Thursday 12 June: Reeves’s review was a sobering experience for hard-pressed taxpayers

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

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

584 thoughts on “Thursday 12 June: Reeves’s review was a sobering experience for hard-pressed taxpayers”

  1. Good morning, chums. And thanks, Geoff, for today's new NoTTLe site.First!!!

    Wordle 1,454 5/6

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  5. Good morning all.
    A bright morning with a thin high altitude cirrus cloud and fluffy cumulus at a lower level.
    An almost warm 13°C on the thermometer.

    1. Our Political idiots never learn anything from the mistakes of others or from their own mistakes.
      Full steam ahead and no control.
      She is a graphic representation of on going errors.

  8. Michael Deacon
    Reform was meant to be the party you can trust on immigration. So what on earth is going on?

    It’s one thing to move Left on welfare, but quite another for the new chairman to parrot smug clichés about multiculturalism

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/briefs/2025/06/11/TELEMMGLPICT000428117179_17496463328280_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf_4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=1280
    Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, pictured with newly appointed party chairman Dr David Bull this week Credit: Jacqueline Lawrie

    11 June 2025 4:00pm BST
    Michael Deacon

    Quick quiz. During an interview with ITV News on Tuesday, which Labour Left-winger said the following words?

    “Immigration is the lifeblood of this country. It always has been.”

    Did you get it? Probably not, because it was a trick question. The person who made that impeccably progressive statement is not a Labour Left-winger. Or even a Labour centrist.

    He is in fact Dr David Bull: none other than the brand new chairman of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

    Seriously. That’s what he said. And then, during another interview later that day, Dr Bull said something just as extraordinary. “We are,” he informed viewers of GB News, “an island of immigrants”.

    Well, yes, I suppose we are, in the year 2025, after three decades of ever-rocketing immigration. But his choice of words was still startling. Because “We are an island of immigrants” is a phrase normally deployed by open-border liberals, with the aim of promoting the false but politically convenient notion that the mass immigration of recent years is entirely normal, and therefore you have no right to object to it. Essentially, the message is: what are you moaning about, you silly gammon? Boudica was born in Afghanistan! Chaucer came from Eritrea! Henry VIII spent £4 million a day on asylum hotels! This is simply the way things have always been, so shut up and be grateful!

    In light of Dr Bull’s comments, therefore, supporters of Reform are bound to be feeling a touch perplexed. Surely their party’s chairman, of all people, should understand what Reform is meant to stand for. It’s meant to offer a proper alternative to the Labour/Tory “uniparty”. It’s meant to reject smug metropolitan clichés about multiculturalism. And above all, it’s meant to be the party you can trust on immigration. So what on earth is going on?

    It’s one thing for Reform to move Left on nationalisation and welfare. But quite another for it to move Left on this. These days, even Sir Keir Starmer is trying to talk tough on border control. Yet, all of a sudden, the chairman of Reform sounds as if he’s auditioning for a slot on Alastair Campbell’s podcast. What will he suggest next? Rejoining the EU? Gary Lineker for Home Secretary? Make Greta Thunberg our ambassador to Israel?

    Still, at least one person on the Right is happy. Robert Jenrick, the former and no doubt future Tory leadership contender, seized on Dr Bull’s words with glee. He clearly couldn’t believe his luck.

    “This is just nonsense,” he snorted. “Not all immigration is equal. The unprecedented mass, unskilled migration we’ve experienced has been severely economically and culturally damaging… The idea that it is the ‘lifeblood of our country’, without which things would fall apart, couldn’t be further from the truth.”

    Until not all that long ago, of course, Mr Jenrick was a member of the government that blithely enabled this “unprecedented mass, unskilled migration” to reach record heights (from a net figure of 252,000 in 2010 to 906,000 in 2023). Which is, very obviously, a major reason why so many voters have abandoned the Tories for Reform. They’re sick of being lied to. They’re tired of being patronised. And they can’t understand why, every month, £1 billion of their taxes should be spent on immigrants’ benefits.

    As a result, they want drastic change. So when Reform promised a “net zero” immigration policy – as in, one in, one out – these voters naturally thought that, at long last, here was a party they could believe in. A party that genuinely thought the same way they did.

    Nigel Farage, therefore, had better reassure these voters that this is still the case. Contrary to what the BBC or The Guardian may imagine, Reform’s prospects of winning power will not be damaged by soap opera nonsense: internal tiffs, or politically incorrect posts on social media, or ex-chairman Zia Yusuf flouncing out in a huff only to slink back in two minutes later. Nor will they be damaged by the news that Dr Bull once described Mr Farage as an “idiot”, all of 11 years ago.

    There’s only one thing that could halt Reform’s surge. And that’s the fear that, once safely ensconced in office, they’d be no different from the parties they’d usurped. Just the Tories, in a slightly lighter blue.

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

    FRANK EVANS
    15 hrs ago
    “Immigration is the lifeblood of this country. It always has been.”

    Yep! Keep on this track Reform, and you will be sunk in the next general elections.

    The brains to be behind Reform's political agendas seem to think that appearing multicultural will win them voters – they are wrong!

    The Muslim and black African votes will not be won by Reform because these two groups of voters see Reform, wrongly or rightly, as Islamophobic and racist. All Reform is managing to do is to cause genuine Reform voters to vote Tory or Lib Dems.

    1. Nigel is surrounding himself with people he can blame when it all goes pear-shaped.

      1. The moment when his decline became inevitable and unstoppable was when he and Yusuf ganged together to expel Rupert Lowe from the Reform Party.

        Nigel Farage is the Reform Party star but he should reflect on the fact that star players are seldom the best captains. Mike Brearley was one of the best England cricket captains but he was a mediocre cricketer; Joe Root is one of the best batsmen of all time but he was not England's best captain and neither was Beefy Botham.

    1. A wonderful writer and an honest patriot.
      And the whole of Europe might have been different if only he had anticipated the Nod of recognition in The Day of the Jackal. 😉

  10. Morning, all Y'all.
    Sunny.
    SWMBO back from meetings in North Norway last night – celebrated with ready-made pizza! Not bad, actually, apparently made in Italy…

    1. Realisation battering its way into their tiny minds?

      Imposing unfair rules and implementing crazy policies on the people and then following up with proposing aggressive actions on those who object, will have its costs.

  12. The 6am graveyard slot on the Today Programme suggests the Americans are pulling out of Iran and Iraq in anticipation of an Israeli offensive against Iran, supplied and funded by America, in retaliation for Iran's support for Hezbollah and the Houthis. It will of course be utterly disproportionate, and only a final extermination of the enemy will do for those with powerful friends.

    How should Iran claim the right to protect its citizens from foreign attack? "Surrender or die" seems to be the option presented to them by the Neo-Nazis in Jerusalem. No doubt they will arrange something to warrant setting off the bombardment. Good job for Israel the UN stopped Iran from developing its nuclear deterrent! Christians elsewhere in the West may quote from the Sermon on the Mount "blessed be the peacemakers", but it seems that the peacemakers can go and get stuffed when there is a war to be won and a 1000 Year Reich imposed on the Middle East.

    Does Iran have any friends though? The Muslims, not installed in hostile sleeper cells around Western Europe, are like rats in a sack, and the Sunni Arabs would happily see all Shia Persians trampled underfoot, as they were during the Hajj once.

    1. Wouldn't it be good to not be able to read about this or that war or massacre in the papers – not because they aren't reporting, but because there aren't any!

  13. Lord Farquard
    10h
    Japan is one of the least r*cially diverse countries on the planet, and is a high trust society.
    Newly knighted Sadiq Khan calls the utter mess that diversity has made of our capital, its "greatest strength".

    Khan has been rewarded for lying and making our capital even worse. Let us hope that one day, after the uprising, natural justice will be served.

    1. Lord Trumpmedecine
      Lord Farquard
      9h
      King Charles armed with a sword and Khan on his knees bottled it. What a waste Dartmouth was.

    2. Our hierarchy certainly knows how to rub the noses of the working class and taxpaying public into the dirt they have jointly created.

    1. Why 12 months and only 7 deadly sins?

      When do we get to celebrate gluttony?

  15. Morning all 🙂😊
    Bright and breezy 15c storms likely Friday evening. That's a normal British summer.
    And the nightmare continues.
    What have we done to deserve this ?

    1. We at the parish council had a special weather warning by email! My thought was, that happens most summers.

  17. Captain Sensible
    9h
    If you meet someone who says “When one door closes, another opens”, don’t get them to install your fitted kitchen.

    1. Vlad already knows who all the problems are. Perhaps he has a friend he can get into Wastemonster and carry out some important adjustments.

  19. 407283+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Better late than never, the opposition formed thirty plus years ago in the phony shape of a governing body triggered it openly via "miranda" blair in 97, ALL other political party's leading kapos within the toxic trio followed on.

    The internal one sided coup has been in evidence quite clearly,
    and given tribal support in many cases by the Countries indigenous peoples.

    NOW reality is rapidly dawning on the herd as to why we are reaping such treacherous, heinous harvests, time after time, the
    majority voter has been successful masters of the nations fate and present odious state.

    In many people's eyes opposing the long running, (them being the ONLY contenders) political coup, via mass civil unrest is the final option after self admitting that after decades of Child rape & abuse, DNR regarding the infirmed / elderly/ daily intake of potential foreign troops, that enough is surely, this time, enough.
    https://x.com/TheBritLad/status/1932795727702602209

  20. My plan for Prevent
    Rod Liddle

    In the autumn of 1940, British cities were being bombed every night by large aeroplanes whose provenance was apparently of some considerable doubt. While the public almost unanimously believed the conflagrations to have been caused by the Luftwaffe, the authorities – right up to the government – refused to speculate. Indeed, when certain members of the public raised their voices and said ‘This is all down to Hitler and Goering and the bloody Germans!’, they received visits from the police who either prosecuted them for disturbing the peace or put their names on a list of possible extremists.

    The nights grew darker. The number of towns and cities subjected to these nightly bombardments widened. Very soon everybody in the country knew somebody whose home had been destroyed or who had themselves been killed. The government was forced to take action, and so in November 1940 it came up with what it called its ‘Prevent’ strategy, which aimed to protect British cities from further destruction.

    In the introduction to this new policy, civil servants listed possible vectors for these bombing raids and top of the list, by some margin, were the Slovaks. A senior intelligence officer told the public: ‘The greatest threat to our nation today is from the Slovaks. We must train our people in how to spot Slovaks and report them to the police whenever they can.’ The Germans were also mentioned, further down the list of possible perps, but the wording here was heavily caveated. Yes, some Germans may have been involved, but over all the German population was utterly devoted to peace and regretted the nightly infernos every bit as much as did the people who suffered under them. Our own air force was directed to drop its bombs on Bratislava, Kosice, Poprad and (the consequence of an understandable confusion over the names of the two countries) Maribor. And yet for some mystifying reason, the raids on Britain did not lessen.

    This seems to me exactly the response of our government(s) and most importantly of Prevent to the threat from Islamic terrorism. Let me be clear: I am not remotely comparing Muslims with Germans or Islam with National Socialism – I am simply saying that, in effect, this is what our government would have done in 1940 if it had been gripped by the same cringing witlessness and outright lying that possesses seemingly all of our authorities today when it comes to terrorist attacks upon the British people.

    You may be aware of the manifestly stupid quote from the Prevent halfwits that people who believe that ‘western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups’ are cultural nationalists at risk of becoming the kind of extremists who end up murdering people. People who believe the above probably consist of 70 per cent of the British population and, if his latest speeches are anything to go by, include the Prime Minister. And yet this stuff pervades everything Prevent puts out, while at the same time exonerating Islam and in some cases even those Muslims who do become terrorists (because they have suffered, you see).

    So, for example, Bolton council’s useful ‘Prevent’ handbook singles out ‘right-wing extremists’ as being at the forefront of terror attacks in the UK, and these extremists include people who are cultural nationalists: ‘Cultural nationalism is ideology characterised by anti-immigration, anti-Islam, anti-Muslim, anti-establishment narratives, often emphasising British/English “victimhood” and identity under attack from a perceived “other”.’ Islamic terrorism is also mentioned – but, again, heavily caveated. Then there’s Prevent’s own list of people who were picked up under its guidelines: 45 per cent were related to extreme right-wing radicalisation (230); 23 per cent were linked to Islamist radicalisation (118); the rest were related to other radicalisation concerns, including incels and those at risk of carrying out school shootings.

    But then I suppose if people who proclaim their support for Brexit or worry a bit about immigration are extremists, you are going to get pretty high arrest figures. If you add into the mix the fact that simply to associate Islam with terrorism you are guilty of Islamophobia, then you can see why we’re in the state we’re in. Incidentally, when she was Prime Minister, Theresa May, to her credit, drafted a new introduction to the Prevent guidelines which made it clear that the biggest threat to British security was al Qaeda, not Tommy Robinson et al. But that message does not seem to have sunk in with those in Prevent.

    It seems almost pointless to run through the facts. The truth is that almost every fatal terrorist attack in Britain since 2001 has been perpetrated by Islamists. All bar three. Have these people got a twisted or perverted understanding of Islam, as Prevent insists? I haven’t a clue. I am no Quranic expert. I’m just, y’know, taking their word for it. Further, 80 per cent of the Counter Terrorism Policing network’s investigations are related to Islamism (2023). Some 75 per cent of MI5’s surveillance cases are Islamists. There are around 40,000 potential jihadis being monitored by our security services. There is not the remotest doubt as to the provenance of the gravest terror threats to our country. It’s not the shaven-headed nutters with swastika armbands. It is Islamists.

    Nigel Farage’s answer is to sack everyone working in Prevent. That seems a perfectly reasonable suggestion. But I may have a better one. Scrap Prevent entirely and initiate a new network of monitoring and reporting which focuses solely on Islamic terrorism. Junk the sixth-form philosophising over what is meant by the term ‘extremist’ and locate the problem precisely where it is: somewhere within our Muslim communities, even if we accept that our Muslim communities may not want them there. In short, get real and tell the truth. This kind of approach worked pretty well 85 years ago.

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

    1. Brilliant.

      you are going to get pretty high arrest figures.

      But not in Northern Ireland where 2TK in his 2TCountry wouldn't dare intervene as anti-immigration protesters lidderally burn down migrant shelters. No police visits for social media posts, and two year sentences for OAPs.

    3. Just check the word Coventrate: supplied us post war kids with great playgrounds (for after school hours

    4. Why not compare it with National Socialism? It has many similarities; contempt for the Untermensch (the kuffar), antisemitism, the belief they are the master race, a determination to eliminate all that stands in its way, a well oiled propaganda machine …

  21. Brendan O’NeilL
    Did Greta Thunberg refuse to watch the October 7 video?
    10 June 2025, 12:06pm
    https://www.spectator.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/GettyImages-2183576113.jpg
    Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg (Getty images)

    Did Greta Thunberg refuse to watch footage of Hamas’s 7 October atrocities? That’s the accusation being made by Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz. Greta and her crew, upon their arrival in Israel last night, were taken into a room to be shown the harrowing truth of what Hamas did 20 months ago, says Katz. But when the video started rolling, and ‘they saw what it was about’, they ‘refused to continue watching’, he alleges.

    Israel just saved you from a bloody warzone and you accuse it of war crimes? How about showing some gratitude?

    This is a serious charge. Thunberg and her fellow sailors should address it with haste. For if what Mr Katz is saying is true, if they really did look away upon being shown footage of the torture and slaughter of the Jews of Southern Israel, then we need to know why. To shut one’s eyes to the grim reality of Hamas’s anti-Semitic barbarism is to be wilfully blind to one of the great horrors of our age – did you do that, Greta?

    Greta’s boat, the Madleen, was intercepted by Israeli forces. She and 11 other keffiyeh-wearing agitators had been hoping to land in Gaza, to ‘break the blockade’. It was a ‘selfie yacht’, in Israel’s salty words, that was carrying a ‘tiny amount of aid’. Israel towed the boat to its port city of Ashdod. The crew, these self-imagined saviours of Gaza, are being repatriated to their countries of origin this week.

    Many shrill claims are being made about Israel’s interception. We’ve been ‘kidnapped’, said Greta. They haven’t. They’re fine and they have sandwiches. ‘If anything happens to us, this is a war crime’, cried one of the boat folk as the IDF boarded. This is teenage petulance masquerading as activism. Israel just saved you from a bloody warzone and you accuse it of war crimes? How about showing some gratitude?

    If these people want to see real war crimes, they could do worse than watch Hamas’s own footage of the racist terror it inflicted on the innocents of Israel. And yet, according to Katz, they turned a ‘blind eye’ to those war crimes. They looked away from the screen. His allegations are being widely reported in Israel and beyond.

    Self-styled warriors for human rights refusing to watch one of the bloodiest assaults on human rights of the 21st century so far? Implacable anti-racists turning away from the worst act of anti-Jewish racism since the Nazis? If this is true, then it surely speaks to a profound moral blindness among the activist class, where they will sympathise with suffering humans everywhere except in Israel.

    We await comment from Greta and the rest about whether they ‘refused’ to watch – and if so, why. To my mind, if this shunning of truth did occur, then it is of a piece with the left’s agonised and sometimes outright shameful attitude towards 7 October.

    Greta and Co would only have been doing physically what the ‘pro-Palestine’ set has been doing morally for nearly two years: refusing to grapple with the enormity of what Hamas did to the Jews on that darkest day.

    The activist set has a truly tortured relationship with 7 October. Some deny it, in a gross rehash of Holocaust denialism. It’s exaggerated, they cry. Women weren’t raped, they claim. Others say it was ‘resistance’. ‘This didn’t start on 7 October’, they snivellingly say, as if Hamas’s fascistic actions, its slaughter of Jewish women and burning alive of Jewish families, were an ‘understandable’ response to Israeli policy. The last people who thought a pogrom was a legitimate response to political grievance were the Nazis.

    The anti-Israeli mob can’t make their minds up. They can’t decide if 7 October didn’t really happen, or it did and it was justified. Their swirling post-truth disorientation, their sick refusal to speak honestly about what an army of anti-Semites did to Jews in this very decade, is born of a depthless moral cowardice. For they know that the truth of 7 October threatens to utterly shatter that precarious moral high ground they teeter on.

    To admit that Hamas visited Nazi-style violence on innocent Jews would be to admit that leftists took the wrong side in the aftermath of that grimmest crime against humanity. For self-styled anti-fascists to acknowledge that they made excuses for the worst act of fascist violence of our times is unthinkable. So they bury, or at least downplay, the truth of Hamas’s atrocities, all to the low end of preserving their own phoney moralism. Nothing as trifling as the suffering of Jews can be allowed to meddle with the self-aggrandising narratives of the new left.

    We cannot know for sure if Greta and her friends really ‘refused’ to watch the 7 October footage. If they did, might this be why – because they could not bear to glimpse the barbarism committed by the Palestinian side in this war? By the side whose flag they wave and whose keffiyehs they wear? They must tell us what happened. This is important.

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

    1. I won't watch such a video. What lives in my imagination is bad enough, without having that confirmed in video images.

      1. But you are already sickened by what happened. You don’t support it, unlike Greta and Co.

    2. I shall be interested to hear Jeremy Morfey's and Stig's responses to this article.

    3. It is a problem with police detectives, that they are gradually and cumulatively altered by witnessing and investigating the behaviour and deeds of criminals.

    4. It is a problem with police detectives, that they are gradually and cumulatively altered by witnessing and investigating the behaviour and deeds of criminals.

    2. Winston is a toy beagle. He has grown outward. He was 9.8kg when I got him. This morning he weighed in at a hefty 11kg!

      2. Although Minty only wrote the above single post to explain her situation to us all, she nevertheless continued watching the NoTTLe site, yesterday, giving upvotes at intervals to various posts she agreed with.

          1. Well, it was just what I thought. Minty never contradicted me when I referred to her as Mademoiselle, Fraülein, Signora, nor Señora, so what was I to think?

          2. Her or his identity has been unclear for some time as many Nottlers who have been here for many years will testify.

            However Minty's identity is more like the identity of people like George Eliot who took male names for reasons of hiding their sex for commercial reasons. Some writers also use initials (e.g. J.K. Rowling) to mask what sex they are.

            What ever Minty's sex is it does not strike me as being remotely 'trans' in a sexual way.

            Some of us disclose quite a lot about ourselves in the Nottlers' forum. Some of us are rather shy and choose not to do so and that is fine by me!

          3. Her or his identity has been unclear for some time as many Nottlers who have been here for many years will testify.

            However Minty's identity is more like the identity of people like George Eliot who took male names for reasons of hiding their sex for commercial reasons. Some writers also use initials (e.g. J.K. Rowling) to mask what sex they are.

            What ever Minty's sex is it does not strike me as being remotely 'trans' in a sexual way.

            Some of us disclose quite a lot about ourselves in the Nottlers' forum. Some of us are rather shy and choose not to do so and that is fine by me!

        2. Quite a while back, in one of her posts Minty may have used a pronoun or some words that led me to regard her as being female. Also, her perspicacity and general ability to look beyond and behind the obvious might persuade one that Araminta is wise enough to be one of the gentler s*x.

  28. How to ruin a city
    Douglas Murray
    https://www.spectator.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/GettyImages-221876f6082.jpg?resize=1536,1024
    Why would you choose to make a city crappy? Plenty of cities don’t have much going for them. But when they do, it takes a certain amount of skill to actively wreck them.

    Take London, for instance. Anyone in charge of our capital needed only to maintain it, if not improve it. Yet in almost a decade as mayor, Sadiq Khan has overseen a decline which is obvious to any resident or visitor.

    That first sign of rot – the tolerance of minor crime – is everywhere. It might be graffiti on the Tube. Or it might be the fact that it is risky to hold a mobile phone in the street or park a bicycle. Khan’s police aren’t interested in minor crimes such as phone and bicycle theft. And they’re not much interested in major crimes either, such as stabbings.

    Yet somehow, it doesn’t matter. Khan was re-elected mayor last year, and this week he went off to Buckingham Palace to become Sir Sadiq.

    It’s a similar story with Gavin Newsom in California. He has been governor of America’s most beautiful and prosperous state since 2019, and won re-election in 2022. Before that he was mayor of San Francisco, which should be one of the world’s most beautiful cities. But Newsom has a skill for wrecking everything he touches.

    During his mayoralty, San Francisco became ever more dystopian. The rich would descend from unaffordable apartment complexes on to once-desirable streets where the ‘unhoused’ roamed around on crack and exposed themselves furiously. It became perfectly normal to walk down any road and think you must have been transported into a zombie movie, with the undead pushing around trolleys of their possessions. Under Harvey Milk in the 1970s, San Francisco famously cracked down on dog littering. By Newsom’s time as mayor the one thing you could say with confidence was that whenever you saw faeces on the streets, it didn’t come from a dog.

    Yet from the time of his election as governor, Newsom tried to roll out his San Francisco model across the state. The policies that had done for San Francisco and then did for Los Angeles include (in no particular order) incentivising illegal migrants to come into the state, ensuring that homelessness is encouraged and home-ownership punished, legalising just about every mind-altering substance known to man and presenting law enforcement as the enemy of the people.

    Of course Newsom did all these things under the same glorious cover that Khan wears – that great cloak of left-wing ‘compassion’. Law enforcement is easy to present as lacking in compassion. Making a city a ‘sanctuary’ allows politicians to present themselves as ‘kind’ and filled with ‘empathy’. Saying that illegality cannot be allowed is ‘mean’ and ‘unkind’. Promote mass illegal migration? ‘Healing.’ Try to stop it? ‘Divisive.’

    Most of the problems in America, as in Britain and Europe, can be chased down to this asymmetry. If you encourage lawlessness you can be seen to be doing it for all the right reasons. If you encourage following the law you will be portrayed as doing it for all the wrong reasons. Allow people to break the law on a grand scale and there is no punishment. Try to mop up that mess and you will be the bad guy.

    So it is with the stand-off between Newsom and Donald Trump. Conservative estimates suggest that between ten and 12 million people entered the US illegally in the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency – almost doubling the number of illegals in the country. Trump has already fulfilled his campaign promise of sealing the southern border, so that the number still breaking into the country via that route is effectively zero. But he is also intent on fulfilling his campaign promise of removing the people already in the country who shouldn’t be. He and his border tsar, Tom Homan, have made it clear that they are prioritising the removal of the more than half a million illegal migrants who are thought to have criminal records.

    On a good day the Trump administration has managed to deport around 800 illegals. But you can do the math yourself on how long it would take to complete the task. At the current speed, assuming there are no more legal or physical challenges, Trump and Homan might be able to deport all the illegal migrants with a criminal record by 2027 or 2028. If they want to deport the millions who came in between 2020 and 2024 alone, President Trump would have to remain in office for years, if not decades. Which is not actually a proposal.

    The unrest that broke out in Los Angeles this week was not even the result of Homan’s team simply detaining illegal migrants. They were seeking people who were engaged in criminal activity. But the unwiser parts of the American left decided to assume their normal position. They blamed law enforcement for causing the problem and pretended that the resulting violence was peaceful. All this as the public could see footage of masked left-wing activists spitting in the faces of policemen and throwing stones at them.

    Now Trump has sent in the National Guard and Marines and told ‘insurrectionists’ that ‘if they spit, we will hit’. Newsom, Hillary Clinton and other Democrat bigwigs are pretending that it is Homan, Trump and law enforcement who are the bad guys, while the people burning cars on the streets and looting the local Apple store are merely reacting to the provocation.

    Which brings me back to that central imbalance of our time – in the US as here. Why is the person who caused the mess allowed to be presented in the kindliest light, while the people trying to clean up after them must be portrayed in the crappiest?

    Curnonsky
    4 hours ago
    Note that the latest (ongoing) Los Angeles riot was certainly planned in advance, and the Democratic party hacks that run the city were kept in the loop by the shadowy NGOs that organized the festivities. Signs were printed, supplies such as cement blocks, protective masks and fireworks were laid on, and the word went out to various violent dirtbags that the party was about to start.

    Somehow – one can guess how of course – the head of a local leftist government employee union was apprised of an imminent ICE raid on a money laundering/smuggling enterprise in downtown Los Angeles, and he made a dramatic attempt to block it (national media notified well in advance, naturally). The riots then followed as surely as the first act follows the overture. The preening governor, the idiotic grinning mayor, and any number of publicity-starved Democratic politicians leapt forward to spout the usual scripted heartfelt soundbites about "our community" and so forth. And of course, Trump is to blame for the riots – even though they're "largely peaceful" and "confined to just a few blocks". So predictable.

    So why do cities destroy themselves? Because they want to. Or because they vote for leaders who want to. It's not just negligence – it's the plan.

    1. Why destroy a city?
      Simple – disaster capitalism.

      Destroy area with riots.
      Buy cheap real estate.
      Get government grants to re-develop inner city.
      Profit.
      Rinse, repeat.

      Catherine Austin Fitts examined the location of the last lot of destruction there during the Floyd riots, funnily enough it was all in inner city development zones where large amounts of $$$$ had already been allocated by govt.

    2. "…Which brings me back to that central imbalance of our time – in the US as here. Why is the person who caused the mess allowed to be presented in the kindliest light, while the people trying to clean up after them must be portrayed in the crappiest?…"

      It comes down to rewriting history. The media set the narrative. The media are far too often, Left wing. How many right minded newspapers are there? How many right minded news outlets? The Media attracts Lefties. The Left relentlessly attack anything Right wing that opposes their hegemony. The regulators hire these Left wing people. Thus the Left perpetuate Left wingery. Look at OFCOM's assault on GB News as it completely ignores the BBCs antisemitism?

      The economy- every indicator – is far worse now than it ever was under Truss' budget announcement, let alone implementation yet the press are silent. They don't want growth, wealth, a free, small state society. They want the same catastrophic waste, inefficiency, nonsense and drivel they live off. It's one parasite living off another living of the host of the tax payer.

      Thus the sensible is denigrated, the foolish praised.

  30. Good morning, all. Bright and very breezy this morning.

    Watch this and be worried, very worried. Either this MP/Minister knows what the near future holds for the people of the UK and isn't saying or he's a useful mouthpiece who isn't concerned with looking a complete fool i.e. taking one (or many) for the "team".

    The "Vagrancy Act" being repealed is a bad omen and is being linked on social media to the nightmare of "tent cities" springing up across the UK. As to whom the government/councils will house in tents remains to be answered. Suffice to say, speculation is rife about the outcome.

    https://x.com/addicted2newz/status/1932862941973655908

    1. Residents are being turfed out of their rented properties by their landlords so that landlords can gain financially by cramming non Brits into their properties.

      1. In order to get hold of more accommodation for the illegals the government agencies are paying landlords double the normal rent.

        Of course landlords are delighted about this but it is pricing normal local people out of the market.

        This is one of the root causes of the current trouble in Ballymena; the riots are already spreading throughout both parts of Ireland and if illegal immigrants continue to receive special and better treatment than the indigenous population the riots could well spread throughout the UK.

    2. I don't know why he isn't just honest and told that either private property will be confiscated or new houses will be allocated to the invading criminal.

    3. That is a Labour mp, my goodness what an uninspiring wimp. We are truly doomed.

  34. The clock is ticking.

    The US is evacuating non-essential embassy staff and the families of military personnel from Gulf bases..
    Trump warns that if no agreement is struck by the deadline, “there will be bombing.”
    Israel to launch a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities with US backing.

    They're not messin around this time.
    Can't wait for outbreak of Leftie hysteria.

  35. Good Morning!

    Continuing our holiday from outrage, anger and righteous wrath (back tomorrow) Graham Bedford appears to have read ZYY's article yesterday and taken to seeking enlightenment by creosoting his garden fence while pondering on life, the universe and where have all the rabbits gone. Read Stepping out of the Warren and assist him on his journey by leaving a comment. Graham loves comments like rabbits love lettuce.

    As a diversion from the lunacy of modern Britain, Zhang Yingyue treats us to a spot of serenity and spirituality in looking at China's traditional Three Paths of the Soul , giving an insight to the harmony between Taoist silence, Bhuddist contemplation and Confucian morality.

    Frederick Edward's summary of where Reform finds itself after the turmoil of the last few weeks is worth reading if you missed it – The Yusuf Problem , vote in the poll, and let us know how you feel about ReformUK.

    Energy Watch: Over the last 24 hours: Britain's electric power was sourced from Gas, 22.7%; Solar, 10.3%: Wind 27.5%; Imports, 16%; Biomass, 8.7%; Nuclear 12% and Miscellaneous, 2.8%.

  36. What percentage of the UK population is paying taxes?

    The new analysis shows 83 per cent of all income tax is now paid by just 40 per cent of British adults, and the top fifth of taxpayers account for two thirds of the total income for the Exchequer from earnings. The top 10 per cent account for 53.1 per cent.23 Jan 2023.

    1. Income Tax payer numbers by type
    there were 33.0 million Income Tax payers in tax year 2021 to 2022, which is projected to increase to 37.4 million in 2024 to 2025
    there are a projected 29.9 million basic rate and savers rate Income Tax payers in tax year 2024 to 2025, of which, 469,000 are savers rate Income Tax payers and 29.5 million are basic rate Income Tax payers. There is a 6.8% increase in basic rate Income Tax payers and savers rate Income Tax payers in 2024 to 2025 from 2021 to 2022. Basic rate Income Tax payers make up a projected 78.8%, and savers rate Income Tax payers are projected to be 1.3% of the overall Income Tax paying population in 2024 to 2025
    there are a projected 6.3 million higher rate Income Tax payers in tax year 2024 to 2025, which is a 42.6% increase compared to 2021 to 2022. Higher rate Income Tax payers make up a projected 16.9% of the overall Income Tax paying population in 2024 to 2025
    there are a projected 1.13 million additional rate Income Tax payers in tax year 2024 to 2025, which is a 117.1% increase from 2021 to 2022. Additional rate Income Tax payers make up a projected 3.0% of the overall Income Tax paying population in 2024 to 2025
    Estimates for 2024 to 2025 are projections based on the 2021 to 2022 Survey of Personal Incomes and the Office for Budget Responsibility’s March 2024 Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Basic rate includes savers rate Income Tax payers and both Scottish starter and intermediate rate Income Tax payers.

    Figure 1: Income Tax payers by marginal rate between 2021 to 2022 and 2024 to 2025

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/income-tax-liabilities-statistics-tax-year-2021-to-2022-to-tax-year-2024-to-2025/summary-statistics

    In England and Wales, 35% of the working-age population (those aged 16-64) are on multiple benefits, according to GOV.UK. This includes those claiming health-related benefits, as well as those on unemployment or other out-of-work benefits. Additionally, a significant number of people are in receipt of health-related benefits, with 4.2 million working-age individuals claiming such benefits in Great Britain, according to IFS. This equates to about one in ten working-age people.

    In the UK, 1.73 million people were claiming unemployment benefits in April 2025. This figure is the claimant count, which includes those claiming Jobseeker's Allowance and Universal Credit who are required to seek work.

    Increase from March 2025: This figure was 5,000 more than the previous month (March 2025).
    Increase from April 2024: It was also 155,000 more than in April 2024.
    Comparison to March 2020: The count was 496,000 above the figure of 1.23 million in March 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the UK labour market.
    AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more
    People claiming unemployment benefits by constituency
    13 May 2025 — The claimant count is the number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance plus people claiming Universal Credit who are…

    The House of Commons Library

    People claiming unemployment benefits by constituency
    13 May 2025 — 1.1. Latest claimant count figures. The seasonally adjusted claimant count was 1.73 million in the UK in April. 2025, w…
    UK Parliament

    Employment in the UK: April 2025 bulletin
    15 Apr 2025 — Claimant Count statistics are currently designated as official statistics in development. The UK Claimant Count for Mar…

    Office for National Statistics

    Over 36 million people in Britain get more in welfare and benefits than they pay in taxes, etc. Is Britain becoming a nation of deadbeats forcing a rise in pension age to 68 by the year 2035?

    The population of the UK in 2025 is projected to be around 69.5 million. This represents an increase from 68.6 million in 2023 and 69.1 million in 2024.
    Here's a more detailed breakdown:
    Mid-2025: The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates the UK population to be around 69,708,000.
    End of September 2025: The population is projected to reach over 70 million.

    1. Thee UK population is well over 80 million. Playing it down is a deceit. I'd imagine we're headed for over 90 million by September.

      Mostly because the few tax payers are forced t fund feckless welfare dependent gimmigrants. 48% of London is gimmigrant, welfare dependent. If that was withdrawn entirely not only would crime literally collapse as the diversity left for another country to ruin but incredible sums would be saved not paying foreigners to pollute this country.

      1. And of course the argument will be that all of these people need to be replaced, eventually, so we need to encourage everyone (including those who already need no encouragement) to have more children. Why do some people always assume that more children = more working people? In any case, why do we need to replace every person who is here? We are already overcrowded as an island. We have had our population increased by mass influx. We don't have to replicate the number that has resulted from that. Our population does not need to increase or even to stay the same – the proportion of those who are here who actually work and contribute as a proportion of the total population needs to be higher, not the number of babies.

    2. The very rich are mobile and are already leaving this country – so the rest of us will get stung for more to feed the invaders and the feckless.

    1. Why do feminists in the West completely ignore the way Muslim women are treated by their menfolk?

      Surely the fact that they say nothing entirely discredits their cause?

      1. Strange that the word "honour" means such different things in different cultures.

    1. 407283+ up ticks,

      Morning W,

      When your grandfathers axe has a replacement head & shaft, can it still be considered as your grandfathers ?

      If anyone has a problem understanding this post explanation
      can be obtained on request.

  39. 407283+ up ticks,

    If only you could be believed for this once O political FATTWAT it would give us reason to hope in the future.

    Dt,
    Boris Johnson: ‘Feeble’ defence budget will leave us at Russia’s mercy
    Labour is failing to show the leadership that is needed to defend our shores, says former prime minister

    Labour is failing to show the leadership that is needed to defend our shores, NOT a patch on us tory's (ino) regarding shore defences, and giving potential, tired invading troops escaping from freedom, succour PLUS.

        1. Hear you, Hertslass. Final straw was the submariner deaths which he almost treated as an afterthought whilst praising ‘British ingenuity’.

          1. Well, as a foreigner himself, he was hardly an example of British ingenuity – or any other indigenous trait.

          2. Thankful he could go to America on his passport, and that Trump accepted. He was once the Conference darling of the blue rinse matrons, could never quite see it myself. I reckon Carrie has his number:-D

        1. Exactly anne 🙂 latest missus seems to have him by the short n curlies tho’…almost feel sorry, but not quite…

  40. Hamas Attacks Bus of Workers from American Aid Group in Gaza; 5 Deaths; Hostages Possible

    The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas attacked a bus full of aid workers with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) on Wednesday, killing at least five local Palestinians who worked with the group.

    Several members of the group may also have been taken hostage.

    In a statement, GHF said:

    Tonight, at approximately 10 p.m. Gaza time, a bus carrying more than two-dozen members of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation team, local Palestinians working side-by-side with the U.S. GHF team to deliver critical aid, were brutally attacked by Hamas. At the time of the attack, our team was en route to one of our distribution centers in the area west of Khan Younis.

    We are still gathering facts, but what we know is devastating: there are at least five fatalities, multiple injuries, and fear that some of our team members may have been taken hostage. We condemn this heinous and deliberate attack in the strongest possible terms. These were aid workers. Humanitarians. Fathers, brothers, sons, and friends, who were risking their lives everyday to help others. Our hearts are broken and our thoughts and prayers are with every victim, every family, and every person still unaccounted for.

    This attack did not happen in a vacuum. For days, Hamas has openly threatened our team, our aid workers, and the civilians who receive aid from us. These threats were met with silence.

    The GHF holds Hamas fully responsible for taking the lives of our dedicated workers who have been distributing humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people at the foundation’s sites in central and southern Gaza.

    Tonight, the world must see this for what it is: an attack on humanity. We call on the international community to immediately condemn Hamas for this unprovoked attack and continued threat against our people simply trying to feed the Palestinian people.

    We will release additional information once it becomes available. Despite this heinous attack, we will continue our mission to provide critical aid to the people of Gaza.

    Hamas is opposed to the group’s operations because Hamas prefers to steal aid provided by the United Nations and to use it to control the population of Gaza.

    This story is developing.

  41. That's a quick job done.
    6 bags of infill emptied and tamped down with kerbstone for next step placed and levelled so more bags of limestone scalpings needed for more infill.

    I'll probably leave it at that for now and get some wood cut & split to finish off that last woodstack.

  42. It’s only Me
    2h
    Rachel on Sky….Truss crashed the economy but we’ve fixed it…said as economy shrank more than expected. She said this with a straight face! Honestly, we can see what is happening out there and it’s going to get worse!

    Rogerborg ⬛🟧
    It’s only Me
    2h
    Mmm. Services are the bellweather, as it's the sector where jobs and spending can be cut fastest. Construction reflects projects already committed to months beforehand.

    keith waites
    1h
    On the wireless – Sly News bulletin – GDP fall the result of 'uncertainty over Trump's tariffs' – so there we have it.. Trump, the leftwing excuse for the ages

    petersitch
    2h
    That can't be true.
    Rachel from Customer Services explained yesterday that she had sorted the economy.

    Unless of course she wasn't telling the truth

    Madeline Grant at the Speccie describes Reeves as

    ”A bollard in a wig”

    2. 'morning C1…looks to be around 4.9 just now. Bloomberg report UK economy shrank more than expected April. Luckily Reeves on hand to change that……..

    1. I hate to think.

      If mortgage rates start rising and repossessions commence in earnest as people can't afford to pay/lose jobs thanks to Reeves's policies and tax takes inevitably fall she's going to have to borrow even more.
      The BoE can try to cut rates BUT
      The "risk factor" on UK debt will rise and interest rates will accordingly, and it could well enter a vicious circle.
      It's not looking good.

      1. It’ll be blamed on the Conservatives, sos. I hope they start calling her out, loudly. Jenrick seems to have developed some sort of combative approach..need a lot more of that.

    1. 53 British nationals on board — Air India
      Air India has confirmed that 53 British nationals were on board the flight heading from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick..

      The airline said that flight AI171 was carrying 242 passengers and crew members.

      Of these 169 are Indian nationals, 53 are British nationals, 1 Canadian national and 7 Portuguese nationals.

      “The injured are being taken to the nearest hospitals,” it added.

      1. I’ll be amazed if there are any ‘injured’. The footage is devastating.

        2. It crashed onto a doctor’s hostel apparently. People were doing their best to assist any survivors (who would probably have been at the rear of the plane).

  49. Good morning, dear NoTTLers. I couldn't resist posting this article by Madeline Grant in the Speccie. We need a bit of humour to be able to stomach the carp the politicians are feeding us:

    "The spending review was 45 minutes I will never get back

    Rachel Reeves looked a little surprised at the cheers from the Labour benches that greeted her as she stood to give the Commons details of the spending review. As well she might: there can’t be many places where her presence is met with such enthusiasm; the National Reserve of Mauritius perhaps? Or Reform HQ? I’m sure her continued presence in No. 11 raises some smiles there.

    ‘My driving purpose since I became chancellor has been to make working people in all parts of our country better off’, began Reeves. It was interesting to learn that she has a ‘driving purpose’. I had assumed that she just existed – like nitrogen or lichen – without any definite end goal. It was tragic too to learn that, having finally chosen a purpose to her existence, the Chancellor had selected something at which she is definitively rubbish.

    Oratory isn’t the Chancellor’s strong suit either. If she has the presence of a noble gas then she has the delivery of a malfunctioning SatNav. In her weird staccato she rehearsed all the same old catchphrases we’ve come to know and hate: ‘£22 billion black hole’, ‘14 years’, ‘fixing the foundations’. The Prime Minister smiled a self-satisfied smirk as she did so, presumably in the manner in which the owners of Mynah birds do when they teach them to say something filthy.

    Alongside telling us things we already knew – ‘we’ve secured a trade deal!’ – and repeating asinine catchphrases, the Chancellor dropped in things which were presumably meant to sound inspiring. ‘We are renewing Britain’ she droned. Why can I not escape the sense that this was a threat?

    ‘We’ve been crunching the numbers, looking at the assets and the liabilities’ she continued in her one-woman crusade to kill off every other member of the House of Commons by surfeit of platitudes. ‘Who’s the liability?’ came a cry from the Tory benches. The Prime Minister scowled furiously and craned his neck to see who had made the remark. He had the air of a substitute teacher on the edge of a breakdown.

    Of course, none of the numbers had actually been crunched. Ironically for a woman who had made a great song and dance of turning the Office for Budget Responsibility into a Universal Arbiter of Moral Truth, the Chancellor hadn’t bothered to run any of these figures past them. She could have been reading out her Lotto numbers for all we knew.

    In terms of the substance there was a little more money for defence – though mostly deckchair rearrangement – and yet more poured into the great Moloch that is the NHS. This however seemed to mostly be so she could take a lame pop at Reform. Mr Farage made a sort of hostile squirm at her as she did so. She then accused him of spending too much time in the pub. Reeves doesn’t go to pubs, presumably she never gets past the car park, being mistaken for a bollard in a wig. I suspect after her jobs tax she’s probably barred from most of them anyway.

    She ended with what she clearly thought was a stirring speech: ‘In place of chaos, I choose stability, in place of decline, I choose investment, in place of pessimism, division and defeatism, I choose national renewal’. Now we know what St. Francis of Assisi would have sounded like if he’d had access to LinkedIn.

    This might just have been the effect of almost an hour of Reeves’s oratory, but the Labour faithful looked glum. I detected only two proper cheers – one for the NHS cash injection, the other for a throwaway mention of Labour’s spite tax on private schools. Save for a few of the more Stakhanovite toadies who nodded vigorously throughout, the enthusiasm was at a temperature so low it could have been measured in Kelvins.

    Those of us who had still somehow clung onto our wills to live after this desultory 45 minutes were treated to a broadside by Mel Stride. Reeves was, he said, impossible to take seriously, ‘weak, weak, weak’ and ‘not an iron chancellor but a tin foil one’. This seems unfair – tin foil is actually useful."

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-spending-review-was-45-minutes-i-will-never-get-back/?most-popular=3#comments-container

    1. What I find very strange is they never, including the last mob (government) of destructive idiots, mention the huge amount of money wasted every single day of the week that is spent on keeping the illegal invaders happy and comfortable. 8 million every single day of the week.
      This is how absolutely stupid they all are. It gets worse, now they want to build thousands of new homes for the people who should never have been allowed to set foot on our soil.
      They are filled with blame and seem to hate the working tax paying British public and ripping every single person off who has saved for their retirement and these morons couldn't run a bath successfully between the lot of them.
      They should all be rounded up and put behind bars. At their own expense.

      1. She is superb. Choices, choices. Do I pick …..

        "It was interesting to learn that she has a ‘driving purpose’. I had assumed that she just existed – like nitrogen or lichen – without any definite end goal. It was tragic too to learn that, having finally chosen a purpose to her existence, the Chancellor had selected something at which she is definitively rubbish."
        or
        "He had the air of a substitute teacher on the edge of a breakdown."
        or
        "She ended with what she clearly thought was a stirring speech: ‘In place of chaos, I choose stability, in place of decline, I choose investment, in place of pessimism, division and defeatism, I choose national renewal’. Now we know what St. Francis of Assisi would have sounded like if he’d had access to LinkedIn."

        Or merely treasure whole article?

  50. Morning everyone. I am up early as I had to take Kadi to the vet. He’s had a stomach upset which is probably a bug. I have medication for him which my long suffering friend who will be caring for them over the weekend will have to deal with. Sod’s Law. We have had so many people drop out of the visit that I can’t not go, especially as I am chairman.

    Taxpayers have been hammered every since people ignored all the evidence and voted Labour in again.

    1. Sorry about Kadi and a massive thumbs up to your friend.

      I know just what it is like with no shows and wishy washy people. They get very short shrift from me.

      But then that's because i'm a bastard.

      1. To be fair, most of them were due to illness and/or injury. One was due to a house fire.

        1. If only one hundred people had voted in each constituency, and 55 of those had voted for Labour, we would still have got Labour. It's our system which doesn't work any more. Or even if 30 had voted Labour, and the rest had voted so that any one candidate had less than 30, Labour would have won.

      1. Looking at the video, no flaps at maximum take-off weight as far as I could discern.

  52. I have had to cancel the long anticipated lunch at 'Les Enfants Terribles' in Weymouth. I spoke to Chef Eric and offered to pay at least the costs. Shellfish being very expensive.

    He wouldn't hear of it and told me it was not a problem and hoped to see me another time.

    I was quite taken aback. My estimation of those cheese eating surrender monkeys has improved enormously.

    1. Sorry about that, Phizzee! Good job my plane ticket is transferable! 😁

      1. Think of all the Co2 you didn't use. You have single handedly saved the planet. Take that Greta !

    2. I missed something… why cancel, if I may be so bold? That looks like a mega disappointment… 🙁

      1. Three guests. One no show. One had a sudden hospital appointment. They are now blocked.

        1. When you say "no show" do you mean that they simply didn't turn up or that they didn't reply?

      2. I might add. Les Enfants is number one in Weymouth. All the seafood and shellfish is pre-order because he buys straight from the boats that morning. Lord knows the fishermen and restaurants are struggling and to then order something then change your mind shows a complete lack of respect.

  53. That was difficult:
    Wordle 1,454 5/6

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

    1. Lots of possibilities!
      Wordle 1,454 5/6

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

  54. I've been trying to look at the report of the terrible plane crash in India but everyone of the newspapers on line wants me to pay in one way or another. They can get stuffed.
    I suppose I'd better get up and get dressed.
    I am sometimes overwhelmed soon after I have taken my medication and have to lie down again, but I did sleep for another hour.
    The downstairs outside windows need cleaning.

      1. We have two tiled lower roofs and have had too many broken tiles in the past.

    4. I wish there was a news website that let you mimic normal behaviour in an actual newsagent…i.e. buy whichever rag takes your fancy on that particular day.
      As I loathe all of them, I couldn't stick to a subscription for any one of them for long.

    1. He appears to be a not-so secret spineless, woke tw@ who couldn't give a t*ss about the people of this country, but is happy to polish his "green" credentials by selling us all down the river. Personally, I think he is in on the NWO plan, but because he is too obtuse to see that he is being manipulated.

      See you all again hopefully before I am taken to The Tower….

      1. Do you like rich fruit cake?
        A densely textured cake is the only way to conceal a file.
        Failing that, I'll get MB to dress as my maid; he's thin enough to unobtrusively wear two dresses.

        1. How about a dense KFC trying to conceal the fact that he is not what our monarch should be?

          All fruitcakes welcomed.

    4. The supreme governor of the Church of England is the titular head of the Church of England, a position which is vested in the British monarch.

      However

      The British monarch has been known as “defender of the faith” since the 16th century, referring to the Church of England after the country's split from Catholicism, but in an increasingly diverse United Kingdom, Charles has long spoken of a desire to protect all faiths.5 May 2023

      Anglican Church and the Church of England are not exactly the same. The Church of England is the original, national church in England, and it is considered the mother church of the larger Anglican Communion. The Anglican Church is a broader term encompassing the Church of England and other similar churches around the world that share a common theological and historical tradition.

      In a monarchy, the king or queen is the head of state. However, as the UK has a constitutional monarchy, the ability to make and pass legislation belongs to Parliament rather than the King.

      The monarch retains a symbolic role in government, but must remain politically neutral. They open Parliament every year and all laws passed, including those in the Scottish Parliament, must receive his stamp of approval, a process called Royal Assent. In reality, no monarch has refused to give Royal Assent since 1708, when Queen Anne did so only at the behest of ministers.

      Seen by some as a “meddler”, for decades constitutional lawyers debated whether Charles would be a reformist, said Wales Online. But in 2018, he insisted that he would refrain from making interventions or lobbying parliamentarians once on the throne, and that he would “operate within the ‘constitutional parameters’”.

      Charles’s formal duties are largely representational, such as embarking on goodwill visits abroad and hosting foreign heads of state. But the monarch does have a few unique legal privileges. http://Royal.uk , the official royal website, said the King “retains the right to claim ownership of any unmarked mute swan swimming in open waters”. He also claims dominion over all whales, sturgeons and dolphins in the waters around England and Wales.

      The monarch is not legally obliged to pay income tax, capital gains or inheritance tax, meaning that Charles has inherited a vast fortune and control of multiple assets and territories from his mother, as well as via his new position as King. He is also commander in chief of the British Armed Forces and immune from criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits.

      Territories?

      Hmm , turn again , stupid King , what about Gibraltar and the Chagos Isles?

      Why has he allowed Starmer to sell them off?

      1. Her late Majesty opted to pay income tax.I understand the Civil List was instituted when the Crown gave up the right to certain income from land.

      2. The monarch at the time, Henry VIII, was conferred with the title "Defender of the Faith" by the then Pope (can't remember his name) for actually writing in favour of the RCs.

  56. From Coffee House the Spectator

    14 Jun 2025
    Coffee House
    Melanie McDonaghMelanie McDonagh
    Why isn’t the BBC telling us what caused the Ballymena riots?
    12 June 2025, 7:11am

    Does anyone know what’s actually happening in Ballymena, in Northern Ireland? If you’ve just been following the news on the BBC, it’s actually quite hard to work out what has led to the violence which has injured at least 32 police officers.

    The initial news bulletins told us that there rioting youths were protesting about a sexual attack on a girl and that two teenage boys were in custody facing charges. My first thought – reverting to the Troubles – was that there was a sectarian element to the whole thing. But we also learned that the police condemned the riots as racist thuggery; so, not sectarianism, it seems, but something to do with race.

    A few further details came to light yesterday. We found out that the rioters were still rioting. A local MP popped up on the news to say that people were unsettled by the number of immigrants in the area. And the BBC informed us that the 14-year-old youths – who deny sexual assault – confirmed their names and ages through a Romanian interpreter at Coleraine Magistrates’ Court. But these glimmers of information still offered little clarity. Wouldn’t it be easier and simpler if the BBC just said that two Romanian boys living in the area are accused of an offence? Instead, we’re left to make informed guesses ourselves about what’s actually going on.

    The coverage of events in Ballymena brings to mind that of the Southport murders last July. There were allegations that the murderer was an asylum seeker; these allegations were promptly dismissed as ‘fake news’ or misinformation. The BBC’s reporters told us that the attacker was born in Britain and living in Southport. We know now, of course, that he is Axel Rudakubana, whose Rwandan parents came here after the genocide. That fact – that his parents were from Rwanda – wasn’t irrelevant to the case; their son was, it seems, obsessed with the genocide and indeed with extreme violence of all sorts. Trying to pretend that he was just some random local wasn’t helpful; people inevitably came to their own conclusions.

    If you’ve just been following the news on the BBC, it’s quite hard to work out what is happening

    The Dublin riots in 2023 happened after an Algerian was charged with stabbing a school assistant and three children, seriously injuring a five-year-old girl. But the authorities – and the news – carefully glossed over the bad-taste question of the background of the alleged attacker; social media inevitably filled the vacuum, which is precisely why the riots had an anti-immigrant aspect. Riad Bouchaker is yet to stand trial and denies the charges.

    Won’t state broadcasters ever learn that not telling us things isn’t helpful? People work things out for themselves. And if they’re not told clearly by the BBC, or whoever, what the background is of the alleged perpetrators in these cases, well, the public is going to arrive at its own conclusions. This was what I did, and presumably what the Ballymena rioters have done, only amplified by social media.

    The sense that elements of a story are being kept from us for our own good – that is, lest people get angry about it – only adds to the idea that we’re not really grown up enough to be trusted with the truth. It’s not a great way to calm things down, you know.

    Melanie McDonagh
    Written by
    Melanie McDonagh
    Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.

      1. Blimey Anne! Don’t come north of the border again too soon! You can’t use hurty words like that….😱

      2. Blimey Anne! Don’t come north of the border again too soon! You can’t use hurty words like that….😱

    2. If you’ve just been following the news on the BBC..

      seriously.. how quaint. LOL

    1. Apparently some ghastly group of paid agitators is planning to kick off on Saturday. There is speculation in the alternative media that this is pyschologically preparing Americans for martial law over Bank Collapse DayWeekendMonth However long we can get away with it.

    2. The situation is not as bad as reported by many sources. It was caused by heavy handed immigration enforcement raids, and since many in California have illegals as friends and neighbours, they don't approve.

      Nearly all the "shouting" and go get 'em attitudes and quotes are coming from people who don't live there.

      But when half of the country broad;ly supports Trump while the other half thinks he ought to be in jail over attempting to subvert an election, "peace" in an unlikely immediate reaction.

      1. Do many in California have people as friends and neighbourswho torch police cars and throw bricks randomly at people’s heads and wave Mexican flags?

    1. Near this Spot
      are deposited the Remains of one
      who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
      Strength without Insolence,
      Courage without Ferosity,
      and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.
      This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
      if inscribed over human Ashes,
      is but a just tribute to the Memory of
      Boatswain, a Dog
      who was born in Newfoundland May 1803
      and died at Newstead November 18th 1808.

  59. A load of logs duly sawn and awaiting Grad.Son to sort those that do not need splitting and get them stacked.
    Those larger ones in need of splitting will be done later.

  60. The neglect of the system is so typical of the UK of the last 20-30 years but the real folly is wind power. Its variability led to the creation of the demented daily 'auctions' and power-trading based on weather forecasts. If the BBC ever discusses it, it will probably blame Mrs T and privatisation.

    Britain's electricity grid is dangerously outdated

    Keeping the lights on is in the lap of the gods thanks to decades of underinvestment

    Kathryn Porter • 12th June 2025 12:00pm BST

    Built for a different era, Britain's electricity grid is now creaking under the weight of the energy transition, and no one is fully in charge of fixing it. Some of the equipment still in use dates from the 1950s. And the software that runs the grid? That was written before the current electricity market even existed.

    Both physical and digital infrastructure are suffering from decades of underinvestment as the connection of renewables has been prioritised above all else. Evidence shows substantial legacy equipment installed between 1955 and 1975, much of which remains in service.

    Last year, a report for energy regulator Ofgem by Cambridge Economic Policy Associates (CEPA) found that a third of transformers and 30pc of switch gear were built in the 1970s, as were just over half of all power cables. The transformer that blew up at North Hyde in March, causing the Heathrow blackout, dated back to the 1960s. More than a third of other grid equipment, from protection relays to communications systems to fire suppression, was built before the 1970s.

    The same CEPA report indicated that some of the grid's most important control systems typically only last 10 to 20 years before needing replacement, and that traditional network assets (overhead lines, underground cables, transformers, and switchgear) generally last between 41 and 70 years. This suggests a lot of grid assets are pushing the boundaries of their expected lives.

    The obsolescence risks associated with modern smart grid infrastructure are higher. The report notes these devices "are often tightly integrated with software and specialised equipment that quickly become obsolete … The typical software and equipment lifecycle of 10 to 15 years can limit the technical lives of these assets".

    The fragility of the digital infrastructure was highlighted recently. May 29 was a day of high wind output, but there was a lot less wind than expected the day before, which is when most power trading takes place. Lots of exports on UK interconnector cables were booked, and not all could be reversed on the day.

    The problem was exacerbated by the fact that until 10am, the within-day wind forecast was significantly higher than the already inaccurate day-ahead forecast. At its height, the difference between actual wind output and the forecasts was 4.5 GW. This represented 28pc of wind output at the time and 17pc of demand, a huge discrepancy for the National Energy System Operator (Neso) to manage.

    That day, the Neso's control room had to implement almost 25,000 balancing actions, turning down wind and tweaking gas power stations' output in an effort to keep the grid running properly. All this was done on software built in the 1980s. A literal relic of the days of privatisation, this software pre-dates the current market structure, known as NETA (New Electricity Trading Arrangements), which replaced the original post-privatisation structure in 2001.

    There are increasingly frequent outages on the system that connects the Neso control room with the control systems of power stations. When this happens, Neso staff must revert to notifying their instructions by telephone. Some 25,000 balancing actions in one day represents 17 a minute – clearly not something the small control room team can do manually.

    Had the software gone down that day, keeping the lights on would have been a matter of prayers as control room staff would have had to revert to a simpler way of doing things: getting wind off the system, bringing up all available gas plants, and, if necessary, suspending exports.

    Doing this would have made balancing by phone feasible, and would have removed a major source of variability that challenges system balance: wind. Not only can wind output swing dramatically, Neso uses inadequate forecasting tools that are widely criticised within the industry for their poor accuracy.

    A major project to replace the ancient balancing system, begun in 2014, was cancelled last year after a decade of failure, with no visibility on when the new replacement will be operational. Neso recently launched an audit of its demand forecasting, indicating its models had not been reviewed in "10-20 years".

    That is despite the significant changes represented by the introduction of renewables, many of which are connected to low-voltage grids over which Neso has little visibility (and which appear as negative demand in Neso's systems).

    Many parts of the grid still rely on control systems developed decades ago, well before the smart grid era. One such system is SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), which allows operators to monitor and control grid equipment remotely. In some cases, these systems are running on obsolete software like Windows 3.1 or early versions of Windows XP, long out of support and riddled with known vulnerabilities.

    In power stations, these controls are sometimes used for synchronising generators with the grid, a safety-critical function. These outdated systems are far more susceptible to cyberattacks, hardware failure and compatibility issues with modern infrastructure.

    The Grid Code – the rulebook for the electricity system – says remarkably little about digital control systems. There's no mention of software integrity, cybersecurity or the use of obsolete platforms like Windows 3.1.

    As demand on the grid increases and the system becomes more complex, continuing to rely on decades-old physical and digital infrastructure represents a growing threat to resilience. Yet, shockingly, no one has responsibility for ensuring industry rules will guarantee a secure system, leaving us in the hands of the original architects of a grid that bears little resemblance to today's power market.

    The question is no longer if the system is fragile, but how long it can survive without a major failure.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/06/12/britains-electricity-grid-is-dangerously-outdated

    1. No mention that the grid has always functioned with a steady supply of electricity from generators that didn’t fluctuate in their output (unlike those that can’t produce if there’s no wind or too much and no sun). Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean it’s useless.

      1. I'll quibble just a little and say it's implied in places (I highlighted one instance) but then it's not really an editorial/opinion piece. This line was the place to make the point firmly:
        "…no one has responsibility for ensuring industry rules will guarantee a secure system, leaving us in the hands of the original architects of a grid that bears little resemblance to today's power market."

        1. But nothing about accepting that today’s power market is not suitable for something that has functioned reasonably well for decades.

        2. In other words it was correctly designed around power stations and distribution from them, but with all these windmills and solar panels scattered hither and yon, it will need a rework.

          Or scrap all the Net Zero stuff and save a fortune. After all, anyone who is enthusiastic about alternate energy can always put solar panels on their own property for their own use. Ditto small windmills. Don't think they would be enthusiastic about backyard very small reactors though, like the ones the USSR used to power their spy satellites.

    2. Subsidising the entire world doesn’t come cheap and is soooo much more important than looking after the native population

    3. I'm flabbergasted that the UK grid still uses Microsoft Win3.1 for part of its control operations.

      I'm in the process of ditching Microsoft Windows 10 OS because it is being made obsolete after its support ceases in a few months time. The only way to upgrade to Windows 11 if you don't have TPM* hardware in your computer is to buy a new computer.

      To stay ahead of technological developments I have started using a ChromeOS box which is integrated with the cloud for both storage and functionality.

      *TPM = TPM refers to a Trusted Platform Module, a dedicated security chip that stores cryptographic keys and other security-related data.

      1. Certainly not very secure for an entity that is on the front line of national security.
        On the other hand, Windows 3.1 is older than ages of the military attackers trying to sabotage the UK's national grid, so…

        PS I am also still using Windows 10 but I shall probably migrate over to some linux variant. I don't like Windows 11, it is too intrusive.
        I would not be comfortable sharing my every computer secret with Google either.

        1. I’ve had excellent private file sharing via Google and have found using ChromeOS things are much faster than using a Chrome browser on Windows 10. There are limitations using cloud. connections but I look forward to using ChromeOS over optic fibre at full rate.

      2. Certainly not very secure for an entity that is on the front line of national security.
        On the other hand, Windows 3.1 is older than ages of the military attackers trying to sabotage the UK's national grid, so…

        PS I am also still using Windows 10 but I shall probably migrate over to some linux variant. I don't like Windows 11, it is too intrusive.
        I would not be comfortable sharing my every computer secret with Google either.

    4. There has been plenty of investment – it's just been in crackpot schemes like connecting fields of solar panels to the grid and expecting them to replace a coal or gas power station.

  61. The neglect of the system is so typical of the UK of the last 20-30 years but the real folly is wind power. Its variability led to the creation of the demented daily 'auctions' and power-trading based on weather forecasts. If the BBC ever discusses it, it will probably blame Mrs T and privatisation.

    Britain's electricity grid is dangerously outdated

    Keeping the lights on is in the lap of the gods thanks to decades of underinvestment

    Kathryn Porter • 12th June 2025 12:00pm BST

    Built for a different era, Britain's electricity grid is now creaking under the weight of the energy transition, and no one is fully in charge of fixing it. Some of the equipment still in use dates from the 1950s. And the software that runs the grid? That was written before the current electricity market even existed.

    Both physical and digital infrastructure are suffering from decades of underinvestment as the connection of renewables has been prioritised above all else. Evidence shows substantial legacy equipment installed between 1955 and 1975, much of which remains in service.

    Last year, a report for energy regulator Ofgem by Cambridge Economic Policy Associates (CEPA) found that a third of transformers and 30pc of switch gear were built in the 1970s, as were just over half of all power cables. The transformer that blew up at North Hyde in March, causing the Heathrow blackout, dated back to the 1960s. More than a third of other grid equipment, from protection relays to communications systems to fire suppression, was built before the 1970s.

    The same CEPA report indicated that some of the grid's most important control systems typically only last 10 to 20 years before needing replacement, and that traditional network assets (overhead lines, underground cables, transformers, and switchgear) generally last between 41 and 70 years. This suggests a lot of grid assets are pushing the boundaries of their expected lives.

    The obsolescence risks associated with modern smart grid infrastructure are higher. The report notes these devices "are often tightly integrated with software and specialised equipment that quickly become obsolete … The typical software and equipment lifecycle of 10 to 15 years can limit the technical lives of these assets".

    The fragility of the digital infrastructure was highlighted recently. May 29 was a day of high wind output, but there was a lot less wind than expected the day before, which is when most power trading takes place. Lots of exports on UK interconnector cables were booked, and not all could be reversed on the day.

    The problem was exacerbated by the fact that until 10am, the within-day wind forecast was significantly higher than the already inaccurate day-ahead forecast. At its height, the difference between actual wind output and the forecasts was 4.5 GW. This represented 28pc of wind output at the time and 17pc of demand, a huge discrepancy for the National Energy System Operator (Neso) to manage.

    That day, the Neso's control room had to implement almost 25,000 balancing actions, turning down wind and tweaking gas power stations' output in an effort to keep the grid running properly. All this was done on software built in the 1980s. A literal relic of the days of privatisation, this software pre-dates the current market structure, known as NETA (New Electricity Trading Arrangements), which replaced the original post-privatisation structure in 2001.

    There are increasingly frequent outages on the system that connects the Neso control room with the control systems of power stations. When this happens, Neso staff must revert to notifying their instructions by telephone. Some 25,000 balancing actions in one day represents 17 a minute – clearly not something the small control room team can do manually.

    Had the software gone down that day, keeping the lights on would have been a matter of prayers as control room staff would have had to revert to a simpler way of doing things: getting wind off the system, bringing up all available gas plants, and, if necessary, suspending exports.

    Doing this would have made balancing by phone feasible, and would have removed a major source of variability that challenges system balance: wind. Not only can wind output swing dramatically, Neso uses inadequate forecasting tools that are widely criticised within the industry for their poor accuracy.

    A major project to replace the ancient balancing system, begun in 2014, was cancelled last year after a decade of failure, with no visibility on when the new replacement will be operational. Neso recently launched an audit of its demand forecasting, indicating its models had not been reviewed in "10-20 years".

    That is despite the significant changes represented by the introduction of renewables, many of which are connected to low-voltage grids over which Neso has little visibility (and which appear as negative demand in Neso's systems).

    Many parts of the grid still rely on control systems developed decades ago, well before the smart grid era. One such system is SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), which allows operators to monitor and control grid equipment remotely. In some cases, these systems are running on obsolete software like Windows 3.1 or early versions of Windows XP, long out of support and riddled with known vulnerabilities.

    In power stations, these controls are sometimes used for synchronising generators with the grid, a safety-critical function. These outdated systems are far more susceptible to cyberattacks, hardware failure and compatibility issues with modern infrastructure.

    The Grid Code – the rulebook for the electricity system – says remarkably little about digital control systems. There's no mention of software integrity, cybersecurity or the use of obsolete platforms like Windows 3.1.

    As demand on the grid increases and the system becomes more complex, continuing to rely on decades-old physical and digital infrastructure represents a growing threat to resilience. Yet, shockingly, no one has responsibility for ensuring industry rules will guarantee a secure system, leaving us in the hands of the original architects of a grid that bears little resemblance to today's power market.

    The question is no longer if the system is fragile, but how long it can survive without a major failure.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/06/12/britains-electricity-grid-is-dangerously-outdated

      1. Yes he is! And I think he’s a very nice young man! No wonder the scousers hate him!🙄

    2. He's a cracking player – he should be a key figure in the England team for many years. Nice lad as well.

    1. There is a P.G. Wodehouse book, The Little Nugget, in which a gang of mobsters kidnap the odious child of very rich parents. They demand a huge ransom from each of the parents but neither of them is prepared to pay. In the end the gang actually has to pay the parents to take him back!

  69. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14805327/Three-teenage-girls-admit-killing-75-year-old-man-vicious-street-attack-filmed-mobile-phone.html

    As part of the police investigation, officers recovered CCTV footage of the assault in which the oldest girl was seen to punch the victim in the head causing him to fall backwards.

    Police were called at 11.25pm to reports of the disturbance and found Mr Rivero unconscious on the pavement with a severe head injury and in cardiac arrest.

    The Bolivian national was taken to the Royal London Hospital where he later died.

    On Thursday, the girls, who cannot be identified because of their ages, appeared at the Old Bailey before Judge Judy Khan KC.

    The girls, who appeared from custody by video link, pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

    Age should not be a factor for revealing the culprits responsible , kids or not , they need to be revealed !

    1. Sod their ages and sod "Manslaughter".
      They killed a man when committing a robbery with violence. It's MURDER.

    1. Labour must be licking their lips.
      Another huge majority on the way, off the back of fragmented right of centre parties.

      1. No wonder Starmer had a strange licky lip look when PMQs was being broadcast yesterday .

        His mouth looked numb with what I just don't know , was he dry mouthed or had words got stuck in his throat , just saying that's all.

    2. What's in a name?

      A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
      A politician by any name would stink as highly.

      Integrity Party ?

      Fine in principle BUT:

      A Nation which calls itself 'Democratic' often turns out to be completely undemocratic.

      A Political Party which calls itself Liberal turns out to be totally illiberal.

      "The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons."

      [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

    3. I truly don't know what Reform stand for anymore.

      The nation is gasping for a Centre-Left Islam friendly party. LOL

      As for The Integrity Party.. the name is a dud. Just like Gina Miller's Tooth Fairy Party. Anyhow they still needs a charismatic showman that is prepared to traipse up & down the country. That aint Rupert.

          1. ha! yes, I too am quite glad that Twitt banned me for life actually, even though I miss following various financial commentators. But at least I’m not feeding the beast by participating!

          2. I was suspended for five months in 2020 as my phone had died so I couldn't use it to verify my account. Even after I'd bought a new phone I had quite a battle to get my account reinstated.

          3. Ah, thanks! A bit slow on the uptake today. Perhaps it’s because I own a four-poster I thought it was a reference to that.

    1. Cummings looks to have a good piece today Spectator, wibbling – 'Westminster must fall'….

  73. It has just been confirmed that the Poundland chain of discount stores has been sold, with a certain grim irony, for the sum of…. yes, you've guessed it, £1

    Although a number of stores are set to close, hopefully a number of the 825 stores and 16,000 employees may be saved. It has been mentioned that the increase in Employers NI contributions was the straw that broke the camel's back. Well done, Rachel!

    I only visited a store a couple of times and, whilst a bit tacky and tatty, they did exactly what it said on the tin!

    I also read with some amusement that the the most asked question from shoppers to shop assistants was always – 'Can you tell me how much this is?'…….

  74. For those still supporting the mNRA Vaccines…

    " Pfizer & Moderna are synthetic mRNA technology. Think human GMO’s, as ALL are gene therapies coding the body to make spike protein, the lethal part of the virus. It’s produced for an uncontrolled amount of time and uncontrolled quantity. The lipid nanoparticle hydrogel (LNP) transports it to vital organs via the endothelium. The blood clots forming contain spike proteins and are folding in, making amyloid structures. Like prions in Mad Cow disease.

    Additionally, COVID jabs shift the initial immune response from IgG1 to IgG4, suppressing immune surveillance for many different types of cancer cells. There is now mounting evidence of reverse transcription destablization, and tumor promoting gene dysregulation in mRNA injected individuals.

    Translation: the more gene jabs you receive the greater the immune system damage, the greater your risk of impaired cancer surveillance and hence, the greater your risk of ‘turbo cancer’."

    1. 100 per cent.

      I consented to two AZ jabs, against my better judgement – largely because vaccine passports were lookng certain to be introduced. I was determined not to recieve any mRNA jab, but the home-grown AZ jab seemed more acceptable.

      How wrong I was. I lost the use of part of my right hand. Tricky, as a church organist, but thankfully, we weren't allowed to sing anyway.

      4 years on, some numbness remains, but isn't a problem. Consultant wrote to my invisible GP that this was likely a vaccine injury…

      1. So sorry you have been inconvenienced in such a frightening fashion re your jabs , Geoff.

        Moh started to get contractions of his toes and fingers when he was put on a Statin.. Simvastatin ..

        He would seize up, it was a very frightening , bizarre effect .. He is a type 2 diabetic .

        The doctor took him off them , and put him on Atoravastatin , still gets slight cramps but not as sever as with the previous drug.

        1. OH took Atorvastatin for about a year and a half…….. I had started to notice memory loss problems so suggested he stop taking them – he did and although his memory loss didn't improve, it doesn't seem to have deteriorated any further. Nobody at the surgery queried that he no longer ordered them with his other meds.

      2. I had two AZ jabs as well – for travel reasons as it was clearly going to be a requirement – and so it was for a couple of years……. but no more jabs for me. I was lucky and had no known adverse reactions.

  75. Allister Heath
    It is now too late for Britain to avoid financial Armageddon

    Rachel Reeves is the Chancellor that lazy, feckless Britain deserves

    11 June 2025 6:08pm BST

    Britain has grown lazy, feckless and fat. We are addicted to bread and circuses, as long as others pay for them. We don’t work hard enough, safe in the knowledge that “society” owes us a living. We crave “free” stuff paid for by taxing the “rich”, and lap up Rachel Reeves’s nonsensical spending review: billions that we don’t have for an unfixable NHS, U-turns on benefit cuts and winter fuel payments, and bribes for the Red Wall.

    We hate our politicians for lying to us – of course Reeves is plotting another tax raid, of course she doesn’t have a clue how to fund a proper military – and yet demand the impossible of them, hence why even Reform are nervous about questioning the welfare state.

    We are obsessed with “our rights”, and don’t want to hear about trade-offs, or personal responsibility, or deferred gratification, or that middle class welfare must end, or that “free” healthcare kills lives, or that carrots without sticks ruin a nation. Yet those who are picking up the bill for Labour’s fiscal incontinence – the top 5 per cent, business and entrepreneurs – are cracking under the strain, downing tools and heading for the exits.

    Britain’s central pathology can be explained by one statistic. In 2023 (thanks, Tories), 52.6 per cent of all individuals lived in households receiving more in benefits and services than they paid in taxes, so-called “net recipients”; net contributors, who pay more than they receive, are an oppressed minority.

    There are two kinds of people in any society: those who take out more than they put in and those who put in more than they take out. We have too many of the former, and too few of the latter, and Labour’s policies – especially after the U-turn on benefit cuts – are explicitly aimed at increasing the number of those dependent on the state. As the spending review points out, “all but the richest 10 per cent of households will benefit as a percentage of income from policy decisions in 2028-29”.

    Net recipients have reached such a critical mass that they can always outvote net contributors. Britain is ungovernable, and unreformable: 33 per cent of the public want to keep tax and spend the same, 30 per cent want to increase both and just 17 per cent want to cut them, YouGov finds.

    It’s a cultural catastrophe, but it suits Reeves: she never really believed in cuts, so no longer has to pretend. Yet she is pushing Britain inexorably to a fiscal crisis: the deficit is out of control, the national debt is surging and gilt yields are higher than they were under Liz Truss. We are living beyond our means.

    Many net recipients are pensioners: the private retirement market has never recovered from Gordon Brown’s vandalism, and was further ruined by regulation from the Labour-Tory duumvirate and by the abysmal performance of UK equities (itself caused by policy stupidity). Too many pensioners, often through no fault of their own, depend on the state pension or tax credits.

    But the truly dreadful number is that 45.3 per cent of adults of working age are net recipients. In a civilised society, the vast majority would be independent from the state: productivity, wages and savings would be higher, more would pay for their own (VAT-free) health and education and the vast majority would own their home. This would require a buoyant economy, driven by supply-side reforms, deregulation, free trade, entrepreneurship and a flat tax.

    There would be no direct route from immigration to welfare and council houses, and we wouldn’t serve as the world’s welfare state of last resort.

    Citizens and long-term residents who have contributed and truly need help would be given it, with clear incentives not to become stuck on benefits. Except for a small minority truly unable to look after itself, perhaps because of severe ill-health, disability, caring responsibilities or catastrophic bad luck, assistance would come in the form of a hand-up, not a hand-out. That is not even remotely close to today’s dystopian reality of a record 6.4 million UK adults on out-of-work benefits, an abominable failure.

    Even the 52.6 per cent statistic for net recipients underestimates the scale of the problem. It doesn’t include public sector workers, who depend entirely on taxpayers, and those who work for state-subsidised “charities”, NGOs or other bodies entirely or largely dependent on government contracts, subsidies and handouts. A full measure of those who are paid more by the state (directly or indirectly) than they contribute to the Exchequer would suggest a society that is no longer meaningfully capitalist.

    Don’t listen to those who accuse Reeves of promoting austerity. She is squeezing some parts of the state but the overall direction of travel is towards socialism. There are 6.15 million public sector employees (as of March), according to the official definition, up 7,000 compared with December 2024, and up 35,000 on March 2024; all of these people have a class interest in redistribution and growing the size of the state. I doubt the reannounced administrative cuts, which could see departmental administration budgets drop by 16 per cent on average by 2029-30, will ever happen.

    Labour is doing what it always does: laying waste to the private sector while growing the public sector. Our only real wealth comes from private enterprise, and yet this tax base is getting smaller while the bureaucratic superstructure it supports is getting ever heavier. How long can this last? There were only 30.2 million payrolled employees in May, down 0.9 per cent compared with a year ago. This is a loss of 274,000 employees in a year, a catastrophic indictment of Labour’s economic illiteracy. How much tax has Reeves foregone? How many are now in receipt of out of work benefits, or have left the UK? How many more jobs will be lost thanks to Labour’s Employment Rights Bill?

    Reeves is a terrible chancellor, perhaps the worst we have ever had. She should read Frederic Bastiat, the French economist. As he put it, “the state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.” One day, perhaps in 2026 or 2027, reality will reestablish itself, Reeves will realise that she has no money, and she will panic. By then, it will be too late: we will already be toast.

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

    Liz Mayes
    21 hrs ago
    Chagos surrender 30 billion.

    What else do you need to know about these muppets?

    Jo Harrison
    21 hrs ago
    I had my eyes opened some 15 years back when up the road from where I live a row of social housing was built. Until then I was always sceptical about the feckless stories. But they're true. These people do not work. They have children (and will have even more if Reeves gets rid of the 2 child cap) they have motobility cars and yet taxis arrive to take some children to school and bring them home, special needs supposedly.

    And we're taking in people from abroad because we need the labour, get these people to work I suggest and in one swoop cut the benefits bill, and increase taxes. Believe me these people clearly have no issues paying for beer at the local pub and finding money for nail treatments and tattoos. And believe me most could work, they work on their cars. they can walk to the local pub, they can have parties with neighbours….yet too ill to work.

    1. Matthew Lynn
      Rachel Reeves only has herself to blame for this recession

      The Chancellor chose to ignore the warnings that her tax raids would crash the economy. We will all suffer for this

      12 June 2025 10:12am BST
      Matthew Lynn

      Companies were hammered by a steep rise in employment taxes. Business rates went up sharply as reliefs were wound down. The living wage was pushed up, and stamp duty breaks were slashed.

      Against that dismal backdrop, it is probably a miracle that the GDP figures for April published today recorded only a 0.3 per cent month-on-month decline in output.

      The Chancellor Rachel Reeves will shamelessly try to blame that on the tariff war started by president Trump. But the blunt truth is this. The unfolding recession was entirely predictable – and she has only herself to blame.

      April was always going to be a tough month for anyone struggling to run a business in the UK. Employer National Insurance went up, and we saw the initial impact of that in the annual loss of 274,000 jobs in the employment data reported earlier this week.

      Likewise, one of the biggest rises in the living wage was imposed, and we saw the effect of that in declining hours worked in sectors such as shops and restaurants, which need lots of modestly paid staff. Business rates went up sharply, as reliefs were wound down, with many pubs facing an extra £12,000 or more in the amount that they have to pay to the local council, and closures are now running at 100 a month. Stamp duty went up as reliefs were phased out, and we have already seen the consequences of that in the 0.4 per cent decline in home prices reported by Halifax last week.

      In the background, industrial electricity prices have remained by far the highest in the world, forcing factories to close their doors. One by one Reeves has taken the major sectors of the British economy – property, hospitality, retailing and manufacturing – and whacked them with huge extra charges.

      Sure, it didn’t help that the US imposed tariffs on the UK along with its other major trading partners. And yet, in reality, the sharp fall in output witnessed in April was entirely self-imposed.

      It took an extraordinary level of incompetence, and a breath-taking level of arrogance, to sequence such a punishing round of tax increases so that they all kicked in at the same time. It is not as if Reeves was not warned of the devastating impact of her tax rises on businesses. The M&S boss Stuart Machin called for the NI rise to be phased in back in February but was ignored. The British Beer and Pub Association called for help with business rates, but no one at the Treasury paid any attention. Rightmove called for stamp duty relief to be extended, and so did many other estate agents, but the Government didn’t listen. The list goes on and on.

      Time and time again, businesses have told the Chancellor that her policies are killing their trade, only to be ignored. As it has turned out, however, they were completely right, and today’s GDP figures have proved that.

      It is going to get much worse over the next few months. We have only seen the start of the fall in employment after the NI rise. After all, if your wage bill is out of control, it takes time to slim staff numbers. There are procedures to follow before you dismiss someone, and most small companies will rely on natural wastage, and simply not replace people, instead of risking the cost of an employment tribunal.

      Stamp duty has only just gone up, and it will take buyers a while to figure out they can no longer afford to move. Meanwhile, retail sales are falling again, and the inevitability of more tax rises on business in the autumn is deterring investment.

      Reeves chose to ignore the warnings that her tax raids would crash the economy. She will now have to reap the consequences of those decisions – and unfortunately so will the rest of us.

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

      Nicholas Copestick
      4 hrs ago
      BBC Breakfast blaming Trump tariffs and pre-stamp duty increase for the shrinking economy. No mention of NI increases etc. Unbelievable BBC bias.

      Chris Marwood
      6 hrs ago
      Look….THEY DONT CARE !!!!!!!.. This is nothing to do with economics…This is philosophical . They are on a mission to replace our current capitalist democracy with their marxist autocracy

      1. Bollocks. Some Britons have grown lazy, feckless and fat. They are addicted to bread and circuses, as long as others pay for them. They don’t work hard enough, safe in the knowledge that “society” owes them a living. They crave “free” stuff paid for by taxing the “rich”, and lap up Rachel Reeves’s nonsensical spending review: billions that we don’t have for an unfixable NHS, U-turns on benefit cuts and winter fuel payments, and bribes for the Red Wall.

        1. As far as I can see, there are very few people in Britain who don't expect unrealistic amounts of free stuff that is piling up the national debt.
          Most of the millions of state-dependent employees/NGOs/charidees etc are just a pure burden on the rest of us – their jobs are freebies that we can't afford.
          Even the cherished old age pensions are unaffordable – and actually, always were. The overspending started about the time pensions were brought in. That's when the pound started to wobble off the gold standard because the government wanted to create too many of them.
          Pensions paid out of taxation should never have been more than a stopgap solution until people who had saved for themselves passed through the system.
          It isn't the fault of today's pensioners – their NI contributions should have gone into their own pots.

  76. Wordle No. 1,454 4/6

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    Wordle 12 Jun 2025

    Shrew for Par Four?

    1. Tricky one today – guessed wrong one of two for a dropped shot…… Bogey!

      Wordle 1,454 5/6

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    2. Bogey for me today.

      Wordle 1,454 5/6

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    3. Quite happy with a par today.

      Wordle 1,454 4/6

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    4. Someone has to make you look good –

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  79. I've just watched the tragic end of that Air India flight, my first thought is undercarriage down and flaps up which is the wrong configuration post take off to gain height. maybe the No,2 i/c selected flaps up instead of U/C up.

  80. Tiring to read but some good stuff

    Part 1

    Dominic Cummings
    Westminster must fall
    12 June 2025, 1:06pm

    Dominic Cummings delivered a Pharos Lecture in Oxford this week on why western regimes are in crisis. Here is an edited transcript of his speech:

    The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous. The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall.

    If you imagine our ancestors who built our civilisation over generations, looking at a sample of recent years, what would they see? They’d see the regime fighting to maintain secrecy of the vast cover-up of industrialised mass rape of white English children by Pakistani and Somali gangs over decades, while Whitehall continues to import people from the exact same tribal areas responsible.

    In January, Number Ten Downing Street claimed that Elon Musk was spreading conspiracy theories about national cover-ups. This is wrong. I witnessed the attempts at these cover-ups myself when I was in working in Whitehall – including the deliberate attempt by government departments to use courts to block reporting of the entire story.

    Every week in London and across Britain, people openly marched demanding a second Holocaust. And the only people who seem to get arrested are those counterprotesting. These protestors prevent access to Parliament itself and intimidate MPs; and the MPs’ response is to jabber about how the real danger is white extremism, and the real priority is protecting the European Convention of Human Rights.

    The regime is introducing new blasphemy laws, but obviously only for the world’s most famous religion of peace. Week after week, the courts use the European Convention of Human Rights to stop deportation of the worst criminals.

    The ECHR system that Britain set up to stop Europe sliding back to totalitarianism, is now being used – thanks to cross-party, multi-decade consensus – by sex criminals and terrorists to force us to prioritise them in ever more grotesque ways.

    You have seen recently the news that the guy who stabbed the girls in Southport attacked prison guards, but you won’t have seen why these cases keep occurring. The reason is the Cabinet Office legal advice states that it’s unlawful under the European Convention of Human Rights to keep even convicted terrorists under surveillance, even in high-security jails, because it breaches their rights to privacy.

    So, when cases like this happen, officials prioritise covering up the ECHR’s role. They do not prioritise the rights of prison guards not to have burning oil thrown in their faces.

    The regime destroyed border control, even though the main reason for ‘Leave’ winning the EU referendum was the desire for more border control. Then it imported unprecedented millions; and hundreds of thousands more simply got on the stupid boats in France and came over. They did so safe in the knowledge that MPs have created a legal regime that makes it practically impossible to deport anybody. The only people left in the world who now seem to listen to what the Home Office says are the tiny fraction of the most skilled people in the world who we actually want to come here. These are the people who the Home Office wages a constant jihad against to stop them coming into the country.

    The regime has broken housing markets, so unless your parents are rich, it’s going to be much harder for you to get a home, and build a family, than it was for your parents. It’s executed a set of economic policies that have created the worst period since Napoleon for productivity and real wage growth.

    It’s broken the NHS so badly that Ukrainian refugees returned to a literal war zone to get healthcare. And these pathological institutions attack the things that work. So if this building was suddenly taken over by terrorists, we would depend on special forces to come and solve the situation. Those special forces now have to have meetings about the Cabinet Office’s constant lawfare against them. They’re having to hire lawyers to defend themselves over operations which they were given medals for over the last few decades.

    I’ve sat in the Cabinet Office watching as terrorists actually on the run from cave to cave in Pakistan call on satellite phones London lawyers, using human rights laws to demand that British taxpayers give them millions. And the Cabinet Office says we’ve got to pay them out. And it sends over these millions, and then it classifies it all in such a high level that no MPs know about it. These cases are not discussed in Parliament. These cases are not discussed in the media.

    In 2020, we started monitoring sewage and provided real time data on disease spread. It is a crucial piece of infrastructure for public health; the same way the Victorians built institutions which we rely on. So, of course, the regime closed it down.

    We proved you could do vaccine research ten times more effectively. So they closed the vaccine task force. We created what I think is the West’s first data science and AI team inside a Prime Minister’s Office. The Cabinet Office and Treasury have tried to vandalise it for five years and close it down.

    If you think, well, at least things like nuclear weapons must be taken seriously, no, that’s also wrong. For 20 years, there’s been a disastrous procurement process costing tens of billions, which, again, is kept super secret so that it’s not the subject of discussion in Parliament, nor the subject of discussion in the media.

    So neither the worst pandemic since 1918, nor the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler, have made Westminster change – quite the opposite. Since the war started in Ukraine, Ministry Of Defence procurement has got worse and worse. When I said in 2020, the future of war was drones and robots, Westminster laughed. Now we see all this playing out on YouTube. But the MOD has spent the years of the Ukraine war deliberately resisting facing this reality. And when people return from Ukraine to explain what’s happening inside the MOD, they’re told: ‘Do not tell senior officials, do not tell ministers’. Our priority is continuing the budgets for the stupid old tanks and all the things inside MOD procurement that don’t work. We want to keep the old gravy train running.

    So step by step, the old regime has piled up the tinder. As Mao said, ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’. Britain, practically alone in the world, has avoided serious political violence for centuries. But the crumbling of our regime and its elites mean we’re now only random viral posts away from riots and prairie fires getting out of control.

    The kind of official story about how government works is that the MPs get up every day and they think about voters and they think about elections. This is not true. A lot of the reason why the news often makes no sense is that people think that the official story is true, but it is not. What MPs actually focus on all day is the old media and their promotions. Their reality comes from this old media. But, of course, this old media itself is breaking down under the power and the shock of the internet.

    We therefore see this kind of what I’ve called a sort of narrative whiplash that now dominates Westminster debates. Everyone herds to one story. The story turns out to be complete nonsense. And then everyone drops it and they herd to a new story. But everything is memory holed.

    I’ll just give a few examples on social media. In 2008, the official story blasted everywhere from the New York Times to the British media was that social media is all nonsense and it has no effect. In 2012, the official story became, actually, it’s wonderful because it’s helped President Obama win. In 2016, it became, actually far from being nonsense, social media technology is evil Jedi-mind controlling technology, and that’s the real reason why Brexit happened and why Trump happened.

    If you look at the start of the Covid pandemic, public health experts laughed at the supermodel Caprice when she went on TV and said: ‘Why are we not closing the borders?’ Remember that? She just voiced what normal people were saying. And, of course, all the public health experts mocked her all over Twitter and they said: ‘No, no, no, no, no. Closing the borders is racist. The actual plan is we’ve got no choice but to run up the white flag. Vaccines are impossible. Tests won’t work. Everyone will just have to do herd immunity without a vaccine and put up with no health service for months’.

    Then the whole story suddenly flipped. And, according to the Guardian and the BBC, the only people resisting this new story were the crazy right-wing Brexit people.

    The same kind of narrative whiplash is played out in the stupidest war in modern history in Ukraine, the war which never needed to happen. At the beginning, the official story was that the Ukraine war is nothing to do with Ukraine joining Nato. Then the official story became Ukraine must join Nato. They started off saying the war must continue, that it is bleeding Russia dry. And then the story became that the war must continue because Russia is strengthening and they’re building this terrible drone force. They’re getting more and more efficient. So the war must continue.

    Over and over again then, we see this constant splitting of the official story; these deranged narratives are the reality for Whitehall and for our MPs. That’s what they’re watching all day. That’s what actually determines their behaviour.

    A very telling example, I think, was that, if I’d said ten years ago that just before the 2024 US election Democrat presidential candidates will openly state that the First Amendment of America was a historic mistake that will be fixed after the election, everyone would have thought that was completely barking mad and completely inconceivable that that would be the case before.

    In the days before the 2024 election, that’s exactly what John Kerry said, and what Hillary Clinton said. The legendary music producer Rick Rubin said, ‘Wrestling is real, the news is fake’. And I think this is a very important, important principle to absorb. Wrestling is real. The news is fake. And if there’s one word now to describe the Westminster regime: fake is the word. Fake meetings, fake decisions, fake news. Fake all the way through.

    The only people that are struggling to see this, though, are the people inside the system. Why is this? Marshall McLuhan said that a new medium becomes invisible during the period of its innovation to almost everyone. And I think that this is part of what’s happening. This weird narrative whiplash, and this fake news is not visible to the MPs and the officials who are running around chasing 24-hour news all day.

    It’s visible to to people outside; if you talk to normal voters, they see these problems. But inside Westminster, the fake story is the real story. And the reason why I think this is happening, I’ll put it in a broader, broader context is, I think we’re going through a normal cycle of history: slow rot, elites blind and then fragmenting, sudden crisis, fast collapse and then regime change and a new elite with new ideas. I think the core reason for this is that, over a period of a few generations, over and over again, we see a similar story play out; the ideas and institutions of the ruling elites become pulled away from reality. They struggle to adapt to reality. And then, eventually, this gap between the stories that they tell themselves, and what’s actually happening in the real world, this gap falls apart and they fall down into the crack of it.

    I’ll give an example parallel to what I think is happening now, which is in the mid-19th century. If you go back to the 1840s, you see a generation who’ve gone through the Napoleonic Wars writing letters to each other. They can feel the collapse of the old order. And they write about this. They talk about the crazy ideas that are spreading in the universities and amongst the young. They discuss the crumbling of the old conservatism of throne and altar, the spread of atheism, the spread of liberalism and socialism. They discuss new technologies like rail and the telegram. And they discuss how they can feel the 1815 international system, the international security system, is also starting to crumble.

    Then, in 1848, dominoes fall, regimes fall, new countries are created; and then in the 1860s and 1870s, you see a whole bunch of books being published reflecting these huge conflicts in the modern world. You have Fathers and Sons. You have Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov. You have Nietzsche publishing Beyond Good and Evil.

    All of these books are grappling with these incredibly powerful forces at the heart of how the modern world is evolved; individual rights, spreading and spreading; markets, spreading and spreading; the idea of constitutions, spreading and spreading; and undermining traditional ideas.

    New types emerge in literature and then become real. They play out in the Russian revolutionaries of the late 19th century, and then you can see them actually seize power in 1917. And, if you flip to 1933, you have the sight of Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential thinkers in the 20th century, particularly on the left, actively welcoming in to Germany’s ancient universities, the Nazi regime.

    Now in the 20th century, you have two sort of big attempts to grapple with these modern forces in ways different than the Anglo-American system: the socialist experiment, and the fascist experiment. Both of these failed for different reasons. After 1991, this new world emerged. But what’s happened to us now, and why the news feels so crazy, is that we are going through the same remorseless historical process.

    If you talk to the people in charge, you hear exactly the same sorts of things as these old guys were writing about in the 1840s; the rise of new ideas in universities; the young seem to be going crazy. In the 1840s, it was railways and telegrams. Now it’s social media, AI, biotech. The international security infrastructure, built from 1945, with Nato, the UN and the EU – all of these institutions also seem to be crumbling in the same way as in the 1840s.

    So what? What can we start to build to get ourselves out of the mess that we have got ourselves into? You have to consider the regime as a complex system, and there is no single magic thing that you can do to change it. Asking the old people to change the institutions will fail. Just putting new people in the old institutions will also fail. You have to change the people, the ideas, the institutions and the tools altogether.

    It’s a system that’s coming apart in Whitehall and it needs to be replaced by a different system. So the first thing is that, for a very long time, the government has not controlled the government. This is the first thing that needs to change. If you look back 200 odd years to 1795 under William Pitt, you see a regime that took elite talent very seriously but took individual responsibility for projects very seriously. It understood the connections between how government buys things and the science and technology ecosystem necessary for building long-term capabilities. Pitt had real meetings in Number Ten Downing Street, not the fake scripted meetings now, where the conclusions are written by officials before the meeting ever happens. That’s not a parody from Westminster. That is actually the process for how modern government works. The big battle in Whitehall over power is not what people say in meetings, which are largely fake and irrelevant. The battle for power in Whitehall is about who gets to write the conclusions of what the Prime Minister says before the meeting starts. That’s not how Pitt did things, but it’s how it’s how Whitehall works now.

    Back then, technologists and entrepreneurs could build great things fast and at scale because of wise procurement, which was taken extremely seriously. Parliament threw people in jail during the Napoleonic Wars for procuring cannons. In stark contrast to how, after Covid, those responsible for procurement scandals were all obviously promoted. So the Whitehall in 1795 was more like Space X 2025 than Whitehall 2025 is.

    All of these different aspects therefore have to be systematically reversed if you’re going to actually have a serious government and a different political regime.

    On day one, a new prime minister that actually wants to take the country in a different direction and solve these problems, has to immediately fire and replace many, many, many of the existing officials who control things. The Prime Minister’s Office needs to take back control of Number Ten. It needs to close the Cabinet Office, and it needs to take over the functions that the Cabinet Office has acquired over a century.

    Now, remember, the Cabinet Office was set up in 1916, 1917, in the crisis of World War One, as the old Victorian system couldn’t cope. This system has gradually taken more and more power, so that the real people with power inside the system have become Cabinet Office officials.

    The Cabinet Secretary now has something like 100 times more power than the average minister does. People often ask me about 2019 and the Brexit negotiations: ‘What did this minister think about this? What about the rows between this minister and that minister?’ And my answer to them is, ‘I don’t really remember. And it wasn’t important’. The ministers were not important in this process. I cared very much what the 30-year old officials in the Cabinet Office thought about these things, because they were the ones with real power.

    If all kinds of things happen today, if when bombs go off, for example, or if a Secretary of State is caught by the security services in unsuitable liaisons, it’s not the ministers that get called first. The wiring diagram of power inside the system means that it’s the Cabinet secretary who is called first when the bombs go off and when crises happen. And the Cabinet Secretary decides which ministers are allowed to see what. All of that must change. We can’t carry on if you want things to be different. You can’t carry on with a system where the political ministers are essentially non-player characters in a video game, and the characters with real power are the unelected officials. You can’t carry on with a system where the ministers all walk up Downing Street and smile for the cameras, and the media and the MPs pretend that the decisions are actually being made in the cabinet.

    I can tell you the decisions are not made in the cabinet. In the whole of 2020, I never even bothered attending cabinet once. The reason is because it’s become fake. Fake meetings, whereas the real decisions and the real power have moved elsewhere. So you replace people, you bring in new people, you close down the Cabinet Office, the prime minister takes over the Cabinet Office, the powers of the Cabinet Office.

    At the moment, the Prime Minister has literally no role whatsoever in the management of key permanent secretaries who actually run the government departments. Nothing at all to do with it. The entire HR system of Whitehall works for the Cabinet Secretary, not for the Prime Minister. If you want change on what’s important – if you want to see a different regime – you have to have a Prime Minister who is actually in charge of setting the priorities for the key officials in the country. That doesn’t happen now. When we started to do that in 2020, the system went crazy and complained that it was fascism. But this really should not be controversial. In the old days, ministerial responsibility was genuine. It became fake. Switching it back to being genuine is not fascism.

    I think the essential concept of permanent civil servants, which was started in the 1850s, is at the root of a lot of the problems. The civil service system has become a closed caste system with Brahmins and untouchables. The Brahmins are insiders promoted through the system, regardless of failure. Look at our current Cabinet Secretary; he was responsible for pandemic preparation and planning. Of course, therefore, the old system has not fired him. It’s promoted him. It’s given him honours. And it’s now put him in charge of the entire civil service.

    The Untouchables are the roughly 100 per cent of the world’s most effective people, none of whom could be hired inside Whitehall by ministers. And the insane HR system means that everybody changes jobs every two years, roughly. So if you’re sitting in Number Ten, you have a series of meetings with someone in charge of, for example, Chinese cyber operations. And you talk to them and you talk to them. You have meeting after meeting, and then suddenly this person vanishes completely and some new person arrives in Number Ten and you say: ‘Oh, hello, who are you?’. And they say: ‘Oh, I’m so-and-so’. And you say: ‘Oh, right. Okay. Um, so what are you doing?’. ‘Oh, I’ve been in charge of special educational needs for the last two years’. ‘Oh, right. Okay. You’re now in charge of Chinese cyber operations?’. ‘Yeah’.

    So the justification for the entire permanent civil service system is supposedly that it develops expertise. But the actual way in which it works now is pathologically hostile to actual expertise. It doesn’t let anyone develop expertise. And it forces people, if you want promotion and you want to get a pay rise, you have to do this constant zigzagging every two years up through the HR system.

    All of that needs to be completely swept away. It was created in the 1850s, and, in my opinion, it’s no coincidence that from the time that the so-called professional civil service took over, that marked the beginning of institutional dysfunction spreading throughout the Westminster system, because it became fundamentally impossible for elected ministers to change things by changing the people. And that’s really where I think responsibility and fake meetings started to take over.

    So there’s a few other things that you need to do in parallel with this. Once you’ve actually taken power, and the prime minister is now actually in charge of Whitehall, the power of the Treasury has to be shattered into a thousand pieces. The Treasury’s processes for all long-term projects are an absolute disaster. They make it impossible for people to plan. They make everything super expensive. Today, with the publication of this spending review, you see this process. Now, behind the scenes, what happens is everybody lies in the spending review process, and all of the budget numbers everyone knows are completely fake. Everyone at the heart of power inside the Treasury at the Number Ten system knows those numbers are all fake. The long-term budgeting process also means that you have ca constant churn whereby entities all over Whitehall can’t actually organise themselves over a five or ten or 15-year period.

    They’re constantly told by the Treasury: No, your ceiling for budgets is just here. Even though the project extends for years beyond that. So you see completely crazy things like, the officials in charge of project X, say at the MOD, are told that everyone on project X will be fired in June because the Treasury won’t guarantee that the budget is still going to be there after, say, November. People are fired, things closed down, And then, in November, the Treasury goes – oh, actually, some 30-year-old, who read PPE 100 yards from here (in Oxford) – says: ‘No, no, no, actually this programme can carry on’. And the people are all hired again. All you’ve done is waste millions of quid and waste everyone’s time. This is regarded as a completely standard, sensible way for Whitehall to organise how it spends all of your money.

    1. Very interesting, thank you. And according to Cummings it all just happened by chance! Bit like evolution really.

      It is absurd that he thinks he can make a serious statement about the state of Britain without mentioning all those supernational bodies to which our politicians belong and keep signing us up to – Bilderberg, Club of Rome, WHO, UN Agenda 2030 etc.

    2. We can see the rot at the centre. The British Empire has already fallen. Britain is next.

  81. Part 2

    The Prime Minister’s Office has got to take responsibility for building a completely new process for long-term budgets, and that obviously impacts with the government procurement. As I said before, 200 years ago, this country was the best country in the world at actually doing procurement. Now it is a poster child for some of the most insane decisions that you can possibly imagine. Even the simplest things like building a dual carriageway is now scheduled to take years. That is completely normal. And if you say: ‘This is mad, and what we’re going to do instead is just systematically rip up all of these rules’, much of the system will go completely crazy. Because the system doesn’t see itself as there to deliver for you, the voters, for the taxpayers. The system sees itself as there to protect itself.

    It’s very routine when you’re sitting inside Number Ten and you look at rolling news on TV and you see some story rolling, scrolling across the bottom of the screen saying ‘Disaster on blah, blah, blah’. You look out the window and you see the official responsible for it just pottering through Horse Guards on the way to the Tube. The culture of direct responsibility is now almost completely unknown and is seen in Whitehall as something that’s almost deranged if you try and do it.

    So during Covid, when we said: ‘Okay, we’ve got to try and get testing going faster, we’ve got to try and get vaccines going faster. We’ve got to try and get a thousand things going. We’re going to put a named individual in charge of each of these things, so that everybody knows that person is the person to call and that person is responsible, right?’ This is not exactly revolutionary management. This is how every single functioning entity on planet Earth works. And this was seen in Whitehall as revolutionary and hostile and to be resisted.

    Now, if you think that that’s the mindset, even when thousands of people are dying every week and it’s a genuine crisis, imagine what it’s like to change things in normal times now; that’s why Keir Starmer is finding that he has meetings. Everyone nods and smiles. And then, three months later, no one did anything because no one really cares what the Prime Minister thinks.

    The system just rumbles on with its own priorities. Why has Starmer got himself into the single biggest political disaster of his premiership on winter fuel payments? Was that in his manifesto? No. Did he say he wanted to do it? No. Did Labour MPs want to do it? No. Why? What happened? It happened because it’s on the 30-year-old Treasury official’s priority list. And if you’ve got non-player characters as prime ministers and as ministers, and a system that operates in this mad way, the system will put its priorities in front of the ministers and push them out on TV to announce things. And then the rest of the MPs go, ‘Where the hell is this coming from? Why are we doing this? We don’t understand’.

    All of these different things need to change. The other thing that you need to do in Number Ten – so you’ve actually taken power from the Cabinet Office, you’ve closed the Cabinet Office you’ve got rid of the HR system so you can fire people, replace people, hire the world’s best people to come and work on important government buildings – you change the procurement system so the government can now actually buy and sell and do things on normal timescales rather than on 20 or 30-year timescales.

    The other central thing that has to happen is science and technology have to become embedded in the Prime Minister’s Office as a core priority of Number Ten Downing Street. We can’t carry on with a government system in which we have a Western civilisation that’s based on science and technology and a political cultural elite dominant in politics and Whitehall that is ignorant of, or contemptuous about, science and technology. That is a recipe for catastrophe.

    A new regime that’s actually serious about turning the country around has to do – as well as these kind of bureaucratic and power changes that I’ve described inside the Number 10/ Whitehall complex – is to say that science and technology, both for prosperity and for security, are now going to become critical aspects of how the Prime Minister spends his time in the same way that they are on national security issues and budgets. They have to be at the top of the PM’s inbox and completely integrated into how the Prime Minister’s Office actually works.

    If you do all these things, you won’t solve all of our problems for sure, but you will at least have a functioning regime that can build things, rather than a dysfunctional and pathological regime.

    The last thing I’ll say then is, if I was going to be on a desert island, one of the top three books that I would take with me is War and Peace. And if you think about War and Peace, there are two kind of strands running through. One strand is that these inexorable human forces, inexorable forces of history, collide and smash. And it doesn’t really matter what individual people do and think. They just get broken and washed along in the flood.

    And the other part of the story is that, at some times, what one person thinks and does can have a huge effect on what happens. Both things are true at the same time.

    Over the next five years, everyone in this room is going to live through two things. They’re going to live through these old regimes of the Western world continuing to crumble and disintegrate and fail. Both the old parties are like one of those Japanese movies where a samurai whips their heads off, but they haven’t quite realised yet that they’re dead. But they are. Samurai has done his bit, the Tories and Labour are (dead). And the AI and biological engineering strand is going to continue as well. And these two things are going to be very connected. These forces are going to smash into all of our lives. They’re going to affect them in all sorts of ways.

    But also, I would just say there’s a last thing that, as per Tolstoy’s message in War and Peace, we can have agency at these moments of crisis. Everyone here can build things. You can prepare for this extremely different world that’s coming. One of the most obvious things to do, I think, is not everything can be about Westminster, not everything should be about Westminster. It’s one of the problems that it’s centralised so much power there. We’ve got to deal with the dysfunction of Westminster. We have to return to a civilisation in this country where other parts of the country can actually build things and do things. And the most obvious thing? It strikes me that there’s something that everyone in this room could get involved with, which is the replacement of the old school system. The AI thing means it’s doomed, a bit like the old parties; the current system (with) fake exams, fake curriculum created by the bureaucratic state to try to justify that it knows what it’s doing, has destroyed in lots of ways the old European (system of) education and the institutions. That old system is doomed. New things are definitely going to come. And the sooner the people like those in this room start building them, what comes next, the better.

    We don’t have to wait for Westminster and Whitehall. They won’t like it, but they’re too broken to be able to stop us. So we can start building alternative things for our children to go into. And if you start creating alternative educational ecosystem in time, that will help us replace the rotten old political regime which is crumbling at the same time.

    2. Being a huge Einstein fan I like that.

      My favourite Einstein quote….

      When he was asked how it felt to be the smartest man in the world, Albert Einstein said, 'I don't know, you'll have to ask Nikola Tesla.'

      Well, I guess he made expensive, useless cars…..

        1. Oh yes, he was – he has an SI unit named after him, for magnetic flux density, so he’s A list (Einstein doesnt, bizarrely…).

          Einstein is even more humble as Tesla was massively critical of his work and the two of them never got on!

          2. His biggest contribution was to prove Edison wrong by demonstrating the superiority of using AC power over Edison's DC approach for power networks. Transformers being then only possible with AC. Nowadays we can compensate with inverter technology.

            As a related aside – we had US built 60 hz computers installed in our UK offices back in the 1960's to provide timesharing services. To convert from the UK 50 hz, pretty hefty motor/generator set ups were used. Today it would be done with solid state electronics, much more efficient – and much smaller.

          3. I agree, although his work in radio transmission pre-dated Marconi’s and could lay claim to being one of the greatest developments of all time.

          4. No dispute from me. I'm a complete numb nuts in these matters.

            Though scientific progress does tend to be based on theories presented and then disproved or improved upon, Shirley.

          5. And not theories proposed which, when the data don't fit the theory, have the data manipulated until they do!

    1. That this barbaric oaf holds one of the great offices of state brings shame, disgrace and ignominy upon us all.

      1. 407283+ up ticks,

        Evening R,
        Another WEF / NWO success then, part of the demoralising campaign they, the political
        enemas are waging.

  84. I didn't think we were heading for civil war. Now I’m not so sure

    We are not there yet, but uncontrolled immigration means that our nation's cohesion is fraying fast

    Annabel Denham, Columnist and Deputy Comment Editor
    10 June 2025 5:28pm BST

    I used to dismiss fears Britain was headed for open sectarian conflict, possibly even civil war, as overblown. Those expressing such unease were, I suspected, succumbing to their own subconscious cognitive bias and exaggerating the scale of the problem.

    After all, does the UK really have the ingredients for such internal strife? We live in an inefficient and messed up society, but not a "failed" one. Taxes are paid, people who want to be are employed, we have abundant food, clothing and energy – at least until Ed Miliband's climate fanaticism catches up with us. We don't have America's gun problem, even if gang violence has become a feature of British life. We have, relative to other developed nations, successfully integrated migrants in large numbers.

    Now, however, I'm not so sure. The rule-abiding majority are nearing the end of their tether with illegal migration. They cannot tolerate the sheer lawlessness of it, how toddlers can be trampled to death in filthy dinghies only for the French authorities to wave the boats on their way. They are appalled when, on the rare occasion those piloting these boats are arrested, the jail time is just a few months. They are horrified that our shadow economy allows illegal migrants to work here, whilst their own taxes fund "asylum" hotels at a cost of £5 million every day.

    And they are tired of being gaslit by our political class, who keenly downplay many of the problems associated with what they deceitfully term "irregular" migration. Of being labelled as "bigoted" for wondering if the scale and pace of change is compatible with assimilation and social cohesion.

    As the state loses control of our borders, with both legal and illegal in-flows reaching objectively unsustainable levels, it is going to ever more desperate lengths to keep the peace. So our officers throw a retired special constable into a police cell over a social media post, though not before sneering at his "Brexity" bookshelves. Our authorities seem to think that rape gangs need to be covered up to protect "community cohesion". I write just days after The Telegraph revealed that concern over mass migration could be deemed a "terrorist ideology" by the Prevent programme. Wish me luck.

    But all this just paints over the mould. If the white working-class feel they are constantly being expected to sacrifice their culture, identity, their freedom of speech in order to celebrate and preserve those of immigrants, it may not be long before they revolt. As Prof David Betz of King's College London warns, when "a formerly dominant social majority fears it is losing that dominance" it doesn't surrender its position quietly.

    If you want to know how this plays out, glance at events unfolding in Northern Ireland and Los Angeles. Violence has erupted on the streets of Ballymena following the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by two 14-year old boys of Romanian descent. Riots have broken out across the city of angels in response to immigration enforcement operations. Some in the Donald Trump-hating media have dismissed the lawlessness as simply "a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn". California governor Gavin Newsom somehow blames not the mobs running amok, but rather "deranged" and "dictatorial" Trump for what is happening in LA.

    What we are witnessing in these conflagrations 5,000 miles apart are worrying signs of what could become much more serious confrontations in the future. On the one hand, "natives" could turn increasingly hostile to migrants. On the other, large migrant communities, now established for two or three generations, could defend newcomers to whom they may be related or with whom they have more in common than with white Brits.

    To avoid the worst of this, white Brits and affluent migrants could leave cities to become dominated by poorer, more welfare-dependent migrant communities – deepening the rural and urban splits recent election results already tell us are emerging. In London, the White British population declined from 71 per cent in 1991 to 37 per cent in 2021. Birmingham has experienced similar ethnic change.

    Nigel Farage wants to empower enforcement officers to detain and deport on a regular schedule, using charter flights to get the job done. Yet when Police Scotland attempted to remove two Indian illegal migrants in 2021, protestors surrounded their van, with the men eventually released following a stand-off lasting several hours. If the Government tried something similar in Tower Hamlets, there would be large-scale rioting with the authorities again, eventually, backing down. Reform will need a clear view about who exactly they would try to remove, the size of the problem and the means to do it. Even then, they may not be able to deport more than a few thousand.

    The situation may seem almost intractable. But the solution cannot be to deny the problem exists.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/10/britain-could-be-heading-towards-civil-war-labour-reform-uk

    If it does happen, be sure that the BBC will have an hour long debate not on the events and what led to them but what the term 'civil war' really means and whether it should be applied to white nationalists attempting to ethnically cleanse the land, for that is how they will portray it.

    1. “Of Romanian descent “? They needed a Romanian interpreter to confirm their names! The vast majority of immigrants, particularly of the “irregular “ (illegal) variety do not integrate nor contribute to the country.

      1. Why did you downvote that, Geoff? I can't see that any of it is untrue. If it is, please point it out and I will amend.

  86. EXC: Government Buying Up Asylum Seeker Hotels

    The Home Office is buying up hotels in order to house migrants. Testy Rachel Reeves told Times Radio this morning:

    “Well, I’m not going to be providing accommodation. That’s up for the Home Office to do. But the wasteful spending at the moment on the most expensive form of accommodation is a terrible use of taxpayers’ money. And that’s why we’re gonna put it to an end.”

    Last night Darren Jones said Labour was putting “capital investment into Government-owned facilities.” Guido can reveal that following the launch of a series of pilots for different methods of migrant housing across the UK the Home Office is outright buying up hotels, including those currently used to house migrants. The Home Office will be spending £2.5 billion annually in 2029 on asylum seeker accommodation – only a £1 billion reduction on current spending levels. The purchase and maintenance of the hotels explains the large remaining spend. Buying up hotels will end up being expensive…

    Once a hotel is bought it can be counted in official statistics as normal accommodation. Will be news to local residents told that asylum seekers would only be housed “temporarily”…

    Hotels are currently being purchased by the government in the Bristol and Cardiff areas. The Home Office did not respond to a request for comment. Labour is teeing up a sleight of hand to “end” asylum seeker hotel use…

    June 12 2025 @ 16:36

    Pitchfork Revolt
    38m
    So the big plan to get them out of 'hotel' accommodation is to buy the hotels and call them something different. Words fail me.

    Dissident
    Pitchfork Revolt
    34m
    It's easy to view the civil service as indolent and devoid of skills… But when it comes to subterfuge, deception, and self-preservation… They are olympians, and world class.

    2. Evil evil government , lying to us all.

      They are betraying us all , they really want to worry us to death and squeeze us dry of all we have , own , have saved and treasure .

      No one and nothing is safe in the hands of these wicked government officials .. We are being despatched to an early death , poisoned , threatened and dismissed.

      1. This is without doubt the most evil anti-British government that our once-proud country has ever had.

        Many people must now feel about England as Macduff felt when he saw the depths to which Scotland had fallen under the usurping and murderous Macbeth:

        Bleed, bleed, poor country!
        Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure,
        For goodness dare not check thee.

      1. Horrible, but will be surprised if this isn't a more frequent occurrence as time goes by.

        1. The whistleblower at the factory that builds the Dreamliners said they were using parts from the bins where parts had failed stress tests. To avoid delays.

          Some time later he was found dead in his truck from a self inflicted gun shot. And if you believe that you will believe anything.

          There have already been far too many incidents of this kind because of Boeing going woke, ending up using under qualified people to fit the diversity targets and cutting corners.

          2. Complex systems will not survive the incompetence crisis.

            When lss intelligent diversity are given a leg up through easier exams, longer exam times, different marking schemes all to pretend they're equal to non-diversity it is inevitable that the weak, less capable, less intelligent dross will enter the workforce and cause problems.

            However, remember, that's what ESG and DIE are all designed to ensure the diversity failure can't be discussed and prevent annoyances like merit and competence are overruled in favour of racism.

          10. That is why standards are being lowered across the board and people our age are being denied essential health care in a timely fashion.

      2. Anyone else wonder why, presumably with a full load of fuel, great chunks of the plane survived – even a passenger.. I would have expected the whole airframe to have been thoroughly incinerated.

        1. Full tanks don't burn as easily as partly empty ones, I believe. Something to do with less vapour and less oxygen.

          1. BUt once they have split, there's a lot more to burn – and they would have broken up on crashing.

          2. To be pedantic it's the fuel that burns – you're right an empty tank full of vapour is more dangerous than one full of fuel which is why they are pressurised with nitrogen

      3. It looks as though the wheels weren't retracting, as if there was a total power wipe out.

      1. Yes yes yes Mm

        No queues , just choose the middle aircraft and run .. hoping it is the right aircraft .

        I did that from Lagos to PH , with young 4 year old son hanging onto my hand , older son was safe and sound in prep school .. we ran across the runway , because the company rep who was escorting son and I , told us to .. it was chaotic .. we boarded the Nigerian Airways jet with dozens of Nigerians clutching their live chickens in cages , and bleating kid goats , the smell ws terrible and we flew all the way to PH at a height of about a thousand feet because things were not working ..

        Our ears were popping , the noise and groans were terrible , the aircraft seemed to creak with metal fatigue , but a few miracle hours later we landed in Port Harcourt .. Moh had been living there for a few months , but my goodness , what a trip .

        Was it the same for you when you flew to Warri?

        1. My internal flights were Lagos-PH mainly. The most interesting trip was by RangeRover from PH to Warri. Used to chopper into Warri from the seismic boat. Different jobs over the years. Shore based core analysis in the late 80s and then transferred to marine seismic in the 90s.

          1. Did you ever think..working and living in a majority black country there were too many blacks?

            ..asking for Diane Abbot.

          2. Not at all, there just weren’t enough white folk. I have to say my workforce (100% very dark) were excellent workers, apart from the odd tribal problem that plagued my last tour onshore there, when they all turned up with spears and bows and wouldn’t talk to each other. Some of the US ex-pats could be a real pain though. The few black US expats loved it there.

          3. Yep, you have been there and done it , goodness , we were travelling from the old airport in Lagos 1977.

            We drove miles in the big VWs rattling along the roads which were just muddy tracks .. I flew to Warri from PH to meet up with other wives , a German pilot flew me ( sadly died in a crash shortly later on in the year near Bonny) but the old helo that transported us leaked oil , and wow what an experience .. Warri was so different ..

    3. Just the still picture looks awful. I am just thankful that I don't have to struggle with that sort of thing and feel very sorry for those who do.

  90. Droughts have been announced in Yorkshire and Wales. I'm slightly surprised given that this time last year, water levels all around the country were very good after two wet winters, especially 23-24, had more than made up the shortfall after the hot summer of 2022. Last summer was cool, suppressing demand, and last winter was average until February.

    Can it really be a lack of reservoirs and the spring drought or is it something else?

      1. So did we , very welcome , now warm and dry , but perhaps more to follow .

        Not looking forward to the heat forecast for next week.

    2. "Day after day, day after day,
      We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
      As idle as a painted ship
      Upon a painted ocean.
      Water, water, every where,
      And all the boards did shrink;
      Water, water, every where,
      Nor any drop to drink."

      Thanks to SCT.

          1. I just assumed where copyright is about to handed over to AI i would get a head start.

            How's the pool?

          2. 95% there.
            I’ve been called back for more heart treatment, but I hope to get at least one swim this summer.

          3. Is the prognosis good?

            I mean if it isn't and the pool is vacant i might pop over for a dip. :@)

          1. Lots and lots! There was an Ancient Mariner who stoppeth one of three. By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, now wherefore stopp'st thou me?!

          2. A sadder and a wiser man he rose the morrow morn…

            The old joke was the Ancient Mariner was, in fact, a Scottish goalkeeper, as he stoppeth one of three!

    3. An increase of 10 million in population doesn't help. Plus the billions of litres lost in leaks.

    4. Too much flushing by too many people.
      You might have thought our political classes might have given a moments thought about that. But let's be honest about their consistency.
      So far without fail they have effed up everything single they they have come into contact with. Why stop now ?

      1. Time for the government to spend millions on mandating toilets that only require 500ml per flush (it would have been pint sized flushes but they want to be nice to the EU).

          1. Martin Lewis' tip for saving water –
            If it's yellow let it mellow
            if it's brown flush it down

        2. Didn't California mandate an "eco-flush" cistern that made matters worse as it increased the number of flushes needed to get rid of a decent sized turd?

        3. Didn't California mandate an "eco-flush" cistern that made matters worse as it increased the number of flushes needed to get rid of a decent sized turd?

  91. Droughts have been announced in Yorkshire and Wales. I'm slightly surprised given that this time last year, water levels all around the country were very good after two wet winters, especially 23-24, had more than made up the shortfall after the hot summer of 2022. Last summer was cool, suppressing demand, and last winter was average until February.

    Can it really be a lack of reservoirs and the spring drought or is it something else?

  92. Labour's sanctions on Israel are disgraceful folly

    It is unprecedented for Britain to treat politicians serving in the government of a friendly power in this way

    Telegraph View
    10 June 2025 6:47pm BST

    It is one thing for the UK to impose sanctions on autocratic enemies like Russia. But to do the same to a democratic ally is reprehensible. The decision to pick out two members of the Israeli government for prohibition is extraordinary from a Government which refuses to proscribe Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the Muslim Brotherhood.

    David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, has banned Itamar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister, from visiting the UK over comments they made on Gaza. Any assets in this country will be frozen.

    It is true that these individuals are on the extremes, even in Israel where their support for expanding West Bank settlements is controversial. Both politicians are ultra-nationalists whose continued presence in Benjamin Netanyahu's Cabinet is preventing the collapse of the coalition.

    But after initially declaring support for Israel after the October 7 2023 atrocities, Labour is in danger of being seen to side with Hamas. Backbench MPs are agitating for a far tougher line than the suspension of trade talks or curbs on arms sales.

    They want the UK to recognise a Palestinian state at a conference in New York later this month. That would be a serious mistake and perhaps Mr Lammy thinks he can head off party critics with limited action against individuals.

    But where does it stop? The two ministers are not being targeted for something they have done but for what they have said. It is unprecedented for Britain to treat politicians serving in the government of a friendly power in this way. How will Mr Lammy feel if Israel now bans him for the criticism he has voiced?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2025/06/10/labours-sanctions-on-israel-are-disgraceful-folly

    There are few people in Parliament more deserving of public humiliation than this grinning chump. Starmer is wierd and increasingly dangerous, Reeves and Rayner are simply coarse and thick, Miliband is retarded, but Lammy enjoys spitting on the nation that has given him a good living while siding with its enemies. There's a smile that requires wiping from the fat face upon which it sits.

    1. Labour do support Hamas. Note all the Muslim migrants get a free ride but if you are a Christian you are denied.

    2. "enemies like Russia"
      you know what they say – War is when the government tells you who the enemy is. Revolution is when you figure it out for yourself…

      1. That was when i first realised i was being lied to by the media. First. Demonise your enemy.

        1. I am embarrassed by how much of their garbage I swallowed hook, line and sinker until 2020 when it just strained my credulity too far!

    1. Supposedly Hamas have attacked a bus full of aid workers, killing some and taking others hostage. I wonder how the doomgoblin will twist that to suit her anti Israel beliefs.

      1. When i read that report i was hoping she was on it.

        Have you noticed her jaw line? Male hormones from birth.

  97. I see Eurostar are about to launch services from Paddington to Geneva and Frankfurt.
    But who wants to go to Frankfurt and Geneva? I suppose only the self entitled Lefties that have never had a proper job.
    On the way to give away more of our sovereign territory for a handful of magic beans and a pat on the head from WEF bigwigs
    I see mayor Khan got one just this week

    1. Khan's knighthood shows that he is doing what Charles wants him to do…official approval for the rocketing crime and mess that is our capital city.

      1. My thoughts too.
        Trying to think of a route from Paddington to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is an interesting exercise!

        1. Surely Paddington to Reading back to Waterloo then out on the old Eurostar line to places foreign.

          Quite easy for an old bear.

          1. Now, try finding a route without the train reversing.
            It’s a mind game we used to play on the test trains, how to get back to the RTC in Derby with the loco at one end being totally inoperative.

    3. There will be plenty of people wanting to travel to Frankfurt and Geneva. But not from Paddington!

    1. Bell, Fleming, Baird, Watt, Napier, Dunlop, Macintosh, Telford and and and…..(all hideously white to be fair…)

      And now this race baiting cretin!

      1. The Scots were always terrible at politics. Remember Mary Queen of Scots' court? Not much has changed!
        It truly is incredible considering the genius of the people you listed (and many more)…

        1. Perhaps it's the exception that proves the rule. It certainly seems to be in the rest of the UK>

          1. I read that as execution! Of course they blame us for chopping her head off, as well!🙄

          3. There is a life size bronze statue of her outside Linlithgow Palace, and as well as being very slim and attractive, she’s over 5’ 10’!

          2. Plus, they hate the English, particularly when we give them money! Makes them feel patronised, don’t you know?

          4. But then they’ll whine and moan, and blame the English, Brexit, Thatcher, etc etc!

          5. But they do anyway, so what’s the difference? And it’ll be cheaper for us.

          8. #MeToo. Though some right wing black bloke did say stop giving us Aid and let us stand by ourselves.

            I think they ate him….

  99. Starmer has said in an interview that he is sending an investigation team to India for the air crash. Oh yeah? What's it got to do with the UK – it was an American aircraft in India, the only teams will be India Accident Investigators and reps from Boeing.

      2. Well, they don't all crash. No one would buy tickets if they did. But there is a problem with Boeing.

          1. Perhaps Airlines should allow free travel and only charge you if you land. Now there's a thought.

    2. He's had a request to give lots of UK Indian civil servants a holiday at home?

    3. I’ve often reminded people at work that we no longer have an empire. For all their talk of decolonising, lefties are the most prone to behaving as if they rule the world.

      1. And they also think that they know everything. I think we would find that most of the sudden masses of self proclaimed 'experts' are lefties.

    4. The investigation team is to look for ways Starmer can blame the British Empire or the Tories for the tragedy.

    1. They'll keep cash, but inevitably make it so difficult to use it – higher prices, limited spending – that you are forced to give in.

      The only group who benefit is the state to control you. Criminals won't care, only decent people will be abused by this nonsense.

      1. They only have to not give out any higher denomination notes, and let inflation rip.

        Time to switch to monero or silver coins. Both are anonymous.

  102. Call me a heartless git if you like but I would still sooner hear about the anti-immigration protests in Norn Iron.

    1. NI isn't the only place here with sectarianism. I hoping it is going to kick off in other places as well. The sooner it comes the sooner we rebuild and get rid of WEF paid Marxist bastards like Starmer and his crew.

      Tory appeasers for years and now we have Starmer, Rayner, Reeves and Cooper. Not forgetting stand outs like Diane Abbot, Jess Phillips and the fucking wog foreign Sec .

      Vlad please take them out.

  103. Well at least all these people in Ireland carrying out all these violent attacks haven't been incited by Lucy Connolly

  104. Paid a visit to Ledbury yesterday with a friend, and had a very nice time having a wander and coffee and cake.

    I would recommend stopping at Saint Michael and All Saints if you have time whilst passing: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ad494b874e8b4a884e63a60a964ea7fd3ac301f056582954711d9b9e5fc69915.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/46b90b1841f7a8f8c57e93c7271ddaceba177325a816567065fa0446855387b8.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/23183113d053dbf390a885300c604ab2ebba24b39a0258ab11255d99fc6ef519.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a8673dcbc0187332baad3df51bb942ab0bef9ba3c0e338a6aca4148e4a81b130.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b82c7d04cc9be2f75b437c5ca09b352d2de2720a112e5406a7d018464ca6c780.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3e67d96c21e9cd90ec08066fede92e595a6af6ba55d34cab57084772adc5b2cf.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/046e10dd97637cdeac32e6caf9f3bf6c235027085d84234945c8ea1e63fcbe1f.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ea852c846cb8f6f47fcd716ce352c118f52ac346fb7264aad52a316c057e6cef.jpg

          5. That’s a steeple learning curve I’m aspiring to. Or should I alter it?

    2. When a church has been constructed, who decides on the theme the stained glass windows should take .. how are they commissioned and where and how did they obtain the colours for the glass and he fine quality glass .

      The artistry is phenomenal .

      1. Often the windows are a gift of one of the (well heeled) congregation in memory of someone. I presume they get in touch with the artisan who specialises in stained glass memorials. In some cases, the windows were removed from another church (see the Battlefield window in Prees church). The colours are ground minerals, I believe, blue being the most costly (lapis lazuli?).

      2. They really are a treat Belle.
        Most are memorial windows for local dignities dating from early Victorian right through to the twenties and thirties.

    3. That's four churches parked next to each other!
      Looks fantastic though, and is now on my visit list.

    4. I really enjoyed sketching this on one of our architectural studies trips from college.

  105. Regarding the riots in Northern Ireland, the cause is reported to be a reaction to an alleged rape by two Romanian immigrants.
    I have a question.
    Is that REALLY the cause, or are there other problems that have been covered up?

    1. Read the Dominic Cummings speech below.

      Desperate attempts to divert the news from reality. It is a long read but also tells us where the cancer lies. In both senses. Posted by Citroen.

    2. Inevitably there will be other issues bubbling under Bob, but there will always be something that tips it over, particularly when we have longer, warmer evenings.

        1. Bananas are radioactive. They contain potassium-40, a radioactive isotope that emits beta and gamma radiation. If you eat one banana a day, your annual exposure to radiation will increase by about 0.035 millisieverts (mSv)

          Or in other words, a CT scan is sorth about 100,000 bananas….so I’m not overly concerned.

          1. Interesting, thank you.

            The reported magnetism results are rather more significant, but I daresay we will learn more as time goes on.

      1. Thank you for the concern, Maggie.
        Stepson’s benefit payment went in this morning so I was up early to sort that out before he had a chance to start spending it.

  109. 13 minutes ago
    8.11pm
    David Lammy holds Cobra meeting
    The UK’s foreign secretary is understood to have chaired a Cobra meeting about the crash.

    David Lammy convened the meeting of senior ministers which is held to handle national emergencies, according to the PA news agency.

    Plane captain’s final message
    The plane captain’s last message was reported to have been: “Mayday … no thrust, losing power, unable to lift.”

    Captain Sumeet Sabharwal’s last message came 32 seconds before the plane crashed, according to Barkha Dutt, a Washington Post columnist and founder of digital platform Mojo Story. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/transport/article/air-india-plane-crash-latest-news-8drj6bp3m

    4. Sounds great doesn't it. Cobra meeting! Except for the fact that is the name of the room and it is full of fuckheads like Lammy. Not some Star Chamber where they could actually do anything at all except complain about the chai and buns.

  110. Residents in three 'Domesday villages' fear their homes will be the first in Britain to be compulsorily purchased to make way for the country's biggest-ever solar farm. Dozens of villagers living in Hempnall, Saxlingham and Tasburgh in Norfolk have received letters from a developer saying their homes 'may be required' to create space for East Pye Solar Project. The development will cover a massive 2,500 acres – the equivalent of 1,762 football pitches or the size of Chichester in West Sussex – and is 10 times bigger than the UK's current largest in Flintshire, Wales.

    1. They are mostly old and white. They don't matter. As a byproduct it also speeds up the dissolution of our culture so..all good.

    2. Sincerely hope it's stopped, Maggie – I'd sign a petition if there is one. Solar panels are disastrous in stormy weather. Plus they don't always have a long life and have to be replaced.

        1. I’d still give it a go, if sufficient public backing, Phiz. And find a rare newt, or similar 🙂

          1. Insurrection ! Import newts !

            I don’t think that works as a slogan though. :@(

          4. Hmm..is there a lot of public support for solar farm? Never give up without a fight, Phiz 🥊🥊😄

          5. Hush….don’t tell anyone where you bought it, only where you ‘found’ it. Stranger things have happened, ye of little faith 😀 x

      2. I don't think it's about solar panels any more – it's about driving people off the land.

        1. Could be. Perhaps approach the landowner with a different deal, never know. I wouldn’t give in without a fight.

  111. Well, what a lovely evening. I’m sitting in the garden having had a couple of industrial G&Ts, a home made chicken madras and now some Abbot Ale. Sunset is in about 40 minutes, the birds are singing and I’m happy! Yeh!

        4. Yep. It’s nearly Christmas, as i observed to a colleague earlier today

      2. I am making the most of it this year. I am going to bed early (before darkness) and waking up with the day. It makes such a difference from staying up after dark.

        1. Alas, I am a night owl. Getting up with the sun doesn't make me in the least productive.

          1. I'm no early bird either, though i have been waking up much earlier than I'd like when it's so light. Odd thing is though it's never a problem getting up at 5am when I'm on holiday.

          2. II'm the same Conners. No matter what time I go to bed, I can't get up early in the morning.

          1. Don’t wait for the gold embossed invitation card! Just get in touch….

  112. Well, what a lovely evening. I’m sitting in the garden having had a couple of industrial G&Ts, a home made chicken madras and now some Abbot Ale. Sunset is in about 40 minutes, the birds are singing and I’m happy! Yeh!

      1. Ah, well, perhaps you've chosen the wrong sport; for me, there's Ascot, Glorious Goodwood, the Leger, the National Hunt season and the Hunt social calendar.

  115. So if you jump out of a fast moving plane at the last minute you stop moving fast and just float to the ground uninjured
    That never used to happen when I jumped off of hop on buses back in the day

  116. The secrets of Britain’s best (and worst) CEOs
    In their rich history of British chief executives, Michael Aldous and John D Turner investigate why UK companies have fallen behind their American competitors

    British Airways used to carry more passengers more miles than any other airline, earning it the title “the world’s favourite airline”. But a series of missteps reduced the national carrier to the butt of jokes. New slogans became popular, such as “I’m flying Abba — Anyone But British Airways”. As BA nosedived, the Dubai-based Emirates took over as the world’s favourite airline. Why did BA slump while Emirates soared? The difference is leadership — the subject of this book by Michael Aldous and John D Turner.

    Emirates has a visionary boss, Tim Clark, a Briton who has read the global trade winds brilliantly over the past 30 years and invested in new aircraft, notably the Airbus A380 superjumbo, food and drink, customer service and a hub airport in Dubai. By contrast, BA has hired a series of penny-pinchers, notably the Spanish chief executive Alex Cruz, who will for ever be known as the man who took away a free cuppa in the morning and gin and tonic in the evening — on a British airline!

    Book cover for "The CEO: The Rise and Fall of Britain's Captains of Industry" by Michael Aldous and John D. Turner.
    This book is about men like Clark and Cruz. The authors, academics at Queen’s University Belfast, start by asking what makes a good chief executive. There are no shortcuts to success, they remind fans of The Diary of a CEO-style podcasters, bloggers and influencers who boast about getting rich quick. Having ambition and purpose is not enough. You need “tremendous work ethic and energy” to sustain “18-hour days”.

    A solid grasp of “demography, social and economic trends, consumer behaviour, global macro trends, the political landscape and new technology” is just the start of the skillset. You also need “strong emotional intelligence” and the ability to strategise in organisations with lots of moving parts, and turn on a dime if circumstances change.

    Being an outsider is helpful and being an immigrant is better yet because it can give a chief executive “the perspective and instinct which lets them see things differently from their peers and to be non-conformist when needed”. Take Martin Sorrell: Aldous and Turner argue that his “Jewish heritage gave him a very clear self-awareness as an outsider”, which helped him to “see opportunities that others overlooked” and create the world’s largest marketing and public relations company, WPP. Sorrell often bristles at this characterisation.

    He does not dispute, however, that he and other successful chief executives are “willing to upset” rivals and immune to criticism. David Ogilvy, the former boss of the global advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, called Sorrell “an odious little shit”, while Chris Ingram, the ex-CEO of the media-buying group Tempus, said he would “rather lick an abattoir floor than work for Sorrell”. Sorrell’s response was to redouble his efforts to disrupt them.

    Aldous and Turner race through 160 years of British CEOs, from the gentlemen amateur traders of the Victorian era to the postwar buccaneers and latter-day bankers. Their narrative is rich with anecdotes. I did not know, for instance, that it was the business style of John Davis, the managing director and then the chairman of the Rank cinema company, that was responsible for the Carry On films. He capped film budgets at £150,000 and demanded “formulaic movies with predictable costs and certain box-office returns”. The franchise’s “slapstick, sexual innuendo and other forms of bawdy humour”, which were shot at Pinewood studios and performed by comic actors who commanded lower rates than film stars, made Davis one of Britain’s richest men in the 1960s.

    But it is Thomas Sutherland of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company who wins the top prize for ballsy negotiating. Angry at the “extortionate” fees the French operator was charging British firms to use the Suez Canal in the 1870s, he led a delegation of British shipping companies that threatened to build a second canal. The French caved.

    • The Sunday Times Rich List 2025: read profiles and interviews, and see all the facts and figures

    Thomas Lipton, of packaged tea fame, was an early Richard Branson. “I’m not vain but I like a small place on the front page,” he liked to say. His publicity stunts — he competed five times in the America’s Cup yacht race — elevated his profile so much that he became the first British business leader to have his portrait on the cover of Time magazine.

    There are few women in the book, but Margaret Haig Thomas stands out. She served as a company director on 33 boards and as chair of seven in the early 20th century. She also found time to establish the Time and Tide newspaper, which ran for nearly four decades. Not even Branson managed that.

    The authors show that the success of many UK companies has declined in recent years due to a lack of innovation and because labour productivity is lower than in other nations, notably the US. They explain the slump by pointing out that most postwar British CEOs came up through the ranks of accountancy and engineering, which meant they tended to prize production over vision and marketing. By contrast, US firms “were more likely to have CEOs from a sales and marketing background” who were “better able to exploit the mass consumer revolution” of the postwar era.

    • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what’s top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List

    They add that management training is more advanced in the US. The first business school in the US was established in 1881 when the Wharton School opened at the University of Pennsylvania. Britain’s first, the London Business School, was founded more than eight decades later in 1964. It is perhaps no surprise that the first three women to head UK FTSE 100 companies — Marjorie Scardino at the media company Pearson, Cynthia Carroll at the mining giant Anglo American, and Angela Ahrendts at the fashion house Burberry — are American.

    It’s easy to blame governments for sluggish growth in the UK, but this book shows Britain’s CEOs can do better too.

    The CEO: The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Captains of Industry by Michael Aldous and John D Turner (CUP £25). To order a copy go to http://timesbookshop.co.uk . Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members

    2. If you live abroad, and you get a BA flight back home, the first thing that strikes you is the crawling political correctness as soon as you step onto the plane.

  117. 407283+ up ticks,

    Pillow Ponder,

    If this is factual then shortly, when it is urgently necessary to take sides for the fight to survive then at least ex Tommy Atkins, and Tommy Robinson will be on the side of the just.

    Lest we forget, NO quarter must be given, treat the politico's as they have treated the innocents.

    https://x.com/darrengrimes_/status/1933213317453262937

    1. At least we will know who to target. Mostly the vinegar tits women on the Labour benches.

  121. Went to a friend's funeral today. The 'crem' was so full that 40 or so of us had to listen to the service outside. 50 miles back to the local for a boozy wake. I bummed a lift as I don't drive. On the journey back I discovered 3 more people that would like to see the present government swinging from a set of gallows.

      1. Most people know that the country is in a deep crisis in my experience. One family I know is thinking of emigrating, another has bought a property outside the city with some land. Others are just clueless about what to do – they think a good grumble and a new set of politicians will sort things out.

    2. I guess there were only 3 other people in the car then, or it would have been more!
      Funerals where the chapel or church is standing room only are bittersweet – it is a great tribute to the departed one.
      I once attended one where the family had hired the smallest chapel at the crem for their eccentric, unmarried, no children ,brother who they clearly thought was a bit of a recluse…I'll never forget their evident bafflement as the door kept opening and more people, men and women of all ages kept arriving. Word had spread of when his funeral was, and all the people for whom he had had a kind word turned up.

  122. Just finished watching Question Time on catch-up. I have to say it is the first time I've seen Zia Yusuf in action and he was very good!

    The appalling bias in the audience against Reform and pro Labour (particularly) was so embarrassing that even the dreadful harpy Fiona Bruce was reduced to bleating 'Oooh we have lots of Reform voters in the audience but we're not hearing from them!'…… what a shower of shite….

    I really shouldnt watch that programme, it's very bad for my blood pressure!

  123. Well, chums, it's now well past my bedtime. So I wish you all a Good Night; sleep well and I hope to see you all early tomorrow morning.

  124. Goodnight, folks. I am off to Normandy in three hours. There's no point in going to bed, but everyone else seems to have. I may not have the internet until Monday.

    1. Oh have a good trip. We are off to Cornwall via t’lad in Cardiff. Aim is to take the boat to Newlyn as prep for our trip to the Scillies next month

    2. Far from being in bed, I was out tripping the light fantastic. 🙂

      Bon voyage!

      K x

    1. She and her colleagues have turned out to be the very worst thing, apart from the invasion that could have,happened to our country.
      But we only have the previous useless government to blame.
      Why are all these people such morons ?

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