rule of the elite, and the liberal elite at that, and it does not care about you.

    It reminds me of the cruelly funny semi-horror film How To Get Ahead In Advertising in which Richard E Grant plays an advertising man who suffers from a boil on his shoulder. This boil slowly develops into a second, rival head which eventually takes over his whole body, turning him into an utterly different (and much worse) person.

    The ‘Supreme Court’ is already functioning as a rival head on our body politic. If it is not soon abolished (no other course will curb it) then it will truly become supreme, and Parliament will not dare do anything it will disapprove of.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-12765883/PETER-HITCHENS-Supreme-Court-got-ahead-conning-cunning-plan.html

    † I’m not sure what Hitchens is referring to here.

    1. I think either he’s saying he’s a remainer at heart or that the judges were correct intervene over the EU vote, although I can’t recall what was challenged nor the outcome..

      I too wondered what that was about when I read the article this morning

      1. Johnson wasn’t PM at the time of the Article 50 case. I can’t remember another before the prorogation hearing.

  63. That’s me for today. Dreary again. Rain tomorrow. Still, at least the well is full. Just finished reading, “The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters” by Benjamin Moser. Fascinating; learned a great deal. I commend it to anyone who likes Dutch paintings.

    Have a jolly evening.

    A demain – one hopes.

        1. Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities. 1 Timothy 5:23.

          2. I have often considered the fact that Islam bans the consumption of alcohol to be part of the reason that Muslims are so f*****g miserable.

          4. I think they are only miserable at the thought of being caught whilst actually drinking the stuff!

        1. “Lovely boy – always had a cheeky smile…Adored his Nan (all twenty ten of them)”

          Edit for maffs error

    4. There was a stabbing in a “residential street” in Shrewsbury. We never had such things before we were “enriched”. Now they are commonplace.

  65. Evening, all. It’s been a good weekend. I’ve spent much of the last decade trying to disabuse the good people of St John the Baptist, Puttenham, of the notion that their organ is ‘listed’ (it isn’t, in any meaningful sense), and of great historical significance (ditto). But the Friends of the Church (who needs enemies?) insisted.

    So a significant sum was raised, and the overhaul took place. Either side of lockdown, which didn’t help. The organ still struggles to stay in tune, while being marginally improved. This being St Cecilia tide, we finally managed to mark the occasion. Last night, Katherine Dienes-Williams, Organist and Master (eh?) of the Choristers at Guildford Cathedral popped up the B3000 and gave us a recital. She extracted sounds from our humble instrument which I didn’t know existed. It’s the first – and possibly last – time I’ve heard it played by a competent organist. And the fact that Mander Organs tuned the beast on Thursday – to protect their reputation – probably helped. It’ll prolly be out of tune again by next weekend.

    Today, we had a service of re-dedication. I was keen that our two volunteer organists should be involved.. Which they were. One played before the service. The other accompanied a splendid rendition of Arthur Sullivan’s The Lost Chord by one of or stalwart singers, who also identifies as a High Court judge. He also supported me by playing the pedal part of Bach’s Toccata in D minor (we omitted the Fugue) on a digital keyboard, since I’m somewhat, er, ‘footloose’.

    Add to the mix Howells’ Hymn to St Cecilia and three rousing hymns.

    The Howells anthem has been, for me, a source of much concern. The score is slightly ‘fuzzy’ and I’ve lost my intermediate specs. The varifocals are generally OK, but I find that I can’t read the notes as quickly as I have to play them. Still – all’s well that ends well – so I have a few days to unwind.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3a93d314789d69ac019deb8d2e2174574ee88102e47c6783b398598c6cd176e6.png

      1. Frankly, I disapprove. Not least because blue is merely one colour. Were I to revert to my mis-spent youth running mobile discos, I’d have installed a sound to light unit. At least…

  68. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/749261f616654465395af0c08b43bb88079f19b45cacfd1d30c94112371e5e30.png
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/19/ted-heath-owed-full-inquiry-police-witch-hunt-say-tory-peer/

    I put the BTL up under this article and to my astonishment it was removed!

    It is generally considered a courtesy for sailors to wave to other boats when they pass at sea.

    On two occasions my friendly wave was not reciprocated. Once was when I sailed past Ted Heath and the other time it was Chay Blyth.
    Most sailing folk will confirm that both were yobbish parvenus and they were not much liked by the real sailing community.

    1. Indeed. The practice continues to this day on Britain’s inland waterways. 99.9% of the time a wave is met with a reciprocal wave using all five fingers!

    2. My sailing activity is limited* to GP14s on Bassenthwaite Lake when I was at school. Fast forward a decade or so, I had a Norfolk Broads holiday with a group of friends. We quickly worked out that Hoseasons’ documentation was wrong. Go against the tide – fair enough. But trying to find a mooring, we found that a space approximating to 3/4 the length of our vessel was large enough. Far from disengaging and drifting in, we aimed for the space, and hit full reverse thrust at the last minute. Never failed. This upset at least one holidaymaker, who thought it necessary to have his captain’s hat on at all times…

      Still – the crew of the sister craft that we towed to safety from Breydon Water were grateful.

      *Some years ago, I attended a 50th birthday bash in Dorset. Look away, True_Belle – it was the eventual CEO of Poole Council. A number of activities were included that weekend. One was sailing. So, as we sailed around Poole Harbour, Dianne asked the chap on her right “what do you do?” “I work for Guildford Council” A discussion about teaching ensued. Somewhat after the event, it transpired that “working for Guildford Council” = CEO of that organisation…

  69. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/749261f616654465395af0c08b43bb88079f19b45cacfd1d30c94112371e5e30.png
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/19/ted-heath-owed-full-inquiry-police-witch-hunt-say-tory-peer/

    I put the BTL up under this article and to my astonishment it was removed!

    It is generally considered a courtesy for sailors to wave to other boats when they pass at sea.

    On two occasions my friendly wave was not reciprocated. Once was when I sailed past Ted Heath and the other time it was Chay Blyth.
    Most sailing folk will confirm that both were yobbish parvenus and they were not much liked by the real sailing community.

  70. Any Wordlers?
    A 4 today, another odd one.

    Wordle 883 4/6

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

    2. Yes, me too. I thought the US spelling was different?
      Wordle 883 4/6

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

  71. Edited: Times of Israel – LIVE UPDATEFROM THE LIVEBLOG OF SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2023
    IDF confirms Houthis hijacked ship in Red Sea, says it is not an Israeli vessel

    The Bahaman-flagged vessel is registered under a British company, which is partially owned by Israeli tycoon Abraham Ungar, who goes by Rami. The vessel was leased out to a Japanese company at the time of the hijacking.

    The Iran-backed Houthis have vowed to target Israeli-linked vessels in the Red Sea.

    🇾🇪🇮🇱🚨‼️ BREAKING: The Houthis in Yemen hijacked an “Israeli cargo ship” called “Galaxy Leader” sailing in the Gulf. There are said to be 22 crew members on board the ship. — Israeli Media

    2. ‘Night, Tom.
      I’ve been wrecked early each day, and with all the darkness, hitting the sack around 21:00.
      Schlaf gut!

  73. Sorry, all I could smell was bullshit, with a faint aroma of pseud puke.

    A rare whisky dubbed the “holy grail of single malts” went under the hammer for more than £2million – a new world auction record for a bottle of Scotch.

    The Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 beat the previous highest sale by more than £700,000 with a winning bid of a staggering £2,187,500.

    It was one of only 12 produced in 1986 by the distillery in Aberlour, Moray, drawn from its renowned cask 263 and featuring a label by Italian pop artist Adami.

    The bottle, numbered 12/12, was sold by Sotheby’s in London with an estimate of between £750,000 and £1.2million, sparking interest from wealthy collectors around the world.

    It was eventually snapped up by an online bidder from Asia after a battle with a rival in the auction room.

    Kirsteen Campbell, Macallan’s master whiskymaker, said: “Being involved in the sensory analysis of this incomparable whisky was an incredible privilege.

    “[It] had incredible depth of character – rich, dark fruits [and] black cherry compôte alongside sticky dates, followed by intense, sweet antique oak … Dark chocolate, treacle, ginger… the notes go on and on.”

    She added: “It was a very special moment to experience the opening of this iconic single malt, and I hope the new custodian will enjoy the same privilege.”

    1. After spending that much on a bottle, even if it is Macallan, what do you do with it?
      If you have lots o’ dosh, then have a party and drink it, with special mates.
      If you don’t (‘cos you blew it all on a scotch) put it in the bank and hope it appreciates.
      But, mainly, hype of the worst sort, will damage Macallan’s brand.

      1. I’m not a great lover of whisky but a Macallan, certainly under £10 bottle, was one of the first single malts I tasted.
        I enjoyed it, but could I tell the difference between the one I enjoyed and even one in the £25 range at that time?
        I very much doubt that I could.

        Just sticking one’s tongue into the cap of that record breaking bottle would probably consume a few thousand pounds worth.

        1. I was never keen on whisky. A Christmas bash among the site staff at Borders General Horse Spittle, Melrose, changed my mind. Harry Bowles, the project manager, had a reputation for ‘doing things his way’. We obliged, with a rousing chorus of “My Way”…

          He went on to manage the second Severn crossing. wihout killing too many operatives in the process…

          2. I was OK with Whisky until I left my first full time job. They poured so much whisky into me that day that I still cannot bear the taste of the blends.

        2. I should add that, on the occasion of Dianne’s daughter’s graduation at Glasgow, we went on to Mull for a week. Tobermory is worth a visit, and the distillery of that ilk has several offerings. 18 year old Ledaig isn’t cheap, but I can make a bottle last for months. Would that that was true for wine…

          1. Me, I now get wine in 3 litre boxes. Often 🙁
            We can also buy gin in 2 litre boxes here, but a) it’s generic, and b) Norway prices make it about £200 or more…

          3. Had a quick run through of the Bach Toccata yesterday morning, with our volunteer organist. His “her indoors” had instructed him not to return home without fizzy water and bananas. So we headed off to Tesco, only hitting an horrendous queue when it was too late to escape.

            I hadn’t planned on shopping, but there was a Clubcard offer of 25% off six bottles of wine. What’s not to like?

          8. A three litre box wouldn’t last us a month, our four litre boxes barely make it. There is a company over here that is selling 16 litre boxes of their more popular wines and depending on variety the price ranges from 59 to 80 pounds.

            Just what is needed when it is cold outside and I cannot be bothered to trot across the road to the wine store.

      2. Having said this, I have a cockney friend who has money AND sense – now decamped to Essex. I did some research for him, because the Russians were buying up certain scotches.

        He looks for “dead labels” – whiskies distilled on that plethora of islands without the population to make a distillery viable.

        So the distillery goes bankrupt with a number of barrels/bottles in stock. The labels will probably never be printed for another bottle – hence “dead”.
        He buys two bottles. One he drinks in the knowledge that every sip appreciates the value of the one he stores.

      3. Having said this, I have a cockney friend who has money AND sense – now decamped to Essex. I did some research for him, because the Russians were buying up certain scotches.

        He looks for “dead labels” – whiskies distilled on that plethora of islands without the population to make a distillery viable.

        So the distillery goes bankrupt with a number of barrels/bottles in stock. The labels will probably never be printed for another bottle – hence “dead”.
        He buys two bottles. One he drinks in the knowledge that every sip appreciates the value of the one he stores.

      4. I’m afraid for me, Macallan’s 12 yo, whilst being my favourite, is as far as i can or will splash out.

  74. “Ukraine ‘light years away’ from joining EU, says Hungarian PM Viktor Orban”
    https://www.euronews.com/2023/11/19/ukraine-light-years-away-from-joining-eu-says-hungarian-pm-viktor-orban

    Viktor Orban said he and his government would “resist” EU talks scheduled for mid-December on whether to formally extend an invitation to Kyiv to join the bloc.
    Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said Ukraine is “light years away” from joining the EU.
    The comments came as he was reelected as the president of the right-wing nationalist Fidesz party for the 11th consecutive time in Budapest on Saturday.
    “Our task will be to correct the mistaken promise to start negotiations with Ukraine since Ukraine is now light years away from the European Union,” Orban said.
    Hungary’s Prime Minister argued that the EU’s promise to start admission talks with Kyiv was a “mistake,” adding he and his government would “resist” EU talks scheduled for mid-December on whether to formally extend an invitation to Kyiv to join.
    Unanimity among all member states is required to admit a new country into the EU, giving Orban a powerful veto.
    Hungary launches anti-EU survey polling citizens about migration, LGBTQ+ issues and aid to Ukraine
    The EU’s executive earlier this month recommended the beginning of accession talks with Ukraine, saying that its government “has shown a remarkable level of institutional strength, determination and ability to function.”
    But Orban, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s only EU allies, has argued that negotiations should not begin with a country that is at war, and that Ukraine’s accession would reorient the EU’s system of distributing funds to member countries.
    Some critics have speculated that Hungary, which has also threatened to block an EU plan to provide a four-year, €50 billion aid package for Ukraine, is using its resistance to leverage concessions from the EU.
    Billions in funding have been withheld from Budapest over concerns that the government has failed to uphold rule-of-law and human rights standards.

    Good thing someone in the EU sees some sense!

    1. Can’t we just print the money to rebuild Ukraine after the war we sent them to fight?
      Wouldn’t that be the nice thing to do?

        1. “There may be Roubles ahead
          But while there’s spondoolicks
          And Zelensky love and romance
          Let’s ignore the small boats from France”

      1. Most beautiful woman I ever met is Hungarian. Absolutely breathtaking, so she is. Quite unbelievable.

          1. Conversation was difficult – she’s the only person who ever took my ability to think, talk, and stand up at the same time away. And- intelligent as fcuk.

          2. Look on the bright side.
            You might be like Phizzee, never able to think, talk, and stand up at the same…

          9. I’ve come across one like that. They’re devastating. Make you feel quite inadequate as you wonder what sort of man it would take to win them.

  75. Well, it’s 8.35 pm, so I’ll wish you all a cheery Good Night, chums. I am personally not going to bed until my normal time of 10 pm, but I plan to spend the next hour and a half listening to some decent classical music on YouTube. I hope we all sleep well and awaken refreshed.

    1. Often think that. Desert clothing is very sensible in the desert. In Shepherds Bush it’s dumb.

      2. I first became aware of Arabs in London in the seventies where my office overlooked the Arcade of South Kensington Underground and surrounding streets.

        One day I watched a group of Arab men walking two abreast in their distinctive dress and headgear then after the men more Arab women wearing Arab dress but with scary leather beaks covering their faces. A colleague enquired whether I had seen a goat at the head of the procession.

        Following that initial sighting I became increasingly aware of the Arab presence in London. When passing in the street the men were fragrant, the women the precise opposite.

  78. Heads are spinning in the comments section!

    Socialist nationalism is on the rise in Germany

    Firebrand Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party combining anti-wokery, Russophilia, and Left-wing economics could win 20 per cent of the vote

    DANIEL JOHNSON • 19 November 2023 • 7:29pm

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e01811222b99dc6bb9aa8e752a687934d64a93db7134bb219e5c020d7cb65b26.jpg
    Just two years have passed since Europe’s centrist Mutti, Angela Merkel, left the stage she had dominated since 2005. Now another formidable woman aims to smash the Merkel mould forever.

    Like the former German chancellor, Sahra Wagenknecht was a loyal communist until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the East German state promptly collapsed. Otherwise, she and Mrs Merkel are polar opposites.

    After decades as the poster girl of the hard Left, she is setting up a new party, modestly named the “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance” (BSW). Only in Germany, where “normal” politicians aspire to be dull in order to avoid Hitlerian comparisons, would an anti-establishment party based on the charisma of its leader stand a chance.

    The BSW will appeal to voters who have abandoned mainstream politics in favour of the far-Right populist Alternative for Germany (AFD).

    Her argument is simple: “Germans don’t vote for the AFD because they’re Right-wing. They vote for [it] because they’re angry.”

    Like many former communists, Ms Wagenknecht, 54, is a social conservative and an anti-globalist. She is against mass immigration and multiculturalism; she refused to be vaccinated during the pandemic; she is hostile to costly green policies; and she is fiercely anti-woke.

    Perhaps the most problematic aspects of Ms Wagenknecht’s brand of “Left conservatism” are her implacable opposition to Nato and her passionate support for Putin’s Russia.

    Since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she has demanded an end to sanctions and a “peace” that would legitimise Russian occupation.

    In common with both Kremlin propagandists and the hard Right in Germany, Ms Wagenknecht tells working-class families that they are being held to ransom by Anglo-American monopoly capitalists who are driving up energy prices and prolonging the war for their own gain.

    Indeed, a part of the Wagenknecht base consists of conspiracy theorists who are convinced that Germany is only a sham democracy. She also exploits Ostalgie (nostalgia for East Germany) by claiming that the Federal Republic is “no more democratic” than the old communist regime.

    The grain of truth in her claims is the fact that the German political system does make it hard for voters to kick out unpopular governments.

    The present “traffic-light” coalition of centre-Left Social Democrats (SPD), liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens has slumped in the polls. Yet Merkel stayed in office for 16 years by changing coalition partners.

    Admittedly, the present Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is far more despised than Mrs Merkel ever was. The German economy has teetered on the brink of recession since the war began, winter is coming and the outlook is bleak.

    The crisis in Israel and Gaza has inflamed the German migration debate – already reignited by more than a million Ukrainian refugees. The Wagenknecht solution is crude but effective: “There shouldn’t be any neighbourhoods where natives are in the minority.”

    Ever since the Merkel government opened the door to millions of refugees from the Middle East eight years ago, simmering resentment against the failure to police the borders has periodically boiled over into protests.

    Last month, an anti-Israel rally in the diverse Neukölln district of Berlin left 65 police officers injured, while the resurgence of anti-Semitism has shaken a nation more accustomed to parading its anti-Nazi credentials than to questioning their validity.

    Thanks to her Iranian father, Ms Wagenknecht has no hang-ups about demanding much tougher policies, both on the integration of German Muslims (now numbering some six million) and on border security.

    The Wagenknecht phenomenon is already putting pressure on Berlin. Germany is one of several EU members now exploring Rwanda-style policies to deal with asylum-seekers off-shore.

    Any resemblance between Sahra Wagenknecht and Suella Braverman is, however, superficial; many of Ms Wagenknecht’s views are closer to Jeremy Corbyn’s. Not only is she for a ceasefire in Gaza and against sending arms to Israel or Ukraine, but she advocates the dismantling of Nato. In Moscow, where she is seen as one of Germany’s Putinversteher (“Putin understanders”), they call her a “National Bolshevik”.

    For British Remainers who still idealise Europe, the forces represented by Ms Wagenknecht are the stuff of nightmares. The EU is increasingly dominated by politicians who could, like her, be described as national conservatives (such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni) or national socialists (Slovakia’s Robert Fico).

    A Left-wing Eurosceptic, she has been consistently critical of the euro, open borders and many other aspects of the EU. Even after Brexit, she defended the British decision to hold a referendum – in a country that has a constitutional ban on plebiscites.

    But will the Wagenknecht experiment work? She has taken nine other MPs from the old Left to launch her new platform in January. Polls suggest that she might gain anything from 12 to 20 per cent of the German vote, and up to 30 per cent in the East – enough to form a sizeable parliamentary bloc.

    Wagenknecht is an unabashed demagogue in a land of machine politicians. However attractive the dark horse from Jena may seem to politically homeless conservatives, they will sooner or later wake up to an unpalatable truth.

    She is hardly the first German leader to combine nationalism, socialism and populism. And at heart, Wagenknecht remains an unreconstructed Stalinist.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/19/socialist-nationalism-is-on-the-rise-in-germany

      1. It illustrates perfectly the foolishness of attempting to define any political belief as exclusively ‘left’ or ‘right’.

  79. Evening, all. Foul weather here – better weather at Cheltenham, thankfully, and Fontwell survived an inspection this morning.

  80. Off to bed now.
    I’ve been working on stripping out the double seat and partitions put into the van by a previous owner and have almost got the job done, but the double seat is a standard front passenger seat from another Vivaro, identical to the front seat in my van, so whilst a double seat, it is rather illegal as it only has a single seat belt as the missing seat belt would have been secured to the passenger door pillar!
    A lot of the plywood will be reusable, but I need to work out where to put it all!

    And good night to all.

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