Tuesday 9 June: Fighting racism does not justify betrayal of those working to rid us of the coronavirus

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/06/08/letters-fighting-racism-does-not-justify-betrayal-working-rid/

761 thoughts on “Tuesday 9 June: Fighting racism does not justify betrayal of those working to rid us of the coronavirus”

  3. Tory PMs’ strange relationship with marriage

    SIR – What is it with Conservative prime ministers?

    First David Cameron speedily introduces same-sex marriage, which was not in the Conservative manifesto, and for which there was no cry from the country, and now Boris Johnson is to rush through “quickie” no-fault divorce (Letters, June 8), which was not in the Conservative manifesto, and for which there is no cry from the country.

    Andrew Loose
    Griffithstown, Monmouthshire

    SIR – In his address to the Royal Society of St George on April 23 1961, Enoch Powell said, with reference to medieval tombs in English churches: “From brass and stone, from line and effigy, their eyes look out at us, and we gaze into them, as if we would win some answer from their silence. ‘Tell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we in our time may know how to hold it fast.’”

    Surely the answer lies in the hands of husbands and wives held faithfully in stone against the onslaught of centuries, as described by Christopher Howse (Sacred Mysteries, June 6), which visually reproach the “quickie” no-fault divorces that our parliamentarians intend to make part of our nation’s manifest destiny.

    Lt-Col Nicholas Cooper (retd)
    Barford Saint Martin, Wiltshire

    1. Destruction of the family unit is the intent.

      We don’t have a Conservative party. They are a continuation of New Labour.

      Good morning, Citroen.

      1. Morning Phizzee

        It’s all Frankfurt School stuff and the Tories are becoming worserer than New Labour

      2. The family is the enemy of the left; it provides stability and a bulwark against state control of children. Naturally, it has to be destroyed.

    2. For all his bluster, charisma and charm Boris has just turned out to be just another common purpose globalist out of the same mold as Blair, as most of us on here fully expected.

  4. SIR – Your Leading Article (June 7) is right that we need to get ready for No Deal in the face of European Union intransigence. As well as measures for the economy and customs infrastructure, we must prepare to police our exclusive economic zone.

    Britain’s eight Royal Navy offshore patrol vessels would be too few to police an area almost three times that of the UK, if faced with the vast French, Spanish and other national fishing fleets simply ignoring the law.

    In the Cod Wars of the Sixties and Seventies, the Icelandic coastguard flagrantly breached international law. Royal Navy vessels were forbidden to fire at the offenders, and our warships – built and refined for speed and low radar signature – came off badly in collisions with Icelandic vessels with commercial hulls. We lost all three Cod Wars, and consequently much of our fishing industry. Royal Marine helicopter boarding parties could be deployed occasionally. But trying to board vessels equipped with high-pressure hoses, perhaps in heavy seas, would be dangerous.

    Fortunately, the Icelandic coastguard demonstrated – illegally in its case – that there is another way. Small but robust fast craft, equipped to cut lines, can put a fishing boat out of business for a whole mission.

    We could buy and convert such craft immediately to supplement our flotilla of patrol vessels, especially as the support fleet for the declining North Sea oil industry offers cheap options for second-hand purchase.

    Such an investment would send an unmistakable message to Brussels that we mean business.

    Sir Julian Brazier
    Canterbury, Kent

    [Former MP for Canterbury.]

    Not cricket but it would put the wind up Brussels

    2. Sir Julian presupposes that anyone in government is capable of seriously concocting a plan and getting it implemented by the Civil Service.The latter will not want to support such ideas as they are basically Remain in mourning.

  6. Raheem Sterling demands English football gives black managers a chance
    Man City forward highlights top roles for Lampard and Gerrard
    Campbell and Cole ‘haven’t been given the right opportunities’

    Raheem Sterling said Sol Campbell and Ashley Cole have also had great England careers and done their coaching badges yet Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard have got jobs.
    Raheem Sterling has called for English football to seize the moment and finally address its lack of black representation in positions of power.

    The Manchester City and England forward made the comments during an appearance on the BBC’s flagship political programme, Newsnight, in the wake of anti-racism protests that have taken hold across the world. Advance clips had shown the 25-year-old offering his support to those who have taken to the streets in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in the United States, but the full interview with Emily Maitlis saw him focus on matters closer at hand.
    *
    *
    *
    https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jun/09/raheem-sterling-english-football-black-managers-campbell-cole

    *******************************************************************
    https://i2-prod.dailyrecord.co.uk/incoming/article12638565.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200c/JS153421542.jpg
    Raheem Sterling’s tattoo

    2. Sterling is not very smart and is certainly ill advised. The tattoo says it all, and his lame explanation/excuse for it was woeful! Good morning all!

    3. While we are talking of Equality, how about paying these Premier League primadonnas something approaching that of the National Living Wage. Even the salary currently given to the Prime Minister, who is charged with running the country as opposed to running around a field, might be a start.

      1. It’s not as if he can play very well, I’ve never seen someone miss so many open goals.
        Yet he keeps getting select to play for England.

        2. He’d be better if he lost a bit of weight – oh, you don’t mean Boris, do you? 🙂

    1. Morning, Peddy. It was an excellent episode of LEWIS last night. (The one about students quoting Shelley.)

        1. “I remember, I remember the house where I was born.
          The little window where the sun came peeping through at dawn.”

          Was that really Shelley, Peddy?

          Or did you mean “Ah yes, I remember it well” from Gigi?

          :-))

  8. Chaos and confusion at UK airports as new arrivals grapple with quarantine laws. 8 June 2020 • 7:14pm.

    Britain on Monday welcomed a new generation of aviation pioneers: travellers forced to queue for quarantine.

    Thousands of passengers travelled to Britain, the first under new Home Office laws, compelled to self-isolate for the next fortnight, or face a £1,000 fine or worse. Perfectly OK perhaps if home is a country estate (or converted barn on the family farm in County Durham) but less appealing if what you were planning was a 10-day whistle stop tour of London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Lake Windermere and the Scottish Highlands.

    It’s tempting to see something sinister in all this but the truth is that it is simply an expression of the general idiocy of the Government. They really are this stupid!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/08/chaos-confusion-uk-airports-new-arrivals-grapple-quarantine/

  9. Fighting racism might be simply to treat “Black Lives Matter” with the contempt it deserves. This campaign is profoundly racist, and glorifying a murdered criminal while ignoring very many thousands of innocents who are murdered, often by those in authority, is perverted.

  10. Until us normies get ourselves organised and take to the streets in peaceful protest in our millions then all these attacks on our way of life, culture and re-ordering of the West will just continue unabated, common purpose has control of every position of authority, there isn’t anybody that is going to stand up to this onslaught, they watch on bended knee while a small mob rips down a statue and throw it in a river, they watch while XR brings business to a standstill.
    But by that time it will be too late to take back control without some sort of violent civil uprising which no normy wants to see.

    1. I must not be a “normie” then, Bob3, for I am now convinced that not only is some violent civil uprising inevitable but also desirable to nip this anarchy in the bud.

    2. Good morning, Bob.

      For the very stout hearted:

      13th. June.

      10/00.

      Sir Winston Churchill’s statue.

  11. I am still learning about racism – but I know a history-changing moment when I see one. Suzanne Moore. Mon 8 Jun 2020 17.26 BST.

    History is made and unmade in a moment. To witness such moments is thrilling. Watching the statue of Edward Colston pulled down was beautiful. A symbolic gesture, perhaps, but one that hurt no one, and one that taught many of us so much.

    Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

    Wordsworth coined the latter words to celebrate the French Revolution which promised a new Age of Reason. What it really ushered in of course was The Terror with its show trials and executions, the barbarities of the Vendée; Napoleon and twenty years of Foreign Wars.

    The names and places will be changed but everything else will follow.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/08/i-am-still-learning-about-racism-but-i-know-a-history-changing-moment-when-i-see-one

    1. …and one that taught many of us so much.

      Indeed it did teach us. It taught us that a mob can break the law and get away with it. Suzanne Moore might regret her words in future, when others may take unlawful actions which directly affect her.

      1. Morning A. Revolutions have certain constants one of them being that they devour their own children (the Bolsheviks etc.) though unfortunately they also devour lots of other peoples as well.

      2. Morning A. Revolutions have certain constants one of them being that they devour their own children (the Bolsheviks etc.) though unfortunately they also devour lots of other peoples as well.

      3. It doesn’t take much for violent action to spill from what one might approve of, to what one definitely doesn’t approve of.
        Defunding / disbanding the police won’t help with that.

        1. It will be interesting to see what the results of the disbanding of the Minneapolis Police Former by the city’s authorities will be.

    2. Revolution’s main thrust seems to be to kill people.
      I wonder why humanity is so savage?

      1. This one is going to be particularly nasty Oberst since it is motivated by anti-White racism, envy and xenophobia. Its unspoken aim is genocide.

        1. Like a child wrecking its toys, and then being upset that there’s nothing to play with afterwards.
          Based on past performance, where is the wealth creation from blacks? Where are the inventions? Where are the taxes? Where are the charitable donations and efforts? Where is the clean water? How many blacks are aeroplane designers? How many run megasoftware houses?
          Sure, there are many poor blacks, but then, there are many poor of all skin colours, but B-all blacks (as opposed to Chinese, Asians, Hispanics and whites) represented at the top of the heap. I wonder why?
          In Nigeria, they used to say of the Nigerians: Give us the job and we will finish the tools.

    3. They were doing a character assassination of Charles Dickens on Radio 4 this morning. I only caught a bit of it but everybody should read A Tale of Two Cities.

    4. Yo Minty and All

      When, and if, normality return to UK, I am either going to buy a subscription to a Tanning Booth shop, or get my own sun lamp’

      I will then become a BAME

      The advantages:

      I can go out and stab people
      I can go and rob them at knife-point
      I can set-up child grooming gangs
      I will be able to ignore most laws on the statute Book
      Queue jump hospital waiting lists
      Ignore Covid Lockdown
      Will not need to tax my car
      Will not need to insyre my car
      Will not need to have it MOT’d

      You will be able to book appointments for colour conversion, at OLT Towers, from next Sunday

    5. Britain did more to end slavery than any other country. We do not deserve this racist treatment.

      1. Morning Johnny. Slavery is just a cover! Very soon you will see calls for reparations!

        1. So long as it includes all. They will feel much better away from all of us.We will feel even better away from them.

          BLM = to black KKK.

  12. Morning all

    SIR – The comment by the footballer Raheem Sterling that “the only disease right now is the racism we are fighting” is an insult to those of any colour who have suffered or died from Covid-19 and also to those working flat-out to ensure this country can return to some form of normality.

    Chris Davis

    Stevenage, Hertfordshire

    SIR – The protesters are telling us that Black Lives Matter. Yet by defying the social-distancing instruction they put their own lives at risk (and the majority were in the category of black and minority ethnic), and, should they become infected, will expect to receive treatment, imposing further risk on the gallant NHS.

    The police are also at risk, not only because of the protesters ignoring social distancing, but by having missiles hurled at them. Sadly, of course, any firmer action would be conveniently regarded as repressive police brutality. What is the answer?

    John E Thornton

    Marlow, Buckinghamshire

    Advertisement

    SIR – The statue of Winston Churchill had “was a racist” spray-painted on it. Why was the nearby statue of Gandhi not also defaced? Gandhi wrote racist comments about black Africans when he was in South Africa. The university of Ghana removed his statue in 2018 because of this. Should we not take his statue down immediately?

    R G Thomson

    Taunton, Somerset

    SIR – Tearing down Edward Colston’s statue reminded one of the fall of Ceaucescu or Saddam Hussein, and of course Stalin and Lenin’s statues at the end of the Soviet Union.

    Those acts were spontaneously done once the despicable policies of those people could be denounced. Edward Colston was born in 1636, nearly 400 years ago, and was a slave trader and also a philanthropist. Throwing history in the dock is no way to learn from it.

    Fenella Ignatiev

    London SW7

    SIR – I deplore the thuggery at the weekend demonstrations but cannot entirely condemn the removal of Edward Colston’s statue – a symbol of inhumanity. Colston’s philanthropy was based on exploitation of a most abhorrent sort. Better to destroy this symbol than to loot or do violence against the police.

    David Leech

    Balcombe, West Sussex

    SIR – I was disgusted to see the police in Bristol allow a mob to commit serious acts of vandalism. What will police in London do when a mob in Trafalgar Square uproots the statue of the slave-owner George Washington, and throws it in the fountain?

    Washington was every bit as bad as Colston (a man who never lived in Bristol as an adult and was, for all his sins, a philanthropist who endowed schools, almshouses, hospitals and churches in London as well as Bristol).

    A contemporary said of America’s first president that “he treated his slaves with more severity than any other man”. He certainly sold some to buyers in the West Indies with the intent of splitting up the families of those slaves who had displeased him.

    In 1781, 17 of Washington’s slaves escaped to seek the protection of the King aboard HMS Savage, anchored in the Potomac near Washington’s plantation at Mount Vernon. They clearly understood the difference between American oppression of their race, and the life they would enjoy as free men and women if they made it to England.

    It’s a pity today’s protesters do not share their perception.

    Nicholas Young

    London W13

    SIR – I have heard so often that it was “only a minority” of troublemakers.

    Why, if it was only a minority, were the police unable to prevent the toppling and defacing of statues?

    Alan Sabatini

    Bournemouth, Dorset

    SIR – I read that the police said it would have caused more disorder to stop the removal of Colston’s statue. So it’s mob rule, then, is it?

    Jack Marriott

    Churt, Surrey

    SIR – Violent demonstrations of anarchy in Bristol. I would lay a modest wager against there being any prosecutions. They would be too dangerous to contemplate.

    David Abell

    Christchurch, New Zealand

    SIR – The cowardly statement by the Bristol officer in charge on Sunday and the pathetic policemen who knelt at the protest in London are sure signs that the police are being badly led. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, has a serious illness on her hands which requires urgent surgery.

    Anthony Brookes

    Charlwood, Surrey

    2. “Better to destroy this symbol than to loot or do violence against the police.”
      Does David Leech also advocate the demolition of Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, bearing in mind what these two represent?

    3. Anthony Brookes, like rot, the decay spreads from the head.
      Cut it off.

  13. The new normal, giving all the top jobs to black people while white folk sod off and die

    1. This week Nottler competition

      Watch as many adverts on TV as you can and count how many ‘totally white’ family units you see

      Every family now seems to have at least one Nigel in the woodpile

  14. I see Piers Morgan is doing his excellent impression of a gobby know-it-all on Good Morning Britain again.

    The man should given an award or something.

  15. Just been investigating a parcel coming from Latvia containing chainsaw parts for which they charged a fair amount for the postage. The Latvian end was fine – took a couple of days for it to get to the UK. Tracking says it was received at HWDC Langley at 04:58 on 31st May, and has been there ever since.

    After fighting my way through the online Help maze for half an hour, I found an email address to send enquiries to, which will no doubt be ignored, since they know they lost the parcel and do they care? Likewise the telephone helpline will need a good cup of tea and a lot of patience to be told my call is important to them, when they know and I know it isn’t.

    HWDC is one of those Central Distribution Hubs so beloved of modern management. It is based in Heathrow, so it is bound to be crime-ridden and rather unpleasant. Only the lives of black criminals matter in that corner of London, or indeed anywhere in London. My mother, who is living in North London right now knows it is a lottery whether something she ordered will be delivered or stolen.

    I was a Royal Mail postman in the early 1980s. The integrity of the staff was considered paramount, and we were all vetted and tested periodically for honesty and competence at securing the mail. Now it seems they can take on any drug-addled gangster, so long as he, she or it is adequately black. How the British Royal Mail has fallen since Vince Cable enabled Goldman Sachs extract maximum profit from it!

    1. We use to send cash in sealed birthday cards to great newnephews and nieces. Back in the late 90s was when the cards failed to arrive.
      One of our old posties was jailed for stealing from his rounds.
      He got the sack. 😊

    3. Post Office lost my welder, many years ago (about 1980).
      How can you “lose” a big parcel that weighed about 40kg?

      1. When we were parcel sorting, we joked that some of the parcels bore an Italian sporting word “Fragile” meaning ‘football’. We could kick it around or see if we could get it in the farthest sack from the door in one. I had a taxidermist on my round, and we didn’t do that with any of his parcels, especially when they had been held up in the sorting office and were a bit ripe and smelly, and dripping juices. I do hope he managed to get all the bits of that fox back together in the right places. “Put the body in the freezer” was the instruction left on my frame.

      3. I’ve known of stuff being lost in well organised warehouses. A pallet sitting in a corner was repeatedly overlooked for weeks while the company was being turned over to find it.
        One of our longer term whisky storage areas had casks of cognac which had been sidelined there for up to seventy-five years. The warehouse people knew that they were there of course, but management had changed and no one had oversight. Eventually a newly appointed warehouse manager noticed and asked questions. The cognacs were blended and bottled, including Hine 1953, Pellison 1950, Grande Marque 1906 and others. I have a bottle waiting for the day the doctor tells me I’m on the way out.

        1. Celebrate yor demise, HP? For you alone, or are others invited?
          1906, eh…? mmm…

    4. I’m going through the same.
      I paid premium postage for quicker delivery. When nothing had arrived after 10 days I complained and was informed that they don’t start to investigate until 28 days have passed from expected delivery.

      Because we live in a hamlet with no road names, house numbers or signs someone has to be near the phone to guide them in. Usually we are given a specific day, but in this case not.

      When/if I get the parts or my money back I’m looking forwrd to giving them a dreadful review.

  16. Interesting that the multi billionaire who finances BLM is the same multi billionaire who has been “leveraging” the British government for “three decades” !

  17. NHS blood unit systematically racist, internal report finds. Tue 9 Jun 2020 06.00 BST

    A large unit within the NHS’s blood and organ transplant division has been found to be “systematically racist” and “psychologically unsafe”, according to an internal investigation into working conditions that was leaked to the Guardian.

    You will probably read a lot of this sort of stuff in the future to justify the White Population being replaced by incomer stock. Expect to see for example far more of them on TV, both in programmes and News, which will be in a variety of minority languages and come to look something like Indian or Pakistani channels.

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/09/nhs-blood-unit-systematically-racist-internal-report-finds

    1. Fine. All the BLM adherents can die of rotten kidneys and leukaemia, then the police can return to doing what they do best; dressing up in tutus and confiscating Easter eggs.
      Morning, Minty.

    1. Good Moaning, Anne.

      I am pleased you mentioned hair.
      Have you noticed how this enforced lockdown has effected your
      hair colour? …mine has turned grey with hints of dark blonde, it
      used to be the other way round!!….:-))

      1. 🙂 I’m at the annoying stage where it’s too long to be short, but not long enough to be pinned up.
        Buy shares in Elnett, I’m using it in industrial quantities.

        1. I used to use it, Anne, but had to stop
          when the eczema attacked my head!
          I wear my hair short, otherwise it is an
          uncontrollable mess…the curls go
          entirely their own way.

      2. Being unable to have her monthly head dying session, the DT’s grey hair is certainly becoming more & more noticeable.

        1. Ah hem! Bob.

          We girlies don’t have our hair dyed,…..
          we have a little enhancement to restore
          its natural colour!! :-))

          1. When it’s finished i will send you a before and after pic. You can decide if it stays or goes.

    1. In which the Muslims played (and are still playing) a large part and got very rich on it.

    3. “road names & public spaces reflect a bygone era“. Does that include all the various ones named after Mandela??

    4. Is London actually stronger now than it used to be before diversity?

      Perhaps the Mayor could explain why he thinks it is – but would any BBC journalist be prepared to question him firmly on the matter??

    5. Gawd ‘elp us:

      “Gaylene Gould, of the Mayor’s Cultural Leadership Board, said: “Statues are symbolic reference points of our nation. Set in stone, they become immovable objects and problematic because they cannot be contested. In this new imaginative period we have moved into, it’s time to create a new imaginative model for publicly honouring London’s people and it’s many, many cultures. This new commission marks a step in the right direction.””

      In this new imaginative world there will be unicorns and money trees for all everyone that belongs to a faux-victim group, no honkies.

  20. An interesting website about slavery:

    https://www.freetheslaves.net/our-model-for-freedom/slavery-today/

    Modern Slaves Are Cheap and Disposable
    New slavery has two chief characteristics—it’s cheap and it’s disposable. Slaves today are cheaper
    than ever. In 1850, an average slave in the American South cost the equivalent of $40,000 in today’s money. Today a slave costs about $90 on average worldwide.

    1. Now that’s what I call progress.
      We can thank the UN, the EU and numerous UK governments of all stripes for this great leap forward in productivity.😎

    2. My previous research, looking at an old invoice, suggested a figure of £9,000 in today’s money (at around the same time). I suppose it was a very imperfect market where there was no full knowledge of all prices. There would be differences between wholesale and retail prices, of course. In any event a slave was not cheap. A slave represented an expensive investment. As I have mentioned before, I doubt that the ROI was very good.

    1. I drink Yorkshire Tea. I’ll throw away what I have left and buy something else. A futile gesture I know but at least it’s something.

    3. There is good news how ever, Owen Jones has stated he is switching from PG Tips to Yorkshire Tea. This reminds me of Geldof and the fishing, good news for fishermen, and likely bad news for Yorkshire Tea.

      Here is his tweet!
      Replying to @YorkshireTea and @thisislaurat
      👏👏👏 That’s it, I’m switching from PG Tips

    4. I always thought that Yorkshire Tea was a bit of an oddity as I understood the tea came from the Indian sub-continent and other far-flung places. I didn’t see any tea plantations when I lived in the West Riding but I cannot have been looking hard enough.

    6. There is good news how ever, Owen Jones has stated he is switching from PG Tips to Yorkshire Tea. This reminds me of Geldof and the fishing, good news for fishermen, and likely bad news for Yorkshire Tea.

      Here is his tweet!
      Replying to @YorkshireTea and @thisislaurat
      👏👏👏 That’s it, I’m switching from PG Tips

      1. I didn’t think Yorkshire tea was very good the once I tried it. I’ll stick with Café Direct and Clippers, whether they’ve vitue signalled or not.

        1. I find the taste of tea is dependent on what your water from your local supplier is like.
          In my experience what tastes nice at home may not be true in another part of the country, and of course vice versa.

          1. I’ve always found hard water makes the best tea – have lived on the chalklands most of my life. Can never make decent tea where we holiday in Spain with really soft water.

        2. I wasn’t keen either – I’ll stick to PG loose tea, as Typhoo doesn’t seem to be available here any more, not loose anyway.

    7. If they really stood against racism they’d have nothing to do with BLM.
      Daft idiots.

  23. Morning, all. Late on parade. Fires to clean. Stuff to do.

    I see that the government feels “strongly” that Lives of Color (sic) Matter. But that the rest of us can go to hell in a handcart.

    At least it is sunny this morning. The weather, that is.

  24. Morning all.

    Just read a snippet on the front page of DT where Daniel Radcliffe says “trans women are women”. I wondered idly if he’d speak the same way if he went to bed with one of them? Somehow I don’t think so!

    What a sad country we live in. No government, no police force, no border force, no one with the balls to stop the anarchy gradually enveloping us.

    1. “…no one with balls…” made me smile, vw – especially in relation to your comment about trans women…!!!

    2. Morning V. It must have been like this in past situations. The intelligent and aware can see the approaching catastrophe but cannot alter it. The European Jews had somewhere to escape to. We don’t even have that.

      1. What can we do? We’ve never been a revolutionary country, never had to be. I just feel so helpless. Writing to my MP is a way to let off a bit of steam but I need to remain polite when all the while I am raging.

      2. The best lack all conviction while the worst
        Are full of passionate intensity.

        [William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming)

    4. The Country is in total disarray and without a viable option to take over and improve matters. Perhaps a short period of anarchy will wake up the slumbering British and get them to make the changes necessary. Lurching from one useless government to another is no way to run a Country, we need change, major change.

    2. Good morning Maggiebelle

      I think that as a people the Britsih are finished. It’s over for us.

      1. Be afraid, be very afraid.

        But, more to the point, will we do something – anything – to fight back against the totalitarian state that is being forced upon us?

        I am currently too old to physically fight back but I call upon the rank and file of the British Armed Forces to stand up and take over from our effete Police Farce and to enlist willing volunteers to join them.

        We need the numbers to outflank the horribly racist BLM movement and Antifa and their backers and organisers.

        1. The armed forces have been on a diversity recruitment drive. I shouldn’t hold your breath.

    3. So presumably in future all Police officers will have to be Black? Cue waves of cognitive dissonance when they start asphyxiating or shooting unarmed Black criminals.

    4. So bring on numerous groups of workers – traffic assistants, robbery investigators, hate thought inventors and so on into a new organisation which to avoid confusion, we shall call police.

      Demilitarising the police makes sense, most police forces now appear to have more firepower than many armies.

      1. Not in this country – they just stand by and watch while statues are torn down and thrown into the harbour. Or they attempt to charge on horseback and are routed by thugs throwing bikes and bottles at the horses.

  27. Boris Johnson says Britain must do more to tackle racism, as he admits to ‘undeniable feeling’ of injustice. 8 June 2020 • 8:50pm.

    Mr Johnson said he “will not support or indulge those who break the law, or attack the police, or desecrate public monuments”.

    “We have a democracy in this country. If you want to change the urban landscape, you can stand for election, or vote for someone who will,” he added.

    He warned those who attacked public property or police officers would “face the full force of the law”.

    Morning everyone. This is like Louis XVI announcing that those who attacked the Bastille will be tracked down and punished. It is an irrelevance. The damage is done. Not to the statue but to the authority of the Central Power. It’s craven submission to the rioters and abdication of responsibility for the Rule of Law along with its general incompetence, vis-à-vis the virus tells us it that will not see out its mandate. The probability of a Labour administration is now almost a certainty.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/08/boris-johnson-says-britain-must-do-tackle-racism-admits-undeniable/

    1. Starmer has been lined up for the job and is getting good coverage from the press, despite been totally useless

    2. Fine words from Johnson. Now, where’s the action? No, thought not…

      ‘Morning, Minty.

      1. He and his Government have U-turned so many times that he doesn’t know right from left nor up from down: ergo, directionless as well as spineless. All that euphoria back in December over the news that Corbyn had failed yet again and we were heading for sunlit uplands, and now…

        Morning, HJ.

    3. I have little faith that any of those who caused mayhem over the weekend would, “face the full force of the law”, when the police ‘service’ is populated with clowns like Supt Bennett of Avon and Somerset Police.

      Dick and her Met didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory either; yesterday evidence surfaced that a small group had surrounded Churchill’s statue to protect it. However, Dick’s ‘service’ moved them on and shortly after, the statue was defaced. Deliberate or incompetence? It doesn’t matter as either reason is sufficient for the public to have little belief that the ‘service’ is fit for purpose. That so many senior officers across the Country share the same levels of uselessness when faced by organised criminal activities e.g. rape/trafficking gangs, XR, BLM, County Lines, inner city gangs, modern slavery etc is indicative of a gross failure in the recruitment and promotion processes. It is past time that the spotlight is turned on Common Purpose and its activities exposed.

      1. Can we bring back the night watchman? A crippled crumbly with a dim lantern might have a better sense of imposing law and order.

        1. I’m far too young to remember the night watchman but I have vague memories of the man who lit the gas street lighting around the St Mary’s area where my grandparents lived.

    4. The law as a flabby kipper.
      Please, grandchildren, make sure your qualifications are portable, as your country appears to be finished.

    5. Louis XVI might have saved his and his family’s life if only he hadn’t been a ditherer. Compare and contrast with Charles II’s conduct after Worcester.

  30. BTL comment on the latest lack of government blunder. only 1318 deaths in people with no pre-existing health problems in England.

    Old McDonaldTrump 9 Jun 2020 10:55AM

    Only 1,318 UK Covid deaths in people who had no underlying health conditions.
    Only 3 of whom are school age children.
    What is this really all about?
    See tab 3

    https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/COVID-19-total-announced-deaths-3-June-2020-weekly-tables.xlsx

    1. Must be fake news – can’t go round making people feel a bit less anxious…

    2. Those are hospital deaths – presumably most of the care home deaths also included people with dementia and other conditions. It certainly puts things into perspective.

    3. Bear in mind that the CCP cunningly advised against autopsies, so it is possible that some of those 1318 deaths did have underlying conditions; if not, perish the thought that they died due to poor clinical decisions, eg complications as a consequence of unnecessary intubation.

      1. I wonder how many of the excess deaths, when they can be counted, will turn out to have been due to other conditions like untreated cancers and heart conditions.

  32. It is looming in the background, across the world:

    Black Lives Matter only really refers to those of Afro Caribbean ‘heritage’ who live in the West

    I doubt if many charities operate in the US to alleviate the suffering of those remaining in Africa, as opposed to those lucky enough for their
    ancestors to taken to the New World as slaves

    The crunch time willcome when the followers of Islam, get picsed off with those described above.

    As the Chinese say May you live in Interesting Times, which as you all know is a curse

    1. I do wish the media were not so selective in their news coverage.
      We never see items about those millions of African-Americans returning home to their roots.

  33. When did Boris Johnson morph from the larger than life, water cannon buying mayor of one of the greatest cities in the world to the shrinking violet that we see now?

    It can’t all be down to a few days in an ICU…

    2. Oh, yes it can!
      When he was taken in, I posted that the experience will change him, and it has. He’s lost his crusading energy, and with that, so has the cabinet. Now nobody can be arsed to do their job, never mind about properly.
      It’s a real shame, I hoped the UK was about to BREXIT and beat it’s own path to the future, but it looks like the virus has stopped all that.

  34. On several occasions in 2018 and 2019, I went on marches with my fellow Brexiteers*. At all times the Police did an excellent job of protecting us, and we gratefully complied with their instructions.

    None of the officers concerned ever expressed an opinion about our cause, which was exactly as it should be. What has changed? Perhaps we should have defaced a statue or two.

    1. I was lucky before the Hunting Act. I went on some demos, but I was in the Gobi when peaceful protesters were clubbed by police wielding batons.

  35. As a matter of interest, is the White population of South Africa and Zimbabwe treated on a par with the Blacks

    And, I do not mean all equally badly

    I am sure they are, having looked a at the Black Leaders

    1. Part of an email I sent to a very leftie long time friend………..

      No body lifted a finger to help the 20 odd thousand people murdered by Mugabe when he realised they would never vote for him and so on and so forth regarding Africa. This has become nothing more then the perfect opportunity for far left wing anarchy to flourish. I suspect many of the people present and jumping about now, were outside Dominic Cummings home terrorising his family.
      Which African countries are constantly involved in tribal warfare war?
      There are currently fifteen African countries involved in war, or are experiencing post-war conflict and tension. In West Africa, the countries include Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Togo. In East Africa, the countries include Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda.
      Strangely this doesn’t meet the criteria of BLM.
      Nor does the ongoing and daily torture rape and murder of white African farmers and their families. Where surely all life matters.
      I lived in south Africa (Travelled around hundreds of miles north and east) for two years and had the greatest respect for the black people, less for the Afrikaners who incidentally built the country up to it’s then high standards, which attracted many black people from other regions to move to and live and work.
      But the once bustling metropolis JHB is now a total shit hole, filthy littered streets, burned out wrecked, building, filthy squats, wide spread prostitution, murders and violence associated with drug dealing. the once beautiful parks and gardens now well know areas for drugs and prostitution. And people in the townships still share one out side tap for their water.
      The ANC government gave them the vote but nothing else. They are just lining their own pockets. As has happened in many African countries. Which the UK has subsidised for decades, with billions of pounds of UK tax payers money. In Africa they just don’t seem to get it. Perhaps it’s inherent, in the genes.
      An old school bubby went to live in JHB quite a few years after I had returned home, he was in printing and commerce. He was sitting in his car at traffic lights in an area Named Hillbrow, the black man in the car behind got out and shot Richard in the (Dead) head. Nobody every found out why. Then drove off never to be seen again. Have a look at the website The death of Johannesburg, you’ll see what I mean it’s an absolute tip. No excuses for that, apart from a distinct lack of education and inherent ignorance.

    2. They have been subjected to a murderous rampage – especially elderly white farming people – nobody is ever arrested and the police just take no notice. They are definitely not treated equally or with any respect at all.

  36. An open letter sent by Archbishop Vigano to President Trump. This archbishop is actually a Christian. Bear with him, he gets to Cultural Marxism, Covid and the riots about a third of the way down.

    Holy Trinity Sunday

    Mr. President,

    In recent months we have been witnessing the formation of two opposing sides that I would call Biblical: the children of light and the children of darkness. The children of light constitute the most conspicuous part of humanity, while the children of darkness represent an absolute minority. And yet the former are the object of a sort of discrimination which places them in a situation of moral inferiority with respect to their adversaries, who often hold strategic positions in government, in politics, in the economy and in the media. In an apparently inexplicable way, the good are held hostage by the wicked and by those who help them either out of self-interest or fearfulness.
    These two sides, which have a Biblical nature, follow the clear separation between the offspring of the Woman and the offspring of the Serpent. On the one hand there are those who, although they have a thousand defects and weaknesses, are motivated by the desire to do good, to be honest, to raise a family, to engage in work, to give prosperity to their homeland, to help the needy, and, in obedience to the Law of God, to merit the Kingdom of Heaven. On the other hand, there are those who serve themselves, who do not hold any moral principles, who want to demolish the family and the nation, exploit workers to make themselves unduly wealthy, foment internal divisions and wars, and accumulate power and money: for them the fallacious illusion of temporal well-being will one day – if they do not repent – yield to the terrible fate that awaits them, far from God, in eternal damnation.
    In society, Mr. President, these two opposing realities co-exist as eternal enemies, just as God and Satan are eternal enemies. And it appears that the children of darkness – whom we may easily identify with the deep state which you wisely oppose and which is fiercely waging war against you in these days – have decided to show their cards, so to speak, by now revealing their plans. They seem to be so certain of already having everything under control that they have laid aside that circumspection that until now had at least partially concealed their true intentions. The investigations already under way will reveal the true responsibility of those who managed the Covid emergency not only in the area of health care but also in politics, the economy, and the media. We will probably find that in this colossal operation of social engineering there are people who have decided the fate of humanity, arrogating to themselves the right to act against the will of citizens and their representatives in the governments of nations.
    We will also discover that the riots in these days were provoked by those who, seeing that the virus is inevitably fading and that the social alarm of the pandemic is waning, necessarily have had to provoke civil disturbances, because they would be followed by repression which, although legitimate, could be condemned as an unjustified aggression against the population. The same thing is also happening in Europe, in perfect synchrony. It is quite clear that the use of street protests is instrumental to the purposes of those who would like to see someone elected in the upcoming presidential elections who embodies the goals of the deep state and who expresses those goals faithfully and with conviction. It will not be surprising if, in a few months, we learn once again that hidden behind these acts of vandalism and violence there are those who hope to profit from the dissolution of the social order so as to build a world without freedom: Solve et Coagula, as the Masonic adage teaches.
    Although it may seem disconcerting, the opposing alignments I have described are also found in religious circles. There are faithful Shepherds who care for the flock of Christ, but there are also mercenary infidels who seek to scatter the flock and hand the sheep over to be devoured by ravenous wolves. It is not surprising that these mercenaries are allies of the children of darkness and hate the children of light: just as there is a deep state, there is also a deep church that betrays its duties and forswears its proper commitments before God. Thus the Invisible Enemy, whom good rulers fight against in public affairs, is also fought against by good shepherds in the ecclesiastical sphere. It is a spiritual battle, which I spoke about in my recent Appeal which was published on May 8.
    For the first time, the United States has in you a President who courageously defends the right to life, who is not ashamed to denounce the persecution of Christians throughout the world, who speaks of Jesus Christ and the right of citizens to freedom of worship. Your participation in the March for Life, and more recently your proclamation of the month of April as National Child Abuse Prevention Month, are actions that confirm which side you wish to fight on. And I dare to believe that both of us are on the same side in this battle, albeit with different weapons
    For this reason, I believe that the attack to which you were subjected after your visit to the National Shrine of Saint John Paul II is part of the orchestrated media narrative which seeks not to fight racism and bring social order, but to aggravate dispositions; not to bring justice, but to legitimize violence and crime; not to serve the truth, but to favor one political faction. And it is disconcerting that there are Bishops – such as those whom I recently denounced – who, by their words, prove that they are aligned on the opposing side. They are subservient to the deep state, to globalism, to aligned thought, to the New World Order which they invoke ever more frequently in the name of a universal brotherhood which has nothing Christian about it, but which evokes the Masonic ideals of those want to dominate the world by driving God out of the courts, out of schools, out of families, and perhaps even out of churches.
    The American people are mature and have now understood how much the mainstream media does not want to spread the truth but seeks to silence and distort it, spreading the lie that is useful for the purposes of their masters. However, it is important that the good – who are the majority – wake up from their sluggishness and do not accept being deceived by a minority of dishonest people with unavowable purposes. It is necessary that the good, the children of light, come together and make their voices heard. What more effective way is there to do this, Mr. President, than by prayer, asking the Lord to protect you, the United States, and all of humanity from this enormous attack of the Enemy? Before the power of prayer, the deceptions of the children of darkness will collapse, their plots will be revealed, their betrayal will be shown, their frightening power will end in nothing, brought to light and exposed for what it is: an infernal deception.
    Mr. President, my prayer is constantly turned to the beloved American nation, where I had the privilege and honor of being sent by Pope Benedict XVI as Apostolic Nuncio. In this dramatic and decisive hour for all of humanity, I am praying for you and also for all those who are at your side in the government of the United States. I trust that the American people are united with me and you in prayer to Almighty God.
    United against the Invisible Enemy of all humanity, I bless you and the First Lady, the beloved American nation, and all men and women of good will.

    + Carlo Maria Viganò
    Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana
    Former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America

      2. I’ve been a Freemason since 1982. It’s a spiritual journey, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols. I don’t know enough about alchemy to comment on that system.

      3. Thanks for the link, Caroline. That’s fascinating. Sadly the only freemason I’ve known well and who would have been happy to explain, was a former work colleague who died of Aids some years ago. Interestingly, once Andrew realised that his days were coming to a premature end and having been raised a Catholic, he began attending mass again and on a daily basis.

  37. Notice that a person has been arrested in connection with murder of retired police captain David Dorn. It is mentioned in the Mail, but not in other papers that I can see.

    Anyone any idea why this is not headline news across the world?

    1. Morning VOM. Well Dorn was an ex-cop and his purported killer was black so it’s a little difficult to squeeze into the present narrative!

  38. Britain goes coal free as renewables edge out fossil fuels
    “We here at Drax decided that coal was no longer the future,” explains Will Gardiner, the chief executive of the power group.
    “It has been a massive undertaking and then the result of all that is we’ve reduced our CO2 emissions from more than 20 million tonnes a year to almost zero.”
    He says the plant now uses seven million tonnes of pellets sourced from commercial forests in the US a year and says Drax will phase out coal entirely by March next year.
    Hmm, “commercial forests in the US”, who the hell do they think they’re kidding?
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52973089

    1. Smack forehead time. Do they not realise that burning wood generates CO2? FFS.

      2. But it’s not fossil fuel CO2. That’s the argument of these dimwits.

        1. Indeed. They don’t – or won’t – understand that coal and oil are just CO2 and H converted into carbon and hydrocarbons eons ago, as opposed to trees that are formed from CO2 a few decades ago. Ultimately all are ways of storing solar energy for use as a power source and simply recycle C and H.

        2. Well, antiques are often more valuable that the modern equivalent.

      3. You should know better than to ask serious questions of that nature.😎

        1. It’s what they shove under all the carpets that causes all of the nasty problems.

    3. Now is the time to ask the little git London mayor why is he allowing a 50 megawatts gas fired power station to be built on green belt land in Mill Hill, London NW7 ?
      Burtonhole Lane Lane.

      It’s because the area has been swamped with new homes on every conceivable site. And still it goes on.

    4. Not to mention the energy used in cutting, chipping, pelleting, drying and shipping the pellets to Drax from the USA.
      I assume someone is also replanting the trees in the US? It’s the law here in Norway, felled trees must be replaced within a reasonably short period.

      1. Probably a rich, incompetent thicko. He know on which side his bread is buttered.

  39. Just heard Sadiq Khan mention “emotional intelligence”. Dear Lord* above, we’re truly doomed!

    *A rhetorical device, not a summons to prayer.

  40. Apropos the recent thread on the stupidity of man, apart from mingling with deadly disease-ridden people in close proximity, the Darwin Awards highlught other ways to kill yourself

    We are always excited when the latest batch of Darwin Awards are announced, and this group is no exception. The Darwin Awards are given “to bestow upon (the remains of) those individuals who, through single-minded self-sacrifice, have done the most to remove undesirable elements from the human gene pool.” So, without further ado, it is once again time to bear witness to all manner of hideous death to showcase mankind’s glorious stupidity!

    5th runner-up: David Hubal, a 22-year-old ski enthusiast and prankster. While engaging in some late-night tomfoolery on the slopes, Hubal and pals stole a yellow foam protector off one of the lift towers at Mammoth ski resort so they could use it as a sled. Unfortunately, the moron rocketed right into that very same unprotected lift-tower at catastrophic speeds, offing himself.

    4th runner-up: Robert Puelo, a 32-year-old troublemaker who wanted to intimidate a Saint Louis Kwikee-Mart clerk, so he grabbed a hot-dog off the warming rack, stuffed it into his mouth, and walked out the door without paying. Later, cops found the miscreant lying dead in the parking lot, a six-inch wiener lodged in his throat.

    3rd runner-up: Marino Malerba, a Spanish hunter who shot a stag standing above him on an overhanging rock and was killed when the animal fell on top of him, antlers-first.

    2nd runner-up: Jerry Stromyer, a West Virginia party animal who popped a blasting cap into his mouth during a backyard bash and bit down, triggering an explosion that blew off his lips, teeth, and tongue. He survived, but Mr. Darwin gives Jerry an “A” for effort!

    1st runner-up: Tony Roberts, 25, who wanted to be a member of Mountain Men Anonymous so badly that he agreed to let a friend try and shoot a beer can off his head – with a crossbow – as an initiation. The bolt entered Roberts’ right eye and exited the rear of his skull, but it managed to miss every major blood vessel and it didn’t even touch his brain (which isn’t really all that surprising, when you think about it). He survived, but another “A” for effort, here.

    And now for the WINNERS! This year’s Darwin Award for Natural Selection at it’s Best goes to the head-banging duo of John Pernicky and Sal Hawkins, two hard-core Metallica fans from Washington state.

    The head-banging buds were royally bummed about not being able to score tickets to the Metallica concert at the George Washington amphitheatre, so they decided to drive up behind the place, listen to the music echoing from the inside, and get piss drunk. After getting thoroughly blotto, the boys decided to climb the 9 foot wall – the only thing that stood between them and their idols – and crash the concert.

    They backed their pick-up truck to the fence, and Pernicky was the first to go over. He was also the first to discover that there was a thirty foot drop on the other side of the wall. He crashed down through a tree until a branch snagged his underwear, trapping him in a wedgie, 20 feet above the ground.

    Looking down, Pernicky spotted some bushes that might soften his fall. So he took out his knife and cut off his undies, and plunged into a clump of holly bushes, causing a holly branch to penetrate deeply into his anus.

    And, oh yeah… he stabbed himself with the knife. Meanwhile, Sal figures out that all is not well. He jumps on the wall and spies his injured cohort writhing and bleeding on the ground below.

    So he tosses Pernicky a rope, ties it to the bumper of the pick up, gets behind the wheel, accidentally throws it into reverse, and hits the gas… When the police arrived, they found Hawkins’ lifeless body 100 feet away from the truck. When they moved the truck, they found Pernicky’s corpse underneath it, half-naked, a holly stick up his ass, a knife embedded in his thigh, and his shorts dangling from a tree branch 25 feet overhead. You know, that’s exactly the way yer old pal wants to leave this world!

    1. Good morning, NtN. After all the BLM news, you’ve brightened my day today!

      :-))

      1. Happy to oblige, Elsie.

        Good morning and enjoy a good belly-laugh at the outrageous stupidity, currently being exhibited by all the vile, hypocritical virtue-signalling white Judases.

      1. Thank you Horace and Good morning. I didn’t notice that, now edited.

        My only excuse is, that it is just another example of the illiteracy of the American language.

        1. Good Morning to you.
          I bame it on my fingers. On my pertinent ticktocker. On my distraction with the music. On my thoughts being elsewhere.

    5. Well, if we are considering doing away with monuments to slave-owners, we should remember that a major slave-owner was – Mohammed. So perhaps all mosques in this country should be torn down.

      Mosques Must Fall!

  42. The Lefties and the BLM mob should be given a history lesson about the US Democratic Party.

    1. Went to war to retain slavery.
    2. Started the Ku Klux Klan.
    3. Initiated the Jim Crow laws.
    4. Only political party, in history, to use atomic weapons (twice) in warfare.

    These are four facts that I never tire of telling tediously tiresome Republican Party-bashers about.

    1. I’m not absolutely certain but I seem to remember reading that during the ‘reign’ of Dems, more slaves than at any other time were brought into the USA.
      And wasn’t it a Republican by the name of Lincoln who brought in the 13th amendment which saw an end to importing African slaves.
      I suspect he’d be classed as racist in todays wild and much troubled democratic minds.

    2. And don’t forget the Republicans pushed for the 13th 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution Of The US while a Democrat President tried to veto one of them.

  43. Good morning all

    I was just wondering whether the black woman bishop of Dover welcomes every illegal migrant coming ashore, and in particular those blacks who are so desperate to get to the UK, despite the fact that they are anticolonialists ?

  44. Government to row back on pledge to have all primary children back to school before the summer. 9 June 2020.

    Gavin Williamson is expected to row back on plans for all primary school children to have at least four weeks of class time before the summer during a Commons statement this afternoon.

    Surprise Surprise. To say this lot are dysfunctional is to flatter them! They are utterly useless.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/08/schools-may-stay-shut-beyond-september-matt-hancock-signals/

    1. On the plus side, while children are not in school, they’re not being brain washed.
      Where do you think the rioters were ‘educated’?

    3. Just heard Nick Ferrari on LBC mention that there are doubts about having all children back to school in September. What the hell is this useless bunch of no-marks smoking?

    2. Those morons are too thick and can’t be bothered to check anything that might actually matter or make a difference. He wasn’t actually a slave trader.
      And slaves were sold by persons of neighbouring African tribes who had no time or respect for their fellow human beings.

    3. Morning to you

      Do you know what , no one is going to listen to you, everything falls on deaf ears . We are old whitey’s , they don’t mind that we don’t matter .

      We are the products of an old fashioned education system which emphasised our greatness prosperity bravery and kindness and long cultural pedigree.

      We might as well sign ourselves off . Thought censorship is gaining pace, and we are being confronted by very unpleasant change .

      I have 2 spaniels , gentle clever and very resourceful .. they are usually quite friendly , but you know what , if they sense trouble ahead re other dogs who are not so friendly, their hackles go up , they can smell unfriendliness and discord.. We usually turn around and head off in a different direction.

      To me , this BLM business is absolutely disgraceful .. Our local newspapers report on county lines , stabbings theft and car crime and other unpalatable things.. Is this BLM a ruse to get felons off the hook , to divert police attention so much so that they are incapable of bringing people to justice for fear of being called racist?

      We are all being bullied by coercive and controlling suggestion.. we are being stifled by common purpose thought processes.. We have to take care of our own , don’t we .

  46. Morning all 😊
    I’m taking a fresh outlook at life.
    No news is good news.
    Turn it off.

    Has anyone else been watching the Australian series about the 2001 outback murder ?
    What a palaver, it’s almost as boring as Picnic at Hanging Rock.
    She keeps saying he hands were tied behind but when she was ‘rescued’ by the effing and blinding truckies her hands were tied at the front.

    1. We find it fascinating.
      The biggest shock was finding it took place nearly 20 years ago.

  47. Former Miss Hitler beauty pageant contestant jailed with three others for being National Action members. 9 June 2020.

    Four neo-Nazi “diehards” convicted of being members of the banned terrorist group National Action have been jailed.

    Former Miss Hitler beauty pageant contestant Alice Cutter and her former partner Mark Jones were convicted of membership of a terrorist group after a trial in March, alongside co-accused Garry Jack and Connor Scothern.

    Cutter was jailed for three years, while Jones received a five-and-a-half-year prison term.
    Jack was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison, and Scothern was handed a sentence of detention for 18 months.

    It’s interesting to note that none of these people have pulled down any statues, assaulted any policemen or passed any false currency. The same applies to their organisation, National Action; it hasn’t bombed, killed or maimed anyone. Go figure!

    No comments either!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/09/former-miss-hitler-beauty-pageant-contestant-jailed-three-others/

    1. Oops. A bit of nonunderreadery*. Sorry.
      I say further up (3 minutes ago) that stiff prison terms for these silly children are essential to support the official narrative of there actually being a “far right”.

      *I’m devising new words for failing to read down before posting my mumblings.

    2. ‘Afternoon, Minty, it’s not too hard for the left to justify their fear of the ‘white far-right’, with the Common Purpose Judiciary handing down sentences like this.

      They’ll be coming for us next.

          2. You originally mentioned, ‘Three Days of the Condor’ and constant monitoring.

            I sometimes deliberately make outrageous comments against the Mostly Shit Media, The Police Farce, The BBC and others too numerous to remember.

      2. Afternoon Nan. Yes with the clamping down on any dissident opinion I don’t think it will be too long before NoTTL disappears from view and maybe some of us with it. Let us speak while we may, a Great Darkness is descending over the Free West.

        1. Much of stuff sent to the internet goes to Chinese servers, I think. Zoom has apparently increased its revenues enormously in th past few months. Set up by a Chinese person who moved to the USA. Just saying.
          Any subversive group would only communicate by letters sent through the post. Coded of course.
          While I’m on the subject, who owns the VPN services? If I were involved in counter-espionage I’d set up a VPN, probably in Switzerland.

  48. How little reporting there has been on the murder of black ex-cop David Dorn in St Louis. He was shot while defending a friend’s pawn shop. A suspect, Stephan Cannon, has been arrested but I doubt if the media will hang, draw and quarter him quite so willingly as Chauvin. Cannon is black.

    1. Wonder what would happen to anyone demonstrating with ‘Justice for David Dorn’ banners?

    2. Just shows, that in reality, Black Lives don’t Matter a tinker’s cuss.

      2. Oh I wouldn’t pin this one on them.

        This is straight from the Orwell playbook, he who controls the past controls the future.

        This is deadly serious, we have an establishment that hates its own people, it is now in the process of destroying our identity, erasing our culture and re-writing our history.

        Give the BBC et al a couple more decades and the few children left of the original inhabitants of this island will be taught that the first person to step on the Moon was a black woman called Beyonce.

        1. Well, they already know that imperialist Churchill started the last war by attacking defenceless Germany.

      3. Didn’t they start with the burning the books in the library of Alexandria in the 7th century?

    2. Is Khan completely blind to reality? Here’s a stunted Muslim asian who is Mayor of London – not sure I could call it the capital except in name, as it doesn’t represent the country one bit.

      His utter lack of self awareness is comedic.

      1. That’s because English people have effectively been cleansed from their own capital city.

        Mr Khan can rely on the block vote of EU nationals to remain in power.

        He knows what he is doing, his power base is not people like thee and me, quite the opposite actually.

  50. It’s only fair that if the media are going to refer to that scumbag
    George Floyd as a ‘gentle giant’ then they should also refer to Adolf
    ‘the prankster’ Hitler, Myra ‘cheeky girl’ Hyndley & Harold ‘what’s
    he like’ Shipman.

  51. Funeral to take place of the unarmed black man who ‘sacrificed for the world’. Tuesday 9 June 2020.

    In Houston, as in his birthplace in North Carolina at the weekend, the memorials for George Floyd represent a sense of personal loss.

    A highly-talented basketball and football player, known to friends and family by his middle name Perry, he was also a familiar figure on the city’s hip hop scene. He moved to Minneapolis six years ago but two of his children still live in Texas.

    There is a new mural in his memory near his old home in Houston’s Third Ward.

    “It is a watershed moment for the American people,” said Houston’s police chief Art Acevedo.

    Were I not inured to the lies of the MSM I would probably be outraged by this utter fantasy. Floyd was a minor criminal caught in the act and would have mugged any of the clowns uttering this twaddle. It does however illustrate how far the West has strayed from Truth. It no longer even knows what it is, never mind speaks it.

    https://news.sky.com/story/george-floyd-death-funeral-to-take-place-of-the-unarmed-black-man-who-sacrificed-for-the-world-12003217

  52. Delingpole: ‘Churchill Was Racist’, Say BLM. Wait Till They Hear About the Guy He Beat. 9 June 2020.

    Another part of the problem is that the police have been brainwashed into imagining that the main threat to law and order and stability comes from the (largely mythical) far right — when it fact, for years, the far more significant threat comes from the hard left.

    This is not, of course, a delusion unique to the police. It’s rife in academe, in the entertainment industry and across much of the mainstream media – especially in the shamelessly leftist broadcasters the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky News. This, in turn, is the result of decades of infiltration — Gramsci’s ‘Long March through the Institutions’ — by the radical left which has relentlessly pushed the propaganda message that Britain is ‘inward-looking, xenophobic and nostalgic for empire’. The left’s purpose is to ‘defame the nation and demoralise its citizens’.

    This is a particularly good article by Delingpole. Lucid and well-reasoned. Well worth a read.

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/06/09/the-real-reason-for-blms-attack-on-racist-churchill/

    1. Membership of far right groups across the entirety of Europe is probably a couple of hundred.

      Who is doing all the rape and bombing across the world? Answers on a postage stamp.

      1. Afternoon Phizz. Hence my post about National Action. Miss Hitler, menace to the Free World! Give me a break!

        1. Good afternoon your Mintyness.

          I see them as a sad remnant of imagined past glories. Not to be taken seriously.

          It does fit the narrative today to expose these foolish people and parade them to make it look as if the authorities are doing something.

          1. “Not to be taken seriously.”
            Actually the powers that be take them very seriously. These are amongst the very few people on whom they can nearly credibly hang the term “far right”.
            These silly children will get many years in prison. This is essential to the official narrative. The Establishment will congratulate itself on having foiled right wing terrorism. At the same time they will confirm the existence of right wing terrorism to the masses. It is the tip of the iceberg.

          2. When German people protested in a square about the rapes of young girls by muslim men. (including a photo of each girl, some of whom had been murdered) they were branded far right.

            All the media need to do is apply the label.

          3. No one, other than myself, has suggested that there should be an audit of care homes in places like Rotherham to discover if any of the young girls are unaccounted for. It seems hardly credible that none of them were murdered. Is that still a step too far for our police and courts?

          4. Given the Police, Social Services and Councillors turned a blind eye for forty years and the Courts are infested with Common Purpose i would say there is a snowflake in hell chance. Social cohesion don’t ya know.

      1. Of course, Attlee had the idea that by encouraging people come to work in Britain was a form of slavery itself .. indentured to the Crown with promises … They just don’t get it , do they ?

        1. Most of that generation were hardworking and not trouble-makers – unlike their descendamts.

  54. She may be married to Piers Morgan so her judgement is questionable but Celia Walden is not totally devoid of common sense. Here is the conclusion to her article in today’s DT about the way the LGBT are attacking J.K.Rowling for impertinently suggesting that only women menstruate:

    How many times in our continued fight against racism and discrimination of every kind have we lamented the bigotry, closed mindedness and exclusionism of past societies and civilisations – and all for what? To box ourselves in with ever more exclusive language and labels, devise new divisions and cultivate still more intransigent viewpoints? That’s not about wanting to effect change but a bored and cosseted society spoiling for a fight.

  55. Black Lives Matter supporters compile a hit list of 60 UK ‘racist statues’ they want pulling down as Sadiq Khan calls for ALL London’s slave trader landmarks to be removed
    Sadiq Khan will ‘review and improve’ London diversity of statues and says he hopes slave traders are removed
    London Mayor said capital’s landmarks largely Victorian – and should include more ‘people of colour’
    BLM activists to gather at Cecil Rhodes’ statue in Oxford at 5pm as part of ‘Rhodes you’re next’ campaign
    ‘Topple the racists’ website maps more than 30 statues organisers claim ‘celebrate slavery and racism’
    These include statues of Sir Francis Drake, Horatio Nelson and Oliver Cromwell outside Parliament

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8401935/Sadiq-Khan-calls-Londons-slave-trader-statues-removed-orders-landmarks-review.html

      2. Mandela, Ebagum, Kenyatta, Sad Dick Khant, Ms Dick, Jeremy Dustbyn, Lewis Hamilton,
        Idiot Amin, Barking O’Banana, Floyd (Not Pink or the Chef)

        1. Gilmour’s stepson climbed the Cenotaph do not forget. Did his Dad give him a spanking I wonder?

          1. I know when the little shit turned up in Court he had had a ‘short back and sides’ and was wearing a suit.

            As with all on the Left…total fucking hypocrites.

          2. But he was sent down, notwithstanding. And his sleb luvvie parents were sooooooo upset.

          5. I don’t know how long he actually served. I don’t follow scum like that. Our sentencing is now 50% off and another 20% off for good behaviour. Probably then released to open prison or tagged. Like i said….5 minutes.

    2. Did the poisonous little shit give a list of worthy BAME’s to replace them?

      Good afternoon, Belle.

        2. Belle……..be grateful for small mercies!

          I now live in a small estate in the middle
          of a very busy village. Although I am local
          to this area, but because I have lived here
          since only 1995, I do not expect immediate
          acceptance.

    4. We need a new Home Guard. The enemy is not only within the walls, it’s running the place.

      1. Yeah, but he was of the tinted persuasion so that doesn’t count. It’s only whitey who should be ashamed and grovel.

        1. The piece concludes that, “slavery is effectively illegal in modern Islam”. I wonder about that. I’ve read that Saudi Arabia finally outlawed slavery in 1962 but there are videos posted online claiming to be evidence of slave markets continuing there. One would be unlikely to survive an investigative exploration, so who knows?

          1. I believe that foreign maids and such like have their passports confiscated by their “owners” so that they can’t just flee.

          2. There is a great deal of modern slavery equivalent.The BBC and Black Lives Matter who continue to focus on the crimes of slavery in America should recognise that it continues to exist in various Muslim countries, And this is because of the tenets that were taught and lived by the Prophet of Islam.

          4. Although slavery is effectively curtailed its equivalents persist as indentured labourers and dispossessed servants. There is ample justification in the Koran for slavery and its sanctification must in some way be linked to its persistence in the Islamic world until very recently. It can be argued that given that its practise is religiously approved of, total abolition could be seen as contrary to the teaching of the Prophet.The rejection of the premise that the Koran is valid for all time presents gentle Muslims with a rather threatening quandary.

    6. Could we declare independence, set up an independent republic of Nottle and rescue all the statues?

  56. ****BREAKING NEWS****

    Vatican announces canonisation of George Floyd.

    That’s a poor joke, but don’t bet it can’t happen

      1. He is definitely a saint in the eyes of the Canadian broadcaster. They interviewed one of St George’s school friends who managed a very tearful, gushing accounting how wonderful he was, a hero that everyone in the neighbourhood looked up to. No mention of how he loved his Gran.

      2. He is definitely a saint in the eyes of the Canadian broadcaster. They interviewed one of St George’s school friends who managed a very tearful, gushing accounting how wonderful he was, a hero that everyone in the neighbourhood looked up to. No mention of how he loved his Gran.

  58. Younger daughter just sent me this!
    I think we need a bit of a larfff!I
    IMG_6281.JPG

      1. I know pet! Struggling to post an image! Technophobes rule OK!
        IMG_5547.jpeg

        1. You need to have it saved to your computer and click on the upload Images icon at bottom left of the comment and then click through to where you have the photo saved.

          2. Oh bravo cynarch! Thanks again! I wondered what those little squiggly things were!

          4. We passed our local McDonald’s earlier today, at around 10.50 actually, and people were queueing! Unbelievable. I s’pose it was all those people who don’t cook.
            Edit: )forgot to put) The time was significant – they open at 11.00!

          5. People are weird! We passed a drive-through Costa yesterday afternoon and it was absolutely heaving!
            Really hot weather and there they all were, stuck in their cars, waiting for terrible coffee? Madness!
            Sorry! IMHO!

  59. I’ve been looking at the website of a cheese-maker. They also sell oatcakes. They do not give the ingredients of the oatcakes. I went to the website of the oatcake producer.The oatcakes are described as “Original” and the bakers describe themselves as “Traditional Family Bakers”. When did traditional bakers use palm oil?
    Their website includes a defence of palm oil. There is reference to the RSPO. The RSPO describes itself thus, “The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is a global, multi-stakeholder initiative on sustainable palm oil.”
    However, I have read as much as I can of the blethers on their website. From it I gather a number of things;
    1. The RSPO is made up of palm oil producers and users.
    2. They certify themselves.
    3. Sustainability only applies after they have legally demolished rain forest and planted palms.
    4. Their website is the biggest pack of lies on the planet (possibly).

    https://www.wooleys.co.uk/buy-online
    https://www.rspo.org/about/our-organisation
    https://ga.rspo.org/ga15/Resolutions/RSPO_P&C_2018.pdf

  61. Today’s DT
    Baldies of the world, throw off your chains
    Bald men are more likely than others to suffer severe symptoms from Covid-19

    I posted this response under the article in the DT by Chartles Moore this morning and am awaiting the response. (As usual my tongue is in my cheek rather than anywhere else!)

    On the other hand, and I speak from personal experience, bald men such as myself, are exceptionally sexually potent. A wise woman will always choose a bald husband because bald men are generally also rather more entertaining and better company than vain and hirsute men.

    Also men who are slightly stout, as I am, are generally more jolly than men such as Cassius who have the ‘lean and hungry look’ and overthink things.

      1. Given his boast; that support you are offering, is it a jockstrap, or a little more intimate?

        };-O?

      3. Yo CT

        and not for:

        On the other hand, and I speak from personal experience, bald men such as myself, are exceptionally sexually potent.

  62. Latest Breaking News Just In –

    Due to the pandemic people are being advised to riot and demonstrate from home.

    BLM are advising supporters to smash up their garden gnomes and throw them in a pond

    1. And rather than clapping….chuck bricks from their patio into their neighbours windows.

  63. Good day to you all. Been away a while

    I have to admit I am in favour of equality. If someone defaces a monument to dead servicemen or throws a civic statue into a river then it is only right that they too should be defaced and thrown into the nearest river. That’s the sort of equality I support.

      1. Better but drained – very much like inbred idleness but without the guilty feeling.

    2. Is this site being monitored by the BBC or the Guardian? My computer packed up 30 seconds after I posted this comment.

      2. I think I had/have Lyme’s disease. I was bitten and developed many of the symptoms but the blood test did not find any bacteria – so I received no treatment. I was completely whacked out at times. Could just be getting old… but I am recovering slowly.

        1. That’s very bad luck.

          Because I keep the garden fairly wild, I seldom get through a year without at least a couple. I am very careful to extract them immediately I spot them and so far have been fortunate. I watch the bite site closely to be sure the telltale signs don’t appear. There are a lot of deer in the local woods.

        2. I thought that when you told us you were ill – it did sound like Lyme’s disease. Glad to hear you’re on the mend.

          4. My last blood tests were ordered by my GP on Friday afternoon. My test was done the following morning (yes, Saturday) and the results were accessible to me on my on-line health page and the GP’s system early that afternoon.

            My BiL in the UK, is severely ill. He was prescribed a test on Monday and the earliest will be Friday and he’ll have to wait a further week for the results. The NHS, envy of the world? I don’t think so.

    5. Welcome back – was beginning to fear the worst. Want to buy a used Kangoo??

        1. Thank you – Needs must – though the MR put it on E-Bay an hour ago – and there have been 49 expressions of interest – a dozen silly bids – and one for 10% above the asking price.. In an HOUR!!

          2. Thanks, John. All a bit hectic. 171 views; 11 offers…. The MR is telling the other ten to up their offers!!

            I’d still rather sell to real French person…. Will keep in touch.

    1. As for that turd in charge of London, the sooner he is reigned in the better.

      He was set up in the position by pure (admin errors) stealth, he’s there for only one reason, the purposeful destruction of our social structure and established culture.

  65. Mark Steyn sat in for Rush Limbaugh for this podcast. He gives a very interesting analysis for where we- and in particular the USA are now in the first 30 minutes after which it is a phone in programme. Mark basically says there is now one approved viewpoint and you ignore this at your peril.There is now no debate.
    https://www.steynonline.com/10361/one-giant-college-campus

    1. I would have said that there were two approved viewpoints in the US, Republic and Democratic.

      Although what exactly the Democrats stand for (apart from not Trump), who knows.

      1. As with our Conservatives, surely most establishment Republicans are actually neocon and indistinguishable from the liberal Democrats?

        1. The establishment Republicans are hiding, waiting for trump to go. Never mind the Democrats, I think that the old guard are the biggest threat to Trumpa reelection.

          1. Who would the Republicans put up in his stead who might have even the slightest chance of winning?

            If Trump gets replaced by a Democrat President I suspect he might well turn out to be the last Republican President until the Democrats eventually to split along ethnic lines, 20 or 30 years from now, by which time America will be an utterly different place.

  66. Nigel Farage branded ‘outrageous’ in furious row on GMB after defending statue of slave trader Edward Colston. 9 June 2020

    Nigel Farage was branded “outrageous” on Good Morning Britain during a furious row over the toppling of a slave trader statue at a Black Lives Matter protest.

    The Brexit Party defended Edward Colston after a statue honouring him in Bristol city centre was ripped down by protesters on Sunday and dumped into a harbour.

    His microphone was eventually muted so the other guests could speak.

    This should be watched really. Farage is up against both Morgan and the other two Guests. They speak over him and his sound is distorted before being cut off. It is of course a matter of opinion whether this is deliberate or not but no doubt exists in my mind.

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/nigel-farage-black-lives-matter-good-morning-britain-a4463496.html

    1. Real UK History 0 BLM History 100

      The past is a different country

      Without the likes of Colston, we would have to watch 24/7 adverts od them begging for

      Water
      Teechers
      Lips

      specs

      etc

      Their leader do have the Mercs and Beemers though courtesy of Overseas Development Fund

    1. At a party at a neigbours house i instructed their Alexa to set the alarm for 3.00AM and to play the Jaws theme music. My neighbour overheard this and cancelled it.

      I recounted the tale in the kitchen because i thought i was being funny (drunk). Turns out the had a second Alexa unit in the dining room and it picked up the command.

      Surprisingly they still talk to me.

        1. How very dare you !

          Actually they are both ex-RN and are used to pranks.

          Don’t ask me about the wet dog……….

          2. The evening included a pond, a dog that loves water and people dressed for a party. My dry cleaning bill was very expensive that weekend.

            I didn’t expect the damn mutt to follow my orders. Dolly never does. 🙁

    2. Actually, for once I did have to go somewhere; the licence fee refund arrived (MOH turned 75 in May) in the form of a cheque. We had to go to the bank to put it in (something we couldn’t do over the phone or on the Internet). It should have been in my name (since I paid the tax last September), but there was no way I was sending it back to Crapita to wait another 28 days minimum before they sorted it out. Into MOH’s bank account, then cash withdrawn to reimburse me. Job done.

      1. Not sure about all banks, but you can pay-in cheques at the Post Office; you would need a deposit envelope provided by your bank. And a cheque.

  68. I just had to log in again. The ‘I’m not a robot’ asked me to tag all the statues in the photograph – half the plinths were empty… and isn’t tagging illegal, despite what Blek Looting Mobsters think?

    1. That us because the protestors got there first, did you check in the canal?

  69. I’ve just been out! I went to Cirencester for the first time since mid- February, to our printers (one chap working on his own) to pick up some of our leaflets. It was good to get out and the car enjoyed a little run too.

      1. Just about. A fallow deer ran across the road in front of me when I was on the way back.

          2. Pity – should have rung my boy Dan -(Long Newnton) – he is a deerhunter! And he is working from home…

            He is 54 tomorrow… I can remember every minute of what I was doing then…at the old Charing Cross Hospital, across the road from the station.

          3. As it was going into Cirencester Park – it probably belongs to Lord Bathurst.

          5. Thank you. He is a tremendous chap. Great father. Super husband and step father. A rock.

      1. Trying, and succeeding in turning this country into the shithole his parents left.

  72. That’s me for the day. Quite a day!!

    I’ll look in briefly tomorrow – then we are out most of the day to go to a funeral. Someone Carolyn has known all her life.

    Off for a little drinky poo. Have a jolly evening.

          3. Medical science for us both.

            Hospital pays everything.

            Leave the effing undertakers weeping….

          5. Thought they might have it as a good example of a spent body that had a good life. :-))

          7. I too wish to buried and would be very angry if cremated against my wishes. Someone told me today that it has been compulsory cremation for Covid victims – haven’t checked how true that is though. She also told me that at a funeral for one of her partner’s relatives only 6 people were being allowed to attend the inhumation.

          8. As I understand it re funerals, numbers are limited but it can either be at a crematorium or at a graveside.

  73. Evening, all. Been a dull day here – no sun, but not cold. Sat out and read, sat out and drank wine after lunch, then did a bit in the garden. New arch behind the seating area and solar powered lights on the obelisks (but have a feeling that they won’t work because there appears to be a break in the wire – will have to get the soldering iron and the insulating tape out).

  74. FFS, have just seen a bunch of pious, cretinous MPs standing for a minute’s silence for the dead American. What the hell is going on? What do we have to do to stop this collective madness??

  75. Small crowd [500 – 1000] in Oxford wanting the Cecil Rhodes statue to be removed. BBC Radio 4 say it is a peaceful protest.

      1. His scholarships have funded many distinguished people through college but the demonstrators have no regard for this side of Cecil Rhodes.

        1. And when the statue is pulled down, I wonder how many of them who have benefitted will defend his memory; very few I suspect.

          1. The last time a Rhodes scholar attempted to have the statue removed Oriel discovered they risked losing tens of millions from legacies. I suspect the same former Oriel men and women will make the same threats and Rhodes statue will remain.

            These protesters seem ignorant of the fact that others fund their colleges. College income relies heavily on legacies and the investments accruing from them.

          2. My old college was endowed tens of millions recently, and the members are constantly being asked to contribute.

            I cut off my small donations for a few years after the Jo Cox beatification. I now contribute again, but if it goes that way again I’ll stop forever.

          3. I’m always getting begging emails from one of my almae matres, but they are so woke there is no chance they are getting any of my money (and oddly enough, it isn’t Essex!).

          4. I was happy to donate, not large sums, but every little helps.

            Unfortunately it’s gone woke. But with Chris Smith as Master that’s to be expected.

            His predecessor, Dearlove was excellent, and his wife was one of the pleasantest people I’ve ever met.

            I was “up” at the same time as CS, he was a very engaging individual and clearly destined for politics.

        4. Use the money to give one-tickets to the Dark Continent to those who want his statue removed?

        5. The Bristol protesters don’t seem to want to give up any of the goodies that Colston bequeathed to the city either.
          Funny, that.

      1. Perhaps in his memory everything he did for Africa including all the infrastructure should be removed as well.

  76. Houston Police lined up saluting as the George Floyd funeral procession passes by. I wonder what they are thinking.

  78. With the current government, such as it is, residing at U-turn central, I am coming to the conclusion that Johnson and his Cabinet will end lockdown on the toss of a coin or the turn of a card. It’s all they have left.

  79. A quick google on ‘britain’s anti-slavery debt paid off 2015’ brings up plenty of Guardian and Daily Mirror headlines (Olusoga features in the reports) about the compensation to slave owners but little about the cost in money and lives of the Royal Navy’s actions in putting down the trade.

    Here are the letters on the subject that appeared in the Sunday Telegraph six years ago after Jamaican slave descendant Willie Thompson made the news when he called for Britain to pay slavery reparations. Some of his ancestors had worked for David Cameron’s distant family.

    Britain led the way in ending slavery and has paid her debt
    The evils of the slave trade cannot be reversed with restitution

    23rd Feb 2014

    SIR – Britain has already paid her debt for her involvement in the African slave trade.

    In 1808 Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act 1807, outlawing the slave trade.

    In the following year, the Royal Navy’s African Squadron was formed, its mission to put an end to the slave trade.

    Its enemies were many and formidable: the African tribal chiefs who sold their own people into slavery; the Arab traders who rode shotgun on the slave caravans to the coast; and the slave ships of the rest of the world, heavily armed and prepared to do battle to defend their right to traffic in the forbidden “black ivory”.

    That African slavery was a monstrous trade, and that many prominent Britons amassed fortunes on the back of it, cannot be denied, but no other nation had either the will or the ability to stamp it out. The Royal Navy deployed 30 ships and 4,000 men against the slave traders, who were predominantly Spanish, Portuguese and American, and 2,000 British seamen gave their lives so that African slaves might be free, while the 30-year campaign cost the British taxpayer in excess of £2 billion in today’s money.

    In 1838, Robert Peart, a slave of Spanishtown, Jamaica, wrote: “Thanks to Almighty God and next to the English nation, whose laws relieved us from the bondage in which we have been held.”

    The debt has been paid in full.

    Bernard Edwards
    Llanvaches, Gwent

    SIR – The idea that Britain should compensate anyone for its role in the history of slavery is as preposterous as it is impractical.

    Restitution could only be satisfied if Britain were to transport every West Indian of African origin back to Africa. I do not think there would be many takers.

    Those who did choose to return to Africa should then sue the governments of countries whose kings and chiefs sold their ancestors to European traders in the first place.

    While Britain must take its share of the blame for the evils of slavery, it should take pride in the fact that it was responsible for the abolition of both the slave trade and slavery throughout the Empire, and that it encouraged (and where necessary, forced) the rest of the world to comply.

    Nicholas Young
    London W13

    SIR – If the slavery compensation case against Britain has any validity, may I suggest that our Government take immediate action for similar claims against the modern nations from which the Romans, Vikings and Normans originated.

    Each invaded this country, killing and enslaving many of our forebears.

    Ken Rimmer
    Chelmsford, Essex

    SIR – My sympathies are with Willie Thompson, the Jamaican striving for compensation from the British Government for the misery of the slave trade.

    However, during the 18th and 19th centuries, three quarters of Jamaica was owned by Scots, so perhaps his claim should land on the desk of Alex Salmond, rather than that of David Cameron.

    A glance through the street names of Glasgow and Edinburgh reveals strong connections with the Caribbean islands.

    Wealthy Scottish landowners had no compunction about despatching their own peasant workers to work as bonded servants beside the Africans on their plantations. Many of the Scottish plantation workers married African slaves, who in turn took Scottish names; Willie Thompson’s own name is a classic example of the Scottish influence in Jamaica.

    The plantation owners made huge fortunes from their slave-driven plantations, and many mansions and estates in Scotland still exist through ancestral barbarity.

    What they couldn’t bring back to Scotland was slaves, because the laws of Scotland declared that no person in Scotland could be owned by another.

    George Wilkie
    Hemingford Grey, Cambridgeshire

      1. So many don’t, though. In consequence, they continue to repeat the mistakes.

      2. And you can’t go back to all those wonderful better times PT.
        Most of it is being cut down erased, knocked down and built over.
        That’s what is making most of us so angry.

        1. I’m angry too.
          Instead of tearing down memorials of controversial figures, look to history and reflect on our relationship with our past.Rhodes cannot be expunged from history.

          1. We had a similar discussion in our lounge when the news came on and I had to go for a lie down.
            Now it’s morning and still it goes on.
            Cecil Rhodes was a great man he wanted to build a railway from Cape Town to Cairo. I’m not sure but I believe that he spent quite a lot of his fortune on building universities and hospitals.
            I’ve a photo somewhere of me and some travelling companions standing along side his statue at Groote Shoure (spl ) hospital in Cape Town.
            Where the first human heart transplant took place.
            Left wing idiot Wilson wrecked Rhodesia.
            I was there when the ‘talks’ were going on on board HMS Tiger.
            They hated him. Everyone did.
            It was a happy educated well run almost self sufficient prosperous country.
            There’s a book Entitled When a Crocodile Eats the Sun.
            I forget the name of the journalist who wrote it. It’s a good read, quite poignant.

          4. I had the book, but I think it ended up in a local charity shop.
            Those shops are quite a good source for cheap old reads. I found the first Book by Hemmingway in one at the end of last year. Fiesta. I think he was just practicing…..

        1. No amount of suds will wash the sambos white – Labour In Vain (old pub sign) 🙂

  81. I was thinking of getting some garden supplies from B&Q and my wife
    had just driven past it on her way back from her mother’s house.

    I said “how big is the queue outside B&Q?”
    She replied “well it’s big and orange and probably about the same size
    as the B”

          1. #MeToo. If someone had told me how many times i would need to repaint my house in 50 years i would never have bought one.

          2. You should never have bought one that had been painted, that’s for sure 🙂

  82. So this is how it works then

    You welcome immigrants from the third world into your country,
    You make make laws to prevent discrimination,
    You let in more more immigrants,
    They come here for a better life and to escape terrible persecution,
    You give them the same life chances to education, health and welfare services as everyone else.
    Then politicians use them for political advantage, expose wrong doing and racism.
    They use that to quell any dissension by concerned natives,
    The natives have to adapt and tolerate the customs and practices of the newcomers however alien to our culture and beliefs.
    They let more in, soon they are the majority in our cities and towns.
    The public services and police decide to turn a blind eye to terrible persecution of native people
    The new arrivals and their second and third generation children decide they no longer like our country as it was.
    They tear down all the old historical monuments and replace them with their own.
    Then all we have left is a third world country.
    Job done

    1. Indeed……………..

      https://i.4cdn.org/pol/1591459880565.jpg?__cf_chl_captcha_tk__=5993b73d2d11e8004c3680b3124f31e4482f52b6-1591464667-0-AQa6oI1EwF6yJZwFrNkLKoXWulOu5bzY-_lB_y8ZeSrAcs8pdP1KaYuPm91MGSArgf9wEO3z3GcSuHG0AwWkz1WwsJWMdQEoy1OK7hZ9yEIbuSjd5K8NG-7srMriuaMWUcpxL8h3PoWWGHpB6YLXyvZo0B03PirAJXiZ-TlabTtH40V2wD04K4XiYeGeryeeBlrVsCtHij_w2tbyLbyQa2-qafWhay-TY8APM_xyGV-abLcfPjVCv0FKEWNEdu19Sjp2HCwx10PU-lZhmryY2P7NA8snuRzoHWhkAZLWpQsGt-QN0CtoR1YT93QBg2xPMzfp_tA0HAcCuJK0VMKd-Y1LhCIaKXXvrROjUZHa2xvTAtIWRW6alixaRvUc-hiPNiuXmznXchWW3EpzvFlRczbYDhh5SVX5zzwn7CzuDmQiezjrLq2RWs4syeQZ0Ihm6MyNH8p7dE6kU-MuiMdwzIx1WP1vtYcZ0iCt6S2bFzzain-tCZMfOmxkr8YNNwCiDpggI2IKb6BHcRB3K7ecKkBzYOmchgSzNl7g8iIEnJzdi8F_s3vLJR8hyGzBZZgp00y81RXYTbJ067jkMGNw6m8

    3. They are trying to start a revolution and the government does nothing. It needs stopping now.

      1. They want a revolution if we all kill each other it will cut our carbon emissions

  83. If the streets get really out of hand this summer, will temporary prisons be built as quickly as the emergency hospitals?

    No, I shouldn’t have asked…

    1. The emergency hospitals could be used as prisons. There are no patients.

      1. They’re not very secure though, are they? I was thinking more along the lines of stacks of shipping containers.

        1. Well they could be used as open prisons – I’m sure those will be considered suitable for protesters.

  84. England manager Gareth Southgate calls for Bame opportunities at the top British sport

    So tell me Mr. Southgate, how many white managers are there of football teams in Africa?
    And also tell me, how many white players are earning £100,000 + a week in Africa?

    2. If it had been a a black copper putting his knee on the neck of a blackman , what then, or a black cop killing a white man ..

      This mass of hysterical twerking trouble makers need sorting out ASAP.

      1. As I see it, the problem America has now is that “Police brutality” is a given; it no longer matters who did what to whom. The police are the enemy.

        I can’t help hoping that the police all over America go on strike and that the mobs tear the celebrities’ and billionaires’ properties apart.

        2. I’ve been thinking that but it occurs to me that the wealthy folk orchestrating this will have private armed security guarding their own properties.

        3. Yet the vast majority of Americans rely entirely on the
          Police for their protection.
          I well remember m first visit the USA, in May 2001, I was
          entranced by the feeling of safety I felt when I arrived
          at Boston………yet three months later…….!

          1. On the opposite side of the scale .. and the Atlantic , Moh and I were held up by an armed Nigerian TRAFFIC WARDEN .. who demanded DASH from us and the contents of the boot of our VW Beetle .. We were in Nigeria .. and it was a very hairy tense situation .. He was so out of it , we could have been murdered . Expat slaughter was a common occurence in those days . they wave their guns around like magic wands , and grin at you, wearing reflective sunglasses .. stroppy, confident and smellily terrifying . They know it as well .. Bullying taken to the extreme . We were lucky , handed over money, we had 12 empty tonic water bottles in the boot of the car to exchange for 12 full ones , and we name dropped like mad .

      2. “a black cop killing a white man.”
        Belle, the MSM would have listed every malfeasance the white guy had committed since the age of 5.

    3. How strange. Whenever I happen upon a televised football match white players are in the minority, particularly in the higher echelons of the Premier League and English internationals.

      1. Indeed.
        There is an assumption that a top class player will make a top class manager and that is seldom the case.

        Of course there are exceptions to that generalisation but more often than not the top managers were not the best players of their generations.

  85. BBC News, SKY News and Al Jazeera News continue to broadcast the ‘private funeral’ of George Floyd …

    Is it a funeral ? or, possibly,

    A richly-funded incitement to further international protest and violence ?

    2. I was wondering just who or what might be getting buried. I’m afraid the seeds of doubt have been planted in my mind that the whole episode was a charade.

      1. A large and tasteless domestic ‘boardroom’ with fluorescent uplighters; perhaps Keir Hardie would have approved …

    1. It takes hard work and application to be a medic, brains too.
      Wonder what demographic is known for that kind of drive and application?

        1. I’ve met some terrible ones too! Racist and incompetent and full of their own status.

  89. Workmen remove monument to 18th Century slave dealer Robert Milligan on wharf he helped construct in London’s docklands – after protesters’ draw up hit list of 60 ‘racist statues’ on day of Black Lives Matter protests across Britain
    Amid growing pressure, Museum of London has taken down the bronze figure of slave owner Robert Milligan
    The statue in West India Quay, London, had been shrouded in placards with a blanket placed over its head
    A spokesman for museum said it ‘recognises’ statue is part of ‘problematic regime of white-washing history’
    It follows BLM activists gathering at Cecil Rhodes’ statue in Oxford as part of ‘Rhodes you’re next’ campaign
    ‘Topple the racists’ website has mapped around 60 statues that must go for ‘celebrating slavery and racism’

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8401935/Sadiq-Khan-calls-Londons-slave-trader-statues-removed-orders-landmarks-review.html?ito=push-notification&ci=17991&si=7271111

  90. e-mail from James Delingpole:

    Black Lives Matter Are the Enemy of Civilisation

    Nothing makes me despair quite so much for the future of our civilisation than when I see people who affect to be its staunchest defenders acceding to its destruction.

    Consider, for example, this tweet today from the BBC’s only conservative journalist Andrew Neil.

    https://twitter.com/afneil/status/1270366986950848513

    It’s a response to a report that a statue of Belgium’s King Leopold II has been removed after being vandalised by protestors.

    Neil has this to say:

    No loss. The man was a monster, responsible for genocide of millions. Should never have had a statue in first place.
    I wonder what Neil is trying to tell us here.

    Is it

    a) that he’s a well-read, historically-informed fellow who has trawled his extensive memory banks and been able to deliver a brilliant, ex cathedra pronouncement on Leopold II which we would all do well to heed?

    b) that beneath that brutish, rough-hewn exterior Neil is as cuddly as a kitten with a pink ribbon round its neck and more caring than a dozen Mother Theresas on International Caring Day – and if there’s one thing he can’t abide its genocide?

    Either way, it sucks and what he’s doing here is unforgivable.

    Now, more than ever, those of us on the right side of the argument need to close ranks and be sure to concede not an inch of territory to the enemy. The shield wall must remain impenetrable and when one of us wavers, he – or she, in the case of Allison Pearson with her equally stupid tweets about how the Edward Colston statue deserved to be taken down – they betray us all.

    All this by way of a prelude to my latest Breitbart piece. Here’s the conclusion (but you should definitely read the rest too…)

    It amazes me that even intelligent people – including one or two politicians and commentators on the right who really should know better – are taking these disgusting Black Lives Matter/Antifa protests at face value, by applauding the demonstrators’ motives or even daringly admitting that they too feel sufficiently strongly about the evils of slavery to agree that the Colston statue should have been pulled down.
    This violence has nothing to do with George Floyd; everything to do with the hard left’s relentless war on Western Civilisation. And thanks to the naivety, weakness and cowardice of the Establishment, the hard left is currently winning.
    Oh and if you ever catch me virtue-signalling like Neil just did – shoot me.

    1. “The man was a monster, responsible for genocide of millions. Should never have had a statue in first place.”
      That’s true, but his “No loss.” is ill considered.

    2. Belgium’s King Leopold II …

      “The man was a monster, responsible for genocide of millions. Should never have had a statue in first place.”

      I agree with Andrew Neil …

    1. So you’re saying (© Cathy Newman), Miles, that most black kids are bastards?

    2. Paying women to have fatherless children is one of the worst government policies ever.

      1. I agree, but surely ‘absent fathers’ rather than ‘fatherless’.

        2. To all intents many of them are fatherless, as they do not have any father figure in their lives.

  92. Well, what an afternoon. The MR put the car on e-bay. Within half an hour, we had 200 visits; 45 e-mails and 11 offers the last one was accepted ten minutes ago – £400 above the asking price… Just looking at the e-mails as they poured in was extraordinary; let alone answering them.

    Matey (bame, natch) is coming on Thursday morning to collect the car. The outfit knows about French admin – and will bring the requisite forms. £20 notes.

    Black Money is as good as White.

    1. Well done Bill. Obviously you didn’t ask for enough moolah. Your Kangoo will now be used to transport illegals to the sunny uplands of benefit heaven. 🙂

      1. I thought about that…but, assuming that it DOES go through, I don’t care. I’ll just pull down a statue somewhere to celebrate.

      2. And they won’t have changed anything, so he’ll still appear as the owner and thus the beneficiary of the trade.

        At least a five stretch, I would guess.

    2. Well done Bill (and MR)! Mind you keep the spondulichs in yer pouch!

    3. It might take time, but count the money yourself, one note at a time. Pretend you’re old…

      There are numerous cons where notes get folded and where you might think you are getting two you’ll only actually receive one.

          2. We’re not trying to worry you. But I hope there are no statues in the garden.

          3. There’s only the one.

            It’s the solid gold one of the poor lawyers, think Burghers of Calais.

            Too heavy to remove.

        1. Please tell me about the bargain I missed. I’m not doubting you I’m just interested.

      1. I told the MR that she should have put it on at twice the price!! I am still recovering…{:¬))

          1. Ackshally, the whole thing is down to her. I have no idea how to use e-bay. Let alone put something on to sell. She is ace at it – though this was by far the biggest item.

          2. What she didn’t tell you is that she included you with the Kangoo as being for sale. That’s why she’s looking so pleased with herself this evening. {:^))

          3. ‘Clapped out French car for sale, complete with dodgy chauffeur’.

          4. I have corrected your comment, Max!

            “Clapped out dodgy chauffeur for sale, comes with free French car”

    3. It shews the ignorance of the daubers – if she has committed murder, it makes her a Murderess. You all care so much about ‘gender’, at least get it right.

  94. Yorkshire Tea have tweeted that they don’t want anyone who doesn’t support the BLM riots to buy their tea. So it’s Twinings from now on for me.

    3. Well, I have a big tin of their tea. When I’ve finished it that will be that.

  98. AP is also having a bit of a wobble with this one.

    Why Dame Cressida Dick must fall

    The one thing both Government and police fear more than civil unrest is an accusation of racism

    ALLISON PEARSON

    Here’s a puzzle for you. How can police caution two grandparents and tell them to leave their son’s garden because they have exceeded the permitted gathering of six people when over 15,000 protesters were allowed to pack Hyde Park in response to the brutal death of George Floyd in the United States?

    How is it that grief-stricken relatives are not allowed to attend the funeral of a beloved uncle because it is against the law, but furious youngsters get a free pass as they deface the statue of Winston “is a racist” Churchill?

    How does Housing Minister Robert Jenrick keep a straight face when he says reopening churches will have to wait because the “exhalation’ during the singing of hymns is a problem? And I suppose, Mr Jenrick, that scores of protesters pursuing Met officers, as they beat a frantic retreat down Whitehall, don’t present an exhalation problem with their foul, four-lettered, airborne oaths?

    Donnez-moi un break!, as the old Boris was wont to exclaim. In the Orwellian lockdown we now inhabit, “Holy, Holy, Holy (Lord God Almighty)”, which congregations should have been singing at full throttle on Trinity Sunday, is banned because it allegedly presents a danger to public health. Yet, on that same Sunday, there was no limitation on gleeful, expectorated cries of “F— the police!”

    Churches, it turns out, are in the bottom category of “the most dangerous and least important services” along with beauty salons and pubs. (Funny, they would be in my top 3 most important.) Even though C of E services are so sparsely attended that social distancing is a poignant fact of Anglican life. Meanwhile, if you fancy assembling a throng to hurl bottles into Downing Street or push a bicycle into a horse – please step this way!

    That, ladies and gentlemen, was the deeply troubling double-standard in law enforcement which we witnessed over the weekend. As it happens, I admire many of the young people who took to the streets to show solidarity with their black friends and neighbours. The young, not being calloused by cynicism, feel injustice keenly and, if you think racial injustice no longer exists in this country, well, that’s because you’re in the wrong (or right) colour skin.

    I also think the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston should have been taken down years ago and put in a museum where it belongs. Colston transported 100,000 men, women and children from Africa to America and mislaid 20,000 on the way. No one should have to look up to that.

    But none of this means it’s OK for the police to turn a blind eye to criminal damage. Superintendent Andy Bennett of Avon and Somerset Police explained that arresting protestors, as they grappled with Colston’s statue, “would have caused more disorder and disruption”. He understood “the frustration and anger many Bristolians have felt towards the statue over the years”.

    It may come as a surprise to Supt Bennett, but the police are not paid to moralize or empathize, they’re supposed to enforce the law. A fear that you may provoke protesters further if you attempt to restrain them is not enlightened law enforcement, it’s a green light for anarchy.

    Things were no better in London where we saw a collapse in Metropolitan policing standards. “Officers displayed extreme patience and professionalism throughout a long and difficult day,” said Commissioner Cressida Dick following scarcely believable scenes of frightened coppers running away from gleeful demonstrators.

    Coppers I saw in the melee who looked more like traffic wardens than riot police. Dame Cressida seemed to neither allow her officers to defend themselves or provide enough PPE to guarantee their safety. Thirty-five suffered horrible injuries as a result, betrayed by their PC boss.

    In the Commons, Priti Patel went some way to restoring public confidence when she vowed to bring violent “thugs” to justice. Still, the suspicion remained that the one thing both Government and police fear more than civil unrest is an accusation of racism. The rules on social distancing apply to everyone, or none at all.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/dame-cressida-dick-must-fall

    1. “…As it happens, I admire many of the young people who took to the streets to show solidarity with their black friends and neighbours. …” Puke!
      Oh, this has nothing at all to do with social distancing, or with the imaginary racism.

  102. Steerpike
    Will Sadiq Khan have to knock down Millicent Fawcett’s statue?
    9 June 2020, 5:39pm

    London mayor Sadiq Khan promised today that he will begin the process of pulling down ‘inappropriate’ statues around London – after Bristolians dumped the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in the river at the weekend.

    To investigate London’s landmarks, Khan has created a ‘Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm’ which will review statues and street names in the capital to make sure they reflect the diversity of its people. Khan said he expected the commission to find that it’s ‘not appropriate to be memorialising, or to be celebrating’ certain figures, especially those with a racist past and links to the slave trade.

    Mr S wonders though if Khan’s commission should perhaps start with statues erected by the London mayor himself.

    In 2018, he proudly unveiled a statue of the suffragette Millicent Fawcett – the first-ever statue in Parliament Square of a woman. At the time, Khan declared that ‘from the very first week of my Mayoralty, I supported Caroline Criado Perez’s campaign to put up a statue of a woman in Parliament Square, and I’m so proud that the day of its unveiling is now upon us.’

    But while Fawcett is mostly celebrated today for the campaign for women’s suffrage, less well-known is her ardent support of the British Empire. Fawcett was such a fan of Empire, that in 1901 she was commissioned by the government to lead an investigation into British concentration camps in South Africa during the second Boer war, after high mortality rates and appalling conditions were reported there.

    The camps had been created after the British began conducting a scorched earth policy during the war, which involved burning down villages, homes and crops to root out a guerrilla campaign. As a result tens of thousands of men, women and children were displaced and forcibly moved into the camps.

    When she arrived, Fawcett thought the camps were deeply necessary for the war, and her eventual report said the commission had a ‘generally favourable’ view of them. She also suggested that many of the deaths were caused by the ‘unsanitary habits’ of the Boers. Around 28,000 Boers died in the camps.

    But if the Boers were unfairly maligned by Fawcett, at least they were mentioned in her eventual report. When she returned to England, Fawcett said that she had investigated ‘every camp’ in the country. In fact, she failed to visit a single camp which held Black Africans, nor did her report address the conditions in which they were held. In total, an estimated 14,000 to 25,000 Africans are thought to have died in the camps that Fawcett ignored.

    Fawcett didn’t have much thought for the participation of Black Africans in society after the war either. In 1899, she wrote that after the settlement of the war,

    “‘I hope we are too deeply pledged to the principle of equal privileges for all white races to abandon it.’

    In short, Fawcett is exactly the kind of person you would expect Sadiq Khan’s statue-toppling commission to take aim at. Or perhaps the London mayor will suddenly understand the value of historical nuance when it comes to his own pet project…

    1. ‘Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm’

      How very Stalinist.

  103. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell’s famous quote comes from his justifiably famous novel “1984”……….

    So who could George Orwell, prophetically, have been describing ?

    Why… George Soros of course who likely controls the British government through his ”leveraging” organization ”Open Society” and BLM, at street level, and financed by him…. see 4, funding…….

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

    Clever old George Soros… he’s got the past, the present, and the future all sewn up.. just like George Orwell said !

    1. Yup. Just sitting back and watching the BLM mob disassemble society. They know that the ‘Bs’ aren’t inclined to build anything to replace it so it will be theirs for the taking.

    2. Because of the long dry spell. We.are in for rain & raised temperatures over the next few days & that might encourage them.

          1. I am a phisherman. In fact I’m on a fishing charter out of Plymouth tomorrow at 6am with 3 good friends in search of piscine victims.

  108. This is a muddled piece. I don’t think the writer quite understands the feelings that chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef rouse in the country. It’s more than a simple argument over protectionism. Leaving the EU and removing some unnecessary regulations for reason of cost shouldn’t mean lowering welfare and production standards.

    Brexit has reopened a divide within the Tories that cannot be bridged

    The centuries-old split between free-traders and protectionists is causing fresh headaches for Boris Johnson

    PHILIP JOHNSTON

    If one issue down the decades has been guaranteed to cause upheavals in the Conservative Party, it is protectionism. The great schism of 1846, following Robert Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws, kept the Tories out of office for 20 years as free traders and landowning farmers split. In the early 20th century, efforts to secure preferential tariffs for British and Empire agricultural products caused another rift. The UK’s entry into the Common Market in the early 1970s was dominated by arguments over the impact on Commonwealth farmers of the EEC’s trade barriers.

    Now that we have left the EU and are negotiating trading arrangements with the bloc and other countries, these internal arguments have broken out once more. Cabinet ministers have reportedly been at loggerheads over how to honour election commitments to uphold food production standards in a trade deal with the United States.

    This has been sold to the country as a determination to keep “chlorinated chicken” off the supermarket shelves, as though the rows and rows of cheap, home-bred poultry, all weighing in at 4lbs 2oz, have been leading the life of Riley before getting the chop. In reality, it is protectionism masquerading as a food standards issue since nothing associated with the US processes will harm anyone. This is about backing British farming against the might of America.

    Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers Union, has gone so far as to warn of an existential threat to the entire industry if it faced unfettered competition from the US, because domestic producers would find it impossible to compete on price.

    The most annoying thing about this debate is the attempt to pretend it is something else. Ministers fall over themselves to deny it has anything to do with protectionism even as MPs are targeted for failing to “stand up for British farmers”. Why not admit the intent and take the argument from there? Protecting domestic agriculture from cheap imports is hardly new. Free traders must acknowledge that farming is no less vulnerable to competition from outside than steel or coal or shipbuilding, all of which have gone under in the past 30 years.

    At issue is which is more important: the industry or the consumer? Free traders following the Ricardian principles of comparative advantage maintain that an overall increase in economic welfare is achieved by importing from countries that produce goods more cheaply. But there is no point pretending this does not harm specific sectors. After the Corn Laws were repealed, domestic agriculture went through a period of depression in the late 1800s up until the First World War. Since the Second World War, farming has been shielded first by UK tariffs and then by membership of the Common Agricultural Policy.

    We left the EU to forge free trade deals with other countries and yet at the first hurdle the old protectionist questions are being asked once more. One battleground is the Agriculture Bill which is to be given a second reading in the House of Lords today. In the Commons a few weeks ago, 20 Tory MPs rebelled by backing an amendment to enshrine in law existing welfare standards. The Government fought it off but it is likely to be revisited in the Upper House, where the Conservatives do not have a majority, and reinserted in the Bill, whereupon it will come back to the Commons. A major celeb-backed campaign is under way to ensure these protections are given statutory force.

    The Government opposes this but insists it has no intention of watering down animal welfare regulations and will not accept imports from countries that do not observe our standards. Yet that may well scupper a trade deal with the US. Why would Donald Trump, or Joe Biden for that matter, want to sign an agreement that kept American livestock producers out of UK markets while allowing our lamb and beef farmers access to theirs?

    It’s either free trade or it isn’t. A half-way house, whereby some goods that do not conform to UK regulations are subject to tariffs, is being explored but does not look promising. A leaked letter from No 10 instructing ministers to have “no specific policy” on animal welfare in US trade talks has heightened concern among farmers that a sell-out is on the way.

    One reason why the proposed US-EU trade deal never materialised was because the Europeans would not allow tariff free access to American chickens which cost 20 per cent less to produce. Farmers say that is because they are kept in dreadful conditions so there is no level playing field. But we also have intensive poultry farming, if not on the same scale. World Trade Organisation rules do not differentiate the methods of production when it comes to trade deals.

    Moreover, if US chickens are sold here and are properly labelled, no one has to buy them. But price is important for many consumers. Free-range chickens can cost four or five times as much as a broiler sold in a cut-price supermarket. The American birds may be cheaper still. In any case, a deal with the US also opens a huge market for UK farmers whose higher quality and ethical standards will be a marketing advantage in pitching for the custom of better-off Americans.

    Under the Agriculture Bill, farmers will continue to receive most of the support they were paid under the CAP until 2022 through a series of transition arrangements that will also protect the environment and ensure high production standards. But, they ask, what will be the point of these if they are then left to the mercies of cheap imports from the US and elsewhere? In addition, if there is no UK-EU trade deal by the end of the year, their exports to Europe will become more expensive.

    Are we really looking at the possible extinction of British agriculture? Aside from the impact on the livelihoods of farmers and the countryside they manage, it would be a serious matter, given how vulnerable this country – which imports 40 per cent of its food – is to a breakdown in supply lines.

    If the vaunted free trade deal with America looks like foundering over agriculture, which way will Boris Johnson jump? He needs to land this deal, especially as talks with the EU are not going well. But he faces the age-old choice for Tory prime ministers: farmers or consumers? It will be hard to placate both, as Peel discovered.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/09/brexit-has-reopened-divide-within-tories-cannot-bridged/

    1. Dear Heaven! We voted to leave the EU. We did not vote for cheap chicken. We knew that leaving would come at a cost. It is not a problem if we pay more for British chicken, British beef, British fish and British bread. We voted to do that. when I buy meat and fish, when French restaurants buy our best and fish we pay for quality.
      As the French say in respect of their wine “the quality will be remembered when the price is forgotten”.

      1. Unless the imports are labelled with their country of origin, consumbers may not be aware aof what they are buying. All food should be labelled, and food of higher welfare standards should also be labelled as such, and also all halal meat labelled as such, so that we can avoid it.

        1. Yes. I wholeheartedly agree. We have the bizarre possibilities attached to smoked salmon. “Scottish Smoked Salmon” means salmon smoked in Scotland. The salmon could be Norwegian. The product could be sliced and packed in Poland. So salmon grown on a salmon farm in Norway could be smoked in Scotland and packed in Poland, and still be legally called “Scottish Smoked Salmon”.
          Actually I tried the Lidl Scottish smoked salmon, sliced and packed in Poland, and it was good. Nicely sliced. (I speak as a former professional smoked salmon taster. A difficult job, but someone’s got to…)
          That goes for all products. there should be details on any components as well as final assembly.
          I saw a dry frier thing in B&M, labelled in big letters “Bosch” with a huge silver seal saying German Design etc. I turned over the box and on the underside in very small text it said “Made in China”.

  109. AP on solid ground.

    It is a national scandal that children will soon be able to go to Thorpe Park, but not to school

    The Government must do whatever it takes to get schools open and to prevent Britain becoming an international laughing stock

    ALLISON PEARSON

    Driving past a school a few days ago, I stopped to let a group of children cross the road. There must have been ten of them, all in single file, wearing their plum and grey school uniform, with two teachers keeping guard at the front and the back. I stopped long enough to see what happened when they reached the other side.

    The teachers made the children – they were very young, maybe five or six years old – open their arms wide to establish a distance between themselves and their neighbour on either side. Then, off they went, not laughing, skipping or whispering as small children do, but in a glum, stretched-out column, remote from one another.

    The children were not the required two metres apart. How could they be? Their little arms were much too short to achieve that span. Still, if one of them had stumbled into the bus lane they were far away enough to mean that no adult could have got there in time. That was my Mummy Mind kicking in. If you’ve ever had small children of your own you never stop doing that kind of instant risk assessment.

    Looking at that sad school crocodile, my Mummy Mind was telling me that those children were in danger. Not from a passing bus. The danger was from unnatural, anti-social distancing measures (SDs) which have been foisted upon them by adults who claim that it’s about keeping them safe from a virus which is fast disappearing and which doesn’t harm children anyway. It’s like that fairytale in which the wicked witch convinces Rapunzel that she must stay locked up in a tower for her own good. The witch is lying.

    Is our Government lying about schools, children and Covid19? Has the fear they instilled through public health messaging worked so well that millions of parents, under the powerful spell of irrationality, are now too scared to send their kids to school so classrooms must be reordered to cope with an imaginary threat? Have the teaching unions seized this opportunity to bugger up Boris? (Silly question. Course they have.)

    Could Matt Hancock be serious when he did a handbrake-turn on plans to get all primary-school pupils back for four weeks before the summer holidays? (A painfully modest ambition as it was.)

    Astonishingly, the Health Secretary even hinted that secondary schools may not be “ready” to resume in September, thereby maiming the prospects of millions of teenagers who are already depressed, disheartened and zombified by a daily diet of Call of Duty.

    If Hancock is serious, this is now a national scandal. It calls for legal action against the Government (one group of parents I know is already taking advice at the highest level), against the teaching unions and, quite frankly, against any of the wickedly useless adults who have failed to provide that service which is enshrined in Article 2 of the First Protocol of the Human Rights Act. A child’s right to an education.

    It is simply incredible that British schools will not be “ready” by the start of the autumn term. Why the hell not? Some 22 European countries have reopened their schools. That has not led to a spike in coronavirus infections. On the contrary, France’s education minister said it is more of a risk keeping children at home (Gavin Williamson, are you listening?).

    Children, if they get corona at all, are asymptomatic and the World Health Organisation said this week that asymptomatic transmission is “very rare”. Teachers are more likely to get the virus from a supermarket trolley than a student. Normal flu poses a far greater threat (in an average year, flu kills twelve children under the age of 15, Covid has claimed 3.)

    The worry now is that, after such a prolonged absence from school, and from bug-trading with snotty-nosed classmates, they will be even more vulnerable to infection. “Some paranoid parents are unwittingly raising mini Howard Hugheses,” a scientist friend observes, “with a baseline psychology of isolation and greatly reduced exposure to the germs that teach their immune system while they’re learning. It’s quite scary.”

    With headless-chicken syndrome at ministerial level parental anger is growing. “So the nation’s children can go to Thorpe Park in a couple of weeks’ time but my kids can’t go to school for the foreseeable future?,” one incredulous mother texted me yesterday. Another mum had emailed the headmaster of her daughters’ comprehensive saying, “My husband and I are back at work, it’s up to you to make sure our girls have an education.” She is worried sick about leaving her daughters aged 14 and 12 – home alone but, financially, they have no choice. Home-schooling provision has been “patchy” and the material for her youngest, who has learning difficulties, was “just insulting, this shape is called a circle stuff”. The head rang the mother and “all I heard was safety and unions. Give me strength.”

    Private schools, which have provided full timetables and Zoom lessons for their paying customers, are desperate to open. No wonder. As many as 30 are preparing to shut altogether due to the pandemic with parents struggling to pay the fees. But the Government wants independents to stay in snail-like lockstep with state schools, presumably to spare its blushes. One head told me that they were being deliberately denied insurance to prevent private schools “proving that it is perfectly possible to open a whole school safely”.

    While thousands of teachers across the country have done a great job working with the kids of key workers, refusal to cooperate with getting schools back to full strength is most evident in Labour-controlled areas. Forget child welfare, this is a political vendetta. Glasgow City Council appears to have said that children will go back for two days a fortnight when schools open after the summer. As one disgusted father said, “That’s not education. It’s not even childcare. It’s a bloody disgrace.”

    Alas, the Government’s own guidance on social distancing is providing left-wing local authorities and unions with all the ammunition they need to fight a return to full-time education. It is almost impossible to run a normal school timetable with two metres between pupils and staff. Other nations have not saddled themselves with that distance; most specify one metre while others are happy to have pupils play and study as normal with no ill effects.

    In Sweden, schools never closed at all and simple hand-washing and common-sense measures have seen Danish schools back to full capacity. In Holland and Australia, there are no SDs for under 18s and there has been zero increase in infections. All schools in Berlin are to return completely to normal as of August 9, the new school year. Slash the two-metre distancing Boris for crying out loud!

    Meanwhile, next week, non-essential shops will be opening, but extremely essential schools will remain closed to most children until September at the earliest when they will have been out of education for six months. What kind of priorities are those?

    A suggestion yesterday by Conservative MP Robert Halfon to set up a “national education army”, creating temporary schools by throwing open the doors of gyms and church halls and hiring retired teachers to run classes for pupils who are not getting any teaching at home, is well-meant. But it should not be necessary.

    For the sake of our children, the Government must do whatever it takes to get schools open and to prevent Britain becoming an international laughing stock. It can do that by scrapping social distancing measures. Far better for adults to admit they got something wrong than to persist in an error which punishes millions of innocent children.

    The terrible Coronabeast will be gone from these isles by September; high time that education returned.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/national-scandal-children-will-soon-able-go-thorpe-park-not

  110. In case any of you hadn’t seen it, this is the piece by NF that had its comments column removed.

    NF still has it in for Tommy Robinson. I don’t think he (TR) would enter the fray but some of the hotheads behind him might. As much as we admire TR’s character for standing up to the police campaign against him, we don’t want his ‘supporters’ giving the establishment another Jo Cox moment.

    And it’s not just Conservative Middle England that is absolutely appalled at what is going on…

    Our craven leaders are failing to stand up to a Marxist mob which wants to tear down our history

    Unless the Prime Minister puts a stop to this policy of appeasing activists, there is real danger of a rapid deterioration in social order

    NIGEL FARAGE

    The appalling scenes of violence and disorder in London and Bristol at the weekend should not have surprised anybody. A few days earlier, the first of this series of Black Lives Matter gatherings had taken place and by early evening, it had escalated into an aggressive encounter between protesters and police outside the gates of Downing Street. Because of the way Wednesday’s incident was handled, the message to anarchists and vandals was clear.

    In effect, the authorities said: “Nobody in this country has the moral courage to stand up to you, so please do as you wish.” The BBC and much of the mainstream media (with a few exceptions) may wish to portray these protests as “peaceful” but they have not – and will not – convince me or millions of others.

    As far as I am concerned, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol on Sunday, amid hysterical screaming, marked the birth of the British Taliban. That same afternoon, for the second day running, Sir Winston Churchill’s statue was also defaced as agitators chanted: “Churchill is a racist”. Even at the Cenotaph, a monument to those who died for free speech and democracy, someone tried to set fire to the Union Flag.

    While many of the middle-class university-educated types who attended these protests did so because they believe in a more equitable society, the truth is that they were being used by an extreme Left wing organisation which is heavily funded by those who want to overturn the norms of our society. No leading political figure has the courage to say this, for fear of being labelled “racist”, but this is the reality and only cowards will deny it. The Black Lives Matter movement has a full Marxist agenda of wealth redistribution and, crucially, a desire to defund the police service. Their proposal is to replace it with some form of community law enforcement.

    In light of this, I would like to know more about the view of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick. She has said she understands the reasons why some of her officers took the knee last week yet, at the time of writing, more than 50 of her officers have been injured – some seriously. What on earth did Ms Dick think she was doing by expressing anything other than an entirely neutral position on this matter? With that said, her wishy-washy attitude does, I suppose, have one use. It confirms that if you appease the mob, they will come back time and time again.

    In Bristol, the Avon and Somerset Police chief constable, Andy Marsh, has said he had no regrets in letting the mob bring down Colston’s statue and throw it in the harbour. He may feel justified in saying this, but what next? Should all statues commemorating historical figures who lived in the days of Empire be subjected to the same treatment? Perhaps Oliver Cromwell is next on the list because of his activities in Ireland in the 17th century?

    I sympathise with the men and women of our police forces, but their bosses have completely failed us. Political leadership is in short supply, too. Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson are happy to parrot “Black Lives Matter” without attempting to explain that while the words themselves may be innocuous, the organisation is dangerous. In this, they are helped by the Opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer, who did not utter a single word on Sunday as police officers were being hospitalised.

    True, Johnson did put out a late tweet about the violence, but does he not realise that Conservative Middle England is absolutely appalled at what is going on?

    People have a right to protest peacefully & while observing social distancing but they have no right to attack the police. These demonstrations have been subverted by thuggery – and they are a betrayal of the cause they purport to serve. Those responsible will be held to account.

    – Boris Johnson #StayAlert (@BorisJohnson) June 7, 2020

    There is a leadership vacuum and, alarmingly, things now look likely to get worse. The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has voiced her outrage, yet there is no tangible sign of anybody getting a grip and tackling this increasing lawlessness. There is a huge difference between equality of opportunity, fair policing, and giving covert support to this violence.

    Some may have hoped that in these troubled times, the Church might offer salvation. They hoped in vain. Archbishop Justin Welby has said merely that he understands why the protests are happening and why white supremacy must end. Again, he is an authority figure who does not – or will not – engage properly with what is going on. There is palpable public anger at the symbols of our nationhood being desecrated. Unless a leader puts a stop to this policy of appeasement, there is real danger of a rapid deterioration. I do not find it difficult to imagine public clashes between Black Lives Matter protesters and the supporters of Tommy Robinson, whose modus operandi I have condemned before. Such clashes would achieve nothing other than widening divisions, of course.

    The tensions of recent days represent the biggest test yet for Boris Johnson’s 11-month premiership. Millions of his supporters are urging him to act. He must do so very quickly or he will fail his allies and split the country.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/09/craven-leaders-failing-stand-marxist-mob-wants-tear-history/

    1. I am sick of hearing political, religious and community leaders say “I understand why it is happening” or similar words. I understand why feral louts steal – it is an easy way of making money. I understand why rapists rape – it is an outlet for their perverted urges. I understand why fabulously wealthy businessmen bleed their companies dry and then leave – they are greedy. None of this provides any sort of excuse for their actions. Oh for a leader who says “I don’t give a damn for the reasons; whatever they are, you will face swift, hard justice”.

      1. Yes. Our leaders, supposed leaders, have commented as if this was nothing do with them, was not something that they were elected to prevent.
        If our leaders are spineless and refuse to act, should we stand idly by while our lives are wrecked, as the future of all our children is wrecked?

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