Wednesday 10 January: Paula Vennells and the very British vice of bestowing awards for failure

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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491 thoughts on “Wednesday 10 January: Paula Vennells and the very British vice of bestowing awards for failure”

  1. Good morrow, Gentlefolk. today’s story

    STATISTIC
    THIS IS A FRIGHTENING STATISTIC, PROBABLY ONE OF THE MOST WORRISOME IN RECENT YEARS.
    25% of the women in this country are on medication for mental illness.
    That’s scary. It means 75% are running around untreated.

    1. Steer well clear of Sir Jasper this morning, Elsie. Methinks that one or more of our lady NoTTLers will be dropping a bomb aiming for a direct hit.

  3. Wordle 935 4/6

    Four today – better than yesterday.

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

    1. Four here too

      Wordle 935 4/6

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

  4. Good morning all.
    Another calm, dry but cold start to the day with -½°C on the Yard Thermometer.

    A BTL Comment I feel many would agree with:-

    John Kirby
    1 HR AGO
    I think we need an investigation into Common Purpose.
    I would like to see how many of this grossly overpaid elite
    have been through the Common Purpose system.
    There is no doubt that there is a privileged clique.

      1. Not surprising, you get the gales from the Steppes
        coming howling across the North German Plain and the North Sea.

    2. It’s not just one organisation but an entire attitude of arrogance, incompetence and malice. The entire state machine closes ranks to protect the failures. Endless doubles all round at the tax payers expense to keep such and such out of the papers/jail/dock.

      When you fail utterly you’re shuffled on to the next non-job or, more likely you are never given the opportunity to fail by continually moving you around between departments until a plum job can be gifted to you as long as you keep enforcing the treachery of the machine : DIE, racism, ‘diversity’, sexism, WEF dogma.

      1. DEI is not “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”, it’s “Discrimination, Exclusion and Indoctrination”.

  5. Gardeners dig in against a growth of horticultural officialdom

    If garden is a good enough word for Kew and Chelsea Physic, it is surely good enough for the rest of us

    CHRISTOPHER HOWSE
    9 January 2024 • 7:28pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/01/09/TELEMMGLPICT000343805882_17048281488130_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqUTB3vMrBgFH3wkEYGI_sPOcQmKPsPCApjlfbkH9hLl0.jpeg?imwidth=680
    A true garden: Chelsea Physic was established in 1673 to grow medicinal plants – and is still going CREDIT: Clive Nichols

    Monty Don, the television plantsman, asked this week: “When did the term horticulturalist replace gardener? And why?” He may well ask, for he has put his green finger on a trend that goes far beyond the herbaceous border.

    “Oh, Adam was a gardener,” declared Kipling in The Glory of the Garden. So he was. The poet also observed that “Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made / By singing: – ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade.” Right again.

    I think we can put on one side the question of whether Kipling was a colonialist, ripe to be weeded from respectable bookshelves and thrown on the bonfire. One could as easily approach the matter from the Lefty outlook of John Ball, the 14th-century demagogue, asking: “When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?”

    He might have added as a supplementary: “Who was then the Human Resources Compliance Officer?” For gardening is connatural with humanity and is not the gift of bossy authorities. Any of us may cultivate our own garden without a licence or online health and safety qualification, though faceless officialdom fires up its computer power to prevent us.

    I heard someone on the wireless talking about a licence to grow seaweed, and I wondered who had invented that. I can’t remember if Magna Carta mentions it. Investigation reveals that the Crown Estate claims the right to license “any form of seaweed activity”. It claims ownership of most territory below the high tide mark. You can’t so much pop a piece of bladderwrack without official permission. This turns on its head the music-hall song You Can Do A Lot Of Things at the Seaside (That You Can’t Do In Town).

    The word horticulturalist belongs on the polysyllabic theoretical, official, municipal, bureaucratic and restrictive side of raising plants. But the nation’s favourite hobby is not horticulture but gardening – practical, amateur, private, paperless and free.

    The funniest reaction to Monty Don came from Horticulture Week, which rounded up a dozen horticulturists to denounce him for “degrading” the word horticulturist. The argument would have been more convincing had not the periodical changed its name some time ago to HortWeek.

    Yes, Hort for short. Maybe a focus group had forecast it would boost circulation. Some Like It Hort. It’s the Hort that counts. It’ll sell like Hort cakes.

    Meanwhile Farmers Weekly has felt no urge to reduce its name to AgWeek.

    Samuel Johnson didn’t put the word horticulturist into his dictionary, let alone horticulturalist, which still doesn’t find a place in the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary.

    Only in 1818 did horticulturist come into the language. Even that lovable word-coiner Sir Thomas Browne, publishing a work in 1658 on “the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, naturally, artificially, mystically considered”, made its main title The Garden of Cyrus.

    What do we call the world’s largest botanical collection? Kew Gardens, or the Royal Botanic Gardens at its most formal. It is not the National Horticultural Resource Centre. Its elder brother is the Chelsea Physic Garden, founded 1673. Oxford Botanic Garden had already been going for half a century then. Every one of them a garden, a lovesome thing, God wot. Horticulture on the whole is not.

  9. Paula Vennells and the very British vice of bestowing awards for failure

    That all depends on if that perceived failure was the intention in the first place.

    1. A typical Common Purpose puppet.
      One of their mantras is that its disciples should “lead beyond authority.”
      Yet, when real leadership is required they immediately retreat behind their colleagues and do nothing except try to save their own skins/careers.

  10. Am I right in thinking that we are now reaping the full ghastliness of Cherie Blair’s changes to the selection processes for KCs and judges?

    Deporting Albanian migrant jailed for cannabis farming would breach his Filipino wife’s human rights

    Court rules against ‘unduly harsh’ treatment of couple at end of criminal’s two-year jail sentence

    Charles Hymas, HOME AFFAIRS EDITOR
    9 January 2024 • 3:24pm

    A migrant jailed for cannabis farming has escaped deportation because it would have breached his wife’s human rights had the couple been forced to choose between moving to Albania or splitting up, an immigration court has ruled.

    Judges decided that it would be “unduly harsh” for the Filipino wife of convicted drug producer Gazmend Jaupaj to be separated from him or forced to move to Albania with him should he be deported.

    It rejected the Home Office’s decision to deport Jaupaj, 38, on the grounds that doing so would be a breach of the couple’s human rights. Article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) stipulates that everyone has a right to respect for their private and family life.

    “The effect of [Jaupaj’s] deportation upon his wife would be unduly harsh. It is not a realistic option to expect her to relocate to Albania, and separation from her husband is likely to cause real harm to her mental health,” the tribunal’s ruling stated.

    Jaupaj entered the UK illegally on Sept 1 2012 and met his wife in February 2018. They married on April 17 2021.

    He cultivated 600 marijuana plants in village house
    A month later he was arrested on suspicion of drug offences after police found he was cultivating 600 marijuana plants in a house in the Leicestershire village of Thurmaston.

    Jaupaj, his brother, Naim, and a third man had attracted the attention of their electricity supplier because the property’s meter had been bypassed. Police officers called to investigate on Tuesday May 19 could not initially gain access to the house because it had a heavily fortified door.

    However, neighbours drew their attention to two men on the roof of the property and officers managed to get inside it and detain the three men. They also found 600 marijuana plants, capable of producing about 33kg (72.6lbs) of cannabis with a street value of up to £1 million.

    Officers also found a 15kg consignment that had been vacuum packed ready to be taken away. That would have had a street value of some £500,000.

    Jaupaj was jailed for two years for producing a controlled drug. A subsequent deportation order made on Sept 13 was challenged by his lawyers.

    Wife’s mental health would suffer if he were deported to Albania
    The tribunal was told his wife had no family in the UK, suffered from mental ill-health and was on medication. Her claims were supported by sick notes and a social worker said the deportation of her husband would cause a “relapse” in her mental health.

    Jaupaj’s lawyers said she did not speak Albanian and it would be difficult for her to integrate in Albanian society. They added that she was settled in the UK, was an active member of her church and had a well-paid job and her primary source of support was her husband, the lawyers added.

    The Home Office has appealed the case and it is being reconsidered by a first-tier tribunal. Home Office lawyers argued that the original tribunal had failed to provide evidence to support its claim that deportation would be “unduly harsh” and had not explained why the woman could not be supported by specialist mental health services in the UK.

    It follows disclosures by The Telegraph that a migrant jailed for cannabis farming escaped deportation because he claimed he could no longer speak his native language and an Albanian crime boss was allowed to remain in the UK despite being jailed for smuggling £8 million of his gang’s profits out of the country in suitcases.

    *****************************

    Edward LL
    15 HRS AGO
    I can barely speak; the judges in this country seem to be working against our national well-being. Again and again

    Tom Butler
    14 HRS AGO
    Compare the treatment of law abiding postmasters in the Horizon scandal to these illegal immigrant criminals. You have to wonder what the hell is going on in this country.

    Mike Brighton
    13 HRS AGO
    Reply to Tom Butler
    We have Starmer (and Starmer clones) as defence counsel, protecting the criminals from awful things like er being deported to their countries

    THOMAS ROBERTSON
    14 HRS AGO
    What about the British citizens? What about our rights to live in a safe country free of foreign drug dealers…I demand my human rights!

    Me At-home
    14 HRS AGO
    Reply to THOMAS ROBERTSON
    Didn’t you know, we’re the only people who don’t have any and should be punished to the full extent of the law if we have no TV licence, etc.

    1. The state has no interest in justice, only process. his law could be changed quite easily. The state doesn’t want it to.

  11. No comments allowed

    CPS refuses to reveal Starmer’s role in wrongful Post Office prosecutions

    Organisation took at least 27 victims to court but refuses to say if they were during Labour leader’s time in charge

    Gareth Corfield and Robert Mendick, CHIEF REPORTER
    9 January 2024 • 9:54pm

    The Crown Prosecution Service is refusing to reveal Sir Keir Starmer’s role in the wrongful prosecution of sub-postmasters after admitting it took at least 27 victims to court.

    The CPS said it was combing through historic files and had found at least 27 prosecutions it had brought over issues linked to the Horizon IT computer system.

    The defective IT system is blamed for hundreds of sub-postmasters being wrongly convicted in the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

    The CPS said that once its trawl had been completed it expected to find about 50 cases in which it had launched prosecutions. More than 700 cases – the vast majority – were brought by the Post Office in private prosecutions.

    But the CPS declined to say precisely when cases were taken to court, insisting it was looking at a time frame of 20 years between 2001 and 2020.

    Sir Keir, the Labour Party leader, was head of the CPS between 2008 and 2013 as Director of Public Prosecutions.

    The CPS refused to reveal if the cases took place between the dates Sir Keir was in charge of the organisation. Sir Keir and his party are favourite to win this year’s general election.

    A CPS spokesman said: “The vast majority of these cases were private prosecutions brought by the Post Office. We’ve worked extensively and identified a small number of CPS cases which involved evidence connected to Horizon. In these cases, we have written to those defendants to disclose information so they could pursue an appeal.”

    The CPS said the cases were taken on in “good faith”. The scandal first came to light in 2009 when Computer Weekly first raised questions about unsafe convictions and queried the Horizon IT system.

    The Telegraph has been told the CPS has identified 27 cases it brought although the final number is likely to be 50.

    Brendan Clarke-Smith, a Tory MP and former minister, said: “After the latest set of revelations, there are clearly some serious questions to be answered surrounding prosecutions. Sir Keir Starmer and the CPS need to urgently clarify whether any of these happened under his watch and if so, why”

    A Conservative Party added: “The CPS have somehow avoided scrutiny over this scandal because the bulk of the prosecutions were private, but the failures of successive DPPs to use their powers to put a stop to this must be looked into by the inquiry.

    “The revelation that the CPS itself prosecuted postmasters raises a whole host of new questions for the leadership past and present of that organisation and victims deserve answers.”

    Richard Tice, the Reform UK leader, said: “The CPS needs to be fully transparent about how many cases it pursued and when. Given the political sensitivity, they also need to confirm what Keir Starmer knew when. So does the Labour leader.”

    Sir Keir’s spokesman declined to comment on Tuesday night. They have let it be known that only a fraction of cases come across the DPP’s desk at any one time and that Post Office cases would have appeared – in isolation – relatively minor. Sir Keir has called for the Post Office to be stripped of its powers to bring private prosecutions.

    1. This is here Kier falls over. He’s required to be a gobby loudmouth yet his entire career has been spent on detail and keeping quiet.

  12. Bill Clinton dined with young girls on Epstein’s island, victim claimed

    Virginia Giuffre reported that the former president twice visited Little St James, also known as ‘paedophile island’

    Susie Coen, US CORRESPONDENT
    10 January 2024 • 3:31am

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/en-us/news/2024/01/10/TELEMMGLPICT000361532831_17048462981310_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqgsaO8O78rhmZrDxTlQBjdGLvJF5WfpqnBZShRL_tOZw.jpeg?imwidth=680
    *
    *
    Nudge, nudge, wink, wink….

    3. Either these people have appalling judgement or sincerely thought they’d never be touched by the law.

      Of course, it’s the latter. The statists, the ones with connections, who can be ‘relied upon’ to hide the secrets, incompetence, fraud, corruption and abuses all get away with it every single time.

      1. Nothing will happen to any of them. Or maybe one token idiot will be sacrificed (PA again?)
        “not proven” “no case” “no evidence” for the rest.

    4. The corporate media is now all over the list of names, which makes me wonder what else was going on on the island apart from underage girls?
      When they go out of their way to shine the spotlight very strongly on something, it’s usually because something else is hiding in the shadows.

    5. Also known as ‘teenage prossie island’. Let’s face it, Mr Epstein was heavily outnumbered by all those well-rewarded little misses.

      1. ……and those “well rewarded little misses” all managed to get their parents to agree to give

        them passports without inquiring where they were going, or who was paying for it.

  13. The West could soon hand Putin the keys to Europe. 10 January 2024.

    Given the war in the Middle East and escalating tensions across the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, the West can ill afford to continually take its long-term eye off Ukraine, for the disastrous ramifications for all of Europe should the West fail to act in collective unity in supporting Ukraine, as a despotic Putin will surely eye his next territorial prize in neighbouring Moldova, or even the Baltics..

    The West can supply everything that the Ukies require except the one thing that they need. Bodies. They are shot out! No amount of weaponry is going to make up for this shortfall against a fully mobilised Russia.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/09/the-west-could-soon-hand-putin-the-keys-to-europe/

    1. Interesting number of replies critical of the War and the West’s interference in it.

      1. Morning Bob. Yes I noticed. The Nudge Unit trolls will probably do some catching up later but it looks as though the tide has turned.

    2. A strong US could have visited Putin and politely coughing into a close fist, said ‘sort it out, Vladdy boy.’

      But Biden is obsessed with woke, Left wing communist causes. He hasn’t the ability to understand what he’s doing and, frankly, the man is ill.

      Of course, that would annoy Ukraine who quite like shelling the Crimea who are ethnically, culturally and politically Russian. It’s a bit like Catalonia or Scotland. That presents a problem to the political class who couldn’t paint one side as the goodies and the other as the baddies. Note how little Russia has actually encroached? It doesn’t want Moldova.

      1. “A strong US could have visited Putin and politely coughing into a close fist, said ‘sort it out, Vladdy boy.'”

        EXACTLY what Trump would have done.

  14. Half of UK Asylum Seekers Who Claimed to Be Children Are Actually Adults, with 4,000 Cases Since 2020

    Half of all asylum seekers who claimed to be children in Britain since 2020 have turned out to be adults, with dozens even being above the age of thirty.

    The practice of migrants claiming to be children, which increases their chances of the UK government granting them asylum in Britain, has increased to such a level that 45 per cent of the 8,766 migrants who claimed to be “kids” were reality adults, equating to 3,944 cases.

    According to information from the Migration Watch UK reported by The Sun, there were 1,582 cases of migrants fraudulently claiming to be children in 2022, compared to 227 a decade prior. The think tank went on to reveal that 887 asylum seekers, at least 52 of whom were older than 30, falsely told border officials that they were children between January and September of last year.

    The most prevalent country of origin for the fraudster migrants was Afghanistan with 1,361 cases, followed by Iran with 612, and Sudan with 550.

    Migration Watch chairman Alp Mehmet told the paper: “That so many still go for this ruse, even when they obviously look much older, tells me it’s a deception that often works.”

    The issue of asylum seekers posing as children has been longstanding in Britain, with minors being afforded increased welfare and protections compared to adult migrants and increased chances of being granted the right to remain in the country.

    A particularly egregious example came in 2020 after a supposed child migrant who “looked 40” was placed alongside teenage schoolchildren in Coventry, England. “He’s got a receding hairline for God’s sake,” one parent exclaimed at the time.

    Another notable instance occurred in 2016, when a 38-year-old man was brought over to Britain from a migrant camp Calais as part of a scheme to receive child migrants from France. While mass migration activists initially tried to claim that he was not brought to the country because of his claim to be a minor, but rather that he was merely serving as a language interpreter, this turned out to be false.
    *
    *
    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/01/09/nearly-half-of-uk-asylum-seekers-who-claim-to-be-children-are-adults-with-4000-cases-since-2020/

    1. BTL Comment:-

      ANYONE, arriving in the UK illegally and without full and proper documentation who can not be immediately deported, should be held in a secure place, interrogated to determine origins then photographed, fingerprinted, DNA sampled and, should they claim to be under 18, have such x-rays and dental examinations as may be necessary to determine actual age.

      1. I’m all for building a receiving centre from some lashed together barrels in the channel. When it’s so full you can’t fit any more on… tough.

      2. Yes, BoB, but when this was suggested (using dental records which can prove the real age of a person) Lord B……? (I forget his name but perhaps one NoTTLer can refresh my memory) used his considerable influence to prevent dental checks.

    2. Yet again this goes back to the fundamental problem this country has: the state makes the rules, changes the rules, controls the rules and does whatever it likes. The people stuffed with the bill are just told to lump it and if we don’t, we’re ruined because of it.

      The gimmigrants should have been returned at sea. Instead, big government ferried them here all quite happily. Boris could have simply repealed the right of the ECHR / Migration pact/ modern slavery acts to intervene but he was more interested in anything else. Even now, Sunak refuses to. Why? It is the obvious solution to resolving this mess. Far of vilification on the world stage? Tough! As much of a shock this may be many countries are not members of these agreements.

      Why do we give them so much?

      Why are we forced to tolerate so much of the destructive, ill thought out, globalist adhering, appalling legislation these fools force on us?

    3. Good morning Citroen

      Last week the media were going gungho over a 16 year old darts player , technically a child , but who looked like a 30 yr old .

      Isn’t it about time we reclassified what age a child is ?

      Asylum seekers come from countries where childhood probably stops at 12yrs.

      My husband’s father started work at 14, and was treated like an adult .

      Childhood in Britain should be reclassified.

    4. I’d be willing to bet that the majority of the ones who ‘pass’ the ‘child’ test are over 16, so hardly ‘children’ anyway.

    5. The level of incompetence is beyond belief. It must be deliberate to have such a high level of totally uncontrolled illegal immigration.

    2. –6ºC? That’s mild weather. We’ve had –15ºC for over a week with deep-frozen snow over 2 feet deep. Paul, in Oslo, has had –27ºC.

    1. I am no great fan of Prince Andrew but I think that the Presumption of Innocence is better than the Presumption of Guilt.

      1. Ignoring the innuendos, on the evidence currently made public, what CRIME is he supposed to have committed?
        OK, yes, shagging a 17yo prostitute is morally questionable, but, under UK Law AS IT STOOD AS THE TIME, it was NOT illegal and, to be honest, when I was of a similar age to his at the time and in a similar situation, I’d have been very tempted.

  17. Good Moaning.
    I get the impression Allison Pearson is not impressed.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2024/01/09/post-office-scandal-mr-bates-horizon-paula-vennell/

    The Post Office scandal has exposed Britain as a hotbed of cronyism and corruption

    For 20 years Mr Bates waged war on a ruthless institution, but ITV’s dramatisation has finally opened people’s eyes to the cruel injustice

    9 January 2024 • 8:48pm

    One watery cheer for Paula Vennells handing back her CBE. Having done the wrong thing for so many years, the former chief executive of the Post Office deserves no credit for finally discovering her conscience. Where do you think she found it? Maybe in the vault where she stashes the £3.7million she earned over six years in the top job, including salary and bonuses. Quite astonishingly, Vennells the vicar was still receiving pay rises and a bonus as the Horizon IT scandal continued to deprive sub-postmasters of their jobs, their savings, their homes, their good name, their sanity and even their lives. What did she do to deserve such lavish remuneration from the taxpayer? Apart from keeping a straight face when she insisted the Fujitsu software that was playing havoc with sub-postmasters’ accounts, leaving them in terrifying arrears, was “absolutely accurate and reliable” and, of course, that favourite word of the elite, slithering classes, “robust”.

    The case was described as “the widest miscarriage of justice in British legal history” by one judge, who said the prosecution of petrified men and women by the Post Office was an “abuse of process” and “an affront to justice”. Defendants were convicted and sentenced on the basis that Horizon data must be correct and, therefore, cash must be missing, although the only basis for that claim was the Post Office, which was the complainant, the investigator and the beneficiary. No conflict of interest there, eh? The Establishment was surely trolling the victims when it gave Paula Vennells a gong in 2019 for “services to the Post Office and charity”. A bit like awarding Oscar Pistorious a knighthood for services to women.

    Do I sound angry? Good. I am angry. Millions of us are bloody angry after watching Mr Bates vs the Post Office, a quietly devastating four-part ITV series about the Horizon scandal, including the role played by Vennells (a coldly impassive, morally inert characterisation by that great actress Lia Williams). Like Ken Loach’s 1966 Cathy Come Home (which highlighted the heartbreak of homelessness) and Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff with its darkly uproarious account of mass unemployment (“Gissa job!”), this drama did what magazine articles, well-researched documentaries, podcasts, meetings with MPs, court proceedings and select committees all failed to do. It dramatised a human story so cruel, so unfair, the perpetrators so wicked, so all-powerful, so deaf to the pleas of ordinary decent people, that no one could watch it without being possessed by a sense of monstrous injustice. Some viewers cried, I certainly did; others were too enraged to go to sleep.

    In one scene, Alan Bates (Toby Jones), the wrongfully-terminated sub-postmaster and tenacious terrier for truth, is hunched over his screen. It is almost 20 years since Mr Bates first reported flaws in Horizon to the Post Office, yet here he is, still trying to gather more evidence that will help David slay Goliath. “All the meetings with MPs, letters to the minister, more ministers than you can shake a stick at, years and years and still nobody in power hears a word we say,” Alan sighs when he tells his partner Suzanne (a wonderfully sympathetic yet feistily spiky Julie Hesmondhalgh) that Vennells has received a CBE for services to the Post Office. “You’re joking,” she replies. They’re stunned.

    God knows, Mr Bates has put up with a lot. Lies upon lies; senior executives in a reputable public body behaving more like an organised crime gang; the peculiar torture of not being believed (when telling the truth); the despair of friends in the campaigning group he founded, Justice for Sub-postmasters’ Alliance (JSFA); the cowardly indifference or moral blindness of politicians who might be able to relieve that despair, but don’t. In 2010, replying to what he called an “offensive” brush-off from Sir Ed Davey, now the leader of the Liberal Democrats then the minister for postal affairs, Alan Bates wrote: “It is [precisely] because you have adopted an arm’s length relationship… [that] you have enabled them [the Post Office] to carry on with impunity regardless of the human misery and suffering they inflict…” He urged Davey not to simply “listen to civil servants” nor to act without questioning the Post Office’s claims. (An embattled Sir Ed now insists the Post Office was “lying on an industrial scale to me”.

    That’s no excuse. Alan Bates told him as much and he chose not to believe him. Not only that, Davey was later hired as a political consultant by top law firm Herbert Smith Freehills, which was acting for – guess who? – the Post Office! He was paid £833 per hour, amassing a grand total of £225,000. There’s a phrase for that kind of money, I believe. Perhaps Sir Ed Davey might like to call for the resignation of Sir Ed Davey?)

    Poor Mr Bates. After that dogged struggle of the underdog, a major honour for top dog Cruella de Vennells? It was intolerable. Unwelcome confirmation that the gilded, frictionless class to which Vennells belongs floats from one plum job to the next, never held to account for the destruction they leave behind while the little people try to salvage what remains of their lives among the ruins. No wonder that, in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast of Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, a petition calling for Vennells to be stripped of her CBE reached 1.2 million signatures. How right people were in their instinctive revulsion: her honour dishonoured honour itself. Even our Prime Minister, sensing which way public opinion was blowing, indicated he would not be displeased were the forfeiture committee to conduct an investigation that could lead to the title being removed. Vennells had no choice but to hand it back before pitchfork-waving viewers turned up at her door. (I am not a fan of mob justice in general, but it feels aptly poetic that Vennells should experience just a sliver of the fear and dread suffered by hundreds of sub-postmasters.)

    “One day we will get the bastards,” Alan Bates promised all those years ago. The surrendering of Paula Vennells’ CBE removes a stinking trace of bastardry from this bad world, no doubt about that. But it’s no good if Vennells is made a sacrificial lamb while the whole pack of wolves gets off scot free. The Horizon case is so far-reaching, such a spider’s web of cronyism, corruption and perjury – from the highest levels of government to the judiciary, lawyers, investigators, the board of the Post Office, its previous chief executives and senior officials, the board of Fujitsu and the company’s systems analysts who lied when they said it wasn’t possible to access a sub-postmaster’s account – that the scandal has been called the British Watergate.

    While the appeals of 750 wrongly-convicted postmasters are fast-tracked, and generous compensation is paid disgracefully late (some 70 claimants have died while waiting), we need a major criminal investigation to root out the guilty men and women. It will make a pleasant change from persecuting the innocent. No, it should not have taken a TV drama to galvanise Parliament and the mainstream media to become passionately concerned about one of the most shameful crimes against ordinary people in our history. (Full credit to Private Eye which never stopped exposing the scarcely believable facts.)

    But Mr Bates Vs The Post Office did far more than that. The outbreak of national disgust which this quietly wonderful series has provoked tapped into a groundswell of feeling that has been growing for some time, I think. A profound sense that ordinary people are not being heard while a rapacious elite are untouchable. There was a time in the UK when we could basically take it for granted that our institutions had the best interests of the people at heart. Maybe that was a fond delusion; anyway, we have been cured of it. Too often wronged individuals find themselves pitted against a greedy, useless system which is more interested in reputation management and bonuses than justice. The infected blood scandal, the leaseholder cladding scandal, the Hillsborough scandal, the NHS maternity-unit scandal in which parents were on their own trying to figure out why their healthy babies died. A supine political class, which has either given up on reforming the state or is complicit in its casual tyranny, expects Joe and Josephine Public to shut up and go away. Fortunately, Alan Bates was not a shutting-up-and-going-away sort of bloke.

    We all owe that doughty man a debt of gratitude. “We’re fighting a war against an enemy owned by the British government using money of the British people,” said Bates, correctly identifying the scale of the task. “We are just the skint little people.” Whatever happens, please let us never forget what the skint little people were put through. Forget the frustration of, “Computer says no”. Horizon, blinking like a malevolent alien under a thousand cosy Post Office counters, didn’t just say “No”. It said, “You owe us money you didn’t make and don’t have.” Imagine an Ealing Comedy rewritten by Franz Kafka: that’s how chilling it was for hundreds of hard-working sub-postmasters. People like the deeply kind, nothing’s-too-much-trouble Jo Hamilton (brought to the screen with exquisite empathy by Monica Dolan). In one scene, we saw a tearful, anxious Jo on the phone to the Post Office helpline, when she’s told “You’re the only one having this problem” while the deficit in her accounts suddenly doubles on the screen before her. Like the others, Jo tried to cover the losses with her own savings, then, increasingly desperate, borrowed from family. Interrogated by merciless Post Office investigators who apparently got bonuses for each scalp (a nice touch, don’t you think?), the sub-postmasters could either accept the shortfall was their personal liability and face bankruptcy or insist that there was a fault in the Horizon computer system and refuse to sign off the accounts as Bates did. But that meant they were in breach of contract and their branch was shut.

    “Why would I do this?” cries Jo, “I love my post office. Where’s the money? What have I done with it?” Answers to these perfectly logical questions came there none. The police would surely have asked, but the Post Office was both allowed to mark its own homework and bring its own criminal prosecutions. A bright 10-year-old could have spotted that the sudden, rocketing instances of “fraud” among sub-postmasters coincided with the introduction of the Horizon accounting system. Why did no one in authority join the dots? Well, put it this way, the system was never scrutinised by anyone except those with a vested interest in it operating perfectly.

    Threatened with a prison sentence for theft, Jo was railroaded by the Post Office into pleading guilty to the lesser charge of false accounting, even though they had no evidence of her alleged crime. So loved and trusted was Jo in her Hampshire community, the courtroom was packed with wellwishers who had a whip-round for her. Giving evidence, the village vicar reflected on their postmistress’s invaluable service: “In some ways, Jo is more of the priest than I am. We can’t believe any of this was on purpose.”

    “Are the Post Office incompetent, Alan, or just evil?” Jo asked her friend. By then, Bates had succeeded in finding a group of over 500 sub-postmasters who had all endured the same horrific ordeal. At their first meeting, Alan said, “We’re here because the Post Office told us over and over, ‘You’re the only one’ and that was a lie. None of us will be the only one ever again.”

    Incompetent or evil? I’d say the Post Office was clearly both. Despite a report into the multiple flaws of Horizon, Paula Vennells (whom the Church of England for its sins considered making the Bishop of London) and her team continued to ignore evidence which would have explained the imaginary shortfalls.

    Instead, it preferred to allow the ruination of hundreds upon hundreds of innocent people. Four sub-postmasters killed themselves. Many others appear to have died of shame. A stickler for accuracy, Fiona Cowan was charged with false accounting at the west London post office she ran with her husband Phil. Called a thief, Fiona was spat at in the street. In January 2009, Fiona the stickler overdosed on antidepressants and died aged 47.

    In Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, we were introduced to another victim, Martin Griffiths. A popular local cricketer, Martin had run his branch in Cheshire with great success for 14 years before he was hounded to pay back £60,000 he knew he hadn’t taken. Devastated by the thought he had let his wife and children down, 59-year-old Martin threw himself under a bus. As symbolic acts go, it was tragically unimprovable. The Post Office, it seems, was prepared to throw any number of decent folk like Martin under the bus if it meant the Post Office was turning round its ailing finances and no shadow of doubt was cast over the mega-contract with Fujitsu. After initially spending £2.4 billion, in November last year the Government handed the Japanese firm another £36 million to keep the Horizon contract running until 2025. Yes, really. If we lived in the United States, some of the people who fibbed about errors that led to suicide and premature deaths would have been up before a grand jury and sent straight to jail.

    “One day we will get the bastards,” he promised. Not yet, Alan, but one day, one day. The public are on your side now; we won’t rest until all your sub-postmasters are acquitted and compensated and Post Office officials and any others who lied and caused boundless human anguish are brought before the courts. For 20 years, Mr Bates went to war against a powerful and ruthless British institution. “We are just the skint little people,” he said. No, Alan, you and yours are giants; it’s Paula Vennells who is the pygmy.”

    1. I made a start by listing the ministers of the Crown with direct responsibility for this farrago,

      I maintain that every Postal Services minister, every Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and every Prime Minister since 1998, when Horizon was imposed on the Post Office be stripped of their gongs, and banned from all public appointments including membership of Parliament, with the possible exception of the current incumbents who are charged with putting things right.Those who should take ministerial responsibility and fall on the swords are as follows:

      Postal Services Ministers (from creation of the post in 2009, the junior ministers prior to this are still to be unearthed, and I would appreciate a list of names below, if anyone knows them):

      Anthony Young (Lord Young of Norwood Green) (2009-10)
      Ed Davey (2010-12)
      Norman Lamb (2012)
      Jo Swinson (2012-15)
      Anna Soubry (2015-16)
      Margot James (2016-18)
      Andrew Griffiths (2018)
      Kelly Tolhurst (2018-20)
      Paul Scully (2020-22)
      Jane Hunt (2022)
      Dean Russell (2022)
      Kevin Hollinrake (incumbent)

      Secretaries of State:

      Peter Mandelson (Baron Mandelson) (1997-98 and 2008-10)
      Stephen Byers (1998-2001)
      Patricia Hewett (2001-06)
      Alan Johnson (2005-06)
      Alistair Darling (2005-06)
      John Hutton (2007-08)
      Vince Cable (2010-15)
      Sajid Javid (2015-16)
      Greg Clark (2016-19)
      Andrea Leadsom (2019-20)
      Alok Sharma (2020-21)
      Kwasi Kwarteng (2021-22)
      Jacob Rees-Mogg (2022)
      Grant Shapps (2022-23)
      Kemi Badenoch (incumbent)

      Prime Ministers:

      Tony Blair (1997-2007)
      Gordon Brown (2007-10)
      David Cameron (Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton) (2010-16)
      Theresa May (2016-19)
      Boris Johnson (2019-22)
      Liz Truss (2022)
      Rishi Sunak (incumbent)

      At the very least, all of the above, still living, should be summoned to explain their role in the affair before a Public Inquiry.

      Edit – in the light of Citroen1’s comment below, I would add all Directors of Public Prosecution from the time of the first prosecution of a subpostmaster over Horizon:

      David Calvert-Smith (1999-2003)
      Ken Macdonald (2003-08)
      Keir Starmer (2008-13)
      Alison Saunders (2013-18)
      Max Hill (2018-23)
      Stephen Parkinson (incumbent)

      There is also a litany of Post Office directors, managers and executives since 1998 that may warrant a dishonourable discharge, including the forfeiture of bonuses, awards and pensions proportionate to cover the cost of compensation and legal costs.

      This is the very least that the public should expect to restore public confidence in Parliament and the Post Office.

      Further edit – on reflection, since a major and serious miscarriage of justice had been committed, starting in 2000 and maintained after 2015, when the last prosecution was initiated, then added to this list for investigation for gross misconduct in office should be added the justice secretaries during this period:

      Baron Irvine of Lairg (1997-2003)
      Baron Falconer of Thoroton (2003-07)
      Jack Straw (2007-10)
      Kenneth Clarke (Baron Clarke of Nottingham) (2010-12)
      Chris Grayling (2012-15)
      Michael Gove (2015-16)
      Liz Truss (2016-17)
      David Lidington (2017-18)
      David Gauke (2018-19)
      Robert Buckland (2019-21)
      Dominic Raab (2021-22 and 2022-23)
      Brandon Lewis (2022)
      Alex Chalk (incumbent)

      2. The state closes ranks. It protects it’s own. Unlimited money, unlimited time, jobs for the boys, back handers, brown envelopes.

        What the post Office returned to Alan Bates by freedom of information request regarding Fujitsu’s report was almost entirely redacted apart from the date. Why are they allowed to get away with that? Chances are most of these people simply ignored the ‘annoying little man’ while filling their boots with cash. That’s the statist way.

        There is so little democratic accountability, so little control over the state in this country, what it spends money on, how much it can spend hat the disaster it would create is obvious. Nothing works precisely because of the detachment, disinterest, lack of discipline and control over government Whitehall and westminster.

      3. Alan Johnson used to be a postman. And not much cop at that, according to someone who knew him and his family.

        1. He was specifically chosen to be Minister of Education because he left school without any “O” levels.

          Mind you, most teachers should be aware that some very bright children obtain no academic bits of paper. On the other hand it is just as wrong to think that because a child is dyslexic or not successful academically that he or she is intelligent.

    2. Good morning Anne

      The pleasure one has selecting greeting cards , writing a quick note, or enclosing some money sending them to friends and relatives here and overseas has now been ruined .

      Stamp prices are now day light robbery , and I am certain that the Royal Mail investment buying electric vehicles is a huge financial load of bollox.

      We received fewer Christmas cards this year than in previous years, The Christmas spirit has been crushed, and of course , friends that one rarely hears from except maybe on birthdays and Christmas , and sometimes Easter , I am sitting here wondering whether to ring them or not, and what do I say?

      1. I now make all my own cards Maggie,, no matter what the occasion. The hard part is making up the internal greeting rhyme. Fortunately I seem to have inherited some of Thomas the Rhymer’s talents

        1. If you can use PowerPoint and have a stock of A4 paper, I can send you a template for you to modify for your own use. Only the cost of paper and ink. sent free by e-mail

        1. I got 38, but that was far fewer than usual. I used to get over 60. Many of the people who used to send cards are, alas, no longer with us.

      3. If calling someone try to be upbeat. No one wants a phone call of gloom. Focus on pleasant things like your next crab sandwich ! and how nice it would be if they could share the pleasure with you.

      4. I wonder if Royal Mail have taken note of Amazon’s u-turn on battery vehicles and their return to a reliable diesel-engined fleet?

    3. One of Alison’s best-ever pieces. She needs to watch it or the cabal will arrange for her sacking.

      1. Fortunately there are still members of The Elite who are being protected.

        Enter Mr Reagan, the boss of Fujitsu, who negotiated such a profitable contract from the Government,

        to great personal benefit.

        Why has he not been questioned?

        It couldn’t be anything to do with Gillian Keagan, his wife, who as a member of the cabinet

        has determinedly protected his back.

        We await to hear his side of the story, and wait, and wait………..

          1. Talking about cronyism, it’s interesting to note that Ms Vennells was given the job of training bishops for the Church of England.

            The Archbishop of Canterbury obviously didn’t consider this placement unwise or even bad publicity for the Church.

        2. Ahhhh. Gillian Keegan, the immensely popular MP for Chichester. According to my daughter who lives there she is loathed – even by the conservatives.

          1. Well she’s obviously immensely popular with Mr Keagan, she’s kept his name out of the ‘papers.

  19. I called in at a friends house over the Christmas,
    He was hiding behind the sofa,
    I said what are you doing?
    He said that Doctor Who was on,
    I said you are not still afraid of the Daleks are you?
    No he said, I’m hiding from the new Doctor

    1. Crashing viewing figures and the leads are talking about leaving after the second season – already being filmed.

      Russell Davies, the show runner is using it to push his agenda driven hard Left gay is good message and it’s predictably turning people off the show.

  20. Good morning everybody. Cold and not quite sunny.

    “The new prime minister, who is in a civil partnership with the MEP Stéphane Séjourné, is also the country’s first openly gay head of government,
    and his new role could mean he is being groomed to run for French
    president when Mr Macron is forced to bow out in three years after two
    terms.” I missed the significance of NTTL chuckles yesterday about the adjective “openly”, so who was the first French PM who was indeed homosexual but not known to be so?
    Edit: and the Telegraph’s mention of ‘grooming’ is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I suppose.

  21. Never mind patient care, diversity is top of the NHS list

    Has been for the last 3 years at least

    Culture WarsNever mind patient care, diversity is top of the NHS list

  22. 381615+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    For the last four decades issues of this nature have been building via the polling stations,. and in that respect the majority voter currently has had a roaring success, they never did realise that when putting the party (ino) before the Country
    they did so without the use of a very long spoon.

    The Post Office scandal has exposed Britain as a hotbed of cronyism and corruption
    For 20 years Mr Bates waged war on a ruthless institution, but ITV’s dramatisation has finally opened people’s eyes to the cruel injustice

  23. 381615+ up ticks,

    Take note, English school authorities,

    Libs of TikTok
    @libsoftiktok
    BREAKING: @JMHSBklyn has informed parents that tomorrow classes will be remote. Why? Because a group of 2,000 illegal aliens are being transferred to NYC and will be sleeping in the school’s gym.

    Americans are being deprived of an education to cater to illegals.

    Council member
    @InnaVernikov
    released a statement blasting the decision.

    This is unacceptable!
    @NYCMayor

    https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1744865191047631201?s=20

    1. That happened in Germany in 2015. Schools lost their sports halls temporarily which were used to house migrants.

  24. Good morning all,

    Clear-skied and frosty at Ty McPhee, wind in the North-East, -2℃ → +3℃ today.

    What an extraordinary thing to say in an interview. Slip of the tongue? I can’t imagine myself or anyone I have ever known making that sort of a ‘slip of the tongue’.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/56a8763280d3fb3a263dbc458be179ad5335b2b8123bde47a5f36526764ce8cf.png

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/01/09/keir-starmer-children-sky-tv-mistake-son-daughter/

    I’d say the fellow is a bit of an odd-ball.

    In 2023 Sir Keir revealed he did not let his children eat meat until they were 10 and said his daughter has “never in her life” tasted it.

    The Labour leader, a pescatarian, and his wife, a vegetarian, refrain from preparing meals with meat or fish at home.

    Speaking on the Table Manners podcast hosted by pop singer Jessie Ware and her mother Lennie, he said: “What we said to the kids was, by the time they were about 10, ‘it’s up to you’.

    “We don’t have meat or fish in the house, we don’t cook it, until they’re about 10 obviously they’re just eating with us.”

    He added: “And then we said, ‘you can do what you like’ and our boy said ‘great’, so the moment we go out there’s a Deliveroo for Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald’s.

    “So he’s taken full liberty with the licence to do what he likes.”

    It’s that last bit the gives me the shivers “he’s taken full liberty with the licence to do what he likes”. What does this say about the attitude of Starmer to an individual’s personal sovereignty? If he can say that about his own son, what would he say about the rest of us.

    Prime Minister material? No way.

    1. Perhaps he is using “licence” to mean “freedom”?
      It’s reasonable when talking about his child, I think.

      Terrible parenting though – vegetarian food for small children, and the only meat they get is over-processed poor quality fast food shyte. I get a strong impression that they don’t respect food in their household.

      1. Then his understanding of language is poor for a lawyer. Licence is ‘permission’. What permission and who gave himself the power to grant it?

        I wonder what his children look like. How big are they? How robust? I can’t imagine what it must do to a child’s development to be brought up not eating animal protein.

        1. If they’re anything like the vegan kids at my children’s schools, they will be swapping their carrots for other kids’ ham sandwiches. The other kids do the swap out of pity.

      2. Then his understanding of language is poor for a lawyer. Licence is ‘permission’. What permission and who gave himself the power to grant it?

        I wonder what his children look like. How big are they? How robust? I can’t imagine what it must do to a child’s development to be brought up not eating animal protein.

    3. He is trying to show us that he is a man for all ages – just as he doesn’t know what a woman is he doesn’t know what a boy or a girl is. Indeed. he may be believe that his daughter will one day be a boy!

    1. Excellent.
      Give it to him and to anyone else who wants it.

      Then tell them that the immunity doesn’t work as it is claimed and prosecute them for everything they can be hit for.
      Without legal aid.

    2. I hope he doesn’t get it.
      As a Cambridge maths graduate and technical expert, his evidence would be very highly trusted. Part of the reason for that is that programmers and mathematicians are usually very honest about their work. One of the first things you learn on the job is that everyone makes mistakes and you shouldn’t point the finger at other people, because code is complicated and it will make a fool of you tomorrow.
      By bearing false witness and allowing the wrongly accused to be convicted, he let the side down and damaged the whole software industry, as well as putting the victims through hell.

      Software is complicated and a large distributed system will in practice never be free from bugs. It’s ESSENTIAL that engineers admit that in public. We are quite safe doing so because there is nobody on this planet, including AI that can guarantee a bug free system!! Important is to eliminate as many as possible before release, and move heaven and earth to admit to and fix the bugs that appear after release.

      1. Yep. It’s the honesty that’s the important thing. If he raised the defects and was told to ignore them or his concerns were not addressed then that’s not his fault. As for testing in live… I’ve seen some people praise it and always thought they’re insane. Take a backup, anonymise and duplicate. Never, ever test in live. It breaks every process going.

        However, it’s cheap. When you’re farming out a product costing billions it tends to go to the cheap side very quickly to make as much cash as possible from a hapless, incompetent customer.

        1. We have a test system at the customer, and a parallel live system. Needless to say, all the testing and bug fixing is carried out on the test system.
          Horizon would surely have had the same. What they were doing messing with the live system heaven only knows.

          I’m sorry, but if I were working on a system that resulted in people being accused of theft (that is actually the worst aspect, the slur on their good names) then no amount of being told to ignore my concerns would keep me quiet. I’d change jobs over that, and blow the whistle.
          Fortunately, all the places I’ve worked for have had more integrity – including Fujitsu in the part that I worked! They had very high standards – this case is very surprising.

          1. Yep, at minimum, dev, test, pre-prod, live. Split the roles up, keep each away from the other. If you need a copy of live create a new environment entirely.

          2. I expect that testing, bug-fixing, performance improvements
            and so on were developed on a test system but once they were deemed successful they would need to be implemented on many hundreds if not thousands of live systems. Sending out technicians to do what would be a monumental task every time it needed doing would be impractical. I feel sure that this would be done by remote access. The claim that remote access was impossible is literally incredible.

          3. Horizon was tested in the North East. When the accounting glitches appeared they prosecuted the subpostmasters. So much for testing.

    3. The relatives of:

      Gordon Goody, Charlie Wilson, Buster Edwards, Bruce Reynolds, Roy James, John Daly, Roger Cordrey, Jimmy White, Bob Welch,
      Tommy Wisbey, Jim Hussey, Ronnie Biggs, Harry Smith and Danny Pembroke,

      Demand that any prosecutions made against them be removed from all Public records and that they posthumously be awarded knighthoods, for services to the Post Office.

      Well they did rob a Mailtrain

    4. The relatives of:

      Gordon Goody, Charlie Wilson, Buster Edwards, BruceReynolds, Roy James, John Daly, Roger Cordrey, Jimmy White, Bob Welch,
      Tommy Wisbey, Jim Hussey, Ronnie Biggs, Harry Smith and Danny Pembroke,

      Demand that any prosecutions made against them beremoved from all Public records and that they posthumously be awarded knighthoods, for services to the Post Office.

      Well they did rob a Mailtrain

    6. It’s not fraud he’s frightened of, it’s perjury which he certainly appears to have

      committed many times.

      We hope that his reward(s) were worth it because he’ll be fearful of prosecution for many years

    1. There’s something very “Turkish Barbers” about this.

      Lavish set-ups but few paying customers?

    2. I can’t remember where i read it but Theresa May was paid for a speech she didn’t give to a non-existent audience. It certainly looks like payments for favours.

      4. I seem to recall that, once they actually managed to pry her claws from the Number 10 door jamb, she was paid handsomely for a speaking tour that was cancelled due to the scamdemic lockdowns. Probably subtler than a brown envelope with a Brussels/Strasbourg gravy train postmark on it?

    3. What is often overlooked is how extremely unpleasant she is. Indeed, she is nasty to the point of being evil.

  28. Q: What is the name of the new French PM.

    A: Oh, the Nancy Derriere chapesse…. I’m not sure …

  29. Good morning, all. Bright and cold this morning.

    Hasn’t taken Shapps very long to start trying to undermine our fighting services. First up, the Royal Marines, one of our elite formations. Which formation will follow, the Parachute Regiment?

    The man who was so very pleased to see his hero that he just had to post a picture on social media of the gleeful coming together. What possible input could William Henry Gates III have on any of the UK’s policies… ???

    https://twitter.com/Samfahh1/status/1744829029348266334

    1. The Marines ought to kidnap Shapps and dangle him over a cliff on a rope. They could then ask him whether he gets the point of the Royal Marines now?

      1. I think that Shapps knows full well the point of the Royal Marines. They are an elite force and therefore pose a threat to any attack on the UK and its people. Can’t be having that in a globalist era.

    2. The corruption of politicians is beyond belief.
      How does a ‘private’ American citizen have such free access to Prime Ministers and Health Ministers and hold sway over scam experimental injections when he’s not an immunologist or scientist. (Rhetorical question)
      How does a private American citizen have access to ministers involved with the Net Zero scam when he’s not a climatologist nor a scientist unless he’s come here with vast quantities of brown envelopes.
      I can’t understand why all the backbench ‘Con’servative MPs are not up in arms that this person has immediate access to ministers of the Crown that they cannot get.
      I can’t understand how they’re not up in arms that the PM should dig up a failed ex PM to become Foreign Secretary and consider none of the other 350 elected MPs are capable.

    3. I consider that the Royal Marines have every right to demand a performance review of Grant Schitts career and ask that he justifies his existence!

      1. They don’t care about their debts. They will never earn enough to pay much (if any) back, and know it will be written off after some years.

          3. Again, I doubt many will care. If they are anything like our ex-DiL, they will continue to have zero money-sense, spending foolishly on non-essentials (got to have the regular hair dies/plastic nails/caterpillar eyebrows/ binge drinking & holidays with ‘the girls’ etc) , while never earning enough to pay more than trivial amounts back each month.

    2. And now we have a severe shortage of qualified British trades people.
      Just rubber boat cowboys at work.
      The mess they make is appalling.

  32. There is just one tiny bit of good news (or slightly less bad news) out of the Post Office debacle. The ghastly Vennells did not become Bishop of London – though she was on Welmeaning’s short list of useless women to appoint t high positions.

    1. They’ve just had a dozen or more ex post ‘masters’ discussing their terrible experiences on bbc TV. Some of the people were actually put in jail. One guy was totally broken financially. Another couple had to take money from his private pension pot to survive. It goes on and on. What a disgrace.

    1. There are so many of theses scumbags out there now, all supporters of each other. Like an old boys club sir Anthony Lynton Blair ???? Another one of them HTF did all this come about.

  34. Morning all 🙂😊
    A bit nippy out there today. Frosty cars but lovely sunshine.
    Yes bestowing awards for abject failure.
    Unjustifiable, but a nasty habit imposed on us by the pointless British upper classes. Who have their hands permanently in the tax payer’s pockets and having never experienced the reality of trying to survive. Still think they know better than the general public.
    This is why our country is now in such a rotten and rapidly rotting mess. For many decades the wrong people in charge.
    Back slapping, money grabbing, self opinionated know-alls.

    1. Morning! Strange, isn’t it. A thousand years ago the ruling class were semi-literate and won power on the battlefield. They left the scholarly stuff to the church, which knew what to do with it back then. Now our rulers are educated but still stupid and weak to boot?

      1. An Excellent observation Sue.
        And Spot on.
        The ruling classes have a massive amount of more than deliberte mistakes to apologise to the public for.
        From stealing furniture and artwork etcnow boasting value of millions, from many past talented people. Even the people who built their mansions.
        And they got away with it and still do, because the top legal people are their friends.

      1. I doubt it, they seem to have been exposed to reality on the way up and seem to have more appreciation of the hardships some people suffer.

  35. Happy Birthday to Hopon.
    It’s our youngest sons 36th birthday today.
    I remember the day well.
    And it’s about time you married that lovely Fiancé.
    Family get together Sunday, almost all others working today.

  37. Good morning everyone,
    RIP RAF Scampton. As ever, the powers are over-ruling normal, decent people and local authorities.
    Once the savages start being housed there, how long before they commit their first crimes?
    Naturally, comments are turned off.
    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/pictures-over-raf-scampton-show-asylum-centre-preparations-made-by-home-office/ar-AA1mHtWl?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=2ad84a96445f4a959c528f76232a59dd&ei=10
    There’s a poll in the article – 93% are concerned.

      1. In theory, not yet lost. But I’d be surprised if any objections, however valid and admissible, aren’t over-ruled.

  38. I can think of few things about Teresa May which are truly interesting. But there is one exception: I reckon you could fill a magazine with examples of Teresa May in some “outfit which jars”. In contrast, as a male observer I have often found myself admiring the smartness of the choices of Liz Truss and, above all, Suella Braverman. Margaret Thatcher was also good in her day.

    1. My theory about Treason and her hideous outfits was that – because she was so important and busy and all that – she employed a personal shopper who loathed her – and produced said ghastly outfits and persuaded Treason that they looked just fabulous!

      1. One does wonder about Mr May. He’s never had the guts to say “Teresa, you look hideous in that!” (my wife is always seeking my opinion before she leaves the house + when we are shopping).

      2. Margaret Thatcher employed a stylist but to rather better effect? My favourite outfit of hers was a light grey wool suit with pale pink satin collar and cuffs, which sounds odd but was beautifully tailored and looked very smart. Can’t find a pic.

  39. Morning all – very heavy frost up here. There’s a monkey in the garden clutching his groin

    2. Was reading a book of WWII memories, where a woman recalled that her female boss (WAAF or similar) had advised her group of ‘gals’ to avoid giving the wrong signal on a date, because ‘a young woman can easily stop but a man cannot’.

      1. When I was at school, sex education consisted of the deputy headmistress sitting in an armchair with all of us girlies aged about 13-14 sitting around her on the floor while she gave us very motherly advice on the facts of life. On the subject of casual sex, she told us that a man may say he loves you and he may mean it at the time but if you sleep with him, he’ll have forgotten all about it in the morning.

        1. We were divided into two classes. The one class got the old biology teacher and the facts that they were taught was the use of the word “no”. We had the new trendy science teacher who invited us to ask any questions we wanted to on the subject, including providing a box so we could submit our questions anonymously. I’m not sure any of us took her up on the offer.

          1. In biology we read chapter 6, the reproductive system of the rabbit, at the end of the summer term. We were told to read chapter 7, the human reproductive system, over the holidays and when we returned in September, we started chapter 8.

        2. Our sex education lesson was an embarrassed, elderly biology mistress telling us about plants and fertilisation by the bees. My mum shoved a little Family Doctor book at me.

          1. Sex Education at Ampleforth was by far the most entertaining component of the entire curriculum since it was exclusively the realm of Benedictine monks. Many of us had Old Amplefordian fathers or elder brothers who had prepared us with devastating questions and buffoonery to cause maximum embarrassment and confusion. In my instance it was the delightful Fr Owen, normally the greatly respected tutor of the top set for ‘A’ and ‘S’ level physics (he had a first from Oxford), who looked like a caricature of Friar Tuck with a tonsure and was an oblate spheroid no matter what angle he was viewed from. It took us less than three minutes of the 45 minute allotted time slot to reduce him to a giggling puce quaking mass. He had so much fun, as did we, the horrible spotty schoolboys.

        3. We never had sex education at school but there were air raid shelters just over the wall in the girls school next door……ok? 😝

    1. Did he begin public life with the intention of becoming a blight on humanity or did the ambition grow on him?

  44. ‘Morning All

    First the media then the opposition seems Tusk is using the Zelensky playsheet……..

    https://twitter.com/markus764/status/1744820049607590158?s=20

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3ee4b4c97b5a25d6355d4cb6762f4eec26d3631c1aeda634fb7b621931900d4b.jpg

    Rest

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1edd7dcb957aa60422123aa81e5178a152edc868f96e493b53b2b38d7f221a19.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/125028961906ff61a0bf801906e268ff0da13a3b62ba91dc5318eb56bdd662f8.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/be218d876168a3cfe8464584806e8bb032c7102e22d10f16aae17bd834ad764a.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/806715827b49a9789ed2368568b991fef4b78cfbdd3625f60d2edcecbd4d6ec9.jpg

    It was always the young women………….

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/60bb085edd9bd136dd75aaf367d02e8f0e98efcefee6b96b740e20caf3fe58ca.jpg

  46. 381615+ up ticks,

    Understatement if ever,

    Just put a Christmasy type stamp on a letter showing
    Mary, baby Jesus falling snow and the wording
    ” All is calm all is bright”

    2. 381615+ up ticks,

      Morning TB

      If 50% were up to it the supermarket share price would go through the floor.

      1. You don’t really think any of them would deign to marry do you? At least three look as if they are Sapphists.

    1. The Beeb news last night had Justin Rowlatt waving his arms about and spouting off about the “Hottest year ever” – absolute garbage but people will believe anything if they’re told often enough.

      1. There’s an article on the beeb webpage by him, which is allowing comment! I honestly can’t be bothered to look as the number of bozos on there will seriously depress me!

  51. As the current excuse seems to be “The computers were lying to us” I wonder if there might be any lateral thinhking to the Climate Scam and Convid??

    I expect it will take a TV Doco in 25 years to wake up the normies to the appalling crimes our government has inflicted on us,,,,,,,,,,,,,

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a74838ebcf1a7294125653158fd611209f701c64de2816023087744e9bc0ee6e.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e47aeea39e372c98c46006d813308694b7850f730102520de189bcc0a2a9e2c9.jpg

    1. Stupidity is now globally endemic. The clear, irrefutable evidence is presented every second of every day wherever humans are to be found (which is fucking everywhere!).

  53. A general canvass: I’ve never done Facebook, Twitter or Instagram or any other social media apart from being in two What’s App groups – one for our residential close and one for bellringers. However, I’m now thinking about opening an account at ‘X formerly known as Twitter’ so that I can follow and maybe comment on the likes of Tucker Carlson, Kathy Gyngell and all the other dissidents and freedom warriors who have been allowed back on to the site.

    What do others think?

    2. I’m on Facebook because my family and a number of old friends like it but the content there is good only for nostalgia, trivia, sentimental stuff and, to be fair, some much needed humour. If you want to know what’s going on in the world, Elon’s X is holding out as the only platform for the free exchange of information and ideas.

    3. I opened an account so i could read threads and replies I have yet to comment {:^))
      No problems so far and much information gained

    4. It is designed to be addictive.
      Be careful what you say as Twitter is monitored by some very authoritarian people.
      It looks as though it is slowly heading towards a subscription service, when that happens I shall leave, but until then I do enjoy it.
      It is a good source of information as Rik says.

    5. You are bonkers. Just look at the NoTTLers who are members. Do YOU want to become like them?? {:¬))

    7. On X You end up arguing with all sorts and you will not win anyone over. There is a case of being able to hound your MP and others higher up the food chain,; they may even read your comments and reply. I was banned for telling a slammer (OBE) some truths about her religion which she didn’t seem to appreciate. I could have said a few Hail-Marys to regain my account but I thought my exit was a good thing. I can still see the X links that are posted here.

    8. Membership of Twitter gains you automatic access to GCHQ’s Enemy of the State File. Not a problem actually if you are Nottler, since we are all members by default.

    10. I’ve been on Twitter/X since 2010 but I never stay more than a few minutes at a time. It’s a toxic snakepit – not like our cosy little chat group here.

  54. Now, if true, this is news to me. Many people since 2020 have commented with their surprise that “covid” was downgraded from a High Consequence Infectious Disease five days before lockdown commenced. In health terms that seemed strange to say the least but..

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b27ed0a0659c59e6ec8cc67e6c63f5fd9783022612ac6c676c429dae1090ccf4.png

    Many searches and I cannot find confirmation of the claim in the above. However, many changes and probably CYA actions may have erased the electronic memory. Plenty of references to the fact that Ivermectin wasn’t licensed for treating “covid”.

    I put nothing past those who were deeply involved in the “covid” scam.

    1. Wouldn’t surprise me if that were true. I just assumed they were covering themselves so that they could say that they never told us it was lethal later.

    2. As I understand it if Ivermectin was recognised as a treatment for Covid, the novel “vaccines” could not have been authorised for emergency use in the absence of any other possible treatment.

      If indeed Ivermectin is effective in curing Covid19, then I would suggest this is a much greater scandal then the present Post Office one and I think the entire World would demand capital punishment for the perpetrators.
      Do the terms of reference into the ‘Covid 19′ enquiry’ include reviewing the claims of the effectiveness of Ivermectin in treating Covid 19 cases?

      2. GRHHHH
        Neither Ivermectin nor HCQ will “Cure” Convid and all trials were DESIGNED to fail
        However they are a vital component of the COMBINATION therapy designed by probably Europe’s most eminent virologist
        Didier Roault
        A zinc ionophore ie Quercetin Ivermectin HCQ
        Zinc
        Vits D and C
        Broad spectrum antibiotic for any bacterial chest infection
        It worked see the kits in India for more details
        Naturally for the sin of being right he was pilloried

      3. As I understood the situation your first sentence certainly appertains to the USA’s laws but I wasn’t certain about here.

        Early on a team of doctors in Australia found that asthmatics were not becoming ill in the numbers expected with an alleged respiratory illness. The intervention was tracked down to the brown inhaler that has to be taken every day. The inhaler contains a steroid substance. I can’t speak for Australia but the inhaler wasn’t banned here: my prescription was always filled.

    3. Fullfact tackled the change in status in May 2020, but not the claim about about Ivermectin and Hydroxichloroquine.

      Several Facebook posts have shared a screenshot from a UK government website, which says that Covid-19 is no longer considered a “high consequence infectious diseases” [sic]. Some readers have also asked us whether this is true.

      Despite the misprinted “s”, which might typically be a red flag indicating a fake website, this screenshot does come from the UK government (although the typo has since been corrected). It is also true that Public Health England no longer considers Covid-19 a high consequence infectious disease (HCID).

      Some Facebook comments say that if Covid-19 is not considered a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) then the current lockdown is based on a “hoax”. This is a misunderstanding of what the HCID label means.

      What is an HCID?
      Covid-19 was first classified as an HCID in the UK on 16 January 2020, when it was still known as the “Wuhan novel coronavirus”. HCIDs are serious diseases that sometimes arrive in the UK from other countries, and have the potential to spread domestically. As a result, the NHS and other European health services have made plans to identify and respond to them.

      According to the UK government’s definition, an HCID has several features. Among them are the fact that it “typically has a high case-fatality rate” and is “often difficult to recognise and detect rapidly”. There are currently 16 diseases listed as HCIDs, including Ebola, SARS, MERS, monkeypox, plague and four severe strains of bird flu.

      The case fatality rate for these diseases—meaning the proportion of confirmed cases who then die—is high. For Ebola it is about 50%, SARS about 15%, and monkeypox up to 11%. Even a small outbreak of these diseases could potentially kill many people.

      For example, if roughly half the population (out of 66 million in the UK) caught a disease with a 1% case fatality rate, it would result in 300,000 deaths. For comparison, 616,014 deaths were recorded across the UK in 2018 from all causes.

      Why was Covid-19 declassified as an HCID?
      Explaining why Covid-19 is no longer an HCID, the UK government says: “Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.”

      The note says that the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens, a group of independent experts that advises the government, also believed that “COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID”.

      This does not mean the current Covid-19 outbreak is not a serious public health emergency, however. Even though the risk of dying from the disease is low for most people, it has been shown that the disease can spread quickly to a large number of people, and therefore cause a large number of deaths in total.

      How dangerous is Covid-19?
      In January 2020, when Covid-19 was a very new disease, it was not known what proportion of the people who caught it would die.

      At the time, it was possible that Covid-19 might have proven to be a disease with a high case fatality rate, like the other HCIDs. This was when Covid-19 (or the “Wuhan novel coronavirus”) was added to the HCID list.

      Covid-19 is still a new disease, but a great deal was learned about it between January and March. The case fatality rate remains a matter of debate among scientists, and will vary in different places, according to the quality of care available, the underlying health of the population, and many other factors.

      However, several estimates in March put the rate a little above 1%, based on data from mainland China and from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. It is important to remember that this represents only the proportion of confirmed cases which result in the patient dying. If there are many unconfirmed Covid-19 deaths the proportion will be higher. If there are many unconfirmed Covid-19 cases, the proportion will be lower.

      In any event, Covid-19 does now appear to have a much lower case fatality rate than the other diseases on the HCID list. It is also now much easier to identify, with greater testing capacity than there was in January.

      Correction 8 December 2020

      This article was corrected with the figure for deaths across the UK in 2018, not the figure for deaths in England and Wales.

      https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-hcid/

      1. What you’ve put up was appearing in many of the searches I was putting together. It doesn’t answer the question on the law as expressed in my screen shot. It would nice to know the source of the comment writer’s information.

  55. Shapps pledges to stop Red Sea missiles after British warship attacked. 10 January 2024.

    Mr Shapps said there was no doubt whatsoever that Iran was guiding the Houthis on the attacks, dozens of which have been carried out in the region since mid-November.

    “Enough is enough,” he said. “This cannot continue and we won’t allow it to continue so watch this space.”

    You just know that this has to be the forerunner to another disaster!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/01/10/israel-hamas-war-latest-news-updates-gaza-palestine-day-96/

  56. Watch this space….

    “On Friday, 5 Jan. 2024, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) agreed to hear the case about whether Donald Trump is eligible for Colorado’s primary ballot. The same day, SCOTUS also began to discuss the merits of another, possibly much more important case: Dan Robert, et al. v. Lloyd J. Austin, III, Secretary of Defense, et al. (Robert v. Austin), filed by a legal team led by Andrew L. Schlafly, Todd Callender, David Wilson and Lisa McGee.

    n Robert v. Austin, the petitioners presented the Supreme Court with three carefully formulated questions:

    Whether the unlawful implementation of the harmful Covid vaccine mandate in the Armed Services properly evades judicial review based on repeal of the mandate and separation of a service member who is subject to recall to duty?

    Whether it is proper and authorized for a court of appeals to engage in fact finding, while going outside of the record, to dismiss service members’ appeal without reaching its merits?

    Whether the government may properly force citizens to receive an experimental gene modifying injection, recognized in the medical literature as causing severe adverse effects?

    1. 381615+ up ticks,

      O2O,

      Purely for the simple of mind & hard core lab/lib/con/current ukip members.

      1. Saw her at the Royal Highland Show in June! You’re right – two very well built, tall men!

        1. Can you imagine Khan. A fleet of bullet proof range rovers and max security like the US President.

          1. He does have a hugely inflated perception of his importance! Definitely small man/willy syndrome!

      2. She only had one close protection officer until some nut job tried to hijack her car going down The Mall in the 1970s.

        1. He has a Walther PPK in .38, IIRC, and it jammed.
          I have one in .32. Totally reliable. Early wartime issue. Shoots better than I do.

    2. And Trudeau will not make the short trip to Toronto on a commercial flight because they claim he must fly private for security reasons.

      Maybe it is because no one likes Trudeau.

      1. Have to agree. She could look a lot better with a softer face-framing style. I once saw her in the flesh when she was on a visit to Edinburgh in the late 60s. She was stunning. The camera never really did her justice.

          1. We didn’t see her for a chat at Gatcombe last August, but we have done in the past – she’s very down to earth.

  59. Ukrainian child refugees ‘are heading back HOME for dental treatment’ amid ever-worsening NHS appointments crisis

    Lib Dem MP Tim Farron said ‘large numbers’ of children are returning home

    Figures show that eight in 10 practices in England aren’t accepting new patients .

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12946311/Ukraine-child-refugees-heading-war-torn-HOME-dental-treatment-amid-worsening-NHS-appointments-crisis.html

    The envy of the world…

    1. A little bird tells me that the Ukrainian parents do not get penalty notices for taking their children out of school during term time.

  60. I’ve just tried accessing my Premium Bond account. They’ve changed the log in again! I can’t get into it! I would like to know how many people have had their Bonds stolen? It stinks of deliberate obstruction.

    1. And once you are logged in don’t even think about clicking the ‘back’ or ‘refresh’ browser buttons.

    2. Once you have logged in and had your device verified under the new system it should remember your details and probably won’t ask you again.
      My sister had a few PB when she died and it was very easy to cash them

    4. I’m locked out of my account because I can’t change the mobile phone number associated with my account. I have to phone them to ask for a temporary password. Can I get through? Can I fairycakes!

    2. In a rousing speech that took note of his country’s hotly-anticipated accession to NATO this year and ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine, Carl-Oskar Bohlin called on ordinary citizens to ask themselves ‘who are you if war comes?’.

      Well if I’m not there start without me!

      1. Funny isn’t it that Vlad is the supposed enemy not the tens of thousands of migrants who make no go areas for the Swedish people.

        France is much the same with their Banlieus.
        One does have to ask the question…………………WHY?

    5. Any Russky tanks rumbling down my street will see me standing outside my house, with a huge pot of superior-quality Borscht on a trestle table, offering hot, nourishing dishfuls at SEK100 a pop!

  64. We have just been out for lunch here https://theroyaloakbarrington.co.uk/ We walked back home down the green. The wind was the coldest (a keen wind eebahgum) I have felt whipping round my ears and across my cheek bones since I left Yorkshire fifty-four years ago. The ice on the birdbath has not melted all day, it is firm, solid.

    1. Beautiful looking place. I see they sell crackling and apple sauce as a side dish. Clever people.

      You need to wrap a woolen scarf around your face !

      1. I certainly do – I would normally have had my ‘Dr Zhivago’ style sheepskin hat perched on my head and over my ears for a trek down the green but we were late…..!

        1. I wish there were places like that near me. I have to travel 50 odd miles to the New Forest to get something similar.

          1. 50 miles!! They are two a penny in this part of the world. Cambridgeshire has a plethora of pretty villages (not as pretty as ours, of course!) with old coaching inns, especially surrounding Cambridge itself.

          2. I think there are some nottlers who live in North Hampshire. Land of the gentry ! I should ask them for recommendations. South Hampshire is Portsmouth and Southampton which is not really what i’m looking for.

          3. A long trip up the M11 for me. Far too far unless i was staying over.

            Edit. That wasn’t a hint BTW.

        1. I had a shortish walk this morning. My wooly hat kept rising up almost exposing my delicate ears. 🤔👂👂

          2. That’s a bit scary. I’ve got a hood on my winter jacket. That should hold that hat down.

      1. It did have something of a world-wide reputation twenty or so years ago, it was owned by a very flamboyant woman by the name of Liz Nicholls who dressed completely in black, she had short curly red hair, heavy make up, false eyelashes and diamenté on the ends of these. Of course, being close to Cambridge is how it got its world wide reputation, Liz was known as far away as NZ as people returned to their homes. The food was excellent and she was highly efficient, she could be found frequently doing two jobs at once – polishing tables and counters, supervising staff and dealing with visitors. She also had a very deep voice and more than one person has suggested she may be transvestite.

        She lived just across the green from us (not on the Oak premises) – one evening in the darkening twilight there was a knock at the door – on answering I nearly jumped out of my skin at the slender, dark apparition “do you know you’ve left your car lights on?” in the deep, booming voice that was hers. Sadly she died a few years ago from bowel cancer and the place went downhill for a while as these places do, but it seems to have found its way once again, although it is not the same as when this charismatic person owned it, she was its soul. She also ran the King William lV (the King Willy) at Heydon at the same time.

  65. Yay!!
    Just noticed I’ve hit 10.000 comments in my new iteration with a very generous 100.000plus upvotes from you generous NoTTLers!!

    1. Difficult to read, but I don’t she mentioned poliomyelitis and the BCG vaccines. Another two that must have saved many thousands of lives.

    2. The US used to deny entry to anyone who hadn’t had the smallpox vaccine but it was taken as read that the vaccine conferred lifetime immunity.

  68. Putin may be about to launch an apocalyptic assault. Hamish De Crettin-Gordon.

    Like Stalin, Putin has an insatiable ego and a desire for greatness at whatever the cost. Those in the West who believe that a ceasefire could be followed by a return to “normality” are utter fools. Nobody with any understanding of the Kremlin believes that it is a certainty that Putin will stop his westwards march. The drift towards militarisation of the Russian state and the surging calls for a greater offensive must serve as a warning that the West needs to wake up before he acts. We must fully support and arm Ukraine. If we don’t, as predicted by the Polish Chief of Security, NATO will be at war with Moscow within a few years.

    I’m quite prepared to believe that our leaders might do something like this because they are all unhinged. As here.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/10/putin-assault-ukraine-kharkiv/

    2. Right at the start of this fiasco Peter Lavelle, an American reporter at RT, predicted that the US administration would claim it as a victory even though Ukraine would lose, because “Putin didn’t reach the English Channel”.

          1. Because Vlad is unpredictable. And likes to hold his unpredictability over the West’s head.

    1. Wish you hadn’t posted that.
      Became uncontrollably teary as a result.
      Poor, tiny wee lass.

        1. What kind of bastard kills a 7-year-old? For whatever reason? I’d happily twist a tourniqut around his neck, very, very slowly, and then piss in his gasping mouth.

          2. Don’t care.
            Nobody who kills small children deserve any kind of consideration. Hope she rots in Hell.

    2. In a sensible world there would not be any “illegal immigrants” from Albania, or elsewhere. A proper country, correctly and naturally protecting its realm from insurgence and invasion, would round them up and shoot them, no questions asked.

  72. Should have been an Eagle; unfortunate choice!

    Wordle 935 3/6
    🟩⬜🟩🟩⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Par here. There are just two words beginning with those four letters…

      Wordle 935 4/6

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

      1. And here

        Wordle 935 4/6

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

    2. Well done. Not so good for me today.

      Wordle 935 5/6

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

    3. I saved it but can’t remember what I got. Here it is,

      Wordle 935 3/6

      ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
      ⬜⬜🟨🟩🟨
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

      better than I thought.

  73. That’s me for today. A curious day – air temperature was higher than yesterday, but there was less sun and a biting wind. We forced ourselves to do our two miles walk but it wasn’t much fun, unlike y’day which was glorious, even though everything was frozen. Much the same tomorrow, I expect.

    Market to go to – as usual. Bracing, if nothing else!

    Have a jolly evening.

    A demain.

  74. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4878b9f77cebf0bc0a7201342e37557f8d3440ae13f0bcff863a77856e92b5de.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/387a6f71b8ff9b9041c77a42e591a84995b40e402a6594135d6cb47e486d08d0.jpg The little differences that I perceive between The UK and Sweden.

    Over a week since our heavy snowfall, temperatures have remained well below zero and not a single snowflake has yet melted. Roads remain icebound yet traffic flows freely. I drove the 25km to Ystad this morning (and back again) without once experiencing the slightest feeling of a skid. The essential fitting of winter tyres, by law, ensures that no occurrences of cars skidding off the road, colliding with other vehicles, or lorries jackknifing are reported. In fact, in the 13 winters I have lived here, I have yet to witness a traffic incident/collision due to snow/ice on the roads.

    Also, when I lived in the UK, the dustbins were routinely emptied by teams of four or five chaps, usually one driving the lorry and the others collecting and emptying the bins. Here we have single-crewed dustbin lorries and, in our case, operated by a young girl in her late teens/early twenties.

    It’s a different world here.

    2. Hope you’ve got a nuclear bunker in your garden – according to the Daily Mail, you’re about to be at war with Russia!

    3. Same here, Grizz.
      Right tyres, even for bikes. We have an engine heater, that defosts the windscreen and makes starting easier. Just better sorted out.

    4. Last Wednesday we were following the dustcart down our road to where we live, the end of the paved road (there are a few cottages along the track below). I was amazed that the only person at the rear, doing all the rubbish bag collecting and chucking into the dustcart, was a slightly overweight androgynous looking young person. As soon as there was room for the driver to let us by he did so. I’m not easily impressed, but I was, and thanked them both.

    1. The savings accounts are painfully variable. You might get a decent rate for a year, with no chance of cashing out without penalties. Premium Bonds are a more relaxing way of putting money aside, with a small chance of a decent win. We’ve used them as a decent way to buy things or helping the kids out financially, without the bank demanding where this money came from. The last few years though, the security hoops you have to go through to buy/sell has become prohibitive.

      1. Once upon a time, in a land far far away, your money was your own to do with as you pleased…

    2. The comics were ok back in the 60s.Making (multiple) films must be a dead end and I hope they suffer for it.

  80. Some more Matts…

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8ac9213748b63a306f1abd013a179d4a8fb6c4833523c4615fa17d3325db5538.jpg
    (from The Time Of The Madness)
    _______________________________________________________________________________________________

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0b9b9f5d5d6e9b75dd94b84f4cc903f946ecca5a06c7093e33e24551d4599d06.jpg

    _______________________________________________________________________________________________

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b901cb6089680ff57cabe1a9b6a0aad47c4c94df4d7baac3b9c182fdaac15aee.jpg

  81. Robert Wilkinson
    @robertwlk
    I woke up with a start, worried I was late for work.
    …and relax: I was already at work.

      1. They can really clog a town up with those tractors. Especially when they get on every roundabout and keep going round very slowly. In the rush hour.

    4. Perhaps they should take their keys and just walk away until the public and the dumbkopf politicians are on their knees begging them to go back to farming.?…

      1. A lot of people think food comes from the supermarket and won’t get it until they go hungry! Which I hope won’t happen, though I fear otherwise.

    2. A former neighbour, plus my old headmaster, were both involved in the Arctic Convoys. Recognition came very late; posthumously in the case of the former. The latter hung on to 103, and received his just deserts. Heroes, both.

  84. One minute you’re the best thing since Tony Blair, tipped as the new prime minister in waiting,
    It just goes to show, you just never know whats over the horizon

    https://scontent.flhr10-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/418911596_868804308584146_4916833456516484619_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_s960x960&_nc_cat=105&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=3635dc&_nc_ohc=zXrM_lBMntYAX_OHl71&_nc_oc=AQm4zMQT0Q7wG0sYb5twtAtP3asKbihwcYA6rSd3LHauCwaGPfaVZ9aEQxiANrvCblZaC7S8q-xnv9JdqJj6i8pv&_nc_ht=scontent.flhr10-1.fna&oh=00_AfCnQwiF-rqsEsX-5P9_ZJcDgEShqOHqZwIPkOR2XNbGRQ&oe=65A40577

      1. Oh I don’t know. He had a nice beer and a curry up in Darlington, when no one was supposed to travel.

        1. Starmer’s such a dirtbag, if there were even a scrap of integrity in politics and the media he would not still be being touted as the next Prime Minister!

  85. It’s just comedy at this point…

    Wayne The Covid Marshal 🦺
    @CovidMarshall
    I know you’re all eagerly waiting to find out whats going to definitely kill you today after successfully surviving the killer potatoes. Well i can confirm today you will be dealing with a vomiting virus from the 1700’s! Its been waiting over 300 yrs patiently to kill you.🦺🤡

    https://twitter.com/CovidMarshall/status/1745033852437827817

  86. Here’s one for you. In the age where green rules and global warming is the panic of choice, I had a discussion with a lady about offshore wind power generation. It seems, that the conversion of AC to DC for offshore wind (very common) actually liberates more kW as heat than kW as electrical energy… and that heat is released into the sea!
    Glowbawl warming, anyone?

    5. This seems entirely plausible, Paul. My electrical knowledge is sufficient to competently do domestic stuff, and thats about it. At the last place (owned by the Parish), I inserted several sockets into the ring main (without asking). A then (and now current) Churchwarden was horrified, and organised a Periodic Inspection, obviously hoping to prove that I’d destroyed their property. The report showed that someone had added sockets in a former coal store, which I was now using as a home for the fridge/freezer, washing machine and dryer. In the process, they had ‘broken’ the ring main, which meant that, potentially (no pun intended) I could be simultaneously running all of the above – plus a dishwasher, kettle and toaster, on a radial 2.5 mm circuit.

      My addition passed with flying colours, and I felt somewhat vindicated…

      Back to the topic, though. Every AC charger/transformer I possess, gives off a little heat in use. It’s also true of my bathroom shaver socket, which at least has the decency to hum, and slightly warm the house, in return for the negligible power it consumes while not actually charging my toothbrush. And that’s merely AC to AC. DC to AC is inevitably a whole different ball game.

      1. I’m on the offshore wind project, so its more than a possibility.
        Combat global warming by heating the sea… Couldn’t make it up!

    1. Afraid I keep posting this, but it absolutely speaks to me:

      When the Nazis came for the communists,
      I remained silent;
      I was not a communist.

      When they locked up the social democrats,
      I remained silent;
      I was not a social democrat.

      When they came for the trade unionists,
      I did not speak out;
      I was not a trade unionist.

      When they came for the Jews,
      I remained silent;
      I was not a Jew.

      When they came for me,
      there was no one left to speak out.


      Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
      habe ich geschwiegen;
      Ich war ja kein Kommunist.

      Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
      habe ich geschwiegen;
      Ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

      Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
      habe ich nicht protestiert;
      Ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

      Als sie die Juden holten,
      habe ich geschwiegen;
      Ich war ja kein Jude.

      Als sie mich holten,
      gab es keinen mehr,
      der protestieren konnte.[1]

      Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller
      (14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a Protestant pastor and social activist.

      1. If Israel had adopted the historic approach of 99% of combatants, and I include Britain and most of the so called civilised world here, they would have done to Gaza what Rome did to Carthage.
        And I’m afraid to say that I think it would have been the quickest and easiest approach to the Muslim maniacs who inhabit the Gaza strip.

        1. I wonder where some of the $$$ are going in this conflict – Wall Street financed both sides in WWII and the Bolsheviks in the Russian 1917 Revolutions. Unfortunately it is not a secret to which people the Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Soros belong. The whole position is far more complex than is realised.

          4. Yes I got that wrong, but that doesn’t mean simple, just that I made a mistake.

            Edit – see my post above, I had been looking at who had been funding what during the various conflicts and made the mistake of including the Rockefellers in the J bracket. I have no problem admitting my mistakes.

          5. It’s a mistake that far, far too many people make.
            And on that matter, Soros may be Jewish by heritage, but he’s less of a Jew than Jesus.
            Soros is whatever the Jewish equivalent of an apostate might be.

          8. He certainly was when he was sniffing out and turning over Jews during WWII. It’s one thing not to be practising, it’s another to betray Jews.

            Who said Jesus wasn’t a Jew?

          9. Much as I dislike Soros the main evidence suggests he was warning them.
            Jesus was a Jew, Soros is less of a Jew than Jesus. As I read my bible there is no evidence Jesus spoke otherwise.

          10. Rockefellers were historically Christian. And yes, they did have a finger in both pies – see the work of Prof. Anthony C Sutton in his “Wall Street Trilogy” which can be downloaded as free.pdf files.

            Standard Oil of New Jersey had a tie-up with I G Farben and helped Germany in its production of oil from coal while it conceded to IGF the monopoly of synthetic rubber which hindered the US war effort. It’s directors stood accused of treason in 1944, I think.

            There is worse. American company ITT owned a 29% stake in Focke-Wulf GMBH which was turning out the FW190 fighters being used to shoot down American airmen in their B17 Fortresses.

          11. Yes – I don’t quite know why I put the Rockefellas in with that – I had been looking at banking stuff in another context and didn’t think.

    2. Afraid I keep posting this, but it absolutely speaks to me:

      When the Nazis came for the communists,
      I remained silent;
      I was not a communist.

      When they locked up the social democrats,
      I remained silent;
      I was not a social democrat.

      When they came for the trade unionists,
      I did not speak out;
      I was not a trade unionist.

      When they came for the Jews,
      I remained silent;
      I was not a Jew.

      When they came for me,
      there was no one left to speak out.


      Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
      habe ich geschwiegen;
      Ich war ja kein Kommunist.

      Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
      habe ich geschwiegen;
      Ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

      Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
      habe ich nicht protestiert;
      Ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

      Als sie die Juden holten,
      habe ich geschwiegen;
      Ich war ja kein Jude.

      Als sie mich holten,
      gab es keinen mehr,
      der protestieren konnte.[1]

      Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller
      (14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a Protestant pastor and social activist.

  88. It would appear that as I don’t want to sleep with a woman who has a penis, I am transphobic.
    I can live with this.

    1. If I was forced to do so, I would bite it off and then spit it down the tranny’s throat.
      Thank you Shawshank Redemption.

    3. Lotsa women have penises.( put inside them)!!!!!

      Where would children comefrom, otherwis

  90. “For Mohammed, who no longer wants to carry the shame, he would like the Post Office to put a poster in every branch where a sub-postmaster or sub-postmistress has been wrongfully convicted, declaring their innocence – and saying they’re sorry.”

  91. Evening, all. Went to the BCP service this morning (the rectorette is away – again). It was said meaningfully and the poetry of the language was uplifting. Even one of the regulars commented on the good delivery (the rectorette rushes and gabbles). Have almost completed putting the Christmas decorations away. The trees are down, but the baubles are everywhere, awaiting being put in boxes and stored until next year.

  92. Following my earlier decision to open an “X formerly Twitter” account I’ve just spent a happy hour or so finding lots of people to follow. I now expect a clogged email inbox! Am I right?

      1. You’ve got to find out where people are going before you can hope to lead them, haven’t you? Just looking for info. sources.

    3. I opened an “X, formerly known as Twitter’ account in that platform’s infancy. Took one look and decided to avoid it. It’s the work of the Devil. That said, I’ve found that, when faced with no response from large corporations, a tweet will usually elicit a response from its Social Media team.

    4. You can click the 3 dots in the top right hand corner of tweets that appear in your feed with “not interested in this post”

      but be aware that every interaction you have with Twitt, even how long you spend reading individual posts when scrolling down, is logged by them and used to build a profile of you
      I sometimes mess with them by upvoting posts and then clicking “not interested in this post”, or following stuff I have no particular interest in, just to confuse their data collection

  93. Thought for the day.
    No more knighthoods, peerages, or any other honours to be awarded unless a holder has died or been stripped of the honour.
    Let’s start by stripping Davey of his knighthood and giving it to Bates.

      2. I think he’s been brilliant and he has proved his point very well and very strongly.
        If he accepted any thing like, the mainly creeps in our country do. It would serious undermine his marvellous achievements. And do him and his colleagues no particular favours at all.

    2. It’s worse than in Lloyd George’s time. Didn’t he invent the MBE/OBE/CBE shenaningans?

    2. I may have mentioned previously that our Rector is a former Army chaplain. He spent time in Helmand. Subsequently was part-time chaplain at Headley Court. He came to the Parish within weeks of my (“extreme chiropody”) and rehabilitation. Certain members of the team were working on getting rid of me, since ‘Geoff couldn’t possibly be our Organist without legs.’ Moves to get rid of me were swiftly quashed. Admittedly, my use of the organ pedals is somewhat limited, but I still manage to accompany hymns, and play manuals-only voluntaries. But the Rector is arguably the most experienced member of the Anglican clergy, so far as amputees are concerned.

      He also has tales to tell. And his impression of one Henry Wales leaves much to be desired. An entitled, bullying pr1ck, would accurately describe the ginger cnut,.

    3. Scotland is abandoning children to trans extremists

      Encouraging the young to think they should change gender is surely itself a form of conversion therapy

      JULIE BINDEL • 10 January 2024 • 8:00pm

      Imagine this: not very far in the future, an 11-year-old boy comes home and says he’s a girl. He dresses to go out with friends wearing a padded bra and micro-skirt, along with a face full of make-up. When his parents tell him he can’t go out looking like that, he says it’s his way of expressing his gender identity and threatens to call the police.

      In a sane country nothing more would happen, beyond perhaps a brief temper tantrum. If the boy is in Scotland, however, under new proposals that have a real chance of being enacted, the story could one day end quite differently.

      There, the police take the call seriously. When they arrive at the house, the parents are arrested, and threatened with up to seven years in jail for refusing to affirm their child’s gender identity.

      It sounds absurd, but the Scottish National Party appears to be working hard to make this reality. The party has proposed a new law that could criminalise parents for refusing to fully validate their child as transgender.

      Among the actions that could be criminalised are preventing someone from “dressing in a way that reflects their sexual orientation or gender identity”, even if that decision were to be taken by a parent acting to protect their child from gender ideologues.

      This abominable law is being proposed in the name of stopping “conversion therapy”, though it is nothing of the kind. I should know the difference. In 2014, while researching a book on lesbian and gay culture, I went undercover to a Christian conversion therapist in the US.

      The ensuing week of being told that I was broken, evil, and unlovable was, despite me having adopted a fake persona, horrific. A loving parent, worried about the influence of gender ideology and concerned for the wellbeing of their child is a very different matter.

      After all, they have good reasons to be concerned. Over the past decade, the number of children claiming to be transgender or non-binary has rocketed, as has the number accessing gender clinics.

      The facts are shocking. A high proportion of children attending gender clinics have some form of autism; puberty blockers almost always lead a young person on to irreversible cross-sex hormones once they reach the age of 18, and the serious mental-health issues and trauma that the child may well be experiencing are often overlooked in favour of simply validating (labelling) them as transgender.

      The interim Cass Review into the NHS Gender Identity Development Service was very clear that there is both a distinct lack of evidence about the effects of puberty-interrupting drugs on children and a great deal of confusion as to their purpose. Parents have not just the right, but a duty, to prevent their children from becoming immersed in a dangerous fiction that will affect them for the rest of their lives.

      The Scottish law is targeted at the wrong group. It is not parents who are practicing conversion therapy, and it is not parents who should be penalised.

      It is not conversion therapy to speak the truth to your children and say that there is no such thing as being trapped in the wrong body. Adults have a duty of care to the young, and sometimes that means stopping them from doing something they are desperate to do because we know the harm it will cause them.

      Instead, “conversion therapy” better describes the actions of those who tell children that identifying as the opposite sex will solve their problems, and who proceed to push them down medicalised pathways, despite the growing mountain of evidence showing the true costs of the approach.

      It is a parent’s job to do what is best for their child and shield them from harm. This includes protecting them from the gender industry, which is busy pumping out propaganda – not only from activists and impressionable young people on social media, but from private gender clinicians advertising their services on social media.

      In my view, some of these clinicians – who ignored the many whistleblowers (both within the Tavistock and elsewhere) that laid bare the terrible consequences for children of being “affirmed” in this way, who have continued to treat children with puberty blockers, and who sent them on a pathway to “changing sex” – should be under investigation.

      Indeed, if the SNP’s law were to be fairly and evenly applied, then they very likely would be.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/10/scotland-is-abandoning-children-to-trans-extremists/

  97. The student loan racket is slowly bankrupting Britain

    Our university system is a scandalous mess that only works for overpaid vice-chancellors

    MATTHEW LYNN • 9 January 2024 • 2:30pm

    There are lots of different criticisms that are made of lending out money. It is unfair. The interest rates can be punitive. And it adds little value to a productive economy. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be; for a loan doth often lose both itself and friend,” as Shakespeare wisely observed in a memorable line from Hamlet.

    Still, traditionally it did at least have one thing going for it. It turned a profit. And yet, the UK’s student loan system no longer meets even that basic criteria. According to an extraordinary report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) this week, student loans will lose money even if they are repaid in full. The university system has turned into a racket that works for no one apart from a few overpaid vice-chancellors – and it is steadily bankrupting the country.

    It takes quite some skill to lose money on something that should be as straightforward as a student loan. You give an 18-year old some cash for their degree, and when they are earning lots of money as a doctor, banker or lawyer, they pay you back with some interest on top.

    Simple right? Well, not as it turns out when the Government is at the tiller. According to the IFS, the Government is not just expected to lose money on all the loans that are never repaid, but may even do so when they do get the money back.

    The reason? The cost of government borrowing has in recent years been lower than the interest rates it expected to charge on student loans. As the IFS points out, however, that has now changed. The yields on gilts are now higher than expected retail price index inflation (the measure used to determine interest on new student loans). By remorseless financial logic, the British state can therefore expect to lose money on every loan.

    Those who designed this toxic set-up should have seen this coming. But the student loan system was essentially based on two assumptions, both of which have turned out to be completely wrong.

    It assumed that the near zero interest rates of the 2010s would last forever, meaning that government borrowing was essentially free, so it would be easy to make money on the loans. Any half-competent banker would have dismissed that assumption in an instant, but it seems it never occurred to the Rolls-Royce minds at the Treasury that rates might go up one day.

    Even worse, it assumed that all of the 1.7 million people studying for an undergraduate degree would get a sufficiently well-paid job, and that all that extra training would boost the long-term growth rate of the economy. Unfortunately that didn’t turn out to be right, either.

    We have already had plenty of reports warning about the off-balance sheet costs of student financing, based on the potential default rate – although it takes many years before we know if someone will earn enough to repay their loan, or even stay in the country (given that it is extraordinarily hard to collect the debt when a student emigrates). But now the Government is expected to lose money even if the debt is repaid.

    The system is a sorry mess that works for no one. It doesn’t benefit a great many students, who are not really encouraged to determine whether a degree offers value for money or not, or whether they might be better off starting their career at 18. It doesn’t work for the huge number of taxpayers who don’t go to university, but will still end up paying higher taxes to subsidise the studies of those that do.

    In the short-term, perhaps it worked for the universities, which massively expanded, and started paying vast salaries to an incompetent administrative class that got rich off the system. But even they have now been lumbered with too many staff, too many buildings†, offering courses that have no real purpose, and are entirely reliant on government subsidies to stay afloat. It is a catastrophe.

    The only solution is a total redesign of the whole system, with fewer universities, of higher quality, and with not nearly so many students. But so far there is no sign that any of our political leaders are brave enough to offer a solution as radical as that. Instead, they sit back and do nothing as another calamity engulfs the public finances.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/09/the-student-loan-racket-is-slowly-bankrupting-britain/

    † Including huge numbers of new student flats that will not be suitable for ordinary letting without significant and expensive modification.

    1. Some time ago I read that there were thousands of students after they had finished their course. Who Left the UK and had never finished paying off their loans.
      Typical of our mindless and pathetic nation.

      1. The student loan is repaid, if ever, through the tax system. Leave the country, and you are free from HMRC.. EU students had to be given loans on the same terms as British students. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what happened next…

        1. Civilised countries give interest free loans to their indigenous students and expect them to be repaid and give incentives for this to happen.

          When the Bank of England’s base rate was ½% students were being charged over 6% in interest and as a result, with the interest compounding, many students will spend virtually their whole working lives in debt with degrees which in many case are useless.

          What an incentive for people to give up and not give a damn as the country sinks further and further into the abyss!

          The UK is no longer a civilised country.

          1. I know you have an interest in this topic, but I still have skin in the game! More exactly, a step daughter in the second year. The whole system is a crock, as they say..

      2. Because I was made redundant started Higher Education before an important rule change, the residue of my Student Loans, still totalling several thousand pounds, were wiped out when I reached 60.

  99. Bed time for me coming up very soon. So I’ll now wish all my chums a very Good Night. Sleep well and see you all tomorrow.

  100. It gets worse much worse:

    DT Headline:

    “Post Office paid out bonuses for every postmaster convicted under Horizon scandal
    Cash incentive handed to investigators”

      1. Do not forgot the cash incentives offered to the nhs for jabs given, ‘cases’ recorded and deaths achieved.

    2. ..and although Paula Vennells has handed back her CB, she hasn’t handed back any of her bonuses

      calculated on her successful prosecution of sub postmasters.

      Now there’s a surprise !!

  101. Middle England has been betrayed by Britain’s feckless new establishment

    Ordinary, hardworking people no longer expect to be treated fairly by a venal new establishment class

    ALLISTER HEATH • 10 January 2024 • 6:55pm

    The Post Office scandal is a parable of modern Britain, a broken society where all too often the best people are taken advantage of by the worst, aided and abetted by a morally bankrupt officialdom. Shoplifters, car thieves, failed asylum seekers and even preachers of hate are frequently let off, but respectable middle-class families are rarely given the benefit of the doubt. The London-based establishment was uninterested in Horizon, the greatest miscarriage of justice of modern times, because its victims were the “wrong” kind of people, a mostly suburban social class they could not relate to, persecuted by paid-up members of our new elite.

    The hundreds of sub-postmasters who were incorrectly convicted of theft and false accounting were self-employed entrepreneurs, white or from an immigrant background, determined to better themselves. They were the lynchpin of Middle England, the toilers who make our high streets tick, the purveyors of services to pensioners, the unsung heroes that are in such short supply in modern Britain. In a sane country, these would be the last people anyone would suspect of criminality; and yet in our warped, morally inverted world, dominated by a “machine knows best” mindset, they were fair game.

    They weren’t wrongly signing on for incapacity benefits, or stealing from shops, or chanting violent slogans, so they weren’t protected by the politically correct double-standards that have turned Britain into an increasingly unfair society. Yet what were the statistical odds that – suddenly – hundreds of such overwhelmingly law-abiding people would turn into criminals, just after a new, ultra-complex IT system was put in place? Why did so few people connect the dots, and realise that something else appeared to be at play?

    The postmasters’ bad luck is that they, the best of Britain, were persecuted by the worst of Britain: the overpromoted corporate-bureaucratic class, the useless apparatchiks of Britain’s Kafkaesque bureaucracies, the unaccountable arms-length bodies, the out-of-control lawyers, the civil servants and the subsidy-hungry corporations. The most disgusting element of this atrocious tale is that while the sub-postmasters were ruined – and in some cases even took their own lives – many of those responsible for their destruction walked away with honours, money, prestige and good jobs. It is this – the rewards not just for failure but for sabotaging others’ lives – that angers the public. They can’t believe nobody has yet been properly punished.

    The scandal exposes the deficiencies of all our institutions. Shockingly, the dreadful Crown Prosecution Service, which does too little to fight real crime, launched prosecutions in several cases, some when Sir Keir Starmer was in charge. But more than 700 cases were brought by the Post Office itself in private prosecutions, in a tragic abuse of an ancient legal practice that used to help uphold English liberty. No large organisation must ever again be allowed to wield such power unchecked. The judges, ordinarily so proud of their independence, are now being overruled in one fell swoop by an act of Parliament. For them and the idiot lawyers responsible, this is a day of shame.

    The Post Office is fully state-owned but is an independent body, a quango run by a well-paid board. Captured by its own management, accountable in practice to nobody – not voters, not shareholders and not politicians – guilty of calamitous failings, suffering from absurd technical deficiencies, it epitomises what happens when the state pretends to be a private company: we get the worst of all worlds, overpaid, mercenary mediocrities with an all-consuming sense of entitlement. Quangos should be abolished, run directly by ministers and government departments, or privatised.

    The scandal is yet another indictment of bureaucrats’ inability to engage in any kind of sensible procurement, as we saw with HS2, during Covid, other failed IT mega-projects and with the MoD. Billions are wasted and we end up with poor, or even unusable systems or kit in return for an ever larger national debt.

    It is hard to believe but the damage wreaked by Horizon could have been even orders of magnitude greater: the original private finance initiative (PFI) contract awarded by John Major’s government to Britain’s ICL (later bought by Japan’s Fujitsu) was not merely to computerise post offices but also to automate the system for paying DSS benefits to 28 million claimants, supposedly to stamp out fraud. This second project was killed off, but why was the Post Office element allowed to go ahead?

    Our bureaucrats are exceptionally bad at working with the private sector, are often outwitted, inevitably overpay and choose the wrong contractors. The merry-go-round between Whitehall, regulators and Westminster and many of the big global firms is hardly helpful. The civil servants responsible for incompetent decisions are frequently rewarded with a generous pension, a second career and endless gongs. The whole Northcote-Trevelyan model is broken. Justice will only be done if many more people are forced to give up their honours. In time, the bureaucracy needs to be utterly reformed along Singapore or New Zealand lines. [Which is…?]

    Failed outsourcers or consultants are rarely meaningfully penalised, either. How on earth can it be that Fujitsu has been awarded a further £4.9 billion in state contracts since the December 2019 High Court ruling that its systems “weren’t remotely robust”? Is the entire British establishment signed up to the idea that failure must be rewarded, and then rewarded again? What a pathetic, rapacious and amoral country we live in – and no, this isn’t real capitalism but a sorry corporatist ersatz.

    The buck ultimately stops with the politicians. Some did cover themselves in glory, but most failed to use their great power for the common good. As with the expenses scandal, lockdown and many of the other great blunders of recent decades, this was a cross-party disaster reeking of cowardice, groupthink and excess deference to authority. Sir Ed Davey failed especially catastrophically and must resign as Lib Dem leader. Sir Vince Cable, another overrated mediocrity, proved useless. Sir Keir has serious questions to answer. Why did neither Labour nor the coalition kill off Horizon? Why did it take the Tories so long to act?

    Ordinary people no longer expect to be treated fairly by officialdom in Britain in 2024: no wonder they are in such a revolutionary mood.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/10/post-office-scandal-expose-elite-contempt-for-middle-englan/

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