801 thoughts on “Wednesday 21 August: This year, the EU itself recognised technology that makes the Irish backstop unnecessary”

  1. Will Italy’s warring politicians succeed in shutting Salvini out of power? Nicholas Farrell
    20 August 2019

    What now looks like a distinct possibility in Italy after today’s resignation of Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte is a reminder of a golden rule of modern politics: the liberal left will sleep with any enemy however repulsive to stop right-wing populism.

    Morning everyone. Quote of the day!

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/will-italys-warring-politicians-succeed-in-shutting-salvini-out-of-power/

  4. Good morning all

    Bright & sunny, warm.

    A good morning for trimming back the jungle at the front of the house.

    1. Morning, Peddy.
      Already trimmed my beard, if that’s what you are alluding to…
      ;-))

  5. It looks to me like Boris will try to get some nitpicking alteration to the backstop then sign up to the rest of May’s terrible deal and then brazen it out. Or why else would he be bothering with that made up issue?

      2. If he returns waving a piece of paper (or an equivalent interpretation du jour) at us in the time-honoured manner, we’ll know.

    2. I have no cast-iron explanations of what Boris is up to, but there is another possibility that perhaps you have not considered. He may be asking for the EU to drop the backstop (knowing full well that they will refuse) in order for negotiations to take place. Now that they have refused point black to drop the backstop, he can safely say “Well, I gave you the chance to reconsider but – since you refuse – then you only have yourselves to blame for me not negotiate negotiating with you.” As I say, I have no proof of what his strategy is but it is certainly another possibility.

  6. Morning all

    SIR – There is no need for the Irish backstop in the Withdrawal Agreement, as I explained in a paper for the Centre for Welsh Studies.

    In March, the European Parliament passed the “electronic freight transport information regulation”. This basically does away with need for border controls on freight throughout the EU. While the final text does not specifically mention a third country (as the UK, including Northern Ireland, will become on October 31), there is no reason why the European Commission cannot utilise the facility in the regulation.

    Sabine Weyand (the deputy EU Brexit negotiator) said in an interview with Politico that no technology is available for the cross-border electronic identification of freight. If there is no technology available, why did the EU put in place a regulation for exactly that?

    So, in my opinion, the backstop can be removed and the United Kingdom can depart on October 31 with an agreement in place that will not leave one part of the country annexed to the EU.

    Myles Power
    Former EU Policy Adviser on Transport, Constitutional Affairs and Legal Affairs
    Sychdyn, Flintshire

    SIR – The initial drearily negative EU reaction to the Prime Minister’s letter to Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, is just what we have learnt to expect.

    The guidelines of April 29 2017, on which our partners insist on basing dealings with us on our democratic decision to withdraw, are a flagrant breach of the provisions of Article 50. Our partners have never denied this, (a) because they can’t; and (b) because they think they need not do so. They think brute force, and divided opinion in this country, will see them through.

    The impasse remains: 27 heads of government demand that we swallow something that not one of them would put to her or his own legislature.

    Sir Peter Marshall
    London W8

  7. Morning again

    SIR – I am not a regular contributor to your Letters page, but when I read suggestions, stemming from the Operation Yellowhammer leaks, that Britain might not be able to maintain our fuel supplies, I feel that I am at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

    I have worked in the oil supply business for the past 50 years and am still active as a consultant. There is no way anyone can restrict oil supplies to us, whether that be crude oil to our refineries or finished oil products.

    Charles L Daly
    London EC4

      2. Eminently so – if he was anti-Brexit and had said that the opposite was true, the media would be all over him like a rash and he would be suffering from exhaustion after touring the TV studios at breakneck speed. As it is I suspect that he will be sitting at home and twiddling his thumbs…a pound to a penny he won’t see the inside of a studio.

        ‘Morning, Bill.

  8. SIR – Jeremy Warner (Comment, August 16) is right that forward indicators, including the reverse yield here and in America, are pointing towards global recession.

    He is also right to recommend that the Government take advantage of exceptionally low interest rates to invest in infrastructure. Could I add one item to his suggested list?

    The Royal Navy is critically short of ships at a time of crisis in the Gulf and the China Sea, both areas that are vital to British interests. Our shipyards are critically short of orders and Scotland, where most of our remaining capacity lies, is feeling unloved.

    During his election pitch Boris Johnson mentioned the need for more naval shipbuilding a number of times. He was right to suggest this and would be right to implement it.

    Sir Julian Brazier
    Canterbury, Kent

    1. Last time anyone tried that, the UK was landed with two aircraft carriers with no escort screen and no planes. Not a great advertisement.

  9. SIR – Patrick Holden, CEO of the Sustainable Food Trust (Comment, August 14), is right – and Goldsmiths, University of London, is wrong. For the good of our health and the environment we should all eat less meat, but it is the intensive factory systems that need to be cut back, not traditional grass-fed livestock.

    We have a small beef farm on Dartmoor. The cows eat nothing but grass, the default crop in the hills. The grass stores carbon and holds back flood water.

    Our hayfields are County Wildlife Sites. We do not use fertiliser or chemicals and we do not plough, till or re-seed. We have 50 species of bird, 14 species of bat and more than 80 types of moth, all dependent to varying degrees on the presence of livestock and our management of the farm, including traditional hedge laying. We have farmed in this wholly sustainable zero-input way for 20 years.

    In the absence of livestock farmers, who would look after most of our countryside – 50,000 salaried civil servants?

    Norman Cowling
    Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Devon

    1. SIR – If we are to stop eating beef, what will the French call us?

      Felicity McWeeney
      Morpeth, Northumberland

      1. Good morning, M.

        Be careful, you are starting to sound like an incomer (and one from the soft underbelly of London at that). :•)

        1. Not at all Grizz

          Each farm has about 1.000 + dairy cows, who don’t graze , who stand over specially constructed slurry pits , and their calves are crated in rows and rows and rows of white kennel containers .

          These farms were traditionally worked until about 10 years ago .

          Dairy herds grazing in fields is a rare sight now, the fields are reserved for beef cattle .

          The countryside has become bitterly harsh .

          Oil seed rape is grown abundantly , as well as maize, the oil seed rape is sprayed early on , and we are all lamenting the lack of insects and bees .

          Big landowners are farming intensively.

    4. And we support everything our good friend, Norman Cowling, says in his excellent letter.

      Tom Pearce
      Bill Brewer
      Jan Stewer
      Peter Gurney,
      Peter Davy
      Dan’l Whiddon
      Harry Hawke,
      Old Uncle Tom Cobley
      and all.

  10. Sir – Charles Moore claims that “most people would prefer to retire a little later” (Comment, August 19).

    This might be true for people in remunerative liberal professions, especially those who, after university, didn’t start work until their early twenties. However, for many workingclass people, half a century of grinding physical labour will have left them unable to work beyond the current retirement age.

    Mr Moore points out that, when the state pension was introduced in 1909, the retirement age was 70. But the percentage of people’s incomes taken by the state was considerably lower than it is today. Our state pension is the lowest of all developed countries, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and yet Britain is one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

    There is plenty of money for state pensions, but it is being squandered on overseas aid, the EU and HS2.

    Clive Kent
    Heathfield, East Sussex

    In a world that is getting more stupid by the day, the prize for being the stupidest must go to the UK for quietly putting up with having the lowest state pensions in Europe. We need to summon some of that Ancient Briton spirit.

    1. But we’ve just discovered a surplus £26 billion down the back of the sofa.
      We could naively pretend it will be used to the benefit of the law-abiding Brits, but I would imagine it will be p!ssed away on foreign aid, HS2 and, of course, the EU will grab a chunk like they did of our estimated earnings from drug dealing and whoring.

    2. Hetty’s Herbs do a packet of Isatis Tinctoria (dyer’s woad) for £2.50, if anyone is so inclined.😎

  11. 10 declassified Russia collusion revelations that could rock Washington this fall. 20 August 2019.

    The Steele interview. It has been reported, and confirmed, that the DOJ’s inspector general (IG) interviewed the former British intelligence operative for as long as 16 hours about his contacts with the FBI while working with Clinton’s opposition research firm, Fusion GPS. It is clear from documents already forced into the public view by lawsuits that Steele admitted in the fall of 2016 that he was desperate to defeat Trump, had a political deadline to make his dirt public, was working for the DNC/Clinton campaign and was leaking to the news media. If he told that to the FBI and it wasn’t disclosed to the FISA court, there could be serious repercussions.

    The mills of American Justice grind exceedingly slowly but exceeding fine! If Trump wins the next election Steele will find himself up in front of an American jury trying to explain why he and MI6 tried to overthrow the legally elected President of the United States.

    https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/458173-10-declassified-russia-collusion-revelations-that-could-rock-washington-this

      1. I always liked this version:

        O what a tangled web we weave
        When first we practice to deceive
        But when we’ve practised quite a while
        How vastly we improve our style

        J R Pope

  12. Sir Elton’s good works

    SIR – The world owes Sir Elton John a huge debt. First, he has shown how to assuage one’s guilt about flying by private jet. Secondly, he has solved the problem of global warming.

    All one has to do is make a suitable contribution to a company that offsets carbon emissions (report, August 20). Perhaps we should also pay 50p every time we fill up our cars with fuel.

    W G McLellan
    Northampton

  13. Morning, Campers.
    I will start with posting some articles that I hope you will find interesting.
    First one is from ConHome.

    https://www.conservativehome.com/localgovernment/2019/08/brexit-will-mean-that-local-government-loses-an-alibi-for-red-tape.html

    “Brexit will lose local government an alibi for red tape

    Harry Phibbs

    Last updated: August 20, 2019 at 6:41 am

    When I was a local councillor, the council officers often came up with a cunning ruse to block one of my bright ideas. They would say it was illegal. Often this excuse would unravel. This is because “my” bright idea would be really to copy something that was being done in Wandsworth. Why should something be banned (or compulsory) in Hammersmith and Fulham, but not in Wandsworth? Another response I would come up with, was to ask which law they were referring to – then a bod from the Legal Department would respond to “clarify” that the initial claim of illegality was nonsense.

    But at other times the objection was valid. It might well be explained that it was due to a requirement from the European Union. Or perhaps the details went beyond the demands of the EU as a result of being embellished in Whitehall. This is the practice known as “gold-plating”. One begins to see how freedom is unduly constrained. The EU makes a demand, the law that ends up being passed goes further, then local government pretends the law goes further than it does. The ban on using imperial measures is an example. Planning rules are another. Also bin collections.

    From time to time a deregulation initiative will be announced but overall the burden grows each year. Apart from the EU, we have all these domestic agencies with a vested interest in widening the scope of regulation. They charge registration and licensing fees and impose fines. The more revenue they gather in, the higher the salaries of their officials.

    This is not a new problem. The other day I was rereading The Mad Officials by Christopher Booker, a volume which was first published in 1994. Here is just one of the many examples he included:

    “The Abbeyfield Society is a Christian housing association with 1,000 independent houses all over the country, where small groups of people can live together in a homely setting sharing domestic chores. In 1991, Environmental Health Officers began calling on a number of these virtually private homes, announcing that, under the Food Safety Act 1990, they must now be treated as ‘food businesses’ and are therefore subject to all the regulations applying to restaurants and other catering establishments.

    “When an EHO from Salford City Council walked into the kitchen of a home in Walkden, run by the Abbeyfield Worsley Society, his first action was to throw a wooden cutting board and rolling pin into the bin saying ‘these aren’t allowed’ – despite protests from the owner that they had been a wedding present many years before. What followed was a battery of statutory Improvement Notices served on the home by the council, including a ruling that residents could not work in the kitchen without special protective clothing…”

    So far as I can gather, some of the provisions in the Food Safety Act 1990 were at the behest of the European Union, others were not. It is even possible that some of them may have been of some genuine benefit. But as with so much legislation, we can see that it passed without enough regard to the cost or the unintended consequences. Far from being modified, it has got worse. Subsequent changes have added further layers of complexity.

    Often it is local government that is supposed to enforce all these laws. So it would be useful to know which ones the Government plans to scrap. Councils are also keen to discover the new regime for procurement. The present arrangements imposed by the EU are highly cumbersome and greatly increase costs. What will the new rules be?

    What is truth? Defenders of the EU are fond of declaring it to be “myth” that some new directive from Brussels is to blame for some threatened absurdity. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. But often the truth is hard to discover as lawyers and bureaucrats wade through the paperwork as baffled as the rest of us. What of the decision by Cardiff Council to ban the recycling of teabags? The Council claimed it was due to the EU. The EU gave a sort of non-denial denial. It was listed as a myth but the EU said:

    “Whilst household catering waste – including teabags – falls within the scope of the EU Animal By-Products Regulation 2002, national rules may still be applied to its composting.”

    Leaving the EU should allow some of that fog to clear. It will remove the alibi for poor decision-making, not just in Parliament, but in our Council chambers.”

    1. I myself witnessed during the Major years how a two-page EU directive on Quality Control was turned by British officials into an 8-volume behemoth two feet thick that we all had to read before we could get City & Guilds accreditation and therefore be fit to bid for Government contracts at any level, or indeed any private contracts where there was some official input. It effectively destroyed most of the small and medium enterprises, leaving the field clear for the likes of Serco and G4S who ignored the rules and had powerful enough friends to get away with it.

      One of the main reasons I voted Leave was to remove the EU scapegoat and expose the rottenness of British administration for what it has become, so that the public can deal with it at source. Above all, we have for too long traded primarily on our capacity to con people out of large amounts of money (“invisible exports” and the “service” economy), and it was only a matter of time before we were found out and foreigners worked out a way of doing things in-house better and cheaper. Our brand image had in the past been of complete integrity and reliability, and like the affection many still have for the BBC, it takes a long and lucrative time for this reputation, founded these days on nostalgia sadly, to be stripped away. It might be the very devil to get it back.

      1. Hence the CBI being pro-EU. They represent businesses that can afford to employ entire departments dealing with that sort of carp.

  14. Now from the Spekkie:

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/dont-blame-britain-for-modis-plan-for-a-new-india/

    “Don’t blame Britain for Modi’s plan for a ‘new India’
    Sumantra Maitra

    History has a sarcastic sense of humour, just ask Francis Fukuyama. Or eminent historians and literary ornaments of India like Ramachandra Guha, Arundhati Roy, and Shashi Tharoor, who are now mourning the loss of a secular liberal India under a Hindu majoritarian quasi-imperial centre.

    These four and their fellow academics are the first ones to blame India’s turn for the worse on the British empire, and all that it ‘made, shaped and quickened‘. This is somewhat ironic, given that Modi’s march to Kashmir is as rebellious and subaltern as it gets. Yet India’s post-colonial moral guardians are worried.

    ‘The passing of the act (which allowed Narendra Modi to overturn 70 years of status quo on Kashmir) was welcomed in (India’s) parliament by the very British tradition of desk-thumping’ Roy wrote. ‘There was a distinct whiff of colonialism in the air,’ she claimed. Even in her daftest misunderstanding of history, Roy cannot resist a dig at the Raj.

    In another confusing op-ed in the Washington Post, dutifully tweeted by Tharoor, historian Ramachandra Guha laments the destruction of secular liberal democracy and the rise of Hindu majoritarianism.

    The worry stems from confusion – mistaken at best and ideologically deluded at worst – of an understanding of India’s history. Ask some academics and they would likely tell you the same myth peddled repeatedly in any western post-colonial university department; the one that became conventional wisdom since the time of Nehru as the prime minister of the largest democracy. It says that colonialism was unequivocally evil and that the British Raj was the single most catastrophic fate that befell the subcontinent.

    There’s no scope of nuance about any of that. It is, of course, not true. India was never truly ‘secular’, neither under the Mauryas or the Mughals. And it was much less united. The only secular and united entity India experienced, for around two hundred and fifty years, traces its roots back to a certain liberal: Lord William Bentinck.

    So when Tharoor asks for reparation from Britain, he glorifies a myth of a naturally tolerant and liberal country. But he is oblivious that liberalism, secularism, and a united nation-state are all gifts of the British – the superstructure stemming from enlightenment ideas, an edifice that is now being torn apart by a native reactionary force.

    In the dying days of the Mughal and Maratha empires and in the early days of British rule, a section of India’s elite understood that too. The Hindu majority population of the Indian subcontinent, ruled by a relatively moderate but nonetheless Islamic ruling elite, was always waiting for strong central forces to take India back in time in search of some mythical, long-lost glorious age.

    Raja Rammohan Roy, an early liberal social reformer against the practice of Sati, where widows would throw themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres, understood how dangerous it would be. He implored the Raj to set up universities, science colleges and facilitate technology and education transfer. The creation and training of a Baboo class of native Indian civil servants would form an enlightened liberal barrier against any Hindu or Muslim ochlocracy. Evidence of that belief is found in his letters to the Viceroys, currently archived in the Victoria Memorial Hall.

    The British Raj was an ally and, in some ways, a benevolent guardian for India’s liberal social reformers. The reason why support for the Indian mutiny was muted in major parts of India was simply because leadership needed leaders. Newly-Westernised liberal leaders and civil society refused to support a bunch of illiterate rebels planning to take India back to feudalism.

    The conventional wisdom is that Britain built up Indian infrastructure and the civil service to drain Indian wealth from the Ganges to the Thames. The reality is that it was welcomed by a significant majority of a freshly-minted liberal elite, desperate to push the country towards modernity. An elite class of people, who either died serving the empire or left the subcontinent after independence, whose side of the story is hardly told anymore.

    It is due to that fault line that the lamentations of the current secular elites sound hollow and hypocritical. Secular liberalism in the Indian context was not natural and native to the land. It was and remains a child of the British empire and the broader Anglo-American rule of law – a liberating but foreign-imposed idea, one whose survival depends on the acceptance of that reality.

    The rise of Hindu majoritarianism in India was entirely predictable. Why? Because it was the only social force strong enough to fill the country’s conceptual vacuum. Realpolitik and an acceptance of Modi’s India as a necessary, if not agreeable counterweight against the rise of China is an understandable reaction in the West.
    But India’s Hindu majoritarian turn also presents a challenge to the current Indian liberal intelligentsia. It’s the same one their forefathers faced in the 1820s: accept the natural return to equilibrium or become revolutionaries and look for foreign allies. Whatever they decide, it starts with long-due reform and teaching the real history of India, instead of the Britain bashing post-colonial ideology that is currently in vogue.”

    Sumantra Maitra is researcher in international relations at the university of Nottingham

    1. The reality is that it was welcomed by a significant majority of a freshly-minted liberal elite, desperate to push the country towards modernity.

      It was also welcomed by the vast mass of the population who wished to live their lives without being arbitrarily plundered by the local rulers. It is of no small significance that no general uprising against British Rule occurred until the 20 th Century and that was largely peaceful!

      Morning Anne.

  16. Turkey vexed with Russia after Syria strikes convoy. August 20, 2019.

    “I would like to note that before the corresponding agreements were signed in Sochi on the demilitarization of part of the Idlib zone, about 50% of that territory was under terrorist control, and now that number is 90%. We are observing constant raids from there, and more than that, we are seeing the movement of militants from that region to other parts of the world, and this is extremely dangerous,” Putin said.

    “There were also numerous attempts to attack our air base in Khmeimim from the Idlib zone, so we support Syrian army efforts to carry out local operations to neutralize these terrorist threats,” he added, signaling Russia’s rationale for the military action in Idlib.

    How different the situation and Putin’s motivations appear when quoted directly as opposed to reported speech in the UK MSM!

    Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/08/turkey-russia-stress-test-idlib-syria-strike-convoy.html#ixzz5xDM49uCB

    2. As you might have seen from the DT letters (and a comment below) our Climate Change worries are over – Sir Elton has reassured us that we can all go on flying our private jets, providing we offset the carbon – problem solved!

    3. It is well worth pointing out to young people the decades-long history of the ‘climate emergency’ and how long we have had to put up with these baseless, doom-mongering claims.

  18. “Let Them Plant Trees.” (Rumble, rumble go the tumbrils.)

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/21/rich-eco-sinners-cant-buy-environmental-absolution-carbon-offsetting/

    Rich ‘eco-sinners’ can’t buy environmental absolution through carbon offsetting.

    Sir Dame(?) Elton John has defended the Duke and Duchess of Sussex against accusations of hypocrisy after it emerged that the eco-conscious Royal couple had used private jets to fly to the south of France and Ibiza in two trips just days apart. He and partner David Furnish, Sir Elton said, had ensured that the Harry and Meghan’s “flight [to Nice] was carbon neutral by making the appropriate contribution” to a charity which specialises in helping people offset their emissions. There was, he insisted, no case to answer.

    After all, plenty of other people are doing the same. When asked to justify her decision to fly 5,400 miles from Los Angeles to attend a Extinction Rebellion protest in London, the actress Emma Thompson replied: “I plant a lot of trees”. And you can see the reasoning. No need to modify your behaviour by giving up the trappings of an international, jet-setting lifestyle when, for a fee, you can absolve yourselves of your sins against Gaia.

    Yet this modern form of absolution – the carbon offset model – is facing heightened scrutiny amid concerns it may actually be harming the environment. UN experts have warned against buying credits “in exchange for a clean conscience”, arguing that trees planted today simply cannot grow quickly enough to cancel out contemporary habits. Such an approach also runs contrary to the prevailing view that we are facing a “climate emergency” which requires immediate action – like Extinction Rebellion’s drastic calls for carbon neutrality by 2025 – since carbon offsetting innately defers it. Like organic farming, whose lower crop yields would mean bringing swathes of rainforest into agricultural use, the wealthy are advocating practices that would be unsustainable if universal.

    And what of the behavioural effects? Allowing passengers to assume the problem has gone away for a small fee surely encourages them to travel even more, much like the famous carpool experiment in Freakonomics. When a school started fining parents who picked up their children late, it caused a counter-intuitive surge in lateness. Given the option to pay a small fine and assuage their guilt, researchers concluded, people will take it en masse. One website Cheatneutral brilliantly parodies this aspect of carbon offsetting by likening it to infidelity: “By paying [us], you’re funding monogamy-boosting offset projects – we simply invest the money you give us in monogamous, faithful or just plain single people, to encourage them to stay that way.”

    Some have even compared the schemes to the sale of papal indulgences – ecclesiastical pardons of sin that served as neat revenue-raisers for the Catholic church. Comparable, too, to the chantries established by medieval potentates who committed funds to pay for a priest to say prayers or sing masses in a private chapel in the hopes of commending their and their family members’ souls to heaven. In our purity-obsessed era, it’s no surprise to see charlatans, like Chaucer’s Pardoner, flogging fake holy relics. One agreement – ironically between the Vatican and a company supported by the Hungarian government – pledged to plant thousands of trees in an effort to make the Vatican the world’s first carbon neutral state. None were ever planted.

    Whether it’s “eating clean” (when did the woke decide to abolish adverbs?), fetishising organic food, or fixating inanely on ‘toxic masculinity’, our increasingly irreligious society is finding new kinds of purity to police. This is never more evident than when two or three celebs are gathered together, busily trying to outdo each other in their efforts to be “greener than thou” and through their demands that everyone else wears a hair shirt – while dodging accusations of hypocrisy when found to be engaging in the conspicuous consumption that is the modern celebrity’s prerogative.

    Eco-warriors should rein in their moralising zeal, or risk alienating ordinary people from the climate debate through sheer hypocrisy. Papal indulgences sparked Martin Luther’s famous theses and hastened the Protestant Reformation. Fury over fuel price increases and the apparent rift between the city “elite” and rural poor triggered the gilets jaunes protests. In our haste to cleanse ourselves of eco-sins, we too should beware the dangers of setting up one rule for the rich, another for everyone else.”

    1. This is all reminiscent of the Pardoners in medieval times who sold relics and granted those who bought them time off their stay in Purgatory.

      Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales indicates that people were just as cynical about pardoners in those days as we should be today about this completely fraudulent idea that you can buy and sell your right to pollute.

      (Apparently the bones of saints fetched a good price in Pardoners’ markets but for a real jackpot you needed to sell an authenticated circumcised foreskin of a saint.)

  20. Pipe down, Elton, you eco-snob. Spiked Brendan O’Neill. 21 August 2019.

    This is the news that Elton John, the Queen Mum of pop, has been made upset by the little people’s criticisms of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for using a private jet to get to France. Elton, being made of money, paid for the jet. They’re staying in his house in the South of France, and you can imagine what that’s like. People have called Harry and Meghan massive, ridiculous hypocrites because just a couple of weeks ago they were lecturing the masses from the pulpit of Vogue magazine about the need to cut carbon and save the planet and yet now they’re farting out more CO2 than most of us do in a year by jetting back and forth across the south of Europe. Elton, like an obsequious courtier protecting his princes from the barbs of the dumb masses, says these criticisms are ‘distorted’, ‘malicious’, ‘relentless’ and ‘untrue’.

    To which the only reasonable reply is: fuck off, Reg. Can these people hear themselves? You’re rolling in money, in the case of Harry and Meghan you are members of the most privileged and archaic institution in the Western world, and yet here you are playing the victim. Just stop. Deep distress is an understandable response to losing one’s job or struggling to get enough money together for the mortgage. But to a few well-deserved slights from ordinary people who are sick of being eco-lectured by rich, woke, hypocritical greens? No.

    I love it! (mind you I don’t believe he paid for the jet!).

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/08/20/pipe-down-elton-you-eco-snob/

        1. The plane call letters are SE-RFL. Planefinder.net data reveals this plane has not been to the south of France. Its last flight was on 18 August from Farnborough to Cosne-Cours sur Loire which is a looooooong way from Nice, a day’s journey by car if you put the pedal to the metal. The plane was registered in Sweden, a Cessna 680, 9-person jet owned by Manjoma Bravo AB. It claims to be a marine shipping company based out of Stockholm.

          As I understand it, Harry has been out of the country in Africa for the month of August. I think MM is living some sort of fantasy world inside her head.

          Edit: I should add allegedly – all info gained from my delving around on the web.

  21. Planting trees to over come CO2 Emissions

    THs seems to be just another scam for starters no one really monitors the overall position so hilt trees may be planted elsewhere in the world they are cutting them down

    I have some rough figures on this and the reality is that it is impossible to plant enough trees

    “So to take up all of the emissions from 2010 you would need 1,545,000,000,000 trees. A mature forest has only about 100 trees per acre (400 per hectare), so you would need 15,545,000,000 acres of mature forest. This equals an area of 24,290,000 mi2 (62,910,000 km2). This is approximately the land area of Asia, Europe, and Australia combined!
    The surface area of land on the planet is about 150,000,000 km2, so in principle we would need to add cover onto 42% of the current land (or we could take soil from deep ocean floors to landfill 1/5th of the oceans!) in order to plant enough trees to solve the problem.”

    1. Land occupied by trees is not occupied by humans. That alone must make a serious contribution to saving the planet.

      1. Shurely shome mishtake on Nigel’s part, Polly? You always led me to believe that the culprit was Goldfinger (or maybe Oddjob or Rosa Klebb).

  24. UK Civil Servants will not be allowed to go to Brussels after 1 September unless the meetings are ones that matter. That suggests that many such meetings were just a joy ride for the participants at the taxpayers expense.

      2. You notice how noisy & bumpy it is on Eurostar when you continue your journey from Brussels in a Thalys (spelling?), 1st class of course.

    1. …and stuff the other children’s education and careers.

      Just because you’ll never get a job, Greta, doesn’t mean you need to jeopardise other children’s chances – all in the name of something you really don’t understand at all.

  26. Awkward………

    “While the politicians here, in Brussels and in the EU

    member states play their games, I was amazed to read that, despite

    Brexit and despite all of us going to die when crashing over the Brexit

    cliff, in real life investors are flocking to the UK:

    “British technology

    start-ups are enjoying an unprecedented investment boom, shrugging off

    concerns over a no-deal Brexit. High-tech companies have received a

    record $6.7 billion (£5.5 billion) in new funding this year, 50 per cent

    more than the same period last year. They are on course to secure more

    than $11 billion by the end of the year, easily eclipsing last year’s

    total of $8.7 billion, according to official figures. The data, from the

    government’s digital economy council, suggests that Britain remains the

    most attractive country in Europe for overseas tech investors.” (link, paywalled)”

    https://independencedaily.co.uk/your-daily-brexit-betrayal-wednesday-21st-august-2019/

  27. The 8.10 am spot on BBC Radio 4 Today programme was a disgraceful anti- Brexit interview with a Minister involved in Border and trade matters. The interviewer, a seasoned one, probably John Humphries, sarcastically taunted the minister by saying why was tuppence halfpenny going to help the local authority deal with the queue of lorries at the port which had been told that they had to expect many more lorries deviating from Dover. In actual fact the local authority had prepared for the extra vehicles and had been given £350,000 by the Government for that purpose with more to come. BBC presenters should stick to the truth.
    The minister is a remainer as pointed out by the interviewer but the minister accepted that and said he supported the Prime Minister as we had to Leave the EU. The interviewer then started shouting at the Minister – ” do you consider that your fellow MPs who are going to vote against the PM in a Vote of Confidence are collaborators. The Minister said that they were undermining the PM. The interviewers rant continued but the Minister stood his ground. The BBC is getting desperate. Collaborator is a mild word to describe the treacherous MPs who said at the outset that they would stop Brexit. I think now these MPs are beginning to realise what the public think of them.

      1. And that is not a joke. It no longer supports our country. It has been infiltrated by leftists.

    2. If we were preparing for war with North Korea, we wouldn’t be spending our time blaming those who supported us because it rained on Pyonyang, we would all get together and accept that it was going to happen, and concentrate on how to deal with it.
      The media are corrupt and insane.

      1. I think there are a lot of wheels within wheels all spinning around…………….

        For example, who is buying stock in the New York Times ?

    3. Portsmouth City Council leader Gerald Vernon-Jackson lamented the Government’s “inaction” to prepare for no deal Brexit.

      John Humphys then asked if he was scaremongering………..coming from Project Fear I nearly fell out of bed laughing!

    5. Really? I think many MPs are as thick as pigs’ waste. They don’t know anything about the laws they pass, they probably don’t even read what they are voting on, most of the time. It’s simply a cushy job during which you can save for a comfortable existence in the future (even if they get thrown out after one term in office).

  28. The Deaf Italian Bookkeeper

    A Mafia Godfather finds out that his bookkeeper, Guido, has cheated him out of $10,000,000.00.

    His bookkeeper is deaf. That was the reason he got the job in the first place. It was assumed that Guido would hear nothing and would therefore never have to testify in court.

    When the Godfather goes to confront Guido about the missing $10 million, he takes along his lawyer, who knows sign language. The Godfather tells the lawyer, “Ask him where the money is.”

    The lawyer, using sign language, asks Guido, “Where’s the money?”

    Guido signs back, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” The lawyer tells the Godfather, “He says he doesn’t know what you are talking about.”

    The Godfather pulls out a pistol, puts it to Guido’s head and says, “Ask him again or I’ll kill him!”

    The lawyer signs to Guido, “He’ll kill you if you don’t tell him.”

    Guido trembles and signs back, “OK! You win! The money is in a brown briefcase, buried behind the shed at my cousin Bruno’s house.”

    The Godfather asks the lawyer, “What did he say?”

    The lawyer replies, “He says you don’t have the balls to pull the trigger.”

    1. Norway has told the French & Germans to eff off, we ain’t taking them. Once there is a scheme to send the buggers back when their application to live in the land of milk & honey is rejected, we’ll think about it.

    2. Translated it means in my view lets encourage even more illegals to come to Europe

    4. Why doesn’t the EU organise refugee camps for migrants to settle permanently along the West African coast.

    5. Their railways are efficient. The carriages draw up up the exact spot beside the platform.
      🙂

    7. Germans keep on saying why do we keep harping back to the War? It’s bl**dy obvious – because they keep on displaying the same behaviour…

    2. Akin! Greta would be proud, you don’t need to take a jet flight to experience the third world anymore.

    3. What was he complaining about?
      He wasn’t even using his front wheel anyway.
      He needs to see a trick cylist!

    4. The bloody annoying part of this is that YouTube allow the idiot’s videos to be on the site without restriction, thus earning him money whenever they are viewed.

    5. The moral of this story in this clip is always carry a catcher’s mitt and a softball on the back seat of the car. It makes it easier to explain why you have a baseball bat in the front passenger footwell.

  31. Every time we have made a lengthier car journey than normal in the past week , meaning travelled 14 miles or more into Bournemouth and Poole , we have encountered road rage , in fact in the last month to be honest we have had some very scary experiences .

    Has any one else on here had similar experiences .. It looks as if people do what they want, drive how they want , and gesticulate , do not obey the road rules, enjoy danger and imperil other road users. . August is a very wicked month.

    2. Good Morning Lovely Maggie

      I have noticed a lot of bad driving amongst the indigenous population of Brittany recently.

    3. There seem to be a lot of insane drivers who take off like a jet plane, overtake at 60mph or more in a 30 zone, and lick your bumpers if they can’t get past. There is some indication that these guys never get speeding tickets because they go too fast for the cameras. They are in two classes – people in fast cars that want to show off, and, more often, people who are too impatient.
      None of us are ever like that.

      1. Some of the most aggressive drivers in yer France are young women. Drive much too fast, flash their headlights should one be stupid enough to be in their way (while driving at the speed limit); give rude signs – and all while using the phone.

        1. There are many young female drivers here like that & the are the worst for tailgating.

      3. Yesterday I cycled past a yellow Jacketed group of four citizens who were observing the speeds of cars passing by. There was a sign up on either side of them advertising the fact that they were doing this. I think they pointed their cameras at me as I was struggling against a strong wind.. I must admit some drivers do speed on this particular section of road. I suppose they pass on their findings to the police who can then put a mobile speed camera crew in place to catch the culprits.

    4. Morning, Maggie! Can’t say I’ve noticed any exhibitions of ‘road rage’ hereabouts.

      Probably down to the more solid, phlegmatic nature of our people.
      ;¬)

          1. When we were last there for any length of time ..

            You had to keep the car windows done up when driving through Glasgow , danger of being glassed and thumped for no apparent reason .

            Of course recent visits to Aberdeen were treated with caution, but up the top in Moray and Inverness etc was tranquil and glorious.. although Cape Wrath and Durness people were not too keen on Sassenachs !

          2. Aye, you need to watch it in Aberdeen, right enough.

            The streets are full of tattooed thugs, most of them the worse for drink, standing about with a menacing air ….. and that’s only the women.
            :¬))

          3. I spent lots of my young school hols in Comrie/ Dunira as it was .. this time of the year .. with a flag .. and worrying about being shot!

    6. In the North East of Scotland it is not necessary to have a driving licence. There is also a minimum speed limit on all roads of 70mph. The A96 Death Road” has fatal accidents on weekly basis.

    7. I have encountered “road rage” in the past, and remember some very scary incidents. But last week, when we drove to Bristol (well outside our usual orbit these days) to see the orthopaedic consultant, we missed the turning and found ourselves in the middle of Bristol and time was running out to get to the appointment on time. Our Satnav was on the blink and not much use at all.

      No road rage – just four very kind and helpful people, who between them a) enabled J to use the loo in a garage, b) made a phone call on a mobile (I had forgotten mine) c) got maps up to show us the way and d) finally a young lady actually volunteered to sit in the car and guide us the last half mile or so. We got there only a few minutes late in the end.

      1. Excellent to hear that J. Perhaps it was because you were driving.

        Moh has a glare that could turn anyone to stone .. and he gets very angry very quickly.

        1. No – he was driving. I was surprised the girl offered to guide us, but she could see that I was there as well.

    8. Not necessarily, but driving is still way more stressful than it used to be.
      The standard of driving has fallen and the aggressiveness has risen.

    9. Not so much road rage as inconsiderate driving. Yesterday, a lorry nearly wiped me out; I was on the roundabout, signalling before taking my exit, when a lorry came from the left without even slowing and pulled straight in front of me. I had to stop on the roundabout or go under the body!

  32. Children are growing up in shipping containers due to lack of council housing, report finds

    The very same organizations that say we have lots of capacity to take migrants and asylum seekers. They have caused this problem now they expect other to dig them out of the hole they have created

    The UK’s most vulnerable children and young people face unimaginable challenges. We’ve partnered with giving platform Benevity to raise funds for two charities – the NSPCC and The Children’s Society – to try to help turn things around for them. You can help make a difference – please donate now.

    Children are being raised in shipping containers and office blocks because councils do not have enough accommodation to house, an official report has found.

    2. I cannot believe what I am reading half the time.

      My husband is a Hampshire hog, born and bred in Southampton . His father worked at the RJ Mitchell site building Spitfires during the war. .

      Southampton was bombed , as was everywhere . Moh’s parents were allocated a Nissen hut to live in on Southampton common , his brother was born in it , and Moh although not born there , also lived there for a while . By all accounts it was home and they kept warm , everyone who lived in the others lost their homes through bombing as well.. eventually they all moved into new homes when parts of Southampton had a big building programme in the early fifties.

      They then took caravan holidays in Kent and Dorset .. They enjoyed the tin experience!

      The tin experience now covers our coastline , our seaside resorts and clifftops are covered in the tin experience , some live there full time , some don’t .

      I really do not get the bleating we read about , I really don’t .. what on earth is cruel about a shipping container with windows and doors.. it is shelter for goodness sake.

        3. That’s the sort of house I wuz dragged up in. There are farsands all over the Country built in the 1950s.

        4. Memory Lane! The estate I grew up on, in Acomb nr York, was mostly prefabs of that type. The tin top bits were all painted in different pastel colours. We had one of the shops in a brick built block of four in the middle of the estate. That made us nominally posh ’cause we lived in a brick ‘ouse!

          2. Ah, what a small world! I was born and raised on the Carr Estate in Acomb. Baptised at St Stephens (Acomb Parish Church) and went to Carr Primary and Beckfield Lane secondary school. Only the front gates of Beckfield survive – our lovely big playing fields backing on to open countryside have apparently now all been built on. Houses and more houses. I haven’t been back there to look at the damage.

          3. Remember the tin prefabs after WW2 that they used to house the lower classes in ? They will still around for many years later ( the prefabs, I mean ).

          6. No, not me. But, strangely, he looks very similar to what I looked like at that age !! And the man looks a fair bit like my dad did.
            Maybe we were just a ” typical English family ” Thanks for pointing it out.

          7. Tin? You were spoilt.

            My parents lived in a prefab in the late fiifties, it was asbestos sheeting that they used. Apart from that, compact but adequate and far better than some of the farm housing that we had lived in before then.

          8. Ah ! I remember the asbetos sheeting !! Good for the lungs, it was.
            No, didn’t live in one. They were t’other side of town. We lived posh like in a rented house. No tenancy security, so got thrown out when the landlord wanted to use the place for a kennel.
            Things were rough, then. Remember class distinction ?

          9. My father was a milkman on a farm. Class distinction was built in. We didn’t tug forelocks but only thanks to our really short hair.

          10. Looxury!

            I were dragged oop on an NCB estate of grey pebbledashed semis.

            [We did have two inside lavs, though!] :•)

      2. People are now buying them as relatively cheap shells to be combined and fitted out as homes. Some look OK.

        But Disqus thinks I’m not really here and will not allow me to upload picture.

      3. Take and old office block or warehouse and convert it into living accommodation in a nice area near the the docks.
        Call it a loft and sell it to the gullible for millions. That’s ok. Putting a homeless person in it is cruel.

    3. Shove in their families; stick container on lorry and full pelt for Felixstowe (other container ports are available).
      When they reach Rotterdam, the EU can add them to their export figures.

      1. Beats the demand for 2,000 additional homes/annum that the PTB want built across the Tendring, Colchester and Braintree districts – all laid out in a nice glossy flyer that, I presume, has been delivered to every household in the three affected districts at quite a cost.
        These areas are known by the misnomer, ‘Garden Communities’. Packing in the planned number will leave little room for gardens. The Local Plan is trying to sell these ‘Communities’ as a means to ensure that infrastructure is planned in a more joined up, considered and comprehensive manner, Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? Water could be a problem: a stretch of the Stour on the Essex Suffolk border has dried up this summer and the fish surviving in the remaining pools had to be rescued.

        1. That’s one reason why we left. We lived in the Great Notley Garden Village, built just before Prescott change the rules on housing density and mandatory social housing. We had decent sized gardens, and once the various shrubs had matured, privacy. But most other developments don’t have that. They’re jammed in, quickly built, too small, no privacy either inside (thin walls) or outside. The roads become gridlocked, public transport overcrowded, and this is sponsored as being “progress” and necessary.

        2. My aunt used to live in Bradfield – nice village surrounded by fields. I always knew I was getting close when I could see the radio mast in the distance. Is that still there?
          I think she would be horrified if she could see what everywhere is like now.

          1. You’ve got me there, Ndovu. I’ve been so used to travelling out that way that I no longer pay attention to the landmarks. There was a Chain Home radar station with one remaining mast situated close to Little Bromley and a tall TV mast at Horsley Cross a few miles further on towards Harwich. I think that the TV mast remains as a transmitter of VHF and digital radio.

    4. They would have really had something to moan about if they had lived here during WW2..
      Ungrateful things.

      What the blazes do they mean by vulnerable anyway.. what does that say?

    5. But shipping containers can by adapted for use as temporary (and not so temporary) homes. Properly done they can be very comfortable.

      1. A great idea for a new tv makeover series masquerading as charity, a la DIY SOS. (Confession – I watch these programmes. Love the art and design element.)

      2. And they can be easily picked up and loaded onto a ship for transport to a foreign country…

      3. I haven’t travelled that way in a couple of years but there was a container situated alongside the A12 that was being used as a transport cafe. IIRC many years ago it received excellent reports on its food and cleanliness.

        1. A wood containing bong trees where piggy wiggies stand would be no place for Mohammed’s adherents.

  37. Grizzly bear dragged musician to his death.

    A musician was killed by a grizzly bear in a remote part of Canada last week while recording an artistic project.

    Julien Gauthier, 44, who was travelling along the Mackenzie River to record natural sounds, was set upon by the animal while he was sleeping.

    The Royal Canadian Mounted Police was alerted by a distress beacon set off by a biologist who was travelling with Mr Gauthier. He said a grizzly bear had dragged his companion away in the middle of the night.

    One grizzly bear kills a man and its worldwide news.

    Thousands of grizzly bears have been shot and trapped by man and no one blinks an eye!

    2. You sure that’s not Doria, the ma in law? The photos in the mail seem to indicate an older lady.

    3. The private jet saga just adds to the obsession of keeping the brat under wraps save for a few extremities. Maybe his looks suggest that he might like chicken and melon .

  39. The standard treatment for concussion (and suspected concussion) is—or was—48 hours lying flat on one’s back in bed, naked, no pillow, one sheet, with hourly checks, day and night. I know this because I have undergone it twice in my lifetime.

    Why then was Australian cricketer, Steve Smith, permitted to resume his innings after a nasty blow on the back of his head, even when it was all too apparent (to every observer) that he was clearly concussed? Why, also, did he not received standard concussion treatment in bed yet still be allowed to attend net practice before being told that he would not be permitted to play in the forthcoming test match because, “he is still concussed”?

    Can you please enlighten me, Nursey Allan?

    2. Concussion isn’t what it used to be Grizz,after Owen Jones was “viciously Far Right attacked” and had his head smashed against the pavement treatment consisted of doing the studio rounds collecting appearance fees……………….

    3. It seem quite common in sport that they just check them over and send them out again after a short time which sound very wrong to me . Even highly qualified consultants are unable to access the impact of a head injury outside of a hospital. The normal approach is to get them to hospital to check them over and unless they were not really concussed they would be admitted for 24 hours for observation. If someone is hit by a cricket ball on the head it should be a trip to hospital

      You also have to rely to an extent on what the patient tells you and professional sportsman do not always tell the truth if asked if they feel nauseous

      1. How many of them just feign concussion to get a rest or or show off, then just get up and carry on ?

  40. Lucas Dobson missing: Body found in search for boy, 6, swept away in River Stour in Kent

    Sadly not unexpected given the time he had been missing. IT appears from reports that he was not wearing a lifejacket. I am surprised if they jumped in straight away they could not rescuer him but I am not familiar with that river. Pictures showing the search though show calm water so I guess they must have been a storm that day

    Young children and boats have risks . They should always be wearing a life jacket for safety

    The incident happened because Lucas was on the jetty and tried to step from there onto the boat but he fell in between the jetty and the boat.
    “As soon as he fell, the three adults jumped in after but the current was too strong; he had already gone. In the short amount of time he could not be found.

  41. HS2: Review to examine costs and benefits of rail project

    This of course was supposed to have been done but when they found their claim of the time saved by business man did not stack up they just waffled on about increasing capacity but that claim does not really stack up as the congestion is not with Intercity but with local services and HS2 does little to deal with that in fact many people will be left with worse services as a result of HS2

    The government is launching a review of high-speed rail link HS2 – with a “go or no-go” decision to be made by the end of the year, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has said.
    The review will consider whether and how the project to connect London, the Midlands and northern England should proceed, looking at costs and benefits.
    Mr Shapps refused to rule out scrapping it entirely.
    He said it was “responsible” to see whether HS2 was “going to stack up”.

    2. Their definition of ‘The North’ differs from mine. The closest it gets to my local East Coast Main Line station is Leeds, 110 miles away by train. London is 276 miles, so it’s not much closer than halfway to this part of England.

        1. HS2 in my view is a huge waste of money and all it will do is to just suck more people into London as it extends the commuting are out to Birmingham

        1. I thought that it was further south. Doesn’t the northern line go up to the north? So surely Barnett is in the north.

  42. “This year, the EU itself recognised technology that makes the Irish backstop unnecessary” – yes, but the backstop has nothing to do with customs practicality, and everything to do with political control and leverage. Do people still not see that?

  43. Council tax shock: MPs demand tax band shake-up to plug £5bn black hole- are you affected?

    Personally I think that in general Council tax should go and be replaced by a local income tax

    Currently council tax has no bearing on a households I one and tends to hit the poorest the hardest whilst the very rich get away with paying very little

    2. The poorest should get Council Tax Benefit or whatever has replaced it as part of Universal Credit.

      1. But many do not get it. A family on a typical average income may pay 10% or more of their income in council tax whilst a Millionaire is paying typically less than 1%. That does not sound fair to me

        1. The Millionaire may not have a particularly large income, but may be property rich.

          Council tax is our largest regular bill.

          1. And how exactly does the millionaire use more local services by virtue of having a larger house ?
            Does he/she visit the library more often ? Perhaps they use more street lighting or require more frequent rubbish collections ? Nonsense on a stick, from our politicians as usual.

          2. It’s the poorestt people who pay the least, who need and use the services more. I suppose that’s fair. somebody has to pay.

            My children were educated, as was I, but these days the only service we use is the rubbish collection and the street lamp.

          3. Agree. If anything the bias is reversed at the moment – it’s the well off who pay the most but consume the least. I pay thousands annually but only get refuse collection for that.
            I paid for my children’s education and they switch the street lamps off between midnight and 5AM anyway !!

          9. Apologies, it’s those in the smallest house who pay the least. Council tax, like fuel duty, insurance taxes, energy taxes, VAT are deeply unfair, progressive taxes.

            Don’t reduce them, scrap them.

          13. Library? Oh, the boarded-up building that is next to where the swimming pool used to be, opposite the now demolished public lavatory at the entrance to the playpark the council sold off to a private developer. That library?

          18. Al Gore uses 27 times the amount of energy as the average American.

            But you’re right, in that there’s a limit on the every day consumption. The very rich don’t eat proportionally more food, for example.

          20. Yup, me too. Council tax is actually now more than gas, electricity, water and home insurance combined. It’s heading for 35% of our mortgage as well.

          22. The council tax you pay represents, on average, 25% of the money councils actually spend.
            It just about covers their pension fund.
            The other 75% comes from general taxation.

    3. When we leave the EU why not replace VAT with a local sales tax that is set by the local council, up to 20%

      Start the tax at 6%, with every increment open to referenda or ten times the rise coming from councillor and ‘chief’s salaries.

      They increase it by 0.1%, they take a 1% pay cut. Increase it by 1%, they take a 10% pay cut. 3%, 30% pay cut.

      They’ll soon find the money without needing to raise taxes.

        1. If you’re going to Côte, I recommend the tuna carpaccio. That’s what I shall have tomorrow.

          1. In the summer – and it’s nice today, we like to sit outside in the courtyard behind Keith’s in Cirencester – next door to Cote. I had quiche & salad.

  45. Off to the MR’s Loopy Friend – the MR to help her apply for an Irish passport; me to deal with a recalcitrant outside light. I hope to be back unscathed.

    Have a jolly afternoon.

    3. The Danes have form in selling islands to the US.
      “US presidents have paid for territory before. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson bought huge tracts of land from France for $15m in the Louisiana Purchase. In 1867, Andrew Johnson paid $7.2m for Alaska from Russia. Territory has also been purchased from Denmark. In 1917 Woodrow Wilson bought the Danish West Indies for $25m, renaming them the US Virgin Islands.”
      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/18/trump-considering-buying-greenland

  47. Useful local weather forecast today from the BBC – “Sunny intervals and a” and a what, you useless lot??
    Meanwhile the Met Office have a written summary of “Cloudy changing to sunny intervals by late morning“, combined with a graphic that clearly shows a sunny morning, turning to cloud with an increased chance of rain by midday!

    1. Perhaps you should have waited until they finished before hurling the radio at the wall……

        1. There are only two forecasts needed for the British summer:

          Mostly sunny with some rainy patches
          Mostly wet with some sunny patches

      1. Yes, this is a complete turnoff and makes me extremely suspicious that – as Nigel Farage suspects both in an article in yesterday’s Telegraph and his LBC Radio Show last night – Boris is trying to rehash May’s Surrender Agreement minus Backstop and pay £39,000,000,000 to Brussels.

        1. This was my reaction.

          But if Boris tries to pass off May’s surrender WA without the bumstopper as a different and new deal then surely both he and the Conservative Party will be finished.

      2. Maybe he just wants sir miles.
        Is he going by commercial airline or private jet?

        All of this upper class trashing reminds me of an incident many years ago. Our CEO was speaking at the same conference as the CEO of a rival company. We travelled cheaply, commercial flight then taxi to the conference. When we left, our boss man saw the hated other boss getting into a limo for the ride back to the airport. Ron had the audacity to run across the driveway to demand that they took us as well. A very quiet ride.

    2. Mutti can’t keep still.

      ♬For goodness’ sakes,
      She’s got the Mutti Mutti shakes …      ♬

  49. British child dies on the Costa del Sol after reports of balcony fall

    It seems to be increasingly common for children to fall out of windows and to fall over balconies. I cannot remember this happening in the past and windows and balconies were a lot less secure with many houses have sash windows

    I suspect some of this is down to poor parental control of their children and them having never taught their children how to behave
    You only have to go shopping or travel on a plane or bus to see parents just letting their children run riot and not say a word to them

  50. Freedom of Movement Ends on October the 31st

    There has been a lot of total nonsense and scaremongering by the Media and the likes of Abbott

    All that has been done is to restate what has been the position for the last couple of years

    To clarify this the October the 31st deadline only applies to people arriving from the EU after that date. For those already in the UK and those arriving up to that date the deadline to register for settled status remains as the end of 2020

    Those arriving after the 31st of October will either have to have a Visa which allows them to stay in the UK for up to 3 month or will have to apply for a temporary right to stay in the UK for up to 3 years. After 3 years they will have leave or apply as a migrant

    1. Doubt that will be enforceable.

      The right to a family life comes first.

      No wonder the HRA is a globalist creation.

  51. Good morning from Saxon Queen with longbow and cleaned axe.
    A sunny day with a deep blue sky in East Anglia.

    The EU needs to vanish into oblivion it’s nothing but
    a succubus dictatorship with no productive relevance .

    1. I don’t think that’s true.

      It makes a pile of money for the honchos and billions for globalists.

        1. I don’t think it was ever a political experiment.

          It was always a money making machine.

          1. Norwegian Vikings who like fiery dragons from
            the sea landed upon Northumberland, Swedish ones
            are fine Mr Viking.

          5. ‘Morning, Ethel, you’ll get into trouble every which way, if you start attacking Scandinavians.

            I know for certain that both Sweden and Norway have their representatives here and I think Hertslass is the Danish Ambassadress.

          7. Swedish Vikings stayed at home and built up their welfare state.
            And accepted one of Napoleon’s generals as their new royal dynasty.

      2. Good morning Mr Viking.
        Just metaphorically chopping up the EU,
        I would love a stygian gloom upon Tusk’ s lips .

  52. THE Great Scottish Run has become the first major race to create a third category for gender [sic] neutral competitors.

    Organisers of Scotland’s largest race, with around 30,000 runners in Glasgow, added a “non-binary” option to entry forms for this year’s event on Sept 29 in an effort to make it more inclusive.

    However, there will not be separate prizes in the non-binary category as the event only gives awards to the “elite” male and female athletes.

    A race spokesman said: “We’re happy to be able to provide this entry option for our runners.”

    The change follows guidance from Scottish Athletics, the governing body, which has agreed to license races where participants do not want to identify as either gender [sic]. Its guidance states: “We fully support and encourage race organisers who wish to include a third gender [sic] category. You can award prizes in this category, but those competing in this category only receive a prize in this category.”

    The Daily Telegraph has approached Scottish Athletics for comment.

    A modicum of common sense at last from Scotland. Hopefully the IOC will see sense and do likewise. We can then sit and watch:

    The men’s 100 metres.

    The women’s 100 metres.

    Then switch off (or go and mash a pot of tea) for

    The its 100 metres.

    [If anyone baulks at my description of the sexually-confused as its, I will repent and re-brand them as freaks.]

        1. Good morning, Grizzly

          Please listen to the Instant Sunshine song about the egg and spoon race which I have posted above. (You may remember you enjoyed the Instant Sunshine song I posted a few weeks ago about the conscientious copper)

      2. Wasn’t there an episode of ‘Ripping Yarns’ back in the ’70s where there was endurance cross country running for the one-legged. Is it numerist to call it “hopping”?

        2. I have the entire set of the insanely funny Ripping Yarns (by Michael Palin and Terry Jones) on DVD.

          The scene you mention is from the episode entitled Tomkinson’s Schooldays, the one where the School Bully has his own office (and mini-skirted assistants) and is senior in rank to the headmaster.

    3. Shouldn’t there be a category for trannies running in stilettos, Scotsmen who insist on wearing pants under their kilts, Scots who still have all their teeth….

    4. Why is my question. Except for the professional runners it I in effect a fun run so what has gender to do with it. I suspect it is just to pander to those that call themselves non binary

      I think I will decide to declare myself as hexadecimal can they arrange a category for that?

      1. “I think I will decide to declare myself as hexadecimal can they arrange a category for that?”

        Yeah. You and fifteen others!

        3. I am sure that must be a hate crime against Hexadecimal people I shall contact Cressida straight away !!!!!

      1. When we are out if the EU we should return to yards.

        This would give our athletes – male, female and trans – a chance to be more competitive against EU athletes who would have to run a 10% longer distance.

  55. Oh, the irony!

    Hundreds of snowflakes have written to the BBC complaining about Gary Lineker making jokes about his bald co-commentators: Alan Shearer and Danny Murphy.

    Pinkoes complaining about a Pinko-in-Chief. Whatever next?

    2. How ironic if this non-event should be used by the beeboids to get rid of the slimy git.

      Good day to you in the land of the swede.

  57. Tomorrow the husband and I are off to John Lewis
    view laptops for me ( still have not much a clue about technical stuff)
    The ones I shall be viewing are
    Dell XPS 13 9380
    Dell Inspiron 13, 5000
    Microsoft Surface Laptop
    Lenovo Yoga s730.

    Does anyone here have one of the above
    the first on the list has higher reviews, the second used up
    much battery, apparently. Word is imperative, not number crunching.

    6. A few points to bear in mind:

      1. For a given amount of storage, a conventional hard drive makes a laptop cheaper than one with a solid state device (SSD). To ensure future-proofing, aim for 1Tb storage.

      2. Some attractively-cheap laptops and tablets do not have Windows pre-installed or use a non-Windows operating system.

      3. As other posters have noted, Apple laptops are on offer at some retailers and are superb machines. They are expensive but the price is offset by, firstly, not requiring anti-Virus or internet security suites and, secondly, not requiring Office or Office 365 (needed if you want Word). Apple’s equivalent to Word is called Pages and will happily open and save a Word file. Pages and other Office equivalents such as Powerpoint and Excel are pre-installed or free to install.

      1. I’m waiting for a 6TB internal drive being delivered today to add to the almost full 2TB and 3TB drives that are already in my PC. RAW photo files take up a lot of room.

        1. Yes, photos can take up a great deal of space. I transfer all mine to an external drive – cheaper than storage in the computer and arguably less prone to corruption or loss.

          1. I’ve got external drives for my back-ups. They’ve saved me more than once when internal drives failed.

          3. I don’t delete the images in my camera until I’ve got them downloaded onto my PC (as soon as I get home) and backed up onto the external drive. That way there are always two copies at any one time.

        2. One RAW IIQ image is 150mb so I tend to keep a thumbnail JPEG on the live system. Two copies are made of the RAW mage onto a 56 Terabyte ThunderBay RAID. But it’s my living so I need to be sure I don’t loose anything.
          Bit of an overkill for Joe Public.

        3. I switched to a 16Tb NAS (Network Array Storage). Works well for me and fairly quick too.

      3. Extra storage can be bought for peanuts (about £50 for a terabyte), and used as a plug-in drive when necessary.

        1. Yes, but the transfer rate for large files is slow and even a portable drive means having to carry it around with you. External drives are best for backups and not really suited for everyday use.

    7. I have the Dell XPS13, though a slightly earlier model of it, lovely machine even after I spilled a whole cup of coffee on it a week or two ago. Beautiful screen. And of course things like adblockers are much easier to find and install than in Apple’s closed, walled environment.

      1. The Dell XPS13 is my favourite on the list
        but I’ve a concern in relation to its Ram being
        4GB whereas the others on my list above it’s 8GB
        and it’s Processor cores are 2 as opposed to 4
        Is that just technical jargon that has no actual
        affect . It’s my favourite still and your opinion
        on that laptop has given me some confidence
        In at least one of them. I am not interested in
        Apple or any not on my list .
        thank you.

  58. Hs Wales gone totally mad?

    Free childcare possibility for non-working parents in Wales

    Lyn Bourne has run Britannia Day Nursery in Caerphilly since 2009 with two partners.
    When asked her view on widening the scheme to non-working parents, she said: “I think it’s a good idea…
    “It would be beneficial for everyone to be able to access it in one form or another, even if it wasn’t the full 20 hours and 10 hours education.
    “To be able to get something would make such a difference to families. It would allow mum to have a bit of time and allow children to see other children, learn social skills, get the opportunity to play and it improves their independence… it can only be a positive.”

    1. I don’t want to spoil your day, Bill, but I’ve just read the following headline: “Budget timebomb: deficit to double as spending outstrips taxes”

      We’re living in la-la land.

      1. He does occasionally. But still has his blind spots and indulges in the same hectoring biased interviews that he says he doesn’t like, eg a recent interview of Gerard Batten.

      1. He isn’t Herstlass, he’s talking about the infectious PC disease infecting society like the plague.

        1. I know he is talking about PC. I wrote “Sounds like” i.e. he could just as well have been talking about Islam in this country.

  61. Good morning, my friends:

    I must apologise if this has already been posted. My reaction to Boris’s dealings with Tusk and Co, which I posted here yesterday, is very much in tune with what Nigel Farage is saying:

    BEWARE OF SNAKE OIL SALESMAN JOHNSON!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/08/20/hope-wrong-boris-johnson-fear-great-brexit-stitch-up-coming

    The most concerning aspect of Boris’s letter was that he didn’t threaten no deal.

    It was good while it lasted. For several weeks, Boris Johnson gave the impression of being a true Brexiteer – so much so that some people even began to ask: “What is the point of the Brexit Party?”

    Most no-dealers in the country cheered every statement the Prime Minister made and this week the Government even announced that free movement of people would end on October 31. At last, it seemed, the referendum vote was being acted upon.

    But don’t be fooled by the PR blitz. For this week, in his four-page letter to Donald Tusk, the EU Council President, we have also seen the other Boris Johnson; the man who, in March, voted for the Withdrawal Agreement and the Northern Ireland backstop at the third time of asking. Some might say this is the “real” Johnson.

    In his letter, Johnson says securing a “deal” is his “highest priority”. Rather than leaving the EU on October 31, it looks as though Johnson wants Britain to enter into a transition period on that day. This, for him, is his “highest priority”.

    Furthermore, surely the most disappointing part of his “Dear Donald” letter is his failure to mention leaving the EU without a deal. But if you don’t issue a threat, why would the other side take you seriously? Who can forget the BBC documentary Inside Europe, in which the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, confirmed that Theresa May never put “no deal” on the negotiating table? It would appear that Johnson, no doubt encouraged by his civil servants, is taking the same approach.

    Johnson implies that if the backstop was removed in its current form, the Withdrawal Agreement would pass through the House of Commons with his support. Yet even without the backstop, this would be the worst negotiated deal in British history. And any further hopes that may be offered in the Political Declaration would not need to be honoured by the other side.

    A lot follows from Johnson’s determination to get a deal. It means he wants to give away £39 billion; he would be happy for the EU’s courts to have continued jurisdiction over British law; he would be content for freedom of movement to continue for the foreseeable future; and there will be no insistence on taking back our territorial waters. All these things are his “highest priority”.

    Now that the EU sees the real Boris Johnson, it might just agree to a reworking of the Withdrawal Agreement. Tellingly, in Donald Tusk’s response, he says that the backstop must stay in place “unless and until” an alternative is found.

    This is so far the softest language I have heard from Brussels. If Johnson and the EU were able to produce a new Withdrawal Agreement, it is not yet certain that Parliament would pass this as amended. But if it did pass, it would be the very worst form of Brexit for everybody – BRINO (Brexit In Name Only). It would lead to years of acrimony with the EU.

    Many of my most loyal and long-serving supporters and donors have been very impressed with the start that Johnson has made. I, too, could not fault much of his language and new tough guy image. But I have always had in the back of my mind a nagging doubt. The same Boris Johnson who wrote in these pages that Mrs May’s Withdrawal Agreement would lead to Britain becoming a vassal state did, after all, end up voting for just that back in March.

    I also wonder what another Donald – Donald Trump – makes of Johnson’s letter. When the G7 gathers in Biarritz this weekend, the Prime Minister will find the President and his colleagues are eager to strike a new all-encompassing trade deal straight away. In fact, the Americans are so flexible, this deal could even be agreed sector by sector, perhaps beginning by the end of the year.

    But if Britain is stuck in a Withdrawal Agreement and then enters into a lengthy transition period, any trade deal with America would not be possible until the end of Trump’s second term. I doubt he would be very impressed.

    Often, it is said that the Brexit Party should do a deal with Boris Johnson in a general election to prevent Jeremy Corbyn reaching Downing Street, but this idea hit the buffers yesterday. Any election campaign in which Johnson stood by having already negotiated a Withdrawal Agreement, or proposed to get a better deal for the future, is unacceptable to our party. Indeed, in those circumstances we would stand against the Conservatives in every seat in the country.

    I truly hope that Johnson’s letter to Tusk is just part of him being seen to go through the motions, while really wanting a clean-break Brexit on October 31. I would cheer from the rooftops louder than anybody if he secured Britain’s independence.

    But when I read his letter, and Tusk’s response, my first sense was one of fear that a great stitch-up may be coming. That feeling has not gone away.

    Nigel Farage is leader of the Brexit Party

    1. Politicians have more faces than a kaleidoscope, look similar and behave similarly.
      (pretty patterns, utterly useless for anything other than bamboozling the vision, and if relied upon to show you the way, make you fall down and ram the thing through your eye socket)

    1. How maddening for the far-left, extremist MSM that it was not a white, middle of the road chap.

  63. Afternoon Nottlers! Just a question. Is there an expected shortage of Sunflower Oil due to Brexit? Every time I’ve been to Morrisons this week the shelf has been cleared out!

    3. Wotcha Minty
      My Morrisons has plenty of sunflower oil but the spice racks looked like an empty desert
      Make of it what you will,…………………….

    4. The largest producers of sunflower oil in the world are the Ukraine and Russia.
      So, it becomes clear. Russia is not only waging war on us in the cybersphere, but also economic warfare by denying us oil for for frying our fish and chips.

    5. Possibly last year’s crop has been exhausted, and more is being produced as we speak.
      Or Morrison’s buying dept. is carp.

    6. Try avocado oil, good for you (avocados have the “right” kind of oil), the taste isn’t overwhelming (like olive oil can be) and it has a high temperature burning point.

      1. I’m not short of Sunflower Oil H but am simply curious as to its sudden popularity!

        2. The sun is forecasted to make an appearance for the next 10 days or so, is it possible that there are morons aplenty wishing to end the summer a nice crispy shade of brown?
          I wrote the comment only slightly tongue in cheek.

          1. It has been sunny all day here. When I went out at 15.00 hrs it was 23C in the shade.

        3. Good for cake making as it has no flavour.
          I use British rapeseed oil for roasting and frying as it produces a crisper result.

      1. Dunno, Bob, I don’t follow things too closely.

        What he said sounded sensible, hence my “Blimey”, especially as HS2 seems a giant waste for a country that’s boracic.

      2. All the turncoats do, Bob – that’s what they are good at.

        Just wait till Johnson comes back from the Fuhrerin with a piece of paper….

  65. Joseph Mifsud, British Intel Asset, Not Russia’s Boy. Larry C Johnson. 20 AUGUST 2019.

    Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese Diplomat who reportedly told George Papadopoulos that Russia had Hillary’s emails, was a British intelligence asset. But the Brits did not keep Mifsud for themselves. They offered him to the CIA and the FBI, and those two US agencies, in a coordinated effort, relied on Mifsud to entrap Papadopoulos and to manufacture a Russian collusion case against the Trump Campaign.

    Mifsud’s job was simple–dangle the possibility of getting Hillary’s emails from the Russians, offer up meetings with Russian Government officials and introduce Papadopoulos to another Western intelligence operative who pretended to be the niece of Vladimir Putin (Putin does not have a niece). These communications were recorded and then used against Papadopoulos.

    The FBI falsely claims that they learned of the Papadopoulos “meeting” with Mifsud two months after it happened from an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, who also was tied closely to British intelligence and the Clintons. But this story does not hold water. Take a look at the criminal complaint filed against Papadopoulos.

    The Brits, in the form of MI6 and the Cameron Government, are up to their necks in this plot to oust Trump from the presidency. It’s being kept out of the UK MSM of course but when the whole story comes out the “Special Relationship” is going to look a little frayed at the edges!

    https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/08/joseph-mifsuds-bogus-russian-connection-by-larry-c-johnson.html#more

    1. Well, to be honest, the “Special relationship” was already a little frayed after Suez, and how about the US-led Agreement in London to cancel all German debt to the UK (while of course keeping our debt to the USA intact). Some relationship. Some special.

      1. Those WW1 destroyers were not much cop either. The destruction of the British Empire and the reduction of British influence in the world has been a US game plan for the last 100 years.
        “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

    2. You really shouldn’t believe everything you read on these blogging sites. Anyone can make anything up, and they do. It’s like treating nttl as a reliable indicator of the average Briton’s political views…

    3. Joseph Mifsud? Did he not have a cousin, a Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci of Mary’s House Tower Road Sliema who was paid £1.2m by the CIA to say that he had sold Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Lockerbie bombing? Evidence now known to be untrue, or in legal terminology, perjury.

        1. Entirely made up – the cousin bit, but who knows? Tony did have a brother who was paid £600,000 to be ready to testify, but never appeared as a witness.
          When the big boys are out to get you, they get you.

          6. Yes, that was my underlying thought. All my little jokes come from deep wells of knowledge, philosophical reflection, and understanding of social patterns. But you knew that.

      2. The Maltese haberdasher who had so little business he could remember selling an unremarkable pair of pyjamas a decade earlier.
        With so little trade, how on earth did he stay in business?

          2. Ah, yes. Good thinking. What with contacts in London (cousins in Soho), that just might work.

        2. Perhaps that was the only pair of jimjams he ever sold, but sold a lot of other clothes which kept him in business.

    2. After I had explained any planned procedure to my German patients, the most frequently asked question was “Tut das Weh?” (will it hurt?)
      to which my reply was, “Mir nicht,” (not to me) with an evil grin. It usually provoked a laugh.

    1. If anyone ever possessed a head designed for drop kicking, better than this object’s, then I’d like to see it.

      Utterly repulsive creature in every way.

  68. Trade deal with Donald Trump’s US after no-deal Brexit could kill off NHS

    More totally fake new about the NHS. A trade deal dos not force us to buy from the US. With large contract it goes out to competitive tender

    How these people get away with constantly putting out fake news I have not a clue

    A trade agreement with the US after a no-deal Brexit could be fatal for the NHS, campaigners warn.

    The health service could be forced to pay hugely inflated prices for medication.
    Powerful American corporations are eyeing up the NHS and want to put an end to the health service keeping its costs down.

    1. Trump is not too happy with US pharma pricing. The US has just approved Americans buying drugs in Canada.

      It already happens but we may see even more day trippers bringing their prescriptions across the border.

      1. How far are people prepared to travel? Many years ago I met a woman in Pittsburgh (where I have family) who drove up to Toronto on a regular basis purely to shop in Marks & Spencer. She was from Catford in South East London but had lived in the US for at least 20 years.

        1. T’internet is a wonderful thing. The news has shown Florida residents using Canadian online pharmacies.
          Even if it is just a day trip there will still be millions of Americans able to make the trip and save more than the cost of a tankful of gas. Bernie Sanders led a busload of cross border shoppers on a drug buying trip, he highlighted the high price of insulin in the US.

        2. Well it has to be said that for anyone who lived in Catford, Marks & Spencer represents the height of civilisation – clearly she was on a pilgrimage…..

  69. It’s a funny old world where they allow animal rights protesters but won’t allow people to protest against abortion, how many of us would be here now if abortion had been so easy in the 1940’s & 50s?

    1. Well, it’s about women choices. So it is all about feminism. Nothing to do with the short and long term impact on the make up of society. That is the prevailing view, despite that the arguments do not support abortion, when we white Christian Europeans are not reproducing even to the level of sustaining current population levels. Of course, I have strong religious and moral views on this but I believe that the pragmatic societal arguments should be strong enough to bring an end to the current abortion on demand. That they are not shows how far we have sunk. We worship Moloch it seems, and our God is Self. However, there are currents in the United States suggestive of change. There are moves to declare that American citizenship begins at conception. That would make killing an American citizen illegal from conception onwards, and an end to easily obtained abortions.

        2. Her life also lacks the great joys children bring – as well as hard work. These can never be replaced, neither can the missing grandchildren.

      2. I’d give them plenty of choices:

        First watch this testimony https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0tQZhEisaE from a former abortion doctor or go home
        Next watch a film of an abortion or go home
        Still here? watch a real life abortion or go home
        Finally if they still wish to go ahead tell them they have to adminster a lethal dose of pain killer to the foetus before the abortion is carried out or they can go home.

        I reckon that’s plenty of choices.

        Always worth being well informed on a subject before making a decision in my opinion.

        1. That too. Oh, and many women then regret what they have done. That does not get much coverage either.
          Were anti- abortion demonstrators not jailed for showing pictures of the reality outside an abortion clinic?

  70. EU migration to UK underestimated by ONS, analysts say

    EU migration to the UK over the last decade has been underestimated, statisticians have admitted, as the reliability of official data on migration was formally downgraded.
    In a humiliating decision for the Office for National Statistics (ONS), its migration statistics quarterly report – which the UK government use to inform policy, including the net migration target recently scrapped by the prime minister, Boris Johnson – has been reclassified as “experimental”.

    The scale of the undercount is not yet known. However, the ONS said the estimate of EU net migration for the year to the end of March had been increased by 16% (29,000). This means an increase in the estimated EU migration from 178,000 to 207,000 for the year ending March 2016.

    1. “Colchester”? Where is that? Is it in the UK?

      I have heard of all the other good “chesters”, i.e. Chester, Chesterfield, Manchester, Winchester, Dorchester, and Chichester, all good old English towns and cities, as well as Cirencester, Leicester and Gloucester, but not any “Colchester”. Have you made that one up?

      2. Great +++++++++++ Aunt Boadicea could give you a clue.
        Even if it is just a smoking ruin.

        1. Boadicea get too much of an airing and
          quite barbaric compared to some one else;)
          I am about to do a 10 week course on Boadicea.

          There is the castle of which those in the middle ages were
          sent to before being burned to the stake.

  72. With reference to the North/South divide mentioned earlier. Clay Cross in Derbyshire is the boundary between the North and the Midlands.

    Fact.

    People from North of that place speak with a “Northern” dialect (a generic term for many Northern accents); and people from south of there speak with a Midlands dialect. I discovered this when I joined the Derbyshire Constabulary in 1973.

    Recruits from Derby spoke in a strange tongue and used weird words, such as “munna’ (mustn’t), “wunna” (won’t), “dunna” (don’t), and “canna” (can’t). They all thought that I, from Chesterfield in the North of the same county, was a “Yorkshireman” since I spoke “Northern”. We quickly decided that Clay Cross was the place where the North became the Midlands.

    As for where the boundary between the Midlands and the South is, I neither know nor care (but I bet there are more than a modicum of NoTTLers who do know and care very much). :•)

    1. I was raised to believe that North and South meet at Watford Gap. In London, the river Thames marks the North/South divide.

      1. Indeed and those that live South of the river are regarded as Transpontine clods by the Northeners
        (and the bloody cabbies)

        2. I suppose the best thing about the North/South divide is that the Midlands provides a bug fat buffer zone between them.

          The Midlands has nothing to do with the North and it has nothing to do with the South. It exists, primarily as a strange, weird, twilight zone to keep the North and the South well apart.

          8. Is that similar to how the residents of ‘Colchester’ lick windows, point at dogs and chase cars?

          13. No idea, but that is what I was told when I visited friends in Brierley Hill over 50 years ago.

      2. Sue, what about the Midlands?

        T’North doesn’t go all the way down there! You’ll be upsetting Garlands and a few others! :•)

        1. I’m sure you know that Watford Gap is in Northants, close to a small village called Watford and nothing to do with a place of the same name in Herts.

          1. 62 miles apart, as I showed on here a couple of weeks ago.

            However, that still doesn’t address the fact that there is a huge wodge of the country in the middle, that keeps the North well apart from the South, and is generally known as “The Midlands”.

        2. Put simply, the centroid is the point at which a cardboard cut-out of the area could be perfectly balanced on the tip of a pencil.[4] Islands are assumed fixed to the mainland in their precise position by invisible rigid weightless wires. A mathematical method is used to do the balancing to a much greater accuracy than the practical method could achieve.

          Unless stated, positions are the centroids of the two-dimensional shapes made by the countries. Calculations include offshore islands unless stated.

          Great Britain

          Whitendale Hanging Stones (#1 on the map), near Brennand Farm, outside Dunsop Bridge, Lancashire in the Forest of Bowland.(54°0′13.176″N 2°32′52.278″W; grid reference SD6418856541) [2]
          Great Britain (excluding islands other than the island of Great Britain itself)

          A field south of Calderstones Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (#3), near Whalley, Lancashire (grid reference SD7232136671)[5]

          England

          Lindley Hall Farm (#4), Leicestershire (near Fenny Drayton and Higham on the Hill) (52°33′42.942″N 1°27′53.474″W; SP 36373.66 96143.05) [6] A plaque denoting this point, and disputing the “traditional” centre of England as being at Meriden in the West Midlands, was erected by Ordnance Survey on 14 June 2013 [7]

          Northern Ireland

          Annaghone (#5), near Cookstown, County Tyrone (54°36′27.277″N 6°41′35.323″W [8] grid reference NV9706433729 ) Irish grid ref H 84494 74047.

          Scotland

          Between Blair Atholl (#6) and Dalwhinnie, Perthshire (56°49′0.257″N 4°11′2.267″W; grid reference NN6678471599) [4]

          Wales

          Near Cwmystwyth (#7), Devil’s Bridge, Ceredigion (52°19′48.791″N 3°45′59.072″W; grid reference SN7972871704) [9]

          United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

          A position “in the middle of Morecambe Bay”, approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) off the coast at Morecambe (#2), Lancashire, at Ordnance Survey grid reference SD4157566760.[10]

          Chew on it.

    3. Wasn’t Clay Cross where some seriously leftie councillors ‘martyred’ themselves?
      Can’t remember why, but I assume Maggie, Maggie, Maggie or at least Tory Toffs were involved.

      1. David Skinner, younger brother of Dennis and scion of socialism, led the so-called ‘Clay Cross rent rebels’ in the 1970s.

        I was called by an old inspector of mine, John Moss (now, sadly deceased), one day to accompany him to the North-East Derbyshire council offices where David Skinner and his fellow rebels were disrupting a council meeting. John said to me, on the way to the chamber, “Fancy a bit of fun, George?”

        As we entered the chamber, we doffed our headgear (me, helmet; John, cap) and got a nod from the council chairwoman. We remained at the back but as soon as we had entered, David Skinner turned around in his chair and fixed us with a stony stare!

        After a few minutes the chairwoman asked the meeting, “Any more questions“, at which Skinner raised his hand, without removing his gaze from John and me, and asked, “Madam chairman; do we have to conduct this meeting in the presence of members of the oppressive forces of the state?”

        John Moss barely stifled a giggle. He was daring Skinner to do something that would justify him frogmarching him out of the chamber. The chairwoman sighed, heavily and replied, “Mr Skinner. Those gentlemen are here at my request, and if there are any more interruptions from you, I shall ask them to escort you from this building.”

        John hissed, under his breath, [“Oh please, please!“]. But Skinner knew what was what and he shut up for the rest of the meeting.

    4. Somewhere around Banbury, would be my guess. In BR days it must have been Oxford as on the then Bournemouth to Birkenhead train, that’s where the Southern region loco was replaced for the haul up to Chester, where there was another change as the train had to reverse there.

      1. I thought I’d misremembered the nursery rhyme but it IS a cock-horse…

        Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
        To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
        Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
        And she shall have music wherever she goes.

        1. I do believe that the “cock-horse” referred to in the nursery rhyme was a dialectic term for a hobby-horse.

          5. A cock horse is a spare horse that is kept at the bottom of a steep hill to be hitched to a wagon to help it up the slope. At the top it’s unhitched and taken to the bottom again ready for the next ascent. It’s extra horsepower.

        2. But the “music” will have been chosen by the metro-sexual Controller of Radio 3 – so you may not necessarily like it, Our Susan.

      2. That’s probably on a similar latitude to Watford Gap, the usual division between ‘north’ and south.

        2. Owen Jones, Garfield Lineacre (yawns and drops off…)

          Prolly the same fluckers who whinged to the beeboids about the “bald” joke….

          1. Is that the one about receding hairline?

            Chaps that go bald from the front of the head are thinkers.

            Chaps who go bald at the back are sexy.

            Chaps who go bald back and front just think they are sexy…..

          3. I’m afraid it don’t apply to me – I’ver got a full head of hair…..Indeed I usually come out of the barber having had it cut, with more hair than most that enter….

          7. I paid £40 for the VIP treatment at the Turkish Barbers today. So invigorating & 2 cups of excellent tea.

          16. Bollux, Missus.

            A real bargain in every way. I used to pay £5 for a haircut. I have 17 a year. So it would have cost me £2,125 – assuming that the fiver I paid in 1994 had not gone up)…..

            Do the math (as yer Yanks say…)

            Best £40 I ever spent.

          18. But you are a beautiful gurl; I am a man whose beloved decided that a number 4 would be best….

          19. Do they give you real Turkish delight sweets with tea ?
            love those, especially the rose flavoured.
            Have a big box at Christmas in a box from Turkey,
            real Turkish delight, not that nasty stuff covered with
            chocolate.

          21. Very wise.

            Chum of mine who was a food hygiene inspector told me what they would find when they removed the “meat” from one of those kebab thingies.

            Myriad livestock chewing away…..

          22. The have pyramids of them on stalls at the
            markets of Istanbul. But I personally prefer them in
            sealed boxes . I don’t eat anything that other people can
            touch, not hygienic. Rohan were offering little strawberry
            cakes last Saturday to customers but I saw lots of fingers
            scrambling around them and decided against it.

          25. Sorry, Peddy £40 for a haircut and 2 cups of tea. Barmy or as they used to have a small footnote in a comic whose name I forget, “Daft, I call it.”

          26. Morning, Tom

            It’s more than just a haircut; it’s the full Monty

            Haircut, beard trim & shaping, wet shave, 2 hot towels, nostril & earlobe waxing (the bit I don’t like), face mask & peeling, vigorous neck, shoulder & arm massage. Takes nearly an hour.

    3. They really don’t understand do they. It’s the big corporations and ultra rich like Soros who want the EU to survive so that they can continue to move cheap (slave) labour from country to country to the detriment of the indigenous population.
      Just noticed she’s a vegan and as loopy as they come, which explains her rant.

      1. It’s only an extension of moving the jobs abroad to find cheap labour. Tory supporters were very in favour of that, as were supporters of New Labour.

        You’ll never convince me free trade without a roughly homogenised wage level is a good idea. Look how free trade has hollowed out our economy simply because many of these jobs were easy to send abroad to import back the finished goods.

  74. Just back from the MR’s Loopy Friend. I just hope and pray I don’t get the way she is.

    Incidentally, after 2½ years the Cherman court awarded her a paltry pension (about half of what she is really due) BUT – because the law has (apparently) changed – the Cherman Social Security – that pays pensions – is appealing. I expect they hope she’ll die.

    Of course, had she been in a burkha, she’d be rolling in dosh, personally handed to her by the Frau Doktor.

    1. Presumably, these “financial obligations” were based on a 28-member EU. So once 65+ million people leave, these estimates can be reduced proportionately. .

  76. Goodbye and thank you, sir.

    Fred Wheeler, Second World War wireless operator and air gunner who survived 60 bombing operations over Europe.

    He died aged 100 and survived 60 bombing operations as a wireless operator and air gunner and was awarded the DFM.

  77. HAPPY HOUR (a bit early since I have a dental appointment_.

    Rowan Pelling (in today’s DT):

    “There’s a game I sometimes play with friends called I Can’t Stand Judi Dench. The aim is to express deep-rooted dislike for three things so dear to most people’s hearts that the entire room is scandalised by the end of your declaration. It’s a bit like Room 101 apart from the fact no one should sympathise with your choices.

    Nigel Farage was clearly enjoying a cathartic session when he told Sydney’s Conservative Political Action Conference that the late Queen Mother was “an overweight, chainsmoking gin drinker”. With this week’s rolling out of publicity for the autumn TV schedules, I feel the need to get something similar off my chest: I can’t stand ‘The Great British Bake Off’.

    Let’s all list our three detestations. I’ll start the ball rolling with three things I loathe and hate:

    1. Only Fools and Horses.
    2. Feta cheese.
    3. Cliff Richard.

      1. Tack. Det är en tre-månaders check-up med tandkirurgen efter mina två extraktioner. Jag kanske måste spendera lite pengar på ett par dyra implantat!

        [For non-Swedish readers: Thanks. It is a three-month check-up with the orthodontic surgeon after my two extractions. I may have to spend some money on a couple of expensive implants!]

          2. Få du skriva så mycket på svenska. Hoppas att den rottweilern inte seer denna! 🙂

            (Are you allowed to write so much in Swedish? I hope the rottweiler doesn’t see this! 😉 )

        3. I recently spent a chunk of money on an implant, coincidentally with a Swedish dental surgeon though in London of course. Didn’t enjoy the process but very happy with the tooth.

          1. Just back with my quotation. At today’s exchange rate it will cost me (for two adjacent implants):
            £1,194·77 for the implants, less £670·92 Swedish tax*, total = £532·79

            Then in three months time, for the two-teeth bridge:
            £1,815·62, less £409·80 Swedish tax*, total = £1,405·82

            *The reason I get a bigger tax discount on the first operation is that it comes under my current annual Högkostnadsskydd (high cost protection) that is provided for resident Swedish patients by their Försäkringskassan (Swedish tax office). My personal ‘year’ ends on Sept 14 and my first op will be on Sept 2 [After paying a maximum £110 in any one-year period (in SEK200 payments each time you have a doctor’s consultation), every subsequent consultation is free-of-charge].

            Since my second op is not until December, I will have entered a new ‘year’ for tax purposes, therefore my ‘discount’ will be much lower.

          2. So £2k to replace 2 adjacent teeth, if I understand you correctly. Quite a bargain. I was quoted over £2k 5 years ago for one tooth & that was a ‘friendship price’. As I don’t miss the tooth, I didn’t go ahead with the treatment.

        4. I can recommend implants.
          The greatest compliment I can pay them is that you don’t know you’ve got them.

      1. Women’s sports? You don’t like the fact that they are over-paid for under-achieving, or that they grunt too much?

    7. 1. Politicians
      2. Snowflakes (of the human kind)
      3. Tripe. Make of that what you will.

      1. I’ve not eaten tripe since I was under 10.

        I would try it again, though, especially if cooked to a French recipe.

    9. 1. Anything new improved, exciting or upgrade.
      2. Anything “designer”, “celebrity”, “trending” or “most watched”.
      3. Premier League football.

      3. I cheer whenever I hear that Murray has lost.

        However I don’t watch lawn tennis because I cannot stand those who play it, commentate upon it or watch it!

    12. I’m with you on 2 and 3 and am ambivalent about 1.

      1, for me, would be Jo Brand.

        1. Food called “bake”
          Eggplant & quash; baked heart
          People whose first reaction is to moan

  78. Nearly 24 hours on, I have simmered down a bit. Last night we watched a very decently made docu about the murder of Lord Louis Mountbatten and the brutal killings at Warren Point.

    To the extent that one can be balanced about this – it allowed both sides to have their say.

    What really stuck in my craw was the way in which the “leaders” of the IRA thugs – McGuinness, Adams, Kelly etc etc etc – NEVER had the guts to stand up and say, “Yes, we planned and organised this – and are proud of it”.

    It was left to a handful of sheepish IRA foot “soldiers” (aka mass murderers) to say that the final decision was “Martin’s”…..with a rueful face.

    Why on earth didn’t we just ignore the border and put mass troops into the Republic and kill every living IRA man – we knew who they all were.

    And if the Teapot at the time had “protested”, we could have said – “Done your job for you, wanqueur”

      1. I know – I still wonder how she managed to bring herself to do so. She did wear gloves, of course….

      2. HM should have heeded the words of the poet, Seamus Heaney:

        “Be advised, my passport’s green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast The Queen.”

    2. “Why on earth didn’t we just ignore the border and put mass troops into the Republic and kill every living IRA man.”

      And I’m a “bully”?

      Well, if you’ve given up your status of impartiality, why don’t you go the whole hog and say that you want exactly the same treatment for every member of the RoP who are at large in the UK freely spouting their messages of hate towards their host nation? We also know who they all are (and where they live).

    3. One of the partners in a practice I worked for in the early seventies, a lovely Irish fellow, Barney Grimes, said much the same thing. We knew who they were and where they lived.

      Instead we allowed Blair to pardon the scum and were left with the hideous spectacle of McGuiness chuckling next to the demagogue Ian Paisley for what seems like years. Murderers walk free.

    1. Wow, what a weasely, spiteful, vindictive loser GB is now showing himself to be. It’s now become very clear that Farage distancing himself from any suicidal stance against the Globalists islam control tool was the only sensible thing he could do.

      1. Now you know that about Gerard is not true, but it is on record about “nige” and is a fact, are you denying that ?

        1. No i’m not denying and have no need to deny it ogga1. I have always pointed out that his actions were sensible & justified, the last few tweets you have posted fully vindicate just how sensible & justified NF’s actions were.
          If someone told me that an impostor was posting as GB, I wouldn’t find it difficult to believe.

          1. You do know what denying means, you ought to, you do it enough, anyway,
            denying = truth evasion.

          2. After 5 hours all you can manage to come back with is painfully feeble psychopathic projection?! ROFL!

          5. Nigel Farage knows that the majority of people do not yet realise the threat that islam poses to the continued existence of democracy itself in all of our countries. That is not an exaggeration in any way. It is clearly self-evident from even a small look at its history. It is not a coincidence that the globalists are trying to get as many muslims as possible into our countries and are spending fortunes to do it.

            Nigel is focusing on one problem at a time, even though time is short. Once we are out of the eu we can control our borders and then look at what needs to be done next. If Nigel told the truth about islam now, it would just scare the horses and drive the lesser-aware voters away.

          2. And there we have it! You myopic tribalistic voters care more for your party / leader than for Brexit & the future of the UK.

  81. Taking Stock

    Following last year’s ‘Big Clearout’, I’m the proud owner of bags of space and as such I intend to start stocking up on essentials in preparation for October’s big event.

    My one and only reason is to reduce any strain on the system should there be problems and, hopefully, help spike the guns of the doomsayers.

    Could I suggest that all Brexiteers in my fortunate position do similar?

        1. I call them doom-echoers. There’s been a lot of that on here of late. All based on stupid speculation, because nobody knows what’s going to happen till we reach Hallowe’en.

          1. On spot!

            In fact, one of the most ludicrous remainer arguments has been that ‘leavers didn’t vote for the current impasse’.

            Of course we didn’t, but neither did the remainers. Today’s present was yesterday’s future and no one knows what the future will bring.

            In the main, my vote in 2016 was to leave the present and the past, both of which I did know about.

        1. You jest… I hope.

          https://www.hattingleyvalley.com/

          English sparkling has gone from 5 million bottles annually to 25 million recently. Do a blind taste test between the French and the English. Even better…do the blind tasting with some French pals and then watch their faces when you do the reveal. :o)

    3. We ate a tin of broad beans yesterday – bb date 2014.
      We now have space for another tin.

      2. The fact you’re still with us tells its own tale, Anne.

        I used to visit a late relative who wouldn’t touch anything an hour past its date and I’d often come home with the back of the car scraping the road with the weight in the boot.

        On a similar theme, I called in Sainsbury’s cafe yesterday for a cuppa and, as usual, despaired at the food left on some of the plates. Sometimes enough to feed a small third-world village for a week.

    2. Oh how sad….. Just go back to Bongo-Bongo land and you mud hut with no running water or sanitation and then let us know how you feel.

    3. The language and sound levels at Allan Towers were impressive while that news item was running.

    5. Perhaps this follower of a murderous terrorist, who “married” a 12 year-old girl, would prefer it if our entire country lay on the ground before her and begged for her forgiveness? We are all filthy kuffar as we know, who should be grateful that we are allowed to continue living at all.

      We should get out the whips and crack them over the heads of our taxpayers to make them work harder to pay for her life as a baby manufacturing plant. Those little jihadi’s wont feed themselves, so we should do it.

      Of course, under islam she would not be stopped from walking into your house and driving you and your family into the street. You will have the clothes on your back and she can take everything that you have spent a lifetime working for.

      I am still trying to remember why importing millions of people who think this way will be good for our country and culture.

  83. Help, dear peeps. I have been attempting to upload a photo (onto this site). I receive a bossy message informing me that I “must be logged in to upload a photograph on this site.” But I am logged in! My ‘name’ is up there top right, I log in via disqus (I don’t do Facebook etc), I can access my notifications. What am I doing wrong, or what else should I be doing? I use an iPad. Any assistance will be gratefully received.

    Edit: Many thanks to all for helpful advice. I will experiment and see what happens. I did not have problems with uploading photos within our previous premises!

    2. I wasn’t able to upload an avatar using the Opera browser but Chrome worked ok. It might be worth giving a different browser a try.

    3. Try rebooting the page, rebooting the ‘puter, rebooting the modem in that order.

      1. What is a PNG? You are speaking to the seriously technically challenged here who, on occasion, has been unable to find the cunningly hidden on/off switch….!

        1. It’s an acronym that appears in a drop-down box when I want to change the format of pictures so Disqus will accept them.
          I use a MacBook Pro, so I suspect my explanation may not be all that helpful.

  84. US supermarket chain Walmart is suing Tesla’s energy division, after solar panels on seven of its stores caught fire.

    Court documents describe a string of fires that occurred between 2012 and 2018 at Walmart locations in Ohio, Maryland and California. Tesla has not yet responded to the claims.

    The lawsuit alleges that the first fire occurred at a Walmart store in Long Beach, California in 2012. Another in Beavercreek, Ohio, in March 2018 saw customers evacuated and the store closed for eight days.

    Walmart is asking Tesla to remove solar panels from all its stores and to pay damages.

    In 2016, Tesla spent $2.6bn (£2.1bn) on clean energy firm SolarCity, which was founded by Elon Musk’s cousins but, since then, installations have dropped by more than 85% and Tesla has cut its sales force and ended a distribution deal with US store Home Depot.
    Mr Musk’s firm is also facing investigations from the US National Transportation Safety Board regarding fires in several Tesla cars.

    Last month, the firm reported a $408m loss in second quarter earnings.
    Tesla’s share price fell on news of the Walmart lawsuit, which was filed in the New York State Supreme Court on Tuesday.

    1. People are still putting these things on their roof. Many fires have been caused by them, but they are hiding the facts as government departments investigate.

  86. Last post. Looking at that ghastly photo – Tusk (as well as being loathed by all his fellow Poles) really is a short-arse, isn’t he?

      1. Nonsense – he was born in 1957. I have a wide range of Polish friends who are the same age – none of them is puny and whinging.

        1. We had a wedding here last year. The Polish bride was at uni with Tusk. She lives on the South coast, but still attends fairly regularly. Don’t know what she thinks about, perhaps I’ll ask her next time she’s here.
          .

      2. Food was never the problem in Poland. They ate a vast quantity of meat per person in the form of cured sausages and had plenty of fruit and vegetables albeit grown in a primitive agrarian way. To this day they are a net exporter of apples to Russia and other countries.

        Since the Poles have received annual subsidies from the EU roughly equal to the contributions the UK makes into the EU annually it goes without saying that their standard of living has increased exponentially. By contrast, as a net contributor, our standard of living has gone down.

        Our infrastructure is consequently crumbling for lack of funding. The Poles in particular have exported their criminals to the UK alongside their hitherto disaffected young people who come to the UK to breed and have children on the NHS.

        Edit: The generations of Poles who found exile in England during WWII and many of their offspring are now gone. I doubt that the current population have any regard for us and suspect this applies to the current populations of other countries such as Denmark, Holland, Brussels and Sweden, all of whom owe this country an enormous debt of gratitude. Instead they spit venom at us as do the wretched French.

    1. It won’t.

      His ‘arris would dissolve the rough end of a pineapple faster than Bill Thomas can fall off a ladder.

      1. Surely she does get out more ?

        After all, she’s sailing the flagship of the green revolution across the Atlantic and soon will be making climate speeches at the UN on behalf of the one world one government globalists.

        Quite an achievement for a 16 year old.

  92. Well, thank heavens for eddication. I never thought my Eng. Lit. ‘O’Level would come in handy xx (cough, cough) years later.
    I ‘did’ the Pardoner’s Tale as my Chaucer section of the exam.

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/elton-john-and-the-inconvenient-truth-about-carbon-offsetting/

    “Elton John and the inconvenient truth about carbon offsetting
    Rupert Darwall

    Elton John did his royal pals Harry and Meghan few favours when he revealed he’d bought carbon offsets for the couple’s recent trip to Nice in Sir Elton’s private jet. It was also a mistake. ‘Offsetting is worse than doing nothing,’ according to Manchester university professor Kevin Anderson, one of the vanishingly small number of people in the climate world who actually walks the climate talk. ‘It is without scientific legitimacy, is dangerously misleading and almost certainly contributes to a net increase in the absolute rate of global emissions growth.’

    Offsetting Harry and Meghan’s emissions must demonstrate ‘with a reasonable level of certainty’ that their flight emissions – plus any emissions consequences from the offsets – adds up to zero over a 100-year period. ‘It is the immutable impossibility of making such long-term assurances that fundamentally challenges the value of such a claim,’ Anderson has argued.

    Anderson’s argument against offsets finds empirical support in a May 2019 ProPublica feature by environmental journalist Lisa Song which shreds them of all vestiges of credibility. Reviewing carbon offset projects around the globe, Song found that they hadn’t offset the emissions they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed – or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. ‘Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came or didn’t last,’ Song concluded.

    Ahead of the 2014 football World Cup in Brazil, Fifa bought carbon credits covering 331,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, ostensibly to offset the entire carbon footprint of the matches, to be deployed in a portfolio of projects in Brazil. One was a reforestation project in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. The project was suspended last year amid reports that loggers destroyed more trees than all the credits sold.

    In a forestry project in Cambodia supported by the Clinton Foundation, 88 per cent of the area to be protected was forested at the project’s outset. Thanks to satellite imagery analysis, Song found that the forested area had almost halved to 46 per cent. One area that had started out 90 per cent forested now has none. ‘Offsets themselves are doing damage,’ Larry Lohmann, an academic and climate activist, told Song.

    ‘Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned, together with their teachers,’ Martin Luther wrote in his Ninety Five Theses of 1517 that he nailed to the door of Wittenberg’s All Saints Church, starting the Protestant Reformation. Rather like carbon offsets, the medieval papacy issued indulgences to rich sinners on the basis they would do fictitious good works. In practice, indulgences were a cynical cash-raising exercise purportedly absolving the wealthy of sin. As much or perhaps more than Luther’s theology, reaction against indulgences and the venality of the Vatican helped bring about the destruction of the medieval Catholic Church.

    So too with today’s secular religion of climate change. Holes in the science are amenable to any number of fixes by the priesthood of climate scientists. What will bring about its downfall will be its stench of hypocrisy and its impact on people’s lives.

    Climate change has become ethics for the wealthy; preaching planetary salvation to justify their privileged position in society and telling the rest of us what we shouldn’t do, while forcing us to pay more for it into the bargain.

    Britain’s worst blackout in over a decade, when a single lightning strike earlier this month knocked out a power station and a wind farm, ‘should never have happened in the first place,’ says professor Dieter Helm, Britain’s foremost energy economist. ‘If power cuts can happen when just two power generators drop off, then something fundamental has gone wrong.’ It has.”

    Rupert Darwall is author of Green Tyranny.

    1. Good evening Anne

      I was just wondering whether St. Ignatius of Loyola and his wonderful prayer ties in with your comment about medieval indulgences?

        2. I always liked Astley’s prayer before Edgehill.

          O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not thou forget me.

    3. Radix malorum est cupiditas.

      Did you see my post about the Pardoner’s Tale yesterday?)

    1. I have a feeling that Greta’s conversation would be enough for anyone to abandon ship.

      1. Doubt if she’s much of a conversationalist, but her ‘thousand-yard stare’ would be enough to make the most jovial of mariners lose the will to live.

    1. I’m looking forward to a similar event this year, for the Brexit celebrations, with Angela Merkel as Brunnhilde.

  100. Late Evening Entertainment:
    Hat
    Merkel the Magician
    Hat, Merkel, Rabbit. ” Look, no Backstop!”
    Applause, applause. Look, Withdrawal Agreement -All Signed, Sealed, Delivered.

    1. Expert starts relocation of German artwork bought by Trump for reinstallation on US/Mexican border.

  102. Just opened a bottle of cheap plonk,a Malbec called “Most Wanted” about
    to discover if it means desirable or wanted for a crime against wine
    I will report back
    Tomorrow,Night All

    1. G’noght, Rik, if you like Malbec, Aldi do a good one at £4.69. Take the French One and Not the Argentinian.

      1. Merkel wants our money. She cares nothing for the UK or its sovereignty. The Germans have done very nicely since being let off significant war reparations following WWII and even better since the introduction of the Euro.

        Compare any German city with the squalor of our own where useless North Africans and an assortment of vicious followers of the Prophet have been dumped on us and transformed previously stable and attractive areas of the UK into Third World shitholes.

  105. Pathetic and embarrassing how Boris Johnson is begging Angela Merkel for ”a deal”, which is certain to be a tweaked Withdrawal Agreement, and she’s handing out 30 day surrender terms like teacher to a naughty student.

    1. Its called negotiation, Have you ever done any. I think not reading your ill informed comments.

      2. Negotiation with EU honchos is for mugs, and it is always a mistake to sound desperate as Boris undoubtedly does.

        Who runs the EU anyway ?

        You should know by now if you’ve been paying attention.

    2. Gove has already declared how things will work under no deal.
      UK will allow freedom of movement at the border except for a few trucks it feels like stopping.
      EU can do what they like on their side.

    1. Good morning Geoff,
      Lovely morning here , has an Autumny crackle to it though, colours are changing , the sounds in the distance are different.

  110. for all the views ..and all the wisdom..opined , nobody has said what the basic problem is….a problem which is becoming more pronounced…..
    World population is increasing at a rate which can only be sustained by losing some of the quality of life….this problem is compounded in Britain by the influx of hundreds of thousands of people from other less fortunate places….
    One of the most common uses of our land is the growing of food…and the most demanding being the growing of meat ….Just as with chickens..the intense growing of beef has changed the visible signs of ” agriculture ” and arguably affected the quality of the end product….

    the choice is stark…procreate less..or eat less beef…

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