Thursday 12 September: Labour owes it to patients to tackle the underlying causes of NHS failure

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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449 thoughts on “Thursday 12 September: Labour owes it to patients to tackle the underlying causes of NHS failure”

      1. Morning OLT. I never post Good Morning. I studiously avoid it. It saves me having to justify it and prevents me making Gaffes. It also means that I don’t have to think up something new every day.

  3. Good morrow, Gentlefolk. Today’s (recycled) story

    Avocados

    A wife asks her husband, "Could you please go shopping for me and buy one carton of milk and if they have avocados, get 6.

    A short time later the husband comes back with 6 cartons of milk. The wife asks him, "Why did you buy 6 cartons of milk?"

    He replied
    "They had avocados."

    If you're a woman, I'm sure you're going back to read it again! Men will get it the first time.
    My work is done here.

  5. Starmer set to target millions more pensioners by scrapping council tax discount. 12 September 2024.

    Four million pensioners living alone face a fresh tax raid after Labour scrapped the winter fuel allowance, Sir Keir Starmer has hinted.

    The Prime Minister and Downing Street officials on Wednesday refused to rule out scrapping a council tax break claimed by millions of one-person households.

    I’m pretty sure that this is coming. It fits the pattern. For whatever reason the Starmer Regime regards pensioners as feather bedded scroungers who need to be taken down. Bus passes are also on the list. Hard times are coming my friends.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/11/starmer-tax-scrap-millions-pensioners-single-person-discoun/

    1. Yo Minty

      This could cost hmg a fortune.

      Will they not have to up the money they pay to the invaders, to cover the increase in council tax, in the houses that they are given

    3. Starmer will only be remebered for his attack on old people. i knew from his first name he would be a wealthy brainwashed marxist.

    4. It won't only hit pensioners, though. I know of at least two non-pensioners who live alone, neither of whom qualifies for any benefits although they aren't well heeled.

  6. Morning, all Y'all.
    Sunny, but chilly & heavy dew. "Warm" promised for the day – that's about +13C.

    2. Its like the person that fell asleep on the synagogue steps and woke up with a heavy dew on.

      1. The Grimes

        Tata Steel to lose 2,800 jobs despite £500m government support

        The steelworks in south Wales will close its blast furnaces, with about 2,500 job losses likely in the next year

        The government will provide £500 million of support to the Tata steelworks in south Wales, but about 2,800 jobs are still expected to be lost. Those made redundant at the
        Port Talbot site will receive better terms under an “improved” deal between Tata and the government,…

        Grauniad

        Labour’s plan for steel is a work in progress. Port Talbot was almost the easy part
        Nils Pratley

        The next crisis may be in Scunthorpe, where the owner of British Steel is reportedly threatening to close its blast furnaces

        Blow for British steel industry as 2,500 jobs go at Port Talbot
        Port Talbot job losses: what’s next for British steel production?
        Wed 11 Sep 2024 18.01 BST

        It was “a bad deal” for workers, taxpayers and the steel industry, insisted Jonathan Reynolds when he was in opposition at the start of the year. You can see what the business secretary, as he is now, meant: £500m of state aid for Tata Steel at Port Talbot to build an electric arc furnace to produce greener steel did not obviously scream “bargain” when the company would simultaneously be shedding 2,500 jobs.

        The question, though, was whether it was the best deal that could be done in tough circumstances. Tata said it was losing £1m a day, seemed determined to close both old-style blast furnaces on the site, and held a strong hand in the negotiations. The UK still needs a steel industry in the age of decarbonisation and the hard reality is that no company is ever likely to invest in large-scale cleaner technology without a heavy helping of public money.

        https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2024/sep/11/labours-plan-for-steel-is-a-work-in-progress-port-talbot-was-almost-the-easy-part

        Lying so-and-so's

    3. Isn't it high time that the insane megalomaniac Miliband was sectioned and locked up before he does any more damage?

      (Sectioned means : having been committed compulsorily to a psychiatric hospital in accordance with a section of a mental health act.
      "a sectioned patient has to gain permission before leaving")

  9. Now the new page is here after Geoff's well deserved lie in, Good Morning all.
    A dry, bright start with thin scattered cloud and a bloody chilly tad under 3½°C on the Yard Thermometer!
    Winter draws on as they say.

    1. "How very sensible of you, my dear" (Frankie Howard to Joan Sims in Carry On Up The Jungle). (Good morning, BoB, btw.)

      1. And just in time for our week in south Devon. What to pack, though? Forecasts can be treacherous.

      1. From a seaside village in Valencia

        Wind Warning State Meteorological Agency 24°C
        Thursday 09:37 Mostly cloudy
        High 29°C

  10. Lammy condemns Russian ‘imperialism’. 11 September 2024

    David Lammy has condemned Russia’s “imperialism and fascism”, describing Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine as part of a “very old and evil story”.

    He hailed his visit alongside Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, as an “important and historic visit” that showed the iron-clad support among Ukraine’s allies.

    He also unveiled that the UK would provide £400 million in humanitarian support to Kyiv this year, along with “hundreds of additional air defences and tens of thousands of artillery shells”.

    Money to burn. Just not here. Just not on the British people.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/11/ukraine-russia-war-latest-news26/

  11. Lammy condemns Russian ‘imperialism’. 11 September 2024

    David Lammy has condemned Russia’s “imperialism and fascism”, describing Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine as part of a “very old and evil story”.

    He hailed his visit alongside Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, as an “important and historic visit” that showed the iron-clad support among Ukraine’s allies.

    He also unveiled that the UK would provide £400 million in humanitarian support to Kyiv this year, along with “hundreds of additional air defences and tens of thousands of artillery shells”.

    Money to burn. Just not here. Just not on the British people.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/11/ukraine-russia-war-latest-news26/

  13. Cur Starmer is living up to his name

    : a medium-sized hunting and working dog with a short coat that was developed in the southern U.S. and is sometimes considered to comprise one or more breeds. 2. : a surly or cowardly fellow.

  14. Cur Starmer is living up to his name

    : a medium-sized hunting and working dog with a short coat that was developed in the southern U.S. and is sometimes considered to comprise one or more breeds. 2. : a surly or cowardly fellow.

  15. Cur Starmer is living up to his name

    : a medium-sized hunting and working dog with a short coat that was developed in the southern U.S. and is sometimes considered to comprise one or more breeds. 2. : a surly or cowardly fellow.

  17. Good morning all,

    Another bright cold start at McPhee Towers, wind still North-West, 7℃ going up to 13℃, light rain showers this afternoon. However, they forecast the same yesterday afternoon and we had extremely heavy showers and the Mother of All Hailstorms – twice.

    Rather than get too heavy too early here's something from a few years back to cheer us all up: Fourteen and a half minutes of Cliff and the Shadows showing why they were simply the best.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSqQc8f-D4k

  18. Good morning, chums. Thanks, Geoff, for today's NoTTLe page. Alas, I didn't get Wordle today.

    Wordle 1,181 X/6

    🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
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    ⬜🟩🟩🟨🟩
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  21. Headline

    Labour owes it to patients to tackle the underlying causes of NHS failure

    May I fiddle

    Labour owes it to the vast majority of the public, from whom NHS funding comes from general taxation and National Insurance contributions, to tackle the underlying causes of NHS failure

    Fixed

    1. If, and it is a massive if, they manage to reform the NHS, then that would be the only worthwhile thing done by this vicious, spiteful, dictatorial, envy ridden socialist rag bag of a government.
      ps. Good morning all, very cold, wet but clearing start.

        1. That is why it is a massive if. Labour, as always are a force for disaster.
          Unintelligent and evil.

    2. The problem we have is, labour seems to think that they know everything about anything but have never really done any homework or thought anything through.

    1. And so it starts courtesy of Starmer, once leader of the CPS, the Criminal Protection Society.

  24. I’m beginning to see how this Labour Government will fall apart

    Starmer and Reeves are incompetently pushing fake, sado-austerity that appeals to no voter group

    Allister Heath
    11 September 2024 • 7:11pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/09/11/TELEMMGLPICT000387090652_17260782038100_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqVKOd1ILXaurCHi1o16wQubeHsZFrEmHQDi0eQN40zhg.jpeg?imwidth=680

    Like the gold-headed colossus of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, Sir Keir Starmer is a giant with feet of clay. His gargantuan parliamentary majority was obtained on a third of the vote with a depressed turnout, and he is already engendering much buyers’ remorse. He has squandered his honeymoon, and is proving so inept at politics that, a mere two months after his historic triumph, there is now reason to doubt that he will last more than one term in office.

    His lacklustre communication skills mean that he is failing to persuade his own side, let alone anybody else; he sounds too Left-wing to the Right, and too Right-wing to the Left. A grey, pseudo-managerialist figure, an accidental prime minister in the mould of Theresa May, there is no trap Starmer doesn’t plunge into headfirst. Rather than providing inspirational, optimistic leadership, he has crushed spirits with his apocalyptic assessment of the state of Britain and cartoonish negativity.

    His stoking of speculation about tax increases at the Budget, a clumsy attempt at managing expectations, has only raised fears that Labour has reverted to the most atavistic socialism. He claims to be taking “difficult but necessary decisions”, but many are questioning whether the nasties may in fact be optional. No wonder his approval ratings are plunging.

    Rachel Reeves, his Chancellor, has allowed herself to be defined by the means-testing of pensioner winter fuel payments, an incendiary policy foisted on her by a Treasury she made the error of trusting. Reeves appeared unprepared for the resulting furore, reminiscent of the omnishambles, “pasty tax” budget of 2012, unable even to make the case that millionaire pensioners do not need handouts.

    To be clear: I support ditching the universal winter fuel payment. But it should be done for the right reasons – to save money, not to buy off the unions – with the right safeguards for the needy, and Labour shouldn’t have claimed there were “no plans” to scrap it.

    There is a more sophisticated, fiscally powerful alternative: fold the winter fuel payment into the state pension, then peg this new, enhanced pension to the growth in median wages, ditching the triple lock and explaining that, as a matter of fairness, workers and pensioners would see their incomes grow in lockstep in perpetuity. This should be accompanied by measures to increase retirement savings.

    Instead, we get a form of fake sado-austerity, whereby Labour pretends that hurting the groups it hates is necessary to protect the public finances. The Government has swallowed its own propaganda, convincing itself that parents who educate their children privately are all proto-oligarchs who can easily afford an extra 20 per cent in VAT and the removal of business rates relief. In reality, hundreds of thousands of families that scrimp and save will never forgive Starmer for singling them out for such a revolting treatment.

    Even more remarkably, Labour has failed to pin the blame for the early release of prisoners onto the Tories: in a shocking set of images, voters have seen ex-inmates thanking Starmer for setting them free, pledging to vote Labour, cracking open champagne bottles and even being picked up by a Lamborghini. If Starmer really cared, why not push through emergency legislation designating a dozen sites for new prisons, overriding all planning and other objections? Clearly, his priorities are elsewhere.

    Labour portrayed itself as a government of “sensibles”, a team of uber-competent, boring technocrats who would govern slightly to the Left of the Tories. They have turned out to be neither experts, nor truly in control, nor politically moderate, nor especially sensible. They have few solutions to Britain’s pathologies, and their agenda is riddled with contradictions.

    Reeves claims to believe in growth, and rightly wants to boost housebuilding, but her plans to tax capital, to hammer investors, to bolster marginal tax rates, to eradicate non-doms, and to tie business up in red tape will cancel out any good from her planning reforms.

    Equally confusingly, Reeves espouses faux-austerity, claiming she was elected “first and foremost” to sort out the public finances. That is nonsense: nobody voted Labour to balance the books, and the public finances she inherited were in a tolerable state. She is pretending to be a fiscal conservative, but wants to take spending and taxation to even higher record levels of GDP. Her new taxes, many of which have yet to be announced, are better described as sadism dressed up as austerity and class warfare camouflaged as prudence.

    Instead of pretending that hitting private schools is the only way to raise funds for state schools, or scrapping winter fuel payments is necessary to prevent a run on the pound, the Government should be more honest about its motivations. These seemingly include taking revenge on older voters, many of whom supported Brexit, the Tories and Reform; ensuring that as many private schools as possible shut; and, rather than reforming the NHS or welfare, pouring billions into our supposedly “under-invested” state.

    Labour’s agenda is unravelling in other ways. Germany has announced tighter border controls; France’s new prime minister, Michel Barnier, has previously called for an extended period of zero net immigration. More migrants might head to Britain instead; Labour’s lack of any kind of plan or desire to reduce immigration is unsustainable. Europe’s Right-wards shift, a product of its existential failure on growth, innovation, and migration, has dashed any real hope of Labour ever rejoining the EU. When the penny finally drops, this will deal the British Left a profound psychological blow.

    A Trump victory, still possible despite his woeful performance at the debate, would be an even greater disaster for Starmer. Trump would torpedo net zero and global tax harmonisation. He would force greater defence spending, derailing Reeves’ sums, and punish – or even sanction – Britain for our despicably anti-Israel policies. He would unleash Wall Street, sucking talent and capital from the City of London.

    If the Tories elect the right leader, there is now a plausible scenario under which Labour slumps – sooner rather than later – to second place in the polls. Starmer’s majority is gigantic, enough to withstand almost any rebellion. But the speed at which his Government is falling from grace means that politics could enter its next period of volatility more quickly than anybody expected.

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

    David Walker
    12 hrs ago
    'To be clear: I support ditching the universal winter fuel payment.'
    And I disagree with you. I retired years ago and ever since then I have expected, and received, a Winter Fuel Allowance. It wasn't unexpected, it wasn't a bonus, it was what I thought I was entitled to.
    But now Labour have decided I deserve a £300 a year pay cut. And I am furious. I worked full time for 46 years, I paid all my taxes, was never a burden on the state, but now, because I am not in a trade union that subsidises these grubby little chancers, I am going to get a pay cut?!
    This is not a country I like any more.

    Professor Gaga
    12 hrs ago
    The first two groups to be attacked by the Labour government are children at successful private schools and pensioners.
    Next up – the wealth creators, entrepreneurs and business owners.
    Speaks volumes about the people who are now running the Labour Party.

    Charles Eames
    12 hrs ago
    In China, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) announced the launch of its enormous Marjan oil and gas offshore collection and transportation platform, one of the world’s largest offshore facilities – quite likely, as CNOOC claims, the largest ever built. CNOOC says that, once installed, the Marjan facility will be capable of gathering and transporting 24 million tonnes (over 171 million barrels) of oil and 7.4 billion cubic meters (2.61 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas annually.
    Chevron, recently announced it had achieved first production from its Anchor project in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. In a release, the company notes that Anchor production “marks the successful delivery of high-pressure technology that is rated to safely operate at up to 20,000 psi”, adding that production comes at depths up to 34,000 feet below sea level, ranking Anchor among the deepest successful drilling and production efforts globally.
    The UK oil industry is worth £60 billionn a year in exports, employs more than 30,000 people directly and indirectly, and last year contributed around £5.2 billion in tax revenues.
    Why has Miliband deliberately chosen to destroy such a useful source of economic wellbeing which would in any rational world be regarded as almost beyond belief.

      1. I don’t think it’s that clever to be philosophy I think it’s Dogma and to prove it they’re all barking mad.

    3. By far, the biggest revenue raisers are Income Tax, NI, VAT and Corporation Tax. If the fiscal situation at the Treasury is as bad as we are told it it, and this is entirely plausible following the Great Fraud of 2008 that was never properly sorted out, a raft of false economies leading to huge expensive mitigation following catastrophies such as Post Office gross and criminal perversions of the course of justice over twenty years and counting, the wilful shortcuts on fire safety in tower blocks, the diversion of NHS money to corrupt PFI redevelopment contracts, the bankrupting of councils as social care and safeguarding legislation is piled onto them as they are denied the money to pay for them… I could go on and on with this litany.

      Then there is Covid – how can an economy not be in trouble if a nation has had over a year telling people to stop work and sit at home, whilst getting relief to do so. Then there is HS2 – why on earth was this white elephant not scrapped as soon as austerity became imperative. What was the 2010 General Election about?

      Therefore, I do not deny what Starmer and Reeves are saying about the state of Government finance. That was bleeding obvious long before they came to office.

      What I find so dreadful is the deceit that this can be put right without a major hike in the major taxes, mitigated by the intention that this should be temporary, and dropped again as soon as the books balance, and that we are not debasing the currency through huge handouts to global financiers in interest on borrowing.

      There are two arguments against putting up Income Tax. One is that no Government since 1992 has been electable after pledging to raise Income Tax. We have Chris Patten's "Double Whammy" campaign to thank for that.

      The other is the Laffer Curve, which I have banged on about for years. This is a holy cow to the Economic Right, a Law of Nature that cannot be challenged or modified. Yet, in the cynical and disgraceful neglect of thinking, highly paid advisers have failed to come up with a remedy, or even imaginative ways to get round this problem – that the moment you tax the socially mobile, the globalist shafter machine responsible for so much of this mess, they scarper with the loot, leaving those loyal to the nation and their communities and bound to where they live and work, with a bill they can no longer pay.

      Worst of all, the bill ends up on stealth taxation – a form of trickery that normal people won't notice until they wonder why everything is so much more expensive and difficult, and still it is well enough concealed for the public to be in ignorance, other than a general and impending sense of doom and trepidation. It is like a sparrow flying hard into a window – they don't know why it's happened, because what's hit them is invisible.

      Capital Gains Tax may be considered a victimless imposition, hitting only rich people, but it is a tax on inflation and hits those with savings trying to find somewhere to put money put by for their old age or for their families that does not get interest at 0.1% when inflation is running at 20 times that. I am selling a flat bought in 2011. The value of the pound has dropped by 40% since 2011. Yet CGT is deemed that the rise in its pound price reflects the rise in its actual value, since CGT has not been index-linked for a long time. I wouldn't mind so much if the amount I paid for it in 2011 was adjusted for inflation to give its equivalent value in 2024, and then taxed heavily on that gain. That is fair. If I profit from a property bubble, then the Treasury has every right to their cut.

      If Starmer and his zombie colleagues had any political virtue, they would have been open to the electorate about rises in all taxes, and not tie their party to stealth taxation.

        1. A pity you could not come up with something more intelligent, or at least say the truth about me, rather than making false presumptions.

          I have always campaigned against waste, and even won an award from the Post Office under their 'War of Waste' campaign in 1981. I pointed out that since unmarked bags defaulted to First Class collections, there was no point in labelling these.

          Years later, working in a mail order specialist bookshop, I saved the firm going under by recycling cardboard boxes from incoming parcels when posting books out to customers.

          Years later still, I collect and dispose of garden waste from the block of flats in Malvern, one of which I jointly own with my mother, rather than paying £60 for a skip every few weeks.

          This is perhaps why I take pride in paying for things for cash out of savings, rather than putting it on credit, as normal people do. If I cannot afford it, then I stagger on with what I've got and improvise.

    4. The same argument was echoed in the 1980s with the discussion on nuclear disarmament. I remember attending a meeting in Haslemere arranged by the Three Counties Peace Group (mostly local Methodists and Quakers with not a socialist in sight). Leading the debate was Bruce Kent, leader of CND. On the platform, and interestingly and virtuously not deplatformed, was local Tory MP Michael Mates, who was also Thatcher's Defence Procurement Minister at a time they were stuffing Greenham Common with a nuclear deterrent. That Mates was prepared to put his case at a CND rally improved dramatically my respect for the man.

      We all agreed, including Mates, that apocalyptic nuclear war was not a good thing, and we all wished the damned things could be uninvented. However, the genie was out of this bottle. The choice therefore was between unilateral or general nuclear disarmament by international treaty.

      The problem with unilateral disarmament is that it would leave us defenceless against attack or being held to ransom by those with fewer scruples, and there would be nothing we could do about it. This was the reason why we had to maintain a deterrance, under the spectre of Mutual Assured Destruction if anyone felt minded to try it on. The Soviets may have a lot of faults, but they did not have a death wish. World domination – fine, but no point in it if they could not live to enjoy it. In the end, a global non-proliferation treaty was slowly and painstakingly negotiated, although it is telling that Israel has never signed such a treaty. That breach in the dam may well come back to bite us.

      That was in the 1980s. Today's preoccupation is with global warming. Just as in the 1980s with the discussion about the Bomb, there are major disagreements between the camps, but that is perhaps politically healthy in a democracy. The consensus is over Net Zero, but the same question applies – should it be unilateral or global?

      Just as it was regarded as idiotic and counterproductive to give up nuclear deterrent while the Soviets' nuclear arsenal remained intact, is it not the same if we ruined our economy with Net Zero, when China is getting rich and powerful doing the opposite?

    5. Milliband is one of the many Trots who sincerely believe that the only way that Marxism can be

      introduced into this country is by an economic collapse.

    6. But it’s not all Moribund, is it. The Cons were just as bad. The 3 main parties and the Greens are utterly stupid in their pursuit of Net Zero and are condemning us to either starving or freezing, in the case of pensioners, and driving businesses out of business. What on Earth for? They are all unbelievably stupid and arrogant.
      ETA: Posted by vw by mistake on Alf’s iPad.

    7. How many "millionaire pensioners" are there? I agree with David Walker. I worked hard, paid taxes, contributed to my pension and as far as I am concerned, the WFA is me getting some of my own money back. Labour always taxes and wastes; it always has. It's in its DNA. I have been subjected to four Labour governments; Attlee, Wilson/Callaghan, Blair/Brown and now this lot. They have ALL been fiscally incompetent.

    8. How many "millionaire pensioners" are there? I agree with David Walker. I worked hard, paid taxes, contributed to my pension and as far as I am concerned, the WFA is me getting some of my own money back. Labour always taxes and wastes; it always has. It's in its DNA. I have been subjected to four Labour governments; Attlee, Wilson/Callaghan, Blair/Brown and now this lot. They have ALL been fiscally incompetent.

    1. Yesterday a BBC anchor-man was "moderating" three US speakers.
      One stated that Trump didn't want wars and would have held peace talks with Putin and be firm.
      The BBC man interjected that Putin had annexed Crimea during Trump's Presidency. Nobody challenged him (or they weren't allowed to) that it was in 2014, when Obama was President.
      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/18/putin-confirms-annexation-crimea-ukrainian-soldier-casualty

      The bits I saw gave a clear picture of the BBC's anti-Trump derangement syndrome.

  26. Gavin Mortimer
    The EU is disintegrating before our eyes
    11 September 2024, 9:08am

    Germany’s decision to reintroduce border controls in an attempt to halt mass immigration is awkward for Keir Starmer.

    A fortnight ago the British Prime Minister, a friend of European free movement, visited Berlin and among the issues he discussed with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were trade, defence and immigration.

    A few days before Starmer’s visit, three people were killed at a diversity festival by a suspected Syrian refugee. Germany’s decision to tighten its borders (initially for six months but this could be extended) is partly a reaction to that atrocity as well as the failed attack last week on the Israeli consulate in Munich.

    It is also a response by Scholz to the victory last week of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Thuringia’s state election.

    That success was the latest triumph in Europe for parties variously described as populist, far-right or nationalist. Take your pick.

    Another description could be that they are the parties of the disillusioned, voters who see in the EU nothing but a failed project that has impoverished and endangered them.

    Across the continent, mass immigration has led to a deterioration in social cohesion, to the ‘ghettoisation’ of inner cities from Malmo to Marseille to Mannheim, and the re-emergence of an anti-Semitism that Europe hoped it had eradicated three-quarters of a century ago.

    This disillusionment has now spread to the elites. On Monday, Mario Draghi, the ex-president of the European Central Bank and a poster boy for the European technocrat class, published a 400-page report on competitiveness that was commissioned by the European Commission in 2023.

    Shortly before Draghi published the report, the EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, posted a message on social media saying that she was ‘eager’ to hear what the former Italian PM had to say.

    She might not have liked what she heard. Over 400 pages, Draghi laid bare just how sclerotic and uncompetitive the EU has become this century. Things are so bad that Draghi admitted to having ‘nightmares’ about Europe’s future if nothing is done to halt what he described as the ‘slow agony’ of the continent’s economic decline.

    In the press conference that accompanied the release of his report, Draghi said that only ‘unprecedented’ reform would arrest the decline. ‘For the first time since the Cold War, we must genuinely fear for our self-preservation, and the reason for a unified response has never been so compelling’, explained Draghi.

    He said Europe required additional annual investment of at least €750 billion – approximately 5 per cent of the EU’s gross domestic product – if the EU is to catch up to America and prevent being overtaken by China. It is a damning indictment of how moribund the EU has become that of the world’s leading 50 tech firms only four are European.

    If the 27 EU members ignore his report, Draghi predicted a grim future: ‘We will be forced to choose,’ he said. ‘We will not be able to become, at once, a leader in new technologies, a beacon of climate responsibility and an independent player on the world stage. We will not be able to finance our social model. We will have to scale back some, if not all, of our ambitions.’

    In other words, Europe will continue its transformation from a first world to a third world continent.

    This is the reason why so many voters have turned away from the traditional mainstream parties, be it in France, Holland, Italy or Germany. They see their living standards are on the wane, and that poverty, violence and anti-Semitism are on the rise.

    As I wrote in January, as Europe’s farmers descended on Brussels to vent their anger against an EU determined to impose ruinous green dogma on their industry, Europeans have had enough of the chronic mismanagement that has been the hallmark of the EU this century. ‘In 2008 the Eurozone and the US had comparable gross domestic products (GDP) of $14.2 trillion and $14.8 trillion in today’s prices,’ I wrote. ‘In 2023 the eurozone’s GDP had edged up to just over $15 trillion, while America’s stood at $26.9 trillion’

    If France was a US State its GDP per capita would rank it between Idaho and Arkansas, respectively the 48th and 49th most prosperous states. Germany would be 39th, just behind Oklahoma.

    Draghi’s blueprint for change contains a series of proposals for reinvigorating the bloc. ‘Europe must become a place where innovation flourishes,’ he proclaimed.

    Easier said than done. The two traditional powerhouses of Europe, Germany and France, are in desperate economic trouble with the latter crippled by huge debts. They are also the EU countries where discontent with mass immigration is the most visceral.

    France’s new Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, has promised to address the issue and he might be emboldened by Germany’s decision to reintroduce border controls. Three years ago Barnier declared himself in favour of a three to five year moratorium on immigration, saying that the current flow was unsustainable and responsible for an increase in insecurity and Islamism.

    The same applies in Britain, although Starmer and his government appear incapable of admitting it. Their heads remain stuck in the sand, not just about the downside of mass immigration but about the scale of the EU’s decline. Why would any sane political leader want closer ties with an organisation that is suffering a slow and agonising death?

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

    plainsdrifter
    a day ago
    Excellent article.
    "Across the continent, mass immigration has led to a deterioration in social cohesion, to the ‘ghettoisation’ of inner cities from Malmo to Marseille to Mannheim, and the re-emergence of an anti-Semitism that Europe hoped it had eradicated three-quarters of a century ago."
    That should be an absolute incentive to pull up the drawbridge. Don't hold your breath.

    Blackfoot
    a day ago
    Last week I attended a minor accident in the small town where I an in the ambulance service. The man driving the car causing the accident could not/would not answer the question as to who was driving as another man had appeared, but with witnesses all stating he had not been in the car driving. He finally admitted he was alone. He then bodged his breath test 5 times. He could not understand he had to go to the police station after being arrested.
    The men, no surprise, were African. The attitude of immigrants to normal laws and standards is frightening.

    The Observer
    a day ago edited
    So back in the day, before Maastricht, before Schengen, the EEC provided a framework within which European countries could collaborate. But countries could also opt-out of specific elements, and they remained independent nations.

    The conversion of the EEC into the EU, aka the US of E, was undertaken without popular consent. Many, if not most, Europeans were not fully aware of what was going on. They have found themselves facing a fait acompli called the Aquis Communitaire….and most don't know Latin, it's not popular.

    Many still don't get it, they believe the EU is some sort of enhanced trade deal. Others, including many UK remainers, are in denial…they even denounced any suggestion the EU want to build a nation as fake news.

    Yet it's all there in b&w on the EU website, albeit written in EUphenisms.

    Now Draghi has turned up with his mega report. Read the first section carefully; it essentially acknowledges that the EU has consistently failed in all the areas that were supposed to be boosted by integration. Just to take one area, there were significant semiconductor developers and fabs in Germany, UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands before Maastricht. And they all produced microprocessors, including several in-house developed devices. The EU has been half an expensive plod forward, two quick steps back.

    Draghi's solution to this is not just Eurobonds to print more money, he wants this money to be spent by the EU using an expansion of QMV (his acronym).

    QMV stands for Qualified Majority Voting, it's a EUphenism for the EU federal government.

    Yes, the EU is heading for a brick wall. But don't put the blame on populism and immigration. The real problem is the EU is being run by Europhiles who have lost the plot, abandoned democracy, and are completely out of touch with reality.

    2. That's all well and good, but it boils down to a solution that that is essentially more money for more EU.

      1. That has always been the EU way; failure means that it has not been sufficiently EU so the answer is, inevitably, more EU.

    3. The EU is disintegrating before our eyes

      Time to rejoin it then. We can then contribute to the mop up costs of disbanding as well as paying an enormous entry fee.

      2. Definitely Rastus. What a smart suggestion.

        Why impoverish Britain with "net zero" when there is an easier way.

        …………increase taxes and just give the money to the EU.

        Starmer and Tugenhadt are very keen on rejoining the EU to bail it out with our money, and

        the majority of voters support one or the other.

    5. The EU is disintegrating before our eyes

      No, it isn’t. Not even close.
      Wishful thinking I’m afraid. That’s not how the world is moving.
      Someone perhaps Starmer will find the way to once again foist EU membership onto the UK long before this could happen.

    6. "Draghi laid bare just how sclerotic and uncompetitive the EU has become this century…" It has ALWAYS been sclerotic and uncompetitive. It was designed that way.

  27. Good morning. The primary cause of NHS failure is putting social engineering before healthcare and Labour won’t change that. All DEI posts should go and medically unnecessary lifestyle treatments should only be available privately, if at all. Ain’t gonna happen.

    1. “putting social engineering before healthcare and Labour won’t change that” – because Liebour (under Bliar) started it.

  28. Morning all 🙂😊🤩
    Who could believe it, a beautiful sunny morning on rain man's birthday 🎂.
    thanks to RT for posting the birthday message.
    Born in St Mary's nursing home Hampstead (now a gated private residence just London side of the white stone pond) conceived around Christmas 1945 dear farther not long back from his WW2 postings.
    In reality just another Virgo. With one elder and one younger sister. With a lovely wife and three wonderful sons and daughter in laws and so far four lovely grandchildren.
    A pile of birthday cards and several lovely presents.
    Slayders. 🤗

    6. Join the Shellacs!

      (See my birthday wishes from late last night and reposted this morning!)

    9. Very many Happy Returns for a wonderful birthday, with your family?
      Have à splendiferous day and hope all goes as you wish.

      2. Absolutely correct, Happy birthday to day. My wife and eldest son are also Virgos. They just scrape in on the time scale.

    1. Vicious and vindictive nasties.
      Most people over 55 in the UK are too mature to vote for their evil and childish nonsense.

    2. Labour have never, ever been the party of the people. The revolting 'climate change act' proves that, and that was 116 years ago. It was the enforcement of socialism by destroying the underpinning of this country.

  31. Reposted from late last night

    Thursday 12th September, 2024

    Ready Eddy

    (aka Eh Calm Down)

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f15108925be65a9a2608d8e25edca14c950fe7218c958fddb1d38927a117d0b9.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9040c9037389e45b10c82ed873d9867947b369ad1d3527621ac854e75059992d.png

    Very Best wishes,

    Caroline and Rastus

    and here's one for you :

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d58NPTjf0v4

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/529918aa96e3f29257591c829915b535d750916c017f1193f11f9f6da3ad6dd6.png

  32. Good morning, all. Bright but cold.

    Not that long ago one of the foremost in-vogue mantras was "save granny", all part of the great CV-19 scam to encourage the population to participate in the greatest self-harm episode ever devised.

    Now, "granny" can chill out, literally, at home swathed in whatever materials will keep freezing at bay.

    With the arrival of the Labour government another even greater scam, Net Zero, has been boosted by the appointment of the arch-zealot of British climate change mania, Miliband minor.

    Little wonder that approval/disapproval ratings are making all the wrong headlines for a new government. I cannot recall a new PM receiving the deserved level of opprobrium that is being levelled at Smarmer in such a short time.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f40eb6f2af7561d7563c9465599c1aa939c7c426499362c0d2ca5356181726f5.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2284793d0ccfefd1b3d581485233232be18bc12753c22be72e60fce86e7e6b2c.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c1d56376f64d8988839809b22dfc304bc9b64cea316648b4135565e333ad6441.png

    1. Govt approval falls to just one in five.
      In other words those that voted them in are still happy with what they've given us all.

    2. The Conservatives could have hamstrung government by scrapping stamp duty, capital gains and inheritance taxes. They did none of these and even set about taking more capital gains tax by lowering the allowances.

      They could have scrapped the climate change tax scam but no. They were Lefty socialists and now Labour are intentionally making everything worse.

        2. The wages of sin is death.

          But after taxes and NI contributions you’ll just end up feeling a bit tired.

  37. Good morning NoTTLers! From Matt Goodwin's substack:

    Revelations—by the respected and rigorous Neil O’Brien, Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby, and Wigston—really are devastating.

    He pointed to not just a government but an entire political system that is either deliberately concealing masses of information from voters about the impact of immigration, or is doing so through sheer incompetence.

    Just look at what he revealed:

    The department for Work and Pensions has STOPPED publishing data on welfare claims by nationality, making it impossible for anybody to ascertain the impact of immigration on the welfare system (and the cost)

    HMRC have STOPPED publishing information on the tax paid and tax credits received by nationality, again making it impossible to build up an accurate picture of how immigration is impacting on the national economy

    the Home Office is now REFUSING to answer detailed questions about the immigration status of people who are imprisoned in UK prisons, making it impossible to gather information on how, if at all, immigration is impacting on crime rates and imprisonment

    even worse, the Home Office actually have these data but they are deliberately REFUSING to publish them

    the Home Office does NOT collect either nationality or immigration data on those people who are arrested on these islands, again making it impossible for us to know how, if at all, immigration is impacting on crime and social order

    the Home Office does NOT reveal, in detail, what it is spending on hotel rooms and accommodation for illegal migrants in the asylum system, once again making it impossible to verify, dispute, or support claims being made

    the Home Office says it DOES NOT KNOW how much it is spending on loans to refugees which is, once again, taxpayer money.

    https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/its-not-just-populists-stoking-misinformation?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=8sze7&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

    1. Morning H. The UK’s public institutions are almost totally dysfunctional. Many of them have been captured by internal pressure groups, ethnic minoroties Gay Rights: what ever. These set the agenda’s for their departments and simply ignore Government directives. They cannot be reformed. If anyone were really interested (they aren’t) only their complete closure and the sacking of the staff would work.

    2. I've just posted the same info a way above before reading down – apologies. Mind you, it is such a scandal that it needs to be broadcast from every outlet in the country multiple times.

      1. Indeed – we can’t all be on here all the time, and these things are a complete scandal. We obviously both think that it needed posting!

  39. Russian counter-offensive reported in Kursk. 12 Septermber 2024.

    Russian forces have begun a significant counter-offensive against Ukrainian troops in Russia’s Kursk region, according to pro-Moscow war bloggers and a senior Russian commander.

    Pro-Ukrainian observers also reported heavy fighting in part of the occupied area and the possible Russian recapture of villages.

    Russian forces were said to have taken several villages on the west of the sliver of Russia that Ukraine has carved out, pushing Ukrainian forces to the east of the Malaya Loknya river south of Snagost. Russia’s defence ministry said it had defeated Ukrainian units at a number of villages.

    There’s no rush here. This Ukie Incursion was never going anywhere. The whole thing has been a tactical fiasco. They will probably use this Russian offensive to cover their withdrawal.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/12/russia-ukraine-war-kursk-counter-offensive-latest-news?filterKeyEvents=false&page=with:block-66e296e08f08e370bfa98911#block-66e296e08f08e370bfa98911

  40. 392882+ up ticks,

    What with the kneler protecting & brought in a law unto himself regarding ring fencing his pension and the reeves bird claiming her own then denying others energy funding,

    As soon as the" deny the pensioners warmth" over winter months vote was taken and won, all that could seen in what now passes as parliament was the bottom rungs of a multitude of disappearing ladders.

  41. I've just seen an article on the still ongoing Post Office scandal.
    It seems that the civil service are about to inject more misery into the still ongoing row by adding even more public funds to try and defend their disgusting behaviour.

    1. From Coffee House, the Spectator. (Peter Hitchens)

      Why I believe Lucy Letby’s trial was unfair
      Comments Share
      Even Horace Rumpole could not have secured an acquittal for Lucy Letby. The more I look at this case, the more I suspect that there could never have been any other outcome than a conviction. I think a great cloud of emotion hung over that courtroom during the whole trial. I think that cloud spread outwards into the public mind before and during the long months of the trial. In my view, the actual prosecution of Ms Letby began on Thursday 5 July 2018, two days after she was arrested for the first time, and more than four years before she finally sat in the dock.

      The prosecution knew throughout that they had no objective proof of their case, large or small
      On that day, police officers dug up her tiny garden in a Chester suburb. Reporters were present to observe tools being carried through her modest semi for this excavation, and photographers were on hand to snap a constable in blue rubber gloves poking about in her gutters and drainpipes. Whatever were the police expecting to find? Did they find it? The suspicions expressed by digging up someone’s garden were reflected back into the courtroom. All those involved knew they were trying a giant, appalling crime. If the babies had been murdered and harmed (and I think this belief was near-universal), whoever was accused would have been convicted. If the crime is terrible enough, the fact of the accusation will be enough for far too many.

      For there is still, in this country, a very strong belief that the police are generally right and that there is no smoke without fire. In a cynical and often quite callous society, there is also a strong passion against anyone who harms children in any way. Here we had a young woman, also a nurse, accused of being, secretly, the loathsome opposite of what she appeared to be. Far from being nurturing, she was a stealthy killer. Far from being an angel of mercy, she was a fiend out of hell. She was charged with a crime of boundless horror, the deliberate killing of newborns. There was little need to paint this in angry colours, for it is the crime of Herod himself. Can there be a viler misdeed under heaven? The accusation, once made, is likely to stick. The thirst for retribution is bound to grow as the process grinds on.

      Most popular
      Douglas Murray
      The C of E’s raving madness

      I am sure Nick Johnson KC, one of the prosecutors, is in private life a kind and courteous gentleman. He must believe in the presumption of innocence. He must understand how miserable it might be for a young woman accused of a terrible crime to undergo relentless, hostile private and public questioning for week after week. Yet he felt it was permissible to ask her if there was ‘any reason that you cry when you talk about yourself, but you don’t cry when talking about these dead and seriously injured children’? I thought, when I read about this exchange, that the trial, inflated by a great gush of emotion, had now ripped free of its rational moorings.

      Once suspicion of heinous crime is alive in the mind, and a convincing culprit has been produced, anything can be made to seem to confirm it. Ms Letby took her notes home. Guilty! Ms Letby (her life halted and darkened forever by terrible suspicion) scribbled wild apparent confessions. Guilty! Ms Letby sent condolence notes to the parents of babies who died. Guilty! Ms Letby looked up people on Facebook. Guilty! Ms Letby was in the hospital when the babies died. Guilty!

      None of these things actually proves anything. But the supposed confession, and the famous chart showing Lucy Letby was at the scene during all the deaths, must surely have stood out sharply amid hours of inconclusive medical detail.

      The value of all this as evidence has now been called into serious question, in most cases by experts. The apparent forensic clincher, about insulin, turns out to have relied on the wrong tests. The whole debate on air embolism and its symptoms has only just begun. The Court of Appeal’s wooden, procedural view is that new evidence on this could have been brought up at the trial, so it’s too late now.

      Is this justice? The Crown Prosecution Service has actually admitted that key door-swipe evidence, supposedly fixing the location of significant persons at important times, was wrong. I suspect that this astounding error, so far a tiny smudge on the radar screen, will grow and grow in importance. The prosecution knew throughout that they had no objective proof of their case, large or small. They kept insisting that the evidence was a totality and that this totality showed Ms Letby’s guilt. Mr Johnson, interestingly, said: ‘In this extraordinary case, context is everything.’ He was right. For there is no objective evidence that the babies who died were deliberately killed, no objective evidence that the babies which were damaged were deliberately harmed. And there is no piece of actual evidence which links Ms Letby directly to any evil action.

      The defence did not face a prosecution of the usual kind. It faced something much more devastating – a hypothesis, vast, dark, wrathful and towering overhead. This hypothesis could only be accepted as a whole, or rejected as a whole. And there was so much of it that rejection of it would have taken a great deal of nerve – even if several rare moral giants had been in the jury room to defy the odds and stand up for reasonable doubt (majority verdicts can, disgracefully, override the lone voice).

      The fact that the jury acquitted or failed to agree on some of the cases really doesn’t undermine this. They surely knew that convicting her of seven murders and seven attempted murders would put her in prison for life. Fighting such a prosecution with normal methods was like hacking with a cutlass at a fogbank. Alas, it is only now – while Lucy Letby sits in prison – that the emotional presuppositions of the prosecution can be exposed to an equivalent counter-hypothesis. This is equally fuelled by public feeling, but this time in favour of fairness.

      Fighting such a prosecution with normal methods was like hacking with a cutlass at a fogbank
      The burning thirst for such fairness, always slow to express itself, must now contend, in the media and probably in parliament, against the rival desire for retribution. If the conviction was just, those who believe her to be guilty surely have nothing to fear from a reopening of the case in which experts are heard on both sides. If it turns out that it was not just, then they should be pleased to have been spared the burden on their consciences of yet another wrongful conviction, another life irreparably wrecked.

      I do not claim to know that Ms Letby is innocent. I strive to keep in my mind the possibility that she may be guilty, for how else can I listen properly to my opponents? I do not deride those who believe she is guilty. I grieve, as much as any stranger can, for the parents of the lost or damaged babies who are at the heart of the case. If there were a way of reopening the matter without distressing them, I would use it. I am just as sure that the police would rather not have dismayed those parents by investigating the allegations that their children had been murdered or deliberately injured. But they believed murder had been done and they had to act.

      I think Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, was wrong to suggest that campaigners asking for a new look at the case are crass and insensitive. We do not seek to attack her prison with pitchforks and liberate her. We seek to follow the law. There is surely enough evidence now that juries can be wrong and that the Court of Appeal can be too unwilling to reconsider cases. Why else did the government set up the Criminal Cases Review Commission? Would the Post Office scandal or the infected blood scandal have been resolved without public campaigning? Of course not. I, and many others, do not think the case against Ms Letby has been proven beyond reasonable doubt, and I think the courts should re-examine it as soon as possible. For, if by any chance she is innocent, the idea of her wearing out her days in prison for long decades to come, with no hope of release, is horrible almost beyond bearing.

  43. Rod Liddle
    The BBC’s strange silence
    From magazine issue:
    14 September 2024

    In the long and illustrious history of race chancing, there must have been many more egregious examples than that of Noel Deans’s recourse to court because a colleague ‘fist-bumped’ him rather than shaking his hand, but I can’t think of any right now. Certainly not over here in the UK, where we still lag a little behind the inventiveness of the top American chancers.

    The case brought by Mr Deans against RBG Holdings was one of racial discrimination. He alleged that on one occasion the firm’s senior partner, Ian Rosenblatt, greeted him with a fist-bump, which is apparently a common form of greeting among the African-Caribbean community from which Mr Deans hails. He told the tribunal: ‘In a professional environment I have never seen someone fist-bump a white new junior. It is customary to shake hands.’

    For his part, Mr Rosenblatt said that he fist-bumped Mr Deans because he was elated at having him on his team – a heady delight which I think we can assume dimmed a little during the course of Mr Deans’s tenure. Tribunals can be guilty of astonishing gullibility, of course, but this was too much even for them. Considering Mr Rosenblatt’s greeting of Mr Deans with a fist-bump, the judgment said that the gesture was a ‘misjudgment’ and ‘insensitive’ but did not find the conduct met the threshold for constituting unlawful race-related harassment. The firm was cleared on all charges.

    It is an excruciatingly tricky business, isn’t it? How should one greet people from a different background? My own recourse is, I admit, flawed, but at least demonstrates a sensitivity to racial difference. When I am introduced to a person of colour I always shout ‘Kasserian Ingera!’ and then perform a short but evocative dance, in the hope that the person I am greeting hails from the Masai warrior people, for whom this is a traditional salutation. The problem here is that not every person of colour hails from the Masai warrior people: I know that, I am not an idiot. But my thinking is that wherever they have their own origins – be it a savannah wilderness in Kenya or, say, the barren mountains of the Hindu Kush – they will at least appreciate that I have made an effort to accommodate their culture.

    Much like Mr Rosenblatt, I would be reluctant to shake hands because it would be an immediate signifier of an oppressive white power structure, quite alien and indeed repugnant to all people of colour, of course. So it is quite possible that, through the best of intentions, I will appear before a tribunal one of these days. I do wonder if Mr Rosenblatt also uttered the words ‘Wah gwaan?’ when he performed his fist-bumping. As Mr Rosen-blatt is a prominent donor to the Labour party, I would guess the answer is ‘yes’, but I cannot be sure.

    I wondered a little how the chief executive officer of BBC News, Deborah Turness, greets people of colour – whether she, too, shouts ‘Kasserian Ingera!’ and does a dance. Probably wise not to speculate, as she might put the BBC’s brilliant Verify team on my case, the very quintessence of fact-based, empirical, unpartisan journalism. Ms Turness and the rest of them over there at New Broadcasting House think they’ve all been doing a sterling job recently and that their coverage of the war between Israel and Gaza has been impeccably balanced: that is one of the benefits of living inside a bubble, I suppose – you are always right, whatever the story.

    A while ago I wrote about the BBC’s coverage, suggesting that it was indeed biased and that a substantial reason for that was the presence of loads of journos from the corporation’s Arabic service being used as independent and non-partisan observers. As I pointed out, the BBC used quite a few journalists who are Palestinian nationals and who seemed, through their reports, to have… y’know… a certain viewpoint regarding Israel – and yet had no Israeli nationals reporting the war, so far as I could tell. That, plus the perverse and counter-rational decision (presumably by Ms Turness) to eschew calling Hamas terrorists, claiming the corporation never uses the word (when it does, pretty much every week), seemed to me to somewhat colour the BBC’s coverage.

    Perhaps you disagree – Turness certainly did. Luckily, we now have an independent report from lawyer Trevor Asserson and a team of data scientists which suggests that in my original article I gravely understated the case. Asserson concluded that the BBC ‘displayed a deeply worrying pattern of bias’ against Israel. Asserson stated in the introduction to his report that the BBC had not met its legal obligations in covering the war, namely: 1. To report accurately; 2. To report with due impartiality; and 3. To avoid the expression of personal views by BBC journalists. Asserson added: ‘The report finds that there have been material breaches by the BBC of a number of its legal obligations.’

    The weird decision not to describe Hamas as terrorists was dealt with, along with the BBC’s grandstanding about how they never use the word. But most importantly, perhaps, was the recognition that the BBC used correspondents and contributors from an Arab background who described the grotesque events of 7 October last year as a ‘morning of hope’, and another who defended a Lebanese journalist who said, ‘Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned’, which seems to me a tad on the anti-Semitic side. In fact the BBC itself furloughed a bunch of these Jew-hating maniacs a couple of months into the war, although whether or not it has since re-employed them, I have no idea. Perhaps Debs can tell us.

    It may come as a surprise to you to learn that the Asserson Report has not dominated the BBC’s news bulletins. And then again, perhaps it might not surprise you that much. Or maybe BBC Verify have assured Debs it wasn’t worth bothering with.

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

    Benjamin d'Israeli
    8 hours ago
    Once again, Rod hits the nail on the head. These days I only listen to BBC R3, and nothing else (avoiding 'news' bulletins at all costs). The sooner BBC 'news' is treated as fiction, as Fox News is, the better.

    Mick Mills football legend
    3 hours ago edited
    The Asserson Report was published on Monday, and this is the first article anywhere that bothers to report on what is nothing less than a scandal.

    The rabid anti-Semitic reporting, lies and hamas propaganda that the BBC has KNOWINGLY been spreading on its various media outlets should be the headline on all news outlets, however, due to the media’s fear of Islamic retribution and the appeasement of politicians, this report will be buried just like the Balen report.

    The report for those interested is utterly, utterly damaging for the BBC, and the BBC’s response was pathetic.

  45. Thanks. I'm still a bit rusty about the mechanics of routine political processes in the UK.

  46. Good Moaning.
    Had a jolly interesting afternoon at The Great War Huts.
    A long term friend of elder son, who is a sort of daughter to us, took me on a guided tour; just the two of us with a chap who works there full-time and is a WWI enthusiast on steroids.
    I hadn't realised that they have built – or rather dug – replicas of the trenches.
    And they also have a huge range of C20 military uniforms from many different countries that they hire out to film and television companies; they are also advisers to those companies down to providing background articles like soap, crockery and cigarette lighters.

    1. A remarkable collection of buildings and memorabilia. A visit to their Facebook site recommended. It would be a pleasure to visit Brook Farm Camp if I ever get the chance.

    2. Do they have any Nazi uniforms?

      Recently a WWII re-enactment group banned them.

      I visited Salisbury Cathedral and then went off to the fort where a re-enactment of war was taking place. I found it very interesting to go into a German officer's tent and have a nosy around.

      What i also liked was the fact that i was there alone with my thoughts. No one watching to make sure i didn't nick anything.

      1. Yes, they do.
        I really fancied a Nazi admiral's great coat for the chillier months to come.
        Probably cost me less than heating the sitting room.

        1. Of course if one person complains they will have to burn it all.

          I never took you for a fashionista ! Hugo Boss no less.

        2. I have my ex-RAF greatcoat. I shall have to bring it out if the winter is a harsh one. More stylish than MOH's Great Aunt Hannah's Canadian fur coat which we inherited (and which I still have) 🙂

  47. Morning Nottlers.

    On the subject of the NHS, in case you missed it, Free Speech had an exceptional article yesterday, written by an NHS junior doctor, who thinks that it is rotten to the core and beyond saving. Today we have articles by Xandra H, a senior NHS psychiatrist, on what makes a serial killer, and a piece by Dr Frank Palmer on the glories of art and education, describing the journey from philistine to philosopher.

    Please do support us by reading and leaving a comment.

    freespeechbacklash.com

  48. Interestingly, there's lots of hot tips whizzing around pitching "nuclear renaissance" stocks such as Oklo (OKLO), Fluor (FLR) etc.. What's interesting is that they all plan to serve the insane amounts of energy required to power data centres relating to AI.

    Of course ChatGPT founder Sam Altman, Bill Gates etc.. are all major investors, and every pitch claim the reactors “will/could begin operations by 2030” such is the urgency in the AI race.

    Question; has anyone spotted Milipede, Peter Kyle or 2TK mention these key words: Urgency. AI Race. Data Centres?

        1. Oh no no.. even Macron knows that EU's current The Artificial Intelligence Act means they are doomed to be also rans in the next great leap forward.. missing out yet again. Mistral AI really is a world leader.. doomed I tell you, doomed.

          Mistral AI is a French company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) products. Founded in April 2023 by former employees of Meta Platforms and Google..

    2. There are plans to build Europe's largest data centre in the South East of England. On farm land of course.

        1. Given the amount of heat a data centre produces one would think they would come up with a way to put that energy back into the system.

  49. I have put a similar comment underneath a Speccie article about reform of the NHS, but I feel sure that it will dawn on Starmer as a first step that not treating anyone over the age of 60 frees up a lot of beds and staff, and saves a lot of money which can be spent on immigrants and "working people", the only people who apparently matter to this government.

    1. I said that on the way home after my scan in MK yesterday, the next step will not be treating those of pensionable age on the nhs as anyone over the age of 70 will be deemed to have lived their life and as far as the state is concerned they are of no further use. No doubt to make sure we trot off early and do not stand upon the order of our going govt will demolish private health care in some way.

      1. Demolish private health by making is so taxed and expensive that only the very rich can afford it.

        2. And make school fees so expensive that more people have to put their children into state schools..

          Do any Labour MPs – including both Starmer and Reeves – seriously believe VAT on fees will make any any money for the state – indeed they must know that it will cost the state a fortune.

          I wonder how many teachers in private schools will decide to work in state schools? Most teachers in private schools are competent and will be able to find other jobs. Indeed – the more competent the teacher the less likely he or she will want to stay in teaching and this will lead to there not being enough teachers in the state system to cope with the swelled number of pupils. And the new recruits to teaching will lack the knowledge and ability to communicate that the teachers who have left the profession had.

          So the sociopathic Labour Party's foul cruelty has been loosed on both the old and the young; and those in the middle -who are neither young nor old – will feel that they too are being punished as they have to pay higher and higher taxes.

          1. I suspect many private school teachers will become private tutors.
            The parents will spend the money on making sure their children pass exams.

          2. Blair used the Oratory School in Fulham – a very good Catholic school. He then got tutors from Westminster School (just round the corner from Downing Street) to top up the teaching!

            I suggested here a couple of weeks ago that if I were young I would get a group of teachers together to offer complete "A" level courses in certain "A" level subjects (for example English Literature, History, French) and work out a viable price that parents would be able to pay. If each teacher was self-employed and kept his/her turnover under £90,000 no VAT would be payable on the fees. A well-organised couple working from home running two separate businesses could take up to £180,00 pa in fees.

            Caroline and I use that formula – we run one business in her name and one in mine and make sure that each of us has a turnover less than the VAT threshold.

          3. One of my friends, when her private school closed, turned to doing individual tuition. I expect a few will take that route.

        3. And make school fees so expensive that more people have to put their children into state schools..

          Do any Labour MPs – including both Starmer and Reeves – seriously believe VAT on fees will make any any money for the state – indeed they must know that it will cost the state a fortune.

          I wonder how many teachers in private schools will decide to work in state schools? Most teachers in private schools are competent and will be able to find other jobs. Indeed – the more competent the teacher the less likely he or she will want to stay in teaching and this will lead to there not being enough teachers in the state system to cope with the swelled number of pupils. And the new recruits to teaching will lack the knowledge and ability to communicate that the teachers who have left the profession had.

          So the sociopathic Labour Party's foul cruelty has been loosed on both the old and the young; and those in the middle -who are neither young nor old – will feel that they too are being punished as they have to pay higher and higher taxes.

  50. Piers Morgan gets a lesson in Geopolitical History From Jeffrey Sachs:

    Does anyone here dispute Sachs' analysis?

    Morgan: "You seem very reliant on accepting Putin's worldview rather than perhaps the stark reality of the barbarism with which he's executed this war".

    Sachs: "Yeah, maybe because I know too much about the United States. Because the first war in Europe after world War two was the US bombing of Belgrade for 78 days to change borders of a European state. The idea was to break Serbia, to create Kosovo as an enclave, and then to install Bondsteel, which is the largest NATO base in the Balkans, in the southwest Balkans.
    So the US started this under Clinton, that we will break the borders, we will illegally bomb another country. We didn't have any UN authority.
    This was a, quote, NATO mission to do that.
    Then I know the United States went to war repeatedly, illegally, in what it did in Afghanistan and then what it did in Iraq and then what it did in Syria, which was the Obama administration, especially Obama and Hillary Clinton, tasking the CIA to overthrow Bashar al Assad.
    And then what it did with NATO illegally bombing Libya to topple Muammar Gaddafi and then what it did in Kiev in February 2014.
    I happened to see some of that with my own eyes.
    The US overthrew Yanukovych together with right wing ukrainian military forces. We overthrew a president. And what's interesting, by the way, is we overthrew Yanukovych the day after the European Union representatives had reached an agreement with Yanukovych to have early elections, a government of national unity and a stand down of both sides that was agreed.
    The next thing that happens is the opposition, quote unquote, says, we don't agree. They stormed the government buildings and they deposed Yanukovych. And within hours, the United States says, yes, we support the new government. It didn't say, oh, we had an agreement that's unconstitutional what you did.
    So we overthrew a government contrary to a promise that the European Union had made.
    And by the way, Russia, the United States, and the EU were parties to that agreement.
    And the United States an hour afterwards backed the coup.
    Okay, so everyone's got a little bit to answer for. In 2015, the Russians did not say, we want the Donbas back. They said, peace should come through negotiations. And negotiations between the ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine and this new regime in Kiev led to the Minsk II agreement.
    The Minsk II agreement was voted by the UN Security Council unanimously. It was signed by the government of Ukraine. It was guaranteed explicitly by Germany and France.
    And you know what? And it's been explained to me in person.It was laughed at inside the US government.
    This is after the UN Security Council unanimously accepted it. The Ukrainian said, we don't want to give autonomy to the region.
    Oh, but that's part of the treaty. The US told them, don't worry about it.
    Angela Merkel explained in Die Zeit in a notorious interview after the 2022 escalation. She said, 'oh, you know, we knew that Minsk two was just a holding pattern to give Ukraine time to build its strength'.
    No, Minsk II was a UN security council unanimously adopted treaty that was supposed to end the war.
    So when it comes to who's trustworthy, who to believe and so forth, I guess my problem, Piers, is I know the United States government, I know it very well. I don't trust them for a moment.
    I want these two sides actually to sit down in front of the whole World and say, these are the terms.
    Then the World can judge, because we could get on paper clearly for both sides of the world, we're not going to overthrow governments anymore.
    The United States needs to say, we accept this agreement. The United States needs to say, Russia needs to say, we're not stepping 1ft farther than whatever the boundary is actually reached and NATO's not going to enlarge.
    And let's put it for the whole world to see once in a while, treaties actually hold."

    1. ”Because the first war in Europe after world War two was the US bombing of Belgrade” – that rather forgets about Hungary, Chechnya, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Cyprus and a few others as well.

        1. I am not sure how much inspiration the Greek civil war or the Cyprus invasion got from either the US or the Soviet Union but the historian’s view seemed to be that it was only the US that was the initiator of wars in Europe and that, until the US started the, Europe was peaceful.

    2. You can find that interview on You Tube. Most enjoyable. Anything that makes clear that Morgan is a fool is a pleasure to watch.

  51. Ho hum. As the weather turns we look at operation shift again. It's a long term plan rather than one born of panic this time, but we're getting boxes in rather than panic buying them, making sure we've no extraneous clutter (even Junior is looking to sell some of the toys he's not unboxed). Hobby stuff has to have 'somewhere' to go that's easy to transport and secure. I found some big padded envelopes I'll use for the glass shelves which can then go into really useful boxes to make them easier to transport.

    The Warqueen is a bit more engaged this time around as before we made a complete hash of packing her various bottles and things (many broke as the box wasn't especially well labelled so she had her favourite lip stick covered in alcohol) so this time we're planning to clear out old bedding and bath mats (as the shower is now enclosed and we're not replacing them and hanging them up to dry after every wash).

    Which leaves hobby stuff. which means consolidating boxes of lego and then there's the comp cables, tools – one thing I'm going this coming holiday is going to go through all the crap I've got and just bin it. Last time we tried to paint our old place and while we did it, and it seemed ok the damned paint cracked and came away and took 3 weekends of living in chaos (which caused stress of it's own as everything had to come out, then go back Saturday morning and Sunday night every weekend), so we've decided to throw money at it this time and just say sod it and rather boringly paint everywhere the same.

    But it all means a timeline, as things have to be moved out to get to the walls so we need to clear our spare room out (where I'd put the racking) and then moved into storage so that if folk look around they're not going 'bloody hell, that's a warehouse' as for some reason I genuinely don't understand people can't look at a room and see it without the stuff in there, in there.

    While this all seems years away, I learned before to do the things in stages as otherwise you need a plasterer, electrician, painter really quickly and can't get one.

    Ho hum. I had such high hopes when we moved in. big bedrooms. High ceilings. Room for Junior to have a bedroom and a playroom, office space for both of us – buggered that right up, didn't I.

    1. What happened in your case to make you want to sell (if that's not intruding too much – if it is I apologise)? We're selling (after I've lived here for 30+ years). We're selling because we want to move South-west. But prospective buyers seem nowadays to want big, bland kitchens with an island and a dining table, and all your walls knocked through. They'll find that gets costly to heat… Plus a bathroom per person.

      All places I've looked at online, while they may look different outside, look practically the same on the inside. What has happened?

      1. It is a version of the silver-grey car concept, easier to re-sell than any distinct colour. Just as groups often dine out on pizza, because other meals might offend (pocs, religionists and veggies).

      2. It is a version of the silver-grey car concept, easier to re-sell than any distinct colour. Just as groups often dine out on pizza, because other meals might offend (pocs, religionists and veggies).

      3. There are things beyond the heating that we want: off road parking, a window in the main bathroom. We are looking for higher water pressure too as the pumped system causes gurgles.

        For the three of us the kitchen is a bit small. It is the first place everyone comes to in ours. Junior does his homework there, the dogs are fed in the corner. Most of the house laptops somewhow find their way on to the table. The car keys are there.

        We're also looking at not having steps up to the door (they're hard on the dogs and my knees). Fundamentally it's about living the way we want to rather than how the systems we have make us.

          1. I'd like to be closer to my gym, walking distance type thing and as most of my friends are the other side of the inlet probably Netley way. Hamble'd be too far out but it's nice down there. Only thing is she's working in Bournemouth now, so it's a long hike.

            We've gone for cul-de-sacs and off main roads before as they tend to be quieter. I don't think we'll ever get the whole list so there're going to be compromises. The ones we won't are gas, window in bathroom and off road parking.

            We concluded that this would be our 'not moving again' home, so it's got to be right.

        2. Your ideal would be to buy land and build what you need. Do you do the lottery? Or go on Escape to the Country and have them do the searching but then you have to go on camera and be sure to criticise everything when they don't find a palace for tuppence!

      4. Fashion. I am, thankfully, happy in my home. I have it how I want it. I just don't want unwanted "lodgers" billeted on me by the government.

  52. I have just received a letter from the tax people.

    I am coming up to my 30th Birthday (in my counting the first 50 are practice) and my pension will be increased, by a wopping 25 pence a week.

    I am just soooooo grateful.

    I shall open Swiss Bank Account tomorrow, to keep it awaay from Cur Starmer.

    2. Invest it wisely – I don't know how I would have survived without it over the last 3 1/2 years

    3. A big pension increase arrives on your seventyfifth birthday in Canada. I didn't mention it because it wasn't enough to even buy a bottle of tonic to go with the small botle of gin that my monthly pension covers.

      How much will the increase in your income tax be?

  53. I know three billionaires who have already fled Labour’s Britain. It’s just the start
    In peddling the politics of envy, this anti-wealth Government risks catalysing a catastrophic talent drain
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/11/i-know-three-billionaires-who-have-fled-labour-britain/

    BTL :

    Y = C + G + I + (X – M)

    This is the old Keynsian equation (which has been discredited in all non-Communist economies.)

    Y = GNP
    C = Consumption
    G = Government Spending
    I = Investment
    X = Exports
    M = Imports

    If people are too heavily taxed they will consume less; if they have less money they will invest less; if the government relies on energy imports then (X – M) will be negative.

    So the only way to get growth in Y is to increase government spending dramatically which means dramatic rises in taxation and complete disincentive for anybody to work hard!

    2. I don't think the MPs actually care about that, as long as they can squirrel away their MP's salary, expenses and perks for 5 years. Those in ministerial positions are probably looking for some kind of globalist jobs afterwards (surely even globalists wouldn't employ the likes of Rayner, Lammy and Reeves et al. but you never know).

    3. If G was made (Govt spending – govt taxes) it might be more accurate. Otherwise, C reduces as tax increases, since for most people the amount they can spend on anything and everything is fixed. Example: From my income after tax, if the tax goes up I have less to spend, therefore don't go to restaurants so often (cutting down on discretionary spending), so they have less income, and so they spend less, too, maybe firing a waiter or reducing opening hours, or switching to being a curry house.

      1. Ah, a fellow monetarist or, as I prefer to call folk – rational humans.

        The problem with Keynes is that he thought spending was all. The only thing that mattered. Didn't matter the value, just the spending.

        That model is fundamentally flawed as spending all comes from earned wealth. What Keynes refused to acknowledge is that if Joe doesn't spend and shoves it all in the bank someone else will as an investment in new machinery or tooling. However, what that approach doesn't account for is absolute, unmitigated government greed in quantitative easing, debasing hte currency, making borrowing expensive and saving pointless (which is the point of Keynesian ideology).

    4. Except, comically, the Treasury. Not that Keynes was ever an economist. He was a champagne socialist.

      1. The Bloomsbury Group. Their main talent was shagging each other. I do like Virginia Woolf as a writer but she was a Labour Party member who openly admitted to holding the lower orders in contempt.

        1. Her work never appealed. Not politically, just I didn't find it interesting.

          It's notable that those actors I respect are the ones who don't keep banging on about how virtuous they are by how they vote.

    1. RT love Roger Waters too. Another delusional idiot. I've always watched the channel with awareness of their blind spots. Antisemitism runs deep in Russian culture. They drove the Jews out and now complain because they went back to Judea. RT hate Israel with such an irrational vengeance that they will excuse the Mohammedans almost anything bar actually killing Russians. It was, after all, the USSR that concocted the Palestinian Myth. So they hate Trump. Well, he recognised the Jewish right to Jerusalem and brought about a very practical alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Orange Man BAD!! Tiresome, isn't it? Yet, if you really want to know what's happening in Ukraine and what the background and reality of that conflict is, go to RT.

      1. So disappointed by Roger Waters, his version of the wall, in Berlin, is by far the best. But god, has he turned out to be a complete low life. How I would like to describe him I can't put into print, it is far to intemperate.

        1. He’s been like that for years! So far up his own backside and pretty well loathed by his band ‘mates’. Extremely unpleasant creature.

  56. Now, talking about making a rod for your own back…

    https://x.com/juneslater17/status/1834169988124401795
    In fact, my opinion is that these so-called people's representatives are nothing of the sort. They are on a mission to cause uproar and dismay, it isn't incompetence, it has all been planned. We've been told to expect more hardship, especially OAPs with the threat of losing the 25% reduction for living alone after bereavement.

    What comes next, bus passes, Blue Badges, free prescriptions? Anything I expect that will upset and cause hardship and worry to the old and infirm. In the eyes of this shower our days of useful production and provision of tax revenues are over and we are now a burden.

    And there's me thinking that discrimination was illegal.😰

    1. That they give away 600 million to continue to fund a way, a wasted 12bn in 'climate change' bungs, massive pay hikes to waster unions – basically paying them back for their election cash.

      It is utterly and completely criminal. The entire political class are nothing but rapists of the country.

    2. Funnily enough, today as I was totting up what's left in my account, I thought, "I can only spend it once; I have to reduce my outgoings. Unlike the government, I can't increase taxes or print money to pay for everything."

  58. The public were failed by the official silence over the Southport atrocity
    Jonathan Hall is right. A lack of swift clarity on the facts on the ground is a dereliction of duty

    Nigel Farage: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/12/official-silence-southport-attack-public-deserve-truth/

    BTL

    How much government money is spent on each illegal immigrant?

    How many illegal immigrants commit violent crimes?

    There are statistics – to which he government has access – which give the answers to both of these questions.

    Why are we not being told?

    1. The state hides the criminality of gimmigrants and the diversity, let alone the cost of housing and feeding them because if it didn't there'd be nationwide riots and lynchings – with most MPs being those who go first.

      Plod would be utterly overwhelmed and Starmer squirreled away in protection details would deploy the army to simply shoot people.

      V for Vendetta got this spot on 20 years ago. Only it wouldn't be because of a secret police. It'd be because of relentless, frantic, unabated violent assault upon the entire country.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvCrDIPSEM4

      1. Hmmm. A nice little cottage industry of manufacturing V insignia is possible there. Marketed right you could end up with a tidy sum.

    2. FOI – refused as not in the public interest (translated as "we daren't let the public know" )

    3. Matt Goodwin published an article on this very subject this morning, in which he reported that Neil O'Brien MP (Con) had revealed the following (quote):

      The department for Work and Pensions has STOPPED publishing data on welfare claims by nationality, making it impossible for anybody to ascertain the impact of immigration on the welfare system (and the cost)

      HMRC have STOPPED publishing information on the tax paid and tax credits received by nationality, again making it impossible to build up an accurate picture of how immigration is impacting on the national economy

      the Home Office is now REFUSING to answer detailed questions about the immigration status of people who are imprisoned in UK prisons, making it impossible to gather information on how, if at all, immigration is impacting on crime rates and imprisonment

      even worse, the Home Office actually have these data but they are deliberately REFUSING to publish them

      the Home Office does NOT collect either nationality or immigration data on those people who are arrested on these islands, again making it impossible for us to know how, if at all, immigration is impacting on crime and social order

      the Home Office does NOT reveal, in detail, what it is spending on hotel rooms and accommodation for illegal migrants in the asylum system, once again making it impossible to verify, dispute, or support claims being made

      the Home Office says it DOES NOT KNOW how much it is spending on loans to refugees which is, once again, taxpayer money

      I think the article might be free access (I'm a subscriber). It's another cracker of a post by Matt:
      https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/its-not-just-populists-stoking-misinformation

    4. Why are we not being told? Because if we knew for certain, even empty prisons wouldn't have enough space to incarcerate those of us who'd be on the streets.

  59. The Met Office strike again. The first of the forecast light showers has arrived at Castle McPhee with a bright flash and a loud continuous rumble.

  63. "Wages” is one of those weird words that can be treated as singular, or plural, depending on the context. In this case, the context tells us that we’re not talking about earnings as in a paycheck or a stack of coins, but as in a reward that is earned. In that case we can treat it as singular and the sentence construction stands.

    :@)

    2. Team sport gives us good examples: "United have won the league; United has announced record financial losses."

    1. True, but surelyTedros doesn't come across as quite so thick as the others? Just completely without morals, which for Globalists can only be a bonus.

  66. From The Daily Mail today :

    'From here Earth sure looks like a perfect world': Billionaire Jared Isaacman COMPLETES historic SpaceX Polaris Dawn private spacewalk and gives emotional first words.

    Bishop Reginald Heber (1783-1826)

    From Greenland's icy mountains,
    From India's coral strand,
    Where Afric's sunny fountains
    Roll down their golden sand;

    From many an ancient river,
    From many a palmy plain,
    They call us to deliver
    Their land from error's chain!

    What though the spicy breezes
    Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle,
    Though every prospect pleases,
    And only man is vile:

    In vain with lavish kindness
    The gifts of God are strown,
    The heathen in his blindness
    Bows down to wood and stone!

    Can we, whose souls are lighted
    With Wisdom from on high,
    Can we to men benighted
    The lamp of life deny?
    Salvation! oh, Salvation!
    The joyful sound proclaim.
    Till each remotest nation
    Has learn'd Messiah's name.

    Waft, waft, ye winds, his story,
    And you, ye waters, roll,
    Till like a sea of glory
    It spreads from pole to pole!
    Till o'er our ransom'd nature.
    The Lamb for sinners slain.
    Redeemer, King, Creator,
    In bliss returns to reign!

  68. Afternoon All
    Lighter Medley
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e734c19e7b8795529caa38162bff29ad1a63b0dd80cf1ff2f91ebf349090ffc8.jpg
    https://scontent.flhr2-3.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/459276180_1067305704758784_122368910586293343_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_p526x296&_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=833d8c&_nc_ohc=9TayEl4IrQYQ7kNvgElDZED&_nc_ht=scontent.flhr2-3.fna&oh=00_AYBlW_MlVILXMJTZFEbmWLf3POnTJ54sV0-4c4_pFKOmPg&oe=66E7C852
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7e8b1ecea70dac591f8ed70e23e370c2f61fae8749457002383de7b499cb2fd4.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2ed0b6a23699d3e0344a9d5fcdcb656e398988a25ac8130f51115866f46501d2.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/80758833f91bf1ae276079859b4ec1b2d4a61d16d3f546544aab8c9ad77f30f0.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8cad0e40c961e29b39ee04cc828ed570f857ba94022e31f9f55bd63c801364d3.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6765dac18a1f8337903d599f36f1a8a49dd8261533885431a74fd2109505fa6e.jpg

    2. All the organs of the body were having a meeting, trying to decide who was the one in charge…

      "I should be in charge," said the brain , "Because I run all the body's systems, so without me nothing would happen."

      "I should be in charge," said the blood , "Because I circulate oxygen all over so without me you'd waste away."

      "I should be in charge," said the stomach," Because I process food and give all of you energy."

      "I should be in charge," said the legs, "because I carry the body wherever it needs to go."

      "I should be in charge," said the eyes, "Because I allow the body to see where it goes."

      "I should be in charge," said the rectum, "Because Im responsible for waste removal."

      All the other body parts laughed at the rectum And insulted him, so in a huff, he shut down tight. Within a few days, the brain had a terrible headache, the stomach was bloated, the legs got wobbly, the eyes got watery, and the blood Was toxic. They all decided that the rectum should be the boss

      The Moral of the story? Even though the others do all the work…. The ass hole is usually in charge

  71. People questioning Letby verdict ‘should be ashamed of themselves’, inquiry hears
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/12/lucy-letby-inquiry-latest-news/

    Should I be ashamed of my views on Covid jabs, Net Zero, illegal immigration, transgender puberty blockers and all the other things where my views may not agree with the official line?

    I have absolutely no idea of whether or not Lucy Letby is innocent or guilty.

    But there are so many very peculiar arrests and convictions, so many inconsistencies, and so many cases where it seems that a person can get away Scot free that it is very difficult to have any faith in our system of justice in our multi-tier state.

  72. Scotland will lose not only its last remaining oil refinery but also the source of 80pc of its fuel – Grangemouth produces most of the petrol, diesel, heating oil and aviation fuel used in Scotland and other markets in northern England and Northern Ireland.

    Frank Demay, the chief executive of Petroineos, the joint venture between PetroChina and Sir Jim’s Ineos which runs the refinery, said the site would become an import terminal, bringing fuels refined abroad into the UK. He said lower demand for fuel in future, triggered by the ban on new petrol cars from 2035, was partly to blame.

    Once upon a time rational politicians took an interest in the UK's Balance of Payments….these days they just flog off bits of Britain….

      1. We live about 8 miles from Grangemouth. Our younger daughter works for Syngenta AgriChem (ex ICI) and we based our business there for 40+ years. This has been a disaster waiting to happen, thanks to successive governments ignoring the engineering and process sector. This area was known as Silicon Glen. It is going to hit very hard and I’m glad we no longer have the production company.

    2. Yo Mr R.

      May I fiddle

      Once upon a time rational politicians took an interest in the UK 's Balance of Payments….these days they just flog off bits of Britain….

    3. What if – as I believe will happen – the banning of new petrol cars from 2035 fails to achieve its end?

      There are growing signs of disenchantment, disillusionment and distress re the prospect of EVs among potential customers and current EV manufacturers.

      In these circumstances, premature closure of our last remaining oil refinery would be strategically naïve and a potential economic disaster.

  73. Phew!
    That took longer than I thought.
    Message from t'Lad t'other week, "Dad, can you take a couple cabinets up to Steeple Grange for the light railway up there?"
    OK, I thought, that'll only take a couple of hours.
    Then it became "Oh, I've got a couple of things to pick up from work that they are getting rid off and they need to come back here, but there's also a few small items to take up to the tramway museum workshop at Crich".
    The couple of things to be picked up from the back street engineering company he is employed for included a ½ ton machine that took a while to load and even longer to unload when we got back to his place as he had to take it apart to get it out of the van.
    Then it was load up the large tool cabinet for Steeple Grange and the sundry items for Crich and hence to get them unloaded.
    So after a half eight start, the "couple of hour job" only just finished at 3!
    And he's still got another tool cabinet to go up to Steeple Grange!

      1. It's a good job I enjoy driving!
        Got a drive to Scunthorpe to pick up some auction lots planned for tomorrow and to Stoke to check up on Stepson booked for Saturday.

  74. Telegraph Letters to the Editor
    12 September 2024 • 12:01am

    SIR – Though he would never dare to admit it, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, knows that the only way to “radically reform the NHS” is to privatise the whole delivery end of the system: hospitals and treatment centres. It is widely acknowledged that the areas already sub-contracted out by the NHS perform better.

    Alan Hetherington
    York

    SIR – There has been a conspiracy of silence from the medical and political authorities. General practice is a full-time occupation requiring continuity of service, knowledge of family dynamics, and consistent availability. This is far from what we have at present.

    Dr Michael Spencer
    Adstock, Buckinghamshire

    1. And of course GPs are Independent Contractors to the NHS (on Schedule D taxation) but with the benefit of the NHS Pension scheme….

          2. As far as I can remember (it was a long time ago) he simply changed elements of their contractual obligations.

          4. Turns out that way…. I understand GP visits are a rarity these days….and even when they do occur it's often a locum -on-call service…..

          6. Blair merely enhanced every little detail, and paid them per patient in their practice, not for actually seeing said patients! What could possibly go wrong?

          7. I think capitation payments pre-date Blair i.e GP practices were paid according to their list size ….

          9. In Norway, you have to pay to see the GP. Except a few special cases. Helps reduce the footfall.

  75. Julie Burchill cannot be accused of being a Tory lackey.
    Here is her article on Spiked! She certainly does highlight the sheer sanctimonious inhumanity of Starmer.

    "Keir Starmer: a bad man who identifies as good

    From the winter-fuel cut to the mass release of wife beaters, he’s clearly not the saint he imagines himself to be.

    The rise of identity politics has led to an interesting new category which has been little noted, compared with the usual oddities like men who ‘identify’ as women and snobs who ‘identify’ as socialists. We now have bad people who identify as good people. Think of those men who are all over the internet, threatening any women and Jews who stand up for their rights with rape and murder, while telling us to #BeKind. Or think of Keir Starmer, probably the most prominent of these weird creatures yet.

    Labour swept The Heartless Tories away at the last General Election with promises of a new dawn. But the grim reality of the morning after, just a few months on with a long hard winter ahead, is one of unalloyed bleakness. I believe that the Starmer paradox – the bad man who identifies as good – is at the heart of it.

    At first glance, the way he has behaved during his short rule so far appears to be mere hypocrisy, so common in politicians that we rarely remark on it anymore. The wonder is here that it’s so utterly upfront. The former anti-corruption crusader now revels in cronyism, allowing a plutocrat to kit him out, as if he were a 20th-century Hollywood gold digger hooking a sugar daddy. The man whose own pension is so big it required its own act of parliament plans to take the winter fuel allowance from the elderly, which may be the difference between security and misery for thousands. The man with the Jewish wife, and who is keen to observe Friday night suppers, who dealt yet another blow to grieving Jewish families by punishing Israel for fighting back against Hamas, just a few days after more Israeli hostages were murdered.

    Most strikingly, he is the man with the happy family life who will sacrifice the happiness of hundreds of women and their families by releasing actual attackers of women prematurely, in order to free up prison places for committers of thoughtcrimes.

    Among the first 1,700 prisoners released yesterday are hundreds of men who have attacked women, leading the domestic-abuse commissioner, Nicole Jacobs, to say that domestic-abuse survivors will be ‘paying the price’ for prison overcrowding. Thousands more are to be released over the next two months.

    Steven Ling was granted parole in July, but Labour’s justice secretary has failed to use her powers to force the parole board to reconsider – no doubt with prison overcrowding in mind. Ling murdered a woman by stabbing her 60 times after raping her. He will now be able to continue his life as a free man still aged only 49. Sentencing him for the sadistic slaughter of 29-year-old Joanne Tulip on Christmas Day 1997, the judge told Ling that he would ‘never be released so long as it is thought you constitute a danger to women’ – or, perhaps, until his prison place might be needed for someone who posted something racist on Facebook.

    In a final grotesque twist, Ling carved swastikas on the dead body of Miss Tulip. I can’t help thinking that if his victim had been a man, he wouldn’t be released, as it would have been judged as a racially motivated crime – and therefore important. But it was ‘just’ misogyny – and therefore not really all that worth making a fuss.

    Starmer’s overseeing of this mass prison-break with absolutely no regard for frightened victims and grieving families is his worst act of inhumanity yet. But there was always something not quite human about him – something of the uncanny valley. He now has a new kitten named Prince, which he bought after his children asked for a dog (Computer says: ‘They are all pets’). Starmer is like Hal 9000 telling us that he’s doing bad things to us because he wants the best for us. But the glitches are adding up to something more sinister now than silly, as they seemed when he had no power. There is a very real sense that he doesn’t like people at all, that he sees them as algebra problems to be solved. ‘I don’t like images and pictures of people staring down at me… I’ve found it all my life… I don’t like it’, he said of a painting of Mrs Thatcher. ‘I like landscapes’, he added, presumably with no messy humanity spoiling his view.

    Starmer seems only able to operate strictly within a pre-planned schedule. See the flashes of anger when he is asked something he wasn’t expecting, or his curious referring to Rishi Sunak as ‘prime minister’ a whopping five times during PMQs last week. Then there was that incident in the pub during the pandemic, when a landlord ordered him out and Starmer just kept going towards him, offering him a pen, as a gift – because it does not compute!

    Maybe Starmer is fully aware of what he’s doing and is, as I have suggested, a bad man posing as a good one. Sometimes it definitely feels like he’s trolling us. Using the word ‘reset’ during his recent European jaunt was a sure way of getting us Brexiteers agitated about his possible nefarious plans to overturn an historic democratic decision (52 per cent of the vote is, incidentally, a lot more than the pathetic 34 per cent Labour won this July).

    Or maybe he is something far, far darker than a troll. Maybe the humble toolmaker’s son is a nihilist. I know it seems unlikely. One doesn’t imagine a nihilist looking like a Davos-loving technocrat – but maybe it’s the perfect disguise. There are certainly similarities – grounded in nothing, loyal to nothing. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines nihilism as ‘a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless’; ‘a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths’; and ‘a doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organisation are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility’. Ronald Nash called nihilism a ‘condition in which all ultimate values lose their value’.

    Starmer’s victory speech in June already seems like a sick and knowing joke in retrospect: ‘Now we can look forward, walk into the morning, the sunlight of hope, pale at first but getting stronger through the day, shining once again, on a country with the opportunity after 14 years to get its future back.’ If only he’d given a pantomime twirl of an imaginary moustache and recited Hughes Mearns’s ‘Antigonish’ instead:

    Yesterday, upon the stair,
    I met a man who wasn’t there
    He wasn’t there again today
    I wish, I wish he’d go away…

    If Starmer were merely a hypocrite, that would be a relief – but this Hollow Man may well be our first ever nihilist prime minister. What comes next is anyone’s – and no one’s – guess."

    3. Thanks, Annie. Ms Raven is one of the few contributors to the Speccie that swayed my decision to renew my subscription. That and the massive discount. Same witn the DT, which I've negotiated from £24.99 to fifteen shillings a month.

    4. It's rather more difficult to secure 52% of the vote when there are several options on the ballot paper. Had the EU referendum offered three ways of leaving and three ways of remaining, none would have secured anything like 52% of the vote.

  76. 392882+ up ricks,

    Could we not run a parallel NHS, consisting of ALL fully indigenous paid up members,with adequate doctors, staff etc
    already paid for as in training over the years of normality.

    Whilst the old NHS can continue catering for the worlds
    sick& ailing

    The NHS as is currently will ALWAYS be in a state of collapse ALL the time the electoral majority headcases are supporting the lab/lib/con, mass uncontrolled / government controlled, immigration coalition party,and the dover invasion campaign.

    There are a 1000001 patients waiting in Calais, plus thieve's, rapist, soldiers of allah, etc,etc.

  77. A plated Par Four?

    Wordle 1,181 4/6
    ⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
    🟨🟩⬜🟩⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Me too.

      Wordle 1,181 4/6

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

      1. Him Indoors was trying to tell me three, but I didn't see the proof. Still on the Spelling Bee – verdict usually 'Solid' :-DD

    3. Joined you on par.

      Wordle 1,181 4/6

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

    4. Silly error on guess 3 results in bogey!!

      Wordle 1,181 5/6

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

          2. Not sure why you cant see them (I can!) – anyhow, here they are again (shame it wasnt yesterday and I could have re-posted my eagle!)

            Wordle 1,181 5/6

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

    5. Silly error on guess 3 results in bogey!!

      Wordle 1,181 5/6

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

  79. Never met or even spoken to to mine, don't even know his? name. Had a tick bite a few years ago, when happened previously antibiotics prescribed, not this time – advised to go to A&E, three hour wait, then more time waiting in Pharmacy. I understand the number of Private Service GPs is growing nationwide. Dire Straits springs to mind..

    1. Labour took the national debt from a few billion to 3 trillion in 9 years then Brown sent it to over 12 trillion in 3. The Tories added another 6 mostly by not cutting the things Labour had pushed on us but no one wanted.

      Then we had covid, adding another 400bn. I'd reckon the real national debt is well over 20 trillion.

    1. Let me think… 11.6bn to foreigners for 'climate change' and massive increases in Union pay, huge commitments to paying unreliables (pocketed by the climate change committee). Sudden;y all that waste adds up to 22bn and lo! A 'black hole'.

      Reeves has been able to look at the Treasury books for some time. She is lying. The problem is the Left wing media won't publicise this to protect their favourite.

    2. It all comes under "not in the public interest". Similar ruling used for refusing the FOI on the cost of a block for asylum seekers somewhere down south.

  82. This doesn't make for pleasant reading:

    RMS. Laconia.
    Troop transport

    Complement:
    2,741 (1,658 dead and 1,083 survivors).
    366 passengers, 1,809 Italian prisoners of war and 200 tons of general cargo.

    At 22.07 hours on 12th September 1942 the unescorted Laconia (Master Rudolph Sharp, OBE) was hit by two torpedoes from U-156 (Werner Hartenstein) about 360 miles northeast of Ascension Island and sank at 23.23 hours. The master, 97 crew members, 133 passengers, 33 Polish guards and 1,394 prisoners were lost. The U-boat began picking up survivors, took lifeboats in tow and notified the BdU about her rescue operation. On 15th September, U-506 (Würdemann), U-507 (Schacht) and the Italian submarine Cappellini (Marco Revedin) arrived and participated in the rescue. The next day, U-156 and another U-boat were attacked by American B-24 Liberator aircraft operating from Ascension, this incident lead to the infamous Laconia order.

    Between 17th and 20th September, 1,083 survivors (among them 415 Italians) were picked up from lifeboats or directly from the U-boats by the Vichy French warships Gloire, Dumont d´Urville and Annamite and taken to Dakar. The 668 Allied survivors were brought to Casablanca by Gloire on 26th September. On board were 1 officer and 178 ratings of the Royal Navy, 17 officers and 87 ratings from the British Army, 9 officers and 70 ratings from the Royal Air Force, 8 officers and 178 men from the Merchant Navy, 1 officer and 69 ratings from the Free Polish Army and 50 women and children.

    Type IXC U-Boat U-156 was sunk at 1315hrs on 8th March 1943 in the Atlantic east of Barbados by depth charges from a US Catalina aircraft (VP-53 USN/P-1). 53 dead (all hands lost).

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5b4a19dc6cd17f7c7df8e3b5684792489661394bb7c010370f8e54fe209330be.jpg

  84. I have just come back from shopping at the Local Lidl.

    The weekly shopping booklet does not contain any dark people at all.

    This must be a first, since Black Lives Rule came into force

  85. I have just come back from shopping at the Local Lidl.

    The weekly shopping booklet does not contain any dark people at all.

    This must be a first, since Black Lives Rule came into force

  87. The 1988 Shorthold Tenancy Act requires a landlord to give two months notice. Is that short? Max & Co think so. So do these people who appear to think (along with the writer) that the purpose of the UK is simply to provide homes for recent arrivals and that private landlords should be forced to accommodate them without question. Ending a tenancy is not an act of cruelty but usually a business decision, typically raise the rent or sell.

    The effect of this proposal is that more and more landlords will sell and the stock of housing for rent will shrink even more.

    'We have no space to play': The guesthouse where everyone is homeless
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy76r1kjpv4o

  88. From the Spekkie.
    Altogether now ….. Karma, Karma, Karma, Karma, Karma chameleon …….

    "Policing minister’s purse stolen at conference about theft

    12 September 2024, 4:38pm

    Sir Keir’s Labour government may be determined to deprive daily life of all fun, but there’s still a little humour left in politics yet. Now it transpires that when the government’s policing minister, Dame Diana Johnson, attended a meeting of senior police officers earlier this week, she, er, had her very own purse stolen. You couldn’t make it up…

    The rather curious crime occurred on the very same day that the Labour government released prisoners early in a bid to get on top of overcrowding in jails – intensified by the sentences dished out to rioters that took to the streets last month. Addressing the policing conference on Tuesday, Johnson rather ironically lectured attendees about how the UK has been ‘gripped by an epidemic of anti-social behaviour, theft and shoplifting’. Doesn’t she know it!

    The unwitting victim’s speech was also accompanied by that of Nick Smart, president of the Police Superintendents’ Association, who lamented the ‘chronic underinvestment’ in the police before adding that forces were ‘operating on a shoestring’. But despite Smart’s statement on the state of British policing, it turns out that a 56-year-old man has in fact been arrested on suspicion of burglary in connection with the theft of a purse, outside the same Midlands hotel that is hosting the conference. Perhaps there’s hope for swift justice yet…"

    1. Pot Unluck – To follow the lovely Karma story above:
      Two weeks ago I bought a nice large Alstromoeria plant for about £25, took it home and planted it in a large glazed ceramic pot (Exhibit A). I also bought and similarly-potted out an Abelia (Exhibit B).
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/875c5c1f0230b22e2ce216d0dd593c5591135bb77aad8b2eef6f40dead3970b2.jpg
      When I looked out this morning I saw exhibit C. My first thought was “Golly, it must have been VERY windy last night, I could only just lift that pot plant using a sack trolley”.

      Then I noticed that the Abelia’s large pot, plus two large glazed ceramic pots full of Hostas, had disappeared, as had one of my neighbours’. Some thieving b@stard(s) had stolen them in the night and just tipped out the Alstromoeria upside down, wrecking it completely.

      Big glazed ceramic pots clearly sell secondhand for good money; typically the small ones are £30, rising to well over £100 for bigger ones.

      Of course I didn’t call on the Police – what use is an Incident Number when you know they are very busy policing hurty words?

      Historically we were told not to have our CCTV cameras looking out into the road and possibly seeing the activities of neighbours. But now it seems the Po Lice [my parsing] ”Service” welcomes CCTV Surveillance, so I have added a second camera to the one that merely monitored my front porch.

      And my neighbour’s savvy son is watching the local Facebook Marketplace (where he has been selling unwanted stuff himself) looking out for Pots.

      Morals:
      1. Don’t put fancy ceramic Flower Pots in your front garden, lest they be nicked.
      2. Get well CCTVed up asap.

      1. Ironically, I have just bought an alstroemeria (but no fancy pot for it) to replace the one I bought at Sandringham and which died over the winter. Mine will go in the ground when I've cleared space in my cut flower bed. My local hardware store had a sale on and was selling large glazed pots for £19.99.

        1. Conners, I just blew up the original photo of the (now dear departed) Abelia pot and it clearly says £19.99 on the indestructible plastic stick-on price label. Any pots I buy in future will lose their stickers immediately.

          1. Then the light-fingered will think they are even more expensive 🙂 I must say, this alstroemeria didn't look much when I bought it from a garden centre on the way to Wolverhampton, but it's flowered nicely. Not quite as dark a red as the lost Sandringham one, but very colourful nonetheless.

          2. The big thing about Alstromoeria is that they flower ON and ON for months. I speak as one who met his late wife in the first week of a Botany course at Bristol University. Of course, Botany is definitely not the same as Horticulture and Plantsmanship, as I have learned all my life.

          3. They make really good, long-lasting cut flowers. The main reason I want to acquire some more for the cut flower bed.

      3. Not that Plod would do anything
        , even if the thieves stood there and gave their names and addresses in front of the camera

    2. Pot Unluck – To follow the lovely Karma story above:
      Two weeks ago I bought a nice large Alstromoeria plant for about £25, took it home and planted it in a large glazed ceramic pot (Exhibit A). I also bought and similarly-potted out an Abelia (Exhibit B).
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/875c5c1f0230b22e2ce216d0dd593c5591135bb77aad8b2eef6f40dead3970b2.jpg
      When I looked out this morning I saw exhibit C. My first thought was “Golly, it must have been VERY windy last night, I could only just lift that pot plant using a sack trolley”.

      Then I noticed that the Abelia’s large pot, plus two large glazed ceramic pots full of Hostas, had disappeared, as had one of my neighbours’. Some thieving b@stard(s) had stolen them in the night and just tipped the Alstromoeria upside down, wrecking it completely.

      Big glazed ceramic pots clearly sell secondhand for good money; typically the small ones are £30, rising to well over £100 for bigger ones.

      Of course I didn’t call on the Police – what use is an Incident Number when you know they are very busy policing hurty words?

      Historically we were told not to have our CCTV cameras looking out into the road and possibly seeing the activities of neighbours. But now it seems the Po Lice [my parsing] ”Service” welcomes CCTV Surveillance, so I have added a second camera to the one that merely monitored my front porch.

      And my neighbour’s savvy son is watching the local Facebook Marketplace (where he has been selling unwanted stuff himself) looking out for Pots.

      Morals:
      1. Don’t put fancy ceramic Flower Pots in your front garden, lest they be nicked.
      2. Get well CCTVed up asap.

    3. I noticed quite a few unattended handbags at my recent party. None of them Channel so they were all safe. :@)

  90. 'Evening, all. I've been subscribing to the Tucker Carlson Network for two or three months. Just watched an interview with Dan Bongino. I see that I can share five videos this month. Whether that means five viewers, or just five videos, isn't clear. So, here goes. It may be visible to all, or just the first viewer. It may help others if you view it in incognito mode…

    https://tuckercarlson.com/dan-bongino-tour/gift/95e6d319-23ee-4190-82ee-18e96755efca

      1. Prolly good advice, Pip. I subscribed to NordVPN on the spare elderly laptop a couple of months age, when I wasn’t allowed to access the far right website which I administer.

        Having subscribed, perhaps I should move the daily ‘post’ over there?

    2. 'Evening, Geoff – hope you are well x. I don't subscribe personally, nevertheless I hear his voice quite a lot as Him in the Workshop is a fan. I believe subscription is around $5 or $6 monthly, which seems quite reasonable, have seen a few short clips. I'm currently watching Trump on Netflix, interesting especially if you're a Trump fan (which I am).

        1. Sorry Geoff can't see it above or below. I watched Trump earlier, don't know what anyone else's reaction is yet, but ours was he seemed quite tired/bored/beaten…wasn't good to see and hear…

  92. Not if people on benefits etc. were exempt, like they seem to be from so much else that we have to pay for.

  93. Evening, all. Miserable start to the day then it brightened up and I managed to get some work done in the garden. I have neglected it somewhat for one reason or another so now I really need to knuckle down and tame it. I shan't get anything done tomorrow, though; one of my horses is running locally and I'll be enjoying a meal in the Owners and Trainers. I am not hopeful that the colt (he's only a 2 year old and home bred) will trouble the judge, but it's a fun day out.

    Labour doesn't feel it owes anything to anyone other than MPs and the WEF. Certainly not the indigenous, voters or those who have worked and paid taxes.

      1. Thank you, mola2. This is only his third run. After this he will qualify for a handicap rating. So far, he has not exactly set the world alight, although he's improving. He's by Territories (Invincible Spirit). I am not sure he'll like the ground (currently very soft to heavy), but if the rain holds off and we get a bit of sun and a drying wind it might be just "soft" by tomorrow afternoon.

    2. Good evening Conners.
      A tad under 1½°C this morning.
      And it feels like it's getting cloder tonight already.

      1. Yes, there was a decided chill in the air yesterday when I woke up in the motorhome. Cloudy breath is a sure sign of approaching winter!

        1. At least in a motorhome you have some insulation!
          My van is currently has none, though I do hope to alter that over the winter ready for next year.

          1. Yes, fully insulated and double-glazed and with thermal blinds and a heater. Unfortunately, I am a fair-weather motor-homer so the most use I get out of the former is keeping cool in the summer. Mind you, Kadi makes a pretty good hot water bottle 🙂 He's allowed on the bed in the motorhome, unlike at home.

  95. The most offensive and disgusting act of the state is to disguise the fact that gimmigrants and the diversity cost massively more in welfare than normal people. It's putrid. The state desperately collects all this information and when it shows things they don't like, just says 'we won't do that any more'.

    It has caused this problem. It must now be forced to accept and confront it: the mass uncontrolled gimmigration farce has been nothing but destructive.

    2. The only successful immigration into this country that resulted in our increased prosperity and wealth was that of the Huguenot weavers, initially in Spitalfields but then after prosecution spreading to Suffolk towns including Sudbury, Glemsford and Haverhill.

      The silk industry added greatly to our country’s wealth and prestige. Even today we have the remnants of the Courtaulds and their gifts to Braintree and Halstead.

      The present immigrants bring only death and destruction, whether from knife and machete wielding thugs fighting over drug territory, to antisemitic and anti-Christian Islamist ghouls wanting to displace us and take our country and wealth to themselves.

      The mere fact that Starmer and his small cabal of Marxist and Trotskyite fools are allowing this theft before our own eyes in plain sight disqualifies them from positions of power. Starmer and his Seven Dwarves has to go and go soon. We cannot afford to leave these cretins with another 5 years in which to complete our destruction.

        1. I do agree. Many Jews came here on transit to the greater possibilities available in America. Many such settled in New York and its suburbs and the areas north extending to White Plains.

          Some remained in the UK but most smelled the coffee and moved on to America.

          Curiously a prominent Czech Jewish family I know of who remained in the UK after pre-war exile recently repatriated their matriarch to England from New York. She died a couple of years ago aged 97 years in England. She lived previously in Scarsdale in New York.

          Research Ruth (Petschek) Stein and the Petschek family of Prague whose Palace (a Bank) I visited over forty years ago. The building on vacation of the Petscheks was used by the Nazis as their Headquarters. I have a photo somewhere of the plaque commemorating this fact on its main facade.

      1. The wine on Malta and Gozo was undrinkable in 1978 but that labelled La Vallette was at least drinkable.

        If Starmer lasts another few weeks I suggest you stay there. Let me know if there are any nice properties for sale. I could stretch to 750k.

      5. Need to pick your brains on Malta, decent areas, hotels etc. Management informs me she wants to go there.

        1. I never stay in hotels so couldn’t recommend one. Valletta is the first stop if you haven’t been before. The Cathedral is worth a visit. They have two Carravagio !
          I will chat via email with more specific information.

  98. Thank you all so much for my birthday messages. We have just finished off the lovely day with a visit and late meal with our middle son his lovely wife and their two very active children. I've had lots of lovely presents and cards all round. And our friends from Perth WA after visiting relatives in Northampton called in on the way to relatives near Windsor. I feel privileged to have such lovely friends and family.
    Also number three son called me face to face to wish me well. From Dubai.
    I'll be turning in soon and thanks once more for all your much appreciated lovely thoughts. 🥰🤩😍
    Tomorrow is another day.

    2. A belated Happy Birthday.

      I think of you as a carpenter or construction chap for some reason. Maybe it is my recollection of your previous posts. I hope I have not been mistaken. Carpenters know how to build things and without them nothing much will have ever been constructed.

      You are a very lucky man to have such a family.

      1. Thank you for your kind words Corim.

        Yes I left school at 15 and carried out a five year apprenticeship as a carpenter bench joiner. I loved it.
        I was taught by Ernie Gaze to make stairs.
        We also made the prototype Velux Windows at J Westerdick and son Harrow.
        Lived and worked in SA worked on the JHB Carlton Hotel, centre.
        Married 50 years ago. And went to Australia for 4 years. I remember you knew Hans Henlien (sp) I worked on many of his projects in London.
        Including his own home. I Ran my own business, loft conversions and also became a contracts manager.
        I’ve made two guitars and two ukuleles from a mahogany coffee table and other scrap wood.

      1. Cheers Conners it was very peaceful until our number two and his family arrived in the evening. But their young children, son 4, daughter 14 months are hilarious 😂.
        Number one and his family will come to visit today after school.
        Number 3 called from dubai it’s wonderful to sit in a chair and see and talk to someone half way across the world. Our parents and grandparents would never have comprehended it.

    7. Belated birthday greetings Eddy.

      So pleased you have been warmly treated by your family .

      My second son is visiting us , paying a fortune to sail across from the Isle of Wight on the ferry with their car. So have been quite busy.

      1. Thanks TB I consider myself a very lucky chap, my family are wonderful.
        I love the IOW. I remember standing at the end of the house rental garden with my grandfather, watching the navy ships leaving harbour on the way to Suez.
        And the huge liners going to the states.
        We had a family friend in Cowes who ran his own dairy farm.

  99. President Putin is currently speaking at the St. Petersburg International United Cultures Forum, which addresses current events related to Russia. He issued the following red line while speaking to a reporter on the sidelines of the conference Thursday:

    Putin says long-range arms for Kyiv would mean 'NATO countries at war with Russia'

    Below is the breaking AFP note:

    Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that the West giving Kyiv a green-light to use longer-range weapons to strike Russian targets would mean NATO will be "at war" with Russia.
    "This would in a significant way change the very nature of the conflict… It would mean that NATO countries are at war with Russia," Putin told a state television reporter.

    1. From the DT:

      "Britain and America must give Ukraine the weapons it needs to “win” against Russia before a pivotal winter of fighting, the Foreign Secretary has said.

      Ahead of crunch talks in Washington on long-range missile use, David Lammy told The Telegraph the coming months were “crucial” in helping Kyiv get in a winning position.

      Talks between Sir Keir Starmer and President Joe Biden in the White House on Friday are expected to include discussions on whether to let Ukraine fire Storm Shadow missiles into Russia

    2. From the DT:

      "Britain and America must give Ukraine the weapons it needs to “win” against Russia before a pivotal winter of fighting, the Foreign Secretary has said.

      Ahead of crunch talks in Washington on long-range missile use, David Lammy told The Telegraph the coming months were “crucial” in helping Kyiv get in a winning position.

      Talks between Sir Keir Starmer and President Joe Biden in the White House on Friday are expected to include discussions on whether to let Ukraine fire Storm Shadow missiles into Russia

    3. My second son and pal (IOW residents )are staying with us for a while hence my absence on here .

      We met a very nice chatty chap yesterday whilst buying ice creams .. He was a serving soldier , based here in my neck of the woods , off duty , and hadn't been long back home here from Poland , where many of our guys have been training others and doing stuff ..

      He suggested we were perilously balanced , and the threat that Putin poses will probably exacerbate a nervous retaliation from some NATO countries .. and the fear that Putin will be as bold as he was when he attacked the Ukraine territory .

      He and his regiment were sceptical of the idiocy of Lammy and decisions made by Starmer ..and the fear that the whole of the Middle East might blow ,aided by Iran at the same time as Putin's threats to Europe .

      You see , even our armed services are nervous of what might be next.

      As they say, yours is not to reason why

      Yours is when to do and die.

      1. Given the circles in which he moves, I suspect Uncle Bill has got wind of all this and has excused himself from these threads in all probability because he is busy constructing a fall out shelter somewhere on his vast domaine!

    4. My second son and pal (IOW residents )are staying with us for a while hence my absence on here .

      We met a very nice chatty chap yesterday whilst buying ice creams .. He was a serving soldier , based here in my neck of the woods , off duty , and hadn't been long back home here from Poland , where many of our guys have been training others and doing stuff ..

      He suggested we were perilously balanced , and the threat that Putin poses will probably exacerbate a nervous retaliation from some NATO countries .. and the fear that Putin will be as bold as he was when he attacked the Ukraine territory .

      He and his regiment were sceptical of the idiocy of Lammy and decisions made by Starmer ..and the fear that the whole of the Middle East might blow ,aided by Iran at the same time as Putin's threats to Europe .

      You see , even our armed services are nervous of what might be next.

      As they say, yours is not to reason why

      Yours is when to do and die.

    5. God forbid it goes that way but if Putin made a pre-emptive strike on Washington and London with simultaneous broadcasts of:

      "That's it. We can stop now or you can try to have your revenge and we all die. Now let's negotiate."

      I wonder what the West would do?

      2. Maybe I've seen too many films, but in the event of a pre-emptive strike, those left in command are required to execute their contingency plan which I believe is named 'MAD'…..

        2. Perhaps those left in command and control will renege on their orders when they see what’s happened, rather than escalate?

          Issue them all with “On the Beach”.

    6. I post earlier when I heard the news 'If that isn't a declaration of war I don't know what is.' Time for cooler heads.

    2. I wouldn't miss the bus pass (I'm never going to the Great Wen again, which is the only place I use it). I have covered the loss of the WFA by giving up my TV licence and refusing to pay to have my green bin emptied.

      1. Just watched Trump (Neflix), recommended Conway if you get desperate. Otherwise, good book…or radio (prob not Beeb tho)…btw how does your green bin get emptied (asking for a friend)…?

          2. I suppose burning it isn’t allowed? As a flat dweller I only have two types of waste. General in one bag and recyclable paper, glass and plastic in the other. Hammersmith council don’t require that we sort the recyclable waste and I don’t honestly believe that they sort it either. I figure it’s all a ruse.

          3. Did you put food waste in your compost bin? Perhaps I'll need to get an air rifle to deal with the rats.

          4. Definitely not, Conway. Some years ago, I kept hens, never left their food out. With age, they stop laying. I decided to not get any more, but husband decided to and bought a fancy feeder which the hens had to put their weight on part of it to release corn.(Previously I just threw down a handful twice a day and watched until they ate it all, rest of time they scratch around, eat grass/mites/worms.) Rats are clever they learnt the feeder trick pdq. They got into the compost too. So yes you may need an air rifle, they’re fast movers. Never apparently more than a few feet away from a rat (two and four leg varieties…)

          5. When I fed the birds I had a rat invasion (trapped and drowned, but apparently that’s no longer humane). They disappeared when I stopped feeding the birds.

          6. No food, no rats. I have a bird feeder, one of those tube types, hanging from a tree in the garden …during the rat infestation, saw four tails hanging down, how they all fitted in a mystery disappeared different directions when I threw feeder on ground. Have a couple of wrens fighting for territory at present, making a heck of a noise, rolling around on the ground. It’s a jungle out there 😀

        2. I don't miss the TV at all (and I have plenty of books – more than I have time left to read, I sometimes think!). The council empties my green bin once a fortnight – or, at least, they did. They are now going to charge £56 for a service that was originally included in my not insubstantial council tax bill and which was wholly inadequate for my needs then. I am consequently going to compost everything now and incinerate the weeds. I already have two compost bins and will get more if needed (I already have an incinerator). I produce a lot of green waste so I expect a lot of compost! I gave my bin a head start today by putting some partly rotted leaves and a few worms into it.

          3. I don’t think I would miss it either tbh, but it’s on the whole time. Used to listen to WS as I painted, might go back to that see how it goes. LA tried to get me to drag my full green bin down the lane some years ago, everyone protested so normal service resumed. Composting a good idea, do that but look out for rats. Incinerator sounds splendid! Compost seems to generate its own worms somehow – small, red and very wiggly:-D Good luck, be interested to read about your progress:-)

      2. This is the point, isn’t it? When they took away my child benefit, my daughter had to stop her ballet and my son his tennis.

        Of course, if they taxed me less in the first place and I could spend my own money as I want…..

        1. This is something socialists (and the recent new socialists called the unconservative party) can’t seem to get their heads round. WE know that you can only spend it once and if your circumstances change you have to cut out things that are non-essential. When I had to retire through ill-health, I had to stop my charitable giving and only spend on essentials.

      1. Usually eating chocolates at the staff station (DO NOT LEAN ON THIS DESK), from what I observe, trundling up and down, wishing they were at home with their cat and daytime TV.

        1. Precisely. The receptionists are roughly spherical in body shape and have jowls from stuffing their already fat faces with munchies. Meanwhile a telephone on their desk just rings and rings whist these virgins chew away in conversation between themselves.

          When I last visited West Suffolk on entering there was a pile of sick next to the main entrance. When I left a hour or more later the pile of sick was still there.

          1. Yuk. Mind, the first time I went to Charing Cross Hospital, the entrance hall stank of urine. Hospitals ain’t what they used to be.

          2. Indeed they aren't. When I was admitted to have my tonsils out, aged 6, the overwhelming smell was of disinfectant. Nowadays, smells are less pleasant.

  104. Friday 13th September, 2024

    Anne Allan

    (aka The Pushy Nurse!)

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f15108925be65a9a2608d8e25edca14c950fe7218c958fddb1d38927a117d0b9.png

    You have not told us your year of birth – doubtless prompted by Oscar Wilde:

    "No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating"

    I think you are in severe danger of becoming "a treasure" on the Nottlers' Forum,

    With our very best wishes,

    Caroline an Rastus

  106. Goodnight, all. As I leave for the night, I ask, have any of you seen the new Charles £1 coin? It has bees on it. How Napoleonic! We all know what happened to him, don't we?

    3. Where you in Thetford in 1985/6 Guvner?
      That's when one of my cousins Michael was the town Mayor.

        1. Just missed him
          🤔 I think he was there when they found all the treasure. Nice guy he passed away around ten years ago.
          Funeral at Bury St Edmonds.
          His surname was Edmond. 😉

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