Thursday 24 July: Kemi Badenoch’s reshuffle has done nothing to energise the Tory brand

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.

549 thoughts on “Thursday 24 July: Kemi Badenoch’s reshuffle has done nothing to energise the Tory brand”

      1. But of course, Annie, he has to work hard in his garden later today. (Good morning, btw.)

      2. Nah!
        Will be having a bite to eat from my haversack rations when I get on the train!

    3. My dear old father was stationed in Algeria and Egypt in ww2.
      He didn't speak much about his experiences, but left a long standing comment. "Never trust an Arab son".

    4. 409988+ up ricks

      O2O,

      🎵

      It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater
      (One-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater)
      A one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater
      Sure looks strange to me (one eye?)

      2. But lying is now acceptable.

        Blair started the trend and Starmer has got to the stage where he is completely incapable of telling the truth about anything.

    2. Agreed totally, but obviously not unacceptable to our current so called Hierarchy. Who are the cause of all the trouble and problems the British public now face.

  7. Good morning, chums. And thanks, Geoff, for todays new NoTTLe site. Wordle in 4 today (a Par).

    Wordle 1,496 4/6

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

  8. Good Moaning.
    And how is one's blood pressure this morning.
    A little on the low side, did you say? Let me help you solve that problem.
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/23/police-escort-pro-migration-protesters-funded-unions/

    Pro-migration protest group escorted by police is funded by trade unions

    Campaigners brought to Epping hotel are TUC-backed and headed by Diane Abbott

    Patrick Sawer23 July 2025 9:55pm BST

    The pro-migration protest group escorted by police to a migrant hotel is partly funded by trade unions and led by Diane Abbott, the suspended Labour MP.

    Counter-protesters involved in the Epping demonstration were carrying placards for Stand Up to Racism, a group that explicitly opposes Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and which is backed by the TUC.

    Essex Police came under fire after footage appeared to show officers escorting the protesters to the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, on July 17.

    Anti-migrant demonstrators went on to claim that their arrival sparked violence between the two opposing groups.

    The force had initially denied that it had brought the Stand Up to Racism activists to the site, yet later admitted that it had done so.

    Stand Up to Racism has frequently campaigned against individual political figures as well as parties – with Mr Farage and Robert Jenrick, the former Conservative immigration minister, among those it has targeted in the past. Its website currently seeks donations for a campaign to “stop Reform UK”.

    The organisation’s president is Ms Abbott, who was suspended by Labour last week after defending a previous claim that Jews experience racism differently than black people.

    Daniel Kebede, Stand Up to Racism’s vice-president, is general secretary of the National Education Union, which orchestrated a total of 593 days of local teacher walkouts in 2024.

    Kevin Courtney, Mr Kebede’s predecessor, also sits on the campaign’s committee as a co-chairman.

    Meanwhile, Mick Whelan, a vice-chairman of Stand Up to Racism, oversaw two years of train strikes as general secretary of union Aslef.

    In March, the campaign group held its annual trade union conference, where speakers included Mr Kebede and Mr Whelan as well as the head of equalities and the anti-racist taskforce chairman at the TUC.

    Titles of workshops held over the day included: “Return to 1930s: the changing face of fascism and our unions’ [sic] role in fighting it” and “Trade Union Network to Stop the Far Right: developing organising online and in the workplace.”

    On the “Trade Union Network” part of its website, Stand Up to Racism says: “Most major trade unions in Britain are affiliated to Stand Up to Racism.

    “It’s our hope to increase the number of activists in the unions prepared to join the struggle against racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and the rise of the far-Right and fascism.”

    The website also includes tips on how to “mobilise” staff in workplaces – with hospital workers advised to “mass leaflet entrances” as colleagues are coming in to start their shifts.

    Meanwhile, teachers are advised to “hold lunchtime/after-school meeting[s]” and to “order badges and posters for lunch rooms and displays”.

    In a lengthy response, a Stand Up to Racism spokesman said they were “deeply concerned that the recent demonstrations that led to violence and rioting at The Bell Hotel in Epping were not organised by local mums and concerned residents”.

    The spokesman continued: “They were organised by Neo-Nazi group Homeland, that is seeking to wind up the local community and stir up racism to build a fascist movement.”

    They also said the organisation “receives funding from members, affiliates, including trade unions”.

      5. Tolpuddle Martyrs: six English farm labourers who were sentenced (March 1834) to seven years' transportation to a penal colony in Australia for organizing trade-union activities in the Dorsetshire village of Tolpuddle. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/693e95433ca16a54208a960f891ed0baa93335387fc909d3c68fd568d6f42e3b.png
        Any protests nowadays seem to attract Rentamob which protests about things that have nothing to do with the original reason for the protest.

  9. Good morning.
    Kemi B desperately does not want to be the Prime Minister when the UK can't sell any more bonds to fund the migrant invasion, we go into hyperinflation, the CBDC is tried and everyone is put into digital id slavery.

  11. Good morning, all. Raining. Off to market shortly. Busy morning. Back after lunch.

  12. Good Morning!

    There's still one act of personal discrimination freely and openly practiced in our society, fearlessly exposed in Age hate, a perfectly acceptable form of prejudice by Mrs M Ducks. Have experienced it? Has your protected characteristic been discriminated against? let us know in the comments.

    Psychologist Xandra H's Is there anybody out there? looks into the effect of AI interference in 'human' discourse, and the the articles Abortion: A Moral Reckoning Between Life and Liberty and Ich Bin Ein Epping-er! Why I stand with the patriots of Epping are still live and attracting comments. More will be welcome.

    Energy Watch: Over the last 24 hours: Britain's electric power was sourced from Gas, 28.7%; Solar, 6.9%: Wind 15.1%; Imports, 22.8%; Biomass, 7.4%; Nuclear 16% and Miscellaneous, 3.1%. – Because of our reliance on unreliables, we are having to import more power than is produced by wind and solar combined.

  13. Empty coaching stock for the Cambridge service is approaching now.
    Wonder if the train has WiFi?

  15. Kemi Badenoch’s reshuffle has done nothing to energise the Tory brand

    I cannot see the point in the Conservative Party any longer, they might as well amalgamate with Labour and the Lib Dems and call it the Uni-Party, they all work for the same masters and agendas and not for us.

    2. It's too soon to sign the death certificate on the Conservative Party.

      Firstly, we need to see how Reform actually acts in Government, rather than in Opposition. Very many of their most popular policies seem to be unsupportable when "hard decisions" are to be made, and others have unknown and untested consequences. Now they are running local authorities, we can see what they are made of, hopefully before Rayner abolishes local democracy in favour of Party Commissars.

      Talking of Rayner's antidemocratic plans, we can see whether Cleverly does any better than Farage at halting this affront to public accountability and local control.

      Next, it could well be argued that the last election cleared out the dross in the Tory Party. We need now to take a good look at the calibre of the prospective parliamentary candidates, poised to take back their seats when Starmer loses the advantage of a low turnout. A few by-elections should give some indication as to whether this is a new broom or a threadbare rag.

      As for amalgamating with Labour and the Lib Dems – a daft idea. If folk want to vote for them, they'd not vote for Change UK turncoats, but rather the real thing. Except that the current Labour Party is an authoritarian clone of zombies incapable of principle, conscience or public spirit, least of all to the less-favoured, and the Lib Dems are far happier running a circus than a nation.

      1. Here's the Reform UK policies ChatGPT found for me. I asked, as it's not easy to find them all listed together – just look at the list of references at the bottom of the response:

        Here’s an up‑to‑date overview of the key policies ***Reform UK***—under Nigel Farage’s leadership—is putting forward for the next UK general election campaign (most of which are drawn from their 2024 manifesto named *“Our Contract With You”*, launched on **17 June 2024**) ([Wikipedia][1]):

        ## 🏛️ Economic & Tax Policies

        * Raise the **income tax-free threshold** from about £12,500 to **£20,000**, and raise the higher‑rate threshold from ~£50,271 to £70,000 ([Wikipedia][1]).

        * Abolish **stamp duty** on properties below £750,000 and eliminate **inheritance tax** on estates below £2 million ([Wikipedia][2]).

        * Cut **corporation tax** immediately from 25% to 20%, then 15% by the third year of government ([Wikipedia][2]).

        * Overall, claim £70 billion in tax cuts, funded via £150 billion in spending reductions, net-zero rollbacks, cuts to quangos and quantitative easing interest payments ([The Guardian][3]).

        ## ✈️ Immigration & Asylum

        * Freeze **"non‑essential" legal immigration** with only limited exceptions; raise employers’ National Insurance by 20% for foreign workers ([Wikipedia][1]).

        * End settlement for illegal crossings, return Channel migrants to France, and withdraw from the **European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)** to facilitate this ([The Guardian][3]).

        ## 🌍 Environment & Energy

        * Scrap the UK’s **net-zero goals**, cancel green subsidies, and fast-track new North Sea oil & gas, shale gas, and nuclear licensing ([Wikipedia][2]).

        * Propose alternative environmental strategies: more **tree‑planting**, recycling, and reduction of single-use plastics ([Wikipedia][4]).

        ## 🏥 Health & Welfare

        * Inject an additional £17 billion/year into the NHS to eliminate waiting lists within two years; promote private‑sector treatment and tax relief for frontline staff and private health insurance ([Wikipedia][2]).

        * Offer **tax relief** for nurses and doctors, and allow vouchers or insurance-based access similar to French-style healthcare ([Wikipedia][2]).

        ## 👮 Crime, Policing & Justice

        * Recruit **30,000–40,000 new police officers**; introduce mass stop‑and‑search, zero-tolerance policing, and mandatory life sentences for repeat serious offenders or serial drug dealers ([Wikipedia][2]).

        * Build **five “Nightingale” prisons**, deport over **10,000 foreign criminals** or transfer them abroad (e.g. Albania, Estonia or Kosovo), and prosecute all shoplifting offences ([The Times][5]).

        ## 🎓 Education, Culture & Social Policy

        * Introduce a **patriotic curriculum**, restrict “transgender ideology” in schools, limit pronoun usage, and promote culture war policies ([Wikipedia][2]).

        * End interest on student loans, extend repayment period up to 45 years, and remove tuition fees for STEM and medicine subjects; offer 20% tax relief on private schooling ([Wikipedia][4]).

        ## 🏗️ Infrastructure, Housing & Transport

        * Scrap **HS2**, ban London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, and remove clean car bans like the 2035 petrol/diesel phase‑out ([BBC][6]).

        * Increase infrastructure investment in coastal regions, Wales, the Midlands, and the North; set up a **Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE)** to cut waste at local council level, first implemented in Kent County Council ([Wikipedia][7]).

        ## 🌾 Other Key Proposals

        * Bring **public utilities and critical infrastructure** under **50% public ownership**, with remaining shares held by UK pension funds; oppose foreign ownership ([Wikipedia][2]).

        * Boost farming with a £3 billion budget, especially targeting small farms and young farmers ([Wikipedia][2]).

        * Replace the **House of Lords** with a smaller, elected second chamber, and hold a referendum on replacing **first‑past‑the‑post** voting with proportional representation ([Wikipedia][2]).

        * Eliminate the **TV licence fee**, withdraw from the **World Health Organization** unless reformed, and increase defense spending to 2.5–3% of GDP, adding 30,000 military recruits ([Wikipedia][2]).

        ## 🔍 Funding & Criticism

        * Reform UK claims its plans cost about £140 billion a year and say it can raise £150 billion through spending cuts (net zero, quantitative easing interest, foreign aid, benefit cuts) ([Wikipedia][2]).

        * Independent bodies like the Institute for Fiscal Studies warn the cost estimates are overly optimistic; IFS says major public service cuts may be required to balance the books ([The Times][8]).

        ### ✅ In summary:

        Reform UK is pitching itself as a right-wing populist, anti‑establishment alternative to both Labour and the Conservatives—focusing on tax cuts, immigration control, forceful criminal justice, dismantling green targets, and dramatically scaling down the role of central government bureaucracy while boosting national sovereignty and public ownership.

        * [The Guardian]( https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/may/27/uk-politics-live-labour-reform-nigel-farage-keir-starmer-welfare-news-updates?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

        * [The Times]( https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nigel-farage-speech-today-reform-news-cvm9l5rjl?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

        * [The Guardian]( https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/21/nigel-farage-reform-spend-over-17bn-to-halve-uk-crime?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

        [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Contract_with_You?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Our Contract with You"

        [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_UK?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Reform UK"

        [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/17/reform-uk-manifesto-key-proposals?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Do Reform UK’s election claims on tax, immigration and environment add up? | Reform UK | The Guardian"

        [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Farage?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Nigel Farage"

        [5]: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nigel-farage-speech-today-reform-news-cvm9l5rjl?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Nigel Farage speech: bobbies on beat should be strapping men"

        [6]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqll1edxgw4o?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Reform UK manifesto 2024: 11 key policies analysed"

        [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_United_Kingdom_politics_and_government?utm_source=chatgpt.com "2025 in United Kingdom politics and government"

        [8]: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-reform-pay-pledges-policies-j2kw7zkrr?utm_source=chatgpt.com "How will Reform UK pay for its pledges and policies?"

        1. Immediate thoughts:
          – What about VAT on school fees?
          – Savings are always optimistic
          – No mention of shake-up of the way the State provides (civil) services, except the changes to HoL and FPTP. If the HoC is to be proportional representation, surely all elected bodies (eg councils) should also be?

    1. Major Gowan was refreshingly old-fashioned even in the 1970s.

      I take your point though. Much as there seems to be a dearth of talent in the US Democratic Party, with few under 80 being electable, I wonder why there is so little political talent or even competence in our indigenes, especially the young indigenes, not all of whom are fat, trout-lipped and tattooed.

  17. A dull start as the ferry docked, but that's given way to a sea fret.
    Now on the train and enjoying a bread roll with calf's liver pate.

  18. Morning, all Y'all.
    Sunny – again/still. Cooler last night, which was welcome.

  19. Room service? Cancel brekkie I'm having a lie-in.. lost a packet last night at the Casino. Oh and if the dentist calls.. tell him I'm out.

    More than 6,000 migrants used government-issued cards loaded with £50 a week at betting shops and casinos in past year

    2. Jesus wept. They (Politicians, gimmegrants) must really think we are stupid.

    1. 409988+ up ticks,

      O2O,

      Respect I don't think so Boo Boo

      Thought for today regarding honest rhetoric,

      Front doors can be replaced, as for decent societies, that's a tad harder.

    3. Didn't they realise just how utterly stupid they looked. Not fit for the job.

  22. The perfect storm on the high street; Socialists in power, massive debt on the books, high energy & staff costs.

    Poundland closing stores..
    Morrison's closing all butcher, deli and fish counters..
    River Island about to fold..
    Wilko gone..

      1. IMF should have been closed down when floating exchange rates were introduced.
        Though they have some success in turning a recession into a depression.

        1. To paraphrase Enoch Powell, it serves the same function as a boiler on an internal combustion engine.

    3. Morrisons are closing 35 fish and 35 butcher counters out of a total of 497. Certainly not all of them.

  23. Nominative Determinism in …. um …. action?

    A surgeon has appeared in court after being accused of lying about losing his legs to sepsis for a £466,000 insurance claim.
    Neil Hopper, 49, is also accused of encouraging 'Eunuch Maker' Marius Gustavson to amputate body parts.

    1. The nice specialist nurse assigned to my case is impressed that we saw The Crucible. He’s of East Asian appearance but has a Christian name. That could place him anywhere from Singapore to Hong Kong?

  24. The hard-left former head of the Fire Brigades Union has been elected permanent general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers.

    Despite having no teaching experience, Matt Wrack, 63, won a vote in which only 4.7 per cent of members took part — the union’s first contested leadership election since 1990. He secured 5,249 votes, defeating Neil Butler, an NASUWT official who polled 3,126.

    The result confirmed Wrack as the permanent successor to Patrick Roach, who stepped down in April after deciding not to seek a second term.

    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/matt-wrack-nasuwt-teaching-union-gb63kf8dq

    Paul Davey
    8 hours ago

    I’m sure all the beardy, coffee breath Guardian clutching wokey loonies who populate school staff rooms will absolutely love him.

    1. Yo T_B

      Have you ever wondered why it is not

      National Union of Schoolmasters and Schoolmistresses.

      The present titlelso excludes the 63 typesof LGBTERWQSers

      1. It's the NAS/UWT – the National Association of Schoolmasters and the last being the Union of Women Teachers.

    2. I made a point of never joining a Union when I was a teacher.

      Indeed, the only Union I have ever been in was the compulsory NUS out of which one could not opt! The dues were automatically taken from the university tuition bill.

      1. Most of what trade unions demanded is now the law of the land and they are no longer needed, as all they do is cause trouble for the rest of us. They should be disbanded and wound up.

        1. They are decidedly obnoxious. It is something about their essential Left wingery that makes them believe they have a right to impose some sort of Marxist ideology on everyone else.

          A worker's greatest strength is in leaving their employer for other, better work and conditions. That ensures merit and effort are the arbiters. A bad company filled with greedy or lazy people fails. A good one attracts the best people. One fails, one thrives.

      2. I only joined a union for the help they were supposed to provide in the event of problems. When it came down to the management making my life hell, the union was worse than useless.

  25. Yo and Good Moaning to you all, from a cold, wet, dank (weatherwise) C d S.

    I think I shall have to see about returning the new 'set of wheels': since we got it the weather has been CRAP!!

      1. Nope, just appears to be a rain magnet, though , I did have an MG Magnette, years ago

        1. I had a BGT with a sunroof. I use to love driving the country lanes at night with roof open listening to the unique exhaust sound.

          2. I had a Renault 6 with a soft top! And a gear stick on the dashboard for my handbag….

          5. Yes just remembered that, I had 5 forward gears over drive on 3&4.
            I had to sell mine just after we married, when the fuel prices went up and we had a mortgage to pay.
            I think mine is still on the road. But it’s never appeared on the MGB FB page. Bronze yellow YYT 6H.
            I had a cousin with a white BGT V8.

          9. I had a Mini with a sunfloor (the kind that's permanently open to let the water in…).

  26. 409988+ up ticks,

    Dt,
    The Daily T: Jake Berry – Kemi Badenoch is toast, Nigel Farage should be PM
    Former Tory chairman says Kemi Badenoch is ‘toast’ and weighs in on unrest in Epping

    We are in dire need of a safety net party as in the Farmers Food and Freedom Party if farage as PM comes into being, lest we forget "make boris PM he makes us laugh" and the consequences thereafter, some proving fatal.many suffering long term.

    1. A tactic they were probably taught at The Royal College of Policing which I hear is a lefty-dominated institution nowadays, much like all education.

    2. TBF, I went on the march from Ayelsford to Misseneden in 2019. We were escorted all the way by Thames Valley Plod, who enjoyed such a pleasant duty on a sunny Saturday. Things have got so much worse since then. Must be Brexit.

    1. Fiscal McP gave links to support the idea. He just disappeared, maybe got back into the DT.

    2. Who controls the energy, controls the prosperity of a nation. I suppose they will let us extract the shale gas at some point in the future.

    1. Spectre.
      Special Executive for Counter-intelligence Terrorism Revenge and Extortion.
      Schawb…….

    2. Couldn't have the truth getting out, could they? Simple fact: if the Leftist state had not intentionally held back the UK, if they hadn't imported the third world en masse, if they had abandoned the tax scam hoax of climate change, if they had diverged from high tax sclerotic EU regulation we would be growing faster than Argentina right now.

      The state wants this. It wants to do the country in.

  30. Morning All 🙂😊
    Cloudy 17 and more rain later. Typical British summer. 🤗
    I don't think it matters who is front bench opposition, the whole lot of them in Wastemonster need clearing out. All of them.

  32. Britain could be sued over climate change
    International Court of Justice opens way for legal claims over effects of historic emissions
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/07/23/britain-could-be-sued-over-causing-climate-change/

    BTL

    Britain caused climate change? We must pay the bill whatever it costs! This will give Starmer yet another opportunity to squander taxpayers' money and betray the UK.

    After caving in to the Unions, caving in to the EU and giving away the Chagos Island and paying to do so Starmer is all agog to find other ways of treacherously throwing away more taxpayers' money.

    1. Everything's our fault. We should pay up without any complaint – reparations for the slave trade, compensation for climate change, money as compensation for colonialism etc. etc.

      Trouble is, there would be no money left for benefits, but at least that would stop immigrants coming when they realise they won't get any freebies in the UK. Might as well stay in their own countries and watch the cash roll in. That way they wouldn't have to pay the people smugglers.

      1. Slight problem.
        All that compensation money will be heading straight for Switzerland.

    2. Wait until interest rates go up, that clock will be whizzing round faster than Essex police bussing fake protesters in!

    3. The state dictates what people must buy. It offers massive subsidy to do that. Customers can't afford/don't want these products. The end result is reduced production as otherwise you're sat wasting money making things you cannot sell – which is the entire basis of economics.

      I don't understand why Thieves Reeves the moronic woman doesn't.

    4. Regarding the MailOnline comment by a Labour MP called the Prime Minister Starmer insane, I put very little stock in the assessment capabilities of "us Labours".

    1. Just the manner in which he tells his lies sets my teeth on edge. An absolute dismal excuse for a human being. ugh!!!

    2. Milioaf has a most threadbare association with the truth. Bah, flip it: he lies continually to suit his own moronic ideology.

    3. Considering the backlash from the locals about the revolting building rather proves her wrong.

      As usual, she's just pushing the Left wing agenda and it's boring.

  39. Bulls**t Detector
    11h
    UK Launches First Sanctions on Groups Accused of Facilitating Illegal Migration
    .
    Border Farce and RNLI?

  40. Police deny 'bussing' protesters to asylum hotel
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g8nzn3ne9o

    This is what it's been reduced to.

    "Ah, well, but we didn't 'bus' them there so we aren't guilty of causing a confrontation."
    "You still escorted them though."
    "Ah, but that's different."
    "Why?"
    "It's obvious, isn't it?"
    "Explain it, then."

    And so on.

    2. "buy land for nature" means "buy land to take it out of food production".
      If you put this to some young fool they just say "but we can import food, we will never be food self-sufficient"
      They seem unable to see the difference between a country that produces most of its own food, and a country that relies on cross channel ferries and planes for the bulk of it.

      1. That bonny as in fat.
        We had a neighbour who would describe her chubster son as 'bonny'.

        1. She’s a big lass, and a bonny lass
          And she likes her beer
          And her name is Cushie Butterfield
          And I wish she were here! 🎶

          1. You'll oft see her doon at Sandgate when the fresh herring comes in;
            She's like a bag full of sawdust, tied roon' with a string.
            She wears big galoshes tae, and her stocking's once was white,
            And her bedgoon it's lilac and her hat's never straight.

    2. Speaks volumes.. the mixing of CAPS & lowercase in the spider scrawl cRayon sentences.
      My six year old daughter had neater handwriting.

    3. I wonder why the professional left didn't trust her with one of their pre-printed signs.

      Edit typo

      1. "Anyone running from wars". Is it possible that even Soros draws the line at claiming there's a war in France?

      1. Same reason we have a black police officers association. Racism.

        The medals : bronze swimming certificate, silver swimming certificate, gold… time served, 5 years time served, 10 years….

        1. The medals seem to be a variety of QEII Jubilee medals and maybe a Chas III coronation + Police LS&GC?

      3. Lots of Asian fires expected this summer? Or perhaps they are going to enter a team for the Chinese Fire-Drill Competition.

    2. Hirst is one of 3 aspiring Conservative candidates for the Essex 'Mayoral' election.
      I doubt the furores of this past week have increased his chances of being chosen.

    1. A country run by NOTTLer dogs (and cats, says she hastily) would be a paradise on Earth.
      And I'm sure hedgehogs and horses would have some useful input.

  50. How come the memory of the invasion of the Falklands has been forgotten by politicians , are they remembering the loss of life , our warships wrecked and ruined and sunk , our troops and sailors lost their lives defending the invasion from the Argentinians .

    We have the equivalent foreign invaders deciding policy here on our island !

  51. SIR – I was a young district nurse in 1984, and as such had to travel past Longannet power station in Kincardine, Fife, to visit an elderly lady to administer her insulin injection. However, “Arthur’s Army” of Yorkshire miners parked their bus across the lane I needed to access.

    Though my Mini clearly stated “Fife Health Board”, a baying crowd of men started to rock my car backward and forward, and stand in my way across the road. Terrified and alone, I put my foot down and accelerated away, running over several toes.
    So don’t tell me police used undue force in their attempt to clear the strikers.

    Anne Earle
    Lytchett Matravers, Dorset

    What the general public, back in 1984 and now in 2025, did — and do not — realise is that the bulk of detritus forming Arthur Scargill's rent-a-mob were not hard-working coal miners eager for a better standard of life. A massive number of them were recruited Left-wing activists who were easily whipped up into a frenzy by the crazed venomous rhetoric of a Marxist madman.

    The average coal miner in the UK has always been a hard-working, honest, proud chap and family man who hankers for the simple life. They work hard, play hard and — often — drink hard but they have always been respecters of fair play. This is why the majority of them, while wishing and hoping for a better life with better pay, utterly abhorred the way they were being violently manipulated as pawns by both governments and unions.

    I recall standing on countless picket lines during that dispute. One particular aspect of disquiet that left an unsavoury taste was the presence, on many of those picket lines, of gangs of numerous, and quite incongruous, people who were quite clearly not miners. Many were young and quite a few were female. What made them stand out — apart from their air of superciliousness — was the fact that they all wore a large yellow lapel badge bearing the slogan, "SHEFFIELD POLICE WATCH".

    This crowd of socialist flotsam had been recruited from local universities, and other hotbeds of radical nonsense, by the NUM's Sheffield headquarters in order to attempt to agitate the pickets into enticing the police presence to react adversely to the situation. They failed. On more than one occasion I approached one of these 'activists' to politely enquire what their purpose was. I invariably received nothing more than a stare before they walked off to mingle with the other present members of their idiotic clique. They had all been warned off not to interact with the police in any way.

    What Anne Earle in her excellent letter (above) reveals is just how far Scargill and his manic mob of crazed scum were prepared to go to disrupt the fabric of the country. Yes, there would always be many genuine miners involved in this but their numbers pale into insignificance when compared with the vast majority of genuine colliers who wanted nothing more than a quiet, but fair, life.

    1. Clear parallels with the rent-a-mob leftists patrolling any objections to the influx of boat people or Muslim takeover.

    3. I see Labour are about to release a report on this . It will be full of lies as they always are.

      1. Its focus will be on the 'far right' and 'right wing thuggery', in order to turn the unthinking against the protests outside the hotels – and to justify the control measures Labour will enforce accordingly.

    5. Morning Grizzly,

      Have you been to the Southern hemisphere , or have you been busy doing other things, following the crickeeeeet perhaps.

      A chap who lives near us was a miner in South Yorkshire .. he is in his seventies , and nearly bent double with back issues , he hobbles along cheerfully , but my goodness he suffers.

    6. Good morning, Grizzly

      I used to read George Orwell's essay Down the Mine to my classes when I was a schoolmaster. I also used to read Shooting An Elephant. I have two Penguin books of his collected essays which are still thought provoking and worth revisiting.

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cfeeb0123fa3e49a51aaefd497e3c52fb55e0a4cbdd8e8d74e096dd742efbe1b.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/84e8f331d7595bdd2f9c3b41fe764d268f9d2633758967b7dcd0293b4b50ea55.png

    7. "just how far Scargill and his manic mob of crazed scum were prepared to go" – just like the Labour party government currently in power in relation to immigration.
      Your description of miners makes me think of the pit closures in South Wales, and the sad songs about them – Max Boyce's "Duw, it's hard" springing to mind, where "the pitheads baths is a supermarket now".

    8. I was a student at the University of Sheffield 1970-1973 and can testify to the presence of many lefties. These ghastly morons infested the Student Union and spent most of their time drinking in the bar. Their cry was “defend the word socialism”.

      The Miners Union had commissioned a new Headquarters building in the town which caused some amusement as it was equipped with projecting balls (think pawnbrokers) around its roofline.

      In the Summer of my second term I took a job labouring on a building site in Bath. We were frequently visited by bus loads of “flying pickets” sponsored by UCATT. They were threatening but my boss was made of sterner stuff and told them to eff off. None were from the West Country I might add but had been bussed in from afar.

    9. And bow we roll over and let them, in the name of “tolerance”

    2. If memory serves there's one next to Heathrow's runway.

      I get it. They need to keep the lie going, it's just so utterly pointless and destructive.

  53. https://www.compactmag.com/article/starmers-hollow-words-on-immigration/

    n the spring of 2011, I was at an Oxford college dinner sitting between the two most powerful unelected people in Britain. I said to one of them, Gus O’Donnell, then the most senior civil servant in the land, that I was writing a book about immigration. He replied: “When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration…. I think it’s my job to maximize global welfare, not national welfare.”

    I was surprised to hear this from the head of a key national institution and asked the man sitting on my other side, Mark Thompson, then director-general of the BBC (subsequently CEO of The New York Times and now of CNN), whether global welfare should be placed before national welfare if the two should conflict. He agreed that it should.

    This exchange helps to explain why immigration to Britain, which has already been too high for most people’s comfort for the past 20 years and contributed to the Brexit vote in 2016, has exploded in the last couple of years under the post-Brexit arrangements that were supposed to reduce it. Net immigration in the year to June 2023 has just been revised up to more than 900,000 (in a country of 68 million)—more than three times the previous high.

    The people at the top of Britain’s universities, businesses, government departments, and health service not only have a benign view of mass immigration, they often have a vested interest in high inflows; and living in the expensive parts of town, they are protected from the consequences of their immigration beliefs.

    Keir Starmer, the Labour prime minister, has now attempted to put himself on the right side of the immigration explosion by accusing his Tory predecessors of consciously conducting a “one-nation experiment in open borders.” But don’t expect this rhetorical shift to be accompanied by the necessary changes in policy.

    A lot of people who voted for Brexit in 2016 and then Boris Johnson’s Tory party in 2019 were traditional Labour voters who had drifted away from the party as it came to be dominated by liberal graduates who embraced mass immigration and felt ambivalent about the nation state.

    Johnson promised them “leveling up” (meaning a significant investment in their post-industrial places), an end to EU free movement, and lower overall immigration. He did deliver an end to free movement, but leveling up turned out to be a slogan, and legal immigration took off like a rocket in 2022. This was partly thanks to temporary factors like the Ukraine war and post-Covid pent-up demand, but also to a desire to signal a post-Brexit openness to the world.

    Meanwhile, the continuing illegal immigration flow on small boats across the English Channel is not only a daily affront to people’s sense of democratic order, but too often, the incomers are transferred from their boats to the main local hotel in a post-industrial town, a valued local gathering place. One result of this massive political failure was the targeting of these hotels in the anti-immigration rioting that followed the murder of three young girls in Southport last August.

    Starmer moved decisively to stop the violence. But he now faces a tougher challenge to prevent further unrest. He and his party have, until now, welcomed high immigration and the resulting demographic transformation of Britain, where the nonwhite British share of the population has risen to almost a third in just two decades, up from around 10 percent. In the great Brexit drama, he also actively opposed the ending of free movement from the European Union.

    But immigration was so high in 2022 and 2023 that it was easy for Starmer to argue during Labour’s victorious election campaign this summer that it should be substantially reduced and to frame this as a pro-worker, anti-laissez-faire measure, thereby appealing to former Labour voters without alienating the party’s left-liberal base.

    Moving forward, things won’t be so easy. The outgoing Conservative government realized too late that its liberalization measures had opened the floodgates, prompting the Tories to change some of the rules. They made it harder for people on work and student visas to bring in dependents and raised the salary threshold for work visas.

    These measures are bringing the inflow down, but not fast enough to satisfy the public, and they are doing nothing to stop the boats, especially as one of Labour’s first acts in office was to scrap plans to process asylum seekers outside the UK in Rwanda (a version of which is now increasingly popular across Europe).

    Nearly 90 percent of current legal migration inflows come from outside the European Union—mainly from India, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, and Zimbabwe—and very little of it is the high-skill, economy-boosting, migration that had been promised. Around 80 percent are people coming in on student or work visas, but nearly half of those were their accompanying dependents in 2023. The proportion coming in who are actually workers was below 20 percent last year, and most of them were coming to work in the National Health Service or the struggling social-care system.

    Starmer has promised a white paper on immigration reduction. Some on the Blue Labour wing of the party, possibly including Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, see this immigration challenge as a means to shift the party in a new, more culturally conservative direction.

    But if Labour is serious about returning net migration swiftly to more acceptable levels of, say, around 200,000 a year, it will have to take measures that will be unpopular with some of its core supporters, especially in a university sector heavily dependent on international students.

    These measures would include: abolishing or severely restricting the current two-year post-study work opportunity for holders of student visas; requiring employers to train a UK worker for every work visa they are granted; increasing the earnings threshold for those wanting to bring in family members (something the last government proposed and Labour has so far refused to implement); lengthening the qualifying period for permanent residence to 10 years, up from five; beefing up immigration enforcement; and instead of levying small fines on the many employers who employ illegal migrants, sending them to prison.

    In the longer term, the NHS and social-care system need to gradually phase out their dependence on immigrants. Britain also needs far better controls on who is in the country, which means checking peoples’ travel documents out of the country, as well as in, and introducing some form of digital ID card system.

    And illegal flows need to be stopped entirely, either by persuading France that it is also in its interests to accept an automatic return of Channel boats, or by significantly ramping up deportations including to countries like Iran or Eritrea where asylum seekers safety can’t be guaranteed.

    The chances of much of the above being implemented remains small from a combination of state incapacity, political squeamishness, and the higher public spending that would be needed as a result of fewer international students and health-care migrants.

    There will be lots of tough talk from Starmer on immigration in the weeks ahead, and he will probably even mean some of it. But without painful cuts to visas for students and health workers—cuts that could provoke serious unrest within Labour ranks—numbers will stay stubbornly high.

    Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, possibly boosted with some of Elon Musk’s cash, will be fighting it out with a renascent Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch, to see who can most effectively expose what is likely to be the yawning gap between Starmer’s words and the realities of immigration in Britain.

    December 04, 2024

    1. The Tories did not do anywhere nearly enough to stem the tide of gimmigration. They had an opportunity to unravel the Blair menace and did nothing. Worse, they were too busy fighting one another over Brexit to achieve anything alongside it. There was no goal, no plan, no guiding ethos just slogans.

    2. If we didn't have a flood of illegals, there would be no talk of digital ID. Won't change our way of life – not much.

  54. Moh has taken son no1 to the bone appointment he has been waiting for , 2 months nearly !

    I do hope he hasn't fractured his scaphoid bone .. Son is an electrician , he needs to work, he is self employed , doesn't claim anything !

  55. Whilst I want England to win the cricket, it seems fairer if India were allowed a substitute for Pant, who has been ruled out with a broken toe for 6 weeks.

    It would need to be on a like for like basis rather than allowing them to select a bowler who suits the conditions.

    1. I thought they were allowed substitutes but understood they weren't allowed to bowl or bat

      1. They are, but they tend to be temporary. In theory I suppose he could bat in a leg plaster using a runner.

        The loss of a key player hits quite hard, India are essentially 0 for 1 in the second innings.

      2. Pant has returned to bat.
        Asking for trouble.
        The commentary has asked if it would be unsporting to bowl yorkers to him constantly.

          1. That’s what a “yorker” is, a fast ball aimed at the feet for an LBW, it’s also very difficult to hit.

  56. I don't understand what Kemi Badenoch is trying to achieve with her reshuffle.

    It's not as if anyone knew the names of those in her cabinet, or what they did. None are saying anything worth llistening to on social media. The Tories have been radio silent over the massive uncontrolled gimmigration problem (mostly because it'd be thrown back at them post haste) so what is the point?

  58. Interesting morning……..a visit from the "Frailty nurse" from our GP surgery, to talk to J about his memory, hearing, medications , blood pressure etc. She was here for more than an hour. A follow up due in six months I think.

      1. We've got no complaints about the service he's received from the hospitals and the surgery.

    2. The overhead display at my local GP surgery waa advertising free fall sessions for seniors. There was no information on the altitude.of the free falling exercises.

      1. Not a lot has been said about the portrait hanging in Epstein's house of Bill Clinton in a red dress.

  60. Bruce Everiss
    60m
    Big weekend ahead. Pick your sport.

    Spa F1.

    Girlies Euros final.

    England V India cricket.

    Australia V British lions rugby.

    Anti migrant rallies throughout Britain.

    1. Anti migrant far-right, extremist, racist rallies throughout Britain.

      There – sorted.

    2. 'Communities and local government'. Not local government any more. communidies. For the dindu. Why are any of that group poncing around near a plane, let alone taking one?

      It's utterly disgusting what those vile savages have done to this country.

    1. You are clucking joking? We all know the Left are perverted sewage but pushing children into a position where they'll be raped by a man in a dress, a mentally ill psycho living a twisted fantasy?

      What is wrong with these hateful, evil people?

    2. HOW has permission been given for this? Just HOW. And WHO has given the permission?

      FFS I hope all the parents are up in arms about this – not to mention Bridget Phillipson. Aaaaaaaargh. What the hell is going on.

    4. Why can't Trans folk go to the dunny themselves, all alone, like the rest of us?
      (Amusing point: I was surprised this afternoon after leaving the toilet cubicle to hear a male conversation going on in another. Bloke on the speakerphone, wasn't it? (I very much hope).

  67. The joys of illegal diversity:

    "Asylum seekers accused of gambling with state-funded debit cards
    More than 6,500 migrants allegedly used Aspen cards in casinos and other venues, prompting an investigation into ‘unacceptable’ misuse of taxpayer money"

    2. How is them gambling with funny money (see video I posted above) any worse than the iniquity of allowing them into the country in the first place?
      I think this is just another feeble attempt to get us to blame the migrants and not the traitors in Wastemonster, Eat-all and the Bank of England.

  68. This is a nice talk from maneco64 about the dual currency system in Britain and how house prices are the cheapest they've been since 1980.
    He speaks so slowly, it pays to watch at 1.25 or 1.5 speed.
    There is an uncharacteristic amount of advertising today, but it's still a good talk (and incogniti sounds like an interesting product, would like to know wibbling's opinion on that – it's a subscription service that claims to scan databases and issue requests for your data to be removed)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eboanfg6U9Y

    1. The Idiot King speaks unbelievably slowly and is yawningly boring.

      A speech of his which takes 5 minutes to deliver could be read at normal speed in one minute and by Ben Elton in 20 seconds.

      1. Maneco64 is not at all boring, quite the opposite.

        I blame the courtiers for lauding Charles's every utterance as genius.

    2. "House prices are the cheapest they've been since 1980". What???? I bought my studio for £36.5k in 1994. Others of the same size in the same building now sell for £200k+.

      1. Agree, We sold up in 1979 – nice deatched bungalow in Essex. Got £30k for it. It's currently valued at around £550k. Another couple of years and it will be 20x what we sold it for.

        In comparison, the house we bought on arrival in the Washington suburbs has gone up about 5x in the same time.

      3. It’s true though.
        Real money is gold, not Bank of England debt notes. And in gold, houses are the cheapest since 1980.

        1. My gold has doubled in price since i bought it.

          My bungalow was bought for £73,000 in 1989 it would now sell for in excess of £300,000 even without being modernised.

          3. I’m just an amateur.
            Once you make the switch to seeing gold as money and everything else as debt, it does change how you view finances.
            Also, when you realise that any wealth that’s in the form of debt notes doesn#t really belong to you, that’s quite sobering too. Bank balances are unsecured loans to the bank and shares are registered to someone else – the public are just ‘beneficial owners’ and that goes for pension companies too.
            Even solid money, including sovereigns – I think I read somewhere that TPTB reserve the right to haul it in if they want to.
            They really don#t like the peasants owning anything.

          4. I think i understand that. I also bought 200 silver Britannia's which haven't done anywhere near as well as gold but those coins would be enough to bribe a Captain to take me somewhere else.

    3. The UK left the gold specie standard on the outbreak of the Kaiser's war. The gold standard the lasted from 1925 to 1931 was a half-arsed piece of work. And it was only in 1816 that the monometallic gold standard was introduced, solely by the UK. (The idea caught on, eventually, but never universally.)

      1. re-introduced
        We had had gold coins before that and we always had silver and copper ones. Our coins used to have actual worth.

    2. "AI Overview
      In the USSR, the amount of living space per person varied, but generally increased over time, especially after Stalin's death. In the early 1950s, it was less than 5 square meters per person, but by the mid-1970s, it had increased to 8 square meters in urban areas for the USSR and 10 for Moscow. During the 1970s and 1980s, the recommended living space per person was 7 and 9 square meters respectively. There were also regulations regarding the number of rooms allocated based on family size".

      Of course the Politburo had an apartment in the city and a dacha in the country. There's very little, if any, difference between communism and feudalism?

      1. Most of these "isms", boil down to the average person constantly being told what to do by various levels of apparatchiks, with disproportionate power. Whether it's communism or fascism, if you are at the bottom of the heap, there is no difference.

    3. Both are anti-Semitic, both are economically mindless, both are useless. Like voting for Scylla or Charibdys.

      On the other side we have the Tories: no policies, no plan, no strategy, continuity Blair and Reform, who… have policies they could never implement, no plan, no strategy.

      1. Yup.
        Not impressed by the list of policies that ChatGPT unearthed… why did it have to look in so many places? How can Reform expect anyone to vote for them if they keep their policies a secret?

    1. I should photograph my arms. On the left is a small mark where the phlebotomy department took seven blood samples in one go (a whole armful!) and the right arm has what looks like a large botched tattoo, where the imaging department put a canula for contrast dye. The mess was mostly caused by the cling film style adhesive used to hold the dressing in place.

        1. I thought clopidogrel was a form of poetry that William McGonagall wrote…
          I'll get me coat 🙁

          1. Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
            Alas! I am very sorry to say
            That ninety lives have been taken away
            On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
            Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

            And so on and so forth (but not the Forth Bridge)

        2. The nurse who came this morning recommended a change in blood thinners – Apixaban probably. He only had Clopidogrel for a couple of weeks after the triple by-pass.

  71. I see what the forces of Globalism are doing now with the creation of Corbyns Hard Left Party
    Just as the powers that be have been corralling hard left agitators towards peaceful community protests against the criminal activities of migrants in order to disrupt and frighten decent people away.
    We will now have a hard left trade union jackbooted party that will stalk every movement, meeting and announcement by Reform in order to intimidate decent people away.

  72. Madeline Grant
    The Epping migrant delusion
    24 July 2025, 11:36am

    The origin of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes is difficult to pin down: could it be 19th century Denmark or 14th century Spain, 13th century India or the 500s BC in Greece? Perhaps the fact that all of these cultures and times are viable options confirms the truth of it: never overestimate the capacity of those in power to believe their own nonsense.

    British politics is an excellent example of this. I’m fascinated by Angela Rayner’s words – leaked from a cabinet meeting in the midst of the Epping hotel fiasco – about needing to ‘repair the social fabric’ and foster ‘better integration’. She’s not wrong, but the fact that something so self-evidently true even needs to be said at cabinet is telling. Surely no one who hasn’t been in a coma for the last 25 years would need reminding of this. It was redolent of one of Basil Fawlty’s better put-downs to his wife; ‘Next contestant: Sybil Fawlty from Torquay, special subject the bleeding obvious’.

    You detect a belief, in some quarters of government, that people are somehow imagining the problems around them. Indeed, Rayner went on to add that ‘while Britain was a successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, the government had to show it had a plan to address people’s concerns and provide opportunities for everyone to flourish.’ Given that she also warned of civil unrest and a summer of rioting in the same breath, to return instantly to ‘diversity is our strength’ platitudinous slop seems to require a certain cognitive dissonance.

    One of the inherent problems with the government’s strategy to ‘educate’ people out of their concerns about immigration is that the narrative it requires is based on myth, not history. ‘The Windrush built Stonehenge, Paddington abolished slavery, Nye Bevan created the world in six days’ brand of legends which are now pedalled as the official narrative of the country’s past simply don’t stand up to any meaningful tests of fact. All this further undermines governmental attempts to allay concerns about migration. This constant construction and promotion of easily disprovable myth only embeds the idea that the powers that be are either dangerously deluded or maliciously dishonest.

    Whenever the issue is raised of enormous numbers of people arriving in the country, in defiance of public opinion and often with beliefs, values and practices that are at direct odds with the norms of this country, we are treated to a lecture by our leaders replete with nebulous platitudes and sometimes a bit of football chat. Football appears to be Keir Starmer’s only cultural touchstone; he claims not to have a favourite book and never to have experienced a dream, he exhibits no knowledge of history prior to the tail-end of the Clement Attlee government. Is it any wonder that this man is incapable of communicating a deeper narrative of Britain beyond his Dalek-like squawks of ‘R’NHS’? These are people who, when faced with an overboiling pot, choose to put a lid on it rather than turn down the stove. They have no idea how truly divided and angry the country is, nor how ill-equipped they are to deal with it.

    The government’s latest plan appears to be shuffling asylum seekers from hotel to hotel, or from hotel into private rented accommodation, and hope no one will notice – while MPs congratulate themselves for getting the numbers down. This tendency isn’t just limited to politicians either. Having initially denied it, Essex police have now admitted that they escorted a left-wing rent-a-mob to the protest against illegal immigration outside the Bell Hotel in Epping. Since the Southport murders, an entire team of civil servants has been tasked with monitoring people’s personal comms on social media. Never does it apparently occur to them that public anger might be rooted in real, tangible things. They fundamentally see this as a matter of information containment or – among the even more naïve – education of the masses, rather than policy.

    There is still a Blair era idea – courtesy of Alastair Campbell – that you can simply ‘manage’ the news, and people will feel better. In practice that means that if enough lies are repeated, enough platitudes spouted and enough protests cracked down on then eventually the headlines will change. Ironically, this attitude is doing more to ‘whip up unrest’ than any Facebook post by some outraged Essex nan. Indeed elsewhere, the government is very much compounding the anger with its lack of transparency. Whether it is the prolonged obfuscation over its new Islamophobia definition, continuing delays with a grooming gang inquiry (last week, Jess Phillips confirmed that it has yet even to appoint a chairman), or just the clear evidence of two-tier justice across all aspects of policing – which you can now expect a ticking-off for noticing.

    Whether it was Denmark or India or Spain, nothing is clearer than the fact that we now have an emperor’s new clothes situation in Britain today. Our leaders strut around naked and then have the audacity to criticise the dress and deportment of the plebs down below. In short, if anything is bringing the nation to boiling point, it is this.

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

    Septic Sceptic
    2 hours ago
    Earlier today Times Radio had a piece on the “far-right” group, Homeland, and how they are helping to organise unrest outside migrant hotels. No counterbalancing piece on who organises the “anti-racist” protests as if they just spontaneously materialise. Virtually no locals will be protesting in favour of having many undocumented young men housed in their communities. We are being gaslit by our MSM as well as the government.

    Amo R Hamilton
    2 hours ago
    Last night on BBC there was a documentary explaining how Winston Churchill may have been PM when we won WW2 but he was not a good man and difficult to work with, alcoholic and not a nice man at all.
    Immediately followed by a documentary on Clement Atlee who won the election post WW2 against Churchill and despite the enormous failures of the Labour government was a nice chap who we should admire.
    Followed by ITV news which headlined, at length on how the IDF is going to all the trouble of bringing in aid to Gaza only to then shoot the people it is being given to. Poor Hamas are victims of course.
    See, tell enough lies and people will start to think, ah, maybe they are true and Liebour are right about everything.

    Bob Johnston
    7 minutes ago
    They (Tory and Labour) put me in mind of Ceaucescu on that balcony in 1989, jabbering the same old same old while the world was unravelling on the square below him. In a parallel with the Epping incident, Ceaucescu's people had bussed in several groups of workers (under threat of being fired) and shoved red flags and pro-government banners into their hands. It's hard to deny that we live in an authoritarian, out of touch state when that state, and its police, behave in an authoritarian, out of touch manner.

    1. Our Madeline is good. Very, very good. A witty and incisive writer.
      … "platitudinous slop". One to treasure.

      1. Talking of mantras such as Diversity is our Strength how about reversing the old warning to adolescents and tell them instead that Masturbation Improves Your Eyesight.

    2. Britain isn't a successful multicultural country, though. Its divided and rapidly losing any vestige of civilisation.

  73. HOME and sat with a PROPER mug of tea!!
    Not a bad journey back at all.

    I've now got a shitload of photos to sort out!

      1. Brought a couple of bottles back with me.
        Plus the two complimentary cans of Heineken from the ferry!

    2. Whilst I applaud the sentiment, I do wonder how many of the accounts popping up saying things like that are agents provocateurs.
      I think protecting ourselves against marauding gangs of hungry young men armed with a sense of moral righteousness in conquering the land of the hated white colonisers is more likely to bring results than going out on the streets to start a civil war as somebody appears to want us to do.

      1. 409988+ upticks,

        Afternoon BB2
        However you name the actions that surely must be the endgame
        bloodshed death and serious injury is going to be suffered, I personally see no other way.
        Undoubtedly the peoples are under, organised for a purpose, pressure, now resulting in only one safety valve option, bloodletting under whatever title.

        Submitting could be considered
        as a viable option I suppose, going on the referendum result, but I believe we would still JUST scrap through.
        One thing for certain these “governing” politico’s / pharmaceutical elites
        must be brought to book.

        1. The people who are going out on the streets just begging to be locked up as “far right thugs” probably haven’t got any backup plan for if the benefit payments stop for a few weeks.
          First things first.

          1. 409988+ up ticks,

            BB2,
            I am not being merciless in saying
            collateral damage, omelettes and
            breaking egg etc, short term suffering can lead to a long term
            beneficial future.

          2. I understand that point of view, all I’m saying is that people are being tempted out onto the street, nobody can say that they don’t know how the police are going to behave now. Yet, the more likely scenario is that we have a bond market crisis, lots of money printing and there will be a few short weeks when the bennies won’t flow and we will have armies of young migrants dependent on government handouts who will be hungry. How many of the people going out on the street have prepared for that scenario?

      1. 409988+ up ticks,

        Afternoon O,
        As I see it the opposition is revving up in illegal invading channel crosser’s, something nasty is about to take place is my guess.

    1. Any Ponzi scheme eventually collapses.

      The State pension was a Ponzi from the outset.

      2. I always assumed that there would be no state pension when I retired, and made private arrangements accordingly. Yes, it cost me a lot, taking additonal pension contributions from taxed pay, but now it's looking as good as one could reasonably hope.
        As far as I can tell, I didn't make enough NI contribution in the UK to get anything back, but the Norwegian version is more generous, so fewer contributions give a reasonable return.

        2. Both OH and I piled lots into our savings…….and other pensions. It meant he could retire at 62 and I did at just under 63. We're not spendthrifts but we don't have to worry about money.

          1. That was my plan.
            I've worked so long and some heavy hours that I don't know what else to do, apart from drink, and that's not so interesting either. So, I'm working some more until retirement age at 67. Then I'll be able to buy a bottle of gin at Norway prices!
            ;-))

          2. We've been able to focus on our interests…….he won't travel any more but is still very keen on wildlife and especially at this time of year, the swifts. I now go on my travels alone or with a friend. Off to see my son in September in his new home, than back to Kenya in November.

          3. Firstborn's farm has flocks of swifts. We see them flying round the house at about 05:00, vacuuming up flies and the like (good!). If there's a chance to sit out in the evening, we see eagles over the forest towards the south. Most often, fish eagles, tat hunt in the lake and river, and occasionally Royal eagles.
            You can see the massive buggers miles away, standing on a tree-top, silhouetted against the dusk… and the occasional screech as they fly by.
            Wonderful!
            And red/black, also green woodpeckers. Beautiful butterflies. And bastard clegs.

          4. Our swifts have done well this year – all five pairs that bred last year were back and this time they excelled themselves – four pairs had three chicks each – the other pair only one and one unhatched egg. We had two new pairs – one non-breeding but they will be back next year; the other chose badly and used a box that was full of straw left by the starlings in March/April – that pair had two chicks but both staggered out of the nest over the straw and I think the parents abandoned them. It will need clearing out and we will probably find two little mummifed corpses.

            Our next door neighbour was very excited to find a pair have taken up residence in their box – and they have two chicks.

            We have had amazing flying displays since May – flying really close around the house in the mornings and evenings especially.

            The non-breeders are beginning to leave now – who knows how the newly fledged youngsters find their way to Africa? The exhausted parents stay for a week or two to replenish their energy and will go probably at the end of July, or early August.

          5. We don't have any sophisticated kit/cameras such as you have but reckon there were about 25 pairs+/- this year, up from 20 pairs+/- last year. Plenty of spectacular flying displays. Haven't seen any in tha last 36 hrs so they may have all cleared off.

          6. The breeders arrive at the end of April, early May and go back to the same nest they chose before. Young birds arrive in waves during June and some will be old enough to pair up and choose a site for next year. They also fly round and entice the young chicks out of the nest when they're about to fledge. They never land except when they are breeding.; they don't breed until they are two or three years old. They are known as 'bangers' as they bang on the nest boxes to see if they are occupied.

            The seven pairs I've mentioned all use boxes installed on our house by OH over the last few years – the first pair chose theirs in 2016 and have been back each year since then, and the colony has grown a bit each year since then. Where are yours breeding?

            Swift numbers declined as their natural nest sites were blocked, by houses being renovated etc, and soffits blocked so they couldn't get in. Man-made boxes or swift bricks have addressed some of those issues. We have cameras in all our boxes so we can see what goes on inside. Most swifts nest under roof tiles on buildings or in man-made nest boxes these days.

  77. The UK will benefit from the arrival of more skilled workers from India under a new deal, Narendra Modi has said.

    India and the UK have agreed an arrangement which will make it easier for people from each country to go to the other and work on a temporary basis. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/07/24/britain-will-benefit-from-indian-migrants-says-modi/

    The Indian prime minister said the deal will “inject new energy into the service sectors of both countries” and the UK economy will “benefit from India’s skilled talent”.

    He confirmed a deal had been agreed on the so-called double contributions convention (DCC) as he signed a broader UK-India free trade deal alongside Sir Keir Starmer at Chequers in Buckinghamshire on Thursday.

    Sir Keir faced accusations of implementing a two-tier tax system when the DCC issue came to light in May.

    The deal means Indian workers employed by an India-based employer will be able to work in the UK for up to three years without paying National Insurance.

    They will continue to pay into Indian social security during that period, with reciprocal rules in place for UK workers who go to India.

    The change was a key demand made by Indian negotiators but it prompted a backlash from some opposition politicians in the UK who claimed it risked undercutting British workers.

    The deal comes a matter of months after Labour imposed higher National Insurance on British companies and follows calls from within Labour for the party to toughen its immigration stance amid the rise of Reform UK.

    Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, increased National Insurance contributions for employers in last year’s Budget in order to raise an extra £25bn in tax.

    The change took effect in April this year. The Tories have argued the move has suffocated economic growth.

    Speaking alongside Sir Keir at Chequers, Mr Modi said they had “reached a consensus on the double contribution convention”.

    “This will inject new energy into the service sectors of both countries, especially in technology and finance,” he said.

    “It will promote ease of doing business, reduce cost of doing business and increase the confidence of doing business.

    “Additionally the UK’s economy would benefit from India’s skilled talent.

    “These agreements will enhance investments and generate new employment opportunities in both countries.”

    The Government said the arrangement “is not expected to have a long-term impact on net migration”.

    Jonathan Reynolds, the Business and Trade Secretary, said it was “completely false” to claim British workers could be undercut.

    On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he said: “On this issue, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt if you were to hire an Indian worker they would pay exactly the same taxes as a British worker, you would have higher costs because of the visa charges, the NHS surcharge.

    “It is completely false to say any British worker is undercut by this deal. I would never agree a deal that undercuts the people I represent or grew up with. That is completely wrong.

    “The specifics of this are that a person on a temporary secondment from an Indian company to the UK or a UK company to India pays into their own social security systems for a short period of time if they are here on a temporary basis.”

    The Government said the UK already had similar agreements in place with numerous other countries, including Chile, Japan, South Korea and Iceland.

    Lindy Lou
    just now
    Is Starmer really this daft?

    1
    1 new reply
    show new reply
    Comment by Padraig Dolan.

    PD

    Padraig Dolan
    just now
    Dare I say that this is what we voted for in 2016 when we decided we'd had enough of Christian European immigration

    Comment by First Sea Lord.

    FS

    First Sea Lord
    just now
    We don’t want your rapists here thanks.

    Comment by Robert French.

    RF

    Robert French
    just now
    Spotted snake with forked tongue…

    Comment by Basil Fawlty.

    BF

    Basil Fawlty
    just now
    Starmer really thinks he is a great negotiator with his Trade Deals giveaways (France, USA, EU and now India) 🇬🇧

    Comment by Richie Rich.

    RR

    Richie Rich
    just now
    Maybe Kweers eye has been turned from young Ukrainian men to those from India, nothing would surprise me with our disgusting Kneeler.

    Comment by Sue Camies.

    SC

    Sue Camies
    just now
    More blo-ody immigrants. Middle class Indians = benefit claimants

    Comment by Archie Wetleg.

    AW

    Archie Wetleg
    just now
    How many call centres do we need in this country?

    Comment by James Pav.

    JP

    James Pav
    just now
    Any country whose capital city is 67% 'non indigenous'.. is a country 'circling the plug hole'… imo.

    Comment by John Devaney.

    JD

    John Devaney
    just now
    Sending over anyone that needs permanent healthcare will be first on the modi list. Followed by the unskilled.

    Comment by Commander Powell.

    CP

    Commander Powell
    1 min ago
    I hear the Indians love the Pakistanis, so what could go wrong.

    1
    1 new reply
    show new reply
    Comment by Thomas Pain.

    TP

    Thomas Pain
    1 min ago
    Most Indians hate us. Starmer taken to the cleaners yet again. God help our young people.

    Comment by Charley Farley.

    CF

    Charley Farley
    1 min ago
    What utter crap

    Comment by David Budd.

    DB

    David Budd
    1 min ago
    Starmer has got to be the most Anti British Prime Minister in the history of mankind. None of his so called deals have benefitted the UK in any way.

    Comment by James Mountain.

    JM

    James Mountain
    1 min ago
    Just f off – no we don't need this, we need to train our own. Its just more cultural destruction from a country that is our competitor.

    Robin Smith
    just now
    Jonathan Reynolds is talking hogwash in the last three paragraphs of this article. The National Insurance issue is significant. Employers will avoid Employers NIC and Indian staff will avoid Employees NIC. The British tax payer loses out and indigenous staff will be undercut. To believe employers won't take advantage of this is chronically naive.

      2. Mr hassan, the foreman agreed. As did the other 12 jurors who put in identical expenses claims for muslim tea towels.

        The 14th member said nothing as they were wearing a bin liner.

    2. Pity the judges in Lucy Connelly's and peter Lynch's cases did not take into account their good characters and lack of previous

      1. They were 'encouraged' to plead guilty. The muslim and black savage is always encouraged to plead not guilty – despite the evidence plainly pointing out the opposite.

    3. I wonder if the riot police facing off against the people of Essex will bare this judgement in mind. Supposed far right thugs in Epping aren't doing to them but the people they are defending will. Nah…I think most officers are oblivious.

          1. As in "Members of the family Ursidæ typically defecate in arboreal environs."?

    4. They will be let off. I don't know how they'll wangle it, but the state will ensure these vermin never go to jail.

    5. That twat of a lawyer must be scamming the government of millions – he defends every case concerning foreigners – of course he's an immigrant himself like most HR lawyers

    6. Well, colour me surprised.
      All Peaceful men will now have carte blanche to break women's noses.

    7. Ricky “Slit their throats” Jones has not even gone to trial yet either and he has pleaded “not guilty” and is out on bail.

      He will not go to jail either.

    3. I think I have posted about this before. I believe that the King is totally enthralled by Sufism, a universal spiritual system that predates Islam by many millennia. Islam is a syncretic polity that did initially subsume Sufism into its teachings, in order to provide a genuinely spiritual system to the non-political amongst its followers. However, present day Islam sectarianism has demonised the Sufis and promoted a far more crass, materialist and murderous version, based on Mohamedanism. Sufis are amongst those they have been ruthlessly murdered in the name of Islam.

      I could go on about this, but will refrain for fear of being too boring, even for me. Suffice it to say that I believe King Charles to be deceived. I would add that, under the Sufi tradition, no-one "on the path" would lose their temper over a non-functioning pen.

  80. Well, some good news about the Envy of the World. 11 am this morning I saw a nurse for my "annual review" (typical question: are you still alive)….

    At the end, I mentioned a problem which has been bothering me for three months (kept hoping it would get better, go away etc etc). She said she couldn't help but that I should see a GP today.

    Phoned – apptmt made for 3.10 pm. Saw one of the two very good young doctors. Told me not to worry but he'd arrange for me to go to a clinic within the next two weeks. The Dr spoke to me in normal English, was very clear in his examination and conclusion and exuded confidence (and experience). The MR – who accompanied me as my carer! – shared my relief at what he had to say.

    Makes a (pleasant) change…

    1. Sometimes, just sometimes it really does work.

      The annoyance is that it isn't always like that.

      Best wishes Bill. I hope you get sorted.

      1. In an ideal world – one for which we pay a lot of money to finance "the envy of the world" – we should not be pleasantly surprised when it actually works.

        2. I should hold on the plaudits for a while. Too many stories in the DM about those who were told all is well, take an aspirin… a few days later….

          1. Like my neighbour, Kadi's former owner. She kept getting told, "no you haven't got cancer" until suddenly it was, "yes, you have got cancer and it's stage 4 terminal".

    2. Bill ,

      So very pleased you have had attention and were listened to .. Good , good , good .

      You will be feeling a lot happier now and quite relieved ..

      Relax , and titter ye not!

    1. I see the President of India says that the influx of his countrymen allowed into the UK under the 2TK deal will be of great benefit to our economy. You might have thought that one of the poorest nations on Earth would want to keep their wealth creators for themselves.

      1. They are no longer one of the poorest nations – their people are poor – but not the state itself.

          1. Yes, they have. They also have a significant number of street people (a majority? a large minority? I don't know) who scrape subsistence by either begging or doing menial work for less than a fair wage. I do love India, but there is no point in lying about her.

      2. Lots of really skilled folk in India. Now the project engineering phase is winding down, many have (been?) returned to India. Good folk, they were, on contract from Siemens. Indians are good people, it's the Pakis and others from that neck of the world you need to watch for.

  82. SWAT team move in on 'Epping migrant hotel protester'. Suspect is arrested at his home.

    Opposing any 'Noble Lie' has got to be twenty years. Remanded for 24 months. No jury.

  83. Adverting to Southport, Epping, Canary Wharf etc etc – my view is that the Unspeakable Starmer, Lord Hermful and the Pencil Monitor know full well the depth of anger but are just waiting for the next very big outbreak of opposition. Then they'll declare a State of Emergency, call on the military to "assist the civil power" and direct those in uniform to shoot to kill.

    You read it here first.

    1. If the self-appointed junta 'direct those in uniform to shoot to kill' they might find that they become the targets.

      1. Why do you think (I know I've said this before) our rulers disarmed the law abiding?

    2. I suspect the same thing.
      Today I stood in a fuming queue of people in W.H. Smiths, all demanding that an assistant actually man the tills.
      Who on earth wants to use a card for small purchases? Apart from that we were all sick of doing the shop's job. After a while, a young chap appeared from the back of the shop and opened up the till.
      As we eventually shuffled forward, the woman ahead of me expounded on how angry she was over the state of the country and particularly the 'imports'. As she said, "I don't mind helping the sick or disabled .. but …." When the normally buttoned up English openly express their opinions to complete strangers, this country is heading for trouble.

      1. It's that we always feel we have to caveat it.

        There are dozens of other countries, all far nearer that could take 'refugees' but no, they come here.

        I don't want to help them any more. They can go somewhere else. Why must we take the entire world? It's physically, socially, economically unsustainable.

        1. Close the border, militarily if necessary.
          Deport immediately anyone over 16 without a NI number. Middle of the atlantic will do, if they won't say where they come from.
          Use prison ships. Be REALLY unwelcoming. Maybe one should have to earn say 5 years NI before you can claim any kind of benefit?

        2. I am completely out of human commission apart from me and mine; which includes proper, real Britons.

      2. Caroline and I made the mistake of visiting a MacDonalds for a cup of coffee a mile or two away from Rennes Airport while we waited for a plane which was delayed by 2 hours to arrive. We had to look at a big screen and press buttons and a quarter of an hour later our expensive but mediocre coffee arrived.

        We shall never visit a MacDonalds place again.

        1. I went to a Wetherspoons a couple of months ago with my old school friends – the fish and chips was excellent but the coffee was as you describe and obtained by pushing buttons on a machine.

          1. You do get an endless cup for £1.5-2.0. If yr really hard up, pinch the cup for next time. I'll get me hoodie..

          4. Barista coffee is the only solution. Drip coffee is a close second. And – no cappuccino after 10 am.

    4. They have been itching to do this for years. Both cheeks have. The ghastly May had the army at the ready to do this very thing when she finally triggered article 50 and didn't bloody leave.

        1. One of her final actions was to sign this country up to the UN Migration Pact – which is why we have so many invaders.

    5. They have started knocking at doors of the faarrrr right and dragging them off. DT refers. Nothing like instilling a bit of fear into the cohort of the population you do not wish to protest.

    6. "Those in uniform" haven't been issued with said uniforms yet. Menwhile, they're dressed as Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats riders.

      From what my former Army chaplain Rector tells me, the squaddies will remain on our side in a civil war situation.

      Hence the vast numbers of fighting-age men being kept in reserve. It's bloody obvious.

  84. https://order-order.com/2025/07/24/jeremy-corbyn-officially-launches-new-party-with-sultana/

    We all rather laugh, but Corbyn increased the Labour membership by many hundreds of thousands. Momentum – the hard Left pressure group – are his creation.

    With the country so polluted with foreigners and a bunch of white guilt middle class Lefties bleating on about 'palestine' he will – despite all the comedy – pick up a lot of votes.

    That folks, is damned dangerous. Corbyn's a zealot.

    1. It'll split the leftie vote so that's a good thing. The real zealots can vote for the Fruit and Nut party, the ordinary Labourites for the Labour party and the sensible people for Reform or one of the right wing alternatives.

      1. How I wish`Rupert Lowe was the leader of Reform and that Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf had retired from politics altogether.

  85. Well, I must hand out laurels to EE. Firstly, I couldn't work out the EE/BT thing. Apparently BT is now concentrating on business accounts while EE is the domestic stuff.
    I have always found the EE/BT shop in Colchester very good; this time they excelled themselves. They took time to sort out old farts without becoming impatient – there was a chap about my age who took up as much time as I did. The assistants are young but explain without being patronising. Fortunately, I had Sonny Boy Snr with me to ask questions that hadn't occurred to me. Result all round. Fibre stuff to the house to be installed next month; no charge. Better broadband and phone package at a lower monthly rate. Mobile contract with more whizzy stuff at a very reasonable price and £41.00 worth of data restored. (Even techie Danish d-in-law didn't know that on pay-as-you-go the data is time limited.)
    As SBS remarked, you simply could not sort that all out on the phone. There are times when only face to face will work.

    1. That's good! We're on BT for the landline (soon to be on VOIP) and EE for the mobiles. I also found the staff in the EE shop very helpful when I bought a phone for J and it was added to my account.

      1. It was actually worth going into town for that service alone.
        Given MB's health, I felt the time had come for my mobile to be more …. well, mobile.

          2. Um ….. I'm like Eric Morecombe. I know the numbers but not necessarily in the right order.

          4. I do but I’ll tell you what’s really sad, Bill. I know the BBC VAT number by heart.

          5. I know both my mobile numbers (and my landline) by heart. For me, numerically challenged as I am, that's pretty amazing!

    2. Hi Annie,

      You're lucky. Six years ago,I ditched Plusnet broadband and switched to a Vodafone Max Unlimited SIM card and a 4G router. I had twice the speed for half the cost.

      So, when the Parish decided they could no longer afford to keep me in my Verger's Cottage (which had been gifted to the parish by Miss Dorothea S Coulthard, of the fabric empire in the 1930's), I found alternative accommodation (with help: it's not what you know, etc.).

      So here in Normandy, 3.5 miles from the centre of Gulldford, no surrounding hills or forests, yet Vodafone, EE, Three and O2 fail to provide more than 1 bar on the signal meter, and my phone relies on Wi-fi Calling.

      The 4G router failed to find a signal. So I'm now with Vodafone on a FTTC broadband contract. I don't know where the cabinet is – I've yet to find it – but I do know that there are absolutely no plans to roll out full fibre here in the foreseeable future.

      Worse still, after a year on an O2 SIM-only deal, and moving on, O2 subscribers trying to phone me (I'm on Three now) are told that my number doesn't exist. O2 refuse to help, since I'm no longer their customer. The issue is clearly with their database, but apparently not their problem.

      So my latest phone is dual-SIM. SIM 2 is a cheap Smarty one costing £4.50 / month. It's also on the Three network, but O2 subscribers can phone it with no problem. I feel it's worth it to save the hassle of changing my main number and then having to notify every contact from the last 30 years of the change…

      At Seale, I had zero EE reception, but Samsung sent me to their shop in Reading to get a replacement screen fitted, and I can't fault that service.

    2. It all comes back to the economy and from the economy, massive, uncontrolled gimmigration.

      Even if some of the immigrant population work and earn enough to sustain themselves and family, they are taking a job a local could be doing and putting ever more pressure on tax payers while depressing wages.

      Even were every immigrant to be a Swiss banker making millions or a Polish actuary or Swedish specialist welder they are still an opportunity cost to the economy.

    3. We have an extra week leave after age 62. This can be taken in one hit, or by the hour, as you wish. And Norway's retirement age is 67.

    4. It's just one more of the many examples of how incredibly stupid our current government really is.

  87. Following on from my posting below, some hours ago, I have just sent an email to Reform UK, with the text below:

    "Hi

    I was trying to find a list of your policies, so that I can think over them and likely vote for you at the next election – sooner rather than later, I hope.
    That task was difficult, so I enlisted the help of ChatGPT.

    It came with the text below. Some points worthy of note:
    1. Your website is not mentioned as a reference
    2. ChatGPT looked in many news sites – just look at the reference list at the bottom
    3. When I went to your site and clicked on “Policies”, I got what looks like a pdf booklet. Not readily searchable
    4. What I did find, and what’s from the ChatGPT below, is long-winded and does not expressly state the problems that would be solved by adopting this and that policy. As a consulting Engineer, I identify a problem, come with a proposal for a solution, and then implement it, with the Client paying. Maybe you should consider rewriting your policies so that you identify, say, the top 5 problems in the UK, then demonstrate how Reform would solve them by implementing your policies, giving some kind of a timescale and budget assessment as well. You would also have to do a political evaluation of the findings, as well, as if you are too heavy-handed, you’ll lose a lot of votes.
    Also, you’ll need to be realistic, because you can be sure that the press and the rest of the world will be on your necks, looking for the first tiny slip-up or deviation.

    Best Regards

      1. Don't think so, but let's not confuse them with details.
        If one of my team produced such a fluffy, unstructured report, they'd be sent back to do it again, with an explanation in short words of what's wrong.

      2. Don't think so, but let's not confuse them with details.
        If one of my team produced such a fluffy, unstructured report, they'd be sent back to do it again, with an explanation in short words of what's wrong.

  88. Granny Weatherwax
    4h
    Will Sultana be in charge of fund raisin?

    Richard
    Granny Weatherwax
    4h
    She will be keeping a currant account no doubt.

    Captain Hindsight
    4h
    I wish the Fruit and Nut party all the best, I'm sure Labour won't regret letting 16 year old vote at all 🤣🤣.

    James Eaton
    4h
    I really, really hope Tulip joins them – then it will be Fruit & Nuts with Flower Power.

  89. Wordle No. 1,496 3/6

    🟨⬜⬜⬜🟩
    ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    Wordle 24 Jul 2025

    Tremble for Birdie Three?

    1. Really Shaken by yet another par

      Wordle 1,496 4/6

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

    2. Really Shaken by yet another par

      Wordle 1,496 4/6

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

    3. Too many choices here.

      Wordle 1,496 5/6

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

      2. Well done. #metoo.
        Wordle 1,496 3/6

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

    5. Par for me.

      Wordle 1,496 4/6

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

        1. The only result I was given was for the ultrasound scan of the arteries in my neck – the ones that provide blood to the brain – and no hardening was found there. The young woman who did that scan told me then and there but the "Patients Know Best" document emailed to me today indicated that the rest will be released to my records after the main event! Hopefully the specialist nurse will let me know ahead of that what their findings are. I see him again next Tuesday as the Lung Function Test is still to be done and there are injectables to be collected from the pharmacy and used for four days prior to surgery in place of Apixaban.

          2. It will be a great relief for you (and us) when all is done and hopefully successfully done.

    2. As we don't have any crocs in our rivers what can it effect here
      beavers salmon carp ?
      Or perhaps people down stream that have to use second hand water.

    1. Appalling vandalism. And the profiteers will be nowhere to be seen when people are hungry.

    1. Doing many of these things requires fully leaving the ECHR. Starmer will never, ever do that. He wants to chain us ever closer to it.

      A slew of laws would have to be repealed. Laws Starmer enacted and keeps embedding with other law!

      2. That's something thta should be in Farage's prospectus:
        The plan
        1. Leave ECHR, if necessary by decree. No negotiation.
        2. Close the borders and begin deportations the day after.

        1. But leaving the ECHR means repealing the HRA, communities act and a host of others, a well as re-negotiating with the EU and the Northern Ireland protocol.

          The state has entangled law deliberately.

          2. We just need an Enabling Act. Cut through all the legislation and in one bound, we're free.

      3. So what? Give them the finger. What are they going to do about it? The punishment beating has been in full flow for years.

    1. Starmer can't acknowledge the problem, so he has no choice except to suppress and use force to control people. They've caused this mess and will make things far worse.

  94. The head of the Police Federation is Tiff Lynch.

    You rightists had better take note. She might just live up to her name…

    2. "I know where she works lives." I've been in her office. I was involved in building PolFed HQ towards the end of my career.

      Imagine a Travelodge with a few offices and a TV studio on top. That's about it.

  95. ‘This is just goofy’

    – Influencer Candace Owens responds on her podcast to a defamation lawsuit filed in the US state of Delaware by French President Emmanuel Macron and wife Brigitte over allegations that the first lady was born male.

      1. There are moments when she has a similar look to some of the men that Emmanuel is seen with in his unguarded moments.

        2. That proves nothing (see Obamas) but Brigitte Macron is too small to be a convincing transwoman. She is very petite.

    2. Is it really anyone's business but theirs? I do not care on whit what someone does or chooses to do, nor how they live. It's their life to live. I care only when someone else's view is forced on me. Otherwise, go do what you like.

      Want to wear a dress? Fine. Want to pretend to be a woman? Fine. Just don't demand I call you anything but a man because your views stop at your head.

      That's 98% of the problems we have these days. Folk think what they want is more important than what others do. It is a lack of duty to others and a preponderance of ego for our own importance and relevance at both macro – with the importing of criminal gimmigrants – and micro, with pikeys defecating all over car parks.

    1. I sowed Kelvedon Wonder and rarely got any maggots. I've let the ground lie fallow this year and haven't planted peas.

  98. 409988+ up ticks,

    May one ask what are brewers views now ?

    Chief fruitcake, and a pleasure and honour to have as such a successful leader, sadly for such a short time.

    I came away from the Birmingham EGM meeting feeling a definite rise in spirits we had elected a winner.

    The treachery shown in 2019 via the parties NEC with input from farage was / is unforgivable.

    https://youtu.be/vj7dFCi2KDo?si=S_uUlx5ClyRDhZIn

  99. Vladimir WARHead
    4h
    Oh for that spark …. surely it can't be long now.
    The State Stasi have already admitted they are poorly placed to deal with the insurrection …. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c7e21c58c9d008ba32686bbacd719170e8c531e3bf874f0108d59e7f5bc65e52.png

    George Finchley
    3h
    Are we talking about single males aged 18-30, as the majority of asylum seekers seem to be, or can they bring their families once they arrive? Since children are legally required to attend school in the UK, it raises the question: if these asylum seekers are indeed single males, why are we paying for school uniforms, Oyster cards, and other benefits for individuals who are not legally in the country yet? Unless they have children of school age, which I understand is a small percentage, and there is no way they should be able to bring families while illegal.
    As they are illegal at this stage, should the UK be footing the bill for their education, travel, or any associated costs? These are crucial questions that need to be asked, especially when local British families are also struggling to make ends meet.

    Additionally, when it comes to perks like e-bike discounts, are we really prioritising asylum seekers over UK citizens? And if these asylum seekers can later bring families with them, what kind of long-term financial impact are we looking at?
    The system needs to be questioned, are taxpayers being asked to support policies that don’t make sense, or contribute to a two-tier society? These questions must be answered to ensure fairness for all.

    1. When headlines like that appear in the Mail…they are programming the people to expect violence.

  100. That's me for this damp day. Brightened by the efficient medical chap. Isn't it nice when they speak in normal English not in medicalese?

    Have a jolly evening – we are going to have plaice (because we know ours). And the first of the new potatoes what I planted on Good Friday.

    A demain.

          3. She insisted on holding the fish like that because the photographer's other images were off the scale.

    2. A plaice for everything and everything in its plaice. I shall have fish tomorrow, it being Friday.

  102. On the plus side.. a berth becomes vacant at the local 5-star hotel in Nottingham.

    Sheraz Malik, aged 27, of Bath Street, Sutton-in-Ashfield, has now been charged with three counts of rape and possession of cannabis.

    1. Oh.. sorry don't mention the rapist.. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right

      I spoke with Nottinghamshire Police yesterday about this case. I was asked not to go public on this matter as it may affect the trial.
      Lee Anderson MP.

    2. He's trying, but he is ignoring the reality. I think, like any religion it attracts the weak minded. There are those preaching it who are violent men who want power and use their religion as an excuse.

      All to easy to blame god to absolve yourself of your own petty, vicious nature.

      1. "I think, like any religion it attracts the weak minded". Really? Have you ever tried forgiving someone or turning the other cheek?

  104. Taking large sums of tax-payer's money to facilitate this immoral national disgrace.

    Britannia Hotels is a British budget hotel chain with over 60 locations across the UK.

  106. Leftie Essex Police Chief Constable, Ben-Julian Harrington has form..

    Exhibit A: sent round two PCs on Remembrance Sunday to investigate Allison Pearson.
    Exhibit B: Obsessed with Hate Crime. Proudly boasts he arrests on average about 1,3 people per day for hate crimes.
    Exhibit C: Bizarrely he also boasts about solving 13% of crime in Essex.

  107. In Ramsgate and it's one of the most miserable July days of recent memory. Cool with relentless drizzle, poor visibility but humid, too. The only way is up, as the song goes.

    1. and narrow hips – and rather broad shoulders. But that means nothing these days. Macron is also very petite. Frenchmen often are. Hence the bluster.

  110. Evening, all. Another day spent taming the jungle that passes for my garden. It is, at last, starting to look civilised. Just as well as I'm hosting a garden party to return hospitality on Saturday. I did at least get to lie out on the chaise longue and appreciate it before the sun went down. I've downed a couple of brandies and a few glasses of rose so hopefully that will dull the pain caused by being on my feet.

    I fear shuffling the Tory party is akin to changing the position of the deckchairs on the Titanic. It's too damaged below the waterline to continue. It will have to be rebuilt (as a proper conservative party).

  111. Builders promised to be round at the weekend and finish off.
    I hope!
    So tired of the mess! But – the craftsmen are very skilled, and have done a lovely job! Most impressed. Poles, so they are.

    1. By Kipling:

      It was not part of their blood,
      It came to them very late
      With long arrears to make good,
      When the English began to hate.

      They were not easily moved,
      They were icy-willing to wait
      Till every count should be proved,
      ‘Ere the English began to hate.

      Their voices were even and low,
      Their eyes were level and straight.
      There was neither sign nor show,
      When the English began to hate.

      It was not preached to the crowd,
      It was not taught by the State.
      No man spoke it aloud,
      When the English began to hate.

      It was not suddenly bred,
      It will not swiftly abate,
      Through the chill years ahead,
      When Time shall count from the date
      That the English began to hate.

    3. Closing the hotel isn't enough. The criminal invaders will just be moved somewhere else.

      The state must be forced to stop the horde getting here at all.

  113. Hulk Hogan RIP
    I was surprised to read he was younger than I am. He seemed to have been around forever.

  116. Oh well after a fairly busy day I'm off to bed now. Goodnight all Nottlers sleep well. 😴

    1. Forgive me but the problem isn't one hotel. It's that the criminal invaders are here at all.

    2. And move them where?
      Not back to their respective shitholes I'll warrant.

      1. Not the hotel, I imagine, but to remove the need for it's use to house gimmigrants, yes, I imagine.

        1. For my part, I built those bloody offices. The motorised council crest, revealing a video screen. Shades of James Bond…

          Beween EFDC offices in Epping, and POLFED HQ in Leatherhead, I'm feeling rather uncomfortable.

      2. Dunno. I’ve just seen that the council are going to sue the Home Office. What the nature of the sue-ing would be was not indicated. It does seem to be at the owner’s discretion of the property whether of not the offers tendered to house migrants is accepted.

    5. Just as I read that, Patrick Christys announced it on tv. Perfectly in sync.

      1. Corbyn once called tax competition between nations a 'race to the bottom'. As if improved services, better quality and higher value is a bad thing.

        The man is an oaf. A childish, racist oaf.

  120. The pikey scum, after having ruined our area have moved on after the court finally, after days of delay bothered itself to get plod to shift them.

    The vermin have just gone up the road, to destroy somewhere else. It's damned intolerable. They want to travel, so travel – and keep travelling, forever.

    They're only going to be stopped by force. Take their vehicles as payment for the damage they do, destroy the wretched caravans. They're thieves and must, like the diversity pollution be excised.

    1. We had some 'travellers' turn up last year on the open land in front of our houses. It took a month for the landowner to evict them. Some of them appeared again a few weeks ago. This time they were gone in 24 hours. The landowner's agent knocked on the doors of some of those who had reported it. "We were ready this time," he said, "last year was good practise."

      1. What did they do to get rid of them? Can a sort of universal restraining order be submitted to permanently keep them out?

        1. There is a legal process and formal evictions can be issued, enforced by big men wearing black clothes and driving big black vehicles. Local authorities should have a traveller unit. Contact them, then contact the police on 101 or their website – some will have a facility to report it. They will give you a reference number.

          The LA cannot issue a notice if it's private land but they should know the owner and tell you who it is. It's then up to the landowner but if the travellers become a real nuisance, the police and the LA will have a record and will do some leaning.

        2. There is a legal process and formal evictions can be issued, enforced by big men wearing black clothes and driving big black vehicles. Local authorities should have a traveller unit. Contact them, then contact the police on 101 or their website – some will have a facility to report it. They will give you a reference number.

          The LA cannot issue a notice if it's private land but they should know the owner and tell you who it is. It's then up to the landowner but if the travellers become a real nuisance, the police and the LA will have a record and will do some leaning.

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

Comments are closed.