Saturday 19 September: The deliberate plan for smart meters to switch off household heating

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/09/18/lettersthe-deliberate-plan-smart-meters-switch-household-heating/

636 thoughts on “Saturday 19 September: The deliberate plan for smart meters to switch off household heating”

  3. Ruth Ginsberg (Supreme Court Justice appointed by Clinton) has died. Expect a monumental, back-biting slugfest as Trump tries to replace her before the end of this term.

      3. There was a recent film about her, I really enjoyed it.
        Don’t let the title put you off, or for that matter get you over-excited:
        “On the Basis of Sex”

          1. A very fine and accomplished lawyer who probably achieved more for women’s rights in America and eventually around the world than any politician or wild feminist has ever done.

          3. Until that last line, it must be one of the only times that I have ever agreed with Lammy.

            One may dislike like her politics but one cannot take away what she accomplished.

    2. I’m afraid that she came across to me as a very bitter person determined to use her position in the American legal system to push forward a very Left Wing political agenda. Perhaps one of the first of the Cultural Marxists to gain high office as part of the Long March Through The Institutions.

      I will add that I was very impressed by President Trump’s measured & dignified response to the news when it was unexpectedly broken to him by a reporter:-
      https://twitter.com/DanScavino/status/1307181690582896641

    4. That should be interesting. I wonder if he is able to nominate and the process must go to final vote or whether if Biden wins he can veto the nomination before inaugeration.

      Either way, if the make up of Congress changes dramatically getting a Trump nomination through might be impossible, unless he opts for a “neutral progressive black woman”

      An interesting and fairly up to date Wiki article:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointment_and_confirmation_to_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States#Nominations_in_the_last_year_of_a_presidency

      1. It has been reported that her ‘last request’ was that her replacement be made by the ‘next president’. Obama has already stuck his oar in saying that she shouldn’t be replaced until after the inauguration in January.

        The two Justices that Trump has installed during his first term with much obstruction from the Dems were both replacing ‘conservative’ Justices. If, as seems very possible, the election result is disputed by one side or the other it will end up going to The (ex-Ginsburg) Supreme Court which has a make up favourable to Trump although Chief Justice Roberts is not wholly ‘reliable’.

        Beyond the election, it is very important that Ginsberg is replaced by a reliable conservative since the appointment is for life. It can be argued that The Supreme Court has greater influence on the tone and long term direction of the country than Presidents who come and go.

        Guess where our very own Tony & Cherie Bliar got the idea for ‘our’ Supreme Court from (via Bill Clinton)

        1. Indeed.

          I think many people outside America do not appreciate quite how important the Supreme Court is, both to America and because of the importance of the USA, the wider world.
          If a Democrat President and Democrat controlled Congress decided to start messing about with fundamental parts of the US Constitution, which they are already threatening to do, the Supreme Court could either halt/slow the process or act as a rubber stamp.

          1. Hence the importance of the SC having a balance of opinion.
            Sadly, for far too long, Democrats appear to have held sway on the bench.

          2. Finding suitably qualified and independent people is going to be hard, with the world becoming so politicised.

            I know that often the judges develop have left of centre leanings after appointment, but at the moment it stands at 5-3 Republican nominated and in terms of age the Rep appointees are younger.

            If Trump gets a second term it could easily end up 7-2

          4. I was going by the President who appointed them rather than any take on decisions.

            From my observations over the years, I consider that Americans take the Constitution extremely seriously and SC judges see their role as upholding the law and protecting the Constitution. It’s one reason I hope that if there is evidence of ballot-stuffing that the Court might overturn some results and possibly call for a ssecond election under clearer rules regading who can and cannot vote by post.

            To be fair to them all, I think that they genuinely do follow the law as it is written and are much less party political than our own abomination of a supreme court.

    5. I’m afraid that she came across to me as a very bitter person determined to use her position in the American legal system to push forward a very Left Wing political agenda. Perhaps one of the first of the Cultural Marxists to gain high office as part of the Long March Through The Institutions.

      I will add that I was very impressed by President Trump’s measured & dignified response to the news when it was unexpectedly broken to him by a reporter:-
      https://twitter.com/DanScavino/status/1307181690582896641

      1. Morning Bob

        Before she was appointed as a District Judge she was a competent advocate for her particular agenda. But she stuck with that agenda which dominated her career at all levels of the judiciary and it showed and grated with lots of people, including many Dems.

        Unable to sleep, I watched President Trump’s return to Andrews Air Force Base from one of his electoral rallies with all the press milling around waiting to trip him up as he emerged on the tarmac. I thought he was superb on this difficult occasion.

        1. Can you imagine the response of ANY senior Democrat had they been informed of President Trump’s demise in a similar way?

  4. SIR – On starting my career in the Eighties I was advised always to identify a scapegoat early.

    Recent events have convinced me that the ill-conceived “rule of six” was never intended to slow the spread of Covid-19 but simply to provide the Government with a convenient scapegoat when it fails and a national lockdown is reintroduced – the Great British Public.

    Jeffrey Edwards
    Melling, Lancashire

  7. SIR – When Robert Robinson took over as host of the BBC Radio 4 quiz Brain of Britain in 1973, he was overjoyed to discover that, due to a typo on his contract, he was to chair something called Brian of Britain.
    From that moment on, the quiz was always referred to as Brian and the contestants known as Brians (Letters, September 17).
    It is a matter of regret that, in all my time associated with the show, we never had a champion called Brian. In a Radio Times article before a new series, Bob acknowledged that, as he sat wistfully over his script wondering how many rivets there were in the Forth Bridge, he was always going to be the bridesmaid, never the Brian.
    Richard Edis
    Producer, Brain of Britain, 1979-2006

    In Cabin Pressure, (funniest radio programming since The Goons) they play Brians of Britain in one of the episodes.

  8. SIR – Amid a sherry shortage, Gerry Twigge (Letters, September 16) asks if all the Jerez munchkins have gone down with the virus.
    A rarity on the shelves in these parts is Dubonnet. It was invented to encourage French troops to ingest quinine, against malaria. But evidence suggests that alcohol does not prevent or lessen the effects of Covid-19. Perhaps some genius will invent an alcoholic drink that does.
    Dr P E Pears

    I’m sure if they do, they’ll find all the test subjects ts they need here on Nottl.
    Sign me up, hic.

    1. ‘Morning, BugS.

      2 months ago there was a scarcity of Dubonnet; when I asked repeatedly in w/rose I was regarded as though I had asked for purple cheese. Shortly afterwards a single row appeared, tucked away among the vermouths. When I went shopping yes’day there were 2 rows – a dozen bottles!

  9. SIR – From 2025 it will be illegal to install gas boilers in new-build housing, which implies a dramatic switch to heat-pump technology.

    Scottish and Southern Electricity (report, September 18) has submitted proposals to Ofgem to allow the use of smart meters to switch off high-usage items … such as heat-pumps.

    Trevor Jones
    Sidmouth, Devon

    Canny

  10. Engagement with anti-vaccine Facebook posts trebles in one month. 19 September 2020.

    Engagement with anti-vaccine posts on a sample of UK Facebook pages trebled between July and August, analysis by the Guardian has found, triggering calls for a major new push to tackle conspiracy theories.

    Interactions on posts expressing scepticism or hostility towards vaccines on six UK Facebook pages increased from 12,000 in July to 42,000 in August, according to the analysis, conducted using the social media analytics tool CrowdTangle.
    Government attempts to rebut disinformation have taken the form of initiatives and bodies such as the “Don’t Feed the Beast” public information campaign and the Cabinet Office’s rapid response unit..

    A spokesperson for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said: “Since the start of the pandemic, specialist UK government units have also been working rapidly to identify and rebut false information about coronavirus, including working closely with social media companies.”

    This Gates vaccine programme is exceptionally important to the PTB and though the Government is almost totally Facebook and Twitter oriented there might well be some culling of dissenting Disqus Blogs before the Takeover.

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/sep/19/engagement-anti-vaccine-facebook-posts-trebles-one-month-coronavirus

    1. When one recalls how easily and quickly votes on posts here were removed by a “bot” because the creator did not approve of right of centre views, eliminating all posts from certain individuals will be very straightforward.

  11. Morning all

    SIR – The vast majority of parents have got their children into school and now want them to stay there. Without access to quick testing, the 99 per cent who are testing negatively are again being punished by extended periods away from the classroom.

    Conscientious schools and parents are taking on the enormous burden of responsibility in keeping our communities and towns safe. In the absence of the promised track-and-trace provision, systems are now being rigged up by schools themselves.

    The Government has had months to get this right. It is schools, parents and pupils who are picking up the pieces, and this is unsustainable.

    Will Phelan

    Principal, The Stamford Endowed Schools

    Stamford, Lincolnshire

    SIR – When I had flu I was so unwell that the last thing I felt like was getting into my car to go for a test, and I certainly would not have been safe doing so. It follows that the vast majority of people going for a test are not feeling that unwell.

    Indeed, this is borne out by the statistics. There were 236,219 tests processed on September 17 and 3,395 new cases, so less than 1.5 per cent of tests are positive.

    Here is yet another sign of the Government’s failure to deal with the pandemic. Its responses are disproportionate, wasteful, poorly targeted and designed to engender panic and hysteria in the population.

    Richard Apps

    Denchworth, Berkshire

    1. Presumably all those who attend any centre where a positive test has been thrown up, at around the time when the lurgeyman was there, should have to isolate for several days on the off-chance they came into close contact with the carrier and got the lurgey.

    2. Spot on, Richard Apps… “Its responses are disproportionate, wasteful, poorly targeted and designed to engender panic and hysteria in the population.“

    3. Children with sniffles should stay at home until well again. The rest should stay at school. Testing should be kept for those who are really ill, care staff and care homes. Though I don’t think those in care homes should be continually tested if they are not unwell.

      1. ….. and sadly for a friend of ours who was diagnosed with lung and brain cancer. Tested positive for covid. Her son came over from Malaysia , he could not see her or be with her in the days leading up to her final hours because of the self-isolation/quarantine rules. After she died the family received notification that the test was a false positive.

  12. SIR – Following a ban on fur (“Post-Brexit fur ban may kill off bearskin hats”, September 18), will shoe leather be the next target?

    We would end up wearing wooden clogs, as replacing natural leather with artificial leather would be terrible for the environment.

    Human existence depends on using the products that nature provides for food, clothing and shelter. Every organism takes something from other organisms. Nature is not squeamish, and, within limits, nor should we be.

    Christopher Morris

    Walsall, Staffordshire

    2. 323822+ up ticks,
      Morning Epi,
      Chris,
      “These boots are made for walking and that’s what they’er gunna do” should be activated in every polling booth regarding the lab/lib/con anti UK coalition party, at every given opportunity.

  13. Morning again

    SIR – I was horrified at the French navy escorting migrant boats into British waters (report, September 17).

    This problem is out of control. To prevent migrants crossing the Channel in unsafe boats, Border Force or the Royal Navy should pick them up and return them to France. If they see that we are not a soft touch, they might not be so keen to risk their lives.

    Caroline Carver

    Rye, East Sussex

    SIR – Should not the Gendarmerie Maritime be taken to the appropriate international court for not obeying international law, which requires any seafarer to render immediate assistance to those in peril at sea?

    John Brackenbury

    Felixstowe, Suffolk

    SIR – Just how dangerous is crossing the English Channel – the world’s busiest shipping lane?

    B G Seiver

    Stapeley, Cheshire

    1. Yes, very clearly the French Navy should be returning the illegal gimmigrants to France. Yes, they are in violation of international law. The French don’t care.

  14. 323822+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,
    I would think smart meters would be hard to come by in gulags, & one thing for sure is this Country MUST invest in an incarceration program to contain
    felons of the future as we proceed into the (grass up your granny you know it makes sense ) era of humanity insanity.
    Is this boris losing another pillow fight with the squeeze ?

    Shares in wood burners must now be escalating nothing is surprising any longer, next move could very well be tree surgeons / lumberjacks will be severely monitored & any type of wood-saw will have to be registered same as guns.

    Dover still open to potential troop / house seeking / welfare dependants
    is it ?

    In my book it might be a benefit to these Isles if bojo took to hugging a nearly real man and dropping ALL this manipulative green sh!te.

  15. SIR – On his annual Ride for Churches, Clive Fewins (Letters, September 18) found seven out of 10 churches locked. He blames churchwardens.

    Coronavirus regulations and uncompromising instructions were issued by the Church of England to incumbents and churchwardens throughout the land, regardless of the size and location of churches and the numbers of visitors they attract.

    Unless churchwardens are prepared to undertake a deep clean every day (whether or not visitors have arrived), they are obliged to leave 72 hours between openings.

    Martin Smith

    Brimpsfield, Gloucestershire

      1. Maybe he/she is self-isolating in a convent or one of those unisex monasteries that used to be run by formidable Anglo-Saxon women.

  17. Listening to Radio 4 last night – they were on about our BAME/BLM friends complaining about an advert promoting some stuff to use on “Afro-Hair” – don’t know what it does but it seems that a test for “Afro-Hair” is to push a pencil through it, demonstrates how thick it is or something?
    I thought the bone through the nose would have been a clear enough indicator?

  18. Something that has been mystifying me in these dangerous times. There are lots of shots of the brave social carers and NHS heros clad from head to toe in plastic, except for their arms which are bare. I would have thought that it would be sensible to have a long sleeved top as a minimum.

    1. Possibly because it’s easier to scrub up from the hands to the elbows when washing between treatments?

      1. Correct.
        Doctor daughter advises me that long sleeved garments are not allowed and have not been allowed for years.

        1. I can remember with glee the time when a senior surgeon bawled out Cameron & Clegg for not rolling their sleeves up on a ward round.
          Or was it for not tucking their ties in?

        2. Except for muslim women, of course. They get a dispensation – clearly hygiene is not important to them.

    2. 323822+ up ticks,
      Morning KP,
      I thought the politico’s had stopped the peoples bearing of arms long ago, in trying to slow up the consequences on the day of reckoning, if ever sanity fully returns.

  19. Anyone know what has happened to tapioca? I don’t have a sweet tooth, but when I do fancy a pudding, I am happy with a bit of the tinned stuff. However, around here it all vanished during lockdown, never to be replaced. And nowhere stocks the dried version, so making my own isn’t an option.

      2. The tapioca pudding we had at prep school was disgusting and it was always the job of a boy to distract the attention of the duty master while the rest of us tipped the contents of our plates behind the bookshelves which lined the dining hall Of course the result was that we had an infesastastion of rats.

        But Caroline often uses tapioca flour for baking her gluten free bread and cakes as she has coeliac disease.

    3. You might try substituting fine-grained couscous.

      Tapioca seems to have disappeared, as has macaroni.

      1. I tried that and it was more like semolina. I like the globules! Weirdly, Morrisons does tinned macaroni as a pudding – I didn’t even know that existed until I went on the Great Tapioca Hunt.

    2. Good morning, Maggiebelle

      Does the government ever listen to our fears about illegal immigration?

      ‘”I doubt it,” said the Carpenter and shed a bitter tear.’

      (Part of another conversation on the beach described by Lewis Caroll – about oysters rather than potentially dangerous criminal immigrants)

    3. I can’t believe what our useless set of politicians have allowed to happen. All at the UK tax payers expense. This must be the most ridiculous and incredible lack of simple common sense ever recorded.
      And we can’t even socialise or meet with our own families, but boat loads of foreign bodies of unknown origin, un-checked for disease and other dangerous illnesses have been allowed and even encouraged to arrive from the squalor of such ridden filthy camps when and if they feel like it.
      UK Democracy has died a death. I would stick my neck out and a say 99% of the UK population do not want this and never wanted this to occur in the first place. What ever the agenda of this, the most ridiculous government this nation has ever had, it is time it was reversed.

    4. If the state were bothered they wouldn’t be getting here at all.

      These wretched boat people must stop. If they won’t, or the French continue to break international law, then action must be taken to punish France.

  24. More Lock Down. Governments should not play God.

    They will fail, as we revolt against any more of this stupid thing, where the remedy is far worse than the cause.

      2. Yet those are against people opposing the state.

        There was no such presence when the state agreed with the rioters.

      3. So the Premier of a democracy thinks the use of brute force is well-deserved. That assault by police officers is to the expected. That a demonstrator can can expect to be fined $5000 dollars each, as those in the video were.
        The police could have taken the licence number of the car and sent a letter. Instead they treated the woman like a violent criminal. In front of her kid.

        1. I don’t think our friends in Oz have seen this, I’m going to send it to them now. One couple have recently had to change their email address they suspect someone has been intercepting their emails.

  25. https://media.breitbart.com/media/2020/09/trans-jesus-420×315.png
    The Church of Iceland has raised eyebrows with a Sunday School advert depicting Jesus Christ sporting a long beard and bouncing breasts.
    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/09/18/church-launches-sunday-school-ad-depicting-jesus-bearded-lady-breasts/
    I despair
    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/959295ff862b0416c796daa90fd665cbf8c1f10e/0_0_3000_2000/master/3000.jpg?width=720&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=e183806cb707569013ea8b0cf0f97333

    1. For what possible reason?
      Another abomination, they are doing it to everything that is part of Western culture.
      As if our elites are at war with the little people

      1. The churches were locked down for Easter. Muslim areas were restricted for Eid. Israel has just reintroduced severe restrictions just in time for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Is a pattern emerging?

    2. When will militant Christians burst into the offices and machine gun the journalists and illustrators?

  26. Restrictions to tighten as second coronavirus wave strikes. 19 September 2020.

    Boris Johnson is preparing to replace the “rule of six” with tougher restrictions on daily life as he warned that Britain was in the grip of a second wave of coronavirus.

    The Prime Minister said he may have to “intensify” measures that could act as a temporary “circuit break” to stem a resurgence of the virus and prevent Britain being forced into a second lockdown.

    Morning everyone. Just to reiterate ad nauseum. There is no “Second Wave”. Covid 19 deaths yesterday were 21!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/18/restrictions-tighten-second-coronavirus-wave-strikes/

  27. James Forsyth
    Boris Johnson’s eco ambitions
    18 September 2020, 4:52pm

    https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltf04078f3cf7a9c30/bltacb9d27a4042df7b/5f64d7b3f972ad4f3941f419/Greenwashed_SE.png?format=jpg&width=1920&height=1080&fit=crop

    Covid and Brexit dominate Boris Johnson’s premiership, and will for at least the rest of this year. But, as I say in the Times today, the speech that Johnson is most excited about giving is not on either of these subjects. Rather, it is on his green agenda. ‘The big narrative we’re not getting right is that this has to be a green recovery,’ says one of those who has discussed the speech with the Prime Minister.

    One of the reasons Johnson is so keen on this speech is his enthusiasm for hydrogen. He and others at the top level of government see it as the answer to many problems. They think that hydrogen could be used not only to fuel heavy goods vehicles, trains and ships but also to heat our homes. The most ambitious figures in government want to replace natural gas with hydrogen so that in 15 years time there’s no carbon used in home heating. The idea is that hydrogen would be pumped through the existing natural gas network (as long as old iron pipes had been replaced by plastic ones) and into our homes.

    Johnson’s challenge right now, though, is not coming up with big ideas but handling the Covid crisis. His aim should be to get through these next few weeks and then regroup. In the circumstances, it would be sensible to put off until tomorrow what cannot be done today.

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

    Boris is an ignorant imbecile…..especially when it comes to matters scientific.

    He dances to Carrie’s tune (another scientifically ignorant imbecile)

  28. It’s strange isn’t it ?
    You stand in the middle of the library and go “Aaaaaaaaargh!!” and everyone stares at you.
    But do it on a plane and everyone joins in.

  29. I asked the man from the council, “Do you dig roads?”

    He said, “It’s alright, but Corfu’s better.”

  30. ‘Morning, Peeps. Charles Moore today:

    When I was a boy listening to BBC Any Questions? on the radio, I noticed that if the panellists wanted a clap, they simply had to end the last sentences of their answers in a determined, decisive way. The tone mattered, the content didn’t.

    I fear the same can apply to newspaper columnists. We are paid to have opinions. If we express these loud and clear, this sometimes successfully conceals the fact that our opinions can be idiotic. In the case of Covid, I have found myself in the position – not ideal for a columnist – of having rather tentative opinions. Back in March, I wrote that too many people were laying down the law about a subject on which certainty was rarely possible. I promised not to do this, except to reserve “the right to point the finger at the people who love pointing the finger”.

    Ever since, on most aspects of the virus, I have continued to sit uncomfortably on the fence. Instinctively, I side more with the liberal argument which trusts people to make adult choices rather than the statist one which grabs arbitrary power to snoop on and punish them. In terms of the best way to control the disease, I favour the relaxed Swedish model rather than the Chinese habit of bricking people into their homes.

    On the other hand, it is factually mistaken for libertarians to argue that their own free choices cannot endanger other people. I get irritated with those who say, “I’ll go on shaking hands”, as if this were a sign of virtue rather than selfishness. And while herd immunity may be the ultimate answer – it may even be true, as some experts argue, that this is close to being achieved – no government of a democratic country can take a punt that the disease will just run its course, as if, in the great scheme of things, thousands of deaths don’t matter much. Emergency public health controls are not necessarily “Orwellian”.

    The problem with the disease itself is that it, too, sits on the fence. It is not such a deadly plague that all normal life must cease, yet nor is it just another flu. All along, public policy has had to balance two opposing needs: staying in and going out. After the first crisis, the scales shifted more to going out, especially for work and school. That, in turn, seems to have produced some more infection, so just now the scales are shifting back. Critics describe the Government response to this as “mixed messaging”; but really it is an extreme example of public policy’s duty to reconcile the conflicting demands of complex modern society.

    My sense is that the public understand this better than the furious media debate suggests. It was predicted that parents were so frightened that they would not send their children back to school, yet most now have. Those same parents who trust schools also recognise that if you join a close-packed herd of drinkers in a pub, that herd will likely not be immune. They took advantage of Rishi Sunak’s “eat out to help out” offer, but they also understand it is a bad idea to go to a rave. They know that a disease whose carriers are often asymptomatic is truly difficult to hold within bounds; but also, by the same token, that it is not terrible for all. They are not in a continuous rage about the situation, though many do feel anxious.

    The Government has to try to accommodate widely varying psychologies within the population. A few people are utterly reckless; a few are hypochondriacs. Most are on a spectrum. At church, for example, I tend to regard the rules about masks and distancing as exaggerated, but I notice they give confidence to many, particularly the old, who otherwise might not venture back. By and large, the rules help.

    A similar thought applies to costs. You could point to the so-far hardly used Nightingale hospitals as a scandalous waste of public money. Yet it seems more sensible to recognise that they have assuaged people’s worst fear – of not being able to get treatment when severely ill. Normal cost benefit calculations falter in the face of something which could take off exponentially.

    This week, the great alarm is about tests. Demand has outstripped supply and will continue to do so for “a few weeks”. Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, is trying to prioritise tests for those who most need them. This story illustrates, yet again, the dangers of exaggeration.

    On the fear side, it is not the case that we are back where we started – and suffered – in April. Then there were only about a thousand tests a day. Today, there are 243,000 per day. One of the obvious consequences of far more tests is far more identified cases. This does not necessarily mean that the true trend of cases is up. There are currently about 3,000 new cases per day, whereas, with minimal testing in April, there were 5,000. These figures do not justify panic. If Mr Hancock manages to introduce more tests fast, the number of positive cases will rise. Then the panickers will allege the problem is getting worse, creating a vicious circle. We might even lock down next week.

    On the hope side, however, the weaknesses of the Government’s approach are exposed. In their different ways, both Boris Johnson and Mr Hancock talk things up too much – suggesting that things will be fine by June (that was Boris in March) or, now, by Christmas. They tend to bluster about Britain being the best in the world, when mostly it isn’t. People become disbelieving. Is it too high-minded to suggest the public can manage quite high levels of information, even quite gloomy information, and would prefer data to boosterism? It is better politics if leaders can say afterwards: “I told you it would be hard, and it was, but now we’re out of it” than “I said it would all be great by now, but it isn’t.”

    The testing saga also illustrates the problem with “following the science”. Under polite but sharp cross-questioning from Greg Clark in the relevant Commons select committee, Lady Harding, the test-and-trace tsarina, admitted that demand had gravely overshot supply this month. Surely the projections of experts should have been subjected to a common-sense analysis of normal human behaviour? If children were going back to school, parents going back to work (and eating out), and the number of tests available was known to be rising, common sense would suggest that far more people would want them.

    A political lead, rather than Sage wisdom, was needed, but was not forthcoming. David Cameron was famous for government by “essay crisis”. The problem has not gone away under Boris, and it seems to include maths homework too. People call for a “strategy” from the Government. The word does not mean much when the basic problem, even now, is that so little is known about the statistical properties of the virus, but there is some lack of leadership here. The way the science works, inevitably, is backward-looking. To follow the science alone is to be late. Political leadership is an art, not a science, and it requires looking forward. From the Prime Minister downwards, we should admit that we are still peering into the mist.

    One of the leading BTL comments:

    Pip Squeak
    18 Sep 2020 10:11PM
    Very balanced article. The media have an awful lot to answer for their continuous fanning of the flames, melodramatic reporting which has made the public fearful of returning to normal life. The fact that they have been anti-Government, anti-Brexit has also had a part to play in their incessant over-reaction. (An Inquiry must highlight their culpability).

    Testing problems have not been helped by hypochondriacs, snowflake parents and time wasters abusing the system. Rationing for genuine cases is welcome. Of course more testing means more cases.

    Boris has lost the plot (he’s clearly still unwell from his own illness) and if we go into a second lockdown, not only is his Party toast, what’s left of the economy will be trashed, but the public will take to the streets and things could get very ugly indeed.

    1. Judging by the masked numpties leaping off the pavements to avoid their fellow human beings, the public have already taken to the streets.
      Morning, HJ.

      1. Bimbling round Sainsbugs yesterday evening, one idiot actually reversed several yards back up the aisle rather than pass me shoulder to shoulder.
        Guess which way I made a point of turning as i reached the end of the aisle!

        1. I had a bit of fun last week when I encountered a woman in her 40s, who parked her trolley at arm’s length right across the supermarket aisle; she couldn’t have been more obstructive. Having got past her, I was determined to stay ahead, so every time she tried to overtake me in other parts of the store I lumbered, pensioner fashion, across her path & carved her up.

  31. One of my mates told me that I often make people uncomfortable by violating their personal space.

    Which was an incredibly unnecessary and hurtful thing to say. It ruined our bath

  32. I told my mate I was going to the capital of Burkina Faso for a holiday.

    “Ouagadougou?” he asked

    “Push pineapple shake a tree” I replied.

  33. Good morning, all. Sunny but N-E gale still blowing.

    I see Priti Awful wants us to snitch.

    Well, Miss, please Miss, there are lots of rubber boats full of illegal people coming across the English Channel, Miss – and you should stop them,.

  34. There is a long piece in The Grimes (which I don’t take on Saturday) about Johnson and how useless he is.

    My view is that he is completely out of his depth. He had no idea what being Prime Minister actually entailed. He shacked up with a woman – and now regrets it. Above all, he has not recovered from the Covid – he remains extremely unwell. He ought to resign “on medical grounds”. Then Halfcock and Glove can set about the final, irrevocable destruction of the country.

    I’ll go and have my porridge.

    1. He’ll resign and then they will rip the cloak away to reveal Blair in all his hideous glory!

      1. I suspect he’ll be kept limping along until January.
        Things have gone rather quiet.
        Morning, Minty.

      2. I suspect he’ll be kept limping along until January.
        Things have gone rather quiet.
        Morning, Minty.

      5. 323822+ up ticks,
        Morning AS,
        And so he should, in claiming victory for the
        lab/lib/con coalition party & their success.

        You must surely give credit to the enema.

        As I have pointed out in prior post they are ALL interchangeable.

    2. Morning, Willum.
      I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know I agree with with you 147%.
      The Green Doxy is becoming a worry.

    4. Don’t hold your breath on a better leader appearing any time in the future: the day of the statesman is long gone.

      There will never again be a leader of merit, intelligence or balls. The Churchills and Thatchers will be a distant memory. Look forward to each successive generation getting more and more stupid and making increasingly more cretinous decisions. The past six PMs have got progressively worse; there is simply no light at the end of an interminably long tunnel.

      2. A Labour politician, but compare his history with the jejune pygmies we have nowadays.

        “After graduation, (Denis) Healey served in the Second World War as a gunner in the Royal Artillery before being commissioned as a second lieutenant in April 1941. Serving with the Royal Engineers, he saw action in the North African campaign, the Allied invasion of Sicily (1943) and the Italian campaign (1943–1945) and was the military landing officer (“beach master”) for the British assault brigade at Anzio in 1944.

        Healey became an MBE in 1945. He left the service with the rank of Major. He declined an offer to remain in the army, with the rank of Lieutenant colonel, as part of the team researching the history of the Italian campaign under Colonel David Hunt. He also decided against taking up a senior scholarship at Balliol, which would have led to an academic career.”

        1. Yet the Labour faithful preferred to vote for Wurzel Gummidge in a donkey jacket (Michael Foot) than install the much more impressive (and infinitely more intelligent) Healey as leader.

          I wonder how he would have fared, politically, if his leanings had been more Conservative?

          1. I’ll quibble on the donkey jacket, Grizz.
            It was actually a fairly smart motoring jacket, an up-market version of the kind stereotypically worn by dodgy car dealers, that the MEEJAH took a dislike to.

          2. I was bought a similar jacket when I left school and started work in engineering. It didn’t have the shiny plastic shoulder section that donkey jackets have, and it was double breasted. It rejoiced under the name of “reefer jacket”.

          3. It infuriates me when the media make such mistakes and repeat them in perpetuity. Most wouldn’t recognise a Donkey Jacket if they tripped over one.
            They also did it with Heseltine who was given a standard camo cotton combat jacket to wear on a visit to Greenham Common. It was described as a “flak jacket”.

          5. I’ll quibble on the donkey jacket, Grizz.
            It was actually a fairly smart motoring jacket, an up-market version of the kind stereotypically worn by dodgy car dealers, that the MEEJAH took a dislike to.

  35. England-wide Covid lockdown needed ‘sooner rather than later’, says former adviser. 19 September. 2020.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2feda5c9d2918d5b6e2c09a5ad72f5e05c7947db7673031938e0805e4228d85e.jpg

    The epidemiologist whose modelling helped shape Britain’s coronavirus lockdown strategy has said new restrictions will be needed in England “sooner rather than later” if the government is to prevent infections surging again.

    Prof Neil Ferguson, who resigned from the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said the country was facing a “perfect storm” after controls were eased over summer.

    Oh my God! It’s the Angel of Death returned to finish the job!

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/19/england-wide-covid-lockdown-needed-sooner-later-says-former-adviser-neil-ferguson

        1. Citroen, I am shamed ,

          in my mind I can see it whizzing off
          but I am blowed if I can remember which shop I was in,
          although I do know it was in ‘Brum’…..was there a
          ‘Swan and Edgar’ there?

          1. I can’t remember a ‘Swan and Edgar’ in Brum, though I do remember one shop with the mail system.

    1. Blair, Macron et al are the vanguard of the New World Order. The nursery is full of their successors and each successive generation will get worse.

      Be afraid. Be shit-scared! Things can only get worse.

      1. We know this, Grizzly, but spending our time
        sitting on our backsides is not going to achieve
        anything either.
        We can all do the talk but very few are able or willing
        to do the walk.

        First posted: 25th.Dec, 2013.

  37. Here’s one that Bob of Bonsall might be able to answer.

    Where is it?

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/319c6ffca8e01010a4518b393a25cdde1723ca28de3aea879bf67946dabb4305.png
    This admittedly rather poor quality scan of a unidentified station was taken in the 1960s. It was almost certainly closed when it was taken; you can just see the stanchions of a shelter over the passenger entrance between the two gables.

    The basic layout is quite common in stations of modest importance – two gables with a shelter over the passenger entrance between them – and particularly so on the Midland Railway when Charles Trubshaw was its architect (1874-1905). Prior to that he had been with the LNWR.

    Here’s a picture of one of Trubshaw’s stations. It’s of Ilkeston Town, built in 1879. Ignoring the extension of the ridge on the left, the basic layout is similar, although it’s slightly more squat and a little more ornate (note the windows). There are a number of similar station buildings in the Derby-Nottingham-Chesterfield area which are also by Trubshaw and it made me wonder if the mystery view might also be one of his. The reason I ask Bob is that it’s almost his neck of the woods (OK, it’s a bit flimsy and most of his working journeys would have been ‘on the other side’!).

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c75c9b5e7237f1c38c8bf577759b2740e1f2bfbccb33eb60e4426cc135de5800.png

    2. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/05e99626309b6723a2b73700094f70c1c006b920ee843925cdd3adc8857278ed.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cd72a8fdb51dadcefd7bdda5ee0f675e52141359b18a1dde1e633554551a2b78.jpg

      Here are two more in that region: two long-defunct railway stations where I would while away my time as a young teenager in the early 1960s.

      The first one is on a “loop” from the main GC line and the second one is also on a different (parallel) “loop” from an LMS line. Although on different regional lines the two stations were closer than a mile apart. I haven’t a clue who designed them.

        1. The top one is Staveley Works station (on the GC loop). The bottom one is the nearby Barrow Hill station (on the LMS line) not far from the still-operating turntable sheds, which are open to the public.

          2. I think the line still exists as an emergency re-route. Barrow Hill (and nearby Hollingwood: the Staveley Works estate) were my beat as a residential bobby back in the 1980s. I was a regular visitor (tea spot) to the sheds.

          4. Known as “The Old Road” as it was the original Midland Line to Leeds that missed out Sheffield by running direct from Tapton Jn just North of Chesterfield to Rotherham Masborough.

      2. A question for someone who regularly comments on linguistic “pet hates”.

        Why do you use the term “young teenager”? (Which is one of my own pet hates.)

        Surely a teenager is, by definition, young and the adjective is, therefore, redundant.

        1. A fair point, but the differences in maturity between a 13 to 15 year old, the age at which the train spotting bug was likely to be the most virulent, and a 17 to 19 year old, who will usually have moved on to other interests, can be quite staggering.

          1. Like everyone else I’ve been there, and I haven’t forgotten. By my 19th birthday I had 2 years at university behind me (not to speak of other experiences).

            Nevertheless all teenagers are young – and the adjective is just as likely to be used to describe a 19 year old as a 13 year old anyway (particularly in the press which is where that phrase is all too frequently found). Grizzly doesn’t tell us how old a “young teenager” he was, so the description doesn’t help in any way.

        2. Did I really say “young teenager”? Mea culpa! I shall stand in the corner! ☹️

          One of my pet hates is “new recruit”. I find it tautological since any recruit is “new” to the position.

          Bill Bryson hates “weather conditions”. In his Penguin paperback, Dictionary of Troublesome Words, he says that adding “conditions” is superfluous and unnecessary.

          1. The evidence is there…

            We all slip up now and then but you don’t usually hoist yourself on your own linguistic petard. 😉

    3. Can’t help i’m afraid.
      One of many stations built to a common design lost to “progress” that could have been converted into a decent and unusual home.

      1. In Welshpool they built the new road between the erstwhile station and the track. The station is now a shop (Edinburgh Woollen Mill) with a café upstairs and, in a normal summer, it’s a busy place.

        There’s a small station converted to a house to the north west of Shrewsbury – but I was told (by a member of the family who converted it) that they had to do a lot of work to cure the “shake” as the trains pass – it’s on the main Birmingham to Crewe line.

      2. In Welshpool they built the new road between the erstwhile station and the track. The station is now a shop (Edinburgh Woollen Mill) with a café upstairs and, in a normal summer, it’s a busy place.

        There’s a small station converted to a house to the north west of Shrewsbury – but I was told (by a member of the family who converted it) that they had to do a lot of work to cure the “shake” as the trains pass – it’s on the main Birmingham to Crewe line.

      3. Ilkeston Town was closed to passengers as early as 1947. It survived for a while in the 50s until Trent Buses built a garage on the site. There’s now a roundabout and a Tesco. The town was without a station for 50 years, the junction station on the Erewash valley line closing in 1967.

  41. More than a month on, the vehicles of the Stonehaven derailment have finally been moved. A temporary road had to be made to accommodate a 600-tonne crane to lift the vehicles. Thirty years past, rail-borne cranes would have been used and the site would have been cleared within two or three days (although this was tricky with two vehicles down the bank, one of them the leading power car).

    https://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/fp/news/video-work-to-clear-scene-of-stonehaven-train-derailment-continues/

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/efdcc4030fbaf590ad584ba0f0c187cdd1634636c430011fce15c623b348edc8.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ab35db6406d121911eedd56fbe3268f424764ea71a83da668870ab1a0a1c94b4.jpg

    1. More than a few on the railway lament the passing of the properly trained and equipped recovery teams, complete with heavy lifters.

      1. On the other hand, as there was a landslip on either side of the train, would it have been possible to get the heavy lifters there?

        That whole section is elevated and, as I understand it, a lot of it had become unstable.

  42. Front runner to be Trump’s nominee to replace Ruth Ginsberg on The Supreme Court. If he doesn’t win on Nov 3rd, I think there’s little chance that he will be able to ram it through, despite holding 53/47 Senate majority.

    https://youtu.be/6f4Zs6QOzC8

    1. I wonder which will appear first, the liberal male retard claiming she grabbed his balls in 1989, the liberal Lesbian who claims she rammed her tongue down her throat when they were in college and also led the gang-scissoring crew that assulted her, the Bame who says she called them a nigger or the journalist who has an exposé of her dealing with Russian spies?

      1. The liberal male retard could have been a black in transition and then you could have had three accusations for the price of one 🙂

      1. Ho ho.
        It is exactly the kind of reaction I would expect from the likes of BLM to make, without looking to see if they have the right man.
        Like mobs who attack paediatricians ‘coz they’s perverts innit….

    1. I popped round to his house a couple of days ago to return some plastic boxes. I couldn’t find him, but I did get a ‘thank you’ email a few hours later.
      He’s certainly putting some work into his garden; my back shrieked just looking at the slabs etc…

    1. I can’t access the picture due to the paywall. Is the picture from the film Master and Commander where someone’s being towed on a piece of wreckage?

    2. Fraser Nelson
      Where’s Boris?

      At the end of last week, the Prime Minister invited Tory MPs to a massive conference call, a kind of digital fireside chat to lift their spirits. It was a disaster. First the MPs were astonished to learn that he wasn’t taking questions; then his connection failed halfway through — at which point the callers, who had been ‘muted’, became ‘unmuted’ and started talking loudly and all at once. One of them, Michael Fabricant, started singing ‘Rule Britannia’. When the call came to an end, the MPs were all left wondering the same thing. What’s happened to Boris? Where is the man we thought we voted for?

      Physically, Boris Johnson is still around. This week he could be found contradicting other ministers in a parliamentary committee, or sulking on the front bench, being given lectures on competence from Ed Miliband. But this is not the effervescent, bombastic, energising leader MPs thought they’d elected. That man is missing. It’s not just Boris; his whole government seems adrift, defined by its avoidable mistakes: Covid policy, Brexit, party discipline… In all these things there is a conspicuous — and baffling — lack of leadership.

      Take this past week. The PM’s Brexit argument should have been simple enough: if the EU wants to play hardball by hinting that it might stop food being sent from Britain to Northern Ireland, then Britain ought to make it clear that obviously it could not tolerate this. Johnson should have said so from the outset, explaining what the EU was attempting and why he needed to be polite but firm in response.

      He could have said that he would protect the integrity of the UK using flexibility built into the agreement he had already negotiated, rather than send a minister into the chamber to say the government would go rogue and ‘break international law’.

      Perhaps the intention was to scare the EU. It ended up appalling the Conservative party and handing ammunition to the Prime Minister’s enemies. International law is a dubious concept in the UK system, but what mattered to Tory MPs was the idea of breaking a promise and reneging on legislation he had only recently asked them to pass. It became a matter of reputation and honour.

      By the end of the debacle, the Prime Minister softened his tone, insisting that he is merely seeking a reserve power that he hopes never to use. It was another embarrassing, damaging, avoidable mess.

      The MPs who bumped into Johnson in the chamber last week said he looked exhausted, broken — and astonished at what he had unwittingly unleashed. It made them wonder: what did he expect? And if he’s the great communicator, why didn’t he bother to communicate?

      On Covid, too, his tactics are coherent and should be defensible. He fears that a second wave is underway in Spain and France and seeks to take stern action to stop the same thing happening in Britain. But why the sudden unexplained jump to Covid marshals and a police-enforced ‘rule of six’? These ideas blindsided the cabinet and the country. A bit more discussion beforehand and a proper understanding of the consequences would also have helped. Is he seriously asking people to inform on neighbours whose children have six friends in the garden? If so, why? To ask us not to enjoy the company of our friends and families is a big deal. If he’s serious about governing by consent then we need to understand the reasoning behind the policy; we need to see the evidence.

      Johnson’s overall Covid policy is now a mystery. Does he seek to ‘flatten the curve’ again? Is he trying to eliminate Covid altogether? We might think that his strategy inspired; we might think it insane — but we need to know what it is. We need to know, for instance, why children aren’t being excluded from the rule of six as they are in Scotland and Wales. There may be perfectly sound, scientific, rational answers to all such questions — but we don’t know, because Johnson is still using emergency legislation to bypass parliament. It’s a strange kind of leadership, and it doesn’t seem like him.

      And where was he during the Black Lives Matter protests? This ought to have been the perfect chance for him to rise above his other troubles and defend the country and its values. Instead, his government stayed mute while statues were pulled down and public buildings vandalised. Only when the Churchill monument outside parliament was defaced did the Prime Minister venture to say that it was all a bit much.

      As Mayor of London, he made several eloquent defences of his city. It’s the Rome of the globalised empire, he’d said, a place of opportunity for all. Kemi Badenoch, his equalities minister, caused a stir when she said that Britain was one of the best countries in the world for black people to live. Why not make that vital point now? Why doesn’t the PM stand up and remind every-one that Britain is among the most successful melting pots in Europe — if not the world? It’s not hard to imagine what Boris the columnist would have been writing in the Daily Telegraph. Why, he’d fume, will no one speak up for Britain?

      There are indeed racial disparities in our country. People of Indian heritage earn more than whites, while Bangladeshis earn less. Those of black African descent do well at school, those of black Caribbean descent do less well. The ethnic group least likely to go to university is white British. There is a fascinating discussion to be had, and there are certainly inequalities to be addressed, but Britain is absolutely not a country defined by racial discrimination and the Prime Minister should have said so. Instead, he looks as if the debate terrifies him, and that he would rather stay quiet and let the two sides battle it out. This is cowardly and entirely unnecessary. The case for liberalism is there to be made.

      The rise of cancel culture, statue-toppling and no-platforming is spreading far beyond university campuses. If the left is so clearly abandoning the basic idea of tolerance and real diversity, then it’s a gift that ought to be seized with both hands. Yet the lack of direction from No. 10 has seen the rot set in even within his own government. Whitehall officials have discouraged the use of words like ‘blacklist’. There have been serious discussions about renaming the Churchill Room.

      Perhaps the trouble is that the Prime Minister is a writer, campaigner and entertainer — but not really a fighter. He dislikes making enemies. He loves to be liked. Critics say he’s a bit too keen to agree with the last person he spoke to. This can lead to contradictory policies and confused messaging. He very much approved of Rishi Sunak’s push to go back to restaurants and the office — but very much sympathises with Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, who is terrified of a second wave. So he goes with both. But the last thing you need in uncertain times is uncertain leadership.

      The optimist in Boris Johnson hates delivering Covid bad news — so he tries to leaven his press conferences with cheerful notes, realistic or not. As a result, we’re promised 500,000 tests a day by the end of next month — and never mind if his government is falling at the 230,000 level. We hear of ‘moonshots’ of testing regimes, ‘world-beating’ Covid apps, the world’s finest track-and-trace system. The trouble is that when these promises aren’t met, it leads to disappointment and disillusion. This is far, far worse than the simple bad news would have been.

      As things stand, polls show that no country has been judged by its people to have done a worse job at handling the pandemic.

      All this, to his enemies, is to be expected. It fits the caricature of Boris the clown, who transplanted his Brexit campaigners into government. Hence the chaos, the critics say. The country is being run by Brexit ideologues. But it’s his supporters who are most surprised, even hurt, by recent events. They see in Boris the potential for an exceptional, gravity-defying politician who could reset politics and run government; someone who could inspire and hire brilliant people, and work with them to enact the agenda of his signature liberal conservatism. So why, they wonder, isn’t this happening?

      For a team to sing from the same hymn sheet, there needs to be a hymn sheet. At the moment, there isn’t one. One of the more depressing events of the last few months was Johnson’s June relaunch, a speech in Dudley billed as his great vision of what lay beyond Covid. His answer seemed to be construction spending, dualling the A1 and building a zero-carbon passenger jet. He spoke about his ‘levelling up’ agenda as if he could pick up where he left off. There was no recognition of the damage that lockdown has caused, or how ‘levelling up’ will now mean repairing that damage — in education, the economy and society at large.

      Rather than relaunch his premiership, the speech highlighted its main problem: a lack of vision and direction, which is odd from a leader who was elected precisely because he could articulate his vision. Once upon a time, he did this better than anyone. Now he hardly does it at all.

      It would be easy for Team Boris to ignore all this. The next general election is four years away, he still leads Labour in the polls, and even with last week’s rebellion his Internal Market Bill still passed with a majority of 77. There is moaning, but no mutiny. And certainly no other contender. The huge majority was won by him, personally. If it wasn’t for him, scores of the disgruntled Tory MPs would simply not be in parliament.

      The question now is whether he can become a proper leader with a sense of direction and purpose, or whether the pattern we have seen in recent months — of disorder, debacle, rebellion, U-turn and confusion — is what we should henceforth expect. Johnson still has millions of supporters willing him to succeed, baffled to see this forlorn creature skulking around Westminster. They know that he’s not responsible for the pandemic, but they do require of him a sense of what might lie on the other side of it: some promise for the future.

      On the day he was elected party leader, he promised that Britain would, like a slumbering giant, ‘rise and ping off the guy-ropes of self-doubt and negativity’. This is how many of his MPs now think of him: a slumbering leader capable of great things, who must begin to rise.

      WRITTEN BY
      Fraser Nelson
      Fraser Nelson is editor of The Spectator and columnist for the Daily Telegraph.

      Comments
      Share

      1. The nub of Brexit was the WA agreement.

        Boris surely must have known the dangers that lurked within it and he had six weeks in which to sort them out – between 12th December when he won his thumping majority and January 24th when the WA was signed. He failed to do so and is now reaping the harvest of this failure.

        In my view Boris ought to hand over the Covid 19 crisis to a deputy prime minister and concentrate on sorting out the mess over Brexit forcefully and unambiguously himself.

      2. The MPs who bumped into Johnson in the chamber last week said he looked exhausted, broken — and astonished at what he had unwittingly unleashed. It made them wonder: what did he expect? And if he’s the great communicator, why didn’t he bother to communicate?

        He’s been nobbled by The Man With the White Cat or perhaps it’s the Girl with the Little Dog! Is she slipping some pschotropic compound in his morning cocoa?

    3. That looks like 2 polar bears peering over an icy ridge, or it’s an electron microscope’s view of the entrance to Boris’s navel.

  46. Alexei Navalny walks down stairs as recovery continues. 19 September 2020.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f3682df6af8b1d787a61b378701485be0669c955af0d53464cfa509c8f9c4c0c.jpg

    The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been pictured walking down stairs, five days after a Berlin hospital said he had been taken off a ventilator and could breathe independently.

    Navalny, the leading opponent of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, fell ill in Siberia last month and was airlifted to Berlin. Germany said laboratory tests in three countries determined he was poisoned with a novichok nerve agent, and western governments have demanded an explanation from Russia.

    What a ridiculous farce! I’m suffering from dehydration at the moment, maybe I should get myself some Novichok as a tonic!

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/19/alexei-navalny-walking-down-stairs-russian-opposition-berlin

    2. That Novichok stuff is crap, isn’t it. If you want to do someone in, at least use arsenic or cyanide.

      1. Those are the famous “proof against Novichok” blue gloves, as used by the team that recovered the water bottles, allegedly contaminated by nerve agent, from a hotel room recently. Personally I would have demanded some serious PPE, but it seems these gloves are enough on their own!!

    2. Apologies if this has already been posted, not had time to read through all today’s posts

      The critics of smart meters were right all along
      Ross Clark, DT

      Imagine that you do as the Government wants you to do and buy an electric car. Then you replace your dirty old gas boiler with an electric heat pump and install a smart meter. You think you have done your bit to help the environment.

      So what is your reward? To have your electricity company use your smart meter to turn off your power because there is not enough juice in the grid. Suddenly, you find yourself sitting in a cold home and your plans to drive to Birmingham tomorrow are scuppered because your car won’t be fully-charged.

      Smart meters have been sold to us as part of a green future where we can manage our homes via mobile phone, switching appliances on and off remotely so as to cut our bills. But it is the cynics, so often denounced in the past few years as paranoid and backward-thinking, who have worked out the real reason why electricity companies are so keen to install them in our homes: they want to ration our electricity.

      It isn’t just us who will enjoy the convenience of being able to access our appliances remotely. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks has proposed a system in which it will be able to turn off certain devices in our homes, such as electric vehicle chargers and heat pumps, when the supply of electricity is too small to meet demand.

      For the moment, the company says it will only do so with consumers’ permission and that it will only be for two hours at a time. But I don’t expect that promise to last. Once electricity companies have established the principle that they can cut off consumers in order to cope with shortages of supply, they are bound to come back asking for more. And at the current rate, they will have to do this, because we simply don’t have enough storage in the electricity grid to cope with the switch to renewable energy.

      Here’s the problem. Yesterday afternoon, Britain was using 34 GW worth of power. It was a sunny and windy day across much of England – ideal conditions for renewable energy. Wind was producing 5.3 GW and solar 7.6 GW, with most of the rest being produced by gas (12.1 GW) and nuclear (4.7 GW). We were also importing 1 GW from the Netherlands.

      But what happens when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, as it all-too-frequently does in cold, anticyclonic conditions in midwinter, when demand for power is at its greatest? Moreover, what happens when electricity demand has been boosted by the switch to electric central heating and electric vehicles?

      It ought to be obvious that if we are going to rely on intermittent sources of energy we are going to need massive investment in energy storage. Quietly over the past few years, large battery installations, housed in rows of shipping containers, have indeed popped up across Britain. At present, however, there are only enough of them to meet 1 GW worth of demand – and even then only for an hour or two. The Government is desperately trying to encourage more batteries by speeding them through the planning system. Even chuck in proposed capacity, however, and it would only supply another 4 GW of electricity for an hour or so.

      But don’t expect even these batteries to get built. The Government is trying to solve the problem of a lack of energy storage through what is calls “capacity auctions”. The bids for batteries, however, are losing out to something called Demand Side Response. If you haven’t heard that jargon before, it means exactly what Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks is proposing to do: persuading people to turn off appliances when electricity demand is too high.

      In other words, the electricity industry has worked out that it is going to be cheaper not to bother building batteries but instead to cut us off when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing. As far as the Government’s capacity market is concerned, a kilowatt-hour of energy saved is the equivalent of a kilowatt-hour stored.

      For the consumer, however, there is every difference. Cutting off our electricity threatens seriously to interfere with our lives – especially if we are going to have to rely on electric cars and heating systems in future. It doesn’t matter too much if our heating goes off for a few minutes, but if electricity companies try to plug the enormous gap between supply and demand on a still winter’s night entirely by cutting off our electricity supply to demand, we are going to find ourselves sitting in the dark rather a lot.

      Unless the Government acts quickly on this problem and invests in a proper energy storage infrastructure – either that or finds another way to back up supply from intermittent wind and solar – we are going to be back in 1973 and the three day week, when homes had to take it in turns to go without electricity. Then, it was the miners’ unions who were to blame; now it is a failure to plan properly for a green future.

      1. One moment is all it takes to realise that “Demand Side Response” is a vision of darkness and death. The notion of a few moments cut-off is unrealistic. Demand will be highest on cold days. Days when the outside temperature is well below zero. Demand won’t go down, it will go up.
        Cuts will last for hours and days. Even if the cuts are rotated around housing schemes, Wester Hailes today and Harrow tomorrow, there will be deaths. Lots of old people will die. Freezers will stop working, food will go off. Petrol pumps won’t work. Many of us remember the power cuts in the 3-Day week. Streets without street lighting. That was then. We were largely white British and just got on with it. Cut the street lighting now and we will see riots, looting, rape and murder. and it won’t be the white British doing it.
        Of course Chelsea and Richmond will not suffer cuts. Even if they did, their wood stoves and gas AGAs will keep them cosy.
        Storage won’t work. That is a daft way to spend billions when the money could be spent on nuclear power stations, and gas power stations, even hydro schemes.

        1. Gas power stations were a very bad idea. We are now using our safe North Sea gas reserves very quickly; estimates are that they will run out 20-30 years earlier than expected. The majority of UK homes rely on gas for hot water and heating, and many for cooking also. What then?

          The ban on new home gas installations from 2025 has nothing to do with cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.

          2. Fracking if it works and it’s safe but imports of gas present obvious problems in today’s world. North Sea gas is ours.

          4. I have a multi-fuel cooker and open fires. I also have oil-fired heating for chilly, not cold, days. Time to stock up on paraffin for the lamps, perhaps.

      2. 323822+ up ticks,
        Morning K,
        They could have ALL the power on the planet, it is not size or amount that counts as with a sex tentacle it is how it is used.
        To those in power, controlling power = submissive pcism & appeasement, OR ELSE.

        1. The state, for some utterly bizarre reason is desperate to shut down our economy. Comically, it also also desperate to bring in vast numbers of energy using immigrants.

          That leaves us with a state desperate to shut down the very thing that pays for it, using policies it thinks will create jobs which will pay for big state in the future, but such jobs cannot be done in this country because the equipment cannot be manufactured because of our energy policies.

          Alongside that it is bringing in economically inactive and useless immigrants which will add to our welfare and, crucially energy bills. Again, to meet some idiotic target set by big state.

          It’s almost as if common sense has been thrown away or, more rationally some confused, stupid, lazy and overpaid civil servant confused the numbers in column A with those in column B.

          1. 323822+ up ticks,
            Afternoon W,
            There is another slant on it, that being there is nothing so dangerously treacherous as a scorned politico, and boy was they scorned on the 24/6/2020.
            For nearly the last 5 years we have been serving a mandatory apprenticeship & in passing out we should be obedient to ALL aspects of the submissive pcism & appeasement unwritten rulings.
            All politico’s / party’s & their supporters lets not forget, have an equal share in the culmination of their input regarding the destruction of England / GB, not long now for the completion.

      3. “…proper energy storage infrastructure…”

        Why do you think they’re pushing for us all to have a battery outside our homes? Ones with four wheels?

        Smart meters cannot turn off individual devices. They can only turn off the power entirely. The intent of a smart meter is to frighten people into using less energy.

        As it is, a gas boiler is not dirty. A heat pump is expensive and no where nearly as efficient as central heating.

        The ‘green homes’ nonsense was precisely awkward enough that it sounded good, but was ultimately so much of a faff that unless you’ve either endless amounts of time or are not spending any of your own money and are getting it all on the state you simply don’t bother.

  48. Good morning, My Friends

    (Last checked yesterday night at midnight.)

    Any updates? Any errors or omissions? Anyone else want to be added to the list? Please let me know under this post.

    2nd January………..Poppiesmum (1947)
    7th January ………..Lady of the Lake
    8th January………….Rough Common
    10th January………..hopon (1960)
    16th January……….Legal Beagle (1941)
    18th January……….BugSpattered Knees
    23rd January ………Damask Rose (1951)
    27th January……….Citroen 1
    11th February ……..Phizzee (1964)
    22nd February……..Grizzly (1951)
    28th February……..Jeremy Morfey (1956)
    29th February………Ped
    5th March……………Sue Macfarlane (1957)
    8th March……………Geoff Graham
    26th March………….Caroline (1962)
    27th March………….Maggiebelle (1947)
    27th March………….Fallick Alec
    19th April…………….Devonian in Kent
    26th April…………….Harry Kobeans
    8th June………………Still Bleau
    9th June……………..Johnny Norfolk (1947)
    9th June …………….Horace (The Horse) Pendleton (1947)
    23rd June………….. Oberlieutenant
    25th June …………..corimmoblie (1952)
    1st July……………….Rastus (1946)
    12th July……………..David Wainwright
    18th July……………..lacoste
    19th July……………..Ndovu
    26th July……………..Delboy (1936)
    29th July……………..Lewis Duckworth (1944)
    30thJuly………………Alf the Great (1946)
    1st August…………..Datz (1950)
    3rd August…………..Molamola
    10th August…………ourmaninmunich (1967)
    18th August…………ashesanddust
    4th September……..Joseph B. Fox (1948)
    7th September……..Araminta Smade
    11th September….. Peddy
    12th September …..Ready Eddy (1946)
    13th September……Anne
    15th September……Ververyveryoldfella
    26th September……Feargal the Cat
    7th October………….Bob 3 (1960)
    11th October ……….Hardcastle Craggs (1944)
    .25th October………..Sue Edison (1955)
    1st December……….Sean Stanley-Adams (1956)
    6th December………Duncan Mac (1943)
    21st December……..Elsie Bloodaxe (1945)

    E&OE

      1. But I doubt whether he will be prepared to don a red cloak, a red hood and a luxuriant white beard at Christmas!

        1. I already have the luxuriant white beard all times of the year, but at Christmas time, it causes quite a stir from the children when walking the hills.

    2. Funny how reticent people are about their age!

      I have never understood why some don’t want to “come out”. After all, you are the age you are – there is nothing you can do about it. What’s so secret?

      I am NOT being critical – Just asking.

      3. Possibly not reticent or secretive uncle Bill I’m for one just amazed how often people misjudge at first site. I can’t run for a bus now, but i look much younger than i am. Born 1946, conception (probably weeks) not long after my own daddy came home from southern Europe after the end of WW2.

        1. I must look younger than I am – I keep telling my riding instructor that I’m geriatric and she keeps forgetting 🙂

        3. Amongst our chums was a chap who was middle aged when we were in our twenties.
          He remained more or less that way for the next fifty years.

          2. One of my school friends married a woman 20 years his senior. He aged almost overnight. She banished us, his peer group.

      5. Good morning, Bill

        Once you pass a certain age your year of birth becomes a defiant badge of honour!

    5. Since you’ve invited proofreading I’ll take you up on the offer. Some avatar names are capitalised, others are not.

      roughcommon (one word).
      Oberstleutnant (spelling)
      ashesthandust (middle section is ‘than’, not ‘and’)

      Just a suggestion: you have listed most by their chosen avatar names, yet to some you have given shortened versions. For clarity for all I would suggest that the following are altered:

      “Legal Beagle” to Bill Thomas
      “Maggiebelle” to True_Belle
      “Rastus” to Rastus C. Tastey
      “Peddy” to peddytheviking
      “Anne” to anneallan

      As I said, Just a suggestion.

    2. We don’t need new law. We just need the state to enforce the ones we have and not ponce about and kneel to the vermin.

  50. It seems that BLM is agitating for a BAMEs vs Whites civil war.

    Given that hypothesis I wonder which politicians and journalists would be on the BAME side and which would be on the side of the whites.

    1. Umm, what’s the reference link?

      As the very idea is preposterous. The problem with the lack looting mob is they think they’re the majority because they cluster together in inner cities – which they turn into war zones and no go areas.

      The rest of the country consists of decent people. However those decent people very swiftly get annoyed and, I tihnk would welcome a free chance to smack the wasters ruining their country into the ground once and for all.

  51. Conspiracy theorists clash with police as hundreds rail against Covid restrictions in central London protest. 19 September 2020.

    Hundreds of anti-lockdown protesters including conspiracy theorists have clashed with riot police at a mass rally in Trafalgar Square today organised by opponents of the Government’s coronavirus restrictions.

    An army of Metropolitan Police officers moved in on angry demonstrators defying coronavirus laws against mass gatherings as they descended upon Nelson’s column in central London in their droves.

    The protesters, who carried placards warning ‘this is now tyranny’ and ‘plandemic’ formed human blockades opposite the officers to stop them from making arrests before fighting broke out in front of the National Gallery.

    I lost count of the number of “Conspiracy theorists” in this article. It must be a world record! They are obviously much more of a danger than XR or BLM. Not on the BBC either! How strange!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8750505/Anti-mask-mayhem-Trafalgar-Square-Conspiracy-theorists-clash-police.html

    2. There were no angry protesters, just normal ordinary people. There were thousands not hundreds and it was a happy party until the police moved in to attack. That was the point where I got the bus home.

    4. They look like peaceful, ordinary people listening to speakers at the rally. Then the riot police move in to break them up.

    5. The caption to every photo has “Conspiracy theorists”! How many did they actually ask? Anyone who can see the coordinated international response to this virus must be a “Conspiracy theorist” and anyone who thinks this is part of the “Green agenda” and “great reset” must be one as well.

    6. An army of Metropolitan police….

      Where were they when black looting mob needed a damned good kicking?

  52. Oh dear another “you couldn’t make it up could you” ?

    Guardian……
    The Metropolitan police force has been ordered to launch an inquiry after a court heard that an escaped prisoner, who had been jailed for firearms offences, spent a month trying to hand himself in to officers but was repeatedly turned away.

    Akram Uddin admitted to absconding from an open prison to see his mother on 17 June. His lawyers told his sentencing hearing on Friday that seven times he asked police to arrest him for it and seven times they refused.

    “This case, more than any other I have heard or have been involved with in my last two decades of practice, perhaps illustrates the extent of the managed decay of the criminal justice system,” Uddin’s lawyer, Liam Walker of Doughty Street chambers, told Maidstone crown court on Friday.

    He detailed several attempts he said Uddin and his solicitor made to have him voluntarily taken back into custody at a south-east London police station. According to his solicitor, Kamal Channa of Brooklyn Law, he first walked into Lewisham police station on 13 July but was turned away.

    During several attempts recorded by Channa, Walker told the court Uddin and Channa were variously told that there was and was not a warrant out for his arrest. Uddin’s final attempt was on 13 August, Walker told the court, adding that his client was told to go back to the police station six days later. One day before that, however, he was eventually arrested.

    “It is utterly astonishing that, when Mr Uddin asked to be taken back into custody, he was refused. There is little more that an escaped prisoner can do than instruct his solicitor that he is going to a particular police station, attend that police station with a bag, say he has escaped from prison, give his full details and ask to be arrested and taken back,” Walker told the court.

      1. Good afternoon, Rastus.

        I don’t know what to make of it. The world that now exists is in a parallel universe to the one I knew. The forces of evil have conquered and are now setting out their stall.

    4. This assumes that the fine and upstanding Mr Akram Uddin was telling the truth (and his lawyers will of course just be repeating what he has told them). It might be wise to wait and see what the inquiry finds.

    6. This assumes that the fine and upstanding Mr Akram Uddin was telling the truth (and his lawyers will of course just be repeating what he has told them). It might be wise to wait and see what the inquiry finds.

    1. David Cameron also tweeted his backing to the charity in 2015 and rewarded Ms Bhari a special Downing Street Point of Light award.

      WTF? None but the “Heir to Blair” could’ve come up with a title quite as pretentious as a “Downing Street Point of Light” award.

    4. Never mind the scam. Half of the fairies that commented are weeping buckets because the poor girl died at 23. They are either too thick to guess or haven’t read the clues that indicate she died of opiate abuse.

  54. Karen Robb’s funeral took place yesterday in beautiful sunshine in the churchyard of Cradley Parish Church which was festooned with flowers, and a big floral display from the village primary school where she taught.

    A great relief from lockdown for a brief while as over a hundred of us gathered there. The choirmaster, actually the Musical Director of the Powick Community Choir and a prominent local politician, escaped the masks inside the VIP enclosure inside the church and joined us outside, listening through a pair of underpowered speakers hung on the main door to the church.

        1. Jeremy posted the full story a short while ago.
          Basically, a much loved teacher fell into clinical depression due to the closedown of her school and, when the school reopened and she was not allowed to resume work with her class, committed suicide.

          1. Thanks, Robert. I missed it. The press merely referred to “sudden death” and I assumed that meant some freak medical condition.

          2. I got the full story from the choir committee members who made up the search party that found the body. For the funeral, I made up a CD of a particular touching recording of her conducting the school choir and the community choir an anthem at a concert last year at Stanbrook Abbey.

            The collection during the service went towards Friends of Cradley School.

      1. And they’d better be careful how much air they send up – she looks as though she’d need enough material in her dress for a galleon and she could be a hazard to Gatwick if the gale is too strong.

  56. Beautiful sunny autumn evening! Yellow, red & green trees, the only sounds being cowbells and ravens. Balm for the soul. That, and a new wine box, of course!

  57. If the Government panics to this extent at the threat of a few hundred deaths, thank God that World War 3 is nowhere in sight.

    Oh… wait….

    1. At the beginning of WW2, the government was at pains to reassure the populace – keep calm and carry on. This lot of nincompoops have gone out of their way to terrify everybody – stay frightened and stay at home.

      2. Surely it’s 2st, not 20? As if I lost 20 stone I’d be -1 stone. And dead.

        Why do people persist on using archaic unit measurements? What is wrong with just using metric?

        1. I’ve really no idea how much weight she lost. I have no problem with stones/pounds/hundredweight or whatever, nevertheless I’m surprised that the Daily Mail chose to use ‘stones’.

          I’m sure you’re right, losing 20 stone is highly unlikely, she looks like she gained 2 stone rather than lost it.

          1. Same as they use something absurd like frogs to measure temperature.

            I’ve no idea what 86 frogs means.

    1. Lunchtime at the Bowls Club I tried a Marston’s ‘Old Empire’ IPA. Very nice but not really a lunchtime drink at 5.7%.

          4. You have both missed the point. I drink it by the wine glass. Four of those finishes off the first bottle!

          5. Why ever not?

            I do, BT does, Phizzee does, Lotl is a quart person…

            What a wimp!

            Are you sure you’re a Nottler?

    2. My neighbours had their grandson to visit again and they were out in the garden while I was removing some unwanted Spirea Davidii. Judging by the shouts of “bad!”, “naughty!” and “how many times have I told you not to do that?” I think they might be starting to appreciate the difficulty of teaching thirty-odd of the little b@stards in one class 🙂

    1. I see the graph is labelled “infections” [type of infection not actually specified] not “deaths”

  64. We need a new daily figure to be published alongside Covid deaths.
    We could call it the Fergudeath number.

    It will be the estimated number of people dying of suicide, heart attacks, cancers and other diseases because people were too frightened to see or be seen by that envy of the world the NHS, or they have lost their jobs, businesses and homes..

    I strongly suspect that the Fergudeath number already exceeds the total number of Covid deaths and that it is accelerating away from Covid deaths at a fearsome rate.

  67. Don’t emote over the headline; Victoria Coren Mitchell is actually making a serious point.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2020/09/19/wrong-laugh-david-tennants-portrait-serial-killer/

    Was it wrong to laugh at David Tennant’s portrait of a serial killer?

    It may be uncomfortable to admit it, but Des contained comedy – very risky comedy

    19 September 2020 • 7:00am

    “If Des wasn’t supposed to be funny then there’s something wrong with me. As the ghastly tale of serial killer Dennis Nilsen unfolded, over three grisly nights this week on ITV, I laughed loudly on many occasions. Not smiles. Not nods of amusement. Belly laughs.

    When I read subsequent reviews of the “sinister” and “chilling” miniseries, with much glowing praise for David Tennant’s “remorseless”, “spine-tingling”, “dead-eyed” and “nightmarish” portrayal of Nilsen, I thought I might be a sociopath myself. No mention of how funny he is? Am I… am I… the only one?

    Don’t get me wrong, it was a wonderful performance from David Tennant. That man just gets better and better. He’s already given us Staged and There She Goes so far this pandemic: three very different turns, all incandescently watchable. I’m a fan of his, so I trust him: this is not an actor who’s funny by mistake. If I am laughing at the cheerful way in which his Nilsen advises the police to visit an old address “where you’ll find 12 or 13 people dating back to 1978”, it’s because Tennant means me to laugh. When Nilsen complains about the press coverage, with puppyish hurt in his eyes, because “nobody mentions my years of public service… my work with the unions”, there is a deliberate sitcom twinkle. (“You f— one goat…”)

    But the advance publicity promised only darkness and bleakness, which reviewers echoed; why? Perhaps because, if they said it was funny, they might get cancelled. This is not a time for taking comic risks. It’s 2020. Cough out the wrong joke and a nation will tighten its masks and phone the authorities. I’m nervous to admit I found it funny myself; some people on the internet would have me pilloried for that.

    Obviously, the story of Dennis Nilsen is dark and bleak. It’s gory and nasty. And it’s heartbreaking: lonely, lost, homeless people were lured to his den, hoping for comfort, grateful just to be given supper, and instead met a terrible fate. He left a trail of fear and grief. He is one of the worst serial killers we’ve ever known.

    And yet, and yet, there is something ineffably comic in the juxtaposition of horror and domesticity. A severed head in a soup tureen. A corpse propped in front of the telly. Neighbours complaining about a blocked drain, and the blockage is a hand. These images are odd, surprising and cartoonish – and one of our natural human instincts, when faced with the surprising and ghastly, is to laugh. That’s why medical students are always putting on revues.

    Making room for this human truth rendered Tennant’s Nilsen more chilling, for me, not less. But that is nuanced and complicated, and we do not live in an era of nuance and complication. Safer for the programme makers to insist the miniseries was only bleak, only horrible, because that is the proper response to murder.

    A dark and gloomy murder story is still entertainment, of course, but drama is allowed more liberty than comedy. I’m not sure why. It should be the opposite! That’s the whole point of the jester: his fearless and limitless licence. But something has gone wrong, and entertainers are currently only safe to deal with illness, tragedy and death in a one-note, downcast, beard-stroky way, for fear of being seen to “disrespect” the nature of trauma.

    Thus, I cannot fault Des for its packaging. Very wise. They were still brave enough to let it be funny – but only as a dog-whistle, a secret exchange of glances between performer and viewer, like that between old friends before a clandestine lockdown hug. Be careful! Don’t let the internet see you!

    I’m not a comedian, but I always hope to be funny because laughter makes life worth living. And yet even a well-meaning, uncontroversial, God-fearing woman like me is nervous to make a joke, these days, because each one is a risk. Even if you can’t spot any potential offence, someone will spot it for you. So, for any individual joke, it’s always easier to think “I won’t bother.” And yet, that leads eventually to a place where there are no jokes at all.

    Levity is being picked off case-by-case, as if a serial killer were at large. It’s truly frightening. We all know that the culture has grown too binary: I’ve been accused of making certain jokes because I’m “so Left wing” and others because I’m “so Right wing”, when the only relevant view I hold is that jokes must be made, freely and confidently, without fear or favour.

    I wonder what Dennis Nilsen would have made of all this? He was a very bright man. And a fan of mine! The bloodthirsty fellow revealed in 2006 that he was “addicted” to Balderdash and Piffle, a TV series I made about the dictionary. Here’s nuance for you: I was pleased to hear it.

    I don’t approve of murder and necrophilia. But does that invalidate him liking my show? It does not! OK, he dressed up the corpses of his victims and socialised with them after death. But, as Osgood Fielding the Third said: “Nobody’s perfect.” A fan’s a fan.

    Is it OK for me to say that? Am I “only joking”? Is it better if I am, or if I’m not? Too risky for me to reveal which it is: whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. Only Connect returns to BBC Two on Monday night – if I haven’t been cancelled.”

      1. It is the banal domestic, pooterish details contrasting with the sheer horror that causes the uneasy laughs.
        That is why we all make jokes about building a new rockery when other half annoys us.
        One of the telling details against Armstrong, the poisoner, was that he breached middle class table manners by passing a cake by hand to one of his tea table victims rather than offering the plate round.

    2. David Mitchel is one very lucky man. Victoria has both brains and good looks.

      I haven’t watched the comedy psychopath drama and have no intention to watch murder porn. But i agree, David Tennant is flourishing in his roles.

      1. David Mitchell may be
        ‘one very lucky man’ but
        …I am orf to Amazon Prime
        to watch:

        ‘The Gentlemen.’

        Seeya’all……. later

          1. Ooooohh, I shall, Dear One, I shall!! :-))

            [A toss up at the moment between
            Mathew McConaughey, Keanu Reeves
            Gerard Butler and Kevin Costner]

            Sharp intake of breath!! :-))
            In fact several sharp intakes of breath!! :-))

          2. Kevin Costner has the acting ability and personality of a clothes prop. His films are beyond dreadful.

            Good afternoon, Garlands.

          3. Garlands isn’t watching because of acting ability. She is waiting for the moment when all his clothes fall off.

          4. I have often said Kevin Costner couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag.
            And his voice…so whiny

      1. Richard III is a play of two halves; first half he is a pantomime villain and in the second half he is serious.

    4. Sexual perversity is so fashionable, it’s amazing necrophilia isn’t yet a protected characteristic.

      2. as the old joke goes:-

        Buggery is boring.
        Necrophilia is dead boring.
        But Incest is only relatively boring.

    5. I also enjoyed watching Des and agree with most of what Vicky says in her review. Tennant’s portrayal of Nilsen was excellent and there were many laugh-out-loud moments.

      The only problem I have with TV crime dramas is the hackneyed portrayal of police officers and procedures that have me shouting at the telly. Yet again we have senior officers bellowing at lower ranks (it never happens). We have officers routinely calling their seniors “Guv” (never heard it once in reality). We have judges calling out “Sustained!” to “Objections” by counsel (Only in America!). And we have the words of the short and formal cautions (which police officers memorise) quoted erroneously. These routinely-repeated mistakes spoil the event for me.

      1. Ah, that’ll be the well-known caution from the old days …. “Irish stew in the name of the Law and I must warn you that anything you say may be taken down, twisted round, and used to my advantage”
        ;¬)

    1. A virus so lethal that some of you need a test….. others get the ventilator and the ICU before anyone gets round to testing them.

      Why it should be quite so variable I do not know, but anyone who has had it badly can tell you that a severe dose is no joke at all.

      1. Contributory factors. If I get it, as an asthmatic fat bugger, I’ll likely peg it.

        Even knowing that I’d rather die on my feet.

          2. Another factor appears to be viral load – the sheer level of exposure seems to matter. Hence so many younger health workers (and they were by no means all overweight) succumbing to it.

      2. In Norway:
        267 have died
        16 in hospital now, no change for days.
        Nearly 1 million tested.
        Total cases 12.769 to date.
        More lockdown on the cards because more tests reveal more infections, yet hospital occupancy is stable at 16. So, not so serious that people need much hospitalisation.
        Average over the 5 years to 2018: deaths with flu = 902 per year. So, 3 times that of covid in twice the period.
        How much lockdown was there 2 years ago due to flu, which carried off more people? How many drive-in flu test centres were there? How many newspapers and tv news were filled with reports of flu deaths? Hmm.
        It’s hysteria.

        1. I’m in complete agreement that much of the response is hysteria and that lockdowns and the like are neither effective nor wise (though if the whole thing makes people take a look at how we run hospitals, care homes and domestic care with huge numbers of “bank” staff swapping from place to place, instead of decently paid regular staff it will have done some good). The collateral damage from the response is highly likely to be worse than the disease and that’s disgraceful.

          But I’ve known 3 people with positive tests; all a little younger than I am and none of them with major co-morbidities. One coughed for a fortnight and has shown no other ill effects. One very good friend spent 17 days on a ventilator and 7 weeks in hospital (he could barely walk when he came off the ventilator). The third was an old friend from near home with whom I’d lost touch, he died 2 weeks ago (though I only heard about it on Friday) his children are still in primary school.

          Yes, over the years I’ve also known people who died from flu – but not one of them was under 70, the 3 above were all in their forties/fifties. We do get newspaper reports about flu deaths – usually when some hospital declares itself overwhelmed – but certainly not on the same scale.

          One big difference between flu and SARS-CoV-2 seems to be the effect of viral load. Flu will be similar wherever and however you catch it. Higher viral loads seem to lead to much worse illness with this thing and that is less of a problem in a country like Norway where people have more space. Oslo’s population density (~1,650 per km²) is less than half of that of Birmingham or Glasgow (~3,550 per km²) and less than a third of that of London (~5,700 per km²). It is striking that most of the worst cases have been in areas of dense population or have been picked up there.

          1. I’m sorry about your friend, Jennifer. That’s awful. There but for the Grace go we all. I’m sorry if I was insensitive.

          2. He was the younger brother of an old school friend – and we only keep in touch occasionally – but as he is about 8 years younger than I am it came as a nasty shock.

            No, you were not really insensitive, I get as frustrated as you do with the response to this thing which is neither logical nor consistent and has made what was already a difficult year much, much, worse. But, speaking as someone who studied a biological science (unlike most on this forum – the ones who claim to be medically clued up are mostly appallingly ignorant, though there are a few exceptions) this virus is not behaving as predictably as most (hence the ghastly mess that the epidemiologists – always to some degree a branch of fantasy rather than science – are making) and it isn’t only “burning out the dry timber” but going into green wood too. I don’t know the answers, but I do know that neither what is being done, nor simply doing nothing is the right track.

            Why does it kill twice as many men as women (there are just as many fat and wheezing females)? – and that’s only one of the questions. At some point, when there have been more cases, and more deaths, the virologists (as opposed to the epidemiologists) will know a lot more and that will be a good thing. The testing regime has the advantage of giving the virologists a lot more data to work with (so it has some positives) – as well as catching cases earlier so that if they turn into serious ones they are more likely to get timely treatment and recover. The friend who ended up in intensive care thought he was over the worst, then collapsed, they were lucky to get him to hospital in time. The work with Dexamethasone and Remdesivir has been useful (and the former is dirt cheap) though, despite claims to the contrary, chloroquine and its derivatives do not show a consistent beneficial effect. Being able to treat the serious cases goes a long way to dispel the fear factor (even if the government do seem intent on increasing it) and more recovered cases is the best way to restore confidence.

            Testing and tracing, without all the massive restrictions, has a purpose. Lockdown has gained us nothing and lost us a great deal. Where we go next goodness only knows, but neither you nor I can do a damned thing about it – and I’m trying not to let it increase my stress levels, they are high enough already.

          3. I’m no epidemiologist, but I do know modelling and it’s uses and limitations. Ferguson should be in jail for that crap and it’s deficiencies. Put it this way, in the nuclear power industry, or offshore oil & gas, he would have been thrown out of the room before anyone ever took his drivel seriously.
            But PPE graduates know better, I guess.

          4. The problem with epidemiologists is just how far they think they can safely extrapolate beyond any sort of actual data. Whereas the first thing a science student is taught is never to extrapolate beyond the data. Modelling, if I understand it, uses collected data, but doesn’t pretend to get too far in front of itself.

            Unfortunately it isn’t only Ferguson. Whitty is another. The original SAGE team was made up of epidemiologists and behavioural scientists, there wasn’t a virologist or even a proper medic to be seen!

            Engineers, being applied scientists, know that if they get it wrong the consequences are likely to be disastrous. You have to be sure that the bridge will stay put, the road won’t collapse under the weight of traffic etc etc (since agricultural is another of the applied branches I understand the mindset – if not the maths!).

            This benighted bunch (and who is going to bet against them being actual knights in return for their bad advice in year or so’s time) don’t actually have to pick up any of the pieces… which makes them think that they can speculate to their hearts’ content!

            There, I’ve even managed not to swear… which is no less than miraculous.

    2. Perhaps they could go back to celebrating Hallowe’en the British way with a witch and ghost party with bobbing apples.

      1. I’m British and I went out guising on Hallowe’en when I was little. The British way varies depending on which part of Britain you lived in.

          1. Recitation, singing, dancing – all acceptable; but the object was to be given sweeties – which is exactly the same aim as trick or treating.

          2. But the principle that they do something to earn the sweets is important, I think, instead of threatening pranks if they don’t get any. I remember answering the door to three very, very small people, one of whom was even tinier than the other two. Their chant began “We are ghosties one, two, three, Two are big and one is wee…” Chorus of “Aaah, how cute!” from the group of students within, and lots of rewards.
            Interestingly, all the guisers knew to come to the student house, where of course they got loads of loot!

          3. I don’t think I’d go as far as calling it a principle – it was a tradition and when traditions are taken to new countries and mixed up with other traditions from other places they do change. The origins of playing tricks at Hallowe’en (when gods, ghosts etc were imagined to be visible) also go back to very ancient history — pre-Christian history. Christians attached a much earlier festival (Samhain) to the eve of All Saints Day and tried to clean it up a bit, but “the devil will out” as the saying goes and most children are imps at heart.

            Of course little folks know where the generous neighbours live – and they make the most of them. Our village was tiny so of course all the neighbours knew us too.

          4. In France and Germany they maintain that link with the dead by visiting the graves of the ancestors on All Saints Day.
            Halloween is definitely a bit impish – round where we live, the children only go to houses with a pumpkin outside.

          5. Are you sure that happens on All Saints Day?

            All Saints Day, November 1, is the celebration of the church’s elite, those who have been canonized but are not amongst the very chosen few who have a celebration of their own day. It is immediately followed by All Souls Day on November 2 a day of commemoration for more personal deaths and that is the traditional day for visiting graves, remembering ancestors whose graves you cannot access etc. Celebrated as “The Day of the Dead” in some parts of central America.

            Being a Sunday chorister means that one gets to know the church calendar rather too well.

            Pumpkins really are a new development in the UK. I can remember hollowing out the biggest swede we could find to make a lantern (which is much harder work than emptying a pumpkin, especially when you are too young to be trusted by your mother with a knife and have to do the whole job with a spoon). “Neep” lanterns were carried by guisers but not generally made by others. In my day those who were “not at home” to guisers (very few) would simply make sure that the light in their front hall was off and the curtains were drawn closed.

          6. I suspect you are right about All Souls, however they seem to make the visits on the holiday of Toussaint / Alleheiligen, both of which translate to All Saints! Probably they are all back at work the following day?
            We also used swedes, I wasn’t aware of the whole pumpkin thing until I was older. You must have been very keen to do that with a teaspoon!

          7. It was an old dessert-spoon with quite a bit of edge on it as it had been used for a multitude of odd tasks, but it wasn’t the quickest method.

            All Saints is a public holiday in both countries so it looks as though, as you say, the two have been run together.

  71. UK entering second wave of coronavirus, Boris Johnson warns. 19 September 2020.

    Britain is entering a second wave of coronavirus, Boris Johnson has said as scientists expressed fears the death toll could be as high as in the first spike without a rapid change in public behaviour.

    The prime minister is prepared to impose sweeping nationwide measures to curb the spread of Covid-19, it is understood. About 13.5 million people in the UK – one in five – are already facing local lockdowns after the government introduced new measures in parts of the north-west, Yorkshire and the Midlands.

    6 people in England and 3 in Scotland have died today from Covid 19.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/18/uk-entering-second-wave-of-coronavirus-boris-johnson-warns

        1. Oh! I see. Is that how government excuses Muslim terrorism? Putting them down to mentally ill lone wolves and classifying it a dementia?

          1. Only a few of them are old enough to plead that excuse. Most of them just have no excuse at all.

    3. We can clearly see the effect of the first spike:

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/81dbd6dae2d13d132c6c2e0b59254cbbe521daeeb68d5f39bf19d1fe6f039f57.jpg

      Consequently, the UK energy demands dropped signicantly below the critical lights out danger level by about 10GW.

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a6eefb395fb910791408a963ae785d95caad23fc289b9ae6f7c32210c74231a8.jpg

      This means we can ditch the two Chinese funded nuclear power stations by keeping a second spike going until we can work out a way of keeping the wind speed constant whilst avoiding the Government switching off our Smart meters.

  72. Though i enjoyed the series we can rely on dear old auntie Beeb to ramp up the fear factor.

    They are now showing Battlestar Galactica from the beginning where many nuclear bombs fall on an unsuspecting planet killing many millions in a holocaust.

    Added to that Dennis Nielson’s Psychopathic murders.

    Personally, i don’t think they are trying very hard. They should show us the daily beheadings and burning of Christians around the world. Bastards !

  73. If one really needs confirmation that the world has gone completely and utterly crazy:
    The Meagain has pronounced, and other morons are joining in.

    Describing her as a “woman of brilliance”, Meghan shared how Ms Ginsburg had been an inspiration to her since she was a girl.

    Meghan Markle said Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a ‘woman of brilliance’

    In a statement, Meghan said: “With an incomparable and indelible legacy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will forever be known as a woman of brilliance, a justice of courage, and a human of deep conviction. she has been a true inspiration to me since I was a girl. Honour her, remember her, act for her.”
    And another moron comments:

    “As a two-time Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductee, the first female to be inducted twice, compared to 22 men having been inducted twice, I Stevie Nicks, induct Ruth Bader Ginsburg into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame of Life.”

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/megan-markle-tributes-ruth-bader-ginsburg-a4551326.html

    1. RBG actually was a good SCJ but I very much doubt if these people could even have named her as a SCJ two days ago.

    2. It’s interesting that she places the emphasis on her gender. Personally I’d rather value characteristics over what sex someone is but then the ‘englightened’ and ‘progressive’ Megan is beyond such vaunted attitudes.

      However, a recommendation of character from someone who has no integrity, decency, sense of duty or ethical grounding is a bit like taking advice from a flushed toilet.

    1. I never knew that RBG had anything on the Clintons.

      One lives and learns.

      Unless one has anything on the Clintons of course, when one lives and dies.

    2. I suppose it is funny but there against would be a darn good exchange to get Ginsburg in exchange for Clinton.

  75. Yesterday I posted a screen shot of some very obnoxious folk and received lots of suggestion for a collective noun for said scum I now now the definitive term is “A bucket list”.

  77. ‘My heart is broken’: EastEnders fans brand Chantelle’s murder ‘powerful and harrowing’ and praise BBC for shedding light on domestic abuse.D Fail

    White Englishman kills black wife and threatens to strangle children because he was brought up in racist London watching Alf Garnet and Lennie Henry. Is there no end to the BBC’s vile propaganda?

    2. Mo mention then of the fact that the BBC has broken the hearts of millions of loyal British subjects?

    3. I used to watch Eastenders but gave up on it years ago so I don’t know who Chantelle is or was……. but with a name like that she has to be black. Everyone of a certain age has been brought up on Eastenders propaganda – is it self-fulfilling?

  79. Good night all.

    Grilled lobster tails with herb butter & crusty French bread, soft green beans. Mongravet 2019, apricots baked with sherry, honey & thyme.

  80. I don’t care that Hancock cocked-up on TV but it’s a shame it had to be at the hands of the girning pixie Munchy. They were made for each other.

    Conversely, Madeline seems like a nice girl…

    The BBC’s statist stance does not speak for us all

    Ministers have been questioned on ‘doing more’, while questions about civil liberties or proportionality have been conspicuously absent

    MADELINE GRANT

    This week, Matt Hancock appeared on BBC Breakfast in what was subsequently trumpeted as a “car-crash interview”. As the Health Secretary, looking sleep-deprived, attempted to explain the rationale for new restrictions, anchor Naga Munchetty grew exasperated with his evasions, questioning him ever-more stridently.

    “This is very worrying, isn’t it?”, she said, as if speaking for the nation, à la Emily Maitlis in her notorious Newsnight monologue. “We all know the rules now… but they’re not working, are they? This is why you’ve had to introduce more regional lockdowns… How prepared are you to impose a national lockdown if those regional measures don’t work?” Hancock’s awkward sign-off: “It’s very good to have me on”, triggered gales of laughter on social media.

    Far more alarming than his slip of the tongue was the way Munchetty framed the debate. Baked into her statements and queries are questionable assumptions; a seemingly automatic conviction that lockdown measures “work” and should be followed up by further escalation.

    Our broadcasters regularly champion such narratives. Their scrutiny of politicians often begins from the statist premise that they should be doing “more”; locking down sooner or more aggressively, perhaps, or spending more to “fix” problems. Spurred on by the additional demand for action created by the frenetic 24-hour news cycle, the idea that the Government might do less rarely seems to feature.

    Radio 4’s Today presenters appear most comfortable challenging ministers on aspects of their response to the pandemic, such as PPE provision or test and trace. Despite highlighting contradictory messaging on liberty-sapping restrictions, very rarely do they question the principle of state control. When Mr Hancock appeared on Today last week, criticism focused solely on clarity over the rule of six, and outrage after Jacob Rees-Mogg characterised public concern over testing as “carping”. Questions about civil liberties or proportionality were conspicuously absent.

    Presenters sometimes even adopt the Government’s own terminology. One BBC reporter this week described new regional restrictions, now a matter of law, as people being “asked” not to socialise. But they are not being asked – they’re being told.

    Worryingly, I have yet to see any broadcaster query the decision to fine Piers Corbyn £10,000 for organising a lockdown protest, despite the use of emergency powers without parliamentary scrutiny. Given Today‘s pivotal role in shaping the daily news agenda, these are grave sins of omission. Every morning, journalists from across the political spectrum tune in as they slug down their coffees and work out what to commission and whom to invite onto their shows.

    In its statist framing of events, the BBC may well reflect majority opinion. As a libertarian, I certainly don’t expect everyone to view the world as I do. But I do expect the BBC to represent at least something of this sentiment. After all, it purports to be our national broadcaster, not just another wing of the state.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/19/bbcs-statist-stance-does-not-speak-us/

  81. About time…

    Senior Tories plot backlash against PM’s emergency curbs on freedoms during pandemic

    It’s time for Parliamentary scrutiny of Covid-19 restrictions, says chairman of the powerful 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs

    By Christopher Hope, CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

    Senior Tories are planning to stop Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposing limits on people’s freedoms without scrutiny by forcing Parliament to have the final say on new lockdown measures, The Telegraph can reveal.

    MPs vote next week on “the renewal of temporary provisions” of lockdown measures under the Coronavirus Act 2020 to reauthorise the Government’s use of the powers.

    Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 committee of backbench Conservative MPs, is planning to use this opportunity to amend this legislation to require ministers to put all new measures to a vote of MPs first. The move will effectively impose a “Parliamentary lock” on any future restrictions, amid widespread fury among senior MPs and peers that restrictions have been imposed on Britons without a vote.

    Sir Graham said: “In March, Parliament gave the Government sweeping emergency powers at a time when Parliament was about to go into recess and there was realistic concern that NHS care capacity might be overwhelmed by Covid-19. We now know that the NHS coped well with the challenge of the virus and Parliament has been sitting largely since April. There is now no justification for ministers ruling by emergency powers without reference to normal democratic processes. It is essential that going forward all of these massively important decisions for family life, and affecting people’s jobs and businesses should be exercised with proper supervision and control.”

    Separately, The Telegraph can reveal Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the Commons, is understood to have been angered when Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, imposed further lockdown restrictions on his constituency without telling Parliament first.

    Tory MPs were in uproar over plans to impose the ‘rule of six’ on Monday September 14, without a debate in the Commons. The legislation means that anyone who gathers in a group of seven or more including children, indoors or outdoors, can be fined £100, doubling for further breaches up to a maximum of £3,200. The separate £1,000 fines for anyone who breaches self-isolation rules – announced by No 10 on Saturday evening – are also likely to come into force on September 28 without any Parliamentary scrutiny.

    Any amendment tabled by Sir Graham is likely to attract a large amount of support among Conservative MPs, many of whom share his concerns. One Tory MP said: “There will be a big rebellion on this.”

    A No 10 spokesman said: “It’s absolutely vital that MPs are engaged in this process as these decisions have a huge impact on them and their constituents, and we will continue to discuss these plans with all MPs.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/19/senior-tories-plot-backlash-against-pms-emergency-curbs-freedoms/

    1. I wish that your rebels(?) Would get a move on and stop this.

      Our ontario government are equally berefet of ideas so they just follow your lot.

      New restrictions were introduced today across the province. We haven’t seen a lurgy case in our area for weeks but still it is down to ten or less in groups.

      If only we had known, we could have ignored the restrictions when we celebrated the golf club championship today.

    2. What’s the betting they’ll debate it and it will go ahead (possibly with additional amendments to add controls from Labour) anyway?

    3. About time somebody stood up for Parliamentary scrutiny of the demented Ferguson, Whitty and Vallance directions. Hancock is an utter disgrace and Boris needs either to grow a couple or else hand over to a real conservative.

      If we wish to stop diseases in this country we should stop importing them. I refer not only to illegal immigrants and fake asylum seekers but the thousands of foreign and particularly Chinese students funding our rotten money grubbing ‘Universities’, many of which should revert to Technical Colleges, Teacher Training Colleges and Polytechnics in order to cater for the less academic and those with other potentially useful skills.

      Edited.

      1. Some of the most shocking stories of failure and dishonesty that I have heard come out of universities.

  82. Evening, all. Late on parade today because I spent so long working in the garden (I don’t know how many more fine days there might be this year), then I had the racing to catch up on. I think that’s the aim of smart meters; they know darn well that the loony green agenda will lead to blackouts, brownouts and lack of capacity in the system, so they’ll need to cut off supplies.

  83. I’m watching ‘Des’ on catch up. They keep talking about ‘gays’ and of victims’ families needing ‘closure.’

    I’m pretty sure that in the early 80s, they would have still said ‘queers’ and that ‘closure’ just referred to door seals and business deals.

  86. I think Heffer gives too many of the UK public credit for their compliance being an act reluctantly performed.

    There is also an unfortunate but mildly humorous spelling error.

    Common sense? Decency? We can’t allow that in Covid Britain, I’m afraid…

    Our national character is being bent out of shape by a government that doesn’t trust its people to act sensibly

    SIMON HEFFER

    When, just under six months ago, we as a people had to get used suddenly to a restriction of our civil liberties not experienced in peacetime since the rule of Lord Liverpool 200 years ago, it presented a test of our national character. Indeed, it threatened to challenge the very idea of whether we still had one. I wrote then how, for all the formidable threats the pandemic posed, including to human life, it presented a rare opportunity to show what we believed to be the best about the British people: kindness, decency, neighbourliness, courage and determination.

    Those qualities have indeed seemed abundant. Across the country communities have come together and people have helped the elderly and vulnerable by shopping for them or, since the end of full lockdown, simply by keeping them company. Staff in hospitals and care homes risked their lives with inadequate personal protective equipment to try to save the lives of the sick. And despite the severe hardship of locking ourselves away for 23 hours a day, sometimes in a confined space with little amusement, most people obeyed the rules and the number of infections fell.

    Inevitably, relaxing the rules sent the infection (but not yet the death) toll up again. However, this predictable rise has injected panic into an already stuttering government. Civil liberties have been withdrawn again – and at an alarming rate. A vast swathe of the North East and North West was locked down on Friday, and by this weekend almost 13.5 million people were living under severe restrictions.

    And with each announcement a vital component of our character becomes dismantled: the decency that restrains us from harming our neighbours is risked by us encouraging to sneak on them. As the rules tighten, the scope to inform on dissident rule-breakers increases.

    It is one thing to tell the police you suspect your neighbour is running a drugs empire from his spare bedroom or abusing his wife; quite another to report, after some fervid curtain-twitching, that he has seven at a barbecue. That is, however, what ministers (including Kit Malthouse, the police minister, and his boss Priti Patel, the Home Secretary) urged us to do last week, after the much-criticised ‘rule of six’ was introduced.

    Curfews have been imposed and ‘mingling’ banned, as is spectating upon or playing sports. And there is scope for a wide interpretation of who is, or isn’t, in a social bubble, and therefore who may or may not meet up. That people should report anyone violating these often contradictory and incomprehensible rules seemed an attempt, sanctioned at the highest level, to make us into a nation of narcs.

    There are notorious historical examples of such societies – but also today too in countries such as Cuba, North Korea or the rapidly-imploding Belarus. When a regime, even a supposedly democratic one, urges one section of society to tell tales on another, peace, unity and happiness are never the result.

    The Home Secretary said, to an interviewer, that she was rarely at home but if, when she was, she saw something ‘inappropriate’, she would “quite frankly, call the police”. She argued that “it’s not dobbing in neighbours, it’s all about us taking personal responsibility”. Perhaps aware – though it could never be admitted – that the rule of six is unenforceable (though perhaps today police will make house-to-house raids to see whether a seventh or eighth person has slipped into a family Sunday lunch), she emphasised that “it’s all about personal responsibility”.

    That phrase brings us back to our national character, and how much this government actually understands it. A government driven by common sense would let us exercise personal responsibility as adults, and not tell us whom we can or can’t have for lunch. When it says a family of six – who are all fit and well –- can’t invite granny, it extinguishes that personal responsibility. If granny herself feels vulnerable, she is old enough and wise enough to decline the invitation.

    But instead another traditional aspect of our character, of thinking for ourselves and exercising common sense, is being expunged from the national psyche. Ambitious ministers believe that the louder they shout and the more threatening they sound about doing as they order, the more they impress those who can ensure their promotions. Part of that heavy-handedness is decreeing that personal responsibility no longer consists of deciding things for ourselves based on an intelligent assessment of the situation at hand.

    One would have thought that by our exemplary behaviour during total lockdown we had earned the right to be treated as though capable of making decisions such as these, instead of being press-ganged as a fifth column. Can ministers not see how much this infantilization of a nation irritates a people quite capable of behaving responsibly in preventing disease? Nor do they seem able to see how much they risk triggering not just widespread civil disobedience, but widespread distrust in and disrespect for government itself among those who would normally be its main supporters.

    That the rule of six was introduced without parliamentary discussion showed how even our elected representatives are being denied a say in how the pandemic is managed. This absence of accountability violates our belief in our democracy and a British faith in our democratic institutions. It also encourages the frequent and capricious changes in the rules that suggest the Government is making it up as it goes along, confusing and angering a generally law-abiding public even more than it was already.

    The elevation of the curtain-twitching sneak to the rank of distinguished public servant was the last straw. This is just not how we on these isles behave. Such busybodies have been figures of ridicule for generations – think, for example, of the preposterous Hodges, the ARP man in Dad’s Army.

    Nasty though Covid-19 is, it is not an existentialist threat to the British nation. When panzers were massing in the Pas de Calais, the German fleet in the North Sea and the Luftwaffe in the skies over Kent, Warden Hodges, ludicrous though he was, had a point. The sneak who calls the police today about the barbecue-of-seven is simply a malicious, small-minded creep – precisely the sort us live-and-let-live British disdain, preferring instead to live by the virtues of their common sense. The Prime Minister, speaking on Thursday, appeared at last to grasp this point. While maintaining, as he had to, his belief in the rule of six, he said: “I have never much been in favour of sneak culture myself,” and suggesting people should alert the police only if “there is some huge kind of Animal House party taking place”.

    The trouble is, if these assaults to our national character continue, and the people are not trusted to act sensibly, there will soon be more ‘Animal House‘ parties every Saturday night than there are police, or even absurd ‘Covid marshals’, to stop them. Every sign is that the people have had enough. When that happens they will do what Britons traditionally do when faced with overbearing bullies: they will find a way of asserting their traditional liberties.

    Sensible politicians know to respect the finer qualities of the British people, as otherwise some of the rougher ones tend to take over. And should that happen, the worst casualty would be the Government.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/19/common-sense-decency-cant-allow-covid-britain-afraid/

    1. If it’s a matter of PERSONAL responsibility, then there is no need to dob anybody in, is there, Pretty Useless? It’s up to them, not to some prodnose spying from behind the bespoke shutters.

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